00:00:13.770 - 00:00:32.100

Travesty or to give a more detailed definition, the practise of an actor playing a character whose gender was not aligned with the actor's apparent birth sex, that practise is basically as old as the professional British

00:00:32.100 - 00:00:40.210

stage itself. During the Renaissance, female parts were, of course, as many people know, played by male youth on the public stage,

00:00:40.210 - 00:00:52.860

and they would have even had to cross-dress themselves play women who were cross-dressing when playing Shakespearean heroines like Rosalind in As You Like It. There was actually no formal ban on women

00:00:52.860 - 00:01:05.580

being professional actors during the Renaissance period, but social conventions requiring female modesty resulted in a kind of de facto prohibition. However, the presence of boy actors

00:01:05.580 - 00:01:18.070

wasn't without controversy. Religious pundits, for example, saw youths playing attractive young women as an invitation to Sodom medical feelings by audience members who were male.

00:01:18.070 - 00:01:33.560

Then shortly after, the theatre was banned entirely under the Puritan Rule of Oliver Cromwell, when the monarchy was replaced by the Commonwealth Republic. After the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660,

00:01:33.560 - 00:01:45.320

the king issued a Royal edict, which established two permanent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. And he also recommended that female parts be played by female actors.

00:01:45.320 - 00:01:57.100

This effectively ended the phenomenon of boy actors, but it also introduced a new form of cross-dressing to the British stage, the breeches role. In many restoration comedies, a female character

00:01:57.100 - 00:02:10.030

would have to disguise herself as a man or a teenage boy and subsequently expose the shape of her legs through stockings and breeches. Some actresses who became known for these parts

00:02:10.030 - 00:02:22.880

include Nell Gwyn and later in the century, Dorothy Jordan. Restoration comedies went out of fashion in the 19th Century because they were seen as too bawdy. But Nell Gwyn remained a national icon,

00:02:22.880 - 00:02:39.970

and the practises of actresses taking on a young male part migrated to the popular stage. An important context here is the Royal patents given to Covent Garden and Drury Lane.

00:02:39.970 - 00:02:55.360

These patents created a monopoly whereby only those two theatres and later, the Haymarket, had the right to stage legitimate or spoken drama. All other theatres or the minor theatres could only play genres

00:02:55.360 - 00:03:10.450

that had significant musical accompaniment, such as burlesque, pantomime and melodrama. This led to the surge of popularity and frequency in staging genres like pantomime and burlesque and melodrama.

00:03:10.450 - 00:03:21.910

Pantomime is an offshoot of Italian Commedia dell'arte, and it first was imported to the British stage in the 18th century. But it was really at the beginning of the 19th century

00:03:21.910 - 00:03:34.150

that it started to develop. And that's because those minor theatres that could only stage illegitimate drama were cropping up at a record pace in order to cater to the needs for entertainment by growing urban

00:03:34.150 - 00:03:47.180

populations. But the practise of casting actresses as the young male lead, that began in force really in the 1820s, not in pantomime, but in burlesque at the Olympic theatre,

00:03:47.180 - 00:04:01.660

in plays starring Madame Vestris. Pantomime was already a few decades old at this point, but it was the popularity of those burlesques at the Olympic that resulted in the migration of the character

00:04:01.660 - 00:04:14.620

of the principal boy, the male romantic lead, who by this time, would be played by a female actor to the pantomime stage as well. There had been a couple principal boys in panto before

00:04:14.620 - 00:04:23.740

the 1820s, but the 1820s is really when this phenomenon became common practise or started to come into common practise. The final key moment in this timeline

00:04:23.740 - 00:04:34.690

is the 1843 Theatres Act, and that's because managers of those minor Theatres started to put pressure on the government to end the monopoly because--

00:04:34.690 - 00:04:44.170

of course, they wanted to end the monopoly because it was restricting their business practises. They could only stage some genres but not the whole range of genres.

00:04:44.170 - 00:04:54.910

And the government and the crown eventually overturned the monopoly in 1843, and their hopes was that overturning the monopoly would actually elevate the British stage because it meant

00:04:54.910 - 00:05:06.070

that all Theatres could perform Shakespeare and Sheridan, not just Covent Garden and Drury Lane. But the 1843 Theatres Act ended up actually having the opposite effect.

