Decline
Sloper retired to the country, and Susannah gave up performing for a while. When Cibber appeared as Lord Foppington in The Relapse at Drury Lane, he was pelted with fruit and garbage. The following year, 1739, Cibber brought an action against Sloper for £10,000 for "detaining" his wife. This time he was awarded £500. Susannah went to Ireland and a concert season with Handel while the scandal died down, but later returned to have a successful career at Drury Lane, working with David Garrick and becoming famous as a tragic actress. Cibber lost his influence in the theatre and spent his remaining years switching from venue to venue, taking the occasional part. His exaggerated acting style was out of fashion and unpopular, and he drank to excess.
His father died on 11 December 1757, leaving Theophilus just £50 in his will, and the following day Theophilus wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Newcastle, asking for work in a theatre. Theophilus' eulogy to his father, delivered on stage dressed in mourning, was not a success, and he was forced to look for work elsewhere. Thomas Sheridan offered him work at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. On the trip to Ireland, his ship, the Dublin Trader with about 60 passengers on board, foundered in a storm, and was wrecked on the Scottish coast. He was lost at sea.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
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