Flying the Feather George, Prince of Wales and the Performance of Masculinity on the Late-Eighteenth-Century Stage

When George, Prince of Wales, made his debut at the end of the 1770s, the Duchess of Devonshire observed, “he looks like a woman in man’s cloaths”. She understood him as a cross-dressed actor. This article maps the Prince’s role by charting a narrative of his emblem, the white ostrich feather. As a symbol and a prop, the feather exposes the Prince’s difficult place in late-eighteenth-century discussions of gender, politics and slavery.