Cora Urquhart Potter's "Perilous Public Experiment": The 1889 "Antony and Cleopatra"

(99-100) The closing decades of the nineteenth century proved to be a period of considerable reformation with regard to the social position of both actors and actresses, with acceptance into the rarified upper echelons of society being proffered, in England certainly, from the very top of gentility's ladder. Society's ideology about women and prescriptions of female sexuality were constantly defied by the actress whose independence, education, allure, and flouting of sexual mores (unavoidable conditions of the work) gave her access to the male ruling elite while preventing her from being accepted by right-thinking and—especially—feminine society" (69-70) Certainly Cora Potter, leaving both her family and her place in New York's upper classes to assume an acting career, could be viewed as a bellwether in the increasing gentrification of the stage at the end of the nineteenth century. Actresses, Corbett continues, also sought to professionalize; however, they achieved this "not by identifying with a preexisting public role for women—there was none that could accommodate her—but by adapting the norms of middle-class private-sphere femininity to a new public role" (117). [...]a number of eminent Victorian actresses sought not to "challenge the middle-class ideal of womanhood, but ... to perform it, onstage and off" (107). According to contemporary critic George Montgomery's February 1889 commentary, Potter's boldly innovative portrayal of the Egyptian queen provoked "more discussion in New York than any other single performance of the present season."