LITHERLAND, Benjamin

“We James and Elizabeth Stokes choose to exercise the sword”: Celebrity couples and prize fighting, 1700 – 1730

 

Stage-fighting, with weapons and/or with fists, was a popular attraction in dedicated amphitheatres in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century. By the 1720s amphitheatre proprietors were demonstrating an increasing sophistication in their manipulation of the burgeoning press, using hyperbole, exaggeration and novelty to advertise their weekly events. One such ‘novelty’ were female fighters or ‘championesses’, and the most famous ‘championess’ of her day, Elizabeth Stokes, was also wife to the celebrated pugilist and owner of a widely popular amphitheatre, James Stokes. An analysis of contemporary adverts and reports suggests the Stokes used their marriage for commercial advantage over local amphitheatres: they would fight other ‘couples’ in mixed-‘tag’ matches, and James Stokes would fight men who had ‘offended’ his wife.

Historians of celebrity have posited that for celebrity to emerge as a distinct social trend there requires connected but distinct historical specificities: a large society where individuals know the performer but the performer doesn’t know the individual, the sub-division of labour, the development of consumer and commodity culture, a sharp separation between performer and spectator, and the emergence of public sphere and mass media. Similarly, all of these conditions played central roles in (re)defining hegemonic gender roles and identities in the same period. In short, this was the environment in which the Stokes were performing, and they were arguably the first celebrity sporting couple, embodying the complex and often contradictory relationship between the long industrial revolution, gender and celebrity.

 

Benjamin Litherland is a Ph.D. candidate and Associate Tutor in the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.