Abstract
Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and Sara Lane (1822–99) were two pioneering women in nineteenth-century theatre history. Both were accomplished singers who made their names initially in comic and breeches roles and, during periods when theatrical management was almost exclusively confined to men, both ran successful theatre companies in London. Despite these parallels in their professional activities, there are substantial disparities in the scrutiny to which their personal lives were subjected and in how their contemporaries and posterity have memorialized them. In this article, Janice Norwood examines a range of portraits and cartoons of the two women, revealing how the images created and reflected the women's public identities, as well as recording changes in aesthetic practice and social attitudes. She argues that the women's iconology was fundamentally shaped by the contemporary discourse of gender difference. Janice Norwood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Drama, and Theatre Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. She has published on various aspects of nineteenth-century theatre history and edited a volume on Vestris for the Lives of Shakespearian Actors series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
Highlights
NOT FAR APART in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery are the burial places of two pioneering figures in nineteenth-century theatre history
The condition of the memorials serves as a reminder of the transient nature of celebrity and how public identity is contingent on social factors
Examination of how Vestris and Lane were presented in a range of portraits and cartoons reflects differences in the women’s individual characters and experiences, and has a more general significance in revealing how such images were in turn shaped by nineteenthcentury attitudes towards women in the theatre and in society
Summary
Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Theatre Managers: the Iconology of Eliza Vestris and Sara Lane. Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and Sara Lane (1822–99) were two pioneering women in nineteenth-century theatre history Both were accomplished singers who made their names initially in comic and breeches roles and, during periods when theatrical management was almost exclusively confined to men, both ran successful theatre companies in London. Janice Norwood examines a range of portraits and cartoons of the two women, revealing how the images created and reflected the women’s public identities, as well as recording changes in aesthetic practice and social attitudes. She argues that the women’s iconology was fundamentally shaped by the contemporary discourse of gender difference. Rosenthal, who claims that the greatly expanded range of performance and print entertainments available in the urban cultural market widened the options, with ‘theatre offer[ing] a third possibility of glamorous, independent woman with a mixed sexual reputation’.4 In the nineteenth century, the iconology of Vestris and Lane demonstrates this multiplicity, and the pairing of these particular women is presented here as illustrative of the diverse and changing nature of images of the female theatre professional rather than as the embodiment of a polarized and antithetical binary
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