The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (80 page)

In Restoration society Bess Morris had her place as well as Phillis and Chloris, and was well aware of it. When ‘a great woman’ named Bess to her face as Dorset’s whore, Bess Morris answered that she was proud of the fact that she pleased at least ‘one man of wit’; let ‘all the coxcombs dance to bed with you!’ she retorted.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Actress as Honey-Pot

‘’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as ’tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot …’

TOM BROWN
, ‘From worthy Mrs Behn the Poetress to the famous Virgin Actress’

A
ccording to John Evelyn, Margaret Godolphin was so mortified to find herself ‘an Actoress’ in 1674, in the court masque
Calisto
, that she spent all her time off stage reading a book of devotion; she could hardly wait for the performance to end before rushing to her oratory to pray. This distaste was recorded with ecstatic approval by Evelyn: in her dress worth nearly £300, and £20,000’s worth of borrowed jewels his favourite looked like ‘a Saint in Glory’; even when on the stage, she had the air of abstracting herself from it.
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The behaviour of the rest of the cast did not live up to this high standard. The ‘tiring-room’ was crowded with gallants, with whom the lady performers passed the time agreeably between entrances. The celebrated singer Mrs Knight, whose services had been called upon to supplement the somewhat weak voices of the amateurs, was an ex-mistress of the King. Renowned for the range of her voice, she had recently been ‘roaming’ in Italy, as a result of which her range was still further extended. Mrs Knight sang ‘incomparably’ on this occasion; nevertheless she was not a particularly welcome sight at court to the royal ladies. Another professional invited, Moll Davis – ‘Dear Miss, delight of all the nobler sort’ – had cast such enchantment over the King with the
sweetness of her singing on stage that he had made her his mistress on the strength of it; she had recently borne him a child.

Although Evelyn was carrying prudery a little far in suggesting that Margaret Godolphin condemned a masque – the real cause of her pique lay elsewhere
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– nevertheless it was true that in the 1670s a respectable woman could not give her profession as that of ‘Actoress’ and expect to keep either her reputation or her person intact.

It was a royal warrant of 21 August 1660 which brought Englishwomen on to the English stage for the first time, so that plays should become ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, from being merely ‘harmless delights’. Before that, women had been seen on stage – but they had been foreigners, and as such highly suspect. Some of these were more travelling performers, mountebanks in the original sense of the word (
monta in banco
– mount on the bench), than actresses: in the time of Queen Elizabeth for example the honest town of Lyme had felt both thrilled and threatened by the ‘unchaste, shameless, and unnatural tumbling of Italian women’. In 1629 a troupe of genuine actresses had arrived from France and had performed at Blackfriars, in the Red Bull and Fortune Theatres; they had been hissed off the stage by the English as being immoral. Later William Prynne in
Histriomastix
denounced them as ‘notorious whores’.
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Under the Protectorate, when Sir William Davenant performed the brilliant conjuring trick of persuading the music-loving Cromwell that the new dramatic form of opera bore absolutely no relation to the scandalous theatre, a woman, Mrs Edward Coleman, had sung the part of Ianthe in the ‘opera’
The Siege of Rhodes
. (Later, conveniently,
The Siege of Rhodes
turned out to be a play, and a very popular one too. Mrs Betterton made the part of Ianthe so much hers that she was generally referred to under that name rather than her own.) The conception of the court masque, so beloved of Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles I, was also preserved during the Protectorate, because in that too music played its soothing part. At the wedding of Mary Cromwell a masque, with pastorals by Marvell, graced the
protectoral court in which the young bride appeared; Cromwell himself may have played a non-speaking part.
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However, a masque – for all Margaret Godolphin’s megrims – was not a professional theatrical performance and nor was an opera – by protectoral decision.

It was a few months after the warrant – sometime in November or December 1660 – that one young Englishwoman actually stepped on to the London stage as the first swallow to signify the long hot summer of the English actress. We do not and shall presumably never know her name, although we know the play –
The Moor of Venice
– and the part – Desdemona. (Before that, as it was wittily said, with men of forty or fifty playing wenches of fifteen, when you called Desdemona: ‘enter Giant’.)
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Two companies had been given the monopoly of the London stage by the King’s warrant, following the Restoration: The King’s Company under Thomas Killigrew and The Duke’s Company under Davenant. Although on balance of probability the claim of The King’s Company to provide the first actress has been allowed, both companies actually claimed it; which means that the honour lies between Anne Marshall, Mary Saunderson (Mrs Betterton) and Katherine Corey, who became a specialist in old women’s roles, famously creating that of the Widow Blackacre in Congreve’s
The Double Dealer
. If Katherine Corey is ruled out as an unlikely Desdemona for this reason, the choice lies between Anne Marshall and Mary Saunderson.
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Mary Saunderson, who married the great actor-manager Thomas Betterton in 1662 when she was about twenty-five, would be a worthy founder of her profession; since she was the famous exception to the rule that all actresses of this period were to be considered potential prostitutes. ‘Having, by nature, all the accomplishments required to make a perfect actress,’ wrote Betterton’s biographer Charles Gildon, ‘she added to them the distinguishing characteristic of a virtuous life.’ So wondrous was her virtue that she was actually engaged to coach the young Princesses Mary and Anne in
Calisto
, a task for which those participants Mrs Knight and Moll Davis would certainly not have been held suitable. Shortly before Mrs Betterton’s marriage
Pepys was ravished by her performance in the title role of
The Duchess of Malfi
(Betterton played Bosola), the play itself being one of the most popular tragedies in the repertory of The Duke’s Company. A long career in the theatre at her husband’s side ended with the admirable Mrs Betterton training up other younger actresses, including Anne Bracegirdle.
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Most of her colleagues presented a very different image to the public. By 1666 Evelyn was finding the professional theatre increasingly distasteful, because audiences were abused by an ‘atheistical liberty’, to wit, ‘foul and indecent women, now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act’; he much preferred the special court performances. In the 1680s the word actress was virtually synonymous with that of ‘Miss’ or kept woman, at least in the expectations of the public.
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The burden of proof otherwise fell upon the individual actress, but there were very few who essayed to make the point. The trouble was that those ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, the kind of new plays inspired by the opportunity of putting women on the stage, might be brilliant comedies of manners or turgid tragedies of emotion or some combination of the two, but in general they were extremely frank in their depiction of promiscuity. Inevitably and excitedly, the public merged the personality of the actress with that of her character on stage.

As a result, the convenient identification of actress and ‘Miss’ led to young ladies becoming actresses precisely in order to secure a rich admirer. Now contemporaries pitied the ‘little playhouse creatures’, as Mrs Squeamish termed them in
The Country Wife
, only if they did not manage to pick up a protector. The casting-couch made its first appearance in our social history when a young woman was sometimes obliged to sacrifice her virtue in order to obtain a coveted place in the theatre from one of its patrons. It was an investment she expected to recoup in the shape of the desired wealthy keeper, once she could display her pretty face to advantage on the stage itself. The beaux of the court expected in their turn to keep a pretty actress; it figured along with all their other expenses in the cause of public display, such as gaudy clothes and fine horses. In this way George Porter
kept Mrs Jane Long, Sir Robert Howard (the nephew of his namesake, the lover of Lady Purbeck) Mrs Uphill, Sir Philip Howard Mrs Betty Hall, and the Earl of Peterborough Mrs Johnson.
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The
louche
atmosphere of the times is well caught by a joyful letter of 1677 from Harry Savile to Lord Rochester, then ill in the country. Savile tried to tempt Rochester to London with the prospect of a sweet new French
comédienne
called Françoise Pitel: ‘a young wench of fifteen’. Savile declared ‘it were a shame she should carry away a maidenhead she pretends to have brought’, but unfortunately the price was so steep that no one currently in London could afford it.
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This two-way traffic called forth many references in the plays of the time. Some of these took the rueful side of management: ‘our Women who adorn each Play, Bred at our cost, become at length your prey’. Others pointed to the actress herself as predator, since she intended:

With open blandishments and secret art

To glide into some keeping cullies heart

Who neither sense nor manhood understands

And jilt him of his patrimonial lands.
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Be that as it may, by the 1670s the word actress had secured in England that raffish connotation which would linger round it, for better or for worse, in fiction as well as fact, for the next 250 years.

It had not always been so. The first actresses often concealed their origins, while the honorific appellation ‘Mrs’ pronounced mistress, which they were granted – as opposed to the opprobrious ‘Miss’ – sometimes makes their marital status hard to unravel. Yet it is clear that they were neither ‘Misses’ nor the daughters of ‘Misses’. Some, like Peg Hughes, came from actors’ families. Others were drawn from that same penurious segment of society which supplied waiting-women and the like, where the daughters were likely to go husbandless if they had no dowry. Singing and dancing being the prerequisites of a ladylike
education such as that provided by the Chelsea girls’ schools, there were plenty of pupils in the early days from which to choose; some of whom later came to form part of what Anthony Hamilton called ‘the whole joyous troop of singers and dancers who ministered to His Majesty’s slighter pleasures’.
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Hannah Woolley, advocating the role of gentlewoman in
The Queen-like Closet
as being the best option available to the unendowed girl, drew attention to the alternatives: ‘Some who have apt Wits and that Dame Nature hath been favourable to, they are courted to be Players.’ The fact was those who had been favoured by Dame Nature did not necessarily share Hannah Woolley’s particular sense of priorities. Mrs Pepys’s gentlewoman, Gosnell, was one of these. Finding the post of gentlewoman too restrictive, she left to find her freedom (see p.386). A few months later, in May 1663 ‘Who should we see come upon the stage’, wrote Pepys, ‘but Gosnell, my wife’s maid’. Unfortunately Gosnell ‘neither spoke, danced nor sung; which I was sorry for. But she becomes the stage very well.’ The following year Pepys saw Gosnell again, singing and dancing finely at first, but finally falling out of tune. Poor Gosnell! Her career never amounted to much more than being an understudy and an occasional singer. Four years later she was singing the performance ‘meanly’ throughout, and had lost her looks: Sir Carr Scroope characterized her as ‘that old hag’. Finally Gosnell was discharged and vanished from view.
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Gosnell had been the daughter of a widow with very little money but genteel connections. Among the first actresses there were plenty of Gosnells, who preferred the liberty and adventure of the stage to a life of doing shell-work with Mrs Pepys, only they turned out to be more talented. Anne and Rebecca Marshall were the daughters of a country parson, who as chaplain to Lord Gerard had been married off to the illegitimate daughter of a Cheshire squire. Mrs Shadwell’s father was either a Norwich public notary or ‘a decayed knight’; Charlotte Butler was the daughter of a widowed shopkeeper. Accounts of Mrs Barry’s origins varied: she was either an orphan brought up by Lady Davenant to be her ‘woman’ in Norfolk, or the daughter of a
barrister called Robert Barry who ruined himself fighting for the King.
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