The Relapse
The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger is a Restoration comedy from 1696 by John Vanbrugh, a sequel to Colley Cibber's notorious tear-jerker Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded. In Cibber's Love's Last Shift, a free-living Restoration rake is brought to repentance and reform by the ruses of his wife, while in The Relapse, the rake succumbs again to temptation and has a new love affair. His virtuous wife is also subjected to a determined seduction attempt, and resists with difficulty.
Vanbrugh planned The Relapse around particular actors at Drury Lane, writing their public personae and personal relationships into the text. One such actor was Colley Cibber himself, who played the evil fop Lord Foppington in both Love's Last Shift and this. However, Vanbrugh's artistic plans were threatened by a deadly struggle between London's two theatre companies, each of which was "seducing" actors from the other. The Relapse came close to not being produced at all, but the successful performance that was eventually achieved in November 1696 vindicated Vanbrugh's intentions, as well as saving the company from bankruptcy.
Unlike Love's Last Shift, never again performed after the 1690s, The Relapse has retained its appeal to audiences. In the 18th century, however, its tolerant attitude towards actual and attempted adultery gradually became unacceptable, and the original play was for a century replaced on the stage by Sheridan's moralised version A Trip to Scarborough (1777). On the modern stage, The Relapse has been established as one of the most popular Restoration comedies, valued for Vanbrugh's light, throwaway wit[1] and the consummate acting part of Lord Foppington, a burlesque character with a dark side.[2]
Plots
Love's Last Shift plot
Love's Last Shift is the story of a last "shift" or trick that a virtuous wife, Amanda, is driven to in order to reform and retain her rakish husband Loveless. Loveless has been away for ten years, dividing his time between the brothel and the bottle, and no longer recognizes his wife when he returns to London. Acting the part of a high-class prostitute, Amanda lures Loveless into her luxurious house and treats him to the night of his dreams, confessing her true identity in the morning. Loveless is so impressed that he immediately reforms. A minor part that was a great hit with the première audience is the fop Sir Novelty Fashion, written by Cibber for himself to play. Sir Novelty flirts with all the women, but is more interested in his own exquisite appearance and witticisms, and, Cibber would modestly write in his autobiography 45 years later, "was thought a good portrait of the foppery then in fashion". Combining daring sex scenes with sentimental reconciliations and Sir Novelty's buffoonery, Love's Last Shift offered something for everybody, and was a great box-office hit.
The Relapse plot
Vanbrugh's The Relapse is less sentimental and more analytical than Love's Last Shift, subjecting both the reformed husband and the virtuous wife to fresh temptations, and having them react with more psychological realism. Loveless falls for the vivacious young widow Berinthia, while Amanda barely succeeds in summoning her virtue to reject her admirer Worthy. The three central characters, Amanda, Loveless, and Sir Novelty (ennobled by Vanbrugh into "Lord Foppington"), are the only ones that recur in both plays, the remainder of the Relapse characters being new.
The cynical trickster subplot is also an independent creation by Vanbrugh, which enlarges the part of Sir Novelty to make more room for the roaring success of Cibber's fop acting. The action of this subplot, in which a clever youth tricks his elder brother out of his intended bride and her large dowry, has little connection with the Loveless/Amanda plot, and takes up nearly half the play. The elder brother, Lord Foppington, is the character in The Relapse that has most amused both Restoration and later audiences. In him, Vanbrugh recycles Cibber's fashion-conscious fop from Love's Last Shift, lets him buy himself a title, and equips him with unfailing aplomb. Literary historians agree in esteeming him "the greatest of all Restoration fops" (Dobrée), "brutal, evil, and smart" (Hume).
