Elizabeth Barry

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Elizabeth Barry (after Godfrey Kneller )

Elizabeth Barry (* 1658 in London ; † November 7, 1713 ibid) was an English actress at the time of the English Restoration .

life and career

She was the daughter of lawyer Robert Barry, who served as a colonel in King Charles I's army in the English Civil War. When the king lost the war to the MPs, Barry lost everything he owned through his personal commitment to the king. The prospects for the daughter of a bankrupt therefore seemed bleak. So Elizabeth came into the care of the Davenant family. William Davenant was the director of the Duke Theater Ensemble and took Elizabeth on stage at the age of 17. After a year, however, she was rejected as being untalented and unwilling to learn. However, the bon vivant John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester noticed her, recognized her potential and made a bet with his friends that he would train Barry to be a good actress within just six months. The training probably took place in the autumn and winter months of 1675. Wilmot became her mentor and (presumably) her lover in the following two years. The dramaturge Thomas Otway was also addicted to her. Many of the leading roles in his plays, including a. the Belvidera in Venice Preserv'd , he wrote to his muse. Barry also liked to be flirted with him and there was a lively exchange of letters (six of these have still been received). But she did not get involved with him, so as not to upset the Earl of Rochester, who was already skeptical and jealous of her enthusiasm. She also had a daughter with the Earl in 1677, who died in 1689, at the age of only 12. Shortly after the birth, the couple separated. Since Barry had already started her successful career, she was now more independent.

Elizabeth Barry's major influence on the restoration drama was her presence as a tragedy actress. She worked in the course of her successful career with the only two theater companies in London at the time: from 1675 in the Duke's Company , 1682–1695 in the United Company (the later merger of the Duke's Company with the King's Company ) and from 1695 as a member of the Acting cooperative, mostly known as Betterton 's Company , of which she was one of the founding members. Barry's stage career began 15 years after a professional actress was first seen in plays by Shakespeare . Until 1660, the roles of women in the theater were occupied exclusively by men.

Reflections

Barry was a successful comedian who had many of the leading roles in restoration comedy in her career , but she achieved the greatest success as an actress in tragedies . Her outstanding pathos was the inspiration for the playwrights Thomas Otway and Thomas Southerne to tailor their three famous tragedy roles : Monimia in Otways The Orphan from 1680, Belvidera in Otways Venice Preserv'd from 1682 and Isabella in Southernes The Fatal Marriage from 1694 These three roles, as prompter John Downes (at Duke's Company and United Company) wrote, “gave her the name of the famous Mrs. Barry, both in court and in town, whenever she played those three roles. She brought tears to the eyes of her audience, especially those who have a compassionate sense for the needy ”.

Dorset Garden Theater , home of the Duke's Company

At the beginning of her career, Barry worked at Duke's Theater. Actor Thomas Betterton said of Barry that she could turn literary material [on stage] into a success that would put off even the most patient reader. And the critic and playwright John Dennis described it as highly changeable "from Passion to Passion, from Extream to Extream, with piercing force and with easy Grace".

A few years later, Colley Cibber recalled the power of Barry's voice in his autobiography: “When tenderness overcomes you, it slips into the most poignant melody and gentleness. In her artistic ability to express arousing compassion, she possesses a power that reaches far beyond any other actress in a way that I have never seen before or what your imagination enables. ”Elizabeth Howe writes that it is Barry's success in the role of Monimia was who marked the turning point from heroic drama to "she comedy" [a form of tragedy in which women were portrayed as victims of male pleasure and sexual objects and thus drew attention to the well-known, but also widely accepted, lack of rights of women ] and made it a popular genre.

Barry has always been described as a simple woman. Portraits indicate intelligent posture, but heavy facial features. The playwright Thomas Shadwell writes in a letter from 1692 that Barry could well have taken part on the stage as a Roman soldier whose hips [recognizable as female] were covered. For his contemporaries, Barry's lack of attractiveness was evidently irrelevant. Although Barry was "the ugliest woman on stage in the world", an unknown author wrote in A Comparison Between the Two Stages of 1702 that Barry was "the finest woman on stage in the world".

Barry's acting style was influenced by her personality and her life. Elizabeth was a person who was considered virtuoso and beautiful. Although many of her roles included pure virgins, her relationship with the Earl of Rochester was well known. She is also known to have sublimated her sexual relationship with Rochester in many of her appearances.

