Episode 102: Celebrity Pregnancy on the 18th-century London Stage with Dr. Chelsea Phillips

0:00We're in public and a myriad of other details, but our obsession with pregnant celebrities has deeper historical roots than you might imagine. Today, we're joined by Dr. Chelsea Phillips, who explores how pregnancy intersected with

0:30the rise of celebrity culture on the 18th-century London stage in her new book, Carrying All Before Her, Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800. Dr. Phillips is a dramaturg and associate professor in the Department of Theater at Villanova University. Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us. So happy to be here. Can we begin by talking about how celebrity culture worked in 18th-century London? It's a very different time and place, but it sounds like there were actually a lot of similarities

1:04with how celebrity works in our own time. Absolutely. So I think some of the biggest similarities are that celebrities then and now are using the press, they're using media outlets, and they're using images and visual culture to create, disseminate, and maintain a sort of what we would call today a personal brand. So the technologies of visual culture were a little different. They were paintings and engravings and satirical cartoons, but they sort of similarly had a range of the ability of the celebrity to control what their image actually looked like.

1:39So we might think of commissioned portraiture as analogous to a vanity fair spread. It's actually a collaboration between two different artists that functions to frame and highlight certain aspects of a celebrity identity. And a satirical cartoon then, as now, is usually critical and aimed to suggest some sort of unpleasant truth about the figure. And I think today we generally associate satirical prints with politicians, and that was certainly true in the 18th century as well. But because actors were such public figures, they were often rolled into this kind of visual

2:13culture as well. I think some of the biggest differences are, of course, the immediate access we have, the immediate and constant access we have today through social media, as well as, on some level, a greater individual control that the celebrity themselves might have over the way that they're presented to the public. So they may have a PR firm that's doing some work for them, but they can also just hop on Instagram themselves and post material if they want to. Essentially, everything happens a lot, lot faster today.

2:45But frequently, celebrity is functioning in very similar ways. So to think about the mechanisms of celebrity, I draw a lot on the work of Joseph Roach, who coins the term the deep 18th century, which is the 18th century that persists into the present. The deep 18th century is the 18th century we're still grappling with. We're still dealing with. And that includes things like consequences of empire and enslavement, as well as mechanisms of celebrity culture, which haven't changed much in 300 years.

3:18So Roach talks about three different aspects that synthesize into celebrity. He talks about public intimacy. And this is something we can find really clear analogies to in the present. You want, as a fan, to feel like you know a celebrity, that you know what their favorite color is, you know what they like to eat, you have some kind of insider intimate information about them. And celebrities know this, and they know it's valuable.

3:48So when they do an Ask Me Anything, or they do an interview that answers questions like this, they are building up the perception that it is possible to know them intimately as individual people. It's an illusion of availability and closeness that is not actually true. And this can get really tricky, right? Because it can tip into stalking. It can tip into dangerous arenas when fans can't appreciate the line between an illusion and a reality. But it's a really crucial function of celebrity because it's what makes us invested and makes

4:19us willing to return to consuming their media. So this public intimacy drives a desire for synthetic experiences of the celebrity. So this means going to see, in the 18th century, this means going to see them on stage. It means staying to watch them give an epilogue, which exists in a sort of gray area between the celebrity as person and the celebrity as character, as performer. It means you might go see their portrait at the Royal Academy or go to an artist's studio to watch them work on the portrait in real time.

4:52It means you might purchase a, you know, essentially a postcard-sized engraving of the celebrity that you can keep in your home and interact with on a daily basis. It might mean you pick up a copy of the play that you saw them perform in so that you can imaginatively recreate that experience over and over again. And it might mean that you seek out news items about them. All of this contributes to the it effect, what he calls the it effect, which is personality driven mass attraction. And there are, there's a crucial balancing act to this.

5:23So just like there are positives to all of these for the celebrity and for the fan, there are also sort of negative aspects of this. So Roach talks about the importance of balancing what he calls charismata and stigmata in a celebrity persona. So charismata are the really attractive qualities of the celebrity. This could be their literal appearance, but it could also be their particular abilities with singing or with tragic queenly roles or something like that. Something that makes them popular.

5:54Stigmata is crucial. There needs to be an element of it because, so if you think about the analogy of, so the perfect supermodel is almost perfect, but has some kind of flaw, you know, wider than normal gap in their teeth, like Madonna does, or a mole like Cindy Crawford. I don't know why all my references are so 80s and 90s. Those are the ones coming to mind. So you need like just a little bit of something that isn't quite perfect because that makes

6:25the celebrity more human. It makes them feel more attainable. And it sort of plays into this dynamic between the fan and the celebrity. But it importantly has to be balanced. Like charismata has to always outweigh stigmata or else you're basically facing a PR crisis. So it's a careful balancing act. And pretty much every celebrity at some point gets the balance wrong and then has to manage the fallout from a crisis. So whether that's they behave in a way that is considered out of their character or out

7:00of their brand and they have to issue a public apology or whatever, that's a very 18th century thing as well as a very common like screenshot of the notes app thing that we see today. Yeah. So those are some of the ways I think about celebrity and particularly the way that I think it's really recognizable to us today when we start to break down the mechanisms of how celebrity works. Now, the other sort of major component of your book is looking at pregnancy.

7:30And if I'm remembering this correctly, there's this incredibly striking figure that you mentioned in the introduction to your book. The average middle-class woman in Britain could expect to be about seven, experience about seven pregnancies. Is that? Yeah. It's interesting. Birth rates are a really complicated thing to calculate, especially in the 18th century, because there are a lot of other changes that are impacting expected lifespan, birth and death rates. So it's a tricky figure to account for. But there are various social historians who have done the work to come up with about an

8:05average birth rate of four children to married middle-class and upper-class women at the start of the 18th century, so right around 1700. And that figure doubles by the end of the 18th century. It's quite remarkable. And it is, in part, driven by the emergence of what we would call obstetrics as a medical field and some of these sort of social support for people who might not have family or community support when they're childbearing.

8:37But it's also because Britain became a very pro-birth state as its empire expanded, as it was found itself in sort of constant wars all over the world. To put it bluntly, Britain needed citizens. And so it became a very, there was sort of a public PR campaign towards have more children. That's what we want and need for our nation. So it's interesting. Yeah, I mean, given that context, I'm wondering how people in 18th century England kind of

9:11thought about pregnancy and maybe since we're already bringing in demographics and geopolitics and things, how did that attitude toward pregnancy affect attitudes towards, to use the old phrase, I guess, what a woman's place was, the private, the public sphere? Mm-hmm, sure. So it's tricky. There's a lot of ways to think through that kind of prompt. So there are advice manuals that are printed that are aimed at childbearing women and their

9:42families. And these are about, you know, these are everything from practical advice to what we would consider some really dodgy advice, like don't walk in a garden and step on certain herbs because of like noxious vapors and things like that. There are medical manuals that are aimed at midwives, accouchers, which was the sort of upper-class term for a man who was practicing midwifery. But those were sometimes used by women and their families, of course, because they could buy and read them as well.

10:12And then there are letters and journals that seem to record actual individual experience. So the thing I think is true across all of these sources is that pregnancy is very much an expected normal part of life. If you, there are not a lot of reliable forms of birth control. If you are a sexually active, fertile person with a uterus, you are very likely to end up pregnant multiple times in your life. And because of that, because there was no expectation that people would be necessarily

10:47trying to control their fertility, or even if they were, that they would be able to do that in a reliable fashion, pregnancy was very accepted as living hand in hand with normal life. So depending on your social status, you would probably continue working during pregnancy as much as you were physically able to do. You would still run your household if you were upper-class. You know, you would still socialize. You would still sort of do all of the day-to-day things.

11:17And part of this, as some social historians have speculated, is that as women are spending more and more and more of their adult lives pregnant, they need the sort of sanctioning to continue their normal lives as much as possible as like a, it's sort of a, it's a way of balancing out the fact that they're doing this childbearing labor all the time to not ask them to sit at home, not go anywhere, confine themselves in some way.

11:50So we have wonderful letters of, you know, women insisting on still horseback riding and fox hunting, of going to a ball and, you know, and dancing until four in the morning, or one woman who went into labor while she was hosting a party, went upstairs to her chamber to give birth and the party just continued. Nobody left, nobody, you know. So the, so I think that we have a lot of assumptions about the ways that this might require a, you

12:26know, a confinement of your sort of physical activity or social activity into the sort of private sphere, but that often wasn't the case, either because you simply couldn't economically afford it if you were of a certain social class, or because it was kind of considered too costly to ask women to, to restrict their lives so much when you get into upper classes. So it's a, it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting moment, but this, the public conversation and the public valuing of and interest in how to manage pregnancy is a big part, I think,

13:01of why actresses are able to have the careers that they do throughout their childbearing years. Yeah. You make the point that, you know, whatever, whatever the particulars of, of attitudes towards women working, being an actress is a very public sort of way of being out there in the public working. And, and I'm curious how that sort of was affected, how that sort of influenced attitudes towards women in the workforce and attitudes towards those particular women who were in the

13:32business of acting. Yeah, it's really interesting. So I will say at a base level, and I, I was as surprised as anybody when I realized this, but at a base level, acting is actually a very pregnancy friendly profession. It, there, there are certainly moments and individuals for whom it doesn't easily marry into their celebrity persona. It doesn't easily marry into their career necessarily, but by the time you hit the mid 18th century, it's very normal to see pregnant women performing

14:10on stage. It's very normal to see married women perform pregnant. And it's very normal to see unmarried women perform while pregnant. And for the most part, there is little commentary suggesting that they should stop working, that they should be fired, that they should be ashamed of their condition, and they should hide until they are recovered from birth. It's, it's a slightly different thing in the restoration, plus our sources are a little more difficult. But when you get into the 18th century, you can really see that it's pretty widely accepted that just as in any profession, women in the theater

14:45are going to continue working to their physical ability during pregnancy. And what I think may be unique for theater is the fact that there is not a hard distinction between married and unmarried women doing this. And I think in part, that might be, that might be one odd benefit of the, of the stereotypes of actresses as a little loose in their sexual morals, which I think is a persistent

15:17stereotype that lots of women are defying and actively engaging with and resisting throughout the century. But I do think it's interesting to think about the theater as a place that because of public display, because of various other things, because of mechanisms of celebrity, an unmarried woman who is sexually active, who has lovers, who has sort of prominent relationships outside the theater, who, and who has children within those relationships, have mechanisms of control over whether or how, what consequences they sort of have to pay socially and professionally for

15:52for those actions. And there's a little, there's a little bit of leeway and a little bit of more acceptance of unmarried pregnant women potentially in this field than there is other places. So part of this is, I think that the public nature of the theater is also really crucial to this because there are very clear, consistent social and cultural norms around pregnancy that develop across the 18th century and remain really stable and consistent. So for example, it is a common and commonly followed piece of advice that if at all possible, one should stop

16:29working entirely or greatly reduce one's physical exertion in the last month of pregnancy. Because at that point, and actually it has a pretty sound physiological basis, at that point, the baby is getting into position for labor as it was considered a particularly delicate time in terms of provoking premature labor. And of course, you don't want to do that because you don't have many resources to support a premature infant in the 18th century. So you want the infant to stay in the mother as long as possible. So lessening one's physical exertion in the last month of pregnancy is considered really

17:03good practice to try and protect against premature labor. After one has given birth, a period of rest from called a line in period of four to six weeks is very common. Now what that looks like is going to vary really widely depending on the household. Some women, especially if they've had a difficult birth and they have a lot of physical recovery to do, might literally be in bed for four to six weeks. That might be possible. But often, you know, someone might spend two weeks taking it really easy in their bed,

17:36in their room, relying on the rest of the household to bring the baby to them, bring them meals, you know, make making physical exertion minimal for them for the two weeks after they give birth. And I will just say anecdotally, I gave birth last November. And that was the exact same advice I was given by my midwives was stay in bed as much as you can for the first two weeks, even if you feel fine. So that was an interesting, interesting parallel to my own research. After that point, though, depending on how a woman is feeling, depending on the demands on her time, she might be receiving

18:09visitors, she might be downstairs, you know, she might be slowly returning to some of her household and domestic duties, especially if she has other children that need caring for, especially if she's breastfeeding. So it would depend what that time would look like would be very individual. But this four to six week range of time before you'd be expected to return to a full social calendar return to work was very consistent. Because the theater is such a public profession, the theater, I think,

18:43potentially faces quite a bit of scrutiny about whether or not they are upholding these social norms. And they do, they tend to make it very possible for women to, you know, retire temporarily from the company when they hit about a month before their due date. Now, the difficulties of calculating your due date are many. So, you know, it's, it's a little, it's a little more inconsistent, but you can consistently see people making the effort to hit that like four week mark before they think they will

19:13give birth. And you can see very consistent four weeks or more after they've given birth before they return to work. So by doing this, the theater is both reflecting and reinforcing these larger social norms. And I think that that, I think that's really fascinating. And I think that that's perhaps a particular burden of being such a public profession. There aren't large crowds that might critique you if you don't give your shop assistant four weeks off for the birth of her child. But if you don't let

19:47Sarah Siddons recover from birth, you're probably going to hear about it from your audience. It's really striking to hear. I mean, this, obviously there, there are a lot of problems still, but, but it sounds like there was a relatively maybe more supportive than we might expect approach to it. As you're saying, you know, the pregnancy of a well-known actress like Sarah Siddons could, could pregnancy affect careers in other ways? I know you, you share, for instance, stories about anxieties that if, if you have to retire from the stage for a period of time, your, your understudy

20:21or someone else might be literally waiting in the wings to take over. Was that a real thing or is that not so much of a concern? Absolutely. So, so I think it was both a real thing and there was more protection around that than we might, than we might assume. So there's this great story that I tell in the introductory chapter to the book about the comic actress, Dorothy Jordan, who becomes one of the most famous and beloved figures of the century, but she, she starts her career in England in the

20:58provinces. So she starts in Yorkshire and when she joins the company, she is pregnant and there is another actress in the company who is also pregnant and they are due about a month apart from each other. And Tate Wilkinson, who's the manager of the company handles this the way he always handles pregnancy. He makes arrangements when the first actress is going to, Henrietta Smith is going to be off the stage. He's made arrangements for other people in the company to take over roles where that's appropriate, or just to leave out some of the plays in the repertoire that she's sort of

21:33particularly associated with. And this is really common practice all over in theaters, all over the nation. Dorothy Jordan, who is new, who is very popular, who is really crushing it to use a colloquialism, gets assigned some of Smith's roles. And Smith is honestly furious about this because she is concerned that Jordan will be so popular and seems to be such a favorite with Wilkinson that he will

22:03take those parts from her and give them to Jordan. Now, if he did, if he did do that, she would probably have a lot of support to fall back on in terms of that being a real violation of what his duties are supposed to be as a manager, because the ownership of roles within a company actually had a lot of respect around it. It was, it was a really conventional right of the performer to like own their roles for the duration of the time they were in a company, unless they agreed to give them up. So, you know, so she

22:36was worried about it, maybe more worried than she needed to be. But it feels legitimate, because Wilkinson really, Jordan really was Wilkinson's favorite. So, you know, we have to acknowledge that that was true. So anyway, her reaction to this is to push herself to return to work, to stay on on the boards way longer than she normally would, like almost up until she gives birth, and then to try and return as quickly as possible. And that way she can minimize the amount of time that Jordan is able to perform. What ends up happening though, is that she, she pushes herself to return. She does,

23:13she gets sick, she collapses, and then she has an even longer recovery period. So Wilkinson writes about this, and he's so annoyed that she didn't just rest the way she should, because now it's an even longer problem. And instead of her resting for a month and then being available when Jordan is gone, now they're both gone at the same time. And he's having to deal with that and figure out what plays they can do and everything like that. But I think, so there's, there's legitimate

23:44concern that people have over competition for roles and status within a company. Because even if Jordan didn't take any roles that Smith actually owned, if all of the plays that Jordan is in start earning significantly more money than the plays that Smith is in, then those are going to be performed more frequently. Smith is going to lose status. And when it comes to something like a benefit night, which a lot of actors relied on to earn a lot of, a significant amount of their

24:17income for the year, her benefit nights are going to start being less valuable. Jordan's are going to be more valuable. So it is really, truly going to have consequences for the stability, financial stability of her family. So I think sometimes we fall into a tendency to believe that it's like jealousy, vanity, caprice, and it's not, it really is sometimes a matter of survival for these performers. I'm wondering too, how, I mean, you're saying that, you know, really actresses on the London stage at

24:47this time are very frequently performing when they're visibly pregnant. How does that affect the audience's perception of the roles that they're playing? Yeah, that is, that's a great question. So one thing I, I came to, as I was reading a lot about celebrity and persona specifically in the theater is that it's helpful to think about celebrities at any one time as hold as having multiple bodies. So they have their body natural, which is their physical body. It's their appearance.

