This talk will introduce the thinking which underpins my collaborative project, ‘Women’s Transnational Theatre Exchanges, 1789-1914’. The project turns on a simple, but transformative question: what happens when we put women’s work in the theatre at the centre of our enquiry into the past? I’m interested in looking at the ways that women’s work travelled, and how female artists, theatre practitioners, and consumers made empire. My focus is on the long nineteenth century – that period from the late eighteenth century when the world seemed to change in revolutionary ways, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the project of modernity was eclipsed and engulfed in Europe-wide war.
In this talk I will discuss two threads in my enquiry: my first focus is on the popular theatre and its engagement of audiences in the imperial centres of London, Dublin, Bombay, Calcutta, Sydney and Melbourne. The popular theatre in western Europe at the start of the nineteenth century changed the world. The popular culture which emerged out of the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the huge expansion of industrialising Europe is, I argue, the foundation of our contemporary global popular culture which works on strong feeling, a driving and sometimes violent sense of right and wrong, and a desire for visible justice. I am interested in women’s involvement in this transnational popular culture and tracing the networks of mobility and exchange in which women participated, along the major routes of the British Empire.
My second focus will be on the creative work of women in domestic, amateur, and paratheatrical activities, with a focus on the archive of one family in a rural area just outside Sydney, Australia. The Rouse family, of Rouse Hill House, were a creative theatrical family, who were typical of the wealthy middle class in the Australian colony just before Federation in 1901. My account of their home theatricals, tableaux, delight in singing and fancy dress, is drawn from a substantial family archive recently deposited in the State Library of New South Wales. I am interested in the way that women’s work, undertaken by three generations of Rouse women can destabilise the dominant ‘radical nationalist’ narrative of Australian cultural history.
My research is driven by an ethical approach to historiography: if we as historians want to offer fair and frank accounts of the past – of what people did, felt, and thought, of the lived and thought texture of the past, we actually need to challenge the hierarchies of aesthetic and cultural value to make space for what the majority of people saw, watched, and did, in terms of performance and entertainment.
‘Women’s Transnational Theatre Exchanges, 1789-1914’is funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Council, under its ‘Frontier Research Guarantee’ for successful European Research Council projects.
Kate Newey is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter. She is a historian of nineteenth century British literature and culture, specialising in teaching and research in theatre history and women’s writing. She has published on Frankenstein, Jane Austen, Victorian women playwrights, Fanny Kemble, Australian theatre, Victorian theatre and popular culture, and John Ruskin. Kate Newey has led several Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded projects and has held several research fellowships.
