A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli

In the 1784–85 London theatrical season, there was a conjunction between one of the greatest tragedies ever written, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and three of the most dynamic and thrilling artists of the last decades of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi (d. 1799), the actress Sarah Siddons (1775–1831), and the artist Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825). Fuseli, engaged with Shakespearean subjects for much of his career, produced in 1783 his Lady Macbeth walking in Her Sleep (Photo 1), a work that circulated starting in January 1784 in the form of an engraving produced by the accomplished printmaker, John Raphael Smith (1752–1812). Sarah Siddons, who had played Lady Macbeth in the provinces, chose the play and the role for her benefit performance in February 1785 at Drury Lane. And for her benefit in March of the same year at the King’s Theatre, Geltruda Rossi danced the role of Lady Macbeth in the new ballet of Macbeth. The three artists were thrown into figurative proximity when an anonymous commentator, on viewing Rossi’s performance, wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of March 19, 1785: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” In uniting Rossi, Siddons, and Fuseli, the writer has suggested a particular interpretation of the role by Rossi, one that contrasted with Siddons’s apparent conception of the character in 1785 and one that we can try and establish through Fuseli’s picture. And while we know much about Siddons, there is little, if any, pictorial representation surviving of Rossi’s performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d’action; it is her performance that is the focus of this article.

The story begins with the performances in 1785 of Lady Macbeth by Sarah Siddons, who would come to be considered one greatest actresses of the age; she had played the role in the provinces, but on February 2, performed it on the London stage for the first time. Macbeth was played by William Smith, Banquo by Thomas Hull, and Duncan by John Hayman Packer, with the three witches played by the male actors William Parsons, John Moody, and Robert Baddeley. To take Lady Macbeth onto the stage at Drury Lane was a formidable risk for Siddons, for the interpretation of the role by the much-loved Hannah Pritchard (1711–1768), performed opposite David Garrick’s Macbeth, was still the one the public knew well and admired. It was a performance Fuseli had been inspired to capture in “Garrick and Mrs Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: After the Murder of King Duncan” in 1766. As it happens, for Siddons the 1785 performances were, according to the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser for February 3, 1785, largely a success:

Lady Macbeth is, without exception, one of the noblest achievements of Mrs. Siddons. Her expressive countenance, which is ever so truly the index of her feelings, had in this play the most forcible influence on our feelings. Her deportment in the fine scene, where her inflexible nature elevates itself above the more conscientious ambition of her Lord, was a masterpiece of acting, and her manner of delivering arguments by which she subdued his wavering mind . . . was electrical in its effects on the auditory.

Photo 1.

Lady Macbeth. Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). Oil. Musée du Louvre.

At this stage, then, Siddons played the character in a noble style, with emphasis on her expressive countenance. A later assessment by the author of Siddons’s biography in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica suggested that

it was the grandeur of her exhibition of the more terrible passions as related to one awful purpose that held them spellbound. In Lady Macbeth she found the highest and best scope for her gifts. It fitted her as no...