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The "Swingeing" of Cibber: The Suppression of the
First Edition of The Refusal
by
Rodney L. Hayley
Two editions of Colley Cibber's comedy The Refusal; or, the Ladies Philosophy appeared in 1721. The play was first issued in quarto (Q1) as the last part of Volume II of Cibber's Plays, both volumes of which were delivered to subscribers on July 1 of that year.[1] In mid-November an octavo edition (O1) of The Refusal was released.[2] This edition consists of two issues, one dated 1721, the other 1722.[3] Despite the difference
Surprisingly, newspaper advertisements appearing at the time O1 was first issued name as its printers and sellers those listed on the 1722 issue title-page.[5] Moreover, the advertisements in O1 (1721) hint at a much earlier date of printing than one would expect, given that the octavo was released in November of 1721. For example, in The Daily Courant for October 6 Lintot advertises the publication of the seventh edition of Pope's Essay on Criticism, and the fourth edition of his Ode for Musick on St. Cœcilia's Day; yet on G3v of O1 (1721), Lintot advertises the fifth edition of the former work, and the third of the latter. Another seeming anomaly is presented by the fact that O1's collation (the text begins on B1, with the preliminaries ending on A4v, apparently printed last) suggests that the edition was set from manuscript,[6] and not from the earlier-issued quarto as one would expect. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Q1 was printed from manuscript: its preliminaries begin on the sheet which completes the preceding work in the Plays collection, occupying leaves 3A3 to 3B1 (the text begins on 3B2.)[7]
All these apparently incongruous details can be reconciled, if we assume that Q1, although issued some four and a half months prior to O1, in fact derived from it. A collation of the two editions proves the validity of such an assumption.[8] The two are very similar: the comparison reveals, however, an attempt on the part of Q1's compositors to regularize O1's accidentals, and to correct obvious errors; the few substantive variants in Q1 appear to be attempts to improve the printer's copy, though sometimes the "corrections" pervert the author's intention. For example, Witling's familiar form of address in O1 for Sir Gilbert Wrangle—"Sir Gil."—was surely intended by Cibber, who is throughout the play bent on delineating the fop's insolent familiarity; but the Q1 compositor, thinking "Gil." to be merely a space-saving contraction, expands it to "Gilbert."[9]
Another such "correction" provides more definite proof of Q1's derivation from O1. In O1, lines 28-36 on D1v read as follows:
L. W. The Wisdom of our Ancestors restrain'd such horrid Licences; and, you see, the Laws they made, describ'd them all by the modest Term of Spinsters only.
L. W. But! I'll take care of her at least; and since she is become a publick Mischief, to humble her will be a publick Good: I'll send to Mr. Witling this moment, and invite him to dine here. I desire you will be in the way, Child, and assist me in bringing this Matter to a speedy Conclusion.
Exit.
The above passage is obviously corrupt: probably a speech by Sophronia (with whom Lady Wrangle is conversing in this scene) has been omitted by the compositor. In Q1, the two speeches by Lady Wrangle are joined into one (the exclamation "But!" becomes "But", thus smoothing the transition, and the second speech prefix is dropped). If we assume O1 derives from Q1, we have also to assume that the O1 compositor chose to break up what seems in his conjectured copy a perfectly correct passage, giving each of these newly-formed speeches to the same character, Lady Wrangle. I would suggest such an assumption is at best highly unlikely (nowhere else in O1 do we detect any sign of such irresponsible creativity on the part of the compositors). If, however, we reverse the situation, and assume that Q1 derives from O1, an explanation for the difference between the two texts becomes readily apparent. The Q1 compositor, taking great care to produce adequate texts for the expensive Plays,[10] decided the two consecutive speeches by Lady Wrangle in O1, his copy, were simply one speech, and accordingly considered joining the two to be merely a routine correction.
Once we have decided on the order of O1 and Q1, a more puzzling problem arises: why was O1, though indeed the first edition, not published until some four and a half months after the second? To explain this bibliographic anomaly one must examine the events leading up to, and following, the production of the play. On January 10, 11, and 12, 1720/1, Lincoln's Inn Fields presented No Fools Like Wits,[11] which the Compleat List of all the English Dramatic Poets (1747) attributes to John Gay, observing of the play: "It is an Alteration of a Comedy called the Female Vertuosoes; and acted against Mr. Cibber's Refusal, which was partly taken from the same Play."[12] Cibber's Refusal in fact was not to appear on the Drury Lane boards until February 14, but it was completed as early as January 16, and was probably well known to Gay.[13] His revision of Thomas Wright's old play, with its similar plot to Cibber's, was no doubt intended to expose Cibber as a plagiarist.[14] At this point, the notorious bookseller and printer Edmund Curll joined the skirmish, advertising in the newspapers "No Fools like Wits: Or, the Female Vertuosoes. A Comedy. As it is now Acting at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields. By Mr. Wright."[15] Then early in February, a week before The Refusal was to be produced, Curll decided to cash in on Cibber's as well as Gay's profits: in The Post-Boy for February 7-9 he announced, "Next Week will publish'd in 8vo. the 2nd Edit. of No Fools like Wits, a Comedy; wherein will be marked the Passages which Mr. Cibber has borrow'd from Moliere in his Refusal, or the Ladies Philosophy."
