ABSTRACT
Colley Cibber, always acutely sensitive to the pulse of contemporary culture, engages with the issue of the gaze and moral reform in his presentation of Lady Easy in The Careless Husband and Lady Wronglove in The Lady's Last Stake. Cibber himself repeated the plot device in The Careless Husband, creating in the character of Lady Easy, a wife who became the byword for virtuous complaisance. Lady Easy's first reaction when she sees the lovers is to kill her husband for the pain he has caused her, to 'raise the Arm Of Duty, even to the Breast of Love'. Her realization that her desire to intrude upon the scene by exposing him to her censorious gaze is a very impractical thing to do mark a significant change in the tone of her speech. The Lady's Last Stake, like The Careless Husband, also features a wife who must deal with her philandering husband.
