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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Sluttishness, circulation, and promiscuity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English theater

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Sluttishness, circulation, and promiscuity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English theater

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Content SLUTTISHNESS, CIRCULATION, AND PROMISCUITY IN SEVENTEENTH-‐ AND EIGHTEENTH-‐CENTURY ENGLISH THEATER by Katharine E. Zimolzak A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2015 Copyright 2015 Katharine Zimolzak ii Dedication for Mumzie, Da, and the other (smarter) Dr. Zimolzak iii Acknowledgements If I have failed to thank anyone for their support in my graduate education, it must only be because I am too humbled by all of the good wishes to possibly remember everyone who helped me along the way. The following people have been instrumental during the formation, writing, and final production of my dissertation: I first want to thank my cohorts, past and present, and mes heaux, for their warmth, love, friendship, and support. My brain would not be what it is today without the encouragement of my instructors, mentors, and professors over the years, especially Mary Ellen Miller for suggesting I teach, Timm Richardson and Roxanne Bruner for piquing my interest in theater and performance, Lauren Onkey for my cultural studies edification, Debbie Mix for teaching me what a thesis really looks like, Tony and Joanne Edmonds for the consummate learning experiences in their classrooms, Nancy West for my ongoing fascination with visual studies, and Devoney Looser for pulling me properly into the eighteenth century. For my continuous employment, I would like to thank The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences’ Department of English, and the faculty and staff of the Writing Program and Thematic Option; the practicality of getting food on the table isn’t perhaps glamorous to think about, but without my appointments in these programs I could not have survived even a year in Los Angeles, let alone seven. To this point, I would also like to thank my students for reminding me why I went into academia: iv even when I was struggling with my own scholarship, they astonished me with their insights and devotion to learning. For their continued feedback on various sections and stages of my project, I extend my thanks to the genial scholars of the American and Canadian Societies for Eighteenth Century Studies. I would also like to thank the staff of Chawton House Library, especially Jacqui Grainger and Gillian Dow, for kindly hosting me during one of my most productive and wildly fun bouts of research. Among my readers, I would like to thank Ileana Baird for providing comments and criticism of my Fielding chapter, for being a patient editor, and for finding my work worthy enough of publication. I cannot provide enough words of thanks to my prospectus and dissertation committees—Natania Meeker, Meg Russett, Bruce Smith, Joe Boone, Sheila Briggs, Leo Braudy, and Emily Anderson—but I would like to hope that this document stands as a monument to the work they have helped me accomplish. Natania: thank you for being more engaged as an outside committee member than I could have hoped for. Meg: thank you for stepping onto my fields committee at the last moment. Bruce: thank you for being instrumental in getting me past the prospectus stage. Joe: thank you for being my faculty mentor from my first day in the program. Sheila: your willingness to help out in the eleventh hour was instrumental in my ability to finish on time. Leo: thank you for having completed the exact trek from Restoration to film that I did so I could learn from your experience. Finally, Emily: I would be remiss not to single you out—without your indefatigable efforts, my dissertation v would have neither been started nor finished, and without your high standards of scholarship, I would not have accomplished half the tasks I set for myself. To my cheerleaders, I owe all the love, gratitude, and support that they have offered me in their turn. I thank Beggs, Bowers, Friedman, Gutter-‐Jaén, McQuigge, Nagle, Springs, Twinner, and Wennerstrom for hearing my rants and assuaging my fears; Ed for the constant assurance that my project may be many things, but boring isn’t one of them; John, for harassing me daily for page counts even when I found it bothersome, and for knowing I could when I thought I couldn’t; Patti, the Amandae, Stephen, Alex, Ash, and Susan for their verbal and written feedback; Devin, Jessie, Mike, and Meghan for our delightful work dates; Michiko, for being there to care at the end of the day; and Adrianne, for having been wise, willful, and wonderful. Mostly here I would like to thank Elizabeth, Jess, and Artur for their infinite generosity in heart and home: if I have even been half as much of a friend to you as you have been to me, I would count myself lucky. Finally, I would like to thank Linda and Daniel Zimolzak, as well as Andy Zimolzak and Elizabeth Moulton, for financially assisting, gently prodding, curiously inquiring, and constantly loving me. You have given me everything, and certainly more than I deserve. vi Table of Contents DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION 1 Scope, Methodologies, and Contributions 5 Women’s Primers, Hygiene, and the Science of Circulation 10 Chapter Outlines 25 CHAPTER ONE. Femme and Fortune: Circulation of Finance and Fate in Women’s Theatrical Comedies 29 Professional Actresses: Proto-‐Feminists or Gender Conformists? 31 Female Characters: Modern Subjects or Shallow Ciphers? 41 Women Writing: Circulation and Depth Behind the Words 44 Fortune, Finance, & Fate: Aphra Behn’s The Rover and The Lucky Chance 52 Female Playwright as Celebrity Spectacle: Pix’s Adventures in Madrid 65 Fortune Reformed in Four Plays by Susanna Centlivre 77 Conclusions 90 CHAPTER TWO. Ballads, Bawdry, and Bodies: The Circulations of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera 93 Polly Peachum: Slut Extraordinaire 97 Polly’s Afterlife in Circulation 103 The Corpus Consumed 113 Conclusions 118 CHAPTER THREE. Popularity, Social Circulation, and Satire in Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and The Pleasures of the Town 122 Network Dynamics and Textual History 136 Satires of Network Abuses in The Author’s Farce 142 Conclusions 147 CONCLUSIONS/CODA: Presaging the Novel 152 BIBLIOGRAPHY 155 vii Abstract Sluttishness, Circulation, and Promiscuity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century English Theater examines the concomitant types of circulation found in the theater of the late-‐seventeenth and early-‐eighteenth century in England. Included in these are financial, social, sexual, and textual circulations; this project explores the cultural forces that aided or prevented such circulation. In my studies, I have argued that all of these forms of circulation are present in the character of the slut. The slut is unique in her ability to comingle with different sexual partners, whether for financial or social gain, yet to maintain her independence in ways a prostitute might not. The slut captures interior and exterior dirtiness, carelessness for self and surroundings, and an ability to subvert expectations of what it means to be a woman. This figure—the slut—is the point of departure in my introduction: even as popular theater was invested in the slut and female professionalization, many authors used promiscuous circulation as a trope in their writing to probe the social and political potential of theatrical genres. Furthermore, I believe that the shift in the meaning of slut, the varieties of circulation, and the changing face of theater and in England are developing symbiotically. “Femme and Fortune: Circulation of Finance and Celebrity in Women’s Comedies” establishes the centrality of gender to popular theatricals. This chapter shows how female playwrights negotiated the increasing ability for women to earn a living without a man’s support. As other scholars have noted, early actresses viii instigated movements towards women’s professionalization: in its impact on society, professionalization for women was arguably progressive and/or transgressive, as were the professional women themselves. In this chapter, I analyze the transgressive potential of characters who concern themselves with the circulation of fortunes. In “Ballads, Bawdry, and Bodies: The Circulations of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera,” I add to my argument on theatrical circulation by analyzing what was one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century. Gay’s character Polly is an ideal case study because she circulates through popular culture of the day in a variety of genres. Furthermore, her fellow characters repeatedly label her a slut, and her popular circulation proves that she is sluttish in more than one way. Finally, “Popularity, Social Circulation, and Satire in Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and The Pleasures of the Town” examines the changing face of theatrical social networks and interpersonal circulations in the London theater community. I close with a brief coda and conclusion that gestures towards the rising popularity and circulations of the novel from the mid-‐eighteenth century onward. My analysis of the theater contributes to important socio-‐political trends that have appeared in scholarship about plays from the late-‐seventeenth and early-‐ eighteenth century. Going to see plays was wildly popular in this time period, and commonly held beliefs about the theater at the time seem to indicate an indivisible link between the theater and modes of circulation. 1 Introduction In early March of 2009, the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts staged a production of The Beggar’s Opera. The production, directed by Stephanie Shroyer, had its fair share of quirks and idiosyncrasies. Audience members gathered outside the Scene Dock Theater, a converted space that had been, as its name suggests, a loading bay and storage space in which to build sets for the school’s various productions. 1 Before the doors were opened, the Player and the Beggar crept up on the audience, incorporated themselves into the crowd, and eventually climbed a tree to announce the play and speak its first lines. As the two characters—and eventually the entire company—sang the first ballad, the viewers were ushered into a space configured nearly as a theater in the round: risers of seats surrounded the performance space, through which the players could move freely. Only the back wall of the theater did not feature seating, as it was the upstage entrance built to resemble part of the main characters’ home. There were times that a character would play with his back to nearly half of the audience. Set design notwithstanding, some audience members, myself included, found the players’ deliveries to be among the most notable quirks and idiosyncrasies of this production. Naturally, all of the performers had their own individual accents, vocal timbres, and inflections. And yet, each one of them repeatedly drew emphatic 1 “Scene Dock Theatre,” USC School of Dramatic Arts. Web. 2 attention to a single word that peppers the dialogue of more than a few characters, and that refers primarily to the young female character Polly Peachum (a poor pawnbroker’s daughter): “slut.” Why come down so heavily on this epithet? The decision certainly played well for laughter, but I wondered if there could be other implications of the word that my fellow twenty-‐first century audience members were overlooking. As it happens, there were. Even if the actors were just playing the word for laughs—watching someone receive verbal abuse can be wildly entertaining in the right circumstances—the spark had caught in my mind. A perusal of the Oxford English Dictionary definition reveals that a slut may be any of the following: 1. a. A woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul slattern. b. A kitchen maid; a drudge. c. A troublesome or awkward creature. 2. a. A woman of a low or loose character; a bold or impudent girl; a hussy, jade. b. In playful use, or without serious imputation of bad qualities. 3. A female dog; a bitch. 4. a. A piece of rag dipped in lard or fat and used as a light. b. The guttering of a candle. 2 2 "Slut, n," Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, March 2015). Henceforth cited as “OED.” 3 Notable here is that the definition as we know it today—pejoratively referring to a woman, or less frequently (though perhaps more degradingly) to a man, who engages in casual sex with multiple partners—is only addressed in the broadest of strokes. 3 A woman “of dirty habits” who exhibits “low or loose character” may or may not be sexually promiscuous. Rather, these definitions seem to suggest that a slut is “dirty” both outside and inside; that she is physically slovenly and morally suspect. What, then, are the implications of a twenty-‐first century theatrical cast insisting on dramatic emphasis of a word that bore a variety of different definitions during the era in which the text was originally composed? Significantly, both the past and present uses of the word can be characterized by physical manifestations: a sexual slut may have sores from a sexually transmitted infection, or a stretched belly from frequent childbearing; a slovenly slut would not keep her clothing or surroundings clean, so it should come as no surprise that she might also be dirty or careless in her sexual habits. In either case, the slut becomes physical bodily spectacle, whether by her own design or not. 4 Because she can be identified 3 There is a distinctly gendered problematic at play whenever a man is degraded with words typically reserved for a woman. Consider “man-‐whore,” “acting like a bitch/pussy,” or even less vulgarly “throwing like a girl”—such insults are clearly predicated on the assumption that to be a woman or girl is inherently inferior to being a man or boy. 4 I will discuss visibility as a type of circulation in my chapter on female authors, the point of which is to demonstrate that the professionalized woman was often considered to be somewhat of a spectacle. The visible spectacle of stage performance adds a level of agency and changeability that is arguably not found in other media. In print media such as novels, characters do not have physical bodies, which is a necessary condition for both sluttishness and spectacle. Although the slut does appear in other performed media (e.g. ballads, poetic recitation), she might not 4 primarily by her bodily characteristics, the slut’s physical presence makes her especially proficient as a dissembler, a performer, and a trickster in different physical guises. It is my contention, however, that the most important link between the past and present meanings of the word “slut” is a sense of promiscuity and circulation. Significantly, the words “promiscuous” and “slut” are very much alike because neither originally provoked sexually connotations. Rather, “promiscuous” most literally means that something mixes easily. 5 Many types of circulation, mixing, and comingling exist, all of which are present in the figure of the slut: 1. She moves from one sexual partner to the next, not only circulating in multiple beds, but also mixing her bodily fluids with those of her many lovers; 2. Scientific advancements earlier in the seventeenth century brought about knowledge of blood’s circulation through the body, the circulation of germs that caused disease, and the ways in which uncleanly “sluttish” surroundings produced just such germs; 3. In a different vein, a slut may be “sleeping around” (a metaphor notable for its use of round/circle imagery) for financial gain, suggesting that money circulates, changing hands even as she does; 4. Even if not for profit, the slut may use her sexual will to manipulate the powers of social advancement, such that her body circulates through be the primary locus of visibility, and not the agent of her own promiscuous circulation. 5 From the Latin prō- [prefix, “in favor of”] + miscēre [“to mix”]. 5 various social spheres and relationships. The more powerful people she has sex with, the more she stands to move upward through the echelons of society. As an already significant site of circulation, the promiscuous slut also brings her tendency for comingling to the theater, and the texts in which she appears. Characters who are referred to as sluts (or actresses who cultivated a sense of promiscuity in their off-‐stage personae) can circulate through the popular consciousness: a story is told and retold, audience members come to idolize or emulate a popular character, and some lucky few characters/actresses are transmitted into different media—they are painted, sculpted, or sketched. While the character’s/actress’ physical body is performing on stage, and while the slut’s body is described in words, they retain some characteristics (Polly is always poor) but adapt to others (many actresses have portrayed her) through the course of a text’s life—because just like a promiscuously circulating woman, a literary text goes through cycles of transmission, revision, publication, and print circulation. Scope, Methodologies, and Contributions Before I launch into my readings of the theatrical texts that will provide the bulk of my project, I should hazard a few clarifications and caveats. My project centers on British comedic theater of the late-‐seventeenth and early-‐eighteenth centuries; although I will address a variety of media, I approach this work first and foremost as a literary scholar interested in the historical implications of theater. In the time period roughly between the Restoration and the 1737 Licensing Act, the 6 popularity of theater flourished: professional actresses appeared for the first time, playwrights and their companies were benefiting greatly from Charles II’s patronage of dramatic arts, and print culture was growing exponentially. Theater’s otherwise ephemeral nature—arguably, patrons can see a different performance nightly—was ripe for propagation under Carolinian rule: not only did the print culture allow other multimedia texts to circulate in and around the playhouse (for example, broadsheet ballads for musicals, playbills, ticket stubs, newspaper reviews), but also because of the different interpretations that were rendered possible by different performances, receptions, and perpetuations of the narratives that audience members viewed and talked about. In other words, as a play garnered popular attention, more texts were generated around it. Instead of dampening the impact of the antecedent, however, these additional texts heightened the play’s popularity, and in many cases helped people remember something as fleeting as a live performance. For example, Nell Gwynn’s popularity in slut roles was immortalized in Pepys’ diary, in paintings, in poetic blazons or lampoons, and in the famous anecdote of her light-‐hearted “Protestant whore” quip. In this process, viewers’ memories of the play itself may have changed, but the narrative would have become more memorable, more easy to circulate, because it was so easy to adapt into different media. The dominant methodologies by which scholars have recently analyzed eighteenth-‐century theater are sub-‐disciplines of cultural materialism and gender performance studies. I believe each of these methodologies is necessary to my project, but each is also only presenting half the necessary perspective: my critical 7 approach in this project is a juxtaposition of cultural materialism and gender performance studies. Recent work in cultural materialism, for example, has demonstrated that early incarnations of popular multimedia, celebrity, and consumer culture certainly existed, and that those incarnations circulated largely in print, performance, and public conversation. 6 Much work in this sub-‐discipline focuses on either the market economy of popular culture, of selling material goods; or on multisensory experiences, neurology, medical history, phenomenology, and reception theory. Detailed studies of portraiture, ballads, novels, and other common multimedia texts indicate the era’s growing consumer culture, and how the culture’s favorite narratives often revolved around theatrical productions. 7 My addition to this line of scholarship is that sluts were a similar cultural material that transcended media boundaries in order to circulate: the physical body, theatrical performance, portraits, gossip, ballads, news stories, and theater reviews are all examples of media in which the slut has currency. Although any character or celebrity can be said to have currency in these different media, the slut’s promiscuity and the ease by which she circulates makes her particularly aptly suited to this multimedia interplay. 6 Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996) and It (2007), and John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), for example, detail the historical milieu of popular culture in the eighteenth century, particularly as it pertained to dramatic production. 7 On portraiture, ballads, and novels respectively, see Gillian Perry’s Spectacular Flirtations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Steve Newman’s Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 8 Gender studies and performance theory also comprise a large bulk of scholarship on eighteenth-‐century theater. 8 These works often address the performer’s body itself as a text to be studied; the slut, on the other hand, often transcends physical study, because “slut” can also connote ideological promiscuity and filth. Within existing scholarship, for example, Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores (2005) and Laura J. Rosenthal’s Infamous Commerce (2006) draw parallels between the performances by actresses and prostitutes—two of the earliest professions for women. 9 In the theoretical space between actress and whore, I locate a gap in scholarship where the slut thrives: she is a sexualized performing woman, like both the whore and the actress, but she does not always earn her living from acting or sex work. Performances of gender, of promiscuous sexuality, and the emergence of the acting profession for women overlap uniquely in the slut character. Actresses who physically enacted sluttishness would have promoted another promiscuous, yet immaterial medium of transmission: gossip. 10 With her reputation derived from, and propagated in, the circulation of gossip, the slut and her scandalizing public sexuality advanced the nascent celebrity culture. For the types of texts and the authors that I have selected, I have completed exhaustive searches and compiled data from various search engines, databases, and 8 Works such as those by Lisa Freeman, Elizabeth Howe, Matthew Kinservik, Felicity Nussbaum, Kristina Straub, and Janet Todd, to name a few, concern themselves with sexual and performative implications of theater, and the influence theater had on shifting social spaces for men and women. 9 Janet Todd’s The Sign of Angellica (1989) engages in women’s self-‐fashioning as performers and professionals; this text is also useful in locating the intersections between sexuality, professionalism, and performance. 10 For extended exploration of gossip as a means of circulation, see Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985). 9 archives. Based on the frequency of use of the word “slut,” the text’s continued cultural capital, and the author’s notability as a key player in the long eighteenth century, I read the text and determined if it could be useful to my study. I can’t pretend that a lot of these texts didn’t fall into my path by chance: during a month-‐ long fellowship at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, I discovered several uses of the word slut that had not turned up in previous research, including the phrase “cover-‐slut,” used to describe a type of throw blanket that can serve as a makeshift slip-‐cover for a decrepit piece of furniture or as a way to hide a heap of otherwise disparate articles of clothing. Ultimately, I believe the slut and the narratives in which she appears are perpetuated and circulated through the collective memory by means of promiscuous repetition and representation in various generic forms. In this way, because of their similarly promiscuous and easily adaptable nature, non-‐print texts can have decidedly concrete impacts on public taste, consumer demands, and citizens’ interactions with different media. A popular ballad tune like those in The Beggar’s Opera, for example, can stay in the listener’s mind more easily than if that listener were to be confronted with an entire unfamiliar musical opus. A portrait, too, may be quickly received, interpreted, and remembered even by an illiterate viewer, whose ability to internalize and remember a written text might not be so possible. Since memory and sensual experiences help determine what texts will retain cultural and canonical value, I believe the slut and her promiscuous surroundings provide an accurate topos for circulation: the slut’s past sensual or sexual experiences are products of physical circulation, yet in the seemingly 10 permanent manifestation of this dirt, disease, or slovenliness, the physical marks of sluttishness contribute to further germ circulation. Some things are durable, whereas others succumb to decrepitude: paradoxically, the slut’s body may decay, but the promiscuous stories and memories her body carried will persist, adapt, and survive. My contribution to the existing scholarship is, simply, an extended exploration of the eminently circulated slut: as of yet, English literary studies have not produced such an exploration of this figure, but she is fascinating in her implications for how we understand and value different forms of circulation. I want now to return to the initial ideas of sluts and slovenliness that I put forward in the first four pages of this introduction. In the following section, I will briefly distill cultural and scientific findings about dirt and circulation that will establish a fair amount of groundwork for my dissertation. Here I will examine women’s primers, handbooks, and miscellanies that were cultural artifacts contributing to the conflation of “sluttish circulation” with “moral lassitude.” These primers, in other words, were broadly designed to keep young women in proper habits. I will also include academic references to scientific progress across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors of which engage with the advanced understanding of the physical properties and effects of circulation. Women’s Primers, Hygiene, and the Science of Circulation As a brief case study, a concrete example to illustrate the cultural forces that might have aided or prevented physical or social circulation, I would like to consider a popular genre of writing that women both composed and consumed: the primer, 11 miscellany, or women’s handbook. In its most common function, a primary book or women’s handbook was effectively an etiquette primer, or a way for a woman to learn how to act more ladylike: how to cook, how to treat sickness, and how to keep house by eliminating uncleanliness. Similarly, the miscellany was an anthology of instructive and cautionary tales (some fictional and some not) with essentially the same aim: to help young women internalize notions of propriety. The complex spectrum of dirt and cleanliness that these books examine illustrates that women, perhaps more than other groups in the eighteenth century, were conflated with notions of dirtiness. Although the collections I address in this section are not directly in service of a study of the theater, I think they are necessary for inclusion as a way to understand, from a non-‐fiction standpoint, how seventeenth and eighteenth century women were typically being educated in multifarious subjects—and in many ways, how women’s primers were meant to keep susceptible young women in the home instead of at the theater. Such texts as these provide important groundwork by which we can understand many of the broader cultural notions of circulation as the citizens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have understood them: notions of performance (i.e. how to act “ladylike”), of dirt’s circulation and elimination from the household, of the texts’ circulation, of femininity and its connection to dirtiness, and of the burden of propriety. Women’s primers and handbooks were not typically produced by the same publishing houses as those that printed editions of plays, but the means of circulation that attended both types of publications are strikingly similar: that is, primers were generally circulated as gifts 12 or subscriptions, and publishers relied on word of mouth and advertisements in the backs of their publications to garner a wider audience. 11 Likewise, live theater relied heavily on word of mouth and publishers’ advertisements. Anthropologist Adeline Masquelier has argued that argues that discourses of dirt carry with them a “gendered metaphysics of power and knowledge” in which “gender is a central axis of difference through which ideas of dirt, pollution, and immodesty can be instantiated.” 12 Masquelier examines the potential moral implications of dirt: Unwashed hands, greasy clothes, offensive smells, [and] grime on the skin all entered into complex judgments about not only the social position of the “dirty” person but also his or her moral worth…. Dirt is not inherently “dirty,” disgusting, or debasing but sometimes points to metaphorical rather than literal pollution. By implication, dirt is not always a physical substance that can be swept away with a broom or washed off with soap…. At times it has more to do with the elimination of substances or states symbolically associated with disorder and impurity. 13 11 Each of the women’s handbooks I address in this section contained lists of “Other Works” from their respective publishing houses. Publishers of primers, handbooks, and miscellanies typically published similarly educational materials and collections of prose and poetic works by various authors. 12 Adeline Masquelier, “Dirt, Un/Dress, and Difference: An Introduction,” in Dirt, Un/Dress, and Difference: Cultural Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, ed. Masquelier (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), 6. 13 Masquelier, 10; emphasis added. The states of symbolic impurity will be paramount in my further discussion of sluts. 13 Masquelier concedes that dirt can be a “his or her” quality, suggesting that the binary of “dirty/not dirty” may be divided along lines of class or culture. The still-‐ common parlance of “dirt poor” or “dirty foreigners” were also at play long eighteenth century, but traditions of Western Civilization provide ample evidence to suggest that this “dirty/not dirty” division is originally one of gender: Judeo-‐ Christian teachings—i.e., those also with strongest influence in the Church of England—place Eve (and thus all women) in a position of sin and spiritual filth that is meant to be borne out during the intensely physical trial of childbirth. 14 In the Midwives Book (1671), a handbook on pregnancy and childbirth, Jane Sharp voices this belief: “A woman is not so perfect as a man, because her heat is weaker, but the man can do nothing without the woman to beget children.” 15 Such traditions meant that women were “imperfect” because they were expected to perform some literal dirty work, like childbirth or the maintenance of the household. There is a vicious cycle to this: women are considered dirty by nature, so they should tolerate working to improve a dirty condition; this work in turn leaves them dirty at the end of the day, confirming that they are dirty by nature. In spite of the cyclic (and practically tautological) downward spiral, and because of the preexisting conflations of women with dirt, a new perspective of one would necessarily mean a new perspective of the other. To direct an investigation of this societal movement towards a general adoption of cleanliness, I turn to women’s 14 For detailed examination, see Margaret Healy, “Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Myth in Early Modern England,” National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context, eds. Michael Worton and Nana Wilson-‐Tagoe (London: UCL Press, 2004), 83-‐94 15 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 37. 14 miscellanies, etiquette primers, and housewives’ handbooks. Hannah Wooley’s Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673) and collections like The Ladies’ Library (1714, editorship attributed to Steele, but without ascribed authorship) are among the works that negotiate women’s social roles in the maintenance of a cleanly household. I will also include John Shirley’s The Accomplished Ladies’ Rich Closet of Rarities (1695) as a text that is primarily attributed to a male author; as well as Amelia Chambers’ The Ladies’ Best Companion (1775), and various issues of The Female Preceptor (collected 1814), as evidence that concerns of proper cleanliness and femininity bookended the long eighteenth century. 16 I chose this long view of the eighteenth century not to hazard a comprehensive assessment of dirt’s rhetoric, but to offer brief summary glimpses of Great Britain’s shifting attitudes towards dirt (in all its guises) over the time period covered in this section. Dirt has three basic rhetorical functions in these works. There are, in other words, three major ways of seeing dirt, or three types of dirt: 1. As anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, dirt is “matter out of place,” something that needs to be eliminated from the body or environment for aesthetic or hygienic reasons. To give some examples: “garbage, animal feces, social outcasts, and sexual dirt.” 17 16 I will secondarily make brief mention of one or two other works that aren’t women’s handbooks, primers, or miscellanies for the sake of paralleling these works with others of the time. Each of the primary works I reference in this section was accessed during a month-‐long fellowship at Chawton House Library, Hampshire, in November 2012. 17 William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), viii. 15 2. Dirt is a way to embody badness and difference as a physical thing, or as an enemy to the person who would eliminate it; 3. Third, dirt can manifest as any mental (religious, moral/ethical, philosophical, metaphysical) smudge that would prevent its bearer from achieving “proper” humanity—and in this case, femininity. In short, these three types of dirt are on the body, on something proximal to the body, and in or of the body. Each type of dirt plays out in the different handbooks: for example, The Ladies’ Library seems to address dirt as “matter out of place” (the first rhetorical function, the most literal dirt) when the author notes, “If we consider the equal consequences of lust and uncleanness...we shall avoid all filthiness of the flesh” (“Chastity,” 158). 18 This kind of “filthiness of the flesh” could be literal—a sore or lesion from venereal disease—but it might also be figurative, or spiritual, because the author also remarks on the filthiness of vanity: “All such attire as serves to looseness and immodesty is forbidden by the scripture” (“Dress,” 97). By stating that “The slightest act of dalliance leaves something of stain and sullage,” the author knowingly obscures whether this “stain” would be literal or metaphorical (“Daughter,” 43). From these examples, we see that even talking about dirt is dirty: there’s slippage between meanings of dirt as “concept, matter, experience, and metaphor.” 19 This “hyper-‐dirt” is frustrating, but also potentially revealing: by recognizing dirt’s own properties and difficulty to pin down, we can approach the subject in a way that allows the different types of dirtiness to mingle and circulate. 18 Subsequent references to primary texts will be made parenthetically with reference to an essay or section title where available. 19 Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox, eds., Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1. 16 It is also important to note the increased interest in human physiology and scientific advancements that developed alongside these women’s primers, particularly concerning the internal anatomy that made circulation—and thus the spreading of internal dirt, germs, and disease—possible. Up until this time, ancient theories of humoral medicine suggested, for example, that conception occurred when a man “produced seed that engendered offspring in the uterine environment. The white, milky appearance of semen indicated that male heat had concocted male seed, something women (regarded as constitutionally colder) could not do.” 20 Semen was understood to consist mostly of blood: “‘a hot and moist substance which has the nature of phlegm in arteries and veins to nourish them,’ it turned these substances into sperm. In men, sperm descended from the head…straight into the testicles, through one vein and artery on either side.” 21 Even in this passage, we can see a preliminary understanding of the ways in which fluids circulated through veins and arteries. As many humoral theories were gradually discredited, other theories of temperature, passions and spirits still persisted in discussions of sexual health: “Allopathic therapies assumed that men were dry and hot while women were wet and cold.” 22 Beyond the realms of reproduction, William Harvey published his radical essay De Motu Cordis in 1628, having examined the circulation of blood in animals and humans. 23 Figures such as Nicholas Culpeper were working during the 20 Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102. 21 Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humors (New York: Ecco, 2007), 82. 22 Crawford 104. 23 Noga Arikha rightly remarks, “Scholars of this chaotic, brutal, distressed period of English history [often say] that Harvey’s thought mirrored his times—the status of 17 1640s and 1650s to translate Latin texts with the intent to distribute information about humoral remedies to an English-‐speaking popular audience, much like the authors of women’s handbooks. The popular publication of medical tracts flew in the face of the Royal College of Physicians, and humoral physiology was becoming increasingly unpopular: “once its unraveling began, it took little time for it to be discarded.” 24 These physical and sexual concerns with the circulation of bodily fluids, and with the ability for the body to circulate or purge uncleanly substances, are certainly at play in women’s handbooks. In the earliest dated among my primary texts, Wooley’s Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673) and Patrick Lord Ruthven’s collection The Ladies Cabinet Enlarged and Opened (1655), the authors’ castigations of dirt have less to do with the body’s surface or surroundings than they do with internal imbalances or aesthetic ugliness—that is, the third type of dirt, which was of most interest in discussions of health from this time. Ruthven, for example, provides a recipe for “Artificial Tunbridge water,” named for a healing spring in Kent: “This water proceeding from an Iron Mine…opens obstructions, purgeth by urine, cleanseth the kidneys and bladder, helps pissing of blood, and difficulty of making water, it allayeth all sharp humors, cureth inward ulcers and impostures, cleanseth and strengtheneth the stomach and liver, &c.” (63-‐4). Humans, of course, have a natural and internal defense system against unwanted dirt: “The body’s nervous system expels [unacceptable foods or drink] by vomiting; the kidneys and liver…filter and the center of the so-‐called body politic was in crisis just as he was redefining the function of the human heart” (182). 24 Arikha 173, 203. 18 cleanse; the bowels …evacuate physical waste, or redundant water and solids.” 25 Although Ruthven’s Tunbridge cure hints at a very human desire to “purge” the body of impurities, to be clean and healthy, it still relies on a humoral understanding of medicine, in which the body is “permeable to heat and water,” and in which “bathing was thought to be dangerous to health—letting vital substances seep out and dangerous ones in,” such that “people rarely washed their bodies or clothes thoroughly.” 26 It was said that, after a bath, “When one emerges, the flesh and the whole disposition of the body are softened and the pores open, and as a result, pestiferous vapor can rapidly enter the body and cause sudden death.” 27 Regarding the circulation of dirt as it pertained to sexuality, the continental book Conservateur de la Santé (1763) rightly notes that the genitals might be a particularly susceptible point of entry for illness, but like its English equivalents, this medical guide falls back into the logic of humoral medicine: “If perspiration or sweat remain on these [genital] parts…the warmth inflames them, and…is taken up by the absorbent vessels and carried into the circulation where it can only do harm by disposing the humors to putrefaction.” 28 Because of the body’s supposed permeability to germs after washing, restorative waters like Ruthven’s were wildly popular. Because the notions still prevailed that bathing rendered the body more susceptible to bad germs, it was not a common practice at the time. Samuel Pepys 25 Virginia Smith, “Evacuation, Repair and Beautification: Dirt and the Body,” Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Profile Books, 2011), 13. 26 Campkin and Cox 2. 27 Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007), 94. 28 Qtd. in Ashenburg 153. 19 counts it noteworthy one day that his wife Elizabeth bathed in 1665: “She now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long it will hold I can guess.” 29 Katherine Ashenburg claims that a centuries-‐long distaste for bathing could be traced to venereal diseases being spread through “sexual hijinks” at public baths, humoral theories of medicine, and fear of the plague: “Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-‐century chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, was convinced that hot baths were one of the principal reasons Rome weakened and fell” 30 In her Gentlewoman’s Companion, Hannah Wooley only gives the following advice on washing the face: [To] make it look beautiful and fair: take rosemary and boil it in white-‐wine, with the juice of Erigan put thereunto, and wash your face therewith mornings and evenings. If your face be troubled with heat, take elderflowers, plantain, white daisy-‐roots, and herb-‐robert, and put these into running-‐water, and wash your face therewith at night, and in the morning. (174) Notable here is that Wooley only prescribes the use of water “if your face be troubled with heat,” and even then the cleanliness of such water could be debated. Rather than washing or bathing the body, the use of fresh linens was a more popular modes of staying healthy: “A French household manual from 1691 emphasizes at length the maid’s responsibility for her mistress’s linen. As for the skin under the immaculate linen, the servant need only know how to draw a foot 29 Qtd. in David J. Eveleigh, Bogs, Baths and Basins: The Story of Domestic Sanitation (Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002), 62. 30 Ashenburg 12, 15. 20 bath and make a paste to clean the hands.” 31 On the continent, etiquette manuals present “instructions for cleaning only hands, face, head and hair until the mid-‐ eighteenth century. At that point, feet are mentioned.” 32 This sentiment is echoed in Wooley: on the way a woman passes her time between her morning and nightly face-‐washing, she says “It behooves you to be very diligent and willing to do what you are bid to do; and though your employment be greasy and smutty, yet if you please you may keep your self from being nasty, therefore let it be your care to keep yourself clean;” and “Incline not to sloth, and love not to laze in bed, but rise early; having dressed yourself with decency and cleanliness” (214, 17; emphasis added). Wooley later admits, however, “I do find that washing…is condemned in holy writ, as the practice of loose, licentious, and lascivious women” (237-‐8). In other words, to wash is to concede that you are dirty and germy; we can understand her earlier points about “keeping oneself clean” and “dressing with decency and cleanliness” as a charge to wear tidy clothing, not as a concern for washing away physical dirt. This aversion to bathing is also substantiated in Wooley’s caution to young women: “If you are stubborn and careless, who do you think will trouble themselves with you…? Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings; and I myself have known a brave gallant to fall foul with the wench of the scullery” (214). Although this castigation includes quite metaphorical dogs and puddings, the literal dirty scullery wench is so largely because she is from a lower social class, or because she does dirty work, but not because of her bodily hygiene. 31 Ashenburg 110. 32 Ashenburg 102. 21 The seventeenth-‐century notion that bathing, health, and cleanliness were only tangentially related continued after the Restoration and into the early-‐ eighteenth century. By mid-‐century (as I addressed on pp. 12-‐13 in the Ladies Library examples), just as the type of dirt discussed was becoming increasingly unclear—the stains, sullages, or smudges could be physical or metaphysical, of quantity or quality, external or internal—so the need to wash was growing ever more apparent. For washing, Amelia Chambers prescribes “an ounce burnt copperas, the same quantity of starch, and as much brimstone” as a means of removing pimples from the face (120). Here we see how the processes of washing might seem antithetical to the contents of the cleaning solution: “To make fine wash balls [for clothing]: mix two ounces of cloves with the same quantity of sanders, and four pounds of the best white soap cut into small pieces; put to it twenty grains of musk, dissolve the whole in rose-‐water, then make it up in balls for use” (89). Yes, your soap should contain soap, but it may also include brimstone, sanders, and fat or grease—substances typically considered uncleanly. The “clean clothing = good health” equation is still at play at this time: in The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1695), John Shirley instructs women to “observe that your face and hands are clean, …that you handle no dirty or greasy things, …[and] see your napkin be fastened about you to save your clothes” (177). With this injunction, it is important to note that Shirley places “don’t handle grease” and “save your clothes” in their own separate clauses; the cleaning of the body’s surface and the cleaning of clothing are each necessary, but it begins to look like they’re important for different reasons. 22 Cleanly dressing, or as Shirley puts it, dressing “decently, proportionable to your body, and suitable to your degree” (185), tells us that the early-‐ to mid-‐ eighteenth century citizen was still interested in a balance of qualities (as in the humoral remedies to uncleanly habits), but that such a balance would have spiritual or psychological benefits as well as physical. In other words, the early-‐eighteenth conduct manual authors were invested in moderation (of dress, behavior, cleaning—everything), and in blurring the boundaries between physical and metaphysical dirt. By the late-‐eighteenth century, this moderation had become expected, and people openly accepted that cleanliness could demonstrate something beyond physical well-‐being: “Words such as ‘slovenly’ and ‘sluttish’ encapsulate the relationship between women’s housekeeping standards and their perceived moral worth.” 33 The authors of essays in The Female Preceptor (1814) caution, “As for your dress, let it be neat, but not gaudy, for virtue is comely in any dress[;] be content to appear in your native beauty: let your dressing time be short, and your recreation moderate;” and, “Never descend to converse with those whose birth, education, and early views in life, were not superior to a state of servitude” (“Employment of Time,” 182, 96). In this passage, the types of dirt are being blurred again: are we supposed to moderate recreation because it will literally make us sweat, or because sunburned skin will make you look like a field-‐worker, and thus qualitatively “dirty” because of your working-‐class status? Are we supposed to avoid consorting with “the help” because we might get physically dirty, or because our associations with 33 Rosie Cox, “Dishing the Dirt: Dirt in the Home,” Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Profile Books, 2011), 49. Consider also John Wesley’s popular maxim that cleanliness is next to godliness. 23 them could sully our reputation? By this time, “[A house’s] cleanliness demonstrated how many servants were employed and how well those servants worked. The use of open fires, the difficulties of heating water and the lack of modern cleaning products, such as soap or washing powder, all meant that houses were dirtier and cleaning was more time consuming and difficult.” 34 Meanwhile, those servants (who were notably mostly women) were settling like dust into a neglected space of dirty subjugation. The (metaphorical) messy layers of meaning that permeate one another when we discuss different types of dirt begin to seep out (as dirt will do) from the rhetoric of class to that of race and colonization: “Humans not only created tools and technologies to keep dirt at bay, but also ideologies that co-‐opted the dangerous power of dirt to frighten, coerce, or educate others.” 35 In this vein, The Female Preceptor includes the following description in an essay on Arabs of the Barbary: “When they are not called abroad by labor, they remain shut up in their tents, where they sit squatting down amidst filth and vermin. Their dress consists only of a few greasy rags, which they never wash. They have no linen, and carry their whole paltry wardrobe along with them” (283). By the time of the French and American Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the accession of Queen Victoria, we are starting to see how women’s handbook writers used dirt not simply as a scare tactic to force their female readers into proper hygiene, but also as a frightful way of looking at cultural or national “others,” and as a means of discouraging the promiscuous mixing of miscegenation: such a way of thinking posits that these 34 Campkin and Cox 12. 35 Smith 34. 24 others haven’t caught on to our knowledge of sanitation and hygiene, so we must either convince them to change their ways or we must accept that they are simply not as intelligent or advanced as we are. This dirt-‐as-‐ideology is dangerous, but equally dangerous is the reverberations in the dirt, the rebellion that drives subjugated people to revolt against those who have brushed them into the corners of society. Over the time between 1660 and 1830, there is certainly a move towards an understanding of dirt as something to be excised, a move towards purification, which was of broad interest to the Victorians in the following century: Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor and the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864 (especially those specific to venereal diseases) called attention to social problems and demanded significant changes to eliminate squalor, disease, and the immoral “dirt” that could be bred in such conditions. In this section, we have seen late-‐ seventeenth, eighteenth, and early-‐nineteenth century authors showing us the typical literate woman’s paradoxical place: clean, healthy, and dressed properly, but also occasionally at work, sweaty, and grimy. Even the women who did not clean house themselves were required to manage their household staff, and as we have already seen, too much consorting with someone of lower status could leave an unsavory mark on a higher-‐class lady’s character. Just so, cleaning practices were often paradoxical: a powder used to eliminate oil on the face might contain a mineral dust, or a cleaning agent might contain lye, grease, or sulfur. People often scrubbed up with plant fibers, with “wood ashes or the absorbent clay called fuller’s 25 earth.” 36 Cohen and Johnson make the distinction that “Filth…is wholly unregenerate,” but polluting substances like fat in soap could “become conceivably productive, the discarded sources in which riches may lie, and therefore fecund and fertile in their potential.” 37 I would counter that no matter how cleanly a lady or how regenerated a formerly dirty substance might be, there is always a smudge remaining. Buried underneath the midden-‐heap of disgust, however, I believe there comes a similar sense of awe for dirt: germs and dirty conditions can kill people, as these etiquette and household primer authors cautioned, and surely we must respect anything with that level of power. Try as you may to eliminate dirt from your body or household, it will continue to circulate. Even when the appearance of cleanliness is presented, as we know, there may still be germs. As Rosie Cox reminds us, “Germs are invisible to the naked eye, [and] there are no obvious indicators of their successful removal, hence no limit to the amount of cleaning that might be necessary.” 38 Likewise, these qualities or conditions of dirt could also be said of the women with whom dirt was so regularly associated: both are in constant circulation, have constant presence, and are powerful even in the smallest amounts. Chapter Outlines From this brief cross-‐sectional and cross-‐century exploration, I reach the jumping off point of this dissertation: dirt, women’s bodies, and the texts they were 36 Ashenburg 23. 37 Cohen and Johnson x. 38 Cox 44. 26 consuming all circulate. In the public venues of London theater especially, dirty bodies circulated freely and regularly—as did textual narratives. As a controlling keyword in this project, “circulation” is multifaceted, repetitive, extensive, and occasionally difficult to pin down. The types of things that circulate—actresses and their characters, germs and bodily fluids, songs and other texts, money, rumors, and the wheels of fate—are the fodder for my chapters. First, I address the circulation of fictional female characters who were created by women. “Femme and Fortune: Circulation of Finance and Celebrity in Women’s Comedies” closely examines tropes of circulation as they appear in a series of plays by female authors. The keyword of primary interest in this chapter is “fortune”: not only in the sense of financial wealth, but also in the sense of fate or good luck. The plays in this chapter present a compelling trend in a woman’s increasing ability to earn a living without a man’s support. To the female playwrights who made their living by their craft, the circulation of currency and the potential for financial independence would be a subject of particular personal importance. This chapter not only addresses female playwrights, but also their sisters in arms—early actresses. Many scholars have already noted the actresses’ contributions to advancements in women’s professionalization. Though this scholarly ground is well-‐trod, I believe the two professions were codependent for success: female playwrights would write speeches for their female characters that included significant political statements about the nature of women’s independence and financial freedom. In its impact on society, professionalization for women was 27 arguably progressive and/or transgressive, as were these two brands of professional women themselves. Next, “Ballads, Bawdry, and Bodies: The Circulations of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera” engages with the circulations of body, dirt, and text in one of the eighteenth century’s most popular plays, featuring one of the century’s most popular slut characters. Even as the play itself was revived, restaged, and revered, the main female character, Polly Peachum, was involved in circulations of her own that were often largely independent of the Opera’s success. The play and Polly’s circulations are, in my estimation, mutually beneficial their popularity spread. As a practically consumable product of the popular text, Polly is an interesting subject in and of herself; what makes her particularly interesting to my study is that her fellow characters repeatedly call her a slut throughout the course of the play. I examine the different media—song, painting, poetry, printed cards, and porcelain figurines, among others—through which Polly circulated. Because she was presented in these different media, and because she is sluttish in more than one sense of the word, I argue that Polly’s promiscuity and circulation firmly establishes her as the eighteenth century’s favorite slut. Furthermore, I consider that the Oxford English Dictionary definition includes the suggestion that a slut can be “a troublesome or awkward creature,” or “a bold, impudent girl.” This might lead us to ask what exactly a slut like Polly is troubling, what she’s willfully rebelling against, or what she’s confronting with her impertinent, impudent behavior. Finally, “Popularity, Social Circulation, and Satire in Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and The Pleasures of the Town” explores the ways in which humans 28 and rumors circulated throughout the London theater community. I suggest that the different editions of Fielding’s play, which commented on the noteworthy state of theater, indicated that Fielding himself was anticipating the changing face of theatrical politics, social networks, and interpersonal circulations in the 1730s. I also note by way of conclusion that Fielding’s work in the theater gestures towards his future career as a novelist. After the 1737 Licensing Act, governmental censorship made it increasingly difficult for theatrical texts to circulate, thus signaling the necessity for a new popular genre in which stories, satires, and social critiques could disseminate; this new genre was the novel, which would rise in popularity from the mid-‐eighteenth century onward. Ultimately, as a popular space, the theater was indivisible from modes of circulation, whether they were financial, sexual, textual, social, or political. 29 CHAPTER ONE Femme and Fortune: Circulation of Finance and Fate in Women’s Theatrical Comedies Put up thy gold, and know, That were thy fortune large as is thy soul, Thou shouldst not buy my love. ~Angellica Bianca The Rover, Aphra Behn Few details are known for certain about the life of Aphra Behn. She may have been Catholic, and married either a German or Dutch man (who may have been a merchant); she very likely traveled to Surinam in an early part of her life, and worked as a spy for Charles II in the Netherlands; she may or may not have ever received remuneration for her service as a spy, as a result of which poverty, she may or may not have served a sentence in debtors’ prison. 1 One detail of her life is certain: to overcome her debts, she took work as a playwright for the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company, and she was the first woman to earn an independent livelihood from the pursuit of writing. 2 Women who had not established careers for themselves or inherited sums of money—that is to say, the majority of women—were dependent on the men in their 1 Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996), 67-‐71, 119. 2 Todd 137, 138. 30 lives to provide financial security for them: “to be sure, in the aristocratic classes women achieved some mobility, but such liberties as visits to the theater depended very much on the compliance of the husband, who still owned all the money his wife had brought into the marriage.” 3 Financial freedom was a uniting concern to many women whose lives intertwined with the theater of the late-‐seventeenth and early-‐ eighteenth century. Even as women were losing opportunities for traditional employment, being “edged out…by male midwives and male milliners,” social standards were shifting to favor leisure pursuits rather than careers for women. 4 This chapter contextualizes my interest in circulation specifically as it applies to professional female authors. For this chapter, I will examine historical and scholarly evidence and advance textual readings that demonstrate the types of circulation that were most important to female playwrights: namely, financial circulation and the circulation of rumors related to a woman’s celebrity or infamy. It is my sense that, as newly professionalized and financially independent people, female playwrights were deeply and personally invested in the modes and outcomes of financial circulation. A woman’s involvement with monetary circulation could likewise tarnish her reputation. As we will see throughout this chapter, a female playwright’s decision to pursue a career as a professional writer meant that she exposed her life to the sort of circulation that was no longer entirely within her control. Actresses, the characters they portrayed, the female audience members who observed the characters and actresses, and the female authors who wrote the 3 Margarete Rubik, Early Women Dramatists, 1550-1800 (New York: Palgrave, 1998), 17. 4 Rubik 18. 31 texts were all indebted to advancements for women’s professionalization. From these advancements came a variety of new ways for women to circulate in society at large. Professional Actresses: Proto-Feminists or Gender Conformists? First, I want to examine the field of scholarship as it pertains to actresses: as the field stands, scholars tend to agree that women’s arrival on the Restoration stage was significant to history mainly for the financial and sociological movement it signaled for women. After eighteen years during which public London theaters had been closed, the Restoration of Charles II and his reopening of theaters must have been socially and culturally stirring. Arguably the most notable characteristic of theater in this era is the arrival of professional actresses. The first extended study of actresses on the late-‐Stuart stage is John Harold Wilson’s All the King’s Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration; it is in conjunction with, in development of, or in opposition to Wilson’s arguments that most revisionist scholars on this topic now situate themselves. 5 Although women had appeared on stage before the interregnum, their presence was primarily in minor roles, in court masques or other private performances; these were not financially lucrative, professional roles, as 5 J.H. Wilson, All the King’s Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1958); Wilson builds his history of women on stage from the Lord Chamberlain’s Records, acting company rolls, and eighteenth-‐ and nineteenth-‐century histories of theater. For the purposes of this paper, the terms “actress” and “female actor” will connote the same figure of the Restoration theatrical world. 32 were those created after the Restoration. 6 The major purpose of Wilson’s study, and the continued purpose of studying professional actresses, is “to consider what kind of women they were, the conditions under which they lived and worked, their behavior on stage and off, and, finally, the effect they had on late seventeenth-‐ century drama.” 7 Indeed, to trace the history of women’s emergence as paid performers in Restoration and early-‐eighteenth century theater is to mark a crucial moment in the history of women’s rights, freedoms, and potentials. In keeping with the interests in women’s professionalization in the theater, Gilli Bush-‐Bailey remarks that accounts of actresses’ lives on stage should be examined with an “understanding of the theater as primarily a profit-‐making enterprise” in spite of the low pay the first actresses would have received. 8 In their respective works, Kimberly Crouch and Kirsten Pullen explore the difficult paradox that many actresses found themselves in. These women had to effectively negotiate seemingly contrary personae of genteel feminine propriety and disreputable low-‐ class pandering; they had to fashion their own self-‐images as respectable entertainers, in other words, ultimately to gain social acceptance for their chosen profession. 9 Specifically, Crouch and Pullen examine the roles of prostitute and 6 Ann Thompson, “Women/’Women’ and the Stage,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 103; Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). 7 Wilson viii. 8 Gilli Bush-‐Bailey, Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage (Manchester: U Manchester P, 2006), 5. 9 Kirsten Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and In Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 67; Kimberly Crouch, “The Public Life of Actresses: Prostitutes or Ladies?”, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, eds. Hannah Barker & Elaine Chalus (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997). 33 genteel lady, both of which professional actresses were expected to embody. In other words, an actress could play a woman of quality on stage, but she was still a paid performer not unlike a prostitute. The women’s performances modeled social norms of female behavior to members of the theatrical audience—whether the behavior was progressive, regressive, bawdy, ladylike, or otherwise was broadly open to audience interpretation. In a detailed study of Restoration actresses and the rise of the modern individual, Sophie Tomlinson suggests that, rather than exploring the sociopolitical or sexual shifts implied in previous works on Restoration actresses, we should take a mainly psychological approach. She argues that the most important historical shift was in the way women (and men) altered their perceptions of female subjectivity based on actresses’ presence on and off the stage. 10 Like Crouch and Pullen, Tomlinson examines the actress’s ability to present an individual human subject on stage, and argues that these performances could inflect the public’s perception of women. In general, scholars agree to herald the social significance of the first actresses because they promoted new possibilities for all women’s identities, not just for those in theatrical professions. In spite of the agreements on what was significant, however, existing scholarship is largely divided into two camps on how to interpret the significance of these women’s professional lives—as a positive or negative advancement. 10 Tomlinson 5-‐7. Tomlinson traces the beginnings of female roles in Jacobean masques and pastoral dramas, following with accounts of Carolinian comedy and drama, thus arguing a continuity of women’s roles rather than a strictly male-‐ dominated Pre-‐Restoration stage. 34 The first of these camps of criticism suggests that women’s accession to the stage signaled a positive proto-‐feminist version of female empowerment. That is, women had been granted a new freedom to pursue artistic careers, and this form of expression allowed their creative voices to be heard for the first time. Elizabeth Howe’s The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 is among the first extended works of revisionist feminist scholarship on the Restoration theater. 11 In her history, Howe tackles the social acceptance of actresses in the theater community, in reception communities of spectators and patrons, and in the larger sphere of British culture. 12 Howe also reflects on the social and cultural ramifications of professional performance, such as the probability of sexual exploitation, and the ways in which ensuing roles written for women may have influenced public perception of actresses and women more generally. Subsequent explorations in the positive advancement camp rely heavily on the works of Howe and Wilson to address more specific reasons why and how the actresses’ appearance on stage would have signified progressive and empowering opportunities for women. Such scholars as Catherine Belsey, Juliet Dusinberre, Phyllis Rackin, and Ann Thompson generally contend that early women’s roles “empower[ed] women (or rather female characters) by allowing them to adopt 11 Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women & Drama, 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992). 12 Spectatorship and reception studies of early English actresses are particularly well-‐researched fields, as much of the primary evidence that historians have at their disposal comes from theater spectators or publication and production information. Individual responses to a play and larger social approbation are rich documents to aid our understanding of general and specific appreciation of specific plays and performers. Thompson briefly addresses the issues of female spectatorship and patronage, as does Gilli Bush-‐Bailey, though their main points of focus lie elsewhere. 35 freedoms denied them in a patriarchal culture.” 13 Most scholars address these freedoms as primarily psychological and sexual in nature, but Joanne Lafler approaches particular freedoms that would have taken the form of economic gains or professional success. In this way, Lafler sheds light on developing female authority and power structures regarding self-‐sufficiency or “influence on taste” to which early actresses may have contributed. 14 John O’Brien begins his essay “Drama: Genre, Gender, Theater” by addressing a supposedly prevailing seventeenth-‐century impression that theater was in decline by the turn of the century, but he goes on to illustrate that this assumption was not entirely warranted. Specifically, O’Brien shows the ways in which genres gained and lost popularity across the decades, and he contends this flux in popularity mirrors not only the flux in power that women gained from their professional acting roles, but also the important social changes that were occurring to benefit women’s rights, freedoms, and self-‐identities at large: “The displacement of complex political and social issues onto an emblem of…femininity signals some of the ways in which serious drama was changing.” 15 In other words, the characters on stage echoed the political and social concerns of women collectively. 13 Thompson 108. 14 Joanne Lafler, “Theater and the Female Presence,” The Cambridge History of British Theater vol. 2, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 73, 78; Lafler is, of course, careful to note that actresses were certainly not receiving equal pay to their male counterparts, nor did any actresses of the Restoration era become particularly wealthy. 15 John O’Brien, “Drama: Genre, Gender, Theater,” A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 198. Although O’Brien refers directly to she-‐tragedies of the eighteenth century, it is important to note that whatever genre happened to be in vogue was the genre that was most directly echoing the tenor of women’s advancement. 