25:21It changes, it ages, it's mortal. You know, you can get sick, right? The celebrity body is essentially a representative of their reputation. It's, it's the popular image you might think of that you have in their mind. It might be associated with a particular painting. So like Sarah Siddons as the tragic muse, that might be an important part of her celebrity body when something that someone pictures when they think about her. And that is much more enduring. It does, it sort of is resistant

25:53to change because it's important that it's stable and recognizable. And then anytime someone is performing in a, in a play, they obviously have the care, the body of the character that they're supposed to be enacting. So their body natural is intersecting with the character body, but the reception of that character is always going to be informed by its relationship to the celebrity body as well. So is this, you know, Sarah Siddons acting Lady Macbeth, which is sort of crucial to

26:23our understanding of her celebrity, or is it Sarah Siddons, as she did late in one pregnancy, performing a role in comedy that she's truly kind of terrible at, but it's, it's more doable for her as a very pregnant woman. So everyone's like, eh, it's fine. It'll still make money. Let's do it. Right. So, so one thing I came to think about is like, how are these bodies intersecting with each other? When the body natural is visibly pregnant, what impact is that having on the celebrity body

26:55and then on the character bodies of the roles that these, these women are taking on? And I came to the conclusion that pregnancy can do three things when it comes to the character body specifically. So it can, the audience can choose to ignore it entirely because it obviously doesn't make sense for the character to be pregnant. And there's nothing in the play that would point to the body in a way that would be disruptive or make it comic, right? So a pregnant actress playing, you know, your standard

27:25ingenue role is one example, right? Ingenues are usually, are usually virgins. They're usually on the precipice of getting married. That's usually a pretty important part of their character. So audiences are going to be like, Oh yeah, I'm just supposed to ignore the pregnancy. That's fine. You know, maybe occasionally it gets like a little extra laugh because, you know, she's protesting her chastity or something like that. Maybe, maybe it makes, maybe it makes someone laugh every now and then, but it doesn't really disrupt anything. And audiences are well aware that they're not supposed

27:55to conflate the body natural and the character body. But on the other hand, there are, so in other, I guess the other extreme to start with that is when the pregnancy is so distracting that audiences can't concentrate on the fiction that's being performed because they're so preoccupied with the pregnancy. So this happens with Sarah Siddons. Sarah Siddons is really well known for her physical performance style. And in a couple of particular roles, including the title role in Nicholas Rose,

28:26Jane Shore, she was really famous for flinging herself face first on the ground at a particular moment. Yep. As you can imagine, no one wants to see their really popular celebrity performer that they feel deeply and intimately connected to throw herself face first on the ground when she's nine months pregnant. So what's really fascinating is, and this, this is from a newspaper source, a person who

28:57was in the audience writes a letter to the paper about this. As that moment is approaching in a performance, they feel like themselves and the rest of the audience are just having this like creeping sense of dread that she's still going to try to do this despite her condition. And everyone is entirely distracted. No one is enjoying the play. No one can concentrate on what she's doing. They are just freaking out that she's going to like hurt herself, go into labor. Like they can't concentrate. Of course

29:30she doesn't do this. Like she knows. So she's just adjusted her performance. But because people were so familiar with it and they didn't know that she was going to do that, they got completely distracted by her pregnancy and couldn't concentrate on the play at hand. So it disrupted their ability to enjoy her performance. And it's often something like that where the audience gets afraid that the performer will hurt themselves that prevents their ability to really enjoy the fiction. My particular favorite response though is when there's just enough squishiness, enough gray area in the character that's

30:05being played in the text of the play itself, when audiences can allied the pregnant body natural with the character body. Because I think this is when really interesting things happen. And when they happen, they start to impact reception of a role, even when the actress isn't pregnant anymore. So this is pulling a bit on Lisa Freeman, talking about the way that every new iteration of a role, every single performance of a role becomes a palimpsest that sort of layers on top of itself

30:38and contributes to the overall celebrity of a particular character. So even if someone isn't always pregnant when they play a role, if it was really impactful to you to see a role performed while pregnant, that will remain in the lineage of your reception. And it will always be available to sort of haunt the performance of the role in the future. So my two favorite examples of this are Saracen's playing Lady Macbeth pregnant, because that's the reason why I wrote this book is because I was so

31:10obsessed with that idea. And there's a lot in the book about it, so I won't dwell on it here. Instead, what I'll talk about is the character Andromache in Ambrose Phillips' The Distressed Mother. So this is a play that is set after the fall of Troy. Andromache is Hector's widow. So Andromache is Trojan, Hector is Trojan. And now the Greeks have taken over the city. Her young son, her and Hector's young son has been imprisoned. He's being kept away from her. She can't see him. And essentially he's being

31:43held hostage until she agrees to marry Pyrrhus, who is one of the Greek heroes. And he promises her if she marries him, he will protect her son. He'll adopt him as his own. And her son can still inherit the throne of Troy after Pyrrhus passes on or after he reaches a majority, something like that, that he'll get to become king as he was meant to be later in his life. So Andromache's story is all about trying to figure out how to negotiate this conflict between love and duty. So her love of her

32:17husband, which means she doesn't want to get married to this other guy, her love of her son to protect him and her duty to do everything she can to protect her child as well as his right to the throne. So what she comes up with is this very clever solution to the riddle that Pyrrhus has presented her with. She is going to marry Pyrrhus. She's going to honor her word that far. And then before the wedding night can happen, she's going to die by suicide. And she's going to trust to

32:50Pyrrhus's honor that because she went through and she did actually marry him, he's going to uphold his end of the bargain, protect her child and grant him the throne later in life. She doesn't actually have to end up doing this because there's a whole other thing that's happening. And Pyrrhus gets killed and she gets to be queen and gets her son back. And it's a weirdly happy ending to this otherwise tragic play. So what's interesting about this is that Andromache's role in this play, she shows up every now and then. She gives these amazing speeches. She has some great tete-a-tetes

33:24with Pyrrhus, but she's not in a lot of the play. It's a very accessible role for a pregnant woman because she doesn't have to do any dangerous physical business. She's only in about a third of the scenes. And most of the appeal of the part are the emotional speeches she gives rather than anything else that is particularly dangerous or physical. She's not throwing herself on the ground the way that Siddons does. So what I noticed as I went through is that four of the six women I was writing about, basically everyone who specialized in tragedy, at some point played this role while

33:58they were pregnant. And not when they were a little bit pregnant, when they were about to give birth pregnancy. And what's really interesting is that, of course, Andromache is a widow, but her husband has only died a month ago. So it's very possible that she could have been pregnant. It's very possible that that pregnancy could be a part of the character's story, even though there's no conscious reference to it in the play. There's nothing in the play that specifically prohibits it. There's nothing in the play that specifically requires it. So there's this nice, interesting gray area where

34:31if she's pregnant, it really ratchets up the stakes of her dilemma because she's not, she is of course responsible to her existing child, but she is also responsible to this unborn child, potentially this last little piece of Hector that she could bring into the world. And so as she debates whether or not she's willing to sacrifice her own life in the hopes that it will protect her child, she's also considering whether or not she's willing to, she's willing to lose this unborn child as well. So it

35:05really heightens the extremity of the situation that she's in. And even if there's no line that says, and what about my unborn child in the play? The fact that these women are playing the role when they are extremely visibly pregnant, when it's impacting the way they walk, the way they breathe, the way they stand means that it's very easy for audiences to elide the pregnant body with the character body and allow that to imaginatively enhance their experience of the play. So there's a number of ways that

