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Colley Cibber ( June 11, 1671 - November 12, 1757) was a British actor-manager, playwright, and Poet Laureate. He was also the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.
Cibber was born in London, his father being Caius Gabriel Cibber, a distinguished originally Danish sculptor. He began working as an actor at Drury Lane, eventually becoming a well-known and popular comedy actor. In 1710, he became manager of Drury Lane, and made a great commercial success of this job, with its many notorious pitfalls for the unwary. In 1730Events Pope Clement XII elected September 17 Change of emperor of the Ottoman Empire from Ahmed III ( 1703-1730) to Mahmud I (1730- 1754) Anna Ivanova ( Anna I of Russia) became czarina Births July 12 Josiah Wedgwood, potter (died 1795) July 26 Charles Me, he was made Poet LaureatePoet Laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events. In the United Kingdom, it has over the centuries come to be the title of the official poet of the British mon, an appointment which attracted widespread scorn, particularly from the ToryThe term Tory derives from the Tory Party the ancestor of the modern UK Conservative Party. To this day it is often used as a shortened alternative for Conservative. A similar usage for Tory exists in Canada to describe the Conservative Party. It was also satirists.
Cibber had a large number of children, but only two seem to have survived him, and these barely. His son, Theophilus CibberTheophilus Cibber ( 1703 1758) was an English actor and son of the actor-manager Colley Cibber. Theophilus had an extremely bad reputation not as an actor where he was famous for playing Pistol in Henry IV, part 2 and some comic roles also popularised by, was also an actor at Drury Lane, and also excelled in comic roles. Theophilus was married to the actress and singer Susannah Maria ArneSusannah Maria Arne ( 1714- 1766) was a celebrated English singer and actress, the sister of the composer, Thomas Arne. She was born in London, and made her debut in her brother's first opera, Rosamund in 1733. In 1734, she married Theophilus Cibber, the. Colley's daughter Charlotte Charke became a celebrated cross-dresser.
130px Anne Bracegirdle . "I had but a melancholy prospect of ever playing a lover, with Mrs. Bracegirdle." Cibber began his career as an actor at Drury Lane Theatre in 1690Events Giovanni Domenico Cassini observes differential rotation within Jupiter's atmosphere. January 6 Joseph, son of Emperor Leopold I becomes King of the Romans January 14 The clarinet is invented in Nuremberg, Germany May 20 England passes Act of Grace, with little success for several years. "The first thing that enters into the head of a young actor", wrote Cibber in his autobiography half a century later, "is that of being a heroe. In this ambition I was soon snubb'd, by the insufficiency of my voice; to which might be added, an uninformed meagre person (tho' then not ill made) 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. The two theatre companies that had originally been granted Royal patents at the Restoration in 1660 had merged into a monopoly, and actors were losing their power to businessmen-managers. 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". He had still after five years not been very successful in his chosen profession, and there had been no heroic parts and no love scenes. However, the return of two-company cutthroat competition now created a unique demand for new plays, and Cibber seized this opportunity to finally launch his career by writing a comedy with a big, flamboyant part for himself to play. He scored a double triumph: Love's Last Shift, or Virtue Rewarded ( 1696), was a great success, and his own uninhibited performance as the Frenchified fop Sir Novelty Fashion delighted the audiences. His name was made, both as playwright and comedy actor. 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 ("Enter Amanda, in an undress"). The première audience is reported to have wept at the climactic scene where Loveless begs forgiveness on his knees. 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.
Later in life, when Cibber himself had the last word in casting at Drury Lane, he wrote some plays that were tailored to fit his continuing hankering after playing "a heroe", but his performances of such parts never pleased audiences, which preferred to see him typecast as an extravagantly affected fop. His most famous part for the rest of his career remained that of Lord Foppington in The Relapse, a sequel to Cibber's own Love's Last Shift but written by John Vanbrugh. Alexander Pope mentions the audience jubilation which always used to greet the the small-framed Cibber's donning of Lord Foppington's enormous wig, which would be ceremoniously carried on stage in its own sedan chair.
Neither Cibber's adaptations nor his own original plays have stood the test of time, and hardly any of them have been either staged or read after the early 18th century. An exception is his popular adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III, which was the standard version from 1700 until the mid- Victorian era. 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 favourite. Modern scholars often endorse the criticism that was levelled at Love's Last Shift from the first, namely that it is a blatantly commercial combination of sex scenes and drawn-out sentimental reconciliations (compare Robert D. Hume).