Abstract
On April 3, 1665, the redoubtable diarist Samuel Pepys attended a play, Mustapha, at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. He did not care much for the play, but he was delighted to find King Charles II himself attending the performance in his private box. With his typical penchant for gossip, Pepys reports that the king held company with his mistress Barbara Palmer, the Duchess of Cleveland, along with a young actress named Eleanor Gwyn, or “pretty, witty Nell” as Pepys called her. Gwyn was one of the first generation of professional English actresses; by the spring of 1665, Gwyn had appeared in a few minor parts at the rival King’s Theatre, but had yet to land a major stage role. She was only a teenager, likely still largely illiterate, and just recently promoted from an orange seller to an actress at the King’s playhouse. Yet there she was, holding a private audience with the king and his mistress—an unlikely opportunity for any young woman of her low birth rank and status.
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Notes
- 1.
Pepys, Samuel, Diary , 3 April 1665, http://www.limpidsoft.com/galaxy8/samuelpepys.pdf, last accessed 13 December 2017.
- 2.
In this chapter I will reference several biographies of Gwyn published over the last one hundred years. But after multiple archival searches, I have yet to find a recent biography of Gwyn published by a scholarly press. The biography by Charles Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King , (New York: Grove, 2005), is well researched and annotated for a popular-press publication. I will address the fact that Beauclerk is a direct descendent of Gwyn later in this chapter. Other useful studies of first generation English actresses include Wilson, John Harold, All the King’s Ladies : Actresses of the Restoration, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses : Women and Drama 1660–1700, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992); Pullen, Kirsten, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Bush-Bailey, Gilli, Treading the Bawds : Actresses and Playwrights on the Late Stuart Stage, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Wilson and Howe offer useful historical overviews of the first generation actresses, each of them inflected by the scholarly pursuits and standards of their respective generations. Pullen focuses on the degree of agency the actresses derived from the public performance of their sexuality. Bush-Bailey explores the relation between Restoration actresses and women playwrights. Howe in particular has an informative section on Gwyn and her role in establishing the “gay couple” as a hallmark of Restoration comedy after her success in the 1667 play Secret Love by Dryden. Unfortunately, Howe misrepresents Gwyn in her role as Bellario in the 1667 revival of Philaster. See Howe, 66–74 and my own brief discussion of Philaster later in this chapter.
- 3.
See, for instance, Wilson, 110–117, 159–162.
- 4.
Van Lennep, William, ed., The London Stage: Part 1: 1660–1700, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 82.
- 5.
Killigrew, William , The Siege of Urbin, (Oxford: Hen. Hall, 1666), 40.
- 6.
Senelick , Laurence, The Changing Room : Sex, Drag, and Theatre, (London: Routledge: 2000), 211.
- 7.
For an excellent scholarly biography of Charlotte Cushman, see Merill, Lisa, When Romeo Was a Woman, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
- 8.
Senelick , Changing Room, 260.
- 9.
Garber , Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, (London: Routledge: 1992), 17. Italics in original.
- 10.
Garber , Vested Interests, 184. Italics in original.
- 11.
Cole , C. L., and Shannon L. C. Cate, “Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3/4 (Fall–Winter 2008), 279–287, 280. My thanks to Dr. Shannon Walsh for informing me of this essay.
- 12.
Cole and Cate, “Compulsory Gender,” 282.
- 13.
Currah , Paisley, “The Transgender Rights Imaginary,” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, vol. 4 (2003), 705–720, 706. This quotation was also cited in the Cole and Cate article, pp. 285–286, but unfortunately the published transcription was inaccurate. Here I include the original version of the Paisley quotation.
- 14.
See, especially, Pullen, 42–54, and Bush-Bailey, 27–50.
- 15.
Howe, 171.
- 16.
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Crenshaw , Kimberlé, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, (1989: 139), 140.
- 19.
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing,” 140.
- 20.
Pao , Angela C., No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theatre, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 26.
- 21.
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- 27.
Postlewait , Thomas, Cambridge Guide to Theatre Historiography, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23.
- 28.
Bank , Rosemarie, and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography : Time, Space, Matter, (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 7.
- 29.
Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn. On Barbara Palmer, see 25–26 and 180–181. On the history of the Dukes of St. Albans, see 366–393.
- 30.
Pepys, Diary, 2 March 1667, last accessed 13 December 2015.
- 31.
Dryden , John, Secret Love , in Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq; Volume the Second, (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725), 7.
- 32.
Dryden, Secret Love, 193.
- 33.
Dryden, Secret Love , 142.
- 34.
Dryden, Secret Love , 199.
- 35.
Dryden, Secret Love , 11.
- 36.
Bush-Bailey counters older assertions that Restoration theater audiences were composed almost exclusively of aristocrats; she cites the fact that Pepys, along with his wife and servants, regularly attended the theater. My point here is that theater attendance among the middling sorts increased steadily over time during the Restoration era, as attested by the construction of larger theater to accommodate growing audiences. See Bush-Bailey, Treading the Bawds, 36.
- 37.
Foucault , Michel, Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 129.
- 38.
Beaumont , Francis, and John Fletcher, Philaster, in The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont and Mr. John Fletcher Volume the First , (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1750), 175.
- 39.
The London Stage offers the November 1667 date; see Part I, 124. But a reference to the May 1668 date appears in the Clifford Bax biography Pretty, Witty Nell: An Account of Nell Gwyn and Her Environment, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1932), 131. And while the puff-piece tone of the Bax book may compromise its credibility, the May 1668 date is also cited in the carefully researched biography by Beauclerk, 130.
- 40.
Pepys, Diary, 11 January 1668, last accessed 13 December 2015.
- 41.
Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever : A Freudian Impression, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68.
- 42.
Dryden , John, The Conquest of Granada, in Dryden: Three Plays, ed. George Saintsbury, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 77.
- 43.
Dryden, Conquest of Granada, 160.
- 44.
Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn, 159.
- 45.
Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn, 180.
- 46.
Dryden, Conquest of Granada, 16.
- 47.
Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn, 360–362.
- 48.
Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics , ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran, (London: Continuum, 2010), 32.
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Sikes, A. (2020). Introduction: Erotic Economies. In: Sex, Class, and the Theatrical Archive. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23116-3_1
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