Frankenstein in Jersey

There have been numerous stage adaptations of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, going back to Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption in 1823.

The gothic tale has also provided plenty of material for film, beginning with a 1910 short made by the Edison studio, and continuing through to the Guillermo del Toro epic recently released by Netflix.

I was particularly keen to see the stage adaptation being performed now at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. It uses a script penned by David Catlin for the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and is directed by STNJ's artistic director, Brian B. Crowe.

This adaptation uses as a framing device the famous story-writing contest at Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. Mary Shelley (played by Amber Friendly) becomes Elizabeth, her common-law husband Percy (Sean-Michael Wilkinson) becomes Victor Frankenstein, and their friend George Gordon Byron (Jay Wade) appropriately emerges as the monster.

Also present during that fateful summer by Lake Geneva was Byron's personal physician John Polidori (Neil Redfield) who semi-plagiarized Byron's tale and published the first famous vampire story in English. Polidori goes on to enact a number of roles in this production, including Victor's friend Henry and the ship captain who encounters first Victor and then the mysterious creature.

We wouldn't know as much as we do about that summer at Villa Diodati were it not for Claire Clairmont (Brooke Turner), Mary Shelley's stepsister who kept a detailed journal that year while waiting for the birth of the child she had with Byron. Claire plays Victor's mother in this adaptation, among a number of other roles, and sometimes nearly steals the show.

The play is showing until November 16th at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in Madison, New Jersey. It's just a short distance from the train station in Madison, on the beautiful campus of Drew University, and it's well worth a trip!

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!

It been a spooky season, and I've been watching a lot of spooky films. Last night, I saw The Phantom Carriage, directed by Victor Sjöström, who also plays the protagonist in the 1921 silent.

The film uses double exposure to create haunting images, and seems strongly influenced by A Christmas Carol. By the 20th century, I imagine that not only Charles Dickens's novella but several stage versions of it had become widely known in Sweden, where the film was made. The movie's plot revolves around not Christmas but New Year's, which makes the film also reminiscent of another supernatural piece by Dickens, The Chimes.

Recently, I was curious to learn of a dark Tennessee Williams film adaptation, The Fugitive Kind. It's based on Orpheus Descending, which reworked a previous Williams play, Battle of Angels. I had to look the film up after I found out it was directed by Sidney Lumet with a host of great actors, including Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton. Brando was paid a million dollars to be in the film, which was unheard of in 1960 when the movie was released.

In spite of Brando's star appeal, the film lost money. It did better than Battle of Angels, though, which closed during tryouts in Boston. The reworked version, Orpheus Descending, did much better, running for 68 performances at the Martin Beck on Broadway. Stapleton played the female leading role of Lady on stage, but was replaced with Magnani in the film, taking on instead the substantial but smaller role of Vee. The story, in all of its iterations, is a Southern Gothic tale of lust, revenge, and murder.

This evening, I watched another spooky movie, Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Like A Christmas Carol, that novel has been adapted for the stage over and over again. In fact, next weekend I'll be seeing a new stage version at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Monsters, figurative or literal, tend to do well on stage, especially this time of year.

Byron's Dramas

Today is the birthday of novelist Mary Shelley, but I want to write about the plays of one of her associates, George Gordon Byron, who remained a close friend and colleague of hers until his death in 1824.

While Byron is today known mainly as a poet, the latest issue of The Byron Journal has a couple of articles addressing his dramas Cain and Manfred. Both plays are verse dramas that Byron protested (perhaps too much, methinks) were not intended for the stage, but then they got performed over and over again anyway.

In "Byron in Space" Anthony Howe of Birmingham City University takes a look at cosmology in Cain as well as Byron's mock-epic poem Don Juan. While earlier poets like John Milton could invoke the Ptolemaic universe at least somewhat seriously, that was not the case for Byron in the 19th century. Act II of Cain shows Lucifer taking the title character to "The Abyss of Space" and asking him to point out the Earth. Cain responds:

                                                        As we move

    Like sunbeams onward, it grows small and smaller,

    And as it waxes little, and then less,

    Gathers a halo round it, like the light

    Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I

    Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise...

