Dorimant {taking the peach} (I,i)

The Dramatis Personae distinguishes the players by class much the same way the play attempts to set the ‘grander’ people from those street vendors and servants ‘beneath’ them. This spread is also mirrored in the theater’s viewing audience, “You have an exact account, from the great lady ‘i th’ box down to the little orange-wench.” (III,ii) Yet, many characters without titles are also intentionally even without names. From the Orange-woman and shoemaker, to the “Hampshire” guy (called so just because he hasn’t, like the other staff, been shipped back from France) a kind of social consciousness is at work here. In light of this, it is less ironic that the first scene shows Dorimant, one of the “Gentlemen” relying on one of the nameless as a matchmaker and ‘fellow’-gossip (by the way, the orange-woman serves as effective at tattling as any of the ‘ladies’ in the play.) But why won’t these well brought up people just “pay her for the fruit,” (I,i) what would be to them a mere pittance, just some loose change in their pockets? It seems like they are stringing them along in order to extract more information rather than choice produce. Is it more annoying for the orange-woman to be constantly asking for money than for the upper class to be avoiding their part of the exchange?

Fanning the Flame

Many in The Man of Mode relish vexing the opposite sex, and no object appears to signal the flurry that ensues more so than the fan. Dorimant introduces how this gadget functions early on, “I have not had the pleasure of making a woman so much as break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself, these three days.” (I,i). Next, Medley announces how this masque (vizard) serves the victim, “She could not have picked out a devil upon earth so proper to torment her. H’as made her break a dozen or two of fans already, tear half a score points to pieces and destroy hoods and knots without number.” (II,i) But fans are also used as tools for etiquette class, as in the scene between Young Bellair and Harriet where its uses are unlimited, “At one motion play your fan, roll your eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me,” and Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell the sticks with a finger.” Further on, the acting lesson continues, but this time the stunts are more physically challenging, “Clap your fan, then both in your hands, snatch it to your mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your body a little forwards. So! Now spread it, fall back on the sudden, cover your face with it, and break out into a loud laughter.—Take up! Look grave and fall a-fanning to yourself. Admirably well acted!” (III,ii) How are woman associated or compared with the kind of instrument they use for deception?

It’s Not About You, Sir!

The Man of the Mode is meant not so much to satirize a type of character as to mirror the audience’s adjustment with the period by pointing out it “represents ye all.” In both the Prologue and the Epilogue, London’s manners and attitudes are being wrestled with, where on “the stage like you, will be more foppish grow.” This organic relationship of stage/audience/stage keeps renewing afresh, “’tis not so wise an age/But your own follies may supply the stage.” Scroope and Dryden are clear that neither make judgments upon the other because, like playwrights, “men grow dull when they begin to be particular.” (III,iii) Instead, this play reveals the time and place’s interest with itself, but not to the detriment of isolating the individual from the whole, “Yet every man is safe from what he feared,/For no one fool is hunted from the herd.”