Background: theatre company split
In the early 1690s, London had only one officially countenanced theatre company, the "United Company", badly managed and with its takings bled off by predatory investors ("adventurers"). To counter the draining of the company's income, the manager Christopher Rich slashed the salaries and traditional perks of his skilled professional actors, antagonizing such popular performers as Thomas Betterton, the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry, and the comedienne Anne Bracegirdle. However, the owners of the United Company, wrote Colley Cibber in his autobiography, "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presumed they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public... were inclined to support". Betterton and his colleagues set forth the bad finances of the United Company and the plight of the actors in a "Petition of the Players" submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. This unusual document is signed by nine men and six women, all established professional actors, and details a disreputable jumble of secret investments and "farmed" shares, making the case that owner chicanery, rather than any failure of audience interest, was at the root of the company's financial problems. Barely veiled strike threats in the actors' petition were met with an answering lockout threat from Rich in a "Reply of the Patentees", but the burgeoning conflict was pre-empted by a suspension of all play-acting from December until March 1695 on account of Queen Mary's illness and death. During this interval, a cooperative actors' company took shape under the leadership of Betterton and was granted a Royal "licence to act" on March 25, to the dismay of Rich, who saw the threat too late.
The two companies which emerged from this labour/management conflict are usually known respectively as the "Patent Company" (the no longer united United Company) and "Betterton's Company", although Judith Milhous argues the latter misrepresents the cooperative nature of the actors' company. In the following period of intense rivalry, the Patent Company was handicapped by a shortage of competent actors. "Seducing" actors (as the legal term was) back and forth between the companies was important in the ensuing struggle for position, as were appeals to the Lord Chamberlain to issue injunctions against seductions from the other side, which that functionary was quite willing to do (see for instance the movements of John Verbruggen below).
Casting The Relapse
As was customary, Vanbrugh attempted to tailor his play to the talents and thematic implications of particular actors, but the difficulties of doing so in 1695–96 were exceptional. Love's Last Shift had had to be cast from the remnants of the Patent Company, "learners" and "boys and girls", after the walkout of the stars. Following the surprise success of this young cast, Vanbrugh and Rich had even greater difficulty in retaining the actors needed for The Relapse. However, in spite of the nightmare of continual emergency in which the Relapse production was mounted, most of Vanbrugh's original intentions were eventually carried out.[3]
Love's Last Shift cast
To cast Love's Last Shift in January 1696, the Patent Company had to make the best use of such actors as remained after the 1694 split, see cast list right. An anonymous contemporary pamphlet describes the "despicable condition" the troupe had been reduced to:
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The only unequivocally successful and well-regarded performers were the Verbruggens, John and Susanna, who had been re-seduced by Rich from Betterton's company. They were used in Love's Last Shift, naturally, with John cast as Loveless, the male lead, and his wife Susanna as a secondary character, the flirtatious heiress Narcissa. Susanna was a better-known and, commentary suggests, simply a better actress than Jane Rogers. Nevertheless character casting allotted the central role of Amanda to Rogers; Susanna was best known for witty, roguish characters and lively back-talk scenes, while Rogers' "line" was unflinching virtue, an important consideration for Amanda. The rest of the cast consisted of the new and untried (Hildebrand Horden, who had just joined Rich's troupe, playing a rakish young lover), the widely disliked (the opportunist Colley Cibber, playing Sir Novelty Fashion), and the modest and lacklustre (Jane Rogers, playing Amanda, and Mary Kent, playing Sir Novelty's mistress Flareit); people who had probably never been given the option of joining Betterton. Betterton's only rival as male lead, George Powell, had probably been left behind by the rebels with some relief (Milhous); while Powell was skilled and experienced, he was also notorious for his bad temper and alcoholism. Throughout the "seduction" tug-of-war between Rich and Betterton in 1695–96, Powell remained at Drury Lane, where he was in fact not used for Love's Last Shift, but would instead spectacularly demonstrate his drinking problem at the première of The Relapse.
