Colley Cibber

Colley Cibber as Lord Foppingon in The Relapse (1696) by John Vanbrugh. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Colley Cibber
Born	November 6 1671(1671-Template:MONTHNUMBER-06) Southampton Street, London, England
Died	December 11 1757(1757-Template:MONTHNUMBER-11) (aged 86) Berkeley Square, London, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	actor, theatre manager, playwright, poet
Known for	His autobiography, and comedies of historical interest Appointed Poet Laureate]in 1730

Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 - 11 December 1757) was an English poet, actor, playwright, and manager, who served as Poet laureate.

Life

Overview

Cibber was born in London, son of a Danish sculptor, and educated at Grantham School. Soon after his return to London he took to the stage. Beginning with tragedy, in which he failed, he turned to comedy, and became popular in eccentric roles. In 1696 he brought out his 1st play, Love's Last Shift, and produced in all about 30 plays, some of which were very successful. Among other plays are The Nonjuror (1717) and Woman's Wit. In 1730 he was made Poet Laureate, and wrote some forgotten odes of no merit, also an entertaining autobiography. Pope made him the hero of the Dunciad.

He regarded himself as foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed. Cibber's brash, extroverted personality did not sit well with his contemporaries, and he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, shady business methods, and a social and political opportunism that was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets.

Although Cibber served as Poet Laureate, his poetical work was derided in his time, and has been remembered as being poor. His importance in British theatre history rests on his being a pioneer in a long line of actor-managers, on the interest of 2 of his comedies as documents of evolving early 18th-century taste and ideology, and on the value of his autobiography as a historical source.

Youth

Cibber was born in London on 6 November 1671, the eldest son of sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber.

Sent in 1682 to the free school at Grantham, Lincolnshire, the boy distinguished himself by an aptitude for writing verse. He produced an “Oration” on the death of Charles II.— whom he had seen feeding his ducks in St James’s Park,— and an “Ode” on the accession of James II.

He was removed from school in 1687 on the chance of election to Winchester College. His father, however, had not then presented that institution with his statue of William of Wykeham, and the son was rejected, although through his mother he claimed to be of “founder’s kin.”

The boy went to London, and indulged his passion for the theatre. He was invited to Chatsworth, the seat of William Cavendish, earl (afterwards duke) of Devonshire, for whom his father was then executing commissions, and he was on his way when the news of the landing of William of Orange was received; father and son met at Nottingham, and Colley Cibber was taken into Devonshire’s company of volunteers.

Actor

Cibber served in the bloodless campaign that resulted in the coronation of the Prince of Orange, and on its conclusion presented a Latin petition to the earl imploring his interest. The earl did nothing for him, however, and he enrolled himself (1690) as an actor in Betterton’s company at Drury Lane. After playing “full three-quarters of a year” without salary, as was then the custom of all apprentice actors, he was paid 10 shillings a week. His rendering of the little part of the chaplain in Otway’s Orphan procured him a raise of 5 shillings; and a subsequent impersonation (1694) on an emergency, and at the author’s request, of Lord Touchwood in The Double Dealer, advanced him, on Congreve’s recommendation, to a pound a week.

On this, supplemented by an allowance of £20 a year from his father, he contrived to live with his wife and family — he had married in 1693 — and to produce a play, Love’s Last Shift; or, The fool in fashion(1696). Of this comedy Congreve said that it had “a great many things that were like wit in it”; and Vanbrugh honored it by writing his Relapse as a sequel. Cibber played the part of Sir Novelty Fashion, and his performance as Lord Foppington (the same character renamed, in Vanbrugh’s piece), established his reputation as an actor. In 1698 he was assailed, with other dramatists, by Jeremy Collier in the Short View.

He was an excellent actor, especially in the rôle of the fashionable coxcomb. Horace Walpole said that as Bayes in The Rehearsal he made the part what it was intended to be, the burlesque of a great poet, whereas David Garrick degraded him to a “garretteer.”

Producer / manager

In November 1702 Cibber produced, at Drury Lane, She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not; or, The kind impostor, among his best comedies; and in 1704, for himself and Mrs Oldfield, The Careless Husband, which Horace Walpole classed, with Cibber's Apology, as "worthy of immortality."

In 1706 Cibber left Drury Lane for the Haymarket, but when the 2 companies united 2 years later he rejoined his old theater through the influence of his friend Colonel Brett, a shareholder. Brett made over his share to Wilks, Estcourt and Cibber. Complaints against the management of Christopher Rich led, in 1709, to the closing of the theater by order of the crown, and William Collier obtained the patent. After a series of intrigues Collier was bought out by Wilks, Doggett and Cibber, under whose management Drury Lane became more prosperous than it ever had been. In 1715 a new patent was granted to Sir Richard Steele, and Barton Booth was also added to the management.

In 1717 Cibber produced the Nonjuror, an adaptation from Molière's Tartuffe; the play, for which Nicholas Rowe wrote an abusive prologue, ran 18 nights, and the author received from George I., to whom it was dedicated, a present of 200 guineas. Tartuffe became an English Catholic priest who incited rebellion, and there is little doubt that the Whig principles expressed in the Nonjuror led to Cibber's appointment as poet laureate (1730). It also provoked the animosity of the Jacobite and Catholic factions, and was possibly a cause of Pope's hostility to Cibber. Numerous "keys" to the Nonjuror appeared in 1718.

In 1720 Drury Lane was closed for 3 days by order of the duke of Newcastle, ostensibly on account of the refusal of the patentees to submit to the authority of the lord chamberlain, but really (it is asserted) because of a quarrel between Newcastle and Steele, in which the former demanded Cibber's resignation. In 1726 Cibber pleaded the cause of the patentees against the estate of Sir Richard Steele before Sir Joseph Jekyll, master of the rolls, and won his case.

In 1730 Mrs Oldfield died, and her loss was followed in 1732 by that of Wilks; Cibber now sold his share in the theater, appearing rarely on the stage thereafter. In 1740 he published An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian . . . with an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. "There are few," wrote Goldsmith, "who do not prefer a page of Montaigne or Colley Cibber, who candidly tell us what they thought of the world, and the world thought of them, to the more stately memoirs and transactions of Europe." But beside the personal interest, this book contains criticisms on acting of enduring value, and gives the best account there is of Cibber's contemporaries on the London stage. Samuel Johnson, who was no friend of Cibber, gave it grudging praise.

Writer

Cibber's appointment as Poet Laureate in December 1730 was widely assumed to be a political rather than artistic honour, and a reward for his untiring support of the Whigs, the party of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Most of the leading writers, such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Henry Fielding, were excluded from contention for the laureateship because they were Tories.

Cibber's verses had few admirers even in his own time, and Cibber acknowledged cheerfully that he did not think much of them. His 30 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, some of which Cibber claimed in his Apology to have written himself. 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). However, Cibber was at least as distinguished as his immediate 4 predecessors, 3 of whom were also playwrights rather than poets.

In 1740 he published An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian . . . with an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Cibber's colourful autobiography was described by Salmon in the ODNB as "smug, self-regarding, and cocksure, but also lively, vigorous, and enormously well informed". It went through 4 editions in his lifetime, and more after his death, and generations of readers have found it an amusing and engaging read, projecting an author always "happy in his own good opinion, the best of all others; teeming with animal spirits, and uniting the self-sufficiency of youth with the garrulity of age."

Conflict with Pope

The Dunciad Variorum, 1729. Courtesy Third Floor Rare Books.

In 1742 Cibber was substituted for Theobald as the hero of Pope’s Dunciad. Cibber had introduced some gag into The Rehearsal, in which he played the part of Bayes, referring to the ill-starred farce of Three Hours after Marriage (1717; this play was nominally by John Gay, but Pope and John Arbuthnot were known to have had a hand in it. Cibber refused to discontinue the offensive passage, and Pope revenged himself in sarcastic allusions in his printed correspondence, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and in the Dunciad.

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 men escalated, until, in the final version of the poem, Pope crowned Cibber King of Dunces. From being merely a 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 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. His revisions, however, were considered too hasty by later critics who pointed out inconsistent passages that damaged his own poem for the sake of personal vindictiveness.

Cibber replied with A Letter from Mr Cibber to Mr Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his satirical works to be so frequently fond of Mr Cibber’s name (1742). Cibber scored with an “idle story of Pope’s behaviour in a tavern” inserted in this letter, and gives an account of the original dispute over the Rehearsal.

By the substitution of Cibber for Theobald as hero of the Dunciad, much of the satire lost its point. Cibber’s faults certainly did not include dullness. A new edition contained a prefatory discourse, probably the work of Warburton, entitled “Ricardus Aristarchus, or the Hero of the Poem,” in which Cibber is made to look ridiculous from his own Apology. Cibber replied in 1744 with Another Occasional Letter..., and altogether he had the best of the argument.

Howevr, once Pope struck, Cibber became a 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 fault 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. The contrast caused Henry Fielding to try Colley Cibber on a charge of murder of the English language in the 17 May 1740 issue of The Champion. 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 was as the King of Dunces that he came down to posterity.

Last years

When he was 74 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, 15th of February 1745), a miserable paraphrase of Shakespeare’s play. He died on 11 December 1757.

Writing

Cibber’s reputation has suffered unduly from the depreciation of Pope and Samuel Johnson. “I could not bear such nonsense,” said Johnson of one of Cibber’s odes, “and I would not let him read it to the end.” Fielding attacked Cibber’s style and language more than once in Joseph Andrews and elsewhere.

Apology

File:Colley Cibber Apology small.jpg

The original text of Cibber's Apology is available on wikicommons.

Nevertheless, Cibber possessed wit, unusual good sense and tact; and in the Apology he showed himself the most delicate and subtle critic of acting of his time. “There are few,” wrote Goldsmith, “who do not prefer a page of Montaigne or Colley Cibber, who candidly tell us what they thought of the world, and the world thought of them, to the more stately memoirs and transactions of Europe.” But beside the personal interest, this book contains criticisms on acting of enduring value, and gives the best account there is of Cibber’s contemporaries on the London stage. Samuel Johnson, who was no friend of Cibber, gave it grudging praise (see Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, vol. iii. p. 72).

The text virtually ignores his wife and family, but Cibber wrote 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 cut-throat theater company rivalries and chicanery of the time, as well as providing pen portraits of the actors he knew. The Apology is vain and self-serving, as both his contemporaries and later commentators have pointed out. For the early part of Cibber's career, it is unreliable in respect of chronology and other hard facts, understandably, since it was written 50 years after the events, apparently without the help of a journal or notes. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable source for all aspects of the early 18th-century theatre in London, 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 at the end of their careers, and lived to see David Garrick perform, he is a bridge between the earlier mannered and later more naturalistic styles of performance.

The Apology was a popular work and gave Cibber a good return. Its self-complacency, however, infuriated some of his contemporaries, notably Pope, but even the usually critical Samuel Johnson had to admit that it was "very entertaining and very well done".

Plays

He was frequently accused of plagiarism, and did not scruple to make use of old plays, but he is said to have been ashamed of his Shakespearian adaptations, one of which, however, Richard III (Drury Lane, 1700), kept its place as the acting version until 1821. Cibber is rebuked for his mutilation of Shakespeare by Fielding in the Historical Register for 1736, where he figures as Ground Ivy.

If Cibber had not as much wit as his predecessors, he displayed in his best plays abundant animation and spirit, free from the extreme coarseness of many of his contemporaries, and a thorough knowledge of the requirements of the stage. His most successful comedies kept their place in the acting repertory for a long time.

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Colley Cibber, aged 67

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Drury Lane playbill, 1725

Love's Last Shift

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Love's Last Shift, published 1696

Cibber's comedy Love's Last Shift (1696) is an early herald 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. According to Paul 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 play, combining the old outspokenness with the new preachiness.

