#rival queens

The theatrical world nourished the large commercial enterprises that spilled out from private performances into the concert halls and entertainment centers of London and its environs. In order to impress friends with their intimacy with celebrities, hosts and hostesses invited star players willing to entertain guests at private events with recitation and song, and to grace social events with their charismatic presence. Star actresses—including Abington, Pritchard, Pope/Young, and Yates—attended the more austere Bluestocking assemblies where women’s conversations reflected “polite, enlightened behavior as opposed to aristocratic decorum through their sociability”; they openly infiltrated gatherings at diverse venues such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and at Cornelys and Pantheon. Sarah Siddons, for example, was known to have undertaken public readings in the Argyll Rooms. 

Celebrated actresses, mingling in fashionable society, forecast the new freedoms for women later realized by Wollstonecraft and others in the 1790s who, though openly hostile to the frivolous consumption to which Abington gave license, shared the desire for economic independence and political influence. Frances Abington’s stature entitled her to choose her own costuming; her fashion expertise allowed her to upstage Garrick, who had difficulty competing for attention with “an actress of powerful talent, backed by half the women of fashion in the metropolis. The dates of her active theatrical life (1754–98) correspond to an explosion in fashion accompanied by an increased audience demand for historically and geographically accurate stage costuming. Reputed to have been a servant to a French milliner in Cockspur Street, she learned dressmaking and costume design in her youth, and these connections with millinery followed her in at least two ways. 

First, rumors of Abington having been a prostitute in her early years may have been a consequence of the customary linkage of “common Women of the Town” with millinery. Apprentice milliners, in spite of being hard-working young women, were known to be the prey of unsavory men and regarded as morally suspect. The London Tradesman, for example, warned parents to avoid apprenticing their daughters to the trade because “The vast Resort of young Beaus and Rakes to Millinery Shops, exposes young Creatures to many Temptations, and insensibly debauches their Morals before they are capable of Vice” (208). The author of the tract reported that “nine out of ten of the young creatures that are obliged to serve in these Shops, are ruined and undone . . . debauched in their Houses” (209). 

Second, Abington’s ability to influence style very likely evolved from her insider knowledge of the dressmaking trade. According to the treatise that described a plan to transform indigent and wayward girls into industrious seamstresses, a milliner’s eye-popping list of products included “Smocks, Aprons, Tippits, Handerchiefs, Neckaties, Ruffles, Mobs, Caps, Dressed-Heads . . . Cloaks, Manteels, Mantelets, Cheens and Capucheens . . . Hats, Hoods and Caps . . . Gloves, Muffs, and Ribons” and more, all articles of clothing that Abington may well have known how to construct (208). The most celebrated women players often commissioned the design of their own costumes and supervised the sewing (with the notable exceptions of handkerchiefs and slippers), and the purchase of elaborate costuming was a necessary expenditure for actresses who sought to maintain star status. 

At the height of her fame, Abington was annually granted the astronomical sum of £500 as her onstage costume allowance, but actresses were known to spend considerably more than allotted. Actresses worked extremely closely with seamstresses but, less predictably, milliners served as their fashion advisors, designers, innovators, and even spies. Actress George Anne Bellamy mentions sponsoring a prospective young milliner going to France, “under the protection of the Mademoiselles Gressiers, in order to learn the art of making mantuas, robes, trimmings, and all the necessary appendages to dress.” 

According to the London Tradesman, a milliner “imports new Whims from Paris every Post, and puts the Ladies Heads in as many different Shapes in one Month as there are different Appearances of the Moon in that Space. The most noted of them keep an Agent at Paris, who have nothing else to do but to watch the Motions of the Fashions, and procure Intelligence of their Changes, which she signifies her Principals, with as much Zeal and secrecy as an Ambassador or Penipo would the important Discovery of some political Intrigue” (207–8). 

