Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles

Author:Rosalind Miles [Miles, Rosalind]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780609806951
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Some French women, or monsters rather, in Michaelmas term 1629, attempted to act a French play at the playhouse in Blackfriars; an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than whorish attempt, to which there was great resort.29

Prynne was not alone in his view. The French actresses also failed to win the approbation of the international drama critics of the London mob, and they were “hissed, hooted and pippen-pelted from the stage.”

More damaging than a few flying apples, however, was the immediate and lasting connection of this new profession for women with that traditionally hailed as the oldest: prostitution.30 Women living independent lives, not married unless it suited them to be, earning and spending their own money, exhibiting their bodies to the gaze of any common stinkard who cared to put down his tuppence at the door—what could they be but whores? When the actress was also passionate, self-willed and autocratic, when she was known to the town as the Earl of Rochester’s mistress but was clearly mistress of no one but herself, then the attribution was certain. The fact that Rochester’s “mistress,” the celebrated Elizabeth Barry, created more than a hundred leading roles during her stage career never distracted public attention for long from her equally vigorous and varied sex life; and when, in a performance of The Rival Queens, Mrs. Barry was so transported by emotion as to stab a real-life rival in the back, causing grievous bodily harm to Mrs. Boutel’s stays, all that the public saw was a bawdy-house brawl, with two town trulls fighting over a customer.

Elizabeth Barry and the other first-generation actresses were women on a frontier every bit as much as their American sisters who had the courage to “go West” a couple of centuries later. Other women pushing back the artistic frontiers during the English Restoration, along with Barry, her rivals and colleagues, were those who for the first time succeeded in obtaining payment for something women had always previously done without charge: intellectual work. Among the millions of women who have ever written or wanted to write, the name of Aphra Behn rises supreme. Not the “first woman writer” of the modern period—the peerless American poet Anne Bradstreet who wrote under the considerably more difficult conditions of colonial settlement and eight children antedated Aphra, as did others—but the first woman known to have made a living as a professional writer, selling her work and supporting herself on the proceeds of it. During her creative career of almost twenty years, this bold and brilliant woman, ex-governess, former spy and world traveler, conquered the theater, previously an all-male domain; she wrote ten plays in the 1680s alone, in addition to several long narrative poems, five translations from French, and five novels, thereby laying claim to another “first,” the first novelist in English. Of course, they said she was a whore.

Since the term “whore” was so freely used against women who did not sell their bodies for money, it had very little power to

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