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. She masquerades as a prostitute and seduces Loveless without being recognised, and then confronts him with logical argument. Since he enjoyed the night with her while taking her for a stranger, a wife can be as good in bed as an illicit mistress. Loveless is convinced and stricken, and a rich choreography of mutual kneelings, risings and prostrations follows, generated by Loveless' penitence and Amanda's "submissive eloquence". The première audience is said to have wept at this climactic scene. 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 mainly to gain a perspective on Vanbrugh's sequel The Relapse, which has by contrast remained a stage favourite. 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. Cibber's follow-up comedy Woman's Wit (1697) was produced under hasty and unpropitious circumstances and had no discernible theme; Cibber, not usually shy about any of his plays, even elided its name in the Apology. It was followed by the equally unsuccessful tragedy Xerxes (1699). Cibber reused parts of Woman's Wit for The School Boy (1702).

Richard III

Perhaps partly because of the failure of his previous 2 plays, Cibber's next effort was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. 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, but his popular adaptation of Richard III remained the standard stage version for 150 years. The American actor George Berrell wrote in the 1870s that Richard III was:

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.

Richard III was followed by another adaptation, a comedy, Love Makes a Man, which was constructed by splicing together 2 plays by John Fletcher: The Elder Brother and The Custom of the Country. Cibber's confidence was apparently restored by the success of the 2 plays, and he returned to more original writing.

Careless Husband

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Outstanding wifely tact in The Careless Husband: Lady Easy finds her husband asleep with the maid and places her scarf on his head so that he will not 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, known 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". His periwig has fallen off, an obvious suggestion of intimacy and abandon, 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 realises 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 analysed 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".

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 as somewhat morally or emotionally insightful. In 1929, the well-known critic F. W. Bateson described the play's psychology as "mature", "plausible", "subtle", "natural", and "affecting".

Other plays

The Lady's Last Stake (1707) is a rather bad-tempered reply to 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 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, 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.

Many of Cibber's plays, listed below, were hastily cobbled together from borrowings. Alexander Pope said Cibber's drastic adaptations and patchwork plays were stolen from "crucified Molière" and "hapless Shakespeare". The Double Gallant (1707) was constructed from Burnaby's The Reformed Wife and The Lady's Visiting Day, and Centlivre's Love at a Venture. In the words of Leonard R. N. Ashley, Cibber took "what he could use from these old failures" to cook up "a palatable hash out of unpromising leftovers". The Comical Lovers (1707) was based on Dryden's Marriage à la Mode. The Rival Fools (1709) was based on Fletcher's Wit at Several Weapons. He rewrote Corneille's Le Cid with a happy ending as Ximena in 1712. The Provoked Husband (1728) was an unfinished fragment by John Vanbrugh that Cibber reworked and completed to great commercial success.

The Nonjuror (1717) was adapted from Molière's Tartuffe, and features a Papist spy as a villain. Written just two years after the Jacobite Rising of 1715, it was an obvious propaganda piece directed against Roman Catholics. The Refusal (1721) was based on Molière's Les Femmes Savantes. Cibber's last play, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John was "a miserable mutilation of Shakespeare's King John." Heavily politicised, it caused such a storm of ridicule during its 1736 rehearsal that Cibber withdrew it. During the Jacobite Rising of 1745, when the nation was again in fear of a Popish pretender, it was finally acted, and this time accepted for patriotic reasons.

Recognition

Cibber was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom by George II in 1730, and served in that position until his death in 1757.

In popular culture

Cibber is a character in the play Masks and Faces (and its prose adaptation Peg Woffington). In the silent film adaptation he is portrayed by Dion Boucicault Jr.

"Kolley Kibber" is the newspaper nom de plume for Fred Hale, a former gangster, who returns to Brighton to anonymously distribute prize-bearing cards for a newspaper competition and disappears, presumably murdered, at the end of the first chapter of the novel Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene.

