In Siddons’s analysis, Lady Macbeth self-destructs because, unlike Macbeth, she has had no outlet for her true feelings. Siddons explains, “His heart has therefore been eased, from time to time, by unloading its weight of woe; while she, on the contrary, has perseveringly endured in silence the utter most anguish of a wounded spirit.”73 This repression results in her collapse:
“her frailer frame, and keener feelings, have now sunk under the struggle— his robust and less sensitive constitution has not only resisted it, but bears him on to deeper wickedness.”74 According to Siddons, Lady Macbeth’s ulti-
mate demise is the result of the sacrifices that she made for her husband. Her own pain leads her to redirect all of her attentions toward Macbeth. Siddons writes, “Yes; smothering her sufferings in the deepest recesses of her own
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wretched bosom, we cannot but perceive that she devotes herself entirely to the effort of supporting him.”75 This is not only a transformation from her
formerly narcissistic monstrousness, but also a radical departure from the persona of her youth. Siddons suggests to her readers that as a child Lady Macbeth had no boundaries set for her and no limits on her power:
Let it be here recollected, as some palliation of her former very different deportment, she had, probably, from childhood commanded all around her with a high hand; had uninterruptedly, perhaps, in that splendid station, enjoyed all that wealth, all that nature had to bestow; that she had, pos- sibly, no directors, no controllers; and that in womanhood her fascinated
lord has never once opposed her inclinations.76
In this passage, Siddons sounds very much like a contemporary actress employing a Stanislavski-inspired approach to understanding the inner workings of her character.77 She creates a past and a set of memories for Lady
Macbeth, which provide her with a psychological narrative and rationale for Lady Macbeth’s actions. The description of Lady Macbeth’s happiest days— her life in the “splendid station” where she had enjoyed “all that wealth, all that nature had to bestow” and ruled all around her with “no directors and no controllers” (not even her “fascinated husband”)—are a far cry from what she descends to at the end of the play. As in the beginning of her analysis, Siddons returns to the details of Lady Macbeth’s appearance: “Behold her now, with wasted form, with wan and haggard countenance, her starry eyes glazed with the ever-burning fever of remorse, and on their lids the shadow of death.”78
Both of these tactics—giving Lady Macbeth a past and inviting readers to visualize Lady Macbeth’s “wasted form”—are similar to strategies used in the portraits of Siddons and Queen Charlotte. In images of the actress and the Queen, viewers are asked to equate their visual personas with recogniz- able models of female identity. Charlotte becomes a dutiful mother and a lovely woman; Siddons becomes an aristocratic fashion plate and a woman who performs for the good of her children. With a strategic vision of the role, Siddons similarly transforms the ruthless Lady Macbeth into a noble heroine for her audiences. At the end of the play, Lady Macbeth is no longer an unnatural, cruel demon but a passionate, grief-stricken woman who gave up a life of comfort and glory in order to promote her thankless husband. For Siddons’s performance of Lady Macbeth to be effective, she must convince audiences that underneath Lady Macbeth’s mask of ambition and cruelty lies a fragile feminine body that will ultimately be destroyed, an idea
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implicitly tied to Siddons’s own exhausting career as an actress. Given that the “Remarks” were written at the end of Siddons’s career, after many years of performing Lady Macbeth, the document might also be seen as convey- ing Siddons’s subtle musings on the physical and emotional price she paid for her extraordinary fame.79 The revised version of a domestic and oppressed
Lady Macbeth in Siddons’s “Remarks” is directly related to her attempts to dissociate her theatrical image from scandal, and to mitigate the stigma of her public role as a manipulative and powerful celebrity.
In a similar gesture toward the end of her memoir, Siddons relates one of the few incidents where her behavior was publicly criticized. When per- forming in Dublin, Siddons was asked to organize a benefit for the actor Mr. Diggs. According to Siddons, she managed to mount a performance of
Venice Preserved after much scrambling and almost no rehearsal. Apparently,
the manager of the theater felt that Siddons had cheated the actors out of their profits. By the time she returned to London, there was a “gathering storm,” and the “public mind was thus poisoned against me.” She describes the affects of the situation:
Alas! How wretched is the being who depends on the stability of public favor! I left London the object of universal approbation, and on my return, but a very few weeks afterwards, was received on my first nights appear- ance with universal opprobrium—accus’d of hardness of heart, of the most sordid avarice and total insensibility to every thing and every body except
my own interest.80
Siddons recreates the moment when she returns to the stage and is hissed and jeered at by the angry audience. Although a kind stranger in the front row tells her, “For heavens sake, Madam do not degrade your self by an apol- ogy, for there is nothing necessary to be said,” she is dragged off stage by her brother, and she faints in his arms. Fortunately, she is convinced by her hus- band, her brother, and Mr. Sheridan to try to go on stage again. This time the audience is silent. She writes: “I was absolutely awe-struck and never yet have been able to account for this surprising contrast.”81 Siddons’s fainting
spell in this scene is a way of literally taking her body (and by extension, her conscience) out of the scene. Similar to the moment in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth “faints” to draw attention away from her guilty husband, Siddons’s swoon at this moment is an attempt to garner sympathy from her audiences. Losing consciousness is also a way of conceding authority, which Siddons miraculously regains when she steps back out on to the stage apparently cleansed of her sins.82
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Siddons’s ability to triumph over accusations of self-interest, and to remain an object of public adoration, was an extraordinary accomplishment. Despite satirical prints of Siddons as a miser hoarding bags overflowing with gold coins, the idea of Siddons as a shrewd and calculating businesswoman was overshadowed by the idea of Siddons as an ideal representation of Brit- ish femininity. Still, it is compelling that, with all her fame and fortune, Sid- dons would still want to rewrite the experiences that hurt her the most: her early difficulties with Garrick and the incident in Dublin. Koestenbaum’s formulation that the diva pretends to be a Queen in order to “imitate figures from the past that might have ignored or abused her”—an imitation that is a “form of mourning-through identification,” since “you imitate what you wish you could explain”83—seems directly related to Siddons’s self-fashion-
ing strategies. Siddons’s gazing at herself in Garrick’s mirror, and her per- formance of the role of Lady Macbeth off stage to avoid culpability for her actions in Dublin, point to the ways in which Siddons’s self-fashioning strat- egies were aimed at relieving her own anxieties about the vulnerability of her celebrity status. But even more important is Siddons’s role as a diva, effectively asserting her specific vision of herself both on stage and off stage. Through her narrative, visual, and theatrical performances, Siddons is for the most part able to use her imaginary role as the Queen of the theater to mask her negotiations as a theatrical diva. The attention that Siddons pays to the negative publicity directed at her celebrity suggests that she was aware that, as a fake queen, she might be held responsible for her actions, particularly for the very threatening assumption of a Queen’s agency and power.