Richard Cumberland (dramatist)
Richard Cumberland | |
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Dramatist | |
Nationality | British |
Richard Cumberland (19 February 1731/2 – 7 May 1811) was an
Early life and education
Richard Cumberland was born in the master's lodge of
Cumberland was educated at the
Political and diplomatic career
He had begun to read for his fellowship at Trinity when the
Cumberland resigned his fellowship when he married his cousin Elizabeth Ridge in 1759, after having been appointed through Lord Halifax as "crown-agent for Nova Scotia."[2]
In 1761 Cumberland accompanied his patron Lord Halifax to
When
Mission to Madrid
In 1780, he was sent on a confidential mission to Spain to negotiate a separate peace treaty during the
He took up residence at
Writing career
Cumberland wrote much but has been remembered most for his plays and memoirs. The existence of his memoirs is largely due to his friend, the critic Richard Sharp, (
He is said to have joined Sir James Bland Burges in an epic, the Exodiad (1807), and in a novel, John de Lancaster. Besides these he wrote the Letter to the Bishop of Oxford in vindication of his grandfather Bentley (1767); another to
His plays, published and unpublished, totalled fifty-four. About 35 of these are ordinary plays, to which have been added four operas and a farce; about half are comedies. His favourite mode was the "sentimental comedy," which combines domestic plots, rhetorical enforcement of moral precepts, and comic humour. He weaves his plays out of "homely stuff, right British drugget," and eschews "the vile Gallic stage"; he borrowed from the style of sentimental fiction of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne.
His favourite theme is virtue in distress or danger, but assured of its reward in the fifth act; his most constant characters are men of feeling and young ladies who are either prudes or coquettes. Cumberland's comic talents lay in the invention of characters taken from the "outskirts of the empire," and intended to vindicate the good elements of the Scots, Irish and colonials from English prejudice. The plays are highly patriotic and adhere to conventional morality. If Cumberland's dialogue lacks brilliance and his characters reality, the construction of the plots is generally skilful, due to Cumberland's insight into the secrets of theatrical effect. Though Cumberland's sentimentality is often wearisome, his morality is generally sound; that if he was without the genius requisite for elevating the national drama, he did his best to keep it pure and sweet; and that if he borrowed much, he borrowed only the best aspects of other dramatists' work.
His first play was a tragedy,
The epilogue paid a compliment to Garrick, who helped the production of Cumberland's second comedy
Works
Among his later comedies were:
- Calypso (1779)
- The West-Indian, makes his reappearance
- The Country Attorney (1787)
- The Impostors (1789), a comedy of intrigue
- The School for Widows (1789)
- The Armourer (1793), originally Richard II but rewritten as The Armourer to pass censorship
- The Box-Lobby Challenge (1794), a protracted farce
- The Jew (1794), a drama, highly effective when the great German actor Theodor Döring played "Sheva"
- The Wheel of Fortune (1795), in which John Philip Kemble found a celebrated part in the misanthropist Penruddock, who cannot forget but learns to forgive (a character declared by August von Kotzebue to have been stolen from his Menschenhass und Reue), while Richard Suett played the comic lawyer Timothy Weazel
- The Dependent (1795)
- First Love (1795)
- The Last of the Family (1797)
- The Village Fete (1797)
- False Impressions (1797)
- A Word for Nature (1798)
- The Sailor's Daughter (1804)
- A Hint to Husbands (1806), which, unlike the, rest, is in blank verse.
The other works printed during his lifetime include:
- The Note of Hand (1774), a farce
- The Princess of Parma (1778)
- Songs for a musical comedy, The Widow of Delphi (1780)
- The Battle of Hastings (1778), a tragedy
- The Carmelite (1784), a romantic domestic drama in blank verse, in the style of John Home's Douglas, furnishing some effective scenes for Sarah Siddons and John Kemble as mother and son
- The Mysterious Husband (1783), a prose domestic drama
- The Days of Yore (1796), a drama
- The Clouds (1797)
- Joanna of Montfaucon (1800)
- The Jew of Mogadore (1808)
His posthumously printed plays (published in 2 vols. in 1813) include:
- The Walloons (comedy, acted in 1782)
- The Passive Husband (comedy, acted as A Word for Nature, 1798)
- The Eccentric Lover (comedy, acted 1798)
- Lovers' Resolutions (comedy, once acted in 1802)
- Confession, a quasi-historic drama
- Don Pedro (drama, acted 1796)
- Alcanor (tragedy, acted as The Arab, 1785)
- Torrendal (tragedy)
- The Sibyl, or The Elder Brutus (afterwards amalgamated with other plays on the subject into a very successful tragedy for Edmund Kean by Payne)
- Tiberius in Capreae (tragedy)
- The False Demetrius (tragedy on a theme which attracted Schiller)
Adaptations
- Aristophanes' Clouds (1798)
- William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (1771)
- Philip Massinger's The Bondman and The Duke of Milan (both 1779).
Novels
- Arundel (1789)
- Henry (1795) – was printed in Ballantyne's Novelists' Library (1821),
- John de Lancaster (1809)
References
- ^ "Cumberland, Richard (CMRT747R)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- required.)
- ^ 'The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland', pub. Parry & McMillan, 1856. pps 318–319.
Sources
- Critical Examination of Cumberland's works (1812) and a memoir of the author based on his autobiography, with some criticism, by William Mudford, appeared in 1812.
- George Paston's Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (1901) includes an account of Cumberland.
- Hermann Theodor Hettner assessed Cumberland's position in the history of the English drama in Litteraturgesch. d. 18. Jahrhunderts (2nd ed., 1865), i. 520.
- Ward, Adolphus William (1911). "Cumberland, Richard (dramatist)". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 622–623. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the