Born, in London, 6 Nov. 1671. Educated at Grantham Free School, 1682–87. Not long after enlisting in forces of Earl of Devonshire he abandoned army, and in 1690 went to London and joined company of Theatre Royal. First appeared as an actor, 1691; at Theatre Royal, 1691–95. Married Miss Shore, 1692. Followed Betterton to new theatre in Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695. Wrote prologue for opening of theatre. His first play “Love’s Last Shift” produced there, Jan. 1696. At Haymarket, 1706–08. At Drury Lane, 1708–32. Share in patent of Drury Lane, March 1708. Concerned with management of Haymarket, 1709–10; of Drury Lane, 1710–33. Appointed Poet Laureate, 3 Dec. 1730. Retired from stage, 1733. Reappeared on one or two occasions afterwards; last appearance, 15 Feb. 1745. Died, 12 Dec. 1757. Buried in vault of Danish Church (now British and Foreign Sailors’ Church), Whitechapel. Works: “Love’s Last Shift,” 1694; “A Poem on the Death of Queen Mary,” 1695; “Woman’s Wit,” 1697 (another edn., under title of “The Schoolboy,” anon., 1707); “Xerxes,” 1699; acting version of Shakespeare’s “King Richard III.,” 1700; “Love makes a Man,” 1701; “She Would and she Would not,” 1703; “The Careless Husband,” 1705; “Perolla and Izadora,” 1706; “The Comical Lovers” (anon.), 1707; “The Double Gallant,” 1707; “The Lady’s Last Stake,” [1708]; “The Rival Fools,” [1709]; “Cinna’s Conspiracy” (anon.; attributed to Cibber), 1713; “Myrtillo,” 1715; “Hob; or the Country Wake,” 1715; “Venus and Adonis,” 1716; “The Non-Juror,” 1718; “Ximena,” 1718; “Plays” (2 vols.), 1721; “The Refusal,” 1721; “Cæsar in Egypt,” 1725; “The Provoked Husband” (with Vanbrugh), 1728; “The Rival Queens,” 1729; “Love in a Riddle,” 1719 [1729]; “Damon and Phillida” (anon., founded on preceding), 1729; “A Journey to London” (adapted from Vanbrugh), 1730; “An Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-Day,” 1731; “An Ode to His Majesty for the New Year,” 1731; “Chuck,” 1736; “Apology,” 1740; “A Letter…. to Mr. Pope,” 1742; “The Egotist; or, Colley upon Cibber,” 1743; “Another Occasional Letter to Mr. Pope,” 1744; “Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John” (founded on Shakespeare’s “King John”), 1745; “The Temple of Dulness” (anon.; attributed to Cibber), 1745; “The Character and the Conduct of Cicero,” 1747; “The Lady’s Lecture,” 1748. Dramatic Works: in 4 vols., 1760.

Personal

  Colley Cibber, Sir, was by no means a blockhead; but by arrogating to himself too much, he was in danger of losing that degree of estimation to which he was entitled. His friends gave out that he intended his birth-day Odes should be bad: but that was not the case, Sir; for he kept them many months by him, and a few years before he died he shewed me one of them, with great solicitude to render it as perfect as might be, and I made some corrections, to which he was not very willing to submit.

  Though his voice as an actor was occasionally harsh and unmusical, more particularly in tragedy, he was a fine reciter of comedies in private. Foote and Murphy, both excellent judges, have given testimony of this; particularly the latter, who heard him read the scenes of Lord and Lady Townly in “The Provoked Husband” to Mrs. Woffington. It is true, his voice partook of the old school, and therefore differed in some respect from that familiarity in modern dialogue which Garrick introduced; but it was, upon the whole, a fine picture of the manners of the age in which the play was written, and had a very impressive effect.