The Relapse cast
Vanbrugh, who had only recently arrived in London when he saw Love's Last Shift performed, seems to have made a point of quickly becoming acquainted with the acting resources of the Patent Company and of planning The Relapse round them. To reinforce the connection with Love's Last Shift and capitalize on its unusual success, he wrote the central roles of Loveless, Amanda, and Sir Novelty for the actors audiences had already appreciated in them: John Verbruggen, Jane Rogers, and Colley Cibber. Keeping Rogers as Amanda was hardly a problem, since she was not an actress that the companies fought over; she had remained with the Patent Company throughout. By contrast, to keep John Verbruggen and Colley Cibber available for the première was a challenge, to which Christopher Rich rose with energetic campaigns of bribery and re-seduction. Filling the rest of the large Relapse cast presented a varied palette of problems, including an untimely death. Out of the Love's Last Shift cast, listed right, Johnson would be interestingly re-used in The Relapse; William Penkethman as a "pert" valet would be first rather unfortunately replaced in The Relapse by the more famous Thomas Doggett, then immediately after the première re-instated at Vanbrugh's request;[5] and Hildebrand Horden, a rising young actor intended by Vanbrugh for the trickster part of Tom Fashion, would be dead. In a notable piece of emergency casting, Mary Kent would replace Horden, going from "kept woman" in Love's Last Shift to playing Tom as a breeches role in The Relapse.
John Verbruggen was one of the original rebels and had been offered a share in the actors' company, but became disgruntled when his wife Susanna was not. To give Susanna Verbruggen, Vanbrugh's Berinthia, mere salary terms may have been the rebels' greatest tactical mistake, as she was a very popular and versatile comedienne, and John also had greater acting potential than had yet appeared. For Rich, it was certainly a stroke of luck to get Susanna and John back into his depleted and unskilled troupe. It is not known how much he paid Susanna, but he doubled John's salary, from £2 to £4 a week, which put him on a level with George Powell. Nevertheless, John's availability to play in The Relapse remained precarious. In September 1696, when The Relapse had still not been staged after six months of trying (probably because Rich was still parleying with Cibber about his availability as Lord Foppington), John was complaining about his employment situation, even getting into a physical fight over it (it is unclear with who) at the theatre. This misbehaviour caused the Lord Chamberlain to declare the £4 contract void and at the same time to order John to stay with the Patent Company until January 1697, to give Rich time to find a replacement. The vital puzzle piece of the original Loveless was thus in place for an autumn season run of The Relapse. The loyal Verbruggen couple moving always as a unit, Susanna's services were also assured.
The Verbruggens were essential to Vanbrugh's intentions for several reasons. Vanbrugh had customized the sprightly temptress Berinthia to Susanna's comedic talents, recently applauded in smart-talking independent heroines like Charlot Welldon in Thomas Southerne's Oronooko and Mrs Buxom in Thomas D'Urfey's Don Quixote (a success thanks to "the extraordinary well acting of Mrs Verbruggen", wrote D'Urfey). John was less well-known than his wife, and no commentary earlier than 1697 has survived on his acting skills, but they would flourish in the cooperative company and be sometimes compared with the great (and aging) Betterton's. Verbruggen was considered a more natural actor, with "a negligent agreeable wildness in his action and his mien, which became him well".[6] Anthony Aston contrasted Verbruggen's wild, untaught talents with Betterton's artfulness, and vividly described Verbruggen as "a little in-kneed, which gave him a shambling gait, which was a carelessness, and became him".[7] Although modern critics do not find Loveless notably irresistible, Vanbrugh wrote the part for Verbruggen, and was thereby able to count on his shambling male magnetism to enrich the character. This would originally have worked even in print, since cast lists were included in the published plays: most 1690s play readers were playgoers also, and aware of the high-profile Verbruggens. Happily married in private life and playing the illicit lovers Loveless and Berinthia in The Relapse, the Verbruggens have left traces of their charisma and capacity for projecting sexuality in Vanbrugh's dialogue. Vanbrugh even alludes to their real-life relationship, in meta-jokes such as Berinthia's exclamation, "Well, he is a charming man! I don't wonder his wife's so fond of him!"
Hildebrand Horden, who had played Young Worthy in Love's Last Shift, was an actor Vanbrugh must have had plans for.[8] He was inexperienced, but he was the only young, handsome, potential romantic lead Rich had, and was popular especially with the female audience segment. Horden was the obvious, indeed only available, choice for Tom Fashion, Lord Foppington's clever younger brother, and it was a blow to the Patent Company when he was killed in a tavern brawl (more glamorously referred to as "a duel" in older sources) in May 1696. With respect to The Relapse, the most interesting aspect of the young man's tragedy is the emergency casting it forced: at the November première, Tom Fashion was instead played by Mary Kent as a breeches role. Despite the breeches role convention, this was unusual casting, and Holland points out that it puts a different face on the uniquely frank homosexual scenes, where Tom keeps skipping nimbly out of the way of the matchmaker Coupler's lecherous groping.
