Partial Histories A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber [Hardcover]

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 thenations poet and canonised Cibbers enemies Pope and Fielding; theatrehistorys narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation andcelebration of Charlotte Charke by womens literary history. Each of thesestories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or b?te 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.

Elaine M. McGirr is Head of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.  She is the author of Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745 (2009) and Eighteenth-Century Characters (2007) as well as chapters and articles on Shakespearean adaptation, the novels of Samuel Richardson, the politics of Aphra Behn, and the authority of actresses.This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and l³¼