{"id":51,"date":"2024-08-23T13:53:12","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T13:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/?page_id=51"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:30:20","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T13:30:20","slug":"women-and-performance-in-the-nineteenth-century","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/essays\/women-and-performance-in-the-nineteenth-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Women and Performance in the Nineteenth Century"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Katherine Newey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

University of Exeter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What would a history of nineteenth-century theatre look like if it were focused on the work of women? We know that women have <\/a>always<\/em> 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 \u2018public woman\u2019 who earned her living through the \u2018unfeminine\u2019 display of her body. Ideal femininity in the nineteenth century valorised women\u2019s domesticity, privacy, and silence. Work in the theatre did not. Women\u2019s working lives in the theatre were conducted within this contradiction, to a greater or lesser extent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Mainstream writers and commentators on \u2018the woman question\u2019, such as Sarah Stickney Ellis in her series of conduct books, addressed to the <\/a>Wives of England<\/em> (published 1843, and followed by works addressed to the <\/a>Women, Mothers<\/em>, and <\/a>Daughters of England<\/em>) and John Ruskin, in <\/a>Sesame and Lilies<\/em> (1865), advocated for the separate spheres of men and women, writing about the specifically feminine power of women\u2019s 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 \u2018uneven development\u2019 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 \u2018[A]t one and the same time, separate sexual spheres were being increasingly prescribed in theory, yet increasingly broken through in practice\u2019 (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 \u2018the idea of <\/a>\u201cWoman\u2019s Mission\u201d served at one and the same time to discipline women and contain their demands \u2013 and to offer them a vastly new and extended scope for action<\/a>\u2019 (Caine 1997, 82). The apparent moral and gender conservatism of domestic ideology was used by feminist agitators throughout the century, argues Caine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>By emphasizing the connection between the female body and women\u2019s moral qualities, [\u2026] 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Caine 1992, 52\u20133)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Nowhere was this more evident than in the theatre, one of the few professions in which women could compete with men on \u2013 almost \u2013 the same terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>However, the cultural politics of the \u2018separate spheres\u2019, and the literary critical and historical approaches to the theatre of the period, have combined to make women\u2019s 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 <\/a>avant garde<\/em> experimentation. This theatre history has tended to privilege moments of rupture, change, and revolution, particularly in discussing dramatic writing positioned as \u2018literary\u2019 and of aesthetic value. Such a model relegates much of women\u2019s theatre work to the realm of negligible and non-aesthetic theatre, unfit for inclusion in the \u2018grand narrative\u2019 of progress. This critical approach also indicates a deep cultural anxiety about the categories of \u2018popular\u2019 or \u2018illegitimate\u2019 theatre which echoes the anxieties, debates, and oppositions of the period itself, characterised through the \u2018decline of the drama\u2019 debate which persisted throughout the century. However, most women (and, indeed men) did not make <\/a>avant-garde<\/em> 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 \u2013 both men and women \u2013 is, as Janice Norwood (2020, 2) argues, of the \u2018mid-tier\u2019 performer with \u2018dramatic specialisms ranging from tragedienne to burlesque performer\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>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\u2019s management of Drury Lane in the 1840s, or Henry Irving\u2019s management of the Lyceum in the 1880s and 1890s, remained the signifiers of \u00e9lite 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\u2019s role in nation-making. In this model of theatre and cultural history, women were doubly excluded, as neither political nor cultural citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In spite of the rhetoric about the \u2018decline of the drama\u2019, throughout the century and the particular professional and ideological constraints within which women worked, women\u2019s 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\u2019s theatre writing: the work of a group of women playwrights writing for the popular theatre in the middle of the century, and the <\/a>Dramatic Opinions<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 Bront\u00eb 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>A number of women made their livings as playwrights and performers for the commercial mainstream theatre mid-century. Most of these women existed as <\/a>femmes couverte<\/em> in their professional lives, their names and identities \u2018covered\u2019 by that of their husbands<\/a>\u2019. 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 \u2018public\u2019 women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>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\u2019s Prize Comedy competition in 1843. Webster decided to do his bit for arresting the \u2018decline of the drama\u2019 by offering a \u00a3500 prize for the best modern comedy reflecting the manners of the age. As well as the prize of \u00a3500 (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 <\/a>Quid Pro Quo<\/em>, written by prolific novelist and playwright, Catherine Gore. Gore was the pre-eminent novelist of the \u2018Silver Fork\u2019 school, and her wry chronicling of the lives of the contemporary aristocracy in her novels and plays frames the style of <\/a>Quid Pro Quo<\/em>. 