Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (review)

On the day of writing this review, the National Portrait Gallery, London, launched a new exhibition entitled The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons. The First Actresses <www.npg.org.uk/whatson/the-first-actresses/first_actresses_exhibition.php>, which reflects the recent resurgence of popular and scholarly interest in eighteenth-century actors and the origins of celebrity culture, promised in its promotional literature to reveal "the many ways in which these early celebrities used portraiture to enhance their reputations, deflect scandal and create their personal identities." Boasting an exhibition catalogue authored by some of the leading scholars in the field—Gill Perry, Joseph Roache, and Shearer West—there was little doubt that the exhibition would deliver on its promises. Yet, as Laura Engel's important study indicates, such approaches to the history of theatre and celebrity merely illuminate a single aspect of a much more complex story.

In the eighteenth century, as now, Engel points out, "the idea of celebrity culture was tied to narrative possibilities" (2). These possibilities were explored by actresses not only in the visual arts, but also in their strategic use of dress, accessories, texts (memoirs, letters, novels, and poetry), and their actual performances on the stage. Performance leaves few archival traces, of course, and Engel is eloquent throughout her book about the challenges of accounting for the historical beings that are her focus. This is not a biographical study in any straightforward way; nonetheless, her book is driven by a conviction that "the fragments or traces of the many selves that the actress leaves behind" should be recognized as having originated in a "living, breathing" body (17). Following these traces might not afford unmediated access to that body, but does elucidate the actress's agency and efficacy as image-maker, as well as the "idealized narratives of female identity" with which she strategically aligned herself (24).

The three substantial chapters on Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Mary Wells (Leah Sumbel) that follow the introduction focus on how actresses variously negotiated their public's paradoxical desire that they be both "authentic" women and "theatrical" stars. In exploring this "representational dilemma" (2), Engel's account is in productive dialogue with Felicity Nussbaum's recent Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), which explores the generation of actresses that preceded Siddons's. Like Rival Queens, Fashioning Celebrity delineates how actresses cultivated a commoditized version of themselves—what Nussbaum terms an "interiority effect" (21)—for their public. The conclusions both scholars reach, however, are strikingly different. While Nussbaum emphasizes the economic power and cultural influence exerted by the likes of Kitty Clive, Peg Woffington, and Frances Abington, Engel offers a more cautious account, attuned to the agency exerted by these women and its precarious nature. If Fashioning Celebrity presents a story about how celebrity identities "materialized" in the period, it also reveals how they "vanished" or were wrested away from the actresses who worked so hard to craft them (60).

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the vast body of Siddons scholarship and points out that much of what has been written about this most captivating eighteenth-century performer focuses not on "Siddons-as-subject" (31), but on "the 'Siddons Effect'": the "after-life" of a cultural icon as mediated by audiences and observers (27). Searching for the "ghostly desires" (31) of the woman behind the performance leads Engel, as it will in each of her case studies, to an enlightening range of sources. Principal among these is Siddons's own writing, particularly her "Reminiscences" (written for her biographer Thomas Campbell) and "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth," which are read alongside now iconic portraits and collectively mined for the insights they offer into Siddons's self-fashioning. Focusing particularly on Siddons's self-identification with royalty and maternity, this chapter examines the extraordinary power that she wielded through...