[In the following excerpt from a work that was originally published in 1953, Boas surveys Cibber's career as a playwright, paying particular attention to The Careless Husband, The Non-Juror, and The Provok'd Husband.]

In the preceding chapters Colley Cibber has from time to time figured as an actor. He was also a voluminous writer of plays, of which the most representative were akin to Steele's sentimental comedies. Born in London on 6 November 1671 he was educated at Grantham and served in 1688 in the force raised by the Earl of Devonshire in aid of the Prince of Orange. In 1690 he joined in a minor capacity the Drury Lane Company, and thenceforward to the close of his life he was in the fullest sense a man of the theatre.

His first comedy, Love's Last Shift (1696), was followed by several others, by a tragedy, Xerxes, and King Richard III, adapted from Shakespeare's play. It was with The Careless Husband, produced at Drury Lane on 7 December 1704, that he established his position as a dramatist. The scene is laid at Windsor, and the title part is that of Sir Charles Easy, who is carrying on intrigues with Lady Graveairs and his wife's waiting-woman, Mrs. Edging. To these at present Lady Easy turns a blind eye, lest a display of ‘jealousy may tease him to a fix'd aversion; and hitherto, though he neglects, I cannot think he hates me’.

Even Sir Charles's acid banter cannot provoke an angry retort.

Sir Char. Nay, the deuce take me if I don't really confess myself so bad that I have often wonder'd how any woman of your sense, rank and person, could think it worth her while to have so many useless good qualities.

…

L. Easy. I can't boast of my good qualities; nor, if I could, do I believe you think 'em useless.

Sir Char. Nay, I submit to you—Don't you find 'em so? Do you perceive that I am one tittle the better husband for your being so good a wife?

L. Easy. Pshaw! You jest with me.

Their dialogue is cut short by the news of the arrival in Windsor of Lord Morelove, in pursuit of the scornful Lady Betty Modish. As he confides to Sir Charles, he had ventured to criticize her conduct, whereupon

She told me I was rude, and that she would never believe any man could love a woman that thought her in the wrong in any thing that she had a mind to, at least if he dar'd so tell her … She desired to be alone, that I would take my odious proud heart along with me and trouble her no more.

He has not seen her since, but now repents of having contradicted her. Thereupon Sir Charles gives him the opportunity of meeting her at dinner, to which his wife has gone to invite her.

Lady Betty is in ecstasies over a new scarf she has just received from London. ‘'Tis all extravagance both in mode and fancy, my dear. I believe there's six thousand yards of edging in it. Then such an enchanting stoop from the elbow—something so neat, so lively, so noble, so coquet and charming!’ But Lady Easy is in no mood for such frivolities. She warns Lady Betty that it is only the beauty of the mind, not of the outside, that has lasting value, and rebukes her for showing more favour to Lord Foppington, who loves all women alike, than to her faithful Lord Morelove. There is cynical shrewdness in Lady Betty's retort:

The men of sense, my dear, make the best fools in the world; their sincerity and good breeding throws them so entirely into one's power, and gives one such an agreeable thirst of using them ill to show that power—'tis impossible to quench it.

When Foppington, in the next scene, appears he is the typical vainglorious and affected coxcomb, interlarding his talk with French phrases, making light of the wife whom he married for her fortune, and boasting of the success of his amours.

The situation of a woman holding at arm's length and humiliating the lover to whom she is ultimately to yield has lost today most of the appeal which it had for playgoers in earlier times. The manœuvres by which Lady Betty irritates Morelove by paying attentions to Foppington, and Morelove, urged on by Sir Charles, seeks to excite her jealousy by courting Lady Carstairs, seem to us now too long drawn out. But they lead up to the admirable scene in Act IV where all the parties are assembled with sallies of wit passing to and fro (as Foppington puts it) as in tennis. It is here that Lady Betty gives her first sign of relenting when she asks Morelove to let her speak with him, and permits him to be her escort when the company make their exit in pairs.

Hitherto the duel between them has somewhat overshadowed the relations between ‘the careless husband’ and his wife. But in Act V Cibber sees an opportunity of answering Jeremy Collier's attack, to which he makes a direct reference, on the immorality of plays.

L. More. Since the late short-sighted view of 'em vice may go on and prosper; the stage dares hardly show a vicious person speaking like himself, for fear of being call'd profane for exposing him.

