Cibber commenced to write The Careless Husband in the summer of 1703, but laid it aside because he despaired of finding any one to take the part of Lady Betty Modish. In 1704 he again took up the writing of the play, and in that year it was acted at Drury Lane on December 7; and it was published in 1705. It was one of the best and most successful plays of the period.[48] It was charged that Cibber received direct assistance in writing the play, but he denied the charge, and as no proof was offered, Cibber is no doubt to be believed. It seems to have no literary source; but one incident, that in which the wife finds the husband and her maid asleep in easy chairs, is said to have been suggested to Cibber by Mrs. Brett, the reputed mother of the poet Savage, from her own experience.[49]
This is Cibber’s best play of the sentimental type. Its plot is consistent, has dramatic probability, and is serious enough in interest to have real reason for being. The characters are well conceived and well portrayed. In style, too, Cibber is here at his best and the dialogue approaches the finest of the period.
The Haymarket opened the season 1706–7 under Swiney, and in order to encourage the new venture, Lord Halifax headed a subscription for the revival of three plays: Shakspere’s Julius Caesar, Beaumont and Fletcher’s King and No King, and the comic scenes of Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode and A Maiden Queen. The last took the form of an adaptation called The Comical Lovers, the adaptation being the work of Cibber. It was acted February 4, 1707, and was published the same year. The alteration was the result of only six days’ labor,[50] and Cibber claims no originality in it. It met with slight success.
The Comical Lovers is another such adaptation as Love Makes a Man. Cibber has merely taken the two comic threads from their serious settings and interwoven them, first a scene from one and then a scene from the other, with only the changes necessary to join them, and has followed his sources almost word for word. Cibber was not under the necessity of changing verse into prose, as he had done in Love Makes a Man, for the comic sections of Dryden are in prose, according to the changed convention of his time; and in the scene between Melantha and her maid, Cibber has not even taken the trouble to alter a single one of the French words, many of which must have acquired a place in the language and been in good use by Cibber’s time. So far as Cibber’s part is concerned, this is the least important of his plays.
The Double Gallant was acted at the Haymarket, November 1, 1707, but was apparently not successful at its first performance. The Biographia Dramatica[51] says:
“In a letter from Booth to A. Hill we learn that the play, at its first appearance was, as he expressed it, hounded in a most outrageous manner. Two years after, it was revived, met with most extravagant success, and has continued a stock play ever since.”
Cibber says nothing about any hounding of the play, but ascribes the failure of the piece to the fact that the Haymarket was too big for plays; a fact that he thinks caused the lack of success of other plays as well as his own.
In regard to the authorship, Cibber says:[52]
“It was made up of what was tolerable, in two, or three others, that had no Success, and were laid aside, as so much Poetical Lumber; but by collecting and adapting the best Parts of them all, into one Play, the Double Gallant has had a Place, every Winter, amongst the Publick Entertainments, these Thirty Years. As I was only the Compiler of this Piece, I did not publish it in my own Name.”
The title would lead one to suppose that it is taken directly from Corneille’s Le Galant Double, but it is a weaving together of Mrs. Centlivre’s Love at a Venture, which is an adaptation of Corneille, Burnaby’s Ladies Visiting Day, and the Lady Dainty action from Burnaby’s Reformed Wife. In consolidating such parts of these three plays as are used, the crudities of the first two are polished off, and certain additions are made to the last. These additions consist in sections of the dialogue, in the changing of Lady Dainty’s lover into a more impetuous wooer, and in the addition of the lover’s disguise as a Russian, by which subterfuge he wins her. The introductory scene, taken from Love at a Venture, is much more lively and entertaining in Cibber’s play than in the original, and Cibber likewise handles more adroitly the subterfuge of the hero’s arrest, taken from the same play, using the same device of decoy letters that he uses in Woman’s Wit. In the working over of Burnaby’s adaptation of the Horner episode, which he had taken from Wycherley’s Country Wife, Cibber has entirely eliminated the unpleasant features.