Editing Colley Cibber (section)

==Playwright==

===''Love's Last Shift''===
[[File:Love'sLastShift title.png|thumb|right|alt=Title page reading "Loves Laft Shift; or The Fool in Fafhion. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal by His Majefty's Servants. Written by C. Cibber|''Love's Last Shift'', published 1696]]
{{Main|Love's Last Shift}}
Cibber's comedy ''Love's Last Shift'' (1696) is an early herald of a massive shift in audience taste, away from the [[intellectualism]] and sexual frankness of Restoration comedy and towards the conservative certainties and gender-role backlash of exemplary or sentimental comedy.<ref>This aspect of ''Love's Last Shift'' and ''The Careless Husband'' has been scathingly analyzed by Paul Parnell, but defended by [[Shirley Strum Kenny]] as yielding, in comparison with classic [[Restoration comedy]], a more "humane" comedy.</ref> According to Paul Parnell, ''Love's Last Shift'' illustrates Cibber's opportunism at a moment in time before the change was assured: fearless of self-contradiction, he puts something for everybody into his first play, combining the old outspokenness with the new preachiness.<ref>Parnell, Paul E. (1960) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173317 "Equivocation in Cibber's ''Love's Last Shift''"], ''Studies in Philology'', vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 519–534 (Subscription required)</ref>

The central action of ''Love's Last Shift'' is a celebration of the power of a good woman, Amanda, to reform a rakish husband, Loveless, by means of sweet patience and a daring bed-trick. She masquerades as a prostitute and seduces Loveless without being recognised, and then confronts him with logical argument. Since he enjoyed the night with her while taking her for a stranger, a wife can be as good in bed as an illicit mistress. Loveless is convinced and stricken, and a rich choreography of mutual kneelings, risings and prostrations follows, generated by Loveless' penitence and Amanda's "submissive eloquence". The première audience is said to have wept at this climactic scene.<ref>Davies, (1783–84) ''Dramatic Miscellanies'', vol. III, p. 412, quoted in Barker, p. 24</ref> The play was a great box-office success and was for a time the talk of the town, in both a positive and a negative sense.<ref>Barker, p. 28</ref> Some contemporaries regarded it as moving and amusing, others as a sentimental tear-jerker, incongruously interspersed with sexually explicit Restoration comedy jokes and semi-nude bedroom scenes.

''Love's Last Shift'' is today read mainly to gain a perspective on [[Vanbrugh]]'s sequel ''The Relapse'', which has by contrast remained a stage favourite. Modern scholars often endorse the criticism that was levelled at ''Love's Last Shift'' from the first, namely that it is a blatantly commercial combination of sex scenes and drawn-out sentimental reconciliations.<ref>{{citation | last = Hume | first = Robert D. | year = 1976 | title = The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century | publisher = Clarendon Press | location = Oxford | oclc = 2965573 | isbn = 978-0-19-812063-6 | url = https://archive.org/details/developmentofeng0000hume }}</ref> Cibber's follow-up comedy ''[[Woman's Wit (Cibber play)|Woman's Wit]]'' (1697) was produced under hasty and unpropitious circumstances and had no discernible theme;<ref>Barker, pp. 30–31</ref> Cibber, not usually shy about any of his plays, even elided its name in the ''Apology''.<ref>Ashley, p. 46; Barker, p. 33; Sullivan, p. xi</ref> It was followed by the equally unsuccessful tragedy ''Xerxes'' (1699).<ref>Ashley, p. 46; Barker, p. 33</ref> Cibber reused parts of ''Woman's Wit'' for ''The School Boy'' (1702).<ref>Ashley, p. 46</ref>