Howe notes how Cain becomes lost in the vastness of space. He seems to suffer from the pain of the Copernican revolution, no longer able to count on the Earth being a fixed point. Interestingly, though, the cosmos he sees still has elements of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, including not just "ether" also a heaven that is a "blue wilderness" postulated by earlier astronomers who thought the sky only grew dark when the Earth's shadow passed over it.

Flora Lisica of Northeastern University London speculates in "Byron's Manfred and Tragedy in the 'Mental Theatre'" that the tragedies of Byron achieve their greatest intimacy when read. Curiously, she does not include Heaven and Earth with the tragic plays Byron had published. (The play is a sort of sequel to his earlier drama Cain.) However, she does remind readers of the advice--traced back to Roman drama--that Byron gives in his poem Hints from Horace:

    Yet many deeds preserved in history's page

    Are better told than acted on the stage;

    The ear sustains what shocks the timid eye,

    And horror thus subsides to sympathy...

Later in the article, Lisica quotes from one of Byron's letters he wrote after seeing Barbarina Wilmot's tragedy Ina, which failed at Drury Lane, probably due to the half-hearted acting of Edmund Kean. Byron lamented Kean's poor performance, and the fact that the epilogue recited by Sarah Bartley could hardly be heard. Alas, the play bombed, in spite of fine performances by Alexander Rae as the villainous monk Baldred and Julia Glover as Princess Edelfleda.

Perhaps it was the fear of failing with a play like Ina that made Byron turn inward when writing Manfred, creating a deeply introspective work. In any case, I enjoyed reading both articles and look forward to the next issue of The Byron Journal when it arrives.

Mythic Collaborations

Mary and Percy Shelley have both made their marks on the theatre, she through the numerous adaptations of her novel Frankenstein, and he through plays like The Cenci.

However, the two also collaborated on a pair of dramas based on Ovid's telling of Greek mythology. For both Proserpine and Midas, Mary wrote dialogue in iambic pentameter while Percy supplied special songs in more ornate verse.

The plays remained unpublished during their lifetimes, but after Percy's death, Mary published her husband's songs as free-standing poems. Frequently, the two writers edited one another's work, but in this case their collaboration was much fuller. With Mary as what musical theatre artists call the "book writer" and Percy as the lyricist, all they needed was a composer to come up with a Broadway hit!

Interestingly enough, Proserpine tells the story of the goddess of spring being abducted by Hades, a theme also explored in the musical Hadestown. Rather than calling the heroine Persephone, however, the play had "Proserpine" rhyme with "divine." The first song, "Arethusa," is sung by the nymph Ino to Proserpine. Later, Proserpine sings her own song, beginning "Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth."

In Midas, the Shelleys take a more humorous look at mythology. The play begins with King Midas of Phrygia judging a musical contest between Apollo and Pan. Midas chooses Pan, winning a pair of ass ears from Apollo. He gets into even worse trouble by helping Bacchus find his foster father Silenus. The god offers him anything he wants, and Midas foolishly asks that all he touches turn into gold. Predictable problems ensue.

Both works date to 1820, after the Shelleys had already matured as authors. Sadly, the full plays are rarely (if ever) performed, but the songs have continued to enjoy a celebrated afterlife.

Reviewed in THE BYRON JOURNAL

I'm pleased to find that my new book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas has been positively reviewed in The Byron Journal.

Julie Carlson previously reviewed the book for The Coleridge Bulletin, paying particularly close attention to the chapter I have on S.T. Coleridge's Remorse. Given that the book also has a chapter on George Gordon Byron's Manfred, it's not surprising that The Byron Journal reviewed it as well.

