Breeches role

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] When the London theatres re-opened in 1660, the first professional actresses appeared on the public stage, replacing the boys in dresses of the Shakespeare era.

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): 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.

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.

In early Italian opera, many leading operatic roles were assigned to a castrato, a male castrated before puberty with a very strong and high voice.

[2] A closely related term is a skirt role, a female character to be played by a male singer, usually for comic or visual effect.

The role of the witch in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, although written for a mezzo-soprano, is now more regularly[citation needed] sung by a tenor, who sings the part an octave lower.