<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<document>
<title>Colley Cibber</title>
<authors>Wikipedia</authors>
<publisher>wikipedia.org</publisher>
<publishedplace>network</publishedplace>
<publishedyear>2010</publishedyear>
<edition></edition>
<category>English Poets Laureate</category>
<section id="17505" fatherid="0" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="1">
Colley Cibber (;  6 November 1671 – 12 December 1757)Eric Salmon, "Cibber, Colley (1671–1757)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 19 Nov 2009 was an English actor-manager, playw and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) started a British tradition of personal, anecdotal and even rambling autobiography.  He wrote several plays for his own company at 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, shady business methods, and a social and political opportunism that was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets. He rose to herostratic fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.
Cibber's poetical work was derided in his time, and has been remembered only for being poor. His importance in British theatre history rests on his being the first in a long line of actor-managers, on the interest of two of his comedies as documents of evolving 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.

</section>
<section id="17506" fatherid="0" title="Life" lv="" priority="2" level="1">
Cibber was born in Southampton Street, in Bloomsbury, London.  He was the eldest child of Caius Gabriel Cibber, a distinguished sculptor originally from Denmark.Except where otherwise indicated, all details of Cibber's private life, as well as all role information, performance dates, and quotations from contemporary reviews come from "Cibber, Colley" in the authoritative Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary of Actors, and have where relevant been double-checked against the calendar The London Stage.  He was educated at the grammar school in Grantham, and failed to win a place at Winchester College.  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 in Thomas Betterton's United Company 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.  She was the daughter of Matthias Shore, sergeant-trumpeter to the King.  Twelve children were born between 1694 and 1713, for whom his parental feeling seems to have been mostly casual. Six died in infancy, and most of the surviving children received short shrift in his will. His only son to reach adulthood, Theophilus Cibber, became an actor at Drury Lane, and was an embarrassment to his father because of his scandalous private life. Colley's youngest daughter Charlotte Charke also followed in her father's footsteps (though she too fell out with him) as did others in the family. In his later years Cibber acted in productions with his own grandchildren. Catherine, the eldest daughter, seems to have been the dutiful one who looked after Cibber in old age following his wife's death in 1734, and was duly rewarded at his death with most of his estate.
After an inauspicious start as an actor, Cibber eventually became a popular comedian, wrote and adapted many plays, and rose to become one of the newly empowered businessmen-managers. He took over the management of Drury Lane in 1710 and took a highly commercial, if not artistically successful, line in the job. In 1730, he was made Poet Laureate, an appointment which attracted widespread scorn, particularly from Alexander Pope and other Tory satirists.
When he was seventy-three, he made his last appearance on the stage as Pandulph in his own Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John (Covent Garden, 15 February 1745), a miserable paraphrase of Shakespeare's play. He died in London in December 1757, leaving small pecuniary legacies to most of his surviving children, and the residue of his estate to Charlotte.  He was buried shortly afterwards, most likely at Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street.

</section>
<section id="17507" fatherid="0" title="Autobiography" lv="" priority="3" level="1">
frame||alt=A book's title page inscribed "An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian"|"Uniting the self-sufficiency of youth with the garrulity of age."
Cibber's colourful 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.Described by the ODNB as "smug, self-regarding, and cocksure, but also lively, vigorous, and enormously well informed". At the time of writing the word "apology" meant an apologia, a statement in defence of one's actions rather than a statement of regret for having transgressed.
The text virtually ignores his wife and family, but 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 cut-throat 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 his contemporaries and later commentators 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 a journal or notes. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable source for the history of the Restoration theatre and of the arts and society in early 18th-century 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 (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.
It was a popular work, and gave Cibber a good return.  The self-complacency of Cibber's Apology infuriated some of his contemporaries, notably Pope. However, it went through numerous editions, before and for many years after Cibber's 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."

