Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble

Siblings Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) were the most famous British actors of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Through their powerful acting and meticulous conceptualisation of Shakespeare’s characters and their worlds, they created iconic interpretations of Shakespeare’s major roles that live on in our theatrical and cultural memory. This book examines the actors’ long careers on the London stage, from Siddons’s debut in 1782 to Kemble’s retirement in 1817, encompassing Kemble’s time as theatre manager, when he sought to foreground their strengths as Shakespearean performers in his productions. Over the course of more than thirty years, Siddons and Kemble appeared opposite one another in many Shakespeare plays, including King John, Henry VIII, Coriolanus and Macbeth. The actors had to negotiate two major Shakespeare scandals: the staging of Vortigern – a fake Shakespearean play – in 1796 and the Old Price Riots of 1809, during which the audience challenged Siddons’s and Kemble’s perceived attempts to control Shakespeare. Fiona Ritchie examines the siblings’ careers, focusing on their collaborations, as well as placing Siddons’s and Kemble’s Shakespeare performances in the context of contemporary 18th- and 19th-century drama. The volume not only offers a detailed consideration of London theatre, but also explores the importance of provincial performance to the actors, notably in the case of Hamlet – a role in which both appeared across Britain and in Ireland.

Fiona Ritchie is Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre in the Department of English at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (2014) and the co-editor (with Peter Sabor) of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (2012).

Peter Holland holds the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre and is Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He was formerly Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and is editor of Shakespeare Survey and co-general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series.

Peter Holland is McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

Peter Holland is the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies and the Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

Stephen Purcell is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Warwick, UK.

Miranda Fay Thomas is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. They are the author of Shakespeare's Body Language: Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage (the Arden Shakespeare, 2019) and editor of The Tempest (Arden Performance Editions, 2021).

Vanessa I. Corredera is Professor of English at Baylor University, USA. Her publications include Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (2022), articles in Literature Compass, The Journal of American Studies, Borrowers and Lenders, and Shakespeare Quarterly, and essays in several edited collections. She is also co-editor, alongside L. Monique Pittman and Geoffrey Way, of Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (2023), as well as a General Editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.