Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form” Lisa A
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Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form” Lisa A. Freeman abstract When Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) returned to the stage in 1816 for two com mand performances in the role of Lady Macbeth, her body, at the age of fifty-seven, was already in an advanced state of decrepi tude. Most critics writing about Siddons focus on only William Hazlitt’s “goddess,” one of the greatest actresses to grace the British stage. Focusing on the decaying body of the actress and on the melan cholic sense of loss that haunts many of the essays, news paper articles, and biographies written on Siddons, I argue that the actress functioned as a kind of cipher through which to filter Romantic preoccupations with mortality and the aging self. Siddons’s iconic status clashed with the aesthetic of authenticity she cultivated, making her into a living effigy of the self. In the face of her visible decline, her biographers strove to breathe new life into the ephemeral body theatric and indem- nify for all time what Anna Seward termed “the dignity of the Siddonian form.” author Lisa A. Freeman is associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (2002) and the editor of Sarah Siddons: Lives of Shakespearian Actors (2009). She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “Antitheatricality and the Body Public: From the Renaissance to the NEA.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27, no. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 2015) ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.3.597 Copyright 2015 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University 598 lisa freeman “Players should be immortal, if their own wishes or ours could make them so; but they are not. They not only die like other people, but like other people they cease to be young, and are no longer themselves, even while living.”1 In what might come as a surprise to many, these dolorous lines form the beginning of William Hazlitt’s encomium on the glories of Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), the great tragic actress who dominated the theatrical boards for most of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hazlitt writes of an extraordinary performer who inspired something akin to idolatry, who seemed, “a being of a superior order [who] had dropped from another sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance ... She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind.” “To have seen Mrs. Siddons,” Hazlitt confidently states, “was an event in every one’s life” (CW, 5:312). These celebratory passages have been featured in any number of scholarly articles and books as eyewitness testimony to the spectacular eminence of the woman who came to be known emblematically in her own time as “The Siddons,” and they speak in particular to the characteristic dignity that she was said to have exhibited both on the stage and in her life. She ascended to practically transcendent status as the sublime symbol of tragedy’s flame, and she also achieved iconic stature as a symbol of both the majesty of the state and the nobility of the British nation. Yet, as Hazlitt’s opening lines lament, even “The Siddons” had to grow old. Time was no more forgiving when it came to actors—no matter how immortal their fame might prove to be—than it was to those mere mortals who comprised the enthralled masses in the pit. Only recently and only in a very few cases have critics recognized that Hazlitt’s sentiments were delivered in the past tense—she “was the stateliest ornament”—and even those few have insisted that Siddons’s late appearances on the stage in an advanced state of debility and decay did nothing to tarnish her otherwise stellar reputation.2 This leaves little room to acknowledge, as Joseph 1 William Hazlitt, “Mrs. Siddons,” in Examiner, 16 June 1816, reprinted in A View of the English Stage; Or, A Series of Dramatic Criticisms (1818), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 5:312. References are to this edition, cited as CW. 2 See Shearer West, “Beauty, Ageing and the Body Public,” in The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons, ed. Gill Perry, Joseph Roach, and Shearer West ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 599 Roach has done in his own writing on Siddons, that encomium is as much a form of prayer and praise as it is a mode of valediction and mourning, a way of marking something that is now in the past, that has been lost and cannot be retrieved, and that the speaker longs nevertheless to restore in an embodied and present form.3 While much has been written about the stirring triumphs and posthumous fame of Sarah Siddons, I will focus in this article both on how the processes of decay associated with her aging body figured in the imagination of those spectators who witnessed her late performances on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century stage and on the valedictory and mournful tone that haunts much of the contemporary critical and biographical writing about her. I will illustrate the extent to which Siddons’s iconic status came into conflict with the aesthetic of authenticity that she cultivated— making her, in effect, into a living effigy of the self—and how, in the face of her visible decline, admirers and critics alike anxiously sought to secure her reputation against the advance of mortality and the distressing vicissitudes of memory. Even more to the point, as I will demonstrate, the experience of watching an actress of Siddons’s iconic stature age over the course of a lifetime on the stage offered a peculiarly painful inducement to take the measure of an aging self and to reckon with one’s own anguished sense of mortality. Her decline provided a strangely auspicious occasion to exercise already heightened Romantic pre- oc cupations with ruins and memory, nostalgia and loss, mortality and immortality. Focusing on the decaying body of the actress and on the melancholic sense of loss that haunts many of the essays, newspaper articles, and biographies written about Siddons, I argue that the actress functioned as a kind of cipher through which to filter concerns with mortality and the aging self. Her body provided (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 106–19; West, “Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 191–213; and Heather McPherson, “Siddons Rediviva: Death, Memory and Theatrical Afterlife,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 120–40. 3 Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 36–40. This article bears the imprint of Roach’s writing on performance genealogies, embodiment, and memory both in It and in his earlier work, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 600 lisa freeman the foundation and her performances the surface on which a series of what I term palimpsestic texts of memory were written. In the dis cussion that follows, I will trace Siddons’s cultivation of an aesthetic of authenticity and her rise to iconic status, the impact of aging on her body and her art, and the mournful reflections tendered by those especially who witnessed both her early and her late performances. • There is no question that Sarah Siddons had “It,” what Roach defines as that “easily perceived but hard-to-define quality pos- sessed by abnormally interesting people,” and that she was adroit in cultivating what he has termed the illusion of “public intimacy.” Siddons had the capacity to render and project a persona that seemed at once “touchable and transcendent,” while her “actual re- mote ness create[d] an unfulfilled need in the hearts of the public.”4 Yet it is also the case that these qualities were and are as socially and historically bound as any others and that, in the particular case of Siddons, they were mediated by and dependent on social categ ories of perception such as gender and age. As Felicity Nussbaum has demon strated in a remarkable study of actresses in the earlier part of the century, women on the eighteenth-century boards, more so than perhaps any other class of persons—male or female—faced a particularly fraught set of cir cum stances in negotiating the politics of sexual difference and in claiming, cultivating, and marketing their celebrity as a comm odity. The extraordinary mandate of these “fascinating women,” as she explains, was not only to “[gather] to themselves sexual powers exceeding those that were ascribed to men,” but also to create an “illusion of interiority” that would “[engage] the audience to speculate about which portion of the inner con scious ness of the actress was shared with the character.”5 In order to form and claim a property in the self, actresses had to appear, para doxically, to provide public access to the experience of an intimate self. This gendered dynamic of performance and spec ta tor ship was further mediated by perceptions of the actress’s age 4 Roach, It, 1, 16–17.