She whirls around! She bounds! She springs!
The professional dancers of the 18th-century London stage, like all but a few of the actors and actresses of the period, have almost entirely disappeared from view. Among those now emerging from undeserved obscurity is Hester Santlow Booth, who was both a leading dancer and a leading actress at Drury Lane between 1706 and 1733. Her acting roles, which may be traced through newspaper advertisements and printed playtexts surviving in the British Library’s collections, ranged from the title role in Charles Shadwell’s The Fair Quaker of Deal (which owed its initial success to her performance) to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (a part she played for much of her career).
Dancing is the most ephemeral of the performing arts, yet some of Hester Booth’s dances can successfully be reconstructed because they were recorded in one of the earliest forms of dance notation. Many of these notated dances can also be found in the Library. One of the rarest such works, A New Collection of Dances by the choreographer Anthony L’Abbé published in the mid-1720s, includes four of her dances. Among them, the solo Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis is remarkable for its length and its virtuosity. In performance, it brings fully to life the description of Mrs Booth’s dancing to be found in a poem by her husband, the much-admired actor and Drury Lane Theatre manager Barton Booth, published shortly after his death. Booth compared her to Venus, Daphne and Diana, writing of her ‘Sweetness with Majesty combin’d’ and her ‘Harmonious Gesture’ and exclaiming at how ‘She whirls around! she bounds! she springs!’. Such was his wife’s power in performance, that Booth was moved to ask ‘Can Eloquence herself do more?’. Dance, it seems, left drama behind when it came to a truly great dancer.
Moira Goff
Curator, Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800
Further Reading:
Booth, Barton. ‘Ode. On Mira, Dancing’, in Victor, Benjamin. Memoirs of the Life of Barton Booth, Esq; (London: John Watts, 1733), pp. 49-51
L’Abbé, Anthony. ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis performd by Mrs Santlow’, in A New Collection of Dances ([London]: Mr Barreau and Mr Roussau, [1725?]), plates 46-56
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