Timothy Ruppert of Slippery Rock University wrote the review. "I think it is quite likely that Romantic Actors will help to foster a desperately needed renovation in the study of Shelley, Byron, and other theatre-makers whose contributions have been unacknowledged or poorly understood," Ruppert wrote. "Armstrong merits commendation for his vision, lucidity, and persuasiveness, as well as for his fortitude in positing a new way of seeing Regency-era stagecraft."

This issue of The Byron Journal also has an article by Jane Stabler, who gave the Annual Byron Scotland Lecture at the opening of last month's conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies. Susan J. Wolfson, Maria Schoina, David Duff, and Peter W. Graham also contributed articles to the issue.

Shelley's Mythic Dramas

I very much enjoyed attending the conference of the British Association of Romantic Studies in Glasgow, but the conference isn't quite over yet. Today and tomorrow, numerous sessions are being held online.

This morning, I zoomed in for a panel chaired by Francesca Saggini and a roundtable put together by Omar Miranda. I was most interested, however, by a paper Pablo San Martín Varela delivered this afternoon as part of a session on Manifestos, Uprisings, Rebellions and Revolutions.

Varela spoke on "The Making and Unmaking of Social Structures in Shelley’s Later Dramas" including Prometheus Unbound, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and Hellas. Unlike P.B. Shelley's frequently performed play The Cenci, these dramas are all based on Greek models, and likely weren't meant for performance.

Prometheus Unbound is inspired in part by Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, which had a lost sequel by the same name as Shelley's drama. Varela said Shelley's play shows a mind trying to remake the world through imagination and love. By using myth, he argued, Shelley was able to create an alternate way of representing history in which violence did not have to beget more violence.

Swellfoot the Tyrant is a literal way of translating Oedipus Tyrannus, but Shelley's burlesque has more in common with the Old Comedy of Aristophanes than with any tragedy by Sophocles. He wrote the play in the wake of the Queen Caroline affair in Britain, and it largely reflects contemporary politics. Varela noted that the chorus of swine in the play turns into a chorus of horned bulls when they become no longer just passive representatives of the masses.

I've previously written about Shelley's Hellas, which is a reworking of another Aeschylus play, The Persians. It portrays the uprising of Greek patriots against the Ottoman Empire, but just as Aeschylus told his story of freedom from the oppressor's point of view, Hellas focuses on the Ottoman Emperor Mahmud II. Shelley opposed violence for any reason, and Varela noted that the play depicts rebels as resorting to the same violent means as their oppressors.

The online portion of the conference continues tomorrow. I'm hoping to catch a session on Rewriting Narratives of the East.

BARS 2024

I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the 2024 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in Glasgow.

 

The conference kicked off on Tuesday with a talk by Michelle Levy on women writers and publishing. Though we often think of authors in the 18th and 19th centuries as selling their copyrights outright, Levy noted that this often was not the case. She gave particular attention to the poet Phillis Wheatley, who appears to have received half of the print run of her poems to sell herself for her own profit.

 

Next, I chaired a panel on Faustian Romanticism. Three speakers addressed how the Faust dramas of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe influenced British Romantic writers. Martin Potter discussed Faustian elements in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while also addressing the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story “The Sandman.” Liz Wan talked about how William Godwin’s novel St. Leon could be read as a Faust story, and Maddy Potter addressed Faustian elements in both John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

 

Later in the afternoon, I went to a panel on P.B. Shelley, since multiple speakers were scheduled to address Shelley’s play The Cenci, with which I have a particular interest. Anna Mercer compared the play to Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga, which also features a Beatrice who suffers a horrible fate. She mentioned that Mary Shelley even quoted from her husband’s play in her journal long after he had died. Nora Crook later went into detail about the various manuscripts that the Shelleys might have had access to that discussed the story of Beatrice Cenci. She also drew parallels between the play and G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.

