The Plays of Colley Cibber


Book Description

This volume provides the first new edition of Cibber's plays since 1777, and the first edition ever published that includes all of his known plays and that incorporates his extensive and often complex revisions. This modern-spelling edition features a comprehensive general introduction to Cibber's career, and separate introductions for each play, detailing sources, performance data, and publication history. Annotations and textual notes are included to allow for additional study.




Love's Last Shift, etc


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Love's Last Shift


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Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747


Book Description

In the first half of the eighteenth century, a new comic plot formula dramatizing the moral reform of a flawed protagonist emerged on the English stage. The comic reform plot was not merely a generic turn towards morality or sentimentality, Aparna Gollapudi argues, but an important social mechanism for controlling and challenging political and economic changes. Gollapudi looks at reform comedies by dramatists such as Colley Cibber, Susanna Centlivre, Richard Steele, Charles Johnson, and Benjamin Hoadly in relation to emergent trends in finance capitalism, imperial nationalism, political factionalism, domestic ideology, and middling class-consciousness. Within the context of the cultural anxieties engendered by these developments, Gollapudi suggests, the reform comedies must be seen not as clichéd and moralistic productions but as responses to vital ideological shifts and cultural transvaluations that impose a reassuring moral schema on everyday conduct. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Gollapudi's study shows that reform comedies covered a range of contemporary concerns from party politics to domestic harmony and are crucial for understanding eighteenth-century literature and culture.




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