36 In the second camp of criticism, however, women’s rise to the stage does not indicate a positive proto-‐feminism. In opposition to those who posit female empowerment, academic arguments in this vein contend that the professionalization of actresses was simply reinforcing gender norms, class structures, and male-‐imposed stereotypes of female sexuality. Bush-‐Bailey, for example, argues that many revisionist accounts of actresses’ sexuality still rely too heavily on “traditional assumptions” that support patriarchal notions of female sexual meaning. 16 Howe admits, “The first English actresses were used, above all, as sexual objects, confirming, rather than challenging, the attitudes to gender of their society.” 17 Pat Gill’s essay “Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage” focuses mainly on the comedy of manners; a genre that she believes enforces social and political conservatism. Gill draws from the texts of the plays themselves to delineate the supposed seventeenth-‐century view that conformity to gender norms was commendable, and to demarcate her position that such plays decidedly did not promote progressive women’s rights. She claims that such plays show how “the Restoration did not restore a past way of life” in which women maintained the status quo and rejected social advancements, a fact the public surely recognized and likely occasionally bemoaned. 18 Similarly, critics such as Mary Free and Jean E. Howard 16 Bush-‐Bailey 35. 17 Howe 37. 18 Pat Gill, “Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage,” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theater, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 192; emphasis added. Gill uses numerous plays by Behn, Southerne, Wycherley, Congreve, and Etherege among others; although certainly a well-‐argued claim, Gill draws her examples from many playwrights who are typically considered conservative, and the inherent marriage plot structure in comedies of manners makes the conservatism rather a foregone conclusion. 37 suggest somewhat fatalistically that “disguises [donned in the theater] serve only to reaffirm the sexual hierarchy: all of the witty heroines dwindle into wives by the end of the play.” 19 Scholars cite one prevailing historical opinion to support claims that early actresses were not harbingers of female empowerment: that is, the opinion that acting was not a moral or respectable profession for a woman, nor indeed was any female profession moral or respectable. J.H. Wilson and Kimberly Crouch, among others, cite sources that express deep moral disapproval towards Restoration actresses. This disapproval contributed in turn, they argue, to disreputable associations placed on actresses for hundreds of subsequent years. Seventeenth-‐ century opponents to women’s professionalization on the stage mostly argued that women could provoke lewd desires. William Prynne, a Puritan politico active before and during the interregnum, for example, “denounced as a whore any Christian woman who dared to speak publicly on stage in male clothing.” 20 These arguments against theater were in line with those that had been leveled before the British Commonwealth: young boys playing women could lead to sexual perversion, and women could lead similarly to fornication. 21 19 Qtd. in Thompson 108; though Free and Howard are specifically addressing disguises of cross-‐dressing on the Elizabethan stage, Thompson argues (and I agree) that similar cross-‐class and cross-‐gender dressing were just as fraught of practices to women in late-‐Stuart theater. 20 Rubik 5. 21 The implied lewdness of pedophilia and sodomy that were provoked from boys’ presence on stage is markedly different from the implied lewdness of sexual promiscuity that women might have provoked; of course, ironically, the charges of lewdness would just as often fall to the alluring boy or woman, rather than the presumably adult male actor who was too weak to resist temptation (Lafler 73-‐5). Extended commentary on the presence and function of young boys in theater even 38 Unlike moral condemnations, on the other hand, legal objections over women performing for profit did not take root until later in the eighteenth century. Such objections hinged on the argument that actresses might be taken for prostitutes, whether or not they actually were. Sources from the mid-‐century and onward pass judgment on women who would follow such a low calling, claiming that “No ‘lady,’ of course could consider a career on the stage; her kinfolk would rather see her starve than degrade a genteel or noble name.” 22 In combination, both the legal and moral debates contributed to the eventual censorship of theater, which affected actresses as much as anyone else in theatrical professions. 23 Today’s scholars, however, have noted that actresses may not have met with great degrees of public resistance from Puritans or genteel theater patrons, and that women’s appearance on the Restoration stage may not have been considered as revolutionary as we now retroactively suppose. As Pippa Guard notes, historical evidence does not suggest that actresses were met with immediate resistance: One of the more intriguing aspects of the arrival of the professional actress on the English stage is the apparent lack of contemporary reaction to the new phenomena. It is clear from Pepys’s diaries that the re-‐opened theaters of 1660 and 1661 were supported by a diverse after the Restoration can be found in Thompson’s essay “Women/’Women’ and the Stage.” 22 Wilson 9; this quotation may seem overly dramatic as a result of its being from Colley Cibber’s memoirs. Although not writing during the Restoration, Cibber’s memoirs certainly reflect the above-‐mentioned “disreputable associations” that lingered over actresses. 23 The Licensing Act was passed in 1737, over half a century after London’s theaters reopened, and laws pertaining to prostitution began to arise in the late eighteenth century; early prohibitions on prostitution were regulated by moral rather than legal authorities (Pullen 183, Crouch 60). 39 audience, who seem to have taken the new practices…in their stride. …Furthermore, there is no evidence of the kind of attacks from anti-‐ theatrical puritans that women on the stage might be expected to have produced. Nor does the arrival of the actress seem to have inspired debate amongst the educated gentry who attended the early Restoration theater companies during the 1660s. There are only a handful of genuinely contemporary references to the first actresses extant and only three that meditate at any length on her arrival. 24 This assertion lends credence to scholarship by authors like Thompson and Tomlinson, who argue that, although the Restoration did indeed mark the first moves towards professionalization, the emergence of female roles in theater was a gradual process, rather than something that came about immediately and solely as a result of restoring the monarchy. 25 Similarly to Guard, John O’Brien and Joanne Lafler have noted a paucity of primary evidence from this era. This is likely the most profoundly influential factor in the increasing difficulty for historians to examine the personal and public lives of women in the late-‐Stuart theater: until the middle of the eighteenth century, “we hear very little from the women themselves. This is especially true for actresses, who left few writings of their own.” 26 24 Pippa Guard, “A Defence of the First English Actress,” Literature & History 15.2 (Autumn 2006), 1. 25 Thompson, for example, explores women’s pre-‐Restoration roles in court masques and acrobatic feats; and also addresses figures like the young actor Edward Kynaston who continued to play women’s roles after the theaters were reopened. 26 Lafler 72; O’Brien 183. In spite of the limited number of personal accounts in primary documents, more work should be done to explore the financial ramifications of women’s professionalization as actresses. Such source material would likely be difficult to trace, particularly if these women were unwilling or 40 Most recent scholarship has, to greater and lesser degrees of success, taken a moderate view somewhere between the two extremes of empowerment and degradation, between recognition of actresses’ potentials for progress, and dismissal of their roles as conforming to traditional gender norms. 27 Perhaps most convincing in its even-‐handed dealing with both positive and negative notions of female identity, Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores: On Stage and In Society suggests that women as early as the Restoration could and did self-‐identify as both sexual victim and social radical. By embracing the implications that arise from conflating the professions of actress and prostitute, early actresses carved a place for themselves in society: “On one hand, the prostitute is a victim: denied sexual agency, she is also denied a voice, a place in history, an identity as an autonomous woman. On the other hand, though vilified, the prostitute can speak for and from the margins…. Particular women incorporate the traditions of transgression and marginalization in order to name their own experiences.” 28 I believe that this both/and assessment of early professional actresses is most generous and productive for further study. Whether maintaining tired clichés of female behavior or blazing trails for early women’s rights, professional actresses had found their place in London society. It is crucial to keep one foot in both scholarly camps unable to write personal accounts of their dealings in the theater. Though somewhat outside the scope of this chapter, it is my sense that the social, political, and artistic functions of wealthy female patrons have also gone largely unexplored: many of the scholars cited here briefly consider patronage, but further in-‐depth research on this topic could reveal more insights regarding the financial growth of the Restoration stage, and the artistic influence that female patrons might have used to the benefit or detriment of female actors, and women in general. 27 I find the comprehensive, moderate approach that balances theories of empowerment and degradation to be most reasonable. 28 Pullen 1-‐2. 41 discussed here: while we must keep in mind that actresses, like whores, were still decidedly limited to the margins of their society, we cannot discount the progressive potentials that these women saw before them. Female Characters: Modern Subjects or Shallow Ciphers? In addition to the scholarship presented on actresses themselves, other studies examine the social impact of identity formation and individuality in early-‐ modern theater by focusing on the characters that early actresses portrayed. In Character’s Theater, for example, Lisa Freeman contends, “Not only that the stage functioned as a critical focal point in eighteenth-‐century cultural discourse, but that in deploying an alternative model of identity based on the concept of character, it marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.” 29 In other words, the characters who took shape in the process of performance did not in fact take shape as proper representations of individual subjects. Similarly, Elaine McGirr’s Eighteenth-Century Characters traces the shifting popularity of certain character types (both male and female) across the century. McGirr notes that eighteenth century characters “play out the century’s shift from and interest in characters that typify to those that 29 Lisa Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002), 1; emphasis added. Freeman begins by positing the theater as a potential counterpoint to interiority and subjectivity presented in eighteenth-‐century novels, but instead finds that “interiority” and “subjectivity” do not apply to one-‐dimensional character types. I tend to agree with her argument, if only because I find myself falling back on the facile argument, “Of course they’re not individual subjects—they’re fictional.” 42 specify—what literary critics and historians have identified as the rise of the individual and subjective interiority.” 30 The stock characters that Freeman and McGirr address may lack the depth of interior subjectivity, but they certainly stand as explorations of “character” in the qualitative sense: that is, as “the estimate formed of a person’s moral qualities.” 31 Characters on stage whose physical traits exactly match their moral qualities, in other words, cannot possess depth, because their surface is indeed the entire summation of their “character”—i.e., their moral qualities. 32 Even while we do not expect to see emotional or psychological depth in stock characters, we have already seen that actresses such as Lavinia Fenton adopted their stage personae as part of their daily lives off the stage. This conflation of an actress with her role is unquestionably linked with recent studies of celebrity and its rise in the long eighteenth century. 33 As an illustrative example, consider Kirsten Pullen’s chapter on the actress and whore Betty Boutell: in this chapter, Pullen minutely details seventeenth-‐ century uses of the word “whore,” concluding that the word was not then synonymous with “prostitute,” but rather was used much like the present-‐day insult 30 Elaine McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 31 McGirr 1. 32 McGirr delineates the conflation of surface and substance as it pertains to female characters such as the heroine/wife; the coquette and her opposite, the prude; the country maid and the town lady; and female wits. 33 See for example works by Felicity Nussbaum (“Actresses and the Economics of Celebrity, 1700-‐1800”) and Joseph Roach (“Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’”) in the collection Theater and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000, eds. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 148-‐68, 15-‐30 (respectively). 43 “bitch,” without necessarily suggesting a woman’s poor moral standards. 34 Pullen argues that women like Boutell could use the moniker “whore” to signify a sense of female identity or self-‐liberation that alternately drew on radical progressive sexuality and victimized destitution. This would suggest not only that empowerment and degradation went hand-‐in-‐hand for early actresses, but also that it was important for women to own both the positive and the negative impulses that might underlie their choice to adopt the personae of their fictional counterparts. Whether they possessed depth, their qualities were entirely presented as physical traits, or they lived on (for better or worse) in the personae of the actresses who portrayed them, fictional theatrical characters presented moral difficulties for performers and audiences alike. For example, a commoner playing a king or queen could spark the blasphemous desire to rise above one’s given social status: “the Restoration period is marked by moral and political anxieties about feigning and hypocrisy.” 35 As noted above, these objections to theater were not unique to the early eighteenth century, nor were they leveled specifically at professional actresses. Along this line, Jean Marsden suggests that female characters served not as sites of subjectivity in and of themselves, but as ideological centers of morality and politics in the theater community. She goes on to argue that tragic female characters may indeed have provided prescriptive notions of appropriate female action, and may even have served as representations of intimate modes of female 34 Pullen 22. For a study of polemical religious responses to female sexuality, see Alison Conway’s The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010). 35 McGirr 1. See also notes 17-‐19 above on the moral and legal critiques leveled against theater. 44 communication that transpired between actresses, playwrights, and female spectators: Their material presence altered the representation of women in drama and even reshaped dramatic form at a time when theater was the most public and most debated literary venue…. Moving beyond the confines of the stage and exploring critical and moral debates as well as play texts, I consider how the theater of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reflected and informed the changing sexual roles women played in society. …[W]e need to approach these questions by considering the spectator as well as the actress, as did critics and playwrights both in theory and in practice. 36 My understanding of female characters is in line with Freeman, McGirr, and Marsden, but with a modification. Although female characters may not have represented ideal subjectivity, they certainly provided material that spectators could choose to mimic, internalize, or reject in their own process of identity formation. This in turn could lead female spectators to strive for greater or lesser degrees of individuality, and thus greater or lesser degrees of financial freedom. Women Writing: Circulation and Depth Behind the Words Finally, in addition to actresses, fictional characters, and female audience members who took cues from the women on stage, female authors were professionalizing in ways that had not been feasible before. Among the well-‐known 36 Jean I. Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660-1720, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006), 3, 16. 45 female playwrights of the Restoration and early-‐eighteenth century, Frances Boothby was the first woman to have an original play produced in London, at Drury Lane in 1669. 37 Naturally, women had been publishing written work prior to the Restoration: female playwrights who have received considerable scholarly attention include Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, and Katherine Philips, and poets included the likes of Lady Mary Wroth and Queen Elizabeth I. Much like actresses who had appeared on stage in earlier eras, however, these women were mostly courtiers who were writing to demonstrate their educational prowess, not to earn an independent income. 38 As Janet Todd notes, the female author was not a sudden effect of the Restoration: “Women authors are not newborn but already part of culture…of borrowing, adapting and following contemporary themes and styles.” 39 The primary difference to mark before and after the Restoration is that of professionalism: 37 Rubik 28. 38 For detailed accounts on women’s appearances in and composition of Pre-‐ Restoration theater, see Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds., Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All Male Stage (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Alison Findlay et al., eds., Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1900 (New York: Longman, 2000); and Christine M. Varholy, “’Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-‐Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8.1 (2008), 4-‐34. 39 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 2. Regarding women’s publications before the Restoration, Todd notes, “The bulk of published women’s writing immediately before the entry of the professional female writer…was in political and religious pamphleteering. Women continue to be political animals in the Restoration and eighteenth century and they are as likely to comment on the public issues of the day in 1690 and 1790 as male authors” (8). Although Todd’s primary locus of study is fiction and the eighteenth-‐century novel—she claims “The constructed nature of female consciousness formed in the eighteenth century to an extraordinary extent through fiction”—I believe that her allusion to Behn’s play The Rover for the title of her work indicates a parallel interest in dramatic fictions. A novel obviously circulates in a different way than a play does, and the playwright’s ability to craft spoken prologues and epilogues are certainly unique sites of self-‐fashioning within the theater. 46 female writers from the gentry or court did not need careers as writers; the women acting and publishing after the Restoration did. Even with these advancements, women were facing harsh criticisms of impropriety, plagiarism, and unoriginality. The act of a woman publishing and owning her literary career was, in Todd’s words, “conscious, blatant, unfeminine and professional.” 40 Figures such as Catharine Trotter, Delariviere Manley, and Mary Pix were mocked as opportunists, talentless hacks, and peddlers of cheap entertainment in the anonymous satirical play The Female Wits. Aphra Behn’s epistle to the reader from The Dutch Lover and her preface to The Lucky Chance included critical defenses of women’s writing: “Accused of pilfering from men’s works…Behn’s professional literary concern is with the portrait, with the social construction of woman, the woman in business, in activity, in story, and in history, the female persona not the unknowable person.” 41 In other words, Behn and those of her ilk consciously presented themselves in their writings. 42 They knew that “the wit is in the appropriation” of cultural trends, so they used “vindications, apologies, autobiographies and prefaces…[and] fictional portraits of women” to reflect their own social and political attitudes. 43 Even when facing the backlash of their society, 40 Todd 1. 41 Todd 1. 42 Much excellent research has been conducted to illuminate the life and career of Aphra Behn, the first professional female playwright. See for example: Dawn Lewcock, Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theater (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008); Robert Markley, “Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress: Feminism and the Dynamics of Popular Success on the Late Seventeenth-‐Century Stage,” Comparative Drama 41.2 (Summer 2007), 141-‐66; and Felicity A. Nussbaum, “’Real, Beautiful Women’: Actresses and The Rival Queens,” Eighteenth-Century Life 32.2 (2008), 138-‐58. 43 Todd 2, 9. 47 then, female playwrights relied on their experiences as women to craft the characters and subject matter for their oeuvres. In addition to Todd’s foundational work on the female author’s ability to self-‐ fashion, Margarete Rubik’s study of early women dramatists is also central to this chapter. Like Todd, Rubik examines the social shame of a woman’s “going public” with a playwriting career, noting that seventeenth-‐ and eighteenth-‐century theater workers “did not subordinate themselves to their roles, but flaunted their own personalities, a fact that led to a confusion of on-‐stage and off-‐stage identity especially detrimental in the case of actresses and the few women playwrights.” 44 Rubik suggests that the eighteenth century saw a lessening of female professionalization: largely because it would have been socially unacceptable to critique the intellectual abilities of the sovereign Queen Elizabeth I, “working women were more acceptable in the Renaissance than two centuries later.” 45 Ultimately, Todd and Rubik agree that, “Like the man, the woman who published could no longer be entirely appropriated and made dependent. But, since women should not be independent or self-‐owning, this failure to be potential property was a kind of impropriety.” 46 We have already seen how actresses’ appearance on stage provoked the public’s interest in the women’s private lives, and the same was true of female playwrights. The female author’s public image (i.e. her visibility, her celebrity persona) would not have been any less public in the theater world than that of an 44 Rubik 20. 45 Rubik 1. 46 Todd 9. 48 actress, and female playwrights were regularly defending themselves against attacks of immorality in their work and personal lives. Marsden and Rubik refer to Jeremy Collier’s diatribe against theater to show that spectatorship and sexuality were closely linked at this time—not only by critics, but also by the authors themselves. Similarly, scholars such as Nancy Armstrong, Peter Stallybrass, and Kristina Straub have explored the class and gender implications that live in “the binarism of spectacle and spectator emerging in theatrical discourse in the late seventeenth century.” 47 This work stands in service to the ways in which women’s images are circulated as if they were sexual objects—meant to be looked at, printed, reproduced, passed around, and longed for—presented for men’s consumption. 48 Rubik notes that nearly all female playwrights came from the middle class: The gentleman playwright was becoming a figure of fashion, but women playwrights risked their reputations in doing so…. This high exposure occasioned a prurient curiosity in their private lives and an inevitable confusion of art and life, right to the end of the eighteenth century. If actresses were confused with the roles they played, women dramatists were judged by the plays they produced, and bawdiness or immorality were attributed to immodesty of character, not to current fashions and audience tastes. 49 47 Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 4. 48 Straub, of course, notes that it is important to “resist the notions of a monolithic masculinity as a subject and a monolithic femininity as object” (5). 49 Rubik 26. I find Rubik’s use of the word “character” telling here, and believe that it echoes the concerns with character (i.e. moral qualities) I explored in the previous section of this chapter. 49 Furthermore to this, “women playwrights were fond of allowing their female figures more independence and control over their action than was the male wont.” 50 In other words, although the female playwright was not physically on the stage under the scrutiny of the audience in the same way that actresses were, her words were presented as a mouthpiece or representation of the writer herself. As often as not, the author’s mouthpiece delivered pointed messages about women’s political, social, and financial autonomy. It is at this point that I would like to shift my focus to circulation. In this chapter, I will explore modes of financial circulation within the narratives, and also how these modes of circulation mirror real-‐world situations. What do female playwrights’ works tell us about circulation that male playwrights do not, for example? How does circulation occur within the plays, as opposed to what happens outside or as a result of the narrative—as in the case of Polly and The Beggar’s Opera’s various adaptations, genres, and social comments? Since both male and female playwrights in the Restoration and early eighteenth century were facing criticism that their plays were too bawdy, it was not unique for women to appropriate sexual metaphors of sluttishness or promiscuity to explain how their writing circulates. 51 What was uniquely important for female playwrights, however, was the portrayal of women and the ways in which their plays’ circulation, their success beyond a three night run, could make or destroy their financial careers. This 50 Rubik 31. 51 As we will see in greater detail in another chapter, Gay and Cibber relied heavily on metaphors of sexual looseness to describe narrative circulation. 50 success or failure would have long-‐lasting impact on women’s professionalization at large. In the women’s plays I examine here, bodies and finances circulate symbiotically, such that female playwrights and the characters they created were distinctly aware of the connection between a woman’s body and her ability to make money. These two overlapping forms of circulation are my primary focus in this chapter. It is my instinct that female playwrights used their plays as a statement to indicate their awareness that women’s circulation—the intersection of bodily and financial acumen—was a rising source of interest. Specifically, I will consider three female authors’ use of the words “fortune” and “spectacle” in their various meanings. From these meanings, there are different valences of circulation that come about: sexual and economic circulation in the guise of prostitution as a means of income, the veneer of gambling as a metaphor for proper life choices, the visibility of a woman who circulates socially, and the wheel of good fortune. Such references illustrate the authors’ interests in circulation. For the authors and texts I will examine in this chapter, Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre are the two most prolific female playwrights of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. By way of transition between sections on the two, I will analyze Mary Pix’s play Adventures in Madrid. Behn and Centlivre serve as fair counterexamples to one another because, although they were both similarly popular and similarly critiqued for their chosen profession, their political allegiances were opposite: whereas Behn was a staunch Tory and royalist supporter, Centlivre was a more puritanical and reform-‐minded member of the middle class. It has been noted 51 that Behn “is on the side of the Cavaliers when it comes to exploiting, humiliating and punishing the Whiggish, Puritan middle class. A bourgeois in her play is always old and semi-‐senile, stupid and often miserly, vain of his political privileges and potentially treasonous, and regarded as fair game for cuckoldry.” 52 Centlivre, on the other hand, “was not seduced into using her works as instruments for moralizing, although she wasted few opportunities to make her zealous political sentiments known.” 53 The Rover and The Busy Body are the two most famous and most canonical works by these two women. In addition to these two plays, I have opted to examine only Behn and Centlivre’s plays that use the word fortune. The double meaning of the word fortune draws a reader’s attention to a paradox of women’s financial freedom in this period: the ability to earn a gainful income (a financial fortune) occasionally had more to do with luck (a stroke of cosmic fortune) than it did with skill or just deserts. In these plays, it is important to note who is using the word fortune: whether or not that character is punning on the word, if the character is male or female, and how they see the force working in or against their favor. This reveals the authors’ positions on the differences between luck, social grace and connections, wealth, and success—and how men and women deploy these traits in different ways. The word fortune is particularly telling for readings of early female dramatists because it was a way for the women to couch their success in the rhetoric of good luck: rather than boldly claiming that they were as talented as any male writer, the women could put on a subtle and sardonic guise of modesty. There 52 Rubik 55. 53 Rubik 94. 52 is certainly loaded intention in calling their success simply “good fortune,” which allowed the women to circulate their work to the theatrical public. Although these female authors could pass their success off as luck, they also knew and relied on parallel implications of the word “fortune” — luck doesn’t put food on the table, but a solid income does. Fortune, Finance, & Fate: Aphra Behn’s The Rover and The Lucky Chance More than either of the other writers in this chapter, Aphra Behn placed herself on equal footing with her male counterparts in the writing world. Margarete Rubik remarks that Behn’s plays are not “explicitly feminist, and very few attempt to undermine social norms,” but that she is nonetheless “much more outspoken on the inequalities of the sexes and the repression of women in her prefaces and prologues, in which she vigorously defends herself against misogynist prejudices and the double standards critics were quickly learning to use against women playwrights.” 54 From this, we can glean that Behn was more likely to ascribe her success to actual talent, not simply luck. Behn’s female characters, moreover, are granted much more independence in their actions than was typical of female characters from a male author. The women are actively engaged in their fates, in the outcomes of their social fortunes, and do not merely accept the decisions that fathers, husbands, or lovers would make for them. This is not a misogynist landscape in which rakes are expressly praised for their philandering, where men are the primary movers of action, or where women are pitted against each other in a demeaning game of 54 Rubik 36. 53 Please-‐the-‐Patriarch. Behn’s men are, in fact, more often made to seem bumbling, self-‐involved, and anything but the dashing heroes they think themselves to be. Behn makes sure that we know fortune is central to The Rover (1677) from the opening scene, in which siblings Hellena, Florinda, and Pedro are discussing the women’s different fates. Their father has deigned that Florinda is to marry Don Vincentio, a typical ill-‐matched elderly man who is poorly suited to the young woman’s tastes. Florinda complains, “With indignation, and how near soever my father thinks I am to marrying that hated object, I shall let him see I understand better what’s due to my beauty, birth and fortune, and more to my soul, than to obey those unjust commands” (I.i). 55 Here, Florinda remarks that, in addition to beauty and good breeding, her fortune sets her apart as a desirable match. The placement of the word “fortune” at a nearly equal distance in the line from the words “due” and “soul,” moreover, draws attention the double meaning of the word. Indeed, “due” and “fortune” can both signify either monetary or metaphysical sums: the fortune that Florinda is due may indicate the price she could fetch in a marriage market. This suggests that Florinda is keenly aware that women in her society are treated roundly as saleable commodities—a point central to my reading of this play. When she adds “more to my soul,” however, we are meant to understand that her fiscal and spiritual fortunes are intimately linked. In other words, she will not part with her (wealth) fortune unless the match is romantically fortunate (advantageous). 55 Aphra Behn, “The Rover,” The Works of Aphra Behn vol. 5, ed. Janet Todd (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996). Future references to this play will be indicated in parentheses by act and scene number. 