00:05:06.070 - 00:05:21.530

And that's because the monopoly opened up the market and turned the stage into a highly competitive commercialised industry, in which survival depended upon making profits by getting as many people in the auditorium

00:05:21.530 - 00:05:29.300

as possible. And what kind of theatrical fare drew audiences into the auditorium? Burlesque and pantomime.

00:05:29.300 - 00:05:42.560

And the profitability of burlesque and pantomime also ensured the return of female impersonation by male actors as a common practise to the British stage. Both genres, burlesque and pantomime,

00:05:42.560 - 00:05:52.860

included dame figures who were post-menopausal or otherwise desexualized figures, who were played by male comic actors. This Convention has come to define pantomime,

00:05:52.860 - 00:06:07.100

but to my understanding, it actually started in burlesque. An American example from this collection is the Macbeth Travesty, in which Lady Macbeth is played by not a female tragic actress, but rather by the popular comic

00:06:07.100 - 00:06:17.430

Mr. Burton. This prompt book actually was owned by Mr. Burton, and so therefore, the annotations and the blocking gives you some sense of how exactly

00:06:17.430 - 00:06:40.660

the pantomime dame or the burlesque dame moved on stage. The most common kind of travesty was, of course, the principal boy in pantomime and burlesque. Burlesque has not survived as a narrative genre in the same way

00:06:40.660 - 00:06:54.970

that pantomime has, at least in a British context, but both were kind of sibling genres during the 19th century. In terms of their similarities, both took a familiar narrative, whether it was a fairy tale or a folk tale

00:06:54.970 - 00:07:09.400

or the latest opera or Shakespearean production, and transposed it to a modern setting that it gently satirised with topical references. The main difference is that pantomime included

00:07:09.400 - 00:07:27.700

a lot more fairy tale elements, whereas burlesque really emphasised the sad horizon of the script of the story that it was transposing into the modern day. With pantomime, often a portion of the narrative

00:07:27.700 - 00:07:42.680

after a narrative opening occurs through a transformation that then takes the characters into fairyland and that they consequently take on new roles as the fairyland counterparts of their roles

00:07:42.680 - 00:08:00.050

from the original narrative opening. In burlesque, by contrast, the emphasis is less on world building and more on the interest of how exactly the original source text is modernised and satirised.

00:08:00.050 - 00:08:11.170

Burlesque does this through inversion, so either high characters will be vulgarised or low characters will be elevated. For example, A Burlesque of the Tempest held by the British

00:08:11.170 - 00:08:26.390

Library turns Prospero into a Victorian schoolmaster and turns Ariel into his head boy. Ariel, by the end of the 19th century, was interpreted on stage as a feminine figure,

00:08:26.390 - 00:08:39.680

as we can see in this collection. So by turning Ariel into a male youth played by an actress, this choice highlights the appeal of a kind of androgyny that hovers at the boundary between male effeminacy

00:08:39.680 - 00:08:50.060

and womanhood. Sometimes this inversion could also happen at the level of individual scenes or numbers. And we can see a good example of this in a Burlesque Extravaganza

00:08:50.060 - 00:09:01.080

of the Fair One with the Golden Locks held by this collection. In this play, the King's minstrel, graceful, who is played by a woman, sings a minstrel song about Jim Crow.

00:09:01.080 - 00:09:16.280

Here, the term minstrel changes from its historical meaning as an entertainment in the Royal court and to what in the 19th century, as well as today, was its contemporary meaning, which is that of blackface performance.

00:09:16.280 - 00:09:29.550

And so here, we see an obvious vulgarisation of the term minstrel going on in this scene in the play. And just as a side note, minstrelsy, as blackface performance as it originated in the 19th century,

00:09:29.550 - 00:09:45.710

was an incredibly important influence on burlesque. And often the dances and the way of inhabiting the body that the principal boy did on stage in burlesque was inspired by the corporeal language

00:09:45.710 - 00:09:59.830

that you see in minstrelsy. And you see that later in the 20th century with minstrelsy as being a really important influence on musical comedy. But travesty didn't just occur in popular comic genres.

00:09:59.830 - 00:10:11.190

Sometimes an actress would take on a role written for a male actor in order to display her histrionic powers. A key example from this century was Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet.

00:10:11.190 - 00:10:25.890

And then you have boys in legitimate dramas also being played by actresses. And this would often be the case if the boy was a street urchin or otherwise sort of meant to provoke pathos and suffering,

00:10:25.890 - 00:10:38.990

and actresses were seen as being especially good at doing this. This kind of dramatic cross-dressing was almost exclusively performed by women, except in the context of school plays

00:10:38.990 - 00:10:51.030

or amateur theatricals in which young men or older men could also play female roles as well. Finally, you have disguises roles, which refers to when over the course of a narrative,

00:10:51.030 - 00:11:06.460

a character temporarily adopts the clothing of the other gender for some reason needed by the plot. Restoration comedies using this trope weren't really revived, but Shakespeare plays that did use this trope were,

00:11:06.460 - 00:11:17.340

of course, often revived. There was a huge culture of reviving and seeing Shakespeare in the 19th century. Ellen Terry, for example, became a national icon in part

00:11:17.340 - 00:11:30.030

by playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice. And those who know Shakespeare well will know that Portia has to disguise herself as a lawyer in order to argue for her husband's friends

00:11:30.030 - 00:11:42.010

deaths being relieved, so he no longer has to pay them to the moneylender Shylock. Other frequently revived Shakespeare plays using a disguised role include Twelfth Night,

00:11:42.010 - 00:11:53.560

Cymbeline and As You Like It. By the end of the century, such disguise roles also started appearing in musical comedy, which was, of course, the offshoot of burlesque.

00:12:01.600 - 00:12:13.910

On one hand, there is significant overlap. And the reason is kind of obvious. The United States was a former British colony. And even after the United States declared independence,

00:12:13.910 - 00:12:26.360

the theatre industries in both countries continued to be deeply intertwined, especially because of course, they shared the same language. Stars from both countries would cross the Atlantic to tour.

00:12:26.360 - 00:12:35.270

So for example, you see Ellen Terry playing Portia in New York City, just as she did in Edinburgh, in London and in the British colonies of New Zealand and Australia.

00:12:35.270 - 00:12:45.440

Plays and generic conventions would also migrate. So for example, scholars typically identify the burlesque principal boy as coming to the United States in 1868,

00:12:45.440 - 00:12:55.210

when British star Lydia Thompson and her troupe came to the US on a tour. Pantomimes were also performed in the United States, but there are differences.

00:12:55.210 - 00:13:04.310

Even though male impersonation in burlesque was brought to the United States by Lydia Thompson, it took years to migrate. It was about maybe 30 or 40 years

00:13:04.310 - 00:13:12.430

before the convention really started to appear in the United States. And it remained stigmatised in the US in the way that it never did in the UK.

00:13:12.430 - 00:13:24.110

In the UK, for example, burlesque was seen as naughty, but it was also normalised at the same time. Additionally, in the United States, the British tradition of the Christmas panto

00:13:24.110 - 00:13:37.740

never really caught on. However, what the United States had, which the UK did not have, was a generation defining tragic actress who played male parts. In the UK in the end of the 18th century,

00:13:37.740 - 00:13:46.200

you did have this with Sarah Siddons, who famously played Hamlet. However, she didn't really have any successors in the 19th century.

00:13:46.200 - 00:13:54.890

No one kind of took up the mantle of playing Hamlet, who was an actress after she retired in 1812. I couldn't really give a conclusive answer

00:13:54.890 - 00:14:10.750

as to why this was the case. My personal hypothesis is simply that there were enough famous and beloved male tragic actors throughout the 19th century who audiences were eager to see play Hamlet, for example.

00:14:10.750 - 00:14:24.860

Examples include Edmund and Charles Kean earlier in the century, and then by the end of the century, Henry Irving. By contrast, we can see America as producing the successor

00:14:24.860 - 00:14:35.520

to Sarah Siddons in the form of the actress Charlotte Cushman. And her Shakespearean performances actually helped to bring legitimacy to the American stage.

