Prologue, To the Duke of Lerma, Spoken by Mrs. Ellen[Nell], and Mrs. Nepp.

When Samuel Pepys heard Nell GwynFootnote ² and Elizabeth KnippFootnote ³ deliver the prologue to Robert Howard's The Duke of Lerma, he recorded the experience in his diary: “Knepp and Nell spoke the prologue most excellently, especially Knepp, who spoke beyond any creature I ever heard.”Footnote ⁴ By 20 February 1668, when Pepys noted his thoughts, he had known Knipp personally for two years, much to the chagrin of his wife. He had met Knipp backstage and in the audience of the two playhouses. He knew her family and they shared a social circle; he had sung with her in domestic and social settings. Pepys had had much experience of Elizabeth Knipp's quotidian language and conversational mode of speech. The prologue, which offered the not-yet-in-role Nell Gwyn and the costumed Mrs. Knipp preparing for the play, begins in prose before breaking into bouncing rhyme to end more conventionally. Mrs. Knipp might seem to appear here as herself, yet Pepys eulogizes Knipp's speaking of the prologue as a theatrical experience. He does not compare her onstage performance of apparently natural speech to quotidian conversation nor does he talk of her acting. Rather, he judges it as an oratorical performance against other stage performances: she “spoke beyond any creature I ever heard.” This article explores what the performance of the prologues and epilogues in the newly established duopoly of Restoration London theatres can reveal about how performers were known and represented, and what they tell us about the increasing individuation of those performers and the implications of this for acting and acting style.Footnote ⁵

Prologues, epilogues, and induction scenes have many functions as paratexts, most notably to act as transitions for the audience between the playhouse and the fictional world of the play. In Tudor and Jacobean theatre we have patchy records of these metatheatrical scenes as only occasional elements. As Tudor household troupes evolved into commercial companies, the metatheatrical spaces of prologue and epilogue became increasingly important ways to manage audiences and audience expectations of the play. These texts playfully reflected the economics of playing and the relationship between playwright and company, as Loewenstein argues: “On the margins of dramatic representation—in induction and epilogues—the Elizabethan play is regularly represented by the speaking actor as ‘ours,’ the possession and, indeed, the product of the actors.”Footnote ⁶

Bruster and Weimann's study of Shakespearean prologues identifies the prologue as a liminal space that was primarily concerned with establishing authority for the company, the author, or the audience.Footnote ⁷ For Tiffany Stern, pre-Restoration “prologues and epilogues indicated a special state of text-in-performance at which judgment could take place. They are there for new actors, and they are there for new plays—they are there for occasions when rejection is possible.”Footnote ⁸ These occasional treats of the pre-Restoration stage were performed by lesser actors in Tudor interludes. By the 1630s, prologues and epilogues were most often performed by hired men or young male performers who had played female roles and were “on the cusp of success as adult players.”Footnote ⁹ In other words, they were not written and designed to showcase or enhance the reputation of the leading players of the companies. Bruster and Weimann find prologues and epilogues to be a “zone of multiple transitions” for the performer, marking a move between functions within the troupe—whether an experienced actor was moving from adjunct to company member or a boy actor was moving into adult roles—or between roles in the repertoire.Footnote ¹⁰

With the reestablishment of the theatre industry at the Restoration, prologues and epilogues became an expected part of new plays, revivals of dormant plays, and performances at Court and at Oxford. New prologues and epilogues were written for the benefit nights for groups of players and playwrights and for the benefit nights of individual players, a trend that began in the 1690s. They were still an activity of audience management that generated and controlled expectations about the play and the players, but they began to take on a different complexion as performances.Footnote ¹¹ During the Restoration, leading performers began to deliver the prologue more often, and prologues and epilogues began to be written to elevate the visibility of individual performers rather than the entire theatre company.

