SOURCE: “Colley Cibber, Love's Last Shift (1696),” in Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 25-33.

[In this excerpt from his study of sentimental comedy throughout the eighteenth century, Ellis considers Love's Last Shift as one of the earliest works in the genre, although he argues that only the last two scenes really qualify as truly sentimental.]

Out of his necessities as an immigrant's son with no more education than Shakespeare, and as a young actor trying to support a growing family on 30s. a week,¹ Colley Cibber wrote his first play. He was having trouble getting good parts, so he wrote one for himself, Sir Novelty Fashion, a role that is part stage-history (reaching down from the Marquis de Mascarille in Molière's Les Precieuses ridicules [1659] through Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege's The Man of Mode [1676]) and part wish-fulfillment. For Sir Novelty Fashion is everything that Colley Cibber was not. He is the first Restoration rake to be called “Beau.” He is resourceful enough to create fashions, not simply to follow them, and rich enough to keep a mistress, a coach, and a footman. But even at twenty-three, Colley Cibber's head was practical as well as stuffed with shaping fantasies. So he also created a role for his wife and one more for his brother-in-law, a musician.

Forty years later, all unaware that he was echoing Ariosto and Milton, he remembered only that he had “resolv'd to leave nothing unattempted that might shew me in some new Rank of Distinction. Having then no other Resource, I was at last reduc'd to write a Character for myself.” It is not surprising that what the happily married man wrote is a celebration of marriage. It was called Love's Last Shift and it opened at the Theatre Royal in January 1696.²

The plot of Love's Last Shift is generated in the classical fashion by a conflict between generations, between one alazon, Sir William Wisewoud, and three pairs of eirons.³ The first of these, Amanda and Ned Loveless, are the abandoned wife and the prodigal husband, patient Griselda and Don Juan. Amanda's trouble is that she is not patient enough. She resents her husband's infidelities and when he found that he “cou'd not Whore in quiet” (V ii 52),⁴ Loveless left her. “The World … is a Garden,” Loveless says, “stockt with all sorts of Fruit,” whereas a wife is “no more than … a half Eaten Pippin, that had lain a Week a Sunning in a Parlor Window” (I i 42-8). So Loveless took off on a seven-year pursuit of shiny new apples and we catch a glimpse of him paying a pope's ransom for the enjoyment of a Venetian exotic (I i 31-4). As the play begins, he returns to London, dirty, broke, and unreformed, still in pursuit of “a Dinner and a brace of Whores” (I i 206). It has been objected that there is nothing in the play “to prepare us for Loveless's Conversion” in Act V.⁵ Even if this were true, a playwright cannot be denied his surprises. But in fact it is not true. Every detail of Loveless's conversion is anticipated in two of young Will Worthy's speeches in Act I (I i 415-32). In the opening speech of the play Loveless says, “Sirrah! leave your Preaching.” In the last speech of the play Loveless is preaching. What he preaches is subsumed by the theme of the comedy: “Change” is obsessive, but marriage is curative. Or, in other words, “change” is alazonic, but marriage is eironic. Loveless has earned his right to preach by experiencing these disjunctions.⁶

The second pair of lovers, young Will Worthy and Narcissa Wisewoud, daughter of Sir William and an heiress, are the bright, hard juveniles of Restoration comedy. Will is “a beggerly unaccountable sort of Younger Brotherish Rake-hell” (III i 191) whose derelictions include heiress chasing, lawyer bribing, and whoring. He is “The vice … combined with the hero … a cheeky, improvident young man who hatches his own schemes and cheats his rich father or uncle into giving him his patrimony along with the girl.” “I am as much in Love with Wickedness, as thou canst be,” he tells Loveless, “but I am for having it at a Cheaper rate than my Ruine!” (I i 118). Will experiences no conversion before he is rewarded by marriage to his heiress, but his being the “first promoter” (V iii 37) and undertaker of Love's successful Last Shift atones for his derelictions, because in comedy Love is “Victorious” “In Spight of Reason” (V iv 1, 15).

