Sarah Siddons (1755-1831)

Portrait of actress and famous tragedienne, Sarah Siddons

“Perform'd in this wide gap of time”: A Stage History of The Winter's Tale

The stage history of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale reflects changing critical perceptions about its themes as well as an evolution of theatrical production over a span of four centuries. First noted in astrologer Simon Forman's record of a performance on May 15, 1611, the play was popular with court audiences but disappeared from the stage when the theatres were closed at mid-century. It reappeared in a truncated performance on January 15, 1741. Nine months later David Garrick offered his abbreviated text—essentially a maudlin, three-act pastoral diversion—to popular appeal but critical censure. In 1802, John Philip Kemble's production presented a fuller, though Bowdlerized, text, featuring the great Sarah Siddons as Hermione. Hermione's role increasingly reflected the Victorian image of the selfless spouse who maintains her moral fiber under duress. During Charles Kean's directorship at the Princess's Theatre starting in 1850, the play acquired more lavish sets and scenery intended to reflect the historical context of the action, but the text sank under the weight of such ponderous efforts at realism. With the arrival of Harley Granville Barker's 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre, the play was returned to a more Elizabethan identity; a smaller, less cluttered stage permitted a faster-paced production with greater attention paid to Leontes as a psychologically fragile husband and monarch. This emphasis on the play as a study of the troubled marriage of a troubled king has persisted into the twentieth century as directors such as Jane Howell and Gregory Doran have lent this romance a convincing emotional depth.

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

Sarah Siddons and the Romantic Hamlet

This paper considers Sarah Siddons’s cross-gender performances as Hamlet in relation to critical fascination with the character’s interiority in the early Romantic era. An examination of the responses to Siddons’s Hamlet in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies of the play reveals that Siddons’s contemporaries saw the actress’s femininity and acting methods as particularly effective for conveying the sensibility and irresolution that became increasingly associated with Hamlet in literary criticism of the period. In particular, the responses to Siddons’s performances emphasise Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s Ghost, a scene often considered the focal point of definitive performances by actors like Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, and Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble. The fact that these commentators describe Siddons’s Hamlet as superior to her brother’s and praise her reactions in the Ghost scene suggests that Siddons succeeded in creating a dramatic interpretation of the character that aligned with the Romantic focus on Hamlet’s inner life.

A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli

In the 1784–85 London season, there was a conjunction between Shakespeare's Macbeth and three of the most thrilling artists of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi, the actress Sarah Siddons, and the artist Henry Fuseli. They were thrown into figurative proximity when a commentator on Rossi's performance wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” While we know much about the art of Siddons and Fuseli, we know little about Rossi's performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d'action.