Charlotte

PARTONE

CIBBERS

(1660--1712)

Of all the spectacles in London, one of the most popular was Bethlem Royal Hospital, the madhouse. "Bedlam" drew crowds of the curious, eager to pay admission to stare with horror at the inmates, howling in frenzy or slumped in silent dejection. In 1676, Bethlem Hospital had relocated to Moorfields, just outside the City's northern wall. The stately design of its new building and gardens, said to resemble the Tuileries, contrasted starkly with the brutal treatment of the miserable "lunaticks" inside, who often were bound in chains and manacles, and routinely whipped and bled.

Bedlam's entrance gate itself produced an unsettling thrill, for on either side loomed the recumbent statue of a near-naked madman. One,Melancholy, reclined on his side in passive imbecility, gazing openmouthed into space. The other,Raving, thrashed against his chains, his countenance twisted and angry. A little larger than life, these sculpted madmen were reputed to represent actual inmates once incarcerated inside Bedlam. But visitors familiar with Rome might have recognized the influence of Michelangelo's tomb statuary and Bernini's fountain sculptures in the Piazza Navona.

Bedlam's disturbing figures had been carved of Portland stone at the end of the seventeenth century by Caius Gabriel Cibber, and were widelyacknowledged as his masterpieces.b To Caius Gabriel's son Colley, the Bedlam statues held more equivocal significance.

A common metaphor (then as now) equated artistic productions with children. A playwright might declare a play to be "a brat of my brain"; poets spoke of their poetical "offspring." Colley, the child of the creator of these lunatics, could thus be said to bear a kinship with them: all were "sons" of his father. This metaphorical affiliation provided an irresistible lure to Alexander Pope, who used it to strike a neat blow inThe Dunciad. Pope imagined a "Cave" of hack writing, located near Bethlem Hospital, "Where o'er the gates, by his fam'd father's hand, / Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand" (I: 29--32). Pope may not have been the first of Colley's contemporaries to think of this gibe, but he was the one who immortalized it.

The Bethlem statues evoke the contradictory legacy that Caius Gabriel Cibber bequeathed to his elder son, Colley, and that he in turn bestowed upon his family, especially his only son, Theophilus, and his youngest daughter, Charlotte. Each generation of Cibbers put its particular twist on that legacy, but the general outline remained constant. Virtually from its emergence into the public eye, the name of Cibber implied the idea of professional prominence marred by arrogance, recklessness, or misjudgment. For three generations (the name died out in the fourth), members of the Cibber family cultivated their inheritance of achievement and ignominy, acclaim and censure.

Colley Cibber was the ambitious son of an ambitious father. Like his son and granddaughter after him, Caius Gabriel Cibber, an emigre sculptor born in Flensburg, Holstein, sought and gained a place in the British public eye. He also invented the family name that he and his descendants would make notorious. When young Caius Gabriel (his original full name) immigrated to England from Copenhagen, where his father had moved the family, he added the new surname "Cibber" to his own. Caius Gabriel had studied in Italy, and the name was possibly an Anglicized form of Cibò, an Italian aristocratic patron of the arts, whose coat of arms he adopted.c Like his son after him, Caius Gabriel relished his associations with aristocracy.1

Caius Gabriel Cibber immigrated to London in the late 1650s, settling west of the old City walls in Covent Garden, where many of his descendants would also live. He arrived on the cusp of three great events that would shake the country and its capital: the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 after the collapse of the Commonwealth established by the Puritan victors of the English Civil War; the return in 1665 of the Black Death (bubonic plague), which killed nearly 100,000 people; and the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed most of the City of London and left as many as 200,000 people homeless.

After 1666, having survived both plague and fire, Caius was well positioned to profit from the latter. The burned-out City had to be rebuilt immediately, so the guilds that controlled London's trades relaxed their traditional restrictions against foreign builders, creating ripe opportunities for the young immigrant sculptor. Caius embarked upon a career that would leave a lasting imprint upon his adopted city.

Decades later, Charlotte Charke and her father would frequently have encountered vivid reminders of their family legacy. Charlotte, seeking employment or adventure within the old City walls, might have passed the massive columnar Monument to the Great Fire (it still stands today, on Fish Street Hill) and paused to scrutinize its vigorous bas-relief. If she had reason to enter the south door of St. Paul's Cathedral, she would have passed under the carved phoenix that symbolized London rising from its ashes.

If, after his parents' death, Colley ever visited the graceful Danish church in Wellclose Square (now destroyed) where they were buried, he could have admired the four vivid sculptures of burnished wood--Saints Peter and Paul, John the Baptist, and Moses (now displayed in the Danish Church in Regent's Park). In the West End, Charlotte and her father would have walked often through Soho Square, where a statue of Charles II stood (and where it stands again today, though much eroded).2 All of these sculptures, and the design of the Wellclose Square church itself, were the legacy of Caius Gabriel. His work was rewarded in 1693 with his appointment as sculptor in ordinary to William III, a position in the king's household dedicated to the conservation and repair of the statuary at the royal palaces.3

In 1670, as his London career was beginning to flourish, Caius, a recent widower, achieved another kind of success by taking as his second wife, Jane Colley, daughter of an old Rutlandshire gentry family whose forebears had played prominent parts in local and national politics. (Colley Cibber later boasted that his maternal ancestors were recorded "as Sheriffs and Members of Parliament from the Reign ofHenryVII.")4 Though the Colley family had lost their land and most of their wealth, they retained vestiges of their former gentility.

Jane, who had control of her own considerable income of £6,000, must have found the young sculptor an appealing matrimonial prospect, since Caius's profession, though once ranked among the manual trades, had risen considerably in status. (Charles II, when creating the office of "Master Sculptor," had issued a statement declaring sculpture and carving in wood an "Art of more excellent skill and dexterity" than arts such as carpentry, masonry, and furniture-making.)5 Caius was also a handsome man: in a surviving portrait his dark eyes focus intensely and his stylish mustache gives him a dashing air. A year after their marriage, on November 6, 1671, Jane gave birth to their first child, Colley, christened on November 29 at the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. But whatever prospects of marital happiness Jane may have envisioned were soon dampened if not completely blighted. For all of his public success, Caius left a private legacy of disappointment that would sour his family life and ultimately shape his descendants' history.

Caius Gabriel Cibber, observed his younger contemporary, the engraver George Vertue, was a "gentleman-like man and a man of good sense." However, Vertue added, "he died poor." His story was common enough: a wealthier gentleman who lodged in his house supposedly introduced him to gambling, creating an addiction Caius could ill afford.6 Despite Jane's handsome dowry, he ran into debt within a year of their marriage. Bills mounted as he borrowed money from creditors and then defaulted. Finally, when Colley was a little more than a year old, the bailiffs arrested Caius and clapped him into Marshalsea, one of the debtors prisons in Southwark, the rough district south of the river. Caius would become all too familiar with the Marshalsea and King's Bench prisons during the next five years.

The threat of debtors prison hovered over the Cibber family during Colley's early childhood. Caius would be released from one incarcerationonly to be arrested again for other debts. Fortunately, this did not entirely impede his career: he sculpted the Monument to the Great Fire during one of his periods of imprisonment, when a magistrate granted him day leave to do the work provided he return to Marshalsea every night. And after the early 1670s, Caius was never again incarcerated, though the bailiffs always loomed since he remained perpetually in debt and was periodically hauled into court by his creditors.7

The Cibbers' financial difficulties placed a particular strain upon Jane, who had three more children after Colley, though only one, Lewis, survived infancy. While the family never suffered the privations of the genuinely poor, their straitened circumstances interfered with their aspiration to gentility. As his reputation grew, Caius was often able to escape the stresses of London for months on end, executing commissions at aristocratic country houses such as Chatsworth, the magnificent estate of the Duke of Devonshire. Jane, on the other hand, seems to have remained in town to face the burdens of an insufficient income. She had been raised to expect better. Some years later, an enemy of Colley's described Jane Cibber as nagging and tightfisted, "a very carking, sparing Housewifely Woman."8

Among the children, the impact of a strained household atmosphere fell most acutely on Colley, and many components of his infamous personality might have resulted from his efforts as a child to cope with the stresses of family life. The adult Colley was notorious for his thick skin, insensitivity, and egotism, traits that a child might develop in an attempt to protect himself from the shame of his father's failings. And the stubborn, willful streak that emerged in the adolescent Colley, who grew up to rebel against his parents, would have been intensified by his resentment of their shortcomings. He knew from an early age that his father's improvidence would force him to make his own way in life, with only a tiny inheritance from his mother's family. Ultimately, Caius's failure to provide for his son strengthened Colley's ability to defy him.