“The Fair Narcissa” (III i 24) conforms exactly to the model of the female eiron in Richard Blackmore's preface to Prince Arthur. An Heroick Poem:

this Accomplish'd Person [Blackmore says] entertains the Audience with confident Discourses, immodest Repartees, and prophane Raillery. She is throughly instructed in Intreagues and Assignations, a great Scoffer at the prudent Reservedness and Modesty of the best of her Sex, She despises the wise Instructions of her Parents or Guardians, is disobedient to their Authority, and at last, without their Knowledge or Consent, marries her self to the Fine Gentlemen above mentioned.⁷

Being an heiress, Narcissa can afford to be fashionably difficile (I i 178-80). She pretends that love is “old stuff” (I i 378), but she is not unwilling that a duel be fought over her because “Narcissa wou'd sound so great in an Expiring Lover's Mouth” (II i 243). And she pays for her pretensions by falling in love with a wastrel who thinks that she is “a strange affected piece,” but can find “no fault in her 1000 l. a year” (I i 523). She is redeemed by her beauty, her wit, and her mischievous “Satyrical Smile” (II i 318).

The third pair of lovers, Tom Worthy and Hillaria, Narcissa's cousin and Sir William Wisewoud's ward, are less interesting. Tom Worthy is a humorless (V iii 82-4) prig whose interpretation of the meaning of Love's Last Shift is a fine example of the device of the deliberately inadequate interpretation. Amanda's “Example,” he intones, “shou'd perswade all constant Wives ne'er to Repine at unrewarded Virtue” (V iii 35-6). But if Amanda had not repined, her virtue would have remained unrewarded.

Hillaria is almost indistinguishable from her cousin Narcissa. She is vain, high-spirited, and cynical (I i 236, 292, 318). In her “Mad humour” (III i 11) she thinks it foolish to be agreeable to her lover (II i 151). But she is redeemed by confessing her folly (II i 191) and also, of course, by her “Wit and Beauty” (I i 235, 270, 276). Her beauty was self-evident, supplied by the playwright's young wife, but her wit has to be taken on faith, for she has few witty lines.

Cibber's observance of poetic justice in the play is a hilarious parody of the virtue-rewarded motif. As in many Restoration comedies, “the price of Women” (V iii 104) is plainly marked. Hillaria is worth about £750 a year in her own right (V i 78). Narcissa has about £1250 a year (I i 162; V i 37-8). Amanda has an income of £2000 a year (I i 322; V ii 211). In awarding his “several Prizes in the Lottery of Human life” (V iii 244), Cibber exercises impeccable economic justice: the least rich girl gets the richest man, Tom Worthy; the richer girl gets young Will Worthy and £5000; the richest girl gets Loveless, whose estate is heavily mortgaged.

Arrayed against these young lovers is the one alazon, Sir William Wisewoud, a humor character in Shadwell's definition:

A Humor is the Byas of the Mind,
By which with violence 'tis one way inclin'd:
It makes our Actions lean on one side still,
And in all Changes that way bends the Will.(8)

Sir William represents an interesting switch on the traditional senex iratus figure; he is senex stoicus: “Old Philosophy” (III i 229) “fancies himself a great Master of his passion, which he only is in trivial matters” (Dramatis Personae). Even before he says “'tis impossible to make me angry” (IV i 52-3, p. 278) we know that he is going to blow. His temper is tested three times in the play and these tests supply a skeleton for the structure of the plot. He is tested in III i by Sir Novelty Fashion's declaration that he is to marry “the Fair Narcissa,” in IV i by two bullies provoking him to a duel, and finally in V iii by the discovery that he has been cheated by the Worthy brothers and a crooked lawyer. Structurally, therefore, these three tests constitute the backbone of the plot and the suspense generated in the first two insures that the third will culminate in a big comic bang.

Besides helping to polarize the comic tone by repeating his obsession, Sir William also functions importantly to obstruct the course of true love.⁹ His avarice would marry off the richer girl, Narcissa, to the richest man, Tom Worthy, in manifest violation of Cibber's version of poetic justice. His blocking role is dramatized when he places his daughter's hand in that—of the wrong man (V i 36) and urges his niece and ward to give her hand—to the wrong man (V i 72). Thus the “Comical old Gentleman” of III i 149 becomes a vicious old gentleman whose plaintive cry, “Ay, but the 5000 l., Sir!” (V iii 200) recalls Harpagon's “O ma cher cassette.”¹⁰ But unlike Harpagon, Sir William grows ashamed of his avarice in time to be reconciled to the eironic world at the play's end.¹¹

The great role in Love's Last Shift, however, and the one that Colley Cibber wrote for himself, is none of these, but that of Sir Novelty Fashion, a clown, a fool, a scapegoat sacrificed to our laughter (II i 211). Like all young actors, Colley Cibber wanted to be a tragedy hero and play opposite Anne Bracegirdle. But he had enough sense to recognize that neither his voice nor his “meagre Person” qualified him. “What was grave and serious did not … become me,” he said.¹² So he became a great comedian, like Pinky (plate 1).

