Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage : Playing Women

Examining theatre economics, rhetorical acting, cross-dressing, the staging of 'self', and the alignment of motherhood and work, this book reveals how actresses drew on changing models of gender to achieve phenomenal levels of success over the eighteenth-century. By doing so it sheds new light on the cultural significance of female performance.

Over the course of the eighteenth century notions of what it meant to be a woman changed radically. Through examining the work of actresses including Anne Oldfield, Peg Woffington, Dora Jordan, and Sarah Siddons, Helen Brooks reveals how female performers both responded, and contributed to, these changes. Ranging from the masculine rhetorical skill of Oldfield and the androgynous cross-dressing of Woffington in the first half of the century, as well as the performances of ''self'' cultivated by Jordan and Siddons at the end, this book reveals how actresses reacted to the cultural shift from the one to two-sex body, and from a protean to a Romantic model of self, by developing new ways of ''playing women''. Consistent throughout the century however was the economic motivation behind these gendered performances: as Brooks emphasizes, actresses were ambitious entrepreneurs who, unlike other professional women, succeeded because, rather than in spite of, their gender.