Abstract
This essay considers Miss Newcombe's and Kate Terry's genderfluid performances as Prince Arthur in William Shakespeare's King John in 1842 and 1852 as manifestations of staged tomboyism, or childhood female masculinity performed theatrically onstage. Employing Jack Halberstam's study of tomboyism and Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity and social construction of sex, I argue that child actresses Newcombe and Terry performed genderfluid tomboyism in their respective productions, but that such tomboyism was ultimately tamed through the editing of their character's speech. This is revealed through a reading of Charles Kean's production prompt book that shows Arthur's speech was edited to diminish masculine language and augment feminine language. Such editing suggests larger efforts to characterise the role of Arthur as feminine in order to prohibit unrestrained tomboyism onstage and preserve the ideals of gender politics and Victorian girlhood offstage.
On 6 February 1852, Queen Victoria commanded a performance of William Shakespeare's King John by Charles Kean's company at Windsor Castle. Later that night, she wrote in her journal about the performance, applauding Shakespeare's own genius, the costumes, and the actors themselves. After praising adult actors Kean, Ellen Kean, and Samuel Phelps in their roles, she went on to compliment the young child actress, Kate Terry: ‘the character of poor little “Arthur” was most touchingly & & [sic] beautifully acted by Miss Kate Terry, a little girl of 9 years old. The scene between Arthur & Hubert, was heartrending’. 1 Indeed, it seems that the queen was not only impressed by Terry's ‘touching’ and ‘beautiful’ acting, but by the fact that Terry was just nine at the time of her performance.
Queen Victoria was not the only one to be moved by Terry as Arthur. Also in attendance at the royal command performance was historian and politician Lord Macaulay, and he was equally touched. In his own diary, he, too, wrote of Terry as Arthur, going so far as to assert that it was ‘worth having passed middle-age to have seen Little Kate Terry as Prince Arthur’. 2 Not only was Terry's performance of the prince touching and beautiful, as the queen had described, but it also seemingly made middle age worth it. As seen by Queen Victoria's and Lord Macaulay's reactions to the performance, Terry's Arthur was particularly poignant and would go on to be celebrated by many in the years to come.
In addition to Terry, another child actress also performed the character. Simply known as Miss Newcombe, she played Arthur in actor-manager William Charles Macready's production of King John at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, ten years before Terry, starting in 1842. 3 Newcombe's and Terry's genderfluid performances as Arthur, like so many before them, are demonstrative of the theatrical phenomenon that was the Shakespearean breeches role. After the English Restoration, what has historically been known as cross-gender acting was a common theatrical practice: girls and women played male character roles, known as breeches roles, in what was often an attempt at theatrical novelty to lure in audiences. 4 By the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet or Romeo were being played by women in great numbers, with their performances being recognised as some of the greatest of the era. 5 Though past theatre historians described this genre of performance as ‘cross-gender’, such a term is now outdated, as it implies a singular gender binary that inaccurately represents these performances of gender. As will be seen, child actresses performed the role of Arthur in such a way that they did not abandon all femininity despite the character's male gender identity; in fact, the role was edited to enhance its male femininity. This suggests a fluidity in performed gender as it showed a girl actress playing a boy character that subsequently exhibits feminine qualities and defies gender-essentialist expectations. For roles like Arthur, a character of young male nobility, this thereby represents a fluid spectrum of performed gendered qualities rather than a strict gender binary. Sos Eltis has called for ‘More open, fluid, and multiple critical frameworks’ to examine performances like these. 6 Accordingly, I follow suit and use the term ‘genderfluid’ to describe these kinds of performances. Though Newcombe and Terry were, by no means, the only young girl actresses that took on young, genderfluid male roles, their celebrated performances in this princely role offer an interesting case study through which to investigate tomboyism, Victorian gender politics, and the subsequent preservation of girlhood in nineteenth-century performance. 7
In this essay, I investigate the portrayals of Arthur by child actresses as a performance of genderfluid staged tomboyism, or childhood female masculinity performed theatrically onstage. Because gender was malleable for children, both in life and in performance, a child actress was able to adopt the persona of a young boy prince for the duration of the play. An instance of a girl playing a boy can be considered a performative tomboyism, as the young girl identifies as a boy for a given performance. This presence of genderfluidity onstage suggests a certain degree of acceptability in casting a young actress in a male character, yet such acceptability remains complicated due to the taming of tomboyism through edited speech. Arthur's dialogue throughout was edited in the production prompt book to heighten his feminine language and thereby stress his feminine characterisation. The result of this was a feminine characterisation of Arthur that aligned the character more with the gender identity of the actress, prohibited uncontrolled tomboyism and genderfluidity, and protected Victorian gender norms. Such genderfluidity, therefore, no longer served as an example of gender progress, but rather, as a tool in the campaign to preserve Victorian gender norms for girls both onstage and off.
