¹ See Mandel, Oscar, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630–1963 (Lincoln, 1963);Google ScholarSmeed, J. W., Don Juan: Variations on a Theme (London, 1990);Google ScholarRussell, Charles C., The Don Juan Legend Before Mozart, with a Collection of Eighteenth-Century Opera Librettos (Ann Arbor, 1993);Google ScholarMiller, Jonathan, ed., The Don Giovanni Book: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal (London, 1990);Google ScholarRushton, Julian, W. A. Mozart: ‘Don Giovanni’, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

² (London, 1938) and (New York, 1990), respectively. For a selective bibliography, see Smeed, Don Juan, 174–86.Google Scholar

³ Burrell seems to have acted Giovanni every other night, alternating performances with a Mr McKeon: see, Songs, Duets, Chorusses, &c, Serious and Comic, sung in the highly popular new broad comic extravaganza entertainment, in two acts, y'clept Giovanni in London; or, the Libertine Reclaimed, 1st and 2nd edn (London, 1818). Few details have emerged concerning Burrell or McKeon's performances in the original production of Giovanni in London. Burrell seems not to have captivated the Olympic's audiences to the extent that Vestris would later do at Drury Lane, perhaps because different cultural meanings were attached to their performances of the role. This complex issue will be explored later in the article.Google Scholar

⁴ For discussion of the ‘extravanganza’ as a genre, its origins in the ballad operas of John Gay and his contemporaries, and its position in London's theatrical world, see Rubsamen, Walter H., ‘The Ballad Burlesques and Extravaganzas’, Musical Quarterly, 36 (1950), 551–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLamb, Andrew, ‘Music of the Popular Theatre’, in Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. Temperley, Nicholas, History, Blackwell of Music in Britain 5 (London, 1988), 92–108.Google Scholar

⁵ Such was Vestris's success in Giovanni in London that Moncrieff wrote the three-act extravaganza Giovanni in Ireland for her. Premièred on 22 December 1821, it was considered too inflammatory and quickly withdrawn: as Winston, James noted in his diary, ‘the unpopularity of His Majesty's visit to Ireland was the cause of the opposition, blended with religion and polities’, Nelson, Alfred L. and Cross, Gilbert B., eds., Drury Lane Journal: Selections from James Winston's Diaries 1819–1827 (London, 1974), 41–2.Google Scholar For an exploration of breeches parts written for Vestris later in her career, see Fletcher, Kathy, ‘Planche, Vestris, and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, 15 (1987), 9–33.Google Scholar

⁶ Vestris adopted a similar procedure in her performances as Macheath in The Beggar's Opera, sometimes with disastrous consequences for other members of the cast: see Memoirs of the Life of Madame Vestris (London, 1830), 42–4.Google Scholar Sources for Giovanni in London consulted for this paper include: Songs, Duets, Chorusses, [… in] Giovanni in London (London, 1818);Google ScholarGiovanni in London: or, the Libertine Reclaimed: an Operatic Extravaganza in Two Acts by W. T. Moncrieff, printed in Cumberland's British Theatre, with Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D G: printed from the Acting Copies, as Performed at the Theatres Royal, London, Vol. XVII (London, 1828), reproduced in Mandel, The Theatre of Don Juan, 398–446; Songs, Duets, Choruses […] as performed at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden (London, n. d.). The following observations are based on Cumberland (1828); significant variants in other published editions have been noted where appropriate.Google Scholar

⁷ For example, a popular lovesong the audience would have known as ‘Together let us range the fields’ became ‘Together let us trapse the streets’ (sic). See Songs, Duets, Choruses, [… in] Giovanni in London (London, 1818), 13 (Act I); this song is not included in Cumberland's edition of 1828. Reworking of song texts in this manner was a characteristic feature of the burlesque and extravaganza genres; see Rubsamen, ‘The Ballad Burlesques’.Google Scholar

⁸ ‘Away with fight and quarrel’, sung by a grand chorus at the Magpie and Punch Bowl public house in Act I scene 3. This ensemble, among the first vocal pieces by Mozart to reach England, was available in London before 1800 (see Fig. 3). It achieved a sustained popularity and was reprinted many times in anthologies of popular vocal music. After her arrival in London in 1806, the Italian soprano Angelica Catalani created a fashion for improvising virtuosic variations on this theme, performing her own set (‘O dolce concento’) at theatres, concerts and music meetings throughout the country.Google Scholar

⁹ The publisher John Miller printed the following address to the public in the first edition of Songs, Duets, Chorusses, [… in] Giovanni in London (London, 1818): ‘It has been erroneously imagined by those persons who have not witnessed the performance, that it is “a tale twice told”, and founded on the old worn-out piece of Don Juan; it may therefore be necessary to add, that this Drama begins where the Italian Opera finishes; that the Hero and Leporello are placed in situations entirely nouvelle, and that the incidents arising from those situations are completely original. Stratford Place, January 16, 1818’.Google Scholar

¹⁰ ‘Behold! in his sweet expressive face’, in Songs, Duets, Cborusses, &c. [in…] Giovanni in London (London, 1818), 10; 2nd edn, 14.Google Scholar

¹¹ Line 5: cossacks were a type of full boot, or perhaps (more likely in this context) a cape; a sack was a loose type of gown worn by women, or a silk train attached to the shoulders of such a dress. 6: a brutus was a type of wig made fashionable by George IV. 7: a style of leather boot named after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. 9: stays were waistline-enhancing corsets, worn by men as well as women. 11: a monocle. 16: spurs. 27: driving a coach and four horses. 30: imprisoned for debt by the Court of King's Bench. 31: a common nickname for The Insolvency Act.Google Scholar

¹² Trumbach, Randolph, ‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Duberman, Martin, Vicinus, Martha and Chauncey, George, Jr. (Harmondsworth, 1991), 129–40.Google Scholar See also Thomas, Gary C., ‘ “Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”: On Closet Questions and Cultural Polities’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Cay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C. (New York, 1994), 155–204.Google Scholar

¹³ See Senelick, Laurence, ‘Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1990), 33–67.Google ScholarPubMed On the intimate relations between theatre, tragedy and the feminine, see Zeitlin, Froma I., ‘Playing the Other: Theatre, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama’, Representations, 2 (Summer 1985), 63–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ Senelick's comments are revealing here: ‘In its evolving gentility, the theatre could validate its credentials for social utility by attacking only those abuses that might be mentioned in mixed company. Sodomy per se could not be pilloried without the stage being accused of obscenity; but it might be obliquely attacked through satire of effeminate behaviour, which was increasingly identified with male-to-male sexuality. The identification of effeminacy with sodomy became an admissible dramatic code’, ‘Mollies or Men of Mode?’, 43. For a survey of British writers who traced male homosexuality to Italy, see Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1988), 19–21 and 75;Google Scholarand Crompton, Louis, Byron and Greek Love (London, 1985), 52–6. Further research into the homosexual argot in use at this time would be invaluable in decoding much of the innuendo in popular stage works such as Giovanni in London.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Audiences may have drawn a parallel between this mock duel and that portrayed by Maria Edgeworth in her novel of 1801, Belinda, the fourth edition of which was published in London in 1821. Edgeworth subverts this ritual even further, presenting a metaphorical warning to women who aspire to male privilege: Lady Delacour is bullied by her friend Harriot Freke, the cross-dressed and mannish lesbian, into challenging another woman to a duel, for which Lady Delacour dons the breeches. When this “unnatural” duel is broken up by an outraged mob, Delacour fires her pistol into the air, bruising her breast; an abscess develops, which she fears is cancer. For further discussion of Edgeworth's novel and its manipulation of gender codes, see Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London, 1993), 100–103.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Sir John English is described by Moncrieff as a deputy Common Councillor in the City of London, and sings the patriotic ballad, ‘Oh the Roast Beef of Old England’, in the opening scene of Act II.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In keeping with the genre of the piece, Moncrieff also uses English's John Bullishness to jibe satirically at the Englishman's expensive infatuation with exotic Italian opera: ‘Deputy. Why, wife! Do you know this is the famous Giovanni? And, from what I have heard a foreigner and a singer. So sir, like a true John Bull, I am glad to see you; and, though I may not understand you, sir, I like you; and any service I can render you, you may freely command’ (Act II scene 1).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Recent literature addressing the function of the cross-dressed woman in opera includes: En Travesti: Women, Gender, Subversion, Opera, ed. Blackmer, Corinne E. and Smith, Patricia Juliana (New York, 1995).Google Scholar For discussion of related phenomena, see also Senelick, Laurence, ‘The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage’, Essays in Theatre, 1 (1982), 30–44;Google ScholarAston, Elaine, ‘Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: The Case of Vesta Tilley’, New Theatre Quarterly, 4 (1988), 247–57;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Garafola, Lynne, ‘The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet’, in Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-dressing, ed. Ferris, Lesley (London, 1993), 96–106.Google Scholar It may be tempting to locate Vestris's personification of the Don within the nineteenth-century pantomime tradition of the principal boy, in which a cross-dressed actress plays the juvenile male lead. But as David Mayer has pointed out, attempts to bring the breeches role into pantomime in 1815 and 1819 were rejected. The principal boy did not become a stock character in British pantomime until the 1830s. See Mayer, David, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomime’, Theatre Quarterly, 4 (1974), 55–66.Google Scholar

