STUDIES IN THE WORK OF COLLEY CIBBER (continued 2)

In The State of the Case Restated72 it is contended that the royal patent to the Drury Lane Theatre was given to Sir Richard Steele for the purpose of correcting the abuses of the theatre, but that Sir Richard had not done this; in fact that

“The same lewd plays were acted and reviewed without any material alteration, which gave occasion for that universal complaint against the English stage, of lewdness and debauchery, from all the sober and religious part of the nation; the whole business of comedy continuing all this time to be the criminal intrigues of fornication and adultery, ridiculing of marriage, virtue, and integrity, and giving a favorable turn to vicious characters, and instructing loose people how to carry on their lewd designs with plausibility and success: thus among other plays they have revived The Country Wife, Sir Fopling Flutter, The Rover, The Libertine Destroyer, and several others, and it is remarkable, that the knight, or coadjutors, had condemned Sir Fopling Flutter, as one of the most execrable and vicious plays that ever was performed in public.”

The change that was occurring may be fairly illustrated by quotations from plays by Etherege and Steele, which are characteristic of the alterations not only as to morals but as to moralizing. In speaking of marriage Etherege says, “your nephew ought to conceal it [his marriage] for a time, madam, since marriage has lost its good name; prudent men seldom expose their own reputations, till ’tis convenient to justify their wives;”73 while Steele’s sentiment is that “wedlock is hell if at least one side does not love, as it would be Heaven if both did.”74

7. Cibber’s Comedies.

Cibber at the very outset of his career as a dramatist, in Love’s Last Shift (1696), deliberately attempted to reform the stage, and that the audience was ready for the innovation is shown by the way it was received, for we are told that “never were spectators more happy in easing their minds by uncommon and repeated plaudits. The honest tears, shed by the audience, conveyed a strong reproach to our licentious poets, and was to Cibber the highest mark of honor.”75 Davies further gives Cibber the credit of being the first in reforming the English stage, and of founding English sentimental comedy. “The first comedy, acted since the Restoration, in which were preserved purity of manners and decency of language, with a due respect to the honor of the marriage-bed, was Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion.”76 Cibber himself makes no claim to decency of language, nor is it found to any greater extent in this play than in the other plays of the period. Certainly there can be nothing bolder than the first act, or the epilogue, which reads as follows:

The main action, that which deals with the reformation of the wandering husband, seems to be original with Cibber in every respect. It deals with the reformation of a husband who eight or ten years before has deserted his young wife for a dissolute life on the continent, and who returns to England still more degenerate in mind and morals than when he left, and so entirely depleted in purse that he has not money enough to buy a meal or pay for a night’s lodging for himself and his servant. The husband is finally led to return to his wife, whose appearance has so changed that he does not recognize her, by her pretense of being a new mistress. This subterfuge is more or less remotely suggestive of Shakspere’s All’s Well that Ends Well and Shirley’s Gamester, both of which have been suggested as its source; but it owes nothing to them in the working out of the situation.

The theme is practically that of The Careless Husband: the reformation of a husband not entirely spoiled at heart. The moral teaching is that there is the same pleasure in legitimate enjoyment as in the baser and illicit sort.

The innovation consists in the very moral ending of the piece, particularly in the definite decision of the hero to reform, a determination which he expresses as follows:

“By my example taught, let every man, whose fate has bound him to a marry’d life, beware of letting loose his wild desires: for if experience may be allow’d to judge, I must proclaim the folly of a wandering passion. The greatest happiness we can hope on earth,

It is to be noticed that the illicit affair of Sir Novelty Fashion and Mrs. Flareit is made ridiculous and not happy at the end, nor does Sir Novelty acquire a mistress or a wife who has previously been chaste. Likewise there is no husband who is made ridiculous by being cuckolded, and the only amour, if it can be called an amour, that which Amanda’s maid unwillingly has with Snap, is made right the next morning by the marriage of the two.

On the other hand, the play, aside from these particulars, exhibits the technique and the material of the typical Restoration comedy. The chief incident deals in most frank style with the sex relations of the hero and heroine, treated essentially in the Restoration way, with the exception that the audience knows they are man and wife while the characters do not. The cellar incident is as frank and gross as anything of the sort in the earlier drama, though in this case the final outcome is a wedding. There is the same succession of lively and disconnected incidents, incidents which would go well on the stage, and which make up five separate threads of story. The substitution of the name of one person for another in the marriage bond is the same sort of thing that occurs over and over again in the earlier comedy.77

The characters represent the same more or less stiff drawing of conventional figures. Sir Novelty Fashion is of the same family as Sir Fopling Flutter; Lovelace and Young Worthy are the same drunken rakes as those who make the principal characters in the unreformed drama, with the exception that here they are not presented to us as carrying on their amours. Snap is the witty servingman who is invariably paired with the maid of the heroine in Restoration comedy. There is the same presentation of local scenes, particularly that in the park; there is the same coarse speech; and there is the same interruption of the story by raillery.

But the play as already suggested is a very distinct step in advance in its treatment of fundamental morality, and marks a conscious beginning of a new mode; not an inconsiderable achievement for the first play of an author twenty-four years old.

The two plots of Woman’s Wit (1697) are entirely dissimilar in tone and dramatic handling, and, moreover, have no essential connection with each other. The main plot, which gives the name to the piece, is in the Restoration manner, while the sub-plot, which deals with the Rakishes, is in the mould of the minor late Elizabethans. In its portrayal of manners it belongs to the type represented by the plays of Brome, marked by coarseness rather than finish, and implying about the same standard of morals.

The main plot consists of a series of complications caused by the efforts of Longeville to unmask Leonora’s unfaithfulness to Lovemore, to whom she is engaged. She convinces Lovemore that Longeville’s efforts are the result of a plot, the purpose of which is to alienate Lovemore and Leonora so that Longeville may have her to himself; and there then follows one complication after another, until the characters are at last gathered together and Leonora is made to confess her duplicity.

The situation on which the main action is based is original and highly dramatic, but in order to maintain the intrigue Cibber has had to use incidents which are marked by improbability and dramatic blindness to such an extent that the action becomes wearisome. Cibber seems to be groping for something different from the conventional Restoration intrigue. His conception is worthy of more success than he attained, but he lacked the dramatic skill and experience to carry it out.

Some of the character drawing is good. Longeville and Lovemore are rather decent young men, but are no doubt too sentimental for success on the stage at this time. The Rakishes are overdrawn and farcical. The women, with the exception of Leonora, are lacking in the spontaneity and wit demanded of seventeenth and early eighteenth century heroines, and like the men are possibly too sentimental. Leonora is the intriguer and is the best drawn and most important personage in the play. Her downfall is the result of her own character and conduct, and in the disapproval of her character and actions Cibber has repeated, to some extent, views he expressed in his first play.

The vulgar sub-plot which deals with Old Rakish and Young Rakish, when separated from Woman’s Wit and acted in 1707 as The School Boy, was a greater success than the original play. With the exception of the change in the names of some of the personages, minor alterations of the dialogue, the omission of parts of the incidents, and the addition of such incidents as are necessary to make it stand by itself, the play is verbatim as it appeared when a part of Woman’s Wit.

From the point of view of the reformation of the stage it must be confessed that Woman’s Wit was not of great importance. The moral tone of the main action is high; at least virtue is rewarded and vice disgraced, and there are no amours carried on. But the sub-action, which was later transformed into The School Boy, is entirely opposed to both good taste and good morals, and after a series of low comedy scenes, ends with the promise of Young Rakish to Master Johnny that he will take Johnny to the playhouse, where the latter may satisfy his disappointment in the failure to marry his mother’s woman. Although notable progress in the morality of the drama had been made, as we have seen, the fact that this sub-action was successfully presented by itself shows that the taste of the theatre-going public was not yet entirely regenerate.

Love Makes a Man (1701) is a rather close adaptation of two of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays,78 in which Cibber does not pretend to any serious purpose. “For masks, we’ve scandal, and for beaus, French airs.” And yet his moralizing and sentimental tendency cannot be entirely restrained, for when Carlos, the hero of the play, does turn from his books to love, he speaks in a most heightened and sentimental strain. So too the efforts of Louisa to seduce him are met with sentiments of lofty morality which are actuated by his sincere love for Angelina. The Restoration lover would not have hesitated in the slightest degree to enjoy all that Louisa offered and his wife-to-be would have taken it as a matter of course, probably would have joked with her confidante, if not with the hero, on the subject. But with Cibber not only is the attitude concerning this sort of thing changed, but in his alteration he has omitted one incident79 that would have been a source of great delight to a Restoration audience, and has softened the language throughout, so that the coarseness which marks his original has largely disappeared. No one undergoes a moral reformation, for Louisa has not been evil in her life, and this one unsuccessful effort at seduction cures her. But the play has two characteristics of the sentimental type; it is perfectly moral in action, and it has some expression of sentimental philosophy.

She Would and She Would Not (1702) is probably more in accordance with modern taste than any other play Cibber wrote. In this regard for good taste as well as good morals it is significant of the change in English comedy, and though it is not sentimental, it indicates Cibber’s readiness to adopt and lead the new mode. In its technique it reminds us of the Spanish intrigue plays of Dryden; but it is perfectly moral, and the two lovers do not employ their time, when away from the main business of winning their wives, in carrying on intrigues with other women.

