page_title: Jane Lessingham
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Jane Lessingham / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Mrs Lessingham as the character Silvia 10.7 x 7.2 cm (whole object) O'D 7: full length, face turned to left, in male attire, left hand on hip, right raised to plumed hat. Vignette.
context_page_description: Jane Lessingham née Hemet was a stage actress from 1756 to 1782. Lessingham predominately performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, where she was known for both her beauty and her skill as a comedy actress.
  Lessingham first came to the stage during 1756, when she played Desdemona in a production of Othello at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. It was not until March, 1762 that she began to use the stage name ‘Lessingham’, when she took the part of Silvia in George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer. During 1768, Lessingham was involved in a public controversy between theatre managers Thomas Harris and George Colman. Colman, and other contemporary sources, cited Lessingham’s ambitions as one of the major sources of the conflict.
  On 13 March 1783 Lessingham died. She was buried in Hampstead Churchyard and left her estate in trust to Harris for the care of their four sons.
context_section_description: The diarist John Taylor recorded that Lessingham’s career began with the support of poet Samuel Derrick, with whom she was having an affair. However in his memoirs, the actor Tate Wilkinson noted that in 1756 she was the pupil of John Rich (founder of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden), who was behind the launch of her career. Lessingham’s first performance was in the role of Desdemona in a production of Othello on 18 November 1756, under the name of Mrs Stott. She did not return to the stage again for some time, until 1762, when she began using the stage name ‘Lessingham’. Her first part was as Silvia in George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer, which she played in male dress. Between 1763 and 1767, Lessingham had moderate success working at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Drury Lane, London and a number of small theatres in Bath, Bristol and Richmond.
  Upon her return to the Theatre Royal (where she would remain until the rest of her career), Lessingham’s career enjoyed rapid success. However, this success was the subject of much speculation and scandal, in particular during the public dispute which broke out between Harris and fellow theatre manager George Colman in 1768. In his history of the English stage, historian John Genest wrote that Lessingham was 'only a second, or rather a third rate actress- nothing but private reasons, unconnected with the theatre, could have influenced Harris to support her in the way he did'. The theatre critic John Roach recorded that the pair initially argued over Harris’ insistence on a private dressing room for Lessingham. Further dispute was caused over both Harris and Lessingham’s insistence that she should play the role of Imogene in a production Cymbeline, which Colman had already assigned to another actress Mrs Yates. In his public pamphlet, Colman wrote that to give the part to Lessingham ‘would be the grossest impartiality, great injustice to Mrs Yates and an affront to the public’. Yet Lessingham was granted the role.  In September, according to Colman, Lessingham rejected the minor role of Nerissa in an upcoming production of The Merchant of Venice, stating in a letter: ‘as I returned to you the part of Nerissa, I think it right to give my reason for it. I have as yet had no list of those parts it is intended I should play; when I have, and I find I have an equal share of good and bad, I shall have no objection to any, though the lowest’. The pamphlet war which ensued between Harris and Colman garnered much public interest and was often depicted in caricatures.  
  Lessingham continued to perform at the Theatre Royal until 1782, the year before her death. There, she was payed £4 a week; raised to £7 a week during her last five seasons. In 1776, she appeared as Mrs Sullen in another of Farquhar’s plays, The Beaux Stratagem, for which Taylor remarked that ‘the only improbable part of her acting in the character of Mrs Sullen was in the chamber scene with Archer, as from her general manner it did not seem likely that she should resist his importunities when he appeared as a gentleman’. Her other performances in tragic roles were largely not well received. James Stewart described her as a ‘water-gruel actress’, however ‘tolerable as Jacintha [in The Suspicious Husband], Nerissa [in The Merchant of Venice] and other parts in boy’s clothes’. Equally, the critic Francis Gentleman described her as a ‘tasteless milksop’, for whom ‘parts eternally would fight, without the sense, or talents, to be right’.Her final role was as Jacintha in Benjamin Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband, in 1782.
caption: Mrs Lessingham as the character Silvia
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