   #copyright

The Relapse

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre

   John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), author of The Relapse.
   Enlarge
   John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), author of The Relapse.

   The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger is a Restoration comedy from 1696
   written by John Vanbrugh. The play is a sequel to Colley Cibber's
   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 stage habits, public reputations, and personal
   relationships into the text. One such actor was Colley Cibber himself,
   who played the luxuriant fop Lord Foppington in both Love's Last Shift
   and The Relapse. However, Vanbrugh's artistic plans were threatened by
   a cutthroat 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,
   and saved the company from bankruptcy as well.

   Unlike Love's Last Shift, never again performed after the 1690s, The
   Relapse has retained its audience appeal. In the 18th century, however,
   its tolerant attitude towards actual and attempted adultery gradually
   became unacceptable to public opinion, 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 and the consummate acting part of Lord
   Foppington, a burlesque character with a dark side.

The Relapse as sequel

Sexual ideology

   Love's Last Shift can be seen as an early sign of Cibber's sensitivity
   to shifts of public opinion, which was to be useful to him in his later
   career as manager at Drury Lane (see Colley Cibber). In the 1690s, the
   economic and political power balance of the nation tilted from the
   aristocracy towards the middle class after the Glorious Revolution of
   1689, and middle-class values of religion, morality, and gender roles
   became more dominant, not least in attitudes to the stage. Love's Last
   Shift is one of the first illustrations of a massive shift in audience
   taste, away from the analytic bent and sexual frankness of Restoration
   comedy and towards the conservative certainties and gender role
   backlash of exemplary or sentimental comedy. The play illustrates
   Cibber's opportunism at a moment in time before the change was assured:
   fearless of self-contradiction, he puts something into his first play
   to please every section of the audience, combining the old
   outspokenness with the new preachiness. The way Vanbrugh, in his turn,
   allows the reformed rake to relapse quite cheerfully, and has the only
   preaching in the play come from the comically corrupt parson of
   "Fatgoose Living", has made some early 20th-century critics refer to
   The Relapse as the last of the true Restoration comedies. However,
   Vanbrugh's play is also affected by the taste of the 1690s, and
   compared to a play like the courtier William Wycherley's The Country
   Wife of 20 years earlier, with its celebration of predatory
   aristocratic masculinity, The Relapse contains quite a few moments of
   morality and uplift. In fact it has a kind of parallel structure to
   Love's Last Shift: in the climactic scene of Cibber's play, Amanda's
   virtue reforms her husband, and in the corresponding scene of The
   Relapse, it reforms her admirer Worthy. Such moments have not done the
   play any favours with modern critics.

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.

   In the trickster subplot, young Tom tricks his elder brother Lord
   Foppington out of his intended bride and her large dowry. This plot
   takes up nearly half the play and expands the part of Sir Novelty to
   give more scope for the roaring success of Cibber's fop acting.
   Recycling Cibber's merely fashion-conscious fop, Vanbrugh lets him buy
   himself a title and equips him with enough aplomb and selfishness to
   weather all humiliations. Although Lord Foppington may be "very
   industrious to pass for an ass", as Amanda remarks, he is at bottom "a
   man who Nature has made no fool" (II.i.148). 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. Colley Cibber wrote in his
   autobiography that the owners of the United Company, "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 that 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 that 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 a key tactic in the ensuing struggle for
   position, and so were appeals to the Lord Chamberlain to issue
   injunctions against seductions from the other side, which that
   functionary was quite willing to do. Later Rich also resorted to hiring
   amateurs, and to tempting Irish actors over from Dublin. But such
   measures were not yet in place for the staging of The Relapse in 1696,
   Rich's most desperate venture.

Casting

   Vanbrugh is assumed to have attempted to tailor his play to the talents
   of particular actors and to what audiences would expect from them, as
   was normal practice (Holland), but this was exceptionally difficult to
   accomplish in 1695–96. Love's Last Shift had been cast from the
   remnants of the Patent Company—"learners" and "boys and girls"—after
   the walkout of the stars. Following the surprising 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 continuous
   emergency in which the Relapse production was mounted, most of
   Vanbrugh's original intentions were eventually carried out.