00:14:43.530 - 00:14:53.640

I'll begin by naming some actresses who were known for playing principal boys on the burlesque and pantomime stage, because that was, of course, the most common form of travesty

00:14:53.640 - 00:15:04.650

during the period. In roughly chronological order, they are Madame Vestris, Marie Bancroft, who was later known as Mrs. Bancroft when she married

00:15:04.650 - 00:15:18.120

Squire Bancroft, Lydia Thompson, her niece, Violet Cameron, Nelly Power and Nellie Farren. A few of these women went actually on to play female roles in legitimate comedies

00:15:18.120 - 00:15:29.550

once they matured and wanted to take a new direction in their career. Examples include Madame Vestris and Marie Wilton. In fact, in this collection, you can see a playbill

00:15:29.550 - 00:15:45.200

that lists Vestris as playing Gertrude in an 1834 burletta entitled The Loan of a Lover. However, principal boys weren't always something an actress could or wanted to mature away from.

00:15:45.200 - 00:16:00.640

So for example, Nellie Farren played principal boys throughout her career, right to the end. Actresses known for playing disguises roles in comedies include Louisa Nesbit during the Regency period,

00:16:00.640 - 00:16:10.480

and then in musical comedies at the end of the century, Marie Tempest. With regard to the dramatic stage, actresses who are known for playing specifically boys

00:16:10.480 - 00:16:22.690

include Mrs. Keeley, who was known most for playing Jack Shepherd, as well as Smike in Nicholas Nickleby and Jennie Lee. Lee actually got her start on the burlesque and pantomime

00:16:22.690 - 00:16:35.140

stage, but her career underwent a dramatic shift when she played the character of Jo the crossing sweeper in Dickens's Bleak House. Her second husband had adapted the play,

00:16:35.140 - 00:16:47.050

and she first played Jo while on tour in the United States. Her pathetic embodiment of Dickens's character was so lauded that she basically couldn't play any other characters.

00:16:47.050 - 00:16:58.090

She wanted to return to the comic line, but her public would only be happy if she played Jo again. And she played Jo for years and years, basically for the rest of her career.

00:16:58.090 - 00:17:12.420

You can even see an example of her stationary in this collection where her letterhead literally includes the name Jo on it. Women who played adult men in dramatic parts

00:17:12.420 - 00:17:19.660

have already been mentioned a few times. The American Charlotte Cushman and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt, even though she was French,

00:17:19.660 - 00:17:29.880

she frequently toured the US and the UK because she basically many times alienated the Comedie-Francaise through her own independence. And so she would just go off and tour on her own.

00:17:29.880 - 00:17:40.270

With regard to male actors, the development of the pantomime dame as a line of business that an actor might specialise in was a bit of a later development than the principal boy.

00:17:40.270 - 00:17:53.180

And this is because for much of the century, the principal male comic part in a pantomime was actually the clown rather than the dame. But over the course of the century,

00:17:53.180 - 00:18:06.770

the narrative opening of the pantomime would be expanded. And then the harlequinade, the intermediary section featuring Harlequin and the clown, that gradually became condensed.

00:18:06.770 - 00:18:16.180

And so with the expansion of the narrative opening, more prominence was given to the dame, and that became the principal male comic part on the pantomime stage.

00:18:16.180 - 00:18:30.100

And so, for example, by the early 20th century, you can see a playbill that gives Barry Lupino first billing for playing Mother Hubbard as far afield as Adelaide, Australia.

00:18:30.100 - 00:18:43.820

Some important names from the previous generation in the 1880s and 1890s were Herbert Campbell and Dan Leno. All three, however, were apparently heterosexual. And Campbell and Lupino, we know married multiple times.

00:18:51.990 - 00:19:04.870

The traditional view among scholars has been that in the case of male impersonation by an actress, travesty didn't disguise the women underneath the clothes,

00:19:04.870 - 00:19:17.280

but rather exposed the female body in order to titillate male spectators. After all, travesty showed off a actresses legs in an era in which they would have otherwise

00:19:17.280 - 00:19:32.470

been completely covered by layers of crinoline and petticoats. And there is certainly evidence that the cross-dressed actress was seen as a sexualized female body, first and foremost.