35:39pregnancy can intersect with a character role. And it really just depends on the role itself and the content of the role. And then the, what is known of the person who's performing it, how an audience seems to receive it. Yeah. To that last bit about what is known about the performer, how the audience thinks about them, kind of, kind of the flip side, we've been talking about the bodies of the characters that these women play. What about their own bodies? Obviously, if they're visibly pregnant, everyone in the audience is probably going to have a pretty good guess as to how that happened. Are there instances

36:12where that starts to start, starts to affect public perception of them, maybe offstage as well as on? Absolutely. So I know we're going to talk a bit about Dorothy Jordan in a moment, so I won't get too much into it here, but there is a pregnancy in Dorothy Jordan's career. Well, there's a rumored pregnancy. We don't know if she was actually pregnant, but she's sort of between relationships. And so there's quite a bit of speculation about who is responsible for it if she is pregnant. And this opens up all kinds of possibilities about was she in, you know, did these relationships

36:44overlap? Was she having an affair? It brings up a lot of speculation about very personal private things, this rumor that she's pregnant. So yeah, as you said, in the 18th century, there's really only one way to get pregnant. There's not a lot of mystery as about how it happened, but sometimes there is some uncertainty as to who is responsible. If a woman isn't known to be in any particular relationship, the pregnancy might force that knowledge out into the open, or at least, you know, put some pressure

37:18on her to maybe reveal who it is or raise the stakes around concealing who it is, depending on what that relationship is. But there are a couple of interesting ways that this happens and ways that the celebrities themselves are able to manipulate the circumstance. So since I talked a bit about Andromache, let me let me stick with that for a minute. So Anne Oldfield, who actually originates the role, she's the first she's the first performer to play the role. Her her career spans the first

37:48three decades of the 18th century. So she's, that's where she is in time. She has two long term monogamous relationships, but she never marries. So her first relationship is with a politician named Arthur Mannering. And they have one child in 1709. And then Arthur is really ill. He suffers from really bad health. There's been speculations that it's malaria. It's some kind of disease that he will recover from and then have a relapse for it sort of goes back and forth. And right before he dies in

38:22the fall of 1712, she gets pregnant again. So she has left the sole provider of their living son, Arthur Jr., as well as pregnant with another child who is going to be born later in the spring. So in this season, in the 1712-1713 season, she repeatedly appears as Andromache all throughout the season. And often these performances are advertised as by desire, which basically means it's by popular request that she is performing this role. Now, sometimes the theaters just say that. Sometimes it is actually

38:56true. So, you know, we take it with a grain of salt. But for whatever reason, it's performed, I think, eight times over the course of the season, which is a pretty hefty number for a new play, because the repertory system is all about novelty. So it's a pretty considerable number of times for this play to be repeated. So she keeps returning to the role every few weeks, meaning that Andromache is increasingly pregnant, and this story gets repeated and repeated and repeated. And so if we think about the content of the play, Andromache's situation is becoming increasingly more desperate,

39:29she has less time to make her decision, things like that. But the role also points to Oldfield's circumstances really explicitly, because now Oldfield is playing a character who is a widow who's just lost her husband. And Oldfield is a woman who has just lost her partner. Andromache is a woman who has been left the sole provider for her child and is trying to figure out how to do that. Oldfield is a woman who has been left the sole provider of her child and is trying to figure out how to do that.

40:00Andromache is pregnant and wondering how to best navigate her commitments in that circumstance. Oldfield is pregnant and trying to figure this out. So it's a really interesting parallel that develops between the private life of the performer and the life of the character. And it's clearly interesting and profitable because the theater keeps doing it and keeps doing it and keeps doing it. There's a really famous epilogue to this play that was crucial to its popularity. And Oldfield

40:33starts as a comedian. She's a very successful comedian. And she makes this move into tragedy right around the time that Arthur dies. And then she sort of specializes in comedy and tragedy from that point onward. So the comic epilogue to The Distressed Mother is this moment where, in a normal context, the actress playing Andromache comes out and gives this witty, slightly salacious epilogue filled with dirty jokes about how Andromache might have died by suicide before she could have a night with Pyrrhus.

41:06But the actress definitely would have given it a night or two to sort of give him a test drive and see how that works. So it's a little crass, but it's meant to be very funny. And it's a hard shift from the tragic tone of the play. But when Oldfield is performing this epilogue, it's kind of no longer comic because that transition from, I'm no longer the character, now I'm the actor, there's no change in circumstance. Because Oldfield is, in fact, a widow. There's a line in the epilogue,

41:41take the ye circles of the brave and fair, take the fatherless and widow to your care. And this isn't a plea to be nice to the play. It's a plea to care for Oldfield, her very visible unborn child, and the young son that everybody knows she has by Arthur Manorine. So there's this really interesting thing that happens where the funny bit at the end of the play is maybe no longer funny because of the private circumstances of the actress. And everyone's hyper-aware of the private

42:11circumstances of the actress, both because Manorine was a fairly public figure, so people know about this, but also because they keep getting the story of this tragedy she's living through in a fictionalized way through her performances of the role. There's another instance that I think is really interesting, and this gets us to the actress Susanna Sibber, who is like low-key the most interesting person that nobody knows about in the 18th century. So Susanna Sibber started as an opera singer, and she married into this really

42:43powerful theatrical dynasty. So Kali Sibber, very famous manager of Drury Lane for years and years, also a really famous actor in his own right. And then his son, his terrible son, Theophilus, who was nevertheless a very good manager and not a bad playwright. She becomes sister-in-law to Charlotte Shark, who is another really fascinating 18th century figure. So Sibber, Susanna Sibber, starts as a singer and makes a hard turn into tragedy, in part because her husband is just awful.

43:20He's just the worst. And so he racks up these gambling debts. They're in total financial straits. And Kali Sibber is like, I'm not going to give you money. He's like, but what could we do? And he sort of gives Susanna an audition and he's like, oh, she's actually got really great potential as a tragic performer. So he trains her in tragedy and she makes a tragic debut and she is hugely successful. She is six months pregnant when she makes her tragic debut and like takes London by

43:51storm. Her celebrity quickly outstrips that of her husband and she becomes sort of the toast of the town for the next few years. Then their marriage completely explodes in this amazing public way. So amongst other terrible things that Theophilus Sibber does, he pimps her out to a young, wealthy gentleman that he meets in his sort of meanderings through the London time. But jokes on him, William Sloper and Susanna Sibber fall deeply and earnestly in love with each other

44:23and then collaborate in helping her escape this terrible marriage that she's in. And fortunately, William Sloper is very wealthy, so that makes everything easier. But Theophilus doesn't want to lose the access to Sloper's money that he gets via this sexual relationship that Sloper has with his wife. So Theophilus decides to sue William Sloper for criminal conversation, which means he's suing Sloper for adultery because of course, women are their husband's property. So this is a property

44:59crime. So he takes Sloper to court the first time he tries to get 5,000 pounds out of him. But it's so clear from the testimony how complicit Theophilus was in this, how just awful he is as a person that the jury awards him five pounds. The next time he asks for 10,000 pounds and receives 10. But it's clear that I think he might get a little more of that. He might get 500 pounds that time. So he never gets what he's asking for. But it becomes very clear through this process that he's just going to

45:33keep doing this. So eventually, the upshot is that Susanna and William Sloper take their now young daughter, Molly, and they escape. They go abroad for a couple of years and they hide. And then a couple of years later, Susanna Sibber makes a triumphant return to the stage. She has gotten a legal divorce, a legal separation from her husband so that he can't take her earnings. He can't have any legal right to anything that she earns or any property that she has. And she gets all of the theater

46:07managers in London to agree that they will never employ her husband in the same company that she is part of. And indeed, that they will never allow him into the building that she works in when she is present. And if they do that, she will consider her contracts with them null and void. And it is a great testimony to how popular and profitable she was that they agreed wholeheartedly. Theophilus' reputation and career get completely derailed by fucking around and finding out. Basically,