Love's Last Shift cast

   The Love's Last Shift cast list. Please click for larger image.
   Enlarge
   The Love's Last Shift cast list. Please click for larger image.

   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:

     The disproportion was so great at parting, that it was almost
     impossible, in Drury Lane, to muster up a sufficient number to take
     in all the parts of any play; and of them so few were tolerable,
     that a play must of necessity be damned, that had not extraordinary
     favour from the audience. No fewer than sixteen (most of the old
     standing) went away; and with them the very beauty and vigour of the
     stage; they who were left being for the most part learners, boys and
     girls, a very unequal match for them that revolted.

   The only well-regarded performers available were the Verbruggens, John
   and Susanna, who had been re-seduced by Rich from Betterton's company.
   They were of course used in Love's Last Shift, with John playing
   Loveless, the male lead, and his wife Susanna the flirtatious heiress
   Narcissa, a secondary character. The rest of the cast consisted of the
   new and untried (for instance Hildebrand Horden, who had just joined
   Rich's troupe, playing a rakish young lover), the modest and lacklustre
   (Jane Rogers, playing Amanda, and Mary Kent, playing Sir Novelty's
   mistress Flareit), and the widely disliked (the opportunist Colley
   Cibber, playing Sir Novelty Fashion); people who had probably never
   been given the option of joining Betterton. Betterton's only rival as
   male lead, George Powell, had most likely 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

   The Relapse cast list. Please click for larger image.
   Enlarge
   The Relapse cast list. Please click for larger image.

   Vanbrugh planned The Relapse, too, round these limited casting
   resources and minor talents, which Peter Holland has argued explains
   the robust, farcical character of the play; Vanbrugh's second comedy,
   The Provoked Wife (1697), written for the better actors of the
   cooperative company, is a much subtler piece. The Relapse was written
   in six weeks and offered to the Patent Company in March, but because of
   the problems with contracting and retaining actors, it did not première
   until November. It is known from Cibber's autobiography that Vanbrugh
   had a decisive say in the ongoing casting changes made during these
   seven months; it is not known whether he altered his text to
   accommodate them.

   To reinforce the connection with Love's Last Shift and capitalize on
   its unusual success, Vanbrugh designed the central roles of Loveless,
   Amanda, and Sir Novelty for the same actors: John Verbruggen, Jane
   Rogers, and Colley Cibber. Keeping Rogers as Amanda was not a problem,
   since she was not an actress that the companies fought over, but
   holding on to John Verbruggen and Colley Cibber posed challenges, to
   which Rich rose with energetic campaigns of bribery and re-seduction.
   Filling the rest of the large Relapse cast presented a varied palette
   of problems, which forced some unconventional emergency casting.

   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, a popular comedienne, was not. For Rich, it was a stroke of
   luck to get Susanna and John back into his depleted and unskilled
   troupe. John's availability to play Loveless remained precarious,
   however. In September, 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 still
   complaining about his employment situation, even getting into a
   physical fight over it at the theatre. This misbehaviour caused the
   Lord Chamberlain to declare his contract void and at the same time
   order him to stay with the Patent Company until January 1697, to give
   Rich time to find a replacement. The original Loveless was thus finally
   guaranteed for an autumn season run of The Relapse. Since the loyal
   Verbruggen couple always moved as a unit, Susanna's services were also
   assured.

