ABSTRACT
Colley Cibber's innovative reform comedy, Love's Last Shift, was born amidst theatrical upheaval and change. Love's Last Shift might owe its birth to a playhouse in disarray, but it owes its success to the changing cultural temper outside the theatre. Cibber's success with Love's Last Shift was not only because his rake-reform plot resonated with his audience, it was also because he managed to conceptually reposition his viewers' relationship to the spectacle onstage. Cibber's adroit orchestration of audience identification is, of course, brief. The box office success of Cibber's play as well as the general acclaim it received suggests that his contemporary audience did not have any particular objections to Loveless's reform. The cultural importance of self-representation and the concomitant concern with effective interpretation of the specular self presented by others also had an impact on the theater which is an institutionalized cultural site for performance and spectatorship.