</section>
<section id="17508" fatherid="0" title="Actor" lv="" priority="4" level="1">
Cibber loved to act. He 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 Hero: 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 King's and Duke's company had been merged into a monopoly, leaving actors in a weak negotiating position and much at the mercy of the dictatorial manager Christopher Rich (). 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" (). After five years, he had still not seen significant success in his chosen profession, and there had been no heroic parts and no love scenes. However, the return of two-company rivalry 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  ("a coxcomb that loves to be the first in all foppery"Cibber's comment in the dramatis personae, quoted in ODNB.) delighted the audiences. His name was made, both as playw and as comedian.
Later in life, when Cibber himself had the last word in casting at Drury Lane, he wrote, or patched together, several tragedies that were tailored to fit his continuing hankering after playing "a Hero". However, his performances of such parts never pleased audiences, which wanted to see him typecast as an affected fop, a kind of character that fitted both his private reputation as a vain man, his exaggerated, mannered style of acting, and his habit of ad libbing.
After he had sold his interest in Drury Lane in the mid-1730s (see below) and was a wealthy man of sixty-five, he returned to the stage a number of times to play the classic fop parts of Restoration comedy that audiences appreciated him in. His Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's Relapse, Sir Courtly Nice in John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, and Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's Man of Mode were legendary. Indeed, critic John Hill in his 1775 work The actor, or, A treatise on the art of playing, described Cibber as "the best Lord Foppington who ever appeared, was in real life (with all due respect be it spoken by one who loves him) something of the coxcomb".ODNB, quoting John Hill, The actor, or, A treatise on the art of playing, 1775, p.176 These were the kind of comic parts where affectation and mannerism were positively desirable. Cibber also essayed tragic parts in plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Dryden and others, but with less success.  By the end of his acting career, audiences were being entranced by the innovatively naturalistic acting of the rising star David Garrick, who made his London debut in the title part in a production of Cibber's adaptation of Richard III in 1741, and wanted less than ever to see Cibber play a hero.  Cibber was on the stage in every year but two (1727 and 1731) between his debut in 1690 and his retirement in 1732, playing more than 100 parts in all.  He returned to the stage for a final time in 1745 as Cardinal Pandulph in his play Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John.

</section>
<section id="17509" fatherid="0" title="Playw" lv="" priority="-5" level="1">
<section id="17510" fatherid="17509" title="Richard III" lv="" priority="1" level="2">
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. The American actor George Berrell, speaking of  Edwin Booth's rendition of Richard III in St. Louis in the 1870s,  wrote of Cibber's work:
</section>
<section id="17511" fatherid="17509" title="Love's Last Shift" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
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.This aspect of the plays has been scathingly analyzed by Paul Parnell, but defended by Shirley Strum Kenny as yielding, in comparison with classic Restoration comedy, a more "humane" comedy. In particular, according to 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 first 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 ("Enter Amanda, in an undress") and seduces Loveless without being recognized by him, and then confronts him with logical argument. Since he did enjoy the night with her while taking her for a stranger, it has been proved that 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". 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, 1783–1784|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 gaining a perspective on 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).

</section>
<section id="17512" fatherid="17509" title="The Careless Husband" lv="" priority="3" level="2">
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". His periwig has fallen off, an 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 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 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".
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 (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".

</section>
<section id="17513" fatherid="17509" title="Other plays" lv="" priority="4" level="2">
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 name 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:
"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 an example: it was "a miserable mutilation of Shakespeare's King John,"Lowe in . 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. 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.
On 18 February 1735, Charleston, South Carolina, hosted the first performance of a ballad opera, Flora: Or Hob in the Well, in the American colonies,Abel, p. 242 at the New World Theatre.Cockrell, Dale and Andrew M. Zinck, "Popular Music of the Parlor and Stage", pgs. 179–201, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music

</section>
</section>
<section id="17514" fatherid="0" title="Manager" lv="" priority="6" level="1">
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 that would include such luminaries as 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, first taking many of its players—including Thomas Doggett, Robert Wilks, and Anne Oldfield—to form a new company at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, and, after Rich's latters patent were revoked, Cibber, Doggett and Wilks were able to buy the company out and return to the Theatre Royal around 1710. The events are well documented, but the three actors' maneuvering to squeeze out previous owners was so lengthy and complex that an approximate date must suffice here. After a few stormy years of power-struggle with Doggett and Wilks, Cibber became in practice sole manager of Drury Lane. He wrote no more original plays, though he continued producing adaptations and patchwork plays from "the frippery of crucified Molière" and "hapless Shakespeare"Pope, The Dunciad, Book the First, in The Rape of the Locke and Other Poems, p. 214. 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 Garrick, as well as the 19th-century actor-managers Irving and Tree, would later structure their careers, writing, and manager identity 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. His triumph was that he rose to a position where, in consequence of his sole power over production and casting at Drury Lane, London audiences had to put up with him as an actor.  Cibber's one significant mistake as a theatre manager was to pass over John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which became an outstanding success for John Rich's theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Cibber had learned from the bad example of Christopher Rich to be a careful and approachable employer for his actors, and was not unpopular with them; however, he made enemies in the literary world by his obvious enjoyment of the power he wielded over authors. Many were outraged by his sharp business methods, which may be exemplified by the characteristic way he abdicated as manager in the mid-1730s. First selling his share for more than 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 letters patent to perform at the Haymarket was, however, refused by the Lord Chamberlain,  who was "disgusted at Cibber's conduct."Lowe in

