The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven It’s possible there was no stage role more familiar to romantic theatergoers than Hamlet. Romantic era theater audiences were swimming in Hamlets, recalling how Hamlet lines were spoken by prior Hamlets, and in›ating these memories whenever a brash tradition- ›outing Hamlet roiled the water.1 So, for example, when Siddons’s brother John Philip Kemble, while performing that role, said “unweeded ” instead of “un-weeded,” and “Did you not speak to it?” instead of “Did you not speak to it?”, it did not go unnoted.2 Many of Kemble’s audience members heard in their heads the Hamlet of David Garrick, who dispensed with a static declamatory manner of speaking lines, and substituted rapid changes of voice and gesture that seemed entirely natural even though he wore a fright wig so that Hamlet’s hair would stand on end when he encountered his father’s ghost. In selecting Hamlet for his 1783 debut, Kemble opted for the people’s choice of Shakespeare play. Kemble declared, “Take up any Shakespeare you will, from the ‹rst collection of his works to the last, which has been read, and look what play bears the most obvious signs of perusal. My life for it, they will be found in the volume which contains the play of Hamlet.” And he backed this assertion up with his own database , going on to state, “I dare say, in my time, some hundred copies have been inspected by me; but this test has never failed in a single instance .”3 He overprepared for the role with a similar obsessiveness, copying and recopying his lines as he tinkered with the part, so that 80 when his friend John Taylor suggested he make some changes, Kemble protested, “Now, Taylor, I have copied the part of Hamlet forty times, and you have obliged me to consider and copy it once more.”4 Given that Kemble was capable of reciting ‹fteen hundred lines of Homer from memory, and, along with Siddons, rose to the task of memorizing the lines of the still-being-written Pizarro, as the play was being performed , his painstaking approach to learning his Hamlet part is all the more striking.5 Kemble prepared with the ghost of Garrick hanging over his shoulder and, quite possibly, with Garrick’s copy of the play on his desk. Garrick ’s eccentric alteration of the play had its own ghostly reputation. Rumored to have been buried with the actor, it was actually given to Kemble as a curiosity from Mrs. Garrick, who also presented the cane Garrick used to walk abroad, a cane that Kemble quickly regifted.6 But when Kemble stepped on stage at Drury Lane, the actor he conjured was Siddons, not Garrick. As Boaden recalled, “On Mr. Kemble’s ‹rst appearance before the spectators, the general exclamation was, ‘How very like his sister!’ and there was a very striking resemblance.”7 According to a review in the Morning Chronicle, his voice “in some of its tones [sounded] so like that of his sister, that were a blind person, familiar to the voice of Mrs. Siddons, to hear Mr. Kemble speak, he might mistake the one for the other.”8 When Kemble debuted his Hamlet at Drury Lane, Siddons had only played that role in the provinces; the audience wasn’t seeing and hearing Siddons when they watched Kemble play Hamlet because they’d already seen and heard her do it, but because his melancholy manner recalled hers as she performed many other tragic roles. “His person seemed to be ‹nely formed, and his manners princely; but on his brow hung the weight of ‘some intolerable woe,’” Boaden wrote (Kemble, 1: 92). The Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, who may or may not have seen Siddons as Hamlet—Radcliffe’s biographer speculates that she saw Siddons perform the role at the Bath-Bristol Theatre-Royal—supposed that Siddons would be the ‹nest Hamlet that ever appeared, ‹ner even than her brother. “She would more fully preserve the tender and re‹ned melancholy ,” Radcliffe wrote, “the deep sensibility, which are the peculiar charm of Hamlet, and which appear not only in the ardour, but in the occasional irresolution and weakness of his character—the secret spring that reconciles all his inconsistencies.”9 Radcliffe attributed chapter eleven 81 Kemble’s lesser ability to play Hamlet to a ‹rmness “incapable of being always subdued,” and claimed Siddons’s tenderness, by contrast, would serve to enhance Hamlet’s sensibility, a sensibility...