Cibber was no doubt familiar with Medbourne’s play, but he used Molière as a basis, and owed practically nothing to any play other than the Tartuffe of Molière. Cibber may have derived the suggestion of the reformation of Charles from the corresponding character in Medbourne’s play, but his manner of carrying out this reformation and the difference in the qualities of the characters in the two plays make this part an original creation.
In the edition of Crowne in the series of The Dramatists of the Restoration, the editors maintain Cibber’s greater indebtedness to Crowne than to Molière, in a way that makes one doubt whether they had ever read either Molière or Cibber. So far as plot is concerned there is absolutely no resemblance, except that in both a priest attempts to seduce a decent woman. The characters, style, and management are both different and inferior in Crowne, although some slight similarity may be discovered in the attempt of Finical and Dr. Wolf to allay the consciences of the respective objects of their attentions. As suggested by Van Laun, Father Finical, like Dr. Wolf, is based on Tartuffe.
Cibber has handled his sources very freely, and in some particulars has improved both the plot and the characters. That is not to say that The Non-Juror is a greater play than Molière’s Tartuffe, for as a whole it is not. The parts of Dorine, who in Tartuffe is the life and source of the humor, of Cléante, and of Madame Pernelle, are omitted, but the part of Mariane is enlivened into one of the best coquettes of the stage. The other characters and incidents correspond in The Non-Juror and Molière’s Tartuffe, though the dénouement is more artistically handled in Cibber.
The Refusal, an adaptation of Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes, published in 1721, was acted at Drury Lane, February 14, 1721, and had a run of six performances. Molière’s play had been adapted by Wright as The Female Virtuosoes in 1693, and this play was revived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on January 10, 1721, to anticipate The Refusal. In like manner with the effort to discredit Cibber’s hand in The Non-Juror, though in this case after the run of Cibber’s play was over, Curll published, with a dedication to Cibber, “the second edition of No Fools Like Wits,[55] as it was acted at Lincoln’s Inn Fields or The Refusal, as it was acted at Drury Lane.”
In his adaptation Cibber has made more changes than is usual with him, both in plot and in character; and in the dialogue he has anglicized the idiom to an extent not found in his adaptations of tragedies from the French.
Molière’s comedy is a satire on false learning in men as well as in women, while Cibber has added some satire on business trickery, in the same way that he added political satire in his adaptation of Tartuffe. Cibber has supplied the elder daughter with a successful suitor, and the dénouement is brought about by different, more complicated, and more characteristically English means. In the incident in Molière’s play in which Bélise takes the love of Clitandre to herself, Cibber substitutes the mother for Bélise, omits the maid, along with her impertinences, and adds some slight original incidents.
Trissotin, the poet, becomes one of the typical would-be wits of English comedy, and Chrysale is changed to a typical promoter. In Molière, Chrysale is a purely humorous character, whose vacillation and lack of force were no doubt very laughable on the stage; Sir Gilbert, his equivalent in Cibber’s play, on the other hand, is in no way a weakling and is in no way admirable or a source of laughter, but embodies a satire on contemporary business practices.
The directness and simplicity of Molière’s play, the unity of tone and plot, give way in Cibber to complication of plot and character, in which the whole piece loses the delightful quality of the humor of the original.
The Provoked Husband was presented at Drury Lane, January 10, 1728, and had a run of twenty-eight nights. There was an unsuccessful attempt on the part of Cibber’s enemies to damn the play on the first night; the interruptions were so great that during the fourth act the actors were compelled to stand still until it was quiet enough for them to be heard. On January 31, Cibber published Vanbrugh’s unfinished play and his own completion of it. The critics, who had condemned the play unmercifully, especially the supposed additions of Cibber, found, when the plays were published, that it was not Cibber but Vanbrugh they had been condemning. According to Cibber,[56] on the twenty-eighth night the play took in one hundred and forty pounds, a greater amount than had been taken in at the last night of any play for fifty years.
Vanbrugh’s Journey to London consists of four acts, the first two practically complete, but the last two apparently unfinished. Cibber has used practically all that Vanbrugh left, omitting the trip to the theatre in the last part of Act II, and adding much of his own to the whole play. He has interspersed his additions between the parts of Vanbrugh’s play, and has changed very little of the Vanbrugh part, except to “water it down” where it had been too strong for the changed taste of the theatre goers.