When Colley was ten, his parents enrolled him at Grantham Free School in Lincolnshire; his tenure there comprised the entirety of his formal education.9 At Grantham, Colley established the checkered reputationthat he would ever after maintain. He was, he later acknowledged, an "inconsistent Creature" at school, "always in full spirits, in some small Capacity to do right, but in a more frequent Alacrity to do wrong."10 His "giddy Negligence" won him reproof as often as praise from his masters. And, he admitted, "my unskillful openness, or in plain Terms, the Indiscretion I have always acted with from my Youth" gained him the enmity of his schoolmates.

Colley's behavior may be explained as defensiveness, but no one liked him better for it, and his cutting wit exacerbated his unpopularity. On one occasion, Colley recklessly struck a classmate for insulting him, and his much larger antagonist began to pummel him mercilessly. As other boys ran to see the fight, Colley heard one of his closest friends cry to his rival, "Beat him, beat him soundly!" Later, this boy explained that he wanted to see Colley beaten "because you are always jeering, and making a Jest of me to every Boy in the School." Reflecting back on this "first remarkable Error of my Life," Colley mused, "Thus I deserved his Enmity, by my not having Sense enough to know Ihadhurt him; and he hated me, because he had not Sense enough to know, that I neverintendedto hurt him."

Colley never entirely absorbed the lesson of the gap between his intentions and the effects of his behavior. During his six years at Grantham, he was several times the butt of his schoolmates' resentment, since his abilities often allowed him to show up the others and his vanity kept him from underplaying his achievements. Rather than learning lessons of modesty and diffidence, Colley instead learned to weather the consequences of his success and self-promotion.

As Colley entered his teens, his ambitious father planned his eldest son's future, fixing upon the church, to which plan Colley, grandiosely imagining himself in bishop's robes, acquiesced. Ordination in the Church of England required a university education, so Caius arranged for the sixteen-year-old to compete for admission to the prestigious Winchester College, which would then position him to enter New College at the University of Oxford. Winchester and New College had been linked since the days of their founding by the priest William of Wykeham, who was an ancestor of Colley's mother.

Caius naively assumed that the family connection would assure his son's admission. As Colley later remarked, in the tone of exasperation he adopted when discussing his father, "Had he tacked a direction to my back and sent me by the carrier to the mayor of the town to be chosen Member of Parliament there, I might have had just as much chance to have succeeded in the one as the other." Arriving with no other sponsorship but his pedigree, he was rejected.d

Undeterred, Caius plotted to use his connections to get his son admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, for which he had completed a sculpture commission. But the Revolution of 1688--89, which deposed King James II, intervened, and Colley's education had to wait. Instead of matriculating at university, he served briefly in lieu of his father in the regiment commanded by Caius's patron, the Earl of Devonshire. He saw no action, but the detour proved fateful. When the political future of Britain was temporarily settled the following year, with William and Mary established on the throne, Caius abandoned his dream of an ecclesiastical career for his son. Devonshire had been madea duke; Caius sent Colley to London to wait upon him, in order to secure some government position. Caius was particularly anxious to fix his son in a respectable occupation, for Colley had begun to show disturbing signs of fascination with the theater.

When Colley discovered that he was not to be admitted to Winchester College, he happily hastened home to London to spend his leftover traveling money on a theater ticket. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was at that time home to London's single licensed troupe. (The two original Restoration royal patent companies had united in 1682.) We may imagine Colley fidgeting on one of the hard, backless benches waiting for the play to begin, drinking in the heady atmosphere of the playhouse--the raffish audience, the bitter smell of burning tapers and orange peel, the blaze of the giant candelabra, the shouts and laughter, the lively music. Then, the ponderous curtain slowly opens, and the players make their entrances. The stage-struck boy gazes transfixed at the reigning royalty of late-seventeenth-century English theater, longing to be among them.

They were a dazzling lot, the luminaries of the Drury Lane company. Chief among them was Thomas Betterton, widely considered the greatest actor ever to tread the stage. Betterton was not handsome: the term "bearlike" might have been coined for him. He had a large head, a broad, pockmarked face, a stocky torso, fat legs, and short, thick arms. His voice was low and growling. He possessed a masterful economy of movement, great emotional intensity, and a subtle, nuanced power of speech that he could "tune," said the actor Tony Aston, to an "artful climax." 11 (When he began to speak, contemporary observers said, he made everyone forget his appearance.)

