[In the following essay, Drougge charges that although Cibber presents his plays as realism, they are actually sentimentalism: “wishfulfilment fantasies offered as instruction, unreal behaviour offered as psychology, submissive eloquence offered as logic.”]

I

Colley Cibber, poet laureate and hero of Pope's Dunciad, produced some four original comedies (depending on how you count)¹ during the initial stages of his impressive career as the first of the actor-managers at Drury Lane. Two of these comedies, Love's Last Shift (1696) and The Careless Husband (1704), have traditionally been accorded some place in theatrical history, mainly though not exclusively for reasons unconnected with dramatic or literary merit. My own reason for offering some remarks on these two plays is non-literary too: I have no intention of trying to revalue them as dramatic literature, or of redefining their opportunism and illogicality in more flattering terms.² They seem to me to be interesting as documents, not merely of an outlandish phase in the history of taste, but of social history. They are wishfulfilment fantasies of a particular kind. Cibber is not an escapist who pretends not to see the social and moral problems of his time, but a sentimentalist: someone who genuinely does not see them but pretends to. In his comedies he introduces some of the questions which seemed most urgent to contemporary dramatists—marital discord, the balance between personal liberty and social adjustment, the balance between material security and individual feeling in choosing a marriage partner—and “solves” them by unproblematizing them. Most problems in his plays turn out to disappear before the panacea of a traditionally submissive feminine role, the adoption of which is recommended with propagandizing zeal in all of Cibber's comedies.

In reading them, it is difficult to escape an impression of hostility towards women as such, and also of a progression towards ever greater hostility, from Love's Last Shift in 1696 to Cibber's part in The Provoked Husband, which he produced in 1728 by completing Vanbrugh's posthumous three-act fragment A Journey to London, and which is his only original work in comedy besides the four plays of 1696-1707 already mentioned. In Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband the female audience is scolded, but also vicariously rewarded, with examples of angelic virtue in Amanda and Lady Easy, who retrieve their straying husbands by means of wifely tact; in The Lady's Last Stake (1707) and The Provoked Husband they are scolded with examples of usurpation, of unnatural women stepping out of their proper sphere and being properly humiliated for it. The Lady's Last Stake is a bad-tempered reply to female critics of Lady Easy's wifely “patience”.³ In this play, the various mortifications attendant on Lady Wronglove's resentment and mannishness are set out in strong and crude colours; and Cibber's own resentment still seems to be growing in The Provoked Husband twenty years later. The dialogue on the harm that comes of spoiling wives, which he has inserted into Vanbrugh's first act,⁴ is shrill and bitter.

These aspects of the plays, however, require little analysis: what is interesting about them is not so much the traditional morality or the hostility, but rather their picture of a new social ideal, which Cibber seems to have offered without being altogether aware of doing so; perhaps merely out of that instinctive flair for the “modern” which was so characteristic of him, as when some forty years later he wrote the first modern autobiography in English.

II

In the theatrical season 1694-95, the patentees' mismanagement of the single theatre company in London (the “United Company”) led at last to a complete rupture between the patentees and the more experienced among the actors, led by Betterton, who consequently set up for themselves in Lincoln's Inn Field.⁵ Naturally, there was keen rivalry between this new cooperative company and the old one at Drury Lane, which was severely handicapped by the disappearance of all its stars and the comparative lack of skill of the remaining young players.⁶ The actors' company had the luckiest start imaginable: they opened in late April 1695 with Congreve's Love for Love, which was an immense success. In the following season the managers of the old company did their best to find a hit of their own by rapidly putting on an unprecedented number of new plays at Drury Lane. Not until January 1696, however, did they produce a new play which really caught the fancy of the town. This was the comedy Love's Last Shift: Or, The Fool in Fashion by Colley Cibber, at that time a rather obscure young actor who had remained with Christopher Rich at Drury Lane (who had in fact presumably never been invited to follow Betterton, since Cibber would surely not have left such a flattering circumstance, had it occurred, out of his detailed account of the events in his Apology) and who considered his acting abilities insufficiently recognized by the management. As he himself told the story, more than forty years later, he had created the few roles assigned to him with great aplomb and striking success; yet had always, unaccountably, found himself again treated as a nobody at the next casting (Apology, pp. 115-18). “Having then no other Resource”, he explains, “I was at last reduc'd to write a Character for myself” (p. 118). The character which he wrote for himself in Love's Last Shift was that of Sir Novelty Fashion, “which was thought, a good Portrait of the Foppery then in fashion” (p. 119). A shrewd appreciation of what will please and pay on the stage was to be characteristic of Cibber in his later career as actor-manager, and apparently he possessed this shrewdness from the start. Sir Novelty turned out to be exactly the sort of thing that audiences loved to see Colley Cibber doing: a fantastically affected, foppish and vain character, which his detractors were later, inevitably, to insinuate that he acted so well because it so closely resembled his own.⁷

The part of Sir Novelty is fairly large, and obviously easily expandable by extra horseplay if desired, but actually it has no very central position in either of the play's two plots. The main or titular plot deals with the relationship between the rake Loveless and his virtuous wife Amanda, who eventually reclaims him by means of a traditional bed-trick, after a separation of ten years which he has spent in lurid dissipation “abroad” (we note that this must mean that he has been away from England since before the revolution of 1688). Amanda, who has been altered beyond his recognition by the small-pox (“though not for the worse”), poses as a woman of easy virtue, lures him to her bed and confronts him with the truth in the morning, claiming to have proved that a wife can be as good in bed as a mistress. Loveless is not only convinced but stricken by the logic of this and makes several speeches on these sorts of lines:

Oh! thou hast rouz'd me from my deep Lethargy of Vice! For hitherto my Soul has been enslav'd to loose Desires, to vain deluding Follies, and Shadows of substantial Bliss: But now I wake with Joy, to find my Rapture real.—Thus let me kneel and pay my Thanks to her whose conquering Virtue has at last subdu'd me. Here will I fix, thus prostrate, sigh my Shame, and wash my Crimes in never-ceasing Tears of Penitence.⁸

Some critics in the audience, according to Gildon, objected to this scene as being “founded on a very great improbability, viz. on Loveless's not knowing his wife … yet the beauty of the incident and the excellent moral that flows from it abundantly outweigh the fault”.⁹ Other sources, too, testify to the striking effect the beauty and moral of the scene had,¹⁰ though it should be noted that Thomas Davies' well-known report about the first-night audience unanimously bursting into tears is far from contemporary.¹¹ Certainly the moral can be said to “flow”; the reconciliation is long, emotional and exclamatory, with a gymnastic choreography of prostrations, kneelings and risings generated by his penitence and her “submissive eloquence”. First she kneels down while he stands “amazed”, then she falls in a swoon, he supports her, she rises; he “turns from her” (ashamed), she kneels again, he begs her to rise, he embraces her, she weeps; he kneels; she begs him to rise.

