English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660–1800

Somewhere between fact and gossip lies the anecdote. Of dubious accuracy, yet vibrantly illustrative, anecdotes are often the most remembered and sometimes the only available details about a historical personage. A customary writerly move involves including one in the introduction of a scholarly article, only to have to concede its unverifiability even if it communicates something of a truth. Anecdotes can augment, obscure, or deviate from fact. Sometimes, however, they are all we have about a particular person or event. What then do we do?Taking up such issues, the essays in Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie’s English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660–1800 grapple with anecdotes that have sometimes obscured and other times enabled theatre history. In this important collection, the first of its kind devoted to theatrical anecdotes of the period, several essays unpack anecdotes as having misled us about an actor, a performance, or a life lived in theatre. Others demonstrate how to make use of anecdotes when alternate sources are scarce. Lest one question the need for an entire volume devoted to the subject, the introduction smartly lays the ground for such an endeavor. These stories, it argues, circulate insider knowledge supposedly straight from the green room. They heighten celebrity, overlap with the joke, and are conveyed, as Lionel Gossman has pointed out, in “a strikingly dramatic three-act structure consisting of situation or exposition, encounter or crisis, and resolution” (149). The introduction makes an excellent case for devoting more energy to the study of theatrical anecdotes, while the coda helpfully suggests possibilities for future study.Several essays in the volume serve as cautionary tales, detailing the misapplication of anecdotes then and now, and striving to correct the record. Chief among these is Leslie Ritchie’s “Killing Delane; or, Mimickry and the Anecdota Obscura,” anecdota obscura being Ritchie’s coinage for anecdotes misleadingly applied by theatre historians and biographers. Scrutinizing an anecdote where David Garrick is said to have mimicked his fellow actor Dennis Delane to such an extent as to occasion the latter’s death, Ritchie excellently illustrates how Garrick’s biographers feasted on the story to augment his celebrity status. Amanda Weldy Boyd similarly describes how anecdotes obscured knowledge of Charles Macklin because authors used them to augment his celebrity rather than unearth elements of his personality. Heather Ladd’s article on the impresario Samuel Foote portrays a way in which anecdotes were misapplied, demonstrating how the roles he wrote for himself in his plays, where his characters rose socially at others’ expense, were then reinforced through classist anecdotes. This illuminating contribution explores how plays themselves can generate anecdotes with long afterlives.A subset of these prescriptive articles depicts how gender and class inflect anecdotes’ deviations from fact. Máire MacNeill shows how anecdotes of violence in eighteenth-century biographies differed according to gender. When the actors were male, the tales either minimized their culpability or used them as cautionary examples, in either case taking the actors more seriously. But similar stories in actresses’ biographies functioned as farce. Focusing on Elizabeth Barry, Seth Wilson excellently demonstrates how three anecdotes about the Restoration’s greatest actress have shaped her legacy. The story that the Earl of Rochester’s tutelage brought Barry’s acting from floundering to fabulous has been much debated in recent scholarship (including my own), yet Wilson importantly contrasts its treatment in scholarship on Barry, which questions it, and some current work on Rochester, which uses the story to depict Barry as unworthy of the poet. An especially strong article by Nevena Martinović traces how anecdotes about an aging female body—that of the actress Sophia Baddely—castigate women who stray outside prescribed sexual morals. Depictions of Baddely’s deteriorating body in a book of anecdotes and in several obituaries, Martinović convincingly argues, castigate the actress for her extramarital affairs and warn other women not to follow suit.While the former subset of articles unearths theatrical facts obscured by anecdotes, perhaps more exciting to the scholar of theatre history are those articles proposing new methodologies for deriving knowledge from anecdotes themselves. In “Anecdote and the Regional Actress: A History of the Farren Family in Several Anecdotes,” Fiona Ritchie takes up the question of what to do when anecdotes are the prime—even the only—source of information about theatre personages. Examining anecdotes helps her look beyond the typical narrative of Elizabeth Farren’s origin story, where the actress is portrayed as overcoming an alcoholic father to become a London star and subsequently marry royalty, to situate her instead in a family of thespians who performed in regional theatres. Through a case study of Elizabeth Farley Weaver, Chelsea Phillips investigates whether actresses performed while pregnant and whether pregnant actresses received different treatment depending on their marital status. While it is not surprising that unmarried pregnant actresses were shamed, Phillips’ article demonstrates how a careful application of anecdotal sources can generate new theatrical knowledge. In “Anecdotal Origin Stories: Mary Ann Yates’s Trip to Drury Lane,” Elaine McGirr claims that Frances Brooke’s story of Mary Ann Yates becoming inspired to join the acting profession while watching Susanna Cibber star in Romeo and Juliet is “feminocentric,” in contrast to many other actresses’ origin stories, which depict another person (usually a man) discovering them. While it would be helpful to compare this anecdote to some origin stories of male actors, McGirr importantly shows how this (fictive) anecdote nevertheless expresses a truth about Yates’ great talent and accomplishments. Studying a book of eighteenth-century anecdotes, Michael Burden demonstrates how they establish seven singers as reputable within the suspect world of theatre. And in one of the volume’s strongest essays, “Queering Roxane from Davenant to Richardson,” Danielle Bobker traces an anecdote about a duped actress from Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count Grammont (1714) and argues that it develops a queer intertextual network through several theatrical and fictional sources.This volume thus makes great use of one of the murkiest resources available to Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre scholars. Illuminating and methodologically innovative, it suggests ways forward for theatre scholars to make the most of these beguiling resources.

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