Character is mediated by the body of an actor. Yet, that mediation is most successful aesthetically when the audience is persuaded that the character exceeds their immediate experience of it. Some characters are so powerfully present that they appear to have a life beyond the instance of their mediation: the body of the actor, the performed play, or the written text. Colley Cibber, in his preface to The Provok’d Husband (1728), communicates this sense even as he acknowledges the contribution of the actors to the success of the play. His compliment to Anne Oldfield, the actress who took the part of Lady Townly, was to attract particular attention:

Cibber's phrase seeks to capture the excess that attaches to the ‘presence-effect’ of character when performed by a remarkable actress. Here, there is a marriage of character and actress: both exceed the expectation of a familiar role. In ‘doing’ a character, Anne Oldfield manages to move ‘out’ of it.

Alexander Pope, never slow to mock Cibber, parodied Cibber's ridiculous formulation in the sixteenth chapter of his satirical instructional work, Peri Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), in which the instructor praises the stage managers-actors of Drury Lane – Robert Wilks, Barton Booth and Colley Cibber – with the phrase: ‘to this present day they continue to Out-do even their own Out-doings’. Pope's parody recasts Cibber's over-excitable repetition of ‘outdoing’ as effluence and waste. Though Cibber was not to be promoted by Pope to the role of King Dunce until the version of the Dunciad that was published in 1743, he is here cast in the same mould as the dull poets who feature in the 1728 Dunciad and Peri Bathous, parasitic cannibalisers of their own waste products, which they ingest and recirculate repetitively.