ABSTRACT
In Colley Cibber’s 1704 comedy The Careless Husband, Lord Foppington puts the dilemma of marriage crudely, but clearly: “women of virtue are now grown such idiots in love, they expect of a man, just as they do of a coach-horse, that one’s appetite, like t’other’s flesh, should increase by feeding” (2.2.192-95).1 There, you have it: the whole problem of marriage (and remarriage) in a nutshell, “a simple story for simple people,” as Peter Warne would say, and a rephrasing of Doralice’s opening observation in Marriage à la Mode: “Why should a foolish Marriage Vow / Which long ago was made / Oblige us to each other now / When Passion is decay’d?” (1.1.4-7). Indeed, a few years later Cibber would premiere his reworking of Dryden’s text into a play he initially advertised as Marriage-a-la-Mode, but subtitled The Comical Lovers, by which it became known. Therein he combined the comic plot involving Doralice, Melantha, Rhodophil, and Palamede with scenes from Secret Love and The Mock Astrologer. Marriage a la Mode; or The Comical Lovers was first staged on Tuesday, February 4, 1707, at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, with an all-star cast: Robert Wilks as Palamede, Colley Cibber as Celadon (from Secret Love), Barton Booth as Rhodophil, Anne Bracegirdle as Melantha, and Anne Oldfield as Florimel (from Secret Love).2 It is safe to assume that by then Cibber had long been familiar with Doralice’s complaint, her wonderment that marriage demands the willingness, even eagerness, for repetition after passion has been spent. Doralice marvels at first, and later accepts, that marriage is always, to borrow Cavell’s language, “remarriage.” And this is the awful truth that preoccupies Cibber in his first comedy Love’s Last Shift (1696), as well as in his most successful comedy, The Careless Husband. In both plays, Cibber is concerned to demonstrate (rather than simply assert, as Dryden had done in Marriage à la Mode) the means by which marriages remain vital. Indeed, Gary A. Richardson’s remark that in Love’s Last Shift, Cibber “treats marriage with a seriousness rarely seen in the era,” applies with equal, if not greater, force to The Careless Husband.3 In Love’s Last Shift, Cibber hedges his bets, in a sense, with a bed trick, a plot device guaranteed to evoke some cynical response, as Vanbrugh demonstrated hilariously in The Relapse (1696). Without taking offense (he did, after all, play Lord Foppington in
Vanbrugh’s play), Cibber seems to have been led as a result to rethink the central problem of marriage as well as its solution. Whereas in Love’s Last Shift, Amanda’s courtesan-act causes Loveless to look at his wife again and anew, in The Careless Husband, Lady Easy accomplishes the more difficult task of arousing her husband’s desire to talk to her.
