Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter by Arthur
Murphy, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1782.
Stipple engraving, ink in paper by Caroline Watson after painting by R. E. Pine 47.4 cm x 35.9 cm. Published 1st May 1784 by John Boydell, London. Original in the Victoria and Albert Museum, H Beard Print Collection. [This image
is in the public domain because the copyright has expired.]
The Early Years
While very young Sarah displayed capacity in private theatricals and resource in improvising costume. She was brought on the stage as an infant phenomenon, and stirred an indifferent audience by reciting the fable of ‘The Boy and the Frogs.’ At the great room at the King's Head in High Street, Worcester, she took part, on 12 February. 1767, with other members of her family, in an entertainment to which admission was granted to those purchasing packets of tooth-powder. Her contribution consisted of a performance of Rosetta in Love in a Village’ her future husband (William Siddons) playing Meadows.
She also appeared as the Young Princess in Howard's King Charles I, and sang between the acts. On 16 April of the same year at the same place a ‘concert’ saw her performance of Dryden and D'Avenant's Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, in which she played Ariel, future husband Siddons appearing as Hyppolito. She also acted with some military amateurs in the Grecian Daughter, and caused some wrath among her military associates by bursting into laughter in the midst of a tragic situation.
The young couple are said to have accepted an engagement with Chamberlain and Crump's company in Bath, where their straits were dire, and to have played in various country towns. At Wolverhampton Sarah acted with her father, as Mrs. Siddons, Charlotte Rusport in the West Indian Leonora in the Padlock and spoke an address, presumably of her own composition.
At Drury Lane, on 1 February, 1776. she was the first Julia in Bates's Blackamoor washed White’ a piece that was damned, and on the fourth performance occasioned a riot. Her last performance at Drury lane was on the 5th June, after which, Garrick having no further need of her, and no other manager wanting her, she went back to the country. Her failure was unmistakable.
Woodfall, the editor of the ‘Morning Chronicle, said that she spoke sensibly, but that her powers were not equal to a London theatre. A contemporary critic described her Lady Anne as lamentable. Ridiculous rumours were circulated concerning Garrick's jealousy of her ability.
In the winter of 1776 she was at Manchester, where she became the rage. On 15 April 1777 she made, when in a bad state of health, her first appearance in York as Euphrasia in the Grecian Daughter Tate Wilkinson, her manager, playing Evander. She was accompanied by her husband, and played Rosalind, Matilda, Alicia, Lady Townly, Lady Alton, Indiana, Widow Brady, Arpasia, Horatia, and Semiramis. Her success was brilliant,
Tate Wilkinson declaring that ‘in her Arpasia, I recollect her fall and figure after the dying scene was noticed as most elegant; nor do I recognise such a mode of disposing the body in so picturesque and striking a manner as Mrs. Siddons does on such prostrate occasions’.
In 1777, she went on 'the provincial circuit'. For the next six
years she worked principally in York and Bath, gradually building up
a reputation, and her next Drury Lane appearance, in 1782, was successful.
She was an immediate sensation playing the title role in Garrick's adaptation
of a play by Thomas Southerne, Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage.
Sarah Siddons was to establish herself as the most acclaimed tragic actress of her own age, and she has subsequently been widely regarded as the greatest female performer in English theatrical history. In her own lifetime she achieved the status of a popular icon.
She moved from the reputedly disreputable world of provincial touring theatre, tainted with its associations with prostitution and low life, to the salons of the aristocracy and royalty.
King George III and Queen Charlotte were avid fans, though they were not in particular fans of the theatre. In January 1783 they went to see her five times in one month, weeping though every performance. Suitably impressed with her manner of delivery they subsequently appointed Mrs Siddons to be the Reader in English to the royal children.
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Portrait
of Mrs Sarah Siddons (1785).
Artist Thomas Gainsborough. Oil on canvas. 126 × 100 cm. Collection
of the National Gallery, London. [This image is in the public domain
because the copyright has expired.]
In the summer of 1777 Siddons was in Liverpool, and in the winter in Manchester.
