Editing Colley Cibber (section)

===''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>