Colley Cibber was a rather unsuccessful young actor at the time of the split, with a squeaky voice and without any of the physical attractiveness of the soon-to-be-dead Horden. After the success of Love's Last Shift, his status was transformed, both companies vying for his services, especially as playwright. While official documents and his own autobiography give the impression that he was always a loyal member of the Patent Company, Milhous has shown that he actually made an off-season transfer to Betterton's company in the summer of 1696, writing part of a play for the rebels, before being re-seduced by Rich by means of a fat contract.[9] Cibber as Lord Foppington was thus also assured, and finally the première of The Relapse could be scheduled with some confidence. Cibber's performance at it was received with even greater acclaim than in his own play, Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington being a larger and, in the estimation of both contemporaries and modern critics, much funnier part than Sir Novelty Fashion. Vanbrugh's play incorporates details from Cibber's own creation of Sir Novelty Fashion in Love's Last Shift, by all accounts an inspired performance, and Cibber has thus imprinted not only his own writing, but also his acting style and squeaky personality, on Vanbrugh's best-known character.
George Powell played Amanda's admirer Worthy, and Vanbrugh's preface to the first edition preserves a single fleeting fact about the première performance: Powell was drunk.
"One word more about the bawdy, and I have done. I own the first night this thing was acted, some indecencies had like to have happened, but it was not my fault. The fine gentleman of the play, drinking his mistress's health in Nantes brandy from six in the morning to the time he waddled upon the stage in the evening, had toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour, I confess I once gave Amanda for gone."
Stage history
The desperate straits of the United Company, and the success of The Relapse in saving it from collapse, are attested in a private letter from November 19, 1696: "The other house [Drury Lane] has no company at all, and unless a new play comes out on Saturday revives their reputation, they must break."[10] The new play is assumed to have been The Relapse,[11] and it turned out the success Rich needed. "This play", notes Colley Cibber in his autobiography, "from its new and easy turn of wit, had great success, and gave me, as a comedian, a second flight of reputation along with it." Charles Gildon summarizes: "This play was received with mighty applause".
The Relapse is singled out for particular outrage in the Puritan clergyman Jeremy Collier's anti-theatre pamphlet Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which attacks its lack of poetic justice and moral sentiment. Worthy and Berinthia, complains Collier, are allowed to enact their wiles against the Lovelesses' married virtue without being punished or losing face for it. The subplot is an even worse offence against religion and morality, as it positively rewards vice, allowing the trickster hero Tom to keep both the girl, her dowry, and his own bad character to the end. Vanbrugh failed to take the Short View seriously and published a joking reply,[12] but Collier's attack was to colour the perception of the play for centuries. While it remained a popular stage piece through the 18th century, much praised and enjoyed for its wit, attitudes to its casual sexual morality became increasingly ambivalent. From 1777 Vanbrugh's original was replaced on the stage by Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough, a close adaptation but with some "covering", as the prologue explains, drawn over Vanbrugh's "too bare" wit:
- "As change thus circulates throughout the nation,
- Some plays may justly call for alteration;
- At least to draw some slender covering o'er,
- That graceless wit which was too bare before."
Sheridan does not allow Loveless and Berinthia to consummate their relationship, and he withdraws approval from Amanda's admirer Worthy by renaming him "Townly". Some frank quips are silently deleted, and the matchmaker Coupler with the lecherous interest in Tom becomes decorous Mrs Coupler. A small-scale but notable loss is of much of the graphic language of Hoyden's nurse, who is earthy in Vanbrugh's original, genteel in Sheridan. However, Sheridan had appreciation of Vanbrugh's style, and retained most of the original text unaltered.
