Frances Abington

Frances Abington, born Frances Barton in 1731, is probably best remembered for originating the role of Mrs. Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play A School for Scandal. While that was one highlight of her career, she actually had a long and varied life upon the British stage.

According to biographer Austin Brereton, young Frances, known as "Nosegay Fan," could be seen daily as a girl selling flowers in St. James's Park. As she got older, she began reciting the works of Shakespeare and other authors in the piazza at Covent Garden. She later "became a servant to a French milliner in Cockspur Street, acquiring thereby a taste for dress, afterwards of great service to her," Brereton writes.

Numerous authors have remarked on the actress's fashion sense, which must have come in handy at a time when performers were usually asked to provide their own costumes. Miss Barton made her stage debut at the Haymarket Theatre in 1755, appearing as Miranda in Susanna Centlivre's comedy The Busybody. From there she went to Bath, and the following summer she played in Richmond, where someone from Drury Lane spotted her and hired her for London's most prestigious theatre company.

It was while working at Drury Lane that Miss Barton became Mrs. Abington, marrying James Abington, her music-master and one of the trumpeters in the Royal service. The marriage does not appear to have been a particularly happy one, and Frances left London for Dublin, where she acted at the Smock Alley Theatre, playing such roles as Mrs. Sullen in George Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and Kitty in James Townley's High Life Below Stairs. While acting these parts, "so nice was her taste in dress that the 'Abington cap' was the rage among the Dublin ladies," Brereton claims.

In 1762, Abington returned to Drury Lane, but she clashed with the theatre's manager, David Garrick. In 1782 she went over to the rival patent theatre at Covent Garden. She made her last public appearance on stage there on April 12, 1799, when she acted as Lady Racket in Arthur Murphy's comedy Three Weeks After Marriage in a benefit performance for Alexander Pope (the actor, not the poet).

Abington excelled in numerous Shakespeare roles, including Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Olivia in Twelfth Night. Here's an engraving of her playing Rosalind in As You Like It.

Back from England

I'm back now from England, where I was visiting my sister for the holidays, but also got a chance to see some great theatre.

On Boxing Day, I went ice skating at Canary Wharf, and in the evening we had tickets to see Hadestown at the National Theatre. Unfortunately, the intimate show got a little lost in the larger space of the Olivier Theatre, though it was still nice to hear the music again live.

As I previously wrote, I visited the Foundling Museum the following day, where there was a small exhibit on the actress Kitty Clive. They also had on display a famous cartoon lampooning John Philip Kemble and the Old Price Riots. Portraying Kemble as "King John" it makes reference to an old nursery rhyme, stating:

        This is the Manager full of scorn,
        who rais'd the price to the people forlorn.
        & employed the Thief-taker shaven & shorn,
        that took John Bull with his buglehorn,
        who hissed the Cat engaged to squall,
        to the poor in the pigeon holes, over the Boxes.
        let to the Great that visit the House that Jack Built.

The House named in the rhyme is Covent Garden, which Kemble rebuilt at great expense, then raising the prices of tickets to recoup his investment. When protests broke out inside the theatre, Kemble hired thugs to enforce decorum, but that apparently didn't stop crowds from hissing the opera singer Angelica Catalani, the Cat in the poem.

Friday, we took the train out to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Timon of Athens. The play was done quite well, but I was mostly excited to see the hometown of William Shakespeare. I hadn't been to Stratford since the 1990s, and while I got to see Shakespeare's grave at Holy Trinity Church then, I missed seeing the Bard's birthplace. This time, the birthplace was at the top of my list of things to see. It was decked out for the holidays and quite a sight to see, as was Holy Trinity at night. I wandered about the graveyard, much to my sister's consternation, but it was incredibly picturesque.

We spent the night in Stratford, and in the morning visited the site of New Place. The house, which was once the grandest in Town, was bought by Shakespeare after he became successful, but its owner in the 18th century burned it down out of spite. So what is there to see now? Beautiful, beautiful gardens. Though New Place no longer looks like it did in Shakespeare's day, it is well worth seeing. It's also right near the Chaucer's Head Book Shop, where I picked up a couple of choice finds, and while you're in the neighborhood, make sure to also check out the Guild Chapel.

A little further away is Hall's Croft, where Shakespeare's daughter Susanna lived with her husband, the doctor John Hall. The building is remarkably well preserved, and also has a nice garden. It also had (appropriately enough) an exhibit on period medicine. Though Shakespeare never lived in the house, he was likely a frequent visitor. Walking around, you still get a sense of the type of atmosphere that surrounded Shakespeare in Stratford.

