Richard Cumberland, who has been called the most insistent of the sentimentalists, the grandfather of melodrama, the founding ancestor of the problem play, began his literary career in 1744 when he enrolled at Westminster School and then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1747. No doubt greatly influenced by his maternal grandfather, the great classical scholar Dr. Richard Bentley, Richard Cumberland set about mastering the classics. When Oliver Goldsmith dubbed him the Terence of England in The Retaliation (1771), it is small wonder Cumberland was so pleased as to overlook the implications of the rest of the portrait, which suggested that he failed to imitate nature in his plays, that his characters were all paragons beyond satire, and that his comedies were more appropriately tragedies; for first and foremost Cumberland is a classicist.

While his first play, "Shakespear in the Shades," known to us only from the passage Cumberland included...