The play's other plot forms a very worldly contrast to these orgies of feeling. It consists of the successful machinations of the Worthy brothers to marry the women of their choice. Elder Worthy, moral and rather stuffy, is in love with the sensible Hillaria, while Young Worthy, a fortune-hunter “of a looser temper” as the Dramatis Personae tolerantly puts it, wants to catch the capricious heiress Narcissa (“‘tis a strange Affected Piece!—But there's no fault in her 1000 l. a Year, and that's the Loadstone that attracts my Heart”, I.i.523). The obstacles to these unions are mostly parental-economic: Narcissa's rich father wants his daughter to marry the wealthy Elder Worthy, who really loves her undowered cousin Hillaria, but pretends to woo Narcissa merely in order to help his impecunious young brother hoodwink the old gentleman. Young Worthy is thus enabled to visit his “piece” freely, posing as a messenger for his brother. Narcissa's father is too credulous to provide any serious reversals, and most of the interest, if that is the right word, of this plot centres round the humours of Narcissa (coquetry) and Elder Worthy (jealousy, rather like Falkland in Sheridan's Rivals) and the fopperies of Sir Novelty Fashion, who flirts with Narcissa, and displays himself generally. There is also a scene between Sir Novelty and his cast mistress Flareit, where her passion and his indifference are clearly modelled on the corresponding scene between Dorimant and Loveit in Etherege's Man of Mode. The rest of this plot does not seem to be actually lifted from anywhere in particular, but is obviously solidly unoriginal.

It is difficult to disagree with Barker's judgement that Love's Last Shift has “little relation to life or to art”,¹² but as lacking in integrity as the play is, it seems to me to be of considerable ideological interest. The London stage was at this time, 1696, beset by outside pressures as well as internal rivalries.¹³ The moral rearmament movement headed by the societies for the reformation of manners and by King William and Queen Mary themselves was well under way,¹⁴ and Young Worthy hints rather sardonically at the new temper of the town for the information of Loveless, who has been abroad for ten years:

Lov. But, hark he [sic], Friend, are the Women as tame and civil as they were before I left the Town? Can they endure the Smell of Tobacco, or vouchsafe a Man a Word with a dirty Cravat on?

Y. Wor. Ay, that they will; for Keeping is almost out of Fasion: So that now an honest Fellow, with a promising Back, need not fear a Night's Lodging for bare good Fellowship.

Lov. If Whoring be so poorly encourag'd methinks the Women shou'd turn honest in their own Defence.

Y. Wor. Faith, I don't find there's a Whore the less for it; the Pleasure of Fornication is still the same; all the Difference is, Lewdness is not so barefac'd as heretofore.

(III.ii.6)

Young Worthy is only interested in the “reformation” of women, which he considers spurious. The reformation of Loveless himself at the end of the play, with its wallowing in the refinements of penitence and magnanimity, at one time made audience and critics consider the play admirably moral, while later critics, less prepared to endorse such scenes, described it as the first “sentimental comedy”¹⁵ and the first sign that the spirit of reform was beginning to affect the stage. Later still, more stress was placed on the opportunism of the play's vivid embodiment of both “Restoration” values (aristocratic, licentious, male, cynical: “He's lewd for above four acts, Gentlemen!” the epilogue points out) and the new “reformed” bourgeois values which were so powerfully to dominate the later eighteenth-century drama (middle-class, virtuous, female, emotional: “the Ladies taste is more refin'd, / They, for Amanda's Sake, will sure be kind”).¹⁶ Now that the existence of earlier plays that are sentimental in the same sense has been pointed out¹⁷ (indeed, the reformed-rake motif had long been something of a commonplace, though not in quite so luscious a form as Cibber gives it, and not in the case of a man already married), and the beginnings of the reform movement itself have been pushed back in time even beyond the revolution of 1688,¹⁸ the play is perhaps best known because of Vanbrugh's famous sequel The Relapse (November, 1696), where Loveless is seen returning to his “Restoration” ways.

Vanbrugh's Relapse is in fact something approaching a problem play (only approaching, since the vitality and energy of its farcical subplot almost crowds the comparatively anemic relapse plot off the stage), while Love's Last Shift stands out by comparison as a non-problem or pseudo-problem play. What distinguishes such a play from a simply escapist or romantic one is of course that it does introduce—in fact is entirely based on—problems, which the author intends or pretends to discuss, while actually refusing to regard them as at all problematic. Thus, for example, Young Worthy's status as an impecunious younger brother brought up to expensive habits (a social evil which Vanbrugh's comedies were repeatedly to present) turns out to be no problem really: “tho' faith my Father left me but 3000 l. … I am supply'd by the continual Bounty of an indulgent Brother” (I.i.138). More centrally, the basic situation of the play, that of a woman tied to a debauched husband, is one that does not look depressing and problematic only to a modern reader, but which looked exactly the same way to many of Cibber's contemporaries, as a result of various social pressures and changes in the role of women. That situation was strikingly and pessimistically treated in Southerne's unfunny comedy The Wives Excuse (1691) and later more amusingly, but with complete seriousness, by Vanbrugh in The Provok'd Wife (1697). Cibber, however, “shows” in Love's Last Shift that it is no problem really, by having Amanda “prove” to Loveless that being a good husband is not merely his duty but also the most enjoyable condition possible to him, thus combining all imaginable advantages. For Loveless' problem, that of having a polygamous inclination, is just a pseudo-problem, the audience learns: men really prefer their own wives, and really have more fun in bed with them than with any other women, so there is actually no sacrifice involved in monogamy. Pleasure and morality lie on the same side:

Not knowing thee a Wife, I found thee charming beyond the Wishes of luxurious Love. Is it then a Name, a Word shall rob thee of thy Worth? Can Fancy be a surer Guide to Happiness than Reason?

(V.ii.223)

The syllogism of the bed-trick has proved to Loveless that he only used to think he wanted to be promiscuous. Why, though, did it take so long for “Reason” to intervene and show that he never really wanted to?

Oh! Why have I so long been blind to the Perfections of thy Mind and Person?

Where, indeed, did the names, words and fancies come from that Loveless speaks of? In all his plays, Cibber was to offer the same facile “psychological” explanation of why people insist on supposing life to be problematic, thus making it necessary to demonstrate to them that it isn't really: it is because they are animated by a spirit of contradiction and modishness, which makes them mistake their own wishes and wrongly imagine personal and social relations to be fraught with choices which will mean for instance sacrificing enjoyment for security or vice versa.

A typical example is Loveless' glib excuse for his love of gaming (a lifelong and very real problem for Cibber himself).¹⁹ This love, he explains in the fifth act, had actually just been a misconception which his wife might have avoided by being a bit more diplomatic when they were first married: “she was always exclaiming against my Extravagancies, particularly my Gaming, which she so violently opposed, that I fancied a Pleasure in it, which I since never found” (V.ii.53). This elephantine hint to wives that they must grease “problems” away by tactful manipulation, rather than exacerbate them by opposition and reproaches, was to be worked out at length in two later plays, The Careless Husband (1704) and The Lady's Last Stake (1707).