   The Verbruggens were essential to the play, not least because Vanbrugh
   had customized the sprightly temptress Berinthia to Susanna's talents
   and reputation for witty, roguish, sexually enterprising characters,
   most recently Mrs Buxom in Thomas D'Urfey's Don Quixote (a success
   thanks to "the extraordinary well acting of Mrs Verbruggen," wrote
   D'Urfey). Although John was less well known, his acting skills were
   considerable and would flourish after January 1697 in the cooperative
   company, where commentators even started to compare him with the great
   Betterton. Verbruggen was considered a more natural, intuitive or
   "careless" actor, with "a negligent agreeable wildness in his action
   and his mien, which became him well." Anthony Aston vividly described
   Verbruggen as "a little in-kneed, which gave him a shambling gait,
   which was a carelessness, and became him." Modern critics do not find
   the Loveless part very lively or irresistible, but Vanbrugh was able to
   count on Verbruggen's shambling male magnetism and "agreeable wildness"
   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 secret
   lovers Loveless and Berinthia, the Verbruggens have left traces of
   their charisma and erotic stage presences in Vanbrugh's dialogue. The
   Relapse 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!"
   Young Colley Cibber as Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington, "brutal, evil, and
   smart".
   Young Colley Cibber as Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington, "brutal, evil, and
   smart".

   Hildebrand Horden, who had played a "wild" young lover in Love's Last
   Shift, was the only young, handsome, potential romantic lead Rich had.
   He was presumably cast by Vanbrugh as Tom Fashion, Lord Foppington's
   clever younger brother (Holland), 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. At the première in November,
   Tom Fashion was instead played as a breeches role by Mary Kent, an
   unusual piece of emergency casting that puts a different face on a
   uniquely frank homosexual scene 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, with both companies
   vying for his services as actor and playwright. He made an off-season
   transfer to Betterton's company in the summer of 1696 and wrote part of
   a play for the rebels before being re-seduced by Rich by means of a fat
   contract (Milhous). Cibber as Lord Foppington was thus also assured,
   and finally the première of The Relapse could be scheduled with some
   confidence. Cibber's performance in 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
   some of the ad-libbing and affectations of Cibber's by all accounts
   inspired performance in Love's Last Shift. Cibber has thus imprinted
   not only his own playwriting but also his acting style and squeaky
   personality on Vanbrugh's best-known character.

   Vanbrugh's preface to the first edition preserves a single fleeting
   concrete detail about the première performance: George Powell was
   drunk. He played Amanda's worldly and sophisticated admirer Worthy, the
   "fine gentleman of the play", and apparently brought an unintended
   hands-on realism to his supposedly suave seduction attempt:

     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

   Trickster subplot in The Relapse: Tom Fashion, pretending to be Lord
   Foppington, parleys with Sir Tunbelly Clumsey in a 19th-century
   illustration by William Powell Frith.
   Enlarge
   Trickster subplot in The Relapse: Tom Fashion, pretending to be Lord
   Foppington, parleys with Sir Tunbelly Clumsey in a 19th-century
   illustration by William Powell Frith.

   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." The new play is assumed to have been The
   Relapse, 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 censure 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. The
   subplot is an even worse offence against religion and morality, as it
   positively rewards vice, allowing the trickster hero Tom to keep the
   girl, her dowry, and his own bad character to the end. Vanbrugh failed
   to take Short View seriously and published a joking reply, but
   Collier's censure 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 as public opinion became
   ever more restrictive in this area, and more at odds with the
   permissive ethos of Restoration comedy. From 1777 Vanbrugh's original
   was replaced on the stage by 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 an 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. The Man of Quality (1870) was one
   such robust production, Miss Tomboy (1890) another. 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 relatively
   neglected, along with other Restoration drama, and experts are
   uncertain about exactly when Vanbrugh's original again resurged to
   prominence on the stage and thereby marginalized Sheridan's version.
   These experts now believe the play may have been first 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. 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 included
   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." 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 so often with commentary on The Relapse,
   Morley focused on the role of Lord Foppington and its different
   interpretations: " 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."

   Restoration Comedy, a play by Amy Freed that draws on both The Relapse
   and Colley Cibber's prequel Love's Last Shift, premiered at Seattle
   Repertory Theatre in 2005, starring Stephen Caffrey as Loveless,
   Caralyn Kozlowski as Amanda, and Jonathan Freeman as Lord Foppington,
   and directed by Sharon Ott.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relapse"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
