“Ach for It”: Anthony Leigh, Autonomy, and Queer Pleasures in the Restoration Playhouse

Anthony Leigh (d. 1692) built his career as a Restoration comedic actor by playing combination of queer, lascivious, old, and/or disabled men to audiences’ great delight. In this essay, I key in on two plays that frame Leigh’s career: Thomas Durfey’s The Fond Husband (1677) and Southerne’s Sir Love (1690). Husband, younger “superannuated,” almost blind deaf Old Fumble who, the first act, kisses man because he cannot navigate heterosexual erotic economy play (as over-determined able-bodiedness). Over decade later, Love, an aging, queer Abbé who is so earnestly erotically invested Love’s masculinity (unaware woman drag) attempts seduce with dancing. bring beginning end stage life together argue body, performing queerly, asks audiences confront limits pleasure sustaining fantasies abled, autonomous self. Using these comedies bookend career, trace pleasures structures feeling experienced playhouse. While Durfey plays-as-texts seek discipline unruly, bodies making punchline, performances open up alternative opportunities for pleasure. Pleasure becomes its ability undo orderings based autonomy (that nasty little myth). Apology, Colley Cibber reveals ways queerly body engages audience members. reflecting reading versus spectating experience, remarks, “The easy Reader might, perhaps, have been pleas’d Author without discomposing Feature; but Spectator must heartily held sides, or Actor would made them ache it” (89). Spectatorship not passive role, rather carnal interplay actor, has immediate, bodily implications. Audiences laugh. They ache. touch. Whereas reader private can maintain composure, theatre are contrarily discomposed, non-autonomous, holding onto their sides. comedian energizes text produces corporeal level audiences. And generated through business touching, feeling, seducing male-presenting characters. may, fact, be experience exposes autonomy.