No other player could keep the normally rowdy playhouse audience as "hushed and quiet" as Betterton. Colley would recall that when Betterton played Hamlet confronting his father's ghost, he conveyed such a profound sense of solemnity, amazement, and fear that he made the ghost as terrifying to the spectators as it was to Hamlet.12 Some satirists made fun of Betterton's egotism and arrogance, but no one questioned his complete domination of the stage.

Betterton's female counterpart was Elizabeth Barry, a tragedienne and the greatest actress of her day, who was known as the "famousMrs. Barry, both at Court and City."13 Her voice was "full, clear, and strong, so that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her," Colley said; she also possessed "an unsurpassed power in the Art of exciting Pity."14 Very attractive to men, Mrs. Barry had been the mistress of the libertine Earl of Rochester--it was said that he had taught her how to act--and, after him, of several other high-born men, including the playwright Sir George Etherege and the Earl of Dorset.

Mrs. Barry was proud, popular with audiences, and very highly paid--a wealthy, assertive woman who wielded great power in the company. She could be formidable, even aggressive: in a choreographed fight onstage with the actress Elizabeth Bowtrell, with whom she had quarreled over a veil, Mrs. Barry wielded her dagger "so fiercely that she pierced the other woman's flesh." She was routinely the target of misogynist satires that represented her as a mercenary whore (a powerful woman being so much more offensive to the satirists than her male counterpart). "Should you ley [sic] with her all Night," sneered Tom Brown, "She would not know you the next Morning, unless you had another five Pound at her Service."15

Counterbalancing Mrs. Barry at Drury Lane was Anne Bracegirdle, who matched her in popularity but projected a very different public image. Anne was not beautiful but she was utterly captivating: Colley said that at any given time half the audience was in love with her.16 She affectingly played a range of leading parts, from heroic queens to charmingly manipulative coquettes (William Congreve wrote the role of Millamant inThe Way of the Worldfor her). Mrs. Bracegirdle was besieged ceaselessly in the green room by would-be lovers, titled admirers among them. (Many upper-class men assumed the right of free access backstage, not only to the green room but often to actresses' dressing rooms as well.) But Anne rejected them all, acquiring a reputation for chastity so unusual for an actress that it made her a phenomenon. Though satirists speculated that she must have lovers (Congreve was a particular suspect), her discretion remained absolute.

There were other stars in the Drury Lane company, such as the beautiful Edward Kynaston, who prior to the introduction of women on the English stage in 1660 had played female roles, and continued to play them until a coterie of actresses was trained. (Once, when King Charles II had asked why a tragedy was not starting on time, he was told that "the Queen had not shaved yet.") Samuel Pepys observed thatKynaston was both the "prettiest woman in the whole house" and "the handsomest man in the house."17 In 1690, he was fifty years old but remained a handsome figure: remarkably, he still had all his teeth.

With these figures, and others almost as alluring before him, Colley was thoroughly smitten. As he cooled his heels in London waiting for the duke to remember him, he went night after night to the playhouse. Devonshire delayed, the theater beckoned ever more seductively, and finally, in defiance of Jane and Caius's protests, the youth heeded its call. He could see "no Joy in any other Life than that of an Actor": only the stage, he declared to his horrified parents, would make him happy.18 Ignoring his parents' remonstrances, Colley plunged into the theater world. He began assiduously to cultivate contacts at Drury Lane, becoming friends with the rakish young actor John Verbruggen--"that rough Diamond," Tony Aston said, who "shone more bright than all the artful, polish'd Brillants [sic] that ever sparked on our Stage"--and, more usefully, gaining the interest of the theater's prompter, John Downes.19 In 1690, Downes recommended nineteen-year-old "Master Colley" for a position as an unpaid apprentice actor.

Colley now considered himself "the happiest of Mortals," but Caius and Jane were distressed. Though they struggled financially, her genteel birth and his professional success allowed them to claim respectability; acting was a step down on the ladder.

Actors were difficult to categorize socially. The salaries of the leading players of a major company placed them in the upper ranks of the "middle station," and some of them moved in aristocratic circles. But their profession was suspect, at best, and most actors never joined a leading company, achieved well-paid leading roles, or had enough money to ride out a poor season. For the most part, theater folk, along with musicians and other entertainers, belonged to their own demimonde, distinct from both the middling and the upper classes.20 With its risque plays, its audiences that included rakes and prostitutes, its air of sexual license, its glamour, and its violence, the theater was profoundly stigmatized.

