Repository | Book | Chapter

Women's literary history has long celebrated the female playwright—it has followed Virginia Woolf's famous dictum that "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds". However, this essay will contend that we should reserve our plaudits for the actresses who gave voice, body and meaning to lines written by Behn and a host of others. Actresses were empowered not only to speak their own minds, but to give public voice to the thoughts of women everywhere. The actress, not the playwright, demanded that women's voices be heard and valued; indeed, the actress's was one of the most prominent voices in the eighteenth-century cultural marketplace. However, despite her cultural authority, the significance of the early actress has been downplayed in the centuries since her debut, and she has been largely neglected by women's literary history. The very category of "women's writing" seems to exclude the actress who authors her texts through performance, rather than publication. Penny Gay argues for the significance of "female eloquence" in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, but keeps her attention firmly on playwrights, crediting those who published and neglecting those who performed. She lauds playwrights for "writing roles that allowed adult women to represent characters who debate … rather than (or perhaps as well as) presenting primarily an erotic spectacle for the enjoyment of a male dominated audience".¹ I contend that playwrights are not puppet-masters, and actresses do not passively mouth the lines given them. The roles for "adult women" lauded by Gay developed in tandem with the rise of the professional actress: these new roles for adult women were made possible by the adult women who performed them. The corporality of performance, and the dearth of performance records in the period means that when the early actress is considered by modern scholars, her body, her celebrity and/or her sexuality are the primary objects of interest; her art is rarely considered. Feminist theatre history from Elizabeth Howe's The First English Actresses (1992) through Gilli Bush-Bailey's Treading the Bawds (2006) and Felicity Nussbaum's Rival Queens (2012) replicate, even as they complicate and challenge, the actress–whore binary popular since the Restoration. This unrelenting focus on the actress's body and its offstage behaviour silences a body of women who spoke as and to women of reputation, women of wit and women of importance. Actresses were eloquent women.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54382-0_7

Full citation: