The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Ruperta carried out her father’s dying commands. She made a suitable match to Lieutenant-General Emmanuel Scroope of Norfolk, and had children.1 Peg Hughes was the giddy one, and in the end Ruperta had to look after her mother (Peg lived till 1719). Despite receiving the huge sum of £6,000 from the will of Prince Rupert, Peg Hughes gambled it all away. Another of Tom Brown’s fictional dialogues in Letters from the Dead to the Living took place between Peg and Nell Gwynn, her rival for ‘handsomeness’. Nell Gwynn’s sentiments were probably based on truth. Nell was made to reproach Peg for losing by gambling what she had acquired by whoredom: ‘for a woman who has enriched herself by one, to impoverish herself by the other, is so great a fault, that a harlot deserves correction for it’.32

  Anne Marshall, who shares with Mary Betterton the claim to be the first professional English actress, was one of a pair of striking dark-haired sisters; later in her career she acted under her married name of Mrs Anne Quin, leaving the title of ‘Mrs Marshall’ to her younger sister Rebecca or ‘Beck’.33 The equation of dark tints with tragic grandeur marked both women out for the proud and passionate female roles created pre-eminently by Dryden, in the new type of ‘heroic drama’, the opposite pole to the brightness and lightness (and lewdness) of Restoration comedy. Rebecca Marshall had the additional advantage for queenly roles – of which there was a plentiful supply – of being very tall. ‘Behold how night sits lovely on her Eye-brows While day breaks from her eyes!’, or ‘Her quick black eye does wander with desire’, or ‘Her long black locks, on her fair shoulders flow’; these contemporary allusions commemorate the saturnine beauty of the Marshall sisters.

  Anne Marshall, as a founder member of The King’s Company and a leading lady there from 1661 onwards, played Zempoalla in The Indian Queen which Dryden co-wrote with Sir Robert Howard, and then Almeria in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor. Pepys praised her Zempoalla and thought it done ‘excellently well, as ever I heard woman in my life’, even if Anne Marshall’s voice was not quite so sweet as Mrs Betterton’s.34 But in depicting the character of Zempoalla, ‘the usurping Indian Queen’ of Mexico who fell in love with her enemy Montezuma, a little stridency would not have come amiss, for she habitually expressed herself in lines like these:

  Great God of vengeance, here I firmly vow,

  Make but my Mexicans successful now,

  And with a thousand feasts thy flames I’ll feed;

  And that I take, shall on the altars bleed …35

  At the end of the play, defeated and her love scorned, Zempoalla killed herself. Almeria in the sequel was Zempoalla’s daughter, equally beautiful, equally tempestuous, equally proud. Catching the eye of the new Emperor of Mexico, Montezuma, who proposed to take her as his wife, Almeria vowed to use his passion to avenge her mother:

  If news be carried to the shades below

  The Indian queen will be more pleased, to know

  That I his scorns on him, who scorned her, pay.36

  At the end of The Indian Emperor however it was Almeria’s destiny, like that of her mother, to die. She killed herself at the feet of the Spanish conqueror Cortez, the object of her unrequited love, as Montezuma had been that of Zempoalla.

  Rebecca Marshall joined her sister at The King’s Company sometime in the summer of 1663 but seems to have been a mere apprentice up until the closure of the theatres in June 1665. Besides being always plagued with debt she had a stormy character: in real life her adventures, if not on such a lofty level, were at least as tempestuous as those of Dryden’s ‘barbarian Princesses’. In 1665 she complained about the attentions of a certain Mark Trevor of the Temple to the Lord Chamberlain (considered the protector as well as the licenser of the theatrical profession); Mark Trevor responded by assaulting her. This brought a second complaint from Rebecca Marshall: that Mark Trevor had ‘affronted her both on and off the stage, attacked her in a coach with his sword etc., and threatens vengeance for her complaining of him to the Lord Chamberlain’.37

  Two years later there was further trouble with Sir Hugh Middleton. Having insulted the women of The King’s Company as a whole, he had the temerity to come round to their tiring-room at the Theatre Royal. Beck Marshall forthwith and roundly denounced him. Sir Hugh Middleton denounced her, calling her ‘a jade’. Beck then went to the King and secured his promise of protection. Unfortunately she proceeded to boast of this moral victory. Whereupon Sir Hugh Middleton hired some ruffians who waylaid the actress on her way home and rubbed the most disgusting filth all over her. In general Beck Marshall could look after herself: in a further row with Orange Moll, plying her wares at the theatre, both sides gave as good as they got in language and blows.

  Naturally her morals were not elevated. She had for example a liaison with the famous fop Sir George Hewell, to whom she bore a daughter. A satire of 1683 suggested that the daughter was no more virtuous than the mother:

  Proud Curtizan Marshall, ’Tis the time to give o’er

  Since now your Daughter, she is turned whore.

  Beck Marshall also acted as go-between or procuress to Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, who conceived a passion for the well-known actor Charles Hart.

