The Rake’s Progress, Wolf Trap; Emilie, Lincoln Center, 2012

Hogarth, the first of 9 engravings, “The Heir”

Stravinsky, Auden, the last scene, “Madness”

Dear friends and readers,

In the last couple of days I’ve watched two operas based on 18th century sources: Kim Witman’s production of Igor Stravinsky & W. H. Auden’s adaptation of 9 engravings by Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress, as performed at Wolf Trap, this summer, and Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s Émilie as performed at the Spoleto Festival and Lincoln Center via DVD. Both productions took material very difficult to make appealing thematic dramatic narrative out of, and attempted to make the audience sympathize with the central characters.

The Wolf Trap Rake’s Progress was intended to be a companion piece to the Don Giovanni they did earlier this summer. As with the earlier production, Witman’s half-hour talk gave the game away. Again there was no mention of what the opera could mean, no attention to content.

When I watched the opera, I found the way the narrative developed gave us a story which stigmatized and made the women characters ridiculous and abject (in one case, that of the Baba the Turk, stupidly evil as well as physically distasteful) and we were (somewhat absurdly) asked to regard the wastrel drone upper class male at the center as earth-shakingly important. We are supposed to care whether this guy gambles, drinks, marries an (unacceptable) middle eastern-dressed prostitute, loses all his money. This is the later 1940s after a horrific war across the world. The fable lesson as presented reminded me of Orwell’s famous punitive story, Eric or Little by Little, maybe the 1790s Road to Ruin. Jim said you find no understanding sympathetic interest in women in Auden, and in the 1950s a retreat from politics for religion. There is a certain kind of misogyny and grotesque humor about sexuality typical of male homosexual work found in Auden. But Stravinsky presumably commissioned this libretto.

I was bored in the first act with its moralizing, irritated, grated upon in the second with its focus on an ugly over-sexualized orientalism. Behind me someone said how “hysterical” Margaret Gawryslak was — I’ve learned that is a ill-understood euphemism for expressing amusement at what makes you uncomfortable. The music and acting was distancing. The last act finally had some depth of feeling that was not controlled by puerile didacticism.

Jim said the opera was padded. There is just not enough narratable (capable of turning into a coherent story) material in the 9 engravings. I thought the hollow center of the opera came from the people doing it ignoring the content. The best thing about it was the costumes. Anne Truelove’s hair-do was 1940s big rolls on her head up front with longish page-boy length hair in a net; her clothes looked like an attempt at imitating 18th century clothes using a thrift shop. The chorus at one point were redolent of Guys and Dolls.

The performers were directed to present themselves as emblems: 2 of the young women had men’s suits on and 2 of the young men were in evening dresses, heavy make-up and high heels.

And what shall I say of a company run by three women (beyond Witman at the Barns there’s Beth Krynicki who is production stage manager) who twice this summer have given us productions which have no sense of real contemporary women’s lives or social types. Don Giovanni’s rapes were treated as trivial joking. Last summer they gave us a Goldoni play turned into an opera where we had these misunderstood men and harridans of women.

If next year Witman and company give us Cosi Fan Tutte with some other misogynistic story, I will begin to suspect there’s a hidden agenda at the Barns. Let’s do all we can to hide the reality the place is run by women. Let us not allow anyone to call our work typical of women’s art or point of view. I felt what I saw at the Barns this summer represented a lost opportunity and betrayal.

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Emilie: as opera opens she is writing and thinking

Her anguish as she contemplates coming childbirth

The opera takes place a few nights before Emilie du Chatelet went into labor; she died soon after and the child did not live much longer either. One reviewer insists the opera is about how biology is not destiny; in fact it’s about how a woman’s body cut a young highly gifted woman off in her prime so she never achieved what she could have done — and not just mathematically. I was badly handicapped as I watched the DVD as it did not have subtitles, and the way it was filmed kept the singer at a distance from the viewer. There were too many candles and mirrors and gauzy curtains in the way — though I liked the triangles.

