Richard Cumberland’s Imposters

Abstract

Richard Cumberland (1732–1813) was the most prolific and popular dramatist of his era. He composed over 50 plays, including six that were theatrical hits: The Brothers (1769), The West Indian (1771), The Fashionable Lover (1772), The Jew (1794), The Wheel of Fortune (1795), and False Impressions (1797).¹ His prickly response to critical reviews of The Fashionable Lover led David Garrick to dub him “the man without a skin” (Cumberland, Memoirs 175), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan satirized him in his comedy The Critic (1779) as Sir Fretful Plagiary, a posturing, hypersensitive, and egocentric playwright.² During the late eighteenth century, Cumberland was the leading purveyor of sentimental comedies, a dramatic subgenre inaugurated in 1696 by Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion. The English sentimental comedy “was a vigorous protest against the accepted view in comedy that ordinary human nature was a target of ridicule” (Williams 414). In most of Cumberland’s sentimental comedies, the focus is on middle-class characters and bourgeois values. Virtue always prevails, tears are frequently shed, villainous characters usually repent, and the humor is never bawdy.