 

The final panel I attended on Tuesday was on remediating the supernatural. Natalie Tal Harries mentioned that Walter Scott collected books on witchcraft and demonology and justified his use of superstition in a note on his poem The Lady of the Lake. Orianne Smith also discussed Scott, focusing on his novel Guy Mannering, a book from which Sarah Siddons often performed readings after her retirement from the stage. The character of Meg Merrilies in the book became a favorite in stage adaptations of the novel. Haya Alwehaib spoke last, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Arabian Nights. We then headed over to Glasgow City Chambers for a drinks reception in a beautiful setting.

 

Wednesday there was a plenary roundtable with Elizabeth Edwards, Craig Lamont, and Tim Fulford. My big activity for the day, though was chairing a session on Romanticism’s legacies in fantasy literature. Will Sherwood talked about William Blake’s influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, noting that while most people focus on how Tolkien’s work as a medievalist influenced his fiction, he was greatly influenced by Romantic writers as well. Annise Rogers discussed the Romantic legacy in Ben Aaronovitch’s fantasy series The Rivers of London. Jason Whittaker then spoke on the influence William Blake had on Glasgow’s own Alasdair Gray, who like Blake was both a writer and a visual artists. That evening, the conference banquet was held at Òran Mór, a restaurant in a former church that is graced by murals designed by Gray.

 

My own paper was scheduled for Thursday. I began the day at a panel on the Gothic. Samiha Begum discussed Ann Radcliffe, a writer who appears as a character in my own play The Mysteries of the Castle of the Monk of Falconara. Radcliffe, who was influenced by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was propelled to fame with her novel The Romance of the Forest and received 500 pounds for her next book, The Mysteries of Udolpho at a time at which the average royalty payment for a novel was only 80 pounds. Interestingly enough, gossip recorded by Anna Seward held that Radcliffe had written Joanna Baillie’s anonymously published Plays on the Passions. I was also interested to hear Jakob Lipski speak on the 1803 historical novel Thaddeus of Warsaw and Laura Eastlake discuss links between vampires and volcanos.

 

In my completely neutral, unbiased, unprejudiced opinion, however, my panel was the best. It began with Bethan Elliott discussing the plays of Baillie (not Radcliffe). She quoted from an 1804 letter Baillie wrote to fellow dramatist William Sotheby. Though Sotheby (who had not had the success on stage that Baillie achieved) urged her to focus on “reading” plays rather than “acting” plays, Baillie held that the qualities that make a play good for acting also make it good for reading. Baillie was not snobbish about how her plays were performed, either, and in 1810 wrote to Walter Scott about being pleased that one of her plays had been performed at a fair. The one play Baillie wrote that she did not think was fit for performance was The Martyr, but that was because of its religious subject matter, not because she didn’t deem it an “actable” piece.

 

My paper was on J.H. Amherst’s play The Death of Christophe King of Hayti. Its depiction of armed women was naturally interesting to the third panelist, Sarah Burdett, who has written extensively on that subject. Her paper was on stage adaptations actresses had written of the poems of Walter Scott. Sarah Smith, who was a favorite of Scott’s, wrote adaptations of both The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake performed at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin. Eliza Macauley, an actress who had a difficult relationship with the Crow Street Theatre, wrote an adaptation of Scott’s Marmion that took a character who only appears in a single Canto of the poem and made her the center of the adapted drama.

 

On Friday, conference delegates could opt for a trip to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde, which provided some very dramatic landscapes. All in all, it was a wonderful conference!

MLA in Philadelphia

Sunday was the last day of the Modern Language Association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia. I delivered a paper on Lord Byron and modern drama, and also presided at a session on Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence.

The first session I attended was on Byron's legacy. Sadly, none of the panelists talked much about Byron's dramas, but Ghislaine Gaye McDayter gave an interesting talk on his poem "The Waltz" and Matt Sandler discussed the influence of "She Walks in Beauty" on the poem "Harlem Shadows" by Claude McKay.

Later in the afternoon, I went to a session on Eugene O'Neill, so there was much more discussion of drama. Bess Rowen spoke, comparing the stage directions in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones with those in Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower. Next, Nicole Tabor made some interesting comments on the representation of Standard Oil in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Reagan Venturi gave a comparison between O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and the Tracy Letts play August: Osage County. The last speaker, Donald Gagnon, compared O'Neill with August Wilson.

