The Grecian Saloon (1851-1867): Assembling Classical Myths and Popular Audiences with Clarissa Ann (Bennett) Conquest

Bratton (in Theatre Survey, May 1996) revises the term femme couverte figuratively when she uncovers the theatrical life of the actress and playwright Jane Scott, whose work for the illegitimate theatre had disappeared from the hegemonic discourse on nineteenth-century British theatre, occluded by the theatrical history of the noted men in her family. Forgotten histories of women dancers have been also commonly effaced from the history of dance when dance sagas dominated by male dancers and theatrical marriages covered their achievements. This is the case of Clarissa Ann (Bennett) Conquest and her work as an actress, dancer, ballet mistress and head of the dancing school at the Grecian Saloon between 1851 and 1867. In this paper, I aim to argue how the Grecian Saloon, as an institution, allowed Clarissa Bennett to participate in an ‘enlarged public sphere’, as defined by Orr (1995), that furthered women’s agency in the transmission of the classics throughout the nineteenth century. For this purpose, I uncover Clarissa Ann (Bennett) Conquest’s significant impact for the success of the Grecian from the viewpoint of classical reception studies by mapping the network of classically inspired ballets that she gathered for its popular audiences. 

Laura Monrós-Gaspar is Full Professor in English at the Department of English and German Studies (Universitat de València), where she leads the Research Group “Literature, Arts and Performance” (LAP). She is also Honorary Research Associate at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford and Head of the Area of Performing Arts at the office of the Vice-Chancellor for Culture at the UV. Her main research interest is on the reception of classical mythology throughout the nineteenth century on which she has published extensively. She is the author of Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the book chapter “Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795-1868” in Macintosh, F, J. McConnell and S. Harrison (ed.) Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, OUP, (2018).