</section>
<section id="17515" fatherid="0" title="Poet" lv="" priority="7" level="1">
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 controversial Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole—assisted by most of the leading writers, such as Swift, Pope, and Fielding, who were Tories.   Cibber's verses had no admirers even in his own time, and Cibber acknowledges quite cheerfully in the Apology that he does not himself think much of them. His 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. 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).
</section>
<section id="17516" fatherid="0" title="Dunce" lv="" priority="8" level="1">
<section id="17517" fatherid="17516" title="Pamphlet wars" lv="" priority="1" level="2">
From the very beginning of the 18th century, when Cibber first rose to be Rich's -hand man and spy at Drury Lane, his opportunism and his brash, thick-skinned personality gave rise to many barbs in print, especially against his patchwork plays. The early attacks were mostly anonymous, but some have been ascribed to Daniel Defoe and Tom Brown (see Lowe). Later, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, James Thomson, Richard Blackmore, John Dennis and Henry Fielding all lambasted Cibber in print. The most famous conflict Cibber had was with Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the age. In the first version of his landmark literary satire The Dunciad (1728), Pope referred contemptuously to Cibber's "past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd, new" plays, produced with "less human genius than God gives an ape", and Cibber's elevation to laureateship in 1730 further inflamed Pope against him. The selection of Cibber for this honor was widely seen as outlandish, at a time when Pope, John Gay, Thomson, Ambrose Philips, and Edward Young were all in their prime. As one epigram of 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 the 1743 Dunciad).
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, mortified by the elevation of Cibber to laureatehood and incredulous at the vainglory of his Apology (1740), took every opportunity to attack him in his poetry, and easily got the laughers on his side. Mostly Cibber replied quite good-humoredly to Pope's aspersions ("some of which are in conspicuously bad taste", as Lowe points out), but in 1742 he snapped and hit below the belt in an angry and damaging pamphlet, 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. In this pamphlet, Cibber's most effective ammunition came from a reference in Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) to Cibber's "whore", which gave Cibber a pretext for retorting in kind with a scandalous anecdote about Pope in a brothel. "I must own", wrote Cibber, "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 Pope was around four and a half 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 the "little-tiny manhood" of Pope. For once the laughers were on Cibber's side, and the story "raised a universal shout of merriment at Pope's expense."Lowe in  Pope made no direct reply, but took one of the most famous revenges in literary history. In the revised Dunciad that appeared in 1743, he changed his hero, the King of Dunces, from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber.

</section>
<section id="17518" fatherid="17516" title="The King of Dunces" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
|260px|alt=Frontispiece—an engraving of a donkey burdened by a pile of books—and title page of a book, incribed "DUNCIAD // With NOTES // VARIORUM, // AND THE PROLEGOMENA OF SCRIBLERIUS."|The Dunciad Variorum, 1729
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 two men escalated, until, in the final version of the poem, Pope crowned Cibber King of Dunces. From being merely one 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 his first choice of King, Lewis 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.
Writing about the degradation of taste brought on by theatrical effects, Pope quotes Cibber's own confessio in the Apology":
"Of that Succession of monstrous Medlies that have so long infested the Stage, and which arose upon one another alternately, at both Houses (London's two playhouses, Cibber's Drury Lane and John Rich's domain 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's notes call Cibber a hypocrite, and in general the attacks on Cibber are conducted in the notes added to the Dunciad, and not in the body of the poem. As hero of the Dunciad, Cibber merely watches the events of Book II, dreams Book III, and sleeps through Book IV.
Once Pope struck, Cibber became an easy 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, who was a Justice of the Peace, to issue a bench warrant for the arrest of Colley Cibber on a charge of "murder" of "the English language". 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 is as the King of Dunces that he has come down to posterity.

</section>
</section>
<section id="17519" fatherid="0" title="Plays" lv="" priority="9" level="1">
The plays below were produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane unless otherwise stated. The dates given are of first known performance.
Cibber also adapted Shakespeare's Richard III (1699), King John as Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John (1745) and Molière's Tartuffe as The Nonjuror in 1717.

</section>
<section id="17520" fatherid="0" title="In popular culture" lv="" priority="-10" level="1">
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 Bon to anonymously distribute cards for a newspaper competition and disappears, presumably murdered, at the end of the first chapter of the novel Bon Rock by Graham Greene.

</section>
<section id="17521" fatherid="0" title="Notes" lv="" priority="-11" level="1">
</section>
<section id="17522" fatherid="0" title="References" lv="" priority="-12" level="1">
Category:English stage actors
Category:English dramatists and playws
Category:English theatre directors
Category:English memoirists
Category:English Poets Laureate
Category:Literary dunces
Category:17th-century actors
Category:18th-century actors
Category:1671 births
Category:1757 deaths

</section>
</document>