This shrouding process, this use of actual social evils, painful choices and incompatible human needs as bricks to build a structure which denies that such things exist, seems to me to be exactly that which ought properly to be called “sentimentality” in Cibber's comedies. Certain aspects of the character of Loveless do, however, appear to have an interest which survives the processes of simplification and unproblematization. The usual critical view of Loveless is that he is an incongruous combination of typical Restoration hero (cynical, licentious, etc.) and typical sentimental hero (emotional, sententious, etc.): first he is the one for four acts and then he becomes the other, and the switch is unrealistic, opportunistic and embarrassing.²⁰ Presumably very few modern readers would disagree about the opportunism and the embarrassment. Cibber's editor Maureen Sullivan defends him against these traditional charges, however. She suggests that realistic and psychological criteria are irrelevant to this kind of play, and that Amanda's reclamation of Loveless ought rather to be seen as simple and fabulous romance, “the story of the beautiful princess who rescues the handsome prince from the wicked spell which has turned him into a beast”²¹—a stage version of fairy-tale, expressed in terms which were in 1696 widely acceptable and comprehensible, namely as the story of how true and virtuous love triumphs over “the worldly, conventional ‘love-attitudes’ presented in Restoration comedy of manners” (p. xvi).

In my view, both the traditional censure and the more recent defence are dependent on untenable assumptions about “Restoration comedy of manners”. The trouble with seeing Loveless' conversion as a critique of the earlier theatrical tradition, or as an opportunistic part-way endorsement of the values inherent in this tradition,²² is that these values do not constitute the simple social and moral monolith required by the argument. Consequently, such a critique or endorsement could hardly have been recognized and appreciated by the audience for which Cibber was writing. They were familiar not with a “traditional hero of the comedy of manners” (Sullivan, p. xvii) but with many different kinds of heroes. Even a very rough classification of comedy since 1660 must surely recognize a minimum distinction between hard and soft heroes (where Otway's and Shadwell's fortunehunters are typically hard, while Mellefont in Congreve's Double Dealer and Etherege's and Wycherley's second-string heroes like Young Bellair and Harcourt are typically soft), together with the very common intermediate “hard-boiled with a soft centre” type (such as Aphra Behn's madcaps and charm-peddlars). Insofar as these various kinds of heroes are alike at all, Loveless manages to be different from all of them, not only after his “reformation” but right from the beginning of the play:

Y. Wor. But how hast thou improv'd thy Money beyond Sea? What hast thou brought over?

Lov. Oh, a great deal of Experience.

Y. Wor. And no Money?

Snap [Loveless' servant]. Not a Souse, faith. Sir, as my Belly can testifie.

Lov. But I have a great deal more Wit than I had!

(I.i.87)

This pre-reform Loveless can hardly be called “worldly”, as Sullivan thinks him. While he is lewd and cynical like the heroes of the “hard” comedy of the 1680's, he is strikingly different from them in being improvident and bohemian. The hero of the earlier comedy is always a materialist, in his hard, soft or hard-shelled way: wit and experience are certainly in varying degrees important to him as well, but first he takes care of the souses. This is true also of those few comedy heroes who are conceived in too complex a way to be easily pigeonholed as hard or soft: Wycherley's Horner, Etherege's Dorimant, Congreve's Mirabell. I am not trying to impute “heartlessness” or the like to, for instance, Congreve's heroes. Of course the ultimate goals and values of a character like Mirabell in The Way of the World transcend mere money matters, but these matters must by properly taken care of before they can be transcended: he must make the material, economic groundwork secure before the structure of love and wit can be built upon it. The personal relation between Mirabell and Millamant is of course much more interesting to the audience than the hero's exceptionally complicated machinations to get hold of Millamant's fortune, just as assuaging Millamant's scruples with respect to her “dear liberty” is more interesting to Mirabell himself than getting the money. But both sides of his activities are essential to the whole: he knows that the personal side is not to be had without the economic.

The typical hard hero, on the other hand, is simply after an heiress, just like Young Worthy who puts the practical-minded questions in the exchange above. Again, the economic motive is not necessarily that which attracts the most attention in these comedies. The hero probably spends a good deal of his time trying to seduce virgins and citizens' wives, for the fun and machismo of it, but only insofar as he can afford to. Otway's returning soldiers, for instance, may take a good deal of trouble to ingratiate themselves with some buxom wife, but this side of their lives is never allowed to interfere with their heiress-traps. A character like Horner in Wycherley's Country Wife arranges his life around affairs with women of quality as the highest good, but there is nothing bohemian in the way he goes about it: his sex life does not in any way threaten his financial and social position.²³

With Loveless, on the contrary, money is genuinely secondary to sex, “experience” and “wit”. His carelessness about financial security is not just a romantic front which the financially secure can afford, as it is in Behn's and Farquhar's “wild” heroes: when put to the test, Loveless would really rather fornicate than eat.

Snap. … now … you are resolv'd I shall starve with you.

Lov. Despicable Rogue! can'st thou not bear the Frowns of a common Strumpet, Fortune?

Snap. S'bud, I never think of the Pearl Necklace you gave that damn'd Venetian Strumpet, but I wish her hang'd in't!

Lov. Why, Sirrah! I knew I cou'd not have her without it, and I had a Night's Enjoyment of her was worth a Pope's Revenue for't.

(I.i.27)

This swagger, typical of Loveless, never succeeds in giving his poverty any glamour. If he is compared to for example Valentine in Congreve's Love for Love (the great success of the rival theatre company in the preceding season, which must have been vividly present to Cibber's receptive consciousness), his dissipation is remarkably squalid and undignified. Valentine, we recall, has squandered his patrimony (as Loveless has squandered his wife's estate) and is trying to recoup his fortunes from a position of pennilessness, just like Loveless (I.i.70). But Valentine is really merely playing at squalor, and displaying great panache in the traditional gentlemanly outwitting of tradesmen and money lenders. (“And how do you expect to have your money again when a gentleman has spent it?”) His manipulations are offered for our admiration, while the voice of thrift and prudence is offered for our contempt in the person of his stuffy old father (“I hate a wit. I had a son that was spoiled among 'em; a good hopeful lad, till he learned to be a wit—and might have risen in the state—.”). Valentine dominates those around him and commands their respect. Loveless, on the other hand, is not playing a game: he is on his way to the gutter.

