Actors - Charlotte Charke

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	Actors - Charlotte Charke

Charlotte Charke (nee Cibber, also Charlotte Secheverell, aka Charles Brown) (January 13, 1713 - April 6, 1760) was an English actress, playwright, novelist, autobiographer, and noted transvestite. She acted on the stage from the age of 17, mainly in breeches roles, and took to wearing male clothing off the stage. She assumed the name "Charles Brown" and called her young daughter "Mrs. Brown". She suffered a series of failures in her business affairs, and worked in a variety of trades, from valet, through sausage maker, farmer, to pastry chef, generally as a man, and then achieved success as herself as a journalist, ending her life as an author.

Early life

She was the last child born to poet laureate Colley Cibber and the musician/actress Katherine Shore. According to her autobiography, her brothers and sisters disliked her and resented her birth in her early years and maintained their dislike throughout their lives.

She was educated in the liberal arts and learned Latin, Italian, and geography at Mrs. Draper's School for girls between 1719 and 1721 and then moved to live with her mother in Middlesex. Her gender identification with men showed up early in her life, as she recalls impersonating her father as a small child, and, when she moved in with her mother, she taught herself shooting, gardening, and horse racing. In 1724, she and her mother moved to Hertfordshire, and there she continued engaging in country sports and education, focusing on subjects and pursuits usually associated with men. She also studied medicine there and, in 1726 (at the age of thirteen), tried to set herself up as a doctor. Colley Cibber, however, stopped her when the bills for her supplies came due.

Actress

Like her brothers and sisters, she had an interest in the theatre. She spent time at Drury Lane, where her father was manager, and in 1729, when she was sixteen, she was courted by the actor, composer, violinist Richard Charke, and the two were married on February 4, 1730. Once married, Charlotte was no longer a minor to her parents, and so she began to appear on stage. She made her debut on April 8, 1730 in the stereotypically ultra-feminine minor role of Mademoiselle in The Provok'd Wife, by John Vanbrugh, at Drury Lane. She had to stop performing, however, when she discovered that she was pregnant. Her daughter, Catherine, was born in December 1730, and a month later, January 1731, Charlotte was back on stage as Lucy in The London Merchant by George Lillo. In July of that year she made her first appearance in a breeches role as Tragedo in the same play and followed that the next year with Roderigo in Othello. She would later appear as Mrs. Slammerkin in The Beggar's Opera and the tomboyish Hoyden in The Relapse. Around this time, Charke began wearing male clothing also off the stage, although intermittently.

In 1733, Colley Cibber sold his controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre to John Highmore, and Charke felt that it should have gone instead to herself and her brother, Theophilus Cibber. In fact, it is likely that the sale was at a vastly inflated price and that Colley's goal was simply to get out of debts and make a profit (see Robert Lowe in his edition of Cibber's Apology). Theophilus, who likely knew of the scheme, grew more bold in demands when his father was not liable for pay and organized an actor's revolt. Charles Fleetwood then came to control the theatre, and Charke went to the Haymarket Theatre and began appearing in many male roles on the stage. She returned to Drury Lane for the role of Cleopatra and then walked out to have her own company in the summer of 1735 in Lincoln's Inn Fields, then the Haymarket. She wrote her first play, The Art of Management in September 1735. It was an explicit attack on Fleetwood, who attempted to buy up all printed copies of the play to prevent its circulating.

She walked out for good in 1736 to join Henry Fielding in the Haymarket. For him she appeared as Lord Place, a parody of her father, Colley Cibber, in Fielding's Pasquin in 1737. The play was a powerful attack on Robert Walpole and his government, and Colley Cibber was satirized for his fawning attachment to Walpole and his undeserving occupation of the place of poet laureate. Walpole led Parliament into passing the Licensing Act 1737, which forbid the acting of any play that hadn't passed censors and closed all non-patent theatres. Charlotte Charke was estranged from both patent theatres. For his part, Richard Charke, who had remained at Drury Lane, had already been estranged from Charlotte by constant affairs, and he fled his gambling debts by moving to Jamaica, where he would soon die. This left Charlotte Charke without an occupation, alienated from her father, and a single mother at the age of twenty-four.

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