SOURCE: “The Playwright,” in Colley Cibber, Twayne Publishers, 1965, pp. 36-80.

In the following excerpt, Ashley provides a comprehensive survey of Cibber's theatrical efforts.

Colley Cibber was writing plays before Vanbrugh and Farquhar, and he did not stage his last work until 1745. During his extraordinarily long career he wrote a dozen comedies, half a dozen tragedies, a “comical-tragedy,” a handful of masques and libretti, and perhaps a dozen prologues and epilogues for other people's plays—not to mention various odes and lyrics, four public letters to Alexander Pope, several miscellaneous prose works, and one of the best autobiographies in English. In this chapter I propose to treat his more important dramatic works in some detail and to say something about most of the rest. I omit little but his last play, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, for it is discussed in Chapter Ten in the context...