¹⁹ At least one o f the costumes worn by Vestris in Giovanni in London appears to have been closely modelled on that worn by Italian baritone Giuseppe Ambrogetti as Giovanni in the London première of Mozart and D a Ponte's opera (King's Theatre, 12 April 1817). For discussion of costumes worn by Victorian transvestite actresses in the extravaganza, see Fletcher, ‘Planché, Vestris, and the Transvestite Role’, 26–9.Google Scholar

²⁰ Duncombe, Thomas H., The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, 2 vols. (London, 1868), I, 175.Google Scholar

²¹ See Ferris, Lesley, Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (London, 1990), 149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² For example: ‘Duncombe, John’, Memoirs of the Life, Public and Private Adventures of Madame Vestris; ‘…’ with Interesting and Curious Anecdotes of Celebrated and Distinguished Characters in the Fashionable World. Detailing an interesting variety of singularly Curious and Amusing Scenes, as performed both before & behind the Curtain, both in Public and Private Life, ‘At Home’ and Abroad (London, ‘1826’);Google Scholar and ‘Chubb, William’, Memoirs of the Private and Public Life, Adventures and Wonderful Exploits of Madame Vestris, the Female Giovanni, Aiacheath, and Don Juan of the present day (London, c. 1830).Google Scholar For an account of the legal action Vestris instigated against John Duncombe in the Court of King's Bench to stop his publication of these anonymous memoirs, see Appleton, William W., Madame Vestris and the London Stage (New York, 1974), 42–3.Google Scholar

²³ Memoirs of the Life of Madame Vestris (London, 1830), 59.Google Scholar

²⁴ Several biographies of Lucia Vestris have been published to date, including: Pearce, Charles, Madame Vestris and her Times (London, 1923);Google ScholarWilliams, Clifford John, Madame Vestris: A Theatrical Biography (London, 1973);Google Scholar Appleton, Madame Vestris (n. 22). See also, Knight, Joseph, ‘Mathews, Lucia Elizabeth’, in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lee, Sidney (London, 1894), XXXVIII, 41–3.Google ScholarIn 1831 Vestris reopened the Olympic Theatre in partnership with Maria Foote (who withdrew shortly afterwards), thus becoming the first female lessee the London stage had known, according to a prologue by John Hamilton Reynolds delivered on the occasion. Vestris controlled the Olympic Theatre until 1838, and with her second husband Charles Mathews she managed Covent Garden theatre (1839–42), and the Lyceum (1847–55).Google Scholar

²⁵ Theatrical Inquisitor, quoted by William Oxberry, Oxberry's Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes (London, 1826), V, 91–106, here 104.Google Scholar

²⁶ Lesley Ferris, ‘Introductions: Current Crossings’, in Crossing the Stage, 1–19, here 11.Google Scholar

²⁷ Quoted in Memoirs of the Life of Madame Vestris (London, 1830), 62–3.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 62.

²⁹ Howe, P. P., ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols. (London, 1930–1934), XVIII, 352.Google Scholar

³⁰ Unidentified newspaper clipping in Madame Vestris file, Harvard Theater Collection, quoted in Laurence Senelick, ‘Boys and Girls Together: Subcultural Origins of Glamour Drag and Male Impersonation on the Nineteenth-Century Stage’, in Ferris, Crossing the Stage, 80–95, here 81.Google Scholar

³¹ Ibid.

³² This production was a new English version b y j. R. Planché premièred on 15 April 1842, conducted by Julius Benedict. It remained close to the original, and replaced an earlier English version - Holcroft's adaptation, based on his Follies of the Day (1784) copied from Beaumarchais, with Mozart's score ‘adapted’ by Henry Bishop and several numbers replaced with new songsGoogle Scholar: see Carter, Tim, W. A. Mozart: ‘Le nosge di Figaro’, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1987), 133–5. At this point in her career, Vestris was manager of Covent Garden theatre under the proprietorship of Charles Kemble.Google Scholar

³³ Trumbach, Randolph, ‘London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Epstein, Julia and Straub, Kristina (New York, 1991), 112–41. For the etymology of these and other terms for same-sex desire between women, see Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 2–8.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ashley, Leonard, ed., A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, 2nd edn (London: 1755; rpt. Gainsville, Fla., 1969). For a discussion of Charke's text, see Kristina Straub, ‘The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke’, in Body Guards, 142–66; and Donoghue, Passions, 97–100, 164–6.Google Scholar