L. Easy. 'Tis hard, indeed, when people won't distinguish between what's meant for contempt, and what for example.

Lady Easy finds her husband and Mrs. Edging asleep together, and stirred into blank verse she for the moment utters threats:

I'll throw the vizor of my patience off;
Now wake him in his guilt,
And barefac'd front him with my wrongs.

But then she thinks that she may be at fault, and as he is asleep without his wig Heaven may punish him with some languishing distemper. Murmuring ‘Forbid it mercy, and forbid it love!’, she takes a steinkirk (neckcloth) off her neck and lays it gently on his head. When Sir Charles wakes he feels the steinkirk and knows that his wife must have seen him sleeping with her woman. He is stricken suddenly with remorse.

How low an hypocrite to her must that sight have prov'd me! The thought has made me despicable even to myself. How mean a vice is lying! and how often have these empty pleasures lull'd my honour and my conscience to a lethargy, while I grossly have abus'd her, poorly skulking behind a thousand falsehoods. Now I reflect, this has not been the first of her discoveries. How contemptible a figure must I have made to her!

This speech marks a triumph for Collier's reforming influence and Cibber continues to press the moral home. Sir Charles surprises his wife by asking her why she ever ventured upon marriage with him, who never took pains to appear but what he was, ‘a loose unheeded wretch … and, in my best of praise, but carelessly good-natur'd’.

Lady Easy. Your own words may answer you. Your having never seem'd to be but what you really were; and through that carelessness of temper there still shone forth to me an undesigning honesty I always doubted of in smoother faces: thus, while I saw you took least pains to win me, you pleas'd and woo'd me most.

Sir Charles is startled by her understanding of him and after further exchange of confidences declares, ‘Receive me then entire, at last, and take what yet no woman ever truly had, my conquer'd heart.’ Whereupon Lady Easy exclaims, ‘O the soft treasure! O the dear reward of long desiring love. … Thus, thus to have you mine is something more than happiness; 'tis double life and madness of abounding joy.’ She even shows her absolute trust in him by refusing his request that she should at once discharge Mrs. Edging. In these speeches there is a riot of sentimentality surpassing anything in Steele's plays.

Here the play might well have come to a close. But Cibber again brings into the foreground the tension between Lady Betty and Lord Morelove, who begs pardon for the favour he has shown to Lady Graveairs. Sir Charles intervenes with a counter-check in a violent indictment of Lady Betty's treatment of Morelove and her flirtation with Foppington. At last this calculated manœuvre succeeds. Lady Betty confesses that she has been to blame, and assures Morelove of her ‘utter detestation of any past or future gallantry that has or shall be offered by me to your uneasiness’. She begs Foppington's pardon for the freedom that she has taken with him, but he airily answers that he has lost a thousand fine women in his time, without being out of humour, and as he has contributed to her happiness, he asks leave to complete it by joining her and Morelove's hands. Even Lady Graveairs rushing in angrily is sufficiently mollified by Sir Charles to accept Lady Easy's invitation to join the company at supper followed by music and a song.

In our eyes today the conversion of the rake Sir Charles is too sudden, and the surrender of Lady Betty is too long delayed, to be convincing, but the play, with its combination of Restoration and moralizing elements, was an immediate and enduring success. Pope was to pour scorn on those critics who would ‘deny The Careless Husband praise’.

In the dozen years that followed Cibber contributed a number of plays of various types to Drury Lane or the Haymarket, some of them adaptations. Among them was a tragedy, Perolla and Isadora (1705); comedies, The Comical Lovers (1707), The Double Gallant, or The Sick Lady's Cure (1707), The Lady's Last Stake, or The Wife's Resentment (1707); an entertainment, Hob, or The Country Wake (1711), and masques, Venus and Adonis and Myrtillo (1715). Some of these proved popular, but were not among his most significant productions.

Towards the end of 1717 Cibber seized on the opportunity of combining a sentimental comedy with a political onslaught. The Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was still fresh in popular memory, and the faction that had refused to swear allegiance to the sovereigns after the 1688 revolution was still troublesome. In his Non-Juror, produced at Drury Lane in December, Cibber hit upon the idea of transforming Molière's Tartuffe into a hypocritical adherent of the lost Stuart cause, in the person of the aptly named Wolf, Doctor of Divinity. This schemer has been taken by Sir John Woodvil into his house, where he has obtained complete ascendancy over him. He has persuaded him that all who are not members of the Roman or English Catholic Church are pagans. Hence Sir John has disinherited in Wolf's favour his son, Colonel Woodvil, and designates him as the bridegroom of his daughter Maria instead of her faithful lover, Mr. Heartly.

