requesting assistance, and promising satisfaction to any who could contribute to its greater perfection. But this Restorer, who was at that time solliciting favours of him by letters, did wholly conceal his design, till after its publication: (which he was since not asham’d to own, in a Daily Journal, of Nov. 26, 1728.)[4]

Pedantic, unimaginative and presumptuous, Theobald was the logical choice for a Dunce King in 1728. Dennis, Ducket, Burnet, Gildon et cie., had assailed him for years, and the prompt responses by Scriblerus merely increased their fury. Pope bore as many undeserved blows as Cibber, and he was no model of patience; the intense hostilities waged against him in the twenties were ample cause for an epic answer.[5]

Pope claimed he attacked only those who had attacked him. It seems strange that, among the inimical host who had indulged in verbal violence, he should have revised his satire against the one man who had not contributed to the paper war, and who had, in his Apology, made humble acknowledgment of Pope’s gifts: “How terrible a Weapon is Satyr in the hands of a great Genius?” Cibber asks, remarking on Pope’s acid portrait of Addison, and adds:

Even stranger is that with such eminent and vocal enemies as Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he should have been concerned with a seventy-year-old semi-retired player who was too ineffectual, it would appear, to be a proper target for his great satire, and whose words in print could never have been a real threat.

The words “in print” are important, especially with reference to Cibber. As far as direct attack in the form of broadsides, pamphlets and the like, Cibber is clearly innocent; however, like many actors, he was an expert improvisator of stage dialogue, and this in itself is a reason to believe that his side of the feud was kept up from the theater platform. A more potent and public method of ridicule would be difficult to devise.

Stage warfare was as prevalent as paper warfare, as Cibber’s mockery of Three Hours after Marriage suggests, and as the prologues and epilogues amply demonstrate. The Non-Juror (1719) with its anti-Catholic remarks and its Jesuit villain played by Cibber himself, has several barbs directed at Pope.[7]

If Pope’s wounds had been festering since 1715, he had a perfect opportunity to avenge them in the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. When Gay’s Polly was suppressed that year, Cibber was accused of being responsible (though it was never proved),[8] since he had first refused The Beggar’s Opera, and then failed miserably to imitate its success with his own Love in a Riddle. He was at this time more widely known than Theobald, and had been a favorite target for anti-Hanoverians since The Non-Juror.[9] It is very odd that Pope should have ignored this chance, particularly when so many of his dunces are playwrights, only to take it up fourteen years later under much less favorable circumstances—when he himself was mortally ill and Cibber out of the public eye—unless something else had provoked him.

One view is that the laureateship triggered the alteration, but while it is true that Cibber was one of the worst versifiers ever to wear the bays, that honor had been conferred in 1730, thirteen years before the last Dunciad. The flood of burlesque Odes that followed each of Cibber’s Birth-Day and New-Year efforts had ebbed by the mid-thirties, and in 1743 the laureate was a stale joke.

The Apology’s praise of Pope did not benefit Cibber; years before the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot had stated:

A Fool quite angry is quite innocent;
Alas! ’tis ten times worse when they repent (108-109).

and the minor slap on the wrist was misquoted by Pope, as the Letter points out. The exchange is interesting, for it is an indication that the man behind the actor’s mask might have been less thick-skinned than he liked to seem, that he was genuinely hurt by Pope’s shafts.

Cibber did not mind being portrayed as a fool. That, after all was the character he had created as Sir Novelty Fashion in Love’s Last Shift (1696), and which he continued to play in public throughout his life. But a charge of immorality did bother him, for he was anxious to be considered a moral man. Apparently he was—his enemies charged him with gambling, highhandedness and plagiarism, but his life seems to have been surprisingly free of the kind of scandal that plagued most theatrical personalities. His plays embody the materialistic middle-class values which he champions in his later prose writings, and of all Pope’s arrows, “And has not Colley still his lord and whore?”[10] seems to have struck deepest. It may be significant that the bawdy house story follows close upon Cibber’s plaintive remonstrance against this line.

As long as Cibber was in his own territory, he could answer Pope orally, but when he at last decided to reply in print, he was at a distinct disadvantage. The actor has a notorious disregard for the written word; his own experience on stage tells him that what is being said has less impact than the manner in which it is delivered. Cibber’s lack of concern for language had been well publicized. His comment that Anne Oldfield “Out-did her usual Out-doing”[11] was never allowed to rest, and Fielding rarely missed an opportunity to use Cibber’s “paraphonalia” against him; that the most merciless parody of his Odes could scarcely sink to the depths of the originals, did not deter the efforts of the parodists.[12]

He was not entirely insensible of his weaknesses. The second edition of The Provoked Husband was silently changed to “Out-did her usual Excellence,” and the spelling of paraphernalia corrected. Dr. Johnson’s testimony supports this view of Cibber’s seriousness: