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The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes
(1907–21).
Volume X. The Age of Johnson.
IV. The Drama
and the Stage.
§ 1. Significance of the term “The Eighteenth Century English
Drama”; Queen Anne’s reign a period of transition in English Dramatic History;
Cibber, Steele and Rowe.
THE term “eighteenth century English drama” suggests a somewhat
arbitrary chronology. Yet it has, perhaps, other justification than that of
convenient reference. The year 1700 marks the death of Dryden, the dominant
figure in restoration drama, and the retirement of Congreve, its most
brilliant comic dramatist. Etherege, Wycherley, Lee, Otway and many other
contemporaries of Dryden had already passed from the ranks of active
dramatists. The growing protest against the immorality of the drama,
vigorously expressed in Jeremy Collier’s invective, A Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), shows that the
old order has changed and is soon to yield place to new. 1
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The reign of queen Anne (1702–14) may be regarded, therefore, as a
period of transition in English drama. Though the current of restoration
comedy still runs strong in the first decade of the eighteenth century, in
Vanbrugh’s later works and in Farquhar’s plays, the tide of drama turns with
the moralised comedies of Colley Cibber 2
and the sentimental dramas of Richard Steele. 3
Cibber strove deliberately to moralise the drama. He ascribed the success of
his first comedy to the “moral Delight receiv’d from its Fable,” and, in
reviewing his own dramatic career, claimed to “have had the Interest and
Honour of Virtue always in view.” 4
Imperfect as his ethical standards often appear to modern critics, there is
little reason to question the sincerity of his intention to reform comedy.
To the moral aim of Cibber, Steele united sentiment. Without the
epigrammatic brilliancy of Congreve or the fertile invention of Farquhar, he
sought to sustain comedy by a different method. If comedy was moralised by
Cibber, it was sentimentalised by Steele.
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Meanwhile, tragedy, also, was showing signs of transition. The heroic
drama of the restoration had torn passion to tatters; but the queen Anne age
inclined more toward classical constraint than toward romantic licence. Even
Nicholas Rowe, who, in The Fair Penitent (1703), followed an
Elizabethan model and wrote Jane Shore (1714) “in imitation of
Shakespear’s style,” shows classical tendencies in limitation of the number
of characters, in restriction of dramatic action and in rejection of comic
relief. His chief dramas—to use his own phrase, “shetragedies”—have an
almost feminine refinement of tone. 5
In the moralised sentiment with which they enforce their pathetic appeals
there is a close kinship between the tragedy of Rowe and the comedy of
Steele. In sentimental drama, pity is akin to love.
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| Note 1. Cf. ante, Vol. VIII, Chap.
VI, pp.185 ff. [
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| Note 2. Cf. ibid., pp. 200–201. [
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| Note 3. Cf. ante, Vol. IX, pp. 32–34, 71.
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| Note 4. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley
Cibber, edited by Lowe, R. W., Vol.
I, pp. 220, 226. [
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| Note 5. Cf. ante, Vol. VIII, Chap.
VII, pp.221–223. [
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