Maria at first affects to be pleased when her brother gives her the news that her father opposes Heartly. She is like Lady Betty in The Careless Husband in rebuffing her admirer, but with less hauteur and more sprightliness. ‘Now one has something to struggle for; there's difficulty, there's danger, there's the dear spirit of contradiction in it now. O, I like it mightily.’ She asks her brother, ‘Don't you know that I am a coquette?’ and when he retorts, ‘it's a hateful character’, she jauntily answers,

Aye, it's no matter for that, it's violently pleasant, and there's no law against it that I know of. You had best advise your friend Heartly to bring in a bill to prevent it. … Take my word, coquetry has govern'd the world from the beginning, and will do so to the end on't.

When Heartly enters she banters him mercilessly, even refusing his request that she shall swear at least she'll never be another's. When she goes out laughing to have tea, the Colonel seeks to cheer him up, and confides his suspicions that the Doctor's desires are fixed, not upon Maria, but her mother. They are interrupted by Wolf's entry and his request that they will join the family prayers. Heartly accepts, provided he does not leave out the prayer for the Royal Family, to which Wolf gives an equivocal answer, followed by a threat against the Government, which provokes the Colonel into shaking him. He runs out to complain to Sir John, but soon returns preceded by Maria, whose dressing-room he has invaded at the desire of her father, who now appears, frowns at Heartly and carries Maria off.

There follows an admirable scene in which Sir John takes the girl to task for playing the fool to no purpose, while his wife mediates between them: ‘Maria's of a cheerful temper, my dear, but I know you don't think she wants discretion.’ Sir John insists that she must marry, and describes his chosen bridegroom, a staunch member of the English Catholic Church, sober and chaste, and aged almost forty-nine, to which Maria replies, ‘You can no more bring me, sir, to endure a man of forty-nine than you can persuade my Lady to dance in a church to the organ.’ Thereupon Sir John fires his final shot, ‘In one word, the good and pious Doctor Wolf's the man I have decreed your husband.’ When Maria greets this announcement with laughter he counters with the threat, ‘if you expect a shilling from me, the Doctor is your husband, or I'm no more your father’. He becomes even more infatuated with Wolf after hearing from him in secret that the non-juring headquarters at Avignon Lane has elected him Bishop of Thetford, after which Sir John scrupulously addresses him as ‘my Lord’.

But Lady Woodvil has been alarmed by the prospect of her husband bestowing his estate upon Wolf, and in concert with the Colonel they prepare to frustrate this. They find an unexpected ally in Charles, who is acting as servant to Wolf. But, as he confides to Maria, with whom he too has fallen in love, he is a gentleman born who through Wolf's influence took part in the 1715 rebellion, and arriving in London as a refugee was taken into his house by Sir John and made an attendant on the Doctor. In proof of his repentance Charles hands over to Maria a deed, not yet signed and sealed, by which Sir John grants to Wolf ‘in present four hundred pounds per annum of which this very house is part, and at your father's death invests him in the whole remainder of his free estate’. The Colonel is entirely disinherited and Maria is to lose four thousand pounds unless she marries with the Doctor's consent.

This leads to an ingeniously devised series of complications. Maria, together with Charles, hurries off to a lawyer, who draws up a facsimile of Sir John's conveyance, except that the Colonel's name is everywhere substituted for that of the Doctor. Heartly, hearing of her thus going to a lawyer's with the Doctor's servant, is racked with jealousy, and Maria keeps him further on tenterhooks by telling him that her business ‘abroad’, as he calls it, was a secret she cannot disclose till next morning. She keeps it also from her brother, but his main interest is now in revealing Wolf's hypocrisy. He brings Sir John to hear him making love to his wife, but the Doctor, catching sight of them in the background, astutely converts his amorous outpourings as if their object was Maria. The Colonel's plan has miscarried and Sir John's infatuation for Wolf is so fortified that he insists on signing what he thinks is the deed disinheriting his son immediately.

