The Conscious Lovers

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1722

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Dedication-Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Background

Socio-Historical Context: Money and Marriage

One of the major developments in the 18th century was the push toward romantic marriage, rather than socio-political marriage, for members of the upper classes. In the past, marriages were largely a way for elite families to forge alliances and maintain fortunes, while members of the lower classes predominantly married out of custom, love, or the formation of family units. This is why older or mercenary characters in The Conscious Lovers—i.e., Sir Bevil, Sealand, and Cimberton—consider marriages through the older lens, as familial alliances, with wealth and family background as the most important aspects of suitable matches. However, the play’s younger, more sympathetic characters—Bevil Jr., Myrtle, Lucinda, and Indiana—are eager to pursue marriages based on love and attraction.

As the practice of arranged marriages grew less prevalent, portrayals of openly displayed affection became positive rather than negative. In the play, the sexual desire of Tom and Phillis, who represent the relative marital freedom of members of the lower classes, for whom marriage was much more likely to be a matter of choice, is something to be admired rather than rebuked. Lucinda’s envy of Phillis’s passion reflects the social changes that would eventually culminate in the Marriage Act of 1753, which limited the requirement of parental consent only to marriages between people under 21.

Ironically, Richard Steele’s assertion that sentimental comedy was a more morally instructive genre than the more overtly bawdy Restoration period was undercut by later accusations that literature and drama promoting romantic marriages was responsible for the change in social attitudes. Works like The Conscious Lovers and Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740) would later be cited as influencing this change.

Literary Context: Sentimental Comedy

Colley Cibber is credited with writing the first sentimental comedy, Love’s Last Shift in 1696. In writing this work, Cibber wanted move away from what he saw as the lewdness and violence of Restoration comedy toward a theatrical work that privileged wit, emotion, and more conservative sensibilities. Restoration plays were popular with audiences who praised plays that included popular elements of libertinism, such as depictions of heavy drinking, violence, and promiscuity. For instance, plays like William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1673) and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677) were hugely successful and featured sexually explicit discussion, fights, infidelity, and drunkenness. In comparison, Love’s Last Shift and even more so The Conscious Lovers are notably tame, eschewing previous theatrical conventions.

Steele’s argument was that even comedy that ended with immorality being punished ultimately reveled in the immoral acts of its characters, whose antics the audience watched with glee. To him, the eventual punishment did little to prevent these characters from shaping social attitudes toward standards of behavior. In response, Steele wanted to write a play that was both comic and moral, featuring good, upstanding characters that are eventually rewarded for their moral actions. However, this was a mixed success: While his play does eliminate the immoral leading characters that previous plays featured, critics pointed out that The Conscious Lovers failed to be funny; even appreciative audiences often responded to the play as though it were a tragedy. The scene in which Indiana and Sealand are reunited, for example, stood out as a favorite for 18th-century audiences. Later, Steele’s idea of rewarding characters for their morals would become a dominant trend in English literature—one that was immediately satirized by writers who saw it as false piety. For example, Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), in which Pamela is rewarded for her chastity with a wealthy marriage, was almost instantly parodied by Henry Fielding in Shamela, or An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), which portrays the young woman as a schemer intent on a mercenary marriage.