Actor, playwright, and theater manager, Colley Cibber was a leading figure in the eighteenth-century London theater world. As an actor, Cibber specialized in playing the fop, the man of fashion whose affectations make him a deserving candidate for...

Just what kind of book is An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber? While this question has not perhaps been burning in the minds of most readers for some time, those who do pick up the Apology are often just as frustrated...

I do here think fit to inform the Reader, that in such Conclusions as these, Reason is certainly in the Right; and that in most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In: Whereof...

In the following excerpt, Ashley provides a comprehensive survey of Cibber's theatrical efforts.

In the following essay, Drougge charges that although Cibber presents his plays as realism, they are actually sentimentalism: “wishfulfilment fantasies offered as instruction, unreal behaviour offered as psychology, submissive eloquence offered as logic.”

In this essay, Straub examines the eighteenth-century practice of gendering literary authority as masculine and in that context focuses on Cibber's unusual use of the sexually ambiguous figure of the schoolboy to construct an alternative model of authority.