His friends mistake him for a beggar (“Surveying his Dress”) and blush to be seen with him. He is too far outside the pale for the gulling of cits and parents—traditionally “honourable” comic solutions—to be available to him. Instead, Young Worthy talks pointedly to him of business and investments: “But how hast thou improv'd thy Money beyond Sea? What hast thou brought over?” Like Valentine, Loveless is proud of having wit rather than money (“But I have a great deal more Wit than I had!”), but unlike the audience at Love for Love a year earlier, that at Love's Last Shift was not allowed to admire these priorities. Loveless is a “wit” in a way which completely justifies the attitude of Valentine's old father; a “wit” in the middle-class backlash sense of the late nineties, as Blackmore described him:

A Wit's an idle, wretched Fool of Parts,
That hates all Liberal and Mechanick Arts.
          Wit does enfeeble and debauch the Mind,
Before to Business or to Arts inclin'd.
How useless is a sauntring empty Wit,
Only to please with Jests at Dinner fit?(24)

This backlash against the uselessness of the gentleman ideal is a significant element in the “reform” movement of the nineties. The stage was the particular target of such reformers as Jeremy Collier and Sir Richard Blackmore, not only because of its “immorality and profaneness” but also because it traditionally displayed a snobbish contempt of thrift, business, labour and “trade”.²⁵ For the modern reader, this element in the pamphlets tends perhaps to be swamped by all their picturesquely sulfurous invective against whoring, swearing and blasphemy. But the pamphleteers were also concerned with the aristocratic laziness and snobbery of the “Fine Gentleman of the Comedy”. The fine gentleman is not merely debauched and atheistical in general, but specifically “a Person wholly Idle, dissolved in Luxury”:

And that Diligence and Frugality may be sufficiently expos'd,—tho' the two Virtues that chiefly support the Being of any State,—to deter Men from being Industrious and Wealthy, the Diligent, Thriving Citizen is made the most Wretched Contemptible Thing in the World.²⁶

In their own way, though, the idle gentlemen heroes of the comedies were diligent and thriving enough, as I pointed out above: they were prudent, financially careful and eventually financially successful. Valentine's poverty, for instance, is clearly accidental, temporary, glamorous; he is really in control, really a prudent man.²⁷ Unlike the frugal citizen, in his stodgy, laugh-raising way, the gentleman ate his cake and had it too: liberty and profit. Such double-dealing infuriated Jeremy Collier particularly:

And they that endeavour to blot the Distinction, to rub out the Colours, or change the marks, are extreamly to blame. ‘Tis confessed, as long as the Mind is awake, and Conscience goes true, there's no fear of being imposed on. But when Vice is varnish'd over with Pleasure, and comes in the shape of Convenience, the case grows somewhat dangerous; for then the Fancy may be gain'd, and the Guards corrupted, and Reason suborn'd against it self. And thus a Disguise often passes when the Person would otherwise be stopt. To put Lewdness into a Thriving condition, to give it an Equipage of Quality, and to treat it with Ceremony and Respect, is the way to confound the Understanding, to fortifie the Charm, and to make the Mischief invincible. Innocence is often owing to Fear, and Appetite is kept under by Shame. But when these Restraints are once taken off, when Profit and Liberty lie on the same side, and a Man can Debauch himself into Credit, what can be expected in such a case but that Pleasure should grow Absolute and Madness carry all before it?²⁸

For Loveless, vice comes in the shape of inconvenience: profit and liberty do not lie on the same side. He has to chose between them, and the play is the story of how he is made to transfer his allegiance from liberty to profit, encouraged and pressurized by Young Worthy and Amanda. The original fault of Loveless, that which Cibber presents as in need of reformation, is not “worldliness” but too much unworldliness. With his characteristic sensitivity to the opportune, Cibber seems in Loveless' story to have produced a kind of satire of the “wit” and “fine gentleman” who is too proud to have anything to do with money and investment and rising in the state. Cibber can hardly be characterized as a consistent anti-snob, in this play or elsewhere, and in the Collier controversy he was to side with his fellow dramatists against Collier,²⁹ whose attack on the immorality and profaneness of the stage was associated with the dissenters and the “merchant” interest;³⁰ nevertheless, a couple of years before Collier's publication of his famous pamphlet, Cibber has already tried to refute the equation which Collier was to attack. Linking wit and vice with improvidence and indignity instead of “a Thriving condition”, Cibber fortifies the charm by having virtue come in the shape of convenience, that is, a rich wife: for while Loveless has been abroad, Amanda has been left another estate by a wealthy uncle. Presumably this change of the theatre's traditional socio-economic allegiance was acceptable to the growing middle-class section of the audience.

The treatment of the character of Young Worthy shows clearly that unworldliness, inattention to worldly advantage, is the only real crime of the play. A living proof of “how well might [Loveless] ha' liv'd, had [he] been a sober man” (I.i.19), no matter how “wicked” a sober man, Young Worthy's character as a prudent, businesslike libertine is stressed throughout. “Faith, Ned”, he programmatically exclaims to Loveless, “I'm as much in Love with Wickedness as thou canst be, but I'm for having it at a cheaper Rate than my Ruine!” (I.i.118). “Though these are Truths”, he agrees to Loveless' conventionally wicked cynicisms, “yet I don't see any Advantage you can draw from them. Prithee, how wilt thou live, now all your Money is gone?” (I.i.133). This unflagging attention to advantage and to money means that Young Worthy is already one of Cibber's goodies: he does not need any reformation, but atones most inexpensively for the readily forgivable faults of which a prudent man is capable.³¹

III

Even more strikingly than Love's Last Shift, Cibber's third original comedy.³²The Careless Husband (1704), is a pseudo-problem play, a wishfulfilment fantasy presented with pretensions to instruction and realism. The socialization of Loveless had certainly been offered as moral exhortation, even though it is true that Amanda was a good deal like a princess in a fairy-tale, rather than a “lady” and a “good woman”; and in The Careless Husband, we get a heroine who is offered as the most delicate social as well as moral example.

Cibber's propagandizing purpose could hardly be more obvious than it is in this play. In practically every line of it, he is busy recommending to the audience the ideal of the traditional “good woman”—the gentle, manipulative wife—as it had been set forth in for instance Halifax' Advice to a Daughter (1688). But as in Love's Last Shift, the crude propaganda is accompanied by a much more interesting picture of a new social ideal, a picture of family life and the feminine role which was almost revolutionary in 1704, but which was to become increasingly familiar over the next few centuries.

If bohemian improvidence is the only serious crime in Love's Last Shift, while the provident rake can debauch himself into credit, a much smaller portion of the same moral picture can be seen in The Careless Husband and its companion piece The Lady's Last Stake (1707). In them, money and material security are not problematic, since all the characters are safely provident and financially secure. The trapdoor into the gutter through which Loveless so nearly fell seems to have been boarded up, and all is “easy”—a key word in The Careless Husband. Consequently, no violation of code need be taken seriously in these plays: they deal only with peccadilloes, mere transparent forgiveness-fodder. Such a shrinking of perspective from the dangerous draughts and precipices of Love's Last Shift into a small, cosy indoors world might conceivably have something to do with the change in Cibber's own circumstances between 1696 and 1704. That change was certainly very striking: he had become the most influential and highest paid actor in the company,³³ with a number of successful patchwork plays behind him (Pope, we recall, was to condole with “hapless Shakespeare and crucify'd Molière” on being rifled for the purpose) and a decisive say about the whole policy of Drury Lane.³⁴ In the case of a writer so sensitive to climates of opinion, however, the increasingly “genteel” audience taste was probably more important than his personal situation.

