A ‘Distinctive’ Map of London: Women, Theatre and the Classics in 1893

Abstract

Copious geographies of nineteenth-century London spectacle have been mapped following different scales and criteria. In this article, I invite readers to scrutinise London’s entertainment industry in 1893 focusing on the venues where modern reconfigurations and adaptations of Greek and Roman mythology by women were first staged. Such a map reveals microhistories of the streets, theatres, pleasure gardens and concert halls, where women as creators and agents of the classical revival played an essential role that has generally been forgotten by theatre historians and classical reception studies. As I aim to demonstrate, this new and gendered cartography challenges the notion of a classical repertoire and the boundaries between the popular and the legitimate.