So, I’ll be brief. In a nutshell, we see an adult sensibility of someone who was aware that many people didn’t believe in a traditional life after death facing death. We see her remember her ambiguous experiences across a lifetime. The emphasis on her beauty and gifts was strong and I thought the point of piece was to say, here is this extraordinarily gifted woman just thrown away because she was pregnant, so as to make us think of all the women over the ages similarly wasted and themselves put through agons.

Repeatedly I’ve seen eighteenth-century material not lend itself to the conventional so-called realistic or naturalistic narrative which 19th century operas thrive on. But Emilie’s story could have been treated this way. I’m not sure I would not have preferred to see her coerced marriage, her complicated attempts to become educated mathematically and achieve respect and position, her love affairs, her relationship with Voltaire and then this final scene. She was turned into a passionately enthralled heroine, especially when she seemed to be remembering Saint-Lambert.

For the English reader the books to read about Emilie are Judith Zinsser’s Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet and David Bodanis’s Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment. I found Elisabeth Badinter’s Émilie, Émilie, L’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle (the other Emilie is D’Epinay) which presents Emilie as an aspiring scientist persuasive.

Surrounded by scientific objects and instruments

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To conclude, I cannot say I liked the music of either opera; they were not lyrical, nor was there a warm feel to vocal sounds. Rake’s Progress was well sung, especially by Anne Trulove (Corinne Winters) and Nick’s Shadow (Craig Coldough as the tempter devil at Rakewell’s ears). Elizabeth Futal as Emilie was far more moving; we knew she had been a real person who had really died in Voltaire’s estate of a dread pregnancy gone wrong. Her case was treated as an adult experience not a punishment); it was a sung one-woman play, raw in tone.

Emilie is the fragile presence with fleeting knowledge seeking to understand life; like Theodore Adorno I found The Rake’s Progress coming at experience from an unreal wrong direction.

And so our summer theater going for this year has come to an end.

Ellen

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John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: On Doing a Sexually Radical Play in the Shenandoah Valley

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Patrick Earl as Giovanni, the lover-brother, and Denice Mahler as his sister-lover, Annabella), from the ASC’s production 2012

Dear friends and readers,

This is a “must-see” production. So wrote the “Mid-Atlantic Travel Blogger” who while anonymous had enough clout to see a “private” performance of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by the group who used to call themselves “The Shenandoah Shakespeare”. He or she couldn’t or doesn’t explain why; indeed seemed puzzled how such a “twisted” play could please, and put it down to “shock.”

Within a few seconds of the start of the second act, I realized this was the production Ford’s daring play calls for: its note throughout is a gleeful exposure of the angry cynicism, amorality or sheer stupidity (imbecility) of all the authority figures of the play: some are amoral such as the cardinal (Rick Blunt), who is disinclined to prosecute the murder of one citizen because the murderer has some connections, and who gathers up all the gold left by dead strewn across the stage at the play’s close; some are justifiably cynical like Hippolita (Stephanie Holladay Earl), rejected wife of a nobleman; or Vasques (Eugene Douglas) a kind of Iago who pronounces moral lessons. There are simpletons who enforce unexamined norms: Florio (Daniel Abraham Stevens), Annabella’s father who forces her to marry the vicious treacherous Soranzo (Jake Mahler). There are the complicit for their own appetites and interest’s sake, Putana, Annabella’s “nurse” (Bridget Rue as brothel madam); Grimaldi, willing to murder at the drop of a sword (typical type of this era, played by Michael Amendola). Dark farce is the way much of these interactions are performed, with over-the-top garishly sexual costuming for the women. The story is complicated but it’s told simply at wikipedia).

Really though there’s nothing new here for us in 2012. Old hat since Marat/Sade. What is startling and commendable is from the second part of the play on, the players did Giovanni and Annabella’s love for one another as totally passionate, a beautiful thing, two souls made for one another with the most idealistic soaring of the spirit. Here’s Annabella telling Soranza what Giovanni is:

This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human, as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You! why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him. (Act 3, sc 3)

The look of aspiration in Earl’s eyes is pitch perfect:

The twisting of this young man from within until he goes mad by the end of the act and himself cruelly murders Annabella (Othello-like, and Ford alludes to Othello, he cannot bear to have his woman taken by Soranzo nightly) and stalks about covered with the blood of Soranzo crazed and vehemently assailing the world from the top of his lungs on the top of a high table — these final moments are where the plot-design of the whole play had been heading.