Friday morning, I delivered my paper, beginning with an overview of Byron's reception during the Victorian era, and then looking at his impact on 20th- and 21st-century dramatists. O'Neill, of course, was one of the playwrights to be strongly impacted by Byron, and his play A Touch of the Poet quotes Byron numerous times. Romulus Linney put Byron on stage as the opium-induced hallucination of his daughter in Childe Byron, and Howard Brenton portrayed him with other Romantics in Bloody Poetry. Byron appears as an off-stage character in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, and more recently, he provided the namesake of Johnny "Rooster" Byron in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem.

After my session, I was able to catch a panel on "Disabling Environments of the Romantic Era." Unfortunately, there wasn't much talk about Romantic drama, but Diana Little made some nice observations on the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and Jane Kim linked the Korean poet Yun Dong-Ju with Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Next, I went to a session on Victorian gaslighting inspired by Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight. After that, I attended an interesting panel on Pan-European Romanticism, which included Jonathan Gross talking about Alexander Pushkin, Martin Prochazka discussing the Czech poet K.H. Macha, Andra Bailard comparing Byron and George Sand, and and Omar Miranda speaking on Madame de Staël.

While Dickens and Lawrence both wrote plays, there wasn't much talk about their dramas at the convention. Still, I very much enjoyed a panel on Lawrence and Affect sponsored by the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America. That organization co-sponsored with the Dickens Society the panel I presided at on Saturday morning. Bridget Chalk and Tara Moore both gave excellent papers. Unfortunately, Holly Laird was ill and wasn't able to come, but I read her abstract for her, along with Lawrence's poem "Dreams Old" which mentions characters from David Copperfield.

It's been a while since I last attended the MLA convention, but I enjoyed seeing people I knew as well as meeting new folks.

Dreams of Dracula

Last night I saw the immersive theatre piece Dreams of Dracula. If you're looking for a fun immersive piece to see, you could do worse. Though not as good as the immersive The Great Gatsby, it has the advantage of still being open, and though the production doesn't have the same resources as Sleep No More, the tickets are more affordable.

Created by Nicole Coady and Jonathan Albert, the piece brings Bram Stoker's novel Dracula to life at the club Musica on 50th Street near the West Side Highway. The upper level focuses on dance pieces, while the lower level is the place you want to be if you prefer dialogue and interacting with the characters. That's also where I ran into Oscar Wilde (played by Kelsey Rondeau), a former classmate of Stoker's from Trinity College in Dublin.

My favorite character was Renfeld, portrayed by Paul Pecorino. He ran about in a straightjacket delivering in his madness lines from Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" among other things. Alas, I never ran into Shelley himself, though Mary Shelley is supposed to appear on some nights, along with Lord Byron and Sigmund Freud for some reason.

Like with Sleep No More, audience members are all supposed to be masked. Those with glasses sometimes had a difficult time with this, but you can put your mask over your forehead, and no one will mind. The dress code is all black, which is good, as any speck of white will shine brightly in the venue's lights. Some of the audience members last night were even better costumed than the actors!

The Vampire

Today it's cold and gloomy outside my window, with rainy weather keeping everyone inside. This reminded my of the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816, which led to a memorable storytelling contest that gave birth to Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley wasn't the only one to come up with a good idea during that contest, though. George Gordon Byron wrote a spooky tale about a man dying while visiting ancient sites in Turkey, but never finished it. However, his personal physician and traveling companion, John Polidori, wrote a complete novella inspired by story and published it as The Vampyre in 1819.

Byron was irate at the pirating of his story, especially as many readers falsely attributed Polidori's work to him. When he published his long poem Mazeppa later that year, Byron added to it "A Fragment" dated June 17th, 1816, which he claimed was his original tale. This fragment is not explicitly about a vampire, but rather ends with the mysterious Augustus Darvell being buried by the narrator.

