Love's Last Shift

The actor Colley Cibber made his debut as a dramatist in 1696 with a play called Love's Last Shift, which while rooted in Restoration comedy of manners, looks forward to the sentimental comedies of the 18th century.

A shift is a lady's undergarment, so being down to one's last shift is an indication that this is the very last chance at something--in this case the last chance for Amanda Loveless to reclaim her rake husband who previously abandoned her for a life of dissipation abroad. (A shift, of course, can also be a trick or gambit, so the play's title has multiple levels of meaning.)

In the first act, Ned Loveless returns to London, where he hears the false rumor that his wife has died. Young William Worthy, learning that Loveless believes himself to be a widower, resolves to tell Amanda and scheme for a way she can reclaim him from his life of debauchery.

Their plan is to get Loveless to make love to his own wife, thinking she is only his mistress. At first, Amanda is reluctant. "To me the Rules of Virtue have been ever sacred;" she says, "and I am loth to break 'em by an unadvised Undertaking." After all, if she were to seduce her own husband, would she not become accessary to him violating his marriage vows?

Amanda overcomes these scruples and pursues her own husband in disguise, much to the delight of Worthy, who is pursuing his own plan to honorably marry a woman he loves. In earlier Restoration comedies, rakes were the heroes, but with the accession of William and Mary as co-monarchs during the Glorious Revolution, attitudes began to change. In the couplet that ends the third act, Worthy expresses his support for Amanda's reformation of Loveless and the rakish values he represents:

          'Twere Pity now thy Hopes shou'd not succeed;

          This new Attempt is Love's Last Shift indeed.

The fourth act shows Amanda seducing her husband and claiming that he has won her over to being a Libertine. The scene is reminiscent of the bed trick in Jacobean plays by William Shakespeare, including All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. However, its sexual frankness that deals so lightly with matters of adultery reflects a change that occurred after the Restoration. At the same time, the seduction is not adulterous, so the audience can revel in the faux immorality while actually cheering on morality.

This is why the play looks forward to the sentimental comedies of the eighteenth century. Characters are placed in difficult positions, but they get out of them through a reliance on virtue. Granted, virtue is forced to be deceptive, but this only presents new opportunities to discuss virtue's merits. When Amanda tries to undeceive her husband, she dramatically swoons, and only tells him the truth after she recovers. All ends happily, and virtue is at last rewarded.

That doesn't mean the play isn't funny, though, in spite of Oliver Goldsmith's later contrasts between sentimental comedy and the "laughing comedy" he preferred. The character of Sir Novelty Fashion (originally played by Cibber himself) provides plenty of comic relief through his foppish antics. That character reappeared in later plays as well, including John Vanbrugh's The Relapse, an unauthorized sequel that might well be more famous than the original.

Peg Woffington's Lothario

Nicholas Rowe's play The Fair Penitent, based loosely on Philip Massinger and Nathan Field's The Fatal Dowry, contains an excellent role for actors specializing in villains: Lothario!

But what if the actor who played the villain was... an actress! Well, the most recent issue of Theatre Notebook contains an excellent article by Annette Rubery on the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington playing the role.

Woffington had a long and productive artistic partnership with David Garrick, primarily appearing in comic roles, but she also played Lady Randolph in the London premiere of John Home's tragedy Douglas. It was in 1753, however, four years before she excited audiences in Douglas, that Woffington appeared at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin as Lothario, the villain of Rowe's tragedy.

Though Woffington's performance as Lothario was not considered a success, it was famous enough to be recorded in paint by the artist John Lewis, whose depiction of her in the role is now owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. She also was not the first woman to play Lothario, as that distinction belongs to Charlotte Clarke, the eccentric daughter of the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber.

Rubery argues that Woffington played Lothario in an effort to seriously show off her talents as a performer. Women who appeared as men in comedies were not expected to act entirely realistically, and part of the fun for the audience was to see a person they knew to be female in a male role. This could actually reinforce gender binaries rather than fight against them, since a woman playing a man was being held up as something inherently comic.

