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Autograph manuscript of Sebastian, or Virtue Rewarded, signed by the 9-year-old Elizabeth Barrett, later Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

This is a chronological list of books with the subtitle Virtue Rewarded. Subtitles are a common feature of English literary works of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially plays. A subtitle will usually offer a generalization or morality drawn from the work's plot. This convention is sometimes made fun of in the early 17th century, as in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or, What You Will. In the sententious 18th century, subtitles will normally point a serious morality, even in case of comic works. An example is "Virtue Rewarded", a reminder or boast to reader/audience that the neoclassical principle of poetic justice will be upheld by the plot. With changing cultural perceptions, such a principle has again become a joke, as witness the last three items on this list. Note the rhyme Sordid/Rewarded in the title of Winifred Phelps' "Melodrama", and the comic density of literary reference brought into play by Cook, Sullivan, and Monamarco, implying that dissertation-writing is governed both by the poetic justice principle—virtue rewarded—and by the depressive symptoms described in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1622).

[edit] List

• Colley Cibber, Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded (comedy, 1696), a notable box-office success in its day, features a patient and resourceful wife who reclaims her rakish husband and is rewarded with his reform and returning affections. Its mix of farce, sentimentality, and steamy bedroom scenes has not stood the test of time, and theatre historians today remember it, if at all, because of John Vanbrugh's sequel The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, still a stage favourite, where the husband returns to polygamy.
  • Virtuous person: married woman
  • Virtue: chastity and wifely tact.
  • Reward: return of straying husband.

• Charles Shadwell, Irish Hospitality, or, Virtue Rewarded (comedy, first published 1720; not known if it was ever acted) is one of the lesser-known works of the inconspicuous playwright Charles Shadwell, son of the far more renowned playwright and poet laureate Thomas Shadwell. There are no extremes of virtue or vice in this play, which rather celebrates the 18th-century concept of "good nature", personified by the middle-aged squire Sir Patrick Worthy. Spirited young women are commended and the Irish squirarchy's lumpish obsession with creature comforts is upbraided. Sir Patrick arranges suitable marriages for his entire family, without regard to money, and the high point of the action is his benevolent tricking of his unprincipled son Charles into making an honest woman out of a serving-girl he (Charles) has debauched.
  • Virtuous person: middle-aged Irish squire.
  • Virtue: good nature, thoughtful fatherhood.
  • Reward: chorus of praise, children well settled.

Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, illustration from the 1742 edition.

• Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (novel, 1740) tells in the first person the story of the virtuous lady's maid Pamela and the modest and agonized delicacy, yet determination, with which she rebuffs and reforms her aristocratic would-be seducer Mr B and is rewarded with marriage to him. Told through Pamela's probingly introspective letters and diary, Pamela is generally considered a seminal influence on the direction the novel form was to take towards psychological analysis and self-examination. The illustration right shows Mr B snatching Pamela's first letter to her parents and reading it.
  • Virtuous person: 15-year-old lady's maid.
  • Virtue: humility and embattled chastity.
  • Reward: grand marriage.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sebastian, or, Virtue Rewarded (poem, ca. 1815) is an unpublished poem by the 9-year-old Elizabeth Barrett, later famous as the author of Sonnets From the Portuguese and the feminist classic Aurora Leigh. Note that the ambitious young Elizabeth signs herself F. R. (Fellow of the Royal Society) on the cover shown top right.
• John Charles Tarver, James, or, Virtue Rewarded (novel, 1896)
• Winifred Phelps, Temptation Sordid, or, Virtue Rewarded, A Melodrama (play, 1960)
• David Slavitt, Rochelle, or, Virtue rewarded (novel, 1966)
• Stanley Cook, William Sullivan, and Fred Moramarco, Anatomy of Melancholy, or, Virtue Rewarded: The Making of the Dissertation (textbook, 1969).

[edit] References

• Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, ed. Robert Lowe, 1889). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, vol.1, vol 2. London. This is a scholarly 19th-century edition of Cibber's autobiography, which is the best source for the circumstances surrounding the composition and première of Love's Last Shift.
• Highfill, Philip Jr, Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward (1973–93). "Shadwell, Charles", in Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 volumes. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Shadwell, Charles, Irish Hospitality, or, Virtue Rewarded is available, through subscription only, in the Chadwyck-Healey English Drama collection.
• Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus. Contains a classic sociological study of Pamela.