The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (83 page)

It is easy to believe from such a picture that Mrs Barry at the height of her fame was held to be ‘the Finest Woman in the World upon the Stage, and the ugliest woman off on’t’.
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Nevertheless it was not likely that the homely creature she represented as a girl would have caught Rochester’s eye had Mrs Barry not belonged to the traditionally promiscuous profession of actress. It can be argued therefore that this aura of promiscuity, while it ruined some young women, helped to advance Mrs Barry.

The story of Mrs Barry, like her origins, has to be pieced together from various (often conflicting) accounts.
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It seems that she first appeared on the stage in 1674 when she was sixteen. Mrs Barry was thus some twenty years younger than Mrs Betterton and Hester Davenport, the founders of her profession. She played Isabella Queen of Hungary in
Mustapha
, by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (brother of Mary Countess of Warwick and Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh). This début was a disaster. According to Colley Cibber, Mrs Barry was considered so feeble that she was discharged from the company at the end of her first year. Anthony Aston wrote: ‘for some time they could make nothing of her; she could neither sing nor dance’, not even in a country dance. Mrs Barry was not the only actress-goose whom Rochester determined to turn into a swan. Had he not attempted the same transformation on Sarah Cooke – ‘Miss Sarah’ – that ‘Mistaken Drab’ so utterly unable even after Rochester’s tuition to impress the critical Wits, that she was ordered back to her ‘Mother’s stall’? It would therefore not be right to credit Rochester with an unerring eye in this respect: he struck unlucky with ‘Miss Sarah’ for all her ravishing looks; with Mrs Barry, much less easy on the eye, he struck very lucky indeed.

What should be credited to him without reservation is the manner of his tutorage. This, which might be described as an early form of method-acting, in the hands of the amazing Mrs Barry enabled her to give a proper reality, something rare indeed at the time, to the whole range of female parts in Restoration drama: ‘solemn and august’ in tragedy, ‘alert, easy and genteel’ in comedy.
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As we have seen, the first generation of actresses (with the exception of Mrs Betterton) tended to be admired in one or the other.

The original failing of Mrs Barry was that while she had ‘an excellent understanding’ she lacked a musical ear: thus she could not catch ‘the sounds or emphases taught her; but fell into a disagreeable tone, the fault of most young stage-adventurers’. Lord Rochester’s solution was ‘to enter into the meaning of every sentiment; he taught her not only the proper cadence or sounding of the voice, but to seize also the passions, and adapt her whole
behaviour to the situations of the characters’. He would rehearse her in a part more than thirty times. As a result Betterton said that she could transform a play that would disgust the most patient reader, calling her ‘incomparable’: ‘her action was always just, and produced naturally by the sentiments of the part’. At a time when artificial heroics were considered an inevitable concomitant of such heroines as those created by Dryden, Mrs Barry could wipe away real tears when acting out a tragic death scene.
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Rochester had taken over Mrs Barry’s career in the first place for a bet: after the disastrous début, he vowed he would make her the most accomplished performer at the Dorset Garden Theatre (the new home of The Duke’s Company) within six months. He certainly won his bet.
Alcibiades
, the first tragedy by Thomas Otway, performed in September 1675, featured Thomas Betterton in the title role, with Mrs Betterton as his betrothed Timandra; it was in the small part of Alcibiades’ sister Draxilla that Mrs Barry reappeared on the London stage. It was probably after this and before her appearance as Leonora in
Abdelazar
by Aphra Behn the following July that Rochester coached her, although the precise sequence is uncertain.
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At all events, the new improved Mrs Barry captured more than critical attention: she also won the heart of Thomas Otway. As a result, he laid at her feet the type of bouquet which only a playwright can bestow upon an actress – a series of plays. Mrs Barry dazzled in such varied parts as Monimia, the pathetic eponymous heroine of
The Orphan
, and Lavinia (Juliet) in Otway’s adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet
. This was an unpopular play, at least in Shakespeare’s version, after the Restoration. Otway’s adaptation, which also drew on Plutarch, was entitled
The History and Fall of Caius Marius
; which led to Mrs Barry as Lavinia pronouncing (to her lover, known as Marius junior) the interesting line: ‘O Marius, Marius, wherefore art thou Marius.’
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Most striking of all Mrs Barry’s creations in the first flush of her success was that of ‘beauteous Belvidera’, the plangent heroine of
Venice Preserv’d
.

In all however Mrs Barry created over 100 roles, at The Duke’s Company, as the leading lady of The United Company
after 1682, and at the breakaway Lincoln’s Inn Fields Company after 1695; although by now she was surrendering the juvenile leading parts to a rising young actress called Anne Bracegirdle. Her parts included that of Hellena in Aphra Behn’s
The Rover
(a ‘breeches’ part), Arabella in Ravenscroft’s
The London Cuckolds
, Lady Brute in Vanbrugh’s
The Provok’d Wife
and Cordelia in another of those bastard versions of Shakespeare which audiences so much preferred to the glorious originals, Nahum Tate’s
Lear
(Cordelia finally married Edgar and lived happily ever after). In 1694 Thomas Southerne, author of
The Fatal Marriage
, paid a graceful tribute to her handling of Isabella, his ill-fated heroine: ‘I made the play for her part, and her part has made the play for me.’
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In
Venice Preserv’d
, Thomas Betterton as Jaffeir gave Mrs Barry as Belvidera, on her first entrance, this lyrical salutation which sums up the romantic view of the female in the late seventeenth century:

Sure all ill-stories of thy sex are false:

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man: we had been brutes without you:

Angels are painted fair, to look like you;

There’s in you all that we believe of heaven,

Amazing brightness, purity and truth!
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It was ironic under the circumstances that Mrs Barry herself, angel painted fair on stage as she might be, was the focus of so many ‘ill-stories’ off it, which if only half of them were true, more than justified the opposing cynical view of the female sex. Mrs Barry was dissolute (‘She has been a Rioter in her time’, wrote Gildon): that in itself was not unusual. She was bad-tempered and at times even violent. Although her good breeding – more or less – was said to make her on stage ‘Mistress of that Behaviour which sets off the well-bred Gentlewoman’, Mrs Barry was capable of exhibiting quite another side to her character, stage or no stage. In a famous incident, Mrs Barry and ‘Chestnut-maned [Betty] Boutel’, acting in Lee’s
The Rival Queens
, quarrelled over a
scarf as the play was about to begin. On the all-too appropriate line:

Die, sorceress, die and all my wrongs die with thee!

Mrs Barry as Roxana struck Mrs Boutel playing the rival queen Statira with such force that her blunted stage dagger managed to penetrate Mrs Boutel’s stays, and pierce the flesh beneath.
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Furthermore Mrs Barry was mercenary. Where her professional life was concerned, that was understandable, in view of the low salaries paid to actresses at the time: for example, she insisted on receiving the proceeds of a benefit at the theatre, hitherto generally reserved for writers. But she was also mercenary where her affections were concerned, to an extent that amazed even this worldly age. It was not so much the settlement she was supposed to have secured from the playwright Sir George Etherege (Mrs Barry could see for herself what happened to the unendowed actress), but Tom Brown wrote: ‘Should you lie with her all night, she would not know you next morning, unless you had another five pounds at your service.’ The lampoons which blasted the private lives of all the famous actresses and courtesans of the time (with the ever-glowing exception of Mrs Betterton) showed in later years a particular bitterness towards the ‘slattern Betty Barry’.

At thirty eight a very hopeful whore,

The only one o’th’ trade that’s not profuse,

(A policy was taught her by the Jews),

Tho’ still the highest bidder she will choose.

At the same time it had to be admitted that Mrs Barry was one whom ‘every fop upon the stage admires’.
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It was as though her defiant combination of talent and calculation was especially exacerbating.

Thomas Otway despaired of Mrs Barry’s treatment of him: while accepting the parts, it is said that she would not even requite his besotted love with a kiss. Otway referred to himself as
being fobbed off ‘with gross, thick, homespun friendship, the common Coin that passes betwixt Worldly Interests’. He addressed a series of agonized letters to his beloved, confessing that since the first day he saw her, ‘I have hardly enjoy’d one Hour of perfect Quiet’; and yet he could not break loose: ‘though I have languished for seven long tedious Years of Desire, jealously and despairingly; yet, every Minute I see you, I still discover something new and bewitching’.
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Otway was bitter in the knowledge that Rochester had succeeded where he had failed: ‘I have consulted my Pride, whether after a Rival’s Possession I ought to ruin all my Peace for a Woman that another has been more blest in, though no Man ever loved as I did: But Love, victorious Love, o’er throws all that, and tells me, it is his Nature never to remember; he still looks forward from the present hour, expecting new Dawns, new rising Happiness, never looks back, never regards what is past, left behind him, but buries and forgets it quite in the hot fierce pursuit of Joy before him.’ On the other hand Rochester, on the evidence of his own letters (thirty-four survive, although they are undated and the originals have vanished), suffered equally from jealousy where Mrs Barry was concerned, for all the consummation of his desire. It was thought by contemporaries that Mrs Barry was the great love of Rochester’s life: she was ‘his passion’, wrote one, and another claimed that he never loved anyone else ‘so sincerely’ as Mrs Barry.
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In poetry Rochester could serenade ‘The Mistress’ with elegance:

An age in her embraces past

Would seem a winter’s day,

Where life and light with envious haste

Are torn and snatch’d away.

But, oh! how slowly minutes roll

When absent from her eyes,

That fed my love, which is my soul,

It languishes and dies.

The letters were less controlled: ‘Madam, There is now no minute of my life that does not afford me some new argument how much I love you; the little joy I take in every thing wherein you are not concern’d, the pleasing perplexity of endless thought, which I fall into, wherever you are brought to my remembrance; and lastly, the continual disquiet I am in, during your absence, convince me sufficiently that I do you justice in loving you, so as woman was never loved before.’ And again: ‘Seeing you is as necessary to my life as breathing; so that I must see you, or be yours no more; for that’s the image I have of dying …’ Writing to Mrs Barry at three in the morning, a letter of furious expostulation, Rochester ended: ‘I thank God I can distinguish, I can see very woman in you … ’Tis impossible for me to curse you; but give me leave to pity myself, which is more than ever you will do for me.’
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Rochester’s relationship with Mrs Barry lasted for about four years; towards the end of it, in 1677, she bore him a daughter. Rochester was by this time immured in the country, crippled and virtually blind from disease, moving towards that classic reprobate’s deathbed in which he would abandon his wicked ways for the consolations of religion. Savile broke the news to him: ‘Your Lordship has a daughter born by the body of Mrs Barry of which I give your honour joy.’ Savile added that the mother’s lying-in was not being held in ‘much state’ since Mrs Barry was living in great poverty in the Mall. The woman who had taken her in was ‘not without some gentle reflections on your Lordship’s want either of generosity or bowels [compassion] towards a lady who had not refused you the full enjoyment of her charms’.
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Rochester was however at this point pursued by his creditors as well as cut off from London by his physical condition, so that it is difficult to see how he could in fact have helped his mistress financially. He contented himself with writing to her: ‘Madam, Your safe delivery has deliver’d me too from fears for your sake, which were, I’ll promise you, as burthensome to me, as your great belly could be to you. Every thing has fallen out to my wish, for you are out of danger, and the child is of the soft sex I love …’ The child, mentioned in Rochester’s will under the name of Elizabeth Clarke, where she was left £40, died in 1689 at the
age of twelve. At some point before Rochester’s death in 1682 little Elizabeth Clarke was taken away briefly from her mother’s care because of her want of ‘discretion’ in bringing her up. Rochester wrote firmly but kindly on the subject: ‘Madam, I am far from delighting in the grief I have given you, by taking away the child: and you, who made it so absolutely necessary for me to do so, must take that excuse from me, for all the ill nature of it …! I hope very shortly to restore to you a finer girl than ever.’
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