Theatre Under Louis XIV

Cross-gender casting was an ongoing phenomenon in the French theatre during the reign of Louis XIV. This book explores the trend and related gender issues in different theatrical genres and different performance contexts. Although professional acting troupes under Louis XIV were mixed, cross-casting remained an important feature of French court ballet (in which the King himself performed a number of women's roles) and an occasional feature of spoken comedy and tragic opera. This book fills an important gap in the history of French theatre and provides new insight into wider theoretical questions of gender and theatricality. The inclusion of chapters on ballet and opera (as well as spoken drama) opens up the richness of French theatre under Louis XIV in a way that has not been achieved before. "She [Prest] concisely and convincingly demonstrates the inherent interest of a largely neglected feature of seventeenth-century French theatre that is significant precisely because it is scarce." - Russell Goulbourne, Times Literary Supplement