Actors - Colley Cibber

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	Actors - Colley Cibber

Colley Cibber (June 11, 1671 – November 12, 1757) was an English playwright, actor, and Poet Laureate. His status as the first in a long line of actor-managers established his importance in theater history, and his colorful memoir (Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber) was key in starting the British tradition of rambling autobiographical style. Cibber's works provide valuable documentation of London stage practices for today's historians, and two of his original comedies are particularly useful records of the changing culture and ideology of the early 18th century.

Cibber wrote some original plays for performance by his own company at Drury Lane and adapted many more. His work received frequent criticism of his "miserable mutilation" (Robert Lowe) of "hapless Shakespeare, and crucify'd Molière" (Alexander Pope). He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor, and though his persistent efforts as a tragic performer were widely ridiculed, he enjoyed success in portraying humorous and foppish characters.

Contemporaries frequently accused Cibber of tasteless theatrical productions and shady business dealings. Social and political opportunism was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better writers, and despite the award his poetic works are considered nugatory by modern scholars. In addition, Cibber's brash and extroverted personality offended many, and he rose to herostratic fame as the chief target of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.

Life

Cibber was born in London, his father being Caius Gabriel Cibber, a distinguished sculptor originally from Denmark. 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 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. He had a large number of children, for whom his parental feeling seems to have been mostly casual (see Dictionary of Actors). Most certainly 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 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 himself one of the newly empowered businessmen-managers. He took over the management of Drury Lane in 1710 and was as theatre manager highly commercially, if not artistically, successful. 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 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, 15 February 1745), a miserable paraphrase of Shakespeare's play. He died in 1757.

Cibber's autobiography

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. At the time of writing the word "apology" meant a statement in defence of ones' actions rather than a statement of regret for having transgressed.

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.

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