Later career

As Barry's career progressed, she was given roles of maternal characters rather than a sexually attractive protagonist. Barry worked for Duke's Company from 1675 to 1682, where she was Cordelia in an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear , written by Nahum Tate . When the Duke's Company and King's Company merged in 1682, she remained one of the stars of the new United Company , which was London's only theater company for 12 years. The lack of competing theaters, however, weakened the actors' negotiating position vis-à-vis the theater management. That worsened when lawyer Christopher Rich took over the business in the 1690s. Colley Cibber writes about him: he was "cunning like a tyrant, as he has never been seen at the head of a theater"

A year after her appearance in "The Fatal Marriage" (by Thomas Southerne, 1694), Barry decided to leave the United Company after a dispute over the fee. With Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle from Duke's Company they put together a new theater company. Barry received the theater permit (" patent ") and the company succeeded with the street sweeper "Love For Love" (by William Congreve , 1695) and constantly challenged the United Company with their successful concept. There was a big disparity in pay between women and men in the theater, comparable to our current gender pay gap . Betterton received between £ 4 and 20 shillings , whereas Barry received only £ 2 and 10 shillings. However, employment contracts of that time allowed actors to give a so-called "benefit performance" once a year , as a bonus payment , and the profit for themselves - depending on the contract, in full ("clear benefit"), to three quarters ("three quarter benefit") or at least half of it (“half clear benefit”). However, the actors had to take care of advertising and ticket sales themselves.

Barry officially retired from the stage in 1710 at the age of 52; their stage presence lasted a total of 35 years. However, her retirement was short-lived, as she succumbed to a fever three years later. She was buried next to her daughter in St Mary's Church in Acton, London. A plaque in the church bears the inscription: "Near this place lies the body of Elizabeth Barry, of the parish of St. Mary, Savoy, who departed this life the 7th of November 1713. Aged 55 years."

List of their roles

plant author role
Alcibiades (1675) Thomas Otway Maid Draxilla
Mustapha (1676) Earl of Orrery Queen Isabelle
The Man of Mode (1676) George Etherege Mrs. Loveit
The Rover (1677) Aphra Behn Hellena
The Orphan (1680) Thomas Otway Monimia
Venice Preserv'd (1682) Thomas Otway Belvidera
The Maid's Last Prayer (1692) Thomas Southerne Lady Malepert
The Fatal Marriage (1694) Thomas Southerne Isabella
The Royal Mischief (1696) Delarivate Manley Homais
All For Love (1704) John Dryden Cleopatra

Modern works with Barry

The Libertine is a 2004 British film about the life of British free spirit and writer John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the debut film by director Laurence Dunmore . The film is based on the play of the same name by Stephen Jeffreys , which premiered in 1994. Barry is playing Samantha Morton . Barry also appears in the 2015 play [exit Mrs Behn] or, The Leo Play by Christopher vanDer Ark .

literature

  • Colley Cibber: An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. JM Dent & Sons Ltd. London (first edition 1740, Everyman's Library ed. 1976) - (edition of 1889, volume 1: Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • John Joseph Knight:  Barry, Elizabeth . In: Leslie Stephen (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 3:  Baker - Beadon. MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1885, pp 317 - 319 (English).
  • Helga Drougge: Love, Death, and Mrs. Barry in Thomas Southerne's Plays. In: Comparative Drama. Volume 27, No. 4, 1994, pp. 408-425.
  • Kate Hamilton: The 'Famous Mrs. Barry': Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity. In: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Volume 42, 2013, pp. 291-320.
  • Philip Jr. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, Edward Langhan: Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. 16 volumes (1973–1993). Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
  • Elizabeth Howe: Elizabeth Barry as comedienne (1676-81). In: The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, pp. 80 ff. (Extract: books.google.de ).
  • Robert Hume: Elizabeth Barry's First Roles and the Cast of The Man of Mode. In: Theater History Studies. Volume 5, 1985, pp. 16-19.
  • Judith Milhous: Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695-1708. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois 1979.
  • Jimmy Hartley: The Dramatic Life of Elizabeth Barry. London 2014.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c A Historical Dictionary of British Women, by Cathy Hartley in the Google book search
  2. ↑ michael-klonovsky.de Blog by Michael Klonovsky (journalist)
  3. ↑ Many sources confirm that Rochester was Barry's mentor and lover and father of a daughter ("Betty") with Barry. However, this description first appears in 1741 - 65 years after the events - when it was published in a biography of the controversial publicist Edmund Curll , who was known for his ornate and imprecise biographies.
  4. ↑ s: en: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica / Otway, Thomas Thomas Otway in the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911
  5. ↑ An untitled poem from 1676 or 1677, written in Rochester's handwriting, probably addressed to Elizabeth Barry, reads: “Leave this gaudy gilded stage From custom more than use frequented, Where fools of either sex and age Crowd to see themselves presented.”
  6. ^ Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 , Cambridge University Press, 1992
  7. ↑ Our Old Actors, Volume 1, by Henry Barton Baker, 1878 in Google Book Search
  8. ↑ Benefit Performance. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . (English).
personal data
SURNAME Barry, Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English actress
DATE OF BIRTH 1658
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1713
Place of death London