An Old Trouper
Gay Was the Pit: The Life and Times of Anne Oldfield, Actress 1683-1730. By Robert Gore- Browne. (Reinhardt, 18s.)
THE general picture of the actress as moving higher in society than she deserves to and living no better than she ought to was formed very shortly after women first began to appear on the English stage. For a long time now any hint of this kind has been regarded as scandalous though it is some years since a dramatic critic lost his job for suggesting that things had not changed all that much.
But nobody need fear repercussions from writing the life of Anne Oldfield, who was born a mere life-span after Shakespeare's death and flourished on the stage and in bed for the first thirty years of the eighteenth century. Her first two affairs with Farquhar the playwright and Wilks the actor (both .Irishmen) iniproved her as an actress and consolidated her position among the theatrical hangers-on whose gossip in the coffee houses was aimed to make and unmake reputa- tions. She quickly consolidated her position by choosing Arthur Maynwaring—`wit, satirist and man of fashion'—of the Kit-Cat Club, who caught her just at the moment when the then Duke of Bedford was bidding £600 a year settled for life for the enthusiastic services and simple charm she had to offer. After Maynwaring's death she moved in with Brigadier-General Charles Churchill and was living with him when she died.
Mr. Gore-Browne has made a good story of all this and naturally has put 'Nance' Oldfield into her proper setting as an actress in which she was outshone only by her predecessor Mrs. Brace- girdle; but she was on the scene before such favourites as Peg Woffington and Lavinia Fenton (later the Duchess of Bolton) and, as her biographer shows, she was early to establish the idea of the all-round actress : her Mrs. Sullen in The Beaux' Stratagem and her Lady Townley in The Provoked Husband were the highest of comedy known to her period and she was, even in those much less restrained days, known as *a resounding Andromache in The Distressed Mother. It seemed only natural at the end of such a career that she should be buried in Westminster Abbey and should have had an irreverent threnody written about her by Pope. I wonder, by the way, whether Mrs. Oldfield might be called the first actress to employ a press agent of sorts? She paid the poetaster Richard Savage £50 a year during her life and he duly wrote verses about her though nothing much more memorable than : Each Look, each attitude, new grace displays Your voice and motion life and music raise.
GERARD FM'
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