Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form”

When Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) returned to the stage in 1816 for two command performances in the role of Lady Macbeth, her body, at the age of fifty-seven, was already in an advanced state of decrepitude. Most critics writing about Siddons focus on only William Hazlitt’s “goddess,” one of the greatest actresses to grace the British stage. Focusing on the decaying body of the actress and on the melancholic sense of loss that haunts many of the essays, newspaper articles, and biographies written on Siddons, I argue that the actress functioned as a kind of cipher through which to filter Romantic preoccupations with mortality and the aging self. Siddons’s iconic status clashed with the aesthetic of authenticity she cultivated, making her into a living effigy of the self. In the face of her visible decline, her biographers strove to breathe new life into the ephemeral body theatric and indemnify for all time what Anna Seward termed “the dignity of the Siddonian form.”