Edward Kynaston | |
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| Born | c. 1640 |
| Died | January 1712 |
Edward Kynaston (c. 1640 – January 1706) was an English actor, one of the last Restoration "boy players", young male actors who played women's roles.
Edward Kynaston | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | c. 1640 |
| Died | January 1712 |
Edward Kynaston (c. 1640 – January 1706) was an English actor, one of the last Restoration "boy players", young male actors who played women's roles.
Kynaston was good looking and made a convincing woman: Samuel Pepys called him "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life" after seeing him in a production of John Fletcher's The Loyal Subject at the Cockpit-in-Court, "only her voice [is] not very good". He also played the title role in Ben Jonson's Epicoene . Pepys had dinner with Kynaston after this production on 18 August 1660. [1]
Simultaneously, Kynaston played male roles as well. He filled the role of Otto in Rollo Duke of Normandy on 6 December 1660, having played the female role of Arthiope in the same play in previous weeks. On 7 January 1661, Kynaston played three roles in a performance of Jonson's Epicoene , one female and two male. [2]
Part of Kynaston's appeal may have been his ambiguous sexuality. The actor Colley Cibber recalled: "the Ladies of Quality prided themselves in taking him with them in their Coaches to Hyde-Park in his Theatrical Habit, after the Play." [3] Cibber also reported that a performance of a tragedy attended by Charles II was once delayed because, as someone explained, Kynaston, who was playing the Queen, "was not shav'd". [4]
In the 1660s women were permitted to appear on stage and male actors playing female roles in serious drama was strongly discouraged. Kynaston's last female role was as Evadne in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy with Thomas Killigrew's King's Company in 1661.
Described by Samuel Pepys as "the prettiest woman in the whole house" and "the handsomest man", the rumour of the time had him playing female roles off stage as well. When already in his thirties, lampoons circulated that made him out to be the lover of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. [5]
Kynaston went on to make a successful career in male roles and was noted for his portrayal of Shakespeare's Henry IV. He retired in 1699.
Kynaston is played by Billy Crudup in the 2004 film Stage Beauty directed by Sir Richard Eyre. He is represented as a foppish bisexual, who slowly reveals more complexity in his personality and sexuality. The film is an adaptation of the play Compleat Female Stage Beauty by Jeffrey Hatcher. In 2012, the Houston Grand Opera announced a new opera by Carlisle Floyd with Kynaston as the protagonist: it premiered in March 2016. [6] He also appeared as a character in Nell Gwynn , played by Greg Haiste in the premiere production in 2015.
Restoration comedy is English comedy written and performed in the Restoration period of 1660–1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym for this. After public stage performances were banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, reopening of the theatres in 1660 marked a renaissance of English drama. Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues:
The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.
Elizabeth Barry was an English actress of the Restoration period.
Colley Cibber was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his "miserable mutilation" of "crucified Molière [and] hapless Shakespeare".
The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger is a Restoration comedy from 1696 written by John Vanbrugh. The play is a sequel to Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or, The Fool in Fashion.
Thomas Betterton, the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London.
Anne Oldfield was an English actress and one of the highest paid actresses of her time.
Stage Beauty is a 2004 romantic period drama directed by Richard Eyre. The screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher is based on his play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which was inspired by references to 17th-century actor Edward Kynaston made in the detailed private diary kept by Samuel Pepys.
Travesti is a theatrical character in an opera, play, or ballet performed by a performer of the opposite sex.
James Nokes was an English actor, whose laughter-arousing genius was attested by Cibber and other contemporaries.
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A boy player was a male child or teenager who performed in Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for adult companies and performed the female roles, since women were not allowed to perform on the English stage during this period. Others worked for children's companies in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.
Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, the theatre was called Lincoln's Inn Fields Playhouse, also known as The Duke's Playhouse, The New Theatre or The Opera. The building was rebuilt in 1714, and used again as a theatre for a third period, 1714–1732. The tennis court theatre was the first public playhouse in London to feature the moveable scenery that would become a standard feature of Restoration theatres.
Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, also known as Epicene, is a comedy by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson. The play is about a man named Dauphine, who creates a scheme to get his inheritance from his uncle Morose. The plan involves setting Morose up to marry Epicoene, a boy disguised as a woman. It was originally performed by the Blackfriars Children, or Children of the Queen's Revels, a group of boy players, in 1609. Excluding its two prologues, the play is written entirely in prose.
The Scornful Lady is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and first published in 1616, the year of Beaumont's death. It was one of the pair's most popular, often revived, and frequently reprinted works.
The Loyal Subject is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy by John Fletcher that was originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.
The Duke's Company was a theatre company chartered by King Charles II at the start of the Restoration era, 1660. Sir William Davenant was manager of the company under the patronage of Prince James, Duke of York. During that period, theatres began to flourish again after they had been closed from the restrictions throughout the English Civil War and the Interregnum. The Duke's Company existed from 1660 to 1682, when it merged with the King's Company to form the United Company.
Walter Clun was a noted English actor of the 17th century. His career spanned the difficult period when the theatres were closed during the English Civil War and the Interregnum, from 1642 to 1660.
Nicholas Burt, or Birt or Burght among other variants, was a prominent English actor of the seventeenth century. In a long career, he was perhaps best known as the first actor to play the role of Othello in the Restoration era.
Anne Marshall, also Mrs. Anne Quin, was a leading English actress of the Restoration era, one of the first generation of women performers to appear on the public stage in England.
Katherine Corey was an English actress of the Restoration era, one of the first generation of female performers to appear on the public stage in Britain. Corey played with the King's Company and the United Company, and had one of the longest careers of any actress in her generation. In "The humble petition of Katherine Corey", she stated that she "was the first and is the last of all the actresses that were constituted by King Charles the Second at His Restauration."
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