Fellows in ignominy, players often banded together, forming friendships and alliances among themselves (when they were not engaged in rivalries and quarrels). So it was not surprising that Colley, havingjoined the theatrical world, found a wife within it too. Caius and Jane must have been particularly dismayed when Colley fell in love with a musician (though perhaps they consoled themselves--prematurely--that at least she was not an actress).

Twenty-four-year-old Katherine Shore, "a very beautiful and amiable young woman, whom [Henry] Purcell taught to sing and play on the harpsichord," was said to have one of the finest voices of her day. Katherine belonged to a family of professional musicians. Her father, Matthias Shore, held a court position as Sergeant of the Trumpeters, Drummers, and Fifes in Ordinary to Kings James II and William III. Her brother William, a trumpet player, also held a court appointment.

Her other brother, John, another trumpeter, eventually succeeded Matthias as Sergeant-Trumpeter: John is credited with inventing the tuning fork and, it was said, could produce from his instrument "a tone as sweet as that of a hautboy." A "man of humor and pleasantry," he also played in the orchestra of the Drury Lane Theatre, where he struck up an acquaintance with Colley.21 One day after rehearsal, Colley accompanied his friend to the Shore family home where, as the young men entered, they heard a woman singing in an adjacent room. The singer was Katherine.

In his own distinctly unmusical, reedy voice, Colley complimented her upon her singing, telling her that he prided himself on his good ear and admired her musicianship. Now his eyes told him that she had a lovely person as well. He, on the other hand, was a short, skinny, bandy-legged, sandy-haired twenty-year-old, already acquiring a reputation for cockiness and dissipation. He had just enjoyed the professional breakthrough of promotion fromunpaid to poorlypaid apprentice actor, but his acquisition of a salary was amusingly backhanded. In his first appearance on the stage, he was cast in a small part requiring him to carry a message to Thomas Betterton, and made his entrance gripped with such obvious terror that he discomposed everyone. Afterward, Betterton indignantly demanded from Downes the name of the youngster who had botched the scene. "Master Colley," replied the prompter. "Master Colley! Then forfeit him," Betterton thundered. "Why sir," said Downes, "he has no salary." "No?" retorted Betterton. "Why then put him down for ten shillings a week and forfeit him five."22

Colley understandably might have refrained from giving Katherinethese details, but he did charm her with his sassy wit and self-confidence. After some months of courtship, Colley proposed. He had to offer only his pittance of a salary, his tiny inheritance of £20 a year, and his unbounded ambition. Some accounts suggest that Matthias Shore actively opposed the marriage, seeing little potential in Master Colley's prospects and perhaps alerted to the young man's growing reputation for rakishness. If so, however, he later reconciled with his daughter, leaving her an inheritance, though he specified that it go to her rather than to Colley. (Matthias also built a houseboat, known as Shore's Folly, where entertainments of music--and less respectable pleasures, for it doubled as a bawdyhouse--could be enjoyed. The German visitor Uffenbach encountered there "one female who, for a small fee, did all kinds of dance figures with a bare sword.")23

Regardless of her father's opinion, Katherine saw something promising in her cocky young suitor, and accepted his offer. The "happiest young Couple, that ever took a Leap in the Dark," as Colley remembered them, were married on May 6, 1693, at St. James's, Duke's Place, Aldgate, London.24 Colley's parents must have been even more dismayed than Matthias. Marriage to a dowryless musician was one more step away from the life of prosperous gentility the Cibbers had envisioned for their elder son.

The newlyweds set up housekeeping on a meager income. Katherine went onto the stage, acting in occasional roles but more often performing entr'acte songs written by leading composers, including the Purcell brothers and John Eccles. Colley's biographers have assumed that Katherine became a professional performer entirely because Colley's salary was inadequate to support them both. But we cannot discount the possibility that, however necessary her salary, she also welcomed the opportunity. Several Drury Lane actresses were married, often to other actors, and even a few of those whose marriages moved them upward on the social ladder continued to act. The stage may not have been respectable, but it represented one of the very few professional opportunities available to women.

