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Colley Cibber

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre; Writers and
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   Colley Cibber, actor, playwright, Poet Laureate, first British
   actor-manager, and head Dunce of Alexander Pope's Dunciad.
   Enlarge
   Colley Cibber, actor, playwright, Poet Laureate, first British
   actor-manager, and head Dunce of Alexander Pope's Dunciad.

   Colley Cibber ( 6 November 1671 – November 12, 1757) was an English
   playwright, actor, and Poet Laureate. His status as the first in a long
   line of actor-managers established his importance in theatre history,
   and his colorful memoir (Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber) was key
   in starting the British tradition of rambling autobiographical style.
   Cibber's works provide valuable documentation of London stage practices
   for today's historians, and two of his original comedies are
   particularly useful records of the changing culture and ideology of the
   early 18th century.

   Cibber wrote some original plays for performance by his own company at
   Drury Lane and adapted many more. His work received frequent criticism
   for "miserable mutilation" of "hapless Shakespeare, and crucify'd
   Molière" ( Alexander Pope). He regarded himself as first and foremost
   an actor, and though his persistent efforts as a tragic performer were
   widely ridiculed, he enjoyed success in portraying humorous and foppish
   characters.

   Contemporaries frequently accused Cibber of tasteless theatrical
   productions and shady business dealings. Social and political
   opportunism was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far
   better writers, and despite the award his poetic works are considered
   nugatory by modern scholars. In addition, Cibber's brash and
   extroverted personality offended many, and he rose to herostratic fame
   as the chief target of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.

Life

   Cibber was born in London, his father being Caius Gabriel Cibber, a
   distinguished sculptor originally from Denmark. Colley's parents wanted
   him to become a clergyman, but he was irresistibly attracted to the
   stage and in 1690 began working as an actor at the Drury Lane theatre,
   a more insecure and socially much inferior job. "Poor, at odds with his
   parents, and entering the theatrical world at a time when players were
   losing their power to businessmen-managers" (Biographical Dictionary of
   Actors), Cibber nevertheless married early in life (1693), to Katherine
   Shore. He had a large number of children, for whom his parental feeling
   seems to have been mostly casual. Most certainly received short shrift
   in his will. His only son to reach adulthood, Theophilus Cibber, became
   an actor at Drury Lane, and was an embarrassment to his father because
   of his scandalous private life. Colley's youngest daughter Charlotte
   Charke also followed in her father's footsteps (though she too fell out
   with him) as did others in the family. In his later years Cibber acted
   in productions with his own grandchildren. Catherine, the eldest
   daughter, seems to have been the dutiful one who looked after Cibber in
   old age and was duly rewarded at his death with most of his estate.

   After an inauspicious start as an actor, Cibber eventually became a
   popular comedian, wrote and adapted many plays, and rose to become
   himself one of the newly empowered businessmen-managers. He took over
   the management of Drury Lane in 1710 and was as theatre manager highly
   commercially, if not artistically, successful. In 1730, he was made
   Poet Laureate, an appointment which attracted widespread scorn,
   particularly from Alexander Pope and other Tory satirists.

   When he was seventy-three years old he made his last appearance on the
   stage as Pandulph in his own Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John
   (Covent Garden, 15 February 1745), a miserable paraphrase of
   Shakespeare's play. He died in 1757.

Cibber's autobiography

   "Uniting the self-sufficiency of youth with the garrulity of age."
   "Uniting the self-sufficiency of youth with the garrulity of age."

   Cibber's colourful autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Colley
   Cibber (1740), pioneered the truly personal autobiography, and
   inaugurated a distinctive British tradition of chatty, meandering,
   anecdotal memoirs. At the time of writing the word "apology" meant a
   statement in defence of ones' actions rather than a statement of regret
   for having transgressed.

