SOURCE: “Colley Cibber, Love's Last Shift (1696),” in Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 25-33.

In this excerpt from his study of sentimental comedy throughout the eighteenth century, Ellis considers Love's Last Shift as one of the earliest works in the genre, although he argues that only the last two scenes really qualify as truly sentimental.

Out of his necessities as an immigrant's son with no more education than Shakespeare, and as a young actor trying to support a growing family on 30s. a week,¹ Colley Cibber wrote his first play. He was having trouble getting good parts, so he wrote one for himself, Sir Novelty Fashion, a role that is part stage-history (reaching down from the Marquis de Mascarille in Molière's Les Precieuses ridicules [1659] through Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege's The Man of Mode [1676]) and part wish-fulfillment. For Sir Novelty Fashion is everything that...