It is Lady Woodvil who, at the second time of asking, succeeds in trapping Wolf. At her suggestion her husband hides under a table and listens to the Doctor's fervid protestations of love to his wife, till he can bear no more and seizes him by the throat with a cry of ‘Traitor’! The further working out in full of Sir John's disillusion and of Wolf's exposure, culminating in the revelation that he is a Popish priest in disguise, and his arrest for treason, has lost much of its appeal today. On the other hand it is doubtful if justice has been done to the artistry of Cibber's portrait of Maria. The high-spirited girl, who can torment the man to whom her heart is really given, shows delicate tenderness to her other lover, Charles, whose passion is hopeless. As she confesses to him, ‘It loses you no merit with me, nor is it in my nature to use any one ill that loves me, unless I lov'd that one again; then indeed there might be danger.’ When he asks what is the charm by which his rival has secured her preference, her answer gives the clue not only to her own attitude but to many marriages since then at which the world has wondered.

The gentleness and modesty of your temper would make with mine but an unequal mixture: with you I should be ungovernable, nor know myself; your compliance would undo me. I am by nature vain, thoughtless, wild and wilful; therefore ask a higher spirit to control and lead me. For whatever outward airs I give myself, I am within convinc'd a woman makes a very wrong figure in happiness that does not think superiority best becomes her husband.

Heartly's generous intervention with the Government on behalf of Charles, resulting in his pardon and reconciliation with his father, brings her nearer to a confession of her feeling. After telling him that he is ‘horrid silly’, she adds, ‘But since 'tis love that makes you such a dunce, poor Heartly, I forgive you.’ And the Colonel clinches matters by making her give Heartly her hand, and showing herself ‘consistent with that good sense I always thought you mistress of’. And she betrays something more than good sense when she at last tells her secret—how by the facsimile conveyance she has foiled Wolf's designs.

Anne Oldfield can never have had a more rewarding part than Maria. Cibber himself played the Doctor, with Booth as the Colonel and Wilks as Heartly. The sensation aroused by the play, with its political and religious implications, was proved not only by the issue of five editions of it in 1718 but by the feud of pamphlets, on either side, that it occasioned. A visit of King George to Drury Lane, to see the play, emboldened Cibber to dedicate it to him, for which he received a reward of 200 guineas.

It was not till January 1728 that Cibber's next, and last, important comedy was staged at Drury Lane. It was a venturesome experiment, an adaptation of a piece A Journey to London which Sir John Vanbrugh had left unfinished at his death in 1726. It contained two loosely connected plots. The journey to London had been undertaken by a country gentleman, Sir Francis Headpiece, with his wife, son, and daughter, as he had just been elected a parliament man to Westminster. He was thus in hopes of obtaining from the Government some highly paid office. Meanwhile his wife starts on the extravagant ways of a would-be woman of quality, his oafish son begins a flirtation with their landlady's daughter, and his pert daughter shows herself a regular enfant terrible. Cibber's treatment of this plot was doubtfully inspired. He makes Sir Francis Wronghead (as he calls him) speak with a country accent and have a dubious claim to his seat in Parliament. He lets the girl be almost trapped into a marriage with a soi-disant Count, a forger, and the son similarly with the Count's mistress, who exposes him. And it is in the vein of sentimental comedy that, on condition of his immediately marrying her, the Count is pardoned and even given £500, the amount of his forged bill, for honeymoon expenses.

But, as Cibber's change of the main title to The Provok'd Husband proves, it was the other plot in Vanbrugh's unfinished play that chiefly attracted him. He even changes the names of its two leading figures from Lord Loverule and Lady Arabella to Lord and Lady Townly. While he takes over much of Vanbrugh's dialogue between them he inserts passages of his own, including one in the opening scene. The provoked husband asks his lady to tell him seriously why she married him and she answers:

Wives have infinite liberties in life that would be terrible in an unmarried woman to take. … In the morning a married woman may have men at her toilet; invite them to dinner; appoint them a party in the stage-box at the play, engross the conversation there, call them by their Christian names, talk louder than the players; from thence jaunt into the city, take a frolicsome supper at an India House, perhaps in her gaieté de cæur toast a pretty fellow; then clatter again to this end of the town, break, with the morning, into an assembly, crowd to the hazard-table.

It is the full-length programme of the twenty-four hours of an eighteenth-century woman of fashion which Lady Townly carries out completely. But, as Cibber makes clear, she does not violate her marriage vows. Her chief offences in her husband's eyes are her extravagance at the gaming-table and her unseemly late hours. Finally he can bear them no longer.