As ever, our players “did it with the lights on,” and so they had no technology to rivet or distract us with. Earl as Giovanni was up to absorbing an audience into awed silence watching him. At the play’s close he has not the problem of what to do next since Vasques comes up to stab him from behind and then has his hired assassins (several in black who turn up whenever needed) to finish the job off:

The woman imitates a police offer, the men without the religious symbols FBI and spy-detective types, and then there’s a priest

The second half of this production was thus much braver than the Capital Fringe Festival group two summers ago who drew out of an abridged version of the play a socially acceptable feminist moral: at one point Annabella tells us (in this production from a high window) we are seeing “A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy (Act 5, sc 1). But the dignity with which she is endowed, and the way the previous production managed to suggest this play was about men oppressing women was not followed here. This Annabella grovels on the floor:

The lines emphasized are those which present the two people as gripped by love, unable to do without one another surrounded by these “vile” types. The production used “mash-up” techniques for the intermission and during the play we were treated to 1950s rock-n-roll ballads that were very familiar to me, strains of them which I could not quite place: about love a blind passion, about loneliness. Soranzo’s bullying becomes a raping of Annabella nightly instead of justifiable rage at finding himself stuck with a pregnant woman who will not tell her lover’s name; he orders her to bed (the lines are there) where he will again do what he wants. Coerced marriage is rape.

The play put me in mind of Simon Raven’s unfortunately little known masterpiece novel, Fielding Gray: the life of the homosexual male is twisted and perverted by having to hide it, being subject to blackmail and abuse. Heterosexuals can be as nasty and horrible as they please in their sex life, it remains okay as it’s heterosexual; homosexual sex is not prima facie no good in itself; it’s what the society does to it that makes it base and wild (see my blog on Andrew Davies’s film adaptation of Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty). So too incest here. Ford’s play differs from the many Jacobean plays enacting incest or incestuous desires and vicarious sex (Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Women Beware Women): Ford empathizes with the lovers. As Eric Minton puts it, Giovanni and Annabella are just these “true-hearted individuals who just happen to have fallen in love with someone sprung from the same womb. Theirs may be the squirmiest sin, but many other characters prove more loathsome in their violent natures, their greed, their infatuation with revenge, and their self-serving self-righteous.” Minton then goes over the downright silly in the play but omits one young woman, Philotis (Bridget Rue), who is sent to a nunnery in a sort of daze: she had on a shiny satiny skirt with a petticoat which reminded me of outfits made for little girls who are given tap-dancing lessons by middle class US parents for the once-a-year stage performance.

Alas though, reading the Mid-Atlantic Traveler, and finding hardly any reviews of this play, and remembering how the previous production I have seen (so to speak) normalizes the action in terms of 20th century values, perhaps the players and their director were rightly cautious in the introduction and first half. They had an added on introduction which both trivialized the coming play and warned us against it, going so far as to tell us Giovanni was a bad villain. It was all a joke we were going to see, but if we couldn’t take some (whisper the word) “incest,” perhaps we shouldn’t stay. Then the first act had the actors at first turning to the audience as if to ask for boos. What they discovered was there were several fools in the first row who took this seriously and began to call out heckling comments which was then half-clapped by further idiots further back. The play-acting in this first act was oddly artificial and over-the-top strident, rather like a clown show. The way of playing the love of Giovanni and Annabella and the betrayals of the other characters seemed to suggest it was a mystery what could possibly have fuelled Ford to write such a ridiculous piece. Maybe the heckling did some good, for I could see the actors begin to stop appealing to the audience, back off, speed up, though not until the second act did the front row people begin to realize they were not supposed to boo Giovanni or call him out as a “bad guy.” Perhaps the gouging out of Putana’s eyes after Vasques manipulates and deludes her into revealing that Annabella’s lover is Giovanni did the trick to silence them. I admit they interfered with my enjoyment in the first act and was relieved when they fell silent.

