Katherine Newey
University of Exeter
What would a history of nineteenth-century theatre look like if it were focused on the work of women? We know that women have always been active in the theatre, but their work has been obscured by sexed and classed hierarchies of aesthetic value, as well as by entrenched practices of historical narrative and literary criticism. In the nineteenth century, women worked throughout the theatre profession as actors, managers, directors, playwrights, and performer trainers. However, this work has been made invisible, and diminished in status, by the collision between sex-based stereotypes of femininity and the perception of the actress as a ‘public woman’ who earned her living through the ‘unfeminine’ display of her body. Ideal femininity in the nineteenth century valorised women’s domesticity, privacy, and silence. Work in the theatre did not. Women’s working lives in the theatre were conducted within this contradiction, to a greater or lesser extent.
Mainstream writers and commentators on ‘the woman question’, such as Sarah Stickney Ellis in her series of conduct books, addressed to the Wives of England (published 1843, and followed by works addressed to the Women, Mothers, and Daughters of England) and John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies (1865), advocated for the separate spheres of men and women, writing about the specifically feminine power of women’s domestic sphere. However, whenever such discursive moves were made to confine women, there was resistance. Historians of the period have noted what Mary Poovey (1988, 3) has called the ‘uneven development’ of sex-based rights, and Linda Colley argues in her overview of the role of women in the formation of the British nation state in the late eighteenth century, that ‘[A]t one and the same time, separate sexual spheres were being increasingly prescribed in theory, yet increasingly broken through in practice’ (Colley 1992, 250; see also Colley 1998). Barbara Caine argues that the power of the moral and educative mission enfolded within domestic ideology meant that ‘the idea of “Woman’s Mission” served at one and the same time to discipline women and contain their demands – and to offer them a vastly new and extended scope for action’ (Caine 1997, 82). The apparent moral and gender conservatism of domestic ideology was used by feminist agitators throughout the century, argues Caine:
By emphasizing the connection between the female body and women’s moral qualities, […] feminists took up the construction of femininity evident in domestic ideology, but moulded it to their own purposes [and] established a basis for demanding political representation and female inclusion within the political world.
(Caine 1992, 52–3)
Nowhere was this more evident than in the theatre, one of the few professions in which women could compete with men on – almost – the same terms.
However, the cultural politics of the ‘separate spheres’, and the literary critical and historical approaches to the theatre of the period, have combined to make women’s theatre work in the nineteenth century largely invisible. The dominant narrative of British theatre history maps the evolution of the theatre as progress from popular and mass entertainment forms of melodrama, farce, and low comedy towards psychological realism, and thence to avant garde experimentation. This theatre history has tended to privilege moments of rupture, change, and revolution, particularly in discussing dramatic writing positioned as ‘literary’ and of aesthetic value. Such a model relegates much of women’s theatre work to the realm of negligible and non-aesthetic theatre, unfit for inclusion in the ‘grand narrative’ of progress. This critical approach also indicates a deep cultural anxiety about the categories of ‘popular’ or ‘illegitimate’ theatre which echoes the anxieties, debates, and oppositions of the period itself, characterised through the ‘decline of the drama’ debate which persisted throughout the century. However, most women (and, indeed men) did not make avant-garde theatre, nor work at the cutting edge of experimentation with dramatic form and theatrical staging. They made their livings in the mainstream commercial theatre, catering for mass urban audiences, touring from London to regional urban centres, and playing a range of popular mixed genres, such as melodrama, social comedy, and farce, often combined with specialist skills in singing and dancing. The more accurate narrative for the majority of theatre practitioners in the nineteenth century – both men and women – is, as Janice Norwood (2020, 2) argues, of the ‘mid-tier’ performer with ‘dramatic specialisms ranging from tragedienne to burlesque performer’.
