Abstract
In 1974, Barry Olshen prefaced a valuable survey of the nineteenth-century stage history of Vanbrugh’s work with the following, ominous words: ‘Vanbrugh’s reputation on the nineteenth-century London stage was largely owing to the efforts of the eighteenth-century adapters of his comedies’.1 Indeed, to compare The Relapse with R. B. Sheridan’s reworking of it, A Trip to Scarborough of 1777, is to be brought sharply up against the changed theatrical sensibilities of the late post-Restoration period and what was, for too long, to follow. All the problems of Vanbrugh’s play are smoothened and, despite Sheridan’s public objections to the cult of sentimentality, sentimentalised, as surely as was the unfinished A Journey to London, which as early as 1728 had been given a suitably sentimental conclusion by the ever-versatile Colley Cibber and performed as The Provoked Husband.
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Notes
Barry N. Olshen, ‘The Original and “Improved” Comedies of Sir John Vanbrugh: Their Nineteenth-Century London Stage History’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, vol. 13(i) (1974), p. 27.
Anthony Coleman, ‘Sir John Brute on the Eighteenth Century Stage’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, vol. 8(ii) (1969), pp. 41–6
Donald Sinden, Laughter in the Second Act (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 168.
William Gaskill, A Sense of Direction (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 52.
cf. Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 58.
John Russell Taylor, ‘Theatre’, Drama, vol. 146 (1982), p. 78.
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© 1998 John Bull
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Bull, J. (1998). Vanbrugh and Farquhar on the Modern Stage. In: Vanbrugh & Farquhar. English Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26508-4_8
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