Anne Oldfield's Lady Townly: Consumption, Credit, and the Whig Hegemony of the 1720s

Take my word, a new Fashion, upon a fine Woman, is often greater Proof of her Value, than you are aware of.

—Lady Betty Modish ¹

Is fashion such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena—of the energies, possibilities, demands and joie de vivre of a given society, economy, and civilization?

—Fernand Braudel ²

When Anne Oldfield took the stage as Lady Townly in Colley Cibber’s The Provoked Husband, a number of admirers saw in her performance the culmination of her life’s work as Drury Lane’s longtime Leading Lady. ³ Opening on 10 January 1728, Cibber’s adaptation of the late John Vanbrugh’s A Journey to London gave Oldfield the opportunity to do many of the things she did best. While her repertoire was various, as befitting an actress of her status, it was heavily weighted with coquettes, jilts, and fashionable women of an upper station. Lady Townly continued Oldfield’s line of rebellious, captivating Ladies of Quality. Described in Cibber’s dramatis personae as a woman “immoderate in her pursuit of pleasures,” Lady Townly typified the recalcitrant flirt that Oldfield had been perfecting for nearly thirty years: she dresses extravagantly; she traverses the town engaging in such upper-class social rituals as theatre, parties, and gambling; she charms most men but enrages her husband; and in the enormously ideological tradition of exemplary comedy, at the end of the play she repents her errant ways, renounces her frivolous entertainments outside the home, and happily accepts a domestic existence subject to her husband’s will. Oldfield concluded this performance of wit, defiance, and headstrong independence with a couplet summing up the then-emergent construction of woman as a properly domestic creature: “But now a convert to this truth I come—that married happiness is never found from home.” ⁴ Anne Oldfield had built a career performing the contradictions inscribed in such roles. As Cibber put it, “Of that sort were the characters she chiefly excelled in” (8–9).

Both Oldfield’s coworkers at Drury Lane and the theatre’s Whiggish patrons lauded her performance. Thomas Davies dubbed Lady Townly the “ne plus ultra” of the actress’s career and praised the ease with which “she slided so gracefully into the foibles and displayed so humorously the excesses of a fine woman, too confident of her power, and led away by her passion for pleasure.” ⁵ Charles Macklin noted that “Mrs. Oldfield formed the center of admiration, from her looks, her dress, and her admirable performance.” He marveled that “when she came to describe the superior privileges of a married above a single woman, she repeated the whole of that lively speech with a rapidity, and gaiete de coeur, that electrified the whole house,” and provoked “unbounded” applause. ⁶ Mary Granville Delany wrote to her sister that Oldfield “topped her part, and notwithstanding [the play] deserves criticism in reading, nobody (let them ever be so wise) can see it without being extremely pleased, for it is acted to admiration.” ⁷ Cibber himself, writing as always for posterity, singled out Oldfield for lengthy encomium in his preface to the published edition:

May it therefore give emulation to our successors of the stage, to know, that to the ending of the year 1727, a cotemporary (sic) comedian relates, that Mrs. Oldfield was, then in her highest excellence of action, happy in all the rarely-found requisites that meet in one person to complete them for the stage.

[7]

Cibber’s praise for Oldfield was, in fact, so voluble that his literary rivals frequently quoted it as a prime example of his graceless, purple prose. In the unfortunate phrase that Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding would later pillory as Cibber’s most egregious malfeasance against writerly good taste, Cibber gushed that in her performance as Lady Townly, Oldfield “outdid her usual out-doing” (7).

The play was an unqualified hit, and evidence suggests that Oldfield’s peers attributed much of its popularity to her performance. In spite of competing for...