As well as overlooking popular and mass entertainment, the orthodox historical narrative of the progress of English drama towards realism and away from the motley of popular performance forms, focuses on national and public institutions vested with high cultural capital. The repertoires and practices of particular theatres and managements in London, such as William Macready’s management of Drury Lane in the 1840s, or Henry Irving’s management of the Lyceum in the 1880s and 1890s, remained the signifiers of élite cultural taste and guardians of the heritage of the English drama. This historiographic framework connects the work of male theatre practitioners, principally playwrights and actor-managers, with the theatre’s role in nation-making. In this model of theatre and cultural history, women were doubly excluded, as neither political nor cultural citizens.
In spite of the rhetoric about the ‘decline of the drama’, throughout the century and the particular professional and ideological constraints within which women worked, women’s work is recoverable, particularly through the written records of their playwriting, their autobiographies, and archival records of performance. The rest of this essay will focus on examples of the women’s theatre writing: the work of a group of women playwrights writing for the popular theatre in the middle of the century, and the Dramatic Opinions of Madge Kendal. These brief case studies suggest ways in which the women theatre professionals could work from within the structures of femininity (as Caine suggests) in order to exercise agency as skilled professionals. Women’s writing for the theatre in the nineteenth century was prolific. Almost any major writer of fiction or poetry in this period also aspired to write for the theatre or was in some way involved in practical terms with the stage: even the Brontë sisters included dramatic writing in their Angrian and Gondal sagas. In the case of many writers, the theatre was one of a number of ways of earning a living by writing. Despite the regular complaints from playwrights about their exploitation by greedy theatre managers, writing for the theatre held out the promise of money, fame, and glamour.
A number of women made their livings as playwrights and performers for the commercial mainstream theatre mid-century. Most of these women existed as femmes couverte in their professional lives, their names and identities ‘covered’ by that of their husbands’. Full names for these women can only be retrieved by searching birth and marriage records. Theatre professionals such as Mrs Hallett, Mrs Denvil (Mary Anne), the magnificently named Mrs Valentine Bartholomew (no given name offered in plays or playbills), and Mrs Cornwell Baron Wilson (christened Margaret), Mrs S. C. Hall (Anna Maria) and Mrs Alfred Phillips (Elizabeth) were ordinary married women, and working professionals. Their married names obscure any indication of identity separate from that of their husbands, but on the other hand, the sign of respectability of marriage offered a modicum of protection for otherwise ‘public’ women.
Ordinariness and respectability may be regarded as constraints, but they might also be preferable to the public commentaries on female extraordinariness or exceptionalism. The dangers of female exceptionalism were pinpointed in the furore when Catherine Gore won Haymarket theatre manager Benjamin Webster’s Prize Comedy competition in 1843. Webster decided to do his bit for arresting the ‘decline of the drama’ by offering a £500 prize for the best modern comedy reflecting the manners of the age. As well as the prize of £500 (a considerable amount in 1843), Webster offered a full production of the prize comedy at the Haymarket Theatre Royal. The cash and the promise of production in one of the three major houses in London attracted 98 entries. The winning play was Quid Pro Quo, written by prolific novelist and playwright, Catherine Gore. Gore was the pre-eminent novelist of the ‘Silver Fork’ school, and her wry chronicling of the lives of the contemporary aristocracy in her novels and plays frames the style of Quid Pro Quo. The play is gently satirical, poking fun at the pretensions of the old and the new rich, with parallel comic plots of romantic comedy and more robust ‘low’ comic vulgarity. It is an unexceptionable play, typical of the time.
However, when it was announced in May 1844 that the £500 had been won by the work of a ‘lady’ scepticism about the play was widespread. Almost immediately, accusations of favouritism were made (Times, 22 May 1844, p. 8), which forced one of the judges to reply with a denial of knowledge about the identity of the winner (Times, 24 May 1844, p. 7). The mildest of comments about Gore’s win comes from the Spectator: ‘It is remarkable that out of ninety-eight competitors a lady should have carried off the prize’ (25 May 1844, p. 492). When the play was produced in June 1844, criticism of the play, extending sometimes to outrage, was quite clearly aimed at Gore’s reputation as a ‘lady’ in terms which would have been unthinkable for a male writer – even a gentlemanly one. The first night performance of Quid Pro Quo was booed, and universally badly reviewed. Perhaps the most devastating of all critiques of the competition and the winning play was made by George Henry Lewes in the Westminster Review. According to Lewes, Gore intruded on masculine territory:
If we should have the misfortune to pain Mrs Gore, we would bid her remember that there are ninety-six authors [sic] whose self-love has been wounded, whose time has been wasted; some, whose hopes […] have been disappointed by the awarding of the prize: ninety-six angry men who need consolation, and who, we cannot but think, deserve it.