  Colley, we are told, had the honour to be a member of the great club at White’s; and so, I suppose, might any other man, not quite unknown, who wore good cloaths, and paid his money when he lost it. But on what terms did Cibber live with this society? Why, he feasted most sumptuously, as I have heard his friend Victor say with an air of triumphant exultation, with Mr. Arthur and his wife, and gave eighteen pence for his dinner. After he had dined, when the clubroom door was opened, and the laureate was introduced, he was saluted with the loud and joyous acclamation of “O King Coll! Come in, King Coll! Welcome, welcome, King Colley!” And this kind of gratulation, Mr. Victor thought, was very gracious and very honourable.

  For my part, I can almost believe that Cibber was a modest man! as he was most certainly a man of genius. Cibber had lived a dissipated life, and his philosophical indifference, with his careless gaiety, was the breastplate which even the wit of Pope failed to pierce. During twenty years’ persecution for his unlucky Odes, he never lost his temper; he would read to his friends the best things pointed against them, with all the spirit the authors could wish; and would himself write epigrams for the pleasure of hearing them repeated while sitting in coffeehouses; and whenever they were applauded as “Palpable hits!”—“Keen!”—“Things with a spirit in them!”—he enjoyed these attacks on himself by himself. If this be vanity, it is at least “Cibberian.” It was, indeed, the singularity of his personal character which so long injured his genius, and laid him open to the perpetual attacks of his contemporaries, who were mean enough to ridicule undisguised foibles, but dared not be just to the redeeming virtues of his genius.

  He flourished in wig and embroidery, player, poet, and manager, during the Augustan age of Queen Anne, somewhat earlier and somewhat later. A most egregious fop, according to all accounts, he was, but a very pleasant one notwithstanding, as your fop of parts is apt to be. Pope gained but little in the warfare he waged with him, for this plain reason, that the great poet accuses his adversary of dulness, which was not by any means one of his sins, instead of selecting one of the numerous faults, such as pertness, petulance, and presumption, of which he was really guilty.

  Of Colley Cibber it is sufficient here to state that he was not merely a popular actor, but one of the most remarkable men of his age. His professional cleverness was so great that it can be described as only falling short of genius; and as a dramatist, his admirable judgment made up for his deficiencies in the art of composition, so that few writers of comedy have achieved greater temporary triumphs. With all his talents, however, it was his fate to earn the hearty contempt of most of his contemporaries whose good opinion was worth having, and in the fulness of his fame his self-sufficiency and arrogance exposed him to all the shafts of satire…. If the character of Cibber were as contemptible as “The Dunciad” and Fielding’s writings represent it, much printer’s ink was thrown away in blackening it.

  Worn-out, tawdry, with a shabby fine laced coat, and dirty tattered ruffles, taking snuff vehemently, and applauding as if he were in the stage-box one moment, weeping as if he were on the stage the next,—behold Colley Cibber; now in the very yellowest and searest of the leaf, to which old age is likened; still writing, still acting his own plays, and still frequenting the table of Samuel Richardson, to eat at another man’s expense, and to pay back the coin of flattery. But he is Poet Laureate; and that office imposes on the worthy, but somewhat tuft-hunting Samuel Richardson.

  Among them all, Colley kept his own to the last. A short time before the last hour arrived, Horace Walpole hailed him on his birthday with a good-morrow, and “I am glad, sir, to see you looking so well.” “Egad, sir,” replied the old gentleman, all diamonded and powdered and dandified, “at eighty-four it is well for a man that he can look at all.”… And now he crosses Piccadilly and passes through Albemarle Street, slowly but cheerfully, with an eye and a salutation for any pretty woman of his acquaintance, and with a word for any “good fellow” whose purse he has lightened, or who has lightened his, at dice or whist. And so he turns into the adjacent square; and as his servant closes the door, after admitting him, neither of them wots that the master has passed over the threshold for the last time, a living man. In December, 1757, I read in contemporary publications that “there died at his house in Berkeley Square, Colley Cibber, Esq., Poet Laureate.”

  No life illustrates more curiously the history of the stage than that of Colley Cibber, and no figure stands out more conspicuously in that sort of turbulence and war which the actor of his era had to wage. His strange career shows us that the actor was as marked a figure off the stage as upon it.

