Elizabeth Boutell

Who was Elizabeth Boutell?

Elizabeth Boutell, née Davenport, was a British actress. She joined the King's Company about 1670 and played many important roles in the 1670s, including Benzayda in John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, Melantha in Dryden's Marriage à la mode, Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley's The Country Wife, and probably Rosalinda in Nathaniel Lee's Sophonisba. Her most famous role was the loving and trustful Queen Statira in Dryden's The Rival Queens. She formed a notable acting partnership with Rebecca Marshall in a series of fashionable "women in conflict" plays, in which Boutell played the virtuous heroine to Marshall's darker antagonist.

Boutell specialized in breeches roles, such as Fidelia in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer.

No roles are recorded for her between March 1678 and April 1688. Her husband Barnaby Boutell had a lieutenant's commission from 1681, and the Biographical Dictionary of Actors speculates that she may have followed him to the Continent in the 1680s.

Edmund Curll described Boutell in The History of the English Stage, a work supposedly based on the notes of the famous actor Thomas Betterton, who was the King's Company's de facto manager in the 1670s: