Rabbit Holes and Puzzle Boxes

This week I was finishing up a draft of a chapter on Sarah Siddons to send to my dear friend and editor. I made it (hooray), but as I went, I found myself confronting a forest-for-the-trees-related challenge.

This particular chapter started out with a pretty straightforward thrust and structure: unlike many of my subjects, there are an ABUNDANCE of sources I can use to detail Siddons's life and career, and it's a really nice problem to have. Along with this nice problem, however, also comes the persistent challenge of avoiding rabbit holes--long trains of research that end up being superfluous to the actual project, collapse in on themselves, and take you far away from the point. I am very familiar with rabbit holes. I fall into them way too often. This week, I encountered something different. I'm calling it a puzzle box: something that opens up to reveal new depth while retaining a structure and clear scope.

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I've been sitting with this material for a very long time. As my understanding of it deepened, I began to see ways for it to expand and grow in potentially productive and interesting ways. What I had initially dismissed as a biographer's mistaken date suddenly opened up a meditation on memory, the body, and historiography. Like a puzzle box, understanding how a person conflated two distinct events in their memory to create something that never happened unlocked new depth to my analysis.

On two distinct occasions four years apart, the biographer James Boaden told the same story twice. Each time, he focused on the same problem (why a play, Robert Dodsley's Cleone, failed), but offered a radically different solution. In the first, the play flopped because audiences disapproved of the playwright, a middle-class author; this failure was in spite of Sarah Siddons' herculean performance of the play's title character, a mother whose son is murdered and who runs made in a scene of exquisite distress. In the second, he specifically denies that audience taste explains the failure and focuses instead on Siddons' pregnancy as the culprit. Instead of the production's one saving grace, Siddons is now a liability, heightening the horror and terror of the play to such a fever pitch that the audience could not stand to watch. It's a great story, but Siddons wasn't pregnant when she played the part in 1786; that was the year before.

As I mentioned, I first assumed this was just a case of mistaken dating and fictionalizing history. But then I realized that Siddons did play a character while pregnant whose "maternal grief" could have the effect on the audience that Boaden described. She didn't act Cleone, but she did play Constance in Shakespeare's King John, whose grief at her separation from her son made her a favored role of eighteenth-century tragediennes.

What if this isn't a mistake of date, but simply of the play and the role? What if the description of the audience's pained reaction to Siddons's grieving, pregnant form was entirely accurate, it was just the details that had slipped away? What does it tell us about memory, about history, and about the sources we rely upon? What does it tell us about truth?

See you next week!