An Actress at Her Toilet, or Miss Brazen Just Breecht (John Collet, 1779)

In theater, a breeches role or breeches part (also pants role, pants part, trouser role, trouser part, and Hosenrolle) is a role in which a female actor performs in male clothing. Breeches, tight-fitting knee-length pants, were a standard male garment when these roles were introduced.[citation needed] The theatrical term travesti covers both this sort of cross-dressing and also male actors dressing as female characters. Both are part of the long history of cross-dressing in music and opera and later in film and television.

In opera, a breeches role refers to any male character that is sung and acted by a female singer. Most often the character is an adolescent or a very young man, sung by a mezzo-soprano or contralto. The operatic concept assumes that the character is male, and the audience accepts him as such, even knowing that the actor is not. Cross-dressing female characters (e.g., Leonore in Fidelio or Gilda in Act III of Rigoletto) are not considered breeches roles. The most frequently performed breeches roles are Cherubino (The Marriage of Figaro), Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier), Hansel (Hansel und Gretel) and Orpheus (Orfeo ed Euridice), though the latter was originally written for a male singer, first a castrato and later, in the revised French version, an haute-contre.

Because non-musical stage plays generally have no requirements for vocal range, they do not usually contain breeches roles in the same sense as opera. Some plays do have male roles that were written for adult female actors, and (for other practical reasons) are usually played by women (e.g., Peter Pan); these could be considered modern-era breeches roles. However, in most cases, the choice of a female actor to play a male character is made at the production level; Hamlet is not a breeches role, but Sarah Bernhardt once played Hamlet as a breeches role. When a play is spoken of as "containing" a breeches role, this does mean a role where a female character pretends to be a man and uses male clothing as a disguise.[citation needed]

History and Development

Dorothea Jordan as Hippolyta by John Hoppner, 1791

When the London theatres re-opened in the Stuart Restoration of 1660, the first professional actresses appeared on the public stage, replacing the boys in dresses of the Shakespeare era. To see real women speak the risqué dialogue of Restoration comedy and show off their bodies on stage was a great novelty, and soon the even greater sensation was introduced of women wearing male clothes on stage. Out of some 375 plays produced on the London stage between 1660 and 1700, it has been calculated that 89, nearly a quarter, contained one or more roles for actresses in male clothes (see Howe). Practically every Restoration actress appeared in trousers at some time, and breeches roles would even be inserted gratuitously in revivals of older plays.

Some critics, such as Jacqueline Pearson, have argued that these cross-dressing roles subvert conventional gender roles by allowing women to imitate the roistering and sexually aggressive behaviour of male Restoration rakes, but Elizabeth Howe has objected in a detailed study that the male disguise was "little more than yet another means of displaying the actress as a sexual object". The epilogue to Thomas Southerne's Sir Anthony Love (1690) suggests that it does not much matter if the play is dull, as long as the audience can glimpse the legs of the famous "breeches" actress Susanna Mountfort (also known as Susanna Verbruggen):

You'll hear with Patience a dull Scene, to see,

In a contented lazy waggery,

The Female Mountford bare above the knee.

Katharine Eisaman Maus also argues that as well as revealing the female legs and buttocks, the breeches role frequently contained a revelation scene where the character not only unpins her hair but as often reveals a breast as well. This is evidenced in the portraits of many of these actresses of the Restoration.

Breeches roles remained an attraction on the British stage for centuries, but their fascination gradually declined as the difference in real-life male and female clothing became less extreme. They played a part in Victorian burlesque and are traditional for the principal boy in pantomime.

Opera

History

The classification of breeches roles has varied quite a bit depending on performance practice and audience expectations. In early Italian opera a large amount of leading male roles were written for castrati. As women were not allowed to sing on stage in the Papal States until the end of the 18th century, although not elsewhere in Europe, many female operatic roles which premiered in the Papal States were originally written as skirt roles (e.g. Mandane and Semira in Leonardo Vinci's Artaserse). However, when this practice began to decline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these roles were increasingly taken over by female singers, especially mezzo-sopranos and contraltos. Singers such as Marietta Alboni and Rosmunda Pisaroni became known for performing heroic male roles in this range, and composers began writing new roles specifically for female performers, which contributed to what is now described as the travesti tradition.

Terminology

The term travesty (from the French travesti, meaning disguised) applies to any roles sung by the opposite sex. A closely related term is a skirt role, a female character to be played by a male singer, usually for comic or visual effect. These roles are often ugly stepsisters or very old women, and are not as common as trouser roles.

Casting Practices

Rise Stevens as Prince Orlovsky, The Metropolitan Opera, 1951

In the modern performance of opera, these roles may be sung by female singers or countertenors depending on the production and availability of singers. For example, the role of Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus is more often than not performed by a mezzo-soprano, but it is also sung by a countertenor sometimes which can change how the character is presented on stage. The breeches role remain a central part of the mezzo-soprano repertoire in modern opera, which reflects both historical vocal traditions and more modern, practical casting considerations.

Dramatic Function

Breeches roles often serve specific dramatic purposes within opera, such as the portrayal of young male characters and the use of cross-gender casting for expressive or comic effect. Scholars have noted that these roles frequently emphasize youth, emotional openness, and physical expressivity in performance. The Madwoman in Britten's Curlew River and the Cook in Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges are later examples. The role of the witch in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, although written for a mezzo-soprano, is now sometimes sung by a tenor, who sings the part an octave lower. In the same opera the "male" roles of Hänsel, the Sandman, and the Dewman are however meant to be sung by women.

The examples below reflect a broader tradition of breeches roles across the operatic repertoire.

Roles in Opera

Mary Garden as Chérubin, Opéra-Comique, 1905

See also

Further reading

  • Howe, Elizabeth (1992). The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Maus, Katharine Eisaman (1979). "'Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress". New York: Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama (1996).
  • Pearson, Jacqueline (1988). The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737. New York: St. Martin's Press.