In minor points the character might be counted fairly applicable to Lady Winchilsea. Her learning, her devotion to literary pursuits, her fecundity in verse, her opposition to amatory themes, her detestation of the modern stage, are all characteristics that tally with the burlesque portrait. Lady Winchilsea was also very religious, and though herself maid of honor to Mary of Modena and so necessarily much in the corrupt Restoration court, was even unnecessarily strict and severe on the subject of morals and manners. This prudishness was satirized by Phœbe Clinket's boast that she is "unwilling to stand even on the brink of an indecorum," as a result of which delicacy she has never allowed in her plays "the libertinism of lip-embraces," and this in spite of the fact that Aristotle never actually prohibited kissing on the stage. But in the main points of Phœbe Clinket's self-confidence and her determination to push her play at all hazards to the point of public presentation, there is no hint of a likeness to Lady Winchilsea, who was exceedingly modest and deprecatory about her work. She never willingly allowed her dramatic writings to pass beyond a small domestic and literary circle, nor out of her voluminous verse did any but a very small portion reach publication with her permission. Furthermore, the tragedy of The Universal Deluge attributed to Phœbe Clinket bears no resemblance to any extant work by Lady Winchilsea.
Taken as a whole, quite apart from any personal application, Phœbe Clinket is the most detestable picture of a learned lady in any of the comedies. She is vain, boastful, and superficial; she is a pedant, a prude, and a hypocrite; and there are no mitigating traits.
Colley Cibber put on his play The Refusal at Covent Garden in 1721 and published it the same year. It is a close version of Les Femmes Savantes, the rich, middle-class family of Sir Gilbert Wrangle in Cibber's play being the counterpart of the wealthy bourgeois family of Chrysal in Molière. The action follows that of Molière's play, and Molière gives the model for many of the important situations and conversations. Curll called The Refusal merely "a Sampler, whereon Monsieur Molière's Stitching may easily be perceived from Mr. Cibber's canvas."[491] But Cibber's play is a success in that it is a brilliant English adaptation of the French original. The two characters that represent learned ladies are Lady Wrangle and her daughter Sophronia.
Sir Gilbert thus describes his wife to Mr. Frankly: "She's a great plague to me. Not but my lord bishop, her uncle, was a mighty good man; she lived all along with him; I took her upon his word; 't was he made her a scholar; I thought her a miracle; before I had her I used to go and hear her talk Latin with him an hour together; and there I—I—I played the fool." Throughout the play Sir Gilbert is very evidently a member of "the hen-pecked fraternity." Lady Wrangle has an important place in but two scenes and in both of these she endeavors to domineer over her husband. In the scene with the maid he is completely cowed, and in the scene of the wedding contract he is triumphant only because of abundant friendly backing. Lady Wrangle's quarrelsome, jealous disposition is perhaps more in evidence than her learning, but she has learning too. She quotes Latin whenever possible and is herself an authoress.
The famous scene in Molière where the maid Martine is to be dismissed for her indifference to Vaugelas and the laws of grammar, becomes in Cibber a similar hurly-burly against the maid and the cook for having used a sheet of one of Lady Wrangle's productions in which to wrap the roast. The maid—"a brainless ideat," "a dunce," "an illiterate monster," "an eleventh plague of Egypt," according to the energetic vituperation of her mistress—seeing the leaf to be blotted and blurred took it for waste paper.
Blurred! you driveller! Was ever any piece perfect, that had not corrections, erasures, interlineations, and improvements! Does not the very original show, that when the mind is warmest, it is never satisfied with its words:
Incipit et dubitat; scribit, damnatque tabellas,
Et notat, et delet; mutat, culpatque probatque.
The leaf in question is a part of Lady Wrangle's translation of the passion of Byblis. Her husband calls it the passion of Bibble-Babble, and says, "If a line on't happens to be mislaid, she's as mad as a blind mare that has lost her foal; she'll run her head against a stone-wall to recover it. All the use I find of her learning is, that it furnishes her more words to scold with."
Lady Wrangle's creed as expressed to Charlotte is, "Refine your soul; give your happier hours up to science, arts, and letters; enjoy the raptures of philosophy, subdue your passions, and renounce the sensual commerce of mankind." She, however, claims Frankly as her lover, a virtuous and platonic one, to be sure, but so irrevocably hers as to preclude significant attentions to others. When she learns of his open love to Charlotte—she exclaims, "I thought virtue, letters, and philosophy had only charms for him: I have known his soul all rapture in their praises." And her indignation that he should "contaminate his intellects with such a chit of an animal" changes her platonic love into the most jealous hate. Her philosophy as to the proper conduct of the passions has no influence on her actions.