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Chapter Five If you are an undergraduate at a large Midwestern university in the United States and you sign up for a summer school class entitled “Voice for Actors,” you will ‹nd yourself playing games designed to get you breathing hard. And if you are a middle-aged college professor auditing this class, not because you have theatrical aspirations but because you have embarked upon a misguided Stanislavskian attempt to imagine what it was like to be Sarah Siddons, you will ‹nd yourself staggering barefooted around a dance studio with budding thespians whose dodgeball skills have not atrophied nearly as badly as yours have. When, in the spare minutes before class begins, students discuss actors they admire, you mention Katharine Cornell, and it becomes immediately apparent that no one else has heard of Cornell, the American Sarah Siddons who toured provincial theaters during the Depression, mesmerizing audiences with her ardent gestures and piercing stare.1 The class members are more conversant in the acting styles of Johnny Depp and Reese Witherspoon, movie stars who have not risked humiliation by performing on stage. No matter. The students are ›eet of foot and precise of aim, and soon everyone is breathing so hard they can barely hear the instructor, who speaks with the perfect enunciation of a British news reader. Her ‹rst pronouncements: “Everything to do with the voice is housed inside the body,” and “How you breathe is the furnace of your entire vocal capability.”2 Siddons’s vocal capability was called into question during her ‹rst 34 ill-fated foray onto the London stage; in 1775 she played Portia in The Merchant of Venice and received anemic reviews. Siddons’s Drury Lane debut coincided with David Garrick’s retirement from the stage; his many ‹nal performances (his last Richard! his last Lear! his last Hamlet !) drew focus away from her ‹rst performances, but even if Garrick had not been bidding farewell at the precise moment when she was introducing herself to London audiences, her voice would have had dif‹culty rising over the din of more experienced actors in well-established roles. If you troll for Siddons mentions in the micro‹lm newspaper record of the 1775–76 London season, trying to ‹nd reports of her performances, you will be most impressed by what a small ‹sh you are trying to hook in a sea of ›ashier theatrical fauna. Combing through the “Theatrical Intelligence” columns in the Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle, one can ‹nd the advertisement for the Drury Lane Merchant of Venice that identi‹es the actress playing Portia as “A Young Lady, ‹rst appearance.” Unheralded, Siddons played the role several more times before retreating from the stage, only to make a few desultory reappearances, most unfortunately in the title role of Epicoene , a bit of miscasting that audiences resented, before playing Lady Anne in Garrick’s ‹nal staging of Richard III. One learns only a little about Siddons’s stage presence by reading theater news published during her ‹rst season, but one learns a lot about the amount of attention that was devoted to actors’ voices. A few days after Siddons’s ‹rst appearance, a review of Thomas Sheridan’s performance as Hamlet at Covent Garden took the actor to task for his vocal limitations. “In that wonderful soliloquy, which requires all the tuneful variations of the most musical and comprehensive voice,” the reviewer wrote, “he gave us the whole, upon the only two notes he possesses , that of C sharp and B ›at”; “this may produce an ideal harmony of oratory to an ear long accustomed to its tones, but an unprejudiced one must be tortured with the discord.”3 A day later, a reviewer for the same paper disparaged Sheridan’s performance as Richard III and also singled out Mrs. Hunter for special opprobrium: “The tones of her voice were but ill adapted last night to the distress of the Queen.”4 Even when the paper’s theater reviewer was pleased with a vocal performance —a novice actor named Webster was praised for having a voice that was “in general harmonious, varying, and powerful”—the reviewer offered the actor “a friendly intimation” regarding his vocal technique. chapter five 35 “We think he has a little guttural, a peculiarity, (perhaps acquired in singing,) in some of the lower tones of his voice, which sound affectedly and unpleasing,” the reviewer noted, going on to warn, “An inattention to this error, may prove fatal to every excellence...

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