Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form” Lisa A

Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form” Lisa A. Freeman

abstract When Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) returned to the stage in 1816 for two comm and performances in the role of Lady Macbeth, her body, at the age of fifty-seven, was already in an advanced state of decrepitude. 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 melancholic sense of loss that haunts many of the essays, newspaper 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 W illiam 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 S ee 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

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 occ upations 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 discussion 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 moteness 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 demonstrated 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 circumstances 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 consciousness of the actress was shared with the character.”5 In order to form and claim a property in the self, actresses had to appear, paradoxically, to provide public access to the experience of an intimate self. This gendered dynamic of performance and spec tatorship was further mediated by perceptions of the actress’s age 4 Roach, It, 1, 16–17. 5 Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth- Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 17, 21.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 601 and eighteenth-century social attitudes towards aging in women more generally. While the age of sixty was considered as the demarcation of the beginning of old age in this period, women, as Susannah Ottaway, has shown, were still “generally perceived to be ‘old’ before men.”6 Once they passed their child-bearing years, women were supposed to have lost their beauty and were expected to withdraw from public view. As Jill Campbell has demonstrated, aging in women was treated as a kind of “acquired deformity” and as a particularly disturbing affront to a male sense of sustained identity through time.7 “The long period of female adult life, after the loss of beauty and youth,” was referred to as an “afterlife,” a kind of lived “social death” from which no woman could recover.8 In this respect, as Campbell illustrates, the aging woman “epitomize[d] for her male viewers the horrific persistence of the female body after it [had] been declared socially dead at the end of its reign of beauty. The social illogic of its material persistence define[d] it as inherently monstrous and deformed.”9 Campbell focuses much of her account of female aging on the particular experience and the many satirical representations of the long-lived Mary Wortley Montagu, but, as Devoney Looser has pointed out, Montagu’s experience of aging extended to and reflected that of almost all women writers and artists well into the nineteenth century: “Old age was presented as a woman’s source of shame, something to be covered over ... Regardless of how women writers of the era experienced the combination of gender, authorship, and old age, all who lived beyond age 55 or 60 faced the prospect of being judged for the united appropriateness of these characteristics, the parameters of which seem to have 6 Susannah R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35. 7 J ill Campbell, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the ‘Glass Revers’d’ of Female Old Age,” in “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, ed. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 213–51. Marie Mulvey Roberts reports similarly on the ways in which “prolongevity itself was gendered,” and “ageing was a process which affected [women] less positively and more profoundly” than men. Roberts, “‘A physic against death’: Eternal Life and the Enlightenment—Gender and Gerontology,” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 158. 8 J ill Campbell, 223. 9 J ill Campbell, 229.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 602 lisa freeman been narrower than those faced by men.”10 For any number of reasons, “women viewed the aging process with more fear and loathing,” and even women as prominent as the Bluestockings, many of whom lived to considerable old age, were careful, once they passed a certain epoch, to cultivate a decorous and modest appearance in public so that they might avoid the kind of ridicule that was routinely heaped on women who refused to “act” their age and were considered, in effect, no longer themselves.11 For Siddons, whose very art and livelihood depended on her unflagging appearances on the public stage year after year, general attitudes towards aging in women were projected and experienced that much more acutely and made for an extraordinarily vexed and challenging performance situation. As Judith W. Fisher ex plains, “It was possible ... for eighteenth-century audiences to accept willingly, and even appreciatively, a performance that was clearly inappropriate (in appearance or age) for a character, mainly because of their identification of and familiarity with a particular actress in that character.” Yet that willingness only went so far, and “actresses who regularly played younger roles as they got older were thus susceptible to ridicule.”12 Given her attachment to the parts of ingenues such as Jane Shore, Calista, and Belvidera, in the guise of which she first caused such a sensation on the London stage in 1782–83, Siddons would have had continually to summon and project every ounce of her charismatic powers to stave off the encroachments of what Roach has termed the “stigmata” or “signs of vulnerability” that could detract from the phantasmatic effects of her performance.13 As she aged, this balance became more difficult to strike, and Siddons would prove no more immune from caricature as an unshapely grotesque than other actresses who preceded or followed her on the stage (see Figure 1). What is extraordinary in Siddons’s case and what merits further 10 Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 4. 11 See Ottaway, 44. See also Looser, “The Blues Gone Grey: Portraits of Blue stocking Women in Old Age,” in Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Perform ance and Patronage, 1730–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 100–20. 12 Judith W. Fisher, “Creating Another Identity: Aging Actresses in the Eigh teenth Century,” Journal of Aging and Identity 4, no. 2 (1999): 60, doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1022851329484. 13 See Roach, It.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 603 consideration is the extent to which her decline and afterlife on the stage was experienced by audiences both as a betrayal of the earlier impressions in memory that she had engendered and as a deeply felt and grievously mourned loss. •

Hazlitt’s essay was occasioned by Siddons’s return to the stage in 1816 for two performances in the role of Lady Macbeth at the entreaty of Princes Charlotte of Saxe-Coburg. Siddons had retired four years earlier at the age of fifty-seven, but she continued to appear on the stage sporadically in benefit performances for family members and former colleagues. She would return for another appearance as Lady Macbeth in 1817, and, in the character of Lady Randolph, she would make her final appearance on the stage in 1819, at the age of sixty-four, in a benefit performance for her brother Charles Kemble.14 Hazlitt’s essay on her Lady Macbeth of 1816 questions the wisdom of her reappearance on the stage and asserts that Princess Charlotte’s request was not “altogether a reasonable one,” and that it was tantamount to expressing an “impossible” “wish to see Mr. Garrick” (CW, 5:313). In Hazlitt’s view, calling on Siddons to return to the stage was akin to summoning the already dead; for what Princess Charlotte expressed in her request was not a desire to see the mortally human Sarah Siddons as she was at the age of sixty-one—slow of speech and drastically obese—but rather a yearning to see “The Siddons” as she was “in her best days” (Hazlitt, CW, 5:313). That Siddons, according to Hazlitt, had long since passed away—though “living,” as he puts it in his opening lines, she was “no longer [herself].” She had passed, in effect, into a living afterlife. The desire to raise the dead has long been endemic, as Roach has shown, to the profession of the actor.15 The very action of the performer summons genealogies of performance that embody an entire cultural apparatus of memory and forgetting. The actor or, in this case, the actress not only bodies forth the character she is playing but also, in the case of historic or historical roles, becomes an effigy for the memory of that persona. Perhaps even more 14 F or a complete list of her post-retirement appearances, see John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage (Bath, 1832), 8:308–12. 15 S ee especially Roach, Cities of the Dead.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 604 lisa freeman significantly for my purposes here, if she remains on the stage long enough, the actress also becomes an effigy to, and surrogate for, an earlier self. That is, where at first she may compete with the memory of those performers who preceded her in the role, ultimately she ends up competing, through an effect that Marvin Carlson calls “ghosting,” with the audience’s memories of her own performances—memories intertwined with the spectator’s own history and anxieties about mortality and projected onto the player each and every time she performs.16 In this respect, as Roach has so formidably postulated, “celebrities ... like kings have two bodies, the body natural, which decays and dies, and the body cinematic, which does neither.”17 To witness Siddons’s live performance in her later years, then, was also to experience a painful sense of loss, to apprehend what she once was, yet was no longer and would never be again. Torn between the memory held in the mind—in this case not cinematically but through performance, paintings, and printed images18—and the present and all-too-painful evidence of the eyes, Siddons’s critics and biographers strove both to breathe new life into the ephemeral body theatric and to ward off their own creeping sense of mortality and inevitable decay. These pains were the discomfiting consequences of what I term palimpsestic performance—the accretion and rewriting of layers of memory in the theatre of the mind over the course of years of witnessing the same actor in the same role. Carlson has, as noted above, described this experience of “theatrical recollection” as ghosting. Yet where Carlson emphasizes the extent to which an audience might “look past” the frailties of the aging actor to focus 16 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 52–95. 17 Roach, It, 36. 18 For more on the circulation and fixity of Siddons’s image in various media forms, see West, “The Visuality of the Theatre,” in Players, Playwrights, and Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 271–93; Heather McPherson, “Painting, Politics, and the Stage in the Age of Caricature,” in Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812, ed. Robyn Asleson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 171–93; West, “The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons,” in A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraits, ed. Robyn Asleson (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 1–39; and Laura Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth- Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011).

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 605 instead on the “bits” of action that enable the actor to “[transcend] the body of flesh and blood,” I am more interested in examining and bringing forward the jolts and jars of recognition that signal, both for the actor and the audience members, an irremediable and increasingly inexorable disjuncture between “bodies” and “bits.”19 Palimpsestic performances produce a kind of disjointedness or what we might better term the attendant experience of palimpsestic temporalities, where the time of each individual performance is measured against the time that has lapsed since the spectator last witnessed the actress in the same role and where each performance rewrites the text of memory, even as that revision is placed in a dialectical relationship to the original.20 All of these effects were dictated and shaped by the peculiar conditions that regulated the production and business practices of theatre companies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this period, the patent playhouses were managed as true repertory companies. Plays would rarely run for more than two consecutive nights at a time, though they might be replayed weeks or months later; and an actor or actress might play more than thirty, and sometimes close to forty, different roles in any one season. Most of the repertory consisted of older plays, especially and increasingly those of Shakespeare; new plays were few and far between. The opportunity to witness the same actress playing in a particular role across a long span of years was possible not only because the same repertory would be repeated season after season but also because of the way that parts were assigned. Actors and actresses were commonly hired by the patent playhouses to fill what were known as the lines of business—first lady, second lady—and roles were apportioned accordingly. Once an actor or actress received a part, moreover, it was considered his or her property until he or she chose to resign it.21 This may account, in part, for why Sarah Siddons’s first appearances on the London stage in 1776 were such 19 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 58. 20 F or an exploration from a phenomenological perspective of the ways in which theatrical time might be said to be “out of joint,” see Matthew D. Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York: Routledge, 2011), 12–33. 21 See J.L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 242; and Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 60.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 606 lisa freeman a failure, for the main tragic female roles at David Garrick’s Drury Lane were still dominated by the forty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Yates and her somewhat younger cohort in the second lady parts, the thirty-six-year-old Elizabeth Younge. Comedy was taken up by the forty-year-old Frances Abington. As Siddons’s first biographer, James Boaden lamented, “Whom was the new actress to displace ... to bring forward Mrs. Siddons, and allow her no business of importance, was without hope of attraction to the theatre.”22 By the time she returned to Drury Lane for what would be her spectacular season of 1782–83, Yates and Younge had been hired away by Covent Garden; and at the age of twenty-eight, the way was clear for Siddons to claim any number of the first tragic parts for the rest of her long career. For the next thirty years, until her formal retirement at the age of almost fifty-eight, Siddons would continue to play her early signature roles as tragic, young heroines, including the parts of Belvidera, Isabella, and Calista. Judith Pascoe has suggested that “we might regard the mem ories of romantic theater-goers as recording devices that were assisted by the repetition of a familiar repertoire.”23 Referring specific ally to “points,” or the set pieces of theatrical stage busi ness that audiences focused on in drawing comparisons between performers and performances, Pascoe theorizes that these moments functioned, “as a further aide-memoire [in] the con densation of the romantic theatrical experience to a collection of emotionally, visually, or sonically intense scenes that helped to imprint these plays on memory.” “The memorization of these ‘points,’” she explains, “made theatergoing more intense ly pleasura ble, as audience members anticipated these partic ular moments, watched them play out, and compared them to versions they had already experienced or even enacted them selves.”24 While Pascoe, drawing on her interest in voice, situates 22 James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (London, 1827), 1:34–35. For more on the challenges that Siddons faced early in her acting career, see Lisa Freeman, introduction to Lives of Shakespearian Actors II, Volume 2: Sarah Siddons (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), vii–xii. Lives of Shakespearian Actors II, Volume 2: Sarah Siddons, which is annotated with headnotes and footnotes, reproduces many contemporary publications on the life, artistry, and Shakespearean roles played by Siddons. 23 Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 72. 24 Pascoe, 72.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 607 each performance as a new recording, I am interested, as noted above, in the way that each performance recorded or wrote over the last to produce a palimpsest of memories of actors or actresses performing in various roles. While the first memory may still have been seen or heard through the imprints that followed, as a whole this layering of memories and the various temporalities they represented had the potential to produce, especially as the actor or actress aged, not only an anticipatory pleasure, but also, as in the case of Siddons, a disturbing and even painful kind of cognitive dissonance in the contrast between what was seen in the mind’s eye of memory and what was seen on the stage. At first, Siddons was compared, though not always favourably, to her immediate predecessors, including the aged Ann Crawford, with whom she engaged in a rivalry of duelling Lady Randolphs, and the deceased Hannah Pritchard, whose Lady Macbeth still resonated in the memory of many in her audience.25 But so singular in her technical and professional innovations was Siddons that, in a short period of time, as Thomas Davies testifies, “her merit ... seem[ed] to have swallowed up all remembrance of present and past performances,” and her own performances became the full measure of her achievement.26 In what multiple witnesses described as one “electrifying” performance after another, Siddons claimed both the stage and those iconic roles as her own.27 In role after role, 25 F or examples of contemporary commentary that compared Siddons to her predecessors and found her wanting, see A Review of Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Siddons, in the Character of Belvidera: In a Letter to a Gentleman at Bath, 2nd ed. (London, 1782); and Horace Walpole to the Countess of Ossory, 3 November 1782, and Horace Walpole to William Mason, 7 December 1782, in The Letters of Horace Walpole Earl of Orford, ed. Peter Cunningham (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886), 8:295–98, 314–17. In her handwritten Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, which was published in Thomas Campbell’s Life of Mrs. Siddons (London, 1834), 2:10–39, Siddons recalled her trepidation at challenging Hannah Pritchard’s Lady Macbeth and recounted her argument with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, then Drury Lane manager, over her singular innovation of setting the candle down for the purpose of “washing out that ‘damned spot’” during the sleepwalking scene. The innovation caused an immediate sensation and became one of her signature gestures (2:37–39). 26 Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (London, 1785), 3:263. 27 On the “electrifying” qualities of Siddons’s performances, see Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs Siddons, 1:284–85; and Percy Fitzgerald, The Kembles: An Account of the Kemble Family, Including the Lives of Mrs. Siddons, and Her Brother John Philip Kemble (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1871), 2:181–83.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 608 lisa freeman as Joseph Haslewood observed, “she conjure[d] up the ghost of the Character she personate[d], be[held] it with the piercing eye of strong imagination, and embodie[d] the phantom[s].”28 As many of her contemporaries pointed out, what made Siddons’s stage appearances so astonishing, and what she was so often celebrated for, was her commitment to authenticity in her performances. Unlike other actors and actresses, including her brother John Philip Kemble, who still took the liberty of acknowl edging the presence of distinguished audience members in the boxes and pit and who thought nothing of falling out of character when they were not speaking dialogue, Siddons became known very early for maintaining her character at all times. From the instant she entered into character in her dressing room to the moment of her final bow, Siddons, as Davies attested, “excell[ed] all persons in paying attention to the business of the scene; her eye never wander[ed] from the person she [spoke] to or should look at, when she [was] silent.”29 This report is confirmed by any number of sources, including the anonymous author of The Beauties of Mrs. Siddons, who when pressed to name only “one perfection” of Siddons’s performance, offered that, “even when not engaged in dialogue, she never loses sight of her character.”30 The common wisdom was that “none of those arts, by which the Actress is seen, and not the Character, can be found in Mrs. siddons” (2:28). This decorum of character was complemented in Siddons’s younger years by what Shearer West calls a “corporeal decorum,” that is, “the suitability of the performer’s body for the roles they p l ay e d .” 31 Any number of early tributes noted this correspondence, with the author of The Secret History of the Green-Room (1785) writing, for instance, “There never perhaps was a better stage figure seen than Mrs. siddons ... she is not at all inclined to the embonpoint, yet sufficiently muscular to prevent all appearances of asperity” (2:26–27). Similarly, the author of The Theatrical Portrait invites readers, in tribute to Siddons’s slender Jane Shore 28 [Joseph Haslewood], The Secret History of the Green-Room (1785; reprint, London, 1795), 2:48. References are to this edition. 29 Davies, 3:264. 30 The Beauties of Mrs. Siddons (London, 1786), 19. 31 West, “Siddons, Celebrity and Regality,” 195. For more on West’s idea of “cor poreal decorum” in relation to Siddons and other actresses, see West, “Body Connoisseurship,” in Notorious Muse, 151–70; and West, “Beauty, Ageing, and the Body Politic,” in The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons, 106–19.

(see Figure 2), to “See her fine Form expos’d to open Air / Fainting beneath the Aggregate of Care!”32 In short, when Siddons first appeared on the London stage playing ingenues, she was tall and thin, with an expressiveness of face, a sharpness of eye, and a plaintiveness of voice that was “clear, distinct, and penetrating” (Secret History, 2:27). Her uncanny ability to disappear into the parts she played was derived, at least in part, from her great genius in conveying the emotional life of her character, as well as the simple fact that from a physical standpoint, her body looked the part. This could not last forever, and, in tracing the arc of Siddons’s career, Boaden concedes that while the part of the ingenue was “ever [to] be the choice of the young actress, and her female admirers. A period [must arrive] when the ardent affection of early life does not quite agree with the stately figure and powerful expression of the mature actress.”33 Thus he opines on the occasion of Siddons’s debut in the more mature part of Lady Macbeth in 1785 that though, “as either maid, wife, or daughter, [Siddons still] had sufficient charms ... to require not grains of allowance in the performance of the long line of tender and graceful heroines ... it yet was wise to show that she could gain the utmost heights of tragedy, and astonish at least as much as she had delighted.”34 Significantly, though Boaden expresses great confidence here in Siddons’s acting abilities, his comments also hint at the proleptic knowledge he has, writing in retrospect, of the time when “grains of allowance” would have to be made for Siddons’s physical appearance and age and not just in her younger parts but in the older ones as well. By the turn of the century, Siddons’s physical condition had started to deteriorate dramatically. Having suffered a number of miscarriages and borne seven children, the last in 1794 at the age of forty, Siddons often complained of a body that was weak and wracked with pain. Since the early 1790s, moreover, she had suffered bouts of ill health and exhaustion that often kept her away from the stage for long stretches of time. Soon she began to endure painful episodes of erysipelas, which left her lips burning in pain and for which she took laudanum and underwent unsuccessful 32 The Theatrical Portrait (London, 1783), lines 83–86. 33 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (London, 1825), 1:242. 34 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 1:242.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 610 lisa freeman electric shock treatment.35 Writing to her friend Mrs Fitzhugh in 1801, over ten years before she would retire, Siddons explained, “My mouth is not yet well, though somewhat less exquisitely painful. I have become a frightful object with it for some time, and, I believe, this complaint has robbed me of those poor remains of beauty once admired.”36 Lest we think that vanity had gotten the best of Siddons, a letter by Hester Thrale Piozzi, who was herself subject to ridicule when she dared at the advanced age of sixty to include a frontispiece portrait of herself in her latest publication, confirms that Siddons picked relentlessly at her burning lips, leaving them in a sorry state and looking very little like Piozzi’s “little miniature of the greatest and only unrivalled female this century last expired has pretended to produce.”37 In Piozzi’s and Boaden’s comments, we can begin to detect that sense of nostalgia and loss that would haunt almost all contem porary accounts of Siddons. Perhaps even more significantly, Piozzi’s reflections recall the extent to which Siddons came to be associated not just with her performances but with painted images that captured her in time. While Siddons cultivated an aesthetic of authenticity on the stage—one in which her person would be subsumed by the character—she also quite conscientiously endeavoured to transform herself into an iconic figure of the age, transposing her person into an abstract or allegorical emblem in portraits such as Thomas Beach’sSarah Siddons as Melancholy in the Character of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” (1782) and Joshua Reynolds’s masterpiece Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784); appearing in the posture of the Tragic Muse in the 1785–86 reprise of Garrick’s Jubilee at Drury Lane; and taking on the role of Britannia at the events organized to celebrate the recovery 35 F or details on Siddons’s health see Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), 173–80, 260. Erysipelas, also known as Sir Anthony’s Fire, is a disease that affects the skin and subcutaneous tissues, causing acute inflammation, painful rashes, and intense itching. 36 S iddons to Mrs Fitzhugh, 1801, quoted in Manvell, 260. 37 H ester Thrale Piozzi to Mrs Pennington, ca. July 1801, in The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788–1822, ed. Oswald G. Knapp (London: John Lane, 1914), 224–25. On the attacks provoked by Piozzi’s frontispiece portrait, see Looser, “The Blues Gone Gray,” 108–11. On the furor caused by Piozzi’s second marriage to her children’s singing master Gabriele Piozzi at what was considered the advanced age of forty-three, see Felicity Nussbaum, “Hester Thrale: ‘What Trace of the Wit?,’” in Bluestockings Displayed, 195–98.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 611 of George iii in 1789 (see Figure 3).38 Through all of these endeavours, as Michael S. Wilson has pointed out, Siddons came to be associated with both a kind of “timeless permanence” and a “rational dignity and moral authority that had been arrogated exclusively to the public realm of male governance.”39 Etched in memory as an emblem of the nation, Siddons’s characteristic dignity both on the stage and off came to function as an index of moral virtue and self-mastery and as a surety of the posterity of the nation. As she disappeared into figures in representation, her body provided the surface on which a narrative of national virtue and timeless vitality could be inscribed. But, as she aged her physical debilities became more palpable and started to interfere with that narrative; her body’s state revealed that neither her immortality nor that of the nation was assured. Further, insofar as the “It” quality of “The Siddons” derived, as a number of scholars have elucidated, from the peculiar mix of mascu line strength and feminine vulnerability that she projected in her performances, the increasingly unavoidable evidence of her determinedly female body undercut the sublime majesty of her performances and introduced a jarring element of the grotesque into the ever more layered book of Siddonian memory.40 38 F or more on Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons as the tragic muse and the actress’s conscientious cultivation of an elevated stature through painted images, see Heather McPherson, “Picturing Tragedy: Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse Revisited,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 401–30, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/toc/ecs33.3.html; and Robyn Asleson, “‘She was Tragedy Personified’: Crafting the Siddons Legend in Art and Life,” in A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraits, 41–95. 39 Michael S. Wilson, “The ‘Incomparable Siddons’ as Reynolds’s Muse: Art and Ideology on the British Stage,” in So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies, ed. Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 117–18, 123. 40 F or more on the peculiar mixture of masculine and feminine that Siddons brought to life in her performances, see Pat Rogers, “‘Towering beyond Her Sex’: Stature and Sublimity in the Achievement of Sarah Siddons,” in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater 1660–1820, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 48–67; Ellen Donkin, “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century British Theater,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 276–90; Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 208–15; Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge:

