CIBBER, COLLEY (1671-1757), English actor and drama tist, was born in London on Nov. 6, 1671, the eldest son of Caius Gabriel Cibber, the sculptor. Sent in 1682 to the free school at Grantham, Lincolnshire, the boy distinguished himself by an apti tude for writing verse. He was removed from school in 1687 on the chance of election to Winchester college. His father, however, had not then presented that institution with his statue of William of Wykeham, and the son was rejected, although through his mother he claimed to be of "founder's kin." The boy went to London, and indulged his passion for the theatre. He was on his way to Chatsworth, the seat of William Cavendish, earl (after wards duke) of Devonshire, for whom his father was then execut ing commissions, when the news of the landing of William of Orange was received; father and son met at Nottingham, and Colley Cibber was taken into Devonshire's company of volunteers. Afterwards he enrolled himself (169o) as an actor in Betterton's company at Drury Lane. On his more than meagre earnings, which rose to Li per week, supplemented by an allowance of £2o a year from his father, he contrived to live with his wife and family—he had married in 1693—and to produce a play, Love's Last Shift, or the Fool in Fashion (1696) . Of this comedy Congreve said that it had "a great many things that were like wit in it"; and Vanbrugh honoured it by writing his Relapse as a sequel. Cibber played the part of Sir Novelty Fashion, and his performance as Lord Foppington, the same char acter renamed, in Vanbrugh's piece established his reputation as an actor. In 1698 he was assailed with other dramatists, by Jer emy Collier in the Short View. In Nov., 1702, he produced, at Drury Lane, She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not; or the Kind Impos tor, one of his best comedies; and in 1704, for himself and Mrs. Oldfield, The Careless Husband, which Horace Walpole classed, with Cibber's Apology, as "worthy of immortality." In 1706 Cib ber left Drury Lane for the Haymarket, but when the two com panies united two years later he rejoined his old theatre through the influence of his friend Colonel Brett, a shareholder. Brett made over his share to Wilks, Estcourt and Cibber. Complaints against the management of Christopher Rich led, in 1709, to the closing of the theatre by order of the crown, and William Collier obtained the patent. After a series of intrigues Collier was bought out by Wilks, Doggett and Cibber, under whose management Drury Lane became more prosperous than it ever had been. In 1715 a new patent was granted to Sir Richard Steele, and Barton Booth was also added to the management. In 1717 Cibber pro duced the Nonjuror, an adaptation from Moliere's Tartuffe; the play, for which Nicholas Rowe wrote an abusive prologue, ran eighteen nights, and the author received from George I., to whom it was dedicated, a present of two hundred guineas. Tartuffe be came an English Catholic priest who incited rebellion, and there is little doubt that the Whig principles expressed in the Nonjuror led to Cibber's appointment as poet laureate (173o). It also provoked the animosity of the Jacobite and Catholic factions, and was pos sibly one of the causes of Pope's hostility to Cibber. Numerous "keys" to the Nonjuror appeared in 1718. In 1726 Cibber pleaded the cause of the patentees against the estate of Sir Richard Steele before Sir Joseph Jekyll, master of the rolls, and won his case. In 1730 Mrs. Oldfield died, and her loss was followed in 1732 by that of Wilks ; Cibber now sold his share in the theatre , appearing rarely on the stage thereafter. In 174o he published An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian . . . with an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time, which gives the best account there is of Cibber's contemporaries on the London stage.
In 1742 Cibber was substituted for Theobald as the hero of Pope's Dunciad. Cibber had introduced some gag into the Re hearsal, in which he played the part of Bayes, referring to the ill starred farce of Three Hours after Marriage (1717) . This play was nominally by Gay, but Pope and Arbuthnot were known to have had a hand in it. Cibber refused to discontinue the offensive passage, and Pope revenged himself in sarcastic allusions in his printed correspondence, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and in the Dunciad. To these Cibber replied with A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his satirical works to be so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's name (1742). Cibber scored with an "idle story of Pope's behaviour in a tavern" inserted in this letter, and gives an account of the origi nal dispute over the Rehearsal. By the substitution of Cibber for Theobald as hero of the Dunciad much of the satire lost its point. Cibber's faults certainly did not include dullness. A new edition contained a prefatory discourse, probably the work of Warburton, entitled "Ricardus Aristarchus, or the Hero of the Poem," in which Cibber is made to look ridiculous from his own Apology. Cibber replied in 1744 with Another Occasional Letter . . . , and altogether he had the best of the argument. When he was 74 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, Feb. a miserable paraphrase of Shakespeare's play. He died on Dec. 11, Cibber's reputation has suffered unduly from the depreciation of Pope and Johnson. "I could not bear such nonsense" said John son of one of Cibber's odes, "and I would not let him read it to the end." Fielding attacked Cibber's style and language more than once in Joseph Andrews, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Cibber pos sessed wit, unusual good sense and tact ; and in the Apology he showed himself the most delicate and subtle critic of acting of his time. He was frequently accused of plagiarism, and did not scru ple to make use of old plays, but he is said to have been ashamed of his Shakespearian adaptations, one of which, however, Richard III. (Drury Lane, 1700), kept its place as the acting version until 1821. Cibber is rebuked for his mutilation of Shakespeare by Fielding in the Historical Register for 1736, where he figures as Ground Ivy.