The character invented by Molière is developed in Cibber's imagination into “a true Original” (II i 45). He is another humor character like Sir William Wisewoud, “an Egregious Fop” (III i 148), whose obsession is fashion. And like Sir William he functions, though less importantly, as a blocking character, by his gallantries with Hillaria and Narcissa. Sir Novelty's “business is Love” (II i 236), as he says. But all his love is for himself (II i 312; III i 144-5).

The language of Love's Last Shift juxtaposes the hero with the alazons and fools of the play. Like Sir William Wisewoud, Loveless is “Insensible” (III i 137; III ii 74). Don Juan, in Colley Cibber's conceit, turns out to be, not a free spirit, but an alazon living in ritual bondage to an obsession, “Fashionable Fornication” (III ii 106). Loveless enunciates the principle in his first speech: “They that will hunt pleasure … must never give over in a fair Chase” (I i 5-6). The “Chase” turns out to be an irrational compulsion. Like Sir Novelty Fashion, Loveless affects “Variety” and “change” in love (I i 43; IV iii 160-1; III i 109-11; III ii 60-1). But Sir Novelty's “Understanding goes naked” (III i 147) and even Mistress Flareit regrets her affair with him, not on moral, but on intellectual grounds: it was stupid, a “forfeiture of [her] Sense and Understanding” (IV i 52). By association, therefore, “Variety” and “change” become irrational, the product of “deluded Fancy” (I i 425-6). In these terms, Loveless's conversion becomes a disenchanting. He is unspelled. “Reason … breaks forth” (V ii 230) and Loveless is cured of the compulsive “Chase.” The equation of reason and marriage, the recurring image of marriage as a remedy (I i 146; II i 390; V i 14), and the case history of Loveless, all combine to enforce “a favourable Opinion of Poor Marriage” (II i 350).

“Lewd for above four Acts” (Epilogue, 16) the play certainly is. While not sustainedly pornographic, it reverts frequently to the sexual act (I i 501, p. 300; IV iii 213-15; V iii 126). Even the trees in St. James's Park are “lovingly … joyned” (III ii 2). The tone of all but the last two scenes is worldly and cynical. One determining device that Cibber could have learned from George Etherege is the potentially sentimental phrase uttered in an ironic voice. What Dorimant says is, “I have always my arms open to receive the distressed.”¹³ What Dorimant means is, “I am always ready to seduce young girls who have run away from home.” In Love's Last Shift the “Unhand me, you villain” kind of melodramatic injunction, concluding with tears (IV i 86), is spoken, not by an innocent to a villain, but by one villain to another, both acting disingenuous parts. Sentimental disregard for money—“Hang an estate! true Love's beyond all Riches!” (V i 77)—is articulated by Sir William Wisewoud who regards nothing but money.

So it becomes necessary to define the sentimentality of the play very carefully. It is mainly the last two scenes, dismissed as “out of fashion stuff” (Epilogue, 15), that account for its inclusion here. The “stuff” that was out of fashion in 1696 became “so much in fashion” that by 1773 Goldsmith felt threatened by it.¹⁴ Like his creature, Sir Novelty, Colley Cibber proved to be resourceful enough to create fashions (II i 269). Even more symptomatic, however, are the sentimental details and motifs scattered throughout the play. The most important of these is the heterodox assumption that human nature is essentially good (A2). The good nature of Amanda, Hillaria, and Tom Worthy is made explicit (I i 83; V iii 209; I i 142). Sir Novelty pretends to good nature (IV i 61). And even Loveless's vice is understood to be not real but assumed, “an Affectation of being Fashionably Vicious” (I i 417-18).¹⁵

There is “a sprinkling of tender melancholy Conversation” (B1):

Elder Worthy. I am your Slave, dispose of me as you please.

