Fops Vs Tops: Character and Attention in the Country Wife.

The competition between Hart and Haines - and between Horner and Sparkish - thus attests to the long history of theatrical tension between the actors who play characters and the actors who play themselves. For the distinctive celebrity culture of the Restoration theater, see Jane Milling, "'For without vanity, I'm better known': Restoration Actors and Meta-Theater on the London Stage", I Theatre Survey i 50.1 (2011): 59-82. 12 Haines first came to prominence as a dancer and physical comedian, but he was also renowned for his verbal wit. The actor who originated the role of Sparkish, the outrageous Joseph Haines (1638-1701), was a prototype of what we might now call the "character actor", an ostensibly minor figure with a disproportionate claim on audience attention, whose own recognizability was both a guarantee of his appeal and a risk to the coherence of the dramatic fiction in which he appeared. Haines's audacious and obnoxious upstaging of Hart, one of the Restoration theater's leading men, lends additional resonance to the competition between Sparkish and Horner - the competition for supremacy in the world of performative masculine raillery, as Sedgwick has shown, but also the competition for audience attention. [Extracted from the article]