00:19:32.470 - 00:19:48.420

Whenever the British stage censor, for example, gave a licence to a pantomime or burlesque script for approval so that it could be staged, he included a disclaimer that reminded the manager to prevent

00:19:48.420 - 00:20:02.850

the appearance of any indecency of dress on stage, because of course, indecency of dress on stage wouldn't have been indicated in the script. And so therefore, the censor had to remind the managers

00:20:02.850 - 00:20:12.210

that he knew that they could do that on stage, even if technically, they weren't allowed to because he didn't in advance, if he only had the script to read.

00:20:12.210 - 00:20:25.450

Other examples of the sexualization of the travestied actress include the scandal that erupted when the American actress Ada Isaacs Menken played the lead role in a dramatic adaptation of Lord Byron's

00:20:25.450 - 00:20:40.320

Mazepa. In this play, she had to appear in a light coloured body stocking that basically made her appear nude. And the public and the newspapers

00:20:40.320 - 00:20:51.450

in both the UK and the US basically erupted in both horror and excitement at this part of the play. Other evidence includes the response received

00:20:51.450 - 00:21:00.720

by Lydia Thompson when she brought her troupe to the United States. This response included comparisons of Thompson and her fellow actresses

00:21:00.720 - 00:21:10.650

basically to prostitutes. In this sexualization makes a degree of sense, given that in the case of burlesque and pantomime travestied actresses often didn't

00:21:10.650 - 00:21:21.700

dress like ordinary men of the period. Because female travesty originated in the era of breeches roles when men would wear stockings and skin tight breeches,

00:21:21.700 - 00:21:31.290

the costumes of the principal boy and the pages in the chorus in burlesque and pantomime differed from the sartorial norms for men during the Victorian period.

00:21:31.290 - 00:21:47.920

So instead of wearing like long trousers and starched search fronts, principle boys wore tights and short trunks and tightly corseted bodices and lots of jewellery and lots of drapery.

00:21:47.920 - 00:21:57.040

And so consequently, they did not look like ordinary men of the period. And to some extent, their body was quite exposed through the tights and the corset

00:21:57.040 - 00:22:09.820

in further emphasising the slimness of their waists. A good example of this in the NCS collection is a bill advertising Lydia Thompson's performance in Robin Hood at Portsmouth, which includes an engraving of Thompson

00:22:09.820 - 00:22:24.220

in the role at the centre of the bill. On the top half, Thompson wears a vaguely mediaeval velvet jacket, which is pretty compatible with our imagination of Robin Hood, but this velvet jacket is corseted.

00:22:24.220 - 00:22:34.420

And below, she wears short trunks that end right at the top of her thighs, which I think we can assume Robin Hood did not wear. But the erotic appeal of the cross-dressed actress,

00:22:34.420 - 00:22:44.020

at least in the context of burlesque, could be more complex. And a good example of this is Madame Vestris. Of course, cast of Madame Vestris famous legs

00:22:44.020 - 00:22:58.770

became collector's items in Regency Britain, but she wasn't exclusively seen as just a kind of fetishized female defined by her attraction to the male gaze. So for example, the periodical of the Tatler

00:22:58.770 - 00:23:11.410

called her the ideal beau, the personification of Ganymede or Adonis. The reference to Ganymede, who in Greek mythology was Zeus's beautiful young cupbearer and lover,

00:23:11.410 - 00:23:23.460

suggests that the basis of Vestris' appeal to men might have actually been homoerotic rather than heterosexual. And the association of Vestris with these kind

00:23:23.460 - 00:23:35.500

of homoerotic figures can even be seen in an engraving held by the University of Adelaide, where we see Vestris costumed as Page Julian. Page where homoerotic figures during this period,

00:23:35.500 - 00:23:46.920

because of their association with Ganymede and the younger partner in an intergenerational Greek relationship, as discussed by, for example, Socrates in Plato's Symposium.

00:23:46.920 - 00:24:00.060

Vestris also had her female admirers. Vestris style somewhat resembled Lord Byron's. And even Byron's ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, apparently had a bit of a crush on Madame Vestris.

