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The Overexpressive Celebrity and the Deformed King: Recasting the Spectacle as Subject in Colley Cibber's Richard III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Julia H. Fawcett
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Abstract

In this essay, I examine Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III (1699) to explore the intersections between celebrity and surveillance in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on vocabularies from performance studies, disability studies, theater history, and literary studies, I theorize a strategy of self-representation that England's first modern celebrities developed to maintain their fame while protecting their privacy from the spectators' anatomizing gaze. Cibber used his performance of Richard's disabled body to disrupt his spectators' attempts to characterize or categorize his identity. By displaying a body that demanded attention at the same time that it defied Enlightenment grammars of behavior—and by publishing literary self-representations littered with misspelled words and blotted pages—Cibber became an early practitioner of “overexpression,” a strategy that allowed him to make himself visible without becoming vulnerable to his public's attempts to interpret, dissect, and disseminate the secrets of his private life.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 4: Special Topic: Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety , October 2011 , pp. 950 - 965
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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