===''Richard III''===
{{Main|Richard III (1699 play)}}
Perhaps partly because of the failure of his previous two plays, Cibber's next effort was an adaptation of [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]]'s ''Richard III''.<ref>Barker, p. 34</ref> Neither Cibber's adaptations nor his own original plays have stood the test of time, and hardly any of them have been staged or reprinted after the early 18th century, but his popular adaptation of ''Richard III'' remained the standard stage version for 150 years.<ref>Ashley, p. 48; Barker, p. 39</ref> The American actor [[George Berrell]] wrote in the 1870s that ''Richard III'' was:
{{quote|a hodge-podge concocted by Colley Cibber, who cut and transposed the original version, and added to it speeches from four or five other of Shakespeare's plays, and several really fine speeches of his own. The speech to Buckingham: "I tell thee, coz, I've lately had two spiders crawling o'er my startled hopes"—the well-known line "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham!" the speech ending with "Conscience, avaunt! Richard's himself again!"—and other lines of power and effect were written by Cibber, who, with all due respect to the 'divine bard,' improved upon the original, for acting purposes.<ref>{{citation | last = Berrell | first = George | author-link = George Berrell | year = 1849–1933 | title = Theatrical and Other Reminiscenses | publisher = Unpublished}}</ref>}}

''Richard III'' was followed by another adaptation, the comedy ''[[Love Makes a Man]]'', which was constructed by splicing together two plays by [[John Fletcher (playwright)|John Fletcher]]: ''[[The Elder Brother]]'' and ''[[The Custom of the Country (play)|The Custom of the Country]]''.<ref>Ashley, p. 52; Barker, p. 39; Sullivan, p. 323</ref> Cibber's confidence was apparently restored by the success of the two plays, and he returned to more original writing.<ref>Barker, p. 43</ref>

===''The Careless Husband''===
[[File:Careless Husband scene.png|thumb|right|alt=Interior scene of an older man and younger woman sitting next to each other asleep, as an older woman covers the man's head.|Outstanding wifely tact in ''The Careless Husband'': Lady Easy finds her husband asleep with the maid and places her scarf on his head so that he will not catch cold, but will know that she has seen him.]]
The comedy ''[[The Careless Husband]]'' (1704), generally considered to be Cibber's best play,<ref>[[Alexander Pope]] called it the "best comedy in the language" and Thomas Wilkes called it "not only the best comedy in English but in any other language" (quoted by Salmon in the ODNB).</ref> is another example of the retrieval of a straying husband by means of outstanding wifely tact, this time in a more domestic and genteel register. The easy-going Sir Charles Easy is chronically unfaithful to his wife, seducing both ladies of quality and his own female servants with insouciant charm. The turning point of the action, known as "the Steinkirk scene", comes when his wife finds him and a maidservant asleep together in a chair, "as close an approximation to actual adultery as could be presented on the 18th-century stage".<ref name=parnell>Parnell, Paul E. (1963) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/460730 "The sentimental mask"], ''[[Publications of the Modern Language Association|PMLA]]'', vol. 78, no. 5, pp. 529–535 (Subscription required)</ref> His [[periwig]] has fallen off, an obvious suggestion of intimacy and abandon, and an opening for Lady Easy's tact. Soliloquizing to herself about how sad it would be if he caught cold, she "takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head" (V.i.21). (A "steinkirk" was a loosely tied lace collar or scarf, named after the way the officers wore their [[Cravat (early)|cravat]]s at the [[Battle of Steenkerque|Battle of Steenkirk]] in 1692.) She steals away, Sir Charles wakes, notices the steinkirk on his head, marvels that his wife did not wake him and make a scene, and realises how wonderful she is. The Easys go on to have a reconciliation scene which is much more low-keyed and tasteful than that in ''Love's Last Shift'', without kneelings and risings, and with Lady Easy shrinking with feminine delicacy from the coarse subjects that Amanda had broached without blinking. Paul Parnell has analysed the manipulative nature of Lady Easy's lines in this exchange, showing how they are directed towards the sentimentalist's goal of "ecstatic self-approval".<ref name=parnell/>

''The Careless Husband'' was a great success on the stage and remained in repertory throughout the 18th century. Although it has now joined ''Love's Last Shift'' as a forgotten curiosity, it kept a respectable critical reputation into the 20th century, coming in for serious discussion both as an interesting example of doublethink,<ref name=parnell/> and as somewhat morally or emotionally insightful.<ref>[[Shirley Strum Kenny|Kenny, Shirley Strum]] (1977) [https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/390757 "Humane comedy"], ''[[Modern Philology]]'', vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 29–43 (Subscription required)</ref> In 1929, the well-known critic [[F. W. Bateson]] described the play's psychology as "mature", "plausible", "subtle", "natural", and "affecting".<ref>{{citation | last = Bateson | first = F. W. | author-link = F. W. Bateson | year = 1929 | title = English Comic Drama 1700–1750 | publisher = Clarendon Press | location = Oxford | oclc = 462793246}}</ref>

