ABSTRACT
The eleventh child of one of England’s leading theatrical families, Charlotte Charke (1713-1760) was a born performer. Her parents were both well-known actors, particularly her father, Colley Cibber, who was also Poet Laureate, a playwright, and manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. Charke made her debut there in 1730 and became renowned as a comedic actress deft at breeches roles and impersonations of famous men, most notably her father. Since women were not allowed to perform on the English stage until after the Restoration in 1660, actresses during the eighteenth century were considered novel curiosities and, because they defied gender decorum, frequently presumed to have loose morals. Charke was an even greater curiosity. Not only an actor but a playwright, she was
also an offstage cross-dresser who often passed as a man, one of the first English women ever to manage a theatre company (and later, a puppetry company), and one of the first secular women to publish an autobiography. She gained notoriety, and lost familial class privilege, when her father disowned her for leaving Drury Lane to “become the leading player in an upstart theater troupe run by Henry Fielding … London’s leading avant-garde playwright, and Colley Cibber’s bitter enemy” (Shevelow 2005: 5). Their troupe’s anti-government satires helped to “inspire” Parliament to pass the 1737 Licensing Act, which restricted dramatic productions to two patent theatres and required all plays to be government-approved prior to performance. Fielding, Charke and other rabble-rousers were effectively banished from the “legitimate” stage. Charke did not let this stop her, taking her subversive parodies to the puppet theatre and traveling the countryside for years as an itinerant performer. Government restrictions on “legitimate” drama in this and the previous century inadvertently helped puppetry to flourish in popularity in England among all classes. Referring to the eighteenth century, George Speaight writes that “never before or since
have puppet theatres so successfully made themselves the talk of the town” (Speaight 1955 [1990]: 92). And though she is rarely given credit for it, the astonishing Mrs. Charke had much to do with puppetry’s success and evolution during this time.