00:24:00.060 - 00:24:16.180

When Lamb met Vestris at some kind of occasion, she once expressed an admiration for the actress so passionate that it became physical. A diarist records Lady Caro as squeezing Madame Vestris

00:24:16.180 - 00:24:28.180

upon meeting her. The diarist actually went on to quote a lesbian verse from Sappho, which indicates that there was literally a sapphic undercurrent perceived by onlookers

00:24:28.180 - 00:24:40.030

during this moment between Lady Caro and Madame Vestris. Another critic from the period also called transvestism, vile and beastly, perhaps because it encouraged homoerotic feelings

00:24:40.030 - 00:24:49.790

among both women and men looking at the travestied female actress. And scripts actually often played up the attractions of the principal boy.

00:24:49.790 - 00:25:02.770

And this could even be true for principal boys in their attractions for women in the plays as well. In the Fair One with the Golden Locks, the character Lucina refers to Graceful, the principal boy

00:25:02.770 - 00:25:14.260

character as a pretty fellow. But the meaning of transvestism wasn't just erotic, whether heterosexual or homoerotic. Of particular significance is, of course, the fact that

00:25:14.260 - 00:25:26.500

on the dramatic stage, as well as in a lot of burlesques and pantomimes, actresses often played young men or male youth rather than mature men. On one hand, this could be seen as desexualizing

00:25:26.500 - 00:25:38.080

the travestied actress because it associates her with innocence and ethereality. And so in such a view, playing a boy rather than an adult man could be seen as neutralising the subversive potential

00:25:38.080 - 00:25:46.280

of travesty. But the boyishness of the travestied actress could also have other meanings. In the case of burlesque, for example,

00:25:46.280 - 00:25:57.370

stars like Marie Wilton and Nellie Farren were seen as gamines defined by their intense corporeality rather than their lack of it. So for example, accounts of fair and really emphasise

00:25:57.370 - 00:26:11.570

the spontaneity and restlessness of her body's movements and the kind of undisciplined boyishness of her spirits. When an actress played a boy in a drama, one of the significant meanings of the casting

00:26:11.570 - 00:26:22.440

could be its role in helping to amplifying the social message of the play. For example, with Jennie Lee playing Jo in an adaptation of Bleak House,

00:26:22.440 - 00:26:33.060

she could play the role in part because she was very petite, and so she literally had the stature to play a little crossing sweeper who was probably like 10 years old in Victorian England.

00:26:33.060 - 00:26:45.800

However, she was also a really skilled, dramatic performer. And critics were just absolutely wowed about how she transformed herself through her costuming, through her hair, through her makeup and through her gesture

00:26:45.800 - 00:27:03.230

into Dickens's friendless, homeless street urchin. And because she embodied this character so completely, she provoked tremendous pathos in the audience and their sympathy with the suffering of homeless children

00:27:03.230 - 00:27:19.790

and otherwise impoverished children in Britain cities. She even kind of eventually became a Victorian version of a celebrity patron, charity patron, for these children. This kind of response was also incited by Mrs. Keeley as Mike

00:27:19.790 - 00:27:32.590

in Nicholas Nickleby, another Dickens adaptation and probably a lot of melodramas in which actresses played neglected and unfriended boys. With regard to female impersonation,

00:27:32.590 - 00:27:46.230

because as a line of work, it didn't really take off until the end of the Victorian period. There's more limited discourse about it. However, the fact that a role like Lady Macbeth in the Macbeth

00:27:46.230 - 00:27:59.720

travesty was played by a leading male comedian, that kind of tells you a lot about how that kind of role was seen. It indicates that a role played by a male actor that

00:27:59.720 - 00:28:11.450

was a female role, it was probably seen as a grotesque hag, whose lack of sexual appeal would simply be amplified and intensified by the fact that she was playing a mature male actor.

