‘Woman! Thy sins be forgiven thee!’ According to a famous anecdote, these were the words that burst from the lips of Patrick Delany, chancellor of Christ Church and St Patrick’s Cathedrals in Dublin, on hearing the premiere of ‘He was despised’ in Handel’s Messiah (1742).Footnote 1 Handel and his librettist, Charles Jennens, designed the aria as a sentimental tour de force intent on eliciting such strong reactions. Its text (drawn from Isaiah 53:3) predicts the suffering of Christ in the moments leading up to his sacrifice. The music marshals an arsenal of pathetic devices (see Ex. 1): slow tempo, halting phrases, sighing appoggiaturas, long pedal tones, suspensions, expressive harmonic swerves and a vocal line that constantly tumbles to its lowest note. In most performances it is the longest single movement in the oratorio, and is an opportunity for sustained emotional immersion.
As Delany’s exclamation suggests, however, the librettist and composer were not the only artists tugging at his heartstrings that afternoon: this text of grief and public humiliation was performed by Susanna Maria Cibber (1714–66), and Delany’s reaction, according to the earliest version of the story, was triggered by ‘the extreme sensibility of her manner’.Footnote 2 Thomas Sheridan echoed that ‘no person of sensibility’ could have heard Cibber’s singing at the performance without being moved.Footnote 3 And Charles Burney claimed that whatever Cibber’s shortcomings, her rendition of this aria was unsurpassed:
This air, the first, perhaps, in our language, has been often sung by Italian singers of the greatest abilities, but never, I believe, in a manner so truly touching to an Englishman, as by Mrs. Cibber, for whom it was originally composed; and whose voice, though a mere thread, and knowledge of Music, inconsiderable; yet, by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear.Footnote 4
Sensibility, pathos and Cibber – this potent cocktail was essential not only to the success of this aria, I wish to argue, but also more widely, influencing Handel’s revisions of his oratorios in ways that both responded to and shaped Cibber’s public image. Cibber was first and foremost an actress, and her particular talent of ‘extreme sensibility’ bridged the space between the proscenium arch and the audience. In the context of recent work on the relationship between singers’ public personae and Handel’s compositional process, Cibber’s story provides a particularly rich illustration of the interplay between the eighteenth-century theatre and Handel’s oratorios.Footnote 5
Cibber’s early professional life was similar to that of many actors in its consistency. Old plays ran for decades, and London audiences relished opportunities to see the same productions over and over again. Actors ‘owned’ their parts, acting them for years, and playwrights wrote sequels with the expectation that performers would repeatedly portray the same characters.Footnote 6 Such predictability did not end with repetition of roles: the acting system of the eighteenth century was one in which typecasting, or following a particular ‘line’, was a vital part of the actor’s identity, even transcending the boundaries of the stage.Footnote 7
In part, performers adopted a regular line (such as military hero, statesman or rogue for men; or ingénue, pert serving girl, devoted wife for women) out of fierce pragmatism. Actors often performed six times a week, sometimes in more than one play in an evening, and their preparations involved more private study than group rehearsal.Footnote 8 Yet logistics were not their only concern: in a theatrical space where audiences sometimes sat on the stage and where boundaries between player, spectator and fictional role were blurred, the idea of ‘character’ extended easily beyond the stage. Lisa Freeman has explained how in this period the modern association of ‘character’ with an individual’s interior moral state was beginning to solidify, and to separate from its etymological root, which referred most literally to a letter pressed into the surface of a coin or printing plate.Footnote 9 This transferral of terminology reflected a presumed linkage between representation and reality, an understanding of true personal character as externally legible; theatrical personas, Freeman suggests, were seen ‘not merely as symptomatic of an interior, but rather as the only basis upon which judgments about [an actor’s] character could be formed’.Footnote 10 The well-documented popularity of actor memoirs and biographies during this period encouraged such identification, providing audiences a remarkable (if often fallacious) sense of intimacy with players.Footnote 11 Freeman explains that this perception of intimacy was bound up with an understanding of performer identity: ‘Eighteenth-century audiences were not only obsessively aware of aspects of an actor’s or actress’s personal life … they were also persistently encouraged to draw associations between those private lives and the roles players played. Audiences, in short, were keenly aware of how public and private “character” either converged or diverged in performance.’Footnote 12 And Suzanne Aspden has shown how these concepts applied equally in the operatic world, with its ‘diverse and fluid epistemology of self and society, at once reflecting and testing the boundaries of social structure, gender and individuality’.Footnote 13
The assumption of symbiosis between players and roles had multiple ramifications for actresses. In the first place, they were able to use it to better their reputation. When women first appeared onstage in the mid-seventeenth century, they were expected to fall short of the moral standards of their female audience members; audiences smiled and winked at the adventures of their favourite starlets like Nell Gwyn, the beloved ‘Protestant Whore’, and Anne Oldfield, who had illegitimate children with two different men.Footnote 14 But eighteenth-century audiences increasingly scrutinised the relationship between actresses’ onstage presence and their offstage morals, and players from Anne Bracegirdle at the century’s beginning to Sarah Siddons at its end were renowned for their virtue both inside and outside of the theatre.Footnote 15 Such connections went hand-in-hand with a renewed faith in the theatre’s ability to promote – in the words of Colley Cibber, Susanna’s father-in-law – ‘the Utile Dulci’ and ‘the Interest, and Honour of Virtue’.Footnote 16 Such criteria could also prove demanding and even perilous for performers. William Chetwood, for instance, admitted that even actresses like Oldfield had been praised on occasion for their ability to instil virtue, but observed how much better it would be if such didacticism came from morally righteous performers ‘as blameless as human Nature will allow’ who would simply ‘imitate those virtuous Characters they represent upon the Stage’.Footnote 17 If performers failed to convince given their offstage conduct, meanwhile, audiences could dismiss them; Chetwood recorded the ‘Horse-laugh’ that greeted one poor actress’s protestations of ‘virgin innocence’ onstage, writing, ‘Here the Audience was disconcerted, and the Reality of the Subject before them loses much of its Force.’Footnote 18
Given this potential rigidity, it is striking that about a decade after Cibber’s debut, her onstage persona broadened considerably. In 1732, Cibber had established her line as a prototypical sentimental heroine, first on the operatic stage and shortly afterwards in spoken theatre. This youthful and innocent persona was then tarnished by a highly publicised sex scandal and out-of-wedlock birth in 1739, followed by several years of retirement. And upon returning to the stage in 1742, Cibber added new, less wholesome character types to her repertoire. Her initial rise as a performer had depended on audiences’ collective belief that she held a ‘natural’ and ‘chaste heart’, and a change in that perception presented a challenge to her public persona.Footnote 19 By the time of Messiah’s premiere, then, at exactly the moment when Cibber resumed her performing career, there was no question about the ‘sins’ to which Delany referred. Yet what remained constant, whether Cibber was playing sentimental heroines or ‘fallen’ women, was the deep emotionalism of her appeal; as one of her admirers put it a few years after her death, ‘softness and pathos … sat with much ease on Mrs Cibber’.Footnote 20
This evolution of Cibber’s line coincided with her years under Handel’s direction. In addition to Messiah, she participated in many oratorios throughout the 1740s, including several with roles created or revised specifically for her: Samson (1743), Hercules and Belshazzar (both 1745). Cibber’s appearances in the oratorios have often been discussed in the Handel literature, but the commonly repeated truths about her – that she was not a particularly strong singer, that her great tragic acting skills held as much sway as her musical abilities, that Handel surely must have employed her because she would draw audiences – do not capture the full story of the composer’s sensitivity to Cibber’s public identity.Footnote 21 Nor do they address how the revisions that Handel undertook for Cibber were influenced by her newly complex public line, itself shaped by the widespread sentimentalism that affected Handel’s oratorios no less than the other artistic and intellectual products of his time.
‘Her manner is entirely modern’ – Cibber and sentimental opera
Cibber made her debut in 1732, as the young ‘Miss Arne’, in the title role of Amelia by John Frederick Lampe and Henry Carey, which set the tone for the first stage of her career. Carey’s heroine was a young Christian woman betrothed to Casimir, a Hungarian fighting in the Ottoman Wars against Osmyn, ‘Grand Vizier of the Turks’. Amelia undergoes several tribulations throughout the course of the opera, including imprisonment in a harem, attempted rape and finally, at her darkest moment, a death sentence imposed by her own lover due to a mistaken charge of infidelity. Led to the gallows, Amelia sings her last solo aria:
The text is tortured, but its point clear: Amelia is prepared to die on the principle that her virtuous behaviour should speak for itself, and she places faith in divine protection (or at least reward in heaven). Amelia advocates here a central philosophy of sentimental literature, that passive acquiescence and faith in virtue as its own reward is the highest ideal.Footnote 22 Her patient goodness pays off; as in many contemporary sentimental comedies, a mechanical device saves the day, when a letter explaining the situation reaches Casimir before the execution, Amelia’s life is spared, and the opera concludes with a joyous double wedding.
Such pathos-laden drama seems to have inspired an unrelentingly morose musical portrait of Amelia. Although little of Lampe’s music from the opera survives (in reduction for flute, voice and continuo), the libretto shows that more than half of Amelia’s nine arias were lamentations, as illustrated in Figure 1.Footnote 23 Her opening aria reads, ‘O let me die while yet I see / The Comfort of my Heart; / For worse than instant Death ’twill be / From thee, my Love, to part’, a verse that both foreshadows the climactic moment when Casimir condemns Amelia to death and places the spotlight on the suffering heroine. Two more arias in similar tone complete Amelia’s music in the first act. Act II brought some musical variety, as Amelia pretends to be happy in the harem as part of a ploy to save the captured Casimir; but even this falsified contentment is tempered by two pathetic numbers. In Act III, at the climactic execution scene, Amelia sings her final lament at the gallows, thereby confirming the role as an exercise in what Arthur Sherbo referred to as ‘repetition and prolongation’, a tendency towards sustained high emotion that he proposed as a fundamental marker of the sentimental drama as a genre – or here, we might say, of sentimental opera.Footnote 24
Amelia’s laments.
A contemporary pamphlet, See and Seem Blind, described the work’s success in terms of its direct competition with Handel at the Italian opera, and with his oratorio that opened shortly afterwards, Esther:
In this Opera, Miss Arne … appear’d in a most amiable Light, to the great Delight and Surprize of the whole Town, she is very young, and very pretty; and has made innumerable Conquests, her Voice is exceeding small, but exceeding sweet; she Sings perfectly in Tune, and her manner is entirely modern; she has such a Warble, such a je ne scay quoy, as tickles my very Soul …
[Amelia] made its way and was it not a bold Stroke to set up an English Opera, in direct Opposition to the Italian? … it was as odd, as bold, for my self saw it, both Opera’s being perform’d the same Night; I left the Italian Opera, the House was so thin, and cross’d over the way to the English one, which was so full I was forc’d to croud in upon the Stage, and even that was throng’d: Is not this odd, I say, for an English Tradesman’s Daughter to spring up all of a suddain, and rival the selected Singers of Italy?
This alarm’d H – l, and out he brings an Oratorio, or Religious Farce, for the duce take me if I can make any other Construction of the Word.Footnote 25
The pamphlet attributes Amelia’s success to its capacity to draw audiences away from ‘the Italian Opera’ (most likely Handel’s Flavio, which coincided with Amelia on 25 April), and goes on to claim it as the impetus for the rise of the English oratorio as a public genre.Footnote 26 And at the heart of this achievement was the ‘Tradesman’s Daughter’, with her ‘modern’ manner and ‘je ne scay quoy’. The explanation for these terms appears to lie in Cibber’s pathetic appeal, signalled by the fact that her subsequent roles in other English operas of this period are strikingly similar to Amelia (see the overview in Figure 2).
Cibber’s arias in English operas of 1732–3.
The producers of these works clearly tried to repeat the formula that had generated Amelia’s success; Cibber was repeatedly cast as a sentimental heroine battling to maintain (or in the case of Rosamond, reclaim) chastity. Two months after Amelia, Cibber starred in the first London production of Acis and Galatea (without Handel’s involvement), with Cibber as the innocent nymph Galatea, pursued by the brutish Cyclops Polyphemus.Footnote 27 Next came Teraminta, with another libretto by Carey that featured attempted rape and murder of the steadfastly innocent title character. Finally, Rosamond, a new setting by Cibber’s brother, Thomas Arne, of an old libretto by Joseph Addison (1707), told the familiar legend of the English king Henry II and his mistress, Rosamond Clifford, who laments her loss of virtue until the angry Queen Eleanor offers her the choice of death by dagger or by poison.Footnote 28 At the end of Addison’s retelling, the Queen refrains from killing the unconscious Rosamond – who has swallowed a mere sleeping potion – and places her in a convent. The sparing of Rosamond was the librettist’s invention, thereby turning a tale of innocence lost into one of innocence reborn.Footnote 29 And although the original score and libretto from 1733 are lost, if the earliest extant libretto (from 1740) offers any indication of what was performed at the premiere, then Arne’s Rosamond was even weepier than she had been in Addison’s original.Footnote 30 Parentheses in Figure 2 show the cuts that the surviving materials seem to indicate, omissions that purge the character of much of her complexity and overt sensuality. What remains is pathos: throughout Arne’s setting, when the title character sings alone, she does nothing but lament, plead or rave.