The Careless Husband (acted 1704) is Cibber’s masterpiece in sentimental comedy. In it he has reached greater excellence than in his former plays in plot and in character presentation, and in the ability to make his plot and moral purpose work out consistently and logically. The reformation of Loveless in Love’s Last Shift strikes one as not in keeping with his character; one feels that his relapse80 is quite the natural thing to happen. In this play, however, the hero’s character is presented from the first in a way that prepares one for the final reformation. In this particular Cibber rises above his contemporaries in comedy.

In The Careless Husband Cibber lays claim to deliberate and serious moral purpose and deals, as he did in his first play, with the reclaiming of a licentious husband by a virtuous wife. Dibdin extravagantly says of it that “it was a school for elegant manners, and an example for honorable actions.” Cibber expresses himself in regard to his purpose, in the dedication, as follows:

“The best criticks have long and justly complain’d, that the coarseness of most characters in our late Comedies, have been unfit entertainments for People of Quality, especially the ladies: and therfore I was long in hopes that some able pen (whose expectation did not hang upon the profits of success) wou’d generously attempt to reform the Town into a better taste than the World generally allows ’em: but nothing of that kind having lately appear’d, that would give me the opportunity of being wise at another’s expence, I found it impossible any longer to resist the secret temptation of my vanity, and so e’en struck the first blow myself: and the event has now convinc’d me, that whoever sticks closely to Nature, can’t easily write above the understandings of the Galleries, tho’ at the same time he may possibly deserve applause of the Boxes.”

But in The Careless Husband, in contrast with what he had previously written in this field, the tone of the entire play is moral, not merely that of the fifth act, the play is worked out consistently, and the offensive effect of an incongruous mixture of standards is lacking. It belongs distinctly to the sentimental type, and is the best of the early school.

In the prologue Cibber gives a summary of the kind of characters that should illustrate the moral the comedy writer has as his theme:

In this play Cibber continues the general practice of basing dramatic technique upon that of the Restoration drama. We find the same multiplicity of plots, though there is here a material reduction in their number. But here the various plots are more consistently bound together and more logically worked out. The hero is a somewhat refined Restoration character; he has more gentleness and goodness in him, but the course he pursues is typical of the earlier plays in that he is carrying on two amours during the play and at the end he abandons those intrigues; with this difference, however, that the reformation of the hero of The Careless Husband is felt to be permanent.

The love story of Lord Morelove and Lady Betty, which forms the sub-action, is in the best style of the comedy of manners. It, as well as the main action, reminds one in its finished workmanship of the best plays written during the latter part of the preceding century.

There is a distinct effort to teach the advantage of moral living, in the unhappy outcome of the illicit affairs and in the happy outcome of the legitimate. The situation in which Edging and Sir Charles are discovered asleep, which proved too gross for Cibber’s audience, is nevertheless handled in a manner to show disapproval; the Restoration dramatist would have been salacious and humorous. Sir Charles’s feeling of guilt after this scene, however, is an entirely new note.

Some of the characters are stock figures. Lady Betty is the usual coquette, is a Millamant type, but is altogether more human and modern; Lord Foppington is the continuation of Sir Novelty Fashion, whom we recognize as a type which appears in Etherege and Crowne; and Sir Charles, until his reformation, is, in his conduct, the Restoration rake, with, however, distinctly more humanity. His whole-heartedness and inherent honor make one forgive his lapse in conduct.

Other characters indicate a new mode. Lady Easy is a modest, virtuous, capable wife, full of moderation and tact, with the gentleness of the modern ideal woman. She belongs to the patient Griselda type, and her situation, which contains not a little pathos, is handled in a way to gain the sympathy of the audience. This is a new and noteworthy contribution in the direction of the fully developed type of sentimental comedy. Even in spite of Sir Charles’s defection in conduct, we recognize an inherent goodness in his nature. Lord Morelove is the preaching, sentimentalizing type, serious minded and upright, the sort of character that Cibber has presented in Lord Lovemore in Woman’s Wit and Elder Worthy in Love’s Last Shift; a character who seldom appears in the Restoration period, or, if he does appear, is ridiculed. In this presentation of a successful lover, lacking in wit and inconstancy, Cibber was not following the convention of the preceding drama, which usually made its heroes witty scamps.

While we still have light banter and raillery, they are primarily used to display character or further the plot, functions which they disregard in the Restoration plays. The theme and its working out not only deal with the reformation of the loose character, but also endeavor to present an admirable example of womanhood who shows a proper fidelity to her husband in spite of all his delinquencies. In the presentation of this high type of character Cibber has again become an innovator and has made a positive contribution to the drama of the period.

In his adaptation of the plays by Dryden81 in The Comical Lovers (1707) Cibber has not attempted any changes, and the play is of no importance in the development of comedy. It was regarded merely as a revival of Dryden’s work, and was acted along with other old plays during the same season, largely because of an antiquarian interest.

