Vanbrugh and Cibber: Language, Place, and Social Order in The Relapse

Vanbrugh and Cibber: Language, Place, and Social Order in The Relapse Derek Hughes In an earlier article, I argued that the moral certitudes and simplicities of Love's Last Shift (1696) are reflected in Cibber's use of two linked and traditional topoi: Loveless' recovery of moral identity is a recovery of linguistic rectitude (and of his name) and is also, both literally and figuratively, a homecoming, initiating the recurrent appearance in Cibber's plays of the home as a symbol of moral order.1 In each case, the rectification of the objective, external systems of speech and place suggests that moral error is a deviation from an unambiguously defined and entirely attainable order of life. Vanbrugh, of course, was not fond of unambiguously ordered endings, and his characters often remain in a moral maze, denied the homecoming which Cibber so repeatedly celebrates. As I have argued, imagery of the home is as common and central in Vanbrugh as in Cibber, but the imagery is usually self-negating, and the homes he portrays are centers of incurable familial and moral disorder. Naturally, Vanbrugh's differences from Cibber are most clearly defined in The Relapse (1696), where pessimism about the moral value of homecoming acquires particular explicitness and intricacy and is combined with considerable scepticism about the moral force of language. One of the dominant motifs of The Relapse is the irremediable dislocation of its characters, the celebration of homebound marital joy being perhaps most explicitly inverted in Young Fashion's first glimpse of Sir Tunbelly's house: FASHION But methinks the seat of our family looks like Noah's ark, as DEREK HUGHES, Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of Dryden's Heroic Plays and of numerous articles on Restoration theater. 62 Derek Hughes63 if the chief part on't were designed for the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field. LORY Pray, sir, don't let your head run upon the orders of building here; get but the heiress, let the devil take the house. FASHION Get but the house, let the devil sake [sic] the heiress, I say.2 The first scene of the play is, however, dominated by metaphors of moral and domestic stability, as Loveless deludedly sees his transient reform as a homecoming to virtue and the knowledge of self: How true is that philosophy which says Our heaven is seated in our minds! Through all the roving pleasures of my youth. . . . I never knew one moment's peace like this. . . . The rock of reason now supports my love, On which it stands so fixed____ (Li.1-3, 9, 53-54) His decision to leave the stasis of his "little soft retreat" (Li. 10) is the first dislocation of many. Loveless' first words on reaching London are nevertheless to promise Amanda that they have found another fixed home: "How do you like these lodgings, my dear? For my part, I am so well pleased with 'em, I shall hardly remove whilst we stay in town, if you are satisfied" (ILi.1-3). He keeps the letter of his promise well enough, since he manages to betray his marriage in the temporary marital home, and his progress to renewed infidelity is marked by repeated and ironic play upon the idea of home. Amanda unknowingly persuades her rival "to come and live with me" (II.i.434). Loveless makes his first approach to Berinthia after learning that Amanda is away from home (III.ii.1-2), though on this occasion he is prevented from pursuing his ardor to extremes by the announcement that "my lady's come home" (LTI.ii.115). Nevertheless, it does turn out that the home is the best place to lodge an unsuspected mistress, as Worthy points out to Berinthia in a speech that transforms the home from a locus of fixed marriage to that of a transient ménage à quatre: "the most easy, safe, and pleasant situation for your own amour is the house in which you now are ... we may all four pass the winter very pleasantly" (HLii.190-92, 199). In Love's Last Shift, Amanda's trust...