Synopses & Reviews
“The theatre scholars daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engagingly presented than in Pascoes account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty, and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research.”
—Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine
During her lifetime (1755-1831), English actress Sarah Siddons was an international celebrity acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines. We know what she looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice, reported to cause audiences to hyperventilate or faint? In The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Judith Pascoe takes readers on a journey to discover how the actors voice actually sounded. In lively and engaging prose, Pascoe retraces her quixotic search, which leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her life.
Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, Pascoe shows how romantic poets preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voices ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound and will engage a broad audience interested in how recording technology has altered human experience.
Review
"Along the way, the author aptly developed her own voiceher gift for felicitous, first-person writing, still a skeptically viewed undertaking in academic monographs. . . . Pascoe succeeds in creating an account, personal and learned, of her quest . . . She spices The Sarah Siddons Audio Files with lively writing . . . a literary counterpart to Siddonss riveting voice.”---The Chronicle of Higher Education
Review
"Richly informed by archival research and theories of new media supplemented by first-hand experimentation, and written in a lively, first-person voice,
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is a vibrant and sure-to-be-influential work of scholarship."
and#8212;Amy Muse, Comparative Drama
Review
"The theatre scholar's daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engaging presented than in Pascoe's account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research."
—Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine
Marvin Carlson
Review
Honorable Mention, Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theatre
Amy Muse - Comparative Drama
Review
Winner of the Barnard Hewitt Book Award from the American Society for Theatre Research
Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theatre
Review
"...a truly inredisciplinary study that is about much more than recovering Siddons's lost voice. In her multifaceted investigations, Pascoe asks us to consider what it means to think about historical evidence in the absence of tangible documentation, an issue that theater historians have been tackling for many years, but ehich have just recently become a central interest of literary scholars."
—Laura Engel, Women's Writing Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research
Synopsis
A remarkable journey to recover the voice of a legendary 18th-century actress
Synopsis
Winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award and a Joe A. Callaway Award Honorable Mention
Synopsis
English actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) was an international celebrity widely acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines.We know what Siddons looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice? In lively and engaging prose, Judith Pascoe journeys to discover how the celebrated romantic actors voice sounded and to understand its power to move audiences to a state of emotional collapse. The authors quixotic endeavor leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her own life.
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is the first full-scale attempt to address the importance of the voice in romantic culture. Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, the book shows how the romantic poets preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voices ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound, and will engage a broad audience interest in how recording technology has altered human experience.
About the Author
Judith Pascoe is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship and The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors.