‘An old fairy tale told anew’: Victorian Fairy Pantomime

Christmas pantomime, a highly-admired and quintessentially British form of popular theatre, often features fairy-tale characters and plots. Given that a great number of the best-known pantomime performances, such as Cinderella, Bluebeard, The Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots and Red Riding Hood, are drawn from marvelous fictions, it is particularly interesting to investigate the role played by the Victorian pantomime in the transmission of fairy tales, and the pantomime’s broader impact on English culture. This essay has a dual focus. In the first place, it draws critical attention to the modalities of transposing fairy tales to the theatrical form of Victorian pantomime. Secondly, considering the pantomime’s crossover appeal to audiences of both adults and children, which is a result of its multivalent construction of transvestite performance, the essay explores how fairy pantomimes contribute to the discussion of gender in Victorian England. More specifically, the essay is concerned with the question of whether the experimentation with travesti roles in the pantomime’s stock characters of the Dame and the Principal Boy leads to the destabilisation of gender boundaries and the creation of new ways of conceptualising sexuality, or whether instead it reinforces rigidly stratified Victorian notions of gender hierarchy. By addressing these questions, the article sheds light on the representation of gender and identity, fantasies of costume and disguise, as well as the development of Western attitudes towards cross-dressing and sexuality.