   Cibber wrote in detail about his time in the theatre, especially his
   early years as a young actor at Drury Lane in the 1690s, giving a vivid
   account of the cutthroat theatre company rivalries and chicanery of the
   time, as well as providing pen portraits of the actors he knew. The
   Apology is notoriously vain and self-serving, as both contemporaries
   and posterity have enjoyed pointing out (see Barker). For the early
   part of Cibber's career, it is also unreliable in respect of chronology
   and other hard facts, understandably, since he was writing down his
   recollections fifty years after the events, apparently without the help
   of any journal or notes. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable source for
   the theatre history of the Restoration and early 18th-century period,
   for which documentation is otherwise scanty. Because he worked with
   many actors from the early days of Restoration theatre, such as Thomas
   Betterton and Elizabeth Barry (albeit at the end of their careers) and
   lived to see the ultra-modern David Garrick perform, he is a
   fascinating bridge between a mannered and a more naturalistic style of
   performance.

   The self-complacency of Cibber's Apology infuriated some of his
   contemporaries, notably Pope, but generations of readers have found it
   an amusing and engaging read, "uniting the self-sufficiency of youth
   with the garrulity of age" and expressive of Cibber's outgoing
   personality, which was always "happy in his own good opinion."( William
   Hazlitt, quoted by Robert Lowe in the introduction to the Apology).

Cibber as actor

   Anne Bracegirdle. "I had but a Melancholy Prospect of ever playing a
   Lover with Mrs. Bracegirdle."
   Enlarge
   Anne Bracegirdle. "I had but a Melancholy Prospect of ever playing a
   Lover with Mrs. Bracegirdle."

   Cibber began his career as an actor at Drury Lane in 1690, with little
   success for several years. "The first Thing that enters into the Head
   of a young Actor", he wrote in his autobiography half a century later,
   "is that of being a Heroe: In this Ambition I was soon snubb'd by the
   Insufficiency of my Voice; to which might be added an uninform'd meagre
   Person… with a dismal pale Complexion. Under these Disadvantages, I had
   but a melancholy Prospect of ever playing a Lover with Mrs.
   Bracegirdle, which I had flatter'd my Hopes that my Youth might one Day
   have recommended me to." At this time the London stage was in something
   of a slump after the glories of the early Restoration period, and the
   two theatre companies had been merged into a monopoly, leaving actors
   in a weak negotiating position and basically at the mercy of the
   dictatorial manager Christopher Rich. When the senior actors rebelled
   and established a cooperative company of their own in 1695, Cibber
   "wisely", as the Biographical Dictionary of Actors puts it, stayed with
   the remnants of the old company, "where the competition was less keen".
   He had still after five years not been very successful in his chosen
   profession, and there had been no heroic parts and no love scenes.
   However, the return of two-company rivalry created a sudden demand for
   new plays, and Cibber seized this opportunity to launch his career by
   writing a comedy with a big, flamboyant part for himself to play. He
   scored a double triumph: his comedy Love's Last Shift, or Virtue
   Rewarded (1696) was a great success, and his own uninhibited
   performance as the Frenchified fop Sir Novelty Fashion delighted the
   audiences. His name was made, both as playwright and as comedian.
   Young Colley Cibber in the role of Lord Foppington.
   Enlarge
   Young Colley Cibber in the role of Lord Foppington.

   Later in life, when Cibber himself had the last word in casting at
   Drury Lane, he wrote, or patched together, several tragedies that were
   tailored to fit his continuing hankering after playing "a Heroe". But
   his performances of such parts never pleased audiences, which wanted to
   see him typecast as an affected fop, a kind of character that fitted
   both his private reputation as a vain man, his exaggerated, mannered
   acting style, and his habit of ad libbing.
   A break with Cibber's melodrama tradition: David Garrick's innovative
   realistic performance as Richard III.
   Enlarge
   A break with Cibber's melodrama tradition: David Garrick's innovative
   realistic performance as Richard III.

   His tragic efforts were consistently ridiculed by contemporaries: when
   Cibber in the role of Richard III makes love to Lady Anne, wrote the
   Grub Street Journal, "he looks like a pickpocket, with his shrugs and
   grimaces, that has more a design on her purse than her heart". His most
   famous part for the rest of his career remained that of Lord Foppington
   in The Relapse, a sequel to Cibber's own Love's Last Shift but written
   by John Vanbrugh. Pope mentions the audience jubilation that always
   used to greet the small-framed Cibber's donning of Lord Foppington's
   enormous wig, which would be ceremoniously carried on stage in its own
   sedan chair.

