1. For specific information on Cushman as Romeo, see: Cole, Susan S., “Charlotte Cushman as Romeo,” Southern Theatre 24 (1981): 3–10Google Scholar; Dudden, Faye, “Female Ambition: Charlotte Cushman Seizes the Stage,” in Women in the American Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994), 92–100Google Scholar; Merrill, Lisa, “Charlotte Cushman: American Actress on the Vanguard of New Roles for Women” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1984), 105–118Google Scholar; Puknat, Elisabeth M., “Romeo was a Lady: Charlotte Cushman's London Triumph,” Theatre Annual 9 (1951): 59–69Google Scholar; Russell, Anne, “Gender, Passion, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Women Romeos,” Essays in Theatre 11.2 (May 1993): 153–166Google Scholar. On Cushman's Romeo, see also: Stebbins, Emma ed., Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1879), 58–64Google Scholar; Leach, Joseph, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 169–180Google Scholar; Price, William T., A Life of Charlotte Cushman (New York: Brentanos, 1894), 137–143Google Scholar; Edwards, Charlene, “The Tradition for Breeches in the Three Centuries that Professional Actresses Have Played Male Roles on the English-Speaking Stage” (Ph.D. diss., University of Denver, 1957), 185–189Google Scholar; Shafer, Yvonne, “Women in Male Roles,” in Women in American Theatre, eds. Chinoy, Helen Krich and Jenkins, Linda Walsh (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 74–81Google Scholar. Editor's note: all citations from Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Wells, Stanley and Taylor, Gary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

2. Russell, “Gender, Passion and Performance,” 153.

3. Two American actresses, Mrs. Henry Lewis (?–1855) and Charlotte Crampton (1816–1868) provide the two most extraordinary examples of successful male impersonation. While these two performers certainly fooled audiences, they were recognized for isolated performances and did not, like Cushman, continually confuse audiences. For more information on these actresses see Mullenix, , “‘Fair Montague’ or ‘Ill-Beseeming Beast:’ Breeches Performance on the American Stage, 1800–1869,” diss., University of Illinois, 1995Google Scholar.

4. Price, A Life, 120.

5. Mullenix, “‘Fair Montague,’” 98–170.

6. “Charlotte Cushman in London,” Spirit of the Times 15.14 (May 1845): 154Google Scholar; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times 19.34 (October 1849): 408. The Spirit provides just one example of the press's perception of Cushman as manly; there are manyGoogle Scholar.

7. Shattuck, Charles H., Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 2:22Google Scholar.

8. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C., eds., Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., vols. 1 and 8Google Scholar.

9. See Salmagundi 2.4 (19 September 1807): 395Google Scholar.

10. Although Romeo (even Cushman's Romeo) was sometimes regarded as a youth by critics during the first half of the nineteenth century—as Ludlow and Hutton's remarks prove—Cushman's Romeo was almost always interpreted as a young man. While Cushman never explicitly stated her thoughts about the character's age, records of her performance indicate that she conceived of Romeo as a young man rather than a boy. Her passions were reported to have been fervent and sophisticated, and her sword play was skillfully executed. Moreover, reviews of Cushman in this role repeatedly referred to her Romeo as masculine and manly as opposed to youthful, weak, and delicate. Indeed, Vandenhoff states in 1843 that “Romeo requires a man to feel his passion.” Cushman's interpretation of Hamlet was aggressively masculine and, while the characters are very different, it is possible that she approached the role of Romeo similarly. For though he is a young man, Romeo is the principal male representative for his family on the streets of Verona where the feuding takes place; additionally, he takes on the responsibility of marriage throughout the course of the play. That Romeo considered himself a man (or at least a young man) is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Tybalt's reference to Romeo as “Boy” in Act 3.1 is meant as an incendiary comment.

11. Coleman, John, Fifty Years of an Actor's Life 2 vols. (New York: James Pott and Co., 1904), 2: 363Google Scholar.

12. Quoted by Parrott in “Networking in Italy,” 317.

13. Letter from William Burton to Benjamin Webster, n.d., Harvard Theatre Collection. This letter is located in the Charlotte Cushman “Extra-Illustrated,” 4:6.

