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"Siddons, Sarah, 1755-1831."
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Sarah Siddons : the first celebrity actress
Sarah Siddons grew up as a member of a family troupe of travelling actors, always poor and often hungry, resorting to foraging for turnips to eat. But before she was 30 she had become a superstar, her fees greater than any actor - male or female - had previously achieved. However, her rise was not easy. This book tells the story of the iconic performer who was adored by theatre audiences, writers, artists and the royal family alike.
BOOK
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
English actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) was an international celebrity widely acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines.We know what Siddons looked like-an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures-but what of her famous voice? In lively and engaging prose, Judith Pascoe journeys to discover how the celebrated romantic actor's voice sounded and to understand its power to move audiences to a state of emotional collapse. The author's quixotic endeavor leads her to enroll in a \"Voice for Actors\" class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her own life.The Sarah Siddons Audio Filesis the first full-scale attempt to address the importance of the voice in romantic culture. Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, the book shows how the romantic poets' preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voice's ephemerality.The Sarah Siddons Audio Filescontributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound, and will engage a broad audience interest in how recording technology has altered human experience.
eBook
Shakespeare and the legacy of loss
\"This book looks at a British actor from the 1700s, David Garrick. By playing Shakespeare, Garrick raised the playwright to a position of new national importance, but in the process of doing so, he also activated Shakespeare as the social and cultural center around which he, and many other actors and even novelists, could work out questions about how to resist the evanescence of theater and life. How could the artist who stakes his fame on an ephemeral form of art be celebrated or preserved? How do approaches to commemoration change in light of these attempts? And how did Shakespeare become an emblem to other artists for how such preservation could be achieved? These are questions that Garrick, through Shakespeare, was able to ask, and questions that, thanks to Garrick, others would then take up. The chapters that follow tell the story of the answers they obtained\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally.' In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays.' Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.
eBook
Looking and Being Looked At
The graphic representation of English theatre spectators in the long nineteenth century raises interesting questions around what they looked at and how they were looked at themselves. Drawing on Maaike Bleeker’s notion of visuality and Ronald Paulson’s notion of spectators as intermediate states of being, as well as on the subjectivity and tendency toward caricature of artists like Thomas Rowlandson, this essay situates visual depictions of spectators within a context of both visceral and performed responses, while also recognizing the fragmented and temporally limited nature of such depictions. These depictions intersect with an analysis of how Sarah Siddons, the most famous actress of her day, was also represented. Visual representation of theatrical spectators often encompass both a critique and an awareness of the complex nature of social and cultural interactions among spectators, whether engaging with the performance onstage or with one another. While attention has been paid regularly to written accounts of spectators during this period, there has been considerably less focus on the analysis of visual evidence, and the moments in time that such evidence encapsulates. The essay makes the case for the significance of such evidence in exploring a doubled relationship: those of both the reactive and interactive nature of nineteenth-century theatrical spectatorship.
Journal Article
The Rise and Fall of the ‘Noble Savage’ in Ann of Swansea’s Welsh Fictions
The writings of Ann Julia Hatton (1764–1838), who from 1810 published under the pen-name ‘Ann of Swansea’, reflect changes in the political spirit of her age as it interwove with episodes in her personal history. Though her 1784 collection of verse is conventional in its politics, The Songs of Tammany (1794), a panegyric in praise of the American-Indian ‘Noble Savage’ written during the years she spent in New York, is heated in its denunciation of European colonialism. After she returned to Britain in 1799 and settled in Swansea, her novels Cambrian Pictures (1810) and Guilty or Not Guilty (1822) showed an equivalent radicalism in their depiction of Welsh characters casting off the yoke of subservience to a corrupt Anglicized gentry and demonstrating that an upbringing in Wales instils all the natural virtues as opposed to the artifices of contemporary civilization. In other fictions, however, such as her satire on the townspeople of Gooselake (i.e. Swansea) in Chronicles of an Illustrious House (1816), Welsh ‘Noble Savages’ have befooled themselves by succumbing to the allure of corrupting sophistications. This paper explores these transitions in Ann of Swansea’s fictional representations of Wales.
Journal Article
Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons
Ranting, canting and toning should not be dismissed as aberrations of acting in Restoration tragedy that gradually disappeared as the new century progressed; rather, they should be understood in relation to the \"rhetorical conventions\" of tragic acting that persisted over the long eighteenth century. Before nearly anything else, it was an actor's voice that demonstrated his or her skill as a performer, and audiences were alert to when actors used their voices well or badly. While inheriting the mid-century renovations of acting wrought by Garrick and Macklin, Sarah Siddons, who began her professional career in the last quarter of the century, employed rhetorical conventions in her tragic performances that seemed to owe more to the age of Betterton than to Garrick. It would seem that Siddons's performances were more \"artificial\" than Garrick's but only if we ignore the interplay of rhetorical and authenticating conventions; to her audiences, Siddons was an eminent successor to Pritchard in the role of Lady Macbeth. Here, with Siddons, the logic of infinite regression falters.
Journal Article
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.
Journal Article
Making Mary: Imitation and Infamy in the Eighteenth-Century Theater
This essay interrogates how the scandalous actress Mary Wells “shadowed” Sarah Siddons through her imitations of the actress; using performance theory and contemporary reviews, it suggests that these imitations allowed Wells to borrow some of Siddons’ fame at the same time that they exposed the duplicity at the heart of the tragic queen’s performance. The contrast between the simultaneously shifting and transparent Wells and the static and opaque Siddons would have been striking to the audience, as Siddons’ aloof distance from her admirers left a path of access to Wells, who would gladly make herself available instead. Wells also used her imitations to carve out a unique niche for herself as an actress, though those imitations simultaneously created a dependence on the actresses she imitated, ultimately leaving Wells with a marginalized place in theater history.
Journal Article