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The Rival Fools
''The Rival Fools'' is a 1709 comedy play by the British writer Colley Cibber. It drew inspiration from the earlier play ''Wit at Several Weapons''. Despite Cibber's previous record of turning out hits, it was not a great success. The original Drury Lane cast featured William Pinkethman as Sir Oliver Outwit, Robert Wilks as Young Outwit, Barton Booth as Cunningham, William Bullock as Sir Gregory Goose, Colley Cibber as Samuel Simpson, George Pack as Sir Threadbare, Theophilus Keene as Priscian, Anne Oldfield Anne Oldfield (168323 October 1730) was an English actress and one of the highest paid actresses of her time. Early life and discovery She was born in London in 1683. Her father was a soldier, James Oldfield. Her mother was either Anne or Eliz ... as Lucinda, Mary Porter as Mirabel and Elizabeth Willis as Governess.Van Lennep p.182 References Bibliography * Burling, William J. ''A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700-1737''. Fairleig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colley Cibber
Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir ''Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber'' (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his "miserable mutilation" of "crucified Molière ndhapless Shakespeare". He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed. Cibber's brash, extroverted personality did not sit well with his contemporaries, and he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, shady business methods, and a social and political opportunism that was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets. He rose to ignominious fame when he became t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, commonly known as Drury Lane, is a West End theatre and Grade I listed building in Covent Garden, London, England. The building faces Catherine Street (earlier named Bridges or Brydges Street) and backs onto Drury Lane. The building is the most recent in a line of four theatres which were built at the same location, the earliest of which dated back to 1663, making it the oldest theatre site in London still in use. According to the author Peter Thomson, for its first two centuries, Drury Lane could "reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre". For most of that time, it was one of a handful of patent theatres, granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London (meaning spoken plays, rather than opera, dance, concerts, or plays with music). The first theatre on the site was built at the behest of Thomas Killigrew in the early 1660s, when theatres were allowed to reopen during the English Restoration. Initially ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comedy Play
Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, the ''Divine Comedy'' (Italian: ''Divina Commedia''). The phenomena connected with laughter and that which provokes it have been carefully investigated by psychologists. The predominating characteristics are incongruity or contrast in the object, and shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. It has also been held that the feeling of superiority is an essential factor: thus Thomas Hobbes speaks of laughter as a "sudden glory." Modern investigators have paid much attention to the origin both of laughter and of smiling, as well as the development of the "play insti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wit At Several Weapons
''Wit at Several Weapons'' is a seventeenth-century comedy of uncertain date and authorship. Authorship and Date In its own century, the play appeared in print only in the two Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679; yet modern scholarship has determined that the ''Wit at Several Weapons'' is a collaboration between Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, written some three decades before publication. In addition to the play's appearance in both folios, its belated entry in the Stationers' Register on 29 June 1660 also assigns it to Beaumont and Fletcher. The Epilogue to the play in the folios refers to a limited Fletcherian role in the play's authorship: "...if he but writ / An act, or two...." Yet the play itself indicates that Fletcher's contribution may be more minor than that; Fletcher's highly characteristic pattern of linguistic preferences (''ye'' for ''you'', em'' for ''them'', etc.) is lacking in the play. David Lake confirms the presence of Middleton and Rowley th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Pinkethman
William Pinkethman(also Penkethman, Pinkeman, Pinkerman, etc.; nicknamed Pinkey) (c.1660–1725) was an English comic actor, a low comedian with a droll style, and theatre manager. He was considered an imitator of Anthony Leigh. Starting in the 1690s Penkethman performed with the United Company at Drury Lane. He largely played small roles, then became known for his delivery of prologues and epilogues in plays. He was known for performing riding a donkey. He later opened a theatre at Richmond. Rising actor Pinkethman overcame a weakness for overacting and playing to the crowd to become a steady performer. He is first heard of at the Theatre Royal, in 1692, in Thomas Shadwell's '' The Volunteers'', in which he played Stitchum the tailor, an original part of six lines. After the departure in 1695 of Thomas Betterton and his associates, Pinkethman was promoted to a better line of parts. In 1702 he was the original Old Mirabel in George Farquhar's ''The Inconstant''. He also r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Wilks
Robert Wilks (''c.'' 1665 – 27 September 1732) was a British actor and theatrical manager who was one of the leading managers of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in its heyday of the 1710s. He was, with Colley Cibber and Thomas Doggett, one of the "triumvirate" of actor-managers that was denounced by Alexander Pope and caricatured by William Hogarth as leaders of the decline in theatrical standards and degradation of the stage's literary tradition. The family was based for many generations in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. His great-uncle, Judge Wilks, had served Charles I of England during the English Civil War, for whom he raised a troop at his own expense. After Oliver Cromwell won the civil war, Wilks' father moved to Dublin, where Robert Wilks was born. He was a clerk to Robert Southwell until he joined the Williamite army. As soon as he was discharged from the army, he worked in the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin from 1691 to 1693. According to Wilks's version of the story ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barton Booth