54 Although Florinda’s financial prosperity is important, so is her prosperity as an independent individual who should have some say in her marriage. Her brother Pedro does not grasp this pun, however, thinking only of her appeal as a commodity, and only of fortune as a financial concern: “I have a command from my father here to tell you, you ought not to despise him, a man of so vast a fortune, and such a passion for you” (I.i). He remarks that she “must consider Don Vincentio’s fortune and the jointure he’ll make you,” to which she replies “let him consider my youth, beauty and fortune; which ought not to be thrown away on his age and jointure” (I.i). Pedro’s close linking of “fortune and jointure” with his reference to Vincentio’s “vast fortune” tell us that he considers fortune strictly a matter of money. Florinda’s rejoinder, however, leaves her meaning of fortune ambiguous—she could mean either wealth or luck. Behn again pairs words linguistically such that “beauty and fortune” contrast with “age and jointure.” Florinda parallels beauty and age to show that the words are at odds with one another, so we should understand that she might also see fortune and jointure as conflicting notions. Florinda’s use of fortune, then, is not the same as a jointure, a financial thing; rather it is something that cannot be purchased or priced. Meanwhile in this scene, Hellena also tries to convince her brother that his attempts at control are unjustly motivated by an avaricious oversight that she and Florinda are humans, not chattels to be bargained over. She pleads that Pedro will “lay aside [his] hopes of my fortune by my being a devotee,” placing “hope” and “fortune” near enough to each other that it is unclear whether she thinks of fortune as a monetary or metaphysical enterprise (I.i). She goes on to complain that their 55 father’s choice for Florinda is wrong, objecting that Vincentio “thinks he’s trading to Gambo still, and would barter himself (that bell and bauble) for your youth and fortune” (I.i). Her argument here hinges on the fact that Vincentio is only interested in the mercantile implications of marriage, counting “trading,” “bartering,” and “baubles” among the old man’s primary interests. Pedro proposes his friend Antonio as a potential match for Florinda. Both she and Hellena consider this match superior to Vincentio, but still not rightly suited for a love match. Florinda knows that “[Antonio] has all the advantages of nature, / The moving arguments of youth and fortune” to recommend him (I.i). Here, Florinda’s pairing of Antonio’s “youth and fortune” shows that he is closer than Vincentio to someone deserving of her estimation, since she has “youth, beauty, and fortune.” Her references to “advantages of nature” and “moving arguments,” however, tell us that she finds Antonio’s fortune only logically appealing, not romantically. When Florinda admits, “I value Belvile,” she suggests that she finds him valuable not only romantically, but also in her intention to secure her wealth to him—that is, she endows him with value because of her own monetary wealth. By the time it comes out that Florinda is in love with Belvile, Pedro protests “Belvile has no fortune” (I.i). Pedro is beginning to pick up on the puns, as his remark indicates that Belvile is neither wealthy enough nor lucky enough to secure Florinda’s hand (not to mention her incipient wealth). When we meet Belvile in the ensuing scene, he is well aware of his predicament. He knows that Antonio “has the advantage of me, in being a man of fortune, a Spaniard, and her brother’s friend” (I.ii). Belvile’s complaint makes a 56 decided pun on fortune: Antonio is a man of fortune not only because has a large sum of money, but also because this money gives him better luck at becoming Florinda’s suitor than Belvile might have. 56 Belvile goes on to welcome his friend Willmore: “What happy wind blew us this good fortune?” (I.ii). His awareness of fortune’s multiple meanings lends him a sympathetic trait that we have not seen from other men in this play: Pedro, his father, Vincentio, and Antonio have all been discussed in fortune’s financial realm, and they seem to believe that wealth-‐fortune is the foremost. Belvile, however, knows that money should not be the only fortune of significance, and his reliance on fate-‐fortune feminizes him in only beneficial ways. By the time his boorish friend Ned Blunt runs off with an eye to gaming and whoring, Belvile has established himself as someone who understands that wealth and luck are not mutually exclusive: “Well, take thy fortune, we’ll expect you in the next street—farewell fool—farewell (II.i). Belvile is wishing his friend good luck, but he is also demonstrating that he knows Blunt is exactly the type of fool to lose all his money at one go. Whereas Belvile demonstrates his sympathy towards the women’s plight— the financial fortunes of the marriage market can bring woefully bad luck— Willmore’s interactions in this scene show that he is just as mercenary as the money-‐grubbing men who would marry Florinda off to the highest bidder. As the women approach the scene in disguise, Hellena singles Willmore out and concocts a 56 Belvile makes an identical complaint later, that Antonio is a “powerful fortunate” as his rival (III.iv). Antonio is fortunate both for his wealth and his good luck. 57 scheme: “I’ll to him, and instead of telling him his fortune, try my own” (I.ii). 57 Dressed as a fortuneteller, Hellena pretends at the ability to predict a person’s fate, but her real interest is to “try her own [fortune],” or to try her luck at wooing a man to secure her own future—financially and otherwise. Willmore chaffs her, “Dear pretty (and I hope) young devil, will you tell an amorous stranger what luck he’s like to have?” to which she replies “Have a care how you venture with me, sir, lest I pick your pocket, which will more vex your English humor than an Italian fortune will please you” (I.ii). Willmore’s choice of the word “luck” sets him outside the field of wordplay, but Hellena’s reply is riddled with innuendo. She warns him not to “venture” rudely—to gamble on her, or to play tricks with her—because she might “pick his pocket,” as a rake might expect a wife to do. In referencing an Italian fortune, Hellena could mean a good stroke of luck or a windfall of money during Willmore’s time in Naples, but she could also refer to a woman. An “Italian fortune” would be a wealthy woman, a member of the nobility, the toast of the town. More to the point, the type of female “fortune” who is most likely to “please him” is a prostitute. Thankfully, just such a prostitute appears momentarily. Angellica Bianca criticizes Willmore in his attempts to satisfy his sexual desires without paying her high price: “Sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary crime? When a lady is proposed to you for a wife, you never ask how fair, discreet, or virtuous she is; but what’s her fortune—which if but small, you cry—she will not do my business—and 57 Hellena’s kinswoman Valeria repeats this pun is repeated in III.i: “When I told the stranger his fortune, [I] was afraid I should have told my own and yours by mistake.” That is, Valeria almost accidentally revealed the women’s true identities, cementing their futures. 58 basely leave her, though she languish for you. Is not this as poor?” (II.ii). We can take Angellica’s reference to fortune as a reference to money because contrasts that quality with others less tangible: fairness, discretion, and virtue. The contrast she draws is intended to show that her demand for money is no less avaricious than a husband’s desire for a large dowry. From this, we know that her profession causes her to rely primarily on a financial definition of fortune, which makes her unlike any of the other women in the play. She warns Willmore against falling in love with her: “Put up they gold, and know, / That were thy fortune large as is thy soul, / Thou shouldst not buy my love” (II.ii). Here, we might assume that Angellica uses “fortune” to mean Willmore’s good luck: if luck were on his side, he would not need to pay her. Her references to “gold” and “buying love,” however, show that the “large fortune” Willmore lacks in her eyes is entirely financial. Furthermore, her suggestion that a fortune is unlike a soul parallels the material/immaterial contrast from earlier in the scene: fortune is unlike fairness, discretion, virtue, or the soul because, whereas those things cannot be touched, to Angellica, fortune can and must be tangible. After Willmore successfully seduces Angellica, he indeed proves that he has a “large fortune” in respect to his luck with the courtesan. He returns to his friends in the street, where Belvile greets him with a question about his luck: “And how and how, dear lad, has fortune smiled? Are we to break her windows or raise up altars to her?” (III.i). Willmore replies, “Does not my fortune sit triumphant on my brow? Dost not see the little wanton god there all gay and smiling?,” hoping to celebrate with wine to “bless all things that I would have bold or fortunate” (III.i). Belvile and 59 Willmore’s direct references to altars and gods show that the men are keeping fortunate fate distinct from monetary fortune. 58 The scene progresses as Blunt marvels at Willmore’s sexual success, exclaiming, “’Sheartlikins, thou art a fortunate rogue” and “Fortune is pleased to smile on us, gentlemen” (III.i). Ned furthers the men’s references to gods of fate, and adds in the word “fortunate.” His usage here is mostly clearly intended to mean “lucky,” since Willmore has had the good luck to get away with bedding a prostitute while yet avoiding having to pay her. 59 In spite of the men’s banter, by the start of Act IV, Belvile has firmly planted himself in a position of sympathy with the female characters, from which vantage he can understand the intersections of finances and fate, and understand his puns on fortune. He begins the scene with a gesture towards the gods of fate: “When shall I be weary of railing on fortune, who is resolved never to turn with smiles upon me?” (IV.i). Belvile’s declaiming complicates his previous discussion with the men. Rather than just a speech against the gods of fortune, this is an indication that Belvile knows there is more to success than just fate and funding: he knows he is “railing on” fortune, that he should be weary of the pursuit because his love for Florinda 58 I do not think this lessens my earlier claim that Belvile understands the significance of his puns on fortune. In this scene, Belvile does not pun because Willmore has not demonstrated an equal understanding that money and luck might be intimately linked. 59 If Willmore had possessed a monetary fortune before having met Angellica, even someone as buffoonish as Ned Blunt would know that a thousand-‐crown fee would make a man decidedly less “fortunate.” Ned, of course, learns this lesson the hard way: after thinking himself the “fortunatest [luckiest] dog” for having secured an audience with the base Lucetta, the whore and her pimp make off with his entire savings [his fortune] (III.ii). In his attempts at revenge, Blunt once again calls on the gods of fortune [luck] to guide him in pursuit of his “blessed fortune [money]” (V.i). Blunt’s profligacy is indicative of Behn’s political distaste for the lower classes, but also of male ignorance to women’s social plights in general. 60 ought to qualify him more than any amount of money might. Later in the scene, he delivers a speech presenting the word “fortune” as an all-‐encompassing entity responsible for wealth, fate, and success: Fantastic fortune, thou deceitful light, That cheats the wearied traveler by night, Though on a precipice each step you tread, I am resolved to follow where you lead. (IV.i) When Belvile decides to follow fortune, he leaves his finances and future up to chance, which may indeed cheat him out of wealth or luck. Like the women of the play, Belvile knows that he is at the mercy of those with more financial influence than himself. Among the women of the play, however, Angellica still feels that her fortune should be a financial venture rather than a metaphysical one. She understands that luck may attend others like Willmore, whom she confronts about his pursuit of Hellena: “Well, sir, you may be gay; all happiness, all joys pursue you still, fortune’s your slave, and gives you every hour choice of new hearts and beauties” (IV.ii). She seems as jealous of Willmore’s good luck as she is of his wandering affections. Considering her impending failure in securing Willmore’s love, she says, “I know what arguments you’ll bring against me, fortune and honor”—that is, her lack of both wealth and virtuous purity. By way of contrast, consider Florinda’s response to Frederick in V.i after he has apologized for abducting her, attempting to rape her, and bartering her off to the man with the longest sword (who happens to be her brother). She tells him, “Sir, I’ll be reconciled to you on one condition: that you’ll 61 follow the example of your friend in marrying a maid that does not hate you, and whose fortune (I believe) will not be unwelcome to you.” This comment may be read as a forthright pardon, but I rather see it as a barbed forewarning. Frederick will marry someone “that does not hate him,” but she may not love him, either. Florinda continues to hedge her forgiveness in litotes, suggesting that though this woman’s “fortune will not be unwelcome,” it may indeed prove problematic. That is, her wealth may be appealing, but her good luck in romance and her ability to cuckold Frederick in the future may not be. As the play closes, Willmore professes his love for Hellena by saying, “And now let the blind ones (love and fortune) do their worst” (V.i). In spite of what has transpired, Willmore still sees matters of wealth and luck as distinct forces. Hellena would know that financial fortune may also be a matter of basic luck, but she has secured Willmore’s hand by exerting some measure of control over her money and her sexual fate: “she may crave sexual fulfillment as fervently as the hero himself, but she is well aware of society’s double standard and the consequences for a woman who abandons herself.” 60 Just so, throughout the play, Behn consistently sets Hellena and Angellica as foils to one another. Angellica “falls in love with the hero and naively believes that a woman can enter into a sexual bargain with a man by granting free love in return for true love,” but Hellena realizes “that a woman can never meet a man on equal terms in the sexual marketplace.” 61 By reconciling wealth with good luck, by not seeing her fortune as one solely controlled by finances (as Angellica does), Hellena maintains both aspects of her fortune. 60 Rubik 45. 61 Rubik 46. 62 Unlike The Rover, Behn’s later play The Lucky Chance (1686) more directly addresses the issues of a woman’s financial dependency during marriage. 62 While not relying wholly on the word “fortune” and its multiple meanings, this play marks Behn’s attempt to reconcile her readers and viewers to the reality of women’s professionalization. Women’s fortunes had advance in both senses of the word, that is, but not yet enough. In the preface, Behn criticizes people who might find a turn of phrase unbecoming to a woman’s writing, when the same phrase would be considered perfectly acceptable from a male author. She aspires to the immortality of a male author, asking readers for “the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me…to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thrived in,” and she establishes “the notorious link between the sexual and linguistic promiscuity of a professional writer who offers her works for public consumption.” 63 It has been noted that Behn “did not consistently deconstruct female clichés or challenge traditional gender roles,” but in The Lucky Chance especially, she does indeed challenge the typical treatment of a wife as her husband’s property. This upset of the status quo draws attention to the fact that women are desiring subjects, not pieces of property to be bargained for. The character Lady Julia Fulbank, for example, is trapped in a loveless marriage with her ridiculous older husband, Sir Cautious, though she is in love with the young (and fortuneless) gallant Charles Gayman. Early in the play, she reads a letter from Gayman that is riddled with financial puns: 62 Aphra Behn, “The Lucky Chance,” The Works of Aphra Behn vol. 5, ed. Janet Todd (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996). 63 Rubik 36. 63 Did my Julia know how I languish in this cruel separation, she would afford me her pity and write oftener. If only the expectation of two thousand a year kept me from you, ah!—Julia, how easily would I abandon that trifle for your more valued sight; but that I know a fortune will render me more agreeable to the charming Julia, I should quit all my interest here to throw myself at her feet. (I.ii) In context, the words “afford,” “value,” “fortune,” and “interest” all highlight the incommodious overlap of money and affection. What seems to trouble Gayman most is Julia’s fully free decision to marry a man for his money rather than love. Julia muses, “Charles…you are as welcome to me now, now when I doubt thy fortune is declining, as if the universe were thine,” and her servant Pert responds, “That, madam, is a noble gratitude. For if his fortune be declining, ‘tis sacrificed to his passion for your ladyship” (I.ii). The women suspect that Gayman’s money may be running out because he has been gambling and selling what little he has to buy Julia “jewels, rings and presents as…must needs decay his fortune” (I.ii). Indeed, not only is his money running out, but also his luck is dwindling the more times he gambles to earn an income. Gayman opens the next act appearing “very melancholy,” railing “Curse on my birth! Curse on my faithless fortune! Curse on my stars, and curst be all” (II.i). His luck turns when Julia sends him money pilfered from her husband in secret: “Receive what love and fortune present you with, be grateful and be silent, or ‘twill vanish like a dream and leave you more wretched than it found you” (II.i). In her 64 note, Julia purports to be an anonymous benefactor who will meet Gayman that evening. At the tryst, the couple is entertained with prescient song: ‘Tis enough you once shall find, Fortune may to worth be kind; And love can leave off being blind…. That god repents his former slights, And fortune thus your faith requites. (III.iv) The singers suggest that it is rare to find a mate who is attractive, wealthy, and deserving of affection. This is indeed Julia and Gayman’s plight, and they must rely on deceits and disguises to carry on their affair When they meet later in the play, free of disguises, Julia feigns offense, chiding Gayman that he doesn’t really love her, and he responds with incredulity: “Why do I waste my youth in vain pursuit…? Why at your feet are all my fortunes laid, and why does all my fate depend on you?” (IV.i). Gayman’s fortunes are about to change in both senses of the word: he wins Julia from Fulbank in a game of dice after the miserly man refuses to pay a hundred pound debt. As her husband bemoans his losses, Julia remarks, “We have lost, and he has won; anon it may be your fortune,” warning him that he is lucky not to have lost more (IV.i). Sir Cautious attempts to renege on his debt, unwilling to part with any amount of money, or indeed anything of value: “That’s money’s worth, sir: but if I had anything that were worth nothing—” (IV.i). To this, Gayman replies, “I would your lady were worth nothing…. Then I would set all this against that nothing.” The men agree on terms, throw dice, and at his final throw Gayman interjects, “Now fortune smile—and for 65 the future frown” (IV.i). This is the last use of the word fortune in the play, and of course, Gayman wins. More importantly, however, Julia is incensed at the wager, and instigates a separation. Her fate is more fortunate by her miserly husband’s unwillingness to pay his financial debts. Additionally, she is able to enact the separation over her ill treatment: she is not property to be wagered in a gamble, and she leaves herself free to choose her own future. Behn’s female characters play on he word fortune in order to establish the importance of women’s financial and social freedoms. Female Playwright as Celebrity Spectacle: Pix’s Adventures in Madrid As Behn’s career reached its close, William and Mary came to the throne and the theatrical world suffered: the new king and the Parliamentarians who backed him were not as likely to support the theater as Charles II, Behn, and other staunchly royalist Stuarts. After Behn’s death in 1689, it was six years before another female playwright’s work was produced on stage. Between the years of 1695 and 1706, there was a striking upswing in the production of women’s plays: “never again in the course of the eighteenth century would there be such a successful profusion of new female voices within one decade.” 64 Women writers were becoming more widely accepted during this period. As it became more common for women writers to participate in the circulation of finances and celebrity, it also became common for the women to be lambasted for their poor writing skills at best, and at worst for their reputations as 64 Rubik 91. 66 little better than prostitutes who entertain for profit. 65 One of the problems that attended these women was their ongoing treatment as something of a curiosity. In the anonymous satire The Female Wits (1696), female playwrights Delariviere Manley, Catherine Trotter, and Mary Pix were criticized on the grounds of their intelligence, writing skill, and physical appearance. In fact, this play was produced at The Theater Royal in Drury Lane—the same playhouse that had only a year before premiered Pix’s first play. 66 The satire generally seems to suggest that the women writing at the turn of the century were talentless hacks who only made their way in the theater by copying the works of men. Of the many women working in the productive years bookending the turn of the century, Mary Pix was most prolific, writing and staging no fewer than a dozen plays. Like Behn before her, Pix was involved in charges of plagiarism; unlike Behn’s general defense that male playwrights drew liberally from source material as often as women did, Pix directly accused George Powell of copying one of her manuscripts that was circulating in Drury Lane (then under Powell’s management). After this event, Pix continued to write, but no longer signed her name to manuscripts. 67 To address the problems attending women writers in this period— accusations of plagiarism, maligned reputations, struggles with anonymity—I would 65 As cited above (n. 62), the connection between the sexual and linguistic looseness was nothing new for women after the turn of the century, and Behn herself faced similar accusations. The only new factor at play after the turn of the century was that there were more professionalizing women writers: as more women took on these positions, more women were facing the typical criticisms. 66 Fidelis Morgan, Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration (London: Virago, 1991), xii. 67 James Person, Jr., and Robin Dublanc, Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (Detroit: Gale, 1988). 67 like to consider Pix’s Adventures in Madrid, which premiered in 1706, the last year of women writers’ resurgence in the theater scene. 68 In its plot, Pix’s play takes many of its cues from Behn’s The Rover: English cavaliers have followed their deposed monarch abroad, and overcome obstacles keeping them from their desired mates. Meanwhile, the desirable and desirous continental European women don disguises to subvert the domineering authority of their stodgy male guardians. What sets this play apart from her other works is Pix’s repeated use of the words “spectacle,” “speculate,” and “speculation.” Although Margarete Rubik has argued that Pix’s comedies rely more heavily on “a whirlwind of intrigues and comical situations rather than verbal wit,” I believe that Adventures in Madrid makes fair verbal play on concerns of money. 69 Pix deliberately puns on these words in much the same way Behn’s characters pun on “fortune.” Pix’s play, however, is more representative of the end-‐of-‐century influx of women writers. If critics would treat these women as a curiosity, Pix would do one step better and make her work an absolute spectacle: she uses the word in order to draw attention to—that is, to make a spectacle of— women’s monetary and social gains and struggles. As a character of interest, the “spectacular woman” is not a new subject of study. 70 Actresses (and indeed actors and authors as well) worked to make sure 68 Because of Pix’s recourse to anonymous publication, scholars cannot be sure if the play is really hers. All best evidence, however, suggests that Pix is the most likely author. 69 Rubik 75. 70 See, for example, Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993); Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992); and Gillian Perry’s Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theater, 1768-1820 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007). Although Perry 68 their dramatic performances matched public opinion of their supposed celebrity personae. Because their public appearances had much to do with physical characteristics, these women took care to present themselves fashionably. Considering the criticisms leveled against authoresses and actresses—that an actress portraying a queen is not actually a queen in spite of dressing like one, for example—it is not surprising that the women would be labeled as dissemblers or tricksters. Actresses are masqueraders by profession, donning a mask or dressing in breeches to wheedle the audience into a plot. When written by a woman, the conceits and deceits of that plot feed even further into concerns of spectacle, deception, and performance. From all this, we learn that a spectacular woman is not only physically interesting to observe, but also invested in her visibility as a performer and her success as a dissembler. When an actress’s character is also a masquerader, she hides her true nature more than an average actress, and exploits her interest as a site of spectacle: people look at her, she wants them to, and they try to guess who she is—they speculate about her true identity as a character and as a celebrity. The spectacular woman is multifaceted, then; like the masquerading woman, she sees and is seen, but only on her own terms. The visibility of spectacle is my primary interest in this section: the ways in which visions can circulate is prominent in Pix’s play because her burgeoning profession made her and other women excessively aware of being seen as curious spectacles. During the start of the eighteenth century, “both men and women were covers an era of theater half a century after Pix’s lifetime and restricts her “spectacles” to the medium of the painted portrait, this interest in the visual is distinctly rooted in theatrical performance. 69 rewarded for increased restraint, greater passivity, and deeper reflection—all virtues beginning to be associated with women.” 71 If we consider a looked at object as a passive thing, the spectacular woman certainly jibes with notions of passivity. 72 I would like to argue, however, that Pix’s female characters are very much active agents of their spectacular “to-‐be-‐looked-‐at-‐ness.” They circulate readily throughout the play, climbing from house to house through a trapdoor that conveniently connects the two, thus placing themselves in advantageous positions from which to observe. As such, they are perpetually speculating. 73 They make speculative intellectual conjectures about their marital and financial futures (e.g., “does my beloved requite my emotions”), and they are party to conversations about financial speculations and risks (e.g., “will I receive my rightful inheritance?”). Furthermore, and most importantly, they are not only speculators, but also spectators who observe, as well as performers of spectacle who make themselves open to being observed. They can see themselves, they can see others, they can be seen, and (to an extent) they can control who sees them, when, and in what capacity. As with the women in Behn’s plays, Pix’s three Spanish ladies—Clarinda, Laura, and Lisset—do not have full access to their wealth or their freedom. Instead, their social and financial speculations are tied up with the miserly Don Gomez. Gomez has married Clarinda under false pretenses, and Laura’s brother, Don Lewis, 71 Cynthia Lowenthal, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003), 104. 72 Laura Mulvey’s theorizes that “to be looked at-‐ness” is a passive action, received by the object of the male gaze (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 [1975]). 73 Consider the Latin root “spec[t]”: all of these words are concerned with ways of seeing; speculation in gambling or investment, for example, involves a supposed means of seeing the future. 70 has confined her to the old man’s care until she can be wed to a similarly elderly “monster of a husband,” and Lewis can steal her rightful inheritance (I.ii). 74 Instead of passively accepting their fates, however, the three women wage their own futures because they are “dangerous, slippery females” who are often “together caballing, contriving, plotting…mischief” (I.ii). In other words, their speculations on how to achieve fortune and freedom run parallel to each other. Moreover to speculating, we learn that these women are spectacular and worthy of attention by account of their English paramours: Gaylove is smitten with the “beautiful vision” of Laura, with her “rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, cherry lips, and…alabaster skin” (II.i). His friend Bellmour contends that Clarinda’s eyes alone have “power to animate the dead” (I.i). Notably, the eyes are not simply points addressed in a blazon of love, but in fact are sources of power—of sight, of sparkling mystery, of life-‐giving energy. The women are able to go in active search of their lovers when Lisset, dressed as a man, tricks Don Gomez into believing she is a eunuch who was sent “to watch virgins and spoil intrigues”—in other words, to use the power of sight to prevent the women’s speculations on romance (I.ii). These women “play masquerade, dance…possess all diversions without interruption or control!” (III.v). They are, in Bellmour’s words, “too cunning to be honorable,” and their plots to outwit Gomez, their speculations, are magnificently clever—spectacular—if risky (II.i). Lisset says “I dare venture anything, my first attempt succeeds so well,” suggesting that even risky speculations are worth the potentially beneficial outcome (I.ii). 74 Mary Pix, “Adventures in Madrid” (London, 1709), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, accessed 27 March 2012. Gale DOI: CW3315917197. 71 The women of the play are not the only ones hazarding in speculation, of course. The first scene presents us a pun on spectacles and speculation that sets the tone for the men’s behavior throughout the play. Gaylove opens the scene, mocking Bellmour for being “Equipped…a la Mode D’Espagne,” including a pair of eyeglasses. Bellmour educates him on the Spanish fashion: Behold what a pair of spectacles my rogue of a tailor has brought me, at sight of which I, in a great passion, bid him look in my face and guess if I wanted those helps. Don Thimble, with the gravity of a Corrigidore, answered ‘twas a proof of manhood, not of age, and by the solemn oath of St. Iago, swore not a hero of fourteen durst pretend to a piece of gallantry without these magnifying glasses adorn’d his nose and alter’d his speech. (I.i) To all of this, Gaylove rejoins, ”Ridiculous.” In a chapter on national identity from her book on theatrical performance, Cynthia Lowenthal examines this scene: “After an initial gesture that attempts to belittle and feminize an English man (a suggestion that a man’s national fashions are more important than his gender), together these Englishmen come up with a better idea: transport all Spanish men’s fashions back to English women for their improvement.” 75 In addition to Lowenthal’s gestures towards nationalism and gender as performances, I would remark that both of these performances rely heavily on visual cues. That is, Gaylove thinks Bellmour looks less manly and less English because of his clothing, and largely because of his eyeglasses. 75 Lowenthal 105. 72 As the play continues, though, we see the spectacle eyeglasses play out in a way to suggest that the men are not as good as the women are at seeing. Most obviously of these unaware men is the literally unseeing old Gomez, whose “ill nature [anyone] may read without…spectacles” (I.i). The Spanish lord is alternately referred to as having “blind eyes” or “spectacles and [a] false eye” (I.ii). His eyesight is so poor that he does not recognize Lisset, his young captor, when she appears in the disguise of a eunuch. Although still technically possessing the faculties of sight, the young Englishmen are nearly as oblivious to what is happening around them as Gomez. Although Bellmour has ascribed the power of communication to Clarinda’s “talking eyes,” he professes to love her without having seen any of her other physical features (I.i). Interestingly, his inability to see Clarinda makes him a speculator if not a spectator: that is, he speculates that Clarinda is as attractive as he could imagine. Considering how much he has risked in his pursuit of a married woman, Bellmour argues that “The venture’s too great to lose,” and his servant Jo confirms, “’tis a damn’d lottery when death may come instead of a prize” (III.iv). To confound the men’s association of wagering, death, and spectacle, the women circulate back and forth through the trapdoor between the buildings; the men believe they are “specters”—that is, ghostly visions. Though they may speculate on their future successes in romance, the men are too unaware to properly see and grasp the full power of the spectacular women. Arguably, however, the most prominent of the unaware men is Gaylove He does not have Gomez’s physical disability, nor does he lack information about his beloved’s appearance as Bellmour does about Clarinda; yet still Gaylove overlooks 73 significant details about his friends and intended lover, Laura. Because of his poor skills of observation, Gaylove has no recourse but to speculate, to guess about the situations he finds himself in, and more often than not his speculations are incorrect. For example, when Laura writes a note accusing him of revealing their love to Bellmour, Gaylove has no idea how she could be party to this information unless Bellmour had told her directly. From this, he jumps to the conclusion that Bellmour’s veiled beauty, whom he can only describe by her “talking eyes,” has been Laura all along. Gaylove grows first concerned, then increasingly violent, assuming that he and his friend have been pursuing the same woman (as if there were only one desirable young woman in all of Madrid). He moves to fight “to prevent then the galling supposition [i.e. liberty]” that Bellmour has made in his pursuit (II.i). Ironically, Gaylove has made just such another supposition by presuming that Bellmour is in love with Laura, rather than Clarinda. To the challenge of the fight, Bellmour replies, “I scorn odds, and thy friendship” (II.i). They will risk the odds, risk their lives, and speculate on the future of their friendship over an assumption. Luckily, Lisset, dressed as a eunuch, leaps into the scene to disabuse them of their “galling suppositions.” When Laura and Gaylove contrive to meet at church, he confesses to her, “I dreaded no witchcraft from a fine woman but her eyes—Now I begin to fancy my nurse’s story’s authentic—that you have at your command a little emissary, who has power to creep through an augur hole, whisk in at window’s pass, and repass like a juggler’s ball; deceive the sight, and discover the heart” (II.ii). Although he had previously only thought that a woman’s eyes could trick him, in other words, he now 74 believes that his own eyes play tricks on him: a woman might sneak, deceive, and manipulate to his confusion and detriment. Laura hopes for his eyes not to rove to another beautiful woman, claiming, “I like a lover best that is silent; will not so much as let his eyes declare to any but his mistress the state of his heart” (II.ii). From financial speculation, then, we return to the spectacle of sight: a man must see and know his intended, and must express his affection only through the “declaration” of a meaningful glance. Laura’s request is reasonable; Gaylove is, after all, occasionally hot tempered and fickle. He speculates too much, while at the same time not observing carefully. It would be understandable for his eyes to wander from one woman to another with little pause to discern any depth. He assures her, “You must never believe our sex when they speak to one another of yours—if they boast of a lady’s favor, ten to one they lie” (II.ii). Here again, Gaylove uses the language of speculation, odds, and gambling to defend his actions. In the next act, Laura attempts to test Gaylove’s wager, trying to dupe him into a supposed infidelity. She appears in a veil, pretending to be someone else, and baits his interest by describing her love for a man who is “just such another leering rogue as yourself—he wear’s a laced coat, a light wig, diamond buckles, has a certain je ne sais in his mien, and fire in his eyes, and eloquence on his tongue” (II.iii). He thinks he has the better position from which to speculate, to risk his luck on a woman who appears to be of high quality because of her jewel-‐adorned hands, but he is wrong: he still cannot see her through the veil, and he has no idea that she knows who he is. More to the point, Gaylove does not recognize Laura even though they have seen each other earlier in the day. This 75 definitely doesn’t sound like the odds (speculation) are in Gaylove’s favor: he can’t tell Laura apart from any other woman on the street. In fact, he later claims he thought all Spanish women had the same voice (the odds of this being possible are also not a wise wager). In disguise, Laura may be a deceitful pretender, for all he knows, instead of the heiress for whom he has previously declared his love. When Lisset finally brings Gaylove to a rendezvous with Laura at which she will not wear a veil, Lisset says, “You must consent to let me blind your eyes with my handkerchief, that you may not see the very light till you come to [the] apartment.” To these conditions, Gaylove agrees: Withal my heart [to be] blind as the god of love. I’ll steal upon my blessing nor covet light ‘til her fair eyes inspire. Where there is so much beauty, I’ll not suspect deceit… For love we venture, as for darling fame Tho different ways, yet still the end’s the same And who sets forth in each must throw off fear ‘Tis glorious hazard makes the blessing dear. (III.ii) This is Gaylove’s final admission that he must wager everything on the possibility for love. He will willingly lose his sight, and he gives over the odds that he will be disappointed: “Give me to know to whom I have mortgaged my heart, for the possession of that fair tenement… [I risk] death upon a bare suspicion” (III.v). This threat against life looks new to Gaylove and the other pursuing men, but it has notably dogged the women since the first scenes of the play. When the women first venture out to meet the men, Clarinda almost loses her will: she tells Laura, 76 “You do not know my danger,” and later, “I dare not venture” (II.iii, III.vii). Laura repeatedly convinces her to take the chance: “You’ll be the more courageous when your hand’s in—But what have you to fear” (III.iii). When Lisset ventures out in disguise, she also ventures her life: “Had not breeches secured her, I should scarce have ventured her,” Laura explains (III.v). The women certainly “run a strange risk, but [their] case is desperate” and although their deceits and their spectacular disguises have granted them a small amount of freedom, they do not know if they will ever be financially independent of the dangerous Gomez (III.v). They risk life and livelihood on the off chance that a group of roving men will have them as wives: as Clarinda succinctly observes, “We are ruined—we must throw ourselves into the hands of wild young men, or else be murdered by a cruel old one” (III.vii). If the young men refuse to see properly, the women are out of luck: they would be married away to undesirable men, at best, with no hope to see their rightful dues; at worst, they would be executed. To avoid these fates, they must put on an elaborate spectacle of their desirability and desirousness—something so blatant that even dunderheaded and oblivious cavaliers would understand. Laura remarks at length on the women’s financial speculations during their first scene: “Money is that philosopher’s stone the grave studying fellows meant, and the new hunt in vain after—for there is no proof against its power; it makes the old young, it conquers towns without soldiers, alters the decrees of senates, raises towers from the dust that touch the skies” (I.ii). She continues, “I should command what money I pleased…. but now ‘tis ten to one whether an old husband prove of this liberal disposition; therefore I am resolved for freedom.” She, Clarinda, and 77 Lisset must use visual spectacle as deceit in order to speculate or risk their futures, so that their fortunes will be at their own disposals. The risk the women face, then, is arguably much worse than the loss of life: it is the risk of a life lived without hope for future prospects, without financial stability, and without freedom. It is a life where the two types of fortune circulate seemingly at random: fate may turn at any moment, which can alter a person’s stream of income. This is a life for which no future can be speculated. Fortune Reformed in Four Plays by Susanna Centlivre The spectacular and speculating women in Pix’s play show us how women writers understood the problems of social performance. Without spectacle, women writers would lose imaginative freedoms. Pix’s women are spectacular in the sense that they are archetypal masqueraders, they are adaptable to changing situations, dressed in breeches, plotting to spy on their intended lovers, and making frequent speculations for their own freedoms. Considering such characteristics— adaptability, venturing and adventuring, and spectacular self-‐awareness—these characters lay the groundwork for women in the ensuing century. In other words, their visibility, or sense of spectacle, allows them to speculate, to foretell the fortunes of the next generation. In Centlivre’s works, the lucky fortunes of Behn’s plays and the spectacular speculators of Pix’s come to a head. Here, we find characters whose speculations of their fortunes have gone too far. Although Pix and Centlivre were writing as contemporaries, Centlivre’s works stand on their own in their prospective view of theater in the eighteenth 78 century. Centlivre’s plays were produced regularly throughout the century, as comedies were popular fodder for actors’ benefits: David Garrick and Kitty Clive both chose Centlivre’s works for their final appearances on stage. The most popular of her works were The Gamester (1705), The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), and The Busybody (1709), which enjoyed more than two hundred performances between its debut and 1750. 76 Provocative comparisons arise even between the titles of Centlivre’s plays and her interests in circulation: a body that is busy certainly is one that circulates; gamesters who sit at basset tables are well aware of financial circulation; and to win love at a venture is to risk the circulation of good luck. 77 Indeed, the language of financial fortunes and circulation hang in the rafters through all of these women’s narrative lives. When Centlivre stages this type of circulation, it takes on the uniquely forward-‐looking parameters of reform. Margarete Rubik notes, “It hardly seems justified to view Centlivre as a whole-‐ hearted feminist, though in some of her comedies she is certainly much more sympathetic towards the plight of women and introduces heroines evincing a female solidarity and intellectual autonomy rare in the drama of the time.” 78 Though it may be unjustified to call any woman a feminist avant la lettre, Centlivre’s works present 76 Melinda Finberg, ed., Eighteenth Century Women Dramatists (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), xvii-‐xviii. Finberg notes that, “By the end of the nineteenth century, only four non-‐Shakespearian comedies written before 1750 were regularly produced on the English stage, and two of them were by Centlivre (xvii). 77 These are the four texts by Centlivre that I will examine in this section, largely because of their provocative titles and because of their engagement with fortune and circulation. Although the busybody in question is a man, I will show how Centlivre’s uses of the word “fortune” invert the gender dynamics of that play. 78 Rubik 111. 79 a type of social circulation that is decidedly in favor of women: these women are surprisingly progressive, illustrating that the wheel of fortune would inevitably bring women to the top, allowing them to circulate more freely through society than their forebears. Centlivre’s female characters are often spectators who see the ways that others mistreat their wealth, or abuse the potential for good luck, and just as often these characters issue a fair warning against carelessness. For example, The Gamester addresses the problems attendant to excessive gambling, “which became a national vice under Queen Anne and the first Georges.” 79 In the play, the gambling-‐obsessed Valere attempts to satisfy his father’s wishes: “Quit the name of your ancestors, who never produced such a profligate. The estate has not been reserved so long in the family to be thrown away at hazard” (I.i). 80 Intent on keeping his inheritance, Valere vows that he will give up gambling and marry Angelica, who is “a virtuous lady, and her fortune’s large” (I.i). To test his intention to reform, Angelica “gives him her picture, enjoining him to keep it safe if he wants her love. But predictably enough, Valere loses the picture at the gambling table. However, the gamester he has lost the picture to is no other than Angelica in male disguise.” 81 Angelica initially rejects his courtship as a result of this 79 Rubik 98. 80 Susanna Centlivre, The Gamester (London: British Library Historical Print Editions, 2011). 81 Aparna Gollapudi, Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696-1747 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 52. Gollapudi makes the point that Valere’s physical description, ventured by Angelica’s servant, teaches the audience how to be spectators of his disarray, such that his “mien too correctly indicates his moral stature” (53). By allowing a servant to speculate on the master’s appearance, and by making a spectacle of her male protagonist, Centlivre provides instruction for the correct mode of looking. 80 carelessness, but when Valere’s father threatens to disinherit him, she takes pity on him and accepts his hand. Like Behn’s women in The Rover, Centlivre’s various characters repeatedly refer to the gods of luck and financial fortune, showing their concern for the role that money will play in their destinies. Valere, for example, bewails his love for gambling: “What a dog am I? I know I have no luck, yet can’t forbear playing. Oh, fortune, fortune! But why do I exclaim against her? I’ll be even with her I warrant her; she has made me lose, but I defy her to make me pay” (I.i). Angelica opens the second act in a similar fit of ill humor over Valere’s chosen pastime: “After all his solemn promises to quit that scandalous vice, when he can hold my love upon no other terms, does he still pursue that certain ruin to his fame and fortune?” (II.i). Angelica and Valere’s speeches are both steeped in the language of finance: the future of their courtship is buried within references to forbearance, breaking even, loss and payment, holding stakes, and fortune of both the financial and fateful types. Angelica’s sister cautions, “I’d rather see you married to age, avarice, or a fool than to Valere. Can there be a greater misfortune than to marry a gamester? …And your fortune being all ready money will be thrown off with expedition” (II.i). It is apt that the lovers should be concerned for their future stabilities, but as Valere’s servant Hector notes, “Fortune may change and give a lucky main [hand]” (II.ii). It does not take long for Hector’s hope to come true: the opening scene of Act III has Valere and his man bantering about good fortune—both luck and wealth— nearly every other line. Valere’s father has paid out a partial debt to Hector, and Valere himself has just come from winning a large sum. Hector begins, “I hope sir, 81 since fortune has been so kind—” but Valere interrupts: “A curse of ill-‐luck! Had I but held in the last hand, I should have had 300 guineas more.” Hector continues, “I am overjoyed, sir, at your good fortune,” and tries to convince Valere to put some money aside and “marry the lady [Angelica] whilst she’s still in the mind, lest fortune wheel about and throw you back again.” Valere, however, has plans to venture out on the winning streak of “a lucky day,” because “There’s nothing like ready money to nick [i.e. dupe] fortune…. Where is the immorality of gaming—now I think there can be nothing more moral—It unites men of all ranks—the lord and the peasant, the haughty duchess and the city dame, the marquise and the footman—all without distinction play together” (III.i). In spite of his protests that he’s too well in fortune’s favor to lose, Valere learns a hard lesson when Angelica, disguised as a man, beats him at a game of dice. Once she has revealed herself to him, Angelica cautions, “Forsake that vice that brought you to this low ebb of fortune,” and he agrees to follow the course of virtue: Virtue that gives more solid peace of mind Than men in all their vicious pleasures find; Then each with me the libertine reclaim, And shun what sinks his fortune, and his fame. (V.ii) Valere has, however, made this vow before; the absolution of his reform is uncertain. Arguably, the dedication and epilogue are more telling of Centlivre’s purpose than is the seemingly inconclusive conclusion. The play is dedicated to Lord George Huntingdon, whose valor in battle suited Centlivre’s sense of national pride: “You, 82 my lord, pursue a nobler end [than the gamester], and have chose rather to stain the field with the blood of your nation’s enemies, than increase your fortune by another’s ruin; or expose your own to the hazardous die, a resolution worthy of your birth and fortune” (v). Unlike a game of dice, Huntingdon’s victories were not a matter of luck, but of valor and skill. The epilogue echoes the sentiment that there are more noble occupations than gambling: “suppose then fortune only rules the dice,” suggests the speaker. This could suggest one of two readings: luck alone (“fortune only”) is in control of a gamester’s fate, or luck does not attend matters of greater importance (“only rules the dice,” that is, and does not influence other fields). The nearest Centlivre comes to a political statement within the play is when Valere’s father first appears. Even as Valere says he cannot see the immorality of gambling, he resents his father’s repeated lectures on the subject: “Now he will rail against gaming, as the Whigs against plays” (I.i). Centlivre ironically places her own Whiggish politics under scrutiny to draw attention to a specific point of moderation: clearly not every Whig is invested in railing against plays, so perhaps not every gamester is quite as simply in need of moral reform. 82 The dangers of gambling and the possibility of reform in moderation are similarly explored in The Basset Table (1705), but with a twist: in this play, female characters are the presenters of vice and virtue. The widowed Lady Reveller owns the titular table, “much to the chagrin of her sober-‐minded lover [Lord Worthy], 82 For more on the topic of gaming, see Victoria Warren, “Gender and Genre in Susanna Centlivre’s The Gamester and The Basset Table,” SEL 43.3 (Summer 2003), 605-‐24; and LuAnn Venden Herrell, “’Luck Be A Lady Tonight,’ Or At Least Make Me A Gentleman: Economic Anxiety in Centlivre’s The Gamester,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.2 (Fall 1999), 45-‐61. 83 until the men conspire to frighten her by pretending to rape her, so that she is more than glad to accept her lover’s protection and promises to give up gambling.” 83 Lady Reveller has gaming and luck on the mind nearly constantly: she enters her first scene talking with her servant Alpiew about “My Lady Raffle” who is “horridly out of humor at her ill fortune; she lost three hundred pounds;” Alpiew remarks, “She has generally ill luck” (I.ii). 84 Instead of making a pun out of fortune as Behn’s characters would do, Centlivre’s speak plainly enough that we know “ill fortune” is to mean only luck. When her staid and religious cousin Lady Lucy lectures Lady Reveller not “to laugh at those that give you counsel for good,” the widow replies “I [cannot] divine what ‘tis that I do more than the rest of the world to deserve this blame” (I.ii). In a parallel to Pix’s speculators, and in nearly direct echo of Valere’s speech against immorality, Lady Reveller’s powers of divination leave her defensive of her hobby’s potential moral shortcomings. But of course, her inability to “divine” presents a double bind: she is in fact speculating on what qualities might accompany the pastime of speculation. Centlivre contrasts Lady Reveller’s opinion of fortune and speculation with those of Lucy and the working-‐class druggist’s wife, Mrs. Sago. Lucy is a stiff opponent of profligacy, nearly to a fault. When Sir James Courtly, who is fond of gaming, asks her, “Is your Ladyship reconciled to basset yet? Will you give me leave to lose this purse to you?” Lady Lucy replies, “I thank fortune I neither wish, nor 83 Rubik 99. Like so many other deceits in theatricals of this time, I find no excuse for the men’s “joke” assault. Rather than talking around it, or worse, trying to justify it, I will let it stand as a problematic point of the plot. 84 Susanna Centlivre, “The Basset-‐Table,” Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights vol. 3, ed. Derek Hughes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001). 84 need it, Sir James; I presume the next room is furnished with avarice enough to serve you in that affair…or Mrs. Sago’s ill luck may give you an opportunity of returning some of the obligations you lie under… I grieve to think that fortune should exalt such vain, such vicious souls” (III.i). Here, Lucy contents herself with righteousness, thanking fortune (again, merely luck) that she is not a gambler herself. Mrs. Sago, on the other hand, is profligacy writ large, but she does not have a strong enough financial standing to meet these society women on their own terms. Just as she is about to lose a hand, she speculates, “My ill fortune has not forsook me yet I see,” and later in the same scene “Now fortune favor me, or this moment is my last” (IV.ii). Though her debts are eventually wiped clean, she sets her sights on sobriety for the future: “Fortune has brought me off this time, and I’ll never trust her more” (V.i). 85 As foils to Lady Reveller, Lucy’s uprightness and Mrs. Sago’s cautionary example leave us little room for temperance. Between the extremes of profligacy and prudishness, however, is a third option. Instead of mindlessly squandering time and money at cards, Centlivre suggests a woman should improve herself intellectually. To this point, Lady Reveller has a cousin, Valeria, who engages herself with scientific pursuits. On the subject of Valeria, Sir James tells her beloved Ensign Lovely, “I think it is a supernatural cause which enables thee to go through this fatigue; if it were not to raise thy fortune, I 85 Mrs. Sago is given the last lines of the play, which are a cautionary song: Shall I for this repine at fortune? — No. I’m glad at heart that I’m forgiven so. Some neighbors’ wives have but too lately shown, When spouse had left ‘em all their friends were flown. Then all you wives that would avoid my fate, Remain contented with your present state (V.i). 85 should think thee mad to pursue her…. If you can bear with the girl, you deserve her fortune” (I.ii, III.i). In a similar vein, Lady Reveller jokes with her cousin, “You should bestow your fortune in founding a college for the study of philosophy, where none but women could be admitted, and to immortalize your name,” to which Valeria says, “What you make a jest of, I’d execute, were fortune in my power” (II.i). Only for Valeria does the word fortune take a double meaning: that is, Lovely deserves Valeria’s dowry and her promising future, and she would found a school exclusively for women if she could control both her money and her fate. This is the fortunate woman that Centlivre prefers in her works: not too dependent on either luck or wealth, a woman like Valeria makes her own way through education and self-‐ promotion. Moreover, by juxtaposing her female characters and their various interests in money, Centlivre speaks directly to the problem of a woman’s financial dependency. For a woman to stake her entire future on marrying well—to a man with money, or at least not to an avaricious man, or to a gambler who will lose the couple’s fortune—is nearly as dangerous as playing at cards or dice. Without intelligence, without nobler pursuits than gambling, a woman has little to recommend her to her mate. Centlivre depicts the institution of marriage’s similarity to gambling most clearly in Love at a Venture (1706); indeed, even from the play’s title, we can understand the parallel. The play follows the intrigues of Bellair, who is pursuing three different ladies—Camilla, Beliza, and the wedded Lady Cautious—all under separate names. All of the characters, both men and women, speak freely of their financial prospects. In the character descriptions, for example, Camilla is referred to 86 as “a great fortune,” suggesting that women are defined by, and perhaps even interchangeable with the amount of their dowry (viii). 86 Lady Cautious reminds her brother William that her elderly and apprehensive husband Sir Paul “took me without a fortune, by which yours is the greater” (III.i). When Bellair pursues Camilla, she praises him with jests about the gamble he has taken on her: “You purchased my life at the hazard of your own, and it shall be the business of that life you saved…to serve you” (II.i). Even as she hints at purchases, hazards, and business, Bellair declares, “It is in your power to overpay the hazard you have mentioned,” but this is not quite true: Camilla will “measure not a foot of [her father’s] estate, though I am his only child” (II.i). Bellair assures her, “I am heir to an estate, perhaps, as large as he can wish,” but she is concerned as to why Bellair “would hazard his [father’s] displeasure for a stranger.” The truth comes out: “The estate’s entailed” (II.i). Even for an “airy spark” like Bellair, such open conversation about inherited fortunes is bold. At the end of the play, after a fair number of deceits, Sir William’s younger brother Ned jokes that he should marry the maid Patch. She chastens him at length in the boldest address of financial resources that the play offers: Though you should make me a lady, you’d not better my fortune much by being your wife; our humors would quickly consume our estate;—I love fine Clothes,—fine Coach,—fine Equipage, and fine House;—your drinking, wenching, gaming, and soforth—that when I wanted a new suit in the morning, you have flung off your money overnight. (V.i) 86 Susanna Centlivre, “Love at a Venture” (London: 1706), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, accessed 28 June 2014. Gale DOI: CW3310564441. 87 This is a poor match not only because the two are not in love, but also because of the characters’ financial prospects. Patch challenges Ned’s standing—indeed, as a second son, he is not likely to inherit much. As a servant speaking to a titled gentleman, this is wonderfully impertinent: Patch knows she is better off fending for herself. More importantly, it is Centlivre’s most apt commentary on the nepotism that often attends wealth and social connections. By the time The Busybody was written and produced, Centlivre had already addressed such topics as potential reform for gamblers, women’s financial dependence, and frank discussions of fortune. This play presents complex inversions of gender and social structures, and in it we can see the author concerning herself with grander scales of social reform. In The Busybody, it is mostly male characters who use the word “fortune.” In an inversion of Behn’s characters from The Rover, the men of The Busybody pun on fortune much more often than the women. As a result, the men can be read as the ones who should be panicked and concerned with the prospects for their future. Put another way, the women of The Rover must rely on their good fortune to secure their financial security, but this predicament falls largely to the men of The Busybody. Sir George Airy and Charles Gripe are friends—wealthy and not, respectively—and they open the play with a conversation on finance’s influence on fate. Sir George tells his friend “There are some men…whom fortune has left free from inquietudes, who are diligently studious to find out ways and means to make themselves uneasy,” to which Charles replies, “[Nothing] in nature can ruffle the temper of a man whom the four seasons of the year compliment with as many 88 thousand pounds.” George reprimands him: “A man that wants money thinks none can be unhappy that has it,” but that he is in a mood for whimsy (I.i). Since George already has determined his financial fortune, in other words, he will go in search of whatever fate that money may or may not be able to purchase. The titular busybody, Marplot, who lives under the care of Charles’ father, joins them and asks Charles to introduce him to Sir George, since “to be ranked in his acquaintance…is a vast addition to a man’s fortune” (I.i). To have friends with money could indeed improve a man’s fortune, either because he is lucky to know someone wealthy and connected, or because he might benefit financially from the acquaintance. By far, however, Sir Francis and Charles Gripe use the word most frequently. Charles’ father Sir Francis is also the guardian to Marplot and the wealthy young Miranda, whom Francis would have for his wife. He has set up financial barriers for any potential suitors to Miranda. When Sir George comes to call, for example, Francis tells him that Miranda “does not love a young fellow, they are all vicious;” he allows George the opportunity to pitch his suit, however, if he pays a hundred guineas for the experience: “If thou dost not buy thy experience, thou would never be wise; therefore give me a hundred and try fortune” (I.i). Francis refers to his charge Marplot as an “extravagant coxcomb that will spend his fortune before he comes to it” (II.i). Indeed, Sir Francis has fortune on the mind, and is a classic miser. As a result of his father’s penny-‐pinching, Charles has neither luck nor wealth with which to pursue his beloved Isabinda. Throughout the play, he delivers such lines as “Fortune generally assists the bold;” “There’s another of fortune’s strokes; I suppose I shall be edged out of my estate;” and “I am immured to the frowns of fortune” (III.i, 89 III.iv, IV.ii). Father and son alike are suffering from a lack of fortune, and Sir Francis would rectify this by marrying Miranda and securing both her luck and wealth to himself. Miranda, however, has other designs. Even though Sir Francis covets Miranda’s fortune, she ultimately is able to choose romance, which also helps her choose her fate—her fortune’s fortune, as it were. At their first encounter, she jokes with Sir George about his easy ability to throw away a hundred guineas in pursuit of a woman: “They are the worst things you can deal in, and damage the soonest; your very breath destroys them, and I fear you’ll never see your return” (I.i). When she later accuses him of pursuing her strictly for her money, Sir George replies, “Did I not offer you in those purchased minutes to run the risk of your fortune so you would but secure that lovely person to my arms?” (IV.iv). When he asks to marry her immediately, Miranda hopes that he will forbear: “I have provided better than to venture on dangerous experiments headlong. My guardian, trusting to my dissembled love, has given up my fortune to my own dispose” (IV.iv). Though she airs her doubts to her maid Patch—“I have done a strange bold thing! My fate is determined, and expectation is no more”—Miranda does not need to concern herself with Sir George’s intentions. Patch remarks, “It is impossible a man of sense should use a woman ill [if she is] endued with beauty, wit and fortune. It must be the lady’s fault if she does not wear the unfashionable name of wife easy” (V.i). If Patch’s comment is read straight, it feels as regressive and as stifling as the problem of circulating women in a marriage market like property. If, however, it is read tongue in cheek, we can hear Centlivre puncturing and deflating traditional expectations: if 90 a husband will only be happy with a wealthy wife, any unhappiness on the woman’s part can hardly be her fault. Conclusions Women writers’ interest in their own financial freedom uniquely shaped the ways they discussed fortune, speculation, gambling, and financial and social independence. The three women whose works are examined in this chapter played these words’ meanings off one another to illustrate the strange predicaments in which women of the Restoration and early eighteenth century could find themselves regarding marriage as an exchange economy as opposed to an institution thriving on romantic love. These decidedly female predicaments could be especially powerful if the woman in question was a potentially professionalized citizen. Behn, Pix, and Centlivre juxtaposed female characters with concerns of fate and finance in order to parallel their own experiences as women whose fortunes—both of wealth and of luck—could influence one another in unique ways. For example, a playwright’s success could depend on her social fortune: the very earliest women playwrights did not need to earn a living because they were born with the privileges of high society. On the other hand, a woman could make her own connections in the theater world based on her social skills instead of a fortunate birth. If word of mouth circulated that a play was particularly well acted, well staged, or well written, the larger London society could assist in the growth of a playwright’s professional fortunes. 91 Furthermore, female playwrights would have known what factors influenced a woman’s ability to earn a livelihood, and would have known that those factors did not necessarily include skillful writing. Concerning skill and the ability to earn a livelihood, consider this example from Centlivre’s life: in 1706 when she presented Love at a Venture to the Theater Royal in Drury Lane, then-‐manager Colley Cibber rejected the play on the grounds that Bellair’s wooing of three different women was too bawdy for the stage. In spite of this apparent objection, Cibber copied extensively from Centlivre’s text for his own play The Double Gallant, which was staged in Drury Lane the following year. 87 In a wonderfully apt moment from Love at a Venture, the “silly projecting coxcomb” of a hack writer Mister Wouldbe jots down notes as the (decidedly more clever) friends Bellair and Sir William converse. Bellair prods the scribbling writer, “I hope you are not one of those spongy-‐brained poets that suck something from all companies to squeeze into a comedy,” to which Wouldbe responds with the lie, “When I write, it shall be all my own, I assure you” (III.i). In addition to his habit of cribbing jokes from those around him to make himself seem more amusing, Wouldbe also is fond of mimicking (the much wealthier) Sir William’s fashions. Early in the play, he is seen sporting the exact same coat as William; when Wouldbe loses the coat in a dupe, he complains, “Nothing vexes me so much as that I have not been seen in it; had I but made the tour of St. James’s, and both playhouses, my passion for it would have ebbed to indifference” (V.i). 87 J. Milling, “Centlivre, Susanna (bap. 1669?, d. 1723),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). 92 Wouldbe's insistence on unoriginality in his writing and fashion is eminently mockable, and remarkably similar to Cibber’s imminent plagiarism of Centlivre’s text. It would seem almost as though Centlivre had considered her prospects as a writer, speculated on her future luck, and predicted Cibber’s plagiarism of a fashionable plot for his own betterment. As we have seen from this example, and as we will see in greater detail in the subsequent chapters, shifts in an author’s financial fortunes were often results of a shift in literary fortunes: namely, as characters became more popular, other authors would copy them for personal gain; as theatrical circles addressed these issues of plagiarism and the resulting feuds, certain authors found their fortunes rising and falling in turn. 93 CHAPTER TWO Ballads, Bawdry, and Bodies: The Circulations of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera Suky Tawdry, Jenny Diver Polly Peachum, Lucy Brown; Oh the line forms on the right, dears, Now that Mackie’s back in town! ~”The Moritat of Mackie the Knife,” Bertolt Brecht The Threepenny Opera (trans. Marc Blitzstein) Few jazz standards are quite so recognizable and readily circulated as “The Moritat of Mackie the Knife.” From Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper with music by Kurt Weill, and popularized by such singers as Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra, the song is a snappy swinging two-‐step that tells the tale of a notorious bladesman and his violent exploits. “Mackie,” in all of its different translations, echoes the seedy sentiments of its source text: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a portrait of London’s underworld crime scene, and a direct satirical attack on the statesman Robert Walpole, the man primarily responsible for the Licensing Act of 1737 that effectively closed London’s theaters. At the same time that it respects The Beggar’s Opera’s criminal element, however, “Mack the Knife” belies the source text’s most popular and most circulated character: Polly Peachum. Buried 94 in the list of Mack’s would-‐be mistresses, Polly was, to her eighteenth century fans, practically a consumer product of John Gay’s popular ballad opera. Before approaching Polly, however, it is important to establish that this work was a site of circulation within itself—and a source of further circulation. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which premiered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728, sparked what was arguably the most famous theatrical media event of the eighteenth century. John Brewer notes: Gay’s original and inventive creation…is characteristic of many works of the early eighteenth century in its use and deliberate satire of the new cultural world it inhabited. It not only deliberately drew attention to its sources, to its nature as a modern pastiche, but included references to an astonishing variety of activities from Grub Street scribbling to the Italian opera. 1 The conditions under which Gay was writing allowed him to alternately draw on and feed back into the cultural consciousness, allowing his characters to circulate through the minds of the London theater attendees. Audience members may not have known the full extent of his sources, but most of Gay’s audience would have “read attacks on politicians and the opera in newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals, seen prints depicting Jonathan Wild’s execution…heard ballad tunes sung on the street, snapped up cheap biographies of criminals, and discussed all these topics in the coffee house.” 2 The popularity of Gay’s subjects, and their origins 1 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), 428-‐9. 2 Brewer 432. 95 within other media and texts, only propelled the play’s appeal; just like Mack the Knife and his various incarnations, these characters were eminently reproducible for circulation. In addition to the characters themselves, the popular ballads that comprised the opera made it even more accessible to the average Londoner: “Because the ballad is so thoroughly common and commodified, it provides an experience of song that cannot be used by the audience to separate itself definitively from the ‘Rabble.’ This allows The Beggar’s Opera to survive the devouring force of ‘commercial culture,’ preserving its democratizing energy.” 3 Notably, the ballad genre often presents bawdy send-‐ups of human physicality: there are naughty puns and irreverent references to famous personages. Many ballads of this time seem to address either bawdry or political commentary, and the two topics are certainly not mutually exclusive. As a genre that often contained verbal abuses and satires, the ballad propagated popular notions of physicality (something tangible) in a decidedly intangible medium (music). 4 By intermingling the immaterial aural media—popular music—with high-‐art opera, Gay not only drew on previous work, but also bridged genres and, presumably, class boundaries to begin a new spiral of intertextual circulation and derivation—which notably resist pure materiality. None of the music-‐bound characters in the opera displays particularly redeeming qualities. These crooks, scoundrels, and sneaks nonetheless represent a 3 Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 18. 4 Although sound waves can be felt as vibrations to the eardrum, I refer to music as an “intangible” medium in the sense that it cannot be held in one’s hand, as can a printed broadsheet or book. 96 wide range of character types in order to “reveal the intersections of political and economic power, social level, gender, and race.” 5 Much scholarly work has drawn attention to the men of the underworld that Gay presents—of course, Macheath’s afterlife as “Mack the Knife” is only one way in which the men of the play have taken center stage. 6 Although Gay’s roguish, rakish highwaymen are certainly compelling, I believe that during the opera’s heyday, Polly Peachum was much more of a standard bearer for the work than any of the male characters because she was presented, adapted, and perpetuated in so many different media—not least of these the ballad. Polly’s promiscuous circulation through different media makes her significant to a study of sluttishness, but also to any study of popular character types in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, Polly’s centrality to the opera hinges on other characters frequently calling her a slut. Because Gay used the word slut primarily when characters are addressing Polly, it wouldn’t matter if a performer chose to portray her as messy or cleanly—she is a slut whether or not she keeps herself washed or chaste. As she repeatedly takes this epithet, Polly is meant to represent the overarching ideological corruption (i.e. the third quality of dirt that is localized to a person’s moral cleanliness) that marks the rest of the play and all of its characters. Moreover, Polly’s labeling as “slut” also reveals that she is capable of mingling, 5 Dianne Dugaw,“Deep Play”: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2001), 26. 6 See, for example, Harold Weber’s foundational The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1986) and Erin Mackie’s Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making if the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009). 97 crossing genre boundaries, and circulating in a most peculiar way. Because the slut moniker clings to Polly like dirt, it is important for us to understand that her enduring legacy is one of circulation—although Macheath may have his famous song, Polly had venues in practically every media outlet the eighteenth century had to offer. Polly Peachum: Slut Extraordinaire Polly was, of course, not the first character of her kind. The loose woman, courtesan or concubine, coquette, or country maid are stock characters who bear resemblances to Polly for their sexual promiscuity and low class status. 7 Though prostitutes may not fit the same classification as Polly—considering what I have laid out in the previous chapter, a prostitute works in the trade of sexuality for money, but a coquette or country maid may not—these character types share Polly’s affinity for saucy retorts, disruption of the status quo, and witty word play. 8 Notorious early actresses such as Elizabeth Barry (in her early career as a comedic actress), Anne Bracegirdle, and Nell Gwynn popularized female characters that frequently appeared in breeches, upsetting gender hierarchies in their plays’ respective narratives. 7 Elaine McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 91. The history of such characters dates as far back as Greek comedy. 8 Polly’s kin appear in different guises throughout plays of the Restoration and earlier: many of those by Aphra Behn addressed in the previous chapter, William Congreve’s The Way of the World (Mirabell and Mrs. Marwood), John Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (Doralice), George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (Lady Bountiful and Mrs. Sullen), and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (Mrs. Pinchwife), among others. Many of these women exhibit the sluttish trait of “loose morals” by falling in love with rake heroes and/or cuckolding their husbands. 98 Like their predecessors, the women in The Beggar’s Opera are given many unflattering epithets: variously, they are harlots, harpies, whores, hussies, wenches, jilts, jades, strumpets, or sluts. “Slut” is unique among these because it refers both to a physically unkempt and a sexually loose woman. During the eighteenth century, the word “slut” was typically descriptive of a woman with a working-‐class background, and generally one who would have been living in any condition from cluttered disarray to downright squalor. It is not much of a leap to understand that the type of woman who cannot keep her surroundings tidy would also not be particularly selective or careful about her choice in sexual partners—this definition, a sexually promiscuous woman, is less apparent from Gay’s text, but nonetheless implicit in the word’s use. Both variations of the word slut intersect at a point of sexual hygienic practice in a way that other epithets in The Beggar’s Opera do not. A harlot or strumpet, for example, is primarily a sexualized being, “a debauched or unchaste woman, [or] a prostitute;” whereas a wench or slattern is above all else “a girl of the rustic or working class” or “a woman or girl untidy and slovenly in person, habits, or surroundings.” 9 These synonyms do not, in other words, carry both meanings of sexual promiscuity and slovenly manner as slut does. To understand Polly, we must understand both senses of this word, as it marks her as the bearer of the play’s many layers of debauchery, satire, and circulation. Of course, Polly is not the only slut of the play: three characters other than her are referred to as sluts, though they all seem to fit under a definition of slut that suggests affectionate address; each of the three is only called “slut” once apiece. Of 9 “Wench,” “Strumpet,” “Slattern,” OED. 99 these three characters, two are prostitutes that Macheath hails. He calls to Dolly Trull, “Kiss me, you slut,” when he first arrives at the bar; he also calls Jenny Diver “a dear slut” before realizing that she has betrayed his confidence to collect a financial reward. It is important to note that Jenny is addressed as a slut before Macheath learns of her treachery: if he knew of her betrayal, he could be using the word maliciously, but as yet he has no cause to think she has done anything wrong. Both of these women certainly fit both definitions of “slut;” when addressed to Jenny, however, the qualifier “dear” produces a pun, suggesting not only that she is Macheath’s darling and favorite prostitute, but also that she is costly, as she is an avowed thief who will readily betray her lover for her own benefit. The third character aside from Polly who is called slut is Lucy Lockit, whose father remarks that she “wilt always be a vulgar slut” after she has deigned to release Macheath from prison. 10 Lockit’s use comes most close to abusive rather than affectionate: he could easily have let the word slip out of frustration, as he usually calls Lucy by her name or by the epithet “hussy,” which is traditionally playful. 11 Polly, however, certainly receives the most verbal labeling as slut, and often with decidedly malicious intent; as such, she presents the most potential for exploration on the topic. Within minutes of Polly’s appearance on stage, Mrs. Peachum calls her daughter in rapid succession “a sad slut” (in song), a “proud slut,” a “pouting slut,” and a “sorry slut.” 12 As in the examples of Jenny and Dolly, we can usually tell from adjectival modifiers whether or not the use of the word is malicious 10 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (New York: Penguin, 1986), 73, 77, 97; henceforth cited as “Beggar’s.” 11 “Hussy,” OED. 12 Beggar’s 54-‐5, 56, 58. 100 or in jest—these are not dear or darling affections that Mrs. Peachum slings, but castigations of her daughter and lamentations of her own lot having to raise such a child. Additionally, Polly’s father, Lucy Lockit, and Macheath each call her slut in their turn. 13 Of these three barbs, only Macheath’s jibe at the end of the play, once he has chosen Polly as his proper wife, seems to come from affectionate teasing rather than from a place of genuine antipathy. Additionally to illustrating the different meanings of the word slut, Polly helps us distinguish between a woman who has chosen sluttishness and one whose community has labeled her a slut. First, we must consider two implications of the word: initially, we know that many of the verbal jabs raised against the women of the opera can be used playfully, “without serious imputation of bad qualities.” 14 As such, they connote a feigned or affected disgust on the part of the speaker. However, even in jest these words still project all the seemingly negative implications of “slut” to someone who does not actively embrace sluttish behaviors. This initially appears to be a bad sign for Polly: as previously noted, being deemed a slut seems to outrank any attempts of her own to espouse cleanliness. However, when we note examples of the word’s usage, we find the second implication: that to be a slut often presupposes the attempt to hide sluttish behavior, or an ability to dissemble cleanliness. An example from the first decade of the eighteenth century describes a deceitful woman: “Nor was she a woman of any beauty, but was a nasty slut.” This suggests the woman in question presents herself as a beauty, and only scrutiny reveals her true self—“a nasty slut.” Two similar examples show women concealing 13 Beggar’s 93, 108, 115, 122. 14 “Slut,” OED. 101 their true sluttishness: in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “Women are all day a dressing, to pleasure other men abroad, and go like sluts at home;” and in George Pettie’s Guazzo’s Civil Conversation (1581): “I have noted often those dames which are so curious in their attire, to be very sluts in their houses.” 15 Historically, these examples suggest that sluttishness is an essential state of being that is hidden behind a mask of cleanliness or propriety. When Mrs. Peachum sings, “Our Polly is a sad slut,” she seems to have a revelation: she has discovered that Polly is willfully deceiving her family, and that underneath her supposed decency is a sluttish reality. Of course, is most common for others to “discover” or “reveal” this supposed truth about Polly, such that we may not know how Polly sees herself: is she a slut in hiding, or a consummate actor who is pretending at sluttishness while actually decent and cleanly? There are various textual clues that could suggest either possibility. Polly’s first line in the play might well be a subtly nuanced statement regarding her ability to dissemble: “I know as well as any of the fine ladies how to make the most of myself and of my man, too.” 16 After learning of Polly’s marriage to Macheath, Mrs. Peachum remarks, “I knew she was always a proud slut; and now the wench hath played the fool and married, because forsooth she would do like the gentry;” and later, “Those cursed play-‐books she reads have been her ruin.” 17 Notable here is that Mrs. Peachum does not say that Polly is a fool, but that she “played the fool,” and that the girl “would do [that is, would act] like the gentry.” Here, we can see that Polly may be living in a fantasy world that “those 15 “Slut,” OED. 16 Beggar’s 53. 17 Beggar’s 55, 62. 102 cursed play-‐books” inspired her to pursue; to support this reading, Polly later remarks to Macheath, “I have no reason to doubt you, for I find in the romance you lent me, none of the great heroes were ever false in love.” 18 She may not realize that fictional romances are not the same as the reality of poverty. On the other hand, she might also be calculating and demanding, negotiating her situation such that, through layers of deceit, her “playing” at romance and gentrification becomes her reality. Peachum, Lucy, and even Polly herself address such pointed implications that to be a woman at all is a form of multifarious deceit. When Peachum arrests Macheath at the bar, he tells the rogue not to have his pride wounded: “The greatest heroes have been ruined by women. But, to do them justice, I must own they are a pretty sort of creatures, if we could trust them.” 19 In noting that women would be pretty only if they could be trusted, Peachum seems to suggest not only that all women are deceitful, but also that all women only feign prettiness—a pretty sort— and all women might be sluts at heart. The women of the play recognize this tendency towards deceit as well: while visiting Macheath at Newgate, Polly and Lucy verbally attack each other, and Lucy justifies her words and actions by telling Polly, “You force me to be so ill-‐bred.” 20 Polly’s presence may indeed have upset Lucy, but to force her actions seems unlikely; to force her to be ill-‐bred, rather than to force her to act ill-‐bred, is even less likely. Polly ultimately ruminates on the feigned decency that Lucy has used to hide her murderous intentions: “The dissembling of a 18 Beggar’s 65. 19 Beggar’s 78-‐9. 20 Beggar’s 93. 103 woman is always the forerunner of mischief.” 21 Polly’s nuanced knowledge of dissembling as it relates to sluttishness and femininity in general comes to bear not only on her character’s afterlife, but also on the often-‐sinister commodification of an actress’s physical body. Polly’s Afterlife in Circulation Polly’s textual body, as Gay has written it, is the marker of corruption that circulates through the rest of the play, and consequently through the other incarnations that the play endured. Considering the etymological assessments of the epithet “slut” and the three different types of dirt (on the body, around the body, and of/in the body) we become aware of the ways in which Polly represents not only the pervasive physical dirt and corruption of the play’s seedy underworld setting, but also the textual implications for a widely circulated and wildly popular text: Polly’s sluttishness pokes its grubby fingers into all of the promiscuous adaptations that the opera experienced. As a popular figure, and often alluded to as a real woman, the character Polly Peachum herself became a text central to The Beggar’s Opera’s endurance. In Gay’s play, Polly’s meditations often suggest that she knows she is performing—in other words, she puts on a show for the other characters on stage—and she may even know she is performed—she needs an actress or reader to vivify her textual self. Her frequently quoted first line, “I know as well as any of the fine ladies how to make the most of myself,” can be read as a metafictional rumination on acting: she knows how 21 Beggar’s 112. 104 to make herself fine, or she simply knows how to make herself, to fashion herself as through performance and circulation. 22 Adding to this that Polly became as real to eighteenth century audiences as the actresses who portrayed her, she gathers more acumen for her promiscuous circulation: her popularity, in fact, prompted Gay to write her an eponymous sequel. In fact, Gay more directly addresses the problems of economic commodification of women in this sequel, Polly. Ironically, just as Gay anticipated theatrical censorship in The Beggar’s Opera, Walpole seems to have anticipated Gay’s retaliation: the statesman banned Polly before it could be staged, and it was not produced until 1777, forty-‐five years after Gay’s death. Walpole is not as directly attacked as in The Beggar’s Opera, making this sequel seem incongruous in comparison to its forerunner. Perhaps surprisingly, further suggesting the play’s differences from The Beggar’s Opera, the word slut is used only once, with an ambiguous referent. 23 Damaris, the lady servant in the Ducat household tells her mistress about “a bustle” between Mr. Ducat and Polly, whom Ducat has recently purchased as a servant—and presumably as a lover. When Mrs. Ducat questions her further, Damaris pleads ignorance: “Madam, I have no experience. If you had heard them, you would have been a better judge of the matter.” Mrs. Ducat immediately follows with “An impudent slut! I’ll have her before me. If she be not a thorough profligate, I shall make a discovery by her behavior.” 24 Here, two antecedents could 22 Beggar’s 53. 23 The most common appellations in Polly are strumpet, jade, wench, and hussy. 24 John Gay, Polly: An Opera (London, 1777); Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), Gale, Accessed 8 April 2009, 105 be assumed: either “you are” or “she is” an impudent slut. It is difficult to say whether the “impudent slut” in question is Polly, the same woman as the subsequent “her” to whom Mrs. Ducat refers, and who is assumed to be Mr. Ducat’s lover; or Damaris, whose rejoinder to her mistress is indeed impudent in its breaching of class boundaries, and in its conjecture regarding her lack of “experience” in comparison to Mrs. Ducat with regards to understanding matters of sexuality. However, even as the assignation of “slut” is ambiguous, this play represents much more openly than The Beggar’s Opera the suggestion that women are little more than another form of currency to be circulated in the exchange economies of marriage, prostitution, or (sexual) slavery. Mrs. Trapes, who in The Beggar’s Opera snitches on Macheath’s whereabouts after his escape from Newgate, takes an equally sinister part in Polly: she is the procuress who transports women to the West Indies to sell them into sexual slavery. She treats her fellow women not even as currency, but as freight—“I have a fresh cargo of ladies just arrived”—and as she haggles with Ducat over a price for Polly, Mrs. Trapes argues, “If I had her at London, such a lady would be sufficient to make my fortune; but, in truth, she is not impudent enough to make herself agreeable to the sailors in a public house in this country.” 25 This is a far cry from the young woman who is so frequently taken for a slut in her previous textual incarnation: Polly may seem impudent to her familiars in London, but her sluttishness pales in this new frontier of sexual slavery. To Polly, Mrs. Trapes goads, “A young lady of your beauty hath wherewithal to make her <http://find.galegroup.com/libproxy.usc.edu/ecco/>; henceforth cited as “Polly.” All quotations in this paragraph are from Polly, 22. 25 Polly 2-‐3. For more on circulations of fortune as it directly pertains to money and bodies, see chapter 1 of this dissertation. 106 fortune in any country,” suggesting that Polly should perhaps have followed a path of marriage, prostitution, or indeed both. 26 In a line that most explicitly draws the connection between servitude, sexuality, and slavery, Ducat complains to Mrs. Trapes that she is asking too much money for Polly: “I could have half a dozen negro princesses for the price.” 27 I leave to my readers to determine what in this line raises more troublesome reflection: the racial hierarchy or the concern for a human’s sales value at all. Much in the way it addresses issues of female sexual circulation, Polly addresses the ways in which women—especially actresses—must dissemble for fear of ruination: Polly dresses as a man to escape her unwanted servitude. Moreover, although Walpole is no longer the prominent butt of satire as in The Beggar’s Opera, this cross-‐dressing scene gestures towards moral concerns of a female actor pretending to be someone not of her own station, or not of her own sex. Polly states that she dons men’s clothing “To protect me from the violence and insults to which my sex might have expos’d me.” 28 In this passage, Polly’s sex might have “expos’d her” to violence and insults in two equally plausible ways: first, much in the same way as a female actor, her physical female body—her sex—might have provoked unwanted attention from men, leading her to a life of sexual servitude; second, other members of her sex—other women—might have betrayed her for their own personal gain. Indeed, considering Mrs. Trapes’ role in the sexual procurement plot, and Polly’s later claim that “I have been ruin’d by women,” it 26 Polly 6. 27 Polly 11. 28 Polly 57. 107 seems not only plausible but probable that she means the latter. 29 Like Polly, Gay recognizes the sexual dangers to which political circumstances might have exposed female actors: on the one hand, they might serve the whim of male sexual desire, whereas on the other, they might be equally abused at the hands of competitive and conniving women. By linking the economics of sexual circulation with the politics of morality and sexual propriety, Polly ultimately unites her two plays’ messages. Polly was not only a reflection on the actress as a sexual commodity, however; it was also Gay’s critique of hack writers who would steal characters from a popular text for their own profit. By becoming nearly a real woman, rather than simply a character on a page, Polly’s popular circulation made her distinctly tangible to audiences, and further solidified the lasting communal memory of the Beggar’s Opera media event. Joseph Roach suggests that celebrities, “like kings, have two bodies, the body natural, which decays and dies, and the body cinematic, which does neither.” 30 Though “cinematic” does not apply to Polly in the twentieth-‐century sense, she was certainly provided with poems, memoirs, and portraits to concretize her celebrity afterlife. In each of the media through which Polly’s story circulated, not only must Polly’s story conform to different generic properties, but so must her body: a body in text is made of words, for example; on stage, the body is that of an actress; in a portrait, the body is charcoal, ink, oil, or acrylic. The ability for each genre to stamp its physical conventions onto Polly reveals a necessary overlap of material and immaterial circulations that appeal to a variety of audience types. In other words, humans crave different narrative genres, and we need our bodies to be 29 Polly 37. 30 Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007), 36. 108 stirred and stimulated in a variety of ways before we can grasp what different bodies are capable or incapable of accomplishing. As the Opera garnered popular attention, it inspired the circulation of more texts. Other authors wrote complete sequels and single-‐ballad parodies of the play; some wrote tales of the seedy London underworld. These parodies included such titles as Polly Peachum’s Jests; The Fool’s Opera; the “New Ballad Inscrib’d to Polly Peachum,” and an “Answer” that it prompted; Thievery à la Mode; and Polly Peachum On Fire, the Beggar’s Opera Blown Up, and Captain Macheath Entangled in his Bazzle- Strings (all texts dated 1728). Outside the realm of theater (though nonetheless still within the purview of performance and play), sermons were preached against “the evil and mischief of stage-‐playing;” decks of playing cards were made available, featuring the opera’s ballad music and lyrics; even alleged biographies surfaced of the fictional female lead Polly Peachum, “written by a childhood friend.” 31 Instead of dampening the impact of Gay’s work, however, these concentric texts heightened the opera’s popularity, and in many cases solidified the lasting effects of otherwise ephemeral live performances. In this process, viewers’ memories of the play itself must have shifted—become more elusive and fragmentary—but the media event, the sum total of the Opera’s impact, would have become more deeply engrained in 31 Brewer 440-‐1; Arthur Bedford, The Evil and Mischief of Stage-Playing: a Sermon (&c.), 2nd ed., (London, 1735); Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Gale, 12 November 2010, <http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ecco>. Although I choose to focus on contemporaneous concentric texts, The Beggar’s Opera propagated well beyond the eighteenth century; Joseph Roach identifies “four major twentieth-‐century adaptations of Gay’s original,” to say nothing of “minor” adaptations (It, 213). 109 the public consciousness because of its easy, promiscuous circulation throughout different narrative forms. Ballads were perhaps the most popular genre for The Beggar’s Opera’s spinoff texts. Essentially, ballads were early modern “ear worms”: everyone would have known the tune, which is a precondition that is hugely important for a song to be able to circulate through the collective aural memory. For example, Gay’s use of the ballad in The Beggar’s Opera compelled the story’s popularity because he adapted love songs or courtly romances into perverse speculations on bodily and political corruption. Ballads, in other words, exemplified textual sluttishness: they circulate and mix readily, and their words can be rewritten to fit multiple situations. Though the melodies would stay the same, the texts and subjects would change, refusing (like their frequently sexually promiscuous subjects) to remain faithful to one voice. 32 As a popular text that often contained verbal abuses and satires, the ballad propagated popular notions of physical bawdry, and protracted the impact of Gay’s work. In “A Ballad, call’d, a dissertation on The Beggar’s Opera,” we find lines attesting to the play’s wild popularity across class boundaries: “All the mob from the city and court / Ran to see this hodge-‐podge sport.” 33 For Polly specifically, many authors composed poems, love songs, and other ballads to her beauty—or to her 32 Although the melodies of the songs interest me, the most important thing I have to say about them is that they stay the same. 33 Anonymous [attributed to Tony Aston], The fool's opera; or, the taste of the age. Written by Mat. Medley. And performed by his company in Oxford. To which is prefix'd, a sketch of the author's life, written by himself (London, [1731?]), 14. Although the text of The Fool’s Opera does not ascribe authorship to Tony Aston, this edition is appended with the “Ballad call’d a dissertation” and a short autobiographical account of Aston’s life, indicating that he was at least part author. 110 detriment. One, entitled “A New Ballad inscrib’d to Polly Peachum,” was featured in a theatrical, The Woman’s Revenge: Or, A Match in Newgate, that is alternately ascribed to Christopher Bullock or Thomas Betterton. Like The Beggar’s Opera, The Woman’s Revenge had a criminal element for its subject matter, following the romantic exploits of Newgate prisoners. In addition to its inclusion in the play, the “New Ballad” was also printed as a broadside, and later as a pamphlet. In “A New Ballad,” the author parodies the ballad “Pretty Polly Say” from Gay’s opera (Act I, scene 13), which was of course based on a preexisting ballad, “Pretty Parrot Say.” Part of the joke on Gay seems to be that a parrot will repeat what it has heard from its owner; just so, a fictional character can only speak the words her author has given her—unless, that is, another author writes new words for the same character. The “New Ballad” author begins, “Pretty Polly say, / When did Johnny Gay / Stitch you, stitch you, for his Play.” 34 The poem continues: Tell us how he plays, How his fingers strays; Tell us all his various ways, How he his shot discharges: Is his veins Like his brains, When in strains, He a theme enlarges? 35 34 A New Ballad, inscrib’d to Polly Peachum. To the tune of Pretty parrot say. By the author of Leheup’s ballad (London, 1728), 1-‐2. 35 A New Ballad 12-‐22. 111 The sexual imagery—straining veins, enlargement, wandering fingers, and explosive discharges—continues throughout, with Polly alternately pleasuring and bankrupting a series of politicos: O thou pretty toast, Fops with joy do boast That with ease they rule the roast, And thou’rt always ready; But I say, Make them pay For their play; If thou’lt be a lady. 36 The author concludes by suggesting Polly “Give each fop a fall” because she owes a sexual performance to each supposed suitor who “has rais’d [her] grandeur” in theatrical performance. 37 Although this author is obviously poking fun at Polly’s apparent sexual promiscuity, his jibes are more purposefully leveled at writers, politicians, and other London notables who would use the convenient fiction of an immaterial figure, “Polly,” for their opportunistic material advancement. In other words, Polly’s sexual circulation in the poem stands in for her popular circulation as a character, and the ways in which she circulated from one text to another for multiple authors’ financial gains. 36 A New Ballad, inscrib’d to Polly Peachum. To the tune of Pretty parrot say. By the author of Leheup’s ballad (London, 1728), 111-‐18. 37 A New Ballad 122, 157. 112 When the “New Ballad” was printed as a pamphlet, a second song was included with it that had been written as a response to the first. The response poem is titled “An Answer to Polly Peachum’s Ballad,” and it addresses the “New Ballad” author in defense of Polly, as if she were actually a flesh and blood woman whose name needed to be cleared of blame: Pray, Sir, who are you That thus dares to shew Polly’s pranks to open view, And so loudly expose her. 38 The “Answer” author sent his poem to the “New Ballad” author, who amended his previous work “to show what he published was not done out of malice to Polly Peachum…having so much value for the female sex as to give fair play to a fair woman.” 39 As a result of this exchange, it would seem that the “New Ballad” author had recanted his original satire against men who had abused “Polly” as a convenient figure to bolster their own careers; rather than lambast Polly’s tendency to circulate from one authors pen to the next, he came to the conclusion that she deserved respect as “a fair woman,” rather than deriding the opportunistic abuses that befell this poor fictional character. Another possibility, and perhaps more likely, is that the “New Ballad” author’s response to the “Answer” is entirely tongue in cheek, with the sarcastic implication that he was too inhumanely cruel to speak so degradingly of a fictional woman. Polly’s popularity did, of course, make her seem very real to 38 An Answer to Polly Peachum’s Ballad (A. Moore near St. Paul’s’: London, 1728), 1-‐4. 39 Answer 1. 113 consumers, and in some cases as real as the actresses who portrayed her: Lavinia Fenton. The Corpus Consumed From the circulation of fictional characters of stage and page, I would like to turn to the circulation of the actresses who performed as Polly. Lavinia Fenton, who originated the role, published memoirs of her life on and off the stage, even as anonymous authors published accounts of “The Whole Life of Polly Peachum” the fictional character. In fact, Fenton eventually adopted “Polly” as her offstage persona, and continued to live and circulate through her social spheres under both names, further complicating the division between reality and imagination that Polly struggles with in the opera, as well as the division between performances on stage and off. After her final turn as Polly Peachum in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera on April 19, 1728, Fenton left the theater to marry her lover Charles Powlett, the Third Duke of Bolton. In a letter to Jonathan Swift, John Gay described the circumstances of her retirement from theater: “The Duke of Bolton, I hear, has run away with Polly Peachum, having settled £400 a year on her during pleasure, and upon disagreement £200 a year.” 40 Gay’s tongue-‐in-‐cheek note presumes a variety of conditions, first of which is that Fenton’s identity had more or less collapsed with that of Polly Peachum. Considering what we know about Fenton’s life under a 40 Qtd. in C. J. H., “Lavinia Fenton,” The Theater: a monthly review of the drama, music and the fine arts, Jan. 1880-June 1894 20 (October 1892). 114 pseudonym, this assumption is not entirely unfounded. 41 Furthermore to Fenton’s success on stage, William Hogarth portrayed her as Polly in a famous portrait, and her face became the model for a series of Royal Doulton figurines labeled “Polly Peachum.” 42 The fictional Polly’s popularity allowed this character to circulate through different genres, and the actress Polly-‐Lavinia drew from that popularity in order to circulate her own image. Even as the theater world was under increasing threat of censorship, Polly-‐Lavinia’s biography can reveal a final space in which Gay and Fenton make a social comment on the fetishized women of theater. Consider the early actress: a woman had to be well trained in dramatic performance, literate or at least with a strong enough memory to learn lines from hearing them repeated. On the other hand, an actress’s ability to dissimulate, her rejection of her own socially approved position while on stage, and her being attacked on the moral grounds that a paid performer was little more than a prostitute, could work against her—even combining to produce a self-‐fulfilling prophecy of sexual servitude. If audience members assume the female actor is only as good as a whore, that is, they will treat her like one; she will often have no recourse but to take up a life of prostitution. Indeed, Fenton herself was rumored to 41 The second and more important assumption that Gay makes, however, is that Fenton’s financial allowances would depend upon her ability to keep her husband happy. This seemingly lighthearted observation is in fact not far from the truth; see chapter 1 of this dissertation for further exploration of women’s financial dependence. 42 Other Royal Doulton figurines in The Beggar’s Opera series included Macheath, two varieties of beggar, a highwayman, and Lucy Lockit; of these characters, only Lucy and Polly were produced in more than one stance (Julie McKeown, Royal Doulton [Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1997], 31). Many of these figurines still exist on display in museums, and many are still circulating through the network of antique collectors. 115 have worked as a prostitute even during her childhood, and the renown she achieved in the role of Polly ultimately coalesced to shape her public persona: one of the admirer’s of Fenton’s performance, The Duke of Bolton, eventually became her husband. Polly in the guise of Lavinia—or is that Lavinia in the guise of Polly?—was available for consumption, and readily circulated. 43 Whether or not a female actor would actively or passively choose prostitution, scholars have noted that what was more broadly at stake during this era was a woman’s ability to make her physical body known to the public: “The concern with the actresses’ sexuality was not merely a matter of audience prurience; it was made one of the foci of the dramatic spectacle. …The women are seductive counterfeits, seductive precisely because they are counterfeits.” 44 Even well into the late eighteenth century, critics such as writer Charles Dibdin were discussing the propriety of women’s appearance on stage: “[Dibdin] attributes their immorality, however, less to their actions than to ‘the publicity of their situation’”— that is, the openness of their sexual exploits. 45 Because “[eighteenth-‐century] society drew an absolute line between virtuous and nonvirtuous sexual conduct in women,” the more subtle boundary between virtuous and nonvirtuous female actors became 43 Laura J. Rosenthal, “Entertaining Women: The Actress in Eighteenth-‐Century Theatre and Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to British Theater 1730-1830, Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 162. See also Charles E. Pearce, Polly Peachum: The Story of Lavinia Fenton and The Beggar’s Opera (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968). 44 Katherine Maus, “’Playhouse Flesh and Blood’: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” English Literary History 45.4 (Winter 1979): 601-‐2, 605. 45 Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992),101-‐2. 116 that much more difficult for theatergoers and the actresses themselves to negotiate. 46 Many scholars have noted that the public nature of female physicality and sexuality in eighteenth-‐century theater signaled an important advance for women in society at large—a point to which I will return in my next chapter. Kristina Straub, for example, remarks, “The actresses’ transgressions [i.e., public, social sexuality] tend to question more dangerously the construct of woman as man’s submissive opposite. As women whose profession is undeniably public, actresses resisted the assumption that feminine sexuality was the private (and passive) opposite of masculinity.” 47 Polly-‐Lavinia—or indeed any actress who played Polly—circulates through the theater world, openly sexual and dissembling on multiple levels, which upsets the supposed male hierarchy of the opera. Moreover, an actress can dissimulate on and offstage, as Fenton did when she took on the persona of Polly: at what point would a friend, fellow actor, or suitor be witnessing Lavinia, and at what point Polly? This dissimulating circulation allows an actress to manipulate her public persona at the same time that she negotiates her internal sense of self, and thus destabilizes social expectations of female propriety. The dissimulating slut figure is, in this way, the most lasting attack on theatrical censorship: she can 46 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Ev’ry Woman is at Heart a Rake,” Eighteenth Century Studies 8.1 (Autumn 1974), 27. Spacks’ article primarily focuses on personal accounts of female sexuality such as those found in diaries, letters, and autobiographies. However, she also addresses novels by mid-‐ to late-‐eighteenth century female authors, primarily novelists such as Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood (namely her later work), and Charlotte Lennox. 47 Straub 89. 117 perform with or without a stage under her feet; she can circulate and retain popular appeal whether or not she is speaking prewritten lines. In the text, Polly embodies Gay’s attack on socioeconomic corruption, and the visual, physical, sexual fetishization of actresses. Polly’s popularity is also an attack on Walpole’s campaign for the censorship of theatrical artistry. The public personae of the women who portrayed Polly could not easily be censored: physically, sexually, or emotionally. The actress’s ability to be brazen, sluttish, and impudent is implicitly squelched with artistic censorship: “To describe actresses as objectified underestimates the agency, power and privilege some of them enjoyed.” 48 In other words, to censor the public liberties that these women might have enjoyed, to keep them from circulating freely however they might, is to censor their abilities to choose sexuality, professionalization, and identity. Walpole’s supposed sociopolitical “reforms” to the theater may indeed have left little room for the social situation of female actors. Scholars such as Laura Rosenthal and Kristina Straub have argued that “the mid-‐ to late eighteenth century is…particularly ambivalent toward the sexual excesses of actresses,” and that late eighteenth century playwrights “created more sentimental and less overtly sexualized roles for women, diminishing (but not erasing) assumptions about the actress’s sexual availability.” 49 If we think of the Licensing Act’s immediate effects—closing all but two theaters, and compelling those two to obtain a governmental imprimatur for any and all plays performed—this seeming “ambivalence” towards promiscuously circulated actresses indeed appears much more deliberately an attempt to clean up the 48 Rosenthal 160. 49 Straub 107; Rosenthal 160. 118 “overtly sexual” sluts and smuts of the theatrical world. Even as figures like Polly and her real-‐life counterparts thumbed their noses at social corruption, they incited that corruption’s wrath; even as an actress reveals or conceals parts of her personal life that she wants to make available for consumption, she may be acutely aware of the revealed or concealed corruption that attends any lucrative venture—whether that be the trade of theatricals, sexual service, or the licensing of plays. Conclusions Considering the on-‐stage and offstage modes of self-‐construction that actresses underwent, Polly Peachum represents a deep-‐seated, yet largely unexplored satirical thread regarding intricate and multivalenced circulations of notable female actors, and of celebrity at large in the eighteenth century. Many authors did use Polly and The Beggar’s Opera’s popularity for their own benefit. Polly’s multiple textual and physical bodies serve, albeit in different ways, to channel the satire that constitutes the bulk of the play—humans are corrupt, perhaps especially when they try to appear the most upstanding, but a slut who moves through popular society may indeed the ultimate dissimulator. Polly’s presence provokes circulation, which is a crucial and defining characteristic of the literary slut; she is written into a “slut’s corner,” from which space she is able to contribute to the circulation of her text, and moreover, to satirize not only the fetishization of the actress’s body, but also the institution of celebrity itself. When we see the word “slut” used to show that Gay’s characters would censure Polly for her circulation, moreover, we may glean that Gay is also 119 censuring Walpole and his compatriots, who would censor future innovations in theatrical arts. Walpole’s impending Licensing Act prevented the further circulation of popular characters, and because women had only recently achieved acceptance as professional actors, the act threatened political, sexual, and artistic theatrical freedoms under which the celebrity slut would have undoubtedly thrived. Whether or not an actress portraying Polly openly embraced celebrity circulation or sluttish behavior in any sense of the word—through filthy or ill-‐kempt appearance, costuming, or off-‐stage persona—the other characters’ dialogue regularly labels her (and by association, her portrayer) as such. Polly is able to circulate through different media: because the character Polly was portrayed by an actress, that actress’s body also becomes a site of Polly’s promiscuous circulation; when that actress steps off the stage and (occasionally) out of character, vestiges of circulation still cling to her offstage persona. As a celebrated character from a celebrated text, Polly is the ultimate celebrity slut, leaving the smudge of her character on those with whom she comes into contact. To leave a smudge of dirt, however, is not a lasting enough legacy: with this smudge comes a social critique of the moral dirtiness that Gay saw in his society. Dianne Dugaw has noted that, in The Beggar’s Opera, “Gay critiqued the moral and political dynamics of an emerging world order driven by acquisition and expansion of capital.” 50 In this play, the slut par excellence Polly carries this satirical burden on her shoulders, critiquing the very process of circulation that made her popular. She represents the corruption attendant to the expansion of capital, to the circulation of 50 Dugaw 22. 120 money—not only because the actress portraying her was being paid to perform (much like a prostitute), but also because Polly as a character could be circulated and adapted into new works from which any number of authors could benefit. In this way, we can see the political and capitalistic underpinnings of sluts: these characters, because of their ability to circulate promiscuously, could carry satirical jibes from one text to another. To conclude, I would like to return briefly to my opening sally regarding Macheath. The highwaymen and dastardly informers of the play may seem most directly related to Gay’s attacks on figures like Robert Walpole, with his supposedly legitimate political employment. If we consider the various types of circulation in The Beggar’s Opera—bodies, money, possessions stolen and pawned—Macheath’s proclivity for gambling seems to be roundly emblematic of the play’s political and economic satire: “Macheath’s ‘deep play’ captures the dynamic at the heart of the new capitalist order of markets, money, and trade on which The Beggar’s Opera fixes our attention.” 51 Just as significant to this satire of “the new capitalist order,” however, is Macheath’s proclivity for loose women. Ultimately, it is the women of the play, and namely Polly, who are integral to Gay’s attacks on social greed, primarily because their bodies are lucrative commodities. For Polly to provoke the foremost statement against corruption in the play, however, and for the actress portraying her to potentially absorb the slut moniker in her offstage life as Lavinia Fenton did, is to toss the ultimate insult against her would-‐be censors: she is free to 51 Dugaw 19. 121 circulate on her own, to be a commodity in her own right, and to make a fortune as a woman from her promiscuity. 122 CHAPTER THREE Popularity, Social Circulation, and Satire in Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and The Pleasures of the Town What Dulness dropp’d among her sons impress’d Like motion from one circle to the rest: So from the midmost the nutation spreads Round and more round o’er all the sea of heads. ~Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (Book II, 407-410) Polly’s circulation through the minds and works of various authors brings me to my final chapter’s topic: the workings of circulation as it attended social networks in London’s theatrical realm. An analysis of these networks can prompt insight to the world of theatrical writing, and the ways in which that world allowed, contributed to, and even propelled the circulation of different texts and opinions of popular writers. In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Henry Fielding, Colley Cibber, and their contemporaries relied on social circulation within the active network of London’s theatrical world in order to encourage the circulation of texts and good opinions. For an apt example of a writer whose texts circulated even as opinions about him changed, I will linger for a moment on Colley Cibber. Cibber’s plays borrow from, respond to, cobble together, and sometimes outright plagiarize works by other 123 authors, and his contemporaries derided him for it. 1 Among Cibber’s detractors were the Scriblerians, and Alexander Pope famously crowned him King of the Dunces in his four book 1743 edition of The Dunciad. In Cibber’s tendencies to borrow or copy from other authors, Pope saw a hypocritical double bind: though any good author might copy a style, collaborate, or give credence and merit to a previous author’s text, Cibber’s work was ultimately published only under his own name. To Pope, this was not as noble as collaboration or homage at its finest, but rather a sign of Cibber’s talentless opportunism: as in this chapter’s epigraph, the ripples of Dulness spread in circles from one work to the next. 2 Perhaps Cibber’s most directly ill-‐natured retort to Pope’s critiques can be found in the Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope: If you think you have a right to lay your satirical tail at my door, whenever your muse has a looseness, have not I an equal right to rub your nose in it? These, I confess again, are most unsavory similes; but I have the classical authority of your Dunciad to plead for them, where we occasionally find your filthy slut of a muse emptying her Jordan [chamber pot], toast and all, into the street! A delicate nosegay it is, indeed! Smell it Reader. 3 1 Refer again to the anecdote at the end of chapter 1: Cibber knowingly took major plot points for his play The Double Gallant from Susanna Centlivre’s Love at a Venture, which Cibber had rejected from his company as “too bawdy.” 2 As an author well versed in mock-‐heroic epics, Pope knew a thing or two about how to create an effective homage. 3 Qtd. in Kristina Straub, “Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope and the Schoolboy,” Pope, ed. Brean Hammond (New York: Routledge, 2014), 187. 124 All of this gets us to the point of promiscuous circulation—both of the text and of the author’s reputation. By using scatological imagery, Cibber lifts “unsavory similes” directly from Pope’s work, and in the process confirms Pope’s accusations of sloppy writing and references taken whole-‐scale from other texts. 4 What we know to be certain is that Pope was criticizing not only Cibber the author, but also “[a] symptom of the ubiquitous reaction against reason and good taste.” 5 In comparison, Cibber describes himself as a “self-‐centered fool, motivated by vanity,” but the Apology is also a rumination on the conflicting roles of Cibber the performer and Cibber the writer: “The man we finally see is a comic actor, knowingly breaking character to show the audience what he is like (or rather, what he thinks he is like) when not acting—but yet remaining upon the stage.” 6 The sluttish mess of collaboration and the circulation of texts that may or may not have been of his own creation are certainly defining features of Cibber’s work. In fact, even within Cibber’s plays, texts are circulating promiscuously, with little sense of proper authorial attribution. Consider again The Double Gallant (1707), the plot of which Cibber took from Centlivre’s Love at a Venture: the ridiculous Sir Solomon Sadlife intercepts a love letter that he doesn’t realize is for his wife, mistaking it as a note to her maid Wishwell. Sir Solomon tells his wife, 4 The metaphors of dirt, filth, and comingling are reminiscent of the subjects found in women’s handbooks, as I have addressed in my introduction. 5 Charles D. Peavy, “Pope, Cibber, and the Crown of Dulness,” The South Central Bulletin 26.4 (1966): 17. 6 Brian Glover, “Nobility, Visibility, and Publicity in Colley Cibber’s Apology,” SEL 42 (Summer 2002): 523-‐39. 125 “Wishwell, I’m afraid, is a slut; she has an intrigue” (III.iii). 7 Wishwell covers for her lady and conceals the truth from Sir Solomon, claiming that the letter is for her—in spite of the fact that she cannot read or write. The Sadlifes help her compose a response, with only Sir Solomon unaware of the truth of the situation. Lady Sadlife muses in an aside, “This absurd slut will make me laugh out.” In addition to its marked use of the word “slut,” a marker for messy circulation, this scene is also a microcosmic version of the critiques that Cibber received during his playwriting career. First of all, the letter’s promiscuous circulation is disrupted, and the text of it ends up in the wrong hands; second, the letter’s author is unknown to Sir Solomon; and third, the reply he intends to make on behalf of another would-‐be writer, Wishwell, is actually not directed towards the initial letter writer. This complicated game of “who writes to whom and on whose behalf?” echoes the ongoing concerns of plagiarism and originality in the London theater circles. In a move perhaps more directly autobiographical than Cibber’s circulated letter from The Double Gallant, the first act of Henry Fielding's The Author’s Farce 8 presents the woebegone author in question, Harry Luckless (who luckily shares a first name with Fielding himself), as he is trying to sell a theatrical script to the publisher Mr. Bookweight. The bookseller is hesitant to publish Luckless because he is unknown as an author: “Had you a great reputation I might venture: but, truly, for 7 Colley Cibber, The Double Gallant (London: John Bell, 1792), 52. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, accessed 10 September 2011. 8 For the sake of word economy, I will use the abbreviated title The Author’s Farce to refer to the entire three-‐act play, not as a way to refer to the framing narrative that makes up the first two acts. Also, I will use the title The Pleasures of the Town to refer to the play within a play that makes up the majority of the third act; this title will also refer to the puppet show when it was produced independently of the first two acts. 126 young beginners it is a very great hazard: for, indeed, the reputation of the author carries the greatest sway in these affairs.” 9 Bookweight knows he must be wary of new authors, so not to lose money on a risky investment. There is irony, however, in Bookweight’s statement: a “young beginner” cannot boast of “great reputation” if he has never published, but publication is necessary to prove that he deserves such a reputation. Bookweight further complicates this authorial cycle, seemingly impossible to enter, when he states: “The town have been so fond of some authors that they have run them up to infallibility, and would have applauded them even against their senses” (11). Such an assessment of taste was not new in Fielding’s time, and it is not much different in ours: a popular author, performer, or director who has regularly received good reviews will very likely find continued support from the general public whether or not his subsequent efforts have as much merit as his early work. 10 The town, then, accepts what a select few producers—publishers, booksellers, theater company managers or shareholders, and similar—have deigned worthy of praise. The (truly) Luckless protagonist goes on to bemoan the trials of publication when his friend Witmore arrives in the scene; the characters are certain that an elite network has conspired to determine standards of what constitutes good taste, and that this network continues to promote and produce only the kind of 9 Henry Fielding, The Author’s Farce and The Pleasures of the Town (London, 1730), I.vi, 11. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically by page number from the 1730 text. 10 Think, for example, of summer blockbuster films, best-‐selling books, or Academy Award nominations: are these truly the best films, the best actors and actresses, the best authors, or are they only presumed to be the best because of their box office totals or sales rankings? 127 work that adheres to those standards. Witmore suggests Luckless’ profession would be more encouraging “in an age of learning and true politeness, where a man might succeed by his merit… but now, when party and prejudice carry all before them, when learning is decried, wit not understood, when the theaters are puppet-‐shows, and the comedians ballad-‐singers: when fools lead the town, [why] would a man think to thrive by his wit?” 11 Just as his characters demonstrate in these passages, Fielding was aware that social connections were just as important as, if not more important than, an author’s talents. He was at once very suspicious of how social connections functioned, and very willing to negotiate such systems to his best advantage throughout his various careers. Having established himself as a notorious satirist in the theater, for example, Fielding was able to parlay that success into later satirical work in newspapers, pamphlets, and novels. Fielding’s enduring success as a satirical novelist has been discussed and analyzed at length, but fewer scholars have focused on Fielding the playwright. 12 Fewer still have written in depth on The Author’s Farce, 11 Henry Fielding, The Author’s Farce. In The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, ed. Jill Campbell (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2001), 1782-‐1824. 12 J. Paul Hunter’s Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), Robert Hume’s Fielding and the London Theater 1728-1737 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Martin and Ruthe R. Battestin’s biography, Henry Fielding, A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), and Albert J. Rivero’s The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989) stand out as seminal texts in this field, but extended works on Fielding’s dramatic texts have fallen out of fashion in current scholarship. Somewhat more recent works on performance and spectacle that devote time to Fielding the playwright are Jill Campbell’s Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Redwood: Stanford University Press, 1995), William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment: the Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 128 which was Fielding’s first commercial success, but not his first play. The conditions under which a play could become financially and popularly successful are what make the theater so central to understanding eighteenth century social networks. The London theater network, for example, contributed to The Author’s Farce’s various successes—its ability to propagate into later editions, to shape public opinion, and to disseminate Fielding's ideas and critiques of his compatriots. In other words, this play is a revealing case study of eighteenth century social networks because it is both a record of events and a lampoon of the networks’ participants and workings. Fielding recognized that, for talented and talentless writers alike, social connections meant more than the individuals or groups that were being connected (an effect frequently colloquialized as “it's not what you know, but who you know”). He was aware that people would understand his mockeries: they would know who was under attack, and, as a result, they might shift or strengthen public opinions of the figures being lampooned, bending the definition of good taste to his own benefit. For Fielding, the payoff of writing such a satire was the benefit of any social network: circulation. Not only would his text circulate to the effect of popularity, but also the social networks of London would interact in order to disseminate his play’s message: namely, that original art is more worthy of praise than derivative forms. The alleged meritocracy that determines which art is worthy of praise, however, might not always make the best choices. How can audience members Press, 1998), and Lisa Freeman’s Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 129 know if the play they’re watching is actually the strongest work, or if the theater managers simply chose to promote a talentless friend? These are the types of question Fielding poses in The Author’s Farce. This work—both in its content and its source materials—anticipates and accentuates the theories that scholars have recently developed to examine the ways in which groups of people interact; social network theorists are providing a language today for something Fielding was already examining in his time. The brief examples above draw attention to some governing themes for this essay: namely, that at its best, a social network can promote collaboration and other interactions that benefit each participant; at its worst, as Fielding knew well, the connections could grow preferential, nepotistic, and exclusive of dissenting opinions. 13 Another way of putting this is that one participant could abuse a network to his or her own benefit without intending to contribute back into a cycle that would benefit others. When Fielding satirizes the latter type of interaction, he anticipates social network theory in ways that are as yet unexplored: in calling attention to and mocking the ways in which literary bigwigs interacted—namely, relying upon their connections instead of their talents to advance—Fielding recognized the potential for connections to be more important than the individuals or groups being connected. 13 Although Fielding also examined issues of nepotism and preferential treatment in his career as a novelist, it is more difficult to imagine a novelist working in tandem with collaborators in order to advance his career. The theater, in other words, has collaborative capacities that are not as apparent to novel writing: a playwright requires the cooperation of a director, producer, and actors for his work to be complete, but a novelist needs only an editor and publisher (and those figures presumably have less input into the final creative product than the collaborators on a play would). 130 Since Fielding’s work predates social network theory, I would like to advance a reading of theater networks as they might have been described during his time by using the term promiscuous. As a supplement to contemporary network theory, the word “promiscuous” suggests the type of sensual and contagious social mingling that was indeed well known in the eighteenth century, not least of all in the theater. Moreover, not only can a person be promiscuous in a social sense, but so can a text be promiscuous in the sense that it becomes popular and can move from one genre or era to the next. When we think of networking today, the implications are largely positive; for promiscuity, on the other hand, the opposite is true. Of course, the word promiscuous does not depend entirely on our current connotation of sexual looseness, but it does literally mean something that mixes easily (from the Latin prō-‐ [as in favor of] + miscēre [“to mix”]). 14 Within the definition most familiar to us, an individual who has had many sexual partners might spread a disease; just so, a prolific gossip can pollute reputations, and a popular narrative that is adapted into various genres can permeate many corners of the shared culture. Promiscuity, or the ability to mix, can lead to influential and potentially contagious social interactions—to the benefit or detriment of other network participants. In its most literal sense, of course, promiscuity is the mark of a functioning social network: one participant mingles with others to create an interconnected group. When a text circulates through the public consciousness, as in the case of The Author’s Farce, that text’s promiscuity and its lasting cultural clout is nearly guaranteed. 14 This does not deny that sex can be promiscuous, but it allows that nonsexual forms of social interaction can be as well. 131 This chapter will demonstrate how The Author’s Farce was significant not only because of its keen awareness of social promiscuity’s potentially beneficial and detrimental uses, but also because of its contribution to early notions of social networking that persisted beyond the mid-‐eighteenth century. In Licensing Entertainment, William Warner hints at an important connection between Fielding’s careers as a playwright and a novelist: “Less a reliable guide than an artful actor or puppeteer, Fielding develops a novelistic species of performative entertainment which concedes to the reader his or her essential freedom as a pleasurable responsibility.” 15 Warner’s interplay of theatrical and novelistic terminology concedes that Fielding’s careers intersect one another: his social circles mix readily, and his chosen generic modes cross-‐pollinate, making his plays and novels all the more telling as artifacts of something akin to networking theory. In his ability to bridge genres, and to seemingly presage shifts in literary taste from poetry to theater to the novel, Henry Fielding is an apt subject for social network studies because of his prominent role in a variety of social and literary circles. Research on eighteenth century sociability has addressed the relevance of political, literary, gender-‐based, and other means of networking. Scholars such as Elizabeth Eger, Ophelia Field, and Patricia Carr Bruckman, among others, have written on the Bluestockings, the Kit-‐Cat Club, and the Scriblerians, respectively. Peter Clark, James Kelly, Jon Mee, Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite have considered the effects of sociability writ large in the century’s literary culture. Mee, for example, argues that the rise of the novel in the late eighteenth century “intensified the 15 Warner 234; emphasis added. 132 concern with intersubjective communication as a key terrain for working out the community’s values.” 16 Of course, these intersubjective communications that determined one’s social networks were occurring just as commonly in the first half of the century, in coffee houses, news circulars, theaters, and casual conversation. Russell and Tuite suggest that “the willingness of Britons to associate in clubs and societies could be explained by urbanization and a non-‐interventionist state post 1688,” and that the “continuing discursive potency of sociability… is not just a feature of current academic discourse on sociability but was apparent in the eighteenth century.” 17 Considering the extensive number of social clubs and circles that developed during the eighteenth century, the authors of the era were bound to examine a variety of networking strategies. Scholars have addressed the impact that these clubs and networks have had that persist beyond their time. For example, Dianne Dugaw and Joseph Roach have proposed the concept of a “deep” or “persistent eighteenth century,” a theory based on how famous a work or its author might have become in its time: a work that today represents depth or persistence is one that, in its time, was popular enough to 16 Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4-‐5. The rise of the novel certainly engendered a specific kind of participatory socialization and conversation, but the novel is clearly not the only print culture, nor is public reading of print the only kind of public engagement. Gossip, for example, is a non-‐print form of sociable participation; theatergoing is another. 17 Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, “Introducing Romantic Sociability,” Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literature Culture in Britain, 1770-1840, eds. Russell and Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3-‐4. Although the scope of their collection is the late eighteenth century, I take their inclusion of the date 1688 to indicate the ongoing history of urbanization, and thus socialization. 133 endure many permutations, editions, performances, or translations. 18 This type of canon formation relies heavily on a story’s popularity, on its ability to be transmitted, on the text’s reception, and on people’s desire to share those narratives or patronize their authors. 19 For this to happen, the text must have popular persistence: its audience or readers must be willing to propagate its reputation. Social network theorists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler refer to a similar social phenomenon that they call “transitivity”—i.e. a person’s ability to connect with other people in a larger group—and they identify connection and contagion as two important aspects of social networking. 20 Social transitivity, connection, and contagion, then, are necessary for a literary text to become transitive and contagious: the text cannot disseminate without a networked audience or group of fellow authors to promote it. According to Christakis and Fowler, the connections within a network are more important than either the individual or the group: A group can be defined by an attribute (for example, women, Democrats, lawyers, long-‐distance runners) or as a specific collection of individuals to whom we can literally point (“those people, right over there, waiting to get into the concert”). A social network is altogether different. While a network, like a group, is a collection of 18 Dianne Dugaw, Deep Play: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001); Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 19 I believe Roach’s assessment of a celebrity “it” factor may be applicable to popular authors and their texts. 20 Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), 14, 16. 134 people, it includes something more: a specific set of connections between people in the group. These ties, and the particular pattern of these ties, are often more important than the individual people themselves. They allow groups to do things that a disconnected collection of individuals cannot. 21 Simply put, a group is not a network unless there is direct interaction between individuals. Putting social network theory into metaphorical terms, John Scott refers to the “texture” or “density” of the social “fabric,” suggesting that the idea of a social network implies a figurative web of netting that binds people together. 22 These metaphors capture the essential “something more” that Christakis and Fowler find so compelling: the social connections that bind people together, and the patterns we see in them. Furthermore, the visual and tactile qualities of Scott’s metaphor and the transitive contagion of Christakis and Fowler’s lend credence to a notion of sociability based on the sensual, or the promiscuous. In most social groups, Scott explains, there might be any number of nodal hubs, or people who connect with many other people. 23 A triadic structure is the 21 Christakis and Fowler 9. The authors suggest that social theorists are “divided into two camps: those who think individuals are in control of their destinies, and those who believe that social forces… are responsible for what happens to us. However, we think that a third factor is missing… we believe that our connections to other people matter most, and that by linking the study of individuals to the study of groups, the science of social networks can explain a lot about human experience” (xii-‐xiii). Another way to put this is synergy with a difference: the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but the process of summing those parts is most significant. 