SOURCE: “The Playwright,” in Colley Cibber, Twayne Publishers, 1965, pp. 36-80.

[In the following excerpt, Ashley provides a comprehensive survey of Cibber's theatrical efforts.]

Colley Cibber was writing plays before Vanbrugh and Farquhar, and he did not stage his last work until 1745. During his extraordinarily long career he wrote a dozen comedies, half a dozen tragedies, a “comical-tragedy,” a handful of masques and libretti, and perhaps a dozen prologues and epilogues for other people's plays—not to mention various odes and lyrics, four public letters to Alexander Pope, several miscellaneous prose works, and one of the best autobiographies in English. In this chapter I propose to treat his more important dramatic works in some detail and to say something about most of the rest. I omit little but his last play, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, for it is discussed in Chapter Ten in the context of his last years.

Cibber's comedies are his best theater pieces, but even these are not all first-rate. There is a modicum of truth in Alfred Bates' comment: “As a dramatist, he has neither the broad humor and strong comic vein of Vanbrugh, nor the fine diction and masterfulness of Congreve, nor the frolicsome gayety and airy fancy of Farquhar. His characters are flat; his plots are neither natural nor well conducted; his dialogue is often flippant.”¹ Cibber's tragedies, generally poor, are effective only when melodrama creeps in.

But occasionally Cibber shows a master hand in both comedy and tragedy. He was capable of turning essentially dramatic ideas into fully realized plays, of integrating striking scenes into successful dramatic unities. He was a man of the theater who well understood the necessary, though secondary, non-verbal aspects of production and staging, matters with which we shall deal in subsequent chapters discussing his long and close association with practical theater management, and the selection and direction of plays for a repertory company. More often than luck can explain, Cibber built sturdy dramatic machines that could, artistically and financially, run. He had a shrewd sense of the commercial potential of a play script, a good ear for the playable line, a good eye for the scene on the stage. He knew his theater and his actors, and he wrote for them (and himself, as an actor) purposefully and successfully, planning for the dramatic gesture, for the actor's stance and expression, for the right costume, the enhancing lighting, the property's positioning, the effective entrance and the electrifying exit. To appreciate how well Cibber's plays went on the stage it is necessary to read them so that the words come off the page, to put them in imagination on the boards of his theater so that the characters stalk before the mind's eye. We shall attempt—by describing not only his writings but his theater, his company, his audience, and the times—to enable the student to consider them in the light of how Cibber, and the people for whom he wrote them, saw them.

Perhaps Cibber has been cheated of just praise because he has been assessed by literary critics who do not take these matters into account, who read his scripts as literature rather than as dramatic literature, who examine his characters and ideas solely in their relationship to real life and not at all in connection with the stage's world of make-believe. Cibber was a professional man of the theater who wrote professionally for the theater, not for posterity. He addressed posterity only, perhaps, in his Apology, for which posterity remembers him best; the rest of the time he was an actor-manager and commercial playwright. It could be said that in some instances Cibber, writing so much for his time, has left us plays which mean little to ours. It could never be said of him what George Jean Nathan so aptly said of Luigi Pirandello's more wordy, intellectual debates—what we can say of much of modern drama—that these plays seem to have been written by a blind man.

Mrs. Inchbald had a good point when she observed: “Whilst many a judicious critic boasted of knowing what kind of drama the public ought to like, Cibber was the lucky dramatist generally to know what they would like, whether they ought or not.”² It was more than luck. Dennis might dogmatize, but no one seems to have written a great play to his formula, which is suspicious. Jeremy Collier might rave—even try to reform the licentious stage—but he was of little fundamental use to the dramatists, for he basically did not like the theater. Cibber did not learn from them. He came by his knowledge by daily study and practice in the theater, not luck. He gave freely of his formulae too, but they were practical, not theoretical ones. He offered dramatists examples more useful than John Dennis' theories. He offered audiences and readers pleasures more moral than those derived from following Collier's well-meaning signposts to indecencies.³ Not only did Cibber contribute to other dramatists by showing them how (or how not) to throw together a complex plot—or a viable play from discarded or forgotten old plays—but he established, for them to copy, a wholly new kind of play: the sentimental comedy. For this alone his position in histories of dramatic literature is secure.

Others had paved the way—Thomas Shadwell, for example—for few things happen suddenly in an art as conventional as that of the theater. But Cibber produced one smashing original success that created a significant demand for brilliant mixtures of the old comedy and the new morality. He put a new emphasis on feeling—especially on pity, repentance, duty, and sympathy. Thomas Otway, who rang these changes in tragedy, should logically have done this in comedy too, but theatrical history does not work that way. He did not. It was left to Cibber to blend the intrigues of a dissolute rake and the pathetic plight of a distressed wife, to combine tergiversation and tears to the popular taste.

Sir Richard Steele, a rake turned sentimental himself, encouraged the vogue. Eventually he wrote The Conscious Lovers (1722). Cibber advised him, perhaps helped him write it. Here was the height of the style, a play determined to “please by wit that scorns the aid of vice,” a play that combined sentiment not with the comedy of manners (as Cibber had done at the beginning) but with farce, leaning heavily on pathos in the serious parts. Steele had only varied Cibber's recipe. And he lacked some of Cibber's restraint: the play is a trifle too saccharine for modern palates; unlike Cibber, Steele did not know when to stop adding sweeteners. As the century went on, the vogue of sentiment increased; and the sentimental comedy was debased by too much popularity. It degenerated into the formula-plays of Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Kelly, Richard Cumberland, and their ilk; and the stage which had been a “school of abuse” and a showcase of licentiousness gradually transformed itself into “a school of morality.” The public tired of sentimental comedies, but not completely. Things change slowly in the drama. (After all, Steele had got part of The Conscious Lovers from Terence.) The sentimental drama is still with us: we still have on the stage, on television, and in the films, plays that teach “by precept and example,” that sermonize, that lecture on the humanitarian belief in the essential goodness of man. “Let the common Practice of Mankind be what it will,” declared Cibber, “it is not Unnatural to be Virtuous”⁴—nor to write dramas that preach that. This view ruled the drama absolutely until Goldsmith, and it is not dead yet. It was Cibber who introduced it to the stage, as surely as it was the Earl of Shaftesbury who introduced it into English philosophy.

If Cibber was lucky, it was in his timing. When he came along, a general reformation of the stage was imminent. The pendulum was swinging: the public had had enough of smutty, witty dialogue and of lack of feeling. The public that thought Charles II's fourteen illegitimate children a “merry” prank had become stricter, and the changing economy was bringing the rising middle class to the fore (and to the theaters, where they sat in “the middle row”). With that class came its sobersided mercantile ethic. Had this not been so, Cibber's success could never have been so immediate and so wholehearted. Tuke, Shadwell, Mrs. Behn, Ravenscroft, Crowne, and others had given copious hints of what was coming. It remained for Cibber to come along at the right time and, whether from moral duty or from sheer opportunism no one can say, to seize upon it and make it pay. There seems to be, no matter how imperfect his morality nor how commercial his successes, no reason to doubt that Cibber truly had “the Interest and Honour of Virtue always in view.” He might have said with Addison, “I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.”⁵ In Love's Last Shift (1696) Cibber began to moralize the drama by capping a play of diverting dissipation with a contrived but morally acceptable conclusion, replete with tearful confessions and guarantees of mended ways (which, being less dramatic, are for offstage). His hero, whom Shadwell would have called “a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring Ruffian,” grew regenerate before the very eyes of the audience in a Grand Transformation Scene of unparalleled effectiveness. The audience delighted in the spicy Restoration intrigue and then, just as the bourgeois “city gentlemen” were beginning to feel guilty at so enjoying it, came the edifying end which excused it. At this they could laugh and cry. Cynical Vanbrugh could not accept the end. He predicted a relapse. But Cibber, a man who could give a happy ending to Le Cid, was sincere in his last act, proud of the “moral Delight receiv'd from its Fable,” and it showed. The audience which came to laugh remained to cry—and loved doing so.⁶

When the initial effect of Love's Last Shift began to wear off, Cibber reinforced it with another moral and sentimental triumph, The Careless Husband (1704). He (and Mrs. Oldfield, whom he trusted to carry a large part of the play) firmly established the vogue once more. Cibber had not only made a momentous discovery, he had capitalized it, for which Thomas Davies praised him fulsomely: “To a player we are indebted for the reformation of the stage. The first Comedy, acted since the Restoration, in which were proferred purity of manners and decency of language, with a due respect for the marriage bed was C. Cibber's Love's Last Shift.”⁷

I LOVE'S LAST SHIFT

It has often been noted that there are conflicting theories of comedy. Ben Jonson, for example, at his best removed the gall and copperas from his ink (“only a little salt remaineth” for bite) and ridiculed strays back onto the path of reason. In plays that instructed delightfully, Jonson presented Comedy

When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

Others burlesqued, satirized, kidded, or excoriated follies and exhorted their audiences to avoid looking as silly or acting as unwisely as the people they laughed at in the plays. Cibber held to another theory and made popular a sentimental comedy in which the stock characters of the Restoration comedy of manners were purged of their vices (but retained, fortunately, some of their old spirit and dash) and presented to the audience as models of virtue to be emulated rather than as horrible examples of what to avoid. Instead of starting, like Jonson, with “manners,” creating caricatures to embody “humours” and a plot to exhibit and satirize them, Cibber—rather like the writer of a nineteenth-century thesis play—starts with a moral problem. His play is devoted to stating it and resolving it. He brings his essentially good people—even his wayward protagonist is an “honest” rake—from distress to happiness. As the curtain falls, however many tears have been shed, the good have their reward and the bad are punished—or, better, reformed by an appeal to their better natures, by sentiments of pity or gratitude or (closely related to both) love. No one is essentially evil or irremediably unsocial; and all men, at last if not at first, are ashamed of folly and dedicated to virtue. Virtue conquers all.

Cibber's sentimental comedy contained an admixture of other elements: manners, “humours,” satire, burlesque, even the barest trace of the Shakespearian or “romantic-commercial” view, as Bernard Shaw calls it. Four of the five acts of Love's Last Shift are much in the vein of the Restoration intrigue comedy. But the last act of that play is thoroughly moral-sentimental, and throughout the whole play every character motivation and plot development is imbued with the sentimentalism that comes to the fore at the end. Love's Last Shift was the inheritor of Thomas Heywood's Elizabethan sentimentality and the forerunner, as we have said, of Steele and Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Mrs. Centlivre, Addison, Charles Johnson, Edward Moore, and many others. It ousted aristocratic cynicism; it introduced bourgeois moral preachment. Its effect was seen not only on the stage but in novels like Pamela, in poems like Gray's Elegy, in periodicals like The Tatler, in lives such as Dr. Johnson's and Goldsmith's. Could Cibber at twenty-four have fully realized that Love's Last Shift, written with a shrewd eye on the box-office and with the pragmatic purpose of creating an outstanding role for its author to act, was to be a milestone in the English drama, to be regarded as the first sentimental comedy?

The conception of comedy on which Love's Last Shift is constructed is one not far developed beyond the definition from Cicero:

Illud genus narrationis quod in personis positum est, debet habere sermonis festivitatem, animorum dissimilitudinem, gravitatem, leniatem, spem, metum, suspicionem, desiderium, dissimulationem, misericordiam, rerum varietates, fortunæ commutationem, insperatum incommodum, subitam letitiam, jucundum exitum rerum.

That kind of narrative which is represented by persons [that is, drama] ought to have liveliness of dialogue, diversity of characters, seriousness, tenderness, hope, fear, suspicion, desire, concealment, pity, variety of events, changes of fortune, unexpected disaster, sudden joy, a happy ending.⁸

This play of Cibber brought a new sensibility to the stage. Emotional relationships between characters, relegated to the subplots if they occurred at all in Restoration comedies, were stressed. Insensitive self-seeking, heartless intrigue, superficial love games—all these were unpalatable to the middle classes who were now thronging the pit and demanding once again sensitive heroes and distressed heroines, hearts of gold rather than flowers of eloquence. Perhaps Cibber's characters did not have brains as quick as those in Congreve's plays, but they had hearts.

Such ideals are not likely, however, to produce realistic or even credible characters, and those in Cibber's epoch-making comedy are less than vital personalities. None can be said entirely to transcend specimen. Loveless, the debauched “hero,” returns to London after eight years abroad, away from his wife. Despite his advertised worthlessness, we sense from the start that he will be redeemed from his life of depravity and (one can almost hear the good burghers of the audience tut-tutting) financial recklessness. His wife Amanda, “a woman of strict virtue” and intolerable patience, whom he abandoned, still loves him. With the aid of Young Worthy, whose name tells all, she devises a bed-trick to win back Loveless. We are supposed to consider neither Shakespeare nor ethical protest as Amanda rhapsodizes:

I can't help a little concern in a business of such moment. For tho' my reason tells me my design must prosper, yet my fears say 'twere happiness too great.—Oh! to reclaim the man I'm bound by heaven to love, to expose the folly of a roving mind, in pleasing him with what he seem'd to loath, were such a sweet revenge for slighted love, so vast a triumph of rewarded constancy, as might persuade the looser part of womankind ev'n to forsake themselves, and fall in love with virtue.

