This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber ¿everybody knows¿ has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the ¿nation¿s poet¿ and canonised Cibber¿s enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history¿s narrative of the birth of naturalism;