by Paula Byrne
At this time, Mary was increasingly subjected to the ‘alluring temptations’ of noblemen who wished to take her under their protection. Charles Manners, the fourth Duke of Rutland, offered her £600 a year for the privilege. She turned him down. She wanted the patronage of the theatregoing and poetry-reading public, not that of an aristocrat seeking a courtesan. In her Memoirs, Mary refused to name all the men who propositioned her, so as not to ‘create some reproaches in many families of the fashionable world’.8 But she let it be known that advances were made by a royal Duke, a lofty Marquis, and a city merchant of ‘considerable fortune’. Many of these men conveyed their proposals via Mary’s milliners and dressmakers. The scurrilous Memoirs of Perdita, published in 1784 for the purpose of discrediting her, gives graphic details of her purported sexual adventures with both the conceited dandy Lord Cholmondeley and an unnamed heavy-drinking importer of vintage wines. Though not to be trusted, this source provides incidental confirmation of the impression that men from both the established aristocracy and the world of new city money had designs on her.
One of the men who paid her most attention was Sir John Lade, the wealthy heir to a brewery fortune and former ward of Henry Thrale, friend of Dr Johnson. Soon after coming of age, Lade concentrated all his energies on the Robinson household in the Great Piazza. He gambled with Tom and paid court to Mary. Gossip columnists were soon sniffing round the ménage:
A certain young Baronet, well known on the Turf, and famous for his high phaeton, had long laid siege to a pretty actress (a married woman) at one of our theatres; he sent her a number of letters, which after she had read (and perhaps did not like, as they might not speak to the purpose) she sent him back again; a kind of Bo-peep Play was kept up between them in the theatres, and from the Bedford Arms Tavern and her window. The Baronet is shame-faced, and could not address her in person, but by means of some good friend they were brought together, and on Sunday se’en-night set out in grand cavalcade for Epsom, to celebrate the very joyful occasion of their being acquainted. The Baronet went first, attended by a male friend, in his phaeton, and the lady with her husband in a post coach and four, with a footman behind it; the day was spent with the greatest jollity, and the night also, if we may believe report. Since that time they are seen together in public at the theatres and elsewhere, the husband always making one of the party, between whom and the Baronet there is always the greatest friendship.9
Lade, who later managed the Prince’s racing stables, affected to dress and speak like a groom. He eventually married a girl called Letty, who had been a servant in a brothel. Lady Letty Lade went on to have affairs with both the Duke of York and a highwayman known as ‘Sixteen-string Jack’.
As rumour spread that Lade had won the affections of the actress, every rake in London began seeking the acquaintance of the beautiful Mrs Robinson. Sheridan was worried that his star would be tempted away by one of the men who were paying court to her. He warned Mary about her expensive lifestyle and the company she kept. The image of her younger self that she presents in the Memoirs is, to say the least, wide-eyed: ‘I had been then seen and known at all public places from the age of fifteen; yet I knew as little of the world’s deceptions as though I had been educated in the deserts of Siberia. I believed every woman friendly, every man sincere, till I discovered proofs that their characters were deceptive.’10 Given all that she had seen in both high society and low, she could not really have been that naive.
Despite the fact that she was treated as public property by the men who pursued her, Mary evoked this time as a golden age of theatre. Sheridan was at the peak of his reputation as a playwright and manager, following the success of his School for Scandal. He was beginning to turn his mind towards a political career and had recently met the young radical politician Charles James Fox. The green room was frequented by the nobility and ‘men of genius’ such as Fox and Lord Derby, who was to marry Elizabeth Farren: ‘the stage was now enlightened by the very best critics, and embellished by the very highest talents’. Mary also remarked that one of the reasons for Drury Lane’s popularity during this season of 1779–80 was that nearly all the principal women were under the age of twenty (a slight exaggeration). As well as herself and Farren, the lovely Charlotte Walpole and Priscilla Hopkins were on the payroll.
The public’s appetite for news, gossip, and scandal about the stage was insatiable. One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with a small group of actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives. The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to discover the intimate details of actors’ lives. A successful player could only have a public private life. Actors’ journals and memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals and magazines rolled off the press. Prints and caricatures of actresses could be bought cheaply. Theatre gossip could be picked up from the newspapers, together with instant accounts of the latest performances – this was the age when professional theatre reviewing grew to maturity.
Sheridan launched his new season on 18 September 1779 with Mary as Ophelia. ‘Natural and affecting,’ said the Morning Chronicle. ‘Ophelia found a more than decent representative in Mrs Robinson,’ judged the Morning Post, ‘except in her singing, which was rather too discordant even for madness itself!’ It also noted that ‘the house, though not a very brilliant [i.e. aristocratic], was a crowded one, and both play and entertainment [the musical Comus] went off with considerable éclat’.11 Mary was Lady Anne in Richard III a week later.