  At the reopening of the theatres in November 1666, the position between the sisters was reversed. The interregnum had given an opportunity to the younger actresses to come to the fore, prominent among them the ex-orange-girl Nell Gwynn with her pretty legs and her talent for comedy, and the ‘mighty pretty and fine and noble’ Beck Marshall: ‘very handsome near-hand’ wrote Pepys, sitting close to her at the theatre. In December 1666 Beck Marshall played the part of Evadne, the corrupted heroine of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, a part hitherto considered the prerogative of her sister. Pepys noted that ‘the younger Marshall’ had become ‘a pretty good actor’. Early the next year it was Rebecca Marshall who played the lead part of the Queen of Sicily in Dryden’s Secret Love or The Maiden Queen – ‘very good and passionate’ – while Anne, having been transformed into Mrs Quin by marriage at some unknown date in between, was condemned to play the secondary part of Candiope, Princess of the Blood; Nell Gwynn incidentally scored a great success in the ‘comical’ part of Florimel, the Maid of Honour.38

  The situation was not to be borne, at least from the elder sister’s point of view. Nor did Anne Marshall Quin attempt to bear it. She left the theatre once more shortly afterwards and petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to restore her to her old roles – and her old stature as a leading lady. This included the privilege of a dressing-room for her own private use. As a result on 4 May 1667 the Lord Chamberlain instructed The King’s Company to admit Mrs Anne Quin ‘to Act again at Theatre Royall and that you assign her all her own parts which she formerly had and that none other be permitted to act any of her parts without her consent. And that you assign her a dressing room with a chimney in it to be only for her use and whom she shall admit.’39

  The petition worked. In a performance of Boyle’s The Black Prince in October 1667, elder sisters will be relieved to learn that Anne Quin played the romantic part of Alizia Pierce, while younger sisters will burn to hear that Rebecca Marshall played the dull part of Plantagenet. The important part of Donna Aurelia in Dryden’s An Evening’s Love followed for Anne Quin in 1668, with Rebecca Marshall uncast. Anne Quin also re-created her famous part of Zempoalla in June 1668; if Pepys no longer doted upon her quite so much, the rest of the world was full of praise.40

  However, by October 1669 Mrs Quin had left The King’s Company once more, to reappear some years later in The Duke’s Company, where she played the part of the courtesan Angelica Bianca in Aphra Behn’s The Rover and a whole list of other important parts in the late seventies and early eighties (she is last heard of in 1682). These included Lady Knowall, Aphra Behn’s caricature of Mary Astell, in Sir Patient Fancy; Lady Squeamish in Otway’s Friendship in Fashion, and Queen Elizabeth in Banks’s The Unhappy Favourite (a role to which her regal appearance and manner were especially well suited).

  The depar
ture of her sister left Rebecca Marshall in full command at The King’s Company. She took over the part of Donna Aurelia, and continued as a leading actress there until 1677 when she briefly caught up with her sister again at The Duke’s Company for a few months before leaving the stage for good.

  It has to be borne in mind that for all the worldly advancement of a Roxalana, a Peg Hughes, and the busy Marshall sisters there were many actresses who fell through the net, were not fought over at court, or ended their lives as ‘Dame Hester, Countess of Oxford’, but like Gosnell, faltered and disappeared. Elizabeth Farley, generally known as Mrs Weaver, was one of these. She was born about 1640, and as a member of The King’s Company from 1660 to 1665, played secondary roles at the Theatre Royal.

  According to Pepys’s actress friend Mrs Knepp, Elizabeth Farley was ‘first spoiled’ i.e. seduced, by the King himself. If true, the relationship did not last very long, for by the winter of 1660 Elizabeth Farley was living with James Weaver, a gentleman of Gray’s Inn.41 Although she was never married to Weaver, Elizabeth Farley ran up bills of credit as his wife, and was also generally listed as Mrs Weaver in the cast lists of the theatre. Weaver not only cast off his mistress but also sought permission of the Lord Chamberlain to sue her for the return of £30; and she had other debts. Furthermore Elizabeth Farley was by now pregnant, although she continued desperately to act, since so long as she was a member of The King’s Company, she was immune from arrest.

  The visible signs of her pregnancy could not be concealed for ever. ‘Mrs Weaver’ was finally discharged. Carefully misrepresenting the cause of her dismissal, Elizabeth Farley appealed to the King for reinstatement. Sir Henry Bennet, on behalf of the King, was ordered to see to it. At this point Sir Robert Howard, the principal shareholder in The King’s Company, issued an indignant protest. Mrs Weaver, he said, had been dismissed because she was ‘big with child’ and ‘shamefully so’ since she was not married. Women of quality were declaring that they could not possibly come to the theatre to watch an actress in such a condition. ‘Truly, Sir, we are willing to bring the Stage to be a place of some Credit, and not an infamous place for all persons of Honour to avoid’, protested Howard.42 (This was at a moment, incidentally, when the King’s maîtresse en titre, Barbara, future Duchess of Cleveland, was just recovering from the birth of the second of the five bastards she bore to the King; admittedly she was legally married to Roger Palmer at the time; nevertheless the genteel protest was striking evidence of the double standard which operated.)

  Elizabeth Farley did return to the stage, and played the part of ‘fair Alibech’, Almeria’s sympathetic younger sister, in The Indian Emperor of 1665, a secondary but not unimportant role. Debts continued to pursue her. When the theatres closed in the summer of 1665 owing to the plague she effectively vanished from view. It is possible she returned to the stage from time to time in the 1670s, under her own name; but if she is the ‘Mrs Farley’ named in a poem of Rochester’s she became a prostitute.

  Elizabeth Barry – ‘famous Madam Barry’ – was by acclaim the greatest actress of the Restoration period and beyond, her reign extending from the 1670s until 1710, when she made her last appearance on the stage. Yet the beginnings of her story are such as to encourage any first-time failure on the stage to persevere. What was more, she might never have pursued her career further had not the most notorious libertine of the age, the Earl of Rochester, come ‘buzzing about her Honey-Pot’.

  No one ever pretended Mrs Barry numbered beauty among her gifts: ‘middle-sized’ with ‘darkish Hair, light eyes, dark Eyebrows … indifferently plump’, was one unenthusiastic description.43 She also had a mouth which was slightly drawn up on one side, which she used to try to conceal by composing her face as though about to be painted. Her portrait by Kneller shows a face which is distinctly plain, with a Roman nose and thick lips; even if there is an air of intelligence about it, and more than a hint of determination.

  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’.44 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.45 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.46 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.47

  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.48 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.’49 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.’50