(II i 196)

Amanda. Forgive this innocent attempt of a despairing passion, and I shall die in quiet …
                                        Falls on the Ground.
Loveless. Ha! she faints! Look up fair Creature! Behold a Heart that bleeds for your distress.

(V ii 150-6)

There is heroic virtue rewarded (B2):

Hillaria. Why d'ye persist in such a hopeless Grief?
Amanda. Because 'tis hopeless.

(I i 309-10)

Amanda's persistence in this hopeless grief turns, of course, into “a Triumph of rewarded Constancy” (III i 78). And there is overt moralizing (B4): “goodness gives you … Power” (II i 199); “sure there are Charms in Vertue” (V ii 4-5).

Loveless's conversion looks like it might be an example of what has been called the “subversive alteration of character” that “regularly” concludes sentimental comedies.¹⁶ But in fact “a conversion … is the ordinary way which our poets use to end [their plays],” as Dryden said in 1668. “The poet is to be sure,” Dryden cautioned, that “he convinces the audience that the motive is strong enough.”¹⁷

Love's Last Shift easily meets this requirement. Loveless's conversion gains some credibility because it follows the pattern of religious conversion reiterated in countless spiritual autobiographies.¹⁸ His “motive,” furthermore, may have been reinforced by the fear that he has had sexual intercourse with his dead wife's ghost.¹⁹ And finally, on the new assumption that Loveless is essentially good, his “Conversion” amounts only to the displacement of “an Affectation of being Fashionably Vicious” (I i 417-18) or an unspelling. And while this magic is taking place (V ii 88-191), Loveless acts very much like a male Sleeping Beauty waking out of his seven-year delusion. The main plot of Love's Last Shift is a recapitulation of folklore motif D1978.4: “Hero wakened from magic sleep by wife who has purchased place in his bed from false bride.”

Love's Last Shift was a success both critically and at the box office. In “every way” it exceeded Colley Cibber's expectations.²⁰ Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, the patron of Dryden and Wycherley and representative (Lord Chamberlain) of the theatre at court, called it “the best First Play that any Author in his Memory had produc'd; and that for a young Fellow to shew himself such an Actor and such a Writer in one Day, was something extraordinary.”²¹ Congreve, who had praised Cibber's acting in The Double Dealer (1694), grew jealous of Cibber's success as a playwright and found—“justly,” Cibber said—that Love's Last Shift “had only in it a great many things that were like Wit, that in reality were not Wit.”²² But Cibber is being too modest, or perhaps ironical, for there are “in reality” a great many things in Love's Last Shift that are Wit and even some that recall Congreve's wit. “I'll hang my self, and swear you Murder'd me” (IV iv 22-3), for example, is a delightful Irish bull. This exchange:

Young Worthy. 'Tis business of Moment, Madam, and may be done in a Moment.
Narcissa. … my business is not so soon done as you imagine.

(I i 468-71)

exhibits the same kind of word play as “I hope I may be offended, without any offence to you, Sir” from The Old Bachelour (III i 293), in which Cibber played Fondlewife in May 1695, eight months before the opening of Love's Last Shift. And whereas everyone knows that night is the time for love, not everyone knows that “what made Daphne run away from Apollo, [was] that he wore so much Day-light about his Ears” (III ii 34-5).

The length of the original run of Love's Last Shift is not known, but it is said to have been “uncommon.”²³ The play was immediately added to the repertoire of the Theatre Royal and performed “over two hundred times” during the next seventy-seven years. Quarto editions of the play appeared in 1696 and 1702. In 1720 it was included in Plays Written by Mr. Cibber and editions in the classical Lintot duodecimo format were published in 1730, 1733, 1735, 1747, and 1752. Pirated editions were printed in Dublin and The Hague. Samuel Foote recalled that when the play was included in Le Théâtre anglois it was entitled La dernière Chemise de l'amour.²⁴

It may never be known for sure whether the first night audience did in fact shed “honest tears” during the reconciliation scene between Loveless and Amanda, but even the theatrical legend is instructive. Nor shall we ever know exactly what the anonymous critic meant when he said “that Play was the Philosopher's Stone … it did wonders.”²⁵

Notes

1. Apology 1889, I 194. A good edition of Cibber's Apology is a major desideratum. In her biography of Cibber, Helene Koon points out that several stars of the Drury Lane company, Thomas Betterton, William Mountfort, and George Powell, had written plays to exhibit their particular talents (Koon 1986, 25).