Gore was already a prolific novelist, and since 1830 had had 13 plays performed in the principal theatres of London. After winning this competition, she wrote no more plays.
Gore’s play was not exceptional; but its visibility was. Other women mid-century worked more unobtrusively in producing comedy and farce for the newly-legitimised, but still ‘minor’ theatres near or in the West End of London. These houses catered for an upwardly mobile middle class, and, as Jacky Bratton (2011) has argued, they have been hitherto overlooked as places in which women were central in creating a new kind of entertainment. Eliza Vestris and Jane Scott were chief amongst these female theatre entrepreneurs, and Marie Wilton was to follow them a decade later. They created sparkling witty entertainments, produced to a high standard, in new smaller theatres, where elegancies of domestic comfort prevailed. Bratton argues that it was in the late 1840s and 5180s that women created what we now recognise as ‘West End entertainment,’ and their work – so often obscured by domestic and family connections – was crucial in establishing London’s West End as a place of comfortable and respectable pleasure (Bratton 2011).
Mrs Hallett’s play Nobodies’ at Home; Somebodies’ Abroad for example, was first performed in 1847 at the Olympic Theatre, which was one of these new theatres, managed for a long time by the partnership of Eliza Vestris and Charles Mathews. Unlike Gore’s Prize Comedy, Mrs Hallett’s play received approving reviews, perhaps because the play was unpretentiously a farce, not a production at a Theatre Royal trying to save the National Drama. It was praised as ‘a […]light and sparkling emanation of humour and fun,’ and ‘cleverly adapted and an excellent cut at demi-fashionable society, and told well,’ ‘produced with the most decided success’. The plot was typical for farce of the period, involving an errant husband, mistaken and disguised identities, mixed in with social class consciousness, and a comic Irish servant. Mrs Hallett’s farce is in no way out of the ordinary or particularly different from the hundreds of similar such plays produced for the content hungry popular theatre. The dicing with respectability and ruin, the comic servant, the quite sharp ridicule of the social climbers – all these things are normal and ordinary for comedy and farce in the mid-nineteenth century.
There is a virtue in ordinariness, both for Victorian women writers, and for later critical assessments of their work. There is a tendency for recuperative feminist literary history and criticism to want to see a kind of triumphalist narrative in which the women we recover and celebrate are recognised as extraordinary. However, it is just as important to see their work as usual and ordinary, while of course recognising the skill and determination of these women theatre practitioners. When women wrote comedy and farce, it could throw into high relief the conditions of women’s everyday lives. Although there is no ‘school’ of women playwrights, across the century women wrote about the world around them, turning the quotidian nature of middle class respectable life into comedy with a particularly feminine point of view, drawn from their experience of organising domestic and family life. While the history of the theatre in the nineteenth century thrives on stories of the exceptional – the international stardom of British actresses such as Fanny Kemble, or Ellen Terry – it is in the ordinary working lives of the female theatre professionals where the gradual progress towards women’s economic and political independence is most notable. While prurient public opinion may have focused on the moral ambiguities of performance for women and girls, there is no doubt that theatre professionals of the period needed to be talented, well-trained, but most of all, able to sustain the physical hard work of performance, night after night, in large, ill-ventilated, noisy theatres, together with daily stage rehearsals, and private practice in learning lines, singing, music, and dance practice, as well as the manufacture or maintenance of personal items of costume.
Actress-manager Madge Kendal wrote forthrightly about the attractions of the theatre as a profession for women.
