Charlotte Charke
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Charlotte Charke (née Cibber, also Charlotte Secheverell, aka Charles Brown) (13 January 1713 – 6 April 1760) was an English actress, playwright, novelist, autobiographer, and noted transvestite. She acted on the stage from the age of 17, mainly in breeches roles, and took to wearing male clothing off the stage. She assumed the name "Charles Brown" and called her young daughter "Mrs. Brown". She suffered a series of failures in her business affairs, and worked in a variety of trades, from valet, through sausage maker, farmer, and pastry chef (generally as a man), and then achieved success under her own name as a journalist, ending her life as a novelist and memoirist.
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[edit] Early life
She was the last child born to poet laureate Colley Cibber and the musician/actress Katherine Shore. According to her autobiography, her brothers and sisters disliked her and resented her birth in her early years and maintained their dislike throughout their lives.
She was educated in the liberal arts and learned Latin, Italian, and geography at Mrs. Draper's School for girls between 1719 and 1721 and then moved to live with her mother in Middlesex. Her gender identification with men showed up early in her life, as she recalls impersonating her father as a small child, and, when she moved in with her mother, she taught herself shooting, gardening, and horse racing. In 1724, she and her mother moved to Hertfordshire, and there she continued engaging in country sports and education, focusing on subjects and pursuits usually associated with men. According to her anecdotes, she also "studied medicine" there and, in 1726, tried to set herself up as a doctor (she was thirteen years old). Colley Cibber, however, stopped her when the bills for her supplies came due.
[edit] Actress
Like her brothers and sisters, she had an interest in the theatre. She spent time at Drury Lane, where her father was manager, and in 1729, when she was sixteen, she was courted by the actor, composer, violinist Richard Charke, and the two were married on 4 February 1730. Once married, Charlotte was no longer a minor to her parents, and so she began to appear on stage. She made her debut on 8 April 1730 in the stereotypically ultra-feminine minor role of Mademoiselle in The Provok'd Wife, by John Vanbrugh, at Drury Lane. She had to stop performing, however, when she discovered that she was pregnant. Her daughter, Catherine, was born in December 1730, and a month later, January 1731, Charlotte was back on stage as Lucy in The London Merchant by George Lillo. In July of that year she made her first appearance in a breeches role as Tragedo in the same play and followed that the next year with Roderigo in Othello. She would later appear as Mrs. Slammerkin in The Beggar's Opera and the tomboyish Hoyden in The Relapse. Around this time, Charke began wearing male clothing also off the stage, although intermittently.
In 1733, Colley Cibber sold his controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre to John Highmore, and Charke felt that it should have gone instead to herself and her brother, Theophilus Cibber. In fact, it is likely that the sale was at a vastly inflated price and that Colley's goal was simply to get out of debts and make a profit (see Robert Lowe in his edition of Cibber's Apology). Theophilus, who likely knew of the scheme, grew more bold in demands when his father was not liable for pay and organized an actor's revolt. Charles Fleetwood then came to control the theatre, and Charke went to the Haymarket Theatre and began appearing in many male roles on the stage. She returned to Drury Lane for the role of Cleopatra and then walked out to have her own company in the summer of 1735 in Lincoln's Inn Fields, then the Haymarket. She wrote her first play, The Art of Management in September 1735. It was an explicit attack on Fleetwood, who attempted to buy up all printed copies of the play to prevent its circulating.
She walked out for good in 1736 to join Henry Fielding in the Haymarket. For him she appeared as Lord Place, a parody of her father, Colley Cibber, in Fielding's Pasquin in 1737. The play was a powerful attack on Robert Walpole and his government, and Colley Cibber was satirized for his fawning attachment to Walpole and his undeserving occupation of the place of poet laureate. Walpole led Parliament into passing the Licensing Act 1737, which forbid the acting of any play that hadn't passed censors and closed all non-patent theatres. Charlotte Charke was estranged from both patent theatres. For his part, Richard Charke, who had remained at Drury Lane, had already been estranged from Charlotte by constant affairs, and he fled his gambling debts by moving to Jamaica, where he would soon die. This left Charlotte Charke without an occupation, alienated from her father, and a single mother at the age of twenty-four.