00:28:11.450 - 00:28:26.980

And thus, a male actor could amplify the comic nature of the role without putting or directing suspicion to himself or the character in question. However, characters who express desire or were more attractive

00:28:26.980 - 00:28:40.060

if they were played by men, were or could be a little bit more subversive. So for example, in 1896, an audience member at the Oxford Music Hall in London complained to the council

00:28:40.060 - 00:28:55.180

when the end of one musical number that consisted of a scantily clad woman dancing with a man actually revealed the scantily clad woman to have actually been a scantily clad man

00:28:55.180 - 00:29:17.470

dancing with another man. For me, another way of asking this question is to ask, was there a 19th century Charlotte Charke? So students and scholars of the 18th century theatre will know

00:29:17.470 - 00:29:29.590

of Charke as this notorious actress, who, in addition to occasionally playing male parts on stage, also according to her memoirs, occasionally presented as a man off stage.

00:29:29.590 - 00:29:48.240

She also indicates in a kind of circumspect way that she also engaged with women in romantic or erotic relationships when she was presenting as a man offstage. So for example, her memoirs present a passing reference

00:29:48.240 - 00:30:05.250

to a Mrs. Brown with whom she travelled when Charke was presenting as a Mr. Brown. Historians have yet to uncover any 19th century equivalent insofar as no actress known for playing male parts or disguise

00:30:05.250 - 00:30:16.530

roles in the theatre during this period published a memoir that recounted presenting as a female husband, which was the term used in this period. However, I've already repeated some names

00:30:16.530 - 00:30:28.560

in listing performers who specialise in travesty and enlisting practitioners characterised by biographers as engaging in same sex relationships. And those performers are Charlotte Cushman and Sarah

00:30:28.560 - 00:30:37.180

Bernhardt, both of whom were known for playing tragic male parts. Although, Bernhardt also specialised in femme fatales and courtesans.

00:30:37.180 - 00:30:47.920

Bernhardt's role as Napoleon the second in the play L'Aiglon was also later taken up by the American actress Maude Adams, whose lesbian relationships were well documented.

00:30:47.920 - 00:31:02.890

However, Adams really only achieved fame towards the end of the 19th century and really starting off as a major international celebrity in 1904 after playing Peter Pan. So I'm not sure how well represented

00:31:02.890 - 00:31:15.080

she is in these collections. Many burlesque and panto stars, however, were not same sex attracted that we know of. But instead, according to the historical record,

00:31:15.080 - 00:31:26.110

they were heterosexual divorcees. Jennie Lee and Violet Cameron, for example, were both sued for adultery with male correspondence, as well as musical comedy star Marie Tempest.

00:31:26.110 - 00:31:35.950

And in these collections is actually a letter from Marie Tempest in which she signs with the name Cosmo Linux, who is the name of her second husband.

00:31:35.950 - 00:31:54.160

And these high-profile adultery cases involving actresses known for playing burlesque principle boys or other disguise roles really contributed to the association of this line of business with being a sexual adventuress

00:31:54.160 - 00:32:08.750

or being prone or vulnerable to predatorial playboys. In the case of male actors who specialise in travesty, it's much more difficult to uncover evidence of sexual or gender non-conformity

00:32:08.750 - 00:32:22.650

in their personal lives. As I previously mentioned, the stage names of those who appear in the legal records or in newspaper police columns as being female impersonators,

00:32:22.650 - 00:32:33.320

their stage names have basically been lost to history. And so consequently, in order to recover those names, a lot of research still has to be done. It can be done, but my understanding

00:32:33.320 - 00:32:47.880

is that it hasn't yet been done. And it's easy to understand why those who were famous, who were already big stars, whose professional names are available, if they were same sex attracted,

00:32:47.880 - 00:32:55.710

why they wouldn't have want their personal lives made public in any way. And that's because same sex intimacy between men was criminalised throughout the century.

00:32:55.710 - 00:33:06.670

And so the stakes of keeping one's private life private were quite high. However, the profession was rumoured to shelter homosexual men and gender non-conforming males.

00:33:06.670 - 00:33:24.890

For example, a smutty guidebook from 1855 claimed that there had been many margery's in the theatrical profession. The answer to that question is a resolute yes.

00:33:24.890 - 00:33:38.110

The evidence is scattered, but in constellation, it paints a pretty coherent picture of travesties queer appeal for all genders, particularly the appeal of male impersonators by actresses.

00:33:38.110 - 00:33:56.440

For me, a really vivid example of this that shows just how old or early in the 19th century this appeal was comes from the foundational work of British sexology at the end of the 19th century, which was Havelock Ellis' sexual inversion.

