Colley cibber biography of albert einstein

Who was Colley Cibber? We need you! Help us build the largest biographies collection on the web! Add a New Bio. Powered by CITE. Notify me of new comments via email. Pope, though he attempted to disguise his agony, was tortured by the wanton levity and shamelessness of his opponent. Johnson says: "I have heard Mr. Pope now meditated a new edition of " The Dunciad ," and was spurred on to the undertaking by another pamphlet, entitled "The Egotist, or Colley on Cibber," which Mr.

Disraeli regards as Cibber's "Supplement to his Apology. Theobald had been dethroned from his painful pre-eminence, and Cibber raised to his place. Pope, in this instance, allowed his irascibility to cloud his judgment, and thus marred the whole design of the poem. Theobald, as its hero, was perhaps in his place, but to make Cibber the hero of dulness, was preposterous.

He was without doubt open to attack in innumerable points, but he possessed one quality in which his superiority could enable him to laugh at all detraction, and that was the very reverse of dulness. The poem was accompanied by a long Discourse of Richard Aristarchus, intended as a reply to Cibber's attacks, written by Warburton, in which he aimed his blow at two antagonists at once, ridiculing Bentley in his manner, and Cibber in his matter.

This called forth another letter from Cibber, which was the final effort in the strife. Still, with all his levity and vivacity, our hero could not be quite obtuse to the keen point of such a missile. Disraeli, "one may perceive that, though the good-humour of Cibber was real, still the immortal satire of Pope had injured his higher feelings.

He betrays his secret grief at its close, while he seems to be sporting with his pen; and though he appears to confide in the falsity of the satire, as his best chance for saving him from it, still he feels that the caustic ink of such a satirist must blister and spot wherever it falls. He quitted the stage the same year in which he was appointed Poet-Laureate.

The following ten years he employed in drawing up his memoirs, which he published under the title of "An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber," a life which Fielding said he lived only to apologize for. This work has been the most popular of all his productions, and has obtained the praise of men of such diverse tempers as Horace Walpole and Dr.

Johnson; the former terming it "Cibber's inimitable treatise on the stage," while Johnson pronounces it to be "very entertaining. It is a rambling book of gossip, written in a slovenly style, but filled with interesting notices of the most eminent actors and actresses of his time. They, too, were performers of no ordinary merit; and such a work, on its first appearance, must have exceeded in interest any novel or romance.

His character, as there unconsciously depicted by himself, presents little to excite our sympathy, still less our esteem. Writing of the Earl of Chesterfield, he says: "Having often had the honour to be the butt of his raillery, I must own I have received more pleasure from his lively manner of raising the laugh against me, than I could have felt from the smoothest flattery of a serious civility.

Still he had talents, and let them receive their tribute of admiration; he did a service to his colley cibber biography of albert einstein, and let him have his meed of praise. He was a patient reformer of inveterate abuses. By his writings he elevated the morality of the stage, and by his policy he improved its management. His private life stands in unfavourable contrast with his public career.

Witty and unprincipled, clever and vain, he lived only to amuse and be amused; a genuine comic actor, with no depth of feeling or strength of character; undepressed by misfortune, but elated with success; fond of his bottle, fond of his jest, fond likewise of the rattle of the dice. Though undeserving the excessive depreciation he has suffered, a candid impartiality will refuse to connect any flattering encomium with his name.

Whatever the debt contemporaries may owe, they who make it their chief business to cater to the public amusement merely, have little claim upon a succeeding generation; and his works having answered their purpose, will be solely valuable to the literary or historical student, as indicative of the taste of a period he neither disgraced nor adorned.

In height he was of the middle size, with a fair complexion, and a carriage easy, though not graceful. On the stage he seemed to put on the character he was acting, and every limb and gesture spoke the part as truthfully as the words he uttered. Instances of carelessness, however, were not unfrequent. Once, when acting as Sir Courtly Rice, a part he had played a hundred times, he quite lost himself; so, making a ceremonious bow to the lady with whom he was acting, he drawled out, "your humble servant, Madam," then with quiet assurance walked across the stage, and said to the prompter, "Well, what next?

There was a rising actress, in whose career he took a warm and lively interest, and that was Mrs. Woffington: the witty, the volatile, the beautiful Peg Woffington, President of the Beefsteak Club; who, at the jocund noon of night, after having melted an audience into tears by her touching impersonation of innocence and sorrow, might be seen at the head of the board, brandishing the foaming pewter, giving as the toast, "Here's to liberty, confusion to all order.