46:42if I can excuse, I cannot say that if you'd like. By messing around and finding out. So anyway, so the amazing, fascinating thing is that Susanna Sibber's celebrity, even when she's married to Theophilus, is based on her facility with these tragic women and specifically wronged and suffering wives. And probably part of the popularity of these roles was that the audience knew that Theophilus was kind of trash. So like, they sort of believed it when Susanna would perform this poor wife whose

47:17husband is always off gambling or sleeping with other women or whatever, and she's at home suffering. So they kind of believed that there was some verisimilitude to her performances because of what they suspected was true about her private life. Well, after these two big trials, they know for sure that it's true about her private life. So this lends a whole new level of credence to everything she performs. So Susanna Sibber, she does like a partial season in Dublin. She was also, she was one of

47:49Handel's favorite performers. So she does this like partial season in Dublin. She does an oratorio season during the Lenten months with him. And she sings a role in the original cast of the Messiah, which includes her singing the lament he was despised, all about Christ's suffering. And the great anecdote about this is that one man in the audience was so moved by her performance and so aware of her as an

48:19adulteress, as an actress, all of these like things about her private life that he leapt from his seat at the end of her performance and yelled, woman for this, all thy sins be forgiven thee, which may not have happened at all, but is a phenomenal story. So anyway, so she, she has some success in Dublin. She gets the sense that audiences are like ready to be on her side, not going to hold all of this stuff that happened a few years ago against her, makes all these arrangements with the London

48:52managers. And it's like, okay, I'm going to go back to London and I'm going to resume my career. And I just want to emphasize, she could have just retired. Like as far as we know, there is no reason why she couldn't have just not pursued her career. Now Sloper was married. He had legitimate children with a wife, this poor wife. He separated from her. I mean, he's still financially supportive of her, but he separated from her and lived with Susanna Siver for like the last 30 years of her life. They had one other child together. They were, they very much behaved as though they were the married

49:24couple, but like in theory, he had sufficient income that he could have supported her as well, but she doesn't want to do this. So she goes back to London and she chooses as her debut role, Desdemona in Othello. And she stands on that stage in front of everyone who has heard intimate details of the sexual acts that her husband spied on, like her husband hired spies to watch her and

49:56William Sloper have sex explicitly so they could testify to it at this trial in the hopes that he'd get a higher payout. So everyone in this audience, because these things get printed, they get collected, they're printed down throughout the century. Everyone in that audience could, in theory, have read intimate details about her sex life. And she picks Desdemona and Othello as her debut, her like triumphant return. And when, when Desdemona is protesting her innocence to Othello in act five, I think of that as like, that was the moment. That was the moment when the audience was

50:32either going to be, how dare you? That is like, we are offended. You think that we would accept you back? Or they're going to be like, yep, we're fully on your side. And supposedly what happens is absolute outpourings of spontaneous applause when she protests her innocence. So she's won, and she knows she's won. And she goes on to become the highest paid actress of her day, and to continue to perform this line of business that is entirely built out of women who have been

51:06wronged by their husbands and who are, and whose innocence or whose, you know, right acting is validated by the fiction of the play and by the other characters in the plays that she performs. There's some really fascinating stories here, and many of which you, you share in the book, but we've been mentioning a name a few times among these 18th century actresses, and it's Dorothy Jordan. It seems as though pregnancy has an especially prominent role in shaping her public

51:38persona. Could you talk a little bit more about Dorothy Jordan and in particular how pregnancy sort of contributed to her celebrity? Oh, absolutely. So Dorothy Jordan is just one of my favorite people. So Dorothy Jordan, I'll give you the quick thesis statement. Dorothy Jordan, she works at the end of the century. She's a contemporary of Sarah Siddons. She has, in the course of her lifetime, in the course of her theatrical career, she gives birth to 14 children, 13 of whom survive and live. She is pregnant as many as 19 times

52:18in 22 years. And in those 22 years, she becomes the foremost comic actress of her day. She becomes one of those popular performers, honestly, probably in the history of the world, but certainly in the history of the 18th century. She goes through two different monogamous relationships. She weathers an enormous scandal when she leaves the man everyone thinks she's married to, to become the royal mistress of the Duke of Clarence, who later becomes William IV in the 19th century. So she is, I cannot understate

52:55how constantly she is pregnant. She is pregnant all the time. She's probably pregnant more often than she's not pregnant when she is performing. And audiences know this better. I mean, you know, in the first, I think in the first six years of her London career, she's pregnant four times. And every time she has, she has two living children out of these pregnancies and two miscarriages, but the pregnancies in both cases with the miscarriages are far enough along that the public's aware of the fact that she's pregnant. So her fertility is like hand in hand with her early

53:32establishment of her career in London. And then because she goes on to continue having a child at least every other year, if not, you know, some other pregnancies between the, the births of those living children, it's becomes an inevitable part of her celebrity that she's incredibly fertile, that she's there's, it is always possible that she's pregnant, whether you know it or not. And that really, really shapes her career and people's associations with her, particularly when it

54:04comes to this moment that I mentioned briefly earlier, where she's, she's ending one relationship and starting another one. And because everyone always associates her with being pregnant, everyone starts to like wonder if a pregnancy has something to do with the end of one relationship, the beginning of another. And this question of who the father is, if she is pregnant, really becomes the largest and most important PR crisis, to put it that way, that she suffers in her career. So I can try to think,

54:39I could say so much better. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to confine myself a bit because it is all in the book. I will start with, so she, she starts her career in Dublin when she's 20. She works first at the Crow Street Theater and then at Smock Alley. And at Smock Alley, she works under the manager, Richard Daly, who is yet another terrible person of the 18th century. So he was known for at the best seducing, at the worst assaulting the women who worked for him. We don't know. We don't

55:14know where along that line Jordan fell. But while Daly's wife was off stage, having one of their children, Daly got Jordan pregnant. Jordan breaks her contract. She leaves the company and the country with her mother and two of her six to nine siblings. We're not quite sure how many siblings she had. And they go to England and they specifically go to Yorkshire and to Tate Wilkinson. And the reason they do this is because Jordan's mother was actually an actress in her earlier life

55:47and worked with Tate Wilkinson. So she has an in with him. They go to Yorkshire. She auditions for Wilkinson and he accepts her into the company. She changes her name from Miss Phillips or no Miss Francis, which is what she was performing under in Dublin to Mrs. Jordan to suggest that she was perhaps at some point married. Now, Mrs. is really more a marker of like age and respectability as opposed to marital status in particular. But this wasn't uncommon if a woman was pregnant to sort

56:21of make the change from Miss to Mrs. In deference to the fact that they were they were in a different phase of their life. So she she makes this change. She performs. As I said before, she's incredibly popular. Pregnancy in no way gets in the way of her establishing her career. And she is eventually scouted from these provincial performances on the Yorkshire touring circuit for the Drury Lane company. So she comes to Drury Lane in 1785, which is the year that Sarah Siddons is pregnant with her

56:52sixth child. And the company is a bit scrambling and wondering what they're going to do because their box office is so very dependent on Sarah Siddons. So they initially hired Jordan to be a second to Siddons in tragedy. But Jordan looks at the company because Jordan's been playing any and every kind of part in the Yorkshire company. She's very, very versatile. And she looks at the at the Drury Lane company. And she's like, if I do tragedy, I am always going to be playing second string to Mrs. Siddons. Like it's never I'm never going to be able to be the leading actress in that

57:28line of business. Elizabeth Farron is in the company and she's sort of got a monopoly on this sort of high status, fine ladies of comedy. But what the company doesn't have is a low comic woman. So a woman who plays the sort of character types, the naive and unintentionally kind of crass comic characters, the Hoydens, the Romps, the women who engage in comic transgressive behavior, and women who

57:59often go into breeches and sort of display their nice legs. Poor Elizabeth Farron was very, very thin. And so her legs weren't considered particularly attractive by 18th century standards. Jordan, however, was considered to have the nonpareil of women's legs. And Damer, the sculptor actually took plaster casts of Jordan's legs as the like, ideal of women's legs. Anyway, so Jordan comes, she convinces the managers to let her debut in a slightly different line of business than they were initially thinking. They do. She's

58:29a huge success. She's credited with sort of saving the company while Siddons is away on her maternity leave. And they're off to the races. They're not competing with each other. It's great. There's room for everybody at the top. It's a good situation. Through her role in the company, she meets a young man named Richard Ford. He is the son of one of the theater's owners. He and she get into a relationship together. They move in together and they start having children almost immediately. And because they're cohabiting, because they're having children together, and because Richard Ford is referring to

59:04her as Mrs. Ford to his acquaintances, everyone assumes that they're married. So for the next four years, she's taken to be a married woman or as, or, you know, married and all but name and no one's really quibbling about it. That's a pretty standard thing. They're behaving as a married couple. Everyone's willing to like grant them the rights and privileges of that. She establishes some patterns during these pregnancies that continue for most of the rest of her life. She continues to perform in her breeches roles while she's pregnant. So her, she was very small. So I can

59:38imagine she sort of just steadily got more spherical. She got more pregnant, but she still plays in breeches roles and people still seem to enjoy that. She goes on a tour outside of London every summer, regardless of whether or not she's pregnant. So provincial audiences are also seeing her pregnant and associating this fertility with her reputation beyond London. She takes at least two weeks off in the case of her miscarriages, which is a quite standard accommodation for other women throughout the century. And she appears, this is, this is an interesting one because it's true only of

1:00:13comic actresses. So every night of entertainment usually involved a main piece and then an after piece. And the after piece is usually always comic. So a comedic actress might perform two roles in a single night, whereas tragic actresses usually are only going to appear in the main piece. So from about the fourth month of pregnancy onward, so a little bit into the second trimester, Jordan and other comic actresses will only perform once a night instead of twice a night. And this is

1:00:45about reducing physical exertion and increasing the sort of safety of continuing their careers. So that's, that's something, that's a pattern she establishes during these pregnancies with her relationship with Richard Ford, and it continues throughout the rest of her career. This is a very visible way that the theater is saying, look how, look what good care we are taking of our valuable commodity. We too feel invested in her safety. Don't worry, audience, you don't need to be concerned. Like we've got it, we're taking care of her. And then she's really rigid about sticking to

1:01:19only four to six weeks of a line in period after birth, though, as she gets older, and as her pregnancies get more frequent, she does start leaving the stage earlier and earlier. And this is probably because it's physically more difficult. It might also just be because she has, as she goes along, the kinds of contracts she has with the theater give her a little more flexibility and control. So she might just not feel like taking herself to London and performing all the time when she's super pregnant. So she sort of establishes these patterns of like how she's going to handle pregnancy

1:01:50and how the managers are going to support her in this. So then when she gets to 1791, some rumors have started to circulate that this young royal prince is quite interested in Dorothy Jordan. He's, he met her the year before. He was quite taken with her. And while she's on a tour with Richard Ford, he always comes with her. They're always together in the summer tours. Must have been nice to have so much vacation time as an 18th century lawyer. The Duke is traveling to see her in various

1:02:25places as she's making these different touring stops. And the papers notice and they start commenting on the fact that like, there's a little bit of puppy love from this Royal Duke. He's four years younger than her. So like, there's like a little bit of a, oh, he's so young and like starstruck with this actress. But there's no real, there's no real sense that she's reciprocating or encouraging this in any way. It's just notable that he's like following her. So then there start to be conflicting reports that she's going to change her stage name to Mrs. Ford, which would suggest that she really is

1:02:59married to Richard Ford or that she's thrown a hissy fit and like refused to perform at one of the theaters because they wouldn't bill her as Mrs. Ford. So you get these like competing senses of whether or not she's married. And then she comes back, starts the season. And then suddenly in October, she has moved out of the home that she shared with Ford. She actually had a couple of homes. So she's like in her home now, not in the home that they shared. And she has moved a bunch of stuff into the Duke of Clarence's royal residence. And so everyone is like, it's the most

1:03:38interesting thing that's happened in so long. So it's like, people cannot talk about it enough. Everyone wants to get their clever comment printed in the paper. Everyone wants to pretend like they've got some kind of insight or knowledge. There is a magazine called the Town and Country Magazine, which writes this entirely fabricated, fanciful story about how the Duke hides in a closet in her dressing room and like pleads with her to leave Ford for him. And she's completely overcome and she

1:04:10faints into his arms and like all this other stuff. And then there are the satirical prints. And the satirical prints are, I mean, atrocious, but also hilarious. And they are aiming, as a satirical print always does, to supposedly reveal a hidden truth. And so you get, it starts in the papers, you get these rumors that she's pregnant. Where did they start? Who knows? It might've just been an assumption because she was so freaking fertile. And because this is quite a big move, like this causes a huge

1:04:44scandal. So it might also be people assuming that there must be something that really triggered like, oh, it had to happen now in the middle of the season, as opposed to maybe waiting for a time when it might've been able to fly under the radar a little more. And pregnancy is a perfectly valid, you know, hypothesis to have about that. So anyway, the rumors start in the papers and then they get taken up by the satirists who don't necessarily explicitly depict her as pregnant, but do things like

1:05:17depict her in bed with Clarence, fantasizing about the life that they'll have and about how he's going to marry her and about how they'll have babies. You get this amazing cartoon from William Gilray. So a slang term for a chamber pot was a Jordan, which is really unfortunate for her during this crisis. So Gilray creates this satirical print that is a life-size chamber pot with little legs sticking out of it and a little skirt. And the chamber pot has a crack in it that looks exactly

1:05:54like a vulva. And the pot is very curvy. So the pot also looks like a pregnant belly. And the Duke of Clarence is like face first up to his waist in the crack in this chamber pot wearing striped sailor pants because he was in the Navy and yelling, ye, ye, oh, ye, which was the chorus of a song that she sang in one of the theaters. It's wild. So anyway, so things are absolute chaos. And meanwhile, she's continuing to show up at work. She's continuing to be in the theater. She's continuing

1:06:27to perform her breeches roles. And she's never explicitly addressing all of the rumors and the satirical prints outside of the theaters. But she is not hiding. She's offering herself up for public scrutiny. She's wearing revealing costumes that in theory, you know, people could say, well, she doesn't look pregnant. Or, you know, I've seen her pregnant four of the last six years and she doesn't look like she normally does when she's pregnant, right? You know, she's giving people the opportunity to view her body. She's also reiterating her celebrity persona of transparency, sincerity,

1:07:04good humor, goodwill, and explicitly refuting some rumors that she's going to retire now that she has this wealthy lover who could take care of her. So her, you know, things are tumultuous in the papers, they're tumultuous in the print shop windows, in part because fertility is such a huge part of her celebrity. But inside the theater, she's still really popular. No one's like being nasty to her in the theaters. And then November rolls around. And I realized this in looking over some notes today

1:07:34that actually, so late November rolls around, she's scheduled to be in a performance and she sends a note right before the performance starts saying she's not going to make it, that she's ill. And this actually takes place on the same day my son was born. I just raised this today, which is kind of fun. So, so she sends this note, the managers have to go out to the like packed house who's expecting to see her and say, uh, guess what? She's not coming. And of course the managers don't want the public to be mad at them. So they're like, she just sent the note. We can't do anything about what

1:08:09should we substitute a different play? Like you tell us what you want to do. And it's like, it's like the dam breaks. The audience starts rioting. They call for her to be fired. They ask for all their money back. Eventually what happens is another actress comes on stage, performs the part. And from that day on, Jordan never performs that part again. Like just by popular demand, it is given to this other actress and she never performs it again because of the way it gets associated with the scandal. So she's gone for about two weeks. And what the, what she reports with

1:08:42the paper, what the sort of official line is, is that she has had a relapse of an issue she was having over the summer where when she would perform these really demanding vocal roles, sometimes it would provoke these really terrible bouts of coughing that would lead to her spitting up blood. So, I mean, if this was the 19th century, we'd think she had TB, but she didn't. She, she, uh, she maybe, she probably had an ulcer or like something that was being exacerbated by sort of vocal exertion. So she basically was on vocal rest for like a couple of weeks to allow

1:09:16this to heal and subside. But of course, two weeks is also how long people are gone when they have a miscarriage. So, so, uh, so there's quite a bit of nebulous stuff. People aren't buying it. And part of the problem is that so much of Jordan's persona was wrapped up in this, like, what you see is what you get. I, you know, I am entirely honest. I'm sincere. I am transparent. Like I am the most natural performer in the world. If you know my characters, you know me, I'm a devoted mother.

