The City Madam

In the plays of William Shakespeare, the colony of Virginia (named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen) shows up only indirectly. Caliban in The Tempest isn't technically a Native American in the New World, though he can certainly be understood that way, and might have been by some of the play's original audience members.

Philip Massinger's play The City Madam gets us a little closer to portrayals of the natives of Virginia, though again somewhat indirectly, since in the context of the play, people are only pretending to be natives. At the end of Act III, Sir John Frugal and his two prospective sons-in-law Lacy and Plenty enter "as Indians." Sir John's plan is to pretend to have retired to a monastery while he grants his estate and the care of his family to his wayward brother Luke.

In the first half of the play, Luke's character seems a bit ambiguous. In his youth, he squandered away his money, but now he is living with his brother. Lady Frugal (the titular City Madam) and her daughters abuse Luke. Has Luke ultimately reformed, or if given the chance, would he once more fall back into his old ways? Sir John plans to test him, and at the same time test his wife and daughters, who have been acting proudly, trying to follow the fashions of the court rather than just live humbly as a citizen of the City of London should.

What the fake "Indians" would have looked like on a 17th-century London stage, I don't know, but the play does give us some idea of how British people in that period might have felt about Virginia. Lacy's father, who is in on the plot, entreats Luke on behalf of Sir John:

            Receive these Indians, lately sent him from

            Virginia, into your house; and labour

            At any rate with the best of your endeavours,

            Assisted by the aids of our divines,

            To make 'em Christians.

Luke, however, worships only money, and makes no attempt to convert the "Indians" to Christianity. Instead, they tell him they have a special arrangement with the devil. If he sends them a virtuous matron and two virgins to be sacrificed in Virginia, they'll send him back an entire mine of gold.

When Luke starts at the name of the devil, the chief "Indian" (Sir John) tells him, "if you / Desire to wallow in wealth and worldly honours, / You must make haste to be familiar with him." The satire here strikes me as more directed at British greed than at the actual religion of native Virginians. Still, the fact that Luke readily believes the natives can supply huge amounts of gold in return for female sacrifices might speak to the fantastic tales Britons received back from the New World.

Luke tells the women that the two daughters will be married off to Indian royalty, but they scorn the idea of emigrating to Virginia. According to one daughter, the people shipped to Virginia are "Condemn'd wretches, / Forfeited to the law" while the other calls them "Strumpets and bawds, / For the abomination of their life, / Spew'd out of their own country." Though the daughters had been portrayed as snobs, I imagine this was a common perception of the British colonists. In fact, Luke says that "Such indeed / Are sent as slaves to labour there."

At the end of the play, Sir John reveals himself. His wife and daughters are repentant, and Sir John turns out his wayward brother. "Hide thyself in some desert, / Where good men ne'er may find thee," he says, "or in justice / Pack to Virginia, and repent." Certainly, in the 17th century, Virginia must have seemed a wild place to Londoners, and a fitting wilderness in which to repent one's sins.

Peg Woffington's Lothario

Nicholas Rowe's play The Fair Penitent, based loosely on Philip Massinger and Nathan Field's The Fatal Dowry, contains an excellent role for actors specializing in villains: Lothario!

But what if the actor who played the villain was... an actress! Well, the most recent issue of Theatre Notebook contains an excellent article by Annette Rubery on the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington playing the role.

Woffington had a long and productive artistic partnership with David Garrick, primarily appearing in comic roles, but she also played Lady Randolph in the London premiere of John Home's tragedy Douglas. It was in 1753, however, four years before she excited audiences in Douglas, that Woffington appeared at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin as Lothario, the villain of Rowe's tragedy.

Though Woffington's performance as Lothario was not considered a success, it was famous enough to be recorded in paint by the artist John Lewis, whose depiction of her in the role is now owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. She also was not the first woman to play Lothario, as that distinction belongs to Charlotte Clarke, the eccentric daughter of the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber.

Rubery argues that Woffington played Lothario in an effort to seriously show off her talents as a performer. Women who appeared as men in comedies were not expected to act entirely realistically, and part of the fun for the audience was to see a person they knew to be female in a male role. This could actually reinforce gender binaries rather than fight against them, since a woman playing a man was being held up as something inherently comic.

When a woman played a man in a tragedy, however, which was thought of as more realistic, she was expected to make the audience forget her sex and enter more fully into the illusion of the play. This, Rubery argues, made Woffington's appearance as Lothario a bit scandalous. She quotes a rather interesting poem that commemorated the performance:

     All adroit, each taper Thigh enclos'd

     In manly Vestments, with Parisian step;

     Light as the bounding Doe she tripp'd along,

     The gay LOTHARIO, in his Age of Joy.

     Venus surpriz'd, thus whisper'd 'Let me die,

     If dear ADONIS wore a lovelier Form.'

     Then clasp'd the Youth-dres'd Damsel to her Breast,

     And sighing, murmur'd, O that for my Sake

     Thou wert this Instant what thou represents.

Perhaps the realism of Woffington's Lothario was a bit too much for audiences to take. In the play, Lothario is a heartless seducer of women. How much worse it might have been in the minds of some audience members if that heartless seducer of women was another woman!

That Ol' Lothario

People sometimes refer to a seductive and sexually promiscuous man as a "Lothario," but where did our culture get this name?

Cervantes seems to have been the first writer to have a character named Lothario who was a seducer. On the English stage, however, there was another famous Lothario who appeared as the villain in Nicholas Rowe's play The Fair Penitent.

Rowe based his 1703 drama on The Fatal Dowry by Philip Massinger and Nathan Field, but he renamed the scoundrel character Lothario when he changed the setting from Dijon to Genoa. Though the character is amusing, he certainly is a cad. In the first act of the play, he brags to a friend how he snuck into the chamber of Calista and seduced her into giving up her virginity:

The yielding fair one gave me perfect happiness.
Ev'n all the livelong night we passed in bliss,
In ecstasies too fierce to last forever;
At length the morn and cold indifference came;
When fully sated with the luscious banquet,
I hastily took leave and left the nymph
To think on what was past, and sigh alone.

Lothario claims he loved Calista once, but he is open about the fact he seduced her mainly to shame her betrothed, Altamont. Calista begs him to marry her, but he refuses, offering instead only nights of passion when she can sneak away from her soon-to-be-husband.

Later, Lothario expresses his desire that his conquest "should be as public / As the noonday sun." Lothario is such a bald-faced villain, it's hard not to like him. He revels unapologetically in his sensuality. Even after he falls to Altamont in a duel, he continues to brag of his sexual prowess:

I conquered in my turn; in love I triumphed;
Those joys are lodged beyond the reach of fate;
That sweet revenge comes smiling to my thoughts,
Adorns my fall, and cheers my heart in dying.

The ending of The Fair Penitent is full of moralizing, but the character of Lothario looms larger than the play itself. It should come as no wonder that his name has become a byword for any seducer today.