When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators

by Lisa Merrill

At the height of her career, actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-76) was one of the most famous women in the English-speaking world. Cushman challenged Victorian notions of gender in her stage portrayals of male characters and of strong, androgynous female characters. Offstage, she was a powerful businesswoman who supported her family, women lovers, and friends.

Lisa Merrill examines Cushman's personal correspondence to shed new light on the actress's relationships and in turn on our understandings of the nature of women's "romantic friendships." She demonstrates how Cushman's androgynous presence served as a symbol to many of her contemporaries, and revealed their multiple and often contradictory attitudes toward female performers, women, and the unspeakable possibilities of same-sex desire.
The biography draws upon unpublished archival material as well as on current critical work to view Cushman's career, relationships, and posthumous reception. When Romeo Was a Woman examines as autobiographical performance Cushman's own narratives, the stories she authorized others to write, and the letters she wrote to intimates. The book is richly illustrated with many previously unpublished portraits of Cushman in her various stage roles, including Romeo and Lady Macbeth, and other revealing photographs of her family, lovers and friends.
When Romeo Was a Woman will find an appreciative audience among general readers as well as specialists in gay/lesbian history, women's history, theater and performance, popular culture, Victorian studies, and American studies.
"A fascinating story, and a major contribution to our understanding of lesbian history. . . . The work done on archival resources is both impressive in its extent and wholly convincing in its effect." --Jacky Bratton, University of London
Lisa Merrill is Associate Professor of Communication and Performance Studies, Hofstra University. She is the coauthor of The Power to Communicate: Gender Differences as Barriers, and the author of Untying the Tongue: Power, Gender, and the Word, forthcoming.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, History

344 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good academic study of the life and work of an interesting nineteenth-century performer. Miller makes a particularly interesting case for how contemporary ideas about female virtue and sexlessness created a cover beneath which Cushman could play male roles on stage to great acclaim and form a series of intense relationships with women; similar relationships with men would have destroyed her, but the assumption that female relationships are sexless and therefore virtuous (because women don’t feel sexual desire like men do, you know) created a space in which she and her friends and lovers could live surprisingly freely. With the medicalization and pathologization of sexuality, that space wouldn’t have existed even a couple of decades later. Opportunities for cross-gender performance also disappeared by the end of the century, returning only in the early twenty-first century. But for a too-brief period, conditions existed in which an intelligent woman, whose appearance fell outside of beauty standards, could live and love whom she chose and become a star.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting scholarly biography of Charlotte Cushman. I didn't know anything about the actor before reading this but was fascinated by the large ammount of information about her and her life, especially considering how long ago she was. The only criticism of the book was that being an older scholarly work it ignored anything to do with trans/gender analysis. There is definitely some interesting research here that I will want to go back to for queer fangirl analysis. And I now want to read Cushman's biography from the time.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less a biography than a research thesis, Merrill nonetheless finds a compelling character in Charlotte Cushman and her incredible life as an actor who played both male and female parts and as a woman who surrounded herself with other women in love and in friendship. Detailed and thorough as possible, Cushman finally gets the respect she so richly earned over a hundred and fifty years ago. Possibly a great subject for a playwright :)