Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater

Chapter 2. "Real, Beautiful Women": Rival Queens

c h a p t e r 2 “Real, Beautiful Women”: Rival Queens Theatrical revolutions are as frequent, and owe their rise to the same principles, as those in the political world.—Pique, resentment, ambition, or interest, which ever motive happens to preponderate, brings them about. —An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1786) 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 additional Objects then of real, beautiful Women, could not but draw a Proportion of new Admirers to the Theatre.”1 The success of the innovation depended upon the erotic impact of live female bodies, but also, less obviously, as illustrated in the previous chapter, upon the women’s genuine entrepreneurial skill and increasing economic authority. Actual women engaged in rivalries kept heroic tragedies such as Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677), and other plays 62 chapter 2 resembling it, viable. The characteristic scene of two women locked in combat remained a staple of the genre in, for example, The Mourning Bride (ZaraAlmeria ), All for Love (Octavia-Cleopatra), The Indian Emperour (AlmeriaCydaria ) and Jane Shore (Jane-Alice), and the confrontation scene contributed to the popularity of the anachronistic plays for generations of theatergoers. In their sensational reenactments the tragedies were transformed into what prompter John Downes once called a “living play,” featuring living, breathing actress-characters who, as embodied forms of cultural memory, repeated, appropriated , and transformed past performances to lend them currency.2 Audiences anticipated certain formulaic structures, but the performances were also tantalizingly alive with potential for innovative parody.3 In spite of eighteenth-century genre hierarchies that privileged tragedy over comedy, new tragedy has never been regarded as the favored eighteenthcentury mode. Susan Staves has argued that the preference for new comedy over new tragedy was an effect of the development of an optimistic Enlightenment narrative compatible with its hopes for progress.4 Comedy, especially sentimental comedy, fulfilled that promise by demonstrating that moral efforts felicitously applied and providentially realized would bring economic and social rewards. But in spite of the apparent failure of new tragic dramaturgy in the period, with the exception perhaps of she-tragedies and domestic tragedies, the performance of older serious dramas found a ready audience in eighteenth-century theaters, in part because of the expertise of brilliant tragic actresses such as Susannah Cibber, Hannah Pritchard, and Sarah Siddons. By considering ongoing productions of Nathaniel Lee’s popular Restoration tragedy The Rival Queens, I argue in this chapter that it was principally actresses who drew the eighteenth-century theater into its contemporary moment by resetting and realigning the audience’s relationship to time.5 Relevant to my argument here is Jean-Christophe Agnew’s influential book, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, which posited that the separation between market and theater had fully emerged by the middle part of the eighteenth century. Agnew, along with David Marshall and Richard Sennett, early provided the most sophisticated descriptions of the period’s development of theatrical kinds of personhood , though none of them focused on its performative history.6 Agnew defines commercialism and theatricality as “abstracted properties” and argues that a more fluid market, with its timeless and fleeting elements, comes to replace an actual theater situated within specific material practices (xiii). As Natasha Korda succinctly frames the issue, Agnew, “in defining the ‘situated “Real, Beautiful Women”: Rival Queens 63 phenomena’ of the marketplace as residual, and the ‘placeless and timeless’ [Agnew, x] market process as emergent (and ultimately dominant), privileges the latter.”7 This increasing abstraction of the market is represented in part for Agnew by the socially mobile actor for whom identity and class position were as unstable and unfixed as the emerging economy. But the concept of liquidity does not, as Korda points out, fully dominate the theater until the end of the eighteenth century...