Amanda sets the trap; she appears “loosely dress'd” to Loveless; and, after his protestations—“I like and I love you,” “my own excess of burning passion,” and so on—she “Runs into his arms.” “Can all this heat be real?” she asks. They go off to “be lavish to our unbounded wishes,” presumably with more effectiveness than they had ever done before, since Loveless was “within two women of my maiden-head” when he knew Amanda previously; but since then he has had eight years of incontinence on the Continent.

The next day she gives him a sermon and a surprise. Upon learning her identity, he dissolves into a rant of repentance: “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.” Amanda raises him with forgiveness (and the information that her late uncle, Sir William Wealthy, has left her £2000 a year). A few other loose ends are tied up, and the play terminates gaily with a masque featuring Love and Honour, “the subject perhaps not improper to this occasion,” and giving the audience time to dry its tears.

The subplot, owing most to the comedy of manners, features a couple of soubrettes, Hillaria and Narcissa; and it stars the fool in fashion, Sir Novelty, who gets some of his laughs with his lines,⁹ some with his costume (his buttons are “not above three inches in diameter”), and some with his farcical falls. Cibber romped in this role, and it was his first real hit as an actor. The public approved him quite as much as “the mere moral Delight receiv'd from the Fable.”

Sir Novelty Fashion rings true, for all the exaggeration. Loveless does not. His excuse (“'Twas heedless fancy first that made me stray”) seems unacceptable; his repentance (“Pray give me leave to think” at the disclosure of his wife's identity and “I have wrong'd you” a moment later) is incredible. It is clear that his heart was never in his licentiousness (which has diverted us for four acts), and his virtue seems sham. His “love” is really nothing more than the Restoration sex game again.

Henry Fielding was one of the few who were annoyed at the hypocritical morality in the play. Vanbrugh, after a life in the army and a term in the Bastille, was more cynical. He could not credit Loveless' conversion. In six weeks he penned what he considered to be a fairer, less sugary picture of human nature, a sequel which showed The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger. Loveless and Amanda are seen again, and this time the libertine is once more on the loose and the wife herself is sorely tempted. The fop was brought back by popular demand—as Lord Foppington, ennobled by purchase but not ennobled in spirit—and once again Cibber was the ostentatiously vapid popinjay, “industrious to pass for an ass.” The Relapse, testified Cibber in the Apology, “by the mere Force of its agreement Wit, ran away with the Hearts of its Hearers.” Though it had been dashed off, Captain Vanbrugh (of Lord Berkeley's Marine Regiment of Foot) traveled in a brilliant set; he had only to commit his ordinary conversation to paper to have brilliant dialogue.

Vanbrugh's dialogue is easily more sparkling than Cibber's. Cibber always relied more upon plot than on dialogue and many times his characters speak no living language. Vanbrugh's structure is better too: it is more of a piece. Cibber brought the action of Love's Last Shift to a moral end only by a wrench which strains the plot as well as our credulity, and it remains a question whether four acts of frivolous (or immoral) bandinage can be excused or atoned for by an ending drenched in sentiment. Are we asked to feel so deeply that we stop thinking? The conclusion of Cibber's play seems to me to have as little necessary relationship to the rest, despite the sentimental motivations throughout, as the endings Sir Robert Howard wrote for The Vestal Virgin (1664); he provided two fifth acts, to be played on alternate nights. True, Cibber asserts (as Shadwell had done) that he is introducing immorality only for the purposes of correction, but there is the distinct impression that he has his fingers squarely on the public pulse. Here is some of what Miss Cross (still dressed as Love from the masque) delivered as an Epilogue:

NOW, gallants, for the author. First to you,
Kind city gentlemen o' th' middle row;
He hopes you nothing to his charge can lay,
There's not a cuckold made in all his play.

And to the beaux:

He fears he's made a fault you'll ne'er forgive,
A crime beyond the hopes of a reprieve:
An honest rake forgo the joys of life,
His whores and wine, t' embrace a dull chaste wife!
Such out-of-fashion stuff! But then again
He's lewd for above four acts, gentlemen.(10)
For faith he knew, when once he'd chang'd his
          fortune,
And reform'd his vice, 'twas time—to drop the
          curtain.

And we turn from the beaux to the ladies, now tucking away their handkerchiefs:

Four acts for your coarse palates were design'd.
But then the ladies taste is more refin'd.
They, for Amanda's sake, will sure be kind.

Cibber, tyro though he was, had hit upon “the understanding of the Galleries” and “the applause of the Boxes.” So cleverly was it done that his enemies paid him the compliment of saying “That, to their certain Knowledge it was not my own.” Some years later John Dennis continued to refuse Cibber credit for Love's Last Shift: “When The Fool in Fashion was first acted, Cibber was hardly Twenty Years of Age. Now could he at the Age of Twenty write a Comedy with a just Design, distinguished Characters, and a proper Dialogue, who now at forty treats us with Hibernian Sense and Hibernian English? Could he, when he was an arrant Boy, draw a good Comedy, from his own raw uncultivated Head … ?”¹¹

The answer was that Cibber could, and his “own raw uncultivated Head” swelled to think that a work of his should be attributed to Dryden or to any other such skillful hands. Loud applause told Cibber that he had found his character as an actor. Jealous opposition told him better than any of the flatteries he cherished that he was on to something important as a dramatist. With Love's Last Shift he had arrived. It was even presented in France, they said, as La dernière Chemise de l'Amour!

II WOMANS WIT AND THE SCHOOL BOY

Cibber's second play was Womans Wit (1697), “intended,” as he said, “to have made the town some amends in this play for their extraordinary favours to my first.” To stress the relationship to his first play, Cibber changed the original subtitle of The Devil to Deal With to The Lady in Fashion. He and his young wife both appeared in Womans Wit and did their best to ingratiate themselves with their audience. So did the author, but there were “considerable hindrances”: “My first hindrance was want of time; for rather than lose a winter (the profits from my other being so considerable) I forc'd myself to invent a fable: now my first was spontaneous, and consequently more easy: the one was the kindly product of my fancy, this of my judgment (I mean of that little judgment I have); that was a cherry gathered in July, this was merely ripen'd by artifice in April. …”¹²

Not only was Cibber working too fast; he was guilty also of “too nice observation of regularity.” Perhaps the influence of French classical models and theories had produced in England chiefly outward changes only, but the production of versions of French pseudo-Classical plays—mostly Corneille and Racine¹³—had had its effect, even though the native English tradition predominated in Otway, Southerne, Rowe, and the rest. Somehow Cibber felt obliged to crowd all the improbable incidents of Womans Wit into five hours and to set them all in St. James's (including the first scene of the last act, set in the real-life fashionable “Indian House” run by a Mrs. Siam, a notorious place of assignation in London). The attempt to abide by Classical rules, as his age understood them, put an added burden on our fledgling author and caused him to be pedestrian and dull more often than “regular” and “diverting.”¹⁴ Moreover, while he was writing the first two acts, Cibber was “entertained at the New Theatre,” and so he tailored the play for the Haymarket's actors. By the time he came to work on the third act, he was back at Drury Lane, had to toss in a low-life character (Mass Johnny) to be played by Doggett, and thus concluded the play with a different stock company in mind than that for which he had begun it.

“Every one did their best, and I thank them,” said Cibber, but the Drury Lane company was “uncertain” in the roles, the performance was bad, and the play failed. In his Apology Cibber asked that Womans Wit be peaceably forgotten, but he himself went back to it late in 1702. From the farcical scenes that constitute a large proportion of the last three acts, he confected an afterpiece, The School-Boy, or The Comical Rival. He himself played Mass Johnny, the impish trickster, and the farce became very popular. Whether Womans Wit be said to have a plot and a subplot (which came into English drama with Henry Medwall) or “more serious” and “less serious” plots interleaved (a practice common with Dryden and other playwrights), the farcical elements were clearly the more vital and in The School-Boy they survived.

III XERXES

Womans Wit had been put together too quickly and too carelessly. Cibber's first tragedy, Xerxes (1699), took two years to write. It transpired that he could no more write tragedy, however, than play it successfully. An enemy claimed that Cibber could not get his tragedy presented at Drury Lane and was compelled to underwrite its performance at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it closed, unlamented, on opening night.¹⁵ Addison's mock inventory of Christopher Rich's theatrical paraphernalia seems to bear out this charge, listing “the imperial robes of Xerxes, worn but once.”¹⁶ Constructed on the frigid model of the late heroic play that crutched its feeble sense on verse, Xerxes lamely tells the story of Tamira, a lady in distress, and it makes plentiful recourse to bombast, the supernatural, and French claptrap.

Perhaps in those days, when audiences had been trained by Dryden and his followers to pay no more heed to tragic declamation than to the libretti of opera, Betterton's stentorian Artabanus and Verbruggen's sonorous Xerxes may possibly have been endured for a performance, especially when there was plenty of gore in evidence, rich costumes, and a plethora of melodramatic moments—as for example this one in the last act when Tamira, clutching her baby to her bosom, is being dragged off, by the hair, screaming “O cruel! cruel men!” at the top of her lungs. Enter Mardonius and Aranthes, two Persian generals, attended. Mardonius speaks, asking the pretty obvious question:

Mar. What means this strange disorder, friends?
Why is this woman rudely dragg'd along?
                                        [They loose her, as half afraid.]
Tam. Relieve me, heav'n!
Mar. Now, by my soul! the fair Tamira. Help ho!
Tam. Protect me, brave Mardonius.
                                        [They raise her.]
Mar. Protect! yes, and revenge thee too-Villains!
Tam. Hold! I conjure you, hold Good Sir, be mild,
And speak 'em fair, or that revenge
May cost me dearer than my life—my child!
Mar. Ha! forego the infant, slaves!
Or by the lifted fury of this arm—
Tam. Oh! do not fright 'em, Sir! see! they're merciful
And kind! they will not hurt the babe!
                    [They set down the child, which runs into her arms.]

This may have all the coldness and pomposity of the painter David's Battle of the Romans and Sabines—without his perfection of finish—but, when Cibber forsook original scripts and turned to the adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III in the next year, his apprenticeship in melodrama with Xerxes stood him in good stead.

IV RICHARD III

Margaret Webster has remarked that Richard III, “which cannot be placed anywhere near the top of Shakespeare's greatest plays … was the most constant Shakespearian vehicle for all the greatest actors who dominated the English-speaking theatre for a period of a hundred and fifty years.”¹⁷ For most of this time this “Shakespearian vehicle” was in fact the brilliantly stageworthy adaptation by Colley Cibber. Cibber took the character of Richard III, more familiar from Restoration plays than from Shakespeare,¹⁸ and he produced on July 9, 1700, at Drury Lane a play which some critics have called a tragedy and which Odell is rash enough to say is better than Shakespeare's.¹⁹

Cibber played Richard himself, as much in the manner of the villainous Sanford as he could manage; and Vanbrugh complimented him on the acting, though others reviled it. David Garrick made his memorable debut as Cibber's Richard and played it often.²⁰ He also chose it for his farewell to the stage in 1776. He and Quin played Richard in 1746 on alternate nights, using it to debate the merits of Quin's old-school histrionics against Garrick's more modern style. Apparently Cibber's character could be played successfully either way, for it was a great play for actors. John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddons appeared in it. George Frederick Cooke brought it to America in 1810 and so did Edmund Kean.²¹ Junius Brutus Booth essayed the part in an attempt to rival Kean. Charles Macready attempted to restore Shakespeare's text (in 1821) as a novelty, but after a couple of performances he was compelled to return to the Cibber version. Samuel Phelps had more success with Shakespeare's Richard III at Sadler's Wells in 1845, but once again the Cibber version returned. When Edmund Kean's son Charles produced his magnificent Richard III at his Princess's Theatre in 1850, it was Cibber's durable play he used, and it was Cibber's version in which he toured America and Australia. It was not really until Sir Henry Irving and the 1870's that Shakespeare's text recaptured popular favor, and even in the twentieth century Walter Hampden, Robert Mantell, and others played Cibber's version in preference to the original. Richard III—“as dramatized by Colley Cibber,” one critic said—became the play that, even more than Hamlet, every aspiring Roscius had to attempt.

It was Cibber's Richard Crouchback, not Shakespeare's slightly more complex but (to use a favorite word of Cibber's) less theatrical villain, that fired the popular imagination. William Hazlitt deplored Cibber's “patch-work” and cited the “idle and misplaced extracts from other plays” used “to make the character of Richard as odious and disgusting as possible.”²² But it was futile. In the fashionable drawing rooms of London and in the raw opera houses and Gold Rush settlements of America, in the Victorian nurseries where children acted out the play in their “tuppenny-coloured” paper theaters, it was Cibber that was preferred.²³

So far as the actors were concerned, Cibber definitely improved upon Shakespeare's Richard III, that peculiar amalgam of chronicle history and morality play. Cibber concentrated the spotlight on Richard, omitting scenes in which he does not appear and heightening the “bottled spider” villainy of those in which he does. To do this, Cibber had to handle his material freely.²⁴ He added speeches and self-explanatory asides to Richard's part to make him deeper-dyed, more obviously guilty of the death of King Edward's sons, more ruthlessly conscienceless, more intolerant of virtue, more deliberately diabolical, more ranting. Cibber's Richard is even more the “cruel monster, deformed in body, mind and soul” than the Tudor historians and Shakespeare manufactured out of the handsome historical Richard. Modern historians have shown that the real Richard was far from the fiend that Shakespeare's portrait makes him out: but Cibber makes him worse. Cibber's Richard, for example, pauses on an otherwise empty stage to fling exit lines like these: “Conscience, lie still, more lives must yet be drain'd; / Crowns got with blood, must be by blood maintain'd.” Who would not thrill to this variation on the theme:

Conscience avaunt, Richard's himself again;
Hark! the shrill trumpet sounds, to horse, away,
My soul's in arms, and eager for the fray.

Cibber's debt to Shakespeare was enormous, of course, but he managed to make the play his own. He introduced some coups de théâtre and some ringing lines that, like “The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome,” gained him fame, at whatever cost.

Cibber's Richard III is written in pure “Cibberian” style. Note the use of villainous asides; the decision to show, rather than to describe as Shakespeare does, the murder of the princes in the Tower; Richard's heartlessness: “How are the Brats dispos'd?”; the playing down of Richard's pangs of conscience after his dream, when Shakespeare has him confess:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
          …
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they,—since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself.

The whole emphasis is concentrated on Richard's evil, though, of course, the compulsory eighteenth-century love interest is tossed in near the end and handled better than the affair between Edgar and Cordelia that Nahum Tate introduced into King Lear. In Cibber's play Richard becomes the utterly conscienceless but clever malefactor; his antagonists, sincere but simple men. The melodramatic struggle is more direct and more dramatically striking than in Shakespeare's more diffuse and complex drama. Cibber's Richard stands out more forcefully, with all the villainous grandeur of Kean in those “penny plain” engravings our great-grandfathers used to color. The sympathy which in Shakespeare's play is “wasted” on the unfortunate Clarence, on Rivers, on Grey, on Hastings, Buckingham, Edward, and the wailing women—all this is conserved. Mad Margaret is cut: her big scene would challenge the star's preeminence. Richard stands alone; or he appears, as did the great actors, “with a supporting cast.”

When Richard has the stage to himself Cibber allows him to revel in his soliloquies, but the rest of the play is speeded up. In a sense it is the same technique William Gillette later used as Sherlock Holmes: while the rest of the cast plays at a hectic pace, with comparatively staccato speeches and quick, nervous gestures, the leading actor delivers his lines with all deliberation, slow, calm, assured, commanding.²⁵ Shakespeare's Act III, Scene 1, exchange is leisurely:

Prince. My lord of York will still be cross in talk.
Uncle, your Grace knows how to bear with him.
York. You mean, to bear me, not to bear with me:
Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me.
Because that I am little, like an ape,
He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders.
Buckingham. With what a sharp provided wit he
          reasons!
To mitigate the scorn he gives his uncle,
He prettily and aptly taunts himself:
So cunning and so young is wonderful.

Cibber was cunning too. Though he was apt to pad his comedies with polite persiflage that was wholly inconsequential, and (when he aimed at wit) took such careful aim that he missed being witty, he achieves a fine economical effect in his Richard III by a different distribution of speeches and an accelerated delivery:

Prince Edward. I hope your Grace knows how to bear
          with him—
Duke of York. You mean to bear me—not to bear with
          me—
Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me;
Because that I am little like an ape,
He thinks you should bear me on your shoulders.
Prince Edward. Fye, brother, I have no such meaning.
Stanley. With what a sharp, provided wit he reasons!
To mitigate the scorn he gives his uncle,
He prettily and aptly taunts himself.
Tressel. So cunning and so young is wonderful!

In little tricks like these, perhaps even more than in the elaborate shifting around of scenes, we see Cibber's theater sense and his tinkering at its best.²⁶

At its worst his tinkering tends to eliminate the “quaint” images that color Shakespeare. He flattens the poetry and interjects a rather uninspired product of his own devising, though Cibber does seem to have been aware of the deficiency of his verse and anxious to keep his additions to a minimum. He is also aware, however, that in Richard III the Bard himself was far from his poetic best, so Cibber does not balk at enlivening Richard III with bits of Richard II, Henry IV (Part I), Henry V, and (to clarify certain details of the political situation) some gems of purest ray serene from the dark, unfathomed caves of the Henry VI plays. After all, Cibber was only stealing jewels to deck the rightful owner. Once in a while he adds a flashing Cibberian ornament. Surely any producer of Richard III owes his audience the thrill of experiencing Richard's wide-flung gesture, his imperious sneer, and the dramatic delivery of Colley Cibber's most famous line: “Off with his head—so much for Buckingham.”

I have gone into some detail here because Cibber's Richard III was for generations one of the theater's warhorses and also because I want to dispel the false notion that Cibber butchered Shakespeare. Actually Cibber's success derived from the fact that he knew precisely how to serve up Shakespeare to the public of his time. He did not hack Shakespeare—but he himself was axed. At the time of the first performance, the Master of the Revels (acting as censor under the authority of the Lord Chamberlain) lopped off the first act of Cibber's Richard III. The death of Henry VI—which Cibber borrowed from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part III—would, the censor thought, put the audience too much in mind of James II, then languishing in exile in France.²⁷ The censor had, Cibber remarked bitterly, “not Leisure to consider what might be separately offensive,” so he expunged not just the scene which referred to the pitiful end of a king but the whole act.

There is, in fact, no convincing proof that Cibber ever presented the entire five acts of his Richard III at any time during his life.²⁸ Certainly the censor's action got the play off to a bad start: without the first act, the original production of 1700 was tepidly received and fairly unprofitable.²⁹ In modern times, strangely enough, it is usually the first act material as arranged and augmented by Cibber that is, along with Edmund Kean's now standard stage business and John Barrymore's as-well-as-possible-disguised limp, incorporated into productions of Richard III when Shakespeare is altered.

V LOVE MAKES A MAN

The hero of one of Cibber's plays asserts that “a single intrigue in love is as dull as a single plot in a play,” a remark that tells us as much about the survival of Restoration dramaturgy as it does about the persistence of Restoration morality, even in Cibber's more “decent” age. In an attempt to keep Love Makes a Man, or The Fop's Fortune (1700) from being dull, Cibber went back to two late Elizabethan plays and combined them in the late Restoration style. From John Fletcher's two plays The Elder Brother and The Custom of the Country, he took two series of tragi-comic adventures, hair-raising dangers, and romantic reversals. He tells his complicated new story in rather artificial but passable prose, as was characteristic of the time, and purges it of indecency, as was characteristic of Cibber, who was always more restrained than his predecessors or even his contemporaries in an age when sometimes “Ev'n Bullies blush'd, and Beaux astonish'd stood” at what they heard from the stage.

For himself Cibber wrote the part of Clodio, The Elder Brother's younger brother, a Frenchified fop with a peruke like a frozen mop. Cibber had plenty of opportunity to play the role, for Love Makes a Man became a standard light comedy, although in its first run it eked out five nights only with the help of added, entr' acte French acrobats, an intrusion then becoming very popular. The play ends, like other comedies of the time, with a dance. It had nothing to do with the plot: it was merely a conventional, flashy closing for the rapidly moving succession of sprightly scenes. One might compare the end of the Pyramus and Thisbe play in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, Scene 1) where Theseus is asked by Bottom the Weaver: “Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company?” Theseus, dispensing with the apologetic epilogue, calls for “your Bergomask” and the stage direction reads “Here a dance of clowns.”

Love Makes a Man is one of those dated but attractive trifles that lead critics who write surveys, such as E. J. Burton, to say of Cibber: “His plays are not ‘literary’—indeed, why should a play script be so?—but they are skillful and appealing. He can catch the character and affectations of the period. … His is the scripting of the professional.”³⁰

VI SHE WOU'D AND SHE WOU'D NOT

The Victorian Mrs. Inchbald found that She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not has “neither wit nor sentiment, but instead it has swearing, lying, and imposture.” Generations of less sanctimonious theatergoers, however, have applauded this romantic comedy of 1702 that, while its initial run was a meager six nights, soon earned a place in the repertoire which it did not lose until the end of the nineteenth century. Maybe the charm of what Dryden would have called “The Songish Part” helped. The songs were particularly catchy, and a critic of Cibber's time complained: “Of late we have been disturbed by a shoal of seamstresses, whores, and shoplifts, with a gang of highwaymen, pickpockets and footboys a-humming your Caelia my Heart.”³¹

It has been said that Cibber got his plot from Leanerd's The Counterfeits (1678), but both probably derive from a common Spanish source. There was a little borrowing from Spanish sources in the eighteenth century: by Steele and Mrs. Susanna Centlivre, for instance. But, wherever the story came from, Cibber made it his own. Getting the exposition out of the way in a somewhat crowded first act, “Our humble Author” proudly sticks to the Neoclassical unities: Act I takes place at an inn in Madrid and the rest of the play is one continous action at the house of Don Manuel, for throughout Acts II, III, IV and V “The SCENE continues.”

Here, from the Prologue, is Cibber's design for the play:

View then in short the method that he takes:
His plot and persons he from nature makes,
Who for no bribe of jest he willingly forsakes.
His wit, if any, mingles with his plot,
Which should on no temptation be forgot:
His action's in the time of acting done,
No more than from the curtain, up and down.
While the first music plays, he moves his scene
A little space, but never shifts again.
                    From his design no person can be spar'd,
Or speeches lopt, unless the whole be marr'd:
No scene[s] of talk for talking's sake are shewn,
Where most abruptly, when their chat is done,
Actors go off, because the poet—can't go on.
His first act offers something to be done,
And all the rest but lead that action on;
Which when pursuing scenes i' th' end discover,
The game's run down, of course the play is over.

These certainly are ideals that a dramatist could do worse than follow. Fully realized, they would have solved every one of Cibber's playwriting problems with the possible exception of his tendency to write lines that (as Congreve said) looked like wit but were not wit.

Cibber's comedy does not, however, seem crippled by theories of dramaturgy. It tells a breezy tale of “The Kind Imposter” Hypolita (a fetching, feminine version of Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke) who turns down her suitor Don Philip and then, when he goes to Madrid to marry another girl, follows him in disguise. Don Philip proposes to marry Rosara, but Octavio is in love with Rosara and so, to prevent her marriage to Don Philip, Octavio goes into disguise as a friar. Intrigues develop rapidly, assisted by the clever servant Trappanti, a device as old as the Roman comedy and as hilarious as Pinkethman can make it on stage. Hypolita appears in a “breeches part” as a young gallant, claims to be Don Philip, duels with the real Don Philip, and marries Rosara! Then she promises to have the marriage annulled—if Rosara will marry Octavio. Rosara's father, Don Manuel, with an “Odzook,” agrees. Hypolita reveals her identity. The lovers “advance slowly, and at last rush into one another's arms,” a stage direction that was still being used (and kidded) when Sandy Wilson wrote The Boy Friend. Don Philip embraces Hypolita (after nine or ten lines of the “O ecstasy! distracting joy” variety). The “something” of the first act is “done,” and a little dance is thrown in for a festive finale.

The curtain falls on perhaps the best constructed play Cibber ever wrote, one so fine that even George Farquhar learned from it. What matter if the elements be conventional, if the ghosts of Shakespeare and Fletcher stalk, if the disguises get so involved as to recall Ben Jonson in his dotage? The play moves so quickly and so amusingly that criticism is stilled, disarmed. All we can remember is the captivating Hypolita, a creature of many madcap moods, and the enjoyment of a rattling good yarn told with economy and élan. We are almost persuaded to accept the moral: “O! never let a virtuous Mind despair, / For constant hearts are Love's peculiar Care.”

VII THE CARELESS HUSBAND

First presented at Drury Lane on Thursday, December 7, 1704, the comedy The Careless Husband was one of Cibber's major works and long a favorite, for it combined the best of two dramatic worlds: the witty, aristocratic intrigues of the Restoration comedy and the new sentimentalism recently popular in the plays of Richard Estcourt (The Fair Example: or The Modish Couple) and of Sir Richard Steele (The Funeral and The Lying Lover). The Careless Husband clinched the success of the sentiment that characterized Love's Last Shift but which had suffered a temporary setback with the arrival of the master-piece of the Restoration comedy of manners, William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). The Careless Husband appeared in two editions in 1705 and was thereafter frequently reprinted as well as revived on the stage. Pope praised it. Wilkes' General View of the Stage extravagantly said that, except for one scene, it was “not only the best comedy in English, but in any other language.” Dibdin discussed it as “a school for elegant manners, and an example of honourable actions,” and Barker claims that “it helped to fix standards of gentility and politeness which were profoundly to influence comic writing throughout most of the eighteenth century.”³²

Cibber began the play while the Drury Lane company was playing at Bath during the summer of 1703, but the death of Mrs. Susanna Verbruggen “in child-bed” caused him to lay aside the script until a suitable Lady Betty Modish could be found.³³ The sudden success of Mrs. Anne Oldfield encouraged him to complete the part for her. She well repaid his confidence:

Whatever favourable Reception, this Comedy has met with from the Publick; it would be unjust in me, not to place a large Share of it to the Account of Mrs. Oldfield; not only from the uncommon Excellence of her Action; but even from her personal manner of Conversing. There are many Sentiments in the Character of Lady Betty Modish, that I may almost say, were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more Care, than when they negligently fell, from her lively Humour: Had her Birth plac'd her in a higher Rank of Life, she had certainly appear'd, in reality, what in this Play she only, excellently, acted, an agreeably gay Woman of Quality, a little too conscious of her natural Attractions.³⁴

Cibber not only made the part fit Mrs. Oldfield but gave quickening highlights to the portrait of Lady Betty by drawing from life, for he limned the wife of his old friend Henry Brett. Cibber had assisted that handsome gallant to win the lady, and now Mrs. Brett helped Cibber clothe his character.³⁵ Cibber always kept an eye on fashionable circles and from Mrs. Brett he learned the accent of a modish lady of quality. Some of his dialogue, he claimed in his Dedication, was inspired by an equally prominent personage: any “easy turn of thought or spirit” came from the Duke of Argyll's “manner of conversing.” We begin to understand why Cibber's plays are so significant as social history, such an important key to fathoming the society of his age.