With such unfavourable advance publicity, it is not surprising that the actual production of The Refusal was a failure: after a tempestuous six-day run, from February 14-20, the play was finally forced off the stage. According to one contemporary account, "Mr. Cibber's Enemies shew'd themselves very warmly at the Representation of this Piece, and I think without much Discretion; for they began to hiss it before they had heard it, and I remember very well, began their Uproar, on the first Night, as soon as he appeared to speak the Prologue. However it went on for six Nights, not without Disturbances every one of them."[16] Cibber's "plagiarism" in The Refusal was by now a well-known joke in the town. On February 18, Mist's Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post commented sarcastically on the play's genealogy:
Curll's campaign against Cibber now began to gather momentum. Shortly after the opening of The Refusal Curll released an edition with the imposing title No Fools like Wits: Or, The Female Vertuosoes. A Comedy As it was Acted at the Theatre in Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Or, The Refusal: Or, The Ladies Philosophy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane. The Second Edition.[18] Despite its title, this work was neither Gay's recently-acted play, nor Cibber's; rather, it was merely a verbatim reprint of Wright's 1693 Female Vertuoso's. Curll even includes the 1693 cast-list, and the original dedication (perhaps because in it Wright acknowledges his debt to Molière). In fact, the amusing title-page, a list of the "Cibberiz'd" equivalents to Wright's characters, and a satirical dedication to Cibber comprise the only new material in Curll's edition. In this dedication
Sometime during this period Lintot, Mears, and Chetwood printed The Refusal in octavo, but faced with the advertising campaign for Curll's "pirate" version, they decided to hold back publication until a more advantageous time. By the beginning of July the two-volume Plays was ready to be delivered to its subscribers, and thereafter was offered to the general public. Although Curll's advertisements for his Refusal had ceased, it still seemed unwise to release the octavo edition: Cibber and his printers did not want the Q1 and O1 editions to compete on the same market—at least not until the bulk of the very expensive Plays had been sold.[21]
Nothing more was heard from Curll until October 7; on that date Mist's Weekly Journal printed an amusing letter from him to the editor, in which the bookseller boasted of his dishonest trade practices, and specifically referred to their damaging effect on Cibber:
Cibber's laughter was no doubt genuine. In this minor engagement between two of Pope's dunces, Curll was the aggressor, but Cibber clearly the victor. It is unlikely that Curll succeeded either in embarrassing Cibber, or in reducing his profits. Certainly he forced Cibber's printers to withhold the first edition of The Refusal—and the resulting delay could have been costly. The play featured the machinations of an unscrupulous South Sea director; by November of 1721, when the octavo was finally released, the controversy surrounding the bursting of the Bubble—an extremely hot issue when the play was originally acted—had died down to a certain extent. The vigorous advertising campaign carried on in the newspapers announcing the publishing of O1 may or may not have succeeded in stimulating sales.[24] But the existence of the issue dated 1722 does not necessarily prove that sales dragged on into the following year. As the newspaper advertisements indicate, the 1721 and 1722 issues were published simultaneously. When the octavo was released Lintot had already sold his share in the copy to Woodward (in November and December, 1721, advertisements were jointly placed by Mears, Chetwood, and Woodward for the octavo; during the same period Lintot advertises the Plays, but not the octavo edition of The Refusal). In order to make known his interest in the copy Woodward cancelled the title-page of O1 (1721), replacing it with one which substituted his name for Lintot's; at the same time he replaced the advertisements for Lintot, Mears, and Chetwood with his own. Since the cancellans title-page was printed late in 1721 it was given the date 1722 as a matter of course.[25] The octavo was not, to my
And finally, if Curll hoped to divert Cibber's expected revenues from The Refusal to himself, he was to be sadly disillusioned. By his own testimony, receipts from his pirate Refusal were negligible: "humbled by Adversity," he had to admit in his letter to Mist that the "swingeing" of Cibber, however enjoyable at the time, had in the end brought him "nothing but waste Paper."[27]
Notes
Approximately two-thirds of the known extant copies of O1 are of the 1721 issue. I have examined the Bodleian, Cambridge, and BM copies of O1 (1721), as well as Xerox and microfilm copies obtained from the Texas, Pennsylvania, Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Huntington, Folger Shakespeare, and Newberry libraries. I have examined only a single copy (belonging to the John Rylands library) of the rarer 1722 issue, but the Newberry, Wisconsin, Yale, Chicago, and Northwestern libraries kindly provided bibliographic descriptions of their copies.