Despite her debilities, Siddons continued to perform; and the result was that in addition to more frequent reflections on the fact that, “she did not play parts like Isabella and Belvidera with the old spirit and abandon,” she also suffered a number of shocking indignities on the stage.41 When she was “not yet fifty years old,” as Percy Fitzgerald records, she “was getting significant warnings to withdraw in the shape of growing physical weakness which should not be exhibited to an audience.” “Thus,” he continues:

when she knelt to the Duke in Measure for Measure, two attendants had to come forward to help her rise; and, to save appearances, the awkward shift was resorted to of making the same ceremonial attend on the rising up of a younger actress who did not need such support ... people saw that this was owing to the stiffness of age, which prevented the free animation of her limbs ... the spectacle of a stout, elderly lady playing Isabella ... could scarcely bring enjoy ment, even to the most aesthetic.42 Siddons had taken on so much weight that her movements on stage became laboured and unwieldy. During an 1808 performance as Queen Katharine in Henry viii, she found her buttocks attached to a chair when the said furnishings proved insufficiently wide to allow her to transition freely into a standing position43 (see Figure 4). While some portraitists attempted to conceal the effects of Siddons’s aging, this troubling corpulence is abundantly evident in a late series of sketches of Siddons in all of her “best and most striking attitudes,” of which Fitzgerald wrote, “though the attitudes are remarkable and graceful, this stoutness and almost

Cambridge University Press, 1994), 162–75; Laura J. Rosenthal, “The Sublime, the Beautiful, ‘The Siddons,’” in The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 56–79; and Heather McPherson, “Masculinity, Femininity, and the Tragic Sublime: Reinventing Lady Macbeth,” SECC 29 (2000): 299–333. 41 Fitzgerald, 2:146. 42 Fitzgerald, 2:145–48. One might be tempted to read Fitzgerald’s comment as a response to Søren Kierkegaard’s “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in which he insists that aging in a great actress allows for her true genius to emerge and hence for the perfectibility of an aesthetic ideality. Kierkegaard, “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17:301–25. 43 Thi s incident is recounted in Mrs Clement Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons (1909; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 231.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 613 corpulence leave a grotesque effect, and it interferes with even her most tragic poses”44 (see Figure 5). Finally, in an anecdote that punctuates Siddons’s sensible mortification, Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography snidely records that “the last time she appeared, (as Lady Macbeth ... ), the loss of teeth rendered her articulation very indistinct, and she occasionally whistled, which, as the character is not a musical one, was by no means effective.”45 My interest in recounting these incidents has not been to dimin ish the astonishing accomplishments of Siddons. I believe she was one of the greatest tragic actresses of all time, and, like Pascoe who so eloquently recounts her unavailing quest to capture how Siddons spoke, I also long to catch a glimpse of this astounding actress and to experience the thrill and chill of her voice.46 The point I wish to make is that for at least the last eight to ten years of her career, Siddons became a victim of the very aesthetic of theatrical realism that she had imported to the stage. Her corpulent body in performance had become a kind of effigy of an earlier theatrical self, and, despite occasional flashes of genius, she could no longer sustain the illusions of authenticity for which she was so highly celebrated. The distracting result, as Fitzgerald points out, was that “she herself was taking away as it were from [the] artistic tone.”47 For the biographers who adored her and for the critics who sought to prop her up as an emblem of the British nation, Siddons’s diminishment as an artist was nothing short of painful, and the broad, psychic effects of their anguish are everywhere evident in their writings. •

44 Fitzgerald, 2:149. In an indication of the extent to which Siddons’s aging mattered and was palpable to others, West reports that Thomas Lawrence attracted virulent commentary for trying to lessen the effects of age in his portrait of Siddons as Mrs Haller in August von Kotzebue’s The Stranger (West, “Beauty, Ageing and the Body Politic,” 116). One critic was so offended by Lawrence’s subterfuge in making Siddons appear so much younger that he crudely pointed out she was “so far from being young, that her climacteric will be no more” (quoted in West, “Beauty, Ageing and the Body Politic,” 116). For more on the threat to her reputation that arose over Siddons’s portrayal of this character, see Gillian Russell, “Killing Mrs. Siddons: The Actress and the Adulteress in Late Georgian England,” Studies in Romanticism 51, no. 3 (2012): 419–48. 45 Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography (Bristol, 1825), 1:137. 46 See Pascoe. 47 Fitzgerald, 2:144.

“Every time I see that magnificent ruin some fresh decay makes itself apparent in it, and one cannot but feel it must totter to its fall.”48 So wrote Fanny Kemble on 13 May 1831, after visiting her seventy-six-year-old aunt, the “incomparable” Sarah Siddons, less than a month before she died. Kemble’s use of the term “ruin” seems no accident, as it conjures both a sense of the monumental stature Siddons occupied in national memory and the place of fascination that ruins played in the contemporary imagination. As Anne Janowitz explains, ruins in the Romantic period evoked “the contemplation of the absolute pastness of the past within the aesthetically controlled shape of temporal transience.”49 Encounters with ruins, purposeful or accidental, gave way to or supplied a cue for both the resort to inward meditation on the precarious place of the individual in time and a longing for a common history that could sustain that individual through time and across generations. The compulsion of Kemble’s feeling—“[she could not] but feel”—as she contemplates the “magnificent ruin” that Siddons had become was not only a reminder of Siddons’s impending mortality but also a portent of the inevitable end that must come to all human actors. Such forebodings are captured in the last known portrait of Siddons, in which a vivacious Fanny Kemble, who had just em barked on her acting career in a successful debut as Juliet, hovers over the lavishly dressed but somewhat shrunken figure of her aunt (see Figure 6).50 Siddons stares blankly into space, past the pages that lie open in her lap, some say in a pose that signifies wisdom, while others point to “the vapid vacuity” that, by Kemble’s report, filled the “last years of [her] aunt Siddons’s life”—the great est living actress staggered by old age and no longer able to sum mon those flashes of genius for which she had been adored and worshipped for so long.51 The image captures all at once the painful simultaneity of continuity in familial genealogies of performance, the “absolute pastness”52 of Siddons’s glorious reign on the stage, and the eventual and inevitable “pastness” of Kemble herself. Although one might catch a glimpse of something Siddons-like in 48 Fanny Kemble, 13 May 1831, quoted in Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 287. 49 Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1. 50 F or more on Fanny Kemble’s career, see the epilogue to Engel. 51 Frances Ann Kemble, Record of a Girlhood (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878), 2:65. For more on this image, see West, “Beauty, Ageing and the Body Politic,”116–18; and Asleson, “Crafting the Siddons Legend,” 89–90. 52 Janowitz, 1.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 615 that next generation, as Kemble herself reports in her own memoir, even the most supportive of friends were wont to comment “that seeing [her] was exactly like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the diminishing end of an opera glass.”53 Ever receding into the more and more distant past, “The Siddons” herself was, in effect, lost to the transience of time. This was the mournful burden borne by Siddons’s biographers, who sought to preserve the ephemeral life of the actress and her legacy in collective memory. As they strove to repair the ruin and maintain her elevated stature, each author had to engage the challenge of reconciling the iconic position Siddons achieved at a much earlier stage in her career with more recent memories of her constricted performances. Taking up the parts that the actress had played in the order of their first appearance, the biographers’ narratives recreate those moments in all of their original glory, even as they try to stave off the inevitable sense of loss that haunts every actor’s performance. Even more daunting was the fact that most of their readers could only have witnessed a Siddons who substituted what Boaden in his introduction termed “the force retained in her decline” for the energy and passion with which she once infused her roles.54 Like many Romantic poems, the narratives are suffused by an air of sadness over the fall away from sublimity and constrained by a heightened awareness of the tension between acclamation and apology, exaltation and lamentation. Not insignificantly, Siddons’s first two biographers, Boaden and Thomas Campbell, set the tone of their narratives with epigraphs that reflect on the fugacious qualities of performance. Boaden, for instance, introduces his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (1827) with a selection from Verses to the Memory of Garrick composed by Richard Brinsley Sheridan that lament:

