Read Linda Fitzsimmons's original review which was published in Theatre Research International, 12, 2 (1992), pp. 163–4.

Tracy C. Davis's first book, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, appeared thirty years ago. By the time I was referencing the Brown University library copy of it for my own dissertation more than a decade ago, it was the foundational work on women in nineteenth-century theatre: the first title anyone mentioned when the topic of Victorian Britain's theatre came up. Just as I was finishing that dissertation in 2012, I found a used paperback of my own in a Kyoto Book Off, a major branch in the largest chain of second-hand bookstores in Japan; this is the copy I turned to once more after being asked to re-review the book for TRI.

Davis described the import of her approach thus in the book's introduction: ‘the complicated social existence of actresses could only be explained pluralistically, and narrative models of historical explanation were abandoned’, leaving her with ‘a book that poses a central question – why were actresses so equivocal in Victorian society? – five times, bringing to theatre studies five “foreign” methodological approaches and five distinct disciplinary traditions’ (p. xi). The effect of reading is a bit like a massive pointillist canvas slowly filling in. A few points here about the appeal of entering the profession to working-class women. A few points there about a clutch of different kinds of charity endeavours. Some poignant anecdotes about walking for miles between provincial towns and capitals for work and the difficulties of maintaining child care. The actress herself – because she is not singular, as Davis is at pains to point out throughout – is curiously absent from the book because while individuals may appear, named or unnamed in individual anecdotes, both Parts I and II attempt to deal with a vast array of actresses, especially those least remembered and most anonymous: the ballet girls, choristers and music hall types who made up the lowest rungs and majority of working women performers.

The first sentence of Linda Fitzsimmons's original review of the book reads, ‘This book transforms nineteenth-century theatre studies.’ I mused on whether I think this sentence proved accurate or not as I composed this re-review. Certainly it was and probably still is one of the first books anyone names when discussing Victorian theatre history, definitely the first book named if the key word ‘women’ is added to that list. Of the three – ‘Victorian’, ‘women’ and ‘theatre’ – anyone writing on any two of those terms is likely to cite this book somewhere: Victorian women, Victorian theatre, women in theatre. A Google Scholar search returns 617 references to Actresses in other scholarly publications; a perusal of those references bears out the general accuracy of the pick-any-two hypothesis. Actresses is referenced in books written in English, German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. The works that name-check it include material about Sweden, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA, India, China, Jordan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Argentina. Specific important books that reference it include Sweating Saris (2011; Srinivasan), Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan (2001; Kato), Treading the Bawds (2006; Bush-Bailey) and Watching Weimar Dance (2014; Elswit), but the reference list also includes topics like ‘Victorian Railway Erotics’, ‘Ghanaian Trickster Performance’, ‘Polkomania on the London Stage’, ‘Deb Margolin, Robbie McCauley, Peggy Shaw’, ‘Actresses in the Roman World’, ‘Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood’, ‘Edna Ferber's Hollywood’ and ‘The Brothel as Theater in the “Circe” Chapter of Ulysses’. And remember, I found it myself in Japan, jumbled into the mass-market non-fiction treasures of the Kyoto expat community. I offer the foregoing as means of meditating on what this famous book has done to ‘transform nineteenth-century theatre studies’. We can see that many texts influenced by Actresses look beyond the nineteenth century as well as far beyond the island of Great Britain.

On the other hand, in revisiting this book after spending the last decade and change on the edges of nineteenth-century theatre history (and more fully in performance studies), it seems to me that Davis's Actresses poses an invitation that has largely not been answered by the field(s) of theatre history and historiography. While hundreds of later scholars have used this book as a reference, vanishingly few of us (I include myself here) have followed Davis's Marxist–feminist approach to social history that sought to cover the vast contours of economic and social issues and masses of people in an Annales-style historiographical tradition. We tend to fall back on what most charitably could be called microhistory or New Historicism, but would often be more accurately identified as lack of any conscientious historiographical methodology. That is, Actresses asked the field of theatre studies to adopt more rigorous and defined historiographical methods, but we mostly didn't do that. Davis used delightfully acidic turns of phrase like ‘Some theatre historians believe that the leaders – not the masses – characterise the profession, and write history in defiance of principles accepted in mainstream historical studies for several decades’ (pp. 39–40). She advocates for the unheralded of the performance world, yet the field remains largely enamoured of individuals. (This tendency could be homeopathically related to the dominant narrative forms of theatre itself as well – a few symbolist attempts at archetypes aside, theatre representation's own basic building block is obviously the individual character.) So Actresses certainly did not ‘transform’ nineteenth-century theatre studies in the sense of inspiring a mass of subsequent works to adopt its methods or other rigorously quantitative forms of historical research. Even Professor Davis's own extensive later works move on from the methods and charts of this book.

