ABSTRACT
It is difficult for the frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S.
(Charles Lamb, quoted in Bate 112)
In 1957, at the thirty-fifth annual Pageant of the Masters in Irvine, California, the actress Bette Davis posed as Sarah Siddons in a recreation of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons as The Tragic Muse. In a photograph of the event, Davis appears in full eighteenth-century garb, seated on a mock throne, glaring down at a woman who reaches up to her in a gesture of devotion.1 That an organizer of the event chose Davis to portray the eighteenth-century diva Sarah Siddons is a testament to the lasting quality of a category of identity that Siddons invented: the modern female superstar. The idea of the actress as a Queen, as an untouchable ideal, an exemplar of femininity, and a sublime being, originated with Siddons. Her celebrity status was the result of carefully crafted visual strategies on stage, on canvas, and in print that worked to convince audiences that she was, as William Hazlitt remarked, “tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind” (5: 312).
