Elizabeth Currer: religious non-conformity in John Dryden’s The Kind-Keeper and Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter

Abstract

ABSTRACT In many ways, Elizabeth Currer’s career typifies modern assumptions about Restoration actresses. In her mistress roles, we might recognise the ‘lusty young wench’ of John Harold Wilson’s 1958 study. 1 1 Wilson, All the King’s Ladies, 2. In her provocative prologues, we can read the uneasy voyeurism Elizabeth Howe describes when she writes of how an actress’s ‘rapport with spectators’ could lead to ‘gratuitous titillation’. 2 2 Howe, First English Actresses, 171. In her trapped wives, we can understand how the libertine ideals of Charles’s court uses and abuses its women. However, beyond her depiction of sexually explicit comic characters, the comedian, Currer, came to represent a specifically eroticised threat of religious dissent during periods of political crisis. By exploring the development of this line from John Dryden’s The Kind-Keeper (1680) to Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1690), this paper demonstrates how Currer’s career both contributed to and challenged a theatrical dialogue surrounding the national anxieties of political unrest and ideological non-conformity.