All these tears served a purpose beyond popular appeal. To be touched by emotional display fitted with a pervasive strain of sentimental philosophising that prized sympathy as a marker of morality. Writers advocating the representation of hyper-charged emotions in the performing arts could assert that they trained the ‘moral sense’ by having audiences’ sympathy simultaneously reinforce and prove their own natural goodness.Footnote 31 Tears, sighs and gasps from audience members echoed the tears, sighs and gasps in the fictional worlds of sentimental art; these outward signs of inner empathy were markers of what would soon be called ‘sensibility’.Footnote 32 One of Handel’s librettists, Thomas Morell, also espoused such lachrymose pedagogy, writing that ‘by the sad countenance of the seen, the heart of the seer should be made better; moved with a compassion unknown before, and charmed with an opportunity of doing good’.Footnote 33 By accepting her line as suffering maiden, Cibber was thus taking on the larger role of moral instructor, which, as we have seen, carried with it expectations of personal, private virtue in the teacher – a balance that soon proved explosive.
‘The part, that is by nature thine’
Although Cibber established her line in operas, she solidified it in the spoken theatre. In January 1736, she made her first appearance as an actress by premiering the title role of Aaron Hill’s tragedy Zara. Hill had evidently been watching Cibber closely in her operatic performances, casting her in a play that was clearly related to Carey’s Amelia: both stories have similarly exotic settings (in and around Jerusalem for Zara, on the Turkish border for Amelia); both feature a villain named Osmyn (or ‘Osman’, as it is spelled in the character list for Zara); and both hinge on the chastity of an innocent Christian woman, put through seemingly endless troubles who in turn issues frequent pathetic speeches or arias. Furthermore, the tribulations of the principal females provide moral lessons to the male characters: even the murderous Osmyn by the end learns from Zara’s sadness, proclaiming, ‘Zara – thy tears were form’d to teach disdain, / That softness can disarm it.’Footnote 34 Yet whereas Cibber’s operatic premiere had ended with the traditional comedic finale of a double wedding, Zara was a tragedy in which a despicable husband ended the life of a young virgin. Little could Cibber have known that in just a few years her professional life would resemble this theatrical debut, culminating in the metaphorical death of her innocent persona at the hands of her own morally suspect husband.
Hill saw in Cibber’s bearing and inner being the same qualities that characterised his fictional heroine. In his preface to the play, he claimed that Cibber’s ‘Person, her Voice, the unaffected Sensibility of her Heart … so naturally qualified her’ for the role.Footnote 35 And as shown in Figure 3, over the next several years she played to type in all cases but one, portraying maidens threatened by (or already suffering from) sexual violence, wives quietly enduring the sexual impropriety of philandering husbands or women dying at the hands of wrongfully jealous spouses. The only exception came with Dryden’s All for Love, in which Cibber played the seductive Cleopatra, who not only comes between Antony and his wife Octavia, but also seduces him away from his daughters. This stepping out of line, though, may not have been a success, since newspapers recorded only one performance, on 16 March 1738.Footnote 36 Throughout all the other plays, Cibber remained an innocent and empathetic moral model for young women.
Cibber’s dramatic roles, 1736–8.
In December 1738, Cibber’s line became complicated by affairs beyond the theatre. That month, her husband, Theophilus – whom she had married in 1734 – sued William Sloper, her extramarital lover, for ‘criminal conversation’ (adultery).Footnote 37 Worse still, an anonymous member of the gallery recorded the legal proceedings and published them for an audience hungry for gossip.Footnote 38 And Theophilus’s evidence, made possible by a peephole that had been bored in the couple’s meeting rooms, read like pornographic fiction:
[He] took her upon his Lap, took up her Clothes, took down his Breeches, and put his privy Member between her Legs. I stayed there longer. Between five and six in the Evening, he let down the Turn-up Bed softly, she laid herself upon it, upon her Back, and pulled up her Clothes; her Body was bare. He unbuttoned his Clothes, hung his Bag-wig upon a Sconce, let down his Breeches, took his privy Member in his Hand, and lay down upon her.Footnote 39
These bedroom details earned the reprobation of the presiding judge, who reminded the courtroom, ‘We are not trying a Rape.’Footnote 40 But they served their purpose for the plaintiff, who argued his case largely on moral grounds.
Theophilus’s complaints were twofold. First, his advocates insisted on his honourable pedigree as the son of England’s Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, and as a relative ‘by the Mother’s Side’ of William of Wickham, Bishop of Lincoln and Winchester.Footnote 41 Moreover, as an actor and playwright, he claimed to work in the ‘School of Virtue and Morals’, a place where ‘many received good Lessons, and Impressions … who perhaps do not incline to go seek for Instruction elsewhere’.Footnote 42 Theophilus’s lawyers thus portrayed him as a moral pedagogue and warned, due to the visibility of the trial, of the ‘mischievous Consequence of suffering a Man to commit such an Injury to the married State without being obliged to repair it in Damages’.Footnote 43 Second, his lawyers alleged that Sloper had cost Theophilus no less than £5,000 by ‘taking her off the stage’ once they had fallen in love, thereby depriving the husband of the wages that under eighteenth-century English law would rightfully belong to him.Footnote 44
Like Theophilus, Sloper mounted a two-pronged defence. First, he insisted that he had not, in fact, kept Susanna from the stage; her retirement was due to disagreements with Charles Fleetwood, the manager of Drury Lane, over whether she or her rival, Catherine Clive, should receive higher compensation.Footnote 45 Moreover, Theophilus’s character was not so admirable as he would have the courts believe. There could be no criminal conversation, Sloper’s advocate claimed, where the activities had been sanctioned by the husband; Theophilus had allegedly encouraged the adultery so long as Sloper was paying for his privileges, and for some time the three had spent nights together, sleeping in a single lodging paid for by the defendant, as Theophilus’s maid testified:
Mr Cibber’s Bedchamber and Mr Sloper’s had a Door opened between them. Mrs Cibber used to undress herself in my Master’s Room; and leave her Clothes there, and put on a Bedgown, and take away one of the Pillows from my Master’s Bed, and go away to Mr Sloper’s Room; my Master used to shut the Door after her, and say, Good Night my Dear; and sometimes he used to knock at their Door in a Morning, to call them up to Breakfast.Footnote 46
According to other reports, the arrangement was much less affable: Theophilus supposedly forced Susanna into the affair at gunpoint, ‘and with most bitter Imprecations, declared he would shoot her that Instant if she did not consent; upon which she did’.Footnote 47 A witness’s recollection of Theophilus’s nickname for his rival, ‘Mr. Benefit’, clarified the nature of the ‘aggrieved’ husband’s part in this domestic drama.Footnote 48
In the wake of this trial (and a second in 1739 that awarded Theophilus damages of £500), Susanna stayed away from the stage until December 1741, when she re-emerged not in London, but in Dublin.Footnote 49 Whether this absence was because of Sloper’s influence, Susanna’s own financial wrangling with Fleetwood or the ongoing notoriety of this affair, there is evidence that memories of her transgressions faded slowly. From the days of her Irish comeback and after her return to the London stage, Cibber added new roles to her repertoire that apparently played on the period’s fondness for actors appearing in propria persona, significantly broadening her line (as shown in Figure 4).
In the course of a successful season at the Aungier Street Theatre in Dublin, Cibber played three characters – Queen Leonora, Laetitia and Lady Dainty – who were hardly sentimental, let alone sympathetic. Leonora, in Dryden’s The Spanish Fryar, was guilty of using the affections of an admirer to condemn an innocent man to death, thereby putting the admirer in grave danger, all in the service of her own romantic desires. Laetitia, in Congreve’s biting comedy The Old Bachelor, was an even more extreme departure from Cibber’s ingénue roles of the 1730s: a woman who has been married for some years to an older man and declares herself impatient and unhappy, before willingly cuckolding her husband with no consequences or remorse.Footnote 50 Finally, Colley Cibber’s Lady Dainty, in The Double Gallant, was absurdly affected, hypochondriacal and fond only of foreign and exotic items and people until her reformation by the play’s end (at which point she marries a decent Englishman).Footnote 51 These roles all had comic leanings; even the grimly plotted Spanish Fryar ends with matrimony. And on her return to the London stage during the 1742–3 season, Cibber took on further comic parts that undermined sentimental ideals, playing disgruntled wives who held little respect for the sanctity of the marital bond, including her characters in The Beaux Stratagem, The Provok’d Wife and The Country Wife, all of whom flirted with having affairs, cuckolded their husbands or managed to escape unhappy marriages.
Cibber’s new roles in spoken theatre, 1742–9, arranged chronologically by first appearance.
Given that Cibber’s representation of such ‘loose’ women could seem to make light of her earlier high moral stance, it is tempting to see her expanded persona as part of a phenomenon that Peter Holland has noted, in which actors regularly inhabited entirely different lines in comedy and tragedy.Footnote 52 Yet Cibber’s sudden addition of new character types cannot be explained simply by her newfound comic muse. Indeed, her comedic efforts were still overshadowed by her tragic roles, many of which were far from unsullied – particularly her parts in Jane Shore and The Fair Penitent. These were Nicholas Rowe’s most popular ‘she-tragedies’, which, like Cibber’s earlier plays, focused on central female characters – but hardly virtuous ones.Footnote 53 Although Cibber’s new line might have indicated that she would play the title role in Jane Shore – a royal concubine and adulteress drawn in a sympathetic light despite Footnote her sexual sins (a role that would have echoed her part in Rosamond) – she instead played Alicia, the worldly, jealous lover who exhibits harsh cruelty towards the suffering Jane, right up to the moment of her death.Footnote 55The Fair Penitent provided a still more striking example of how Cibber’s sexual past followed her onto the stage. Cibber played Calista, a ‘fallen’ woman who remains fiercely devoted to her rakish ex-lover even after marriage to another man, right up to the play’s bloody conclusion, with the requisite suicides and murders. Rowe’s closing lines reinforce the seriousness with which his audiences viewed chastity: ‘By such examples are we taught to prove,/The sorrows that attend unlawful love;/Death, or some worse misfortunes, soon divide/The injur’d bridegroom from his guilty bride.’Footnote 56 From Amelia to Calista was a long way to fall.
Although Cibber’s dramatic roles were broadened, however, she by no means abandoned her established line, which resulted in a split persona. Figure 5 provides data on her appearances as advertised in newspapers between 1742 and 1749. Out of the 398 announced performances, it is striking that the morally compromised Calista appeared far more often than any of Cibber’s other roles; the unsympathetic Alicia was also among her most frequently performed parts. Yet a tension in the perception of this ‘fallen’ actress remained for audiences, who were still apt to encounter her as innocent woman during the post-trial period, most often as the wrongfully accused Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello or as the deceived Monimia in Thomas Otway’s The Orphan. Indeed, a tally of all these newspaper announcements shows that comedic disgruntled wives and tragic, corrupt and ‘fallen’ women comprised less than a third of her performances. The rest featured her as innocent, good or oppressed. Calista had not displaced, but joined the sentimental heroines of Cibber’s repertoire.
Cibber’s appearances as announced in London and Dublin newspapers, 1742–9.Footnote 54
From the moment of the trial, this tension had already been present, in part through the resurrection of old ideas of the morality of those onstage. Sloper’s lawyers asserted, for instance, that they ‘never heard that [the theatre] was a place celebrated for Virtue’.Footnote 57 Indeed, their characterisation of the institution was far from flattering:
[They held] That the Players are a People who act, and enter into all manner of Characters, that their Men and Women are made to fall in Love with each other every Day, this Day with one, To-morrow with another; that this Practice in Variety must give them an uncommon Propensity to Love, without any Confinement of the Passion to a particular Subject; that ’tis very likely this enters into their Common Course of Life. That their Women learn all the Allurements that can engage the Eye and Ear, and strike the Imagination of young Gentlemen.Footnote 58
In the second trial, these lawyers went on to allege similarly that Cibber, ‘being the Mistress of the alluring Arts of the Stage’ might, with Theophilus’s ‘Privity and Assistance … lay a Snare for the Affections of an unwary young Gentleman, take a Sum of money from him, and when he would part with no more, then come for a second Sum to the Court of Justice’ – charges, we must remember, made by lawyers representing her still current lover.Footnote 59 By one account, then, Cibber had been forced into the affair with Sloper at gunpoint; in another, she had used her acting abilities to seduce and extort her lover. With so many stories coexisting, there was substantial scope for ambiguity in judging Cibber’s reputation.
Even Cibber’s putative admirers were apt to be torn between praising her sentimental appeal and acknowledging her sexual lapse. A pamphlet by ‘Francis Truelove’ from 1739, for instance, capitalising on the Sloper affair, lamented Susanna’s absence from the stage and urged the audience to accept that she was not principally responsible for her crimes:
Mrs. C—r, as an Actress, hath been very well received by the Town; I cannot answer how far the late unhappy Accident may affect her, but am persuaded, if the Audience were once convinced she is injured, she might again appear in the Light of an excellent Actress … in the Characters she was wont to represent. And sure no one could see her in the feigned Grief in the part of Amanda, in Love’s Last Shift, but must pity her, for the Similitude it bears to the Cause of her real Sorrow.Footnote 60
Truelove here draws a parallel between Susanna’s real marriage to Theophilus Cibber and Love’s Last Shift, Colley Cibber’s most famous sentimental comedy, in which a husband abandons England and his wife to escape gambling debts, only to return to London in search of rakish pleasure before eventually being reformed by his wife’s unfailing marital virtue. Truelove thus referenced Theophilus’s own habits as a philanderer, gambler and sometime fugitive, while showing that he recognised the effect that such a role could exert for Susanna when transferred onto the stage. Then, however, in the pamphlet’s final lines, Truelove draws from a poem by Matthew Prior:
In its original context, Prior’s verse ridicules the doctor Hans Carvel, who dreams that Satan has given him a magical ring to ensure his roving wife’s fidelity. Believing himself to have placed his finger into the ring, Carvel has actually, his wife tells him, ‘thrust [his] finger G–D knows where’, an act that, temporarily at least, would indeed block any other man’s entrance. Was Truelove clumsily ridiculing Theophilus in this passage, or, by quoting these words, issued in Prior’s poem from the mouth of the adulterous and disgruntled wife, making it clear that his entire plea on the actress’s behalf was a farce? The answer is unclear.