During the intermission for the first time in all the many times I have seen ASC productions (a lot of them by now), I began to think well, at long last they have goofed. Or maybe it was that in such a conservative era, and in this mid-Virginia Shenandoah valley (not so far off is Evangelical Jerry Falwell country) they were scared off of doing justice to the very material they had chosen. I might have suggested to Jim we go home, only it had been a 3 hour drive to get there. But I remembered the choice of ’50s music during the intermission and hoped it was deliberate and stayed.

In the event, the actors switched gears totally and the last hour and a half was magnificent in energy, bravura, acting, poignancy.

From a Brooklyn Academy of Music production

It may be that the day we went there just happened to be a number of naive audience members in the first row. I have seen actors on stage make the mistake of inviting an audience slightly to cut up, and have to actually not just back up but even half-scold said audience to get them to be courteous in their interactions again. One must not forget that the actors on a stage are in a state of abjection to the audience: they may seem to be individually triumphing, releasing themselves, showing off, but they are performing for us, nailed down to their scripts, often showing themselves, costumed in dangerously vulnerable ways. Actors have sometimes had overtly to separate themselves from evil characters to protect themselves from the audience’s identification of them with their roles. I have read insightful accounts of theater which make this point about the reality of the actor’s rightly unacknowleged position of supplication (See Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: 18th Century Players and Ideology on the long-hard slog actors of the 18th century performed to gain respect stop heckling and abuse, and protect the actresses.) I had not actually experienced what this means before this.

Jim had a different take — while just as surely recommending going to see it if you are at all within driving distance. Over dinner Jim argued that Ford is playing with ideas, at a distance from them (in the way I think of the Fletcher plays, Middleton and Massinger in his comedies). The play, Jim says, is misogynistic. Ford judges Annabella to be a whore, using the term in a general vilifying way to mean any woman who has sex outside marriage even if with just one man. (Izzy protested that Annabella cannot be a whole because she is paid nothing, has no money; she used the 20th century definition of whore means prostitute which is the way I use the term.) Jim maintains the text of the play blames Annabella. Her looseness starts the evil spreading. PUtano had it coming to her. Vasques is the Vindice (revenger on behalf of God and providence) character and that’s why he is left standing. Jim suggested that since a modern audience would dislike this very much, and want to empathize with a tragic character and feel for the victims, the people who do Ford must alter the play into black farce. Then we don’t worry who is to blame. Or they can, like the Capital Fringe people, impose a modern anti-misogynistic message by abridging.

Tragic heroine from The Broken Heart

I’m not sure. I find it hard not to read Ford’s The Broken Heart as feminist. If we are to blame Annabella, why not Giovanni who is cursed by several authority figures in the play. Surely Soranzo. Vasques recalls Shakespeare’s Iago.

So don’t miss the play. This is a play where the behavior spectacle of the audience may become part of the play and the play itself of real interest.

Ellen

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South Central ASECS Conference: at Asheville

Dear friends and readers,

Hitherto I’ve put all my conference reports and news about my papers on this blog. Since the beginning of this year when I created a new blog just for Austen and 18th century studies and women writers, I decided that my reports of 18th century conferences, papers and Austen should logically go onto Reveries under the Sign of Austen. However, as I know I have a small audience for such reports here, I thought I’d cross post just the URLs to the reports of the SC/ASECS conference for which I read so much for an Ann Radcliffe paper and at which Jim and I had such a good time.

So, on the good time we had socially and what touring we did, and my paper:

South Central ASECS: The Nightmare of History in Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes

The above photo is me giving the paper.

The first day and one half of sessions and papers:

South Central ASECS: Panoramas (gothic, animals in, the Biltmore), Scottish fidding, Rameau & Jane

The third day and evening, a panoply of papers, eating and drinking, ending in a dance:

South Central ASECS: Women writers, poets & actresses, and myths

Just today Jim confided in me that he took the above photo and this one of the central spa in the center of the hotel (whose three buildings formed a horseshoe surrounding the spa, which could be seen from anywhere in the building when you looked down:

Ellen

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Margaret Woffington and Frances Abingdon, hard-working material girls in material worlds

An imagined portrait of Margaret Woffington’s first interview with theater-owner and manager, John Rich (whose theater harbored many cats is the joke)