Publications

Poetry

• A Poem: On the death of our late soveraign lady Queen Mary. London: John Whitlock, 1695.

Plays

• The Careless Husband: A comedy. London: printed for William Davis, 1705.
• Ximena; or, The heroic daughter: A tragedy. London: printed for B. Lintot / A. Bettesworth / W. Chetwood, 1719.
• The Refusal; or, The ladies' philosophy. London : Printed for B. Lintot / W. Mears / W. Chetwood, 1721.
• Plays. London: London : Tonson / Lintot / Mears / Chetwood, 1721. Volume I, Volume II
  • (edited by Rodney L. Hayley). (2 volumes), New York: Garland, 1980.
• The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber. (2 volumes), London: printed for J. Clarke / C. Hitch & L. Hawes / D. Browne / J. and R. Jonson / J. Rivington, 1760. Volume I, Volume II
• The School-boy; or, The comical rival: A farce of two acts. London: J. & R. Tonson, 1761.
• The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber. (3 volumes), London: J. Rivington, 1777. Volume I, Volume II,Volume III.
  • New York: AMS Press, 1966.
• The Plays of Colley Cibber (edited by Timothy J. Viator & William J. Burling). Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.

Prose

• An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1740; London: John Watts, 1740.
  • (edited by Robert W. Lowe). (2 volumes), London: J.C. Nimmo, 1889, Volume I, Volume II.
  • An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber: With an historical view of the stage during his own time (edited by Byrne F.S. Fone). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968.

Collected editions

• Selected writings of the Laureate Dunces: Nahum Tate (laureate 1692-1715), Laurence Eusden (1718-1730), and Colley Cibber (1730-1757) (edited by Peter Heaney). Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1999.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Plays produced

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, January 1696)
• Woman's Wit (Comedy, 1697)
• Xerxes (Tragedy, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1699)
• The Tragical History of King Richard III (Tragedy, 1699)
• Love Makes a Man (Comedy, December 1700)
• The School Boy (Comedy, advertised for 24 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), a parody of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens.
• Ximena (Tragedy, 28 November 1712)
• Venus and Adonis (Masque, 12 March 1715)
• Myrtillo (Pastoral, 5 November 1715)
• The Nonjuror (Comedy, 6 December 1717)
• 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, 16 August 1729)
• Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John (Tragedy, Covent Garden, 15 February 1745)

Bulls and Bears, a farce performed at Drury Lane on 2 December 1715, was attributed to Cibber but was never published. The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Esq. (London, 1777) includes a play called Flora, or Hob in the Well, but it is not by Cibber. Hob, or the Country Wake. A Farce. By Mr. Doggett was attributed to Cibber by William Chetwood in his General History of the Stage (1749), but John Genest in Some Account of the English Stage (1832) thought it was by Thomas Doggett. Other plays attributed to Cibber but probably not by him include Cinna's Conspiracy, performed at Drury Lane on 19 February 1713, and The Temple of Dullness of 1745.

See also

Preceded by Laurence Eusden

British Poet Laureate 1730-1757

Succeeded by William Whitehead

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

The Blind Boy - Colley Cibber

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Cibber, Colley". Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 351=352. 
• Ashley, L. R.N. (1965), Colley Cibber, New York: Twayne 
• Barker, R.H. (1939), Mr Cibber of Drury Lane, New York: Columbia University Press, OCLC 2207342 
• Sullivan, Maureen (1973), Colley Cibber: Three Sentimental Comedies, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-01532-1 
• Van Lennep, William; Avery, Emmett L.; Scouten, Arthur H.; Stone, George Winchester; Hogan, Charles Beecher (eds) (1960–1970), The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled From the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press 

External links

Poems

• "The Blind Boy".

About

• Cibber, Colley at InfoPlease.
• Colley Cibber in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Colley Cibber at NNDB
• Laurence Eusden and Colly Cibber at Office of the Poet Laureate, University of Otago
• Colley Cibber at TheatreHistory
• Cibber, Colley in the Dictionary of National Biography

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is in "Cibber, Colley"