For his part, Colley labored to prove himself. The popular actor William Mountfort kindly took him under his wing, giving him his firstsmall speaking part, a servant, in Thomas Southerne's comedy Sir Anthony Love. (The character of Sir Anthony Love is a woman who passes as a man for almost the entire play.) But Mountfort's patronage of Colley was cut short the next year. A seventeen-year-old army officer, Captain Richard Hill, who mistakenly thought that Mountfort was having an affair with Anne Bracegirdle, trailed the thirty-three-year-old actor home from the playhouse and stabbed him on his own doorstep. William staggered through the door and died at the feet of his wife, Susanna, who was pregnant with their second child.25

Shocked and saddened, Colley persevered, yet all the best parts were claimed by the older, established actors, who jealously guarded their privileges against potential rivals. An opportunity presented itself in the season of 1694--95, when long-simmering disputes erupted between many of the company's principal actors and the theater's patentee, Christopher Rich. Colley said Rich was "as sly a Tyrant, as ever was at the Head of a Theatre; for he gave the Actors more Liberty, and fewer Days Pay, than any of his Predecessors: he could laugh with them over a Bottle, and bite them, in their Bargains: he kept them poor, that they might not be able to rebel; and sometimes merry, that they might not think of it."26

Betterton, Barry, and Bracegirdle were not poor, however, and they did, finally, rebel. They, along with many other veteran players, seceded from Drury Lane and obtained a license from the lord chamberlain to start a second, competing company under their own management at a theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Colley, however, saw that his own interests were best served by remaining with the unscrupulous Rich at Drury Lane, for the suddenly decimated company would have to promote younger actors to fill the vacated roles.

But Colley now found his progress blocked by another obstacle--George Powell, the most powerful player remaining, who had pegged Master Colley as an upstart. Powell, an excellent actor, was also an envious, quarrelsome alcoholic: he would go on stage so aggressively heated with drink, according to John Vanbrugh, that his romantic scenes with his leading lady resembled assault more than courtship.27 Powell was often in a position to deny Colley roles. Continually frustrated, the ambitious youth finally realized that in order to act in good parts he would have to create them himself.

So, over the summer of 1695, Colley wrote a comic play entitledLove's Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion.The playwright Thomas Southerne read it and recommended that it be staged. The comedy premiered in January 1696, with a strong cast that pointedly did not include George Powell: Colley cast John Verbruggen (now married to the former Susanna Mountfort) instead.

The play's plot centers around the plight of Amanda, a virtuous wife, played by Mrs. Rogers, who was neither. (It was said that she considered herself virtuous because she played chaste characters.) Amanda's libertine husband, Loveless (Verbruggen, cast much more according to type) abandoned her shortly after their marriage, but for ten years Amanda has remained faithful to him, as he has impoverished himself through debauchery in Europe. The play begins with the destitute Loveless returning to England because he has heard that his wife has died from smallpox. Amanda, whose illness has not killed her but has altered her appearance, hides her identity and lures him into bed for a night of rapture. Only in the morning does she reveal that their supposedly illicit love was licit all along. Loveless, guilt-struck but also impressed by the pleasures of the previous night, vows to redeem himself within the bonds of faithful marriage (and, presumably, good sex). The play ends with Loveless's proclamation that true happiness can be found only in "the chaste Rapture of a virtuous Love."

Love'sLastShiftbecame an instant hit, striking a note that would define Colley Cibber's career, namely, a plot that allowed the audience both the pleasures of sexual intrigue and the satisfaction of a sentimental ending. As Cibber's epilogue reminds the audience with a verbal wink, the rake may reform at the end of the play, but "he's lewd for above four acts" first. Having enjoyed the play's licentious situations and sexy banter, the audience could conclude with tears of moralistic pleasure.

Colley wrote for himself the role of Sir Novelty Fashion, the first of his many upper-class fops who would mince across the stage overdressed in parodies of the latest Parisian fashions. Sir Novelty's entrance brought down the house: his wig was an extravagant confection of curls and ties, the lace on his sleeves reached his knuckles, and the buttons onhis coat were, he pointed out with false modesty, "not above three Inches diameter." Colley's high-pitched voice and flattened vowels--he pronounced his "o's" as "a's"--gave Sir Novelty an affected drawl, which he punctuated with the exclamation "Stap my Vitals!" His vacuous expression and unprepossessing, bandy-legged figure made the fop's preening narcissism all the more incongruous.

At age twenty-five, Colley had found his calling and his character, vindicating his choice of career. Basking in the acclaim that greetedLove's Last Shift, Colley laughed off the insistence of some critics that he must have plagiarized the play because it was too good for him to have written. Suddenly he was acknowledged as a promising playwright and actor, and he began to gain influence with Rich. His parents did not live to see him famous--Jane would die in 1697 and Caius in 1700--but they were both alive to hear of the triumph ofLove's Last Shift. Perhaps they even went to see it.

Ironically enough, given its embrace of virtue and marital fidelity,Love's Last Shiftalso made Colley his first high-born rakish friend, Colonel Henry Brett, who marched backstage after a performance, bent upon acquiring Sir Novelty's wonderful wig. Though Colley refused to surrender the wig, the two men became immediate friends. Brett, who at the time was seeking to repair his ruined fortune by marrying a rich woman, would eventually provide the model for Colley's most famous libertine character. And his friendship opened the door to the society of upper-class rakes, whose example stimulated Colley's developing taste for the pleasures of gambling and whoring in high company--additional fruits of his success.

During the next decade, Colley exerted increasing influence over Rich, and continued to perfect his craft as a comic actor.28 As a playwright, however, he experienced flops as well as successes. He also began to adapt other plays, a routine practice that nonetheless opened him to charges of plagiarism from his critics. The already thin company was hit by a series of blows, too. Hildebrand Horden, a promising young actor positioned to take Mountfort's place, was killed in a brawl at the disreputable Rose Tavern adjacent to the theater. In 1703, Susanna Verbruggen, a sparkling comic actress, died in childbirth at age thirty-seven. And the theater's treasurer, Ralph Davenant, was stabbed todeath on his way home one night. Christopher Rich, opportunistic and often incompetent, paid his actors irregularly while skimming off the profits for himself, driving the company into debt as it struggled to hold its own against Betterton's troupe. Talk of an actors' mutiny was again in the air, despite one promising development: Rich's importation of the dashing Irish actor Robert Wilks. This, however, created tensions with George Powell, who presciently feared that the short-tempered but highly disciplined Wilks would eventually supplant him.

The theater generally was facing increasingly vociferous criticism as a sink of immorality and a threat to public decency. Reform was in the air. The reign of William and Mary, neither of whom was fond of plays, both coincided with and encouraged a backlash against Restoration excesses. In 1692, the Society for the Reformation of Manners was founded and began to execute its mission of rounding up prostitutes, prosecuting people for swearing in public, and threatening the playhouses and players. Jeremy Collier's diatribe,A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, spoke for many when it was published in 1698, castigating the most popular plays for their indecent plots, characters, and language. The accession in 1702. of Queen Anne, another monarch who did not care for the stage, intensified the reformist mood. A shock of alarm ran throughout the theater world.29

This was the climate in which the comedy considered Colley's masterpiece,The Careless Husband, premiered in December 1704. He had begun writing it some years before for Susanna Verbruggen, for whom he intended the principal role of Lady Betty Modish, a narcissistic society coquette. Colley had sorrowfully laid aside the play when Mrs. Verbruggen died, intending never to complete it. Susanna's old parts had been taken by a young actress who had been in the company for a year without distinguishing herself.

Anne Oldfield seemed to Colley a poor substitute for Susanna; he found her manner diffident and her delivery flat. When she was cast in Susanna's part inSir Courtly Nice, Colley, who played Sir Courtly, only grudgingly agreed to rehearse with her. Understandably, the rehearsal went badly, but on the night they first took the stage together, everything changed. Mrs. Oldfield turned in a performance whose brilliance amazed Colley--all the more so because "it proceeded from her own Understanding, untaught and unassisted by any more experience'd Actor" (to wit, himself).

Openly admitting his mistake, Colley became Oldfield's ardent supporter and admirer, speaking of her as "the foremost Ornament of our Theatre."30 He paid Anne his greatest compliment when he returned to writingThe Careless Husbandand shaped for her the role he had begun for Susanna. Mrs. Oldfield inhabited the role of Lady Betty so definitively for the next twenty-five years as to blur the distinction between the actress and the character.

A great beauty, with a figure "tall, genteel and well-shaped" and large expressive eyes, Mrs. Oldfield had an irresistible manner of tossing back her head and half-closing her eyes as she delivered a clever, cutting line.31 Anne herself was of humble origins, literate but not well educated; her father, probably the son of a tavern-keeper, had been a trooper in the Horse Guards who lived extravagantly and died young, leaving his family impoverished.32 But despite her low birth, Anne could play the coquettish society lady as perfectly if she had been bred to it.