We had to get back to London for Sunday, though, when we had tickets to see Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Seeing the show by candlelight was a real treat. The following day (New Year's Eve) I visited the Tate Britain, where they had on display a portrait of Mary Ann Yates in Arthur Murphy's play The Orphan of China, itself a reworking of a zaju play by Ji Junxiang.

After welcoming in the New Year, we visited Kensington Palace, which had on display costumes from the recent film The Favourite. After touring the palace, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I of course had to see the theatre collection. They had on view the Royal Patent which Charles II gave to Thomas Killigrew in 1662. That patent gave Killigrew a near monopoly on theatre produced in London, though he still had to compete with William Davenant, who had a similar patent.

I spent most of the following day in Greenwich, where (among other things) I toured the Queen's House, designed by Inigo Jones, who also designed masques during the Jacobean era. That night, we had tickets to see Danai Gurira's play The Convert at the Young Vic. I enjoyed the play thoroughly. However, the Young Vic is located dangerously across the street from The Bookshop Theatre, where I picked up a few more books to load down my luggage for the return trip.

The next day there was a trip to Pollock's Toy Shop, where I picked up the colored prints to make a toy theatre of Oliver Twist. I already have a modern toy theatre of another Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations, but that is a modern design. These prints are facsimiles of actually 19th-century designs. When I will actually have time to build a toy theatre with them remains to be seen, but I'm glad I have them.

My final day in London was spent on another Dickensian errand: visiting the newly rediscovered portrait of the author at Philip Mould & Co. While on my way there, what did I pass but the site of the house where the actress Nell Gwyn once lived!

So it was a trip with many theatrical connections. It's good to be back, however, and now I need to settle in and do some writing. Happy New Year!

The Rival Sisters

Arthur Murphy was a successful playwright of the 18th century. He adapted Voltaire's The Orphan of China (itself an adaptation of the Chinese zaju play The Orphan of Zhao) in 1759, and later penned the hit tragedy The Grecian Daughter.

Yet after Murphy wrote The Rival Sisters in 1783, he chose to publish it without having it performed. Murphy knew full well that a good production was often crucial to a play being favorably received. He wrote in the preface to the play that the piece had not received "The pomp of splendid scenery, and the illusions of the skilful performer" without which a play "in the leisure of the closet is not always supported."

In fact, a play being perceived as a closet drama can "excite a prejudice not easy to be surmounted," Murphy wrote. Audiences might well ask: "If it be of any value, why was it not produced in the usual form of a Public Exhibition?" However, he was equally clear that "the Play was written with a view to the Stage." The play is not a closet drama, and Murphy was acutely aware of the stigma that came with such a label.

The Rival Sisters is based on a 1672 play by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre Corneille, author of The Cid and The Liar. The legendary actress Marie Champmeslé (who later became the muse and mistress of Jean Racine) played the lead in the first production of that play. Murphy seemed highly aware of the fact that if his own play were to succeed on stage, it would require a performer of similar ability. He wrote in his preface: "When this country could, with pride, boast of an Actress equally followed, and perhaps with better reason, it occurred that a Tragedy, with the beauties of the original, but freed from its defects, might, at such a season, be acceptable to the Public."

For whatever reason (and Murphy remains quite coy in his preface), the author decided not to press The Rival Sisters to be performed by some grand British actress. Still, we can guess for whom it might have been intended. Murphy completed the play the year after the stunning appearance of Sarah Siddons at Drury Lane in the role of Isabella in Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage. Siddons, who later that year also starred in Murphy's The Grecian Daughter at Drury Lane, took the theatre world by storm. She likely was the actress Murphy had in mind who might equal the grandeur of Champmeslé.

In fact, Siddons did perform in The Rival Sisters, though not until 1793. A decade after the play's composition, it finally made its premiere. The piece tells the story of Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos in favor of her sister, Phaedra. Interestingly, Ariadne does not even appear until the second act, when she confidently proclaims:

                    No, from this day, from this auspicious day,
                    Theseus is mine; the godlike hero's mine.
                    With ev'ry grace, with ev'ry laurel crown'd,
                    The lover's softness, and the warrior's fire.

Ariadne trusts her lover and her sister, though both are false. Pathetically, she goes to Phaedra, entreating her help to win back her man from the temptress leading him astray:

                    You can detect the traitress; guide me to her.
                    If on this isle—ha!—why that sudden pause?
                    That downcast eye? why does your colour change?
                    Oh! now I see you know her: in your looks
                    I read it all.

Yet Ariadne still does not understand. She thinks Phaedra is concealing her rival, not that her sister actually IS her rival! When the truth becomes known and Theseus sails away with Phaedra, Ariadne starts to go mad, then stabs herself.

In many versions of the myth, Ariadne marries the god Dionysus after her abandonment. Murphy gives us no such consolation, but he does show his heroine rising to a higher plain as she exclaims:

                    Elysium is before me; let not Theseus
                    Pursue me thither; in those realms of bliss
                    Let my departed spirit know some rest.
                    Oh! let me feel ingratitude no more.
                    Keep Theseus here in this abode of guilt;
                    This world is his; let him remain with Phaedra;
                    Let him be happy; no, the fates forbid it:
                    They will deceive each other.

And as those who know other plays about Phaedra can tell you, she's right. Theseus and Phaedra will deceive each other, but that's a matter for a different play.

The Grecian Daughter

Before criticizing the works of Arthur Murphy, we should first remember what he wrote in the preface to his collected plays: "A bad critic is generally a bad man: he is out of humour himself, and he wants to communicate his rancour to others."

Murphy's play The Grecian Daughter might seem old-fashioned to us today, but we are surely out of "humour" if we let loose our "rancour" upon this jewel of a play. Murphy was already known for his adaptation of The Orphan of China as well as farces like The Apprentice and The Citizen when The Grecian Daughter premiered at Drury Lane on January 23, 1772. At the time, the theatre was being run by David Garrick, a man Murphy both admired and found incredibly difficult as a collaborator.

The play focuses on Evander, the deposed King of Syracuse, and his titular Greek daughter, Euphrasia. In the original production, these two were actually played by a husband and wife team, Spangler and Ann Barry. Euphrasia is suitably feminine, but no blushing flower. When her ally Melanthon says that there is nothing to do but despair, Euphrasia answers:

               Yet why despair?
               Is that the tribute to a father due?
               Blood is his due, Melanthon; yes, the blood,
               The vile, black blood, that fills the tyrant's veins
               Would graceful look upon my dagger's point.
               Come, vengeance, come, shake off this feeble sex,

Murphy opens his second act with "A wild romantic Scene amidst overhanging Rocks; a Cavern on one Side." It is in this secret cavern that the tyrant Dionysius has imprisoned the rightful king, forbidding anyone from bringing him food or drink. Euphrasia begs to be admitted, and after much delay, the guards relent and allow her inside. Philotas, who had previously urged submission to the tyrant, then relates what he saw the faithful daughter do:

               Wonder-working virtue!
               The father foster'd at his daughter's breast!
               O! filial piety!---The milk design'd
               For her own offspring, on the parent's lip
               Allays the parching fever.

Though this event took place offstage, it clearly left an impression on audiences. A Staffordshire pottery maker chose this scene to represent The Grecian Daughter in ceramic. Such miniatures were common among theatre fans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The figure pictured to the right dates from somewhere between 1820 and 1830. That was long after Ann Barry had originated the role of Euphrasia, but it had later been taken up by such notable actresses as Sarah Siddons and Eliza O'Neill. (Fanny Kemble first played the role in 1830, and some people believe it might have been her appearance that inspired this miniature.)

The third act of the play begins on a rampart near the harbor as the Greek general Timoleon comes to deliver Syracuse from the rule of Dionysius. Timoleon really did invade Sicily in 344 B.C., by the way, though his main target was the tyrant Hicetas, as Dionysius only controlled the small island of Ortygia, which formed the center of the city of Syracuse. The historical Dionysius subsequently went into exile in Corinth, though the play (as we shall see) departs from this history.

Murphy has Euphrasia secrete her father in her mother's tomb. In the fourth act, Dionysius plans to slaughter the Greek armies during a supposed truce to bury their dead. He also promises Euphrasia he will kill Evander before her very eyes. Dionysius, of course, doesn't know the old man has already been hidden in his wife's tomb. Euphrasia goes to him in her mother's monument, allowing her to recite this set-piece of gothic terror:

               All hail ye caves of horror!---In this gloom
               Divine content can dwell, the heartfelt tear,
               Which, as it falls, a father's trembling hand
               Will catch, and wipe the sorrows from my eye.
               Thou Pow'r supreme! whose all-pervading mind
               Guides this great frame of things; who now behold'st me,
               Who in that cave of death art full as perfect
               As in the gorgeous palace, now, while night
               Broods o'er the world, I'll to thy sacred shrine,
               And supplicate thy mercies to my father.

