ABSTRACT

Success and celebrity status for eighteenth-century performers – especially female performers – have typically been conceptualized in terms of perceived appearance. Instead of possessing some inherent natural quality or “it factor” that constituted “celebrity,” recent discussions in eighteenth-century performance studies have suggested that to varying degrees actresses of the period acted as “authors” fashioning their own character personas through a myriad of public and private performances. This paper seeks to expand the ways in which researchers engage with eighteenth-century female performers in the archive, extending notions of authorship beyond the strictly textual domain. In dialogue with the existing foundation of literary scholarship this paper proposes examining eighteenth-century actress Mary Robinson’s social and stage presence through an “imagined ecological” framework in order to delve into one specific instance of self-fashioning – her opera box at the King’s Theatre during the 1782-3 season. Drawing upon material culture studies on the one hand, and literary documents on the other, this essay aims to reconstruct the optics of Robinson’s celebrity in such a way that the textual evidence is not privileged at the cost of what lies in the margins.

摘要

18 世纪表演者——尤其是女性表演者——的成功和名人地位通常是根据外貌来概念化的。18 世纪表演研究中最近的讨论表明，这一时期的女演员在不同程度上充当了“作者”，通过无数公开和私人表演。本文旨在扩展研究人员与档案馆中 18 世纪女性表演者互动的方式，将作者身份的概念扩展到严格的文本领域之外。在与现有文学学术基础的对话中，本文建议通过“想象的生态”框架来研究 18 世纪女演员玛丽·罗宾逊的社会和舞台存在，以深入研究自我塑造的一个具体实例——她在国王剧院的歌剧包厢在 1782-3 赛季。本文一方面借鉴物质文化研究，另一方面借鉴文学文献，旨在重构罗宾逊名人的形象，使文本证据不以牺牲边缘的东西为代价而享有特权。