In spite of her humble origins, Abington possessed the requisite economic clout and insider’s expertise to cultivate a signature style while employing others to carry out the labor she could knowledgeably supervise. On her appearance at Covent Garden in 1782, Abington claimed to be a “noviciate” (in spite of being advanced in her career) to both fashion and a religious order when, dressed in a simple dark “Carmelite satin” with short white sleeves, her stage address reached from “the goddesses in the boxes to the gods in the upper regions” (Life of Mrs. Abington, 92). The newspapers lingered lovingly over the details of the Parisian fashion that combined elegance with religious overtones: 

“Mrs. Abington’s dress was a chef d’ouevre, in point of taste and simple elegance: the body of her gown was of Carmelite satin, with white sleeves of silver-spotted muslin, tied near the middle of the arm, with a Carmelite ribbon, the bows of which were turned behind—The skirt of her dress was a white silver tissue, decorated with an ostrich and silver trimming, studded with jewels. Her apron was of silver-spotted muslin, with two flounces near the bottom, edged with a trimming of carmelite and white, below which appeared a rich embroidered petticoat fringe. Her head-dress contained no profusion of jewels, but was remarkably neat; the cap consisted of a few feathers, admirably disposed, and an artificial sprig, of carmelite colour, with white ribbons.”

 “Carmelite” is, of course, not only a warm golden brown color but also the name of an order of cloistered nuns, thus calling to the audience’s mind her status as a heaven-sent intercessor who called them to consume. Women’s stage clothing in the Restoration period had been restricted to the theater, for one was not permitted to take away “feathers nor clothes nor ribbons nor any thing relating to the stage.” A defiant late seventeenth-century actress was warned, “Whereas by Experience Wee find our Cloathes Tarnished & Imperilled by frequent Weareing them out of the Playhouse It is thought fitt noe Weoman presume to goe out of the House with the Play House Cloathes or Properties upon Penalty of their Weekes pay.”

But the boundaries of stage and theater became surprisingly more porous in the eighteenth century, and luxurious theatrical display thoroughly pervaded the London’s social world that imitated it. One European observer who returned to England in the 1770s, for example, criticized the spectacular clothing worn as everyday dress as more suitable to masquerade costuming: “There is at present much more expence and taste in the trimmings of the Ladys Gowns than in the stuffs; they are full and in almost a theatrical style, but I think very handsome.” Theatrical costumes were extremely expensive, amounting to an increasingly large percentage of the company’s budget, and tempted lesser players to help themselves to stage clothing. 

Actress George Anne Bellamy describes in her memoirs the strange admixture of elegant, stained, and tattered clothing cobbled together for fellow actors in the tragic productions she witnessed: “Whilst the empresses and queens appeared in black velvet, and, upon extraordinary occasions, with the additional finery of an embroidered or tissue petticoat; and the younger part of the females, in cast[off] gowns of persons of quality, or altered habits rather soiled; the male part of the dramatis personae st[r]utted in tarnished laced coats and waistcoats, full bottom or tye wigs, and black worsted stockings.” Unlike the earlier decades when actresses often recycled cast-offs or dresses from ladies of quality through countless performances, Abington’s high couture declared her newfound value.

As a living mannequin dressed in high fashion, Abington advertised through her self-commodified person, and through democratizing exchanges with the audience, that being à la mode was newly accessible to them. Though she was not the sole inventor of theatrical fashion-modeling, Abington turned à-la-mode clothing into her own idiosyncratic personal trademark and a sign of her value, thus paradoxically creating a material femininity through surface opulence but also producing an impression of a robust interiority. For better and for worse celebrity’s effects, as Chris Rojek has neatly summarized them, operate “to articulate, and legitimate, various forms of subjectivity that enhance the value of individuality and personality.”

Fashion afforded Abington a unique cultural authority that male actors, even as fops, would have found impossible to emulate. “Ladies of the first distinction,” Charles Dibdin tells us, consulted “from a decided conviction of her judgment in blending what was beautiful with what was becoming.” Abington thus broke from the traditional generic costuming in the theater, which had included “black velvet and white satin dresses, point lace, and stomacher for the tragic line; pink, blue, and white satin dresses with feathers, fans, and veils for comedy; and scarlet or buff frocks with blue or green ribbons, crucifix pendant, and French head dress for melodrama.” 