Here, as elsewhere in the play, Murphy seems to be invoking feelings of the sublime as theorized by Edmund Burke. The most sublime scene, however, comes at the end, when in "one glorious effort" Euphrasia draws a dagger, and strikes Dionysius, crying:

               A daughter's arm, fell monster, strikes the blow.
               Yes, first she strikes; an injur'd daughter's arm
               Sends thee devoted to th' infernal gods.

Notice that Euphrasia strikes "first" to defend her father, rather than waiting until her father is stabbed or she herself is threatened. Dionysius complains that he is struck "by a woman's hand" and dies. Engravers memorialized this scene in numerous prints, such as this one to the right of Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia.

Garrick recounted the spectacular ending in an epilogue he wrote:

               A father rais'd from death! a nation sav'd!
               A tyrant's crimes by female spirit brav'd!
               That tyrant stabb'd, and by her nerveless arm,
               While Virtue's spell surrounding guards could charm!

Euphrasia's charm cast a spell over the audience for many generations, leading Murphy's play to be a hit well into the nineteenth century. Around 1820, John Smyth printed in Belfast an anonymous broadside retelling the story of the play and illustrating the offstage breast-feeding scene. Over the top? Perhaps. But then again, that was sort of the point.

'Terror and Pity reign in every Breast'

No, that isn't a rejected motto for Chick-fil-A. It's the title of a really great book by Paul Ranger about gothic drama in England from 1750 to 1820. Ranger takes the title from a review in the London Chronicle in 1757:

Our expectation is well worked up and Terror and Pity reign in every Breast, till by due degrees the Discovery is made, when a Tide of Joy breaks in upon us...

In his first chapter, "The Gothic Spirit," Ranger tries to define what he means by the term "gothic drama" as neither 18th-century playwrights not their audiences used the term. Incidentally, while "gothic" was not in vogue, variations on the term "Romantic" were. Matthew G. Lewis's 1797 play The Castle Spectre for instance introduces in the Prologue a "fair enchantress" named "Romance." Ranger also points out that Samuel Johnson included in his dictionary the word "Romantick" which could mean "fanciful; full of wild scenery." He also cites a 1773 reference in Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote to a garden "laid out in a romantic taste" that mixed "the cheerful and the gloomy."

Wild scenery was certainly important to the gothic, as was a gloomy atmosphere, but so were other qualities. Gothic plays tended to have stock characters, including a conventional hero, heroine, and villain. They had a few recurring devices, including mistaken identity, and a slew of horrors unleashed in the last act. These plays displayed the distinct influence of German playwrights such as Friedrich von Schiller and August von Kotzebue. Sometimes, there were direct adaptations, such as Joseph Holman's 1799 play The Red Cross Knights, which took Schiller's bandits in The Robbers and turned them into Knights Templars. Similarly, Richard Brinsley Sheridan adapted Kotzebue's The Spanish in Peru as the tragedy Pizarro. For Ranger, what is particularly important, though, is that in these dramas a dark and wild side of human nature was reflected by the characters' surroundings.

The second chapter, "A World Untamed," explores those settings that served as a metaphor for the characters. In Joanna Baillie's 1800 play De Montfort, the title character finds himself instinctively drawn to scenes of horror. In the 1816 play Bertram, Charles Robert Maturin placed a tempest at the opening, employing not just visuals but also gripping sound effects to move the audience and inspire them with thoughts of the characters' inner lives. Ranger observes that this unity of scene and character gradually led to the integration of the performer into the scenic background. Actors began to appear as diminutive beings, pitted against the untamed grandeur of a sublime yet savage world. This eventually led to melodrama, a genre that appeared in part in John Philip Kemble's 1794 play Lodoiska, but more fully in 1802 with Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery.

Chapter Three tackles the two most popular gothic settings, the castle and the cloister. Lodoiska included three scenes of a castle, the first outside, the second in a tower, and the third with a hall and gallery, which went up in flames at the end of the play. Anna Maria Crouch, who played the title role, was supposed to stand imperiled in a tower, but one night, she became imperiled for real. Michael Kelly, the actor playing her love interest, Florenski, tried to come to her assistance. He later wrote:

I ran up the bridge which was a great height from the ground, towards the tower, in order to rescue her; just as I was quitting the platform a carpenter prematurely took out one of its supports; down I fell and at the same moment the fiery tower, in which was Mrs. Crouch, sank down in a blaze with a violent crash; she uttered a scream of terror. Providentially, I was not hurt by the fall and, catching her in my arms, scarcely knowing what I was doing, I carried her to the front of the stage.

