Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1

by De Witt Clinton Croissant; Edmund Dresser Cressman; Pearl Hogrefe; Arthur Mitchell

On the other hand, the play, aside from these particulars, exhibits the technique and the material of the typical Restoration comedy. The chief incident deals in most frank style with the sex relations of the hero and heroine, treated essentially in the Restoration way, with the exception that the audience knows they are man and wife while the characters do not. The cellar incident is as frank and gross as anything of the sort in the earlier drama, though in this case the final outcome is a wedding. There is the same succession of lively and disconnected incidents, incidents which would go well on the stage, and which make up five separate threads of story. The substitution of the name of one person for another in the marriage bond is the same sort of thing that occurs over and over again in the earlier comedy.[77]

The characters represent the same more or less stiff drawing of conventional figures. Sir Novelty Fashion is of the same family as Sir Fopling Flutter; Lovelace and Young Worthy are the same drunken rakes as those who make the principal characters in the unreformed drama, with the exception that here they are not presented to us as carrying on their amours. Snap is the witty servingman who is invariably paired with the maid of the heroine in Restoration comedy. There is the same presentation of local scenes, particularly that in the park; there is the same coarse speech; and there is the same interruption of the story by raillery.

But the play as already suggested is a very distinct step in advance in its treatment of fundamental morality, and marks a conscious beginning of a new mode; not an inconsiderable achievement for the first play of an author twenty-four years old.

The two plots of Woman’s Wit (1697) are entirely dissimilar in tone and dramatic handling, and, moreover, have no essential connection with each other. The main plot, which gives the name to the piece, is in the Restoration manner, while the sub-plot, which deals with the Rakishes, is in the mould of the minor late Elizabethans. In its portrayal of manners it belongs to the type represented by the plays of Brome, marked by coarseness rather than finish, and implying about the same standard of morals.

The main plot consists of a series of complications caused by the efforts of Longeville to unmask Leonora’s unfaithfulness to Lovemore, to whom she is engaged. She convinces Lovemore that Longeville’s efforts are the result of a plot, the purpose of which is to alienate Lovemore and Leonora so that Longeville may have her to himself; and there then follows one complication after another, until the characters are at last gathered together and Leonora is made to confess her duplicity.

The situation on which the main action is based is original and highly dramatic, but in order to maintain the intrigue Cibber has had to use incidents which are marked by improbability and dramatic blindness to such an extent that the action becomes wearisome. Cibber seems to be groping for something different from the conventional Restoration intrigue. His conception is worthy of more success than he attained, but he lacked the dramatic skill and experience to carry it out.

Some of the character drawing is good. Longeville and Lovemore are rather decent young men, but are no doubt too sentimental for success on the stage at this time. The Rakishes are overdrawn and farcical. The women, with the exception of Leonora, are lacking in the spontaneity and wit demanded of seventeenth and early eighteenth century heroines, and like the men are possibly too sentimental. Leonora is the intriguer and is the best drawn and most important personage in the play. Her downfall is the result of her own character and conduct, and in the disapproval of her character and actions Cibber has repeated, to some extent, views he expressed in his first play.

The vulgar sub-plot which deals with Old Rakish and Young Rakish, when separated from Woman’s Wit and acted in 1707 as The School Boy, was a greater success than the original play. With the exception of the change in the names of some of the personages, minor alterations of the dialogue, the omission of parts of the incidents, and the addition of such incidents as are necessary to make it stand by itself, the play is verbatim as it appeared when a part of Woman’s Wit.

From the point of view of the reformation of the stage it must be confessed that Woman’s Wit was not of great importance. The moral tone of the main action is high; at least virtue is rewarded and vice disgraced, and there are no amours carried on. But the sub-action, which was later transformed into The School Boy, is entirely opposed to both good taste and good morals, and after a series of low comedy scenes, ends with the promise of Young Rakish to Master Johnny that he will take Johnny to the playhouse, where the latter may satisfy his disappointment in the failure to marry his mother’s woman. Although notable progress in the morality of the drama had been made, as we have seen, the fact that this sub-action was successfully presented by itself shows that the taste of the theatre-going public was not yet entirely regenerate.

Love Makes a Man (1701) is a rather close adaptation of two of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays,[78] in which Cibber does not pretend to any serious purpose. “For masks, we’ve scandal, and for beaus, French airs.” And yet his moralizing and sentimental tendency cannot be entirely restrained, for when Carlos, the hero of the play, does turn from his books to love, he speaks in a most heightened and sentimental strain. So too the efforts of Louisa to seduce him are met with sentiments of lofty morality which are actuated by his sincere love for Angelina. The Restoration lover would not have hesitated in the slightest degree to enjoy all that Louisa offered and his wife-to-be would have taken it as a matter of course, probably would have joked with her confidante, if not with the hero, on the subject. But with Cibber not only is the attitude concerning this sort of thing changed, but in his alteration he has omitted one incident[79] that would have been a source of great delight to a Restoration audience, and has softened the language throughout, so that the coarseness which marks his original has largely disappeared. No one undergoes a moral reformation, for Louisa has not been evil in her life, and this one unsuccessful effort at seduction cures her. But the play has two characteristics of the sentimental type; it is perfectly moral in action, and it has some expression of sentimental philosophy.