Overview
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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 biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber ‘everybody knows’ has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the ‘nation’s poet’ and canonised Cibber’s enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history’s narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation and celebration of Charlotte Charke by women’s literary history. Each of these stories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or bête noir. This monograph challenges these partial histories and returns the theatre manager, playwright, poet laureate and bon viveur to the centre of eighteenth-century culture and cultural studies.
Reviews
“Partial Histories does usefully prod us to consider and reject the many dismissive and derogatory verdicts on Colley Cibber, who was an actor, manager, and theater historian of both importance and distinction.” (Robert D. Hume, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 43 (3), 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Partial Histories
Book Subtitle: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber
Authors: Elaine M. McGirr
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-02719-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-02718-4Published: 02 June 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-66904-2Published: 21 April 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-02719-1Published: 22 June 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 210
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Theatre History, Literary History