Richard Cumberland (19 February 1731/2 – 7 May 1811) was an Englishdramatist and civil servant. In 1771 his hit play The West Indian was first staged. During the American War of Independence he acted as a secret negotiator with Spain in an effort to secure a peace agreement between the two nations. He also edited a short-lived critical journal called The London Review (1809). His plays are often remembered for their sympathetic depiction of characters generally considered to be on the margins of society.
Cumberland resigned his fellowship when he married his cousin Elizabeth Ridge in 1759, after having been appointed through Lord Halifax as "crown-agent for Nova Scotia."[2]
When Lord George Germain in 1775 acceded to office, Cumberland was appointed secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, a post he held till Edmund Burke's reforms abolished it in 1782.
Mission to Madrid
In 1780, he was sent on a confidential mission to Spain to negotiate a separate peace treaty during the American War of Independence in an effort to weaken the anti-British coalition. Although he was well received by King Charles III of Spain and his minister, the Count of Floridablanca, the question of which nation would hold sway over Gibraltar prevented resolution. Recalled by the government in 1781, Cumberland was refused repayment of his expenses although his advance was insufficient. He was £4500 out ofpocket and never recovered his money. Soon afterward, Cumberland lost his office in Burke's reforms and retired on an allowance of less than half-pay. In 1785, he wrote a defence of his former superior, Character of the late Lord Viscount Sackville.
He took up residence at Tunbridge Wells; but during his last years he mostly lived in London, where he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, after a short oration by his friend Dean Vincent.
Writing career
Cumberland wrote much but has been remembered most for his plays and memoirs. The existence of his memoirs is largely due to his friend, the critic Richard Sharp, (Conversation Sharp) who together with Samuel Rogers and Sir James Burges (Sir James Lamb, 1st Baronet) gave considerable support to the endeavour.[3] The collection of essays and other pieces entitled The Observer (1785), afterwards republished with a translation of The Clouds, was included among The British Essayists.
He is said to have joined Sir James Bland Burges in an epic, the Exodiad (1807), and in a novel, John de Lancaster. Besides these he wrote the Letter to the Bishop of Oxford in vindication of his grandfather Bentley (1767); another to Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, on his proposal for equalizing the revenues of the Established Church (1783); a Character of Lord Sackville (1785), whom in his Memoirs he vindicates from the stigma of cowardice; and an anonymous pamphlet, Curtius rescued from the Gulf, against the redoubtable Dr Parr. He was the author of a version of 50 of the Psalms of David; of a tract on the evidences of Christianity; and of other religious pieces in prose and verse, the former including "as many sermons as would make a large volume, some of which have been delivered from the pulpits." Lastly, he edited a short-lived critical journal called The London Review (1809), intended to be a rival to the Quarterly, with signed articles.
His plays, published and unpublished, totalled fifty-four. About 35 of these are ordinary plays, to which have been added four operas and a farce; about half are comedies. His favourite mode was the "sentimental comedy," which combines domestic plots, rhetorical enforcement of moral precepts, and comic humour. He weaves his plays out of "homely stuff, right British drugget," and eschews "the vile Gallic stage"; he borrowed from the style of sentimental fiction of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne.
His favourite theme is virtue in distress or danger, but assured of its reward in the fifth act; his most constant characters are men of feeling and young ladies who are either prudes or coquettes. Cumberland's comic talents lay in the invention of characters taken from the "outskirts of the empire," and intended to vindicate the good elements of the Scots, Irish and colonials from English prejudice. The plays are highly patriotic and adhere to conventional morality. If Cumberland's dialogue lacks brilliance and his characters reality, the construction of the plots is generally skilful, due to Cumberland's insight into the secrets of theatrical effect. Though Cumberland's sentimentality is often wearisome, his morality is generally sound; that if he was without the genius requisite for elevating the national drama, he did his best to keep it pure and sweet; and that if he borrowed much, he borrowed only the best aspects of other dramatists' work.
His first play was a tragedy, The Banishment of Cicero, published in 1761 after David Garrick rejected it; this was followed in 1765 by a musical drama, The Summer's Tale, subsequently compressed into an afterpiece Amelia (1768). Cumberland first essayed sentimental comedy in The Brothers (1769). This play is inspired by Henry Fielding's Tom Jones; its comic characters are the jolly old tar Captain Ironsides, and the henpecked husband Sir Benjamin Dove, whose progress to self-assertion is genuinely comic. Horace Walpole said, that it acted well, but read ill, though he could distinguish in it "strokes of Mr Bentley."
The epilogue paid a compliment to Garrick, who helped the production of Cumberland's second comedy The West-Indian (1771). Its hero, who probably owes much to the suggestion of Garrick, is a young scapegrace fresh from the tropics, "with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch,"—a libertine with generous instincts, which prevail in the end. This early example of the modern drama was favourably received; Boden translated it into German, and Goethe acted in it at the Weimar court. The Fashionable Lover (1772) is a sentimental comedy, as is The Choleric Man (1774), founded on the Adelphi of Terence. Cumberland published his memoirs in 1806–07. George Romney, whose talent Cumberland encouraged, painted his portrait, which is in the National Portrait Gallery.
The Jew (1794), a drama, highly effective when the great German actor Theodor Döring played "Sheva"
The Wheel of Fortune (1795), in which John Philip Kemble found a celebrated part in the misanthropist Penruddock, who cannot forget but learns to forgive (a character declared by August von Kotzebue to have been stolen from his Menschenhass und Reue), while Richard Suett played the comic lawyer Timothy Weazel
The Carmelite (1784), a romantic domestic drama in blank verse, in the style of John Home's Douglas, furnishing some effective scenes for Sarah Siddons and John Kemble as mother and son
^'The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland', pub. Parry & McMillan, 1856. pps 318–319.
Sources
Critical Examination of Cumberland's works (1812) and a memoir of the author based on his autobiography, with some criticism, by William Mudford, appeared in 1812.
George Paston's Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (1901) includes an account of Cumberland.
Hermann Theodor Hettner assessed Cumberland's position in the history of the English drama in Litteraturgesch. d. 18. Jahrhunderts (2nd ed., 1865), i. 520.
.jpg)
