Category: Plays/Films/Dramas
The lax morality prevailing in England at the time of the Restoration, produced a literary and dramatic school of art suited to the taste of the public. Congreve wrote _Love for Love_, and coolly remarked, when accused of immorality, “that, if _it_ were an immodest play, he wa...
John Kemble was now both actor and manager at Covent Garden, and the results were much more satisfactory in every way to Mrs. Siddons. Harris the proprietor was strictly punctua...
10. CHAPTER X.Mrs. Siddons’s life between the years 1785 to 1798 was passed in the professional treadmill, and her history during this period is best told by an account of the characters she...
7. CHAPTER VII.On the 15th June she tore herself away from all these “private” and “public marks of gratifying suffrages,” and again paid a visit to Dublin, which at the beginning was more suc...
9. CHAPTER IX.Needless to say that in those days, when genius was worshipped and the entrance to the most exclusive circles of society accorded to talent of every description, the social homa...
4. CHAPTER IV.The rebuff she had sustained at Drury Lane called out all that was finest in Mrs. Siddons’ nature. The blow had been “stunning and cruel,” as she says; but the resolute valiant...
1. CHAPTER I.The lax morality prevailing in England at the time of the Restoration, produced a literary and dramatic school of art suited to the taste of the public. Congreve wrote _Love for...
2. CHAPTER II.As Sarah Kemble passed from childhood to early womanhood, she continued to act the round of all the company’s plays, taking more important parts as she grew older. The very atmo...
12. CHAPTER XII.It sends a pang through our heart as we hear Mrs. Siddons say in later life, with a sigh, to Rogers the poet: “After I became famous, none of my sisters loved me so well.” What...
17. CHAPTER XVI.In 1817 Mrs. Siddons, anxious, for the sake of her daughter Cecilia, to see more society, left her Country retreat, Westbourne Farm, where so many hours of repose snatched from...
3. CHAPTER III.“Have you ever heard,” asked Garrick, in an unpublished letter to Moody, then at Liverpool, “of a woman Siddons, who is strolling about somewhere near you?” Four months later, b...
8. CHAPTER VIII.Contemporaneous critics are unanimous in declaring Lady Macbeth to be Mrs. Siddons’s finest impersonation, and it is with this _rôle_ that we always connect the Great Actress. S...
6. CHAPTER VI.Irishmen have a natural theatrical instinct, and Dublin, at the time of which we write, was to a certain degree valued as a censor in dramatic affairs as highly as London. A Dub...
15. CHAPTER XV.What wonder that Mrs. Siddons now seriously began to think of retirement. Already, in 1805, she had written to a friend: “It is better to work hard and have done with it. If I c...
5. CHAPTER V.At last all difficulties were arranged between the manager of Drury Lane and Mrs. Siddons, and the day dawned on which she was again destined to make her bow before a London aud...
13. CHAPTER XIII.Though still suffering from enfeebled health, Mrs. Siddons again made up her mind to visit Dublin in the spring of 1802. A strange depression, partly the result of physical weak...
11. CHAPTER XI.The apparition of Sheridan, meteor-like, in the laborious, active, well-regulated lives of Mrs. Siddons and her brother, and the history of his professional intercourse with the...
16. act ten nights for the benefit of her son’s family:—“A thousand thousand thanks to you my kind and good friend for your most delightful and gratifying letter. You do me justice in believing that whatever conduces to your happines...