Instead, Abington designed sumptuously beautiful clothing that was unique to particular performances and identified specifically with her, most especially the Francophile Lady Bab’s magnificent costume in Maid of the Oaks in which she was immortalized in Thomas Hickey’s painting. During her five-year sojourn in Dublin, Abington was fetishized as a highly prized commodity from her first performances as ingénue and fine lady in Ireland: “The whole circle were in surprise and rapture, each asking the other how such a treasure could have possibly been in Dublin, and almost in a state of obscurity; such a jewel was invaluable, and their own tastes and judgments they feared would justly be called in question, if this daughter of Thalia was not immediately taken by the hand, and distinguished as her certain and striking merit demanded.”

Abington commodified her apparent interiority to personify accumulation and profit as she circulated in an aestheticized form that signified her value. During the fashionable 1770s, familiar objects of everyday life gained magical properties on stage, thus possessing the double quality of being simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. Lynn M. Voskuil helpfully explicates this paradoxical doubleness of properties first articulated in Marx’s Capital: “The talismanic properties of commodities, then, were precisely a function of their familiarity, their status as everyday, usable items. In the marketplace, triviality became fantastic when, in circulation, it was dislodged from its social and material context, lending commodities a hypostatic autonomy that appeared to be as objective as the wood that made up the table or the linen that went into the coat. In this way, the realistic and the fetishistic were closely related, their links embodied by objects that were at once familiar and strange.”

Transformed into commodities like the charismatic Abington, these consumable objects took on mystical powers and potential agency, becoming attached to character and enmeshed with the identities of the human beings who wore them. Theatrical fashion and accessories served as conduits for surprisingly intimate relations between actresses and women of elevated standing. When the New Theatre in Glasgow was set on fire by disgruntled Methodists, George Anne Bellamy’s extensive wardrobe was incinerated: “I there beheld the ashes of all my finery, which had cost many, many hundreds of pounds . . . there being among them a complete set of garnets and pearls, from cap to stomacher” (Apology, 4:69, 70). The ladies of the city and its environs, vividly demonstrating the interactivity between elite dress and theatrical fashion, promptly came to the rescue to loan the actress more than forty gowns, “some of these almost new, as well as very rich” (4:71).”

The cross-dressed Woffington, resonating with a cluster of real gender disguises at mid-century, could be regarded as a signifier of both political and sexual liberty. Actresses and other women masquerading as soldiers were perceived to be simultaneously erotic and patriotic, for sexual freedom paralleled other kinds of dangerous independence. Among the many examples, actress Charlotte Charke achieved greater mobility when cross-dressed in real life as Mr. Brown who cohabited with her “wife” Mrs. Brown; Mary Hamilton masqueraded as “the female husband,” Dr. Charles Hamilton, but came to trial in 1746 for having married Mary Price; and Hannah Snell published her story as the female soldier in 1750. Even David Garrick’s wife-to-be, Viennese dancer Eva Maria Violette, disguised herself as a man to enable her to travel by sea from Holland to Harwich in 1746.

Breeches roles in the theater, in addition to increasing nightly receipts because of the audience’s wish to admire women’s curves in pants, facilitated a variety of plot consequences in which the disguised heroine pursues her elusive lover whom she serves incognito; or she may act as liaison to a rival mistress. In other examples, a cross-dressed actress, tinged with homoerotic overtones, becomes the mistaken love object of another woman. A third category of cross-dressed figure is immediately recognizable as a woman: she wears male dress while remaining openly female in order to take up an occupation, such as a military officer, from which she is ordinarily restricted. Cross-dressed or travestied roles heighten attention to the constructedness of gender categories in the real world.