   Cibber loved to act. After he had sold his interest in Drury Lane in
   the mid-1730s (see below) and was a wealthy man of sixty-five, he still
   returned to the stage a number of times to play the classic fop parts
   of Restoration comedy that audiences appreciated him in: Lord
   Foppington in Vanbrugh's Relapse, Sir Courtly Nice in John Crowne's Sir
   Courtly Nice, and Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's Man of Mode.
   These were the kind of parts where affectation and mannerism were
   positively desirable; but in tragedy, audiences were at this time being
   entranced by the innovatively naturalistic acting of the rising star
   David Garrick, and wanted less than ever to see Cibber play a hero.

Cibber as playwright

   Cibber's comedies Love's Last Shift (1696) and The Careless Husband
   (1704) are early heralds of a massive shift in audience taste, away
   from the intellectualism and sexual frankness of Restoration comedy and
   towards the conservative certainties and gender role backlash of
   exemplary or sentimental comedy. In particular, according to Parnell,
   Love's Last Shift illustrates Cibber's opportunism at a moment in time
   before the change was assured: fearless of self-contradiction, he puts
   something for everybody into his first play, combining the old
   outspokenness with the new preachiness.

   Neither Cibber's adaptations nor his own original plays have stood the
   test of time, and hardly any of them have been staged or reprinted
   after the early 18th century. An exception is his popular adaptation of
   Shakespeare's Richard III, which remained the standard stage version
   for 150 years.

   The American actor, George Berrell (1849-1933), in his autobiographical
   "Theatrical and Other Reminiscenses," [unpublished]in speaking of Edwin
   Booth's rendition of Richard III in St. Louis in the 1870, says of
   Cibber's work on Richart III: "Hamlet" was followed by Shakespeare’s
   “Richard III,” not the version generally played—a hodge-podge concocted
   by Colley Cibber, who cut and transposed the original version, and
   added to it speeches from four or five other of Shakespeare’s plays,
   and several really fine speeches of his own. The speech to Buckingham:
   “I tell thee, coz, I’ve lately had two spiders crawling o’er my
   startled hopes”-; the well-known line – “Off with his head! So much for
   Buckingham!” the speech ending with “Conscience, avaunt! Richard’s
   himself again!” and other lines of power and effect were written by
   Cibber, who, with all due respect to the “divine bard,” improved upon
   the original, for acting purposes.

Love's Last Shift

   The central action of Love's Last Shift is a celebration of the power
   of a good woman, Amanda, to reform a rakish husband, Loveless, by means
   of sweet patience and a daring bed-trick whereby she masquerades as a
   prostitute ("Enter Amanda, in an undress") and seduces Loveless without
   being recognized by him. She then confronts him with unanswerable
   logic: he did enjoy the night with her while taking her for a stranger,
   which proves that a wife can be as good in bed as an illicit mistress.
   Loveless is convinced and stricken by this argument, and a rich
   choreography of mutual kneelings, risings and prostrations follows,
   generated by Loveless' penitence and Amanda's "submissive eloquence":
   she kneels down while he stands "amazed", then she falls in a swoon, he
   supports her, he "turns from her" (ashamed), she kneels again, he begs
   her to rise, he embraces her, she weeps, he kneels; she begs him to
   rise. The première audience is said to have wept at this climactic
   scene (Davies, 1783–1784|84). The play was a great box-office success
   and was for a time the talk of the town, in both a positive and a
   negative sense. Some contemporaries regarded it as moving and amusing,
   others as a sentimental tear-jerker, incongruously interspersed with
   sexually explicit Restoration comedy jokes and semi-nude bedroom
   scenes.

   Love's Last Shift is today read only by the most dedicated scholars,
   and mainly for gaining a perspective on Vanbrugh's sequel The Relapse,
   which has by contrast remained a stage favorite. Modern scholars often
   endorse the criticism that was leveled at Love's Last Shift from the
   first, namely that it is a blatantly commercial combination of sex
   scenes and drawn-out sentimental reconciliations (see Hume).

The Careless Husband

   Outstanding wifely tact in The Careless Husband: Lady Easy finds her
   husband asleep with the maid and places her scarf on his head so he
   won't catch cold, but will know that she has seen him.
   Enlarge
   Outstanding wifely tact in The Careless Husband: Lady Easy finds her
   husband asleep with the maid and places her scarf on his head so he
   won't catch cold, but will know that she has seen him.

   The comedy The Careless Husband (1704), generally considered to be
   Cibber's best play, is another example of the retrieval of a straying
   husband by means of outstanding wifely tact, this time in a more
   domestic and genteel register. The easy-going Sir Charles Easy is
   chronically unfaithful to his wife, seducing both ladies of quality and
   his own female servants with insouciant charm. The turning point of the
   action, famous in the annals of British theatre history as "the
   Steinkirk scene", comes when his wife finds him and a maidservant
   asleep together in a chair, "as close an approximation to actual
   adultery as could be presented on the 18th-century stage" (Parnell,
   291). His periwig has fallen off, an obvious suggestion of intimacy and
   abandon on the 18th-century stage, and an opening for Lady Easy's tact.
   Soliloquizing to herself about how sad it would be if he caught cold,
   she "takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head"
   (V.i.21). (A "steinkirk" was a loosely tied lace collar or scarf, named
   after the way the officers wore their cravats at the Battle of
   Steenkirk in 1692.) She steals away, Sir Charles wakes, notices the
   steinkirk on his head, marvels that his wife did not wake him and make
   a scene, and realizes how wonderful she is. The Easys go on to have a
   reconciliation scene which is much more low-keyed and tasteful than
   that in Love's Last Shift, without kneelings and risings, and with Lady
   Easy shrinking with feminine delicacy from the coarse subjects that
   Amanda had broached without blinking. Paul Parnell has analyzed the
   manipulative nature of Lady Easy's lines in this exchange, showing how
   they are directed towards the sentimentalist's goal of "ecstatic
   self-approval" (Parnell, 294).

   The Careless Husband was a great success on the stage and remained a
   repertory play throughout the 18th century. Although it has now joined
   Love's Last Shift as a forgotten curiosity, it kept a respectable
   critical reputation into the 20th century, coming in for serious
   discussion both as an interesting example of doublethink and
   manipulation (Parnell), and as somewhat morally or emotionally
   insightful (Kenny). As late as 1929, the well-known critic F. W.
   Bateson described the play's psychology as "mature", "plausible",
   "subtle", "natural", and "affecting".

Other plays

   Cibber wrote two other original comedies. Woman's Wit (1697) was
   produced under unpropitious circumstances and had no discernible theme
   (see Barker, 30–31); Cibber, not usually shy about any play of his,
   even elided its existence in the Apology. The Lady's Last Stake (1707)
   is a rather bad-tempered reply to female critics of Lady Easy's wifely
   patience in The Careless Husband. It was coldly received, and its main
   interest lies in the glimpse the prologue gives of angry female
   reactions to The Careless Husband, of which we would otherwise have
   known nothing (since all contemporary published reviews of The Careless
   Husband approve and endorse its message). Some women, says Cibber
   sarcastically in the prologue, seem to think Lady Easy ought rather to
   have strangled her husband with her steinkirk:

          "Yet some there are, who still arraign the Play,
          At her tame Temper shock'd, as who should say—
          The Price, for a dull Husband, was too much to pay,
          Had he been strangled sleeping, Who shou'd hurt ye?
          When so provok'd—Revenge had been a Virtue."

   Most of Cibber's plays, listed below, were hastily cobbled together
   from borrowings, or drastically adapted from Shakespeare. His last
   play, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, may serve as an example:
   it was "a miserable mutilation of Shakespeare's King John" (Lowe),
   heavily politicized, and caused such a storm of ridicule during its
   1736–37 rehearsal that Cibber withdrew it. During the 1745 crisis, when
   the nation was in fear of yet another Popish pretender, it was finally
   acted, and this time accepted for patriotic reasons.