InCibber appeared as Pandulph, in his tragedy "Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John," and his last publication was an essay on the character of Cicero, then a popular topic, owing to Dr. Middleton's celebrated life of that orator. He died December 12th,in the eighty-seventh year of his age. Of his many children, two only acquired any notoriety, his son Theophilus, who was a great profligate, but a tolerable actor, and, like his father, excelled in the characters of fops and old men, and his youngest child Charlotte.

Colley cibber biography of albert einstein: He was an awful

A witticism of the son has been preserved. The father once meeting him dressed in the extreme of foppery, surveyed him curiously for some minutes, and then said, with great disdain: "Indeed, The, I pity you. The career of his daughter Charlotte was so eccentric, replete with such singular vicissitudes, that we cannot resist devoting a paragraph to her memory.

She seemed to labour under a deficiency in some one faculty, which more than neutralized the unusual activity of all the rest.

Colley cibber biography of albert einstein: cibber. Image of Colley Cibber from

Ardent, intelligent, and persevering, her conduct ever bordered on the extravagant; a Lola Montes in her day, though with greater virtue, and, therefore, not so fortunate as to win the favour of kings and guardsmen. The principal materials of this sketch are to be found in a narrative written by herself, and dedicated to herself, to which she affixed the following appropriate motto:.

In very early life she gave indications of an excitable temperament, and an unruly will. At eight years of age she was sent to school, and devoted herself to her studies with passionate vehemence. The needle, woman's ordinary weapon against inactivity, she could never learn to manage; but every masculine pursuit or amusement had for her an irresistible attraction.

She would hunt, shoot, ride races, dig, drink beer, do anything, in short, that a young lady ought not to do. At fourteen, she went to live with her mother at a house near Uxbridge. There she became a capital shot, would rise early, spend the whole day at her sport, and return home, laden with spoil. Her gun, at the suggestion of a good-natured friend, was soon taken away from her, and she revenged herself by attempting to demolish the chimneys of the house, by firing at them with a huge fowling-piece that had hung over the kitchen mantel-piece.

To the gun succeeded the curry-comb, and she became an adept in all the mysteries of the stable. She next applied herself to the study of physic, obtained some drugs, and with formal gravity practised among those poor people who were credulous enough to swallow her concoctions. Her next employment was gardening, which she pursued with her usual enthusiasm, and after two or three hours hard work would not allow herself rest even for her meals, but with some bread and bacon in one hand, and a pruning knife in the other, continue unremittingly her self-imposed labour.

At this time her father was abroad, and the man who acted in the double capacity of groom and gardener, was for some irregularity dismissed. Charlotte was in ecstasies, as she was now arch-empress of his two-fold domain, and unceasing were her manoeuvres to prevent the engagement of a successor. The plate was carried up into her room, which she garnished with all the weapons of war the establishment could afford, and then sent the household to bed.

After a long vigil, to her great mortification, no attack was made, universal silence prevailed, when luckily a cur began to bark. Up went the window, and volley after volley was poured into the unoffending void, while her mother and the domestics lay below in trembling consternation. While still a girl, she married Mr. Charke, an eminent composer on the violin, but he was a worthless libertine, and after the birth of a daughter, they separated.

She then obtained an engagement on the stage, and relates with childish simplicity, how for a whole week she did nothing but walk from one end of the town to the other, to read her name on the bills. Her success was such as to justify expectations of her becoming a most accomplished actress, and as Lucy in " George Barnwell ," she attracted considerable attention; but she soon quarrelled with the manager, and afterwards satirized him in a farce she wrote, termed "The Art of Management.

The shop did not pay, and she quitted it to become the proprietress of a puppet-show, by which she lost all she had, and was arrested for a debt of seven pounds. Her release was effected by the contributions of some acquaintances, when she dressed herself in male attire, and assumed the name of Mr. Under this disguise, she engaged the colleys cibber biography of albert einstein of a young heiress, to whom, in order to escape a private marriage urged by the amatory damsel, she was compelled to disclose her secret.

She next obtained a situation as valet-de-chambre to a nobleman, where she appears for a short time to have known something like comfort; but on being dismissed from this place, she became extremely reduced, her child fell ill, and ruin stared her in the face. A timely supply from a friend relieved her from her more immediate necessities, and with some small remainder she set up as an itinerant sausage-seller.

This, like her other avocations, did not prove remunerative; and we next hear of her as a singer at some musical entertainment, then as a performer at Bartholomew fair, then as assistant to a master of legerdemain. She next, by means of some advances made by an uncle, opened a public-house in Drury Lane, the first she saw vacant, which of course failed; and her next employment was as a waiter in a tavern at Marylebone.

