Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.

Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.

Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)

Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition

But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.

The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.

Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.

• The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.

ZONE

Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.

John Donne, Elegy 20: To His Mistress Going To Bed (c.1654)

Starry Starry Night

All together now: THE LAST ALPHABET POST EVER. And it’s a word with one of the longest definitions I’ve yet come across: zone, first cited in 1500, from the Latin zona and the Greek zone, which originally means ‘girdle’.

Blame him. He stole my clothes. Venus and her cestus, Lucas Cranach the Younger (1540s)

Its complexity is mainly owing to the range of disciplines that have claimed it for their own; these include astrology, astronomy, physical geography, mathematics, poetry, and crystallography. Its immediate practical meaning is geographical: ‘Each of the five ‘belts’ or encircling regions, differing in climate, into which the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles divide the surface of the earth’ – that is, ‘the torrid (burning) zone between the tropics, the (north and south) temperate zones extending from the tropics to the polar circles, and the frigid (frozen) zones (arctic and antarctic) within the polar circles’.

A zone, then, is a ‘belt’ that marks out space, enclosing and dividing at once, as reflected in its vaguer sense from 1559 as ‘any region extending round the earth and comprised between definite limits’, where it is also applied to ‘a similar region in the heavens or on the surface of a planet’.

Of course, the Ancient Egyptians gave the practical sky-based role of zoning to a woman – Nut, the goddess of the sky, married to the earth god Geb (an unusual gendering). Nut is depicted throughout Egyptian art as a naked woman arched over the earth, balancing on her fingertips and tiptoes, and often covered in stars, from which position she protects the sun god Ra, and the earth below – a zone in its fourth sense (from 1591), as ‘a circumscribing or enclosing ring, band, or line’. Whence it is but a short step to 1608’s contribution to the party, zone as ‘a girdle or belt, as part of a dress’ (chiefly ‘poetical’), which is really the only literal use for the word: before the word’s adoption into English, Ancient Greek women wore a ‘zona‘ under their clothes to accentuate the figure.

Alas! My Girdle!

So we end where we began: with an extra-snazzy belt. Women’s girdles have a long and varied history going back to the cestus or ‘Belt of Venus’, an ill-judged wedding present to the Goddess of Love from her husband Hephaestus which rendered her irresistible to men (and, appropriately, endures on as an astronomy term). Martial refers to the cestus in his Epigrams as ‘a cincture that kindled love in Jupiter’ (planetary theme ftw), and clearly considered it quite hot stuff himself, since it was ‘…still warm from Venus’ fire’.

The Medieval West was not to be left behind in all this sexy-talk: no right-thinking female of the thirteen-hundreds considered herself fully sexed-up without a gipon, a type of corset designed to flatten the breasts and emphasise the stomach. And in case this proved insufficient, she might also pad her belly out for extra effect – well-rounded bellies appear again and again in contemporary art – and, as with the Cranach Venus (above), a decorative zone was the perfect way to emphasise its shape, making this a garment no less sexually charged in the 1340s than the 1940s (when, of course, its job was to hold the belly in). Like a garter, then, a girdle could serve as a fetishistic focal point for erotic (and indeed erogenous) zones, marking them out and keeping them restrained at the same time.

A sixteenth-century German satirical woodcut: the rich old man's wife takes his money but her young lover brings her the key.

The Dictionary seems to have picked up something of this atmospheric heat itself, and brings us all back to earth by citing for this sense of the word Francis Quarles’ Emblem VIII (‘Shall these coarse hands untie / The sacred zone of thy virginity?’ (1635)). Neatly, this citation highlights the flip-side of zone‘s erotic focus – the Roman marriage ceremony famously culminated in the groom untying his wife’s girdle (enduring into the thigh-rubbing Latin slang phrase ‘zonam solvere‘ – ‘to untie the girdle’).

Meanwhile, the chastity belt (which also encompasses the ‘torrid zone between the tropics’, if you want to be vulgar about it) supposedly made its debut in Western society during the Crusades, lest the mice should play while the cats were off murdering Muslims. They may have been a niche market then, but – under the waggish and consistent alias ‘Venus’ belt’ – they were certainly widespread enough by the sixteenth century to become a target for satire. It was not until 1718 that English got the separate word zoned, but its meaning – ‘wearing a zone or girdle, hence, chaste’ – was clearly familiar to Francis Quarles, although he’s not talking about a literal woman, but about the relationship between body and soul.

John Donne plays with this conceit in his Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed, which famously describes the ‘mistress’ in question as ‘my America’. Her ‘girdle’ glitters like ‘heaven’s zone‘ (viz.: the celestial sphere), but the woman’s body is itself a ‘world’, a ‘new-found land’, and the speaker’s ‘roving hands’ explorers in a ‘kingdom’ – just as in The Sun Rising, ‘she’s all states, and all princes I’. It’s not just Donne (Thomas Carew did it too): think how many landmarks are claimed for sleeping giantesses, using the female body to map out geographical zones, just as geographical zones can be used to map out a woman (what else is the mons veneris?), and think back to Sir Francis Dashwood, landscaping pudendas in his garden.

Much like the zone itself, this Alphabet has tried to encompass various notions of womanhood. Come back soon and maybe there’ll be a final post mortem-style analysis…