Reputation, Celebrity, Selves: Knowing the Performers

In his exhaustive collection of prologues and epilogues of the long eighteenth century, Pierre Danchin characterizes the prologue speaker at the end of the Restoration period as a “highly individualized actor … who is known by name by the public and is supposed to speak propria persona, whether he appears as one of the characters in the play or pretends to be entirely independent from it.”Footnote ¹² This focus on known performers delivering prologues in propria persona, that is, in his or her own person, charts a shift in theatrical practice from the pre-Restoration theatre, which rarely named and singled out its “star” performers in this way. As Danchin's collection illustrates, it is a mode that evolved over the period.Footnote ¹³ One of the ways we can chart the development of knowledge about the actors in metatheatrical spaces is by noting the frequency with which prologues and epilogues were printed with an identified speaker. For example, Danchin's survey reveals that during the period January 1671 to January 1674, thirty-nine mainstage prologues were delivered by male performers, of which thirteen (one-third) were identified as spoken either by the leading actors (Thomas Betterton,Footnote ¹⁴ William Smith,Footnote ¹⁵ Charles Hart,Footnote ¹⁶ James Nokes,Footnote ¹⁷ Cave Underhill,Footnote ¹⁸ and Michael MohunFootnote ¹⁹) or by the comic (Joseph HainesFootnote ²⁰). By the period January 1701 to January 1704, of the fifty-five mainstage prologues delivered by male performers, thirty-six (two-thirds) were identified as spoken by the leading dramatic actors of the companies (Robert Wilks,Footnote ²¹ Thomas Betterton, Colley Cibber,Footnote ²² John Mills,Footnote ²³ George Powell,Footnote ²⁴ Barton Booth,Footnote ²⁵ or Thomas DoggettFootnote ²⁶) or the famed comic William Penkethman.Footnote ²⁷ The increasing frequency with which the name of the speaker of prologues and epilogues was recorded suggests that the reader of playtexts was expected to have knowledge of individual performers.Footnote ²⁸ During this same period, it was increasingly common for separately printed prologues and epilogues to be sold as artifacts: in the late 1670s and early 1680s during the Exclusion Crisis, politically inflected prologues were frequently printed in broadside.Footnote ²⁹ By the 1700s, aesthetically valued pieces were appearing in poetic miscellanies, in poetic collections from playwrights, and in short-lived periodicals such as A Pacquet from Parnassus (published 1702), The Diverting Post (published 1704–6), or The Muses Mercury (published 1707–8).Footnote ³⁰ Many of these separately produced copies of prologues and epilogues had the tag “Spoken by” and carried the performer's name to a diverse public of provincial readers who were unlikely to have seen the originating performance in a London theatre.

However, we should note that while many more prologues and epilogues recorded the speaker's name, we cannot assume that named actors delivered the prologue in propria persona. The idea of an actor in propria persona that Danchin raises is a complex one and is a problem still much addressed today by contemporary theorists of performance wrestling with analyzing the identities of the autobiographical performer or the performers of task-based live art.Footnote ³¹ Who is the speaking “I” of the Restoration prologue or epilogue? David Graver has created a taxonomy of actorly presence for the modern theatre that offers a useful way of looking at the prologue speaker. He considers at least seven ways to capture the “ontological complexity of the actor's body on stage,” including as “characters, performers, commentators, personages, members of socio-historical groups, physical flesh, and loci of private sensations.”Footnote ³² His list is designed to suggest not exclusionary categories but a multiplicity of possible interpretations that come into focus for an audience at different moments.

During the first years of the Restoration, the “commentator” function predominated in most prologues and epilogues; actors primarily voiced playwrights' aesthetic concerns or comments on the play.Footnote ³³ At the same time, the prologue actor stood as performer qua performer and a representative of the company. The content would remark upon the economic or entertainment value of the performance the company was offering. Graver suggests that we can also understand performers as representatives of a sociohistorical group, and we can see this most obviously in one of the novelties of the theatres of the Restoration theatrical period, the actress. Playwrights increasingly wrote for actresses in prologues or (more usually) epilogues. Later in the Restoration period, it became more common for playwrights to write for specific actresses. For example, Danchin's collection of prologues and epilogues indicates that fourteen of the forty-seven epilogues for the period 1671–74 were given by women, but the women were not always identified by name. Thirty years later, nineteen of the thirty-five epilogues for the period 1701–4 were delivered by named actresses. A generic form of female epilogue emerged that developed the traditional entreaties to the audience for acceptance and applause into a form of flirtation with the audience. Diana Solomon notes that the rhetorical trope of the actress's sexual availability produced the new genre of the bawdy female epilogue.Footnote ³⁴ This recast in new form the long theatrical tradition of the bawdy jig following the mainpiece. In the majority of these epilogues, actresses stand as a generic type that represents a gendered group.

