Prithee don't screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.

Pope's animosity began in 1717 when he helped John Arbuthnot and John Gay write a farce Three Hours After Marriage in which one of the characters "Plotwell" was modelled on Cibber. Loveless is convinced and stricken and a rich choreography of mutual kneelings risings and prostrations follows generated by Loveless' penitence and Amanda's "submissive eloquence". Mostly Cibber replied quite good-humouredly to Pope's aspersions ("some of which are in conspicuously bad taste" as Lowe points out) until 1742 when he hit below the belt in "A Letter from Mr.

His importance in British theatre history rests on his being one of the first in a long line of actor-managers on the interest of two of his comedies as documents of evolving early 18th-century taste and ideology and on the value of his autobiography as a historical source. 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. 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 [and] hapless Shakespeare".