14. As quoted in Clement, Charlotte Cushman, 39.

15. Ibid., 37.

16. J.M.W., , “First Impressions of Miss Cushman's Romeo,” People's Journal 2 (1847): 118Google Scholar.

17. The Observer (March 2, 1845): 3.

18. Ibid.

19. Although Cushman arrived in New York on 1 September 1849, she purposely delayed her New York engagement on account of the recent Astor Place Riot. Cushman was aware that audiences often associated her with Macready (both because he was her acting mentor and because she resembled him in appearance and style) and decided to postpone her New York engagement at the Astor Place until tempers had eased regarding the affair. Instead, Cushman went immediately to Boston, continued on to Philadelphia, went back to Boston, and then proceeded on a tour of the southern states. It was not until May of the following year that Cushman appeared for a long engagement in New York.

20. Spirit of the Times 20.14 (18 May 1850): 156Google Scholar. The critic calls Tree Miss Kean in reference to her husband Charles Kean. Regardless of their marital status, actresses were often referred to as Miss—a prefix which supposedly inspired public interest because it suggested that an actress was still “available.” Fisher, for example, was said to have declined in popularity after she married Maeder.

21. Ibid.

22. New York Herald, 14 May 1850. Cushman's portrayal of Rosalind also differed greatly from another English actress', Helen Faucit, the most celebrated Rosalind during the mid-nineteenth century. Cushman, when “caparison'd like a man” (3.2.191), appropriated a masculine persona unlike Faucit, who never lost touch with the “hidden woman's fear” (1.3.118) underneath a deliberately transparent disguise. Faucit reflected: “No one can study this part without seeing that, through the guise of the brilliant-witted boy, Shakespeare meant the charm of the high-hearted woman, strong, tender, delicate, to make itself felt. … The actress will, in my opinion, fail signally in her task, who shall not suggest all this” (14). Shattuck also remarks on Cushman's innovative interpretation in regard to her delivery of specific lines from the script. As Shattuck explains, Cushman “avoided that coy squeamishness which other Victorian Rosalinds affected when they had to speak certain naughty words” (1:92). See Faucit, Helen, On Some of Shakespeare's Women (London: printed for private circulation, 1885); and Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage, 92Google Scholar.

23. Quoted in Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 63.

24. Athenaeum, 3 January 1846, 19.

25. Lloyd's Weekly Messenger as quoted by Price, 135; London Times, 30 December 1845, 5; The Britannia, 3 January 1846, 6.

26. It is important to point out that the American press did not dedicate a great deal of attention to any of Cushman's dramatic efforts before she achieved international success in 1845. While many of the papers carried brief statements about her work or passing mentions of her performances, she rarely received a full review. Cushman was considered a highly competent actress, but, because she had not yet reached star status, dramatic critics reserved their column space in the late thirties and early forties for Fanny Kemble, Celeste, Forrest, and Macready.

27. See, for example, “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 15.49 (31 January 1846): 584. This issue reprints the review of Cushman's Romeo from the London TimesGoogle Scholar.

28. Spirit of the Times, 20.14 (18 May 1850): 156Google Scholar; Spirit of the Times, 20.35 (19 October 1850): 420Google Scholar.

29. “Astor Place Theatre,” The Albion, 9.20 (May 18, 1850): 236. Emphasis in the originalGoogle Scholar.

30. The New York Herald, 14 May 1850; New York Herald, 15 October 1850.

31. The New York Herald, 15 October 1850.

32. The Albion 35.43 (24 October 1857): 512Google Scholar.

33. Porter's Spirit of the Times 4.15 (12 June 1858): 229Google Scholar.

34. Quoted in Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 63.

35. The Albion 35.43 (24 October 1857): 512Google Scholar.

36. The New York Herald, 15 October 1850.

37. London Times, 30 December 1845, 5. Russell writes of a similar situation in Ellen Tree's performance of Romeo. Although certain reviewers had “a divided mind” as they watched Tree's similarly convincing enactment of the young Montague, “Tree's continuing and stable presence ‘as a woman’ is also stressed by Victorian theatrical convention.” Russell describes how Tree was escorted before the audience for her curtain call, thus reinforcing the actresses need for male direction. See Russell, “Gender, Passion and Performance,” 161.

