ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical, cultural, and theoretical connections between Siddons and Wollstonecraft in a number of arenas. In her material presence as a friend to Wollstonecraft who then overtly rejected her when scandals broke about her morality. In the cultural currency she earned through her portrayals of tragic female victims, who are analogues to Wollstonecraft's representations of wronged women and, most intriguingly, as a theorist of acting whose performances persistently destabilized gender roles. Siddons's professional influence in histories of acting and theoretical performance studies is indisputably legendary, her life as 'Sarah' or 'Mrs. Siddons' equally celebrated, marketed as it were. Both relationship between Siddons and Wollstonecraft and its ultimate rupture offer a complex example of the pervasiveness of the theatricality of social mechanisms. Siddons's preparations for her dramatic roles were both scholarly and creative. Siddons's notes and the reviews of her work all underscore a work ethic, seriousness to her approach to all roles, more commensurate with twentieth-century.