The two plays from which this is made go well together and present something of the best that Dryden did in the line of satiric comedy, and no doubt the social satire was almost as pertinent in Cibber’s time as it had been forty or fifty years earlier.

But the moral standard, which is almost always present, even if in the background, in Cibber’s own plays, is almost entirely lacking here. Celadon expects to be cuckolded, but would rather be cuckolded by Florimel (who reminds one very strongly of Congreve’s Millamant even in the stipulations before their agreement of marriage), than by any one else. So too in the complications in the second story in the play, the moral defections are humorous merely because they are immoral, and there is no disapproval expressed or implied. In Cibber’s own work he may retain his disapproval until the last act, but the moral standard always appears in some way or other, so that this play is essentially uncharacteristic of Cibber’s work.

The Double Gallant (1707) is an adaption of the same sort as The Comical Lovers, derived from Restoration plays,82 but it does have more significance. It is marked by the same general tone of moral irresponsibility and lightness, but without the actual culmination of delinquencies; there is the same raillery, somewhat curtailed, and the hero, as in those plays, involves himself in intrigue with several women at once. There is more respect for morals in the general conduct of the piece. The change is indicated in the handling of the source. Burnaby83 has made use of what is probably the most notorious and grossest incident in Restoration comedy, Horner’s subterfuge in The Country Wife, but has modified some of the elements of the intrigue. Cibber has prevented the successful outcome of the intrigue, and has entirely omitted the unpleasant features.

The Lady’s Last Stake (1707), in the handling of a serious theme, seems the most modern of Cibber’s comedies; it represents almost an approach to the modern problem play in the Lord and Lady Wronglove story and in the theme of the Lord George and Lady Gentle story. It is a fully developed comedy of the sentimental type of this period, with its four acts of intrigue, its reconciliation at the end, and its extremely moral teaching. Cibber makes two statements of his theme, first in the dedication, and then in the prologue. His statement in the dedication is as follows:

“A Play, without a just Moral, is a poor and trivial Undertaking; and ’tis from the Success of such Pieces, that Mr. Collier was furnish’d with an advantageous Pretence of laying his unmerciful Axe to the Root of the Stage. Gaming is a Vice that has undone more innocent Principles than any one Folly that’s in Fashion; therefore I chose to expose it to the Fair Sex in its most hideous Form, by reducing a Woman of honour to stand the presumptuous Addresses of a Man, whom neither her Virtue nor Inclination would let her have the least Taste to. Now ’tis not impossible but some Man of Fortune, who has a handsome Lady, and a great deal of Money to throw away, may, from this startling hint, think it worth his while to find his Wife some less hazardous Diversion. If that should ever happen, my end of writing this Play is answer’d.”

The plot centers around a most lively intrigue, but shows a departure from the Restoration type. Cibber seems to have devised his own plot from observation rather than to have taken it from the work of some one else, though in his characters he shows some imitation of characters in older plays. Miss Notable is a Miss Prue type, but the action of the play preserves her virtue and indicates disapproval of the effort to seduce her. There is a wide difference between this and the course of Congreve’s character who rushes eagerly to her bedroom followed by Tattle.84 So too in the relations of Lady Wronglove with her husband there enters a new note. Not only does Cibber show her a virtuous woman, but he recognizes the infidelity of the husband as grave enough to merit not only condemnation but punishment; and though he does not carry his story so far as to inflict on him his just deserts, he recognizes the right of the wife to resent Lord Wronglove’s action, although he clearly feels her resentment is unwise. Sir Friendly Moral, who reconciles the various couples, furnishes the somewhat sentimental moralizings, and seems to be the mouthpiece of the author.

One does not waste much sympathy on either Lord or Lady Wronglove in their bickerings, and their reconciliation at the end through the good offices of Sir Friendly is decidedly lacking in probability, in view of the way in which they have been previously presented. This dénouement is brought about by a typical deus ex machina device, in which Sir Friendly, by supplying money to one of the characters, and by using his exceeding wisdom and knowledge with another set of characters, brings about the happy ending. Cibber was not unlike the other late seventeenth and early eighteenth century writers in his inability to bring his plays to a logical and probable conclusion. He was hampered by his theory that the element of surprise should enter into the happy ending, and hence he often seems to feel compelled to introduce a new force very late in the play.

The characters in the main action are somewhat serious and lacking in attractiveness. But those in the comic action, Lord George, Mrs. Conquest, and Miss Notable, are much more lively sources of interest. Miss Notable, as already stated, is a Miss Prue type, though she is probably not to be described as a “silly, awkward country girl.” She is essentially a sophisticated city miss, but her desires and ambitions, as well as some of her ingenuous characteristics, are similar to those of the Miss Prue type. She starts a flirtation with each new man she meets in order to pique the last new man, who in like manner had his turn. The discomfiture of Lord George when Miss Notable avows her love for Mrs. Conquest, who is in the disguise of a man, is very clever.

It is hard to believe that an honorable gentleman, as Sir George is described as being, would cheat at cards even for the purpose of seducing another man’s wife. It is in just such conceptions as this that Cibber’s superficiality is shown, a superficiality which prevented him from writing great drama notwithstanding his knowledge of technical requirements.

In the situations of Lady Gentle and Mrs. Conquest, especially in that of the latter, there is a distinct element of pathos, similar to that in The Careless Husband. As in The Careless Husband, this pathos is due not merely to the situation, but depends likewise on the nature of the persons presented. In this respect it is superior to the later sentimental comedy, in which the pathos depends more largely on the situation alone.

In its serious elements The Lady’s Last Stake attacks what are without doubt notable human failings, and the dialogue at its best reminds us of some of the best Congrevian sort. But Cibber’s practice as to the happy outcome and his theory that there must be a surprise at the end of a play, have prevented what might have been, in the hands of a more serious and larger minded dramatist, a most important handling of a new theme in a new way.

When he wrote The Rival Fools (1709), Cibber seemed, if one may judge from the prologue, to feel that his efforts for reform were not meeting with sufficient response and appreciation, and therefore tells the audience that

But though this comedy is not didactic in its purpose, it is morally clean in its action.

In The Non-Juror (1717), a play written with an avowedly political purpose, he cannot avoid moralizing and sentimentality, qualities which appear slightly in the story of Charles, and in the relations of Dr. Wolf to Lady Woodvil and Maria. It cannot be claimed that the play has any important bearing on sentimental comedy, however.

The Refusal (1721) might be called a purified Restoration comedy, without any positive bearing on the sentimentalizing tendency except that it shows the tendency to make the drama more moral.

The Provoked Husband (1728), Cibber’s completion of Vanbrugh’s A Journey to London, is typically sentimental in treatment, with the happy ending, the reformation of the vicious, and the true but dull expression of moral sentiments by the serious characters. In it Cibber has departed from Vanbrugh’s original intention by reforming the wife, whom he has preserved as perfectly true to her husband, though unduly given to gambling. In the love affair of Mr. Manly and Lord Townley’s sister we likewise have sentimental treatment, and in the expression of pious thoughts no one could be more prolific than Mr. Manly. In this play Cibber does not strike any note he has not used before; it is merely significant of the permanence of the changed manner of writing in English comedy generally.

In the first plot Cibber has somewhat softened the characters of Vanbrugh’s Lord and Lady Loverule in Lord and Lady Townley, giving to the husband a much less dictatorial and more sentimental and uxorious character. Lady Townley, though she does not show any signs of softer qualities, is made to see the error of her course of late hours and gambling, and undergoes a somewhat improbable but characteristic conversion. Cibber tells us85 that it had been Vanbrugh’s intention to turn the lady out of doors, as would have been natural and logical, giving to the play a serious interest which it lacks under Cibber’s management.

The characters are shorn of their rough virility in Cibber’s version. Squire Richard is a sort of rough study of the Tony Lumpkin type,—without his wit, however,—but the credit of the portrayal is due to Vanbrugh rather than to Cibber.

While the play is far from lacking in interest and power to amuse, there is a very decided inferiority to Vanbrugh’s play, even in its unfinished and imperfect state. Cibber’s play is a typical sentimental comedy, with its undeserved happy ending, reformation of the vicious, and commonplace expression of sentiment and morals on the part of the serious characters.

Although it does not exhibit any startling new qualities, in its theme attacking the evils of gambling which Cibber has previously attacked, the play is a good example of eighteenth century comedy; fully as good, indeed, as the work of the other dramatists of the time, but suffering in comparison with Cibber’s own best work.

It may be interesting to note that Cibber is said to have added the parts of Tom and Phillis to Steele’s Conscious Lovers.86 When Steele submitted this play to him, Cibber felt that it would not satisfy the desire of an audience to laugh at a comedy. According to the account in The Lives of the Poets, Steele gladly accepted Cibber’s suggestion that a comic action be inserted and even proposed that Cibber make such additions to the play as he saw fit. The absence of humor is a mark of the form of sentimental comedy inaugurated by Steele, while the form represented by Cibber’s work is closer to the Restoration type, is indeed really a modification of that type, and the element of humor is consequently found in it.

8. Typical Quality of Cibber’s Work.

Cibber’s work typifies the change that was going on in the moral reformation of the drama, as it likewise shows the development characteristic of the time in other elements of the drama.87 In him, as in others, we see that while the general type of Restoration comedy was adopted in the construction of the plot, there was a tendency to simplify the plot. Moreover, Cibber further departed from the Restoration type by the selection of themes other than mere sex relations. Other dramatists were able to present such themes without reference to moral degeneration, but Cibber, when he takes such a subject as the dangers of gambling, for instance, cannot entirely avoid dealing with sex immorality.