===Other plays===
''The Lady's Last Stake'' (1707) is a rather bad-tempered reply to critics of Lady Easy's wifely patience in ''The Careless Husband''. It was coldly received, and its main interest lies in the glimpse the prologue gives of angry reactions to ''The Careless Husband'', of which we would otherwise have known nothing (since all contemporary published reviews of ''The Careless Husband'' approve and endorse its message). Some, says Cibber sarcastically in the prologue, seem to think Lady Easy ought rather to have strangled her husband with her steinkirk:
{{quote|Yet some there are, who still arraign the Play,<br />At her tame Temper shock'd, as who should say—<br />The Price, for a dull Husband, was too much to pay,<br />Had he been strangled sleeping, Who shou'd hurt ye?<br />When so provok'd—Revenge had been a Virtue.}}

Many of Cibber's plays, listed below, were hastily cobbled together from borrowings. Alexander Pope said Cibber's drastic adaptations and patchwork plays were stolen from "crucified Molière" and "hapless Shakespeare".<ref>Pope, ''Dunciad'', Book the First, in ''The Rape of the Locke and Other Poems'', p. 214</ref> ''[[The Double Gallant]]'' (1707) was constructed from [[William Burnaby (writer)|Burnaby's]] ''The Reformed Wife'' and ''The Lady's Visiting Day'', and [[Susanna Centlivre|Centlivre's]] ''Love at a Venture''.<ref>Ashley, p. 60; Barker, p. 68</ref> In the words of Leonard R. N. Ashley, Cibber took "what he could use from these old failures" to cook up "a palatable hash out of unpromising leftovers".<ref>Ashley, pp. 60–61</ref> ''The Comical Lovers'' (1707) was based on Dryden's ''[[Marriage à la mode (Restoration Drama)|Marriage à la Mode]]''.<ref>Ashley, p. 61</ref> ''[[The Rival Fools]]'' (1709) was based on Fletcher's ''[[Wit at Several Weapons]]''.<ref>Ashley, p. 64; Barker, p. 128; Sullivan, p. 323</ref> He rewrote [[Pierre Corneille|Corneille's]] ''[[Le Cid]]'' with a happy ending as ''Ximena'' in 1712.<ref>Ashley, pp. 69–70; Barker, pp. 116–117</ref> ''[[The Provoked Husband]]'' (1728) was an unfinished fragment by John Vanbrugh that Cibber reworked and completed to great commercial success.<ref>Ashley, pp. 72–75; Barker, pp. 140–148</ref>

''[[The Non-Juror]]'' (1717) was adapted from [[Molière]]'s ''[[Tartuffe]]'' and features a Papist spy as a villain. Written just two years after the [[Jacobite rising of 1715]], it was an obvious propaganda piece directed against Roman Catholics.<ref>Ashley, pp. 65–69; Barker, pp. 106–107</ref> ''[[The Refusal (play)|The Refusal]]'' (1721) was based on Molière's ''[[Les Femmes Savantes]]''.<ref>Sullivan, p. 323</ref> Cibber's last play, ''Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John'' was "a miserable mutilation of Shakespeare's ''[[The Life and Death of King John|King John]]''".<ref>Lowe in Cibber (1966b), p. 263. This is a scholarly 19th-century edition, containing a full account of Cibber's long-running conflict with Alexander Pope at the end of the second volume, and an extensive bibliography of the pamphlet wars with many other contemporaries in which Cibber was involved.</ref> Heavily politicised, it caused such a storm of ridicule during its 1736 rehearsal that Cibber withdrew it. During the [[Jacobite Rising of 1745]], when the nation was again in fear of a [[Popery|Popish]] pretender, it was finally acted, and this time accepted for patriotic reasons.<ref>Ashley, pp. 33–34</ref>