c.1718–1760
An acting legend of the eighteenth century known for her beauty and professionalism
Peg Woffington was born, possibly under the name of Murphy, in the narrow, vermin-infested slum area of George’s Court, off Dame Street, Dublin. Her father, a bricklayer, died around 1720 and was buried as a pauper, leaving nothing for young Peg, her mother and her baby sister, Polly. Peg’s mother took in washing and tried to run a small grocery shop, but failed, and the little family edged closer and closer to destitution. Eventually, the bare-footed Peg and her mother were reduced to scraping a living by selling watercress from a basket in the streets around Trinity College.
This was Peg’s situation when her big break came at the age of about twelve. While fetching water from the River Liffey one evening, she was spotted by Madame Violante, a popular acrobatic performer from Europe. When Madame was not performing her own bizarre act, which involved walking a tightrope with a live baby hanging from each foot, she was scouting for talent for her children’s acting troupe. She wanted looks and she wanted talent – and in Peg Woffington she struck lucky on both counts.
Peg was undoubtedly a beauty. Amazingly, despite being the most vulnerable of slum children, she had managed to avoid the usual malnutrition, rickets and smallpox, and she was blessed with a creamy complexion, perfect white teeth, dark, expressive eyes and thick, black hair. As for her talent, Madame quickly realised that Peg was an acting natural and gave her the female lead as Polly Peachum in a pirated version of The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. Peg’s vivacity, wit and humour, phenomenal memory and versatility were apparent from the off (although, as she herself admitted, her speaking voice not terribly strong and this was, of course, in an age without microphones). In addition, Peg was a genuine trouper who became renowned for staggering on, even when ill. She never missed an opportunity to learn her trade and would take small parts if it meant learning something new or was for the benefit of the play. Though beautiful, she often played old or disfigured characters and was always willing to step into the breach at the last minute.
After this promising start, Peg was in demand. The playwright Charles Coffey gave her the lead in his comedy, The Devil to Pay, at the Theatre Royal, Aungier Street, which was the main Dublin theatre and the one patronised by the Dublin Castle set. During intervals, Peg also provided the song-and-dance routines that were de rigeur in eighteenth-century theatre. But soon, these light pieces were not enough for Peg. She wanted more – and in the true theatre tradition of A Star is Born, she got it.
In 1737 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark was just about to open at the Smock Alley Theatre, but the actress playing Ophelia suddenly fell ill. The manager, Mr Elrington, was about to cancel the production when Peg seized her moment. She had just two days in which to learn the lines and stage directions to a sell-out production of Shakespeare’s finest tragedy, but she persuaded Elrington to give her a chance. When the curtain rose on her first night, Peg performed flawlessly. When the curtain fell, the applause was deafening and Peg was a star. She was nineteen years old.
After that, the tall, beautiful, comic, tragic, singing, dancing Peg could do whatever she wanted. She toured London and Paris, always in lead parts. In 1739 she started in ‘breeches’ roles, a mildly titillating piece of theatrical cross-dressing whereby an actress with exceptional legs would wear knee-high breeches and play a male part. Peg loved doing this and made the role of Sir Harry Wildair in George Farquahar’s The Constant Couple a mainstay of her repertoire for the next twenty years.
Despite the on-stage breeches, offstage Peg frequently demonstrated she was all woman. The stage was not entirely respectable and neither was Peg – but respectability was not at that time the Holy Grail it was later to become. Unlike the dull, tightly corseted Victorian era, the liberated 1700s were characterised by a love of life. Beautiful Peg from the slums was nothing if not a woman of her times. She indulged herself with many lovers and did not waste energy worrying about the proprieties.
Then Peg fell in love. His name was Taafe, and he was a thoroughly bad lot from a good family. In 1740 Mr Taafe persuaded Peg to leave her beloved Dublin, took to her to London, promised marriage – and then abandoned her for an heiress. Peg hid her broken heart to exact revenge in an impressive and appropriately theatrical manner. Getting back into her breeches and posing as a young man, she befriended Taafe’s new amour. Once she had gained the girl’s confidence, and sparing no detail, Peg informed her of Taafe’s penchant for Dublin actresses and his desire to marry money, whereupon the sensible young woman dumped him.
After this, Peg, all alone in the big city, picked herself up and presented herself to the renowned and deeply eccentric theatre manager John Rich of Covent Garden. Rich took her on immediately and Peg made a hugely successful début in November 1740. She acquired her soon-to-be-universal nickname, ‘The Woffington’, and became immensely popular with London theatregoers who loved her looks, loved her liveliness and loved the gossip surrounding her.
Her reputation as a sensual woman who was free with her favours caused her to be the butt of many a joke: one night she came offstage having played a particularly successful Sir Harry Wildair. ‘Lord,’ she exclaimed delightedly, ‘but I have played the part so often that half the town believes me to be a man!’ ‘Aye, madam,’ retorted a nearby wag named Quin, ‘but the other half knows you to be a woman!’
In 1741 Peg defected to the Drury Lane Theatre and met the failed wine merchant who was to become the greatest actor of his day, David Garrick. The Woffington was greatly instrumental in Garrick’s rise to superstardom, which later became known as ‘Garrick fever’, and in 1742 they became lovers. They set up an unconventional ménage á trois with another actor, named Macklin, in Bow Street, London, and then alone together in Southampton Street, but their relationship was tempestuous at best.
