Partial histories: a reappraisal of Colley Cibber

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