Sarah Siddons
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified".
She was the elder sister of John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Stephen Kemble, Ann Hatton, and Elizabeth Whitlock, and the aunt of Fanny Kemble. She was most famous for her portrayal of the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth, a character she made her own.
The Sarah Siddons Society, founded in 1952, continues to present the Sarah Siddons Award annually in Chicago to a distinguished actress.
Background
The 18th-century marked the "emergence of a recognisably modern celebrity culture" and Siddons was at the heart of it. Portraits depicted actresses in aristocratic dress, the recently industrialised newspapers spread actresses' names and images and gossip about their private lives through the public. Though few people had actually seen Siddons perform, her name had been circulated to such an extent that when it was announced "the crowd behaved as if they knew her already".Actresses playing and acting like aristocrats decreased the difference in the public's eyes between actresses and aristocrats and many earned large amounts of money. Despite this giving actresses a larger amount of control, women were still viewed as "extreme representations of femininity - they were good or bad, comic or tragic, prostitutes or virgins, mistresses or mothers". Their on-stage roles and personal biographies blurred - leading many actresses to use these extreme representations of femininity to create a persona that could be viewed both on and off stage.
Biography
Early life
Siddons was born Sarah Kemble in Brecon, Brecknockshire, Wales, the eldest daughter of Roger Kemble, a Roman Catholic, and Sarah "Sally" Ward, a Protestant. Sarah and her sisters were raised in their mother's faith and her brothers were raised in their father's faith. Roger Kemble was the manager of a touring theatre company, the Warwickshire Company of Comedians.Although the theatre company included most members of the Kemble family, Siddons's parents initially disapproved of her choice of profession. At that time, acting was only beginning to become a respectable profession for a woman.
From 1770 until her marriage in 1773, Siddons served as a lady's maid and later as companion to Lady Mary Bertie Greatheed at Guy's Cliffe near Warwick. Lady Greatheed was the daughter of the Duke of Ancaster; her son, Bertie Greatheed, was a dramatist who continued the family's friendship with Siddons.
Early career: Before success in London
In 1774, Siddons won her first success as Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd. This brought her to the attention of David Garrick, who sent his deputy to see her as Calista in Nicholas Rowe's Fair Penitent, the result being that she was engaged to appear at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Owing to inexperience as well as other circumstances, her first appearances as Portia and in other parts were not well received and she received a note from the manager of Drury Lane stating that her services would not be required. She was, in her own words, "banished from Drury Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune".After she was released from Drury Lane, Siddons was immediately engaged by Richard Yates, manager of the Theatre Royal Birmingham. During the summer of 1776, John Henderson would see Siddons perform. He was immediately struck with her excellence, and pronounced that she would never be surpassed. He did more than this; he wrote directly to Palmer, manager of the Theatre Royal Bath, to advise an engagement of her without delay. Due to there being no available roles for Siddons at the time of Henderson's letter, Palmer could not immediately attend to his advice.
In 1777, she went on "the circuit" in the provinces. For the next six years she worked in provincial companies, in particular York and Bath. Her first appearance at Bath's Old Orchard Street Theatre was in autumn 1778 at a salary of £3 per week. This amount grew as her performances became better known, and as she began to appear in Bristol at the Theatre Royal, King Street, also run by John Palmer. Siddons lived with her husband and children in a Georgian house at 33 The Paragon in Bath, until her final performance there in May 1782.
To say farewell to Bristol and Bath, Siddons presented her famous 'three reasons' speech. In a speech of her own writing, Siddons literally presented her three children as her three reasons for leaving. She said 'These are the moles that bear me from your side; / Where I was rooted - where I could have died. / Stand forth, ye elves, and plead your mother's cause' The full speech was published in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 4 July 1782.
The presentation of her own motherhood was something she used throughout her career, notably when she performed her next Drury Lane appearance, on 10 October 1782, which could not have been more different from her debut performances. She was an immediate sensation playing the title role in Garrick's adaptation of a play by Thomas Southerne, Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage. So good was she that "Her pathetic embodiment of domestic woe created a sensation, flooding the audience with tears and exciting critics to hyperbolic praise."
Mid-career: Notable roles
Siddons continued to act in the provinces, appearing at The Theatre, Leeds, in 1786 and consistently brought a thorough understanding to each of her roles. It was through her portrayals of Lady Macbeth and Isabella, particularly, that Siddons offered a new way of approaching character. Siddons has been credited for inventing and promoting textual accuracy above the theatrical traditions of her time: "Siddons was unique for making herself familiar with the entire script, sitting offstage in order to hear the full play, and paying careful attention to her scene partners and to textual clues that could aid performance."Her most famous role was that of Lady Macbeth, which she first performed on 2 February 1785. She spellbound her audience through the grandeur of her emotions as she expressed Lady Macbeth's murderous passions. Rather than portraying Lady Macbeth as a murderous evil queen, Siddons depicted her with a strong sense of maternity and a delicate femininity.
