Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

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1 COMPABATIVE i ama Volume 30Summer 1996Number 2 Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage Anne Russell From the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, a remarkably high number of English and American women performed tragic male Shakespearean roles on the professional stage. Although there was a thriving stage tradition of crossdressing in comedy, melodrama, Italian opera, and dance,1 not since the early 1660's, when women replaced the boy actors who had previously played women's roles on the English stage, had the conventions of tragic performance in English professional theater included crossing gender boundaries. The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and lago as well as heroes of nineteenth -century works such as Thomas Noon Talfourd's tragedy Ion and Edward Bulwer Lytton's melodrama The Lady

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