The Refusal (1721) might be called a purified Restoration comedy, without any positive bearing on the sentimentalizing tendency except that it shows the tendency to make the drama more moral.
The Provoked Husband (1728), Cibber’s completion of Vanbrugh’s A Journey to London, is typically sentimental in treatment, with the happy ending, the reformation of the vicious, and the true but dull expression of moral sentiments by the serious characters. In it Cibber has departed from Vanbrugh’s original intention by reforming the wife, whom he has preserved as perfectly true to her husband, though unduly given to gambling. In the love affair of Mr. Manly and Lord Townley’s sister we likewise have sentimental treatment, and in the expression of pious thoughts no one could be more prolific than Mr. Manly. In this play Cibber does not strike any note he has not used before; it is merely significant of the permanence of the changed manner of writing in English comedy generally.
In the first plot Cibber has somewhat softened the characters of Vanbrugh’s Lord and Lady Loverule in Lord and Lady Townley, giving to the husband a much less dictatorial and more sentimental and uxorious character. Lady Townley, though she does not show any signs of softer qualities, is made to see the error of her course of late hours and gambling, and undergoes a somewhat improbable but characteristic conversion. Cibber tells us[85] that it had been Vanbrugh’s intention to turn the lady out of doors, as would have been natural and logical, giving to the play a serious interest which it lacks under Cibber’s management.
The characters are shorn of their rough virility in Cibber’s version. Squire Richard is a sort of rough study of the Tony Lumpkin type,—without his wit, however,—but the credit of the portrayal is due to Vanbrugh rather than to Cibber.
While the play is far from lacking in interest and power to amuse, there is a very decided inferiority to Vanbrugh’s play, even in its unfinished and imperfect state. Cibber’s play is a typical sentimental comedy, with its undeserved happy ending, reformation of the vicious, and commonplace expression of sentiment and morals on the part of the serious characters.
Although it does not exhibit any startling new qualities, in its theme attacking the evils of gambling which Cibber has previously attacked, the play is a good example of eighteenth century comedy; fully as good, indeed, as the work of the other dramatists of the time, but suffering in comparison with Cibber’s own best work.
It may be interesting to note that Cibber is said to have added the parts of Tom and Phillis to Steele’s Conscious Lovers.[86] When Steele submitted this play to him, Cibber felt that it would not satisfy the desire of an audience to laugh at a comedy. According to the account in The Lives of the Poets, Steele gladly accepted Cibber’s suggestion that a comic action be inserted and even proposed that Cibber make such additions to the play as he saw fit. The absence of humor is a mark of the form of sentimental comedy inaugurated by Steele, while the form represented by Cibber’s work is closer to the Restoration type, is indeed really a modification of that type, and the element of humor is consequently found in it.
8. Typical Quality of Cibber’s Work.
Cibber’s work typifies the change that was going on in the moral reformation of the drama, as it likewise shows the development characteristic of the time in other elements of the drama.[87] In him, as in others, we see that while the general type of Restoration comedy was adopted in the construction of the plot, there was a tendency to simplify the plot. Moreover, Cibber further departed from the Restoration type by the selection of themes other than mere sex relations. Other dramatists were able to present such themes without reference to moral degeneration, but Cibber, when he takes such a subject as the dangers of gambling, for instance, cannot entirely avoid dealing with sex immorality.
In the dull, chaste lover, the sober, moral, worthy gentleman who is largely a result of the sentimental tendency in the drama, such as Lord Morelove in Woman’s Wit and Elder Worthy in Love’s Last Shift, Cibber developed and made more important a type which had appeared but had been relatively unimportant in earlier drama. In the comedy of Steele and his followers this character was further developed so that it became the central figure. Cibber and his predecessors seem to have been guided by some such formula as that interesting personality and morality appear in inverse ratio in male characters.