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.