Terry Foreman on 18 Feb 2012  •  Link

Edward Angel, ? - 1673

"Comedic actor, his early life is inknown but he appears in the record in 1659, acting in Drury Lane as 'Florimel' in Fletcher and Rowley's 'The Maid in the Mill'. He joined the Duke's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields after the Stuart Restoration, and developed a reputation for comedy and farce, his successes being noticed by Pepys. A partnership with another comedian, James Nokes, added to his popularity. However, playwrights such as Dryden, Aphra Behn and Edward Howard were concerned that the Angel/Nokes brand of low comedy was compromising the dignity of some of the works in which they appeared. Angel's popularity with audiences, however, remained undimmed. His habit of improvisation, adding topical political comments to his lines, ran him into trouble with the lord Chamberlain on one occasion, and Aphra Behn later criticises: ' [Angel] spoke little of what I intended for him, but supplied it with a great deal of idle stuff, which I was wholly unacquainted with until I heard it first from him'. The cause and circumastances of Angel's demise are unknown, but after his death an elegy was printed and circulated:
'Here lies Ned Angel,
who rul'd as he thought fit,
The English Stage of Comick, Mimick Wit."
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