Clare Siviter and Emmanuela Wroth begin their chapter by establishing France’s best known women actors, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, as a barometer for the hypervisibility of French women performers’ bodies. Siviter and Wroth explore two case studies that paved the way for the late nineteenth-century celebrity which Bernhardt and Rachel embodied: the ‘Bataille des Dames’ between Mlle George and Mlle Duchesnois at the start of the nineteenth century and the Restoration rivalry between Classicism and Romanticism personified by Mlle Mars and Marie Dorval. They focus on three particular sites: the women’s physical presence and experience of their gendered bodies including their voices; their often sexualized fetishization in contemporary print; and their memorialization both in their autobiographies and in theatre history. Having analysed the roles of class, gender and sexuality, they return to the hypervisibility of Rachel and later Bernhardt’s bodies, and the important questions these women’s bodies raise regarding other marginalized identities, especially in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’.

Chapter 6 investigates how the duopoly, by radically curtailing numbers, inadvertently transformed actors from vagrants in need of a patron’s protection to celebrities lionized by courtiers and commoners alike. Managerial choices coalesced with the historical accident of a monarch so intimately associated with the theatre that he took two actresses as mistresses. Playhouse architecture also exerted an unexpected phenomenological effect on their status. The intimacy characteristic of the Restoration playhouse transmogrified performed intersubjectivity into the crackling exchange of eroticized energy. Unprecedented social freedom, economic mobility, and even contemporary portraiture attest to their new stature after 1660. That new prominence, however, invited attacks in print and person – against women especially – from men anxious about their own precarious hold on respectability. The choices, contingencies, and memories that made Restoration theatre such an unforgiving business nonetheless catapulted the acting profession toward the celebrity culture that would flourish in the following century.

This chapter analyses cross-dressing in Restoration Shakespeare – in the main, female characters dressed in male attire – exploring the key question of how this theatrical device was influenced by the advent of the professional actress on the English stage. The approach is twofold. Firstly, the chapter examines the use of cross-dressing in specific Restoration-era adaptations of Shakespeare. One of the earliest of these, Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest (1667), provides additional opportunities for transvestite performance as the play’s new male role of Hippolito was performed as a travesty part by an actress (either Mary Davis or Jane Long) and the female part of Sycorax (also added to the play by the adapters) was likely played by a man. Furthermore, it explores how other adapters treated the cross-dressing already inherent in the Shakespearean texts they chose to rewrite, considering, for example, George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701) and Charles Burnaby’s Love Betrayed (1703), a version of Twelfth Night. Secondly, the chapter investigates the Restoration performance history of Shakespearean ‘originals’ that feature transvestism, including Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The chapter nuances our understanding of gender in Restoration Shakespeare through a detailed consideration of cross-dressing.

Beth Holmgren charts the modes in which men functioned as gatekeepers in nineteenth-century professional theatre, which showed not only the parochialism of their views but a deep anxiety around sexuality that required the disciplining of women’s bodies on and offstage. She reveals how actresses pioneered new ways of living that escaped entrapments of conventional marriage and which allowed some financial autonomy. Beata Guczalska details the treatment of actors from the twentieth century to today; although not persecuted as in other European contexts, actors were still subjected to a lack of social recognition and stability, poverty and a dependence on patrons. A history of acting is also shown to be one of shifting technologies: lighting, photography, radio, illustrated newspapers and cinema. Marek Waszkiel explores both the political and satirical valences of puppets as well as their aesthetic forms. He also analyses the development of acting in relation to objects that thinks acting through dialectical relationships. In this way, the history of puppetry is embedded in a history of ‘acting’, and this offers a new mode of considering performer training, craft and profession.

This chapter focuses on the early British reception of Ibsen. It begins with Edmund Gosse’s early initiatives and Ibsen’s introduction to the English-speaking world. The next phase involves a group of socialists and feminists who in the 1880s made Ibsen their own, including Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner and George Bernard Shaw. Towards the end of that decade Ibsen experienced surprising success in book form, not least through William Archer’s translations. His breakthrough on the British stage came in 1889 and was followed by a number of intense years with many productions and publications. One notable feature of Ibsen’s stage success was the strong involvement of a number of actresses, who even took on the stage-management of his plays, not least Janet Achurch, Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea. The most notorious event involved the 1891 performance of Ghosts at the Independent Theatre and involved brushes with the censor, while the production of Hedda Gabler was celebrated as a critical success. After the fierce cultural battles over Ibsen in the early 1890s, a swift canonization followed. The last part of the chapter briefly charts Ibsen’s association with the independent theatre sector, his place within the commercial London theatre and key publishing ventures.

African American actresses apparently appeared in Shakespeare productions for New York’s African Company in 1821. But after the suppression of the company and for the rest of the century the only other records that seem to survive of black actresses’ public Shakespearean performances describe recitals of speeches from the plays. Despite the recognized talent of two later black Shakespearean elocutionists, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Adrienne McLean Herndon, neither ever appeared in a full Shakespeare production – a prohibition pointing to the belief that black women were manifestly incapable of embodying Shakespearean meanings. Such representational policing operated within the period’s violently reactionary anti-blackness, and both actresses fashioned responses to it, with Davis eventually leaving the stage altogether for pan-African political organizing with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. Herndon, however, began a tradition of Shakespeare productions at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), soliciting new audiences and authorizing black women as Shakespeareans.

The fifth chapter examines how Ireland’s status as the bridgehead between Georgian Britain and Mughal India is also reflected in London performance venues dominated by women. I frame this transnational connection from the jaded viewpoint of Bengal ex-captain Thomas Williamson, who lambasts Abu Taleb Khan as an effeminate poser for bragging about his romantic intimacy with English noblewomen. Indeed, the Indo-Persian’s travelogue, Persian poems on London, the Diwan-i-Talib, and his essay “Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women” (printed in 1801 in European periodicals) was forged in two overlapping spaces of female sociability: the salon of the Duchess of Devonshire Georgiana Spencer, a politically outspoken socialite, and the London playhouses where star actresses ravished the Indian spectator with their professional artistry. Both spaces recall the skilled courtesans he would have known in Lucknow, mainly their perceived ability to debauch men. His subtle critique of elite British theatergoers who indulge in such impropriety aligns the feminized imperial capital with Persianate court rituals, panicking racist chauvinists like Williamson.

Actresses performing as Irish characters on the eighteenth-century London stage embodied the contradictions of national identity during the Irish Enlightenment. Playwright and actress Kitty Clive was the first to claim an ‘Irish-English’ identity and to turn topsy-turvy the notion of Irish inferiority. The chapter argues that more than their male counterparts, these actresses and the characters they played often served as intermediaries across gender, class, national and religious divides. The various parts for Irish women, largely comic, ranged from peasants and labourers to boisterous widows and would-be aristocrats. The most notable recurrent Irish characters are the cross-dressed and travestied women who perform roles that reveal fixed assumptions about gender and national identity and often expose English hypocrisy. Examples include Ann Barry in Garrick’s Irish Widow cross-dressed as her soldier brother; Margaret Doyle as Patrick in Holcroft’s Seduction; and Maria Macklin’s several roles playing a man or dressed as one, especially in her father Charles Macklin’s The School for Husbands. These women employed popular stereotypes but also attempted on occasion to empty them of their power. They are thus exemplary of the plight of immigrants who seek to assimilate while maintaining a distinct identity.

Actresses performing as Irish characters on the eighteenth-century London stage embodied the contradictions of national identity during the Irish Enlightenment. Playwright and actress Kitty Clive was the first to claim an ‘Irish-English’ identity and to turn topsy-turvy the notion of Irish inferiority. The chapter argues that more than their male counterparts, these actresses and the characters they played often served as intermediaries across gender, class, national and religious divides. The various parts for Irish women, largely comic, ranged from peasants and labourers to boisterous widows and would-be aristocrats. The most notable recurrent Irish characters are the cross-dressed and travestied women who perform roles that reveal fixed assumptions about gender and national identity and often expose English hypocrisy. Examples include Ann Barry in Garrick’s Irish Widow cross-dressed as her soldier brother; Margaret Doyle as Patrick in Holcroft’s Seduction; and Maria Macklin’s several roles playing a man or dressed as one, especially in her father Charles Macklin’s The School for Husbands. These women employed popular stereotypes but also attempted on occasion to empty them of their power. They are thus exemplary of the plight of immigrants who seek to assimilate while maintaining a distinct identity.