Cibber as manager

   Drury Lane playbill, 1725.
   Enlarge
   Drury Lane playbill, 1725.

   Cibber's creation of the combined actor-manager role is important in
   the history of the British stage because he was the first in a long and
   illustrious line that would include such luminaries as Garrick, Henry
   Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Rising from actor at Drury Lane to
   advisor and spy (see Dictionary of Actors) on behalf of the manager
   Christopher Rich, Cibber worked himself by degrees into a position to
   take over the company. With two other actors, Thomas Doggett and Robert
   Wilks, he was able to buy the company outright around 1710 (the events
   are well documented, but the three actors' maneuvering to squeeze out
   previous owners was so lengthy and complex that an approximate date
   must suffice here), and, after a few stormy years of power-struggle
   with the other two, to become in practice sole manager of Drury Lane.
   He wrote no more original plays, though he continued producing
   adaptations and patchwork plays from "hapless Shakespeare, and
   crucify'd Molière" (Pope) for the company, and to act on the stage. He
   thus set a pattern for the line of more charismatic and successful
   actors that were to succeed him in this combination of roles. His
   near-contemporary Garrick, as well as the 19th century actor-managers
   Irving and Tree, would later structure their careers, writing, and
   manager identity around their own striking stage personalities.
   Cibber's forte as actor-manager was, by contrast, the manager side: he
   was a clever, innovative, and unscrupulous businessman who retained all
   his life a love of appearing on the stage, and his triumph was that he
   rose to a position where London audiences had, in consequence of his
   sole power over production and casting at Drury Lane, to put up with
   him as an actor.

   Cibber had learned from the bad example of Rich to be a careful and
   approachable employer for his actors, and was not unpopular with them,
   but made enemies in the literary world by his obvious enjoyment of the
   power he wielded over authors. Many were outraged by his sharp business
   methods, which may be exemplified by the characteristic way he
   abdicated as manager in the mid-1730s: first selling his share for over
   3,000 pounds, he immediately encouraged his scapegrace son Theophilus
   to lead the actors in a walkout to set up for themselves in the
   Haymarket, rendering worthless the commodity he had sold. Cibber's
   application on behalf of his son for a patent to perform at the
   Haymarket was, however, refused by the Lord Chamberlain, who was
   "disgusted at Cibber's conduct" (Lowe).

Cibber as poet

   Cibber's appointment as Poet Laureate in 1730 was widely assumed to be
   a political rather than artistic honour, and a reward for his untiring
   support of the controversial Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole. His
   verses had no admirers even in his own time, and Cibber acknowledges
   quite cheerfully in the Apology that he does not himself think much of
   them. His birthday odes for the Royal family and other duty pieces
   incumbent on him as Poet Laureate came in for particular scorn, and
   these offerings would regularly be followed by a flurry of anonymous
   parodies. In the 20th century, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee
   considered some of Cibber's laureate poems funny enough to be included
   in their classic "anthology of bad verse", The Stuffed Owl (1930).

Cibber as dunce

Pamphlet wars

   From the very beginning of the 18th century, when Cibber first rose to
   being Rich's right-hand man and spy at Drury Lane, his opportunism and
   his brash, thick-skinned personality gave rise to many barbs in print,
   especially against his patchwork plays. The early attacks were mostly
   anonymous, but some have been ascribed to Daniel Defoe and Tom Brown
   (see Lowe). Later, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, James Thomson, Richard
   Blackmore, John Dennis, and Henry Fielding all lambasted Cibber in
   print. The most famous conflict Cibber had was with Alexander Pope, the
   greatest poet of the age. In the first version of his landmark literary
   satire The Dunciad (1728), Pope referred contemptuously to Cibber's
   "past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd, new" plays, produced with "less
   human genius than God gives an ape", and Cibber's elevation to
   laureateship in 1730 further inflamed Pope against him. The selection
   of Cibber for this honour was widely seen as outlandish, at a time when
   Pope, John Gay, Thomson, Ambrose Philips, and Edward Young were all in
   their prime. As one epigram of the time put it:

          "In merry old England it once was a rule,
          The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:
          But now we're so frugal, I'd have you to know it,
          That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet." (Recorded by
          Pope in the 1743 Dunciad).

   That he was selected immediately after a change in the government from
   Tory to Whig was also noticeable. Further, Cibber associated himself
   with Robert Walpole, the highly divisive "first Prime Minister."
   Alexander Pope made Cibber the ultimate hero of the Dunciad.
   Alexander Pope made Cibber the ultimate hero of the Dunciad.

   Pope, mortified by the elevation of Cibber to laureatehood and
   incredulous at the vainglory of his Apology (1740), took every
   opportunity to attack him in his poetry, and easily got the laughers on
   his side. Mostly Cibber replied quite good-humoredly to Pope's
   aspersions ("some of which are in conspicuously bad taste", as Lowe
   points out), but in 1742 he snapped and hit below the belt in an angry
   and damaging pamphlet, A Letter from Mr. Cibber, to Mr. Pope, inquiring
   into the motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be so
   frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's name. In this pamphlet, Cibber's most
   effective ammunition came from a reference in Pope's Epistle to
   Arbuthnot (1735) to Cibber's "whore", which gave Cibber a pretext for
   retorting in kind with a scandalous anecdote about Pope in a brothel.
   "I must own", wrote Cibber, "that I believe I know more of your whoring
   than you do of mine; because I don't recollect that ever I made you the
   least Confidence of my Amours, though I have been very near an
   Eye-Witness of Yours." Since Pope was around four feet tall and
   hunchbacked due to a tubercular infection of the spine he contracted
   when young, Cibber regarded the prospect of Pope with a woman as
   something humorous, and he speaks mockingly of the "little-tiny
   manhood" of Pope. For once the laughers were on Cibber's side, and the
   story "raised a universal shout of merriment at Pope's expense" (Lowe).
   Pope made no direct reply, but took one of the most famous revenges in
   literary history: in the revised Dunciad that appeared in 1743, he
   changed his hero, the King of Dunces, from Lewis Theobald to Colley
   Cibber.

The King of Dunces

   The Dunciad Variorum, 1729.

   The derogatory allusions to Cibber in consecutive versions of Pope's
   mock-heroic Dunciad, from 1728 to 1743, became more elaborate as the
   conflict between the two men escalated, until, in the final version of
   the poem, Pope crowned Cibber King of Dunces. From being merely one
   symptom of the artistic decay of Britain, he was transformed into the
   demigod of stupidity, the true son of the goddess Dulness. Apart from
   the personal quarrel, Pope had reasons of literary appropriateness for
   letting Cibber take the place of his first choice of King, Lewis
   Theobald. Theobald, who had embarrassed Pope by contrasting Pope's
   impressionistic Shakespeare edition (1725) with Theobald's own
   scholarly edition (1726), also wrote Whig propaganda for hire, as well
   as dramatic productions which were to Pope abominations for their
   mixing of tragedy and comedy and for their "low" pantomime and opera.
   However, Cibber was an even better King in these respects, more
   high-profile both as a political opportunist and as the powerful
   manager of Drury Lane, and with the crowning circumstance that his
   political allegiances and theatrical successes had gained him the
   laureateship. To Pope this made him an epitome of all that was wrong
   with British letters. Pope explains in the "Hyper-critics of Ricardus
   Aristarchus" prefatory to the 1743 Dunciad that Cibber is the perfect
   hero for a mock-heroic parody, since his Apology exhibits every trait
   necessary for the inversion of an epic hero. An epic hero must have
   wisdom, courage, and chivalric love, says Pope, and the perfect hero
   for an anti-epic therefore should have vanity, impudence, and
   debauchery. As wisdom, courage, and love combine to create magnanimity
   in a hero, so vanity, impudence, and debauchery combine to make
   buffoonery for the satiric hero.
   "Monstrous Medlies that have so long infested the Stage": Cibber's
   afterpiece / opera / pastoral farce Damon and Phillida. Charlotte
   Charke, Cibber's daughter, here plays Damon as a breeches role.
   Enlarge
   "Monstrous Medlies that have so long infested the Stage": Cibber's
   afterpiece / opera / pastoral farce Damon and Phillida. Charlotte
   Charke, Cibber's daughter, here plays Damon as a breeches role.