Cibber's acquisition of experience and confidence during those eight years is in any case evident in The Careless Husband, a “well-constructed” play, as Love's Last Shift obviously had not been. It was a great success on the stage and remained a repertory play throughout the eighteenth century (a fact which probably had a good deal to do with its handy cast: only seven characters, all good acting parts). The play also kept a respectable critical reputation for much longer than Love's Last Shift.³⁵ Its two plot strands are simple in themselves and skilfully integrated: the estrangement between Sir Charles Easy and his wife is accompanied by the comment and advice of his friend Lord Morelove and her friend Lady Betty Modish, while Sir Charles in his turn very materially assists the progress of the “fond” and serious Lord Morelove's courtship of the coquettish Lady Betty. Cibber seems to have regarded the part of Lady Betty as his masterpiece,³⁶ but the marital plot to which the play's title refers is far more original and striking.

Sir Charles, the careless husband, has lost interest in his wife and taken to having affairs instead:

I am told she's extreamly handsom—nay, and I have heard a great many People say she is certainly the best Woman in the World—why, I don't know but she may; yet I could never find that her Person, or good Qualities, gave me any Concern—In my Eye the Woman has no more Charms than my Mother.

(I.i.70)

Such complaints are familiar in the “marital discord” comedies of the time, some of which are better-known today than Cibber's plays:

What cloying Meat is Love—when Matrimony's the Sauce to it! … Sure there's a secret Curse entail'd upon the very Name of Wife. My Lady is a young Lady, a fine Lady, a witty Lady, a virtuous Lady,—and yet I hate her.

(The Provok'd Wife, 1697)³⁷

Sir Charles, however, is not a surly brute like Vanbrugh's Sir John who is speaking here, or a brainless fop like Mr Friendall in Southerne's Wives Excuse (1691). On the contrary, Cibber tries to make him as charming and as excusable as possible. He is becomingly insouciant, and his affairs, a domestic one with his wife's maid Edging and a “quality” one with a young widow, Lady Graveairs, are as unenjoyable as possible. He is forever being subjected to inconveniences and indignities as a result of them and expressing his sense of this in rueful asides. (“Death! I'm in a pretty Condition! What an unlimited Privilege has this Jade got from being a Whore?” [I.i.103]). His affair with Lady Graveairs is even at the beginning of the play at the unglamorous stage where it goes on “As agreeably as a Chancery Suit: For now it's come to the intolerable Plague of my not being able to get rid on't” (II.ii.13). The presumably more exciting opening stages of these amours are never mentioned. Again, a heavy-handed unproblematizing of a real problem is taking place: the point is being made that there are no real reasons for Sir Charles to be debauched, he does not really enjoy it, hence is not really tired of his wife. Having nothing to lose but trouble and embarrassment, he is being set up for a conversion; unaware except in the bleakest theoretical sense of his wife's excellence, he is due for an eye-opening demonstration of it.

This demonstration comes in the famous “steinkirk scene” in the fifth act, where Lady Easy “discovers” (by the scene opening) Sir Charles and Edging asleep together in a chair, “as close an approximation to actual adultery as could be presented on the eighteenth-century stage”, as Parnell points out.³⁸ Sir Charles' periwig has fallen off, possibly an almost pornographic suggestion of intimacy and abandon on the eighteenth-century stage, which also offers an opening for Lady Easy; for, after expressing first indignation and then grief and resignation (“Perhaps / The Fault's in me, and Nature has not form'd / Me with the Thousand little Requisites / That warm the Heart to Love”), Lady Easy becomes afraid that her husband will catch cold:

Ha! Bare-headed, and in so sound a Sleep!
Who knows, while thus expos'd to th'unwholesome
          Air,
But Heav'n offended may o'ertake his Crime,
And, in some languishing Distemper, leave him
A severe Example of its violated Laws—
Forbid it Mercy, and forbid it Love.
This may prevent it.
[Takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently
          on his Head.]

(V.v.21)

(A “steinkirk” is of course a floppy lace collar or scarf, named after the battle of Steenkirk.) Lady Easy then steals away and Sir Charles is struck to the heart when he wakes and realizes (“Feeling the Steinkirk upon his Head”) that she has been there. Long overdue, his reflections are eminently foreseeable: “A crowd of recollected Circumstances confirm me now, she has been long acquainted with my Follies, and yet with what amazing Prudence has she born the secret Pangs of injur'd Love, and worn an everlasting Smile to me!” Full of remorse, he seeks her out and they have a wonderful reconciliation, all the more titillating for being much more low-keyed and “tasteful” than the galumphing kneelings and risings between Loveless and Amanda in Love's Last Shift:

Sir Cha. … since I see you are so generously tender of reproaching me. ‘tis fit I should be easy in my Gratitude, and make what ought to be my Shame, my Joy; let me be therefore pleas'd to tell you now, your wondrous Conduct has wak'd me to a Sense of your Disquiet past, and Resolution never to disturb it [sic] more—And (not that I offer it as a Merit, but yet in blind Compliance to my Will) let me beg you would immediately discharge your Woman.

Lady Ea. Alas! I think not of her—O, my Dear, distract me not with this Excess of Goodness. [Weeping.]

Sir Cha. Nay, praise me not, lest I reflect how little I have deserv'd it—I see you are in Pain to give me this Confusion—Come, I will not shock your Softness by my untimely Blush for what is past, but rather sooth you to a Pleasure at my Sense of Joy, for my recover'd Happiness to come: Give then to my new-born Love what Name you please, it cannot, shall not be too kind: O! it cannot be too soft for what my Soul swells up with Emulation to deserve—Receive me then intire at last, and take what yet no Woman ever truly had, my conquer'd Heart.

Lady Ea. O the soft Treasure! O the dear Reward of long-desiring Love!—Now I am blest indeed, to see you kind without th'Expence of Pain in being so, to make you mine with Easiness: Thus! thus to have you mine is something more than Happiness, ‘tis double Life, and Madness of abounding Joy. But ‘twas a Pain intolerable to give you a Confusion.

(V.vi.95)

The scene, full of psychology and “manners”, is typical of the re-aligned emphases of the play, compared to Love's Last Shift: we note the Easys' joint concern for his endangered “easiness” and, still more emphatically, for her vulnerable feminine delicacy. The second of these two concerns, indeed, rescues the first, as Lady Easy shrinks timidly from the coarse subject of Edging, and Sir Charles with almost indecent alacrity takes his cue from her reaction. Her demonstrative gentleness³⁹ and his paternal, protective attitude reinforce each other until he is completely reinstated in the complacency which had never altogether deserted him.

