Examining theatre economics, rhetorical acting, cross-dressing, the staging of 'self', and the alignment of motherhood and work, this book reveals how actresses drew on changing models of gender to achieve phenomenal levels of success over the eighteenth-century. By doing so it sheds new light on the cultural significance of female performance.

Helen E. M. Brooks is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, UK. is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, UK. She is Associate Editor of the Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660–1789 and has published articles on eighteenth-century women as actresses and theatre managers, on private theatricals, and on performance historiography.