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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Stardom and Sedulousness

  • Deborah C. Payne, American University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660–1700
    Published online:
    18 October 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024, pp 214-255
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  • Summary

    Chapter 6 investigates how the duopoly, by radically curtailing numbers, inadvertently transformed actors from vagrants in need of a patron’s protection to celebrities lionized by courtiers and commoners alike. Managerial choices coalesced with the historical accident of a monarch so intimately associated with the theatre that he took two actresses as mistresses. Playhouse architecture also exerted an unexpected phenomenological effect on their status. The intimacy characteristic of the Restoration playhouse transmogrified performed intersubjectivity into the crackling exchange of eroticized energy. Unprecedented social freedom, economic mobility, and even contemporary portraiture attest to their new stature after 1660. That new prominence, however, invited attacks in print and person – against women especially – from men anxious about their own precarious hold on respectability. The choices, contingencies, and memories that made Restoration theatre such an unforgiving business nonetheless catapulted the acting profession toward the celebrity culture that would flourish in the following century.