1:09:46I'm a devoted wife. I'm a devoted professional. And suddenly this fact that she was hiding this burgeoning relationship with Clarence, that she was letting people believe that she was married when she wasn't now, nobody trusts anything from her. So basically the public feels like they've been lied to and they start, they start questioning things. And among the things they question is like whether or not she should be able to continue her career. And this has really high stakes because when she became Clarence's official Royal mistress, now there was like an actual contract.

1:10:20It's enormous. It's in the Royal archives in Windsor. It's terrifying to unfold it. Cause you feel like it's going to crumble to death. But in this contract, she got an annuity. She got like, I think it was like 800 or 900 pounds a year. It wasn't nearly as much as people thought it was. And because she was going to be able to rely on this annuity, she signed over all of her theatrical earnings every year in perpetuity to her three other children, her three other daughters, because she rightfully didn't trust their fathers to do right by them. So she signed over all of the

1:10:58savings that she had done so far and like half of all of her earnings every year into the future for their maintenance. They lived in a separate household where both parents sort of had shared custody. Her sister lived with them. Her sister had a stipend to take care of them. So Jordan had done this really responsible thing by her children. And because of the way she'd set it up, her theatrical earnings were now directly connected to her ability to mother these children and to

1:11:30fulfill her financial obligations as a mother to these children. So the fact that people call for her to be fired, the fact that people are like threatening the viability of her professional career is also potentially compromising her ability to take care of those children. And so she writes this letter that's like, how dare you threaten my ability to be a good mother? Like she reminds people of this. She reminds them that they have this information, not from her, but from Richard Ford, who like has every reason not to be generous to her. And so if he's willing to make it public,

1:12:03then that really means it must be true. The letter doesn't really do anything. But when she finally returns to the stage, so once again, people can see her, people can interact with her. She can use all of the charisma, the considerable charisma that she has to convince them of her sincerity. She tries to just perform without addressing it. And when they won't, when they, when the audience is clearly wanting a statement from her, she steps forward. And I love this. She doesn't apologize. She specifically doesn't apologize, but she does assert that she was really ill, that she would never

1:12:38lie to them about, about illness, that she would never do anything to compromise her career. And that, because part of the tension here is that Clarence is wealthy enough that Jordan, you know, he compromises the economic relationship between Jordan and her public, right? That they are supposed to be her patrons. And now he is. So they don't quite have the same power dynamic that they like to have with her. And so she does this very smart thing. She tells the audience that she has always relied

1:13:10on them for her emotional well-being and support. That she is always indebted to them for the popularity of her career. And that she always, every day, is seeking to be worthy of those things. And so she basically doesn't apologize, but she does give them back a little bit of the power that they think they have lost. And it's like the entire crisis just disappears. That's all they wanted

1:13:41to hear, that she wasn't going to retire and that they still were important. That's all they wanted to know. The whole royal family comes and sees her in an opera like a month later, like the entire royal family shows up. I don't know how Clarence got them all to do it, but they all show up, they all watch her perform. And the audience, the public is kind of like, okay, I guess this is fine then. And with the exception of a couple of nasty, satirical prints that continue to sort of poke at this idea that she lied about a miscarriage when she was gone, the scandal is pretty much over.

1:14:15And then she and Clarence go on to have a 20-year relationship. They have 10 children together. And like pretty soon, they're just seen this like old, boring, married. And everyone's like, oh yeah, she's pregnant again. But she learns her lesson. She's really proactive about sharing private information about the way that her family obligations will sometimes prevent her from coming to the theater and doing her professional duties. So one of her children has a bad reaction to a smallpox inoculation. And like it is in the papers the second that it happens. So there's no

1:14:50question about why she's not there. There's no question about like what she's doing. She's pregnant at the time. And so there's this big reminder that like she's super pregnant, but she cares so much about her babies that she's like risking herself, risking her own health to mother this child herself, even though she probably had this huge staff that could have done it for her. So like she learns her lesson and she consistently presents herself as a mother first, but only like a little bit first to her professional obligations. You know, this is obviously the story of Dorothy Jordan is this

1:15:23very public scandal, I guess, at least at one point. But in many cases, it's not always clear. The evidence of pregnancy isn't always clear from the historical record. I'm curious, how do you go about finding that evidence and assessing it? Yeah. So it basically collating a lot of information, a lot of different sources. You know, in some cases, because I did sort of start this by focusing on celebrities, often, you know, people have done the work to find, you know, the parish records, the, in Jordan's case, there's this great moment where Clarence sits down and records all of the

1:15:59birthdates of all of their children, including the times they were born, which I think is so sweet. Like he has, he has such detailed information of like when each of his children was born. He was, I mean, he was kind of a doofus, but he was also kind of great. He was like a stay at home dad. That was kind of great. Anyway. So sometimes you have something like that, where like, it's very clearly recorded. Sometimes you have parish records, which might at least record a baptismal date. So you have a sense of when the child maybe was born. And, you know, we've got great biographical sources. We've got the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. We've got the

1:16:33Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, and other, other stage personnel has very long title, 1660 to 1800, edited by Philip Heifel and some others. So I started with those. I started with like secondary biographical sources to try and figure out what we already knew. And then I just looked for people who had children. I looked for birthdates for those children. And then I just did some math. In some cases, you know, we only have a sort of vague sense of when they may have been born because maybe they're mentioned in a will and maybe their age is there, but we don't really

1:17:04have a birth date for them that we found. So sometimes I would go to parish records if it was really important and do a little poking around to see if I could identify a more specific date. So like my mom does a lot of genealogy. So I just stole her Ancestry.com. I did a bunch of stuff there. So sometimes I discover children that nobody knew about that way or other things. And then in order to figure out how this then actually mattered to their performances in their careers, I would turn

1:17:36to repertory records. So mostly I was looking at the London stage, which is a five-part, 11-volume, incredible compendium of daily performance, records of known performances in London between 1660 and 1800. Like volume one is like this big, much smaller and covers the first 40 years. And then it gets down to like, there are like three different honking volumes just to cover the period from

1:18:061776 to 1800, because there's so many records. There's so much information. So then what I started doing is building a lot of Excel sheets that tracked every role that women were performing in, in these throughout the season that they were, that their child was born. And I was mostly focusing on times when the birth date fell in the middle of the season in some way, or very close to the end of the season, because I was really interested in the last like trimester or so, because assuming that's

1:18:41when pregnancy is going to be most visible. And that's when any accommodations that the theater's making for their physical wellbeing are probably most likely to happen. So I would just record every single thing they did for a season. I would record it when there were substitutes coming in for their roles. I would take note of when a play seems to sort of just fall out of the repertory entirely. And then for a control, I would check the seasons on either side of that, just to try and make sure that I'm not attributing to pregnancy something that was, you know, just a larger shift that may have

1:19:15been for a different reason. And in some cases doing this repertory work would tell me when a child was likely to have been born, even when we don't have a parish record telling us. So like if there was a general year, the repertory records might suggest, oh, it was probably October because she was gone from like October 1st to November 30th. So probably she had the baby somewhere in there. And then especially for celebrities and especially in the last decades of the 18th century, reporting on celebrity pregnancy gets really popular and really common. So you can find,

1:19:50for Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, you can find pretty much daily updates in the papers about what they're doing, when they expect their children to be born, what roles they're going to play or not play, whether there's going to be a new play premiere before they give birth or whether it's going to be pushed off until after. There's a lot of discussion of their pregnancies in the papers by the time you get to the end of the century. And then of course, I'm looking at manuscript sources, mostly correspondence, anything I can get from the women themselves, of course, but often people around them. So my favorite

1:20:27are the letters of Mary Tickel or Tickel. I think it should be Tickel, but I think it's actually Tickel. She was a singer and part of a large theatrical family. So Thomas Lindley was a composer and a musician and then became part owner of Drury Lane with Richard Brinsley Sheridan after David Garrick retired. So she started as a singer. She retired when she got married, but her husband was like a sometime playwright and sort of writer of epilogues. He also probably wrote pieces that he would submit,

1:21:02he wrote puff pieces that he would submit to the newspaper. And then they'd be like, look how popular our play is because we had someone write a piece saying how popular it was. So her father owned, was part owner of the theater. She was married to, you know, someone who was kind of involved in the business too. She was part of, I'm forgetting what they called it. I think they called it the cabinet. It was like this unofficial advisory board of the theater. So she was part of that. Her sister, Elizabeth, married Richard Brinsley Sheridan. So she was Sheridan's sister-in-law.

1:21:35Her mother was the wardrobe mistress for the theater. And she acted as an unofficial sort of dramaturg and producer. She would read scripts and give Sheridan her opinion on them. She would show up at rehearsals and give people notes and tell them what they were doing wrong. And she sends constant daily letters to her sister reporting on all the goings on at the, in the backstage of the theater. So Mary Tickell hears from her mother who got it from Dorothy Jordan's dresser that Jordan is

1:22:09pregnant before Jordan's told anybody at the theater herself. She has so many opinions about Sarah Sitton's 1785 pregnancy and like what she should or shouldn't do, roles she should and shouldn't perform. She's helping to strategize how they can squeeze the most money out of Sitton's before she goes into labor. Like Mary Tickell is a riot. She is so interesting. Anyway, so she was a, she was a wonderful source. I came by that wasn't from the women themselves, but was very much an intimate look at their daily lives and how their pregnancies were progressing.

1:22:42Yeah. I I'm curious, Chelsea, how you see this, you know, seemingly remote historical era, how you see its celebrity culture reflected in ours, maybe particularly when it comes to attitudes towards women, towards work, towards pregnancy. So I see a lot of parallels. I think that we still have a desire to feel close to celebrities. You know, there's a lot of discussion about parasocial relationships now. And I think, you know, that's, that's been a function of celebrity for a long

1:23:12time. We still want to know always more about them. We still want more intimate details of their lives. We still want to understand, honestly, even if you're not that personally invested, it's like a way of connecting with other people sometimes too. Like I don't actually care about Olivia Wilde, but I, I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why she was trending with salad dressing the other day. Like I wanted to know, you know, we want to know about women's pregnancies. We want to know about their experiences. We want to know if their experiences are like our experiences, or we want

1:23:46to use celebrities to like figure out what our experiences might be like if we were ever pregnant then. And now, you know, we gain access through a combination of live appearances, reported news and gossip, the circulation of sanctioned images and the proliferation of unsanctioned images then. And now parenthood, but especially motherhood is a really complicated set of performances with really high stakes. I think that's, it's, it's heightened today because our social norms have

1:24:18changed really significantly and social media allows for such swift, extreme pylons and policing of people's behaviors. But certainly, you know, there were high, there were standards of good motherhood in the 18th century too, that women, that actresses wanted to make sure people knew they were meeting. So Jordan's emphasis on her financial commitment to her children was because provisioning for one's child was a, was really crucial to being considered a good mother. Cultural norms and expectations around pregnancy, of course, shape the way we treat pregnant celebrities, how we expect them to dress and

1:24:52behave and speak about their experiences. You are supposed to be delighted about being pregnant. You are not supposed to think any side effects or symptoms that you might have of it dampen your enthusiasm at all. You are supposed to glow. You are supposed to have a nice, you're supposed to look like you swallowed a basketball and still look really nice in all your red carpet clothing and stuff like that. And celebrities can, can face really intense backlash if they don't subscribe to the performance of pregnancy. We want them to, but the like flip side, one of the great benefits of celebrity is that if

1:25:27someone resists one of those scripts, if they simply like, if they physically can't adhere to it, they can actually crack open a conversation about how damaging those scripts can be. And they can bring light to experiences that many people may feel alone and isolated in suffering through. So for example, the writer Anne Helen Peterson has a great piece about Kim Kardashian's first pregnancy and the way that her struggle with like preeclampsia and eventually eclampsia prevented her from being able to adhere to this

1:26:02script of like the celebrity pregnant body. And the fact that she was on Keeping Up with the Kardashians meant that like, you weren't only getting her celebrity pregnancy in these very controlled, like red carpet moments. You were getting it all the time. You were getting like her actual lived experience. You were getting the fact that she was miserable and in pain and uncomfortable. And what that meant is that all of those women who feel alienate or all of those pregnant people who have felt alienated by the fact that they can't relate to the like shiny, happy, perfect Instagram celebrity pregnancy are suddenly like,

1:26:38yes, that's what it was like for me too. I too was really tired. I too was uncomfortable. I too wanted to have my kid, but didn't love being pregnant. And like, great, there can be space for that narrative now. When Amy Schumer and Ali Wong have comedy specials where like the whole comedy set is about asking the audience to actually think about and engage with the discomfort and lack of glamour around pregnancy, right? Kate Middleton and Amy Schumer both had hyperemesis during their pregnancies.

1:27:14Kate Middleton just kind of like didn't ever appear in public if she couldn't appear in this like very controlled, shiny way. And Amy Schumer's like, I had a contract. Like I had to show up today regardless of how I felt. And she asks the audience to reckon with that. She has, she asks the audience to reckon with the fact that like her profession isn't flexible enough for her to not suffer in severe economic ways if she's not willing to like push through physical suffering to keep performing.

1:27:47So yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think it's, I think it's really interesting. And I think it's probably very true that in the 18th century, pregnancy was doing this range of things that we see it do today, even though we don't necessarily, even though we can't necessarily point as easily to it. So in the conclusion, I try to draw some parallels between contemporary celebrity, celebrity pregnancy at certain moments, like Beyonce's VMA reveal of her first pregnancy, you know, and Dorothy Jordan, like doing a little wink and a nod that maybe indicated she was pregnant. So I try to draw some explicit parallels where I feel like we have the evidence for 18th century.

1:28:21But, but the last thing I will say is that I think that we have some real work to do today that the 18th century might help us with. So 18th century theaters never started from the question of whether or not they could or should accommodate a childbearing labor force. They started with how they would do it. And paid leave policies were central to how they did it, just as they should be today. So I suspect if we hopped in a time machine, we would find backstage spaces in 18th century theaters

1:28:56were filled with children and babies and that children and that everyone in the theater was to some degree responsible for keeping these children alive and fed and entertained and quiet enough not to disrupt the business of the theater. From the extras in the wings who would hold infants while their mothers went and performed a scene to Dorothy Jordan entertaining Sarah Siddons' oldest child, Henry in the green room, something he talks about in, in some of his later writings. And I just wonder

1:29:30what would we gain with today with such an attitude? What would we gain if we provided the kind of job security and the kind of friendly environment for people to, to live their reproductive lives hand in hand with their professional lives and didn't force people to create such a false separation between those two aspects of their identities? My bet is that we would gain a lot. We would gain more than we could ever imagine. And I think, of course, this is a labor issue, but I don't think it's just a labor issue

1:30:05because I don't, I think we have no idea how powerful it might be for audiences and other performers to see pregnant people on our stages, not just when those pregnancies were specifically indicated by a script, but because a working professional is entitled to work even when pregnant. And because it's good for audiences to confront the fact that women continue, that pregnant people continue their lives and careers when they are pregnant all the time. And we have gotten really comfortable with never

1:30:37being asked to see that. And theater is a way that we can ask people to see it. And to see it as a way of reflecting their own experiences and as a way of confronting and challenging assumptions about it. We'll post additional information about Chelsea's book, Carrying All Before Her, Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689 to 1800. We'll also post links to images of and information about some of the actresses she introduced us to today. Chelsea, thank you again for explaining how pregnancy and celebrity

1:31:10interacted in 18th century London. Thank you so much for having me.

1:31:18If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net and follow at Theater History on Twitter. Just a note, theater is spelled T-H-E-A-T-R-E in our website URL, and it's spelled T-E-E-R at the end in our Twitter handle. Our theme music is The Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally, thank you for listening.

1:31:50The New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally, thank you for listening.