 As Elin Diamond put it, “When gender is alienated or foregrounded, the spectator is enabled to see a sign system as a sign system. The gender lexicon becomes so many illusionistic trappings to be put on or shed at will.” It is no surprise, then, that moral conservatives at the turn into the eighteenth century imagined cross-dressing onstage and off to be a threat to Godgiven sexual difference. Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring Anglican clergyman who had refused to pledge allegiance to William and Mary, and who evidenced strong Jacobite sympathies, asserted that clothing must correspond to anatomy. In The Conduct of the Stage Consider’d (1721), for example, Collier argued that apparel should not be exchanged between the sexes, even for seemingly harmless amusement. 

He wrote, “Men putting on womens Apparel, and Women Mens apparel, as they do in the Masquerades,is a Practice condemned by Revelation, and the Light of Nature. The Holy Scriptures tell us, The Women shall not wear that which pertains to the Man, neither shall a Man put on a Woman’s Garment; for all that do so are an Abomination to the Lord: Deut.22.5 . . . . Nature has made difference not only between the Sexes, but between the Apparel of Men and Women.” In short, the heterodox cross-dressed figure represented an artificial difference that competed with nature. It was, then, a clever ploy to use the character of a cross-dressed woman to call anti-Jacobites to arms later in the century, as Woffington did, and as late as 1745 swapping gender, even in costuming, was regarded with suspicion in some quarters.

 A letter in the Daily Advertiser urged Charlotte Charke—who flagrantly dressed as a man in private life and played Macheath, George Barnwell, Lord Foppington, and Lothario in travesty—to resume playing female characters so as to appear in “her proper Sphere” by “laying aside the Hero,” which Charke had justified as occasioned by a scarcity of actors. Charke’s equivocal sexuality offstage invaded her stage persona and became troublingly real. The eighteenth-century audience’s pleasure in cross-dressed roles, as many critics have argued, was aroused partly through its recognition that the character was in camouflage, and that the woman’s body beneath the disguise could readily be distinguished. Indeed, Stephen Orgel believes that the whole point of Renaissance boys pretending to be women was that the audience could easily see through the impersonation to admire their budding masculine anatomy.

Many critics have argued similarly that in the Restoration and the eighteenth century the delicious ambiguity of breeches evoked pleasure because the woman’s figure beneath the male disguise was satisfyingly perceptible. Considering breeches roles in the eighteenth century Dror Wahrman, drawing on and extending Kristina Straub’s arguments, has maintained that penetrating the disguise to make out the female anatomy beneath the clothing signaled a larger historical shift from an ancien régime belief in a flexible, constructed identity to a fixed, essential gender identity as man or woman. But the steady historical progression from an unstable to a fixed gender identity at the end of the century is perhaps not as straightforward as Wahrman suggests, and in travesty roles no unveiling occurs. 

Contemporary observers, for example, were quite divided in their opinions about the extent to which Peg Woffington succeeded in fooling the public into believing she was a man. Commentators like Thomas Davies thought that Woffington acted male parts perfectly and without a hint of femininity, while other observers, such as her manager, costar, and sometime lover David Garrick, maintained that she was indeterminately gendered as a sexual impersonator. Still others thought her acting as a man was so convincing it could teach male spectators proper gentlemanly conduct. In her cross-dressed theatrical roles at mid-century, Woffington by many accounts behaved as if she were a virile, heterosexual man; her interpretation of male characters was applauded for avoiding the excesses of femininity labeled “effeminate,” a term best understood as men’s exaggerated rendering of conventionally feminine mannerisms that regularly provoked satirical responses to foppish characters. 

When Woffington impersonated a man, her effortlessness in inhabiting the parts, described as uninhibited and free, catapulted her to the top of her profession and established her reputation. Robert Hitchcock noted her natural ease in assuming a male character, for Woffington offered an “elegant portrait of the Young Man of Fashion in a stile perhaps beyond the author’s warmest ideas” (1: 108). James Quin compared Woffington’s breeches roles to Ned Kynaston’s impersonation of female characters but preferred her rendering to the Restoration actor’s because she was happily “dispossessed . . . of that aukward stiffness and effeminacy which so commonly attend the fair sex in breeches.” He continues, “It was a most nice point to decide between the gentlemen and ladies, whether she was the finest woman, or the prettiest fellow.”