2. Apology 1889, I 212.

3. Frye 1957, 172-5.

4. The line (and page) numbers of Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband are those of Colley Cibber: Three Sentimental Comedies, ed. Maureen Sullivan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), but the text is that of the first edition of each play. By taking as her copy-text Plays Written by Mr. Cibber (1721) Sullivan bowdlerizes and misrepresents the play that was performed and published twenty-five years before. For the edition of his collected plays in two volumes Cibber undertook a thoroughgoing revision of Love's Last Shift to conform to the more refined sensibilities of the Georgian period. He cut out a few phrases like “lye in a naked bed” (I i 501, p. 300) and “her stinking breath” (IV i 25, p. 302). He changed “What the Devil shall we do?” (III ii 197, p. 302) to “What shall we do?”, “Maidenhead” (IV i 37, p. 302) to “Maid,” “hot Raging Lust” (IV i 108, p. 302) to “the Dotage of undone Desire,” and “new Ravish'd” (IV iii 210, p. 302) to “new-blest.” He also cut out an entire low-comedy episode (IV i), the importance of which to the structure of the play is set forth below (p. 28).

5. Bateson 1928, 22.

6. The terms “alazon” (impostor) and “eiron” (self-deprecator) for the blocking characters and heroes/heroines in comedy were made current in Anatomy of Criticism (Frye 1957, 40, 172); Frye 1957, 174.

7. Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur. An Heroick Poem (London, 1695) sig. A2r.

8. Thomas Shadwell, The Humorists (London, 1671) Epilogue.

9. Frye 1957, 168, 172.

10. Molière, L'Avare (1668) V iii.

11. Frye 1957, 165.

12. Apology 1889, I 182-3.

13. Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676) V ii 121.

14. Goldsmith 1966, III 210. Estimates of the number of sentimental comedies produced in the eighteenth century have been made, but the estimates lack credibility because the criteria for inclusion are not defined (Sherbo 1957, 161; The London Stage, part 4, I clxii-clxix; Hume 1972, 257).

15. Although human nature is assumed to be essentially good, virtue, inconsistently, is assumed to require that “Conscience and … Reason” be deployed to overcome nature (V ii 121).

16. Stanley T. Williams, Sewanee Review 33 (October 1925): 408.

17. Dryden 1800, I ii 80-1. “The manipulation of plot does not always involve metamorphosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum when it does. Unlikely conversions … are inseparable from comedy” (Frye 1957, 170). Kenneth Burke, making a further distinction, calls it “violating repetitive form in the interests of syllogistic progression” (Counter-Statement [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931] 164).

18. Loveless's comic conversion follows very closely the stages of religious conversion made known through the extensive literature of spiritual autobiography: 1. provocation to repentance (V ii 86); 2. reflection or consideration, a “coming to oneself” (V ii 112); 3. conviction or godly sorrow, remorseful self-accusation (V ii 141-3, 173-4); conversion proper, when God intervenes to relieve and reclaim the sufferer (V ii 193-4) (George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) 106. The God in this case is Love.

19. If this is the “Thought” that shocks Loveless's soul (V ii 157), the operative folklore motif is the taboo against sexual intercourse with unearthly beings in general (C112) and with a ghost in particular (E474). Almost no one in the audience in 1696 would have doubted the existence of revenants.

20. Dedication to Richard Norton of Southwick, Esq., sig. A3v.

21. Apology 1889, I 214.

22. Apology 1889, I 220.

23. Davies 1783-4, III 412.

24. Bryan R. S. Fone, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 7 (May 1968), 34; The Comic Theatre, ed. Samuel Foote et al., 5 vols. (London, 1762) I sig. a6r.

25. Davies 1783-4, III 412; A Comparison between the Two Stages (1702), ed. Staring B. Wells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942) 16. Hostile, moralizing criticism of Love's Last Shift in the twentieth century is summarized in Koon 1986, 196-7.