On 24 October, as Lady Townly in the Provoked Husband, she made her first appearance under Palmer in Bath, where, during the season, she was seen as Mrs. Candour, Mrs. Lovemore in the Way to keep him, Elwina in Percy, Lady Jane in Know your own Mind, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Lady Brumpton in the Funeral, Queen in Hamlet, Portia, Rosamond in Henry II, Imogen, Queen in Richard III (and many other roles) - a remarkable variety of characters for so young a woman.
Most of these parts had previously been played in Liverpool, where also she had been seen as the Countess of Somerset in Sir Thomas Overbury, Clarinda in the Suspicious Husband, Statira, Cleopatra, Miranda in the Busy Body,’ and other parts.
In Bath she reopened the following season in her great character of Lady Macbeth, and here she remained during the three following seasons, four seasons in all. In Bath or in Bristol, the theatres being under the same management, she played over a hundred different parts. On 27 June 1781 she played Hamlet in an alteration of the tragedy by Garrick and Lee, Miss Kemble being the Queen and Siddons the Guildenstern. Most of the parts mentioned were subsequently seen in London.
It was impossible for the London managers to shut their ears to the rumours of her triumphs in Bath. Aristocratic patronage did something for her; but Henderson, who from the first recognised her greatness, seems to have been the first who induced the Drury Lane management to make some timorous advances.
Her difficulties about reappearing in London were conquered; terms were, after some wrangling, arranged; and on 10 October 1782, as Mrs. Siddons from Bath, she reappeared at Drury Lane, playing Isabella in the piece so named - Garrick's version of Southerne's Fatal Marriage. Her triumph was immediate and complete, so complete that her merit was said by Davies to have swallowed up all remembrance of present and past performers. At this moment she is thus described by him:
‘The person of Mrs. Siddons is greatly in her favour; just rising above the middle stature, she looks, walks, and moves like a woman of a superior rank. Her countenance is expressive, her eye so full of information, that the passion is told from her look before she speaks. Her voice, though not so harmonious as Mrs. Cibber's’ (to which it had some resemblance), ‘is strong and pleasing; nor is a word lost for want of due articulation. . . . She excels all persons in paying attention to the business of the scene; her eye never wanders from the person she speaks to, or should look at when she is silent. Her modulation of grief, in her plaintive pronunciation of the interjection, 'Oh!' is sweetly moving and reaches to the heart. Her madness in Belvidera is terribly affecting. The many accidents of spectators falling into fainting fits in the time of her acting bear testimony to the effects of her exertions’ (Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 248–9).
The actors on the stage engaged for farce could not easily recover their spirits after seeing her in tragedy. It was at this time she was taken to see Dr. Johnson, who paid her many compliments, and talked long with her concerning her predecessors on the stage. The highest honour he did her was when in Reynolds's picture of her as the ‘Tragic Muse,’ ‘he wrote his name upon the hem of her garment. 'I would not lose,' he said, 'the honour this opportunity offered to me for my name going down to posterity on the hem of your garment”’ (Northcote, Reynolds, i. 246).
Text based on
The Story of the Scots Stage,
By Robb Lawson (1919)
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Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble in Macbeth 1786
Sarah
Siddons and John Philip Kemble in Macbeth 1786, painted by Thomas Beach. Collection of the Garrick Club, London.
Mrs Siddons could affect people in a most surprising way -the reports of her audiences crying hysterically and fainting with grief at her portrayals of bereft, heartbroken or grateful mothers are legion. Siddon-imania was the term used to describe her audience’s reactions. They were considered victims of The Siddons Fever.
As a result of her fame she amassed a substantial personal wealth: in 1786 she confided to a friend that she had saved the magnificent sum of £10,000 on which she had initially planned to retire, but wrote, 'My riches are incredible, for I will go on as long as I am able'. By 1801 this fortune was estimated to be as much as £53,000. Her public success, however, was attended by a great deal of personal sadness: her marriage to the philandering and feckless William Siddons, was an unhappy one and ended in informal separation, and she outlived five of her seven children, suffering numerous miscarriages in addition to this dreadful loss.
In her letter to Cassandra Austen of the 25th April 1811, Jane Austen bemoaned her lot:
I have no chance of seeing Mrs Siddons. She did act on Monday but as Henry was told by the Boxkeeper that he did not think she would all the places and all the thought of it were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance and could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me.