In Quin’s view, the would-be opposites became indistinguishable from one another rather than antipodal, and the androgynous middle ground suggests a blending that made it difficult to discern the female form beneath the male costume. Francis Gentleman, too, remarked on her admirable blending of the sexes when he writes that her deportment in travesty as Sir Harry Wildair was “free and elegant, whose figure was so proportionate and delicate.” The “raison d’etre” for the breeches role rested “in the imperfect masculinity of the performer” (Rogers, “Breeches Part,” 257), but many of Woffington’s contemporaries strongly praised instead how “well made” she was as a “model of [male] perfection” without differentiating between breeches and travesty roles: “Indeed when she assumes ye man there is such a freedom in her air, such a Disengagement from ye woman, with ye happiness of Being perfectly well made, that it is by no means surprising that she has been followed with uncommon & universal applause.” 

In short, to stage a convincing man whether in breeches or travesty meant, for many viewers, that Woffington separated herself completely from the gestures associated with female form and persuasively affected the style and manners of a gentleman; for others it involved combining the sexes in a harmonious fashion. As we shall see with reference to specific travesty or cross-dressed parts, Woffington represented the tensions for eighteenth-century Dublin and London audiences that Diana Taylor has found to be characteristic of modern identity with its “entangled surplus subjectivity, full of tugs, pressures, and pleasures.” Woffington’s popular characterizations in male dress also legislated against the idea that national identity rested on strict sexual difference, though her studied affectation of robust masculinity may have countered the nation’s fears of contamination from French effeminacy. 

Yet while her transvestite impersonations and speeches rejected effeminacy, they also ambiguously incorporated women, of a certain sort, into the definition of nation: in her public performance as a man or a cross-dressed woman, Peg Woffington refuted both the idea that women should remain exclusively within the private domain and the belief that the female sex was entirely peripheral to the nation’s interests. Woffington’s surplus of identities in performance might be described, then, as creating a kind of value-added onto the commodity that she had become. 

That is, the incremental increase in her value as a result of the very marketable identity-effect she produced could be converted into an economic surplus that resulted in higher net receipts for herself and the theater. In short, her simulated identity is the commodity that Woffington purveyed through the gaps and fissures exposed in her cross-dressed and travestied roles. That surplus of identities, created not only through reiterative performances but also through the varied sexual, religious, and national alignments they evoked, proves to be an index to modernity and key to the aspects of her interiority effect that produced her value.”

In rehearsal but also in performance, actors “responded to the audience on their level, answering the regular (and expected) heckling, but also making points in propria persona about the nature of the performance itself. . . . Audiences were actively involved not simply in approving or condemning a play, but in revising it.” As we have seen, epilogues offered special opportunities for actresses to spar with the audience and sometimes to suspend theatrical illusion by breaking character or interjecting improvisational comments. Their comic speeches—addressing coquettes or fine ladies or calling out to pit, gallery, and boxes—could specifically implore the ladies in the audience to approve the play, or, on occasion, could cause the audience to respond with disruptive retorts. At many levels, then, the full assembly participated in determining the nature of the performance onstage and off. 

In another example of lively theatrical interactions, when Colley Cibber’s enemies booed the 1727 adaptation of Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Husband, legend has it that actress Anne Oldfield was forced to contend with the rude hissing of a disorderly playgoer as she delivered the prologue: “She fixed her eye upon him immediately, made a very short pause, and spoke the words poor creature! loud enough to be heard by the audience, with such a look of mingled scorn, pity and contempt, that the most uncommon applause justified her conduct in this particular, and the poor reptile sunk down with fear and trembling.”