Francis Abingdon as Lady Bab in in Burgoyne’s Fair Maid of the Oats by John Hickey

Dear friends and readers,

On and off for the past couple of months, I’ve been reading Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century Theater with a view to writing a review for publication in an academic journal on it. When I write reviews, I not only read the book with great care, thinking about it as I go, but (unless I really am an expert in the area or, conversely, when I find I can’t stand the book or the material and will still write briefly on it because I promised to), I read a selection of the materials the author read to write it. In the case of Nussbaum, I was eager to read more than I had. I had read some contemporary biographies of the actresses (e.g., Anne Oldfield) and memoirs by them too (George Anne Bellamy), and a few modern biographies (of Oldfield, of Bellamy, Dora Jordan [Claire Tomalin's], Hannah Pritchard, Elizabeth Inchbald) and a few essays on and texts either by them or intended for them to act out (Catherine Clive, Sarah Siddons), and also a few general histories, but this was my opportunity to read more. And I did.

I’d like to share some of this with my reader as it’s just fascinating stuff, relevant to our world today in so many ways, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to write up coherent notes as I went, plus I was partly directed by my reaction to Nussbaum and my task to check her out, see how accurate were her readings and who disagreed with her and why. I chose to write up two because one swallow does not a summer make and if two don’t either, the pair do reveal the tragedy, pain, and ambivalent lives of loss as well as triumph both women lived.

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Woffington as Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple

Margaret Woffington (1720-60) is one of the women Nussbaum focuses on and like other 18th century actresses still remembered for their supposedly exciting sex life and transgressions on stage, it’s not hard to find sites which purport to give a gist of her life and pictures of her on the Net. Unfortunately, like many of these (and Nussbaum too) what is available is filled with falsifying glamor and puffery, which obscure what was Woffington’s experience of life.

The only full-length book that exists is Janet Dunbar’s Peg Woffington and Her World (1968). On one level, it’s a poor book. It’s a story outline of Woffington’s life interspersed with potted biographies of those she worked with, and imagined thoughts she gives them, nothing of which contains any real insight into the characters of the people. What’s also missing is the keen ethical perspective of Mary Nash’s Provoked Wife (a life of Susannah Cibber in the context of her family, era, musical and stage theater).

OTOH, since meager records (playbills, lists of plays performed from memoirs of the era and various documents) and gross bogus history and legend, calumnies that make Woffington into a monstrous sex-made half-prostitute, and recorded silly exaggerations that idolize her are mostly what’s left from Woffington’s life, Dunbar’s book is a unexpectedly sober, respectful and coherent narrative from which one can draw a probable understanding of Woffington’s life.

What else is available? a very few articles which treat Woffington from an author’s agenda-driven point of view (nowadays a favorite is her penchant for cross-dressing); the ODNB biography; A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, ed. Highfill, Burnim, Langhans (1993); Nussbaum’s chapter in her book and the first writing; and a 1760 biographical memoir (Memoirs of the Celebrated Mrs Woffington). This memoir is disgraceful, a document which testifies to the shameful tone of writer’s mind. Suffice to say that as an adolescent Peg was perhaps “discovered” by a French impresario woman who was looking for talent for fair-ground, and this memoir presents part of this time as Peg, an 11 year old giving herself up to disgusting fellatio and other forms of oral and anal sex to young men out of sheer love of it. The tone of the memoir throughout is crude, leering, voyeuristic.

Margaret Woffington spent her life as an actress living on her own and now and again she lived with different well-known males and she did not attempt to hide this. None of them had the high friends that Anne Oldfield’s first choice did — Arthur Maynwarning was attached to the Queen and high gov’t Whigs. Garrick’s popularity and position did not cut anywhere near that high. Peg really defied many norms: she did not even try to appear chaste or virginal when not married. Like Clive, she seems not to have had any children. Woffington did not weave total lies of improbable virginity and chastity like Elizabeth Farren. She just let her life be seen.