From the 1670s, commercially minded playwrights created more theatricalized prologues. Performers still served as commentators and as representatives of the company, but the prologues also included more reflexive moments of the actor as a “personage,” in Graver's taxonomy, “an aura generated by the public circulation of stories about the actor” that is most obvious in the modern idea of celebrity.Footnote ³⁵ Joseph Roach notes that this type of identity emerged during the Restoration period: “As their images and reputations began to circulate freely in the absence of their persons, actors and actresses became the first modern celebrities—popularly recognized public figures who were not also kings or queens.”Footnote ³⁶ While audiences learned about the reputations of actors through images and anecdotes that circulated beyond the theatre, they also learned about them through their onstage activity. By 1700, around two-thirds of theatrical prologues and epilogues were delivered by identified performers, male and female, each season, and of these around one-third had some element of reference to the professional persona of the performer.

Recent critics have examined the relationship between the personages of actors and the characters they played within the fictional worlds of the plays of the Restoration stage. This doubled relationship of performer persona and character holds true for most theatrical performance, the “inherent duality of theatrical activity,” as Jean Alter dubs it.Footnote ³⁷ Lisa Freeman describes this relationship as competitive, noting that “the fictional persona created by a playwright often had to compete with the persona or public reputation of the actor or actress taking that part. In this very basic sense, the ‘character’ presented to an audience was neither singular nor unitary, but rather manifold and incongruous.”Footnote ³⁸ For her, this means that Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre was always a place of resistance to the emergent idea of an interior, coherent, authentic, and moral self, as modeled by the novel.

The prologues and epilogues of the Restoration inverted this process, allowing audience members to build knowledge about an actor's personage or professional persona through their memory of the theatrical roles and characters he or she had played. After around 1670, many of the new commercial playwrights explicitly wrote prologues and epilogues to help audiences do this. Durfey's induction to The Virtuous Wife (1679) demonstrates that audiences were assumed to share in a complex understanding of playhouse politics and the personae of the leading players. When the actress Elizabeth Barry finds she is to play the eponymous virtuous wife, she complains that “Underhill, Jevan, Currier, Tony Lee/Nokes, all have better characters than me”Footnote ³⁹ and “Throws her Part away.” In response, Anthony LeighFootnote ⁴⁰ “peeps out of a little window over the stage” and refutes the suggestion that he has a better part (“I play a Fool you know, a silly Rogue”) and accuses her of collaborating with James Nokes. Nokes himself then “peeps out of a little window [on] the other side of the stage” and Nokes and Leigh banter. “You're a pimp, a Pandarus of Troy, a Gripe, a Fumble,” accuses Nokes. Leigh retorts, “Ye're a Swash, a Toby in a Barrel.” These terms of abuse refer to the characters that each actor had played, with great success, during the preceding season.Footnote ⁴¹ The argumentative tone of the exchange prefigures the violent onstage relationship of Sir Lubberly Widgeon (Leigh) and Lady Beardly (“Nurse” Nokes) and seems also to reveal more of the professional personae of the actors. Leigh and Nokes became a popular pairing from the mid-1670s, and their names appear as a shorthand for foolish blustering behavior in numerous poems and pamphlets.Footnote ⁴² The prologue to Durfey's The Virtuous Wife emphasizes the economic value of playing, as was conventional at the time. Leigh worries, “'Sdeath are you mad, shall we lye down,/Lose all our shares, nay, and affront the Town?” Barry concedes, “Well I must do't I see, or lose my share,/Come, come—be friends, I'll Act—for once I'll trye.” Here, the professional persona for both the male and the female actor includes membership in the group of commercial performers who need to please the town and an individual identity that builds on an accretion of roles.

A performer's professional persona was not a static entity. Professional personae and reputations could be crafted within prologues and epilogues. The prologue to Durfey's Marriage Hater Match'd (January 1692), whose text pairs actor William Mountfort and actress Anne Bracegirdle, demonstrates how this might work. Bracegirdle, a young, unmarried performer, had made her debut with the United Company in 1688. She had had considerable success playing virtuous heroines and witty flirts and had taken several roles playing opposite Mountfort in previous seasons. The virtuous nature of the suffering heroines she played began to garner her a reputation for virtuous behavior offstage:

Durfey's implication that Bracegirdle was famed for prologues is interesting because in January 1692 she had delivered only two (possibly three) prologues and around four epilogues. This prologue was itself to develop her fame for delivering prologues. The cross-dressed Bracegirdle resists the potential illusion of gender complexity by drawing attention to her body and her resistance to wearing men's clothes, apparently providing a stable interiority under the “nauseous Dress.” This echoed her performance as Semernia, the Indian queen of Behn's The Widdow Ranter (1689), who reluctantly disguises herself as a man to fight the English and save her rebel lover. She seems to disavow her performance of what was to become, partly because of this prologue, one of her theatrical specialties—breeches roles—at the very moment that she adds a cross-dressed performance to her repertoire. Although, as Diana Solomon argues, Bracegirdle's virginal public persona was paradoxically played against the fallen character of Phoebe in Marriage Hater Match'd, that virginal reputation is reconstructed in the prologue in language (but challenged in sense) through Durfey's ironic quip in Mountfort's mouth, “Well, we'll allow your Modesty is Fam'd.” This quips works in two ways, both to reinforce a reputation that was being constructed around Bracegirdle by a series of writers and to challenge it, because informed members of the audience knew that Mountfort was the very person who could attest that Bracegirdle's modesty was in question.Footnote ⁴⁴ This allusion confirmed the constructed nature of Bracegirdle's professional persona in the moment of its construction. What appears to be a reference to a moral interiority attached to Bracegirdle's real, offstage self is revealed as a writerly game with her evolving reputation and professional persona. In many ways Bracegirdle's professional persona was anomalous; the identity that was written for her resisted the sexualized norm for actresses of her generation and continued to emphasize her “virtue.” Two years later, during the complex negotiations in 1694 with Christopher Rich, manager of the United Company, she capitalized on this individuation by arguing that her public prominence merited a salary increase.Footnote ⁴⁵

“Without Vanity, I'm better known”: The Missing Popular Performers

Modern commentators have tended to concentrate on the celebrity of the leading dramatic actors, such as Bracegirdle and Betterton, but another group of male performers was greatly celebrated in their day as knowable individual personae—the fools. In the world of the prologue and epilogue, fools were the performers most skilled at establishing a fantasy of a knowable identity and at establishing a comic complicity and intimacy with an audience through direct address. The roll call of the leading fools or clowns hardly resonates for us today: John Lacy, Thomas Jevon,Footnote ⁴⁶ Joseph Haines, Anthony Leigh, James Nokes, Thomas Doggett, and William Penkethman. Our histories have tended to concern themselves with the leading dramatic performers of the companies and have often missed the elision of popular and elite culture, the merging of entertainment from the public fairs and the mainstage in Restoration playhouses. The bold John Lacy,Footnote ⁴⁷ who performed his own prologue for The Dumb Lady (1672), bounced onto the stage with this:

Self-authorizing and in mock-abject form, Lacy played up the image of himself as the impecunious poet, even though he was a shareholding player. Later in the century, in the prologue to his play The Devil of a Wife (1686), Thomas Jevon addressed a section of the audience he dubbed his patrons and claimed, “My name's Mr Jevon, I'm known far and near.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Both Lacy and Jevon explicitly addressed the commercial value of their celebrity in the prologues to their first plays, where they attempted to negotiate their commercial success as writers.

One of the mechanisms that produced celebrity for these comic performers and seduced audiences into believing that the performer would reveal a knowable “I” was extemporization, which suggested tantalizing access to a “real self” and to the most explicit agency of the actor intervening in the scripted world of the text. When Robert Howard wrote a double ending to his Vestal Virgin (1664), he also wrote an epilogue for John Lacy that drew attention to the fluidity of plot and form as a theatrical conceit. Lacy's epilogue to the tragic version starts:

But for the comic version, Howard wrote an epilogue that seemed to put Lacy at a disadvantage:

Lacy then proceeds to deliver a beautifully turned epilogue, clearly not extempore but masquerading as such.

Dryden provided a prologue for Joseph Harris's The Mistakes (1690) that created even more of an illusion of extemporization:

Williams then “stumbles” physically and in the scansion of several lines, as Dryden built in the pauses, hesitations, and apologies of an actor making it up as he goes along. Apparent extemporization was a mode to which playwrights frequently returned as part of their hold on the textual world of performance. Actual extemporization was the preserve of the fools. The written traces of such extempore performances are found in prologues and epilogues written by comic actors or the more theatrically astute playwrights, such as Behn or Durfey, and are usually set within a context that directly references popular culture and popular performance from the fairgrounds.

The London fairs—Bartholomew Fair, which was held for two weeks in August, and Southwark Fair, which lasted for up to two weeks in September—offered a wide range of entertainments such as drolls, puppet shows, acrobatics, feats and exotic beasts, ropedancing, and music amid the stalls selling goods, food, and drink. The drolls were often based on folk traditions and ballads as well as cut-down versions of popular comedies and frequently made scurrilous reference to City of London authorities and topical political events. The booth theatres were temporary wooden structures that often had a gallery and bore a passing resemblance to the licensed playhouses.Footnote ⁵² Thomas Jevon's booth act was directly reproduced in Aphra Behn's Emperor in the Moon (1687). In the prologue, Jevon describes how dramatic literature has failed to find success, so the company has “bought a share i' th' speaking Head./So there you'll save a Sice.”Footnote ⁵³ The speaking head was a well-known entertainment from the fairs, where it cost sixpence, or “a Sice,” to see it. A performer dressed as a learned doctor magically brought a bronze head to life. The head, conveniently situated on a table covered with a cloth, answered questions. (An advertisement for John Harris's booth at Bartholomew Fair included the bronze speaking head and the doctor in a popular woodcut.Footnote ⁵⁴) The act offered a direct appeal to the nonelite audience in the galleries and alerted all the audience to the generic playfulness of Behn's farce. In Behn's prologue, Jevon and the head improvise, in the manner of the fairground entertainment.

He speaks lowder, it answers indirectly.

The text records only the manner of the gag rather than the improvised content of the exchanges that follow.

In the epilogue to the farce Jevon wrote, The Devil of a Wife (1686), the complex elision of character and professional performer is played up in the mode of popular droll performance. Jevon concludes the play onstage with Mrs. Percival, who has played his long-suffering wife in the comedy. He addresses her by her character name, Nell, but talks of his actorly activity of changing for the postperformance dance:

Mrs. Percival replies in character as his wife and makes an address to the audience on behalf of her husband. Jevon interrupts:

Although he turns to address Susanna Percival as “wife” once more, it is clear that Jevon, a comic famed both for his work with the theatre company and his fairground booth act, is bantering with the audience in his professional comic persona, not quite an “actorly” one and not quite his “real” self.Footnote ⁵⁶

Another exponent of the improvised form was Joseph Haines. In the epilogue to fellow actor Hildebrand Horden's Neglected Virtue (1696), Haines acted the “Mad man” and danced, sang, canted, and threw off his periwig. In the printed text the verse is interrupted with a footnote: “Here Mr. Hains made several pleasant Digressions too long to be inserted; and to make place for 'em, omitted some Lines of this Epilogue.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In extempore performance the actor interposed a tactical self—not an obediently created character but a troublesome (though still a performed) persona. Such comic personae, with their confident direct address to an audience alluding to the delights of scurrilous, popular fairground entertainment, were valuable draws for the theatre.

The fools onstage summoned a tradition of popular entertainment that operated above and beyond the licensed theatres, a form of entertainment that had not been interrupted by the prohibition of playhouses during the Commonwealth. This tradition continued outside the literary traces of playtext and learned or elite criticism of the day.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the induction sequence to Edward Howard's Man of Newmarket (1678), actors Joseph Haines and William Shatterell come onstage as “themselves” and debate which play they should perform. Haines argues for a farce, drumming up the audience to support him: “Where thou shalt see me, Joe Haines, so mimick French and English mixtures; thou knowst my Talent that way.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Haines had played the French tutor in Edward Ravenscroft's The Citizen Turn'd Gentleman (1671), a range of fools such as Sparkish in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), and Harlequin in Ravenscroft's Scaramouch a Philosopher (1677). He had also performed in the booths of the London fairs.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although this remark seems to be an example of generic snobbery, suggesting that the nonelite members of the gallery might be the most acquainted with Haines's alternate career as a performer in the London fairs, the fairs drew a wide social range, and in the theatres the players performed all genres to appreciative audience members seated in all the ranked spaces of the playhouse. Haines's trademark ability as a parodic physical mimic of French social behavior drew upon his excursions in the train of the Duke of Buckingham to Louis XIV's court in 1670, where he danced in the première of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Haines thus embodied the melding of low and elite culture in his professional persona to such an extent that when the theatres at the end of the century begin to produce a mixed program of entertainment, with frequent entertainments from dancers, singers, and more lowly fairground entertainments, he was the natural choice to introduce the Strong Kentish Man, a popular fairground act, as the summer entertainment at Dorset Garden.

One of the most interesting ways that Haines cultivated his celebrity was by deliberately merging religious belief, one of the most “private” aspects of a moral self, with a changing professional persona. Haines had toyed with audiences about his religious proclivities in metatheatrical material he had written since 1675:

The story of Haines's conversion to Catholicism is muddied by the many versions that exist, but it occurred during his European travels in the entourage of either William Soames, ambassador to Constantinople, or of the Earl of Castlemaine, ambassador to the pope. Haines returned to England in late 1688, during the fraught negotiations over James II's removal from the throne. In Haines's first recorded performance after William III's accession in 1689, he took the role of Bayes, a parody of John Dryden that was originated by John Lacy, in a revival of The Rehearsal. In the prologue to this performance, his most printed prologue, he publicly recanted his conversion to Catholicism. Haines chose to enact his reconversion to Protestantism on the stage as a theatrical performance. He appeared as a penitent in a white sheet holding a candle, and in a combination of blasphemous parody and earnest supplication ended the prologue to The Rehearsal:

His request “from your kind hands” required not the conventional touch of an absolving minister but the conventional applause of a multitude of hands in the playhouse. He required a secular bodily response to an embodied performance that operated as a cluster of social, political, religious, and theatrical practices. A 1690 pamphlet by Tom Brown regarding Haines's erstwhile Catholicism is subtitled, Being the Third and Last Part of the Dialogue of Mr. Bays; this links Joseph Haines to John Dryden,Footnote ⁶⁴ whose Catholicism led to his fall from grace after 1689, by having Haines recount a scurrilous version of the travels on which his conversion occurred in dialogue with “Mr. Bays.” The pamphlet provides another account of this period of Haines's life that became interleaved with Haines's professional persona.Footnote ⁶⁵ Brown's pamphlet attributed Haines's reconversion to “Interest, which a Poet ought always principally to mind; now the Protestant Religion, Mr. Hains, will qualifie you again for the Play-House” and to “Fashion,”Footnote ⁶⁶ emphasizing the commercial and political aspects suspected to have been in play in Haines's apparently personal spiritual declarations.

The Haines recantation prologue was very popular with audiences and was repeatedly performed. Recognizing its commercial value, Thomas Durfey wrote a second recantation prologue for him in 1690:

By now the force of repetition and cumulative excess of explanation reduces the aura of credibility about this recantation, for here Haines must confess himself a Muslim, and circumcised to boot. This is perhaps the most extreme example of celebrity produced by a professional performer adopting a persona that mimics the appearance of a private, moral self.

The extent of Haines's celebrity as a recognizable persona performing an apparently knowable, comic self is demonstrated by the number of times he was invited to perform or write prologues and epilogues by other playwrights and players. When Congreve wrote the prologue to Powell's play A Very Good Wife (1693), he vouched for the value of the play and of playwright George Powell, himself a well-known figure in the United Company, through the body of Haines.

The authorizing presence here is the comic actor, Joseph Haines, who is “better known.” The prologue continues to reveal by whom Haines is known:

Haines can be doubly authorizing because he is figured as famous in two contexts. The first is Will's coffeehouse, a known haunt of playwrights and a group of writers dubbed the “Wits,” a cultural space that implies that the literary qualities of his work can be vouched for. The second context is onstage, where Haines stands for reliable entertainment value in performance, a value that inheres to his professional persona. By 1693, Haines was a highly recognized celebrity: the “I” of these texts holds both the fantasy of a stabilized, unitary interiority and the reality of continual variation, the interplay of visible surfaces, shifting between and within each performed experience. The body of the performer stands as a memorial that summons other spaces of performance, such as the coffeehouse and the fairground booth, for audience members who have also participated in his performance beyond the stage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Haines was also the subject of the first biography of an actor, The Life of the Late Famous Comedian, Jo. Hayns, a contribution to a burgeoning print culture that was emerging around the celebrity performer.Footnote ⁶⁹ Haines and Jevon were part of a tradition of celebrated fools and clowns: William Kemp,Footnote ⁷⁰ Robert Armin,Footnote ⁷¹ and Richard TarltonFootnote ⁷² had been celebrities of the pre-Restoration stage and were as widely known as the one or two leading actors of the Elizabethan and Jacobean companies. Although we are less acquainted with the celebrity comics of the Restoration stage today, the success of their often self-authored performances is evidenced by the large number of separately printed prologues and epilogues and by the regular commentary on them in anecdotes, printed ephemera, and theatrical pamphlets. Their personae appeared to offer audiences a veridical, knowable “I” and contributed to the rise in popularity of this kind of Restoration prologue and epilogue—and thus to the increased individuation of the known performer from the troupe.

“Grunting like Betterton”: Style and the Individual

Metatheatrical spaces produced knowledge of a professional persona and, in the case of the comics, playful allusions to a knowable offstage personality. Inevitably, these spaces were also the place for discussions of acting skill and, particularly within the context of theatrical competition at the end of the seventeenth century, of acting style.

By the 1680s and 1690s, the economic value of a player's name and of his or her identity had become increasingly important to acting companies. The appearance of certain performers could make or break a play, as numerous playwrights confess in their prefatory material. “And now for you who here come wrapt in Cloaks/Only for love of Underhill and Nurse Nokes,” says Elizabeth Barry in Otway's epilogue to Caius Marius (October 1679).Footnote ⁷³ Southerne's epilogue to his Wives Excuse (1691) has Barry, who as Mrs. Friendall has remained virtuous against all odds, step forward to speak in the voice of a disgruntled audience member. Barry asks:

Southerne creates the audience member who is imaginatively entering into the character of the lover in order to complete the adulterous activity of the plot and, more significantly, entering into the actorly persona of Betterton, who “struts and cocks” and whose success in rakish roles would have cued the expectation of adultery. Here is a commentary on Betterton, although admittedly in a rather clichéd form, as a performer who struts and swaggers on stage.

By the 1690s, religiously motivated challenges to the theatre were building that emphasized the immorality and insincerity of actors.Footnote ⁷⁵ The theatre defended itself against these attacks not so much with theoretical treatises as with daily lived experience, through the particularity of the bodies and personae of leading performers. When Farquhar defends the value of the stage in the face of the onslaught from Jeremy Collier and the members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners who challenged the theatre's legitimacy,Footnote ⁷⁶ he points to Betterton's performance of Alexander the Great in Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens:

Farquhar uses Betterton's reputation and status as a leading performer to ground his championing of the representational agenda of the stage. Roach argues that this valorization of Betterton in particular (but also of players in general) within the public sphere becomes a form of surrogation. For Roach, Betterton, in recollection more than in performance experience, comes to stand as “a shadow king, a visible effigy signifying the dual nature of sovereignty, its division between an immortal and an abject body, and the ultimate symbolic diffusion of the former into a body of laws.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Roach identifies the role the hagiology of Betterton plays in circum-Atlantic culture, but Betterton could come to be considered so significant and individual a performer only after he had made the particularly audacious commercial decision to secede from the monopoly of the United Company and establish what was to be popularly known as the Actors' Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1695.Footnote ⁷⁹

The self-authorizing force of reestablishing an actor-led playing company, which had not seen since before the Civil War, put the pressure for commercial success squarely onto the shoulders of the leading performers. Robert D. Hume suggests that Christopher Rich attempted to retain some players at Drury Lane in what was left of the Patent Company by offering individual actors a benefit night to offset the shortfall in their salaries. He demonstrates how the model of group benefits for the women players or young players and the logic of the playwright's third-night benefit led individual actors at both houses to establish a benefit night “to demonstrate popularity, to make an effort in one's own behalf, and perhaps, just perhaps, to make a profit far beyond what could be earned in many weeks of salaried work.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Cheryl Wanko discusses the social significance of the actor benefit in her study of the emerging fashion of the actor's biography, an inevitable extension of the circulation of reputation. At such occasions, “the audience also gains cultural capital, a return on their benefit investment, by being seen at the most fashionable players' benefits, thus affirming their good taste, and by assuring the regard and deference of a popular performer.”Footnote ⁸¹ As the performers became increasingly distinguished from each other, in part through the mechanisms of the metatheatrical spaces, the drive for knowledge about performers developed and with it both the attraction of cultural significance that might accrue to the aficionado and the entertainment value of the fantasy “actor persona.” More than a line of business or the expectation of what an “actor in character” would provide, the theatrical activity beyond the performance of the play offered audiences knowledge of the actorly personae of individual financially successful players.

Commercial imperatives contributed to the evolution of an interest in individual acting style: the possibility that an increasingly consumerist public might develop a taste for the individual acting prowess of one company or one kind of performance over another and thus make one set of performers more financially successful than another. The intertheatre rivalry produced a number of theatrically referential plays that dwelled on acting ability and style, particularly from the members who were left at the Patent Company at Drury Lane, who acknowledged their company's lack of experienced players and the implications that this had for their income and their acting. For example, in the epilogue to John Crowne's Caligula, an unnamed girl actor acknowledged that its audience members preferred “the famous Actors” who had “fled from us to an old Tennis Court.”Footnote ⁸²

In John Fletcher's Philaster; or, Love Lies a Bleeding (1695), the young members of the company complained that they were hard pressed to find competent actors to perform in the manner to which the audience had become accustomed.

The Patent Company called for patience to allow its younger performers to refine the arts of playing. Meanwhile, the company's players mocked the impressive but limited playing of the “dear Antiquities” of the other house in an attempt to generate support for their own style:

The reference to the dated rhymed tragedy of Orrery's Mustapha is a deliberate ploy to point up the age and the older style of the performers in the Actors' Company. Betterton's Solyman had been an early ranting role. William Smith, who was to die in 1695, had been a noble Zanger; and Samuel Sandford, known for his hunched shoulder, had played the devious Rustan.Footnote ⁸⁵

This competition for audiences between the two companies was to translate into direct performance rivalry. Colley Cibber records the battle between George Powell and Thomas Betterton when Powell acted The Old Batchelour in mimicry of Betterton's style and when Cibber himself had an opportunity, during Doggett's short desertion to the other house, to try a different style for Fondlewife.Footnote ⁸⁶ Likewise George Powell's The Fatal Discovery (1698) extended the criticism and mimicry of the other house:

In another example of overt discussion of the style of particular actors, the passionate style of Betterton, Barry, and Bracegirdle is mocked in the anonymous The Female Wits (1697), in which the author Marsilia directs a highly disorganized rehearsal at Drury Lane. In attempting to act the play within a play, the young actors are shown struggling with remarkable performance demands. Marsilia commands the actress, “Dear Mrs. Knight, in this speech, stamp as Queen Statira does, that always gets a Clap.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Mrs. Knight, a real actress with Drury Lane, is here instructed to imitate Bracegirdle's acting style in the role of Statira in Lee's The Rival Queens. Later in The Female Wits, Marsilia instructs the hopelessly miscast William Penkethman as the young hero Amorous:

Undoubtedly Penkethman was to perform in direct mockery of Betterton's great tragic heroes. This flurry of competitive metatheatrical banter indicates how personnel issues were affecting repertory choices. As Betterton, Barry, and Bracegirdle aged, they became increasingly famed for their tragic prowess. A burgeoning print culture made the wider circulation of theatrical commentary, review, and audience perspectives possible, thus also creating knowledge of the leading players and their reputations apart from the performed encounter in the playhouse. However, these performed encounters, as the intercompany rivalries of the seasons after 1695 illustrate, came to be about a distinctive, individual style of playing, not just about a professional actorly persona as informed by character roles, company position, or even generic preferences.

Discourses emerge over the period that center attention on the aesthetic concerns of the “art of acting,” in which the activity of the successful performer was increasingly characterized and perceived as removed from the trade of impersonation. Here we see the beginnings of the valued cultural field of the artist.Footnote ⁹⁰ Postlewait notes that Garrick's “art, which seemingly overcame the distance between external performance techniques and internal vital passion (by means of native sensibility), and his life, which closed the social gap between an actor and a gentleman (by means of moral sensibility), offered reassuring evidence that the problem of a split identity was eminently solvable.”Footnote ⁹¹ Roach identifies the paradigm shift in scientific thought that championed empirical analysis that was applied to the stage. Through metatheatrical stage conventions, through biography, and through the theatrical material produced by an emerging print culture, the actual activity of actors and the observation of difference in acting style became possible by the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹² Much ink has been spilled in charting the contests set up between the styles of representative actors of the eighteenth century: Garrick and Quin, Garrick and Macklin, Kemble and Kean. Such perception of differentiation became a kind of knowledge that was culturally valuable to the spectator.

In the complex representation of individual performers in prologues and epilogues, more than a line of business emerged. Audiences were seduced by these individuated performers, these apparently knowable personalities, who were to become economically significant within the theatrical marketplace. Rather than the leading dramatic actors and actresses of the day, it was the clowns and fools who most fully developed prologues and epilogues as performances of the veridical self. The benefits, metaphoric and economic, of an individuated actorly persona also carried a social and symbolic significance. As the theatrical institution changed, paralleled by movements in social understandings of identity, the differentiation of one actor from another began to generate an interest in acting “style.” The recognition of such stylistic niceties became an important mark of culturally significant audience taste. Restoration prologues and epilogues chart the tactical interventions of performers in spaces outside text, character, and the conventions of dramatic genre. They draw as much upon the performance of popular, fairground culture as the practices of licensed drama, and they mark the arrival of the celebrity performer.