A Portrait of Shakespeare's Folio: Sarah Siddons's Editorial Legacy in Current Editorial Theory and Practice

Siddons is best known for pioneering a new style of acting that produced impassioned and psychologically plausible interpretations of stage characters, as conventions of neo-classical performance began to yield to Romantic acting. Little is however known about Siddons's talent as a reader, critic and editor of early modern texts. Starting from a close analysis of Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Siddons, shown leafing through a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio (and now in the holdings of Tate Britain), this essay reconstructs Siddons's influence on early nineteenth-century editors of early modern texts, including the first professional female editor of drama, Elizabeth Inchbald. This essay argues that Siddons and Inchbald were responsible for initiating a new approach to the editing of early modern drama, which placed performance (and the insights an editor can gain from performance) centre-stage, as a crucial source of critical interpretation on a level with an editor's literary judgement and familiarity with the material conditions of print production in the early modern period.