In the dull, chaste lover, the sober, moral, worthy gentleman who is largely a result of the sentimental tendency in the drama, such as Lord Morelove in Woman’s Wit and Elder Worthy in Love’s Last Shift, Cibber developed and made more important a type which had appeared but had been relatively unimportant in earlier drama. In the comedy of Steele and his followers this character was further developed so that it became the central figure. Cibber and his predecessors seem to have been guided by some such formula as that interesting personality and morality appear in inverse ratio in male characters.

The precocious Miss Prue type, the young woman who is destined to have a lover or a husband, perhaps both, in a short time, is represented by Miss Jenny in The Provoked Husband and Miss Notable in The Lady’s Last Stake. This type of character soon disappeared from the drama, as did likewise the Millamant kind of coquette, who appears as Maria in The Non-Juror and as Lady Betty in The Careless Husband. Snap and Trappanti are typical menservants, witty and graceless, and we find the mercenary serving woman in The Provoked Husband and She Would and She Would Not. Characters of this type continue occasionally in the succeeding drama, where they furnish the comic relief.

9. General Characteristics of Cibber’s Comedies.

Cibber’s themes are taken from contemporary life and its more obvious problems. Of course so far as any serious purpose is concerned, a distinction must be made between those plays designed merely to afford the pleasure of an evening’s entertainment and those written with more serious intent. Cibber often distinguishes between these two classes, and frankly states his purpose in the prologue or dedication to the separate plays.

His attitude toward his audience is somewhat naïve. He frankly states that his “sole dependence being the judgment of an audience, ’twere madness to provoke them.”88 He again says89 that “every guest is a judge of his own palate; and a poet ought no more to impose good sense upon the galleries, than dull farce upon undisputed judges. I first considered who my guests were, before I prepared my entertainment.” This would seem to indicate that at times he had no high respect for his audiences; especially when he wrote The School Boy and Hob in the Well, if the latter is by him. In this connection one may note that he consciously distinguished stage and closet drama, and made no attempt to write the latter. In his “Remarks to the Reader” of Ximena he says, “though the reader must be charmed by the tenderness of the characters in the original, I have ventured to alter, to make them more agreeable to the spectator.” These statements would seem to indicate that Cibber wrote his sentimental plays because he thought the audiences desired something of the sort.

As a playwright Cibber was a strong upholder of religion and the established church. He points out that the only religious sect to close the theatre was also opposed to the established church.90 But in treating religious subjects he does not use the Puritans for dramatic material, for they were no longer a political menace, but he turns to the Roman Catholics, whose activities were not merely religious, but political. In The Non-Juror we have a play almost entirely built on anti-Catholic feeling; in King John we have another attack on the Church of Rome; and in the fourth act of Woman’s Wit we again have satire, but in this case primarily of the Catholic clergy, rather than the church itself. We do not have any references to party politics, aside from this Catholic problem.

His original plays in comedy, other than farces and operas, deal with moral problems. In the case of Love’s Last Shift and The Careless Husband we have presented the reformation of husbands not yet entirely spoiled at heart; in The Provoked Husband the reformation of a wife who has not committed any serious breach of the moral code; and in this last, as well as in The Lady’s Last Stake, we have plays dealing with the evils resulting from women’s gambling. It is curious to find one who was so notorious a gambler as Cibber choosing such a theme.

The language shows great change from that of the Restoration in regard to moral refinement. Cibber’s plays become less and less coarse in speech. His earlier plays have a grossness almost equal to that of Restoration comedy, but gradually grow purer. This change in the language is found in English comedy generally, and as it progresses a new element enters, the expression of moral sentiments, extravagantly and artificially stated. This last shows a gradual increase, reaching its height in the later sentimental comedy of the middle of the century.

Merely as literature, three of Cibber’s plays, at least, are well worth while: The Careless Husband, She Would and She Would Not, and The Non-Juror. They lack the briskness and sureness of touch that characterized Congreve, but compare most favorably with the work of men in the next rank, and are not only delightful and profitable reading, but are thoroughly representative of the period in which they appear. Grouped with these as possessing permanent literary value are the Apology and not more than half a dozen songs. Outside of these three plays, one prose work, and a few songs, Cibber produced nothing that is worth preserving because of its merit as literature. His greatest importance to the student of literary history lies in his contribution to the development of sentimental comedy.

10. Place of Steele in the Development of Sentimental Comedy.

In view of the place that is always given to Steele as the originator of sentimental comedy, a discussion of any phase of the subject would be incomplete without at least a reference to his relation to the particular question under discussion. We may grant that Cibber does not represent the culmination of the sentimental type: that is to be found in Steele’s Conscious Lovers (1722). He is, rather, the most prominent figure in the first stage of the development of sentimental comedy, during which the Restoration type was transformed by the addition of a moral purpose, by the purification of the language, and by the addition of the pathetic element; so that the new form in his hands has much of the old as well as the new, while Steele’s Conscious Lovers has almost entirely broken away from the old and looks forward. But the movement in which Cibber was so prominent a figure did make the way possible and contributed the most important elements which later developed in the hands of Steele and his followers.

