Women and Victorian Theatre

216 Pages·2007·5.79 MB·English

by  Kerry Powell

Victorian women were exhilarated by the authoritative voice and
the professional opportunity that, uniquely, the theatre offered
them. Victorian men, anxious to preserve their dominance in this as
in every other sphere of life, sought to limit the theatre as being
distinctively, irrevocably masculine. Actresses were represented as
inhuman monstrosities, not women at all. Furthermore, the execu-
tive functions of theatre-manager and playwright were carefully
defined as requiring supposedly masculine qualities of mind and
personality. A woman playwright came to be seen as an impossibil-
ity, although their number actually increased toward the close of
the nineteenth century. In this book Kerry Powell chronicles the
development of women's participation in the theatre as play-
wrights, actresses, and managers and explores the making of the
Victorian actress, gender, and playwriting of the period, and the
contributions these made to developments in the following century.

WOMEN AND VICTORIAN THEATRE

WOMEN AND
VICTORIAN THEATRE
KERRY POWELL
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521471671
© Cambridge University Press 1997
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1997
This digitally printed first paperback version 2006
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Powell, Kerry.
Women and Victorian theatre / Kerry Powell.
p. cm.
ISBN 0 521 47167 2 (hardback)
1. Women in the theatre - Great Britain - History - 19th century.
2. Women dramatists, English - History - 19th century. I. Title
PN2582.W65P68 1997
792'.082'094109034 - dc21 97-5746 CIP
ISBN-13 978-0-521-47167-1 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-47167-2 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-03329-9 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-03329-2 paperback
For Beth
"Two souls with but a single thought,
two hearts that beat as one."

Contents
List of illustrations pagex
Preface xi
PART ONE: THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN ACTRESS
1 "Think of the power-" 3
2 Masculine panic and the panthers of the stage 13
3 Actresses, managers, and feminized theatre 64
PART TWO: GENDER AND VICTORIAN PLAYWRITING
4 The impossibility of women playwrights 77
5 Textual assaults: women's novels on stage 95
6 Victorian plays by women 122
PART THREE: REVOLUTION
7 Elizabeth Robins, Oscar Wilde, and the "Theatre of
the Future" 149
Notes 174
Index 198
IX
Illustrations
1. Helen Faucit as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, 1838. (Reproduced
courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, the Theatre Museum.) page 53
2. Charlotte Cushman as Romeo and Ada Swanborough as
Juliet-a sketch from The Illustrated London News, 1855.
(Reproduced by permission of the Raymond Mander and Joe
Mitchenson Theatre Collection.) 55
3. Ellen Terry in The Amber Heart, 1887, illustrating the actress in
relation to "mystical womanhood." (Reproduced by permission
of the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre
Collection.) 59
4. Annie Hughes as Little Lord Fauntleroy in the "lost" dramatized
version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel, the Prince of Wales
Theatre, 1888. (Reproduced by permission of the Raymond
Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.) 117
5. A drawing of the all-female audience of Terry's Theatre for Little
Lord Fauntleroy, 1888. (Reproduced courtesy of the Board of
Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Theatre
Museum.) 118
6. A production photograph from A Mother of Three, 1893, with
Fanny Brough as the title character crossdressed as her own
husband in the hit play by Clotilde Graves. (Reproduced
courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, the Theatre Museum.) 142