Hitherto, there has been valuable discussion on Shakespearean breeches roles and on children's work in Victorian theatre; however, when discussed, these topics have remained mostly distinct from one another. For example, Anne Russell's article ‘Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage’ studies the performance genre of tragic breeches roles, highlighting key Shakespearean parts, but focused on adult actresses only. Anne Varty's Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain, is the first monograph to outline children's work and labour in the Victorian theatre industry. Nevertheless, Varty makes only a singular passing mention to one instance of young girls in genderfluid Shakespearean roles—that of sisters Ellen and Kate Bateman playing Richmond and the titular Richard in Shakespeare's Richard III, respectively. 8 She omits any larger study of young girls in genderfluid Shakespearean roles. The only work to merge the two fields of breeches roles and children's labour on the nineteenth-century stage is Marlis Schweitzer's Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. 9 My essay follows Schweitzer's model, but focuses specifically on child actresses portraying Arthur. I offer a textual exploration of the girlhood performance of tomboyism on the Victorian stage and demonstrate how such tomboyism was ultimately tamed through the editing of the production's prompt book. The ultimate significance of this case study is a new reading of the Shakespearean role of Arthur as being used in the larger campaign to preserve Victorian girlhood during the pivotal, middle-stage years of a progressive gender movement.
Victorian Gender Politics and Staging Tomboyism
Modern understandings of Victorian gender politics have largely been dominated by the ideology of the separate spheres. This ideology, popularised in modern scholarship by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, describes two separate settings wherein men and women could exist and operate. 10 The theory held that men would take on public, often professional, roles of work while women remained at home in the domestic roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. Phillippa Levine contends that the emergence of this separate sphere ideology with women residing in the private, domestic sphere resulted from Victorian society's reliance on church teachings. She writes that ‘Women were bound doubly by [religious] teachings; in the biblical texts of St Paul, their submission to men had become an item of religious law, and further, in the religious revivalism of the early nineteenth century, their tasks as bearers of religious moral values was clarified and strengthened.’ 11 In other words, Victorian Christianity helped to both restrict and empower women. They were expected to submit to men while simultaneously being charged with the moral education of the household.
However, it is worth noting that this binaristic ideology of the separate spheres did not encapsulate the entirety of British gender politics. In her evaluation of Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes, Susie Steinbach notes that the ideology was ‘prescriptive, not descriptive’ and thus motivated a larger academic expectation of domestic ideology in the comprehensive study of British women's history. 12 I do not aim to enter into the debate over the existence of separate spheres ideology; rather, I merely contend that such a domestic ideology existed in the field of British historiography and that it contributed to the construction of Victorian girlhood. With the popular understanding that women in Victorian Britain were expected to take on domestic roles, this inevitably prescribed future gendered expectations for young girls.
The understanding that young girls were, in a sense, future women, governed the perception and treatment of girls from adolescence onwards. Though Victorian children of all genders were seemingly within the same social sphere, upon reaching adolescence, young girls were thrust into the preparation for domestic womanhood as wives and mothers. Deborah Gorham notes that ‘It was believed that some preparation for that [domestic] role should begin even in childhood; while mothers were advised that in childhood the differences between girls and boys should be minimised, still, even during those years, girls were to learn to be “little housewives.”’ 13 Conceptualising young girls as ‘little housewives’ helped to preserve Victorian gender politics by determining young girls’ social trajectory from childhood to adulthood. Indeed, because Victorian adult women were expected to embrace qualities of purity and gentility in their domesticity, such expectations inevitably transferred to teenage and young girls as well. As such, a Victorian daughter was expected to behave as a ‘sheltered flower’ and ‘ornament of the household’ in preparation for her future. 14 Even as children, therefore, girls were understood through their future adult roles.
Nevertheless, young girls in early childhood had more genderfluidity than they would have upon reaching adolescence. On occasion, they were allowed to navigate and traverse traditional gender boundaries and expectations. Indeed, in an 1868 reprint of Harriet Taylor Mill's 1851 feminist pamphlet, The Enfranchisement of Women, there is a footnote citing Sydney Smith, who described this childhood similarity between the sexes: ‘As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike.’ 15 In childhood girls and boys could run and play together in such a way that ignored gender boundaries and expectations to the point of striking similarity. Girls were permitted to be like boys or boyish in nature, but were eventually expected to return to Victorian femininity. In essence, young girls could be physically active, just as young boys were, so long as they resumed playing with dolls, as was expected of their gender. 16 Girls were therefore allowed to display instances of masculinity before their mandatory period of adult femininity. These crossings into childhood masculinity can be understood as manifestations of tomboyism.
Jack Halberstam's modern theory of female masculinity, particularly as it relates to tomboyism, is useful in understanding this historical phenomenon of Victorian tomboyism. In Female Masculinity, Halberstam investigates the presence and production of masculinity in and from non-male bodies, with the overarching goal of illuminating what masculinity would be like ‘without men’. 17 Though the monograph focuses primarily on masculinity in adult female bodies, Halberstam begins his study by examining tomboyism. He defines it as ‘an extended childhood period of female masculinity’ that takes place before puberty. 18 This timeframe is significant. Because young girls have yet to develop their sexual organs, they demonstrate an ambiguity of gender because they are not yet women, but are also not boys or men. Such ambiguity in gender identity facilitates the acceptance of tomboyism and allows a young girl to navigate gender binaries and expectations more fluidly, even in the Victorian era.
However, after puberty, the girl is forced to conform to the female gender in order to be accepted within society. As Halberstam writes, ‘Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl.’ 19 A young girl, therefore, may reasonably identify as a tomboy and exhibit elements of female masculinity in childhood, but as soon as she experiences adolescence, such masculinity is fiercely prohibited. It was a gendered expectation that the young girl would abandon such masculinity upon reaching puberty so she could ‘put up her hair and [don] long skirts’ and ‘begin to prepare herself with adult seriousness for adult femininity’. 20 Tomboyism thus represents a freedom in gender navigation until a certain age; it is this freedom that enables the genre of childhood genderfluid performance on stage. Newcombe and Terry, in acting a young boy prince, were performing their own version of tomboyism but, just as Halberstam predicted, that tomboyism would ultimately be curbed through the editing of Arthur's speech. Moreover, upon reaching adulthood, actresses like Newcombe and Terry would be expected primarily to play roles of adult women characters. Though an adult actress could, and often would, still take on breeches roles, they would shift their repertoire of roles to more closely align with their own gender identity. Arguably, the continued performances of breeches roles in adulthood for anything other than occasional novelty undermined and threatened the Victorian gendered order due to a woman's willing desire to perform masculinity in her adulthood.
Of course, genderfluid theatrical performance is derived from and made possible by the performative nature of gender as a whole. In evaluating gender as performative, Judith Butler explains that Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.
21
Furthermore, Butler extends this initial theory of gender performativity in Bodies That Matter, contending that sex is a ‘regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs’. 23 This understanding posits that sex is socially constructed and perceived. Often, this manifests onstage in how characters perceive and treat other characters. If actors-as-characters discern and treat Newcombe and Terry as Arthur then, for all intents and purposes, both actresses have become a blended manifestation of the actress as a young girl and the character of the young boy prince. In other words, such a combination of feminine and masculine characteristics creates the figure of the tomboy in performance for audiences to detect and register.
