Partial Histories

A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber

Elaine M. McGirr

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137027184
• eBook ISBN: 9781137027191
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber 'everybody knows' has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the 'nation's poet' and canonised Cibber's enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history's narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation and celebration of Charlotte Charke by women's literary history. Each of these stories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or bête noir. This monograph challenges these partial histories and returns the theatre manager, playwright, poet laureate and bon viveur to the centre of eighteenth-century culture and cultural studies.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Elaine M. McGirrPartial Histories10.1057/978-1-137-02719-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Elaine M. McGirr¹

(1)

Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

End Abstract

Celebrity and Infamy

In 1740, a work of surprising genius was published. It was a work that fascinated and infuriated Georgian Britain in equal measure. It was read avidly, sometimes angrily, but certainly often: going through multiple editions in 1740 alone and inspiring a raft of imitations, continuations, parodies and commendations. The novelty and success of this book was such that it is often credited with inventing an entire genre. However, its appeal was, even for those who championed it, hard to pin down, but both the pleasure and the anxiety produced by this new work can be traced, at least in large part, to the power of the book’s narrative voice and the textual presence (or absence) of the protagonist’s character; indeed, it sparked debates about its protagonist’s character that are still current more than two hundred and fifty years later. Perhaps more than anything else, this new style of writing played into contemporary debates about the nature of the self and the ability to write legibly from the heart.

The work in question is not Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela, 1740’s other publishing phenomenon, but rather the memoirs of the actor-playwright-manager and Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber. The Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Esq. and Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded have a great deal in common, not the least of which was their ability to enrage Henry Fielding, who famously yoked them together in his double parody An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews … by Conny Keyber. Necessary to be had in all Familes (1741). Both Cibber’s Apology and Pamela were written in the first person, encouraging readers and scholars ever since to read between the lines in order to discern the true character behind the ‘I’ of the text. Both Pamela Andrews and Colley Cibber have been accused of hypocrisy and naivety, of vanity and deception. Both texts have been read for what is not, or is only accidentally, exposed. Both, when initially published, purported to tell the story of a real person. But there the similarities end. Pamela tells the story of a vulnerable young woman and her domestic travails; the Apology describes the public career of a successful man. And, of course, one is a work of fiction, while the other is ostensibly true. But the most troubling dissimilarity for hostile readers like Fielding—and for later scholars—is that Pamela, the fictional character, seems to be more fleshed out, more real, than the historical actor.

Colley Cibber’s Apology purports to be about Colley Cibber, and the beguiling narrative voice conjures up a vivid presence, but it obscures the real person: the Apology is full of personality, but conveys very little personal information. And of course the ‘I’ of the Apology—the vain, smug, scatty narrator—only grants us a partial glimpse of the long and varied career and life of the eighteenth-century’s most (in)famous man. So while the desire to fix, to locate, the real Colley Cibber has encouraged generations of readers to discover Cibber in his autobiographical voice, this is a strategy that is both flawed and misleading. Whereas Pamela captures a year in the life, the Apology purports to tell the whole story, yet the narrative ‘I’ is stable throughout. Colley Cibber speaks as his present self—the 69-year-old Poet Laureate and bon viveur—not, as Pamela does, in the present tense. The critical and chronological distance this opens up between the narrative voice and its subject overwrites the youthful subject with the retired author. Pamela writes as Pamela Andrews, not Mrs. B—, and there is real uncertainty about how her story will turn out, about who and what she will become; there is no such ambiguity about Cibber’s career trajectory. The presence of the Poet Laureate in the recollections of his younger self helps tell one version of Cibber’s life story: his rise from ambitious but overlooked teenager to national treasure. Unfortunately, this is a story not often heard. Just as Pamela’s narrative voice was hijacked and rewritten by Henry Fielding as Shamela, creating doubt in readers’ minds about Pamela when they returned to the original text, so too has Cibber suffered from attempts to re-characterise him. Nathaniel Mist redubbed him ‘Kibber’, Fielding called him ‘Aesopus’, ‘Conny Keyber’, and sarcastically referred to him as ‘the laureat’, and ‘Mr. Ground-Ivy’, turning that honour into a badge of ridicule. But perhaps the most damaging resignification came from Alexander Pope, whose personal, political and aesthetic enmity led him to crown Cibber the ‘King of the Dunces’. As Shamela is to Pamela, the plosive Keyber/Kibber/King of the Dunces, a character defined by greed, tyranny matched with imbecility and an egotism without bounds, is to the sibilant Cibber. This book is a study of the ways in which and reasons why this resignification, this character assassination, proved so successful and has been so enduring. It attempts to unpack why literary, theatre and cultural histories of the period have privileged the satires, reading them as somehow more authentic, more real, than less partial accounts.

Infamy

For some, the Apology (and its critical and financial success) was the final straw. Cibber had long been the victim of politically and personally motivated abuse, most entertainingly at the hands of John Dennis, most often in the periodicals of Nathaniel Mist and his allies. Cibber’s feuds with Pope and with Fielding were well established by 1740, but the Apology tipped the scales. Fielding, a gifted parodist, focused his enmity on the Apology’s narrative persona, lampooning it mercilessly in a series of publications, both canonical and ephemeral. Shamela and Joseph Andrews join The Laureat and the Life of Aesopus in their mocking adoption of Cibber’s voice and their claims to represent the real character of Colley Cibber. But perhaps the most damning indictment came from Cibber’s long-time rival Alexander Pope. The success of the Apology seems to have infuriated Pope, who responded by revising and expanding The Dunciad, his satire of contemporary literature culture. Pope demoted the Shakespearean scholar Lewis Theobald, who had offended Pope by pointing out errors in his six-volume Works of Shakespear (1725), and made Colley Cibber the new King of the Dunces, a crown Cibber found remarkably difficult to shake. The new, expanded four-book Dunciad fizzes with anger about the critical and popular status enjoyed by Cibber, whom Pope dubs the ‘the Antichrist of wit’ (2.16). Cibber, ‘this arch absurd, that wit and fool delights’ (1.221), dazzles both the masses and their masters: to Pope’s fury, even those who (he thinks) should know better have succumbed to Cibber’s ‘brazen’ charms.

Pope lambasts the ‘Cibberian forehead, and Cibberian brain; / This brazen brightness to the ‘Squire so dear; / This polish’d hardness that reflects the Peer’ (1.218–20). In this caricature of Cibber, Pope draws a genealogy not through his father, the sculptor Gaius Cibber, but through the sculptor’s most famous works, the magnificent statues of raving and melancholy madness guarding the entrance to Bethlehem Hospital. Pope resignifies ‘Cibberian’, connecting it to, even conflating it with, a dangerous combination of madness, emptiness, and artifice. But there is envy even within the condemnation. The ‘polish’d hardness’ of Cibber’s supposedly empty head ‘reflects the Peer’. Cibber is a satiric mirror, reflecting back the foibles and fashions of the elite. Yet this condemnation of both actor and peer is also an acknowledgement that the actor, unlike the Catholic and physically frail Pope, successfully performs gentility. Cibber is like—and is liked by—men of rank and status. And because these men find Cibber so appealing, his appeals for friendship and patronage are consistently rewarded. After all, the Apology represents Cibber’s fourth, or even fifth, cultural phenomenon, following on the heels of his Love’s Last Shift (1696), The Non-Juror (1717) and The Provok’d Husband (1728), not to mention Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III (1700) and the award of the Laureateship in 1730. We see this mix of envy and condemnation again when Pope moves from Cibber’s brazen shell to his mien: ‘the proud Parnassian sneer, / the conscious simper, and the jealous leer, / Mixt on his look’ (2.5–7). The oxymoronic balance of the sneer, the simper and the leer highlight Cibber’s complicated relationship to power. Cibber’s elevation in The Dunciad is, of course, ironic, but his power is still undeniable: ‘all eyes direct their rays / On him, and crowds turn coxcombs as they gaze’ (2.7–8). Cibber was artistically and socially successful; he engendered sincere imitation as well as spiteful parody. Cibber’s ‘Parnassian sneer’ reminds us that he was in a position to look down on other authors, even those as celebrated as Pope. The Poet Laureate was secure in his sinecures.

Pope’s anger stemmed at least in part from Cibber’s faux-polite acknowledgment of Pope’s penchant for name-checking Cibber in his satires. Cibber, who had heretofore limited his retaliations against Pope’s frequent attacks to the stage and the social circles both inhabited, finally committed himself to print in the Apology:

When I therefore find my Name at length in the Satyrical Works of our most celebrated living Author, I never look upon those Lines as Malice meant to me, (for he knows I never provok’d it) but Profit to himself: One of his Points must be, to have many Readers: He considers that my Face and Name are more known than those of many thousands of more consequence in the Kingdom: That therefore, right or wrong, a Lick at the Laureat will always be a sure Bait, ad captandum vulgus, to catch him little Readers: And that to gratify the Unlearned, by now and then interspersing those merry Sacrifices of an old Acquaintance to their Taste, is a piece of quite right Poetical Craft. ¹

Cibber’s jibe and Pope’s furious response to it with The Dunciad delineate the line between celebrity and infamy. Rather than pretend to ascend Parnassus to rival Pope, he drags Pope down to Grub Street, reminding readers that the ‘celebrated poet’ is also a commercial writer: Pope’s income, just like Cibber’s, depends on the success of his works. Cibber refuses to be embarrassed by this truth or by his celebrity. Rather, he confidently asserts the fact that his name is a valuable commodity, while Pope denigrates his fame, protesting that Cibber is a name and a man not worth knowing.