Next, she reprised her Fidelia in The Plain Dealer. Her costume drew attention, though the critic in the Morning Post tried to give the impression that he was only looking at it from the point of view of dramatic verisimilitude, not that of the shapely leg to which it clung:
Fidelia was performed with great ease and feeling by Mrs Robinson, and is by far the best character she has hitherto attempted; but as propriety of stage dress should always be strictly attended to, particularly in the professional characters, it may not be improper to inform Mrs Robinson, that Fidelia as a Volunteer cannot wear a Lieutenant’s uniform, without a violation of all dramatic consistency.12
She played fifty-five nights that season, adding to her repertoire Viola in Twelfth Night, Nancy in The Camp, Rosalind in As You Like It, Oriana in George Farquhar’s The Inconstant, Widow Brady (‘with an Epilogue Song’) in Garrick’s The Irish Widow, and Eliza Camply in The Miniature Picture by Lady Elizabeth Craven. As Oriana, she had to win over a reluctant lover by engaging in various schemes including dressing as a nun, feigning madness, and disguising herself as a page-boy. As the Irish Widow, she had to mimic a strong brogue, put down an assortment of men, talk about her clothes, claim that she despised money, and cross-dress as a sword-bearing officer called Lieutenant O’Neale. But it was the Shakespearean breeches roles of Viola and Rosalind that were her greatest triumph. She revealed a gift for both the expression of Shakespeare’s language and the characters’ emotional range – from pathos through wit to fortitude and command.
Admirers began to address her through the medium of the daily press. The Morning Post printed a long and not a little voyeuristic letter to her. ‘Madam,’ it began,
Criticism is a cold exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the chill, and the acid of the critique. I am the veriest bigot to old Shakespeare. – The Genius himself could not have gazed upon you with more delight; nor have forerun your motion, action, and utterance, with more tremulous solicitude for your excellence in Viola, than I did. Shakespeare’s principal substantives should never be sunk, nor kept back, as it were, from the attention, by an emphatic tone upon his epithets.
In the manner of speaking the ‘green and yellow melancholy,’ I would, sweet woman, that the yellow tinge appeared no more than equal to the green; and, that the melancholy so coloured should have a principal share of your voice to mark the subject.
I have seen you too in Fidelia, and am apt to think, that the tone, force, and manner of tragedy make a kind of apparel, both too magnificent, and too solemn, for the sentimental part of comedy.
BO-PEEP13
The author sounds as if he would very much like to pay a private visit to her dressing room in order to advise her upon her Shakespearean epithets.
She also played the female lead in Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s 1756 version of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was revived by Sheridan, after fourteen years’ absence from the repertoire, on Saturday, 20 November 1779, in memory of Garrick, who had died earlier that year. It centred on the young lovers, Prince Florizel and Perdita, who is supposed to be a shepherd’s daughter but is really a princess. It included a sheepshearing song, sung by Perdita, and a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses. Mary’s performance was a success, though the Morning Post complained ‘Mrs Robinson’s Perdita would have been very decent, but for that strange kind of niddle to noddle, that she now throws into every character, comic, as well as tragic.’14
At the second presentation, the following Tuesday, she was honoured by the presence of such leaders of London society as the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Lord and Lady Melbourne, Lord and Lady Spencer, Lord and Lady Cranbourne, and Lord and Lady Onslow. After this performance the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser published a long criticism. It said that the piece ‘is in general well cast and ably performed’, but reservations were expressed about the costumes:
The dresses on which much of the effect depends, were liable to very glaring objections. Shakespeare has been particularly attentive to the dress of Florizel and Perdita:
Your high self you have obscur’d
With a swain’s wearing, and me poor lowly maid,
Most goddess-like, prank’d up—
To correspond with this description Florizel and Perdita have hitherto appeared in beautiful dresses, covered with flowers of both the same pattern, and she wore an ornamented sheep hook, instead of which Mrs Robinson appears in a common jacket, and wears the usual red ribbons of an ordinary milk-maid, and in this dress she also appears with the King to view the supposed statue of Hermione, after she is acknowledged his daughter.15
For most of the audience, though, the figure-hugging jacket and milkmaid’s ribbons were exactly what they wanted to see. Takings were excellent and the show played again on the next Friday night and the Monday and Wednesday after that. Mary gained further public exposure when the Morning Post printed her poem ‘Celadon and Lydia’.16 Then on Friday, 3 December 1779 there was a royal command performance. A full house was assured. Mrs Robinson was about to become ‘the famous Perdita’.
PART TWO
Celebrity
CHAPTER 8
Florizel and Perdita
Her name is Robinson, on or off the stage for I have seen her both, she is I believe almost the greatest and most perfect beauty of her sex.
George, Prince of Wales
King George and Queen Charlotte were ardent lovers of the stage, commanding over three hundred performances between 1776 and 1800. The King preferred modern comedies, calling Shakespeare ‘sad stuff’. He also preferred the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden to its rival. Especially after Sheridan took over Drury Lane, and became more and more closely identified politically with the radical Whig faction of Charles James Fox, the two theatres – situated within a few hundred yards of each other – were seen as reflections of the political divisions within Parliament. Drury Lane was regarded as the Opposition’s theatre, Covent Garden as the Government’s. So the appearance of the royal family at Drury Lane on 3 December 1779 was a very special occasion.