The sentimental part ofThe Careless Husband'splot features Lady Easy, whose libertine husband, Sir Charles, has recently seduced her maid. In her sensible and forbearing way, she has refused to sour her marriage by complaining. One afternoon, however, Lady Easy discovers her husband and her maid asleep in adjoining chairs in obvious postcoital slumber. She does not awaken them, but lays her scarf over his head for him to find when he awakens: an act of wifely solicitude lest he catch cold, but also an eloquent statement of her awareness of his adultery, and her forbearance.

Cibber was said to have modeled Sir Charles Easy after Henry Brett, who was reputed to have been discovered by his wife, the former Countess of Macclesfield, in a similarly compromising position. In keeping with his own dramatic principles, however, Colley gave his play an ending apparently absent in the real-life domestic comedy enacted by Colonel and Mrs. Brett. When Sir Charles awakens to find the scarf, he realizes that he has been a fool. In his wife, he has long possessed a valuable jewel whose very familiarity has caused him to overlook its beauty and its worth. At the end of the play, as inLove's Last Shift, the libertine repents, vowing to become the faithful husband such a virtuous wife deserves. This play was one of Colley's greatest successes: it would be performed more than two hundred times during his lifetime. 33 Even Alexander Pope praised it.

The Careless Husbandfeatured a series of comic scenes centering around Lord Foppington, the Sir Novelty Fashion character who has bought himself a peerage--Colley's most famous role.e By now, Colley had definitively laid claim to the fop, and to his stature as a comic actor. However much those who disliked him might carp about his unwise persistence in trying to play tragic roles, Colley's brilliance as a comedian was evident. As the stuffy Aaron Hill backhandedly acknowledged, "It is not possible to look at him without acknowledging this remarkable talent and confessing he wasbornto belaughedat." Hill went on to describe Colley's stage manners: "In his face was a contracted kind of passive yet protruded sharpness, like a pig half roasted; and a voice not unlike his own might have been borrowed from the same suffering animal while in a condition a little less desperate."34

In theTatler(no. 182), Richard Steele wrote:

The First of the present Stage are Wilks and Cibber, perfect Actors in their different Kinds. Wilks has a singular Talent in representing the Graces of Nature, Cibber the Deformity in the Affectation of them ... . Cibber in another Light hits exquisitely the flat Civility of an affected Gentleman-Usher, and Wilks the easy Frankness of a Gentleman ... . To beseech gracefully, to approach respectfully, to pity, to mourn, to love, are the Places wherein Wilks may be made to shine with the utmost Beauty: to rally pleasantly, to scorn artfully, to flatter, to ridicule, and to neglect, are what Cibber would perform with no less Excellence.

The Careless Husband, Steele continued, was "a Play that is acted to Perfection, both by them and all concerned in it, as being born within the Walls of the Theatre, and written with an exact Knowledge of the Abilities of the Performers."

Colley responded to political pressures and changes in audience taste by writing plays that created emotionally charged scenes illustrating the value of family life and the raptures of faithful married love. Colley'sown behavior, however, was not modeled upon this ideal. Twice he was arrested on charges of sexual misconduct. In October 1697, four years after he and Katherine were married, he was briefly imprisoned on charges of indecent assault upon Jane Lucas, an actress and dancer. The charges were apparently dropped. (After several more years of continuing to act and dance in small roles--she played the maid inThe Careless Husband--Jane Lucas vanished from the theater's records.)

In June 1712, Colley was arrested for siring a child with an unmarried woman named Mary Osbourne. This time Colonel Brett paid his bail, and the case was settled out of court before it could come to trial. The fate of Mary Osbourne and her illegitimate child, not likely a happy one, remains obscure.35

These accusations may have been completely false or exaggerated. But they gained at least some credibility because of Colley's reputation. His biographer, Helene Koon, argues that while Colley self-protectively wore a mask of rakishness and foppery in public, his real sexual behavior was in fact exemplary. But there survives much innuendo aboutColley's conduct outside of his marriage. He himself referred to his familiarity with brothels, and his acknowledged predilection for drinking and gambling in rakish company shows that he embraced a libertine milieu.f

In fact, Colley Cibber never pretended that he himself was a model, despite the fact that he created examples of morality for the edification of others. "I am for the church, though I don't go to church," he would say. The actress Mary Porter once asked him, "How can you draw such admirable portraits of goodness and live as if you were a stranger to it?" To which he replied, coolly, "The one, madam, is absolutely necessary, the other is not."36

CHARLOTTE. Copyright © 2005 by Kathryn Shevelow. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.