Cibber, never of these high circles, strove to be in them; and the folly and affectation of such people as these (whom he always snobbishly admired) gave him the subject of The Careless Husband—his bourgeois view of the beau monde. Scorning “the incorrigible Fool” and the inmates of Bedlam and Newgate, he presents a picture not of vice and depravity but of frailty and foolishness among “the better sort.” His Prologue is Jonsonian in explicitness but not in content:

                    We rather think the persons fit for Plays,
Are those whose birth and education says
They've every help that shou'd improve mankind,
Yet still live slaves to a vile tainted mind;
Such as in wit are often seen t' abound,
And yet have some weak part, where Folly's found:
For follies sprout like weeds, highest in fruitful ground.

The main plot of The Careless Husband deals with Sir Charles Easy who, like a typical Restoration rake, has long engaged in affairs. He has now fallen out with his mistress, Lady Graveairs. (“What a charming quality is a woman's pride, that's strong enough to refuse a man her favours, when he's weary of 'em.”) He has even grown tired of his wife's saucy maid, Edging. But he is more refined than the standard dramatic cavalier, and much more sentimental in his sensuality. The most famous scene of the play is that in the last act in which the long-suffering Lady Easy, finding her husband and Edging asleep in armchairs and fearing that he might take cold without his wig, “Takes a Steinkirk off her neck, and lays it gently on his head,” moved by “my heart-breaking patience, duty, and my fond affection.” Sir Charles wakes—and to his wife's love as well:

Sir Char. She certainly has seen me here sleeping with her woman:—If so, how low an hypocrite to her that sight must have proved 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 lethergy,—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?—A crowd of recollected circumstances confirms me now, she has been long acquainted with my follies, and yet with what amazing prudence has she borne the secret pangs of injur'd love, and wore an everlasting smile to me? This asks a little thinking—something should be done. …

He begs his wife's pardon, stirred “with so severe a proof of thy exalted virtue, it gives me wonder equal to my love”; and he is converted. Too suddenly? So think some critics. A Farquhar or a Fielding would have said yes; a Steele or a Cibber, no.

The superbly carpentered subplot concerns the coquetry of Lady Betty Modish, who is loved by Lord Morelove but is flirting audaciously with the shallow Lord Foppington (played with verve by Cibber). After a great deal of highly artificial dialogue that Cibber counted upon to be rescued by Mrs. Oldfield's charm, Lady Modish at long last abandons Lord Foppington and is happily received by her true love.

We may compare the elements of The Careless Husband to those of the Restoration comedy of intrigue as exemplified by Dryden, D'Urfey, Ravenscroft, and Mrs. Aphra Behn, and as succinctly summarized by John Harold Wilson:

This consisted of a plot involving one or more cynical gallants who sought to seduce (or marry) a like number of brisk young ladies, and who had to overcome or circumvent a heavy father, an old husband, or a set of rivals. Fortified with a variety of fools, country bumpkins, braggarts, fops, and half-wits (all of whom provided broad physical comedy by their appearance and behavior in farcical situations), and spiced with erotic bedroom scenes, pretty actresses in breeches, and passages of double entendre, a merry intrigue comedy was sure to please the taste of the town. Sometimes a setting in France, Spain, or Italy added a touch of variety.³⁶

The scene of Cibber's play is Windsor. There is no profanity. The very few lines that might bring a blush to the sensitive are confined to the subplot. The play ends with a wayward husband won back to virtue and with a coquette about to marry a tried and true lover. The dialogue is anything but coarse. Croissant claims that it “approaches the finest of the period,” but Barker is closer to the truth: “One feels stifled in this atmosphere of well-bred chitchat, one longs for a little coarse and unrefined humanity.” The structure of the play is admirable, but its equally consistent moral tone is offensive. Cibber, objecting to “the coarseness of most characters in our late Comedies” as “unfit entertainments for People of Quality, especially the Ladies,” has clearly striven to produce a popular piece in which virtue is rewarded and vice—folly, rather—punished.

His hero, Sir Charles, is conceived too simply. Quite apart from the facile reformation is the question of his rationale for wrongdoing in the first place. He is accused of being untrue to his “Human Nature,” of not being informed by what Steele would call his “good natural impulses,” of not “thinking.” A moment's reflection is then supposed to produce a permanent reformation: his “want of Thinking” is cured abruptly by a single act of his wife's thoughtfulness. This action reawakens his reason, rouses his dormant conscience, and effects his regeneration, causing him without further ado to abandon the delusive pleasures of vice for virtue, now recognized as the sole source of all true and lasting bliss. What a generous and feeling rake! What transformation can be effected in the most evil man by an appeal to his better nature! But suppose he was evil, suppose he had no better nature, suppose he had been a shameless or a heartless rake, suppose he had more than “want of Thinking” to atone for. Has the new sentimental drama, of which The Careless Husband was one of the best and most loved examples, no place for villainy or even insensitivity? Must no vice go unrepented and no virtue unrewarded? Apparently. “There the dread Phalanx of Reformers come,” cried one playwright who spotted the new Men of Feeling on the horizon. With their “Pensive Homilies” all rakes turn reformers; all punks, proselytes. In The Careless Husband we have “stuffy morality and snobbish manners” with a vengeance. Sir Alphonsus Ward is grossly understating the case when he concedes that this play “fails to treat vice from the loftiest of stand-points.”³⁷

Ward is on firmer ground when he discusses characterization and dialogue. The skirmishes of Lady Betty and Lord Morelove (and of Lord Foppington and Lady Graveairs) are indeed “in the best style of later English comedy.” Lady Betty is truly “a most delightful coquette—with a heart,” and Lord Foppington “one of the best easygoing fools ever invented.” Foppington completely fits Etherege's definition of the exquisite gentleman, one who “ought to dress well, dance well, fence well, have a genius for love letters, an agreeable voice for a chamber, be very amorous, something discreet, but not over-constant.”³⁸ Lady Easy is another fine portrait and in her the Patient Griselda is not soppy.

With such excellent acting parts it is not surprising that The Careless Husband was a milestone in genteel comedy, both in its original form and in its adaptations.³⁹

VIII PEROLLA AND IZADORA

Perolla and Izadora, a tragedy acted at the end of 1705, was designed to satisfy the needs of the time. John Dennis only a few years before had written in the Epistle Dedicatory to The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry: a Critical Discourse (1701) of what he and his contemporaries expected of tragic drama: “Every tragedy ought to be a very solemn lecture, inculcating a particular Providence, and showing it plainly protecting the good, and chastizing the bad, or at least the violent.” Anything else, said Dennis with his accustomed dogmatism, was “empty amusement, or a scandalous and pernicious libel upon the government of the world.” All that can be said for Perolla and Izadora is that in it the author of The Careless Husband and other such plays probably conscientiously designed “a very solemn lecture.” I find no “empty amusement” in it—nor any other kind. The view of human nature presented is precisely what one might have expected from the man who established the sentimental comedy; but, from one who confessed that he wrote more to be fed than be famous, it is surprising to have a work so altruistically devoted to giving people what they said they wanted rather than what they really wanted and would pay to enjoy.

Of course the play pleased no one, not even Dennis. The diction recalls the worst of Nathaniel Lee. Pope called it “thick Fustian and thin Prosaic,” and Dennis hopped on it immediately. He spoke of it feelingly and forcefully, alleging that Cibber's “Masterpieces in Tragedies, Perolla, and [Ximena] the Heroic Daughter … are … full of Nonsense and False English … and are full of stiff, awkward, affected Stuff, and Lines that make as hideous a Noise, as if they were compos'd in an Itinerant Wheel-Barrow.”⁴⁰ Richard Savage spoke true when he said that John Dennis was often “Too dull for laughter, for reply too mad,” but in this case Dennis hit the nail squarely on the head. Like so many others whom we have been told to despise because Pope attacked them, Dennis was not the hopeless fool he was made out to be. Though he was immoderate in his damnation of Cibber, whom he both envied and detested, calling him a caput mortuum for putting down some plays of real merit—Dennis'—Dennis was right about Perolla and Izadora. Fortunately, an occasional play such as this unfortunate tragedy does not compel us to identify dramatists and managers such as Cibber with what Dennis called them: The Causes of the Decay and Defects of Dramatic Poetry, and of the Degeneracy of Public Taste.⁴¹

IX THE DOUBLE GALLANT

Pierre Corneille's younger brother Thomas wrote about forty plays including Le Galant double, and Cibber's comedy The Double Gallant (first acted at the Haymarket, November of 1707) sounds as if it might be a translation. But, Cibber tells us, his Double Gallant is “made up of what is tolerable in two or three” other plays: Mrs. Susanna Centlivre's Love at a Venture (which is from Corneille) and bits of The Ladies' Visiting Day and The Reformed Wife (both by Charles Burnaby), all considerably cleaned up.⁴² Taking what he could use from these old failures, Cibber constructed an extremely complicated plot, far too intricate to recount here, which moves so fast as virtually to exclude sentiment. The piece is remarkable chiefly because it shows that Cibber was more moral than the Restoration (as befitted a man of his time) and capable of cooking up a palatable hash out of unpromising leftovers without using too much spice (as befitted a commercial playwright of his era).

The single final scene—“worthy of Wycherley or Vanbrugh,” says Thorndike—⁴³ is that in which Lady Sadlife's letter from Atall, her secret lover, is intercepted by Sir Solomon, her husband. She quakes as her lord reads the missive, but Atall has taken the precaution to address it to Wishwell, her maid, so Sir Solomon is thrown off the track:

Sir Sol. I have made a discovery here—your Wishwell I'm afraid is a slut—she has as intrigue.

Lady Sad. An intrigue! heavens, in our family.

Surely any competent performers could make that a great moment in the theater. Wishwell thinks quickly and accepts the letter as her own—and then asks Lady Sadlife to draft a reply for her. So Sir Solomon stands by, all unsuspecting, while we watch his wife writing to arrange an assignation with her lover.

No amount of opposition to Cibber as a person could keep a scene this effective from gaining favor at last. The Biographia Dramatica tells us Barton Booth wrote to Aaron Hill that “we learn that the play, at its first appearance was, as he expressed, hounded in a most outrageous manner. Two years after, it was revived, with most extravagant success, and has continued a stock play ever since.”⁴⁴

X THE COMICAL LOVERS

The title of The Comical Lovers, or Marriage à la mode, a comedy first presented at the Haymarket in 1707, points up its derivation from John Dryden's play of 1673. To this was added a generous portion of the comic elements of Secret Love, and the result was happy in the extreme in that it provided opportunities for Mrs. Bracegirdle (Melantha) and Mrs. Oldfield (Florimel) to rival each other as charming impertinents. But even after Mrs. Bracegirdle “retir'd from the Stage in the Height of her Favour from the Publick” after playing the “breeches part” of Florimel, the play continued to draw audiences.⁴⁵ It was one of the features of the gala Coronation program in 1714. When the revivals of Restoration plays were few indeed, Dryden survived in this adaptation, a sparkling play from which, even after more than two centuries, the bubbles have not all escaped.⁴⁶

XI THE LADY'S LAST STAKE

In the Preface to The Lady's Last Stake, a very didactic comedy from Cibber's most prolific year of 1707, the author, addressing the Lord Chamberlain, writes: “If I would have been less instructive, I might easily have had a louder, tho' not a more valuable Applause. But I shall always prefer a fixt and general Attention before the noisy Roars of the Gallery. A Play, without a just Moral, is a poor and trivial Undertaking; and 'tis from the Success of such Pieces, that Mr. Collier was furnish'd with an advantageous Pretence of laying his unmerciful Axe to the Root of the Stage.”

This serious comedy was acted with some success at the Haymarket on December 13, 1707; sold a considerable number of copies at 18d. (the standard price for a printed play in those days); and was still on the boards as late as 1786. It was intended, says Thorndike, as a “pendant” to The Careless Husband. To the critics who found Lady Easy in that play “a poor-spirited creature,” Cibber replied:

He gives you now a Wife, he's sure in Fashion,
Whose Wrongs use modern Means for Reparation.
No Fool, that will her Life in Sufferings waste,
But furious, proud, and insolently chaste;
Who more in Honour jealous, than in Love,
Resolves Resentment shall her Wrongs remove:
Not to be cheated with his civil Face,
But scorns his Falsehood, and to prove him base,
Mobb'd up in Hack triumphant dogs him to the Place.

So Lady Wronglove, the jealous wife, is persuaded to try sweetness and tenderness to win back her erring husband. “Husbands,” advises Lady Gentle, “must be smil'd upon.” Of course “soft affection” works wondrously, and Lord Wronglove succumbs, confessing, “I cannot bear that melting eloquence of eyes.” Sir Friendly Moral, who introduces ethics into the comedy and exhorts to virtue on every possible occasion, is partly to be credited with the victory. A sentimental guide, philosopher, and friend, Sir Friendly was to have many imitators during the century, to become a stock character. Cibber's was “the first full-length portrait of the type.”⁴⁷ Certainly Sir Friendly is very useful: he sees to it that Lord and Lady Wronglove are reconciled, that the profligate Lord George Brilliant (Cibber as the fop again) is taken in hand by Mrs. Conquest, that everything comes out right in the end, even for the minor characters:

Ld. Geo. Confess me victor, or expect no mercy: Not all the adamantine rocks of virgin coyness, not all your trembling, sighs, prayers, threats, promises or tears shall save you. Oh transport of devouring joy!

Closely embracing her.

Mrs. Con. Oh!—Quarter! Quarter! Oh spare my perriwig!

The authentic voice of the most dismal melodramas of the nineteenth century, saved in the nick of time by a light touch! Miss Notable, summed up by Thorndike as “an amorous tell-tale who plays tricks on every one and does all she can to thwart the moral stratagems,”⁴⁸ rounds out the cast. These seven carry a subplot as well as the main action, and the play not only gives us the prescription for a happy marriage—sincerity, fidelity, good humor, and a double bed—but also cautions against gambling: “Some other Follies too, our Scenes present; / Some warn the fair from Gaming, when extravagant.” This was a popular occupation in the eighteenth century and a common topic in plays,⁴⁹ but no one else approached it with the earnestness of Cibber. Witness his Preface: “Gaming is a Vice that has undone more innocent Principles than any one Folly that's in Fashion; therefore I chose to expose it to the Fair Sex in its most hideous Form, by reducing a Woman of Honour [Lady Gentle] to stand the presumptuous addresses of a Man [Lord George], whom neither her Virtue nor Inclination would let her have the least taste to.”

Cibber, who put an allusion to gambling into the mouth of Lord Stanley in his Richard III, was well equipped to preach on gambling: he knew it from experience. Himself, his father, and his son were all addicted to betting. It was not merely that he risked as much as £1500 in a speculation like the South Sea Company—everyone was doing that, albeit with smaller amounts—but in his youth he haunted Groom Porter's and in his later life he was frequently to be seen gambling at White's in London and at the fashionable spas. Sir Richard Steele once indignantly had to insist that the rumor that Cibber had lost £6000 in one year was unfounded. Victor, a friend of Cibber's old age, joked that Cibber was frequently seen at prayers—and that that was only right, since the vicar always accompanied him to the gaming house. But, though Cibber was an inveterate gambler himself, he would not praise it from the stage: the theater had “to entertain the Town, without giving Offence, either to Virtue, Decency, or Good Manners;”⁵⁰ the theater had to be more moral than the dramatists. When Mrs. Porter objected that he personally did not live up to the virtuous models he created for the stage, Cibber replied sincerely: “Madame, the one is absolutely necessary, the other is not.” He was not being hypocritical when he insisted that the moral be writ large after the fable. In 1707 he was right: sentiment and morality ruled supreme—on the stage.

XII THE RIVAL FOOLS

First acted January 11, 1709, The Rival Fools, a slight farrago, was an inconsequential attempt to put Wit at Several Weapons, by John Fletcher, into Queen Anne dress. As Cibber often did, he belittled in the Prologue what he had received from his source; a bold undertaking, considering that Henry Vaughan had written “Upon Mr. Fletcher's Plays” (1647): “This age or that may write, but never see / A wit that dares run parallel with thee.” Undaunted, Cibber confessed frankly:

From sprighly Fletcher's loose Confed'rate Muse,
The unfinish'd Hints of these light Scenes we chuse;
For with such careless Haste this Play was writ,
So unperus'd each Thought of started Wit;
Each Weapon of his Wit so lamely fought,
That 'twould as scanty on our Stage be thought,
As for a modern Belle my Grannam's Petticoat.
So that from th' Old we may with Justice say,
We scarce cou'd cull the Trimming of a Play.

The Elizabethans and Jacobeans lived in a far more boisterous but more barbarous era and were satisfied with a good deal less than Cibber's sophisticated audience demanded! (We recall the statement of seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn who commented that crude and barbarous works such as Shakespeare's Hamlet “begin to disgust this refined age.”) Cibber did, in fact, make a few improvements on Fletcher: the exposition in Cibber is a good deal clearer, the conclusion is more effective, and The Rival Fools is in prose. It is true that Fletcher wrote the most conversational of all blank verse and it can scarcely be said to obtrude; but verse of any sort was really unnecessary both in his play and in Cibber's. Still Cibber's entertainment cannot be rated as wholly acceptable. We fail to appreciate the “keen Satire's Jerk” of which Cibber boasted. We cannot say that we are conscious of the advertised “Profit and Delight” now that we have turned its tedious pages. Cibber truly was, as William Hazlitt said, “one of the best comic writers of his age,” but this particular effort does nothing to support that statement. There must be easier ways for us to learn of the fatuities and futilities of polite society in the reign of Good Queen Anne.

XIII THE NON-JUROR

Molière indirectly gave English literature a number of its most notable plays, and the most famous of all Cibber's rifacimenti was from Molière: The Non-Juror was based on Tartuffe (1667).⁵¹ The Author's purpose in reworking this material was eminently serious and patriotic, as he explained to the King in the Dedication:

Your Comedians, SIR, are an Unhappy Society, whom some Severe Heads think wholly Useless, and others Dangerous to the Young and Innocent: This Comedy is therefore an Attempt to remove that Prejudice, and to shew, what Honest and Laudable Uses may be made of the Theatre, when its Performances keep close to the true Purposes of its Institution: That it may be necessary to divert the Sullen and Disaffected from busying their Brains to disturb the Happiness of a Government, which (for want of proper Amusements) they often enter into Wild and Seditious Schemes to reform: And that it may likewise make those very Follies the Ridicule and Diversion even of those that committed them.⁵²

Cibber's opponents, professional and political, did not for a moment accept this righteous stance. He was, they said, just trying to write a pennycatching play, and plagiarizing at that:

Yet to write plays is easy, faith, enough,
As you have seen by—Cibber—in Tartuffe.
With how much wit he did your hearts engage!
He only stole the play;—he writ the title-page.(53)

But Cibber had done very much more to make this a popular, partisan play than to translate Molière. He went back, to some extent, to the early drama of the Restoration, which put a distinct emphasis on contemporary political affairs, but he gave everything his own particular touch. If his Apology is to be trusted, he was once again consciously introducing that didactic tone with which (along with greater refinement in both language and structure) he modified the Restoration comedy of intrigue:

About this Time Jacobitism had lately exerted itself, by the most unprovoked Rebellion, that our Histories have handed down to us, since the Norman Conquest; I therefore thought that to set the Authors, and Principles of that desperate Folly in a fair Light, by allowing the mistaken Consciences of some their best Excuse, and by making the artful Pretenders to a Conscience, as ridiculous, as they were ungratefully wicked, was a Subject fit for the honest Satire of a Comedy, and what might, if it succeeded, do Honour to the Stage, by shewing the valuable Use of it. And considering what Numbers, at that time, might come to it, as prejudic'd Spectators, it may be allow'd that the Undertaking was not less hazardous, than laudable.

To give Life, therefore, to this Design, I borrow'd the Tartuffe of Moliere, and turn'd him, into a modern Non-Juror: Upon the Hypocrisy of the French Character, I ingrafted a stronger Wickedness, that of an English Popish Priest, lurking under the Doctrine of our own Church, to raise his Fortune, upon the Ruin of a worthy Gentleman, whom his dissembled Sanctity had seduc'd into the treasonable Cause of a Roman Catholick Out-law.⁵⁴

The Tartuffe character becomes Dr. Wolf, a Jesuit priest posing as a nonjuring (Anglican) clergyman.⁵⁵ Nonjurors were not ordinarily traitors, for they did not advocate violent opposition to established authority, but Dr. Wolf is no dissenting Protestant: he is a papist spy. Nonetheless, he contrives to convince the gullible Sir John Woodvil that he is a member of the Church of England, not the Church of Rome, and gains refuge in his household. An unmitigated villain, Wolf proposes to repay this kindness by seducing his benefactor's wife, seizing the estate, and disinheriting young Woodvil. His hypocrisy threatens to make impossible the discovery of his nefarious plans, but love finds a way: he is betrayed by his assistant Charles who, though a former pupil and a Preston rebel, is touched by a deep, Cibberian, and sentimental attachment for Maria, the Woodvils' daughter. Sir John is directed to hide under a table and he hears the hypocrite Wolf make advances to Lady Woodvil. The plot becomes so clear that even the naïve Sir John cannot doubt; the jig is up. After this service neither the audience nor the author can be ungrateful to the repentant Charles. Cibber grants him a royal pardon⁵⁶ and, for good measure, restores him to his long-lost father. Dr. Wolf, exposed, is punished as befits his crime. The Woodvils are happy once more.

The subplot features Maria as a coquette. She dallies with Charles and (especially) a certain, patient Mr. Heartly, a gentleman prodigiously equipped with moral pronouncements for all occasions. The saucy Mrs. Oldfield, however, managed to enliven this part of the play by putting a good deal of sparkle into Maria. She assisted Cibber in making this role of the impudent flirt a much more entertaining one than that of Marianne in Molière.

Though Cibber in effect added Charles to the play,⁵⁷ he generally economized and cut out Molière's Dorine, Cléante, and Madame Pernelle. His Lady Woodvil (Molière's Elmire) is less lively than her original, probably because Cibber had decided to adopt the usual moral main plot and witty subplot arrangement; he therefore gave all of the glitter to Maria. His Sir John (Orgon) is closer to the French model. The greatest changes are in the major figure: Molière's romping rogue becomes a slinking villain, less hypocritical but even more dishonest. Tartuffe is a fat, florid, gormandizing mountebank, teetering on the brink of farce; Dr. Wolf has a lean and hungry look, is more dangerous, less outwardly demanding, more insidious, verging on melodrama. He appears in the first act—much earlier than Molière's main character—and his treasonous machinations are soon patent: he will not pray for the Royal Family by name, he visits the Continent, he is clearly trying to put the Old Pretender back on the throne. When we hear of his connection with the Rebellion of 1715, we are not surprised; when we see his downfall, we are not unhappy.

Miles is the authority for stating that about three-quarters of The Non-Juror is new material. His thesis laid stress on the originality of the love interest in Cibber's plot, and he concluded that “Cibber does not owe much to Molière. He has a good many scattered reminiscences embodied in free paraphrase, three copied scenes in which many phrases are borrowed, and two passages translated quite closely from the French. Still the language of the adaptation as a whole is distinctly Cibber's.”⁵⁸ Not only are the language and the significant plot devices largely Cibber's but the very tone of it all is Cibberian—Barker calls it “his own spurious conception of gentility”—even to the touches of sentimentalism designed to “coerce” the passions.

So soon after the Old Pretender and the Earl of Mar, such a play, as Cibber well knew, necessarily offended some. Because it was Cibber's play, it was especially opposed. Though The Non-Juror ran for eighteen successive nights in December, 1717, and through five editions in the next year, it called forth a flood of protest. Some of this was, of course, attributable to Jacobite sentiment, which did not die easily; but most was less in support of the divine right of kings than in rebellion against the divine right of theater managers. There was a flurry of vituperative pamphlets and several “keys” to the drama (including Joseph Gay's Compleat Key to the Non-Juror and an ironic one by Pope).⁵⁹ Christopher Bullock rushed The Per-Juror onto the stage at Lincoln's Inn Fields in an attempt to cash in on the publicity and one “W. B.” (advertised as “late of St. John's Colledge, Camb.”) penned a farce called The Juror.

The newspapers were full of jokes, criticism, and counter-criticism; for Cibber had boldly discussed from the stage one of the most debated issues of the day. Mist's Weekly Journal was but one of the many periodicals that took up the question on the personal as well as the political level. It printed a diatribe against Cibber purportedly by the author of The Wife's Relief and signed “Charles Johnson,” which showed scant gratitude to Cibber for the kind reception Johnson had received at Drury Lane. Barker quotes it in full, and it is studded with phrases like “more malice, nonsense, and obscenity”; “a stolen, malicious, insulting performance”; and “would-be wit.”⁶⁰ It alleges that Cibber made £1000 out of The Non-Juror (and promptly lost it all gambling).

As late as February 3, 1731, the Grub-Street Journal recalled the fuss that The Non-Juror had raised. The anonymous author is insulting Cibber (recently appointed Poet Laureate) by comparing him with a rhyming shoemaker named Carpenter (“Deputy Bellman of the City of Hereford”):

CIBBER is also a Translator and Cobler, but in no degree equal to his rival. He has translated, as I am told, two pair of CORNEILLE's and MOLIERE's old shoes, in such a manner as to fit no mortal. The Pompey, the Cid, &c. were despised by many in our Society, who wear none but second-hand shoes: and even the Nonjurors themselves have chosen to go almost barefoot, rather than to appear in a pair of patch'd shoes of Tartuffe, or to tread one step like him.

The point is that years later it could be assumed that the public would still recognize allusions to Cibber's play of 1717. The Non-Juror had been a huge success. Like many another thing with which Cibber had been associated, it had been widely discussed, and it left its mark. It made for Colley Cibber some extremely vocal political enemies (who turned out regularly to damn his plays for years thereafter, regardless of their merit). It also made him some extremely valuable political friends; and, regardless of Cibber's merit, he was eventually to become the chartered bard of Whig sentiments, the Poet Laureate of England. He owed that honor, he himself said, to The Non-Juror. If he thereby incurred a debt to Molière's memory, perhaps it was canceled when someone “borrowed” the play from Cibber: in 1769 Isaac Bickerstaffe reworked The Non-Juror into The Hypocrite.⁶¹ Once again it was a hit. A good thing has a long life in the theater.

XIV XIMENA, OR THE HEROICK DAUGHTER

Aimez donc la raison; que toujours vos écrits
Empruntent d'elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.

—Boileau

We have above quoted a reference to Cibber's version of Le Cid. It was Ximena (failed, 1712; printed, 1719), and in the Preface Cibber explained that his purpose in tinkering with Corneille's masterpiece of 1637 was to make it more reasonable, to improve it. Though the impeccable taste of George Saintsbury caused him to hail Le Cid as “perhaps the most epoch-making play in all literature,”⁶² Cibber, who was no more afraid of classics than he was of controversy, felt that he could regularize it along Neoclassical lines, make it less romantic, render it more credible. He always thought that French plays were too unrealistic. As late as November 21, 1749, he wrote to his friend Benjamin Victor that “the French Plays I never had any great opinion of; their Comedies want Humour and their Tragedies credible Nature; that is, they are too heavily romantic.”

Sometimes Cibber follows Corneille's text closely—clearly there were some things in the play which he much admired—but he does not hesitate to alter. He gives the tragedy a new first act, for he complains that Corneille has been lax in opening with “a cold conversation between Chimène, and her Suivante” (at the end of which Chimène “quaintly walks off, to as little purpose as she came on”). He is obviously treating Corneille's masterpiece in precisely the same way he would a new script submitted to him at Drury Lane—and the author is not there to defend his work against Cibber's practical, slashing quill. Chimène, he feels, is not built up enough to serve as a fit heroine. Cibber's first scene is a chatty but highly purposeful exchange between Don Alvarez (Don Diegue in the original) and his son Don Carlos (Corneille's Don Rodrigue, the Cid) which establishes Don Carlos' love for Ximena (Chimène) and gives the audience cause to concern itself over them.

Occasionally Cibber makes an improvement only to cancel it out again: he wisely cuts the Infanta from Act I and then adds Belzara and complications which only hinder the necessary business of the play. Some of his changes are interesting: he makes the Count (Ximena's father) “more civilized and rational,” more dignified than Corneille's character, and the King likewise is more reasonable and less tyrannical. Some of the changes are indefensible: he gives the original's somber end a happy (but infelicitous) twist. Dorothy Canfield Fisher explains that “he thought the French ending too sad a one, and adopted the most childlike method of making it cheerful—that is, the resurrection of a character supposed to be dead.”⁶³

The whole adaptation is free and cannot in any major respect be said to be either very faithful or superior to the original. Much as it might help Cibber's reputation could we divide the blame, there seems to have been no truth in the rumors that Pope had a hand in the play.⁶⁴ Parker in 1717 in his Complete Key to the farce Three Hours after Marriage announced that Cibber had “Naturaliz'd the Cid of Corneille into an English Heroick Daughter, Which will see the Light, as soon as Mr. Pope has touch'd it up, who has it now for that Purpose, the Diction being somewhat obnubilated.” The diction remained obnubilated, and the play and the blame are all Cibber's.

XV THE REFUSAL

In The Author's Farce Henry Fielding deals in Aristophanic directness and personal allusion. He has Marplay Senior (Colley Cibber) explain to Marplay Junior (Theophilus Cibber): “The Art of Writing, Boy, is the Art of stealing Old Plays, by changing the Name of the Play, and new ones by changing the Name of the Author.” In The Refusal, or The Ladies Philosophy, however, Cibber was no simple plagiarist; he changed quite a bit more than the title of Molière's satire Les Femmes savantes (1672).⁶⁵ He altered plot, characterization, and dialogue. He raised Molière's bourgeois main characters to the minor nobility and thoroughly Anglicized them. He switched the satire from philosophy (typically French) to business (typically English): Chrysale becomes a typical promoter: Sir Gilbert Wrangle, a director of the South Sea Company.⁶⁶ A little of the satire deals with idealized love (in Plato and Milton),⁶⁷ none with the clumsy grammar lampooned in Molière. (Style was a touchy point with Cibber, whose own was constantly under attack.) For the most part, Cibber cashed in on the South Sea craze, much as he had exploited the anti-Catholicism and the Bangorian controversy of the time in The Non-Juror. Molière's satire of typical individuals becomes in Cibber's hands satire of individual types, and the very character names in The Refusal underline this: Wrangle, Frankly, Witling. In Cibber, each character has “some distinguishing quality”⁶⁸ but the satire is broader, more like Shadwell's. The plot, as is usual with Cibber, thickens. Here is the Plotwell of Three Hours after Marriage hard at work. Croissant says that the dénouement is accomplished by Cibber by “more characteristically English means” and that, because of its increased complexity, it is less amusing than Molière's.⁶⁹

This lively comedy of manners did not deserve the cold reception it met in 1721, one due to opposition to Cibber as a person, not as a playwright. It was widely read, reaching four editions by 1737 and being reprinted in 1753 and 1764. It still repays reading, not only for its intrinsic merit but because of the picture it presents of the era.⁷⁰ It must be confessed, however, that the diction of such characters as Sophronia sounds more like that of a Sir Walter Scott heroine than the speech of human beings. Since the wit is not particularly clever, many of the lines have gone flat over the years, while an unintentional humor of artificiality strikes the modern reader, as sometimes happens as he peruses Samuel Richardson's Pamela or John Cleland's Fanny Hill.

XVI CAESAR IN AEGYPT

First acted December 8, 1724, and published a week later, Caesar in Aegypt is carpentry. Most of the materials come from The False One (a collaboration by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger),⁷¹ a tragedy of 1674 which reminds one of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and treats of the treacherous murder of Pompey by Septimus (“The False One”); the intrigues of Photinus against Ptolemy and Cleopatra (joint rulers of Egypt); the Alexandrian revolt and Caesar's suppression of it; the death of Ptolemy; and Caesar's affair with Ptolemy's celebrated sister, Cleopatra. To this material is added some ormoly from Corneille's Pompée (1642 or 1643) and a little scrollwork of Cibber's own. Cibber gave no indication that the whole work was not his own.

In its day Caesar in Aegypt competed successfully with the splendiferous operas and extravagant entertainments at rival theaters, for it offered sumptuous and exotic settings and good bravura roles for Booth (Caesar) and Wilks (Antony), Mrs. Oldfield (Cleopatra) and Mrs. Porter (Cornelia, “The relict of Pompey”), Cibber (Achoreus, counselor to the King of Egypt) and Theophilus Cibber (Ptolemy). Downes' Roscius Anglicanus defined an “opera” as a play with “machines”; though Caesar in Aegypt had incidental music at most, it had plenty of machinery in both its production and its plot and was Drury Lane's sort of answer to the musical extravaganzas at the Haymarket and elsewhere. Mrs. Oldfield in the Epilogue asks: “Was it not bold, from stated rules to rove, / And make the Tragic Muse commode to love?” Bold, yes; but without the spectacle that accompanied it the play is “scarcely worth mentioning.”⁷²

XVII THE PROVOK'D HUSBAND

In the period of Garrick's contribution to what Samuel Johnson called “the gaiety of nations” and “the public stock of harmless pleasure” Cibber was second only to Shakespeare in popularity as a writer of comedies, and The Provok'd Husband, with eighty-two performances in twenty-six seasons, was the most acclaimed of all Cibber's works.⁷³

The Provok'd Husband was a sentimental comedy of manners combining feeling and wit, imbued with the bourgeois morality—perhaps we should say respectability, or desire for it—which had come to dominate England, the nation of shopkeepers. Bellmour in William Congreve's first play had succinctly stated Restoration irresponsibility: “Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit, be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation; and let father Time shake his glass.” But how different Cibber's age had become, and Cibber wrote “to expose, and reform the licentious Irregularities that too often break in upon the Peace and Happiness of the married State.” With this serious purpose Cibber took up the “occasional papers” of A Journey to London, a play left unfinished by Sir John Vanbrugh at his death in 1726. Out of them Cibber fashioned The Provok'd Husband.

Cibber claims that he attempted to preserve as much of “Sir John” as possible, and even the new title recalls Vanbrugh's masterpiece The Provok'd Wife (1697); but he softened the characters and the story line by numerous changes and “he unconsciously stamped his individuality upon almost every scene.”⁷⁴ The play became more moral, more sentimental, more regular, more probable. Two plots are neatly stitched together, and all that Vanbrugh left “irregular” or “undigested” is carefully ordered, as befits the serious intent of the author's utile dulce. As George Farquhar, close friend of Cibber's partner Wilks and the author of several comedies in which Cibber was featured, wrote about the intent of comedy of the day:

Comedy is no more at present than a well-framed tale handsomely told as an agreeable vehicle for counsel or reproof. This is all we can say for the credit of its institution, and is the stress of its charter for liberty and toleration. Then where should we seek for a foundation but in Aesop's symbolical way of moralizing upon tales and fables? with this difference: that his stories were shorter than ours. He had his tyrant Lyon, his statesman Fox, his beau Magpie, his coward Hare, his bravo Ass, and his buffoon Ape, with all the characters that crowd our stages every day; with this distinction, nevertheless, that Aesop made his beasts speak good Greek, and our heroes sometimes can't talk English.⁷⁵

Cibber's “fable” is in two parts, as we have said. Plot number one concerns serious Lord Townly (Lord Loverule in Vanbrugh) and his sister Lady Grace, who are annoyed by the gay irresponsibility of Lady Townly (Lady Arabella). Manly, Lady Grace's fiancé, advises Lord Townly to threaten his pleasure-mad wife with divorce. (In Vanbrugh there was some talk of throwing her out of the house.) She is thereby brought to her senses, and Peace and Happiness are restored with a maximum of wit and surprisingly little sententiousness, considering Cibber's didactic intent. Plot number two concerns the country-cousin family of Sir Francis Wronghead (Headpiece in Vanbrugh). Though Cibber played Sir Francis, this more breezy, somewhat farcical subplot is basically Vanbrugh's; Cibber should therefore, receive credit for the major plot's handling. Of course Cibber, alert to the opposition accorded him as a personality, announced it vice versa, confounding his critics. On opening night he was treated to the spectacle of his enemies applauding the Cibber scenes and nearly stopping the play with hisses for Vanbrugh's. It was devious of Cibber thus to ascribe the sentimental parts which he himself had added to the play to an aged Vanbrugh, converted from cynicism, but it was both clever and justified. Personal antipathies were so strong that any work announced as Cibber's seldom got a fair hearing. Even after Cibber retired from the stage, the works of other authors—Theophilus Cibber and Charles Boadens, for example—were hissed when they were falsely suspected of containing parts by the old man.

Opening night was a triumph for the stately and sparkling Nance Oldfield. The reviews damned Cibber, however. Mist's Weekly Journal announced on January 13, 1728: “On Wednesday last a most horrid, barbarous, and cruel murder was committed at The Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane upon a posthumous child of the late Sir John Vanbrugh by one who for some time past has gone by the name of Keyber. It was a fine child born and would certainly have lived long had it not fallen into such cruel hands.”

Actually the foundling would never have lived at all had Cibber not adopted it. Mist was wrong and as usually vicious, and his outbursts looked pretty silly when the shares of Cibber and Vanbrugh were identified on January 31. Others attacked the Wronghead scenes, thinking that what Cibber had played he had written; but, despite carping critics, the play was a success. It was not only well written and well acted, the audience liked its message or moral:

For in the Marriage-state the World must own,
Divided Happiness was never known.
To make it mutual Nature points the Way:
Let Husbands govern: Gentle wives obey.

If the solution of the play's problem is more than a little contrived, well, Mozart managed to get away with a Da Ponte Marriage of Figaro libretto that ends like this:

Count: Contessa perdono!
Countess: Più docile io sono, e dico di sí
All: Ah tutti contenti saremo cosí
Count: Forgive me, Countess!
Countess: I am more gentle
And answer you “yes.”
All: We all are delighted
To have it end thus.

The public welcomed The Provok'd Husband. In 1728 good comedies in London had long been too rare. The play ran for a month and, though its success was then eclipsed by the prodigious reception of The Beggar's Opera at the rival house, it meant a new prosperity for Cibber and his theater. The Provok'd Husband brought in more than any other single play done at Drury Lane in fifty years.⁷⁶

XVIII THE RIVAL QUEANS

The year 1703 is a probable date for the première of Cibber's “Comical-Tragedy” The Rival Queans. With the Humours of Alexander the Great, actually a mock-heroic parody of the false fire and fustian of Nathaniel Lee's famous, fatuous heroic tragedy The Rival Queens (1677). Lee's “furious Fustian and turgid Rants” tell the tale of the first and second wives, Roxana and Statira, of Alexander the Great. The rival queens bombast and recriminate, Alexander goes spectacularly mad, and Lysimachus emulates Samson (tearing a lion to pieces with his bare hands) while the actors do everything but subject the scenery to the same fate. Cibber bravely essays the task of making these materials even more ridiculous. He reduces the queens to queans (that is, sluts) and strains even harder than Lee to produce prodigious similes but fails amusingly. It all sounds a good deal like the business in the last act of Farquhar's The Constant Couple (1699), not only in the bustle of the action but in the burlesque of Lee's rhetoric. (In Farquhar's play Sir Harry Wildair listens to Angelica's overblown speechifying and comments wryly: “This is the first Whore in Heroicks that I have met with.”)

