Abstract
This essay argues that Ann Macklin’s benefit night program at Drury Lane, 23rd April 1746, on the eve that news of Culloden reached London, presents a response to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion contradicting the thesis that national crises prompt theatricalized reactions of anxiety and insecurity. Co-produced with her husband, Charles Macklin (who wrote two new pieces for the program, including A Will and No Will), their program prominently featured other—nominally Catholic—Irish actors. One of them, William Havard, was a Jacobite proselytizer. His tragedy, King Charles I (1737), was Britain’s only regularly performed pro-Stuart drama. Conflicting with the notion that contemporary crises precipitate cross-dressing, the Macklins reduced the number of cross-dressed roles in Charles Shadwell’s, The Humours of the Army, or The Female Officer. Furthermore, Peg Woffington’s cross-dressed “Female Volunteer” epilogue had been preceded by real cross-dressed Jacobite warrior women near Inverness, hardly insecure and certainly not Hanoverian. Despite the scale of the Rebellion, a proto-nationalist rising supported by Scottish Lowlanders as much as Highlanders, Ann’s benefit program simply emphasized the good humored continuities of regional distinctiveness.
