Commodities and the Acting Profession: A Newly Discovered Inventory for William and Susanna Mountfort’s “India Shop” (1692)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The discovery of the postmortem inventory of the estate of William Mountfort sheds new light on how Restoration actors managed their incomes during the off-season. Mountfort was killed in 1692 by a teenaged Captain Richard Hill, who believed the actor was his rival for the attentions of the actor Anne Bracegirdle. William wrote his will on his deathbed, leaving everything to his actor-wife Susanna and their two-year-old daughter. The inventory, compiled two months later, reveals details of the Mountforts’ day-to-day domestic life in their new house on Norfolk Street in the parish of St Clement Danes, London. The second part of the document is the surprise: it contains a list of the “Trading Goods” found in the shop and storage rooms on the first two floors of the house, which suggests that the Mountforts not only engaged successfully in the acting trade, but also ran a retail business, selling luxury fabrics, decorative objects, and tableware. The first play the United Company (to which the Mountforts belonged) performed after the murder was Thomas Southerne’s Maid’s Last Prayer , a dark comedy that incidentally features an India shop, and provides a useful contemporary context for the Mountforts’ business.