For all the domestic, psychological, or psychologizing, ambience of the Easys, however, “realistic” is clearly hardly the word for a character so obviously and resistlessly managed by his creator as Sir Charles: first so unaware of the facts highlighted by the action—all the excellent reasons against having affairs which emerge so clearly from his embarrassing encounters with Lady Graveairs, for example—and then all of a sudden, when required (“Now I reflect … A crowd of recollected Circumstances confirm me”), fully aware of them. In moral terms, Sir Charles is far less realistic than the simple beast-into-prince Loveless, since his is a stage without trapdoors, a harmless, “easy” world without the economic dimension which was the only serious dimension in Love's Last Shift: with no other risks and responsibilities than those in the sphere of personal relations. The physical world has shrunk to the home, and the cold outdoors draught from wicked “abroad” and “the Park”, where Loveless spent so much of his time, is never felt in the drawing-rooms of The Careless Husband, the single non-drawing-room scene of which (IV.i) takes place only halfway outdoors, on the terrace of Windsor Castle. The sexual range of the hero is restricted to bickering domestic mistresses; we recall Loveless' international callgirls offering a fabulous “Night's Enjoyment”. Escape has become escapade.

I disagree, then, with Appleton's contention that The Careless Husband deals with the “problem” of “the relation of the individual to society”.⁴⁰ Like Love's Last Shift, this play deals only with non-problems; and the non-problem of the relation of the individual to society is precisely what the later play has moved away from. Money, the link between the individual and society in Love's Last Shift, does not exist here, and there is no other link possible in Cibber's dramatic universe. Loveless' “problem” had been the anarchistic, libidinal way he wanted to live in the world (actually, only thought he wanted, of course). Sir Charles' “problem” is the much more easily dismissed one of wanting to spice the way he lives with his wife with little excursions: a wish that is from the start presented as a mere excuse for a foreshadowed reconciliation.

IV

Naturally, when the stage shrinks from society to the home, and the moral focus shifts from money to sex, women become proportionately more important, more morally central. The problems of women, creatures entirely contained in the domestic and sexual sphere, could be presented as having some initial, token seriousness in a play that had come in from the cold of the larger world into the huis clos of this sphere; and Cibber does wish to deal with “problems”, as we have seen. If the purpose of The Careless Husband and its spin-off The Lady's Last Stake is indeed to instruct and improve the audience, as Cibber often claims,⁴¹ these plays would seem to be aimed at a female audience exclusively; for in them, only women are seen as capable of moral responsibility and of self-propelled change. The men can do nothing that is not venial: the indulgence extended to such boyish pranks as adultery, rape and theft⁴² is striking, even in the context of early eighteenth-century comedy in general, with its “wild” gentleman ideal. Morally speaking the men are not there at all: they are mirrors and lamps for the education, progress, punishment and reward of the central character, the heroine. The moral centre of The Careless Husband is the portrait of Lady Easy, a woman carrying out the traditional Patient-Griselda type strategy outlined in Halifax' Advice to a Daughter (1688):

… remember that next to the danger of committing the fault yourself the greatest is that of seeing it in your husband. Do not seem to look or hear that way: if he is a man of sense he will reclaim himself, the folly of it is of itself sufficient to cure him; if he is not so, he will be provoked but not reformed. To expostulate in these cases looketh like declaring war, and preparing reprisals, which to a thinking husband would be a dangerous reflexion. … An affected ignorance, which is seldom a virtue, is a great one here; and when your husband seeth how unwilling you are to be uneasy there is no stronger argument to persuade him not to be unjust to you. … There is nothing so glorious to a wife as a victory so gained; a man so reclaimed is for ever after subject to her virtue, and her bearing for a time is more than rewarded by a triumph that will continue as long as her life.⁴³

The play opens with Lady Easy soliloquizing, and she certainly seems to present a problem of some substance to an audience which has not yet met Sir Charles and realized how ripe for reformation he is:

Was ever Woman's Spirit, by an injurious Husband, broke like mine? A vile, licentious Man! must he bring home his Follies too? Wrong me with my very Servant! O! how tedious a Relief is Patience! and yet in my Condition ‘tis the only Remedy: For to reproach him with my Wrongs, is taking on my self the Means of a Redress, bidding Defiance to his Falshood, and naturally but provokes him to undo me. Th'uneasy Thought of my continual Jealousy may teaze him to a fixt Aversion; and hitherto, though he neglects, I cannot think he hates me.—It must be so; since I want Power to please him, he never shall upbraid me with an Attempt of making him uneasy—My Eyes and Tongue shall yet be blind and silent to my Wrongs; nor would I have him think my Virtue cou'd suspect him, till by some gross, apparent Proof of his Misdoing, he forces me to see,—and to forgive it.

Cibber's fondness for logical argument, everywhere apparent (but especially in his heroines: Amanda in Love's Last Shift is all syllogisms), is in evidence here, and the argument is unusually cogent for Cibber: a woman has no redress against a husband, since he has complete power over her and can at will “undo” her; and since power is naturally short-tempered, any resentment she might show of any ill-treatment would only annoy him and provoke worse. In this speech, Lady Easy really has nothing to do with any ideas of duty or morality, but only with expedience and prudence: there is no question of submissiveness being her duty, or of Sir Charles being “the Man I'm bound by Heaven to love”, as Amanda said of Loveless. She is merely making a realistic assessment of her situation. The extremity of a legal separation, which Farquhar was airily to suggest a few years later in The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), would of course in actuality make her a social outcast, with no possibility of remarriage.⁴⁴ The soliloquy is an explicit presentation of the depressing conclusions implicit in Southerne's and Vanbrugh's “marital” plays and in the social reality of the married woman's position. Perhaps Cibber thought of his play as starting where Southerne's sombre Wives Excuse ended.

In the rest of the first act, we see Lady Easy's conclusion (that she must not reproach her husband) energetically put into practice, as she fields his pointed attempts to get at her real opinion:

Sir Cha. Prithee, my Dear, what sort of Company would most please you?

Lady Ea. When business wou'd permit it, Yours; and in your Absence a sincere Friend, that were truly happy in an honest Husband, to sit a chearful Hour, and talk in mutual Praise of our Condition.

Sir Cha. Are you then really very happy, my Dear?

Lady Ea. Why shou'd you question it? [Smiling on him.]

Sir Cha. Because I fancy I am not so good to you as I shou'd be.

Lady Ea. Pshah!

Sir Cha. Nay, the Duce take me if I don't really confess my self so bad, that I have often wondered how any Woman of your Sense, Rank and Person, could think it worth her while to have so many useless good Qualities.

Lady Ea. Fie, my Dear.

Sir Cha. By my Soul, I'm serious.

Lady Ea. I can't boast of my good Qualities; nor if I could, do I believe you think 'em useless.

Sir Cha. 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?

Lady Ea. Pshah! you jest with me.

