Colley Cibber

Colley Cibber (June 11, 1671 – November 12, 1757) was an English 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 the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and adapted many more from various sources, receiving frequent criticism for his "miserable mutilation" (Robert Lowe) of "hapless Shakespeare, and crucify'd Molière" (Alexander Pope). 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. Cibber's brash, extroverted personality did not sit well with his contemporaries, and he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, social and political opportunism (which was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets), and shady business methods. He rose to herostratic fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.

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, 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.

Related Topics:
1696 - 1704 - Restoration comedy - Gender - Backlash - Sentimental comedy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

Related Topics:
Shakespeare - Richard III

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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, 1783–84). 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.

Related Topics:
Rakish - Bed-trick - 1783 - 84 - Restoration comedy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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 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

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, a fairly 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 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 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).

Related Topics:
Ladies of quality - Adultery - Soliloquizing - Cravat - Battle of Steenkirk - 1693

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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".

Related Topics:
Repertory - Doublethink - Manipulation

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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:

Related Topics:
1697 - 1707

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

:"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.

Related Topics:
King John - 1745

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~