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 \u2018low\u2019 comic vulgarity. It is an unexceptionable play, typical of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>However, when it was announced in May 1844 that the \u00a3500 had been won by the work of a \u2018lady\u2019 scepticism about the play was widespread. Almost immediately, accusations of favouritism were made (<\/a>Times<\/em>, 22 May 1844, p. 8), which forced one of the judges to reply with a denial of knowledge about the identity of the winner (<\/a>Times<\/em>, 24 May 1844, p. 7). The mildest of comments about Gore\u2019s win comes from the <\/a>Spectator<\/em>: \u2018It is remarkable that out of ninety-eight competitors a lady should have carried off the prize\u2019 (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\u2019s reputation as a \u2018lady\u2019 in terms which would have been unthinkable for a male writer \u2013 even a gentlemanly one. The first night performance of <\/a>Quid Pro Quo<\/em> 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 <\/a>Westminster Review<\/em>. According to Lewes, Gore intruded on masculine territory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>If we should have the misfortune to pain Mrs Gore, we would bid her remember that there are ninety-six authors [<\/a>sic<\/em>] whose self-love has been wounded, whose time has been wasted; some, whose hopes [\u2026] have been disappointed by the awarding of the prize: ninety-six angry men who need consolation, and who, we cannot but think, deserve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>(<\/a>Westminster Review<\/em>, 106)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Gore was already a prolific novelist, and since 1830 had <\/a>had 13 plays performed in the principal theatres of London. After winning this competition, she wrote no more plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Gore\u2019s 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 \u2018minor\u2019 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 \u2018West End entertainment,\u2019 and their work \u2013 so often obscured by domestic and family connections \u2013 was crucial in establishing London\u2019s West End as a place of comfortable and respectable pleasure (Bratton 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Mrs Hallett\u2019s play <\/a>Nobodies<\/a>\u2019 at Home; Somebodies<\/a>\u2019 Abroad<\/em> 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\u2019s Prize Comedy, Mrs Hallett\u2019s 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 \u2018a [\u2026]light and sparkling emanation of humour and fun,\u2019 and \u2018cleverly adapted and an excellent cut at demi-fashionable society, and told well,\u2019 \u2018produced with the most decided success\u2019. 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 all these things are normal and ordinary for comedy and farce in the mid-nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>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\u2019s everyday lives. Although there is no \u2018school\u2019 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 \u2013 the international stardom of British actresses such as Fanny Kemble, or Ellen Terry \u2013 it is in the ordinary working lives of the female theatre professionals where the gradual progress towards women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Actress-manager Madge Kendal wrote forthrightly about the attractions of the theatre as a profession for women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>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, \u2014 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,\u2014 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 [\u2026] \u2014 at any rate there are a great many who can earn their \u00a3300 or \u00a3400 a year; and that is a very nice competence for a woman in the middle class of life, \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Kendal 1890, 79\u201380)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Her <\/a>Dramatic Opinions<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 \u2018in the middle class.\u2019 Kendal goes on to advocate for girls<\/a>\u2019 employment in the theatre, again, on the grounds of their earning power offering material improvement for their families:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>Oh, think of the families at Christmas that are positively kept from starving by the fairies<\/a>\u2019 weekly stipend! Think of fairies, and then think of dinner, \u2013 so unfairylike! But oh, what joy! Could any fairy of Hans Andersen\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>(Kendal 1890, 164)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Kendal\u2019s 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, <\/a>Dame Madge Kendal, By Herself<\/em> (Kendal 1933) demonstrate the growing visibility and confidence of women\u2019s presence as theatre professionals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>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 \u2018spectacular activism\u2019 (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 \u2018lady\u2019 was a social performance in itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Although the suffragettes questioned the efficacy of the previous 40 years of constitutionalists<\/a>\u2019 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 \u2018The Suffrage Camp Revisited\u2019 in 1908, when she wonders aloud why \u2018[t]hese excellent people [Sarah Stickney Ellis and Anna Jameson] failed to further the Cause they advocated\u2019 (Robins 1913, 65). Her answer is that Victorian women themselves were flattered into believing the myth of the \u2018Exceptional Woman\u2019, a concept used by male public opinion to cordon off \u2018those women whose capacity could not be denied\u2019 but which allowed all other women to be regarded as unfit to be involved in public affairs (Robins 1913, 65). Robins<\/a>\u2019 answer to the divisiveness of the Exceptional Woman is \u2018Combination\u2019. Robins<\/a>\u2019 thinking and writing makes way for the women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bratton, Jacky (2011) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830\u20131870<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caine, Barbara (1992) Victorian Feminists<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caine, Barbara (1997) English Feminism, 1780\u20131980<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colley, Linda (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707\u20131837<\/em>, London: Pimlico. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colley, Linda (1998, September) \u2018No More Separate Spheres!\u2019, American Literature<\/em>, special edition, 70<\/em>(3<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Farfan, Penny (2004) Women, Modernism, and Performance<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kendal, Madge (1890) Dramatic Opinions<\/em>, Boston: Little Brown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kendal, Madge (1884) The Drama. A Paper Read at the Congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Birmingham, 1884<\/em>, London: David Bogue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kendal, Madge (1933) Dame Madge Kendal, by Herself<\/em>, London: John Murray. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norwood, Janice (2020) Victorian Touring Actresses: Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating the Cultural Landscape<\/em>, Manchester: Manchester University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poovey, Mary (1988) Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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