A commonplace of literary history is that it was Steele who purged English comedy of its vileness and was the first to write sentimental comedy. This, as we have seen, is not true; for though The Conscious Lovers is probably the best of its type, it merely lays more stress upon the pathetic element and carries forward another step the sort of thing that Cibber had done in such comedies as The Careless Husband and The Lady’s Last Stake, which are as truly sentimental comedies as this, and which possess the pathetic interest, but in a less marked degree. In Steele’s other plays, The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1705), The Tender Husband (1705), Steele, except in the matter of the purity of the language, does not show as fully developed examples of the type as does Cibber in his work of the same period and earlier.

Steele’s first play to be acted, The Funeral, lacks sentimental quality; it is merely a comedy which, when compared to the Restoration type, has a higher moral tone. Steele had no higher motive, he tells us, in writing this play than the purpose of reinstating himself in the opinion of his fellow soldiers who had ostracized him as a moral prig after the appearance of The Christian Hero (1701). In his preface he mentions two themes as those around which the comedy is written, namely, the practices of undertakers and “legal villanies.” Lady Brumpton, who had bigamously married Lord Brumpton, is discredited by being ejected from Lord Brumpton’s household, but there is no suggestion that she is in any way reformed, and in the rest of the action none of the other elements of sentimental comedy are prominent.

The Lying Lover goes a little further and reforms the hero at the end, as is done in the comedies of Cibber. But even this similarity is only superficial, for the hero is not really vicious, being guilty only of some entertaining lying, and the reformation is brought about, not by approved sentimental feminine means, but by the fact that the hero finds himself in prison. But even though the hero is humiliated by temporary imprisonment, his delinquencies are so diverting that the reader is entirely in sympathy with him. Our sympathy for him, indeed, is so great that it is a distinct disappointment that the lady is given to the honest and jealous lover instead of to him. Steele lays no claim to originality in the reform, “compunction and remorse” of his hero, for in his preface he says that such things had been “frequently applauded on the stage.” Nor is the versifying of the elevated portions of the play a new thing; it is found both earlier and later than sentimental comedy and is not a distinctive mark of that type.

The Tender Husband was indebted to Cibber’s Careless Husband, which had recently appeared, but is not to be compared to it in its sentimental qualities. In both plays, however, we have the reconciliation of an estranged husband and wife. In Cibber it is the husband who is the offender, and he is recalled from his vices by the patient fidelity of his wife; a reformation based on sentiment. In The Tender Husband, the wife is reformed from extravagance in her expenditure of time and money on trivialities, and from failure in her duty to her husband, but the reformation is brought about by a mere trick that the husband plays upon the wife rather than by the interaction of personality on personality. Steele shows nothing of the serious grasp of the situation that Cibber shows in his play on the same theme, The Provoked Husband. Steele’s handling is distinctly less artistic and distinctly less sentimental than in either of Cibber’s plays. This is seen also in Steele’s light treatment of the wife’s equivocal action toward Fainlove, whom she mistakenly supposes to be a man, and toward whom she makes questionable advances. Not only in regard to such situations as this, but in the attitude toward actual breaches of morality, Steele shows a lower standard than Cibber. In both The Careless Husband and The Tender Husband the hero keeps a mistress, but while Cibber brings the illicit amour to an end with the disgrace of the mistress and a distinct moral, Steele not only shows none of this disapproval but provides the mistress with a husband of means and gives her a good dowry.

Seventeen years later, though according to Genest91 the play had been written some years before it was acted, Steele produced his fully developed comedy of the sentimental type, The Conscious Lovers. It is entirely different from the preceding plays, for instead of containing a lively intrigue with clever satire and wit, such as we have in The Lying Lover, the tone throughout is fixed by the pathetic and didactic elements. Steele rightly felt that he was doing something new, and took credit to himself in the prologue:

Not only does this moral and sentimental note appear throughout, but in Mr. Sealand, especially in his dialogue with Sir John Bevil in the fourth act, there appears the exaltation of the tradesman class which culminated in the work of Lillo. Bevil Junior is a pattern of propriety and goodness, but his lack of virility and brilliance contrasts him most disadvantageously with the heroes of the preceding period. He is the dull, chaste lover, the hero of the second intrigue of the Restoration and Cibber type of comedy, the Lord Morelove sort, exalted to the first place. Indiana is the patient Griselda type, the Lady Easy sort of person, but in The Conscious Lovers her gentleness and goodness are not used to recall the erring, but are presented merely as desirable qualities for a virtuous young woman to possess. The witty rake has disappeared. The Wildairs, Lovelesses, Millamants, and Lady Betties are no more, and in their places are maudlin, sickly sentimentalists, whose goodness and sufferings are all that commend them. Parson Adams was right, it does contain “some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.”