Dramas

  Cibber has written a great many comedies; and though in several of them there be much sprightliness, and a certain pert vivacity peculiar to him, yet they are so forced and unnatural in the incidents, as to have generally sunk into obscurity, except two which have always continued in high favour with the public, “The Careless Husband,” and “The Provoked Husband.” The former is remarkable for the polite and easy turn of the dialogue; and, with the exception of one indelicate scene, is tolerably moral, too, in the conduct and in the tendency. The latter, “The Provoked Husband,” (which was the joint production of Vanbrugh and Cibber), is, perhaps, on the whole, the best comedy in the English language. It is liable, indeed, to one critical objection, of having a double plot; as the incident of the Wronghead family, and those of Lord Townley’s, are separate and independent of each other. But this irregularity is compensated by the natural characters, the fine painting, and the happy strokes of humour with which it abounds. We are, indeed, surprised to find so unexceptionable a comedy proceeding from two such loose authors; for, in its general strain, it is calculated to expose licentiousness and folly; and would do honour to any stage.

  His “Double Gallant,” which has been lately revived, though it cannot rank in the first, may take its place in the second or third class of comedies. It abounds in character, bustle, and stage-effect. It belongs to what may be called the composite style; and very happily mixes up the comedy of intrigue, such as we see it in Mrs. Centlivre’s Spanish plots, with a tolerable share of the wit and spirit of Congreve and Vanbrugh. As there is a good deal of wit, there is a spice of wickedness in this play, which was a privilege of the good old style of comedy, not altogether abandoned in Cibber’s time…. The characters in the “Double Gallant” are well kept up. At-All and Lady Dainty are the two most prominent characters in this comedy, and those into which Cibber has put most of his own nature and genius. They are the essence of active impertinence and fashionable frivolity. Cibber, in short, though his name has been handed down to us as a byword of impudent pretension and impenetrable dulness by the classical pen of his accomplished rival, who, unfortunately, did not admit of any merit beyond the narrow circle of wit and friendship in which he himself moved, was a gentleman and a scholar of the old school; a man of wit and pleasantry in conversation, a diverting mimic, an excellent actor, an admirable dramatic critic, and one of the best comic writers of his age.

  Steele’s “Conscious Lovers” is the first comedy which can be called moral; Cibber, in those parts of the “Provoked Husband” that he wrote, carried this farther; and the stage afterwards grew more and more refined, till it became languid and sentimental.

  In selecting the play of “King Richard the Third,” I have, upon mature consideration, decided on adopting the well-known version of Colley Cibber, instead of going back to the original text of Shakespeare. That text has been practically declared by the greatest ornaments of the drama, less fitted in its integrity for representation on the stage than almost any other generally acted play of the great poet; whilst, on the other hand, the tragedy, as modified by Cibber, being rather a condensation than an alteration of Shakespeare (the interpolations themselves being chiefly selections from his other plays), has been pronounced one of the most admirable and skilful instances of dramatic adaptations ever known. David Garrick made his first appearance in London, in 1741, in Colley Cibber’s version of “King Richard the Third;” and Henderson adopted the same play; the classical John Kemble followed deliberately in the wake of his great predecessors; and to these succeeded George Frederick Cooke, and my late father, Edmund Kean. With such distinguished precedents for my guide, I might well hesitate in reverting, on the present occasion, to the original text, even if their judgment had not been sanctioned by the voice of experience, and were it not also a fact that the tragedy of “King Richard the Third,” as adapted by Cibber, is most intimately associated with the traditionary admiration of the public for those renowned and departed actors. There may be a question as to the propriety of tampering at all with the writings of our bard: but there can be none that as an acting play, Colley Cibber’s version of “King Richard the Third,” evinces great dramatic judgment, and a consummate acquaintance with scenic effect.