³⁵ Balderston, Katherine C., ed., Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi, 1776–1809), 2 vols., 2nd edn (Oxford, 1951), 770.Google Scholar See also the anonymous pamphlet, , A Sapphick Epistle, from fack Cavendish, to the Honourable and most Beautiful Mrs. D - R. (London, [1782]).Google Scholar For discussion of Darner's life, see Noble, Percy, Anne Seymour Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion, 1748–1828 (London, 1908);Google ScholarFothergill, Brian, The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and his Circle (London, 1983), 201–2; and Donoghue, Passions, 145–8, 262–5.Google Scholar

³⁶ Grieg, James, ed., The Farrington Diary, 8 vols. (London, n. d.), I, 233–4.Google Scholar

³⁷ Stanley, Liz, ‘Epistemological Issues in Researching Lesbian History: The Case of Romantic Friendship’, in Working Out: New Directions for Women's Studies, ed. Hinds, H., Phoenix, A. and Stacey, J. (London, 1992), 161–72, here 163;Google ScholarCasde, Terry, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modem Culture (New York, 1993), 92–106;Google ScholarMavor, Elizabeth, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Harmondsworth, 1971), 73–7;Google ScholarFaderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), 120–5.Google Scholar

³⁸ Terry Castle has observed that the mythic figure of the transgressive male rake, of the man ruled by his desire for women, offered for some nineteenth-century women ‘a way “into” their own transgressive desire: the one kind of sexual unorthodoxy sanctioned the other’ - hence, Anne Lister was interested to discover that Miss Ponsonby (of the Ladies of Llangollen) had confessed to reading the first canto of Byron's Don Juan (The Apparitional Lesbian, 92–106, here 104). In the light of Casde's comments, it is perhaps significant that the high-minded Ladies also owned a china model of La Jambe de Vestris (Mavor, 212), although they left no record of having attended any of her performances.Google Scholar

³⁹ For example, the case of ‘James Allen’, married to Mary Allen for twenty-one years until her death in an accident at the shipwright's yard where she was employed as a labourer. Only then was it discovered that she was a woman. See, ‘The Female Husband’, Times, 17 and 19 January 1829. Following the death of her ‘husband’ Mary Allen was harassed by the mob, who believed she must in fact be a man.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ For further discussion of passing women and the ‘female husband’, see Donoghue, Passions (n. 15), 59–86; Wheelwright, Julie, Amazons and Military Maids: Women who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London, 1989);Google Scholar and Dugaw, Dianne, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Chicago, 1989).Google Scholar On Fieldin'gs somewhat contradictory attitudes towards female transvestism, see Jill Campbell, ‘ “When Men Women Turn”: Gender Reversals in Fielding's Plays’, Crossing the Stage, 58–79; and Casde, Terry, ‘Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband’, English Literary History, 49 (1982), 602–22. Casde concurs with Fielding biographer Pat Rogers in suggesting that Fielding may also have had Charke in mind when writing The Female Husband (616–17).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1825), II, 334.Google Scholar

⁴² Memoirs of Mrs Siddons, 2 vols. (London, 1827), I, 283. See Kristina Straub, ‘Guilty Pleasures’, 148.Google Scholar

⁴³ Life of Mrs Jordan, 2 vols. (London, 1831), I, 46.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Oxberry, Oxberry's Dramatic Biography, V, 91–106 (97).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See Drury Lane fournaL Selections from James Winston's Diaries, 21. Winston was acting manager for Elliston at Drury Lane from 1819, and had complete charge of hiring actors and of negotiating salaries and conditions of employment: his journal, therefore, carries considerable authority as a record of Vestris's business relationships with her managers.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Professional and Literary Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger, ed. Speaight, George (London, 1956), 143–4.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ ‘Engagement [ms] between John Ebers and Lucie Elisa Vestris’, British Library, Additional MS 52335, f. 32. See also the manuscript terms of her engagement at the King's Theatre and signed contract, dated 24 May 1822, Westminster City Archives, H2, 291.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Passions, 87.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Lamb, Charles, Review-of.Thomas Dibdin's Don Giovanni, or a Spectre on Horseback, Examiner (22 11 1818).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Quoted in Williams, Madame Vestris: A Theatrical Biography, 58.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Hunt, Leigh, Review of Giovanni in London at Drury Lane, Examiner (4 06 1820).Google Scholar

⁵² I am grateful to Sophie Fuller and Christopher Fox for their helpful comments and encouragement during the preparation of this article.Google Scholar