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Colley Cibber (June 11, 1671 — November 12, 1757) was a British actor-manager, playwright, and Poet Laureate. His colorful Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) started a British tradition of personal, anecdotal, and even rambling autobiography. He wrote some plays for performance by his own company at Drury Lane, and adapted many more from various sources, receiving frequent criticism for insensitive butchery of "luckless Shakespeare, and crucify'd Molière". He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed. His importance in British theater history rests on his being the first in a long line of British actor-managers, on the interest of two of his comedies as documents of mutating early 18th-century taste and ideology, and on the value of his autobiography as a source for our knowledge of the 18th century London stage.
Cibber was the target of many attacks for his shady business methods and his brash, extrovert, thick-skinned personality. He rose to herostratic fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.
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[edit] Life
Cibber was born in London, his father being Caius Gabriel Cibber, a distinguished originally Danish sculptor. 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 casual (see Dictionary of Actors). Only two of them survived him, and these barely. His son, Theophilus Cibber, also became an actor at Drury Lane, and was married to the actress and singer Susannah Maria Arne. Theophilus was an embarrassment to his father because of his scandalous private life. Colley's daughter Charlotte Charke became a celebrated cross-dresser.
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 theater 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.
[edit] Cibber's autobiography
Colley Cibber's colorful autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), pioneers the truly personal autobiography, and inaugurates a distinctive British tradition of chatty, meandering, anecdotal memoirs. Cibber writes in detail about his time in the theater, especially his early years as a young actor at Drury Lane in the 1690s, giving a vivid account of the cutthroat theater 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 is writing down his recollections fifty years after the events, apparently without any help from any journal or notes. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable source for the theater 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 theater, 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.
Generations of readers have found the Apology 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" (Hazlitt).
[edit] Cibber as actor
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 theater companies had been merged into a monopoly, giving actors a weak negotiating position. 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 cutthroat competition 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 comedy actor.
Later in life, when Cibber himself had the last word in casting at Drury Lane, he wrote, or patched together, some plays 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 extravagantly affected fop, and 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. Alexander Pope mentions the audience jubilation which 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 65, 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 Dryden's Sir Courtly Nice, and Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's Man of Mode. These were of course the kind of parts where affectation and mannerism were positively desirable; with the new naturalistic acting methods of the rising star David Garrick wowing audiences at the other house, London wanted less than ever to see Cibber play a hero.
[edit] Cibber as playwright
Cibber's comedies Love's Last Shift (1696) and The Careless Husband (1704) are historically significant as 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, 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 either 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.
[edit] 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 where 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—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 the purpose of gaining a perspective on John Vanbrugh's sequel The Relapse, which has by contrast remained a stage favorite. Modern scholars often endorse the criticism that was levelled 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).
[edit] The Careless Husband
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 theater 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, a pretty 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 floppy lace collar or scarf, named after the way the officers wore their cravats at the battle of Steenkirk in 1693.) 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 has always unobtrusively been ("Now I reflect... A crowd of recollected Circumstances confirm me"). 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 true 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".
[edit] 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 earlier play, 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 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.
[edit] Cibber as manager
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 which would include such luminaries as David 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' manoeuvering 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 "luckless 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 David Garrick, as well as the 19th-century actor-managers Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, would later structure their careers, writing, and managership 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 Christopher Rich to be a careful and accessible 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 and frequently dishonest business methods, which may be examplified 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 theater was, however, refused by the Lord Chamberlain, who was "disgusted at Cibber's conduct" (Lowe).
[edit] Cibber as poet
Cibber's appointment as Poet Laureate in 1730 was widely assumed to be a political rather than artistic honor. His verses had no admirers even in his own time, and Cibber acknowledges quite cheerfully in the Apology that he doesn't himself think much of them. His Birthday Odes for the Royal family and similar duty pieces incumbent on him as Poet Laureate have come in for particular scorn, and extracts from them appear in Wyndham Lewis' and Charles Lee's classic The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (1930).
[edit] Cibber as Dunce
There are, in effect, two Colley Cibbers. The man himself has been obscured by the character left of him by Alexander Pope, who made Cibber the hero of the four-book version of his mock-epic poem Dunciad. Colley Cibber the Dunce has a life almost in competition with Colley Cibber the author and actor-manager.
According to a pamphlet Cibber published in 1742, entitled "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", Pope's enmity for him began with the staging of the farce Three Hours After Marriage by Pope, John Gay and John Arbuthnot in 1716. In this play Cibber, intriguingly, acted the part of Plotwell, which was a satire on himself as playwright. The play was hissed, and in another play acted shortly afterwards, Cibber ad-libbed a jibe at the Gay-Pope-Arbuthnot flop. Outraged, Pope "came behind the scenes, with his lips pale and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult", but Cibber unrepentantly vowed to repeat his ad-lib at every subsequent performance. From that day, Pope took every opportunity to lampoon Cibber, finally targeting him in one of the great lampoons of British literary history, the Dunciad.
