Gilli Bush-Bailey
TREADING THE BAWDS
Actresses and playwrights on the late-Stuart stage
226pp. Manchester University Press. £50.
0 7190 7250 6
Jean I. Marsden
FATAL DESIRE
Women, sexuality and the English stage, 1660–1720
216pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. $45; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. £25.50.
0 8014 4447 0
From Restoration gossip to twenty-first-century film, the story has survived that the Earl of Rochester bet he could turn the young Elizabeth Barry into a great actress, and won his wager. He accomplished this by making Barry rehearse a part up to thirty times, going into every detail of her character’s speeches; and it may be assumed that there was a sexual element to this pedagogy, because the actress later bore her tutor a daughter, in 1677. As the recent film of Stephen Jeffreys’s play, The Libertine, makes clear, the Restoration stage would never have had its Shakespearean heroines well acted without the critical interventions of the good Earl.
Is Gilli Bush-Bailey really the first person to challenge this version of events? Though her book, Treading the Bawds, concentrates on Elizabeth Barry’s later career – especially her work with a slightly younger, equally gifted woman, Anne Bracegirdle – Bush-Bailey begins by suggesting that Barry owed her pre-eminence not to Rochester but to the community of theatrical women to which she belonged. Barry was effectively a child of the theatre, brought up in the household of Sir William Davenant and his wife Mary. After Sir William’s death, Barry would have seen how Lady Davenant ran the theatre company that her husband had established after the Restoration, the Duke’s Company. She would have known Mary Betterton, the experienced actress and acting coach, as well as other actresses whose roles Barry would inherit. Perhaps most significantly, there was a female playwright on hand – Aphra Behn – who became Barry’s friend and collaborator in the 1670s and 80s. Bush-Bailey argues that it is therefore with Behn rather than Rochester that Barry’s career playing sexually sophisticated, compromised female characters begins.
In Bush-Bailey’s view, tenuous assumptions about women’s supposedly subordinate role to men, like the story about the Earl of Rochester’s wager, plague theatre history. She fumes about the posthumous veneration of Congreve, for example, and how it has obfuscated his status in his own time. There is a “chasm of historical exclusion” between him and his female counterparts that the latter – despite a concerted critical rescue operation – cannot cross. “The occlusion of theatre women”, she writes, “is part of an ongoing agenda in the eighteenth century that sought to bring the playhouse and its personnel under the control of political hegemonic interests.” That hegemony makes its influence felt today: hence the “familiarity” of The Way of the World as part of a theatrical repertoire from which a fine comedy such as its exact contemporary, The Beau Defeated by Mary Pix, is excluded (not that modern audiences has much chance of seeing either).
As with playwrights, so with actors: “If we are to change the way that theatre women are included in today’s stories, we must attend to how they have been marginalised in the stories of the past”. The story Bush-Bailey attends to is that of the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which, for many years, Elizabeth Barry co-managed with Anne Bracegirdle and Thomas Betterton. A kind of seventeenth-century United Artists, the Players’ Company was an ensemble of great experience and flexibility. Barry and Bracegirdle had already formed an enduring stage partnership, with Bracegirdle specializing in exactly the parts that Barry did not: passively suffering saints or ingénues. Barry’s roles tended to be rather more scarlet. It is Betterton, however, who traditionally receives all the credit for the successes of the so-called Players’ Company, even though the names of both actors and actresses appear on all the relevant legal documents. At crucial moments in the company’s history, it appears that Barry and Bracegirdle took the lead (literally, Bush-Bailey tells us, in the case of at least thirty new tragedies, alongside their less celebrated collaborations in at least twenty-two comedies). They were either directly or indirectly responsible for many anonymous prologues and epilogues, and Bush-Bailey suggests the “Ariadne” who wrote She Ventures and He Wins, the “remarkable” comedy that opened the 1695–6 season at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was none other than Elizabeth Barry herself. In Bush-Bailey’s eyes, the Players’ Company was a collectively governed enterprise, dominated by its leading actresses, who frequently supported female dramatists when Christopher Rich’s rival company at Drury Lane did not. The Players’ Company was the Barry and Bracegirdle company, both on and off the stage.
