Portrait of an Actor: The Many Faces of Colley Cibber

Abstract

Chapter 2, ‘Portrait of an Actor’, examines Cibber’s reputation as an actor and challenges long-held assumptions about Cibber’s inability to act seriously. It discovers that negative accounts all post-date Cibber’s career and attest to changing tastes in performance styles (e.g., the rise of Garrick) and increasing hostility toward Cibber himself. Taking Cibber’s acting seriously reconfigures our portrait of the man and his abilities, and also calls into question long-held assumptions about the fops he remains famous for. By placing a range of Cibber’s signature roles together—Lord Foppington, Malespine, and Aesop—we discover that they speak to and through each other. The fop, then, like Cibber himself, is both more significant and less marginal than has generally been believed.