Most of Cibber's published replies to attacks by Pope are very good-humored, but the 1742 pamphlet already mentioned is a notable exception. In the 1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope had sneered at Cibber's sycophantic associations with aristocrats and at his sex life, in claiming that his own attacks never really harmed him: "Whom have I hurt? … has not Colley still his lord and whore?" Cibber, stung, retorted with a scandalous anecdote about Pope in a brothel, claiming to have saved him from infection by pulling him off an unsafe woman: "I must own, 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 Alexander 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 having by his action saved for posterity the great translation of Homer on which Pope was engaged. Pope was the first aggressor, but Cibber's revenge was very effective and nasty. Samuel Johnson, who mentions the incident in his Life of Pope, reports an eyewitness account by the young Samuel Richardson of Pope's rage and distress at Cibber's indiscretion. Pope made no direct reply, but took one of the most famous revenges in literary history: in the four-book revision of The Dunciad that appeared the year after, he changed the hero from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber.
Pope's own version of the quarrel is different. In the notes to the Dunciad B, he says that Cibber's pamphlet letter had been sent privately before publication and that it had been written not in response to the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, but, in fact, due to the publication of the fourth book of the new Dunciad. In other words, Pope portrays Cibber's letter, and especially the publication of it, as an ill-natured personal attack, and he quotes at length from the letter to demonstrate the unworthiness of Cibber.
[edit] Pope's Dunciad
Colley Cibber was the second "King of the Dunces" in Pope's poem. The first had been Lewis Theobald in 1728 and 1732. However, Pope had other poets he classified as dunces, and scholars today use the collective term "the Dunces" to refer to those enemies of Pope's whose fame (except among specialists of the era) is solely from Pope's attack. John Dennis, theater critic, was the first marked out by Alexander Pope, and he was followed by Ambrose Philips the poet, William Wotton the critic, Richard Bently the classicist, Elkanah Settle the playwright, Lewis Theobald the editor, and many others.
Pope had already attacked Cibber in the 1728 Dunciad, where, in Book I, the goddess Dulness shows her new king, Lewis Theobald,
- "How, with less reading than makes felons 'scape,
- Less human genius than God gives an ape,
- Small thanks to France and none to Rome or Greece,
- A past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd, new piece,
- 'Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Congreve, and Corneille,
- Can make a Cibber, Johnson, or Ozell." (I, 235—40)
Pope's first attack on Cibber in 1728 was as a patchwork author. He decried Cibber's custom of reviving old plays and "improving" them, in particular of borrowing plots and poetry from French sources in preference to Classical literature, and of butchering Shakespeare. In the 1732 Dunciad Variorum, he aggravates the satire with a note quoting Jacob Tonson as saying that Cibber is a slight person of lively conversation and energy but whose poetry and plays were improved by the help of his friends. Pope then takes an extra dig at Cibber by saying that Cibber was "particularly admirable in tragedy" (a genre that Cibber had, in fact, repeatedly lost face by attempting).
Whether Cibber's own account of the origins of the quarrel are accurate or not, two things happened between 1728 and 1743. One was the letter that Cibber wrote in response to Pope's publication of a stand-alone version of Book IV of the Dunciad, where Cibber was made Dulness's son, and the other was Cibber's Apology. Both aggravated the sore relationship, and both contributed to Cibber's transformation from merely a symptom of artistic decay to the demigod of stupidity.
In the 1732 Dunciad, the goddess Dulness is attempting to spread her dominion from odes and state poetry (which she already controls) and political writing to the stage. Pope's first choice of King, Lewis Theobald, was a bridging figure who had a place in political hack writing and theater writing, but Colley Cibber fits the task much more completely. Further, as Pope writes in the Hyper-critics of Ricardus Aristarchus prefatory to the Dunciad B, Cibber's Apology exhibits every trait necessary for the inversion of an epic hero. Pope says that an epic hero must have wisdom, courage, and chivalric love, and the perfect hero for an anti-epic therefore should have vanity, impudence, and debauchery. As wisdom, courage, and love combine to create magmanimity in a hero, so vanity, impudence, and debauchery combine to make buffoonery for the satiric hero.
