Nell Gwyn’s many after-lives : taming ‘the Protestant Whore’ in 21st century popular fiction

Abstract

Ever since her supposed self-fashioning as ‘the Protestant Whore’ in the 1660s, Nell Gwyn has become a figure of fascination, revamped and reinterpreted in a multitude of ways along the years: from the black and white films of the 1930s, the story of this Restoration orange seller turned Royal concubine continues to excite the imagination of not just film makers, but of novelists, artists and even jam makers nowadays, as much as it inflamed Restoration audiences. The aim of this paper is to analyse the discourse that lays at the basis of three modern-day reconstructions of Nell Gwyn’s figure in an attempt at drawing a connection between celebrity, pop culture and historical fiction so as to explain the reimagining of this actress as an innocent strumpet, a scheming shrew, a dignified lady and all things in between; this paper takes ideas on celebrity and historical fiction as the theoretical basis upon which to build the criticism of these revampings of Nell Gwyn to better understand the survival of her figure three centuries after her death.