An anonymous poem in Dublin’s Gentleman’s Magazine of 1742, meanwhile, provides a less ironic yet still troubled instance of praise for the performer. On the one hand, the poet enthusiastically memorialised Cibber’s ability to move audiences in song: ‘Now tuneful as Apollo’s lyre,/She stands amid the vocal choir’, he begins.Footnote 62 On the other hand, the poet remains concerned about the relationship between actress and role:
This poet admits freely that Cibber’s ‘nature’ was suited to the acting profession. But was this a backhanded compliment? He wants to know what was ‘the part, that is by nature thine’ – in other words, was Cibber the innocent women of her favourite roles or was she the adulterous Laetitia or the fallen Calista whom she had just begun portraying on the Dublin stage?Footnote 63 Once again, the connection between inner and outer character caused a conflict for this woman whose mixture of lines had ended up as complicated as her offstage identity – a tension that could not have been lost on Handel as he began creating and revising oratorio roles with Cibber in mind.
‘O Mirrour’ – Handel’s revisions
By the time that Cibber re-established herself in London in the autumn of 1742, Handel was revising Samson (first prepared in 1741) by enlarging the part of Micah for her. This oratorio established a precedent: in Samson and in the other two dramatic oratorios with parts explicitly crafted for Cibber, Hercules and Belshazzar, Handel asked her to portray men who pronounced the pieces’ central moral messages while expressing sympathy for the suffering of the people around them. By so doing he seems to have prudently borne in mind the realities of the dramatic oratorio, which, with no costumes or sets, could encourage the type of connection that Delaney had made between aria and persona during the Messiah premiere. In contrast to Cibber’s theatrical managers, Handel and his librettists neither capitalised on her publicised sins nor featured her as a figure of female virtue. Instead, the choices that they made for Cibber’s characters allowed the nexus between her dramatic and personal identities to inform her roles more subtly. By having Cibber provide voices for fictional male confidants, these oratorios circumvented the actress’s troubled female persona while giving her recurrent moments of pathetic musical language and the dramatic theme of sympathy, thus tying her parts to one another, to the actress whom Hill had deemed ‘so naturally qualified’ for morally didactic pathos, and to those audiences of sensibility most affected by such emotionalism.
The revisions made for Cibber in Samson and Hercules, works basically complete at the time that she joined the casts, show the lengths to which the composer was willing to go to feature her specific talents.Footnote 64 A note in the autograph of Samson (B-Lbl RM 20.f.6) indicates that Handel completed the first act on 29 September 1741. Soon thereafter, John Christopher Smith prepared the first version of the performance score for Act I (D-Hs M A/1048), apparently while Handel was working on Acts II and III.Footnote 65 Although the performance score was already well underway, by 12 October 1742 – after Handel’s return from his collaborations with Cibber in Dublin – the composer made substantial changes to Micah’s part in Act I. This was the first of several stages of revision that Handel undertook, adding to and deleting from the part music that stood in the original autograph version, as shown in Figure 6.Footnote 66
Revisions for Micah before Samson premiere, 1743. Bold typeface indicates substantial changes.
These revisions stressed Micah as the oratorio’s central moral mouthpiece. Given one intertextual fact of casting that no London theatre-goer could have missed, this starring role certainly played on Cibber’s personal identity: she appeared in Samson alongside Catherine Clive (1711–85), her rival both on the stage and off.Footnote 67 Since the mid-1730s, they had played against one another as opposite sides of a moral coin, a dyad of wiles vs. innocence.Footnote 68 Clive, for example, portrayed the money-grubbing Narcissa against Cibber’s patient Amanda in a 1737 production of Love’s Last Shift, and she embodied the indulgently sensual Euphrosyne against Cibber’s idealistically virtuous Lady in Arne’s 1738 setting of Milton’s Comus. Off the stage, the two were embroiled in a lengthy newspaper and pamphlet war over the ownership of the role of the naïve and innocent Polly in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera; Cibber won, and Clive was resigned to playing the murderous Lucy against Cibber’s Polly.Footnote 69 With Clive as Dalila, Samson’s seductive Philistine temptress, audiences might have expected Cibber to counter her as a moral force. But some among them surely wondered how this contrast could be convincing, or whether Cibber might be met with the ‘Horse-laugh’ that Chetwood had described for exactly this sort of conflict between on- and offstage character.
Handel’s excision of several movements from Samson worked alongside Cibber’s new masculinisation to distance her persona from the libretto’s world, thereby reducing the potential of contamination of the oratorio’s message during her earliest appearance before Handel’s London audiences. Micah’s first music, for instance, was originally to have been ‘God of our fathers’. The composer reassigned this air to an anonymous Israelite tenor in his autograph revisions, however, scratching out Micah’s name at the bottom of the preceding recitative (‘O ever-failing trust in mortal strength’, f. 20v).Footnote 70 A second level of emendations (in a different pen and on two different places on the page) hints that this omission had to do specifically with Cibber: when castrato Gaetano Guadagni played Micah in 1750, Handel re-assigned the aria to the character.Footnote 71 Technical considerations alone, moreover, cannot explain the deletion. Had the music been too difficult for Cibber, Handel of course could have revised the score, but even in its original form the music did not present great challenges: the alto version is of limited compass, a-d’’, well within Cibber’s normal ranges (described below), with just a few bars of melismas and leaps of no more than an octave.Footnote 72 The aria’s text provides a more likely explanation for its removal:
This text would have expressed sensitive ideas for Cibber, who had been so ‘exalted high’ as the theatrical representative of virtue before her recent fall. An aria about ‘unseemliness’ and the fragile ‘Bubble’ of human fame was perhaps something that Cibber was unwilling to sing – or Handel was unwilling to have her sing.
Were this the only expurgation of such textual material, it might be dismissed as coincidence, but two other numbers were removed from Micah’s part with similar effect. In Act II, Micah originally had just one air, ‘It is not virtue’. At some point before the premiere, it was taken from Cibber and transposed up to D minor for another singer.Footnote 74 This was again an aria of limited range (c’-d’’), and it featured profoundly affective passages that Cibber could have delivered with dramatic flair. Its text once more provides a possible explanation for the reassignment:
One final omission similarly softened Micah’s role, again sparing Cibber from indicting her own sex. It is a recitative text indicated in the autograph that does not appear in the printed libretto or the other musical sources:
The harshness of these lines would hardly have bothered mid-century listeners, and even female characters frequently critiqued their own gender in similar terms (including the woman who sang ‘It is not virtue’ in the first performance). Yet removing these words from Cibber’s part would have been prudent, given the assaults on her personal virtue, so unfeelingly broadcast in the printed trials. Taken together, the omissions also underlined Micah as a reliably sympathetic character who never condemned the humbled hero for his sins of the flesh.
Handel’s additions to Micah’s part also emphasised this sympathetic nature. The first was ‘O mirrour of our fickle state’, which began life as a chorus.Footnote 76 The transformation from chorus to solo aria required no small effort from the composer, and the change signals the important dramatic and musical role that he granted Micah in the oratorio’s revision. By giving ‘O mirrour’ to Micah, Handel moved the character’s introduction much closer to the beginning of the work (Act I scene 2), whereas his first substantial number had originally come well into the third scene. After this revision, Samson and Micah are the first Israelites to sing arias, and are thereby foregrounded as the main characters among the prisoners.
From his introduction, Micah serves as the principal intercessor between the oratorio’s world and its audience, as the mediator of the oratorio’s message. He introduces his opening aria with a recitative that remorsefully reacts to the hero’s condition:
Having adopted the role of narrator, Micah goes on to introduce every character and important detail of the work. It is thus Micah who announces that Samson is blind: ‘Which shall we first bewail, / Thy Bondage, or lost Sight?’, thereby introducing what is surely the oratorio’s moment of highest pathos, Samson’s ‘Total eclipse’.Footnote 77 At the close of the hero’s lamentation, Micah announces Samson’s ‘rev’rend sire, old Manoah, / With careful Steps, and Locks as white as Down’.Footnote 78 Later, Micah ushers Dalila in and out of the drama, and he does the same for each of the villainous Harapha’s entrances and exits.Footnote 79 He again welcomes Manoah onto the stage in Act III scene 2, and in the oratorio’s final scene he proclaims the arrival of an Israelite messenger who brings news of Samson’s death and the destruction of the Philistines’ Hall of Dagon. Finally, Micah has the honour of bringing Samson’s dead body into the mind’s eye with the recitative that follows the ‘Dead March’ (‘The body comes’).Footnote 80
In addition to being the Footnote bridge between the audience and the fictional world, Micah was closely connected to his fellow characters through both his sympathy and his moral guidance. This tone is set following Samson’s first substantial music, the aria ‘Torments, alas’, in which he describes his pains in prison. Micah reacts with ‘O mirrour’:
In setting this text, Handel moved from the gloomy C minor of ‘Torments, alas’ to the even gloomier world of F minor, the key he generally chose for dramatic moments of highest pathos.Footnote 82 The same key makes a return for Micah at Samson’s darkest hour: when the hero is reported dead in Act III, Micah leads his countrymen into mourning with ‘Ye sons of Israel now lament’, and they respond in F minor with the moving chorus ‘Weep, Israel, weep’. Micah’s role, in other words, is bookended by F minor pieces of deep sadness.
The vocal part in ‘O mirrour’ also illustrates the range that Handel provided for Cibber’s new line as virtuous male, which was much lower than during her pre-1742 period (see Figure 7, which shows the ranges of her oratorio arias and her non-Handelian songs). It seems clear that Handel’s exploitation of Cibber’s lower ranges encouraged their use in other contexts as well, but as late as the 1760s she was still singing high soprano music on some occasions.Footnote 83 Handel’s extensive use of Cibber’s lower register signalled more than masculinisation, since it also created expressive effects similar to those of Messiah’s ‘He was despised’. In ‘O mirrour’, for instance, Handel used the very bottom of Cibber’s range (compare Example 1 with Example 2). Particularly striking is the word painting in bar 37, with its descent to b natural. Handel took this gesture a step further in bars 78 and after, with a florid depiction of the term ‘deep’, pushing all the way down to g.Footnote 84 Handel designed this aria not only to showcase musical talents, but also to allow Cibber to express the ‘depths’ of sorrow in plaintive tones.
Ranges of Cibber’s arias and accompanied recitatives.Footnote 81
The source of this sorrow is sympathy for Samson, and Handel therefore ensured that Micah’s music resonated with the hero’s (Example 3). As Samson had in ‘Torments, alas’, Micah begins monophonically. Samson’s aria opened with a tortured descending diminished fourth; Micah’s begins with exactly the same melodic gesture, effectively echoing (or ‘mirrouring’) the sentiments expressed by the character with whom Micah sympathises and establishing a musical kinship between the two, as does the identical rhythmic and melodic gesture that caps their opening phrases (bar 4 in both cases). Since the characters’ two introductory arias appear in succession, the effect would have been easy to perceive. The harsh interval and exposed nature of Micah’s music communicate the pain that he feels, pain comparable with – and musically similar to – Samson’s.
This echo seems to signal that Micah is palpably aware of the suffering of his fellow man. He thus possesses the mark of the supremely moral man of sympathy advocated by eighteenth-century schools of moral sense philosophy, which held sensation – ‘sensibility’ – as one of the prime forces of social morality.Footnote 85 The ultimate act of sympathy is the collapsing of identity into that of another human being, so that, as Adam Smith theorised in 1759, ‘we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him’.Footnote 86 Micah’s adoption of Samson’s musical expressions of pain into his own voice gives a sonic version of this sympathetic understanding of morality.
These sympathetic traits persisted in Cibber’s next role. Hercules featured Cibber as another male confidant of a suffering principal character: Lichas, adviser to Hercules’s wife, Dejanira.Footnote 87 Like Micah, Lichas had been fully drafted before Cibber confirmed involvement with the project. Handel scored him initially as a tenor, but emended the autograph (B-Lbl RM 20.e.8) to suit the new female voice.Footnote 88 He also drastically enlarged the role; Figure 8 shows this expansion, which transformed what was originally a part with only a few lines of recitative to one with six arias and one accompanied recitative, including the first and last solo music in the oratorio. With these changes, Handel allowed Lichas to introduce the work and its principal characters, as well as to offer the final moral sentiment of any single voice. Cibber once again served as the work’s apologist for moral virtue while still avoiding her now questionable authority as innocent woman.
Lichas’s role as revised for Hercules premiere.
As had the revisions for Samson, the new opening for Hercules signalled a change in perspective. In the autograph’s first version, Handel headed the opening ‘Act 1. Scene 1. A Royal Apartment. Dejanira and Chorus of Trachinians’, beginning with Dejanira’s recitative ‘O Hercules! Why art thou absent from me’ and her subsequent aria, ‘The world, when day’s career is run’. A note in the autograph manuscript (f. 4r) shows that once Cibber was signed up, Handel opened instead with Lichas: ‘NB. Lychas ac [accompanied recit]. And Aria. poi segue’. The indication ‘NB’ signals a separate piece of composing paper, inserted at this point in the bound autograph, with the result that Dejanira’s music is bifurcated by Lichas’s pair of pieces. Folios 4r and 4v contain Dejanira’s recitative and the first fourteen measures of her aria; Lichas’s insertions then intervene (ff. 5r–8v), headed with an updated stage direction (‘Act 1. Scene.1. A Royal apartment[.] Dejanira, Lychas & Chorus of Trachnians’, f. 5r), and capped by a note that Dejanira’s pieces are to follow (‘poi segue Dejanira accomp. O Hercules! Why art thou absent from me’, f. 8v).Footnote 89 Dejanira’s aria continues from bar 15 on the following page (f. 9r).
The music originally intended to open the oratorio placed Dejanira in a familiar situation: alone, separated from her lover and mourning his absence, and the tortured chromaticism of her opening accompanied recitative expresses her deep-felt sorrow (Example 4 shows both this number and the newly inserted music for Cibber that preceded it in the premiere.) Handel’s revision here was an inversion of the process he had applied in Samson: Lichas introduces and prefigures Dejanira’s suffering with his own accompanied recitative, for which Handel provided even more mournful gestures, including pulsating orchestral figuration, chromatic ‘lamento’ gestures in the bass, and unrelentingly dark tonal areas (opening in B flat minor and touching on both C minor and F minor before a final cadence in A flat). The theme of the text further establishes Lichas’s credentials as a true man of sympathy: ‘See, with what sad Dejection in her Looks,/indulging Grief, the mournful Princess sits!’ Lichas therefore musically expresses Dejanira’s grief before we hear the princess herself lament. From this music and the earnest seriousness of Lichas’s following aria, a prayer to the heavens to spare Hercules’s life (‘No longer fate’), we might suspect that Lichas suffers just as severely as Dejanira at the hero’s absence.
Such sympathy marks Lichas’s role throughout the oratorio. In his next aria, ‘The smiling hours a joyful train’, Lichas rejoices at Hercules’s safe return. Coming immediately after Dejanira’s own enthusiastic expression of relief (‘Begone, my fears’), Lichas’s aria echoes and reinforces her sentiments. With this addition, Handel and his librettist Thomas Broughton brought the oratorio’s first section, encompassing Hercules’s absence, to a pleasingly symmetrical conclusion: Hercules had begun with Lichas introducing Dejanira’s lamentation, and the first section ends with Lichas echoing her relief, followed by a chorus, ‘Let none despair’.Footnote 90 The next important event is the arrival of Iöle, a captive princess, and the celebration of Hercules’s safe return, which together make up the remainder of Act I.
Act II introduces the story’s central conflict: Dejanira is jealous of Iöle’s beauty and distrustful of her husband’s fidelity. This lack of trust provided Handel and Broughton with a new theme for Lichas (and for the oratorio): the arias that they added in Act II (‘As stars that rise and disappear’ and ‘Constant lovers never roving’) turn the focus to marital fidelity – a surprising decision for an actress-singer who had been recently accused of luring a gentleman into a sordid affair for financial gain. In Act II scene 2, Dejanira confronts Iöle with her suspicions. In the autograph’s original state, Dejanira concluded this scene with a brief (two-bar) recitative, proclaiming, ‘It is too sure, that Hercules is false’, followed immediately by a judgemental chorus, ‘Jealousy, infernal pest’. Handel’s new scene 3, inserted immediately after Dejanira’s recitative, rationalised this choral outburst, tying it to Lichas’s assessment of the situation. Handel added a stage direction indicating Lichas’s arrival at the end of Dejanira’s brief recitative (‘Dej: going out meets Lichas’), and he provided a symbol to direct his copyist to a secondary sheet.Footnote 91 On the inserted page (f. 55r), Handel composed music to a new dialogue by Broughton, which concludes with the herald’s proclamation, ‘Alcides false? Impossible!’ Lichas’s aria, ‘As stars that rise and disappear’, follows, celebrating the constancy of the work’s hero: ‘As Stars that rise, and disappear, / Still in the same bright Circle move,/So shines unchang’d thy Hero’s Love/Nor Absence can his Faith impair.’ Dejanira’s brief response in recitative, ‘In vain you strive his Falsehood to disguise’, is met by Lichas’s retort, ‘This is thy work, accursed Jealousy.’Footnote 92 The chorus now rises directly out of Lichas’s distaste for jealousy’s pernicious influence, once again foregrounding Cibber’s character as the moral centre.
Lichas’s second aria, ‘Constant lovers never roving’, is linked to ‘As stars that rise’ through its textual focus as a further hymn to constancy. While Lichas’s other arias focus on his capacity for sympathy, sharing either the sadness (‘See, with what sad dejection’, ‘No longer fate relentless frown’, ‘O scene of unexampled woe’) or the celebration of the protagonists (‘The smiling hours a joyful train’, ‘He who for atlas prop’d the sky’), his constancy arias enshrine marital fidelity as a mark of morality. Lichas thus shows himself to be in line with the sentimental ethics of male heroes in contemporary drama and fiction.Footnote 93 By refusing to doubt the constancy of his hero, Lichas rounds out his own sentimental credentials as introduced in his arias of sympathy.
Was Cibber’s public persona at the heart of this aspect of the expansion of Lichas’s role? Faith in constancy – one of the principle characteristics of sentimental literature broadly – marked many of the dramas in which Cibber had specialised before her break from acting. Indiana in Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers, for example, was a heroine unable to imagine that her protector could harbour anything but the noblest of feelings for her, and the play presents their eventual marriage as a triumph of love over the less admirable dictates of mercantile-aristocratic relations. Monimia in Otway’s The Orphan grieved herself to death after the tragic, accidental compromise of her own marriage. (She is raped by her brother-in-law while she believes herself to be consummating her vows.) And in Love’s Last Shift, Cibber played Amanda, who saves her marriage by indulging her husband’s rakish desires, saving him from sin by disguising herself as a prostitute. To hymn marital fidelity, in other words, was once more to embrace the public persona on which Cibber had built her career, perhaps signalling (like the omissions from her part in Samson) how she would like audiences to understand her ‘true’ character.
Lichas’s introduction of ‘Jealousy, infernal pest’ was in addition exemplary of one final element in Cibber’s oratorio roles: in all of the works with parts designed for her, Handel created similar moral proclamations with choral response. In these moments, Cibber’s characters call on the assembled masses to respond in appropriate ways, sometimes to dramatic developments and sometimes to moral dictates, on one occasion even leading them in prayer. In Hercules, a second moment of union between Lichas and the people comes in Act III, just after the hero’s poisoning has been reported. Lichas begins a long recitative with a call to mourning: ‘Ye sons of Trachin, mourn your valiant Chief’. After four bars of recitative, a Trachinian interjects with just five notes of response: ‘Oh! Doleful Tidings!’ Lichas continues with an extended speech describing the death of the hero, and then sings an aria that meditates on the tragedy, ‘Oh scene of unexampled woe’. This in turn evokes one final short outburst from the Trachinian (a three-bar recitative beginning ‘Oh fatal jealousy’) before the full chorus expresses its horrified reaction to the news in ‘Tyrants now no more shall dread’.
Belshazzar similarly highlights Cibber’s role in connection with the masses. Part I scene 3 features her part, Daniel, in four sequential solo numbers, as shown in Figure 9. The scene resembles a miniature religious service, with Daniel speaking from the pulpit. The role was appropriate within the bounds of the diegesis; Daniel was a treasured leader for his fellow captive Jews in Babylon, had maintained his faith during a time of captivity, and was respected by Babylonians and Jews alike as a seer.Footnote 94 This sequence opens with a supplicant prayer (the aria). Daniel then delivers a homily (the first accompanied recitative), calling for faith and celebration with ‘Rejoice, my countrymen’. Next, Daniel turns his auditors’ attention towards holy scripture in a brief secco recitative (‘For long ago’) before beginning an actual reading of Isaiah 45:1 (‘Thus saith the Lord’), which promises emancipation of the Jews and rebuilding of the temple. The chorus responds with appropriate rapture in ‘Sing oh ye heavens’, concluding with a rousing ‘Hallelujah, amen’. Belshazzar immediately afterward calls for his own Babylonian people to join in a different type of revelry: a hedonistic celebration. This contrast reinforced the idea of Daniel/Cibber as the moral leader of the opposing Israelite group.Footnote 95
Daniel leads the Jews in prayer (Belshazzar).
The most formally inventive of all these interactions between Cibber’s characters and the assembled masses comes in Samson. In two cases, not only Micah’s moral and emotional but also his musical presence continue during communal (i.e., choral) prayers. The first comes early in Act II, when Micah and his fellow Jewish captives pray for the protection of their weakened warrior. Micah begins with a supplicant prayer in the aria ‘Return, O God of hosts’. The chorus responds with its own words to God:
Handel’s setting incorporates Micah’s music directly into the choral texture, creating continuity of musical thought to complement the libretto’s textual continuity. The second such aria-chorus hybrid for Micah even more clearly illustrates the moral influence of Cibber’s characters within the fictional worlds. In ‘The holy one of Israel be thy guide’, Micah advises Samson, on the verge of entering the temple of the idolatrous god Dagon, to trust the power of the Judaic god:
The aria begins with a ten-bar ritornello. After its cadence, Micah intones a psalm-like melody, with a repeating a’ lending the phrase sobriety (Example 5). The text is later reprised by the chorus, who first sing the third line of Micah’s air to different music (‘To Fame immortal go’, etc., bar 43) and then repeat both the opening text and Micah’s monophonic approach (bars 51–6). The whole integrated structure unites Micah’s sentiments and those of the Israelites through musical and textual means, emphasising the central importance of this character to the captive Jews.
All these tight connections between Cibber’s characters and communal expressions of faith and feeling point out the importance of her presence on the oratorio stage. Cibber repeatedly served as the moral instructor for her onstage compatriots – and in as overtly moralising a genre as oratorio, her moral instruction presumably served the auditors in the hall as well. In 1742, Handelian oratorio had inspired Reverend Delany to absolve Cibber’s sins; just a few years later, it gave her the opportunity not only to move audiences’ sentiments, but also to lead prayers, tutoring fellow characters and audiences alike in a musico-theatrical ‘school of virtue and morals’ (to recuperate Theophilus’s term). Handel and his librettists thus produced for Cibber a more sophisticated portrait of virtue than either Amelia or Calista could have provided; her Handelian roles were an illustration of a scenario elsewhere described to a young female readership by Eliza Haywood: ‘There have been instances where virtue, once reclaimed, has, like a broken limb, grown stronger than before.’Footnote 96
* * *
The didactic nature of Cibber’s roles within the oratorios was ultimately not far removed from the aims and approaches of the moralising plays on which she built her career. The most powerful pedagogic tool that she used in both spoken and sung roles, sympathy for her fellow men, underpinned the philosophies and aesthetics of sentimental art, which aimed, as Laurence Sterne put it, ‘to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures’.Footnote 97 In spoken plays, she rent the heartstrings of audiences as ever-endangered or fallen women; in the oratorios, she gave voice to characters who rent their own heartstrings for the suffering of their fellow men, from Christ in Messiah to the worldlier hero of Hercules.Footnote 98 This capacity was no small feat: as Cibber’s and Handel’s friend Charles Burney explained, this power was dependent not upon art, but upon ‘nature, which gives to the tone of voice of persons of sensibility, certain touching and delicious inflections, which those who feel nothing never possessed’.Footnote 99 Certain people – namely, ‘persons of sensibility’ – were thus imbued by nature with a quality that performers ‘who feel nothing’ could never convey. For Burney, a singer’s ‘natural’ self, no less than that of a stage actress, was intimately connected to her artistic success.
In the years after she stopped singing for Handel, Cibber’s persona as a woman of feeling stayed with her as memory of her scandal faded. In a 1772 letter to David Garrick, David Williams recalled her performances as superior to those of Garrick himself: ‘Nothing but nature could well exceed many of your imitations; – and Mrs. Cibber was nature … She entered only on those parts for which nature had formed her.’Footnote 100 Williams remained vague about exactly which parts were entwined with her ‘nature’, but most of Cibber’s later encomiums were less ambiguous. In 1750 the playwright and critic John Hill could still praise ‘the manner in which Mrs. Cibber engages our affection, our tears, in the character of Monimia (in which she seems inspir’d with the very genius of the author who wrote the part, and with the very soul of the heroine whom she represents)’.Footnote 101 Cibber thus shared not only the ‘genius’ of a playwright, but also the ‘very soul’ of one of her regular characters, a pure, innocent and tragically betrayed woman. Monimia was also an adolescent, and it is a testament to the power of Cibber’s first line that she continued to play these young women until the very end of her career.Footnote 102 Her aura of innocence, fragility and youth encouraged audiences’ tendency to blur feigned and true selves, despite both the trial and her new roles.
Handel’s casting of Cibber as the moral centre of his oratorios helped to distance her from her scandalous trial, while at the same time tapping into the tight connection of sentiment and morality that she had mastered on the stage. Cibber served as a conduit through which fellow-feeling could flow into and out of the oratorio, and the changes that Handel made for her therefore ultimately provide an opportunity not just to reflect on the career of a singular performer, but also to examine how the British theatre and the culture of sentiment influenced the composer’s last major genre.
Handel, Messiah, ‘He was despised’, bars 12–21.
Samson, ‘O mirrour of our fickle state’, bars 36–8 (top) and 78–82 (bottom).
Samson, ‘Torments, alas’, opening (top) and ‘O mirrour of our fickle state’, opening (bottom).
Hercules, ‘Oh Hercules’, opening (top) and ‘See, with what sad dejection’, opening (bottom).
Samson, ‘The holy one of Israel’, bars 9–13 (top) and bars 50 ff. (bottom).
