Cibber! Write all thy Verses upon Glasses,
The only way to save ’em from our A—s.
ALEXANDER POPE: from Epigrams Occasioned by Cibber’s Verses in Praise of Nash
Actor, playwright, theatre manager, Cibber was an important figure in eighteenth-century English drama. His parents were wealthy, and he was born in the then new and fashionable suburb of Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square. His father, who had been apprenticed to the London sculptor John Stone, was himself a celebrated sculptor whose most famous work, two huge statues in Portland stone that were designed for the gates of the new madhouse, St Mary’s of Bethlehem (‘Bedlam’), represented Melancholy and Raving Madness. These moving works, portraits of two inmates of the asylum, including Daniel, Oliver Cromwell’s mad porter, are now in the Guildhall. Though Cibber’s plays were greatly admired by Smollett and Walpole, none of them has stood the test of time; one of them, indeed (The Non-Juror, 1717), was ridiculed in a pamphlet by Pope, who also chose Cibber as the anti-hero in the final edition of The Dunciad. Nonetheless, he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1730, and wrote a handful of poems, including the sentimental ‘The blind boy’, that are still read. His most entertaining work remains An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), an autobiography that paints a vivid picture of early eighteenth-century theatrical life, in which he calls Fielding ‘a broken wit’ – thus provoking the novelist to pen a withering, anti-Cibber satire in the opening chapter of Joseph Andrews.
Cibber was an important figure in the ‘operatic war’ that divided English musical life between 1715 and 1718 into two factions: those who espoused the English Restoration masque, and those who wished to develop Italian opera. Cibber’s preface to his own Venus and Adonis (‘A Masque’) and Myrtillo (‘A Pastoral Interlude’) speaks volumes about the seriousness of his intent, and can be compared to Mozart’s celebrated letter to Professor Anton Klein, dated 21 March 1785, in which he expresses the fervent hope that one day a German opera house might be founded for opera to be sung in German:
The following Entertainment is an Attempt to give the Town a little good Musick in a Language they understand. […] We are so far from establishing Theatrical Musick in England, that the very Exhibition or Silence of it seems entirely to depend on the Arrival or Absence of some Eminent Foreign Performer […] It is therefore hoped, that this Undertaking, if encourag’d, may in time reconcile Musick to the English Tongue.
Cibber has been much mocked by Pope, Fielding and others, but his intentions to promote English music were admirable – a pity, then, that Pepusch’s 1715 settings of Cibber’s libretti were so feeble. The attractive coloured bust of Cibber in London’s National Portrait Gallery is arguably a truer likeness of the man than Pope’s caricature in the Dunciad.
O say! what is that thing call’d light,
Which I must ne’er enjoy;
What are the blessings of the sight,
O tell your poor blind boy!
You talk of wondrous things you see,
You say the sun shines bright;
I feel him warm, but how can he
Or make it day or night?
When e’er I sleep or play;
And could I ever keep awake
With me ’twere always day.
With heavy sighs I often hear
You mourn my hapless woe;
But sure with patience I can bear
A loss I ne’er can know.
Then let not what I cannot have
My cheer of mind destroy:
Whilst thus I sing, I am a king,
Although a poor blind boy.
(Haydn, Hurlstone)