SOURCE: “Colley Cibber's ‘Genteel Comedy’: Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband,” in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1982, pp. 61-79.

In the following essay, Drougge charges that although Cibber presents his plays as realism, they are actually sentimentalism: “wishfulfilment fantasies offered as instruction, unreal behaviour offered as psychology, submissive eloquence offered as logic.”

I

Colley Cibber, poet laureate and hero of Pope's Dunciad, produced some four original comedies (depending on how you count)¹ during the initial stages of his impressive career as the first of the actor-managers at Drury Lane. Two of these comedies, Love's Last Shift (1696) and The Careless Husband (1704), have traditionally been accorded some place in theatrical history, mainly though not exclusively for reasons unconnected with dramatic or literary merit. My own reason for offering some remarks on these two plays is non-literary too: I have no intention of trying to revalue them as dramatic literature, or...