“Instrument and Screen of All Your Villainies:” Charlotte Charke, Deviant Bodies, and Disguise in George Lillo’s The London Merchant

Abstract

George Lillo’s The London Merchant, 1731, was required viewing for leagues of apprentices due to its seemingly straightforward moral: men and women should do as their positions, masters, law, and God require; transgressions are not to be tolerated. However, Millwood, the play’s powerful prostitute, rails against the aforementioned ideals, pointing out how men consume all that is beneficial to them, and how they subsequently dispose of the rest. She seduces and manipulates George Barnwell and uses him to lie, steal, and murder. At the play’s end, Millwood and George are hanged. This suggests that her ideas and those influenced by them die with her. Since this play was so widely viewed, it is important to take note of which actors were filling which roles in the production. Charlotte Charke—a notorious cross-dresser—played the role of George in 1734 and 1744. She played the role of Millwood twice in 1735. In the role of George, Charke’s performances imbue the role with a sense of deviance, if not ridiculousness, before his encounter with Millwood, who is unfairly blamed for his transgressions. Millwood crafts a story of abandonment for economic survival; Charke’s lived experiences as a women abandoned by her husband, her father, and her family, imbue this role with authenticity. While scholars have respectively discussed Charke’s life and autobiography and The London Merchant’s morality, the intersection of this actress’s personal history and her performance in this play has not been analyzed. Charke’s life experiences, celebrity, and presence on stage point to the fact that the consumption of transgressive female bodies sustain the prevailing systems of morality of the play. Looking at the eighteenth-century drama and Charke’s role in it through Marvin Carlson’s work on the haunted stage, and Felicity Nussbaum’s work on celebrity culture, this play illustrates the ways in which performance serves to utterly disrupt the meaning of a play as cultural icon and broken hegemonic symbol.