   Writing about the degradation of taste brought on by theatrical
   effects, Pope quotes Cibber's own confessio in the Apology":

          "Of that Succession of monstrous Medlies that have so long
          infested the Stage, and which arose upon one another
          alternately, at both Houses [London's two playhouses, Cibber's
          Drury Lane and John Rich's domain Lincoln's Inn's Fields ]... If
          I am ask'd (after my condemning these Fooleries myself) how I
          came to assent or continue my Share of Expence to them? I have
          no better Excuse for my Error than confessing it. I did it
          against my Conscience! and had not Virtue enough to starve".

   Pope's notes call Cibber a hypocrite, and in general the attacks on
   Cibber are conducted in the notes added to the Dunciad, and not in the
   body of the poem. As hero of the Dunciad, Cibber merely watches the
   events of Book II, dreams Book III, and sleeps through Book IV.

   Once Pope struck, Cibber became an easy target for other satirists. He
   was attacked as the epitome of morally and aesthetically bad writing,
   largely for the sins of his autobiography. In the Apology, Cibber
   speaks daringly in the first person and in his own praise. Although the
   major figures of the day were jealous of their fame, self-promotion of
   such an overt sort was shocking, and Cibber offended Christian humility
   as well as gentlemanly modesty. Additionally, Cibber consistently fails
   to see any faults in his own character, praises his vices, and makes no
   apology for his misdeeds, so it was not merely the fact of the
   autobiography, but the manner of it that shocked contemporaries. His
   rather diffuse and chatty writing style, conventional in poetry and
   sometimes incoherent in prose, was bound to look even worse than it was
   when he squared up to a master of style like Pope, causing Henry
   Fielding, who was an actual Justice of the Peace, to issue a bench
   warrant for the arrest of Colley Cibber on a charge of "murder" of "the
   English language". The Tory wits were altogether so successful in their
   satire of Cibber that the historical image of the man himself was
   almost obliterated, and it is as the King of Dunces that he has come
   down to posterity.

Plays

   The plays below were produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane unless
   otherwise stated. The dates given are of first known performance.
     * Love's Last Shift (Comedy, 1696)
     * Woman's Wit (Comedy, 1697)
     * Xerxes (Tragedy, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1699)
     * Love Makes a Man (Comedy, 1701)
     * The School Boy (Comedy, 26 October 1702)
     * She Would and She Would Not (Comedy, 26 November 1702)
     * The Careless Husband (Comedy, 7 December 1704)
     * Perolla and Izadora (Tragedy, 3 December 1705)
     * The Comical Lovers (Comedy, Haymarket, 4 February 1707)
     * The Double Gallant (Comedy, Haymarket, 1 November 1707)
     * The Lady's Last Stake (Comedy, Haymarket, 13 December 1707)
     * The Rival Fools (Comedy, 11 January 1709)
     * The Rival Queans (Comical-Tragedy, Haymarket, 29 June 1710)
     * Ximena (Tragedy, 28 November 1712)
     * Venus and Adonis (Masque, 1715)
     * Bulls and Bears (Farce, 1 December 1715)
     * The Refusal (Comedy, 14 February 1721)
     * Cæsar in Egypt (Tragedy, 9 December 1724)
     * The Provoked Husband (with Vanbrugh, comedy, 10 January 1728)
     * Love in a Riddle (Pastoral, 7 January 1729)
     * Damon and Phillida (Pastoral Farce, Haymarket, 1729)

   Cibber also adapted Shakespeare's Richard III (1700), King John as
   Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John (1745) and Molière's Tartuffe
   as The Nonjuror in 1717.

Literary trivia

   " Kolley Kibber" is the newspaper nom de plume for Fred Hale, a former
   gangster, who returns to Brighton to anonymously distribute cards for a
   newspaper competition and disappears, presumably murdered, at the end
   of the first chapter of the novel Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colley_Cibber"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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