[edit] Mr. Brown and poverty
It was at this point that Charke began wearing male clothes off stage more frequently. In 1738, she was granted a license to run Punch's Theatre at St. James's. It was a puppet theatre, and she used her puppets to perform a number of satirical plays. Her puppet shows were popular, and the government could not shut her down. She got the idea of taking her theatre on tour in the rest of the nation, and, while traveling, she fell seriously ill. Medical bills, according to her autobiography, cost her the theatre, and she sold her puppets at a loss. She sent Catherine with begging notes to her friends and relatives. None of her family would help her. Her father, in particular, was furious with her for the actor's rebellion at Drury Lane and her role in Pasquin. Dressing as a man was one way to avoid being recognized, but it was also clearly Charke's preference. According to the autobiography, the only aid she received was from other actors. Back in London, she was arrested for her debts, and Charke says that the coffee-house keepers and prostitutes of Covent Garden banded together to raise the money to pay her bail. She left London, and began appearing in public almost exclusively as a man. She called herself "Charles Brown" and her daughter "Mrs. Brown," and she boasts that one heiress fell in love with her as a man and proposed marriage, resulting in disappointment for both Charke and the heiress. She began to work any job she could, but always a job she could do as a man. She was a valet to Richard Annesley, 6th Earl of Anglesey and then a sausage maker. Anglesey was famous as a bigamist and libertine, and suspicions of active lesbianism date from this period. Anglesey was a central party to an infamous scandal, being dispossessed of his lands (but continuing to use his title) after a court ruled that he had sold his young kinsman, James Annesley, who had a better claim to the inheritance, into slavery.
In 1742, she got a new acting company in the New Theatre in St. James's, and she produced her second play, Tit for Tat, or, Comedy and Tragedy at War. In the flush of early success, she borrowed money from her uncle and opened the Charlotte Charke Tavern in Drury Lane. This failed, and she sold it at a loss. In the summer season, she appeared in a series of male roles. At this point, she was "Charles Brown" in public in London on an everyday basis. She joined with Theophilus Cibber at the Haymarket in 1744 and then joined William Hallam's company. She married John Sacheverell in 1746, but scholars cannot determine anything about this man, and Charke refers to him only in passing in her autobiography. Whatever the nature of the marriage, it was not full or long lasting, and all that Charke seemed to get from it was a name under which to appear for a time.
Some time in 1747, Charke went on the road as a strolling player. On the road, "Mr. Brown" and "Mrs. Brown" went to the West Country for four years. In 1750, Catherine married an actor named John Harman, despite Charlotte's not liking him. During these years, she was imprisoned, worked as a (male) pastry cook, and set up as a farmer. All of these were failures. Between 1752 and 1753, she wrote for the Bristol Weekly Intelligencer, and in 1754 she worked as a prompter in Bath, under her own name but in men's clothing. At the end of that year, she decided to move back to London and make her living as a writer.
[edit] Charlotte Charke as writer
In 1754, Charke wrote her first novel, The History of Mr. Henry Dumont and Miss Charlotte Evelyn and sold it for ten guineas. It was published in 1755, and the publisher's estimate of its value was apparently confirmed, as it did not sell especially well. However, Charke, like her father, was still famous and infamous, and she began writing her autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, which began to appear in installments. These sold very well, and the installments were collected and sold as a book, which went into two editions in the year. An abridged form appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine, as well.
Charke's tone is, like her father's, chatty, witty, relaxed, and intimate. It is a mixture of honesty and self-flattery, but with nothing like her father's self-aggrandizement. She wrote the autobiography, she said, to reconcile herself to her father. It did not work. He would not communicate with her, returning a letter unopened, and when he died in 1757, a very wealthy man, he left nothing to Charlotte. In response, Charke wrote The Lover's Treat, or, Unnatural Hatred, a novel about families at war with themselves.
In 1758, Catherine and her husband moved to America, and in 1759 Charke attempted to return to the stage in the breeches role of Marplot in Susanna Centlivre's The Busybody. She died in April 1760, forty-seven years old.
[edit] Gender issues
Charke's Narrative has received renewed attention in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Part of this has come from scholars who have viewed her as a transgressive figure, a woman who challenged and redefined gender. She has also been viewed as an openly lesbian figure. However, the Narrative has little sure evidence of lesbianism, and none for open lesbianism, and Charke indicates that her transvestitism was very rarely met with shock or outrage. Those who met her as "Mr. Brown" and knew her actual sex did not seem to be, in her account, very disturbed by her clothing or very interested in her sexual orientation. Thus, some have even seen in Charke's transvestitism and possible lesbianism a sign of how loosely female gender was policed and controlled, or how thoroughly actors and actresses were outside of social norms. Whatever contemporaries perceived of Charke's habits and orientation, her constant financial difficulties and vocational limitations are, at the least, examples of the openness and restrictions of the mid-18th century economic system in England.
[edit] References
- Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, ed. Robert Lowe, 1889). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, vol.1, vol 2. London.
- Thompson, Lynda Mia. "Charlotte Charke," in Matthew, H.C.G. and Brian Harrison, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. vol. 11, 92–95. London: OUP, 2004.
[edit] Further reading
- Morgan, Fidelis The Well Known Troublemaker - A life of Charlotte Charke 1989, London: Faber
