How to Represent Female Identity on the Restoration Stage: Actresses (Self) Fashioning

Raquel Serrano González; Laura Martínez-García

doi:10.2478/ipcj-2014-0007

Authors

Raquel Serrano González University of Oviedo, Dpto. Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa
Laura Martínez-García University of Oviedo, Dpto. Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/ipcj-2014-0007

Keywords:

Actresses, Restoration, Bracegirdle, Gwyn, gender notions, deployment of alliance, deployment of sexuality

Abstract

Despite the shifting ideologies of gender of the seventeenth century, the arrival of the first actresses caused deep social anxiety: theatre gave women a voice to air grievances and to contest, through their own bodies, traditional gender roles. This paper studies two of the best-known actresses, Nell Gwyn and Anne Bracegirdle, and the different public personae they created to negotiate their presence in this all—male world. In spite of their differing strategies, both women gained fame and profit in the male—dominated theatrical marketplace, confirming them as the ultimate “gender benders,” who appropriated the male role of family’s supporter and bread-winner.

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Author Biographies

Raquel Serrano González, University of Oviedo, Dpto. Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa

Raquel Serrano González has been a Research Fellow at the University of Oviedo (Spain) for the last three years; she is currently finishing her PhD thesis on the reception of Don Quixote in seventeenth-century England. Among her research interests are the impact and influence of Cervantes’s masterpiece, seventeenth-and eighteenth century British theatre and gender and sexuality studies.

Laura Martínez-García, University of Oviedo, Dpto. Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa

Laura Martínez-García has been an Associate Lecturer at the University of Oviedo (Spain) for the last three years; she is now in the process of publishing her PhD thesis on identity, sexuality and resistance in Restoration drama. Her research interests include Restoration drama and culture, gender studies, the influence of the 17th and 18th-centuries on modern day popular cultural products and written accounts of early explorations and alpinism.

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