Cibber may have lacked originality in The Rival Queans, but the work pleased. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the English were developing a new and immensely popular offshoot of the commedia dell'arte. Taking Harlequin and some of the other vivid characters from the Italians, the English produced elaborate spectacles in which dialogue and music were added to the mime of the harlequinade. The public flocked to see these frothily fabulous entertainments and thrilled to the great “transformations” and the increasingly fancy and pictorial scenery (which greatly influenced the drama of the next century). Cibber and his colleagues inveighed against these “non-rational” entertainments but were compelled to compete with the other theaters, so they presented them. The Rival Queans lay somewhere between these spectacles and farce and was probably presented with verve and with plenty of mime and mugging, appealing to those elements of the audience that would concur in the opinion that “the pantomime is a kind of stage entertainment which will always give more delight to a mixed company than the best speaking farce that can be composed.”⁷⁷

Pantomime and farce, slapstick and rowdy burlesque, had drawing power and were not to be gainsaid. Cibber deplored their excessive popularity and fundamental foolishness, but he was too acute as a manager to banish them from his theater and too enterprising as an author to omit them from his works.

XIX LOVE IN A RIDDLE

The vogue of Italian opera in England, dating probably from Arsinoe (1705), “was demolished by a single stroke” of John Gay's pen, said Pope, when The Beggar's Opera appeared in 1728. Gay's sprightly mixture of simple comedy and simple melody, tunes “commonly sung up and down the Streets,” created a rage for ballad opera—The Quaker's Opera (1728), The Village Opera (1729), and so on—that persisted nearly unabated until mid-century.⁷⁸

As manager of Drury Lane, Cibber had read Gay's manuscript and declined it. Then he had to watch, with what discomfort we can imagine, as John Rich's production of it proceeded to smash all records. Rich netted some £4000 from his production, plus the satisfaction of lording it over his rival as Cibber sat down to imitate the very piece he had rejected. In 1729 Cibber came up with Love in a Riddle, exploiting the ballad-opera vogue but claiming to have written the piece “upon a quite different Foundation that of recommending Virtue, and Innocence.” In addition to the sentimental didacticism, however, it had an elaborate plot, a comic subplot, fifty-five rousing songs of high moral tone, Cibber himself as Philautus (a Corinthian fop), and Catherine Raftor (later famous as Mrs. Kitty Clive) in her debut as the heroine.

The ravishing Mrs. Raftor nearly saved Love in a Riddle despite all, but it was damned. Cibber's enemies, of course, all knew that he had rejected The Beggar's Opera, and they were ready to adduce that fact as proof that he had no taste. His imitation signified to them that he had no principles. The rumor that he was responsible for the suppression of Gay's own sequel Polly they took as evidence that Cibber had no scruples.⁷⁹

On the opening night of Love in a Riddle the audience was restless. On the second night (January 8, 1729) Cibber's enemies destroyed the work entirely. Cibber had expected trouble and had taken the precaution of installing Frederick, Prince of Wales in the royal box, hoping that the presence of royalty would discourage rowdiness. The stratagem didn't work. The catcalls were so frequent and the boos so vociferous that Cibber was forced to step out of character to beg the audience's indulgence while the actors finished the play, promising that they would never again be insulted by it. In an age when duels between members of the audience on the stage were not unknown and bloodshed in the pit was not uncommon, it was dangerous to provoke the audience.

With a “prodigious Concourse of Gentry and Nobility” flocking to see Gay's “Newgate pastoral” at another theater,⁸⁰ one might think that the musical pastoral Cibber was offering at Drury Lane would gain acceptance. But the power of Cibber's enemies was great enough to ruin anything of his if they exerted themselves. Nathaniel Mist had been preparing for six months scathing articles in Fog's Weekly Journal to axe this entertainment. Even before he saw it, he hated it. When it was hooted down, he was delighted. An enemy of Cibber both personally and politically, Mist gloated as he reported:

On Tuesday night last a ridiculous piece was acted at the theatre in Drury Lane which was neither comedy, tragedy, opera, pastoral, or farce; however, no thief or robber of any rank was satirized in it and it could be said to give offense to none but persons of sense and good taste: yet it met with the reception it well deserved and was hissed off the stage. However, it may serve to bind up with the rest of Keyber's works.

XX DAMON AND PHILLIDA

Love in a Riddle had, nonetheless, some sturdy theatrical lumber in it, and this Cibber was able to salvage. In the same way that he made a popular farce (The School-Boy, 1703) out of the subplot of Womans Wit (which failed in 1697), Cibber now created a famous afterpiece out of the comic underplot of Love in a Riddle. It too dealt with comic rivals—the booby brothers Crimon and Mopsus who woo the fair Phillida—and it was called Damon and Phillida. Cibber took care to present it anonymously in 1729, lest it meet with the fate of its parent. It became immensely popular—as Love in a Riddle ought to have done—and Baker's compendium Companion to the Playhouse praised it for “a Simplicity of Manners and a Uniformity of Conduct that render it most perfectly and truly pastoral.” Today the piece seems rowdy, noisy and dull, but fifteen sparkling songs and plenty of slapstick kept it in the repertory for years.

XXI POLYPHEME

Another musical venture by Cibber was Polypheme, an opera by Paul Rolli with music by Nicola Antonio Porpora.⁸¹ Cibber translated the Italian libretto of Polypheme, one of five presented in London for the Opera of the Nobility, a group set up to rival Händel. It was presented at the Haymarket at the beginning of February, 1735. Cibber seems to have known Italian, therefore, as well as French.

XXII VENUS AND ADONIS AND MYRTILLO

Cibber was the author of the libretto of Venus and Adonis. A Masque, first performed March 12, 1715, with music by Dr. John Christopher Pepusch, director of music for Lincoln's Inn Fields.⁸² For that theater Dr. Pepusch wrote not only Venus and Adonis but also Apollo and Daphne (1716), The Death of Dido (1716, with text by Barton Booth), and The Union of the Three Sister-Arts (1732).

Cibber and Pepusch also collaborated on Myrtillo. A Pastoral Interlude, first performed November 5, 1715. Like Venus and Adonis it recalls Dryden's ode Alexander's Feast. Neither of Cibber's libretti for masques is of interest today except as “representative of a vogue which was popular but which left no permanent impress on the English drama.”⁸³

Notes

1. The Drama: Its History, Literature, and Influence on Civilization. Victorian Edition. London, 1903, XV, 4.

2. Quoted in D. M. E. Habbema, An Appreciation of Colley Cibber, Actor and Dramatist (Amsterdam, 1928), p. 58.

3. Cibber wittily suggested in the Prologue to Ximena that Collier's crabbed pages were scanned by readers who wanted “But to be pointed to the bawdy plays.”

4. Preface to Ximena.

5. Spectator, No. 10, March 11, 1711.

6. “Doubtless, it is unnecessary to find fault with the term ‘sentimental comedy,’ which is sanctioned by contemporary usage and actually adopted by Goldsmith in his attack upon sentimental drama. But it is important to recognize that the wave of sentiment swept over a wider field than that of English comedy, or even of English drama.” The Cambridge History of English Literature X, 68 then mentions Destouches, Marivaux, Nivelle de Chaussée, Voltaire, and Diderot, concluding that in France the term drame “suggests the obliteration of the rigid line between comedy and tragedy. In England and on the continent alike, sentiment tended to break down the barriers of dramatic convention.” Cibber's decision to make virtue and order triumph in comedy (as it had done in tragedy), if only at the last, made comedy's laughter less of “a distorted passion”, more “serious,” more moral.

7. Dramatic Miscellanies, III, 441.

8. Rhetor. ad Herenn., Book I. Steele uses the Latin as the epigraph to The Conscious Lovers.

9. “In short, madam, the cravat string, the garter, the sword knot, the centurine, the burdash, the steenkirk, the large button, the long sleeve, the plume and the full peruke were all created, cried down, or revived by me.”

10. “We may hope that Cibber had the grace to smile, if not blush, when he wrote those words, for in their conscienceless pandering they are surely among the most indecent ever written. And they are among the most permanently offensive—the very spirit of what is meretricious, and calculating, and mercenary, the epitome of all the crocodile tears and sanctimonious headshakes that crowd fast upon four acts of titillation and suggestiveness. After two or three such sentimental comedies, we sigh for the wholesome decency of Shadwell or Wycherley.”—Louis Kronenberger, The Thread of Laughter (New York, 1952), p. 149.

11. Critical Works, p. 408.

12. Preface to Womans Wit. Another “hindrance” is that the play contains no character like Sir Novelty Fashion, the fop so unconscious of his hilarious foolishness that he can modestly and sincerely turn aside a compliment on his popularity with “Stap my vitals, I don't believe there are five hundred women in town that ever took any notice of me.” Not only is Cibber trying harder to write Womans Wit, but his characters are trying harder to be funny. When Cibber strains at wit, he always fails.

13. Corneille had come to England as early as 1637, when Joseph Rutter's Cid was played “before their Majesties at Court and on the Cockpitt Stage in Drury Lane.” Sir William Lower, Mrs. Katherine Philips, John Dancer, and others all translated and adapted Corneille. John Crowne and Ambrose Philips both did versions of Racine's Andromaque, and Thomas Otway (Titus and Berenice) was only one of the other playwrights who made English successes out of Racine's works.

14. Our later comments on the theater and scenery in Cibber's time will make it clear that “unity of place” was dictated by some appreciation of “Classical” rules and not, as is the case in the modern Broadway theater, by financial considerations.

15. The Laureat, p. 102.

16. Tatler, No. 42, July 16, 1709.

17. Shakespeare Without Tears (New York, 1942), p. 62.

18. Richard III was seen in the Restoration in John Caryl's The English Princess, or the Death of Richard III (1667) and in “little starch'd Johnny” Crowne's The Misery of Civil War (1681).

19. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (New York, 1920), II, 153.

20. Garrick was first seen at Goodman's Fields in 1741. Pope saw the production three times and said Garrick would “never have a rival.” London went “horn-mad” about him, said Thomas Gray.

21. Edmund Kean reintroduced the small, nervous character that Cibber had played, so brilliantly and so jerkily that Coleridge said watching Kean as Richard III was like “reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

22. Hazlitt speaks in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (Vol. IV, pp. 165, 364, of the Centenary Edition of the Complete Works, 21 vols., London and Toronto, 1930) of “perverse consistency” and “vulgar caricature.”

23. As for America, Cibber's Richard III (played in New York in 1750) was the first “Shakespearian” production seen in this country. Edwin Forrest's tours made it mean “culture” (and entertainment) all across the land.

24. Genest said Cibber was “wanton” and made more changes than anyone would believe. If Cibber did so, as was the case with Shakespeare himself, his success was his excuse. Furness' Variorum edition details all the changes.

25. William Gillette (born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1855) took Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Professor Moriarity, added eight characters and a main plot of his own, and created Sherlock Holmes (London, 1922). Première Buffalo, New York, October 24, 1899; in New York, November 6, 1899; in London, September 2, 1901.

26. Hazelton Spencer's Shakespeare Improved (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), analyses and compares the Shakespeare and Cibber versions in detail.

27. Cibber put in the death of Henry VI, undoubtedly, for sensationalism and with no political reason in mind.

28. Cibber last revived the play himself in 1739.

29. Cibber himself, as Richard, provided the “low, mincing curtails of magnaminity” required by the role, yet the third night (the author's benefit) yielded him a paltry five pounds. For recent comments see: Eleanor Prosser, “Colley Cibber at San Diego,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XIV (1963), 253-61; Albert E. Kalson, “The Chronicles in Cibber's Richard III,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, XIV (1963), 253-57.

30. The British Theatre: Its Repertory and Practice (London, 1960), p. 159.

31. Quoted in Barker, op. cit., p. 46.

32. Ibid., p. 47.

33. Susanna Percival (born 1667) made her debut at fourteen in D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whigg. In 1686 she married the comedian William Mountfort (killed by a Captain Hill in 1692). She appeared in Southerne's Sir Anthony Love (1690), in which Cibber made his debut, and (as Mrs. John Verbruggen, the wife of the actor who had been Cibber's closest friend at the time he joined the Drury Lane company) she appeared in many plays with and by Cibber: as Narcissa in Love's Last Shift, Berinthia in Vanbrugh's The Relapse, Louisa in Love Makes a Man, and Hypolita in She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not. Her daughter, Susanna Mountfort, had an affair with Barton Booth. Her acting career (1703-1718) was cut short by insanity. Cibber found Mrs. Verbruggen “Mistress of more variety of Humour than I ever knew in any one Woman Actress,” and her death would have been a very great loss to him had not Mrs. Oldfield come along, rather unexpectedly. (Only a year before Mrs. Verbruggen's death A Comparison Between the Two Stages was hailing her as “a Miracle” while dismissing Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Rogers as “mere Rubbish that ought to be swept off the stage with the Filth and Dust.”)

