APPENDIX
THE FIRST ENGLISH ACTRESSES, AND THE CHANGE IN THE ACTOR’S SOCIAL STATUS
The actress, as an established element in the theatre, is comparatively modern. The English stage had been a flourishing public institution for something more than a century when, in the first years of the Restoration, veritable women began regularly to replace those lads and beardless men who in Shakespeare’s day enacted stage heroines.
There are, to be sure, fleeting glimpses of women acting in England much earlier in the seventeenth century, while boys were regularly playing women’s parts. King James spent immense sums on his court revels, and his Queen, Anne, was both actress and manager—no doubt with much professional coaching. In 1625—the first year of the reign of Charles I—there was a merry round of plays acted at Hampton Court at Christmas time. “The demoiselles,”—who, as Doran surmises, were probably the maids of honor—“mean to present a French pastoral wherein the Queen is a principal actress.”[221] Thus the first actresses in England were amateurs, and among them were two Queens of the Realm! Henrietta Maria was, of course, French, and it was due to this fact, and to her liking for the stage, that actresses from France came to London[222]—doubtless the first professional actresses to appear there. The fashion—or rather the obvious advantages—of the acting of women’s parts by women appears to have commended itself much earlier on the continent than in England. “They have now,” contemptuously says Prynne,—the author of Histrio-Mastix (1633) and the theatre’s best hater,—“their female players in Italy and other foreign parts.”[223]
The French actresses who came to act at Blackfriars may have pleased their countrywoman, the Queen. But they seem to have had, on the whole, a rather hard time. “Glad am I to say,” wrote Thomas Brand, another stout Puritan, “they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so that I do not think they will soon be ready to try the same again.” Prynne was furiously abusive. He calls the actresses by a variety of names, of which “monsters” is one of the mildest.
But to some extent, the idea had taken root, and during the ten years before the closing of the theatres, in 1642, women occasionally replaced the boys and men who passed for heroines. In The Court Beggar, a play enacted in London in 1632, one of the characters, Lady Strangelove, says: “The boy’s a pretty actor, and his mother can play her part. The women now are in great request.” These early actresses were, however, not regularly employed, their names have not come down to us, and it is correct to say that professional English actresses appear for the first time, when, in 1660, the theatres were reopened, after their eighteen years’ suppression by the Puritans.[224]
There were two companies, Killigrew’s and D’Avenant’s. Each had its regularly enrolled actresses, whose names are recorded. Among them were Mrs. Corey, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Knipp, the Marshall sisters, Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Saunderson, and, a little later, Nell Gwynn.
No one, however, took the trouble to make certain for posterity the name of the first of them to appear. We know that she played Desdemona, in an adaptation of Othello, called The Moor of Venice; that she was of Killigrew’s company; that the date was December 8, 1660, and the place the Red Bull; and that Thomas Jordan wrote for the occasion “A Prologue, to introduce the first woman that came to act on our stage.” But who the actress was is not known. Two names are the likeliest: Margaret Hughes, and Anne Marshall. Mrs. Hughes was “more remarkable for her beauty than for her great ability.” “A mighty pretty woman,” says Pepys of her, “and seems, but is not, modest.” She was married later to Prince Rupert, and brought him to the verge of bankruptcy. Anne Marshall, the other chief claimant, was a competent actress of the day, remarkable chiefly for being the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian clergyman.
At first the old practice of giving the women’s parts to boys threatened to survive, alongside the new custom of employing women. For a few years both played the heroines, but the race of actors who could portray women was fast dying out and, owing to a changed public opinion, was not replenished.[225] When, in 1663, the King granted patents to Killigrew and D’Avenant, those managers were virtually instructed to employ none but women to represent female characters: “Whereas”—the royal patents read,—“the women’s parts in plays have hitherto been acted by men in the habits of women, at which some have taken offense, we do give leave that for the time to come all women’s parts be acted by women.” In a year or so the “boy-actresses” had virtually disappeared from the stage.
Our old friend Pepys had the pleasure,—undoubtedly a keen one for him,—of seeing some of the earliest appearances of actresses in London. We have it from him that in 1661 he saw women acting in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Beggar’s Bush. If he was present at the Red Bull on the eighth of the previous December, when the first English actress walked on, he strangely omits to say so.
Something should be said of the changing conditions in the actress’ calling since 1660. As we all know, the complete social recognition of actors and actresses is distinctly modern. Of course, in the nature of things, they were always the objects of acclamation and often admiration; but they were long in attaining real public respect, strange as that seems to an actor-worshiping (or especially actress-worshiping) age.