00:33:56.440 - 00:34:08.180

Ellis includes the case study of a male born person, who by this point in the century is quite old. But during his youth, when he was a boy, he loved to perform Madame Vestris songs as a child.

00:34:08.180 - 00:34:18.860

And then later in adulthood, this person came to identify with femininity, predominantly. Boulton and Park, the female impersonators who were tried for committing sodomy,

00:34:18.860 - 00:34:28.760

they were observed multiple times attending Theatres throughout London in either female dress or androgynous dress. And the plays that they most frequently frequented

00:34:28.760 - 00:34:40.020

were burlesques, including a burlesque at the Lyceum Theatre starring Jennie Lee. In the 1890s, so a little bit later, Wilde and his male companions frequented the Gaiety Theatre,

00:34:40.020 - 00:34:50.700

which I've already mentioned, was associated with burlesque and really specialised in burlesque. It wasn't just an association. And at around the same time, George Ives,

00:34:50.700 - 00:35:04.020

who was a groundbreaking gay rights campaigner and activist, he recorded in his diaries seeing a lot of his kind at the musical comedy Theatres. And musical comedies, of course, evolved from burlesque.

00:35:04.020 - 00:35:18.740

And another piece of evidence comes from a study of a homosexual prostitution ring in 1920s Glasgow. The historian notes that many of the male sex workers in this ring took their aliases from actresses who specialised

00:35:18.740 - 00:35:38.250

in male impersonation in the 1890s and early 20th century. The nature of the appeal of the principle of boy, for example, to queer male spectators is a bit difficult to ascertain. We could ask, did the effeminacy of the principal boy

00:35:38.250 - 00:35:53.350

spark desire in Ernest Boulton or Oscar Wilde? It's impossible to say. Could he-- the principal boy have instead presented a form of attractive male effeminacy to emulate?

00:35:53.350 - 00:36:03.870

That's also possible. What we do know-- what is certain is that the homosexual Theatre critic James Agate wrote rapturously of his love of the principal boy

00:36:03.870 - 00:36:14.310

of his Victorian youth. He recounted his love for their handsome turns and body slapping of their thighs. For Agate, the principal boy's appeal

00:36:14.310 - 00:36:28.090

lay in the combination of pretty feminine dress with the insouciance of male youth. Male impersonators seem to have inspired erotic role playing among same sex attracted women.

00:36:28.090 - 00:36:40.720

Pages, for example, were a standard feature on the pantomime and burlesque stage. In fact, there could even be entire large choruses of women in Page costumes in the background

00:36:40.720 - 00:36:52.300

when it wasn't even narratively necessary or even justified. American poet Natalie Barney dressed up as a Page to court the courtesan Liane de Pougy. And her next lover, Renée Vivien,

00:36:52.300 - 00:37:02.920

dressed as a Page in several photographs that she took with Barney. Another of Barney's lovers, the bisexual Olive Custance, referred to herself as a Page in her courtship letters

00:37:02.920 - 00:37:12.760

to Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful blonde lover of Oscar Wilde. Custance even sent Douglas photos of herself in male clothing and referred to him

00:37:12.760 - 00:37:25.190

as her Prince Charming, which was the principal boy archetype, so beloved by the Theatre critic James Agate. The Prince and the Page did not form a homoerotic couple on the pantomime or burlesque stage,

00:37:25.190 - 00:37:39.630

but they did in this ostensibly heterosexual courtship that actually had a lot of queer resonance because of the orientations and cultural embedding of both Douglas and Custance.

00:37:39.630 - 00:37:52.020

With regard to female impersonation, its affinity with sexual and gender non-conforming male use was actually a connection made by the public. The Boulton and Park trial actually brought the term drag

00:37:52.020 - 00:38:01.620

into public discourse for the first time. And the newspaper, The Times, speculated that young men started going in and out of drag in public in their social lives after either playing

00:38:01.620 - 00:38:13.830

female parts in amateur theatricals or seeing travesty on stage. In the 20th century, when drag became a professional performance genre, several practitioners actually played

00:38:13.830 - 00:38:18.500

pantomime dames, or at least got their start on the pantomime stage.