Abstract
As the eighteenth century’s greatest English actress, Sarah Siddons brought an unprecedented dignity and decorum to the profession in the representation of women. The unusually moral and religious theatrical dynasty which shaped Sarah’s personality and talent expedited her rise to the respectability of a national institution by the end of the century. Sarah was born into a strolling company managed by her parents Sarah Ward and Roger Kemble, on 5 July 1755 at a public house in Brecon. Her grandfather John Ward, who had appeared with Betterton, headed a Warwickshire and Welsh border strolling company in 1746, which brought some of the most famous plays in the language to small market towns. In general Ward strove for a good moral theatrical performance, making his company known as a very respectable body of comedians.1 The company included Roger Kemble, who married Ward’s daughter Sarah in 1753.
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Notes
Cecil Price, ‘John Ward, Stroller’, Theatre Notebook, I (January 1946) 10.
Lord Bruce’s party attended the performance prepared to ridicule it as a provincial misrepresentation. Sarah did indeed hear some ‘suppressed noises’ during the performance which she assumed to be a refined tittering. The next day Lord Aylesbury told William in the street that his whole family, ‘had wept so much and were so disfigured with red eyes and swoln [sic] faces, that they were this morning actually unpresentable being all confined to their chambers with violent head-achs’ [sic]. See William Van Lennep (ed.), Reminiscences of Sarah Siddons: 1773–1785 (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 3.
Gamini Salgado, Shakespeare and Performance (Sussex University Press, 1975), pp. 342, 333 as quoted from J. Boaden’s Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (London, 1825).
Yvonne Ffrench , Mrs Siddons: Tragic Actress (London: Derek Verschayle, 1954), p. 119.
D. Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 118.
Anonymous, The Modern Stage Exemplified (London, 1788), p. 10.
John Ruffin, The Rhetorlogue (London, 1922), p. 239.
A Lady of Distinction, The Beauties of Mrs Siddons (London, 1786), p. 14.
Fleeming Jenkin, Papers, Literary, Scientific, etc., S. Colvin and J. A. Ewing (eds), vol. I (London, 1887), pp. 59–60, 79. See Ffrench, pp. 111–15 for a shorter summary of these notes.
Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 116.
Naomi Royde-Smith, The Private Life of Mrs Siddons (London, 1933), pp. 242–3, 245.
O. G. Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story (London, 1904), pp. 175–6, from a letter of 4 December 1798.
F. M. Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons (London, 1909), p. 227.
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© 1993 Sandra Richards
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Richards, S. (1993). Sarah Siddons (1755–1831). In: The Rise of the English Actress. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09930-6_4
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