In contrast to each other, Volume 5 is a sociological portrait of mostly little people in their tragic and comic efforts to achieve fame on the London stage during the Restoration and eighteenth century, whereas Volume 6 is dom­inated by the glamour of David Gar­rick, Nell Gwyn, and Joseph Grimaldi, the celebrated clown. Some 250 por­traits individualize the great and small of the theatres of London.

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How the suspect sexuality of actors and actresses shaped early modern debates about gender and sexual identity From the Restoration through the eighteenth century, the sexuality of actors and actresses was written about in ways that stirred the public imagination. Actors were frequently suspected of heterosexual promiscuity or labeled effeminate or even as “sodomites,” and actresses were often viewed as prostitutes or sexually ambivalent victims of their profession. Kristina Straub argues that this depiction of players greatly shaped public debates about what made women feminine and men masculine. Considering a wide range of literature by or about players—pamphlets, newspaper reports, theatrical histories, and biographies as well as the public correspondence between Alexander Pope and the famed actor Colley Cibber—she examines the formation of gender roles and sexual identities during a period crucial to modern thinking on these issues. Drawing from feminist-materialist and gay and lesbian theories and historiographies, Sexual Suspects analyzes the complex development of spectacle and spectatorship as gendered concepts. She reveals how national, racial, and class differences contributed to the subjection of players as professional spectacles and how images of race, class, and gender combined to create divisions between “normal” and “deviant” sexuality.

Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott’s legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott’s letters to be published and presents all extant copies.