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Chapter Thirteen Over the course of my research, I consulted a farrago of alluring Siddons artifacts. I handled Siddons’s fragile copy of Cymbeline, which revealed that she had only one page to change into her night dress for the bed chamber scene. I looked over the seating chart for one of Siddons’s readings, and I examined the list of signatories on a petition to coax Siddons back onto the stage. I studied the auction catalog that lists Siddons’s household remains, and I skimmed Siddons’s prayer book, wondering about the great-great-grand-daughter who, in 1928, had sold it. But nothing seemed as promising as the notes taken by George Joseph Bell while he was sitting in Siddons’s audience, notes that have been bound in three leather volumes, and that are now in the holdings of the Folger Shakespeare Library. George Joseph Bell seems, at ‹rst glance, an unlikely chronicler of Siddons’s star turns. Born the third son of a Scottish Episcopal clergyman in 1770, he made his notes on Siddons around 1809, by which time he was known as the author of a treatise on the laws of bankruptcy in Scotland. However, Bell’s status as a recorder of Siddons’s vocal nuances accords well with the combined artistic and scienti‹c propensities of his family members. Bell’s older brother John, a surgeon and anatomist, opened his own lecture theater in Edinburgh and drew the illustrations for his treatise The Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints (1793–94). George Joseph Bell’s younger brother Charles was a physiologist and surgeon whose 1806 Anatomy of Expression attempted to ex96 plain the anatomical basis for the artistic representation of emotion. Charles Bell’s lectures on anatomy attracted artists as well as medical students. All three brothers were lecturers; George Joseph Bell may have had a professional as well as a recreational interest in the way in which Siddons declaimed her lines. Bell’s notes stand as one point on a trajectory of efforts to create a written recording of the voice in advance of the moment when a phonograph stylus would “write” the vibrations of the voice onto a wax cylinder. George Joseph Bell was possibly a relative of Alexander Bell (1790–1865), a Shakespeare scholar and public reader of Shakespeare’s plays, who insisted that his famous grandson, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, memorize great swaths of Shakespeare’s plays, including passages from Macbeth. Alexander Graham Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, devised an alphabet for recording the sounds of all languages , and enlisted his son to serve as his assistant when he gave public lectures on his system of Universal Alphabetics. While the young Bell was out of the room, audience members were encouraged to make strange sounds that Bell senior translated into this system of symbols. When Alexander Graham Bell would return to the hall, he would, on the basis of his father’s notations, reproduce a sound that he had never heard. The younger Bell recalled, “I remember upon one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. They recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.”1 John Durham Peters writes, “This is the primal scene of the supercession of presence by programming.”2 Bell made his notes in the margins of published plays. He devoted his most detailed note-taking to Siddons’s performance in Macbeth, which is understandable, given the acclaim she received for that role and the many times she reprised it over the course of her career.3 Siddons took over the role of Lady Macbeth from the celebrated Hannah Pritchard and made it her own by putting down her candle in the sleepwalking scene—a startling break from stage tradition. When John Philip Kemble became acting manager of the Drury Lane theater, he began regularly performing the role of Macbeth alongside his sister, and, in 1794, Kemble opened the newly rebuilt theater with a spectacular production of Macbeth that included a large chorus, rolling thunchapter thirteen 97 der, and ›ying witches. When Kemble moved to the Covent Garden theater in 1803, Macbeth was staged seven times that season, and every season after to the end of his career. (The play was also used for the opening of the rebuilt Covent...

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