computed to amount to fifty-four. About 35 of these are regular plays, to which have been added 4 operas and a farce; and about half of the whole list are comedies. The best known of them belong to what he was pleased to term “legitimate comedy,” and to that species of it known as “sentimental.” The essential characteristic of these plays is the combination of plots of domestic interest with the rhetorical enforcement of moral precepts, and with such small comic humour as the author possesses. These comedies are primarily, to borrow Cumberland’s own phraseology, designed as “attempts upon the heart.” He takes great credit to himself for weaving his plays out of “homely stuff, right British drugget,” and for eschewing “the vile refuse of the Gallic stage”; on the other hand, he borrowed from the sentimental fiction of his own country, including Richardson, Fielding and Sterne. The favourite theme of his plays is virtue in distress or danger, but safe of its reward in the fifth act; their most constant characters are men of feeling and young ladies who are either prudes or coquettes. Cumberland’s comic power—such as it was—lay in the invention of comic characters taken from the “outskirts of the empire,” and professedly intended to vindicate from English prejudice the good elements in the Scotch, the Irish and the colonial character. For the rest, patriotic sentiment liberally asserts itself by the side of general morality. If Cumberland’s dialogue lacks brilliance and his characters reality, the construction of the plots is as a rule, skilful, and the situations are contrived with what Cumberland indisputably possessed—a thorough insight into the secrets of theatrical effect. It should be added that, 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, as he undoubtedly did, it was not the vicious attractions of other dramatists of which he was the plagiary.
His début as a dramatic author was made with a tragedy, The Banishment of Cicero, published in 1761 after its rejection by Garrick; 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). The theme of this comedy is inspired by 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, though not altogether original. 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). The hero of this comedy, which 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 in the end prevail. This early example of the modern drame was received with the utmost favour; it was afterwards translated into German by Boden, and Goethe acted in it at the Weimar court. The Fashionable Lover (1772) is a sentimental comedy of the most pronounced type. The Choleric Man (1774), founded on the Adelphi of Terence, is of a similar type, the comic element rather predominating, but philanthropy being duly represented by a virtuous lawyer called Manlove. Among his later comedies may be mentioned The Natural Son (1785), in which Major O’Flaherty who had already figured in The West-Indian, makes his reappearance; The Impostors (1789), a comedy of intrigue; The Box Lobby Challenge (1794), a protracted farce; The Jew (1794), a serious play, highly effective when the character of Sheva was played by the great German actor Theodor Döring; The Wheel of Fortune (1795), in which John Kemble found a celebrated part in the misanthropist Penruddock, who cannot forget but learns to forgive (a character declared by Kotzebue to have been stolen from his Menschenhass und Reue), while the lawyer Timothy Weasel was made comic by Richard Suett; First Love (1795); The Last of the Family (1795); False Impressions (1797); The Sailor’s Daughter (1804); and a Hint to Husbands (1806), which, unlike the rest, is in blank verse. The other works printed during his lifetime include The Note of Hand (1774), a farce; the songs of his musical comedy, The Widow of Delphi (1780); his tragedies of The Battle of Hastings (1778); and The Carmelite (1784), a romantic domestic drama in blank verse, in the style of Home’s Douglas, furnishing some effective scenes for Mrs Siddons and John Kemble as mother and son; and the domestic drama (in prose) of The Mysterious Husband (1783). His posthumously printed plays (published in 2 vols. in 1813) include the comedies of The Walloons (acted in 1782); The Passive Husband (acted as A Word for Nature, 1798); The Eccentric Lover (acted 1798); and Lovers’ Resolutions (once acted in 1802); the serious quasi-historic drama Confession; the drama Don Pedro (acted 1796); and the tragedies of Alcanor (acted as The Arab, 1785); Torrendal; The Sibyl, or The Elder Brutus (afterwards amalgamated with other plays on the subject into a very successful tragedy for Edmund Kean by Payne); Tiberius in Capreae; and The False Demetrius (on a theme which attracted Schiller). Cumberland translated the Clouds of Aristophanes (1797), and altered for the stage Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (1771), Massinger’s The Bondman and The Duke of Milan (both 1779).
In 1806–1807 appeared Memoirs of R. Cumberland, written by himself. Cumberland’s novel, Henry, was printed in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library (1821), with a prefatory notice of the author by Sir Walter Scott. A so-called Critical Examination of Cumberland’s works and a memoir of the author based on his autobiography, with the addition of some more or less feeble criticisms, by William Madford, appeared in 1812. An excellent account of Cumberland is included in “George Paston’s” Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (1901). Hettner well characterizes Cumberland’s position in the history of the English drama in Litteraturgesch. d. 18. Jahrhunderts (2nd ed., 1865), i. 520. Cumberland’s portrait by Romney (whose talent he was one of the first to encourage) is in the National Portrait Gallery. (A. W. W.)
CUMBERLAND, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS, Duke of (1721–1765), son of King George II. and Queen Caroline, was born on the 15th of April 1721, and when five years of age was created duke of Cumberland. His education was well attended to, and his courage and capacity in outdoor exercises were notable from his early years. He was intended by the king and queen for the office of lord high admiral, and in 1740 he sailed as a volunteer in the fleet under the command of Sir John Norris; but he quickly became dissatisfied with the navy, and early in 1742 he began a military career. In December 1742 he was made a major-general, and in the following year he first saw active service in Germany. George II. and the “martial boy” shared in the glory of Dettingen (June 27), and Cumberland, who was wounded in the action, displayed an energy and valour, the report of which in England founded his military popularity. After the battle he was made lieutenant-general. In 1745, having been made captain-general of the British land forces at home and in the field, the duke was again in Flanders as commander-in-chief of the allied British, Hanoverian, Austrian and Dutch troops. Advancing to the relief of Tournay, which was besieged by Marshal Saxe, he engaged that great general in the battle of Fontenoy (q.v.) on the 11th of May. It cannot now be doubted that, had the duke been supported by the allies in his marvellously courageous attack on the superior positions of the French army, Fontenoy would not have been recorded as a defeat to the British arms. He himself was in the midst of the heroic column which penetrated the French centre, and his conduct of the inevitable retreat was unusually cool and skilful.
Notwithstanding the severity of his discipline, the young duke had the power to inspire his men with a strong attachment to his person and a very lively esprit de corps. As a general his courage and resolution were not sufficiently tempered with sagacity and tact; but he displayed an energy and power in military affairs which pointed him out to the British people as the one commander upon whom they could rely to put a decisive stop to the successful career of Prince Charles Edward in the rebellion of 1745–1746. John (Earl) Ligonier wrote of him at this time: “Ou je suis fort trompé ou il se forme là un grand capitaine.”
