Elizabeth+Barry

**__ (1658-1713) __**
==== Elizabeth Barry was an English actress who performed during the 17th and early 18th centuries. An immensely talented and versatile actress, she performed in many successful comedic roles throughout the course of her career, but is considered to have had the most impact on Restoration-era theater as a tragedienne. She is widely known both during her time and in the present day to be one of the greatest actresses of the Restoration period. Few actresses had the sort of impact on theatre as an art form as Barry. Prior to her career, Restoration theatre was most often centered around male-dominated heroic dramas. Barry’s moving performances accelerated the shift in popular theatre from heroic to pathetic comedy (that is, comedy centered around the theme of love), specifically “she-tragedies” (tragedies involving women’s trials and tribulations). Of particular interest to this class is that she played the role of Mrs. Loveit in Sir George Etherege's //The Man of Mode//. ====

==== Barry was born circa 1658 to barrister Robert Barry, who ruined himself financially during the English Civil War funding a Royalist regiment. She, along with the rest of her family, was put in a position where they had to provide for themselves at a young age. Not much is known about her early life, and the rest of her family remains unknown. After her father’s ruin, Sir William Davenant, playwright and manager of the famous theatre company Duke’s Company, took her in. Through his tutelage she was first introduced to the stage, as the Davenant family. ====

==== Barry’s first documented role on stage was the part of Draxilla in Thomas Otway’s //Alcibiades//, in September 1675. She was not a natural on the stage, and her first performances as a professional actresses were unsuccessful. In particular, she did not have a good ear for music, and therefore was not a talented singer. This changed when she was discovered by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and he vowed to make her “the Finest Player on the Stage”. With Rochester’s help, the by the 1679-1680 theatrical season she was finally considered a serious actress. By general consensus, her first great role was as Monimia in Thomas Otway’s //The Orphan//, which was created specially for her. This was considered one of her three greatest roles of all time, the other two being Belvidera in //Venus Preserv’d// (also by Otway) and Isabella in //The Final Marriage//. ====

==== Her last recorded performance was as Lady Easy in Colley Cibber’s //The Careless Husband// in 1710. Shortly after she retired from the stage, and moved to Acton. She died in 1713, allegedly of rabies, and was buried in Acton. ====

==== Barry’s romantic entanglements within the theatre community had a not insignificant effect on her career as an actress. The Earl of Rochester, who trained Barry to become a skilled actress, was her lover. They never married, but she had a daughter by him in 1677. She also had an affair with Sir George Etheredge, whom she also had a child by. Perhaps predictably, she also acted in his play The Man of Mode. ====

==== Thomas Otway, who was a famous playwright during the Restoration, was in love with Barry as well. Her first introduction to the stage, //Alcibiades,// was his play. She had prominent roles in all of his plays up until 1680 (Highfill 315), many of which he created specially to suit her talents. Out of the three greatest roles in her entire career, two of them were written by Otway. It is not known whether his love for her was reciprocated, but her career certainly benefited from his affection. ====

==== Barry is unique amongst English actresses during the 17th and 18th centuries due to the fact that she was a single woman in a time where most female actresses received respect because of who their husbands were. On top of this, she had two illegitimate children, but this did not diminish her theatrical success. To carve out a successful career like hers despite those societal obstacles is proof that Barry’s immense talent spoke for itself. ====

==== Barry’s most notable and most critically acclaimed roles were tragic roles. Although she was not considered conventionally beautiful, her stage presence and expressive nature captivated her audience. Critic Thomas Rymer wrote that she was “the finest woman in the world upon the stage, and the ugliest woman off on’t.” (18) Unlike most Restoration-era actors and actresses, who would simply ignore the goings-on of the play and stand expressionless when not reciting their lines, Barry’s force of expression set her apart. ====

==== Her colleagues on the stage had nothing but positive reviews of her performances. Sir Thomas Betterton had glowing words to say about her performance in //Mustapha// as the Hungarian Queen, saying, “The very air she appeared with, in that distressed character, moved them with pity, preparing the mind to greater expectations….these passions were so finely expressed by her, that the whole theatre resounded with applauses.” (16-17) She was known for her pathos, her ability to elicit emotions in the audience unlike any of her contemporaries. Actor-manager Colley Cibbler also commented upon the emotions that she would command in her tone of voice, as he wrote in his autobiography: “When distress of Tenderness possess'd her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity, she had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.” ====