38. Rackin, Phyllis, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” Speaking of Gender, ed. Showalter, Elaine (New York: Routledge, 1989), 113Google Scholar. I should point out that, while I find Rackin's ideas concerning transcendence and monstrosity helpful in terms of their contribution to my theory of the double image, I disagree with her ultimate conclusions about the androgyne. Rackin argues that this figure “refuses to choose between actor and character or between male and female but instead insists on the ambiguities” (124). My theory of the double image works against this idea of an ambiguous or blurred persona. Rather, the androgyne, as I conceive it, is a double figure who embodies the potential to switch between genders, to be either one or the other.

39. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 98Google Scholar. For additional information on Cushman's reportedly supernatural ability to break confining material restraints through her performance, see Williams', Gary Jay essay on Cushman's Meg Merrilies in When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare, eds. Fisher, Judith L. and Watt, Stephen (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 34–35Google Scholar.

40. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 138. Emphasis is Butler'sGoogle Scholar.

41. Butler, Judith, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Case, Sue-Ellen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–271Google Scholar.

42. Vandenhoff, George, Leaves from an Actor's Notebook: Anecdotes of the Green Room and the Stage (London: T.W. Cooper and Co., 1860), 202–203Google Scholar.

43. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 290–291. In her chapter entitled “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” Smith-Rosenberg discusses the New Woman's appropriation of a politico-sexual language created by male physicians in the late nineteenth century in order to contain the threat of women's entrance into institutions of higher education. The New Woman adopted terms like “Mannish Lesbian” and “intermediate sex” in an attempt to exercise male power and “demand a role beyond conventional gender restraints” (40.) Smith-Rosenberg employs theories surrounding the trickster figure to better interpret the endeavors of the New Woman in this respect. Thus, the term trickster is used to explain the New Woman or female modernist as androgyne. For example, Woolf's Orlando is described as a “joyous androgyne” who glories “in androgyny, the confusion of categories, the options that extend beyond social proprieties” (289). Orlando is also described by Smith-Rosenberg as “a trickster par excellence” (291). These terms are used in conjunction with one another because they complement and explain one another. It is in this manner that I have employed them in an attempt to illuminate Cushman's Romeo.

44. “Our Lady Correspondent,” Porter's Spirit of the Times 4.15 (12 June 1858): 229; Athenaeum, 3 January 1846, 19; The New York Herald, 10 May 1852Google Scholar.

45. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 293.

46. In placing Rosalind's name in quotation marks to make a distinction between the character and the disguise put on by Ganymed, I am borrowing a convention used by Michael Shapiro in his recent book Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

47. Belsey, Catherine, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis, John (New York: Methuen, 1985), 180Google Scholar.

48. Ibid.

49. Regardless of her musings about gender instability, Belsey does not consider the androgyne (with its double image) as a possible alternative identity to take the place of unstable representations of male and/or female.

50. Ibid. It is important to note here that the version of As You Like It that Cushman used was Macready's reformed version, which included the Epilogue. In his attempts to restore the text to its original form, Macready returned the Epilogue to the play.

51. Ibid. 183.

52. Kristeva, Julia, “Women's Time,” Signs 7:1 (August 1981): 34–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Ibid. 34.

54. Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference,” 189, 190.

55. Whittier, Gayle, “The Sublime Androgyne Motif in Three Shakespearean Works,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19:2 (1989): 188Google Scholar.

56. Garber, Majorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16Google Scholar. Russell also invokes Garber and makes the very good point that, while Garber “sees most instances of cross-dressing as complicated,” she inexplicably dismisses Cushman's potential to inspire category crisis. Garber, Russell explains, does not regard the nineteenth-century female theatrical transvestite as significantly anomalous, a point that both Russell and I find debatable.

