Carrying All before Her
eBook - ePub

Carrying All before Her

Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Carrying All before Her

Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800

About this book

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

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Yes, you can access Carrying All before Her by Chelsea Phillips in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Editor
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Figures
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction
  10. 1. Inheriting Greatness: Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen and Anne Oldfield
  11. 2. Pregnant Sensibility: Susannah Cibber and George Anne Bellamy
  12. 3. Conceiving Genius: Sarah Siddons
  13. 4. Prolific Muse: Dorothy Jordan
  14. Conclusion: Celebrity Pregnancy, Then and Now
  15. Appendix: Birth and Christening Dates
  16. Notes
  17. Bibliography
  18. Index
  19. About the Author