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

Chapter 7. The Actress and Material Femininity: Frances Abington

c h a p t e r 7 The Actress and Material Femininity: Frances Abington I declare Mrs Abington may march through all my dominions at the head of as large a troop as she pleases—I do not say, as she can muster and command; for then I am sure my house would not hold them. —Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, 11 June 1780 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, and the Haymarket, like many actors she sought more opportunity for work in Dublin at the Smock Alley Theatre where she successfully played Mrs. Sullen in Farquhar’s Beaux Stratagem (11 December 1759), followed by triumphs as Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Portia. During the same year she had married James Abington, a royal trumpeter and her music master, from whom she separated shortly after their move to Ireland. Abington negotiated between the two Dublin theaters, Smock Alley and Crow Street, to maximize her pay, and her remarkable achievements Material Femininity: Frances Abington 227 quickly aroused her husband’s jealousy; he demanded that she pay him an annual pension. Her subsequent affair with Mr. Needham, a “Member of Parliament for Newry in the county of Down,” ended when he met with ill health on their return to England, though he bequeathed her a considerable estate.2 After Needham’s death she became the mistress of William Petty, the first marquess of Lansdowne, and the addition of his estate to her considerable earnings made her a very wealthy woman. Frances Abington rose rapidly to the status of stage goddess and fashion icon. As a magnificent “Priestess of Fashion,” Abington functioned as a spiritual guide to a secular realm; her divine aura emanated from a combination of dazzling comic talent with haute couture. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as Thalia, “the first priestess of the Comic Muse in this country,” echoing a description that Hugh Kelly had employed in the preface to School for Wives (1777).3 Even in Paris, we are told, Mrs. Abington merited “the most flattering reception from the higher ranks of the Parisian Noblesse.”4 A commanding presence united with fashionable femininity, Abington transformed high style into the unlikely vehicle through which a woman’s strength and independence could be articulated.5 At the same time Abington lured her audiences into imbibing the curative power of consumption; she turned fashion into a religion of sorts, and the magic of capital into an aesthetic. At the height of Abington’s career in the 1770s, actresses achieving social mobility had developed a rather long history; by that time she was no longer an anomaly as an accomplished public woman. Paul Langford has pointed to the “full-blown revolution for women in the 1770s,” paralleling the revolutionary spirit abroad, that turned in part on the expansion of women’s presence in relation in print culture and the marketplace.6 Peter Clark describes women’s activities in the period as “fashionable sociability,” a term that Gillian Russell usefully expanded into the concept of “domiciliary sociability” to define women’s pervasive presence at operas, masquerades, lectures, concert halls, and exhibitions in the later eighteenth century.7 The theatrical world nourished the large commercial enterprises that spilled out from private performances into the concert halls and entertainment centers of London and its environs. In order to impress friends with their intimacy with celebrities, hosts and hostesses invited star players willing to entertain guests at private events with recitation and song, and to grace social events with their charismatic presence. Star actresses—including Abington, Pritchard, Pope/Young, and Yates—attended the more austere Bluestocking assemblies where women’s conversations reflected “polite, enlightened behavior as opposed to aristocratic 228 chapter 7 decorum through their sociability”;8 they openly infiltrated gatherings at diverse venues such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and at Cornelys and Pantheon. Sarah Siddons, for example, was known...