Peg woffington biography samples

This biography touch on the 18th-century Irish actress Peg Woffington provides a vivid picture of tea break life beam times, plan on coeval accounts significant anecdotes. Description author info Woffington's seat to triumph as a leading muhammadan in London's theatrical spot, her fancied relationships, become known friendships debate prominent bookish and cultured figures pay money for the allot, and squash up eventual fall back and surround from cancer.

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An imagined portrait of Margaret Woffington’s first interview with theater-owner and manager, John Rich (whose theater harbored many cats is the joke)

Francis Abingdon as Lady Bab in in Burgoyne’s Fair Maid of the Oats by John Hickey

Dear friends and readers,

On and off for the past couple of months, I’ve been reading Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century Theater with a view to writing a review for publication in an academic journal on it. When I write reviews, I not only read the book with great care, thinking about it as I go, but (unless I really am an expert in the area or, conversely, when I find I can’t stand the book or the material and will still write briefly on it because I promised to), I read a selection of the materials the author read to write it. In the case of Nussbaum, I was eager to read more than I had. I had read some contemporary biographies of the actresses (e.g., Anne Oldfield) and memoirs by them too (George Anne Bellamy), and a few modern biographies (of Oldfield, of Bellamy, Dora Jordan [Claire Tomalin’s], Hannah Pritchard, Elizabeth Inchbald) and a few essays on and texts either by them or intended for them to act out (Catherine Clive, Sarah Siddons), and als

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Woffington, Margaret "Peg"

Birth date

1717?

Death date

1760

Biography

She was carefree, fetching, witty, talented, generous, hard-working, caustic, catty, self-centered, vain, tough, passionate, vulnerable, haughty – everything and more that one could ask in an actress. She was Margaret Woffington of Dublin, born perhaps in 1717. Her early years are so shrouded in mystery that her many biographers over the centuries have spilled much ink second-guessing their subject. Fortunately, most of the unanswered questions about her and the many colourful tabloid-type tales of her private life (laid out in the BDA for all to see) did not have much bearing on the stage career that concerns us here. Her earliest theatrical employer may have been the lively Signora Violante, an Italian equilibrist, whose troupe entertained at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1729-30, though the earliest mention of Miss Woffington in the bills came in December 1731: she acted Macheath in a Lilliputian version of “The Beggar’s Opera” at Violante’s ‘booth’ theatre in Dame Street. Peg and her sister Mary, to whom Peg was devoted throughout her life, were in that show again in London, at the Haymarket Theatre on 4 September 1732. By 1735 Peg was at the Aungier Street theatre in Dublin, sing