Several times she found herself ousted from her theater group: sometimes from the London group and then she’d quietly turn up in Dublin and then after a while the journey would be reversed (she’d be ousted from Dublin and then be found playing on a London stage). Her specialty was the transvestite role: dressing as a men and playing a man’s role nearly straight, dressing as a man and playing it as a travesty (with her woman’s body emphasized): what we can see in this is this the outsider and perhaps a bisexual or lesbian person. Her one long-time liaison with Garrick is not atypical in that she apparently did want to marry him, but he found her unacceptable as a social choice. Once Margaret educated her sister, Polly, and managed to marry Polly into Walpole’s family (Horace sneered at the man who married the girl) the sister more or less dropped Margaret.

The way Nussbaum treats Woffington’s collusion with the powerful authorities in Ireland (Duke of Dorset) to encourage men to go to war reveals Nussbaum’s agenda: Nussbaum’s goal is to counter those who have said women had no effect on politics. Nussbaum seems not to care what kind of effect. Woffington “influenced the political imaginary of the time.” One famous instance of her pronouncing an epilogue (as a “Female Volunteer”) we know about it because the playbill of Woffington has her dressed as a soldier with a low cut blouse that emphasizes her breasts and a bunch of cloth that shows where man’s phallus would be; she spoke an epilogue which reminds me of WW1 posters urging women to send their sons to fight. Nusssbaum is just all ga-ga about how this shows how important and powerful Woffington was (!). Woffington was then invited to a dinner at an exclusive club with the Duke of Dorset — Dunbar describes this and provides the sycophantic poem Woffington recited, and then quickly tells how not long afterward Woffington was hooted from the stage by an Irish contingent and fled to London. Nussbaum chose Woffington because Woffington was especially known for this kind of “patriotic” cross dressing. For one of her epilogues see comment.

Nussbaum argues such enactments show Woffington bringing together cross-dressing, sexual transgression and patriotism; she was answered by a satirical pamphlet that defended the English soldier against this attack on their masculinity. It dismisses Woffington’s piece as sexual contamination not genuine patriotism. A later tract, Guide to the Stage (1751) maligned Woffington by claiming she rather than Jacobites lures audience “into a clap”.

Woffington apparently spoke another epilogue, one to the Non-Juror (by Cibber) where she appears as feminine and again nags the audience to be English protestants against “vile banditti” from “Church of Rome” (Charles Stuart). She thus distanced herself from Catholicism, critiqued the festering Jacobitism of Scotland, called French “henpecked” and effeminate.

At the time in Dublin Sheridan was playing one of Voltaire’s radical plays Mahomet ou le Fanatisme and Woffington was in it. The audience was heavily Irish Catholic; they cheered for the villain-hero and insisted he re-say his speech. Sheridan was livid at the actor who did this. The next performance Sheridan forbad this. What emerged was the hostility and anger of the audience towards the players who were co-opted by the Anglo-Protestant establishment into doing such a play to flatter them at the same time as they had Woffington (paid her of course and Sheridan) do these “patriotic” epilogues. They booed Woffington and threw eggs at her when she came on stage. Sheridan fled. The theater inside was smashed. The theater was fixed and within a few months everything but to normal but Woffington found herself not appreciated by anyone after all and returned to London.

Nussbaum does present this but as a triumph by not telling us the details, not telling us the realities of what Woffington was enacting and for which side. Does it not matter? Again I cannot see how this is admirable if that’s what Nussbaum wants me to see. I see an actress maligned and castigated, doing reprehensible kinds of urging for money in clothes that make her body a salacious joke. Not that Dunbar is any better, for she does not mention the true or full context; the reader has got to be politically aware, knowledgeable him or herself to understand fully what is happening.

There is at this time nothing written about Woffington that conveys her reality, that tells the politics of it with any humanity or decent values and relates it to our time as I have just done. I suppose it’s in no one’s interests but perhaps the Irish who however will today have a nationalist agenda anyway.

Margaret died young (perhaps a heart attack while on stage) because she ceaselessly worked. People who’ve studied her playbills mention how she seems hardly ever to have taken off. Night after night ceaselessly.

She did make money, enough to support her probably illiterate and very low-in-class mother in Ireland. Surprisingly Nussbaum does agree openly with the earlier biographers which have Woffinton the daughter of a bricklayer and laundry-peddlar woman. Woffington bought a nice house in Twickenham area, Teddington. Several times like Clive she found herself tricked and pressured into taking a much lower salary and she refused. She never wrote defenses of herself. I assume she was not sufficiently educated. In fact we have hardly any writing by her about herself.