  “The Careless Husband” doubtless contains things which may seem out of harmony with this intention, and the principal situation would justly be resented by a modern audience. But the purpose of this play is genuinely moral—viz. to exhibit the triumph of pure long-suffering affection, when its object is a man not spoilt at heart. There is true pathos in the character of Lady Easy, and one may forgive her husband as one forgives Fielding’s heroes, or Steele in actual life. It cannot be justly said that such a picture is an apology for vice, though doubtless it fails to treat vice from the loftiest of standpoints. The execution is upon the whole admirable; and the quarrels of Lady Betty Modish and Lord Morelove, with Lord Foppington and Lady Graveairs intervening, are in the best style of later English comedy. Lady Betty in particular is a most delightful coquette—with a heart; and the Lord Foppington of this play, who is not a mere replica of Vanbrugh’s development of Cibber’s Sir Novelty, is one of the best easy-going fools ever invented.

  Those, however, who, after listening to the incomparable language of Shakespeare, and witnessing the superiority of this magnificent play, can ever again tolerate the rubbish which has usurped its place for a century and a half, can have little pretensions to taste.

  Cibber’s alteration of “Richard III.” has brought down on him almost as much contumely as did the “Dunciad;” and yet his interpolations are excellent mock turtle—so excellent that Charles Reade says that the most admired passages in what literary humbugs who pretend they know Shakespeare by the closet, not the stage, accept as Shakespeare’s “Richard,” are Cibber’s. How many of us have quoted the lines, “Now, by St. Paul, the work goes bravely on!” and “Off with his head—so much for Buckingham!” in blissful unconsciousness that Shakespeare never wrote them! Here is a quotation that has pardonably misled thousands, for it has a sonorous ring of which Cibber’s treble seems incapable:

  Cibber’s best service to the stage was his “Apology for his Life,” the most entertaining and graphic record of the actors and actresses of a remarkable period that perhaps exists in any language. Cibber was a good actor, something of a fine gentleman, so far as fine clothes and foppish manners go to the “make up” of that character. He was also one of the “wits” of his time, and having the laws of stagecraft at his finger ends, and understanding the requirements of audiences, he was enabled to compound a successful comedy, “She wou’d and she wou’d not,” where the brisk give-and-take of the dialogue is borrowed from the dramatists of Charles II.’s age, and the bustling plot taken from a Spanish original. His comedies are the smart plays of a clever man whom circumstances, not natural genius, made a playwright. They do not quite possess the ring of true comedy.

  Cibber’s plays are lighter than thistledown, and mark the rupture between dramatic writing and literature. But they are praiseworthy for their comparative innocence, and for the absence of such cynicism as Collier denounced.

  It was only as Poet Laureate, for he could not write poetry, that Cibber displayed his inferiority…. Of poetry there is no trace in the five volumes of his dramatic works; there are few touches of nature, and little genuine wit, but these defects are to some extent supplied by sparkling dialogue and lively badinage. Cibber is often sentimental, and when he is sentimental he is odious. His attempts to express strong emotion and honourable feeling excite laughter instead of sympathy, and on this account it is difficult to accept without some deduction Mr. Ward’s favourable judgment of “The Careless Husband,” which, if it be one of the cleverest of Cibber’s dramas, is also one of the most conspicuous for this defect. Here, as elsewhere, Cibber should have left sentiment alone.

  Most are fairly lively, but hardly any is really literature.

Apology, 1740

  And Cibber himself is the honestest man I know, who has writ a book of his confessions, not so much to his credit as St. Augustine’s, but full as true and as open. Never had impudence and vanity so faithful a professor. I honour him next to my Lord.

  He was not, indeed, a very wise or lofty character—nor did he affect great virtue or wisdom—but openly derided gravity, bade defiance to the serious pursuits of life, and honestly preferred his own lightness of heart and of head, to knowledge the most extensive or thought the most profound. He was vain even of his vanity. At the very commencement of his work, he avows his determination not to repress it, because it is part of himself, and therefore will only increase the resemblance of the picture. Rousseau did not more clearly lay open to the world the depths and inmost recesses of his soul, than Cibber his little foibles and minikin weaknesses. The philosopher dwelt not more intensely on the lone enthusiasm of his spirit, on the alleviations of his throbbing soul, on the long draughts of rapture which he eagerly drank in from the loveliness of the universe, than the player of his early aspirings for scenic applause, and all the petty triumphs and mortifications of his passion for the favour of the town.

