Breaking the Code: Toward a Reception Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

These words were spoken by Drury Lane performer Susanna Mountfort, in her cross-dressed role as Belvedera, the female officer of Charles Shadwell's 1713 army comedy, The Humours of the Army; or, The Female Officer.2 This moment serves as a synecdoche for a range of cultural instabilities which preoccupied eighteenth-century London audience members. The speaker in the passage emphasizes the slippage between the I of the female character who successfully assumes a male role in the play's narrative, and the I of the female performer who threatens to pass for male not only on stage, but perhaps in life as well, at least amongst the complicit or naive audience members before her. Elsewhere in this fascinating and peculiar work, two cross-dressed male actors play soldiers' wives, a euphemism for prostitute campfollowers. Whether their performance signifies as a parodic travesty of working-class female behavior, a satiric critique of the recently exposed urban mollies,3 or a sly wink