Talk:Sarah Siddons

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Sarah Siddons article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Biography: Arts and Entertainment

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the arts and entertainment work group (assessed as High-importance).

Wales High‑importance

	Wales portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Wales, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Wales on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.WalesWikipedia:WikiProject WalesTemplate:WikiProject WalesWales articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

England Mid‑importance

	England portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject England, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of England on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EnglandWikipedia:WikiProject EnglandTemplate:WikiProject EnglandEngland-related articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Theatre Mid‑importance

	Theatre portal This article is part of WikiProject Theatre, a WikiProject dedicated to coverage of theatre on Wikipedia. To participate: Feel free to edit the article attached to this page, join up at the project page, or contribute to the project discussion.TheatreWikipedia:WikiProject TheatreTemplate:WikiProject TheatreTheatre articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Shakespeare High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Shakespeare, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of William Shakespeare on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ShakespeareWikipedia:WikiProject ShakespeareTemplate:WikiProject ShakespeareShakespeare articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

London Low‑importance

	London portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject London, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of London on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LondonWikipedia:WikiProject LondonTemplate:WikiProject LondonLondon-related articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Women's History High‑importance

	History portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women's History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Women's history and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women's HistoryWikipedia:WikiProject Women's HistoryTemplate:WikiProject Women's HistoryWomen's History articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on July 5, 2018.

Sources

I don't know what sources were used in the writing of this article but I checked the information here against the very long ODNB article and this one seems accurate. So, I included the ODNB as a reference and removed the "lack of sources" tag. scribblingwoman 04:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New file Sarah Siddons by J. Dickinson.jpg

Recently the file File:Sarah Siddons by J. Dickinson.jpg was uploaded and it appears to be relevant to this article and not currently used by it. If you're interested and think it would be a useful addition, please feel free to include it. Dcoetzee 04:02, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Portrait added.

Tovojolo (talk) 18:33, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Sarah Siddons. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/Siddons/Legend.htm
Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141121134137/http://www.sarahsiddonssociety.org/about-us/ to http://www.sarahsiddonssociety.org/about-us/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:48, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Welsh, English, Irish...

@Ritchie333 and Glane23: I'm not sure that it's strictly correct to characterize her as a "Welsh-born English actress", given that only her father was English. Her mother was Irish. Is there a reliable source for specifically calling Siddons just "English" in light of that? If not... well, "Welsh-born English-Irish actress" seems ridiculously clunky, and it may be preferable to stick with the simpler and objectively factual "Welsh-born actress" in the lead. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 17:33, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This National Portrait Gallery source says Siddons "continued to dominate the London stage until her farewell in 1812", which is kind of close. It might simply be best to go with British actress. You might want to ask Megalibrarygirl who's the girl with the mega library databases, or Martinevans123 who's knowledgeable about all things west of Offa's Dyke. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:42, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Welsh-born" refers to (duh) where she was born, but "English" refers to where she did her acting. They're orthogonal concepts, but both are correct. For anything prior to <waves hands vaguely> 1900-ish (or maybe as early as the 18th century; I'm hazy on the details), using "British" as "English+" is actually misleading. For Welsh, specifically, it may be close enough; but had she been born in Ireland it would have been actively problematic. Even after the union, and ignoring legal formality, culturally these were distinctly different nationalities (with attendant stereoptypes). Case in point, in a c. 1850 work I'm currently transcribing over at Wikisource, the author laments that an admired Irishman stayed with his stupid and provincial countrymen in Ireland, rather than come to England where his genious would have been allowed to flourish and would have been encouraged by the enlightened English. Edmond Malone, roughly contemporary with Mrs. Siddons, was very much an Irishman, but is considered an English scholar (and politically he was royalist, nationalist, and favoured the English).
Anyways, my point is that if we're to avoid the problem by just using one, we need to pick one of the specifics rather than make it more general: Siddons was Welsh and Malone was Irish. Calling either of them British is both inaccurate and misleading. --Xover (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You will be pleased to know that Brecon is definitely in Wales. (My father's family were all from just up the road in Builth, pretty much at the centre of Wales. Brecon is a great place for a Jazz Festival. I might add.) I find it curious that, 250 years on, these questions of English/ Welsh/ British, etc., are sometimes still just as difficult to answer. I'm more intrigued as to why she was born in Brecon at all - the article for her Roger Kemble makes no mention of the town. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:42, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Martinevans123: consider my edit earlier today about her birthplace. My guess is that the company was on tour in Wales, and they were passing through town on a short-term gig. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 22:36, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A perfectly reasonable explanation. But one wonders just how theatrical Brecon was in 1755? Not the hurly-burly showbiz metropolis that was swanky Builth Wells, obviously....Martinevans123 (talk) 22:40, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What he said. It could go either way, thus my reverts. I'm happy with whatever is the consensus. Geoff | ^{Who, me?} 17:32, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]