were, you would / Be so much more the man." Thus Lady Macbeth enforces a masculine conception of power, yet only after pleading to be unsexed, or defeminised. Performance history John Rice, a boy actor with the King's Men, may have played Lady Macbeth in a performance of what was likely Shakespeare's tragedy at the Globe Theatre on 20 April 1611. The performance was witnessed and described by Simon Forman in his manuscript The Book of Plays and Notes thereof per Formans for Common Policy. His account, however, does not establish whether the play was Shakespeare's Macbeth or a work on the same subject by another dramatist. The role may have been beyond the talents of a boy actor and may have been played by a man in early performances. In the mid-18th century, Hannah Pritchard played Lady Macbeth opposite David Garrick's Macbeth. She was, in Thomas Davies' words, "insensible to compunction and inflexibly bent on cruelty." Sarah Siddons starred in John Philip Kemble's 1794 production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and offered a psychologically intricate portrait of Lady Macbeth in the tradition of Hannah Pritchard. Siddons was especially praised for moving audiences in the sleepwalking scene with her depiction of a soul in profound torment. Siddons and Kemble furthered the view established by Pritchard and Garrick that character was the essence of Shakespearean drama. William Hazlitt commented on Siddons' performance: Helen Faucit was critiqued by Henry Morley, a professor of English literature in University College, London, who thought the actress "too demonstrative and noisy" in the scenes before Duncan's murder with the "Come, you spirits" speech "simply spouted" and its closing "Hold! Hold!" shouted in a "most unheavenly manner." In the "I have given suck" speech, he thought Faucit "poured out" the speech in a way that recalled the "scold at the door of a gin-shop." Faucit, he believed, was "too essentially feminine, too exclusively gifted with the art of expressing all that is most beautiful and graceful in womanhood, to succeed in inspiring anything like awe and terror." He thought her talents more congenial to the second phase of the character, and found her "admirably good" in the banquet scene. Her sleepwalking scene, however, was described as having "the air of a too well-studied dramatic recitation." In 1884 at the Gaiety Theatre, Sarah Bernhardt performed the sleepwalking scene barefoot and clad in a clinging nightdress, and, in