Word: cibber
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Shakespeare's own native England was in no hurry to serve him properly; and for generations the plays were offered in the "improved" versions of Nahum Tate, Colley Cibber, Thomas Shadwell, David Garrick and the like...
...Dunciad, Alexander Pope's genius and malice made Colley Cibber memorable ; in The Vision of Judgment, Byron made Southey immortal. But if the name of Victor Purcell-or Myra Buttle-is remembered in a hundred years it will be for the fact that he threw a dead cat at a living poet. Before The Sweeniad nears its inevitable conclusion ("This is the way that Sweeney ends. Not with a curse but a mutter"), the satire has fallen heavily among the bric-a-brac...
...Relapse (by Sir John Vanbrugh; produced by the Theatre Guild) reached Broadway just 254 years after it first opened in London. Among the last of the Restoration comedies, it was written to refute the first of the sentimental ones-Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift.* Otherwise Vanbrugh wrote with small sense of purpose and merely to entertain. The play tells two barely contiguous stories: one-the frilly, mannered tale of Loveless' backsliding-is pure Restoration bawdry; the other-the lusty courtship of a panting, pent-up hoyden-is timeless low comedy. Morally, also, the play faces...
...Cibber reformed his rakish hero, Loveless, at the end: Vanbrugh wrote The Relapse to show that Loveless would not have stayed reformed. Love's Last Shift is otherwise chiefly noteworthy for having once been translated into French as La dernière Chemise de l'Amour...
...English producers missed out on something, too, when they presented Handel's prima donna, the notorious Mrs. Cibber (who was actually sold by her husband to another man), as a pious woman. The picture is saved by the excellent performance of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the casting of Elizabeth Allan in a part which might have been spoiled by an opera singer...