CUMBERLAND, RICHARD (1732-1811), English dram atist, was born in the master's lodge of Trinity college, Cambridge, on Feb. 19, 1732. He was the great-grandson of the bishop of Peterborough; and his father, Dr. Denison Cumberland, became successively bishop of Clonfert and of Kilmore. His mother was Joanna, the youngest daughter of the great scholar Richard Bent ley, and the heroine of John Byrom's once popular little eclogue, Colin and Phoebe. Cumberland was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree as tenth wrangler in 175o. He had just begun to read for his fellowship, when he was offered, and accepted, the post of private secretary to the earl of' Halifax, first lord of trade and planta tions in the duke of Newcastle's ministry. In 1761 he accompanied his patron (who had been appointed lord-lieutenant) to Ireland as Ulster secretary and subsequently held other Government posi tions. In 178o he was sent on a confidential mission to Spain, the expenses of which he strove in vain to recover, and soon after retired on an al?owance of less than half-pay. He died in London on May 7, 1811.
Cumberland is remembered by his plays, and, to some extent, by his Memoirs (18o6–o7), which include a long account of his Spanish mission and reminiscences of politicians and of Garrick, Foote and Goldsmith. Cumberland was a good observer of men and manners; but the uneasy self-absorption which Sheridan im mortalized in the character of Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic is apparent enough in this autobiography.
Cumberland's plays, published and unpublished, have been corn puted to amount to fifty-four. About 3 5 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 sentimental comedy. He first essayed sentimental comedy in The Brothers (1769). The theme of this comedy is inspired by Field ing's Tom Jones; its comic characters are the jolly old tar Captain and the henpecked husband Sir Benjamin Dove. The epilogue paid a compliment to Garrick, who helped the production of Cumberland's second comedy The West-Indian (1771), which was afterwards translated into German by Boden; Goethe acted in it at the Weimar court. The Fashionable Lover (1772) is a sentimental comedy of the most pronounced type.
Among his later plays may be mentioned The Natural Son (1785), The Imposters (1789), a comedy of intrigue; The Jew , a serious play; The Wheel of Fortune (1795), in which John Kemble found a famous part in the misanthropist Penrud dock, who cannot forget but learns to forgive (a character de clared by Kotzebue to have been stolen from his Menschenhass and Reue), and a Hint to Husbands (18o6), which, unlike the rest, is in blank verse. The Carmelite (1784), a romantic domestic drama in blank verse, in the style of Home's Douglas, furnished some effective scenes for Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble as mother and son. His posthumously printed plays (published in 2 vols. 1813) include 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 Shake speare's Timon of Athens (1771), Massinger's The Bondman and The Duke of Milan (both 1779). 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, by William Mad ford, appeared in 1812. An excellent account of Cumberland is in cluded in "George Paston's" Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (1901) . Hettner well characterizes Cumberland's position in the his tory of the English drama in Litteraturgesch. d. i8 Jahrhunderts (2nd ed., 1865) , i. 52o. Cumberland's portrait by Romney (whose talent he was one of the first to encourage) is in the National Portrait Gallery.