One of the problems was that, all her life, Peg had been generous to a fault – she lent her costumes to struggling young actresses, gave lavishly to charity and supported her mother and sister as soon as she was earning. In contrast, Garrick was notorious for his meanness. In spite of the fact that he earned three times as much as Peg, he made her take turns paying for the monthly upkeep of their home.
It was soon a standing joke among the big names they entertained – Dr Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Henry Fielding – that the hospitality was much more lavish when it was Peg’s month to pay. Garrick even complained that she was extravagant with tea-making, brewing it so strong it was ‘as red as blood’. He hated this financial aspect of life with Peg, and also probably felt that her magnetic attraction to and for other men would not make her a good wife – he always had doubts about what he called in a love poem her ‘wavering heart’. In 1745, Peg received an insultingly half-hearted proposal of marriage from Garrick. Shortly afterwards he either retracted the offer or she rejected him on other grounds, either way the two fell out.
Peg went to live in the healthier moral climate of Udney Hall, Teddington, thirteen miles upriver from London. When her younger sister, Polly, returned from her expensive convent education abroad, she came to live with her. Peg’s social ambitions for her sister were fulfilled when Polly made a match with the Honourable Captain Robert Cholmondeley, the somewhat chinless son of an earl. Peg was very robust when dealing with her aristocratic future in-laws. She received a visit from the earl one day, complaining about the match. ‘My lord, I have more reason to be offended with it than you have,’ Peg responded in a typically spirited manner, ‘for before I had only one beggar to support and now I have two.’ Polly later went on to become a successful hostess in English high society, and an out-and-out snob who looked down on the big sister to whom she owed everything.
Peg had a good heart and a loyal one, but, with the exception of her beloved mother and sister, she saw other women as rivals. Then, as now, there was savage competition in the theatre for the same roles, and actresses would routinely block each other. In Peg’s case, London rivals would refer slightingly to her ‘brogue’, which she kept all her life. Peg had a hot temper and had a tendency to throw tantrums – on occasion coming to blows with the actresses at Drury Lane. Eventually it got so bad she left and returned to Covent Garden.
However, at Covent Garden, Peg ran into the worst of them all, her one-time protegée, George Anne Bellamy. George Anne was the illegitimate daughter of an Irish peer, and was at least ten years younger than Peg, a fact she never failed to mention during a row. She was a nasty piece of work, who had conveniently forgotten that it was Peg who had helped her get started in the theatre. One memorable night, her taunting drove Peg to grab a knife and try to stab her, nearly within sight of the audience. George Anne saved her own neck by running away, ‘to live,’ as she quipped, ‘to fight another day’. After this incident, Peg deemed it politic to leave Covent Garden.
In 1751, Peg returned to Dublin to work for Thomas Sheridan (Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s father) in the Smock Alley Theatre. She found her appeal had increased in all her old roles as well as some new ones she had created, and she made a record-breaking fortune for Sheridan.
In her spare time she associated with the cream of society, as she had in London. Finally, she was elected the president of a society called the Beefsteak Club, which was a social club for the Dublin Castle set. She was the only female ever to have been admitted to the club and, no doubt, regarded it the pinnacle of social achievement for a woman from her background. However, Peg’s fans were not pleased. Among all the harmless high jinks that took place at the club, there were some that were not so harmless. Bad enough that Peg was entertaining William Cavendish, third duke of Devonshire and lord lieutenant of Ireland, but soon rumours hit the streets of anti-Irish toasts being drunk by the Castle oppressors, and The Woffington herself drinking to the health of the king of England. To make matters worse, there were also rumours – true as it turned out – that Peg had converted to Protestantism. She felt she had sound financial reasons for this. The Penal Laws forbade Catholics from inheriting property, and an old actor named Owen Swiney wanted to leave his property to Peg. Ever the pragmatist, Peg simply threw off her religion like an old role and converted in order to claim the inheritance.
This was too much for The Woffington’s Irish public. She was one of their own and was expected to remember where she came from. One night, Peg was performing in Mahomet by Voltaire, a play containing incendiary passages about touchy subjects, such as court favouritism and tyranny. The mob inside and outside the theatre, outraged at what they perceived as Peg’s traitorous behaviour and inflamed by Voltaire’s text, stormed the Smock Alley Theatre during her performance and wrecked it.
That was enough for Peg. After a three-year absence she returned, with relief, to Covent Garden, and there, in October 1754, yet again brought the house down with her first performance. She continued to appear in tragic roles, Shakespearean plays and contemporary comedies and never lost her popular appeal again.
Sadly, just as it appeared Peg was attaining the position of grande dame of the theatre, her career was actually nearing its end. In May 1757, at the end of her fourth successful season back in Covent Garden, she was playing Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In between acts, Peg complained of feeling ill. The play was a ‘benefit’ for a fellow actor – this was a custom whereby actors were allowed to supplement their income by claiming the ticket money for a single performance. A true professional, and conscious of the fact that her non-appearance would make things difficult for her fellow actors, she tottered on to finish the Epilogue – and collapsed with a scream.
Peg had had a massive stroke. Everyone thought she would die, but she lingered on for another three years, crippled but with her mind in perfect working order. Her last lover, a Colonel Caeser, took care of her. Peg flirted once more with Protestantism, but she had never been religious and died as irreverently as she had lived on 26 March 1760. She is buried near her home in Teddington, Middlesex.