The actor only shrinks from Time’s award; Feeble tradition is his memory’s guard; By whose faint breath his merits must abide, Unvouch’d by proof, to substance unallied! ...... All perishable! like the electric fire.55

53 Kemble, Record, 2:86. 54 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 1:xiv. 55 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 1:xi. The epigraph from Colley Cibber on the title page of Thomas Campbell’s volume is perhaps even more evocative:

Working against the condition of mutability described in these verses, Boaden relates that his goal is to communicate “by [his] touch some of the electric fire which [he had] received” when witnessing a performance by Siddons.56 From the outset, we are to understand that the biographer can recover only “some” of the “perishable” fire that Siddons originally conveyed to her audiences; the rest must be left to the reader’s imagination. But even here Boaden is thwarted by more recent memory and the discomfi ting reality of Siddons’s long decline. Thus he wrote of Siddons’s late appearance in the role of Imogen in Cymbeline: “When I assert that Mrs. Siddons was the only perfect Imogen that I have ever seen ... we are to remember that in the male attire the female figure always becomes visually deceptive; and that I am not speaking of the Mrs. Siddons of 1802; that in reality, Imogen is a character of infinite energy, and that the spectator must contribute to his own pleasure, by overlooking the opera tion of that time upon the actress, which has consummated her ar t .” 57 The awkward syntax of this pronouncement highlights the self-consciousness and concern with which Boaden conveys his vision of “The Siddons.” Few and far between were the readers in 1827 who might have seen her at the pinnacle of her career more than forty years earlier. Further, while in 1787, when she first performed the role of Imogen, the slender Siddons may well have been “passable” in the cross-dressed part—with allowances made for “visual deception”—by 1802, her figure had become so bulky that any attempt to pass as a boy simply defied credulity no matter what the visual conventions of the day (see Figure 4). As Boaden indicates, spectators who took in her performances would have had either to efface or write over the “operations of time” on her appearance, imagining an Imogen who “in reality” was infinitely more energetic than the laboured movements of Siddons could convey. Where before Siddons had been able to embody the character and lend to it an air of authenticity, by the

“Pity it is that the momentary beauties flowing from a harmonious elocution cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record; —that the animated graces of the Player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that represent them; or at least can but faintly glimmer through the memory and imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators.” Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, t.p. 56 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 1:xi. 57 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 1:220–21.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 617 end of her career, she appeared almost as a grotesque parody of what she wished to represent on the stage. The pleasures of the 1802 audience lay in witnessing a performance by an iconic legend—perhaps catching brief glimpses of her former brilliance here and there—but that pleasure could only come at a steep cost both to the integrity of the performance and to the dignity of the actress herself.58 Boaden’s admonishment and his strained efforts to repair that cognitive dissonance by producing a collec tive “we” marks not only the ways in which her appearance con stituted a breach of “corporeal decorum,” but also the ways in which Siddons’s last ten years on the stage constituted a period of mourning and loss, the “consummation” of what she once was and would never be again. For Campbell, to whom Siddons bequeathed her memoranda and reminiscences, the task of preserving Siddons’s legacy was more difficult because he had been born too late (in 1777) either to have witnessed the great tragic actress at the height of her powers or to experience the electric thrill she sent rippling through her audiences. Writing of her Belvidera, he guiltily admits: I am glad that I have far better testimonies than my own to offer in proof of the great actress’s triumph in the character; for, to say the truth, when I saw her perform Belvidera, she was in the autumn of her beauty, large, august, and matronly; and my imagination had been accustomed to picture the object of Jaffier’sfondness as a much younger woman. Accordingly, I recollect having thought (it was a new thought for her acting to inspire), that I could have conceived another actress to have played the part more perfectly. But, without retracting my general opinion that she continued to act this character when she was somewhat too old for it, I can easily conceive that in my boyish criticism I may have judged of her unspiritually, and too much by externals. Attending to the woman more than the actress, I dare say I was blind to innumerable beauties, that made her Belvidera, even late in life, one of her finest performances in the eyes of better judges than myself. When she was young, there were no two opinions, about her perfection in the part.59

58 L eigh Hunt captured this point of view when he wrote of Siddons in 1807, “Besides, the figure of mrs. siddons is now too large and too matronly to represent youth, and particularly the immediate passions of youth; we hope that by next season she will have given up the performance of characters suited neither to her age nor her abilities.” Hunt, “Mrs Siddons,” Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatre (London, 1807), 19–20. 59 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 1:182–83.

In this striking passage, Campbell confesses both his own disap pointment in watching Siddons perform Belvidera and his guilt for having the disloyal thought that perhaps a younger actress would have been more compelling in the part. He tries to recover Siddons’s reputation by attributing his apostasy to the flawed judgment of his own youth, but the damage has, in a sense, already been done. In his candour, he has only admitted what any number of others may only have thought—that Siddons persisted too long in parts that no longer suited her age and appearance. There is no question that Siddons retained the power to send her audiences into paroxysms later in her career—despite the fact that she had “latterly rather outgrown in size the limits of embonpoint,” she still “thrilled” the American writer Washington Irving with her “consummate excellence” when he saw her as Calista in 1805—but even those experiences were haunted by reflections on “what Mrs. Siddons may have been when she had the advantage of youth and for m .” 60 Offering what Boaden had termed “grains of allowance,” Campbell diffidently remarks on Siddons’s retirement season: “She performed fifty-seven times, and in fourteen different characters, among which, independently of those which suited her years, she blended many parts of younger heroines, and gave them a charm that was absolutely marvellous in the person of an actress of fifty- six.”61 Without having been able to see Siddons at the apogee of her full powers, Campbell is reduced to damning his remarkable subject with faint praise. His Life of Siddons reflects the sorrow and regret of one who arrived too late to witness an extraordinary phenomenon and one who can only try, palimpsestically as it were, to write over his own impressions by availing himself of the memories of others. For critics who had witnessed Siddons at her height, the experi ence of observing her decline was all the more distressing, as it not only marked her precarious place in time but also their own. As biographer Fitzgerald notes, “The spectacle, too, of a portly elderly lady, moving with difficulty over the stage, could not fail to offer a painful contrast for those who had seen her in her greatest days” 60 W ashington Irving to William Irving Jr., 26 October 1805, in Letters, ed. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 1:213. 61 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2:335–36.

(see Figure 7).62 For someone like the Romantic diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, that pain was personal. Thus, he wrote of her performance as Margaret of Anjou in 1811:

The character is one to which she can still render justice. She looked ill, and I thought her articulation indistinct, and her voice drawling and funereal during the first act; but as she advanced in the play, her genius triumphed over natural impediments. She was all that could be wished ... In every limb [she] showed the tumult of passion with an accuracy and a force equally impressive to the critic and the man of feeling. Her advancing age is a real pain to me. As an actor, she has left with me the conviction that there never was, and never will be, her equal.63

Fashioning himself as both critic and “man of feeling,” Robinson measures Siddons’s performance on the evening against prior iterations and finds her wanting. While her labours to overcome her “natural impediments” may have ensured the triumph of genius on this occasion, the valedictory words with which Robinson concludes his assessment suggest nevertheless that the performance overall was less than satisfying and that it only made him all the more keenly, indeed painfully, aware that he was already a witness to the afterlife of this great actress. Any pleasure that he might have taken from Siddons’s “tumult of passion” had to be weighed in the balance against the “real pain” that her palpable decline had caused him. Even while living and still performing, she reminded him of that time when she, and perhaps he, would be no longer. The practice of memorializing Siddons and commemorating her past performances even as she continued to appear on the stage marks the extent to which she had become the emblem of an era. For some, such as Hazlitt, moreover, she took up an even more significant place in the romantic theatre of the mind as a kind of totem of memory and of the transience of the lived life. Thus he 62 Fi tzgerald, 2:96. Alluding perhaps to her reputation for avarice and miser liness, Fitzgerald wrote of Siddons’s very last performance in a benefit for her brother, “It had been wiser, and for her a cheaper gift, to have presented her brother with the few pounds which the exhibition brought, than to have furnished for idle curiosity the spectacle of an unwieldy person, of an infirm lady, now not far from seventy years of age” (2:200–1). 63 H enry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 1:209.

Mrs. Siddons was in the meridian of her reputation when I first became acquainted with the stage. She was an established veteran, when I was an unfledged novice; and, perhaps, played those scenes without emotion, which filled me, and so many others, with delight and awe. So far I had the advantage of her, and of myself too. I did not then analyse her excellences as I should now, or divide her merits into physical and intellectual advantages, or see that her majestic form rose up against misfortune in equal sublimity, an antagonist power to it—but the total impression (unquestioned, unrefined upon) overwhelmed and drowned me in a flood of tears. I was stunned and torpid after seeing her in any of her great parts. I was uneasy, and hardly myself, but I felt (more than ever) that human life was something very far from being indifferent, and I seemed to have got a key to unlock the springs of joy and sorrow in the human heart.64