Once the actors reached the front, the audience erupted with applause, thinking the entire disaster had been planned. According to Crouch, many members of the audience were convinced it was some of the best acting they had ever seen.

The other great gothic building was the cloister. Of course, most monasteries and convents in England had been long closed by the 18th century, but the advent of the French Revolution meant that some monks and nuns expelled from France ended up taking refuge in Britain. Of even more importance were the trips abroad that had become standard for young people as a way of finishing their educations. Returning to England, these travelers rarely had positive images of what went on behind cloistered walls.

One of the most spectacular stage buildings of the period was the convent chapel in Baillie's De Montfort. The scenery was designed and built by William Capon, the senior designer at Drury Lane. The chapel had a reasonable degree of historical accuracy, which was rather unusual for the time. Capon loved medieval architecture, and he built the chapel to represent a 14th-century church. The set went back a full 52 feet. In spite of her reputation for writing closet drama, Baillie didn't miss an opportunity for spectacular stage technique. She called for a procession of nuns bearing torches to walk around a freshly dug grave while singing a funeral dirge. Reaction to the play was mixed, but the set was a hit, and Drury Lane ended up reusing it several times in different plays.

The importance of stage spectacle increased in the ensuing years, which is the subject of Ranger's fourth chapter. Capon designed an impressive Hall of Armoury for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1813 play Remorse, which had been strongly influenced by Baillie's work. That same year saw far more impressive scenery on stage at Covent Garden in Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men. The titular miller led a group of bandits by night and by day stayed holed up in a windmill. At the climax of the play, the mill spectacularly exploded on stage, an event that rendered the elevated poetry of plays like Remorse irrelevant in a new world of spectacular special effects.

Ranger's fifth chapter covers the attitude and speech of actors in gothic dramas. He focuses on two roles, Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter and the title character in De Montfort. Drury Lane first produced Arthur Murphy's tragedy The Grecian Daughter in 1772, but the play was performed frequently throughout the later 18th century. Beginning in 1782, Sarah Siddons took over the role of Euphrasia, who had to kill a tyrant in order to save her own father. Ann Barry, who originated the role, portrayed the killing without reticence, but Siddons made Euphrasia conflicted about taking the tyrant's life, a choice that earned her great acclaim as an actress.

Baillie wrote the part of De Montfort hoping that Kemble would play it, which he did. Though Baillie avoided giving stage directions instructing the actor how to handle emotion, Ranger argues that she clearly wanted his facial expressions to be seen. The proof? Her play called for some monks' lanterns to light De Montfort's face at a key moment, an intriguing use of lighting design by a playwright. Later on, Edmund Kean revived the play at Drury Lane, and Baillie revised the part to better suit his particular talents.

In chapter six, Ranger goes into three case studies of gothic plays: Douglas, The Castle Spectre, and Pizarro. John Home's 1756 tragedy Douglas is one of the earliest plays still considered a gothic drama. Originally the play was performed in Edinburgh, which suited its Scottish setting, but after achieving critical acclaim there, it opened the next year in Covent Garden. Peg Woffington played the leading role of Lady Randolph, while the not-so-young Spranger Barry played Young Norval. Later, Sarah Siddons would take on the role of Lady Randolph, famously beginning with a quiet intensity and working herself up into a frenzy.

Thomas Greenwood designed the original set for The Castle Spectre, which depicted Conway Castle in northern Wales. The play is notable for the role of Angela, a young, virtuous heroine originally played by Dorothy Jordan. The lengthy role apparently exhausted Jordan so much she was unable to sing the song in the fourth act, and it had to be cut. Also grueling is the role of the villain, Osmond, who in the fourth act must recount his bone-chilling encounter with the titular ghost. It was while reciting this speech that an actor named (I'm not making this up) Graves Aickin collapsed and died from a burst blood vessel.