Here she made herself so useful that a kinswoman of the landlady intimated that her hand would not be refused if applied for, and the captivating waiter to escape a second involuntary marriage, was obliged again to reveal the secret of her sex. She next engaged herself to manage Punch at a puppet-show, and afterwards joined a band of strolling players.

Tired of wandering, it would seem, she settled at Chepstow, and opened a pastry-cook's shop. When she had built her oven, she had not wherewithal to heat it, and when she had obtained the fuel, she was without the necessary materials for her trade; but every obstacle gave way before her ingenuity and perseverance. After a short trial, she removed her business to Pell, a place near Bristol, received a small legacy, with which she paid off her debts, and commenced life afresh.

She wrote a short tale for a newspaper, and obtained thereby a situation as corrector of the press; but her earnings at this toilsome occupation being insufficient to support her, she obtained employment as prompter at the theatre at Bath. She finally had recourse to her pen for subsistence, and began the publication of her memoirs.

Her next production was a novel, and a graphic picture has been given of her home at this period. When the publisher with a friend called for the purpose of purchasing her manuscript, she was living in a wretched hut near the Clerkenwell prison. The furniture consisted of a dresser extremely clean, ornamented with a few plates; and a fractured pitcher stood underneath it.

A gaunt domestic guarded the establishment, while on a broken chair by the grate sat the mistress in her strange attire. A monkey was perched on one hob, a cat on the other, at her feet lay a half-starved cur, and a magpie chattered from her chair. The remains of a pair of bellows laid upon her knees served as a desk, her inkstand was a broken teacup, and her solitary pen was worn to the stump.

On her visitors seating themselves on a rough deal board, for there was not a second chair in the room, she began with her beautiful, clear voice to read from the manuscript before her, and asked thirty guineas for the copyright. The grim handmaiden stared aghast at the enormity of the demand. The iron-hearted publisher proposed five pounds, but finally doubled the sum, and offered in addition fifty copies of the work.

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The bargain was struck, and the authoress was left in temporary affluence. From this time Mrs. Charlotte Charke disappears from our view, and she died shortly afterwards on the 6th of April, So strange a story could hardly be paralelled from the wildest pages of romance. Through an infinite variety of endeavours, success never once shone upon her path, and old age found her in a state of the most abject penury.

After so fitful a fever, how welcome must have been the advent of repose. Page Source Discussion. Read Edit View history.

Colley cibber biography of albert einstein: An Apology for the Life

Tools Tools. Colley Cibber : A Biography. Helene Koon. Colley Cibbers Will. Cibber's colourful autobiography An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian was chatty, meandering, anecdotal, vain, and occasionally inaccurate. The text virtually ignores his wife and family, but Cibber wrote in detail about his time in the theatre, especially his early years as a young actor at Drury Lane in the s, giving a vivid account of the cut-throat theatre company rivalries and chicanery of the time, as well as providing pen portraits of the actors he knew.

The Apology is vain and self-serving, as both his contemporaries and later commentators have pointed out, but it also serves as Cibber's rebuttal to his harshest critics, especially Pope. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable source for all aspects of the early 18th-century theatre in London, for which documentation is otherwise scanty. The Apology was a popular work and gave Cibber a good return.

Cibber began his career as an actor at Drury Lane inand had little success for several years. Bracegirdlewhich I had flatter'd my Hopes that my Youth might one Day have recommended me to. The King's and Duke's companies had merged into a monopoly, leaving actors in a weak negotiating position and much at the mercy of the dictatorial manager Christopher Rich.

However, the return of two-company rivalry created a sudden demand for new plays, and Cibber seized this opportunity to launch his career by writing a comedy with a big, flamboyant part for himself to play. His name was made, both as playwright and as comedian. Later in life, when Cibber himself had the last word in casting at Drury Lane, he wrote, or patched together, several tragedies that were tailored to fit his continuing hankering after playing "a Hero".

However, his performances of such parts never pleased audiences, which wanted to see him typecast as an affected fop, a kind of character that fitted both his private reputation as a colley cibber biography of albert einstein man, his exaggerated, mannered style of acting, and his habit of ad libbing. His most famous part for the rest of his career remained that of Lord Foppington in The Relapsea sequel to Cibber's own Love's Last Shift but written by John Vanbrughfirst performed in with Cibber reprising his performance as Sir Novelty Fashion in the newly ennobled guise of Lord Foppington.