Polidori's novella changes Darvell's name to Lord Ruthven, a rather cruel twist, since Lord de Ruthven was the name Byron's ex-girlfriend Caroline Lamb had used for the Byronic figure in her fictionalized takedown of him, Glenarvon. As in Byron's fragment, the mysterious man in The Vampyre extracts a strange vow from the protagonist before he dies. In Polidori's novella, Ruthven's friend must not reveal the aristocrat's death for a year and a day.

The rest of the story (which does not appear in Byron's fragment) recounts how the protagonist returns home to find Ruthven not only raised from the dead, but now courting his sister. Since Ruthven is the Earl of Marsden, he would be an eligible bachelor, were it not for the fact that he is literally a blood-sucking monster. The protagonist's vow is so strong, however, that every time he tries to warn people, he is supernaturally prevented from uttering the words.

If this sounds to you like a great setup for a play, you wouldn't be alone. The popular dramatist James Planché wrote The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles based upon Polidori's novella, premiering it at the Lyceum Theatre in London on August 9th, 1820. Planché's adaptation also drew inspiration from a French melodrama, Le Vampire by Charles Nodier, Achille de Jouffroy, and Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche, which had premiered that June in Paris and was likewise based on Polidori's tale.

Numerous imitations followed Planché's drama. William Thomas Moncrieff opened his play The Vampire on August 22nd, 1820 at the Royal Coburg Theatre. Charles Edward Walker brought the new trend to the patent theatres when his play Warlock of the Glen opened at Covent Garden on December 2nd, 1820. Unlike the tales by Byron and Polidori, these plays were set in Scotland, frequently making use of Fingal's cave, a natural formation on the island of Staffa, with hexagonal columns made of basalt.

Planché's play begins in Fingal's cave, where a Spirit of the Flood and a Spirit of the Air look over the heroine, Lady Margaret, who is stretched on a tomb. (No, I don't think there are any actual tombs in Fingal's cave, but it makes for a spooky setting.) We are told that Ruthven is possessed by the spirit of Cromal the Bloody, but that his reign of terror will end if he cannot prey upon a virgin before the set of the full moon.

Since the play was performed as a melodrama in one of the minor theatres of London, it was required by law to include extensive musical sequences. The play's songs are usually based on pre-existing Scottish tunes, including "Johnny Cope," "The Lass of Patie's Mill," "Ye Banks and Braes," "There's Nae Luck About the House," "Down the Burn, Davie," "Of a' the Airts," and "Fly, Let Us Awa to the Bridal."

Music also plays a role in the play's final scene, which features "A large Gothic Window, through which the Moon is seen going down." The audience watches in anticipation as Ruthven tries to marry and feed upon Margaret before the moon sets. At the Lyceum, he disappeared through the famous "vampire trap" made of India rubber that allowed the actor to disappear in an instant.

That rainy June in 1816 certainly had a tremendous influence on literature and drama. Today, vampires abound on the stage, as well as on screens large and small.

Presenting on Saint Joan

Today was the second day of the International Shaw Society's "Shaw and Heroism" conference at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

We opened with some video presentations delivered over Zoom. David Staller spoke about his experiences running Gingold Theatrical Group which will be performing Arms and the Man this fall.

After David spoke, Jean Reynolds gave a paper on Getting Married. She noted that Mrs. George's trance in the play prefigures the trance in Shaw's later drama Heartbreak House. She also likened the play to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, since both stories feature a stopped clock and an uneaten wedding cake.

Next, Vishnu Patel spoke about heroism and desire in Pygmalion. He discussed an Indian adaptation of the play in which caste replaces class. The Eliza character in that version is named Manjula, and like in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, it is hinted at the end that she might marry the professor who taught her how to speak and act in a new way.

