The Relapse
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The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger is a Restoration comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh, which premièred in London in November 1696. It is a sequel to Colley Cibber's notorious tear-jerker Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded, which had been performed in January of the same year.
Love's Last Shift, which was to provide the inspiration for Vanbrugh's Relapse, is a celebration of the power of a good woman, Amanda, to reform a rakish husband, Loveless, with patience and a bed-trick. Cibber's play has been criticized, e. g. by Robert D. Hume, as a blatantly commercial combination of four acts of sex comedy with one act of sententious reform, designed to attract simultaneously the rakish and the respectable Londoners. It was a great box-office success and the audience is reported to have wept at the climactic scene where Loveless begs forgiveness on his knees. The Relapse continues the action from this scene, sending fresh sexual temptations in the way of both Loveless and Amanda. There is more psychological realism in the characters and their reactions to events than in Cibber's play, and The Relapse mounts an argument against Cibber's recommendation of wifely patience as a cure for all the ills of marriage.
The subplot of The Relapse has little connection with the Loveless/Amanda plot and takes up nearly half the play. It is a classic fortune-hunter or trickster story in which a clever and penniless younger brother tricks his elder brother Lord Foppington out of his intended bride and her large dowry.Colley_Cibber_as_Lord_Foppington.JPG
There is no moral sentiment or poetic justice in the subplot of The Relapse, where the trickster hero is allowed to keep both the girl, her dowry, and his own bad character to the end. This rewarding of vice was singled out for particular outrage in Jeremy Collier's anti-theatre pamphlet Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), but Vanbrugh refused to take Collier's attack seriously and published a joking reply.
Colley Cibber played the part of Lord Foppington at the première of The Relapse, and it remained a famous star part for him for many years. Alexander Pope mentions the audience jubilation which always used to greet the small-framed Cibber's donning of Lord Foppington's enormous wig, which would be ceremoniously carried on stage in its own sedan chair.
While Cibber's own Love's Last Shift has not been staged again since the 1690s, Vanbrugh's sequel has retained its appeal to audiences.
References
- Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, Everyman's Library ed. 1976). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.
- Dobrée, Bonamy (1927). Introduction to The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, vol. 1. Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press.
- Fisk, Deborah Payne (ed.) (2000). The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.