ce, 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 res
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