What Halberstam and Butler's theories permit is a study of how gender performativity manifests onstage in genderfluid children's performances. Though both authors employ their theories of tomboyism and gender performativity in analysing modern gender identities, these theories can be applied to historical theatre performance. Joining Halberstam's understanding of tomboyism with Butler's conception of gender performativity and social construction allows for a new lens of critical inquiry: staged tomboyism. I use this term to describe the phenomenon of child actresses’ genderfluid performances as boys and how such tomboyism can, in essence, be performed or staged. Through what Butler calls a ‘stylized repetition of acts’, a young girl actress such as Newcombe or Terry can stage her performance of tomboyism in her presentation of the role of Arthur. However, the key to staged tomboyism is that it is confined to the theatrical performance; once the play concludes, so does the tomboyism. Such confinement reflects the larger Victorian pursuit of preserving gender norms and expectations. Moreover, because Newcombe and Terry's role of Arthur was edited to enhance the character's femininity, the performance can therefore be read as taming their tomboyish performance in order to further preserve the essence of Victorian girlhood both within the theatre and outside it.
Taming the Tomboy in the Text
Having established the theoretical lenses underpinning this case study, I now move to discuss the editing of Newcombe and Terry's dialogue as Arthur in King John. In examining their performances as instances of staged tomboyism, I reveal how such tomboyism was edited to reduce the actress's presentation of childhood masculinity. I argue that Arthur's speech was edited in the prompt book to heighten traditional understandings of domestic caregiving, hysteria, and submission, three functions or qualities typically associated with women at this time. This augmentation of feminine characteristics tames the genderfluid tomboyism in performance for Newcombe and Terry as they would not be performing in a strictly masculine character. Rather, they would be manifesting a genderfluid presentation of Arthur that preserves the integrity of their own femininity as young girls.
Before discussing the specific textual moments of Arthur's tamed tomboyism, it is necessary to note the textual history of Kean's prompt book. The prompt book Kean used for his 1852 production of King John at Windsor Castle and at the Princess's Theatre was actually a transcription made by prompter George Ellis six years earlier, in March 1846. Ellis had copied the textual annotations and performance cues from a prompt book owned by Macready, who produced King John at Drury Lane in 1842 with Newcombe as Arthur. This was not the first time that Kean sought to copy one of Macready's Shakespearean prompt books. Indeed, as I have described elsewhere, the two actors were rivals and Macready knew that Kean was trying to replicate his work. Though another loyal prompter declined to copy on Kean's behalf, Ellis agreed to do so. 24 The implication of this is that Kean's prompt book for King John in 1852 did not feature his own edits; instead, it was Macready's edits that Kean copied and used for his own production. 25 This prompt book and its revisions, then, share the edited dialogue that Newcombe and Terry both used. Among these edits are the ones that tame Arthur's tomboyism.
Though present throughout much of the play, the character of Arthur speaks most when faced with the threat of violence and death. Despite his youth, Arthur is supported by the French armies, as he is believed to be the rightful heir to the English throne. The play is thereby concerned with crises of authority and legitimacy, two things often threatened by the very notion of genderfluidity in the social and monarchical spheres. When attempts to usurp the existing English monarch, the titular King John, are made, threats against Arthur surge. By Act Four, Scene One, Arthur experiences his first real threat onstage when Hubert, a citizen and follower of John, enters the scene with blinding irons in hand, seeking to blind and kill him. 26 It is in the ensuing dialogue that Arthur's feminine speech manifests.
Arthur's immediate response to Hubert can be considered feminine as it appeals to Hubert's sense of sympathy through a domestic scene of caregiving. Arthur recalls an earlier time where he cared for Hubert in sickness, pressing his handkerchief to Hubert's brows: And, like the watchful minutes to the hour,
Still and anon cheer’d up the heavy time;
Saying, What lack you? and, Where lies your grief?
Or, What good love may I perform for you?
Many a poor man's son would have lain still,
And ne’er have spoke a loving word to you;
But you at your sick service had a prince.
27
This femininity continues in Arthur's next monologue. After Arthur's initial appeal to Hubert's sympathy fails, Hubert is resolute about blinding Arthur. He responds that he has ‘sworn to do it; / And with hot irons must I burn them out.’
30
Arthur's original speech in response, as printed in the prompt book, would have demonstrated his transition from a feminine appeal to a masculine anger at the injustice before him. The original speech would have had Arthur denying Hubert's ability to follow through, saying Ah, none, but in this iron age, would do it!
The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears
And quench his fiery indignation,
Even in the matter of mine innocence:
Nay, after that, consume away in rust,
But for containing fire to harm mine eye.
Are you more stubborn-hard than hammer’d iron?
An if an angel should have come to me,
And told me, Hubert should put out mine eyes,
I would not have believ’d no tongue, but Hubert's.
31
As the scene progresses, so does Arthur's display of femininity to the point of desperation and nervous hysteria. When attendants enter with binding cords and more irons, the reality of his circumstances is realised as the imminent threat grows nearer. 32 This provokes a hysterical response from Arthur, as he reverts to begging Hubert for his mercy. Arthur cries, ‘For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound! / Nay, hear me, Hubert! drive these men away, / And I will sit as quiet as a lamb.’ 33 His begging is marked by exclamations, denoting a heightened tone in performance typically associated with the stereotype of a hysterical woman character. Such hysteria transitions from imploring to bargaining, as seen in his proposal to ‘sit as quiet as a lamb’ should Hubert remove the attendants intending to bind him. As the scene progresses, Arthur's attempts to bargain with Hubert only increase in severity.
Arthur's begging is indicative of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of women's hysteria due to Arthur's inability to ensure his own safety. Peter Melville Logan, in his cultural history of hysteria in British writing, notes how early conceptions of hysteria understood it to be formed in women's uteruses, thereby establishing it as a disorder of the female body and goes on to discuss Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's 1895 publication, Studies in Hysteria. In examining one of the hysteric figures of the work, Logan notes that a characteristic symptom of hysteria is inadequacy. 34 This inadequacy is often understood in literature to be the inability to tell one's own story; however, it can also apply to Arthur's situation in this scene. Because he feels inadequate and unable to convince Hubert to spare him, Arthur resorts to the hysterical act of desperate begging and bargaining. His attempts therefore help to closely align this speech with qualities perceived as feminine.
While he previously bargained for the removal of attendants in exchange for silence, Arthur takes it further by offering his tongue in exchange for his eyes: ‘Or, Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue, / So I may keep mine eyes; O, spare mine eyes; / Though to no use, but still to look on you!’ 35 In Arthur's desperate attempts at bargaining, he cleverly includes yet another appeal to Hubert's sympathy by alluding to his love for him once again. By offering his tongue in exchange for his eyes, he would be able to ‘still look on [him]’ with the same affection that he used to care for Hubert in his earlier sickness.
The final example of feminine language in this scene is marked by submission and comes with Arthur's attempt to shame Hubert as a last effort to avoid his imminent blinding and death. After Arthur fails to convince Hubert that the fire is out and cannot be used to light the irons, he shifts to the final rhetorical tactic of shame to dissuade Hubert from blinding him. The prompt book's printed text has Arthur shaming Hubert at length: And if you do, you will but make [the fire] blush,
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert:
Nay, it, perchance, will sparkle in your eyes,
And, like a dog that is compell’d to fight,
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on.
All things, that you should use to do me wrong,
Deny their office; only you do lack
That mercy, which fierce fire, and iron, extends
Creatures of note, for mercy-lacking uses.
36
Kean was using a transcription of Macready's prompt book which featured these edits to Arthur's speech and subsequently created a feminine characterisation of Arthur. Macready, too, cast a girl actress—Miss Newcombe—in the role of Arthur. Reportedly, Newcombe played the role to mixed criticism. Charles H. Shattuck notes several periodicals that reviewed the performance: The Athenaeum allows her to have done it ‘very intelligently’ and speaks in praise of ‘the domestic quality’ which she gave to her expression of fear. She was ‘a pretty, interesting little child,’ said the Times, ‘with a voice somewhat of the highest, and with much feeling both in expressing grief and playfulness.’ ‘A most earnest and passionate little creature,’ the Examiner called her, ‘whose downright energy gave new terrors and new beauties to the master-scene.’ [….] John Bull put it down as simply a matter of too much loudness: ‘Even the child…was falsely tutored to scream like the rest, and the little soul strained her voice in such a manner, that it was only toward the conclusion when, from exhaustion, she among the rest was compelled to resort to a less forced intonation, we discovered that her natural tone, though small, was sweet and pleasing.’
37
The preservation of this girlhood came during a growing movement for equality for women and can be understood as a counterreaction to such gender progress. Newcombe's and Terry's performances occurred in 1842 and 1852, respectively, squarely between the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication on the Rights of Woman in 1792 and before the emergence of the figure of the New Woman in the late nineteenth century, thereby taking place in a Victorian middle stage of the feminist pursuit for equality. Though inklings of the feminist movement began to permeate the theatre industry by the mid-nineteenth century with actresses such as Madame Vestris serving as actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1839 and Charlotte Cushman performing roles such as Romeo, Hamlet, and Cardinal Wolsey in the 1840s and 1850s, both Newcombe and Terry were child actresses performing at a time situated between the early beginnings of feminist thought and the period wherein several, but not all, of women's rights were actually obtained. Macready's textual edits and Kean's subsequent adoption of them, therefore, appear first and foremost as a traditionalist and reactionary taming of the tomboy as a result of this continued progress.
However, there does remain an alternate possibility where such edits were both catering to gendered expectations for young girls and simultaneously embracing their professional potential in the theatre. Indeed, both Newcombe and Terry performed in a feminised version of the role of Arthur, but their very casting over a young boy actor demonstrates the actor-manager's recognition of their theatrical talents regardless of gender identity. Their opportunity to perform in the boy prince role, then, can be seen as alluding to a degree of gender progressivism, even if it is imperfect in editorial execution.
Conclusion
Newcombe's and Terry's portrayals of Arthur were not isolated from the rest of Shakespearean performance history. In fact, between 1737 and 1830, there were at least 102 individual performances of actresses taking on the role of Arthur, many of them by young girls. 38 Indeed, young girls and adult women would play boy roles often enough for it to be an accepted practice. Newcombe and Terry, then, followed a trend in performance history by the mid-nineteenth century. However, it remains to be seen whether or not the role of Arthur had always been edited to tame the tomboyism and if this was a phenomenon with established history, or if his character speech was ever retained in its entirety.
Though little is known about Newcombe and what became of her career, Terry became a proficient performer of boy prince roles. Arthur was her first role under Kean's management in 1852, but she would go on to play Fleance in Macbeth in 1853 and the Duke of York in Richard III in 1854, all at Kean's Princess's Theatre in London. The start of her theatrical career in London was characterised by the Shakespearean breeches role, primarily that of young boy princes. It was her performance as Arthur, though, for which she would be most remembered and celebrated. Her career spanned twenty years before she eventually left the stage to be married in 1867. 39 Despite her prolific childhood career of breeches roles, therefore, Terry still matched the expectations of women by discarding her breeches and pursuing a domestic life.
Newcombe's and Terry's performances as Arthur in King John, produced in 1842 and 1852, serve as exhibitions of Halberstam's understanding of tomboyism for their portrayals, as young girls, of a young boy character. This tomboyism further exemplifies Butler's ideas of gender performativity because of Newcombe's and Terry's ability to stylise a portrayal of a gender other than their own for an established amount of time in performance. Tomboyism, when paired with this idea of gender performativity, marked an example of staged tomboyism. Nevertheless, in spite of Newcombe's and Terry's genderfluid acting being an example of staged tomboyism, the editing of the production prompt book marked a containment of such tomboyism. Arthur's speech, while originally printed to show a blending of masculine and feminine language characteristics of a child, instead was edited to diminish the masculine language and heighten the feminine. Throughout Act Four, Scene One, in his interactions with Hubert, the edited text left Arthur speaking the language of domestic caregiving, hysteria, and submission—all stereotypically associated with girls and women at this time. Though his language of care and hysterics prove ineffective in convincing Hubert to not blind him, his language of submission is what proves successful and he is subsequently spared and released. The implication of this is that the role served as a tool in the preservation of Victorian gender politics within the theatre, as the feminine submission is what ultimately spares the gender-nonconforming character. Newcombe and Terry, in their performances as Arthur, were thereby continuously confined to their own female gender identities rather than to the tomboyish gender they were playing, ultimately gesturing to managerial efforts to preserve Victorian girlhood and gender politics during the larger pursuit for gender equality.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Vanita Reddy, for whom I first wrote a version of this essay in a graduate seminar; Dr Ziona Kocher for helping me develop my understandings of genderfluid performance further; and Dr Susan Egenolf, my dissertation committee chair, for her feedback, guidance, and support.
Notes
), in 2023.