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Chapter Twelve If we want to judge what role Siddons’s voice played in creating the Siddons phenomenon, the trans‹xing and traumatizing of audience members, we must look at the series of public readings she gave across the length of her career. Before the king and queen at Frogmore, in an assembly room in Dublin, and in the Argyle public room in London, Siddons read passages from Shakespeare’s plays and from Paradise Lost, enacting all the characters, rather than just the ones she played on stage. In the best visual record we have of a Siddons reading, Thomas Lawrence’s 1804 portrait (‹g. 16), Siddons looks as impenetrable as a fortress. Her body a black velvet tower, she stands next to a book that is big enough to contain wallpaper samples, and plucks one giant page as she stares impassively at the audience. The painting conveys neither the dynamism of her readings nor the varied responses that they elicited. “She acted Macbeth himself better than either Kemble or Kean,” Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote of one Siddons reading, going on to say, “It is extraordinary the awe this wonderful woman inspires.”1 But the readings led others to decamp from the Siddons fan club, and to complain that she had become a stilted and pretentious version of herself. Siddons was not the only person giving readings of one kind or another in early nineteenth-century London. In early 1818, William Hazlitt spoke on English poets; Coleridge lectured on “the Belles-Lettres ”; John Thelwall expounded on poetry, the drama, and elocution; 89 Fig. 16. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mrs Siddons (1804), The Tate Gallery/ Digital Image © Tate, London 2009. and a Mr. Webster discussed steam.2 Siddons was also not the ‹rst actor to venture out on the reading circuit—John Henderson capitalized on his supple voice by giving Shakespeare readings.3 Nor would she be the last reader to enact a wide range of characters—Charles Dickens’s harrowing readings of Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist reportedly hastened his own death.4 But as a renowned actor giving pared-down versions of her stage performances and as a woman reading male parts, she was using her voice in new and perilous circumstances. One account of a Siddons reading is preserved in a single sentence of Mrs. Galindo’s Letter to Mrs. Siddons, which refers, brie›y and tantalizingly , to the time when Siddons was “reading Paradise Lost at the Lying-in-Hospital rooms, and had engaged to give the last night’s receipt to the charity” (12).5 Paradise Lost may seem like an odd choice of reading material for a lying-in hospital, but, from an early age, Siddons was smitten with Milton’s epic, and it assumed an important place in her public readings. There survives in the Harvard library Siddons’s manuscript copy of Paradise Lost, prefaced by a handwritten announcement that the poem was “abridged at the request of some friends, for the purpose of dividing it into four readings.”6 I spent a day collating Siddons’s reading copy of Milton’s poem, which includes frequent underlining, seemingly aimed at reminding her where to place emphasis. When she transcribed “impious war in Heavn, and battle proud,” she underlined “war.” When she copied Milton ’s description of Satan and his horrid crew rolling in the ‹ery gulph, she underlined the words “more wrath,” in the line “But his doom / Reserved him to more wrath,” as if to stop herself from lapsing into an iamb. It is possible to determine from the Paradise Lost manuscript Sarah Siddons’s pattern of omissions, to ascertain that she cut a great swath from the opening of Book IX, so that she could get straight to the business of Eve convincing Adam that they should divide their labors.7 It is far harder to ‹gure out how she sounded when she read any of Milton ’s lines. Although her underlining almost certainly serves as a cue for emphasis, and she seems to use an “x” in the margin to mark an omission , the series of small circles she drew under parts of certain lines, rows of tiny in›ated dots of the kind adolescent girls use to dot “i”s, is harder to parse. Under Milton’s lines, “What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support,” Siddons drew one of these strings of beads, signifying something that her audience must have heard as a chapter twelve...

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