Theophilus Cibber (1703–1758)

Donald W. Nichol, Professor Emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland
November 2023

Storms presided over the birth and death of Theophilus (“Theo”) Cibber (1703–1758) and might be said to characterize much of his career and two marriages. His grandfather, Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630–1700), was a well-known sculptor whose works, like the statue of Charles II in Soho Square, still weather the elements of England. His father, Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor, playwright, and theatre manager, was elevated to Poet Laureate in 1730, much to the surprise of many and the particular irritation of Alexander Pope. Theo attended Winchester College, then followed in his father’s footsteps in 1720 as an actor at Drury Lane Theatre. Relations between father and son were often strained. In her biography of Susannah Cibber (née Arne), Mary Nash writes: “Colley’s merry self-belittling, which was an effective kind of social appeasement, became grovelling self-loathing in Theophilus” (45). Like his father, Theo had a flair for comedy, rakish tastes, and a gambling habit. A frequent guest of the Fleet debtors’ prison, Theo could have been an understudy for William Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell in Rake’s Progress.

An early adapter of Shakespeare—his Henry VI was “altered from Shakespear” in 1720 (a second edition of his script survives dated 1724)—Theo was entrusted with managing Drury Lane’s summer season from 1722 to 1734. He performed in more than two dozen plays between 1720 and 1738 including six by James Miller, four Fielding comedies, and Thomson’s Agamemnon. As an actor, writer, and theatre manager, he had some enterprising plans. Theo adapted Patie and Peggy: or, the Fair Foundling. A Scotch Ballad Opera, based on Allan Ramsay’s hit in Edinburgh, The Gentle Shepherd, which opened at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1730.

On Valentine’s Day 1732, Henry Fielding’s comedy, The Modern Husband, opened in Drury Lane Theatre with Colley Cibber as Lord Richly, Theo as Captain Bellamont, and his future wife Susannah (née Arne) as Lady Charlotte Gaywit. Theo also appeared in Fielding’s farce, Tragedy of Tragedies. He brought Hogarth’s painted and engraved series on Moll Hackabout’s fall into prostitution (1732) to the stage in 1733 as The Harlot’s Progress; or, the Ridotto al' Fresco: a Grotesque Pantomime Entertainment. Its 12-page pamphlet/programme bore two frontispieces: one of Hogarth at his easel and the other of “Cibber in the character of Antient Pistol” from his break-out role as Falstaff’s sidekick from 2 Henry IV at Drury Lane in 1720. It sketches out stage directions for 27 actors, provides lyrics to six airs (no musical scores), morphs into the Ridotto al' Fresco (a nod to Jonathan Tyers’s newly opened Vauxhall Gardens), and concludes with “the Masque of The Judgment of Paris &c.”

Pope placed Theo in the Dunciad in 1728 (and again in 1743) at the head of a legion of in-your-face dunce-sons in Grub Street:

     Mark first that youth who takes the foremost place,
And thrusts his person full into your face.
With all thy Father’s virtues blessed, be born!
And a new Cibber shall the stage adorn. (Dunciad 3: 139–42

In 1738 Pope’s persona in Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue I declaims against the sorry state of theatre managers who put on airs and (dis)graces:

Ye Gods! shall Cibber’s son, without rebuke,
Swear like a lord, or Rich out-whore a duke? (ll. 115–16)

Henry Fielding, whose plays provided much employment for the Cibber family, described Theo as “that face-making puppy young Cibber” in Joseph Andrews (bk III, ch. x).

Following disputes in 1733 at Drury Lane with John Highmore, Theo persuaded several fellow actors to set up a new company at Haymarket Theatre. In his 1734 engraving of Southwark Fair, Hogarth inserted John Laguerre’s print of “The Stage Mutiny,” with Theo in his Pistol stance and his father (who ultimately didn’t pass on his share in the theatre to his son) sitting to one side. When Highmore soon afterwards went bankrupt, Cibber and his company accepted the offer of the new patent owner, Charles Fleetwood, to return.

Theo proved a bad-tempered, abusive, and unfaithful husband. Jane Johnson, whom he married in 1725 against his father’s wishes, was a young actress at Drury Lane. He wrote one of his rare original works for her: The Lover ran for eight performances with Jane in the lead. She died before reaching the age of thirty after giving birth to four children, two of whom survived infancy. His second wife, Susannah (née Arne), whom he married in 1734, was pressured by Theo into having an affair with William Sloper, their well-to-do lodger, to avoid the Fleet debtors’ prison. Their bizarre living arrangement—the three lived in various places around London with Theo bringing his wife and her lover a tray in bed at breakfast—led to one of the most sensational criminal conversation cases of the century.

