Colley Cibber

Colley Cibber (London, 1671 – London, 1757) was an English actor, playwright and Poet Laureate who also managed theatre companies, making him one of the first actor-managers in British theatre. His importance rests on that double role, on two of his comedies that show how taste and ideas were changing in the early eighteenth century, and on the memoir he left behind.

His father, Caius Gabriel Cibber, was a sculptor of Danish origin. Cibber began acting at Drury Lane in 1690 and struggled for several years before his breakthrough. In 1696 he wrote Love's Last Shift, a comedy built around a flamboyant fop role that he played himself, and the success made him known both as a writer and as a performer. In 1710 he took over the management of Drury Lane, running it with a commercial rather than artistic focus. He was at his best in comic parts, while his tragic roles drew ridicule. Many of his plays were adaptations, and these attracted harsh criticism, most famously from Alexander Pope, who made him the chief target of The Dunciad. In 1730 he was appointed Poet Laureate, an honour that was widely seen as the result of political opportunism, and his verse is now regarded as minor.

His memoir, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), is chatty, digressive and sometimes inaccurate, yet it remains a lively source on London theatre from the late seventeenth century into the early eighteenth. His legacy lies in that record and in his place as a bridge between the stylised acting of the Restoration and the more natural performance styles that followed.