I do not think there is a thing in the world that a woman could be better than an actress; there is no other calling in which she can earn so much money, — no other calling in which she can keep her own standard so high; no other calling in which she can set a better example and do more good. An actress lives in a world of her own creation and imagination for the time being,— a world in which she is perfectly happy or perfectly miserable, as the case may be; and she holds a position which is unique if she has the necessary qualifications […] — at any rate there are a great many who can earn their £300 or £400 a year; and that is a very nice competence for a woman in the middle class of life, – very much more than she would earn in almost any other career. Besides, she has the blessedness of independence; and that is a great thing to a woman, and especially to a single woman.
(Kendal 1890, 79–80)
Her Dramatic Opinions were published specifically for her American audience, which might explain her emphasis on independence and earning power, but by 1890, her view was no longer so unusual. The discourse of respectability, which had made a woman’s choice to enter into the theatre potentially risky 50 years earlier, is here deployed in favour of the profession of the actress. The money to be earned enables a woman to maintain a life ‘in the middle class.’ Kendal goes on to advocate for girls’ employment in the theatre, again, on the grounds of their earning power offering material improvement for their families:
Oh, think of the families at Christmas that are positively kept from starving by the fairies’ weekly stipend! Think of fairies, and then think of dinner, – so unfairylike! But oh, what joy! Could any fairy of Hans Andersen’s creation give more joy than the flesh-and-blood fairy of the stage, when on Saturday mornings she takes 15s or 18s. to the mother, and there is meat for dinner on Sundays!
Kendal’s public visibility as an actress-manager, and her willingness to speak frankly, as she did in her address to the Social Sciences Congress in Birmingham in 1884 and her autobiography, Dame Madge Kendal, By Herself (Kendal 1933) demonstrate the growing visibility and confidence of women’s presence as theatre professionals.
This recognition of the theatre as a profession which offered economic and intellectual independence was central to the involvement of women theatre practitioners in the suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And conversely, the direct actions of the new movement of the suffragettes drew on the principles of public performance in their ‘spectacular activism’ (Farfan 2004, 32). Suffragette activists understood that performance was not always in a theatre, and they saw the ways in which theatricality and performance could help the cause. In recognising this, they were also taking control of a sort of social performance which had long been imposed on women generally, as the ways in which being a woman, and more particularly a ‘lady’ was a social performance in itself.
Although the suffragettes questioned the efficacy of the previous 40 years of constitutionalists’ battles for the female suffrage, their protests were not wholly cut off from the past struggles of the Victorian woman writer or artist. Suffragette actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Robins, recognised this. The suffrage fight taught women about protest and politics in a way that was not available to their feminist mothers and grandmothers. Elizabeth Robins focusses on this point in her speech ‘The Suffrage Camp Revisited’ in 1908, when she wonders aloud why ‘[t]hese excellent people [Sarah Stickney Ellis and Anna Jameson] failed to further the Cause they advocated’ (Robins 1913, 65). Her answer is that Victorian women themselves were flattered into believing the myth of the ‘Exceptional Woman’, a concept used by male public opinion to cordon off ‘those women whose capacity could not be denied’ but which allowed all other women to be regarded as unfit to be involved in public affairs (Robins 1913, 65). Robins’ answer to the divisiveness of the Exceptional Woman is ‘Combination’. Robins’ thinking and writing makes way for the women’s liberation movements of the twentieth century. And it is significant that her ideas about combination were developed through her work in the theatre, where collective endeavour is central to the creation of performance.
References
Bratton, Jacky (2011) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caine, Barbara (1992) Victorian Feminists, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caine, Barbara (1997) English Feminism, 1780–1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Colley, Linda (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, London: Pimlico.
Colley, Linda (1998, September) ‘No More Separate Spheres!’, American Literature, special edition, 70(3).
Farfan, Penny (2004) Women, Modernism, and Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendal, Madge (1890) Dramatic Opinions, Boston: Little Brown.
Kendal, Madge (1884) The Drama. A Paper Read at the Congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Birmingham, 1884, London: David Bogue.
Kendal, Madge (1933) Dame Madge Kendal, by Herself, London: John Murray.
Norwood, Janice (2020) Victorian Touring Actresses: Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating the Cultural Landscape, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Poovey, Mary (1988) Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.