Pizarro, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's take on Kotzebue's The Spanish in Peru, helped revive the finances of Drury Lane, largely due to Kemble's triumphant portrayal of the hero Rolla. Of course, he had a great supporting cast, with Siddons as Elvira and Jordan playing the innocent Cora, but it was Kemble who made the largest impact on audiences. Sir Thomas Lawrence later painted a famous portrait of Kemble as Rolla holding Cora's infant aloft and defending the child with a drawn dagger. The fact that he looked absolutely nothing like the Incan warrior he was playing was irrelevant. At the time the play premiered, Britain feared an invasion by Napoleon, and Kemble's portrayal of an incorruptible warrior defying an invading army won the day.

Ranger's final chapter examines the response to gothic drama. He traces its influence on Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Iris Murdoch, and of course modern horror films. Ranger, it should be noted, has also directed some of these plays, notably The Castle Spectre and Pizarro, both of which strike me as quite performable today.

It

I recently finished reading Joseph Roach's book It, which traces stardom from Restoration England to the celebrities of the present day.

Roach's introduction sets up his project by first identifying the intangible quality we mean when we say a certain person has "it." He quotes Elinor Glyn, who wrote in the forward to her novel called It:

To have "It," the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.

In Glyn's novel, the charismatic protagonist with "it" is a man, but when it came time to make a movie of the work, Paramount wanted to turn the piece into a vehicle for their newest discovery, Clara Bow. Anyone who has seen the film knows that Bow definitely had It. There were plenty of other stars in Hollywood who were more beautiful of better actors, but it doesn't matter. When she's on screen, you can't take your eyes off of her. It's that elusive quality of attraction that Roach wants to chronicle throughout the Anglophone world.

Though the book does follow a loose chronology, it jumps around more often than not. Rather than organizing the chapters by time period, Roach groups his examples by metonymy, naming his chapters accessories, clothes, hair, skin, flesh, and finally bone.

The accessories chapter touches on a number of topics, including the Restoration's original It girl, Nell Gwyn. An accessory, Roach notes, is something supplementary that serves to identify the wearer, but is not itself necessary. So it was with the famed actress who became an accessory to King Charles II, a beautiful but ornamental mistress who served a political purpose in the king's retinue of women by serving no political purpose at all. Gwyn remained popular because belonging to no one she belonged to everyone. Roach cites Aphra Behn's dedication of her play The Feigned Courtesans to Gwyn, in which the playwright gushed:

...you never appear but you glad the hearts of all that have the happy fortune to see you, as if you were made on purpose to put the whole world into good Humour; whenever you look abroad, and when you speak, men crowd to listen to you with that awful reverence as to Holy Oracles or Divine Prophecies, and bear away the precious words to tell at home to all the attentive family the Graceful thing you uttered.

In his chapter on clothes, Roach backtracks a few years from Behn's play to focus more on George Etherege's 1676 comedy The Man of Mode. The play provides two archetypal characters, the seductive rake Dorimant and the outrageous fop Sir Fopling Flutter. The play underscores the importance of clothes to both these types by having the entire first scene take place in Dorimant's dressing room while the protagonist puts on clothes--in Roach's words--"as a well-attended knight dons armor to do battle."

The chapter on hair delves more thoroughly into the eighteenth century, quoting not just Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, but also Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. This was an age of wigs, and Roach gets much out of Old Hardcastle's reminiscence of how Tony Lumpkin "fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I went to make a bow, I popped my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle's face."

A chapter on skin cannot help but bring up the deathly pallor of Sarah Siddons, especially as depicted in her portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds as The Tragic Muse. Siddons, Roach notes, also played Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy's 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter. This role became the subject of another portrait of Siddons by William Hamilton.

The chapter on flesh jumps ahead to the twentieth century and George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. (Incidentally, this year marks the centennial of the play's premiere.) The famous opening scene of that play takes place in Covent Garden, a site already haunted by a great deal of theatrical history. Roach notes how the fascination Henry Higgins develops for Eliza Doolittle is mirrored in Shaw's own fascination with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who first played the role.

Roach's final chapter on bone deals with the dark side of It, the attraction of the highwayman and the pirate. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera becomes a key text here, along with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's re-imagining of the play as The Threepenny Opera.  Roach makes an interesting case for using the original Marc Blitzstein adaptation that opened off-Broadway in 1954 rather than the more faithful translation by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett. Though Blitzstein had Jenny Diver sing the song "Pirate Jenny" rather than Polly, he did so with good reason. Lotte Lenya was playing Jenny in that production, and her interpretation of the song has deservedly been ingrained into our consciousnesses.

It is a delightful book, and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in celebrity in the theatre.