Abstract
The actress often features as the embodiment of the phenomenon of celebrity culture and “public intimacy”, but the playwright, specifically the female playwright has received less attention in this development. This chapter examines how the highly successful early eighteenth-century playwright, Susanna Centlivre, was involved in the promotion of actresses’ “public intimacy” through the unusual stage direction of “peeping”. It argues that the act of “peeping”; a half-concealed, half-revealed position that provided the audience with unique access to the actress compared with “asides” is similar to how we now read celebrity culture to function. The chapter explores the literary context of “peeping” and related issues of privacy, desire, control and power to demonstrate further the significance and impact of Centlivre’s use of the device.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacky Bratton, “Reading the Intertheatrical, or, the Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre,” in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 7–21.
- 2.
Bratton, “Reading the Intertheatrical,” 7.
- 3.
Gilli Bush-Bailey, “The Mystery of Revival: Performance and Reception of Susanna Centlivre on the Modern Stage,” in The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Laura Engel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 283–99. It is notable that David Garrick chose one of Centlivre’s plays [The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1741)] for his last performance. He also played Marplot; a popular character for audience and actor so much so that Centlivre wrote a sequel, Marplot; or, The Second Part of the Busybody (1710).
- 4.
Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
- 5.
Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: the Prior History of ‘It’,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–30; Nussbaum, Rival Queens.
- 6.
Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, “Introduction,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1–11 (4).
- 7.
For example, Nussbaum, Rival Queens on the “provisional, multitiered, and situational” nature of self-representation of interiority (21).
- 8.
One of the first and highly influential studies was by Elizabeth Howe. Subsequent studies include work by Felicity Nussbaum, Helen Brooks and Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr. Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Nussbaum, Rival Queens; Brooks, Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Engel and McGirr, eds., Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014).
- 9.
Much of the recent theatre research has been informed by Jacky Bratton’s approach, which highlights the “intertheatrical” nature of plays as indicated here. See, for example, Nancy Copeland who also provides a reading of Centlivre’s Busy Body in its longer history. Copeland, Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women’s Comedy and the Theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
- 10.
See, for example, Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003).
- 11.
Gilli Bush-Bailey, Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
- 12.
See Howe, The First English Actress.
- 13.
Misty G. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 109–10.
- 14.
Roach comments on the monarch’s celebrity status and reads its model as evident in the theatre of the long eighteenth century. Being divinely ordained and having close contact with the people meant that Charles II had the accessibility crucial to creating “It”. He also courted Nell Gwyn in the Park. Roach, “Public Intimacy: the Prior History of ‘It’,” 20–21, 24.
- 15.
Evelyn “walked with him thro St. James’s Parke to the Garden, where I both saw and heard a very familiar discourse between [the King] & Mrs. Nellie”. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), III: 573.
- 16.
See Copeland, Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre and Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). See the continuation of this play in Marplot. Also, read as a “desexed”, “unmale” and eighteenth-century homosexual character, he is drawn from the character Maiden in Tunbridge-Walks (1703).
- 17.
Susan Staves, A History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156.
- 18.
Jacky Bratton reads Marplot in a comparable way as signifying “an unruly member of the audience”, which gestures towards and facilitates the movement between text, performance and audience. Here, however, I am stressing what I read as the celebrity culture dimension of his nature.
- 19.
Centlivre, The Busy Body, in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, ed. Melinda C. Finberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). All further references to this play will refer to this edition.
- 20.
For examples and more detail see: Will Pritchard, “Masks and Faces: Female Legibility in the Restoration Era,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 31–52 (46).
- 21.
On the complex use and representation of patching see: Karen Hearn, “Revising the Visage: Patches and Beauty Spots in Seventeenth-Century British and Dutch Painted Portraits,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2015): 809–27.
- 22.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: the Prior History of ‘It’.”
- 23.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: the Prior History of ‘It’,” 16.
- 24.
Looking is implicit in many accounts of celebrity from attending and seeing a performance at the theatre to glimpsing a celebrity on the street, for example. The other essays in the collection attest to this including viewing portraiture (Elaine McGirr), death scenes (James Harriman-Smith) and accessing celebrity through material objects (Claudine van Hensbergen).
- 25.
Vol. II printed for J. Knapton; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; W. Strahan; R. and J. Dodsley; and M. and T. Longman (1760), 150.
- 26.
Vol. II (1760), 150.
- 27.
Using Historical Texts. JISC. Keyword search “peeping” and “peep” also including fuzzy search to try and catch any alternative spellings or partial or poor reproduction.
- 28.
