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's autobiography

Colley Cibber's colorful 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. 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.

Related Topics:
1690s - Restoration - 18th-century - Thomas Betterton - Elizabeth Barry - David Garrick

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The self-complacency of Cibber's Apology infuriated some of his contemporaries, notably Alexander 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" (Hazlitt).

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