(I.i.164)

At the end of this exchange, which is very much longer than I have space to quote here, there comes a gleam of hope in Lady Easy's comment as Sir Charles goes off practising dance steps and singin “Toll le roll”: “This Excess of Carelessness to me excuses half his Vices, if I can make him once think seriously—Time yet may be my Friend.” The rest of the play, as we have seen, is to develop this hint into proof that her problem which seemed so grave to begin with is no problem really, for he really wants what she wants.

Although Lady Easy's reflexions when alone, in the opening soliloquy quoted above, were made in terms of expedience, the way she carries out her conclusions in public—her official attitude as it were—is that of sweet wifely unselfishness. Before Sir Charles is made to “once think seriously” he sees her as merely passive and “convenient” (“The most convenient piece of Virtue sure that ever Wife was Mistress of”), but after the steinkirk scene he is overwhelmed by crowding recollections of her “tender disposition”, “Softness” and “easy Sweetness”. She is Amanda dwindled to a wife: soft, tactful and tender, where Amanda was clever, argumentative and seductive. Her acquisition of “realistic” middle-class virtues is perhaps seen most clearly in the way she conceals her gentle manipulations from everybody, even from herself. Amanda had plotted and planned in a blaze of publicity and advice and had foreseen with all the force of logic how Loveless “must” be affected by her machinations. Lady Easy does not even in soliloquy admit the faintest notion of any effect to be hoped from her only, crucial action, beyond that of keeping her husband from “th'unwholesome Air”: an attitude which keeps the audience deliciously hovering on the brink of that emotional bath (his remorse) which nobody but Lady Easy can now help foreseeing.

[Takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head.]

And if he should wake offended at my too busy Care, let my heart-breaking Patience, Duty, and my fond Affection plead my Pardon. [Exit.]

Lady Easy would never dream of blabbing the sacred secrets of the home all over the place, as Amanda does. Her anxiety to keep “all our Differences, like our Endearments, … equally a Secret to our Servants” (V.vi. 127) duly impresses her coarser-mannered husband: “Still my Superiour every way—be it as you have better thought.” This attitude to domestic privacy and to the importance of discretion before servants is so infinitely recognizable to the modern reader as to seem perhaps a fact of nature (to any reader of Jane Austen's novels, for instance, where openness before servants is one of the touchstones of vulgarity); but in Restoration comedy, we recall, the servants are the natural confidentes. Lady Easy is in fact one of the very first champions of the mighty movement of domesticity, defined by Edward Shorter as “the family's awareness of itself as a precious emotional unit that must be protected with privacy and isolation from outside intrusion”.⁴⁵ Cibber develops the theme further in The Lady's Last Stake, where it is repeatedly demonstrated that one of the many regrettable consequences of lady Wronglove's strident and unwomanly attitude is that “in our Matrimonial Squabbles, one side's generally forc'd to make a Confidence with their Servants” (I.i.145).

Lady Easy's evasiveness with her inquisitive friend Lady Betty after the reconciliation is an edifying contrast to Amanda's indiscriminate public confidences of intimate details:

Lady Bet. You have been in Tears, my Dear, and yet you look pleas'd too.

Lady Ea. You'll pardon me, if I can't let you into Circumstances: But be satisfied, Sir Charles has made me happy ev'n to a Pain of Joy.

(V.vii.1)

Sir Charles is receptive to her instructive behaviour, and the virtue of discretion (in the modern, not the Restoration sense) can be seen growing into a recognizable way of life, glimpsed in his smug advice to his angry ex-mistress, Lady Graveairs:

Lady Gra. Have you then fallen into the low Contempt of exposing me, and to your Wife too?

Sir Cha. 'Twas impossible, without it, I could ever be sincere in my Conversion.

Lady Gra. Despicable!

Sir Cha. Do not think so—for my sake I know she'll not reproach you—nor, by her Carriage, ever let the World perceive you've wrong'd her. [To Lady Easy]—My Dear—

Lady Ea. Lady Graveairs, I hope you'll Sup with us?

Lady Gra. I can't refuse so much good Company, Madam.

Sir Cha. You see the worst of her Resentment—In the mean time, don't endeavour to be her Friend, and she'll never be your Enemy.

(V.vii.276)

In this exchange, Sir Charles' pomposity reaches a peak which matches that of his wife's glowing-coals technique, but through the familiar miasma of masculine self-satisfaction, the shaping of newer attitudes can be perceived. Poor Lady Graveairs, who has been doing the passionate cast mistress (another version of Etherege's Loveit) with great verve up to now, is properly subdued by this double-barrelled domestic attack: “I am unfortunate—'tis what my Folly has deserv'd, and I submit to it.”⁴⁶ Sir Charles' self-conscious, Steele-like scrapping of the aristocratic or “Restoration” virtue of shielding a mistress' reputation heralds the closing of the domstic ranks.

V

It seems to me a pity to define the word “sentimental” in merely descriptive terms (having a happy ending, featuring belief in the innate goodness of human nature and plenty of emotion, especially emotion issuing in generous tears, etc.), when the evaluative and frankly derogatory lay sense of the word so well summarizes for instance the inconsistencies of Cibber's plays: wishfulfilment fantasies offered as instruction, unreal behaviour offered as psychology, submissive eloquence offered as logic. If “sentimental comedy” is seen as just a genre, intrinsically no better or worse than any other genre, to be judged by its own standards,⁴⁷ the most interesting part of the word's meaning has been drained off. It is not necessary to eschew value judgements in order to be precise and to discriminate, as Paul Parnell's well-known articles on Cibber's comedies surely demonstrate.

I have tried to show that Cibber offers his plays as realism and instruction, rather than mere romance and escapism, as Maureen Sullivan has suggested.⁴⁸ If we cannot accept the offering on his own terms, as presumably few of us can, it does not really help to redefine the failure of realism as romance; for that reduces the plays to a trivial game, just as Charles Lamb's famous defence reduced Restoration comedy (“Utopia of Gallantry”). In both cases, it is the social and moral roots of the plays that made them interesting to contemporary audiences and can make them so to us: their relevance to real life and real human choice. That relevance, in the case of Cibber's comedies, is clearly more devious than in the case of Congreve, for instance; but it is firm nevertheless. Cibber's sentimentality, his brash early version of “eighteenth-century optimism”, retains a measure of interest by virtue of its (still earlier) images of emergent social attitudes: in Love's Last Shift, the reformation of the anarchistic, libidinal Loveless into provident and prosperous husband, and in The Careless Husband the collapse from these economic realities into “careless” and “easy” domesticity, presided over by the genteel wifeliness of Lady Easy.

Notes

1. See Maureen Sullivan, ed., Colley Cibber: Three Sentimental Comedies, Yale Studies in English, 184 (New Haven, 1973), p. x.

2. For example as humane comedy which makes a heart-warming change after the cold intellectualism of Restoration comedy: cf. Shirley Strum Kenny, “Humane Comedy”, MP, 75 (1977), 29-43.