Behn, The Young King: Or, the Mistake (London, 1683), B1776 (Wing), 45.
- 29.
Bailey, The Spightful Sister (London, 1667), B444 (Wing), 44.
- 30.
The Counterfeit Bridegroom, or the Defeated Widow. A Comedy (Langley Curtiss: London, 1677), 41. Unattributed. An adaptation of Middleton’s No Wit, no Help, like a Woman’s (1627) possibly by Betterton as noted by Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 259.
- 31.
The Counterfeit Bridegroom, 41.
- 32.
Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), l. 120. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. James Noggle and Lawrence Lipking, Ninth Edition, vol. C. (London: W. W. Norton & Company), 2769.
- 33.
Danielle Bobker, The Shape of Intimacy: Private Space and the British Social Imagination, 1650–1770 (PhD dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2007). Bobker examines peeping in relation to a subgenre—the printed closet or cabinet—“broadly speaking, cabinet of love denotes a place where any passionate relationship might be shielded from public view”, 49.
- 34.
Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Enquiry (London: Chicago University Press, 2001).
- 35.
See Hal Gladfelder, “Obscenity, Censorship, and the Eighteenth Century Novel: The Case of John Cleland,” Wordsworth Circle 35, no. 3 (2004): 134–41. Danielle Bobker examines Cleland’s critical reading of novels and how he demands an active, interpretative reader of his erotic fiction in “Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2010): 1035–45.
- 36.
John Cleland, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of the Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner (London: Penguin, 1985), 193–294.
- 37.
George E. Haggerty, “Keyhole Testimony: Witnessing Sodomy in the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century, Special Edition, Preposterous Pleasure: Homoeroticism and the Eighteenth Century 44, no. 2/3 (2003): 167–82.
- 38.
Haggerty, “Keyhole Testimony,” 169.
- 39.
Haggerty, “Keyhole Testimony,” 169.
- 40.
Haggerty, “Keyhole Testimony,” 169.
- 41.
Bobker, The Shape of Intimacy, 118.
- 42.
Bobker, The Shape of Intimacy, 51.
- 43.
There is also the “singing scene”, but this one features the maid and Isabinda and, although an example of female trickery, the “dumb” and “monkey” are fuller and also feature the protagonist Miranda and her ingenuity.
- 44.
Lisa A. Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5.
- 45.
The play-text makes this clear but we have no evidence about the actual performances. Because the women are directed to be “peeping”, we can use previous examples from earlier plays where the peeping characters were unseen from the onstage counterparts and so may have been partially concealed. It would be obvious when the onstage men do not react to their presence at all, that their words are unheard and physical presence is unseen by them.
- 46.
Mottley‚ John‚ “Mrs. Susanna Centlivre.” A Compleat List of All the English Dramatic Poets. Appended to Thomas Whincop‚ Scanderbeg (London‚ 1747)‚ 189‚ quoted in F.P. Lock‚ Susanna Centlivre (Boston‚ Mass: Twayne Publishers‚ 1979)‚ 63.
- 47.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 21.
- 48.
It is also how Miranda describes the exchange: “Well, Gardee, how did I perform my dumb scene?” (3.4. 1).
- 49.
Nussbaum makes a direct comparison between novelistic discourse claiming that “the most successful actresses, I suggest, recognised the necessity of creating an ‘interiority effect’ which allowed the theater to compete with other nascent forms reflective of inwardness—such as the epistolary novel, the periodical, and autobiographical writing—in fostering and revealing a sense of individuality and intimacy”. Rival Queens, 19.
- 50.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, also 21.
- 51.
Brooks, Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage, 12.
- 52.
It could be read as an instance of her “obscuring of her professionalism”. Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 150.
- 53.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 15–16.
Works Cited
Anderson, Misty G. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002.
Bailey, Abraham. The Spightful Sister (London, 1667), B444 (Wing), 44.
Behn, Aphra. The Young King: Or, the Mistake (London, 1683), B1776 (Wing), 45.
Benedict, Barbara M. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Enquiry. London: Chicago University Press, 2001.
Bobker, Danielle. “The Shape of Intimacy: Private Space and the British Social Imagination, 1650–1770.” PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2007.
———. “Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2010): 1035–45.
Bratton, Jacky. “Reading the Intertheatrical, or, the Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre.” In Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 7–21. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Brooks, Helen. Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Bush-Bailey, Gilli. Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
———. “The Mystery of Revival: Performance and Reception of Susanna Centlivre on the Modern Stage.” In The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Laura Engel, 283–99. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
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Joule, V. (2018). “Peeping” and Public Intimacy in Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body (1709). In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_4
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