When a woman played a man in a tragedy, however, which was thought of as more realistic, she was expected to make the audience forget her sex and enter more fully into the illusion of the play. This, Rubery argues, made Woffington's appearance as Lothario a bit scandalous. She quotes a rather interesting poem that commemorated the performance:

     All adroit, each taper Thigh enclos'd

     In manly Vestments, with Parisian step;

     Light as the bounding Doe she tripp'd along,

     The gay LOTHARIO, in his Age of Joy.

     Venus surpriz'd, thus whisper'd 'Let me die,

     If dear ADONIS wore a lovelier Form.'

     Then clasp'd the Youth-dres'd Damsel to her Breast,

     And sighing, murmur'd, O that for my Sake

     Thou wert this Instant what thou represents.

Perhaps the realism of Woffington's Lothario was a bit too much for audiences to take. In the play, Lothario is a heartless seducer of women. How much worse it might have been in the minds of some audience members if that heartless seducer of women was another woman!

Stooping to Conquer

In a famous essay in 1772, the author Oliver Goldsmith tried to make a comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy.

Borrowing the definition from Aristotle, Goldsmith called comedy "a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind, to distinguish it from tragedy, which is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great."

The problem was, in Goldsmith's view, British comedy had taken to detail the calamities of people in the middle classes rather than poking fun at their foibles, as had been done by comic writers of the Restoration, such as Colley Cibber and John Vanbrugh.

He also claimed to have history on his side. Though the Roman playwright Terence sometimes had his comedies approach the quality of tragedy, Goldsmith observed that Terence always stopped short of rendering his characters truly pathetic. In Goldsmith's opinion, the only advantage of sentimental comedy was its novelty.

More importantly, he warned of what we might be losing in giving up the genre of laughing comedy for a comedy of sentiment:

It is true that amusement is a great object of the theater, and it will be allowed that these sentimental pieces do often amuse us; but the question is, whether the true comedy would not amuse us more? The question is, whether a character supported throughout a piece, with its ridicule still attending, would not give us more delight than this species of bastard tragedy, which only is applauded because it is new?

Goldsmith tested this hypothesis with his own play, She Stoops to Conquer, which opened the following year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. George Coleman the Elder was manager of Covent Garden at the time, and he did not particularly care for the piece. Neither did David Garrick, who had turned down the play for Drury Lane.

On the advice of Samuel Johnson, though, Coleman put the play into rehearsal with the actress Mary Bulkley in the leading role of Kate Hardcastle. It ended up a success, and the theatre even chose to use it for their season closer later that year.

At the end of his essay, Goldsmith had written:

It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.

Fortunately for us, no such calamity occurred, and She Stoops to Conquer continues to delight audiences to this very day.

The Tragical Comedy of Punch and Judy

I've written in the past about Mr. Punch, the puppet descendant of the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello. He first showed up in England in the 17th century, and a plaque outside of St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden marks the spot of the first recorded performance of a Punch puppet play, which was mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1662.

At first, Punch appears to have been a marionette, but later versions tend to be hand puppets. We have records of puppet shows featuring Punch and his wife Judy throughout the eighteenth century. Colley Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke, was given a license in 1738 to run a puppet theatre at St. James's that was known as Punch's Theatre. Unfortunately, no scripts for Punch and Judy plays exist from this period.

That changed in 1827, when John Payne Collier published a script entitled The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy. The dialogue was allegedly related to Collier by the puppeteer Giovanni Piccini, but given that Collier was later outed as a forger of documents relating to William Shakespeare, everything he claimed has to be taken with a heavy portion of salt. He secured the noted artist George Cruikshank to illustrate the book, though, so the script at least has the advantage of being beautiful.

Collier's script begins with Punch getting into a fight with his neighbor, Scaramouch, another figure from the commedia tradition. Scaramouch's dog Toby bites Punch's nose, and after a fight between the two neighbors, Punch knocks Scaramouch's head clean off his shoulders. Judy then makes her first appearance, handing the couple's child over to Punch. After failing to appease the crying baby with a lullaby, Punch beats his child, then throws the baby out the "window" of the puppet stage's proscenium and into the audience.

As you might imagine, Judy is unimpressed. She beats Punch with a stick, but then he snatches the stick from her and beats her in turn. After at first appearing like he will relent, Punch beats Judy to death and knocks her body off the side of the stage, claiming, "To lose a wife is to get a fortune." He soon finds another woman, though: Pretty Polly. She's actually a character borrowed from John Gay's play The Beggar's Opera, and in Collier's script Punch sings an air from that play: "When the heart of a man is oppress'd with cares."

The second act opens with a special puppet with an extendable neck. Alluding to hanging, Punch tells him, "You may get it stretched for you, one of these days, by somebody else." The comment foreshadows an event later in the play, when after killing a doctor and a servant and beating a poor blind man, Punch is at last arrested for multiple murders. The hangman Jack Ketch tries to execute him, but Punch tricks Ketch into putting his own head in the noose, and Punch hangs him. Punch's final challenge comes when the devil himself comes for him, but Punch succeeds in even beating the devil.

A later Punch and Judy script appeared in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. The script Mayhew recorded also includes a clown named Joey (after Joseph Grimaldi) and a character named Jim Crow (who originated in minstrel shows). Another innovation in the script is bringing Judy back from the grave as a ghost. After being terrified by the ghost, Punch keels over, and a doctor comes on and asks Punch if he's dead. Punch responds that, yes, he is dead, and becomes quite upset when the doctor doesn't believe him.

Punch and Judy shows have continued to evolve over the years, though now in the 21st century, they might just be too violent for most people's taste. Even Mr. Punch himself might tell you that he's now dead. You probably shouldn't believe him, though.

Colley Cibber

"Though every poet-laureat must be expected to attract a considerable portion of envy, few have been so severely handled as this ingenious man," said one biographer of the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber.

Cibber was born in London on November 6, 1671, the son of the sculptor Caius Cibber and Jane Cibber, whose maiden name--Colley--provided the given name for their first child. The parents sent the boy to grammar school at The King's School,Grantham, in Lincolnshire. The school continues in operation to this day, and includes Isaac Newton among its alumni.

Originally, Cibber prepared to enter university, intending on a career in the church, but all that changed with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Cibber joined the service of the Earl of Devonshire in taking up arms in favor of the invading William of Orange, whose forces drove out King James II. Fortunately, this occurred without blood being spilled, but the political turmoil disrupted young Cibber's studies, and he looked about for something else to do.

By his own account Cibber had felt an early inclination for the stage, so he took a position as an actor with a meager salary of ten shillings a week. On the recommendation of the playwright William Congreve, Cibber performed the part of Lord Touchwood, in Congreve's The Double Dealer. Later, also on the playwright's recommendation, he played the role of Fondlewife in Congreve's The Old Bachelor.

When Cibber wrote his first play, Love's Last Shift, he also performed in it as the character Sir Novelty Fashion, gaining a reputation for himself of playing fops. The play shows the reformation of a rake named Loveless by a good woman, but it has been largely overshadowed by a sequel written by John Vanbrugh called The Relapse. In the sequel, Loveless goes back to his old rakish ways. Cibber seems not to have minded, as he appeared in Vanbrugh's play, reprising his role of Sir Novelty Fashion, who in the sequel has bought the title of "Lord Foppington."

As I previously wrote about in this blog, Cibber rewrote William Shakespeare's Richard III in 1699, appearing in the title role himself. The production was not a success, but Cibber's adaptation went on to become popular in the eighteenth century, essentially replacing the original play in the repertoire. Most people consider Cibber's best play to be The Careless Husband, which he wrote in 1704, but he apparently made more money off of an adaptation of Moliere's play Tartuffe called The Nonjuror, which won the approval of King George I and a royal present of 200 pounds.

After the success of The Nonjuror in 1717, Cibber's star continued to rise, and in 1730 King George II named him poet laureate. The government approved of his anti-Catholic sentiments, but the Catholic poet Alexander Pope was unimpressed. Even before Cibber was named poet laureate, Pope began composing The Dunciad making fun of inferior poets, with Cibber as the foremost of the Dunces. In one particularly brutal passage, Pope quipped:

                         In merry old England it once was a rule,

                         The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:

                         But now we're so frugal, I'd have you to know it,

                         That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet.

Even after Cibber officially quit the stage, he still made occasional performances, for instance acting in Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John based of the KingJohn of Shakespeare. Cibber lived well into his 80s, dying in December of 1757.