34. Apology, p. 177.

35. Before her roving eye lit on Brett and she married him to save him from the bailiffs, she had a lively career. She had once been Countess of Macclesfield, and it was rumored that the famous Richard Savage was her illegitimate child by the Earl Rivers. Her daughter elevated Mrs. Brett to the highest circles when the young lady became the first English mistress of King George I.

36. Introduction (p. x), Six Restoration Plays, (New York, 1959).

37. A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne. 2 vols. (London, 1875), II, 597.

38. Sir George Etherege is characterizing his Sir Fopling Flutter, or The Man of Mode.

39. The Careless Husband had a long acting history; it influenced Steele's The Tender Husband (1705); it was translated into German as Der sorglose Ehemann (Göttingen, 1750); it was modified by Sheridan to make A Trip to Scarborough (1777). Barker, op.cit., pp. 52-53, comments on various critical pronouncements on The Careless Husband and Habbema, op.cit., devotes most of his study to a painstaking analysis. Cf. Harry Glicksman, “The Stage History of Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXXVI (19-21), 244-50.

40. Critical Works, p. 407.

41. Dennis was something of a pedant in this work of 1725. In his other sometimes abusive, sometimes judicious criticism, he was the sort of man who found Shakespeare lacking in “art and learning,” who believed that “the end of poetry” was solely “to instruct and reform the world, that is, to bring mankind from irregularity, extravagance and confusion, to rule and order.”

42. F. W. Bateson, “The Double Gallant of Colley Cibber,” Review of English Studies, I (1925), 343-46.

43. A. H. Thorndike, English Comedy (New York, 1929), p. 357. A very useful book.

44. Biographia Dramatica, II, 173.

45. Mrs. Bracegirdle's last regular appearance was on February 20, 1707, in a revival of Banks' The Unhappy Favorite. She appeared on a later occasion in a single performance of Love for Love as a special favor to Thomas Betterton. (She had been brought up in Betterton's family, “whose Tenderness she always acknowledges,” reported Edmund Curll, “to have been Paternal.”)

46. Henry Dell (fl. 1756-1766) revamped Cibber's Comical Lovers in 1757 (for Covent Garden) as The Frenchified Lady Never in Paris, but Cibber's “original” remained unsurpassed.

47. Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility (Harvard University Press, 1915), p. 107.

48. Thorndike, op. cit., p. 358.

49. Mrs. Centlivre, who wrote nearly a play a year from 1700 to 1722, had touched on this subject and so had James Shirley in The Gamester (1633). Edward Moore (1712-1757) produced an excellent bourgeois tragedy of this title in 1753. One of the most famous scenes of the century was in Mrs. Centlivre's The Gamester (1705) in the fourth act, when the gambling lover loses his fortune to his mistress, who is disguised as a man.

50. James Miller, a clergyman, writing in the Dedication to The Man of Taste (1735).

51. Among the adaptations from Molière were Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-all (from L'Étourdi), Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (from Le Misanthrope), Vanbrugh's The Mistake (from Le Depit amoreux) and The Cuckold in Conceit (from Sganarelle), and Fielding's The Mock Doctor (from Le Médecin malgré lui) and The Miser (from L'Avare).

52. For this Dedication the dramatist received not only permission but £200 as well.

53. These lines are from the Epilogue to Dr. George Sewell's Tragedy of Sir Walter Raleigh (1719).

54. Apology, pp. 302-03.

55. The nonjurors were those English and Scottish clergymen who remained loyal to James II and would not swear allegiance (hence the name) to William and Mary in 1689. The archbishop of Canterbury, some bishops, and about 400 other clergymen in England thus lost their positions. They were joined by most of the Church of Scotland when Episcopalianism was there disestablished (1689) in favor of Presbyterianism. Though nonjurors theoretically were nonresisters of established authority, many were active in the Old Pretender's rebellion of 1715, and nonjuring took on political as well as theological implications. The “Bangorian Controversy,” involving the nonjurors, began in 1717 when Benjamin Hoadley, Bishop of Bangor (Wales) preached a sermon before the King in which he asserted that Jesus Christ had delegated no authority to the Church. William Law, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, answered him for the nonjurors in several public letters which defended ecclesiastical authority and touched off a literary battle in which more than fifty writers and two hundred works were involved. It was against the background of this massive controversy that Cibber's Non-Juror was seen and argued. Among many articles relevant here are: W. B. Gardner, “George Hicks and the Origin of the Bangorian Controversy,” Studies in Philology, XXXIX (1942), 65-78; three articles by D. H. Miles: “A Forgotten Hit: The Non-Juror,” Studies in Philology, XVI (1919), 67-77, and “The Original of The Non-Juror,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXIII (1915), 195-214; and “The Political Satire of The Non-Juror,” Modern Philology, XIII (1915), 281-304; W. M. Peterson, “Pope and Cibber's The Non-Juror,” Modern Language Notes, LXX (1955), 332-35.

56. Cibber probably got the idea from history: King George I granted such a pardon to the son of the Duke of Atholl after the Rebellion of 1715 had failed.

57. Laurent, Charles' opposite number in the Molière play, remains offstage throughout.

58. D. H. Miles, “The Relation of The Non-Juror to Le Tartuffe,” Master's Thesis, University of Chicago, 1908, p. 12. Since we know that Cibber visited France several times (and was fond of putting French phrases into the mouths of his dandies) we may hazard a guess that Cibber translated his French sources himself.

59. Pope's “key” was The Plot Discovered. Pope's father had been a nonjuror who “never dar'd an oath, or hazarded a lie,” and Pope himself was a devout Roman Catholic—as well as an enemy of Cibber. See Chapter Nine.

60. Barker, op.cit., p. 108.

61. Bickerstaffe had already retouched The Plain Dealer.

62. Pierre Corneille's tragicomedy caused a great controversy in its time because the Academicians objected to the way it violated their ideas of Neoclassical unities (and seemed to condone dueling, prohibited by Cardinal Richelieu). The Academy condemned its story, style, and dénouement, but it has since been recognized as one of the glories of French literature.

63. Corneille and Racine in England (New York, 1904), p. 176.

64. The story was that Pope had offered to put finishing touches on Cibber's Ximena in exchange for Cibber's cooperation in producing Three Hours after Marriage at Drury Lane.

65. Molière was, in Cibber's time, only rivaled by John Fletcher as a quarry for dramatic materials. Altogether Molière influenced more than sixty surviving plays, from those by D'Avenant to those by Sheridan. Even Les Femmes savantes had already suffered a sea change to something called The Female Virtuosoes (1693) by the time Cibber got around to it.

66. Cibber himself was only one of thousands who speculated in the South Sea Company, formed by Robert Harley in 1711, a bubble which burst disastrously in 1720, ruining banks and individuals who had bought inflated stock—it went from 128[frac12] to 1000 when the government got behind the company. It destroyed confidence in the unlimited expansion of credit. The government fell when the bubble burst. Sir Robert Walpole was appointed First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer to straighten out the tangle. To Cibber this meant the return of Walpole's friend Steele to power at Drury Lane and, eventually, Cibber's preferment at court under the Walpole administration (1721-1742). In writing a play about the South Sea Company, Cibber was once again dealing with a widely discussed political and social situation of his day.

67. Cf. G. W. Whiting, “Colley Cibber and ‘Paradise Lost’,” Notes and Queries, CLXIV (1933), 171-72.

68. William Wycherley in The Double Dealer, another play excessively heavy in plot, defines a “humour” as “some distinguishing quality.”

69. Croissant, op. cit., p. 25.

70. “Une époque n'est bien connue que si l'on connait bien les choses que cette époque a particulièrement aimées.”—Louis Petit de Julleville.

71. Fletcher wrote more than a dozen plays with Massinger before 1623. This is one of the best of them.

72. Dorothy Fisher, op. cit., p. 223.

73. H. W. Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (New York, 1954), passim.

74. Barker, op.cit., p. 142. Barker devotes some pages to detailing the “tricks of Cibber's trade” revealed by these changes.

75. “A Discourse upon Comedy in Reference to the English Stage: in a letter to a friend (1702)” as edited by Barrett H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama, (Revised Edition, New York, 1945), p. 221.

76. Cibber's play appeared in France in 1761 as Le Mari poussé à bout.

77. Thomas Davies, op. cit., I, 108-09.

78. E. J. Burton, op. cit., p. 160: “A simple plot, a gay or satiric delineation of the more or less accepted life of the period, could be made attractive and exciting by the selection of popular song tunes to which fresh words were fitted. The ‘releasing’ power of music which seems to strengthen every gesture and movement, and to sanction that theatrical enlargement of character and situation which most people find attractive (music removes the play from the conventions of naturalism), gave the new age its true and freer expression.”

79. Actually Polly was suppressed by Walpole's government for purely political reasons. Cibber had nothing to do with it. Polly was not seen, however, for fifty years.

80. The standard book here is E. McA. Gagey's Ballad Opera, New York, 1937. Gagey reports (p. 36): “In a record run of sixty-two performances, interrupted only by a few benefit nights, The Beggar's Opera proved to be the sensation of the age, reaching all parts of England, traveling to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Minorca, and bringing great profit to all concerned. [Gagey means to say that the sixty-two performances were in London. The “road companies,” of course, brought the total number of performances much higher, and they did not star the London actors.] Gay netted £693 13s 6d from the four author's nights and sold the copyright of the play and the Fables for ninety guineas. His total proceeds have been variously computed from £2000 down.”

81. Porpora was a Neapolitan singing teacher and composer well known in Italy. He had collaborated with the great Domenico Scarlatti and others. He wrote forty-four operas in all, five of them in England, where he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

82. Pepusch was a learned German who joined the Drury Lane orchestra as a violinist, became a cembalist, then a composer and organist to the Duke of Chandos (a post in which he preceded Händel). In addition to writing the pieces listed for Lincoln's Inn Fields, he also arranged The Beggar's Opera, Polly, and The Wedding.

83. Croissant, op. cit., p. 5.

Bibliography

Books

Baker, D. E. Biographia Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Playhouse … London: Printed for Longmans, Hurst; enlarged (3 vols.), 1812.

Barker, R. H. Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.

Bernbaum, Ernest. The Drama of Sensibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915.

Burton, E. J. The British Theatre: Its Repertory and Practice. London: Jenkins, 1960.

Davies, Thomas. Dramatic Miscellanies. 3 vols. London, 1783-1784.

Dennis, John. The Critical Works. E. N. Hooker, ed. 2 vols. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939-1943.

Downes, John. Roscius Anglicanus. Montague Summers, ed. London: Fortune Press, 1926.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Corneille and Racine in England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1904.

Gagey, E. McA. Ballad Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937.

Genest, John. Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. 10 vols. Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832.

Hughes, Leo and Scouten, A. H., eds. Ten English Farces. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1948.

Odell, G. C. D. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. New York: Scribner, 1920.

Pope, Alexander. Correspondence. George Sherburn, ed. 5 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956.

Spencer, Hazelton. Shakespeare Improved. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927.

Thorndike, A. H. English Comedy. New York and London: Macmillan, 1929.

Ward, Sir Alphonsus William. A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1875. Revised, 1899, 3 vols.

Anonymous Pamphlets

The Laureat: or, The Right Side of Colley Cibber, Esq. London, 1740.

Other Pamphlets

“Gay, Joseph.” A Complete Key to the Non-Juror. London, 1718. “H. S.” Some Cursory Remarks on the Play Call'd The Non-Juror. London, 1718.

Pope, Alexander. The Plot Discover'd; or, A Clue to the Comedy of The Non-Juror. London, 1718.

Theses and Dissertations

Miles, D. H. “The Relation of The Non-Juror to Le Tartuffe.” Master's Thesis, University of Chicago, 1908.

Biographical and Critical Essays

Bateson, F. W. “The Double Gallant of Colley Cibber,” Review of English Studies, I (1925), 343-46.

Croissant, DeWitt C. “Studies in the Work of Colley Cibber,” Bulletin of the University of Kansas, Humanistic Studies, Vol. I, No. 1., Lawrence, Kansas, 1912.

Gardner, W. B. “George Hicks and the Origin of the Bangorian Controversy,” Studies in Philology, XXXIX (1942), 65-78.

Kalson, Albert E. “The Chronicles in Cibber's Richard III,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, XIV (1963), 253-57.

Miles, D. H. “A Forgotten Hit: The Non-Juror,” Studies in Philology, XVI (1919), 67-77.

———“The Original of The Non-Juror,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXIII (1915), 195-214.

———“The Political Satire of The Non-Juror,” Modern Philology, XIII (1915), 281-304.

Peterson, W. M. “Pope and Cibber's The Non-Juror,” Modern Language Notes, LXX (1955), 332-35.

Prosser, Eleanor. “Colley Cibber at San Diego,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XIV (1963), 253-61.

Whiting, G. W. “Colley Cibber and ‘Paradise Lost,’” Notes and Queries, CLXIV (1933), 171-72.

———“The Temple of Dullness and Other Interludes,” Review of English Studies, X (1934), 206-11.