The sweeping statistical calculations and the expansive anecdotal evidence Davis gathered to make up the basis of Part I still make a great basis for new historical research on the three intertwined topics of Victorian women, Victorian theatre and women in theatre, but they also feel like a reference book, as if the intervention remains to be made after all the contextual facts have been arrayed. Perhaps Part II should provide the argument to fill the main subject of the pointillist mural. Certainly, the original reviewer thinks this is the case: ‘The real achievement of Tracy Davis is to extend her feminist understanding of the ways in which pornography functions as an arm of patriarchal power and control into her investigation of theatre history’ (p. 164). But it also feels a bit like a whole new canvas to me. I appreciate both parts for the inordinate amount of research and detail accumulated, although I sometimes missed the sense of a central figure to anchor myself.

Thus asking the same question five times here led to two very different answers, which sometimes are hard to reconcile with each other: the agency and creativity of the actresses toiling under twinned capitalist and patriarchal conditions in Part I of the book disappear into the fantasized sex-object actress in Part II where the real ‘working women’ are supplanted by the fictional denizens of a vast pornotopia, mapped onto the same streets of the capital. Both the semiotic analysis employed and the tenor of the feminist analysis of sexual objectification feel dated now. Even in the original review, the reviewer notes that the strenuousness of Davis's parsing of the difference between actress and sex worker can make it sound as if ‘prostitutes are lesser beings than actresses’ (p. 164). From my thirty-year armchair, this conundrum sounds also distinctly like the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s.

To be clear: this is not Andrea Dworkin Goes to the Music Hall. I personally struggle to articulate this complex conflation in my own scholarship and especially teaching: that stage players were not synonymous with sex workers, but as the stage (especially, as Davis illustrates, the ‘lower’ type) was saturated with the objectifying dynamics of patriarchal sex politics, the position of the actress was not not a kind of sex work. So I appreciate the time taken here even as the blunt, blanket conclusions Davis made no longer feel like news in and of themselves. (‘Victorian males interpreted theatrical performance with reference to the staple motifs of sexual fantasy, pursuit, and pleasure from illicit literature’, declares page 132. Or, a page later, ‘The theatre flaunted its vestimentary, gestural, and figural heresies until they were taken for granted. Through frequent repetition, the heresies seemed natural, though their potency as sexual referents was intact’. (p. 133)) This sense of non-revelation may very well be proof of another way in which Actresses transformed nineteenth-century theatre studies: if the conclusions feel commonsensical now, that could be evidence of the effectiveness of the intervention thirty years ago. (I see an analogue matter-of-factness when students encounter early Judith Butler today – notions of the performativity of gender have so saturated common knowledge of gender and trans discourses that students are frequently nonplussed by reading Butler, published in the same period as Actresses.)

I suppose it was up to the rest of us over these last thirty years to try to forge some synthesis of these disparate parts. And while I may have found the semiotic half a rather awkward fit over the pointillist aggregation of data in Part I, I also think it may well be time for us to revisit, reanimate and extend into the twenty-first century some of Davis's forthright feminist analysis of pornographic tropes in light of recent issues in theatre, related industries and beyond. I'm thinking here of intimacy choreography; the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements; Title IX (in the USA) and other debates about how to address sexual harassment, assault and inequality on campuses and workplaces; and a renewed focus in theory and philosophy on consent, intimacy and sexual politics as indexed by Ania Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021), Katherine Angel's Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2022), renewed feminist conflicts around transgender people and activism, and the controversial works of Laura Kipnis. Even if the semiotic analysis Actresses as Working Women posited three decades ago no longer feels revolutionary, the problems Tracy Davis was urgently addressing certainly still do.