My own presentation was also today. I discussed how the actor Sybil Thorndike came to embody heroism in the London premiere of Shaw's masterpiece Saint Joan. Shaw had originally gotten to know Thorndike when she understudied the leading role in a touring production of Candida. It was after he saw her in a different role, that of Beatrice in Percy Shelley's The Cenci, that he reportedly remarked, "I have found my Joan."

The first woman to play Joan in Shaw's play was not Thorndike, but the American actor Winifred Lenihan. John Corbin, critic for the New York Times, was unimpressed with Lenihan, though fortunately ticket sales for the play remained strong. Thorndike played the role when the play opened in London, and she seems to have put her own distinctive mark on the piece.

After my presentation, we had a discussion with the cast of the staged reading of Saint Joan we saw yesterday. The actor who played the lead commented that Joan is earnest and authentically herself, while everyone else is acting out roles assigned to them by society. (By the way, this is also a major theme in my own play about Joan of Arc, Dark Night of the Soul.)

The last speaker today was Miki Matsumoto, who discussed the film Mournful Indifference, which reimagines Shaw's play Heartbreak House. The Russian film directed by Aleksandr Sokurov in 1987 was interpreted at the time as relating to Perestroika in the Soviet Union, but Miki also related it to the present war in Ukraine.

Tomorrow, Mary Christian will be speaking on Shaw's true and false prophets. It promises to be quite interesting!

Shaw Conference at William and Mary

Today was the opening day of the International Shaw Society's conference on "Shaw and Heroism" at the College of William and Mary.

I made the mistake this morning of going to the Wren building for the opening, not realizing that this historic site was just being used for performances. The regular sessions are in Miller Hall. Fortunately, I got there in time to hear a keynote address by Peter Gahan.

Peter spoke on Shaw's heroes and their predicaments. Since we are meeting in the colonial city of Williamsburg, he noted that Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans all take place in colonies. Conforming to Shaw's ideas about Puritanism, these plays portray sex not as the main action of the play, but not non-existent, either.

Caesar and Cleopatra, which takes place in Roman-occupied Egypt, is a construction not just of different historical accounts, but also of different theatrical depictions of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Peter said. William Shakespeare's plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are models, but Peter also pointed out later versions of the story that Shaw likely knew, including John Fletcher's The False One, Pierre Corneille's The Death of Pompey, and Colley Cibber's Caesar in Egypt.

The other plays in Three Plays for Puritans are The Devil's Disciple, which takes place in New England during the American Revolution, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, which takes place in Morocco. Captain Brassbound's name comes from a fragment of a poem by Percy Shelley that Mary Shelley attached to the preface of The Witch of Atlas, which runs in part: "And, when / I went among my kind, with triple brass / Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed, / To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful mass!" Peter had some nice insights into Brassbound's character.

We had a long break before our next speaker, Bernard Dukore, who used to run the theatre program at CUNY Graduate Center, though before my time. Bernie talked about how Shaw considers ideals to be masks for the truth, and he applied this to Arms and the Man as well as other plays. When it opened in 1894, Arms and the Man was so unconventional that the Prince of Wales walked out of it, he said! A 1932 film version showed the battle that takes place offstage in the play, but the film was later shortened, and that sequence cut. Shaw wrote his own screenplay for Arms and the Man in 1941, with the American star Ginger Rogers to play the leading role of Raina, but Rogers decided she wanted to play Luka, and the production never happened.

Bernie also discussed Shaw's never-shot screenplay for Saint Joan. That screenplay showed battle scenes as well, including a cannon shattering a tower and a bridge being destroyed by fire and gunpowder. In the afternoon, we got to see a staged reading of a cut version of Saint Joan, and this evening we saw a workshopped version of a new musical called MADam Lucy Deceased by William Schermerhorn and Elise Morris. (The show will be performed for the public on Sunday.) McKenna Grantier, who played the Earl of Warwick in Saint Joan, took on the role of Lucy Ludwell Paradise, a famous hostess of the eighteenth century who was ultimately committed to a madhouse. Her ghost is said to still haunt Williamsburg.