22 John Scott, Social Network Analysis, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2000), 5. 23 Though calling a person a “node” or “hub” may seem reductive and dehumanizing, such sociographs help visualize the ways in which people are connected. This is a profoundly useful way to analyze a network. 135 least complex type of interaction in which discord can arise between network participants. Two individuals/nodes may simply avoid one another if they don’t get along, but a third participant, a hub who gets along with both of the antipathetic members, introduces conflict to the group. 24 From this most basic building block of a social network, participants can be added with positive, negative, or no relationship to every other member of the group. A hub is one of the centermost figures in the network: he may have direct connections—as a friend, neighbor, or coworker, for example—with a large number of people, some of whom only have two or three direct connections. The hub then expands these peoples’ social transitivity because he gives them an indirect connection with all of his own direct connections; the network connectivity expands exponentially. In my conception of a network, then, the hub is the most socially promiscuous member of the group. Now take into account Fielding’s utility as a subject in the field of social networking: when each individual/node in a network can become a hub by which any other individuals may be connected to form a group, Fielding becomes a hub that connects other famous actors, playwrights, theater producers, general members of the London elite, and later, novelists. If we analyze Fielding’s works and their seeming anticipation of social network theory, we can better examine how literature provides a connection between people, generations, and centuries. Although others have critiqued the workings of their respective social circles before and since Fielding, he was a network critic par excellence; he called attention to the 24 Scott 14-‐15. In a slightly different scenario, nodes A and B may not have known each other before hub C linked them; only after this connection happens do the three participants realize that A and B do not get along. 136 complexities of social promiscuity, relied on the public nature of theater to promote his opinions, made strategic use of social connections to ensure his texts were transmissible, and decried talentless authors and the readers who allowed their works to represent public taste. Literary collaboration is one type of social exchange. So is gossip; both practices are also profoundly isolating to the object of concern. For gossip or collaboration to work properly, there must be sociability (people gathered in a community to share rumors and opinions). Similarly, one possible end of the gossip machine is isolation: a group of people spreads a rumor that is specifically designed to single out an individual for scrutiny or ridicule. Network Dynamics and Textual History Originally written during 1729, The Author’s Farce presents us with characters who illustrate the alternate benefits and detriments of social circulation and a social network’s connectivity. Written within a long tradition of metatheatrical critique, The Author’s Farce follows the authorial exploits of Harry Luckless, a playwright whose primary concern in the first two acts is to write a successful play. 25 Luckless does not work for writerly renown or social clout, however, but in order to settle his rent with the landlady Mrs. Moneywood, with 25 Other plays in the metatheatrical tradition include some of Fielding’s recent forebears. For example, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is framed as a production that a beggar has set in motion. Georges Villiers’ satirical play The Rehearsal (1671) was a pointed attack on the works of John Dryden, and John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse is a self-‐referential sequel to Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (both plays dated 1696). Earlier metatheatrical works include The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613) by Beaumont and Fletcher, and perhaps most famously, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 137 hopefully enough money left over to marry her daughter Harriot. After two unscrupulous theater managers, Marplay and Sparkish, reject Luckless’ proposed play, effectively shutting him out of their network, the writer revises the script into what he sees as a degraded genre: a puppet show that is meant to mock his unsupportive associates. Of course, Luckless makes a fortuitous social connection and finds a new venue almost immediately. 26 The interpolated plot in the third act, The Pleasures of the Town, is a puppet show being performed by human actors dressed as puppets. Near the end of this act, a messenger arrives, interrupts the play within a play, and names Luckless “Henry I, King of Bantam.” Luckless also learns that his beloved Harriot is Princess of Old Brentford, his landlady is the queen, and one of the performers in his puppet show is a prince. After the puppet show and the framing play wrap up, four poets try to determine how the evening’s performance should conclude: “When [the poets fail] to compose an epilogue to his play, Luckless gives the part to a cat, with excellent results.” 27 In its initial run, the play enjoyed an impressive forty-‐two performances at the New Theater in Haymarket during the early part of 1730. 28 The play was a critical and financial success largely because of its subject matter: the pointed mockery of London’s theater scene appealed to the audience’s sense of irony, as did the insider knowledge that nepotistic connections and promiscuous sociable 26 As I will explain at length below, this event is drawn directly from Fielding's life. 27 Martin C. Battestin, A Henry Fielding Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 249. The epilogue contains a spate of sexual jokes about the cat/pussy, hearkening to common notions of sexual promiscuity. 28 Thomas Lockwood, ed., Henry Fielding: Plays (1728-1731) 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 1:194-‐96. Although Fielding revised the text within the first month of the run, I consider these minor changes part of the first version of the play. 138 circulation could potentially weigh more than talent in determining an author’s success. Members of London’s theatrical networks would have understood the less-‐ than-‐subtle subtext: anyone who appreciates a work lambasting poor taste can claim that they “get it,” that they are clever enough to know the origin and aim of the ridicule, and that they have good taste by proxy. There are more measures of networking at play than just those in the social dimension, however: retelling a joke from the play would create connections between people who had seen it because they can bond over their knowledge of the joke’s source and author; telling a joke at someone else’s expense can create connections between the people who are not mocked because they feel like they are on the same side; and the more people hear about such a joke, whether they were at the theater or not, the more individuals/nodes can participate in the circulation of gossip. In this way, a text’s promiscuity—its ability to circulate between readers or audience members—relies on the social network’s connectivity. Fielding knew that this both social and textual circulation was possible, especially in the world of theater: Luckless’ experiences match his own experiences as a playwright almost exactly. The money-‐mad producers Marplay and Sparkish reject one of Luckless’ proposed scripts just as the Theater Royal managers Colley Cibber and Robert Wilks had rejected one of Fielding’s. By the 1720s, Cibber and Wilks were well established as popular actors and producers for the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, where they favored lavish operatic spectacles. They had produced Fielding’s first play, Love in Several Masques, at Drury Lane in 1728: the play ran four nights and was never revived. As a result of the financial flop, Cibber failed to 139 support Fielding’s subsequent work, and refused to produce his next play, The Temple Beau. Like Luckless in the play, Fielding sought a venue elsewhere, and he found it at the New Theater in Haymarket. 29 Now that he had a stage, Fielding took the opportunity for satirical revenge. The time was right: Cibber was named Poet Laureate of England in 1730, and his critics would seize any excuse to denigrate his talent and deride his sycophantic pandering. A jape about Cibber would spread easily, promiscuously, through networks of people who knew him directly or not. Once again mirroring the action of The Author’s Farce, a playwright took retribution against the finance-‐obsessed managers who had denied his artistic merit: Fielding wrote The Author’s Farce to ridicule the poor taste that he believed had become endemic to London’s entertainment industry, and the graceless money-‐grubbers like Cibber who supported it. Later in 1730, Fielding made a few minor alterations to the text; these led to a second successful run that continued through May and June, and a revival that was staged in July. In August 1730, only the third act puppet show, The Pleasures of the Town, was performed; a new prologue was added in October; and a production including only the first two acts ran in November of the same year. A prologue that has since been lost was added in mid-‐1731. The final showing at Haymarket was in June of 1731. Since 1731, other productions 29 Battestin 242-‐43. John Potter had built the New Theater, or Little Theater, at Haymarket in 1720; his first patron and manager was the French Duke de Montague who, like Fielding, left a career in theater because he could not find an amicable venue in London. 140 throughout the eighteenth century included altered prologues, excised the epilogue, or excluded everything but the third act, The Pleasures of the Town. 30 Scott addresses the complexities of social network dynamics that are much like those Fielding would have encountered during the play’s performance history. A network, in his view, is not typically restricted to easily defined triads; the informal subgroups of closely related individuals within a larger network can be referred to as “cliques.” 31 The conflict between Fielding and Cibber might aptly be described as a conflict of two theatrical cliques: those of the Theater Royal/Drury Lane and the Little Theater/Haymarket. 32 After the success of The Author’s Farce at the Little Theater, however, Fielding was able to mend his relationship with the Drury Lane clique, largely because management had changed hands. Cibber’s cronies were retired or deceased, bequeathing their majority stakes to John Ellys and John Highmore; when these men took control, Cibber had less desire to keep up his shares personally, so he rented shares to his son Theophilus. By the time The Author’s Farce had finished its last run in Haymarket, the Theater Royal was 30 Lockwood has traced performances of The Pleasures of the Town throughout the eighteenth century. See Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 197. In 1734, Fielding made notable changes in the cast of characters that reflected events in the London theater scene, as I will demonstrate below. The play’s parts circulated easily, which allowed for a greater dissemination of Fielding’s work. 31 Scott 19. Some social theorists distinguish a clique as different from other more formally related subgroups such as family, church, or social classes. Scott notes that the clique provides “a degree of group feeling and intimacy” and a tacit understanding of normative behavior between all participants (20). 32 The Drury Lane clique included producers Cibber, Wilks, Barton Booth, and their troupe of actors and supporters; the Little Theater clique included Samuel Johnson and Fielding, among others. 141 struggling and Fielding’s successes made him financially appealing: the author came back into favor with the money-‐strapped managers at Drury Lane. 33 Coming back into favor with the Theater Royal also gave Fielding an excuse to profess loyalty to Ellys and Highmore during the Actors’ Rebellion of 1733, which marked the final downturn of any positive link in Cibber and Fielding’s mercurial relationship. The rebellion was largely a result of a dispute between the Cibber men: Theophilus proved difficult to work with, and since he was only renting his father’s shares in the theater, Ellys and Highmore tried to buy the shares back directly from the elder Cibber. For what was perceived as his father’s betrayal, the younger Cibber and his social followers rebelled. During May of that year, he led a strike by which a majority of contract performers from Drury Lane shifted their loyalties to the Little Theater. By interpreting the dispute as a manifestation of one Cibber’s greed and the other Cibber’s youthful bullheadedness, Fielding once again declared himself in an ideological war with both Colley and Theophilus; the men would not put away petty squabbles for the sake of art and business, which Fielding found grossly unprofessional. To memorialize this momentous event in London’s widest-‐reaching theatrical social circle, Fielding made decisive modifications to The Author’s Farce: he changed the character Sparkish to “Marplay Junior,” drawing Theophilus Cibber into the satirical space that had been reserved for John Wilks in the 1730 edition. 34 Just as the original 1730 play was the only version performed at the Little Theater, 33 Battestin 43. 34 As Wilks had died in 1732, his managerial tactics were no longer fodder for satire (Battestin 163). 142 the 1734 version was the only one performed at Drury Lane. 35 Provoking an even more befuddling irregularity in the social and textual histories of the play—was it approbation or retribution?—Theophilus Cibber revived only the first two acts of the play at Covent Garden in 1748. Whether or not this indicates the Cibbers’ ability to claim a last word in the argument is a point that remains open for debate. What is certain is that the commercial and cultural interests of these cliques were intertwining—the network was shaping the text and vice versa as the facts of the theater world circulated—but whereas the Cibbers seemed only interested in helping themselves, Fielding’s interests lay with the maintenance of artistic freedom. Satires of Network Abuses in The Author’s Farce In its transmutability, The Author’s Farce is a success of social networking. By commenting on the newsworthy events that were happening in the theater world, Fielding allowed social connections to influence the content of his work. In the process of lampooning members of London’s theatrical scene, the various editions of The Author’s Farce not only strengthened the network’s connectivity, but also called attention to the often-‐deplorable abuses of such connectivity. Revisions and revivals of the play not only reflect, but also mediate the processes of social networking that are necessary for a text to thrive. The heart of the play’s satire lies in the third act. Luckless’ play within a play, The Pleasures of the Town, is in itself a wild web of interconnectivity: human actors perform the roles of puppets that have traveled to 35 The 1734 edition of the play, however, was not published until 1750. This edition was held to be the definitive version of the play until the twentieth century. 143 the underworld to the Court of Nonsense. Audience members, then, saw flesh-‐and-‐ blood actors playing fictional characters in the guise of puppets that are also ghosts—all at the same time. Vying for the Goddess of Nonsense’s attention are all of the ridiculous writers and personages of the town: Mrs. Novel, Signior Opera, Don Tragedio, Monsieur Pantomime, Doctor Orator, and Sir Farcical Comick. The characters are not only allegorical stand-‐ins for the feeble forms of London entertainment but also direct parallels to real individuals: Eliza Haywood, author of titillating amatory novels; the castrato Senesino, a popular figure in the craze for Italian opera; Lewis Theobald, a hackneyed dramatist who drew heavily enough from others’ works to be termed a plagiarist; John Rich, producer of elaborate theatrical spectacles and pantomimes; John Henley, a clergyman known for his bombastic showmanship and inflammatory rhetoric; and Colley Cibber, this time portrayed as an eager-‐to-‐please comic actor instead of a producer. 36 Using these characters as his satirical mouthpiece, Fielding voiced his distaste for poorly produced English art, as well as obsessive fascination of the time with foreign genres: “Authors starve and booksellers grow fat, Grub-‐Street harbors as many pirates as ever Algiers did—They have more theaters than are at Paris, and just as much wit as there is at Amsterdam; they have ransacked all Italy for singers, and all France for dancers” (35-‐36). Even outside the context and content of his play, Fielding openly criticized “the Folly, Injustice, and Barbarity of the Town,” decrying London citizens who would “sacrifice our own native Entertainments to a wanton affected Fondness for 36 Battestin 179. 144 foreign Musick; […] our Nobility seem eagerly to rival each other, in distinguishing themselves in favor of Italian Theatres, and in neglect of our own.” 37 An author who was known to mix in London’s literary circles, Fielding nonetheless found the cobbling together of lesser art forms painfully unoriginal. In Fielding’s opinion, this comingling of high and low art forms, highbrow and lowbrow culture, was an abuse of the social network’s potential to produce great work. Throughout The Author’s Farce, Luckless pokes fun at the writers that he—and by proxy, Fielding—would have others believe are talentless. Fielding and his characters damn the negative examples of promiscuity that arise from authors who borrow heavily without crafting any original contribution to the theater network or London entertainment at large. Luckless and Witmore, for example, discuss the problems inherent in compromising one’s artistic integrity. Convinced that he can only make a living by creating a work “beneath the dignity of the stage,” Luckless muses, “Who would not then rather eat by his nonsense than starve by his wit?” (28). At the Goddess of Nonsense’s court, each of the suitors tries to show Nonsense what a dutiful servant he or she has been, and which of them is the best at writing badly; in other words, how helpful they have been in promoting and serving her network of followers. This excellently bad writing stems from careers in which the puppet-‐authors relied too heavily on others to promote them: the puppet-‐ authors and their real-‐life counterparts liberally plagiarized, poorly translated, and indiscriminately borrowed from other members of literary and theatrical networks without contributing original material back into those networks. The borrowing in 37 Battestin 242; emphasis in original. 145 itself is not a bad practice, Fielding would suggest, but without feeding back into the culture with something new or reworked, the network will fail to thrive and grow. 38 Luckless notes, for example, how nonsensical Doctor Orator’s (so-‐called) original work is: “Not only [does he] glean up all the bad words of other authors, but makes new bad words of his own” (40). Trying to win Nonsense to his part, Sir Farcical Comick interjects to show that his own work is just as adept as Orator’s is at being inept: “I have made new words, and spoiled old ones, too…. I have as great a confusion of languages in my play as was at the building of Babel!” (40). Orator and Comick try to feed into the cultural network, but what they feed it is recycled or plagiarized. Late in the Goddess’s courtship, the underworld ferryman Charon appears to tell Nonsense: “I hear rare news, they say you are to be declared Goddess of Wit” (47)―as if to confirm how low entertainment has fallen, nonsense and wit are conflated. As part of the interpolated plot, Luckless receives a warrant issued for his arrest for his extended railings against nonsense: “People of quality are not to have their diversions libeled at this rate… Shall you abuse Nonsense when the whole town supports it?” (52). These pointed lines are meant to skewer the producers and peddlers of unoriginal art: as in Fielding’s real life, the play within a play shows the author taking lazy or careless members of his networks to task. In a final twist, 38 Outside the interpolated plot, we see characters engaging in similarly uncreative endeavors that do not bolster the network. One of the cronies who had refused to publish Luckless’ work composes bad translations: “Nobody now understands Greek, so I may use any sentence in that language to whatsoever purpose I please” (21). This character is borrowing indiscriminately, not knowing the real meaning of the words he “translates,” and thus does damage to the literary network because his work is grounded in nonsense. 146 Fielding’s play admits to a confounding irony: if London’s theatergoers prefer nonsense, it is only because they have not been offered other options, because the supposed arbiters of taste will promote unoriginal work: as Marplay rejects Luckless’ play, he reasons, “There is nothing in it that pleases me, so I am sure there is nothing in it that will please the town” (17). Of course, the only thing that pleases Marplay is something that will fill his wallet: “Interest sways as much in the theater as at court—And you know it is not always the companion of merit in either” (18). In this passage, “interest” indicates the curiosity of the town only as much as it also indicates the accrued profits of an investment. Although initially undertaken as a satirical response to the profiteering of unethical members of the theatrical social scene, The Author’s Farce as a text gains a purpose greater than the sum of its parts, much like a social network does. According to William B. Warner, “Fielding shows how the whole system of theater and book production subordinates wit and sense to showy spectacle.” 39 In other words, the play is a farce ruminating on its own overblown nature. The blurring lines of reality in the play parallel, indeed, the blurring interactions of the London theatrical social network. 40 Because the characters in The Author’s Farce are reflections of real people, the network’s various triadic interchanges might represent any combination of real or fictional participants in the social structure. For example, Luckless (A) and Marplay (B) are at odds, just as their real-‐life counterparts, Fielding (A) and Cibber (B), were. A second version of Cibber, 39 Warner 241-‐42. 40 As mentioned earlier in this article, the connection between persons A and B is not linear, but rather a permeable exchange between the two that can be intercepted by a person C. 147 however, is introduced in the guise of Sir Farcical Comick (C), who interacts with Luckless. 41 If we consider that these three characters represented only two historical personages, of course, the triadic structure slips, revealing an underlying level of promiscuous interchange—one node of the triad takes on a second nodal position. Ultimately, Fielding does not just satirize the members of London’s theater scene who nonchalantly took advantage of the system’s connections; he illustrates how connections are represented in his play (or in any textual medium, for that matter), and what we can gather about a network by analyzing the connections that those textual media rely on and portray. Conclusions After The Author’s Farce, Fielding’s theatrical successes showed that he was an adept entertainer: “Fielding adjusted to market conditions and developed an ingenious compromise with the proclivities of his audience,” and was obsessed with “hackneyed oracles… that seduced the vulgar populace of modern England with strange speeches and empty promises.” 42 For The Author’s Farce, he took on the pseudonym Scriblerus Secundus, positioning himself as a next generation participant in the Scriblerians’ satirical literary network, which celebrated “a delight in combative talk as a national characteristic.” 43 Decades before The Author’s Farce 41 To complicate the lines of this triad, Luckless is responding to Sir Farcical Comick under the name of “Master of the Play,” whom we might consider something of a figure A2. 42 Warner 241; Laura McGrane, “Fielding’s Fallen Oracles: Print Culture and the Elusiveness of Common Sense,” Modern Language Quarterly 66:2 (June 2005), 173. 43 Mee 12. In line with his role as the Scriblerian Heir Apparent, Fielding’s Goddess of Nonsense and her allegorical suitors are strikingly similar to Pope’s Dunciad and 148 was staged, debates were already raging about the quality of art being created in England. Members of the Scriblerus Club such as Pope, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift had long been attacking the political arbiters of poor artistic productions—as well as the artists, such as Cibber, who would sacrifice artistic integrity for the sake of career advancement and royal patronage. To these satirists, Cibber and his ilk mixed genres and styles only to please himself, and ignored quality standards that others might expect from a theatrical manager of his stature. Unlike the Scriblerians as a networked club, however, Fielding was an individual; how, then, can an individual profess to be the heir of an entire network? To this, I would suggest that Fielding, as an individual participant in many networks, recognized that a network could not function without individuals, that individuals could not thrive without networks, and that the connections at the heart of these networks deserved attention. In this way, Fielding not only reflects on the specific connections within his network, he also illuminates much about the process by which these connections are forged. Fielding's satirical work casts a critical lens upon the social network required for production of plays because his writing mixed with two distinct social strata in publishing and production—both as a playwright and a novelist. In what initially might seem an arrogant, self-‐serving move for advancement in the vein of Colley or Theophilus Cibber, Fielding is usually single-‐handedly credited with drawing Robert Walpole’s ire to incite the Licensing Act. This is, however, just another example of Fielding’s devotion to his social connections. After the wild success of The Beggar’s Opera in 1727, Walpole prohibited John Gay’s 1729 its satirical addresses towards the Goddess Dullness, the King of the Dunces, and their real-‐life equivalents. 149 sequel to the play, Polly, under the assumption that it would contain additional unsubtle jabs at political corruption. In response to censorship that, indeed, signaled more drastic measures to come, Fielding penned a work in Gay’s defense entitled Macheath Turn’d Pirate: or Polly in India, meant both as a recapitulation of Gay’s attack on the “great man” and as a defense of artistic liberty. 44 This was not an individualistic move for advancement, but rather a way of benefiting authors at large. As more and more artists continued to attack Walpole, more and more censorship followed. In 1737, Fielding published “The Vision of the Golden Rump,” a satire of the prime minister and king, which greatly angered Walpole. 45 A subsequent play, also titled The Golden Rump, has been attributed to Fielding; this play is now lost, and scholars debate whether or not it actually ever existed. 46 The Golden Rump allegedly attacked Walpole and King George II for their lack of taste and their refusal to support the arts. To put an end to these concerted attacks, Walpole issued the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, a landmark of censorship to the British stage that gave the Lord Chamberlain the power to approve or ban any play before it reached the stage, effectively shutting down a text’s ability to benefit from a larger social network and freely change form. In all of his late theatrical works, Fielding attacked the financial corruption of the theatrical world, nepotistic network connections, and also what he saw as Londoners’ desire for ridiculously spectacular entertainment. Within the broader network of London’s theater elite, Fielding stood 44 Battestin 67. 45 Some scholars debate whether Fielding is actually the author of this work. 46 McGrane 192. 150 in defense of free speech, feeling it was his duty to point out the unjust censorship of his compatriots’ artistic expression and the excesses of a corrupt government. Ultimately, Fielding’s The Author’s Farce illustrates that theater, literary clubs, and political discourses were all socially promiscuous, and the texts these interactions inspired bled into one another in ways that wrought the social fabric of the mid-‐eighteenth century and beyond. Textual and social promiscuity play off one another: popular texts encourage social interactions, and texts also emerge as the products of such interactions. Whether or not a member of the network benefits from a text’s popularity depends on how that person can adapt to the network’s needs. If we accept that “group relations are in a dynamic flux,” and that the final outcomes “[result] from the actions and compromises of all the participants involved,” perhaps the same may be said for the final outcome of a literary career that drew on just such actions and compromises for its inspiration. 47 After his career in the theater had ended, Fielding’s work, in turn, cross-‐pollinated with nonfiction print genres such as newspapers, theatrical reviews, journals, and penny pamphlets. There was something about cheapened, derivative entertainment, however, that dogged Fielding even after he had left the world of the theater. In two of his most famous works, Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Fielding similarly drew from entertainments he deemed ridiculous: Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Rather than simply mocking, plagiarizing, or creating a derivative parody, however, Fielding used these ventures to contribute a message about textual interplay to his 47 Scott 14. 151 literary networks: virtue or talent may not be rewarded, but corruption and nonsense will be exposed. From the positive potentials of promiscuity―of social networking and textual interplay―Fielding not only advanced his own career but also contributed something beneficial to London society at large: a hope for originality and artistic progress. 152 CONCLUSIONS/CODA: Presaging the Novel By the time most of London’s theaters closed in 1737, the throngs of theatergoers went from circulating in the streets to taking up novels in the privacy of their homes: in the novel, they had found a new type of diversion. Like his erstwhile audience, Fielding had also shifted his career to this newest genre of publication. As a ravenous reading public responded to Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular novel Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Fielding took to satire yet again with An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), in which he once again mocked the popular pleasures of the town. As a form of entertainment, the novel may seem not to lend itself as readily to a study of circulation, largely because its audience does not engage in social interactions in the way that a theatrical audience would. Although the novel is indeed a largely solitary pursuit, reading simply marks a shift in the types of circulation in which eighteenth century audiences were participating: rather than circulating bodies, songs, or celebrity gossip as the theater did, the novel circulated as a direct product of the burgeoning print culture of the age. With many of London’s theaters closed due to the Licensing Act and the printing houses well open, novels were more readily available—more ready to circulate—by the middle of the century. David Brewer has written at length about the circulation of books as material objects, and how the widespread circulation of books, complete with their 153 textual variants, resulted in the popular sense that the novelistic work was “oddly placeless, yet potentially omnipresent.” 1 In its “placeless presence,” the novel became “an inexhaustible public resource” that contrasts with the theatrical need for physical proximity to inspire circulation. 2 The path of the novel’s improving reputation—from short amatory fiction of a supposedly corruptive nature 3 to a serious genre of entertainment—has been well trod by scholars such as William Warner in Licensing Entertainment and John Brewer in The Pleasures of the Imagination. Within these scholarly works, we see how the mid-‐century heyday of the novel allowed for that genre to develop its own forms of circulation and respectability as a form of high art. 4 This was no longer solely a world of human actors playing puppets and cats on a live theater stage; this was a world in which print publication was the emerging form of circulation du jour. Taken individually, each of the texts detailed here could demonstrate the popular consumption of theater in the eighteenth century. Taken together, however, 1 David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005), 41. 2 Brewer 40. 3 The novels of the early eighteenth century were frequently treated as a bad influence on susceptible minds, much like the playbooks that gave Polly Peachum a skewed notion of reality. 4 On further concerns of realism in the novel, see for example Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957; reprinted Berkeley: U of California P, 2001); George Levine’s The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983); Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002); and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900 (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). Current scholarly trends concerning the novel have shifted away from realism in general and towards specific historical facets of social reality—for example, the late-‐ eighteenth century novel’s contributions to burgeoning theories of feminism, education for women, the growing problems of empire, or the arguments for or against revolution. 154 I hope that this study serves as something of a foreword for the well-‐worn ground and detailed studies of how novels were consumed as a form of entertainment. I hope that this study provides a lasting impression of media circulation as seventeenth and eighteenth-‐century consumers of popular theatrical culture might have experienced it. 155 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works “An Answer to Polly Peachum’s Ballad." Printed by A. Moore near St. Paul’s’: London, 1728. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Gale. Accessed 12 November 2010. <http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ecco>. Aston, Tony. The Fool’s Opera; or the taste of the age. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Sluttishness, Circulation, and Promiscuity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century English Theater examines the concomitant types of circulation found in the theater of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century in England. Included in these are financial, social, sexual, and textual circulations

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