Colley Cibber Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephen Szilagyi

Critical Essay by Stephen Szilagyi

SOURCE: “The Importance of Being Easy: Desire and Cibber's The Careless Husband,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 142-59.

In this essay, Szilagyi claims that the tendency to dismiss Cibber and his comedies as lightweight has caused scholars to overlook the serious social and political issues of such plays as The Careless Husband. Szilagyi views Cibber's presentation of the fop character Lord Foppington as a critique of aristocratic privilege.

Although popular with both critics and audiences throughout the eighteenth century, Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband (1704) has not been sufficiently appreciated in the twentieth century. In essence, The Careless Husband is judged good lightweight entertainment that is historically significant for the theater—perhaps like Cibber himself. Nevertheless, many also lament, in its sentimentality, a certain “meretriciousness and hypocrisy in catering to the public,” to borrow William W. Appleton's felicitously phrased rebuke.¹ Such judgments,...
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