The history of the theater in eighteenth-century England is a history of flamboyant personalities, one of whom was Charlotte Charke (1716-1760). She initially achieved fame as an actress and later achieved notoriety when she began to wear men's clothes off the stage. Kathryn Shevelow's Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress's Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World treats us not only to a well-researched and entertaining biography of a controversial character, but also to the fascinating theater world.

Charlotte was born into one of London's most colorful theater families. Her father, Colley Cibber, who later became England's poet laureate, was a famous dramatist, comic actor, and theater manager, who worked at the Drury Lane Theater.

According to Shevelow, eighteenth-century loved spectacle. London was a "theater writ large," a city of "continual performance," that demanded its inhabitants take on roles. People were sometimes rewarded for the roles they took on, and sometimes they were castigated. Charlotte experienced both acclaim and disapproval.

Early on, Charlotte seemed destined for the stage. At four, she, to her father's amusement, slipped out of the house dressed in one the elaborate periwigs he wore on stage. At seventeen, she married another actor, Richard Charke, and began acting in Drury Lane productions. Throughout her life, Charlotte suffered a string of bad luck. Every success she had was followed by a disaster that forced her to rebuild her livelihood and her career. Soon after her marriage, she and Richard became estranged, leaving her as the sole support of their daughter, Kitty.

By the time Charlotte was in her mid-twenties, she had made a name for herself in London's theaters, specializing in what were known as "breecher parts," roles in which female actors wore men's clothing and played male characters as part of the plot.

In 1736, she left Drury Lane to become part of a theater troupe established at the Little Haymarket under the direction of Henry Fielding. Fielding wrote a number of anti-government plays in which Charlotte, often appearing in breeches, played major parts. In addition, in other performances she took to parodying her father and some of his most famous roles, eventually alienating him, which later deprived her of needed access to his money and influence.

Approximately a year after joining Fielding, his theater was shut down because of the seditious content of his plays. Fielding would later achieve fame as a novelist. Charlotte would not be so lucky. Due to her strained relations with her family, she had to rely on her wits and talents to survive.

Although she never completely abandoned acting, she was never able again to solely support herself with theater work. Instead she took on a string of jobs-- sausage-seller, waiter, valet, puppet theater owner. It was at this point that Charlotte took the breecher roles she had made famous into real life. She began to dress and, in some instances, act like a man. In two of the jobs she held, as a waiter and as a valet, she initially passed as a man. When she worked as an actor in traveling theater troupes, she often performed under the name Charles Brown.

In the last fifteen years of her life, she lived with a woman, likely an actress, known only to history as "Mrs. Brown." In fact, the two of them often traveled together as Mr. and Mrs. Brown. One of the interesting historical questions Shevelow attempts to answer is what did it mean for a woman to publicly cross-dress and have a relationship with another woman in the eighteenth-century? Charlotte herself, in her published autobiography, does not address these issues, so Shevelow is left to speculate, suggesting that in eighteenth-century mores we see reflections of the current century.

Shevelow argues that on the stage then, as now, a "cross-dresser's status as simultaneously 'both-and' and 'neither-nor' must have delivered, for some, its own erotic charge." As to the nature of the relationship between Charlotte and Mrs. Brown, Shevelow can once again only guess, but she convincingly contends that they can be seen as "forebears" to contemporary lesbian couples because "Charlotte finally found a loving, loyal companion to relieve her loneliness and to share her exile."