pleasing him with what he seem’d to loath, were such a sweet Revenge for slighted Love, so vast a Triumph of rewarded Constancy, as might persuade the looser part of Womankind ev’n to forsake themselves, and fall in Love with Virtue.

Loveless is a more familiar figure from the world of Restoration comedy, a rake who has lived according to a delusion of his sex and class about marriage: “an affectation of being fashionably Vicious, than any reasonable Dislike he cou’d either find in” his wife’s “Mind or Person.” Amanda, who has been altered (but not for the worse) by smallpox since Loveless last saw her, is persuaded by Young Worthy to trick her husband into her bed. This plot involves two transformation scenes. In act 4, the audience has the titillating experience of seeing the apparently virtuous Amanda abandon herself to the pleasures of “a lawless Love: I own my self a Libertine, a mortal Foe to that dull Thing call’d Virtue, that mere Disease of sickly Nature.” In act 5, when Loveless discovers the mistake he has made, he admits the errors of his ways and returns to his faithful wife, a scene that reportedly brought tears to the eyes of the first-night audience.

These characters are one-dimensional figures committed to particular moral points of view, but the clash between these opposing views gives their scenes dramatic tension. Cibber also managed to leaven their scenes with laughter by introducing a subplot involving Loveless’s servant Snap and Amanda’s maid. Snap is placed under a table throughout Loveless’s assignation with Amanda. After Loveless and Amanda retire, Snap sneaks up on Amanda’s maid, who is listening at her mistress’s door, and begins to take advantage of her. When she gets a chance, the maid tricks him into falling into the cellar, but Snap pulls her down with him and they spend the night together. Their brief scenes form an appropriate low-comedy contrast to the more serious affairs of their master and mistress.

The secondary plot ostensibly involves the correct mating of the Worthy brothers. Young Worthy loves Narcissa, who is betrothed to Elder Worthy, who loves Hillaria, Narcissa’s cousin. At the end of the play, the couples are correctly matched, but Cibber’s working out of this plot was perfunctory, since his real interest in this part of the play was Sir Novelty Fashion, the role that helped to establish him as an actor. One might expect Sir Novelty, a stock figure from Restoration drama modeled after Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s The Man of Mode: Or, Sir Fopling Flutter (pr., pb. 1676), to function as possible rival for the hands of Narcissa and Hillaria, but he is so obviously a fool that no one, save himself, takes him seriously. Rather than using Sir Novelty to add complications to the secondary plot, Cibber used the plot as an occasion to display Sir Novelty. As a prank, the four young lovers lure Sir Novelty to St. James’s Park with the promise of a rendezvous with Narcissa, whom he assumes must be enamored of his charms. Instead, he meets Mrs. Flareit, a used mistress he wants to get rid of. The scene, like so many of Cibber’s big comic scenes, is filled with physical action. At its climax, the emotional Mrs. Flareit attempts to run Sir Novelty through with a sword. Occurring at the beginning of act 4, this scene with its broad humor balances the almost melodramatic meeting between Loveless and Amanda at the end of the act. In addition, the scenes thematically resemble each other, since both involve tricks played on male characters who are overly concerned with following the false dictates of fashion. Unlike Loveless, Sir Novelty experiences no moral reformation. He is simply exposed as the fool he is, to the general amusement of all.

The Careless Husband

In The Careless Husband, written eight years later, Cibber used more artfully many of the elements that had worked so well in Love’s Last Shift. Sir Novelty reappears as Sir Foppington, but now he furthers the plot. He is still a fantastic fool, but not so ludicrous that he cannot make a devoted lover jealous when he ogles the lover’s mistress. The double plot once again involves a similar situation played out with two couples, but here the characters in both plots are from the same genteel level of society and interact with one another. In the main plot, Sir Charles Easy is married to a faithful woman who sincerely loves him. Only at the end of the play does he learn to value her devotion and cast off the conventional role of jaded husband who must look outside his home for pleasure. In the secondary plot, Lady Betty Modish is pursued by a faithful suitor, Lord Morelove, who sincerely loves her. Only at the end of the play is she able to come to grips with her true feelings for him and to cast off her conventional role of the desirable beauty who delights in exercising her power over men and in keeping them on a string.

These characters neatly complement one another. Lady Easy is a model of virtue. Even when she discovers her husband sleeping with her maid, she suppresses her anger and thinks instead of his needs by placing a scarf “gently over his head” so he will not catch cold. Her only concern is that he should not wake and be irritated: “And if he should wake offended at my too-busy care, let my heart-breaking patience, duty, and my fond affection plead my pardon.” Lady Betty Modish is a flirt. She cannot resist engaging in battle with the opposite sex and is satisfied with nothing less than victory: “Let me but live to see him once more within my power, and I’ll forgive the rest of fortune.” Sir Charles Easy is a man of the world, careless in his affairs, weary of the complicated games lovers play: “I am of late grown so very lazy in my pleasures that I had rather lose a woman than go through the plague and trouble of having or keeping her.” Lord Morelove is so timid that he would never even attempt such an affair: “The shame or scandal of a repulse always made me afraid of attempting a woman of condition.”

The reconciliations in act 5 are better prepared for here than in Love’s Last Shift. Sir Charles Easy and Lady Betty Modish may not be in touch with their true feelings, but the audience is well aware of them. In this context Lady Easy is extremely useful. To a modern reader, she may appear impossibly prim and virtuous, but she is aware of the true feelings of Sir Charles and Lady Betty, and she helps expose what the characters themselves do not know. Here, for example, Lady Easy probes the feelings of Lady Betty:Lady Betty Modish: But still, to marry before one’s heartily in love— Lady Easy: Is not half so formidable a calamity. But if I have any eyes, my dear, you’ll run no great hazard of that in venturing upon my Lord Morelove. You don’t know, perhaps, that within this half hour the tone of your voice is strangely softened to him, ha! ha! ha! ha!

At the end, the reader does not feel that the reconciliations have been imposed by the law of happy endings; they are rather the natural consequence of character in action.

The Provok’d Husband

Cibber’s last successful play, The Provok’d Husband, was presented twenty-four years after The Careless Husband. Like so many of Cibber’s works, it is not a completely original play. In this instance, Cibber revised an unfinished play that came into his hands after the death of its author, Sir John Vanbrugh. The changes Cibber made give a good indication of his theatrical interests. Vanbrugh’s play consisted of two plots and was entitled A Journey to London. The main plot involved a well-to-do family from the country, the Headpieces, who come to London only to fall easy victims to the lures of the big city. The secondary plot involved the battling Loverules, who fight over Lady Loverule’s extravagances. Peter Dixon suggests in his edition of the play that if Vanbrugh had finished the work, the Loverule plot would have issued “in an angry separation, without hope of reconciliation, but also without the possibility of divorce.” Cibber, who had a reputation as the dramatist of genteel society, reversed the importance of the two plots. The disputes between the Townlys (the new name for the Loverules) became the primary plot, while the misadventures of the Wrongheads (the new name for the Headpieces) became the secondary plot. In act 5, Cibber provided a moral conclusion with the reconciliation of the Townlys.

The theme of a wife’s financial excesses dominates the Townly plot. Lady Townly is addicted to gambling. Her fault is not simply a matter of extravagant expenditures, for she virtually abandons her husband for the pleasures of the hazard table, associating with the least reputable people in polite society and sleeping until five in the afternoon.

In act 5, however, Lady Townly reforms when she is threatened with the possibility of being cut off from her husband’s wealth and her position as his wife. Her reformation is as unprepared for as Loveless’s in Love’s Last Shift. Both characters renounce their wicked ways after having spent a whole play demonstrating how committed they are to their profligate habits. In her recantation, Lady Townly sounds suspiciously like another Cibber character, Lady Betty Modish in The Careless Husband. Both ladies are great beauties who use their allure to gain power over men. Not surprisingly, both of these parts were written for Cibber’s favorite actress, Anne Oldfield.

The secondary plot is also dominated by a conflict between spouses. Lady Wronghead quickly learns the main vice of the married lady in town—to spend money. She starts with knickknacks and fripperies, since the greatest distinction of a fine lady in this town is in the variety of pretty things that she has no occasion for, but soon moves on to the pleasures of the hazard table, to which she is introduced by Lady Townly. At the end of the play, there is no recantation scene for Lady Wronghead. Rather, she is whisked back to the country, where she belongs and where she will do herself and others no harm. The Wrongheads, like Sir Novelty Fashion, exist to amuse the audience; moral reform is not possible for them.

In this late comedy, Cibber once more manipulated the character types and situations with which he had worked for thirty years. Cibber’s career as a dramatist does not reveal growth; rather, it reveals an early mastery of the requirements of the stage that sustained him for the rest of his career and made him the most important writer of comedies in the early eighteenth century.