''The Rival Fools'' is a 1709

comedy play Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy endi ...

by the British writer

Colley Cibber Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir ''An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber'' (1740) describes his life in ...

. It drew inspiration from the earlier play ''

Wit at Several Weapons ''Wit at Several Weapons'' is a seventeenth-century comedy of uncertain date and authorship. Authorship and date In its own century, the play appeared in print only in the two Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679; yet modern scholars ...

''. Despite Cibber's previous record of turning out hits, it was not a great success. The original

Drury Lane Drury Lane is a street on the boundary between the Covent Garden and Holborn areas of London, running between Aldwych and High Holborn. The northern part is in the borough of London Borough of Camden, Camden and the southern part in the City o ...

cast featured

William Pinkethman William Pinkethman (also Penkethman, Pinkeman, Pinkerman, etc.; nicknamed Pinkey, c.1660–1725) was an English comic actor, a low comedian with a droll style, and theatre manager. He was considered an imitator of Anthony Leigh. Starting in th ...

as Sir Oliver Outwit, Robert Wilks as Young Outwit, Barton Booth as Cunningham, William Bullock (actor), William Bullock as Sir Gregory Goose,

as Samuel Simpson, George Pack (actor), George Pack as Sir Threadbare, Theophilus Keene as Priscian, Anne Oldfield as Lucinda, Mary Porter (actress), Mary Porter as Mirabel and Elizabeth Willis (actress), Elizabeth Willis as Governess.Van Lennep p.182

References

Bibliography

* Burling, William J. ''A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700-1737''. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1992. * Koon, Helene. ''Colley Cibber: A Biography''. University Press of Kentucky, 2014. * McGirr, Elaine M. ''Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber''. Springer, 2016. * Nicoll, Allardyce. ''History of English Drama, 1660-1900, Volume 2''. Cambridge University Press, 2009. * Van Lennep, W. ''The London Stage, 1660-1800: Volume Two, 1700-1729''. Southern Illinois University Press, 1960. 1709 plays Plays by Colley Cibber West End plays British comedy plays {{18thC-play-stub