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ABSTRACT
Margaret Woffington (1717?–1760) was one of the most popular actresses on the eighteenth-century English stage. She initially made her name in breeches roles, and as a versatile comedian, but would later re-train in classical tragedy. Brilliant and beautiful, she was discovered in 1730s Ireland, then blazed a trail through the London theatre scene until 1757 when she suffered a stroke while performing in As You Like It. Woffington never returned to the stage but lingered, bed-ridden, until her death in 1760. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s she was subject to titillating gossip and highly fictionalised memoirs that depicted her as a prostitute. While considering the aesthetic debate around sensibility described by Diderot in his famous Paradoxe sur le comédien, I look at how visual art might offer an alternative reading of this actress’s life—indeed, how portraiture can be considered a genre of life-writing because it offered actresses an opportunity to shape their images for public consumption (a relatively new phenomenon in the eighteenth century). Here I focus on an unusual portrait, Peg Woffington in Bed (circa 1758), by an unknown artist, arguing that this intimate scene was a shrewd autobiographical performance that brought the actress in line with a more sentimental age. A curious mixture of private and public, the painting not only affirms Woffington’s status as a formidable tragedienne but expunges perceived sexual misdeeds through the power of emotion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Annette Rubery was awarded her PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies by the University of Warwick. Her dissertation explored ideas around identity in the works of Gertrude Stein and Georgia O’Keeffe. While not quite abandoning her love for Modernism, she has, over the last decade, become fascinated by English eighteenth-century theatre and is currently writing a biography of the actress Peg Woffington.
Notes
1 Even though Woffington never married, she almost always appeared on playbills as ‘Mrs,’ which was the traditional mode of address for professional actresses of the period.
2 Camden Lucey mentions all of the men in her biography, Lovely Peggy, but evidence of Woffington’s relationships can be found in myriad eighteenth-century sources including the letters of David Garrick and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, popular satires, and the biographies by contemporaries such as George Anne Bellamy. With regard to Theobald Taaffe, there was a legal dispute over a cohabitation contract drawn up with Woffington; this was uncovered and noted by W.J. Lawrence in ‘An Episode in the Life of Peg Woffington,’ but the paperwork was subsequently destroyed in the Irish Civil War of 1922. Details about her living arrangements with Garrick come chiefly from Charles Macklin’s biographers James Thomas Kirkman and William Cooke.
3 Tate Wilkinson says the performance of As You Like It was on 17 May (43) but his memory likely deceived him because The London Stage 1660–1800 lists The Earl of Essex as playing at Covent Garden that night. However, As You Like It was advertised in the playbills with Woffington as Rosalind and Vincent as Celia on 3 May. See Winchester Stone Jr. Citation1962, 596, 600.
4 According to both Kerslake (Citation1977) and the authors of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London 1660–1800 (Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans Citation1993, 220), there has been something of a vogue for attributing portraits of Woffington to Hogarth, but the subject should be approached with caution because there is insufficient evidence. Having said that, Hogarth was concentrating on portraiture around the time that Peg Woffington in Bed was produced.
5 For more information on this topic see Dabhoiwala Citation2013, 296–313.
6 The gaps in Woffington’s name were supposed to protect the publisher from libel actions.
7 It was tricky for actors and actresses to defend themselves against scurrilous pamphleteers, not only because of the lack of libel laws, but because an aggrieved individual might easily disrupt their performances. Not all women remained silent, however; in March 1759, Kitty Fisher took out an advertisement in The Public Advertiser complaining of the exploitation of her person by unscrupulous people. According to the advertisement, Miss Fisher ‘has been abused in public places, exposed in Print shops, and to wind up the whole, some Wretches, mean, ignorant, and venal, would impose upon the Public, by daring to pretend to publish her Memoirs’ (Fisher Citation1759). Whether this was an act of self-defence or of shrewd self-publicity is still a matter for debate.
8 For an enlightening comparison between the 1746 illustration of Woffington as the Female Volunteer and a 1777 image of Ann Spranger Barry dressed as Sir Harry Wildar, see Nussbaum Citation2010, 208–211.
9 See, for instance, Lilti Citation2017 for an in-depth analysis of the rise of eighteenth-century celebrity culture.
10 Even Voltaire, an early exponent of the claque (a group hired to applaud or heckle a performance), was not immune. In 1748 he tried to ensure the success of his tragedy Sémiramis by buying tickets for his friends and instructing them to clap heartily, but the play was so dull that a number of them yawned aloud while applauding, amusing everyone except the author (Mantzius Citation1909, 256–7).
11 There are two surviving editions, dating from 1750 and 1755, but it looks as if two intermediate editions, now lost, were published in 1752 and 1753. For a detailed analysis of the texts, see Valentino Citation2011.
12 The whole letter is transcribed and reprinted in Camden Lucey Citation1952, 86–7. Hill is ‘the acting-poetaster’ and ‘Vain coxcomb’ who ‘has had the insolence to brag favours from me.’
13 A fascinating paper by Professor Robin Simon entitled ‘“A concrete knowledge of man”: Garrick, Hogarth, Shakespeare and Europe,’ given at a conference on 23 February 2017 in London celebrating the tercentenary of Garrick’s birth, drew my attention to the link between Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine, John Hill, and Denis Diderot.
14 All references to Diderot’s text are drawn from its first English translation by Walter Herries Pollock, published in 1883 under the title The Paradox of Acting. Diderot draws on the lives of both actors and actresses to illuminate his arguments but uses ‘he’ when speaking in general terms about acting. However, we can understand his treatise to relate to both sexes on the stage.
15 Sir Laurence Olivier’s famous—but probably apocryphal—comment to Dustin Hoffman on the set of the 1976 film Marathon Man comes to mind as a less serious version of the same argument. Hoffman was tired, having stayed awake for seventy-two hours in an attempt to achieve emotional realism, prompting the veteran actor to remark: ‘My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?’ The story is quoted in Simkins Citation2016.