==== Restoration theatre is generally divided into comedies and tragedies, with little overlap between the two. A significant exception to this is playwright Thomas Southerne’s plays, which often featured tragic feminine heroines in comedic settings. Scholar Helga Drougge notes that Restoration audiences generally preferred these two genres separated, but “the medium through which they were joined in Southerne’s comedies was the great actress Elizabeth Barry”. (410) In //The Fatal Marriage// by Southerne, the character Isabella (which is widely considered one of her three greatest roles) accidentally commits adultery on her wedding night, the victim of a plot devised by her husband’s younger brother. She dies at the end, but the central tragedy is the adultery, not the murder. As her adultery is the plot of a comedy, Drugge argues that Barry’s performance added unprecedented depth to the common plot of secret sexual plots in Restoration comedy. The way by which she commits adultery is entertaining, but her “most injur’d innocence” is tragic. Southerne’s tendency to blur the line between comedy and tragedy would not have been as successful had Barry not been part of the cast, as she was the most successful tragic actress of her time and could convey emotion in a way that no one else could. ====

==== Barry started her theatrical career a mere 15 years after women were first allowed to take the stage in London, and the relative newness of female success in theatre had a significant effect on her life. The ideal of Puritanism gave women greater agency, which was not normal in English society at the time. Puritan rule during the Restoration was unpopular, and Barry’s career, like that of all female actresses during the time, suffered from “a general backlash against the greater importance assigned to women, marriage, and domestic life by the Puritans.” (King 88) In popular society, Barry’s talents were undermined by the pervasive narrative that she got to where she was because of the men in her life. Scholar Thomas A. King cites Thomas Betterton’s //The History of the English Stage// as evidence of this, asserting that his emphasis on the Earl of Rochester’s sponsoring Barry “suggests that becoming the mistress of a virtuoso was the actress’s chief way to make her talents visible.” (93) ====

==== Although Barry was most prominently known for her tragic roles as an actress, she was also a skilled comedian. She would most likely have brought the same talents that made her such a great tragic actress to the comedic stage. Her skill at pathos and ability to convey acute emotion to the audience would have translated well to playing the role of Mrs. Loveit. She would have greatly emphasized Mrs. Loveit’s jealousy, her unwillingness to adapt to modern social norms, and her pride to great effect. Her skill at comedy was well established during her role as Isabella in Thomas Southerne’s //The Fatal Husband//, so it is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that her role as Mrs. Loveit was not similarly masterful. It is possible that she would have elicited sympathy from the audience over Mrs. Loveit’s character, when normally she would be ridiculed, presenting an interesting take on the play and blurring the divisions between what was commonly accepted as comedy and what was commonly accepted as tragedy. I imagine that the audience's reception to The Man of Mode would have been heightened as a result of her performance, as she was uniquely able to connect to her audiences in such a way that none of her other contemporaries could. ====

==== Rymer, Thomas. //A Comparison between the Two Stages, with an Examen of the Generous Conqueror ; and Some Critical Remarks on the Funeral, or Grief Alamode, the False Friend, Tamerlane and Others. In Dialogue.// London: publisher not identified, 1702. Web. ====

==== Highfill, Phillip H. et al. “A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800.” Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1993. Web. 27 Oct. 2016. ====

==== King, Thomas A. “‘As If (She) Were Made on Purpose to Put the Whole World into Good Humour’: Reconstructing the First English Actresses.” //TDR (1988-)//, vol. 36, no. 3, 1992, pp. 78–102. [|www.jstor.org/stable/1146237]. ====

==== Drougge, Helga. “Love, Death, and Mrs. Barry in Thomas Southerne's Plays.” //Comparative Drama//, vol. 27, no. 4, 1993, pp. 408-425. [|www.jstor.org/stable/41153661]. ====