As a novitiate in the order of “The Siddons,” Hazlitt experienced the kind of exhilarating transport that made him almost a stranger to himself, and it is no great wonder to find, given the mood of the era, that his reflections on that sublime experience are positively Wordsworthian in both substance and spirit. Like William Wordsworth, who found in the ruins of Tintern Abbey an object in memory through which to reflect upon and explore the persistence of the self in time, so in Siddons Hazlitt found both a source of inspiration and an object in which to anchor his very sense of being. The experience at a young age of watching Siddons perform left Hazlitt spellbound, and in that place of reverie he gained access to what Wordsworth termed “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused,”65 a sense that revealed, or, as Hazlitt put it, “unlock’d the springs of joy and sorrow in the human heart.” Like Wordsworth again, who returned to Tintern Abbey and the “sylvan Wye” in his mind’s eye for solace when he found himself “in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns 64 H azlitt, “On Novelty and Familiarity,” in The Plainspeaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 2:255–56. 65 William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798, lines 95–96, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth Edition, Volume D: The Romantic Period (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 288–92. References are to this edition.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University the siddonian form 621 and cities” (lines 56, 25–26), so too did Hazlitt, as a “retired and lonely student, through long years of solitude” (CW, 5:321), find inspiration and solace in his mind’s memory of Siddons. In those youthful moments of despondency, he attests, “her face has shone as if an eye had appeared from heaven, her name has been as if a voice had opened the chambers of the human heart, or as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead” (CW, 5:321). Unlike Wordsworth, whose poem commemorates his return to Tintern Abbey after five years’ absence, Hazlitt’s encounters with “The Siddons” were continual over the span of decades. How devastating to discover over time that this actress whom he had worshipped almost as a goddess was human, all too human, with the attendant vulnerabilities and infirmities of all who are merely mortal. Siddons’s late appearances on the stage, her devolution into a kind of ruin, constituted an assault not just on Hazlitt’s sensibilities but also on his secure sense of the self in time. As this consummate critic and devotee of the stage once observed, the only “drawback on the felicity and triumphant self-complacency of a play-goer’s life, arises from the shortness of life itself.”66 A life spent amid the shadows of the theatre was a life of inevitable loss; “we miss the favourites,” he wrote, “not of another age, but of our own—the idols of our youthful enthusiasm; and we cannot replace them by others” (“On Play-Going,” 144). Siddons was without question one of the irreplaceable idols of Hazlitt’s “youthful enthusiasm,” and the fire she kindled in his mind’s eye never ceased to glow. It offered him solace in periods of despondency, and was nothing short of a life-sustaining and life-affirming force. “It is well,” he wrote as prelude to yet another tormented paean to the lost glories of “The Siddons,” “if in our after-age, we can sometimes rekindle the almost extinguished flame ... While we can do this, life is worth living for: when we can do it no longer, its spring will soon go down, and we had better not be!” (“On Play-Going,”144). For all this adoration, he was not blind either to Siddons’s slow decline or to the deleterious effects that her persistent presence on the stage exerted on her reputation. Old players, as Hazlitt once noted, attract the mockery of audiences who never saw them at their best and the chagrin of 66 H azlitt, “On Play-Going and On Some of Our Old Actors,” London Magazine (January 1820), in Hazlitt on Theatre, ed. William Archer and Robert Love (New York: Hill and Wang, 1895), 143–44. References are to this edition.

ECF 27, no. 3–4 © 2015 McMaster University 622 lisa freeman those who had; they only ever appear as “living vouchers against themselves.”67 However transcendent Siddons may have been at her height, she was, at the last, no exception to this general rule. Of her late performance in the part of Lady Macbeth in 1816, it was difficult for Hazlitt not to observe that “the machinery of the voice seem[ed] too ponderous for the power that wield[ed] it ... There [was] too much preparation ... she acts the part more with a view to effect ... There was none of this weight or energy in the way she did the scene the first time we saw her, twenty years ago” (CW, 5:313). When he wrote in the same essay, “To have seen Mrs. Siddons, was an event in every one’s life,” the sentence did not, as many have been led to think, end there. Rather it continues, “and does she think we have forgot her? Or would she remind us of herself by shewing us what she was not? Or is she to continue on the stage to the very last, till all her grace and all her grandeur gone, shall leave behind a melancholy blank?” (CW, 5:312). It is unclear from this locution whether the “melancholy blank” refers to Siddons herself as she faded, to the vacuum she would leave in her wake when she was no more, or to the image memory over-written and worn down in the theatre of the mind by the palimpsestic layers of performance produced by her unwonted perseverance on the stage. What is clear, and what I have demonstrated here, is that those who adored her also experienced an anguished pain and took a kind of personal offence at her infirm and enervated appearances on the stage. Time was writ large across the body of “The Siddons” and clearly weighed heavily on the minds of all those who sought to indemnify for all time what Anna Seward termed “the dignity of the Siddonian form.”68 •

67 H azlitt, “Conversation the Thirteenth,” in Conversations of James Northcote (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 180. 68 Anna Seward to Sophia Weston, 20 July 1786, in Letters of Anna Seward: Written between the Years 1784 and 1807 (Edinburgh, 1811), 1:165.

’—and taking’—and farewell Figure 1. TheatricalFigure Rival the or Jealousy, Garden Covent of Queens (1816). Reproduced by (1816). Reproduced the Folger of permission Shakespeare Library. portrayed is Siddons and heavy, old, as here especially unattractive, when with juxtaposed O’Neill, of Eliza the figure who rival, younger her succeeded in many her Garden. Covent parts at damage the notes text The to done had Siddons her by reputation her extraordinary “late on Re-appearance” saying “after the stage ‘ the Stage of leave a formal ago.” Years some

Figure 2. Sarah Siddons as Jane Shore (1790). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 3. Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1785). © Courtesy of The Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

A Palpable Hit! 4. A Palpable Figure Houghton Thr 489.3.29, Library, Harvard Reproduced University. Siddons permission. by in in Dublin Hamlet played 1805. Although 1802 and wearing resisted she the part, the for breeches depicts image caricatured an with in breeches her on emphasis exaggerated a trait buttocks, large her the echoing by heightened in the background image figures, in which the two striking postures the same fencing her and Siddons as Galindo, Mr instructor and decidedly slender are muscular.

Figure 5. Mary Sackville Hamilton, Sarah Siddons Dressed as Belvidera [1807–49 (fl. circa) 1802]. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 6. Henry Perronet Briggs, Fanny Kemble and Her Aunt, Mrs. Siddons (ca. 1830–31). Boston Athenæum. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 7. Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), Mrs. Siddons (1804). © Tate, London 2014. Reproduced by permission. Though beautiful and statu esque here, Lawrence’s representation does nothing to disguise Siddons’s “portliness.” Her niece, Fanny Kemble, thought the portrait made Siddons look like “a handsome dark cow in a coral necklace.”

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