![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), one of the very early theatre actresses on the Restoration stage and long-term mistress to King Charles II, has today become a popular cultural icon, revered for her wit and good-naturedness. The image of Gwyn that emerges from Restoration satires, by contrast, is considerably more critical of the king's actress-mistress. It is this image, arising from satiric references to and verse lives of Nell Gwyn, which forms the focus of this paper. Creating an image—a ‘likeness’—of the subject is often cited as one of the chief purposes of biography. From the perspective of biography studies, this paper will probe to what extent Restoration verse satire can be read as life-writing and where it can be situated in the context of other seventeenth century life-writing forms. It will examine which aspects of Gwyn's life and character the satires address and what these choices reveal about the purposes of satire as a form of biographical storytelling. Gwyn's case, it will be argued, demonstrates that Restoration verse satire, which participates in many of the biographical conventions of the period, ought to be revaluated as a site of early modern life-writing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Julia Novak is a Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow (Austrian Science Fund) at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Salzburg, Austria, working on a post-doctoral project on fictional biographies about historical women artists. She has published a monograph on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen: Die Buchgruppe als soziales Phänomen und ökonomische Triebkraft (Lit-Verlag, 2007) and a study of Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Rodopi, 2011). She is editor of Vienna:Views (Luftschacht, 2007), a collection of short stories about Vienna, and co-editor of Staging Interculturality (WVT, 2010), Ireland in Drama, Film, and Popular Culture (WVT, 2012) and Ireland in/and Europe (WVT, 2012).
Notes
1. Gwyn was illiterate but a few letters have survived which were presumably dictated to a scribe. Many famous observations and anecdotes about her conduct at court stem from the reports, letters, diaries or memoirs of others, such as the famous Pepy's Diaries and the memoirs of the Comtesse D'Aulnoy.
2. For a more detailed discussion of the referentiality debate in satire criticism, see Griffin 115–24.
3. Significantly, the first recorded appearance of the term ‘biography’ dates back to 1661; cf. Donaldson 67.
4. See, for instance, Kernan, The Plot of Satire, and Mary Claire Randolph, who proposes a bi-partite structure of criticising folly and reinforcing a norm in ‘The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire’; for a general discussion of the rhetoric of satire, see Griffin 35–8.
5. Nell Gwyn was, in fact, not the only Restoration actress who entered into a liaison with an aristocrat. Actress Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes, for instance, became long-term mistress to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, first cousin of King Charles II, at around the same time when Gwyn's relationship with the king began, thus rendering Gwyn's social ascent extraordinary in degree rather than kind.
6. Paulina Kewes explicitly mentions the panegyric as a format of early modern royal biography (187).
7. Orange girls had a reputation for selling more than just fruit. See the entry on ‘Orange Moll’ in The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre; see also Beaucleark 56–8, and Parker 46–7.
8. Cf. Parker 4 and Beauclerk 12 on this point. There seems to be no reliable documentary evidence of the life of Gwyn's father. Interestingly enough, Beauclerk speculates that the legend of his death in Oxford prison may well be true, citing ‘A Panegyric’ as his source (Beauclerk 12).
9. Mrs. Gwyn is said to have fallen into a ditch in a state of alcoholic intoxication and subsequently drowned; see Beauclerk 292–3. She had worked as a prostitute, as had Nell Gwyn's sister Rose, see Beauclerk 13.
10. See James Thorpe's commentary in The Poems of George Etherege, 142.
11. Less obviously, ‘A Panegyric’ and ‘The Lady of Pleasure’ could also be related to the long-standing tradition of verse lives of saints, which flourished well before the Restoration, John Capgrave (fifteenth century) and Elizabeth Cary (early seventeenth century) being two notable representatives. Already in the late sixteenth century, this metrical form of hagiography was appropriated by George Whetstone to commemorate secular figures, as for instance in his ‘Sir Phillip Sidney, His Honorable Life’ (1587).
12. Interestingly enough, it is precisely this upward mobility that makes Gwyn a suitable Cinderella-character for twenty-first century romance novels. Diane Haeger, author of the Gwyn novel The Perfect Royal Mistress (2007), notes that ‘readers here in the US really relate to characters who pick themselves up by the bootstraps, move through poverty, and triumph over adversity. It is a quintessentially American tale’ (Haeger interview). See also Gillian Bagwell's The Darling Strumpet (2011) and Susan Holloway Scott's The King's Favorite (2008), two romantic novels that similarly depict Gwyn's rise and liaison with the king. While biographer Charles Beauclerk explicitly refers to Gwyn as a ‘Cinderella’ of the Restoration (2), Gwyn's unmarried state, which distinguishes her from her mythical foil, in fact poses considerable structural problems to romance writers (see Novak 2014).
13. In another satire, ‘Mrs. Nelly's Complaint’ (1682, presumably by Etherege), the merchant's name is given as Duncombe: ‘Duncombe, by my great sway and power preferred, / For mounting me well first now mounts the Guard’ (l. 81–2). The editor and antiquary William Oldys gives the name as ‘Duncan’, see Beauclerk 40.
14. Here probably for ‘quean’, hussy, which has the same etymological roots as ‘queen’, cf. OED ‘quean, n.’.
15. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, is of course another frequent subject of Restoration verse satire, his illegitimacy making him a popular target. The unattributed satire ‘The King's Vows’ (1670), for instance, which resembles Marvell's ‘Royal Resolutions’, ironically depicts him as ‘a fine son (in making though marr'd) / If not o'er a kingdom, to reign o'er my Guard, / And successor, if not to me, to Gerrard’ (l. 25–7), thus also mentioning the (apparently outrageous) biographical fact that he was promoted to Commander of the King's Lifeguards, succeeding Lord Gerrard in this position.
16. It should be noted that ‘great’ influential statesmen, too, would sometimes find elements of their lives strung together in a biographical fashion and vilified by their political adversaries in Restoration verse satire. ‘The Litany of the Duke of Buckingham’ (1680), for instance, gives an extensive portrait of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, criticising his financial dealings, his affair with the Countess of Shrewsbury, the fact that their illegitimate infant son was buried in Westminster Abbey, and relating his political downfall in 1674. Similarly, ‘On Plotters’ (1680) lists biographemes of the Duke of York's life—among them his conversion to Catholicism, his support of (in the author's view) unpopular courtiers, his marriage to a Catholic princess, as well as his politically questionable travels to Flanders and Scotland—to discredit him as a potential successor to the English throne.
17. In that sense, Fuller's statement of purpose can also be seen to hark back to Horace's famous dictum, ‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae’ (Ars Poetica l. 333).