How Daphne pays his debts: Sir William D'Avennt and the evolution of the Shakespearean actress

Abstract

On the resumption of public playing, the Restoration theatre had little in the way of new drama on which to draw, and was obliged to revive many texts from the pre-Commonwealth era. So, when women were permitted by King Charles II to perform as professional actresses on the public stage, they took roles, which, in a great many cases, had been written over sixty years earlier and for male apprentice actors. Not the least popular of the pre-Commonwealth dramatists whose plays were revived after the Restoration was Shakespeare. This thesis considers author-theatre manager Sir William D’Avenant and seeks to assess the impact of the first professional actresses on his Shakespearean adaptations, both as texts for study and as blue-prints for performance.

D’Avenant was the first manager to use actresses in public-playhouse adaptations of Shakespeare. Over the seven years in which he managed the Duke’s Men, he experimented with a variety of methods of utilising the actress on stage. Certain critical assumptions have been made about D’Avenant’s adaptations: that he was excessively concerned with neo-classical theories of plot construction and, equally, that his adaptations were dominated by issues of decorum in his portrayal of women. This thesis shows that, when D’Avenant’s adaptations are considered chronologically and from a performance perspective, there is little basis for either of these views. The thesis also argues that the utilisation of actresses progressed from an initially confused and exploitative phase to a usage that became, in some cases, the equal of adaptations of male roles as theatrical vehicles for performance.

It is argued that the enormous success of many of D’Avenant’s Shakespearean adaptations allowed the actress to become an integral, and indeed vital, feature of the Restoration stage and that much of the driving force behind D’Avenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare was a search for a theatrically effective way of accommodating the actress. Finally, it is suggested that the use of the actress in tragic roles was perhaps an instrumental factor in the shift in tragic form from the ‘heroic’ to the ‘affective’.