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Sophie Duncan illuminates iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare´s heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and careers of the actresses who played them. Duncan draws on a wealth of archival material to explore the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other.

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Shakespeare´s Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare´s heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare andcontemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses´ movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry´s Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal´s Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry´s Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare´s lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the ´Jack the Ripper´ killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and therise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare.Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women´s creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses´ creative networks encompassed suffragistactivists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.

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Shakespeare´s Woman and the Fin De Siècle will be required reading for anyone working on Shakespeare´s reception in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and vital for those wanting to understand the New Woman more fully. It is a thorough work of theatre history. And it will satisfy those for whom the cults of Terry and Langtry never die. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Victorian Studies

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Sophie Duncan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her principal research interests are in Early Modern and nineteenth-century drama, theatre history, cognitive approaches to literature, and cultural memory. She has published on fin-de-siècle Gothic culture, Shakespeare, and celebrity. Beyond academia, she works regularly as a historical advisor and dramaturg for theatre, radio, and television.

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