57. J.M.W., People's Journal, 118.

58. As quoted by Leach, Bright Particular Star, 178.

59. Cook, Dutton, Hours with the Players (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881), 2:196Google Scholar.

60. Marston, Weston, Our Recent Actors (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888), 2:77Google Scholar.

61. Coleman, Fifty Years of an Actor's Life, 302.

62. Albion 35.43 (24 October 1857): 512Google Scholar.

63. Russell, “Gender, Passion, and Performance,” 157.

64. In addition to reinserting the information concerning Rosaline, Cushman also depicted Romeo's death in the conventional fashion (dying before Juliet wakes from her drugged state), restored Lady Montague's character, returned Mercutio's Queen Mab speech to its proper place in the text, and reinstituted the reconciliation scene between the Montagues and the Capulets in Act 5.3. See Odell, George C., Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), 2: 271–272Google Scholar.

65. London Times, 5.

66. Cushman, Charlotte promptbook, Romeo and Juliet (New York: W.M. Taylor and Co., 1852): v (Harvard Theatre Collection)Google Scholar. This promptbook bears a handwritten note stating that it was used in performance on 5 March 1852—seven years after Cushman's debut as Romeo at the Haymarket. Although I have been unable to locate Cushman's promptbook for the 1845–46 run at the Haymarket, one can be relatively certain that the Garrick-based 1852 promptbook is strikingly different from the original that Cushman is reported to have restored in 1845. Shattuck states that, “beginning about with Macready in the late 1830s and after, Phelps in the 1840s and after, and others of the ‘restorers,’ the usual practice was to eschew the acting editions with their petrified ‘errors’ and to work from a ‘true text,’ using sheets from one or another well-printed, good paper, multi-volume complete Works.” See Shattuck, , The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalog (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 8Google Scholar.

The fact that versions of the play, like the 1852 promptbook, were still in use after Cushman attempted to reform the text can be explained through the triumph of theatrical pragmatism. Cushman's need to work overwhelmed her desire to be celebrated as a textual reformer, and when managers and audiences wanted to see Garrick's version, Cushman responded by performing this adaptation. This can be evidenced by an undated letter that Cushman wrote to Benjamin Webster, the manager of the Princess Theatre in London. She writes: “Your brother wrote me a note this morning saying that your stage manager had informed you of my preference for the acting ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ Understand from me pray, that I am thoroughly prepared to do whatever you wish, I found that when the gentlemen now expressing in no very measured terms [the] displeasure … this original text was giving them, the stage manager informed them that it was all stuff and nonsense doing it in the way proposed… … I am quite prepared to act Romeo in any way that shall please you.” Cushman manuscript collection, Harvard Theatre Collection. Emphasis is Cushman's.

67. As quoted in Price, A Life, 137.

68. London Times, 5.

69. Novy, Marianne, “Violence, Love, and Gender in Romeo and Juliet” in Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, ed. Andrews, John F. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 361–362Google Scholar.

70. Whittier, “The Sublime Androgyne,” 193.

71. Butler, Gender Trouble, 25.

72. Novy, “Violence, Love, and Gender,” 365.

73. Whittier, “The Sublime Androgyne,” 194–195.

74. Vandenhoff, Leaves From an Actor's Notebook, 202.

75. Coleman, , Fifty Years, 2: 363Google Scholar.

76. From “First Impressions of Miss Cushman's Romeo,” The People's Journal 1 (1847): 118Google Scholar.

77. Fletcher, George, Studies of Shakespeare (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 380Google Scholar. Although he never mentions Cushman by name, it is certain that Fletcher is referring to her performance at the Haymarket, because he says he will discuss the production that was “on the boards of one of the patent theatres of London, in the following December, 1845.” There was no other production of Romeo and Juliet at either the Covent Garden or the Drury Lane at this time; therefore, it is evident that Fletcher is remarking upon Cushman's run at the Haymarket.