Celebrity

In light of the attacks by authors such as Pope and Fielding, it is tempting to identify Cibber as the first modern celebrity, as a famous personality, rather than a celebrated talent. After all, modern celebrity is concomitant with—and indeed a necessary consequence of—the increased interest in and celebration of the individual, seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding the publications of Pamela and the Apology. Modern celebrity is a pageant of Self, or what Jason Goldsmith calls the ‘illustration of interiority staged through the mechanism of spectacle’. ² But to reduce Cibber to his personality, the ‘interiority effect’ he projected from the stage and in the Apology, is to accept the negative re-characterisation of that persona, and to reduce the actor-manager-playwright and Poet Laureate to no more than a man about town. ³ It is to strip Cibber of his cultural authority. Cibber had ‘it’, but he was more than the sum of his accessories. ⁴ Colley Cibber was a celebrity in the sense of being a famous personality, but he was first and foremost a celebrated talent. He was an immensely successful manager, the most frequently performed playwright of the century, and a hugely popular actor for more than thirty years. What really separates Cibber from modern celebritydom however is the length of his professional stardom (1696–1745) coupled with his continued cultural relevance and significance throughout his long retirement. Cibber formally retired from active management and performance in 1733, but continued to make sporadic command performances until 1745. He spent his remaining 12 years in public retirement: holding court at clubs such as Will’s and White’s, visiting and being visited by the leading authors and actors of the next generation, and advising, advancing and correcting the work of friends and protégés such as Samuel Richardson, Benjamin Victor and Laetitia Pilkington. He read drafts of Richardson’s later novels, Clarissa (1747–8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), and offered the (ultimately untaken) advice to give Clarissa a happy ending and to make Grandison more of a ‘rake in his heart’. ⁵ While he refused to soften his characters or their fates, Richardson did acknowledge his friend’s authorial fame by making Cibber’s Careless Husband (1704) Clarissa’s favourite play. ⁶ Cibber advised Laetitia Pilkington on the composition of her memoirs and encouraged her to trade on their friendship and correspondence. ⁷ He exchanged letters with Benjamin Victor about the art of theatre management, and championed Arthur Murphy as the next great playwright. These endorsements mattered: they had tangible use and were turned to practical and economic profit. Colley Cibber was a celebrity, but he also functioned as a cultural broker in his retirement, connecting the next generation of artists with potential patrons, advising aspiring actors, managers and writers on matters of art, taste and fashion. His advice, while not always taken, was continually sought. His friendship was valuable to a great many, and his companions, clothes and activities were reported in the press as he travelled between the fashionable sites of London, Bath and Tunbridge Wells.

Searching for Cibber: The Man and/in the Works

The Apology and Cibber’s enemies’ responses to it have not only obscured Cibber’s character, but they have also overshadowed his other writings. Cibber’s much-lampooned and admittedly jejune occasional odes, written to fulfil his obligations as Poet Laureate, have likewise discoloured impressions of his talents as a writer. But this slighting view was not the common one. Benjamin Victor, writing 30 years after Cibber’s death, voiced the common perception of Cibber’s skill as a playwright when he enthused that ‘the Stage is beholden to Mr. Cibber for more good Comedies than to any one Author; which will perpetuate his Name as long as the English Language exists.’ ⁸ Cibber may have written a lot of pedestrian, even clunky, verse in the nearly thirty years he served as Poet Laureate, but he knew his way around a play. In addition to his own original plays, Cibber served as Drury Lane’s play-doctor, updating old plays to appeal to modern audiences and editing and often amending the new works submitted for performance. While some, such as Henry Fielding, objected to Cibber’s presumption to judge, many others appreciated his editorial eye. Thus, when The Female Tatler wanted to blame Cibber for interfering with Susannah Centlivre’s (unsuccessful) The Man’s Bewitched (1709), she jumped to the defence of her play-doctor, using the play’s preface to denounce The Female Tatler and its attack on Cibber, concluding, ‘I willingly submitted to Mr. Cibber’s Superior Judgment in shortning [sic] the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Portrait of an Actor: The Many Faces of Colley Cibber
• 3. Portrait of a Theatrical Despot: Cibber the Manager
• 4. Authorship, Authority and the Battle for Shakespeare
• 5. Family Portraits: Re-viewing Cibber’s Marriage and Family
• Backmatter