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

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.

Helen Brooks is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, UK. She is Associate Editor of the Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789 and has published articles on eighteenth-century women as actresses and theatre managers, on private theatricals, and on performance historiography.

Introduction 
1. Playing for Money: 'This is certainly a large sum but I can assure you I have worked very hard for it' 
2. Playing the Passions: 'All their Force and Judgment in perfection'
3. Playing Men: 'Half the men in the house take me for one of their own sex'
4. Playing Her Self: 'It was not as an actress but as herself, that she charmed every one' 
5. Playing Mothers: 'Stand forth ye elves, and plead your mother's cause'
Bibliography
Index