As a polemical act of revision, Treading the Bawds gives the study of this period in theatre history a welcome jolt. From the title onwards, however, the book has its dubious elements. Bush-Bailey warns, for example, that An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740) should be treated with caution because Cibber wrote it towards the end of his long life. She then takes a list of actors and actresses from that work and introduces it as written “when Colley Cibber joined the United Company in 1690” (the list’s arrangement in parallel columns apparently “speaks of a perceived equality” between the sexes). She passes over the possibility that Betterton and Barry were considered the leaders of the Players’ Company; indeed, Treading the Bawds leaves one with the odd impression that theatrical work takes place in single-sex cubicles, with an absolute minimum of ad hoc interaction across the gender divide. On the women’s side, “sexual activity and personal relationships” “deflect attention from their theatre practice”; on the men’s, they are an “afterthought”. This overstatement touches on a subject more carefully discussed by Scott Paul Gordon in The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (2002): that of actors’ troubling capacity for self-metamorphosis and how this can be explained away, rhetorically depriving them of agency. Some have reckoned Elizabeth Barry’s passionate performances, complete with real tears, to be the result of a passionate nature – simulating emotion would be far too active and alarming. Who could be the object of that passion? The Earl of Rochester, presumably.
Bush-Bailey offers a fresh transcription of an anonymous “Satyr on the Players” – previously published in truncated, bowdlerized form by Montague Summers in 1928 – a bilious libel that is almost even-handed in its vicious depiction of both actors and actresses, the latter as sexual incontinents to a woman. This comes to mind when reading Jean I. Marsden’s Fatal Desire – a study of the “theatrical spectacle of female sexuality”, as embodied by the likes of Barry and Bracegirdle. Since Marsden concentrates on these actresses’ roles rather than their careers, her book makes a convenient complement to Treading the Bawds, especially for its chapters on that curious subgenre, “she-tragedy”, and for its relevance to theatre beyond its declared period of interest, 1660–1720. Fatal Desire is a fascinating account of how “women representing women” changed English theatre during the later seventeenth century; like Bush-Bailey, Marsden shows little interest in what “boys representing women” achieved before 1660.
The defining feature of she-tragedy is “the suffering and often tragic end of a central, female figure”. This figure inevitably winds up in an “erotic situation” and must pay for it, regardless of whether or not it is her fault, with her life. The subgenre’s voyeuristic tendencies are evident in a speech that Marsden quotes from the popular Ibrahim (1696) by Mary Pix, in which the account of the heroine’s rape at the hands of the eponymous sultan becomes an invitation to the heroine’s virtuous lover to “suppose / Her prayers, her tears, her cryes, / Her wounding supplications all in vain”:
The savage Ravisher twisting his [fingers]
In the lovely Tresses of her hair,
Tearing by the smarting Root,
Fixing her by that upon the ground:
Then – (horrour on horrour!)
On her breathless body perpetrate the fact.
“Perpetrate” rather than “perpetrating” is a suggestive syntactic slip; an over-literal reader might imagine that it is not the savage ravisher but the addressee who is being ordered here to attack the heroine. But it is also an ambiguity that reflects an essential quality of she-tragedy: how it draws its spectators, on stage and off, into a sinister collusion.
“In an age of cynicism and political turmoil, such suffering provided a kind of authenticity that the fate of kings and empires no longer possessed”, writes Marsden. Yet as many understood it, the fate of empires depended on the sexual virtue of their women; for Whig dramatists, the sexual tyrant was a potent figure of absolutist misrule. Nicholas Rowe, at the height of the she-tragic craze, hints at such concerns when he writes that “Poets frequently might move Compassion, / And with She Tragedies o’er-run the Nation”. She-tragedies – by Otway, Congreve, Southerne and Rowe himself – did indeed become standard fare in the eighteenth century.
Written for Barry and Bracegirdle, they provided the demanding roles in which potential stars could be judged. And their influence was felt beyond the stage; as Marsden notes, they provided Adam Smith with illustrations for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She might also have said a word or two about the novels of Samuel Richardson, with their drawn-out sexual sieges and vicarious distresses – prose she-tragedies that perhaps owe more to Elizabeth Barry than is generally acknowledged.
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Michael Caines is editing a book on David Garrick. His anthology of plays by eighteenth-century women was published in 2004.