They arrived at a door situated near the stage door. The royal box was next to the proscenium on the audience’s left-hand side and always especially fitted up at command performances. The royals were met by one of the proprietors of the theatre. Equipped with a candelabrum, and walking backwards to face the King, he led them through a private corridor that gave direct access to the box. The King would pay £10 on every night that it was occupied. The royal party was presented with special playbills printed on satin. As the King came within sight of the audience, everybody stood up and applauded. The greeting was returned with a bow. The family would have had a very close view of the stage, and would even have been able to see the actors waiting in the wings.
Accompanying the King and Queen that night was 17-year-old George, soon to become Prince of Wales and eventually King George IV. He was dressed in blue velvet trimmed with gold and wore diamond buckles on his shoes. He would have sat in the Prince’s box, which was adorned with his motif of three feathers and situated directly opposite the King’s – and equally close to the stage.
The Prince at the age of 17 was not the fat, lecherous, dissipated hedonist of later years, depicted in so many satirical cartoons. When Mary first met him he was handsome, cultivated, and good-tempered. He was known as a man of enormous charm, intelligence, and taste. Mary was not exaggerating when she described him as ‘the most admired and most accomplished Prince in Europe’.1 He fenced and boxed, but also played the cello, drew and had a deep appreciation of painting. One of the members of the royal household, Mrs Papendiek, wrote in her journal, ‘he was not so handsome as his brother, but his countenance was of a sweetness and intelligence quite irresistible. He had an elegant person, engaging and distinguished manners, added to an affectionate disposition and the cheerfulness of youth.’2 In a letter to his first love, Mary Hamilton, written when he was 16, he described himself as follows:
Your brother is now approaching the bloom of youth. He is rather above normal size, his limbs well proportioned, and upon the whole is well made, though he has rather too great a penchant to grow fat. The features of his countenance are strong and manly, though they carry too much of an air of hauteur. His forehead is well shaped, his eyes, though none of the best, and although grey are passable … His sentiments and thoughts are open and generous. He is above doing anything that is mean (too susceptible, even to believing people his friends, and placing too much confidence in them, from not yet having obtained a sufficient knowledge of the world or of its practices), grateful and friendly to an excess where he finds a real friend. His heart is good and tender if it is allowed to show its emotions … Now for his vices, rather let us call them weaknesses. He is too subject to give vent to his passions of every kind, too subject to be in a passion, but he never bears malice or rancour in his heart. As for swearing, he has nearly cured himself of that vile habit. He is rather too fond of Wine and Women, to both which young men are apt to deliver themselves too much, but which he endeavours to check to the utmost of his power. But upon the whole, his Character is open, free and generous.3
His fondness for wine and women, even at such a young age, was a reaction against the restraint and rigid application to duty in which he had grown up. When he misbehaved as a child, he was beaten by the King in person. The royal household was based in secluded quarters at Kew and Windsor. The Prince and his brother, Frederick Duke of York, had their own apartments, where they were maintained under the watchful eye of an austere governor, the Earl of Holdernesse. Inevitably, the Prince sought more interesting company and developed a tendency to fall in with the wrong people. When he was 15, one of his tutors, a bishop, was asked his opinion of his pupil. ‘I can hardly tell,’ he replied. ‘He will be either the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe, possibly an admixture of both.’4
Garrick’s adaptation of The Winter’s Tale omitted the first three acts of Shakespeare’s original and began the action with a penitent Leontes washed up on the coast of Bohemia in company with his courtiers. Whereas Hermione is the
most important female part in the original, the adaptation – which was published under the title Florizel and Perdita – concentrates more on the young lovers: the prince Florizel and the shepherdess who is really a princess. The name Perdita means ‘the lost one’, but, of course, she is found in the end and the Prince and the Princess are married. The outcome of the royal command performance that December night was, it might be said, the original ‘scandal in Bohemia’.
By her own account, Mary was teased by the other players before the show began. William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, so called for his skill in playing genteel roles on the stage and for his manners and intelligence off it, was to be Leontes. ‘By Jove, Mrs Robinson,’ he said, ‘you will make a conquest of the Prince; for to-night you look handsomer than ever.’5
Before she was due to go on, Mary chatted in the wings to Richard Ford (son of one of the proprietors of Drury Lane), who introduced her to his friend, George Capel, Viscount Malden, who was a politician and also a boon companion to the young Prince of Wales. Malden was 22, the same age as Mary. Known as a dandy, he was attired in his usual flamboyant dress – pink satin with silver trim and pink heels to match his coat. The Prince watched them from his box, as he conversed with his companions. He was of medium height, stocky with a rather florid complexion and powdered hair. Mary always remembered the especially clear view of him that she had as she waited in the wings.