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Abstract
This study examines the effects of two concurrent cultural developments on British attitudes towards gender during the long eighteenth century: the introduction and popularization of actresses to the British public stage and the ongoing British colonial project. The goal is to demonstrate how theatrical performance shaped changing social attitudes towards women in light of the country’s encounters with non-European peoples in the Americas. I am specifically concerned with performance and the interplay between the fictional personae of the characters and the offstage reputations of the performers bringing them to life. I use a framework that I have termed “hauntography” to illustrate how the fictional content of plays interacts with the performers’ identities and the broader cultural and political context to produce meaning. I read performances from the late seventeenth century through the beginning of the eighteenth century staged at sites around the Atlantic holdings of the British empire to show that theatre participated in a negotiation around women’s role in society that ultimately resulted in a repressive enclosure of women to domestic rather than public space.