Fairies, Femininity, and Fame: Madame Vestris and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1840-1914

In most modern productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s king and queen of the fairies have a volatile, passionate relationship that is rooted in the sexual chemistry of two powerful figures colliding.  This explosive dynamic is particularly alluded to in visual portrayals of Oberon, where the king of the fairies is teeming with masculine virility. Consider, for example, recent portrayals of the fairy king: from a bare-chested Rupert Everett in the 1999 movie version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a bare-chested John Light in the 2013 Globe production to a bare-chested David Harewood in Julie Taymor’s 2013 filmed staged version, Oberon is a warrior who is formidable, sexy, and abounding with machismo. 

Madame Vestris as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Covent Garden, 1840. Image courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection

Yet it was not always this way.  For several generations of playgoers, women usually played all of the fairies, including the masculine Oberon.  From 1840 until 1914, with only a couple minor exceptions, women always played the fairy king.  This trend was originated by Lucia Elizabeth Vestris, better known to her contemporaries as Madame Vestris, in a highly influential production in 1840 at Covent Garden wherein she cast herself as the King of Shadows.  Vestris’s portrayal proved seminal, and for almost seventy-five years, no American or English production featured a man in the role.

But why was Vestris’s portrayal so influential?  What is it about distinctly female fairies that made them such a potent image on the Victorian stage?  And how were these feminine fairies integral in revitalizing interest in the full-text version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the most excised, expurgated, reduced, and adapted of Shakespeare’s plays?  

The answers to these questions are deceptively complex—and contradictory.  Throughout the Victorian and early Edwardian age, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the objects through which the era’s anxieties about innocence, idealism, passivity, and femininity were debated, and Vestris’s self-fashioned and gender-bending performance was indicative of the nineteenth-century impulse to idealize and infantilize women.  However, this feminine docility was moderated, perhaps even overpowered, by the sight of the voluptuous Vestris in breeches, which titillated the audience and hinted at the power and sexuality of Shakespeare’s fairy king.  Vestris’s feminized Oberon thus showcased the contradictions and complexities of Victorian society regarding the display of the female body, and Vestris’s performance worked on two different and contradictory levels through capitulating to feminine idealization while covertly coopting masculine aggression.

To read more about how Shakespeare’s play in text and in performance has served as a Rorschach test for each era’s anxieties about gender roles—and to see how productions from Madame Vestris’s to Julie Taymor’s have captured the cultural zeitgeist by altering the fairies’ roles to accommodate changing social attitudes about the power, idealism, docility, and maturity of women—see

Marija Reiff, “‘More Aerial, More Graceful, More Perfect’: Madame Vestris’s Oberon, Victorian Culture, and the Feminized Fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1840–1914” Victorian Review vol 44, no 2, Fall 2018, pp. 251-268.

    

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