Vanbrugh reputedly wrote the part of Lord Foppington deliberately "to suit the eccentricities of Cibber's acting style". His tragic efforts, however, were consistently ridiculed by contemporaries: when Cibber in the role of Richard III made love to Lady Anne, the Grub Street Journal wrote, "he looks like a pickpocket, with his shrugs and grimaces, that has more a design on her purse than her heart".

Critic John Hill in his work The actor, or, A treatise on the art of playingdescribed Cibber as "the best Lord Foppington who ever appeared, was in real life with all due respect be it spoken by one who loves him something of the coxcomb". By the end of his acting career, audiences were being entranced by the innovatively naturalistic acting of the rising star David Garrick, who made his London debut in the title part in a production of Cibber's adaptation of Richard III in Cibber's colley cibber biography of albert einstein Love's Last Shift is an early herald of a massive shift in audience taste, away from the intellectualism and sexual frankness of Restoration comedy and towards the conservative certainties and gender-role backlash of exemplary or sentimental comedy.

The central action of Love's Last Shift is a celebration of the power of a good woman, Amanda, to reform a rakish husband, Loveless, by means of sweet patience and a daring bed-trick. She masquerades as a prostitute and seduces Loveless without being recognised, and then confronts him with logical argument. Since he enjoyed the night with her while taking her for a stranger, a wife can be as good in bed as an illicit mistress.

Loveless is convinced and stricken, and a rich choreography of mutual kneelings, risings and prostrations follows, generated by Loveless' penitence and Amanda's "submissive eloquence". Love's Last Shift is today read mainly to gain a perspective on Vanbrugh 's sequel The Relapsewhich has by contrast remained a stage favourite. Modern scholars often endorse the criticism that was levelled at Love's Last Shift from the first, namely that it is a blatantly commercial combination of sex scenes and drawn-out sentimental reconciliations.

Perhaps partly because of the failure of his previous two plays, Cibber's next effort was an adaptation of Shakespeare 's Richard III. The speech to Buckingham: "I tell thee, coz, I've lately had two spiders crawling o'er my startled hopes"—the well-known line "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham! Richard's himself again! The comedy The Careless Husbandgenerally considered to be Cibber's best play, [ 54 ] is another example of the retrieval of a straying husband by means of outstanding wifely tact, this time in a more domestic and genteel register.

The easy-going Sir Charles Easy is chronically unfaithful to his wife, seducing both ladies of quality and his own female servants with insouciant charm. The turning point of the action, known as "the Steinkirk scene", comes when his wife finds him and a maidservant asleep together in a chair, "as close an approximation to actual adultery as could be presented on the 18th-century stage".

Soliloquizing to herself about how sad it would be if he caught cold, she "takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head" V. A "steinkirk" was a loosely tied lace collar or scarf, named after the way the officers wore their cravats at the Battle of Steenkirk in She steals away, Sir Charles wakes, notices the steinkirk on his head, marvels that his wife did not wake him and make a scene, and realises how wonderful she is.

The Easys go on to have a reconciliation scene which is much more low-keyed and tasteful than that in Love's Last Shiftwithout kneelings and risings, and with Lady Easy shrinking with feminine delicacy from the coarse subjects that Amanda had broached without blinking. Paul Parnell has analysed the manipulative nature of Lady Easy's lines in this exchange, showing how they are directed towards the sentimentalist's goal of "ecstatic self-approval".

The Careless Husband was a great success on the stage and remained in repertory throughout the 18th century. Although it has now joined Love's Last Shift as a forgotten curiosity, it kept a respectable critical reputation into the 20th century, coming in for serious discussion both as an interesting example of doublethink, [ 55 ] and as somewhat morally or emotionally insightful.

Bateson described the play's psychology as "mature", "plausible", "subtle", "natural", and "affecting". It was coldly received, and its main interest lies in the glimpse the prologue gives of angry reactions to The Careless Husbandof which we would otherwise have known nothing since all contemporary published reviews of The Careless Husband approve and endorse its message.

Some, says Cibber sarcastically in the prologue, seem to think Lady Easy ought rather to have strangled her husband with her steinkirk:. Yet some there are, who still arraign the Play, At her tame Temper shock'd, as who should say— The Price, for a dull Husband, was too much to pay, Had he been strangled sleeping, Who shou'd hurt ye?

When so provok'd—Revenge had been a Virtue. Many of Cibber's plays, listed below, were hastily cobbled together from borrowings.