In the heyday of David Garrick’s management of Drury-Lane Theatre (1747–76), numerically coded charts provided playgoers with comparative ratings of their favorite performers. The arithmetical scale offers a fascinating glimpse into the qualities that eighteenth-century theater audiences valued most highly in the actors of both sexes. A Critical Balance of the Performers at Drury-Lane Theatre (1765), a broadsheet costing a shilling, printed a table quantifying each actor’s figure, grace, spirit and ease, sensibility, taste, dignity, manners, expression, pantomime, low and genteel humor, elocution, voice, dress, and “noise”¹ (Figure 1). No actor is assigned a total score, and the anonymous...

The London theater stood at the center of urban life in Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Women were vital participants in its success as actresses, playwrights, patrons, orange girls and pawnbrokers, costume makers and vendors. Star players such as Elizabeth Barry, the subject of Otway’s poetic lines, linked public fame to audience affection through the magnetic theatrical appeal of their palpable feminine presence. Barry and other actresses openly violated the conventional injunction aimed at ambitious women during this historical period: “Your sex’s glory,” enjoined Edward Young in Love of Fame (1725–28), “ ’tis, to shine unknown; / Of all applause...

The eighteenth-century London stage was haunted by the performance of older plays recycled from earlier periods, many of which centered on pairs of historical or classical female characters. The new phenomenon of actresses—real, beautiful women—catapulted the antiquated roles into an eighteenth-century present. “Before the Restoration,” wrote theater manager, actor, and playwright Colley Cibber in his Apology, “no Actresses had ever been seen upon the English Stage. The Characters of Women, in former Theatres were perform’d by Boys, or young Men of the most effeminate Aspect,” but after their appearance as players there was a radical shift, for “the...

In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the Cinderella story of a servant girl’s stubborn resistance and eventual marriage to her seductive master, the heroine’s virtue is largely synonymous with her chastity. In the novel Pamela protests that she would willingly embrace “Rags and Poverty” rather than forfeit her virginity.¹ When Mr B ultimately succumbs to her irresistible charms and accepts her terms, her wedding gift to him is “an experience’d Truth, a well-try’d Virtue, and . . . [an unequaled natural] Meekness of a Temper, and Sweetness of Disposition” (337) which, the reader is encouraged to agree, serves as a legitimate...

In Sir Richard Steele’s short-lived periodical The Theatre, his depiction of a broad-based audience engaged in the critical assessment of drama adds new dimension to our understanding of audience-actor relations. In the first issue, Sophronia, a sophisticated lady of high quality, attends the theater with a belle assemblée of three female friends who share her passion for drama.¹ In a subsequent issue, Steele’s exalted persona, Sir John Edgar, proposes that a small number of theatergoers like Sophronia and her companions should be elected “Auditors of the Drama” in order to characterize public taste to the management and to speak as...

As new forms of patronage developed alongside the increasingly commercial theater in the eighteenth century, the spirited Catherine Raftor Clive (1711–85) took full advantage of the situation to rival her manager as well as other actors and playwrights, and she deserves to be treated as their talented equal. Born to an Irish father and an English mother in 1711, Clive debuted on the stage a scant two years before Anne Oldfield died, thus inaugurating a second generation of actresses who followed upon Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle; she was the heir apparent to these extraordinarily gifted performers, many of...

John Rich reportedly found the actress Margaret Woffington (1720?–60) to be an impossibly beautiful woman. When the young Irish girl arrived in London in 1740 after taking Dublin by storm, she allegedly pestered Rich until he granted her a personal audience. The legendary scene of the dissolute Rich encountering the lovely wisp of a woman has been memorably captured in word and image: he met her while reclining “on a Couch, with one Leg lolling over the other, his left Hand holding a Play-Book, and his right a China Cup, out of which he was sipping some Tea. Round...

Frances Abington, née Barton (1737–1815), was, according to Horace Walpole, equal to the first of her profession. “I do impartial justice to your merit,” he exuberantly remarks, “and fairly allow it not only equal to that of any actress I have seen, but believe the present age will not be in the wrong, if they hereafter prefer it to those they may live to see.”¹ Abington debuted as a principal on 29 October 1756 as Lady Pliant in The Double Dealer, along with her more experienced Drury Lane rivals Hannah Pritchard and Kitty Clive. Performing occasionally at Bath, Richmond,...

Near century’s end a canon of plays emerged with the publication of the twenty-one- volume Bell’s British Theatre (1776–81) and later the twenty-five-volume edition of The British Theatre (1808) accompanied by Elizabeth Inchbald’s remarkable critical prefaces.¹ Each volume in the first edition of Bell’s British Theatre consisted of five comedies or five tragedies, the volumes alternating evenhandedly between the two genres to convey a sense of their equivalence. In his advertisement to a similar set of British Poets, John Bell wrote that the little volumes were designed to “form a truly elegant ornamental appearance, in the drawing-room, dressing-room, or...