SOURCE: "Paris Was Always Burning: (Drag) Queens and Kings in Two Early Plays by Alexandre Dumas pére, " in Essays in Theatre, Vol. 14, No. 2, May, 1996, pp. 158-73.

In the following essay, Kiernander explores aspects of androgyny and sexual ambiguity in the plays Christine and Henri III et sa cour.

It is apt that the writings of Alexandre Dumas père, which deal so frequently with overwhelming obsession, should have provoked similar extraordinary obsessions in his readers. The result of one such obsession is a vast repository of Dumas material, the book collection alone consisting of over 2,500 titles (many of them multi-volume works), in the Auckland City Library, collected in the first half of this century by a passionate New Zealand bibliophile Frank Wild Reed. Reed corresponded avidly with similar Dumas fanatics around the world, and his own substantial collection was augmented by the legacy of one of his...