  His well-known account of his own life; or his “Apology for his Life,” as he modestly or affectedly calls it, is an amusing piece of something higher than gossip; the sketches he gives of the various celebrated actors of his time are many of them executed, not perhaps with the deepest insight, but yet with much graphic skill in so far as regards those mere superficial characteristics that meet the ordinary eye.

  Remains to-day one of the best books ever written about the stage.

  That entrancing “Apology” with its delightful pictures of his theatrical contemporaries, is as fresh as ever. It will be read when greater poets than he have sunk into oblivion, and thus perpetuate the name of one of the most remarkable characters of a by-gone epoch.

General

  The most undaunted Mr. Colley Cibber; of whom let it be known, when the people of this age shall be ancestors, and to all the succession of our successors, that to this present day they continue to out-do even their own out-doings: and when the inevitable hand of sweeping Time shall have brushed off all the works of to-day, may this testimony of a contemporary critic to their fame, be extended as far as to-morrow.

  He seems to me full as pert and as dull as usual [“Cicero”]. There are whole pages of common-place stuff, that for stupidity might have been wrote by Dr. Waterland, or any other grave divine, did not the flirting saucy phrase give them at a distance an air of youth and gaiety.

  Cibber’s merits as an author are of no mean degree; for independently of the comedy which still keeps possession of the stage, notwithstanding the great advance in refinement since the period of its production, the masterly portraitures which he has given of his theatrical contemporaries must ever establish him as a critic of first-rate pretensions. Valuable and numerous as are the delineations of society and manners of the period in which Cibber flourished, none are more spirited than those which we owe to his pen, both in the dramatis personæ of his comedies, and the admirable sketches of living characters with whom he associated; and possessing so many and such high claims to consideration, it seems peculiarly hard that he should appear to be indebted to the stigma attached to his name for any part of his well-earned celebrity.

  Pope has made himself ridiculous, as he generally did in his petty malice, by making Theobald the hero of the Dunciad, because he had convicted Pope of gross ignorance of Shakspeare. He now made himself ridiculous a second time, by exalting to that dull eminence, Colley Cibber, one of the wittiest and most sprightly authors of the day. Cibber’s letter of remonstrance to Pope was unanswerable.

  Who makes himself a conspicuous ass.

  Although Cibber was not a good poet, he was persevering and consistent, and his integrity has never been questioned. As an actor and author he excelled in comedy; to say that he did not succeed in tragedy is no detraction from his other merits. Wanting all the higher attributes of a poet, his Laureate Odes were never collected, simply because they were not worthy of preservation.

  All things considered, both in this controversy [with Fielding] and the later one with Pope, Cibber did not come off worst. His few hits were personal and unscrupulous, and they were probably far more deadly in their effects than any of the ironical attacks which his adversaries, on their part, directed against his poetical ineptitude or halting “parts of speech.” Despite his superlative coxcombry and egotism, he was, moreover, a man of no mean abilities. His “Careless Husband” is a far better acting play than any of Fielding’s, and his “Apology,” which even Johnson allowed to be “well-done,” is valuable in many respects, especially for its account of the contemporary stage. In describing an actor or actress he had few equals—witness his skilful portraits of Nokes, and his admirably graphic vignette of Mrs. Verbruggen as that “finish’d Impertinent,” Melantha, in Dryden’s “Marriage à-la-Mode.”

  Cibber’s “Odes” are among the most contemptible things in literature.

  One of the most delightful autobiographies ever written, and a comedy which is in its way a masterpiece, have been powerless to counteract, nay even to modify, the impression left on the world by the portrait for which Pope made Colley Cibber sit.