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  • Reevaluating Colley Cibber and Some Problems in Documentation of Performance, 1690–1800
  • Robert D. Hume
Elaine M. McGirr. Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber ( London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Pp. ix + 210. $99.99

Serious scholarly attention to Colley Cibber is long overdue. He was a playwright, actor, theater manager, and theater historian of considerable importance in all those realms. He was hugely successful over the course of a long life (1671–1757), but not much loved, finding himself envied, hated, and derided. Being loathed and savaged by Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding (among many others) has been no help to his posthumous reputation, and the twenty-seven years he spent as poet laureate, diligently churning out drivel, did nothing to improve later critical views of him. Prior to McGirr's study, only four books of the slightest value have ever been published on Cibber. These are F. Dorothy Senior's The Life and Times of Colley Cibber (1928), Richard Hindry Barker's Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (1939), Leonard R. N. Ashley's Twayne Colley Cibber (1965, rev. ed. 1988), and Helene Koon's Colley Cibber: A Biography (1986). The studies by Senior, Barker, and Ashley are respectable efforts of their times and types. The Koon biography is an inaccurate whitewash that should not have been published.1 Much remains to be done with [End Page 101] Cibber. Very few people realize that his plays were unquestionably among the most performed on the eighteenth-century London stage. Only Shakespeare's plays were performed more times than Cibber's (see the appendix, "Comparative Performance Data Issues," at the end of this review).

The design of McGirr's book is straightforward. She devotes a twenty-two page first chapter "Introduction" to consideration of Cibber's "celebrity" and "infamy," the difficulties of "Searching for Cibber: The Man and/in the Works," the nature of "the Archive" (i.e., the records available to us, particularly of performance history), and a brief section "About This Book" in which she explains what she is attempting to accomplish, both in general and chapter by chapter. She says bluntly and accurately, "This is not a biography of Colley Cibber. I am not writing the story of his life, but rather the story of his reputation" (14). Yet she aims to reconstruct "the real Colley Cibber." Given the acute shortage of personal material concerning Cibber's life, this is a somewhat quixotic enterprise. We have no diaries, few letters, and precious little lifetime testimony from friends and colleagues. There is the 1740 Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley CibberWritten by Himself, but as McGirr promptly and rightly acknowledges, the Apology is only "ostensibly an autobiography" (28), and what it displays of its author is partly a virtuoso exhibition of "the Foppington mask" (8) and partly self-deprecatory clowning. Cibber clearly decided to announce that people could say what they pleased of him, while demonstrating that they need not bother, because he was quite prepared to say worse of himself. I do not believe there is a sufficient evidentiary basis from which to construct the inner life of the "real" Colley Cibber with any confidence in the results.

This book makes many good points, but McGirr spends a great deal of time denouncing critics from Cibber's lifetime to the present day who seem to her insufficiently to admire Cibber's acting, management, service to Shakespeare, and what she regards as an exemplary family life. She says in her "Acknowledgments" that her husband has listened patiently to her "heart-felt defences of all things Cibber" (vi). In the "Introduction," she remarks that "Colley Cibber deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote to The Dunciad" (fair enough), and adds that this book is "a partial history: it is partial towards Colley Cibber" (9). I confess to being uncomfortable with this honest admission. To mount a sober inquiry into the nature and quality of Cibber's acting and management, the nature of his Shakespeare adaptation and performance, and his family life is one thing. To mount a passionate defense "of all things Cibber" is partisan advocacy, not judicious scholarship.

Chapter 2, "Portrait of an Actor: The Many...

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