This chapter considers how star roles such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra were sculpted and scored by precisely the kind of physical virtuosity that is demanded in the scenes of skill instruction and sporting display discussed elsewhere in the book. The chapter offers sustained, in-depth readings of a number of leading female roles, placing Cleopatra within a broad theatrical context of corporeally virtuosic leading women including the titular heroine of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, Pandora in John Lyly's The Woman in the Moon, and Lucretia in Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter. It also offers sustained, in-depth readings (partially informed by practice-based research) of particularly spectacular features of Cleopatra's stagecraft, demonstrating how specific acts of violence and physical collaboration redound widely across the early modern dramatic canon. These cross-repertorial readings create a complex network of physical feats and corporeal interactions between actors that centre on the dexterity of the leading boy player, further extending the concept of early modern theatrical culture’s shared investment in boys’ corporeal performances.

falls into two parts. The first section discusses the main elements of the touring repertoire. This consisted initially of popular melodramas such as The Manxman, Trilby and The Sign of the Cross. The Bandmann Opera Company, his most important company, provided facsimile versions of Edwardian musical comedies, most of which were drawn from the George Edwardes’ Gaiety Theatre, with whom Bandmann had an exclusive agreement. Another mainstay of his repertoire was variety theatre, which became increasingly important after 1914. Each genre was represented by its own company, each of which toured on an integrated rotation system. The second section discusses the heterogeneous publics on the Bandmann Circuit as a colonial public sphere. Bandmann’s publics included non-English-speaking audiences in Japan, parts of China and the Dutch East Indies, among other areas.