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.

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 19th-century 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 with many other contemporaries 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.

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• 1911 EB encyclopedia entry on Colley Cibber-->