Lord Town. Whatever may be in your inclination, madam, I'll prevent your making me a beggar at least.

Lady Town. A beggar! Croesus! I am out of patience. I won't come home till four to-morrow morning.

Lord Town. That may be, madam, but I'll order the doors to be locked at twelve.

Lady Town. Then I won't come home till to-morrow night.

Lord Town. Then, madam, you shall never come home again.

Lady Town. What does he mean? I never heard such a word from him in my life before.

In a preface to the printed edition of The Provok'd Husband Cibber stated that Vanbrugh had intended in the catastrophe of the play to make the husband turn his wife out of doors, and thus to point a moral to vicious women. With Cibber sentiment had also to be taken into account—but not till the eleventh hour. The last straw is when he finds his wife turning away a tradesman unpaid, though he had given her a large sum to clear off her debts. She retorts that he has less to complain of than many husbands of equal rank. His reply must have startled not only her but many of the Drury Lane audience.

Death, madam! do you presume upon your corporal merit, that your person's less tainted than your mind? Is it there, there alone, an honest husband can be injured. Have you not every other vice that can debase your birth, or stain the heart of woman?

He deplores that the legislature has left no precedent of a divorce for ‘this adultery of the mind as well as that of the person’. He summons his sister Lady Grace and his confidential friend Manly who were present at his wedding to be witnesses of his ‘determined separation’, though he acquits her of the least suspicion against the honour of his bed. Then at last Lady Townly breaks down and falls upon Lady Grace's neck, crying, ‘Support me, save me, hide me from the world.’

Manly pleads with Townly not to leave her thus but to give a hearing to something that is labouring in her mind, whereupon she makes what she calls not her excuse but her confession. Infatuated with the homage paid to her beauty she had triumphed over all hearts, while insensitive herself to any, and had allowed her father to choose Townly as her husband.

Our hands were joined, but still my heart was wedded to its folly. My only joy was power, command, society, profuseness and to lead in pleasure. The husband's right to rule I thought a vulgar law which only the deformed or meanly spirited obeyed. I knew no directors but my passions, no master but my will. Even you, my Lord, some time o'ercome by love, were pleased with my delights, nor then foresaw this mad misuse of my indulgence. And though I call myself ungrateful while I own it, yet as a truth it cannot be denied that kind indulgence has undone me, it added strength to my habitual failings.

Time alone, she declares, can convince him of her future conduct, and not till then can she hope for pardon. But Townly, realizing that he has not been without fault, makes the surprising announcement, ‘No, madam, your errors, thus renounced, this instant are forgiven’, which brings the response, ‘Oh, till this moment never did I know, my Lord, I had a heart to give you.’ Well may Townly take Manly and his sister to witness, ‘See here the bride of my desires! This may be called my weddingday.’ Townly's change of front is too abrupt to be convincing but it allows of a harmonious conclusion which Cibber substitutes for what, according to him, had been Vanbrugh's intended austere climax.

As with The Non-Juror, but now on literary not political grounds, the performance of The Provok'd Husband aroused a controversy. Cibber's enemies, ignorant of his share in the play, condemned ‘the journey to London’ part, which was mainly Vanbrugh's, and applauded loudly the Townly plot in which Cibber had the chief hand. In self-defence, when he published the comedy in 1728 with a dedication to Queen Caroline, he also printed A Journey to London from Vanbrugh's manuscript. The division of opinion has lasted into our own day. W. C. Ward, in his edition of Vanbrugh's dramatic works, rejected The Provok'd Husband as not worth including. Allardyce Nicoll, in his History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama (1925), with more reason calls it one of the best comedies of the period.

A faction also interrupted the performance in January 1729 of Cibber's pastoral ballad-opera, Love in a Riddle, though on the second night the Prince of Wales was present. When from this Damon and Phillida was extracted it was not announced as by Cibber, was favourably received and constantly revived. His enemies had yet more occasion to blaspheme when in December 1730 he was appointed Poet Laureate. Thereafter he produced no more plays, but in 1740 he rendered a notable service to the history of the theatre by publishing the Apology for his life. This vivacious autobiography should have been enough to save Pope from his egregious blunder in the final edition of The Dunciad (1743) in replacing Theobald by Cibber on the throne of Dulness. Throughout his career of eighty-six years, ending on 11 December 1757, Colley Cibber as dramatist, actor, and manager established a reputation proof against satirical attack.