78. Ibid.

79. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 99.

80. Ibid. 382.

81. Sherson, Erroll, Lost London Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (London: Constable and Co., 1932), 128Google Scholar.

82. Male critics regarded certain breeches actresses as particularly threatening, especially when they were playing serious or tragic male roles. Critics castigated Mary Barnes (1780–1864), Clara Fisher (1811–1898), Mrs. Sharpe, Mrs. Henry Lewis (?–1855), and Charlotte Crampton (1816–1868) among others for their forays into masculine theatrical terrain.

83. Jewsbury published her novel one year after Fletcher's scathing account of Cushman's Romeo appeared in print, which suggests that she may have been directly responding to his critiques of her friend's performance. Yet, Coleman and Vandenhoff published their attacks after Jewsbury's book came out, which indicates that Jewsbury recognized the potential threat that Cushman presented (perhaps after she became familiar with Fletcher's review) and commented satirically about the potential for further critical anxiety.

84. Jewsbury, Geraldine, The Half Sisters (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848), 2:22–24Google Scholar.

85. Mullenix, 311–314.

86. Donkin, Ellen, “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century British Theater,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1922), 278. Emphasis is Donkin'sGoogle Scholar.

87. Marston, Weston, Our Recent Actors, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888), 2:76Google Scholar.

88. Price, A Life, 120.

89. Ibid., 141.

90. After discovering that her former business agent Louis Harlan embezzled the interest due her on almost seventy thousand dollars, Cushman, with the advice of her financial agent Wayland Crow, made all future business decisions herself. See Leach, Bright Particular Star, 279.

91. As quoted by Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 12. Stebbins does not make it clear, however, what diary this is from. She says only that she quoted this sentence from “the precious memoranda of Charlotte Cushman's earliest days in Boston.”

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid. 16.

94. Coleman, , Fifty Years, 2:309. Emphasis added. It is interesting that Cushman uses the term “actor”—now often used in a non-gender specific-manner—to describe herself in an age when terminology reflected strict gender prescriptions. A woman was a lady, an “angel of the house,” a True Woman—a female performer was an actressGoogle Scholar.

95. Leach, Bright Particular Star, 210.

96. Several recent scholars discuss Cushman's lesbianism at length. See Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981), 220–226; Merrill, 64–89; and Mullenix, 320–322Google Scholar.

97. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 156. See also Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct.

98. Coleman, , Fifty Years, 1:310Google Scholar.

99. In an interview conducted by LaSalle Corbell Pickett towards the end of Cushman's life, the actress was asked if Lady Macbeth had been her favorite role. She replied, “No; I preferred Romeo to all others. He has such a varied career and so many different emotions, and each one is so tensely felt, that nearly all the facets of emotional life are presented. Then it gave me a chance to fight a real duel, which is always a triumph for a woman.” See Pickett, , Across My Path (New York: Brentano's, 1916), 21Google Scholar.

100. Coleman, , Fifty Years, 1:363Google Scholar; Marston, Our Recent Actors, 75–76.

101. As quoted in Price, A Life, 132; Times, 30 December 1845, 5.

102. The New York Herald, 15 October 1850.

103. New York Daily News, 10 November 1860.

104. The New York Herald, 10 November 1860.

105. Leach, Bright Particular Star, 170.

106. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 98.

107. The Spirit of the Times, 21.27 (August 1851): 324Google Scholar.

108. Coleman, , Fifty Years, 2:361–362Google Scholar; Leach, Bright Particular Star, 179–180.

109. Whitehead, Barbara, “Fancy's Show Box: Performance in the Republic, 1790–1866,” diss, University of Chicago, 1976, 119Google Scholar.

110. The photographs of Cushman with a cravat appear in the Harvard Theatre Collection's Extra-Illustrated volume of Mathews, and Hutton's, Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States vol. 4 (New York: Cassell and Company, 1886)Google Scholar.

111. Pickett, Across My Path, 22.

112. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 100.