Nussbaum presents a version of Woffington’s life which is all success and power and money and achievement. Nussbaum is of the idolizing school. She omits what Dunbar presents under the wraps of conventional dullard speech: such as for example, that Owen M’Swiney, a Signor Angelo, and later in life a Colonel Caesar functioned as her protector-males (M-Swiney and Caesar probably capable of the necessary thug behavior) from other thugs who might and would attack a woman living alone. From my reading of Anne Halkett’s memoir and other 17th and 18th century women who lost their respectability and had no family or friends or connections to support them (who would have to be answered to), I know a woman living alone was continually at risk for any bully male to break in and try to harass and rape her.

She apparently suffered a stroke while playing Rosalind in As You Like It; she retired to her hard-won house, a villa in Teddington where she was cared for by Colonel Caesar for her last three years.

My favorite picture of Woffington F. Haytley’s as Mistress Ford (from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor). I fancy her courage and intelligence shines through:

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Mrs Abingdon as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love by Joshua Reynolds (1771)

Again there is no good modern biography, a few articles which push an agenda; the ODNB and the Highfill, Burnim and Langhans Biographical Dictionary; Nussbaum’s chapter and an earlier biography, this one written in 1888 (The Life of Mrs Abingdon) – which is however not bad. Like Dunbar’s life of Woffington, this 1888 life of Abingdon provides an outline, some imagined suppositions, and is based on documentary evidence, including this time a revealing series of letters between Garrick and Abingdon, which letters show them to have had high quarrels and frequent bickering.

Frances Abingdon (1737-1815) also rose from very poor people, spent a period as a young girl surviving and promoting herself in whatever way she could, and slowly took on distinctive roles: in Abingdon’s case, they were often a strong, cool, guarded fashionable woman. She became rich men’s mistresses more manipulatively, and used dress as a costume to distance herself from others. She wanted people to forget her origins. She quit the stage more than once. Like Woffington, forced out of London, she went to Dublin and unlike Woffington had a unqualified success monetarily and from the point of view of her reputation. Unlike Woffington, she got two men to leave her big legacies and retired. She was not short lived either as she didn’t exhaust herself the way Woffington had.

From the 1888 biography a complex woman who dressed the way she did out of intense pride emerges. The comic roles she took were quite different from Clive’s (hoyden, chambermaid) or Oldfield (aristocratic witty lady); she took on middling women who were super-elegant and highly intelligent. Her intense engagement with such roles was the result of her perpetually beating back her background to show how she was as good as any one else. The facade became her protection.

About 2/3s the way through the biography the anonymous biographer suddenly dumps a huge cache of letters between Garrick & Abingdon on the reader. They are mind-bending. However corrected, they read as real. Abingdon was continually taking offense, tirelessly defensive, ever accusing Garrick, paranoic some might say. If he wanted control, strong respect from her, and profit, she was tremendously touchy and probably was often slighted. They fight over each iota of status, monetary gain or loss continually. She quit several times. Abingdon’s constant complaints, anger, go beyond something pragmatic, well beyond. She was hurt and angry from within from her experience of life.

She paid the one husband she married to stay away: his jealousy reminds me of the Frenchman who beat his actress wife to death: it’s not sexual or even plain jealousy of her success; it’s something more dangerous; he cannot bear that his wife should do better than he since for him too the rest of the world was despising him. Perhaps that was their initial bond. She too had many epilogues written for her and these do provide a fascinating take on her which somehow emanates from her even if she didn’t write them. (I reprint a typical one in a comment.)

For a narrative life once she gets successful the 1888 biographer gives us the gist of each of her famous roles, then little paragraphs about the play’s production, then a contemporary review and then we move onto the next famous role. And after all what were her waking hours but these? It’s wisdom to make this the central text rather than the marginal love and sex stories that occurred in the interstices of time or even her social support network — fragile without the legacies she got from her two lovers. It’s revealing that Mrs Abingdon called herself Frances and made it stick. Not Fanny. I see in that her intense desire for respect.

