Sarah Siddons’s Performances as Hamlet: Breaching the Breeches Part

Abstract

Sarah Siddons performed the role of Hamlet nine times over thirty years, reviving this early role once she was an established star, and playing it till the age of fifty. Yet this occurrence has hitherto drawn scanty analysis that has often been rife with contradiction and inaccuracies. For an actress of such stature to have played a role so central to the Shakespeare canon deserves deeper scrutiny and clarification. I read her choice of costume as an encapsulation of how she foregrounds and complicates gender. The costume Siddons designed for the part, neither conventionally male nor female, resists the inevitable sexualization that was then associated with breeches parts, and instead, indicates Siddons’s radical choice to play Hamlet without breeches. The boldness of Siddons’s choice of both role and costume lies in the distinction, little discussed, between traditional breeches parts and cross‐gendered roles. She prompted James Boaden and Ann Radcliffe, among others, to an inchoate recognition of the exteriority and constructedness of gender. I particularize current discussions regarding Siddons’s manipulations of and contributions to gender discourse, and situate Siddons’s performances within the history of theater, gender, and Romanticism.