In a recent interview with them., writer Tana Wojczuk commented on her inspiration for her book Lady Romeo, explaining, “I grew up reading fairy tales and being really frustrated by the female characters in them and how powerless they seemed. They never got to have adventures, and [Charlotte] Cushman’s story is like an adventure story, and I just loved that. She’s so uncompromising and doesn’t apologize for herself.” Lady Romeo is a biography of America’s first stage celebrity, Charlotte Cushman, who made headlines in both the U.S. and Europe in the 19th century for her stunning portrayals of some of the most celebrated characters in the theatre canon, such as Shakespearan classics like Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Meg Merrilies in Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering. Cushman was not only hailed as one of the most transfixing, expressive, and talented performers to ever grace the stage, but she was also a revolutionary in the sense that she opened up theatre audiences to gender bending performances, exposing just how useless binary gender constructs are both on the stage and in the real world.
In her biography, Wojczuk offers the full scope of Cushman’s life, beginning with her origins as the eldest daughter of a respectable Boston family, who are thrown into economic desperation by the desertion of Charlotte’s father, all the way to the end of her life, when she retired from the stage with great acclaim in her 60s, and succumbed to breast cancer. Wojczuk not only provides detailed accounts of Cushman’s performances and the complex arc of her career and rise to stardom, but also dives into Cushman’s personal life, which feels inseparable from her public life. As a queer woman who maintained various romantic relationships with other women throughout her life, Cushman further experimented with gender and sexual norms by adopting male dress in her personal life and refusing to ever enter into a marriage with a man, despite society’s expectations for her. Cushman refused to shrink herself to fit into the prescribed boxes of femininity, and prioritized her career and her artistry in an age where women had very few avenues to financial or professional independence.
The book offers fascinating insight into the many prominent artists, thinkers, and culture-defining intellectuals that Cushman had an impact upon throughout her career. Fans and associates of hers included Walt Whitman, Secretary of State William H. Seward, President Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist and writer Louisa May Alcott, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other prominent artists. The theatre audience, then divided by massive class distinctions, was united in its praise of Cushman as a truly revelatory performer who brought Shakespeare’s words to life for her audiences. Despite the many critiques of her appearance that landed in the papers (some things never change), Cushman stunned audiences of men and women alike with her emotion, total commitment to her performance, and presence.
The biography is a meticulously recorded and fascinating account of an actor that has widely been forgotten by theater history. It contains fascinating firsthand accounts of Cushman’s public and private personas, with excerpts from Cushman’s diary, her letters, and contemporary new sources. Wojczuk claims, “My goal was to make this book read kind of like a novel. Doing that took about ten years because it’s all true. I didn’t want it to be a mishmash of fact and fiction. I wanted you to really know who she was. So I used letters, which are in archives all over, and I requested material from overseas archives.” A crucial addition to the queer history canon, Lady Romeo is an immensely readable and compassionate portrayal of a complex, radical, and unapologetic performer.
Further Reading: Some other fascinating books that demonstrate the personal impact of queer historical figures include Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, and Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.