Overview

Examining theatre economics, rhetorical acting, cross-dressing, the staging of 'self', and the alignment of motherhood and work, this book reveals how actresses drew on changing models of gender to achieve phenomenal levels of success over the eighteenth-century. By doing so it sheds new light on the cultural significance of female performance.

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9781349334483

Table of Contents

Reviews

'This book makes an important step in the growing body of outstanding scholarship in theatre and performance history by focussing upon the lives and successes of actresses as active participants in the business of theatre. Students of public history, cultural history, gender studies, English literature as well as theatre and performance will find this stimulating study challenges many preconceptions about the actress and her part in the growth of the modern economy of celebrity.' - Dr Gilli Bush-Bailey, Professor of Women's Performance History, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

This book provides a new focus through a study of how these actresses negotiated and displayed contemporary concepts of gender in order to create themselves as profitable and marketable commodities. ... Brooks offers an impressive contribution to the study of eighteenth-century actresses, appealing to scholars of theatrical history, eighteenth-century drama and women's history ... . (Anna Louise Senkiw, The BARS Review, Issue 48, Autumn, 2016)

Author Information

Helen E. M. Brooks is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, UK. is Senior 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.

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