Not Mere Beauties: Women on the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Stage

Elaine McGirr

English Drama changed in 1660. The closure of the theatres during the Civil Wars ruptured English theatrical tradition, while the exiled Cavaliers’ exposure to French and Italian theatres ensured new traditions and theatrical expectations were brought back along with the monarchy. The greatest of these innovations was undoubtedly the introduction of actresses to the professional stage. Actresses changed the drama: they changed the kinds of stories playwrights could tell, and changed the ways in which those stories could be dramatised. Female roles embodied and voiced by adult female performers added a new level of verisimilitude to performances; scenes of seduction gained a frisson of realism and female voices added new harmonies to the spoken stage. Women on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage were central to the new drama and embodied the new age’s new heroines, new models of femininity created by these pioneering women. The first generations of actresses offered playwrights and audiences new female characters and new possibilities: Nell Gwyn’s pert mistresses embodied the Restoration’s rejection of the austerity and Puritanical mores of the Interregnum; Anne Oldfield’s fine ladies offered a template for Georgian aspiration; and Susannah Cibber’s tragic wives captured the mid-century cult of sensibility and its passion for pathos. Each of these celebrity actresses embodied a feminine ideal; each taught generations of audiences how to feel about women and their plots.

The extent to which actresses fundamentally changed English drama is seen in the Shakespeare revival of the mid-eighteenth century. Like the previous century’s Restoration, this was a return with a difference. The Shakespeare revival was, in many ways, a fundamentally conservative turn, yet this return to tradition was also the most radical innovation in English theatre since the introduction of women. Shakespeare was not simply restaged; he was reimagined and rewritten to make his female characters shine. This new Shakespeare was defined by the actresses who first interpreted these roles, and no one was more influential in this process than Susannah Cibber. Her interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragic heroines – especially Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia, Perdita, Isabella, Lady Anne and Lady Constance – were definitive and taught audiences how to feel about these wronged women; they taught us how to read Shakespeare. A century after Cibber had left the stage, her performances were still being touted by theatrical and literary critics as the correct and ideal reading of Shakespeare. In their performances, interpretive – authoritative – acts of theatrical and literary criticism, Susannah Cibber and the women who preceded her taught us what a heroine could be: they created a range of female roles that not only tapped into the prevailing cultural mood but also became stock characters, female archetypes that we still recognise and rely on today.

Nell Gwyn

The impact of having real, beautiful women embodying female roles on the professional stage cannot be overstated. Their attraction seems obvious: the actress-as-whore trope has never left us and of course many of the first actresses were also notable courtesans. But Covent Garden was not the only place in which beauty could be found, and actresses, even the most notorious, provided more than sex and erotic spectacle. The actresses who succeeded were famous for more than mere beauty; they were admired for their craft, not just their legs. Thomas Killigrew indicates the significance of actresses to the success of his plays in a partial cast list for Thomaso, a ten-act episodic comedy about the adventures of a set of exiled Cavaliers in Spain. Despite the male protagonist, Killigrew’s ideal cast only lists the female parts; for him, the success of the play rested on the availability of his preferred actresses, including Nell Gwyn in the role of Paulina, the archetypal whore with a heart of gold.