![]() States that “the possession of parts at that time (except when permitted novicesįor a trial of their theatrical skill)” was “considered as much the property of performers, as their weekly In Apology for the Life (1785), George Anne Bellamy ![]() Roles over the course of years, and sometimes decades. With earlier performances and younger versions of themselves.” Eighteenth-century players incarnated their celebrated Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and theĮighteenth-Century British Theater (2010), albeit without usingĬarlson’s terminology: “As aging actresses, they even found themselves competing Rivalry that Felicity Nussbaum similarly acknowledges in her introduction to Memories of her own performances.” This is a ![]() Ghosting wherein Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth competes “with the audience’s The ‘Dignity of the Siddonian Form,’” Lisa Freeman describes a modified form of Layered experiences of an actor in the same role in her 2015 article “Mourning The ghosts that the audience encounters when confronted with “the appearance ofĪn actor, remembered from previous roles, in a new characterization.” The memories of the audiences could also include Carlsonĭefines “ghosting” as “the identical thing that encounteredīefore, although now in a somewhat different context.” He discusses the varied forms in which ghosting can occur, including Machine, considers the theatre as a space of remembering. Memory work is inherent to the theatre, and Marvin Carlson’s 2001 monograph, titled Siddons’ Lady Macbeth.” In these essays, Hazlitt suggests that the actress only maintains her public identity through an early departure from the stage. I argue that, in these comparisons, the actress’s physical decline is accompanied by the loss of her former identity to this end, I will investigate the intersection of gender and age in William Hazlitt’s essays on retiring players: namely, “Miss O’Neill’s Retirement,” “Mr. To emphasize the feminine loss that accompanied aging, the authors of performance reviews and biographical descriptions of aging actresses would often juxtapose the player’s physical body with those of younger players, as well as with the memory of its own younger form. As the earliest female actresses on the London stage, these women were the first to navigate the public’s reception of the aging female body. Theatrical history of the long eighteenth century offers insight into how female players confronted these societal expectations of normative youth and femininity. In her 2013 monograph on cultural gerontology, Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life, Julia Twigg states: “Normative femininity is youthful, and this means that the changes in appearance that occur with age erode the status of women in a much more direct way.” Though Twigg is discussing the twenty-first century, this construction of normative femininity is not new. ![]() For actresses, whose careers relied on delivering performances using their physical bodies, this equation was detrimental to their public reception. In eighteenth-century theatrical documents, the language of youth and feminine beauty is accompanied by the language of their potential loss. ![]()
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