Theo played the part of the cuckold in real life. In a legal battle that would have inspired a soap opera, he painted himself in letters to the press as a poor, unfortunate, devoted husband betrayed by a wife who was lured into adultery by a younger wealthier man. The court (after learning the plaintiff had encouraged the affair) awarded Theo £10 in damages rather than the £5000 he sought. Not one to avoid adding insult to injury, Theo then sued Sloper for £10,000 for “detaining” his wife, but this time he was awarded a more favourable sum of £500.

After discovering in 1738 that his estranged wife was pregnant, Theo abducted Susannah who had to be rescued by her brother Thomas, the composer who gave us Rule Britannia! Mother, lover, and daughter moved houses numerous times to avoid confrontations with Theo. To avoid further raids upon Susannah’s earnings and property and William’s dwindling savings, the lovers vanished for two years with their baby daughter Molly. In 1739 Theo was ousted from Drury Lane and offered his services to John Rich at Covent Garden. Late in 1741, Susannah resurfaced to accept a part in Steele’s Conscious Lovers in Dublin. She stayed on to sing at the première of Handel’s Messiah on 13 April 1742 and reprised her part there in June. Upon returning to London Susannah obtained a court injunction preventing Theo from collecting her earnings and forbidding him to perform in any theatre where she herself was acting. Since Rich had just engaged her to perform at Covent Garden and Theo had managed to get himself fired from Drury Lane, he was effectively barred from both theatres for the time being. In 1743 he migrated to Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, but soon left after a quarrelling with Thomas Sheridan (father of the playwright) over a missing costume.

In 1744 Theo played a 41-year-old Romeo to his 14-year-old daughter Jenny’s Juliet. Revis’d, and Alter’d from Shakespear, his version borrowed Thomas Otway’s innovation (from The History and Fall of Caius Marius) of having the heroine wake up shortly before her husband succumbs to his poison. He revived the play in 1748 to compete with David Garrick’s production starring his estranged wife and Spranger Barry. Theo published his text of Romeo and Juliet, appended to which was A Serio-Comic Apology in which he fulsomely praised his daughter’s performance, condemned Susannah—she refused to do a benefit night for him, imagine!—and slighted William Warburton’s recent Shakespeare edition. Warburton, in turn, attacked Cibber in the footnotes to his 1751 edition of Pope’s Works.

When England was under threat of takeover during the Jacobite Rising in 1745, Theo wrote The Association from jail, in hope of raising funds to pay his debts:

England, provok’d, now feels, one generous Soul
Inspires each honest Heart, to loyalize the Whole…

While admitting this poem was not his best effort (given his and his country’s urgent circumstances), he managed to invent a new verb in the midst of his jingoistic verse: “to loyalize.”

In 1753 Theo’s name appeared as author of The Lives and Characters of the most Eminent Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and Ireland, intended to cover stage history from Shakespeare to the present day. Instead, Lives turned out to be a Life: one single entry, on Barton Booth (his former colleague at Drury Lane), prefaced by A Familiar Epistle to Mr. Warburton, an attack on the 1751 edition of Pope’s Works, which was totally unrelated to the book at hand. A more coherent collection, The Lives of the Poets, came out in five volumes in the same year. According to James Boswell, Samuel Johnson told him, “The Lives of the Poets by Mr. Cibber, was entirely compiled by Mr. [Robert] Shiels” and that the bookseller, Ralph Griffiths paid Theo, then in jail, ten guineas to append the Cibber name to the title-page as it still had selling power. This project may have prompted Johnson to start his own superior version a quarter of a century later.

Colley Cibber’s sustained sang-froid towards his son extended to his will. When the Laureate died in 1757, his two granddaughters were allotted £1000 each while his only male heir was left the meager sum of £50. Theo dealt with the bitterness by cashing in on his father’s posthumous reputation, staging a production at the Haymarket Theatre of Aaron Hill’s The Insolvent, or, Filial Piety, with a prologue delivered by the grieving son. The preface to this play contains the phrase, summing up the desperation facing young actors—“But sinking men catch at reeds”—which proved to be haunting. The invitation to perform again at Smock Alley Theatre proved Cibber’s undoing when the ship transporting him, his cast and crew was wrecked in a storm enroute to Dublin on 27 October 1758. According to one report, “a fiddle-case, directed for Mr. Cibber, in Dublin” washed ashore in Scotland. His widow became David Garrick’s most celebrated leading lady and lived with William Sloper until her death in 1766. Theophilus Cibber would have been vexed to know that while his widow is well remembered in The Provoked Wife: The Life and Times of Susannah Cibber (1977) by Mary Nash, a full biography of the wayward laureate’s son remains to be written.