Barton Booth (168210 May 1733) was one of the most famous dramatic actors of the first part of the 18th century. Early life Booth was the son of The Hon and Very Revd Dr Robert Booth (priest), Robert Booth, Dean of Bristol, by his first wife and distant cousin Ann Booth, daughter of Sir Robert Booth (judge), Robert Booth, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and was educated at Westminster School, where his success in the Roman comedy ''Andria (comedy), Andria'' gave him a gave him an inclination for the stage. He was intended for the church, and to attend Trinity College, Cambridge; but in 1698 he ran away and obtained employment in a theatrical company in Dublin, where he made his first appearance as the title character in Aphra Behn's ''Oroonoko''. London success After two seasons in Ireland he returned to London, where Thomas Betterton, who had previously failed to help him, probably out of regard for Booth's family, now gave him all the assistance in his power. At the Lincoln's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Bullock (actor)
William Bullock (''c.'' 1657 – ''c.'' 1740) was an English actor, "of great glee and much comic vivacity." He played at all the London theatres of his time, and in the summer at a booth at Bartholomew Fair. Life Bullock's name is mentioned in Downes's "Roscius Anglicanus." He first appears in the cast of Colley Cibber's "Love's Last Shift," produced by the associated companies of Drury Lane and Dorset Garden, 1696. In Cibber's piece he played Sly. He had joined the companies the previous year. Among his original characters were Sir Tunbelly Clumsy in the "Relapse," 1697, and Soto in ''She Would and She Would Not'' 1702. He also played with success many parts in the plays of John Dryden, William Wycherley, Thomas Shadwell. Until 1706, he was at Drury Lane. He then went to the Haymarket, returning to Drury Lane in 1708. After another brief migration to the Haymarket, followed by a new return to Drury Lane, he quitted definitely the latter theatre, 1715–16, for Lincoln's Inn Field ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Pack (actor)
George Pack ( fl. 1700 – 1724) was a British stage actor, singer and theatre manager of the eighteenth century.Heard p.48 His first known performance on the London stage was as Westmoreland in Shakespeare's '' Henry IV'' at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and he remained with the company until it transferred to the Queens's Theatre in the Haymarket in 1705. He played in a mixture of comedies and tragedies, originating roles in plays by many of the leading dramatists of the era including Nicholas Rowe, Mary Pix, John Vanbrugh and Susanna Centlivre. In 1708 Pack joined the Drury Lane company and remained with it until he left to join John Rich's new company at the revived Lincoln's Inn Fields Theare in 1715. His final original role was in '' The Chimera'' in 1721. The following year he announced his retirement but came back briefly to appear in a benefit performance for Frances Maria Knight in 1724 and also received his own benefit shortly afterwards. After leaving the st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theophilus Keene
Theophilus Keene (1680-1718) was an Anglo-Irish stage actor and theatre manager. Keene was from a Presbyterian background. He originally began acting at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Having arrived in London from Ireland in 1704, he appeared as part of the company at the Drury Lane Theatre until 1714. Along with Christopher Bullock he took over the management of the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1717, at the time one of two patent theatres in London. The co-managers worked together for one season after replacing the "broke" John Rich before Keene's death after a fall from a horse while riding in the county. Following his death in 1718 a biography of him ''Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Theophilus Keene'' was produced by Richard Savage.Wanko p.231 Selected roles * Balance in ''The Recruiting Officer'' by George Farquhar (1706) * Rodogune in ''The Royal Convert'' by Nicholas Rowe (1707) * Memnon in ''The Persian Princess'' by Lewis Theobald (1708) * Priscian in ''The Rival Foo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Oldfield
Anne Oldfield (168323 October 1730) was an English actress and one of the highest paid actresses of her time. Early life and discovery She was born in London in 1683. Her father was a soldier, James Oldfield. Her mother was either Anne or Elizabeth Blanchard. Her grandfather owned a tavern and left her father several properties, he however mortgaged these which resulted in Anne and her mother being placed in financial difficulty when he died young. It appears that Oldfield received some education because her biographers state that she read widely in her youth. Oldfield and her mother went to live with her aunt, Mrs Voss, in the Mitre tavern, St James. In 1699, she attracted George Farquhar's attention when he overheard her reciting lines from Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's play ''The Scornful Lady'' (1616) in a back room of her tavern. Soon after, she was hired by Christopher Rich to join the cast of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Career A year later she was cast in he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Porter (actress)
Mary Porter (died 24 February 1765) was an English actress. Life She was brought to the attention of Betterton by Elizabeth Barry, who had seen her play the Fairy Queen at Bartholomew Fair. In his company she made her first appearance in 1699, in tragedy, in which she was at her best, although she also played a long list of comedy parts. When her friends, Mrs Barry, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Oldfield, had retired from the stage, she was left its undisputed queen. In 1713 she appeared in John Gay's comedy '' The Wife of Bath'' at Drury Lane. In 1724 she featured in his tragedy '' The Captives'' as Astarbe, Queen of Media. Selected roles * Mirabel in ''The Rival Fools'' by Colley Cibber (1709) * Alicia in ''Jane Shore'' by Nicholas Rowe (1714) * Lady Woodvill in '' The Non-Juror'' by Colley Cibber (1717) * Eudocia in ''The Siege of Damascus'' by John Hughes (1720) * Astarbe in '' The Captives'' by John Gay John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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