The roles Jane Austen so wanted to see her perform were her most famous; King John by Shakespeare had was to be performed at Covent Garden on Saturday 20th April, 1811. However a day or two before, Hamlet was substituted. Mrs Siddons made her first appearance since December 1810 in Macbeth on the following Monday. During the remainder of the time Jane Austen was in London staying with her brother Henry, Mrs Siddons performed in The Gamester and as Lady Randolph in Douglas, Jane Austen does not appear to have been able to get to any of these performances.
The role of Constance in King John was one of Siddons' most acclaimed, and the original text was revised by her brother to emphasise Constance’s role as the dominant force in the play, even though Constance appears in only three scenes. Mrs Siddons herself noted that she would leave her dressing-room door open between her scenes, and therefore was able to overhear events on stage so that she could work herself into an appropriate frenzy, as they would cause ‘bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection to gush into my eyes‘.
Her interpretation of the role Lady Macbeth was her triumph, as William Hazlitt, the critic wrote:
'If we have seen Mrs Siddons in Lady Macbeth only once, it is enough. The impression is stamped there for ever, and any after-experiments and critical inquiries only serve to fritter away and tamper with the sacredness of the early recollection'.
No wonder Jane Austen was virtually grinding her teeth in frustration at having missed seeing Mrs Siddons in her iconic roles….
[Text based on Jane Austen and Mrs Siddons, at austenonly.com]
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Sarah Siddons, ca. 1784. Painting attributed to William Hamilton RA Oil on Canvas. Height: 13.37in, Width: 1.25in. Bequeathed to the Department of Science and Art, South Kensington Museums in 1859 by the Reverend Alexander Dyce.
In 1773, at the age of 18, she married William Siddons, an actor. Her family
life was less than fortunate; she gave birth to seven children but outlived
five of them, and her marriage to William Siddons became strained and ended
in an informal separation.
In 1774, Siddons had her first success as Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice
Preserved. She was noticed by David Garrick, who engaged her
to appear at Drury Lane. Due to a lack of experience, her appearance
as Portia, and other roles, was not successful and the management
informed her 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."
Her most famous role was that of Lady Macbeth; it was the grandeur of her emotions as she expressed Lady Macbeth's murderous passions that held her audiences spellbound. In Lady Macbeth she 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.
Later, she played Desdemona, Rosalind, Ophelia and Volumnia, all with great success; but it was as Queen Catherine in Henry VIII that she discovered another part well adapted to her acting powers. Over the next twenty years in which she was the undisputed queen of Drury Lane. Robert Shaughnessy, in the Oxford Dictionary of national Biography, describes her celebrity status as 'mythical'" and 'monumental'. By 'the mid-1780s Siddons was established as a cultural icon.' She mixed with the literary and social elites of London society, and her acquaintances included Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke.
In
1802 she left Drury Lane. Subsequently she made occasional appearances at
Covent Garden. It was there, on 29 June 1812, that she gave perhaps the
most extraordinary farewell performance in theatre history. She was playing
Lady Macbeth After
the end of the sleepwalking scene, the audience refused to allow the play
to continue. Eventually, after tumultuous applause from the pit, the curtain
reopened and Siddons was discovered sitting in her own clothes and character. She
delivered an an emotional farewell speech to the audience lasting eight
minutes.
Although Mrs. Siddons had formally retired from the stage, she occasionally
appeared on special occasions. Her last appearance, on 9 June 1819, was
as Lady Randolph in John Home's Douglas.
Wonderful stories are told of her powers over the spectators.
Macready relates that when she played Aphasia in Tamburlaine, after seeing her lover strangled before her eyes, so terrible was her agony as she fell lifeless upon the stage, that the audience believed she was really dead, and only the assurance of the manager could pacify them. One night Charles Young was playing Beverly to her Mrs. Beverly in The Gamester, and in the great scene was so overwhelmed by her pathos that he could not speak. On the night of May 2nd 1797, Sarah Siddons's character of Agnes in Lillo's Fatal Curiosity suggested murder with 'an expression in her face that made the flesh of the spectator creep'. In the audience was Crabb Robinson, whose respiration grew difficult. Robinson went into a fit of hysterics and was nearly ejected from the theatre.
[This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh
Edition, a publication now in the public domain, and an entry on the Austen Only web site.]
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