ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 191
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ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN
We are so beautiful, dancing in tights,
Mashers adore us for hundreds of nights,
Sending us bracelets and little invites,
Waiting outside on the mat!62
The Shop Girl also asserts the appropriateness of a modern ‘dancing
girl, burlesque or operatic’ to be ‘mother of a race aristocratic/Who will
have their noble rights to ancestress in tights’, in this case reinforcing
the notion of actresses’ challenge to class rigidity by revealing that a
charming shop attendant is the lost heiress to £5 million. This enables
the foundling to marry her beau, son of a knighted solicitor, overturning
his mother’s objections.
All of these scripts assert that women from the formerly despised
classes really provide the more appropriate genetic material for
aristocratic regeneration. The teleology of their social position, as the
Frivolity Theatre actress Miss Plantagenet (‘Andantino Spagnoletti’)
asserts in The Shop Girl, closely resembles the upper crust’s. They both,
for example, are the subjects of photographs and the focus of the masses’
and gentlemen’s fascination in the fashionable West End:
I’m a lady not unknown to fame
Critics call me by my Christian name
And you see my photograph on show
Just wherever you may care to go!
I’ve been taken in my dinner gown
Looking modestly and shyly down,
Or kicking high with petticoats that fly,
The smartest girl in town!
Her transformation to Duchess is, therefore, an easy matter, for social
success is a matter of acting correctly:
Ah, dear boys you won’t be very glad,
When I’m married to a noble lad.
I shall turn most singularly prim,
And I reckon I’ll look after him!
Oh, I’ll be a very proper sort,
Quite propriety itself in short,
And all the peers will vote me a success,
The grandest dame at Court!63
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