As she noted in her own "Remarks to the character of Lady Macbeth", Siddons found an unearthed fragility in this role. "She read, in the 'I have given suck' soliloquy, a 'tender allusion the maternal mother yearning for her babe'; it is therefore in Lady Macbeth that Siddons found the highest and best scope for her acting abilities. She was tall and had a striking figure, brilliant beauty, powerfully expressive eyes, and solemn dignity of demeanour which enabled her to claim the character as her own."
After Lady Macbeth she played Desdemona, Rosalind, Ophelia, and Volumnia, all with great success; but it was as Queen Catherine in Henry VIII that she discovered a part almost as well adapted to her acting powers as that of Lady Macbeth. She once told Samuel Johnson that Catherine was her favourite role, as it was the most natural.
The role of Hamlet
Sarah Siddons played the role of Hamlet multiple times over three decades. By the early nineteenth century, "Hamlet had become arguably Shakespeare's most iconic character". Her choice to tackle this role was fascinating as cross gendered roles were "generally more difficult and demanding than a breeches role". The performer would need to sustain the illusion for the whole duration of the play as opposed to a breeches role which is much more brief and gained comedic success from the character's poor delivery at representing the opposite sex.Far from a one-off curiosity, "Siddons played Hamlet repeatedly, if sporadically, for three decades, always in the provinces and never in London, until she reached the age of fifty". Sarah Siddons first played Hamlet in Worcester in 1775 and then in Manchester opposite her brother John Philip Kemble as Laertes March 1777. At the Bristol theatre, she played Hamlet in 1781. She went on to repeat the role in Liverpool. In Dublin, she played Hamlet during the season of 1802-03 and once more in 1805. She proposed that last performance to her friend and fellow actor William Galindo as a revival of their successful 1802 performance, with herself as Hamlet and Galindo as Laertes. This 1805 revival production made enough of an impression to be caricatured in The Dublin Satirist five years later in 1810.
Celebrity status
Celebrity persona and the "Female Star"
It was the beginning of twenty years in which she became the undisputed Queen of Drury Lane. Her celebrity status was called "mythical" and "monumental", and by the mid-1780s Siddons had established herself as a cultural icon. Yet her iconography and the fashioning of her celebrity differed greatly in comparison to her female counterparts. Siddons, according to Laura Engel, invented a new category of femininity for actresses: the "Female Star". By "cleverly blurring the distinction between the characters she played on stage with representations of herself offstage " Siddons was able to present a duality to her admirers. At once she would project both the "divine and the ordinary, domestic and authoritative, fantastic and real".She avoided claims of sexual licentiousness, and the only damage to her career was faced toward its end, when caricatures and satirical prints emerged detailing the physical decline and stoutness of her body. Shearer West, in an analysis of the collapse of Siddons's private and public personas, wrote that Siddons's brother, the actor-manager John Philip Kemble, "substantially rewrote passages in some of the plays in order to temper any indelicacy transcend sexual indiscretions" that could harm her reputation of feminine propriety.
Siddons had a unique ability to control her own celebrity persona and "manipulate her public image through a variety of visual materials". Some scholars believe that although Siddons's fame and success appeared effortless, it was in fact "a highly constructed process". This left her successful, yet fatigued as she was "always aware of the ultimate power of her audiences to approve of her or destroy her". In being aware of her position in the public eye, Siddons "carefully selected the roles in which she appeared and assiduously cultivated her domestic image".
She would only choose roles which could aid her popularity and protect her image. By cleverly blurring the distinction between the characters she played on stage and her presentation offstage, Siddons combined her maternal persona with depictions of British femininity. This allowed her to avoid the same reproach and scandal as other actresses of the time. For example, Siddons used her role of Isabella, a sacrificing mother, to frame her "rise to stardom in terms of her maternal roles on stage and off stage".
In performing these domestic moments with the result of public triumph, Siddons was able to reiterate the characteristics that made her such a popular celebrity and icon; "her devotion to her family and her humble, behind-the-scenes existence". Siddons's role off stage, then, appears to be that of the ordinary wife and mother and this was crucial in a time when women were expected to stay at home, rather than provide for their family. Overall, her choice of roles and carefully constructed persona meant Siddons was able to live out the entirety of her career with little to no public scandal.