In the 19th century, A Trip to Scarborough remained the standard version, and there were also some ad hoc adaptations that sidelined the Lovelesses' drawing-room comedy in favour of the Lord Foppington/Hoyden plot with its caricatured clashes between exquisite fop and pitchfork-wielding country bumpkins.[13] The Man of Quality (1870) was one such robust production, Miss Tomboy (1890) another. Uniquely, Vanbrugh's original Relapse was staged once, in 1846, at the Olympic Theatre in London.
During the first half of the 20th century The Relapse was comparatively neglected, along with other Restoration drama, and it is unclear at what point the original took back command of the stage from Sheridan's version. The play is thought to have been brilliantly rehabilitated by Anthony Quayle's 1947 production at the Phoenix Theatre, starring Cyril Ritchard as Lord Foppington and brought to Broadway by Ritchard in 1950.[14] A musical version, Virtue in Danger (1963), by Paul Dehn and "John Bernard", opened to mixed reviews. John Russell Taylor in Plays and Players praised the cast, which featured Patricia Routledge as Berinthia and John Moffatt as Lord Foppington, but complained that the production was "full of the simpering, posturing and sniggering which usually stand in for style and sophistication in Restoration revivals."[15] Vanbrugh's original play is now again a favourite of the stage. A 2001 revival by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre was described by Sheridan Morley as "rare, loving and brilliantly cast". As has so often been the case with commentary on The Relapse, Morley focused on the role of Lord Foppington and the relation between different interpretations of it: "Alex Jennings superbly inherits the role of Lord Foppington which for 20 years or so belonged to Donald Sinden, and for another 20 before that to Cyril Ritchard."[16]
Notes
- ^ See Faller.
- ^ See reviews of Trevor Nunn's 2001 production by Michael Coveney in Daily Mail and Michael Billington in the Guardian, each of which makes this point.
- ^ Some of the "seductions" and counter-seductions of actors have been reconstructed by modern scholars, notably Judith Milhous, from the records of the Lord Chamberlain's office and from Colley Cibber's autobiography An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740). It must be noted, however, that actors were obscure, low-status people at this time. This is especially true of the actors remaining at the Patent Company after all the stars had decamped to Betterton's cooperative company; always excepting Colley Cibber, their birth dates are unknown and there is no portrait in existence of any of them. John Vanbrugh, later a famous architect, was likewise an obscure young man in 1696. Some of the motives of these all but unrecorded people remain irrecoverable; for example, there is no obvious reason why William Penkethman, a popular clown and funnyman, well-liked by his peers, who played Vanbrugh's Lory the pert valet, should have stayed with Rich and the Patent Company.
- ^ A Comparison Between the Two Stages, 1702, quoted in Milhous, 82.
- ^ See Cibber's Apology.
- ^ The anonymous The Laureat (1740), quoted in Biographical Dictionary of Actors.
- ^ 1748, quoted in Biographical Dictionary of Actors.
- ^ Holland.
- ^ Milhous 86.
- ^ Milhous 82.
- ^ The London Stage, I, 470.
- ^ A Short Vindication of The Relapse and The Provok'd Wife From Immorality and Prophaneness (1698), reprinted in Dobrée, Works.
- ^ Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this paragraph comes from Harris xxvi.
- ^ See Cyril Ritchard biography site.
- ^ John Russell Taylor, review in Plays and Players.
- ^ Sheridan Morley, review July 21, 2001 in The Spectator.
References
- Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, ed. Robert Lowe, 1889). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, vol.1, vol 2. London.
- Dobrée, Bonamy (1927). Introduction to The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, vol. 1. Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press.
- Faller, Lincoln B. (1974–75). "Between jest and earnest: the comedy of Sir John Vanbrugh". Modern Philology, 72, 17—29.
- Gildon, Charles (1699). The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets. London.
- Harris, Bernard (1971). Introduction to The Relapse. London: New Mermaids, Ernest Benn Ltd.
- Highfill, Philip Jr, Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward (1973–93). Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 volumes. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. All details about individual actors are taken from this standard work unless otherwise indicated.
- Holland, Peter (1979). The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Milhous, Judith (1979). Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Van Lennep, William (ed.) (1965). The London Stage 1660—1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled From the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Part 1: 1660–1700. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.