The most interesting thing Nussbaum tells is that Abingdon was “reputed to have been a servant to a French milliner in Cockspur Street where she learned dressmaking and design.” The actresses were supposed to get their own costumes. Nussbaum suggests the rumors of prostitution in youth might have come from her having been a milliner (here she resorts to old-fashioned language: milliners the “prey of unsavory men,” regarded as morally suspect!). Abingdon would know how to make all sorts of articles of clothing, what was liked when it came to her to commission clothes for others once she rose to have a good salary and fine clothes herself. I remember that George Anne Bellamy mentions sponsoring a milliner to go to France to learn the art of making clothing of all sorts.

Abingdon’s epilogues bring out her role as an icon of fashion. She combined a material milliner with lady of quality she aspired to be. She was adroit in the use of accessories, like fans, pins, flowers (as a girl selling flowers she was known as “Nosegay Fan”). Rather than asserting sexual power through body anatomy she manipulated accessories. The biographer of Elizabeth Inchbald and Sarah Siddons wrote that Abingdon commanded space. Nussbaum insists that Abingdon was not trivialized and lists her famous roles: Widow Bellmore, The Way to Keep Him; Lady Bab in The Maid of Oaks, Mrs Candour in School for Scandal. Abingdon combined a nostalgic or traditional femininity with an avante-garde/modern femininism.

Abingdon did dressed just spectacularly jewelled and overdressed (she wears Satin as Prue), got up as a kind of Madame de Pompadour. Abingdon broke with a tradition of generic type dressing and when she could dressed individually and sumptuously for each character; we see these outfits immortalized in paintings which do justice to her costume. A contemporary is quoted saying that Abingdon was consulted as a physician, paid as an artist, people of fashion treat her as an equal (the 1888 biography, p 232-33). Other women were copied this way: Anna Cartley, Woffington. I remember that Pritchard came from family of staymakers, costumers for stage, said to be consultant to Queen Charlotte; the Pritchards had a warehouse.

I remember reading in Bellamy’s autobiography that she lost a wardrobe worth hundreds of pounds in New Theater at Glasgow; ladies of Edinburgh loaned her more than 40: “some new … as well as very rich” Nussbaum brings in Bellamy’s intense quarrel with Elizabeth Furnival over Bellamy’s outfit to be Cleopatra, which ended in outrageous insults. Furnival stole clothes for Octavia that Bellamy intended for herself as Cleopatra; seamstress fell on her, Bellamy complained to Sheridan.

Nussbaum wants us to believe that Abingdon “mobilized nation’s fashion industry.” One thinks of Bette Davis who in Now Voyager becomes beautiful and sexy by dressing glamorously. Carole Lombard movies were sales pitches for clothes in the Neiman Marcus mode.

What I’d end on was how Abingdon got writers to rewrite Jacobean and Caroline plays for her (by Fletcher, by Massinger) so as to present earlier hard types, strong, abstract female characters, who (if in the end humiliated) give as good as they get for most of the play, e.g., The Capricious Lady out of The Scornful Lady; an updated version of an updated version of the heroine in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. Abingdon wanted to enact fantasies of power and one of the famous portraits of her (by Reynolds) comes from her role in the farce, The Sultan where we are asked to take seriously that she reasons the Sultan into changing the nature of his relationship with women and his court, (absurd) Orientalist fantasy. Nussbaum says she “reforms the seraglio, erases erotic power of tragic Eastern woman, and replaces it with comic female sway.” She forgets how the play teaches us to despise the eunuch. Well, one can’t have everything.

My favorite story of Abingdon: Samuel Johnson liked her so much that he sat in the pit to watch a play he could neither see or hear very well. Boswell pictures Johnson sitting there gravely and attentively.

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The interested reader is invited also to look at my Anne Oldfield as actress, and foremother poet-writer blog on Catherine Clive; and what I managed of an etext edition of Bellamy’s autobiography before I discovered this 6 volume autobiography is readily available on ECCO. These women I also bond with. I’ve put some notes on Susannah Arne Cibber as revealed by Mary Nash’s Provoked Wife and briefly defended Sarah Kemble Siddons in my comments too.

Ellen

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