This sentimental didacticism becomes still more conspicious in the work of Holcroft and his school, whose plays are rendered degenerate and emasculate thereby. If the historians of literature mean that Steele was the originator of this type, whose essential characteristic is the centering of the action around a pathetic situation, they are probably right; but any statement that it was he who introduced the sentimental or pathetic element into English comedy, or that he began the reformation of the drama in the direction of morality, is easily seen to be false by a comparison of his work with the earlier and contemporary work of Cibber.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Cibber’s Works.

Prose.

An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian, and Late Patentee of the Theatre-Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Written by Himself. London, 1740. (I have used the fourth edition, London, 1756. Best edition is that of Lowe, London, 1889.)

A Letter from Mr. Cibber, to Mr. Pope, Inquiring into the Motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber’s Name. London, 1742.

The Egoist: or, Colley upon Cibber. Being his own Picture Retouch’d, to so plain a Likeness, that no One, now, would have the Face to own it, but Himself. London, 1743.

Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope. Wherein the New Hero’s Preferment to his Throne, in the Dunciad, seems not to be Accepted. And the Author of that Poem His more rightful Claim to it, is Asserted. With an Expostulatory Address to the Reverend Mr. W. W............n, Author of the new Preface, and Adviser in the curious Improvements of that Satire. By Mr. Colley Cibber. London, 1744.

The Character and Conduct of Cicero, Considered from the History of his Life by the Reverend Dr. Middleton. With Occasional Essays and Observations upon the most memorable Facts and Persons during that Period. London, 1747.

The Lady’s Lecture, a Theatrical Dialogue, between Sir Charles Easy and his Marriageable Daughter. Being an Attempt to Engage Obedience by Filial Liberty: and to Give the Maiden Conduct of Virtue, Chearfulness. By C. Cibber, Esq: Servant to his Majesty. London, 1748.

Non-Dramatic Poetry.

Gentleman’s Magazine. London, 1731—

London Magazine. London, 1732—

A Rhapsody on the Marvellous: Arising from the First Odes of Horace and Pindar. Being a Scrutiny into Ancient Poetical Fame, demanded by Modern Common Sense. By Colley Cibber, Esq. P. L.

Dramatic Works.

(Arranged in the order of stage presentation. The dates are those of publication.)

Collected editions of his Plays appeared in 1721, in two volumes; in 1636, in five volumes; in 1760, in four volumes; in 1777, in five volumes. The last named is the edition I have used.

Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion. 1696.

Woman’s Wit; or, The Lady in Fashion. 1697.

Xerxes. 1699.

The Tragical History of Richard III, altered from Shakespear. 1700.

Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune. 1701.

She Would and She Would Not; or, The Kind Impostor. 1703.

The Careless Husband. 1705.

Perolla and Izadora. 1706.

The Comical Lovers. 1707.

The School Boy; or, The Comical Rival. 1707.

The Double Gallant; or, The Sick Lady’s Cure. 1707.

The Lady’s Last Stake; or, The Wife’s Resentment. 1708.

The Rival Fools. 1709.

The Rival Queans, with the Humours of Alexander the Great, a Comical-tragedy. Dublin, 1729.

Ximena; or, The Heroick Daughter. 1718.

Cinna’s Conspiracy. 1713.

Venus and Adonis. A Masque. 1715.

Myrtillo, a Pastoral Interlude. 1716.

The Non-Juror. 1718.

The Refusal; or, The Ladies Philosophy. 1721.

Caesar in Aegypt. 1725.

The Provok’d Husband; or, A Journey to London. 1728.

Love in a Riddle. A Pastoral. 1729 [misprinted 1719].

Damon and Phillida; a Ballad Opera. 1729.

Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John. 1745.

2. General Bibliography.

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Carlile, J. The Fortune Hunters; or, Two Fools Well Met. London, 1689.

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Charke, Charlotte. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. Written by Herself. London, 1755; reprint, London, 1827.

Chetwood, W. R. General History of the Stage. London, 1749.

Cibber, Theophilus, editor. Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1753.

Cibber, Theophilus. Two Dissertations on the Theatres. London, 1756.

Corneille, Pierre. Oeuvres. Paris, 1862.

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Steele, Richard, and John Dennis. The Theatre, by Sir Richard Steele; to which are added, the Anti-Theatre; the Character of Sir John Edgar; Steele’s Case with the Lord Chamberlain. Illustrated with Literary and Historical Anecdotes by John Nichols. London, 1791.

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FOOTNOTES:

BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS HUMANISTIC STUDIES

Vol. I January 1, 1914 No. 2