Sarah Siddons, theatre voices and recorded memory

Summary

Romantic era theatregoers left behind a comet’s trail of praise for the dramatic brilliance of Sarah Siddons. The accolades include Hazlitt’s hyperventilated tribute to ‘a being of a superior order [who] had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world’, and Mary Robinson’s effusive description of the actress whose ‘soul beam[s] through every veil of fiction ... making art more lovely than even nature in all its fairest adornments’. I take these testimonials at face value, while privately nursing a grudge against Siddons. When Mary Robinson sought out the actress, Siddons refused to meet her, citing the impossibility of an association which, ‘however laudable or innocent, would draw down the malice and reproach of those prudent people who never do ill’. My Sarah Siddons is a bit of a prig, and all Hazlitt’s declarations of the power seated on her brow or the passion emanating from her breast never overshadow the cautious woman holding her skirts out of Robinson’s path for fear of damaging her own reputation. I began to think about Siddons’s voice out of a desire to understand, at a visceral level and as a corrective to my prejudice against her, what made Siddons so great. I think it might be possible, by analysing the acoustic culture of Siddons’s vocal performances in key roles, to re-animate a romantic era dramatic repertoire long derided by critics as consisting of mangled versions of Shakespeare’s plays and long-forgotten theatrical set-pieces.