The Post-Boy, November 9-11, 11-14, 14-16, and December 16-19; also The Daily Courant, November 10, 13, 15, 17, and December 18, 20.
I have collated thirteen copies of O1 (listed in note 3), and eight copies of Q1 (BM, Bodleian, Cambridge, Leicester, Rutgers, Pennsylvania State, Kentucky, and Stanford).
In John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812), I, 217, the 1721 Plays are described as "beautifully printed."
London Stage, Part 2, 1700-1729, ed. Emmett L. Avery (1960), p. 608. The play was apparently never published: see William H. Irving, John Gay, Favorite of the Wits (1940), p. 189.
Probably by John Mottley, the List was appended to Thomas Whincop's Scanderbeg (1747). Mottley's testimony is not entirely correct: though Cibber's Refusal is, like Thomas Wright's Female Vertuoso's (1693), an adaptation of Molière's Les Femmes Sçavantes, it is not "partly taken" from Wright's play, but rather derives independently from the common Molière source. Mottley's word on the question of Gay's authorship, however, has been generally accepted. D. E. Baker (The Companion to the Playhouse [1764], I, s. v., No Fools Like Wits) also gives the play to Gay, and agrees it was acted "in Opposition to Mr. Cibber's Refusal." These details are followed by the revised Biographia Dramatica (1812), III, 86; Irving (op. cit., p. 188) also accepts the attribution, though he argues that Gay's version must have contained more original material than the Biographia Dramatica seems to imply.
The Daily Post for January 16 announced a subscription for "Two Volumes of PLAYS, Written by Mr. Cibber . . . Vol. II containing . . . V. The Refusal; or, The Ladies Philosophy; a new Comedy now in Rehearsal."
Gay and Cibber had long been enemies: for the background to their quarrel, and for Cibber's satire in The Refusal on Gay and his friends, see my note, "The Scriblerians and the South Sea Bubble: a Hit by Cibber," R.E.S., 24, No. 96 (1973), 452-458.
Mottley's List, p. 197. The playhouse disturbances were probably connected with politics: cf. Baker, op. cit., I, s. v., The Refusal; John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (1832), III, 49; and Cibber's Apology, ed. R. W. Lowe (1889), II, 189.
John Dennis was to continue his attack on The Refusal in The Causes of the Decay and Defects of Dramatic Poetry (1725?): see The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (1943), II, 281.
If indeed there was a "first edition" of this work it is apparently not extant. According to Ralph Straus (The Unspeakable Curll: Being some Account of Edmund Curll, Bookseller; to which is added a full List of his Books [1927], p. 245) Curll had reprinted Wright's play in 1717, entitling it The Female Virtuosoes, or Witty Ladies. Straus comments vaguely, "I am not sure of the date of this first (Curll) edition. I am not even certain that the title is correct. Breval seems to have had something to do with it." I have been unable to locate a copy of this work.
See The Post-Boy for February 23-25, and March 9-11; The Daily Post for April 28, May 5; The Daily Courant, May 10, 17.
The cost of a subscription to the Plays was not advertised, but later the two-volume set retailed for the large sum of "1 l. 15 s." (see The Daily Post, February 2, 1722). The lushness of the edition, "Gold besmear'd / In Quarto Royal," with "fair vermillion'd Leaves" was ridiculed in The Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post for March 3, 1722.
Curll here alludes either to his jailing in 1716, ordered by Westminster after he printed an unauthorized version of Winton's state trial, or to the drubbing given him in the same year by the boys of Westminster School (he had printed without permission an oration by the School's Captain on the death of Dr. Robert South). See Straus, op. cit., pp. 65-76.
Though his letter was not published in Mist's Journal until November 25. Mist apologized for the delay in a prefatory note to Cibber's letter and Curll's rejoinder (both apparently sent in to Mist by Curll): "I heartily beg Pardon of my good Friend Mr. C—rll, for delaying the Publication of two little Epistles he was so kind as to send me, to adorn my Journal with; assuring him, this Misfortune is owing entirely to an Excess of Care, in laying up these Letters so safely that I have not been able to find them again, till after a Month's strict Search; and not to any Negligence in obeying his Commands, which I shall always receive with Pleasure."
According to Nichols (Literary Anecdotes, III, 249n.), "The Rule in general observed among Printers is, that when a Book happens not to be ready for publication before November, the date of the ensuing year is used." It is observable that some printers followed this practice at the time the octavo Refusal was issued; for example, S. Briscoe's edition of Sedley's Works, advertised as "This Day is publish'd" in The Post-Boy for December 2-5, 1721, bears the date 1722 on its title-page (BM copy).
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