When Pope made Cibber the King of Dunces in the 1743 Dunciad, he left most of the poem unchanged, with few specific, new attacks on Cibber the man in the first three books. Indeed, Cibber's account of the origins of the quarrel is less supported than one would suppose, for Pope only has one reference to Cibber and Three Hours After Marriage. Most of the references and condemnation come from Cibber's Apology. However, in the section on the degradation of taste brought on by theatrical effects, where Cibber and John Rich were damned from the beginning, he quotes Cibber's own condemnation in his Apology" of "that Succession of monstrous Medlies that have so long infested the Stage, and which arose upon one another alternately, at both Houses [Drury Lane and 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 draws the obvious inference that Cibber was a hypocrite. In general, the attacks on Cibber are conducted in the notes added to the Dunciad, and Cibber is not attacked very specifically in the body of the poem. As hero of the Dunciad, he merely watches the events of Book II, dreams Book III, and sleeps through Book IV.
[edit] Other attacks on "Cibber the dunce"
Pope was not alone in the attack on Cibber. From the very beginning of the 18th century, when Cibber first rose to being Christopher 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. The early attacks were mostly anonymous, but some have been ascribed to Daniel Defoe and Tom Brown (see Lowe). With the laureateship in 1730, Cibber's Birthday Odes to the Royal family began to be gleefully awaited and regularly followed by a flurry of anonymous parodies. Jonathan Swift, John Gay, James Thomson, Richard Blackmore, John Dennis, and, later, Henry Fielding all lambasted Cibber in print. Today, the figures known as "the Dunces" are remembered more as the victims of satire than as authors in their own right, but Cibber stands above the rest in two respects.
First, unlike other that of other "Dunces", Cibber's work has had lasting importance. His Apology has filled the theater history of the Restoration and early 18th century period with living detail, which without Cibber's scribbling itch would not exist for us today. Secondly, also unlike the other dunces, Colley Cibber remained a target of Tory satirists for more than one generation. As for why he was even posthumously such a favored satirical victim, two things set Cibber up for lasting scorn. First, his Apology offended many with its semblance of vainglory. Second, his winning the post of Poet Laureate seemed to the other authors to be a political appointment and without worthiness. At a time with Alexander Pope, John Gay, James Thomson, Ambrose Philips, and Edward Young all in their prime, the selection of Colley Cibber seemed outlandish. As one epigram at 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 Dunciad B).
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." Pope was mortified by the elevation of Cibber, but so, of course, were all the other writers who considered Cibber far less than the best writer, and the fact that he was not primarily a poet and had not proven himself as a poet only made matters worse.
Long after Cibber's appointment to the laureateship, though, he was attacked as the epitome of aesthetically and morally 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 by speaking of himself and others. 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. There are numerous examples of offensive boasting in the Apology that were cited by later authors for their crudity or vainglory. For parental neglect, he says, "my muse and my spouse were equally prolific; that the one was seldom the mother of a Child, but in the same year the other made me the father of a Play. I think we had a dozen of each sort between us; of both which kinds some died in their Infancy." Such glib jesting offended both gentlemanly and religious codes of behavior.
Once Pope struck, Cibber became an easy target for future satirists, and Cibber's association with Robert Walpole made him culpable for Walpole even as it allowed satirists to attack Walpole (and Walpole's stance on the arts that had been shown in unpopular measures like the Licensing Act of 1737) through Cibber. Henry Fielding, who was an actual Justice of the Peace, issued a bench warrant (under the name of Captain Hercules Vinegar) for the arrest of Colley Cibber on a charge of "murder" of "the English language." The Tory wits were so successful in their satire of Cibber that he has come down to the modern age almost only as a Dunce. Although contemporary scholars have attempted to re-examine the "dunces" in general, Cibber's works retain interest primarily only as historical documents, rather than as works of literature.
[edit] Plays
The plays below were produced at the Drury Lane theater 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.
[edit] References
- Barker, R. H. (1939). Mr Cibber of Drury Lane. New York.
- Bateson, F. W. (1929). English Comic Drama. Oxford.
- 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 edition, containing a full account of Cibber's long-running conflict with Alexander Pope at the end of the second volume, and an extensive bibliography of the pamphlet wars in which Cibber was involved.
- Highfill, Philip Jr, Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward (1973–93). Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 volumes. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Kenny, Shirley Strum (1977). "Humane comedy". Modern Philology, 75, 29—43.
- Lewis, D. B. Wyndham, and Lee, Charles (first published 1930, Everyman Classic 1984). The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse. London: Dent.
- Parnell, Paul (1963). "The sentimental mask". PMLA, 57, 519—34.
- Pope, Alexander (ed. John Butt, 1963). The Poems of Alexander Pope. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by: Laurence Eusden |
British Poet Laureate | Succeeded by: William Whitehead |