The London Daily Post reported an even more spectacular disruption of Mr. Pritchard’s The Fall of Phaeton (1736) when actress Kitty Clive broke off her singing to rescue a lady in the pit who had fainted: “In great Concern [Clive] ran off the stage for a Glass of Water and procured it to be delivered to the poor Lady who, by this means, recovered. I could not but be delighted to see Her (who enters so thoroughly into all her Part and is really the very Character she assumes) the first to take notice of an accident of this kind: nor could I help feeling better pleased when the Audience applauded her Action.” 

…It is commonplace to argue that Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences attended plays “to see, and to be seen,” as Clive’s epilogue put it. Clearly verbal banter ricocheted from stage’s edge to the audience and back, and the actress’s words reflect a shared immersion in the theatricality of the event. Though women of the middling and upper classes ordinarily occupied the boxes and the middle gallery, both sexes sometimes sat on the eighteenth-century stage itself, especially during benefit performances, to constitute a second audience visible to the pit, gallery, and boxes. Female servants were among those who occupied the upper gallery. 

The spectacular presence of ladies from the court in attendance purportedly testified to the nation’s claim to superior women: “the Whole is illuminated to the greatest Advantage,” unlike the theaters abroad where only the stage was lit, “and indeed the English have reason in this, for no Nation in the World can shew such an Assembly of shining Beauties as here.” This nationalist fervor would have resonated differently in Ireland: at a Dublin charity benefit of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent in January 1746, “a hundred ladies of the first distinction, dressed in all the elegance of fashion, who, unable to obtain places in the pit and boxes, had, in order to assist and support the manager, accepted of accommodations on the stage, the clamour was so great that Mr. Sheridan was obliged to withdraw without speaking.”

Even after the audience was banished from the stage, the brilliantly lit house of the Dublin theater, shaped in a semicircle, put the ladies and gentlemen of quality on display in the same manner as the actors. Like the fictional Sophronia introduced in Steele’s Theatre, sometimes the “fine ladies” attended together in a theater party conspicuously seated in the side boxes, though women of elevated social standing often appeared in vizard disguise until audience members wearing masks were banned in the early eighteenth century. The public liaisons reputed to occur in pit and gallery may have led theatergoing women to avoid those seating areas because of the potential sexual danger. 

Susan Cannon Harris imaginatively characterizes the political and social stakes for women in the mid-century Dublin theater as potentially subversive when the women spectators sat onstage as the fair penitent actress-heroine performed Rowe’s play. Female spectators and actresses in close proximity were, she argues, united in recognizing their vulnerability to sexual coercion and violence in spite of their social differences, to “carve out a cause, and a subjectivity, of their own.” That kind of consolidation of women’s interests in the public sphere, Harris contends, threatened to supersede other national, regional, or class loyalties. This close identification between the ladies and the actresses and their formation of a shared subjectivity, I suggest, was not limited to the Irish theaters at mid-century but was ongoing even from women’s first appearance on stage.

…The problem was especially vexing during benefit performance when, for example, Lavinia Fenton, acting as Cherry in The Beaux Stratagem for her benefit (29 April 1726), reported that she “offended the best Part of her Friends, by laying Pit and Boxes together” to increase the number of seats available and thus the evening’s receipts. The offense was sufficiently heinous that many tickets for the performance had to be refunded. The memoirs of actors, theater managers, and theater historians abound with similar anecdotes describing startling interruptions and boisterous exchanges among authors, managers, actors, prompters, and spectators that gave texture to the eighteenth-century theatrical arena. 

The vocal, often rowdy, audience who participated jointly with the players in an evening’s entertainment in Covent Garden or Drury Lane is, then, more typical of the period than the image of a theater filled with bemused spectators regarding a proscenium stage would suggest, and women on both sides of the stage engaged with the actors in multiple ways. Because of the full assembly’s participation in theatrical repartee, the confusion of the stage’s boundary, and the bonds of patronage between actor and audience, it is misleading to regard the eighteenth-century theater primarily as a picture stage upon which a distant audience gazed with relative detachment, especially with regard to women actors and spectators.”