3. The main interest of this uninspired companion piece to The Careless Husband lies in the indirect glimpse it gives of angry female reactions to the earlier play:

   … our Author drew you once the Life
   Of Careless Husband, and Enduring Wife,
   Who by her Patience (tho' much out of Fashion)
   Retriev'd, at last, her Wanderer's Inclination.
   Yet some there are, who still arraign the Play,
   At her tame Temper shock'd, as who should say—
   The Price, for a dull Husband, was too much to pay.
   Had he been strangled sleeping, Who shou'd hurt
             ye?
   When so provok'd—Revenge had been a Virtue.
   —Well then—to do his former Moral Right,
   Or set such Measures in a fairer Light,
   He gives you now a Wife, he's sure in Fashion,
   Whose Wrongs use modern Means for Reparation.

   (Prologue, Three Sentimental Comedies, p. 181)

4. The Provoked Husband, ed. Peter Dixon, Regents Restoration Drama Series (London, 1975), I.265-349.

5. See The London Stage 1660-1800, Part 1, ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale, Ill., 1965), p. 439.

6. Colley Cibber was to give a colourful account of the more or less dirty tricks involved in this rivalry in his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740; ed. B. R. S. Fone, Ann Arbor, 1968, pp. 109-16), which is the most detailed source that we have for the theatrical history of the nineties.

7. E.g. Dennis in “The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar” in 1720; Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker, II (Baltimore, 1943), 193.

8. I.i.191; all quotations from Cibber's plays are taken from Three Sentimental Comedies, ed. Maureen Sullivan.

9. Gerald Langbaine and Charles Gildon, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets (1699); quoted by R. H. Barker, Mr Cibber of Drury Lane (New York, 1939), p. 29.

10. Notably the anonymous Comparison between the Two Stages (1702); cf. Three Sentimental Comedies, p. xxvi.

11. Dramatic Miscellanies, 1783-84, III, 412; cf. Arthur Sherbo, English Sentimental Drama (East Lansing, Mich., 1957), p. 104.

12. Mr Cibber of Drury Lane, p. 27.

13. See Calhoun Winton, “The London Stage Embattled: 1695-1710”, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 19 (1974), 9-19.

14. Love's Last Shift was written midway between the two great waves of legal action and official propaganda against immorality, 1690-91 and 1699-1700; see D. W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957), pp. 23-24.

15. E.g. Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility (Boston, 1915), pp. 70-77, and Joseph Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York, 1924), pp. 202-04.

16. E.g. by Paul Parnell, “Equivocation in Love's Last Shift”, SP, 57 (1960), 519-34.

17. See Kathleen M. Lynch, “Thomas D'Urfey's Contribution to Sentimental Comedy”, PQ, 9 (1930), 249-59, and John Harrington Smith, “Shadwell, the Ladies and the Change in Comedy”, MP, 46 (1948), 22-33.

18. Cf. Bahlman, p. 67.

19. Barker, pp. 12-13.

20. Allardyce Nicoll, History of English Drama, 1660-1900, I. 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1965), 278; Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-1740 (Oxford, 1964), p. 288.

21. Introduction, Three Sentimental Comedies, p. xlviii.

22. As Parnell does in “Equivocation in Love's Last Shift”.

23. The courtly or mock-précieuse type of hero early in the period, to whom money is simply not an issue (in Dryden's comedies, for instance) does not fit in here, of course, but clearly Loveless is quite unlike him, too.

24. Sir Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (1699), ll. 118-123, Poems on Affairs of State, VI, ed. Frank H. Ellis (New Haven, 1970), 140.

25. John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford, 1959), pp. 21-24.

26. Sir Richard Blackmore, preface to Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (1695), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1908, rpt. 1957), III, 231.

27. As Jeremy Collier was to point out: “Now, without question, to be in Love with a fine Lady of 30000 Pounds is a great Virtue!” (A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage [1698], Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, III, 254.)

28. A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, p. 253.

29. Cf. The Careless Husband, V.vi.58-69.

30. Loftis, pp. 24-26; of course Collier himself was anything but a political radical, let alone a dissenter.

31. “Being the first Adviser of it [the bed-trick], has aton'd for all the Looseness of his Character”, observes the virtuous Elder Worthy casually (V.iii.37).

32. His second, Woman's Wit: Or, The Lady in Fashion (1697), had no discernible theme or unity and was a complete and deserved failure, having been written under extraordinarily unpropitious circumstances; cf. Apology, p. 146, and Barker, pp. 30-31.

33. Barker, p. 61.

34. Barker, pp. 58 ff.

35. An extreme example is F. W. Bateson, who analysed the play at length in his English Comic Drama 1700-1750 (Oxford, 1929), pp. 26-28, and who, with some reservations about Cibber's language (“miserable”) nevertheless used terms like mature, plausible, subtle, natural and affecting to describe its psychology.

36. He makes much of his despair of “having Justice done to” it and his delight at the eventual success of Anne Oldfield in the part (Apology, p. 167).

37. I.i.1; The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb (1927; rpt. New York, 1967), I, 115.

38. “The Sentimental Mask”, PMLA, 78 (1963), rpt. in Restoration Drama, ed. John Loftis (New York, 1966), p. 291; a rather closer approximation had in fact been presented in Southerne's Wives Excuse (V.iii) in 1691, but it is perhaps worth noting that the actors involved in that discovery scene had been man and wife (the Mountforts).

39. Parnell has analysed the manipulative nature of her “gentle” replies in this scene, which are of course directed towards the true sentimentalist's goal of “ecstatic self-approval” (“The Sentimental Mask”, p. 294).

40. William Appleton, intr., The Careless Husband, Regents Restoration Drama Series (London, 1967), p. xiii.

41. See Apology, pp. 146-47, and the prologues to the comedies.

42. “‘Twoud be hard indeed, not to make some allowances for Youth” (V.ii.335) is the comment of Cibber's mouthpiece Sir Friendly Moral in The Lady's Last Stake upon discovering that the dashing Sir George Brilliant has done or attempted these things.

43. Complete Works, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 279-80.

44. Gellert Spencer Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Wallingford, 1942), pp. 106-24. No woman obtained a parliamentary divorce, the only kind that permitted remarriage, until 1801.

45. The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), p. 227. Cf. Lawrence Stone. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977), pp. 253-54.

46. Again, there is a direct contrast in The Lady's Last Stake, where Lady Wronglove's indiscretion (“to tell the greatest Secret of her Life to a Girl! To own her Husband false, and all her sober Charms neglected”) exposes her to the humiliation of having her rival triumph in her distress (II.i.162).

47. Cf. Bateson, English Comic Drama, p. 148, and Sullivan, pp. xxvii, xlvii.

48. “A closer look at Cibber's comedies, always treated by the critics as exercises in illogical behaviour and excessive emotion, will reveal that they are, in fact, a species of romance. In setting and costume, they purvey the familiar matter of every day, but the theme of virtue's triumph is presented in terms of the story of the beautiful princess who rescues the handsome prince from the wicked spell which has turned him into a beast” (p. xlvii).