George Powell (1668? – 1714) was a 17th-century London actor and playwright who was a member of the United Company. He was the son of the actor Martin Powell, a long-standing member of the King's Company.
Plays
In his playwrighting Powell has been called 'an unscrupulous and opportunistic appropriator, gleaning materials from a variety of sources'.[1] He was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal after writing a misogynistic play called The Imposture Defeated; or, A Trick to Cheat the Devil, first performed in September 1697. This play portrayed the proper treatment of an adulteress as brutal confinement and isolation from others to punish her and prevent the spread of her attitude. It is widely accepted that Powell had plagiarised from the then unpublished manuscript of Mary Pix's The Deceiver Deceived.[1][2] Theatre critic Charles Gildon called Powell's version the inferior of the two.
The United Company broke in two in 1694, with the walking out of senior actors including Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, and Anne Bracegirdle. It is unlikely that Powell was invited to join them: while he was skilled and experienced, he was also notorious for his bad temper and alcoholism (Milhous).
At the première of John Vanbrugh's The Relapse in November 1696, Powell was according to Vanbrugh so drunk that when playing the seducer Worthy he molested the heroine Amanda in a much more physical way than the script provided for.
^ abAlan Houston, Steve Pincus (editors) (2001). A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration. Cambridge University Press. pp. 234–236. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)
^Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah Cowley (2001). Eighteenth-century Women Dramatists. Oxford University Press. pp. xii.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Milhous, Judith (1979). Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
