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The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, , The Georgian female performer is a site of contradictions. On the one hand, she is an economically astute, ambitious, talented, and a hard-working professional. On the other, she is an erotic object, sexually ambiguous, and a 'whore'. Since , when the first professional British actress walked onto the stage, these women's offstage liaisons, sexual availability, and erotic capital have been a constant subject of fascination, providing a tenuous yet consistent basis for popular commentary, biographies, histories and even, more recently, critical studies.
Yet while the fascination with the Georgian actresses' sexuality is, to an extent, an inheritance from studies on her Restoration predecessors, it is also the product of our perception of Georgian society. The growth of the bourgeois public sphere and the increasing emphasis on women's domesticity have long been studied as central features of Georgian culture. And within a context in which women are seen as having been relegated to the private sphere, the actress has become a troubling, anomalous figure whose visible publicity was resolved through imagining her as 'whore'.
Underpinning this essay is the supposition that it is time to move away from this focus on sexuality and the image of the 'actress-as-whore', discourses which in their persistence threaten to limit future scholarship both methodologically and in terms of subject matter. While recognizing that sexual identity and questions of representation are important aspects of our wider understanding of Georgian actresses, the subject, as this essay will demonstrate, has been well surveyed.
