1982 Have I been hasty ?-am I then to blame? Mrs. Siddons returned to Drury Lane Theatre in 1782, and may be said to have mounted with but a few steps to unrivalled possession of the tragic throne. The oldest praisers of the by-gone time scarcely pretended to have beheld or heard of her superior in acting, though they had seen the best actresses of the century, and had heard their fathers describe those of the age before. When I entered on the Life of Mrs. Siddons, I felt curious to ascertain the traditional characters of those women who may be called her predecessors as the Queens of our Tragic stage; and, when any subject engages our own interest, we naturally imagine that it will not be wholly unattractive to the curiosity of others. I even felt as if there would be something like abruptness in commencing the history of her professional supremacy without some prefatory remarks on the previous state of Female acting in England. This was perhaps taking an exaggerated view of the subject. But, at all events, as my retrospect of our greatest tragic actresses, anterior to Mrs. Siddons, will be brief, I hope the reader will not repudiate it as a wholly uninteresting digression. It is true, that all the information to be gleaned respecting those elder actresses is very scanty; and it is the misfortune of histrionic genius that the most vivid portraits of it convey but vague conceptions of its excellence. And yet, amidst all this vagueness, the mind can make out some general and trustworthy conclusions. I find, for instance, no Queen of our stage so unequivocally extolled for majesty and beauty of person as Mrs. Siddons: nor any one whose sway over her audiences can be imagined to have been stronger. My inference is, if I may parody Milton's phrase, that she was the fairest of her predecessors—and that if Time could re-build his ruins, and re-act the lost scenes of existence, he would present no female to match her on the Tragic stage. |