I didn't hear Madam Lucy's ghost last night, but I've got a few more days to spend in Williamsburg. Tomorrow I'm presenting on Sybil Thorndike's portrayal of Joan of Arc in Saint Joan, and on Sunday Mary Christian is scheduled to speak.

I'm looking forward to it!

My Book on Sale!

If you've been wanting to order a copy of my new book, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas, but were putting it off because copies were too expensive, now is the time to get one, as the book is currently on sale for $24.99!

That's only if you get the hardcover edition, of course. If you want the e-book, you still have to pay $89. Yes, the illustrations are in color in the electronic version, but not only is there no substitute for paper, but the hard copy is currently cheaper, so why not get it?

Click here to order the book. I'm not sure how long the sale will last, so you might want to order it soon. The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, is also advertising free shipping on select orders. Oh, and if you're in Europe, they're advertising books for €24.99 as well. (That's slightly more expensive at current exchange rates, but might be cheaper than paying conversion fees.)

The full title of the book is Romantic Actors Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage. It reinterprets British dramas of the Romantic era through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. In addition to providing an overview of the period, the book provides four in-depth case studies of actors and the playwrights they influenced: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and P.B. Shelley.

Hopefully, you'll find it insightful and filled with interesting surprises!

Romantic Dramas at NASSR

Today, I presented my paper on Olympe de Gouges and Ira Aldridge online as a part of the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, better known as NASSR.

I was a part of a panel on Theaters of Violence and Justice moderated by Sophie Thomas. The panel was led off by Marjean D. Purinton of Texas Tech University who spoke on "Justice on Trial in Romantic Period Drama and Novels."

Purinton is incredibly knowledgable about British Romantic drama, which is also the subject of a recent book of mine. She began by discussing one of my favorite playwrights of the period, Joanna Baillie, but instead of talking about one of her more well-known dramas, she delved into The Stripling, a prose tragedy based on a real-life case in Scotland.

In most of the plays Purinton discussed, legal trials are suggested but not directly portrayed on stage. In The Iron Chest, for instance, George Colman the Younger's adaptation of the novel Caleb Williams by William Godwin, a trial is central to the plot, but occurs offstage, as the accused title character comes to have less and less faith in a legal system that seems to just protect the rich and powerful.

Next, Purinton discussed The Cenci, a drama by Percy Shelley which I have written about frequently. She argued that the play really criticizes the justice system in Britain during the Regency, not the courts of Renaissance Rome that are nominally depicted in the tragedy. In addition she discussed James Boaden's The Secret Tribunal and a play by Elizabeth Inchbald, though I didn't catch the title of that one.

Young-ok An from the University of St. Thomas rounded out the panel, discussing Percy Shelley's The Cenci and Mary Shelley's novel Valperga. Thanks to everyone who showed up to listen to us!

NASSR Conference This Week!

This week, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism is holding its annual conference in Huntsville, Texas. I'll be attending, but online rather than in person.

Last year, NASSR held a joint conference with the British Association for Romantic Studies, which was also held in a hybrid format. I presented a paper virtually on George Gordon Byron's play Marino Faliero, and even chaired a panel on Byron.

This year, the theme of the NASSR conference is Romanticism and Justice. The conference opens on Thursday, and though I'll have to teach during the morning sessions, I plan on attending a virtual coffee hour with Julia Wright from Dalhousie University. Then, the Keats-Shelley Association of America is sponsoring a virtual seminar called Percy Shelley for Our Times.

My panel will be on Friday morning. I'll be discussing imprisonment in the plays The Convent by Olympe de Gouges and The Black Doctor Ira Aldridge. I'll be joined by Marjean D. Purinton discussing dramas that put justice on trial, Shavera Seneviratne discussing T.W. Moncrieff's The Cataract of the Ganges, and Young-ok An discussing women on trial in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Sophie Thomas of Toronto Metropolitan University is currently scheduled to be chairing my panel. I'm looking forward to it!

The Book Is Finally Out!

After a long wait, my new book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage is now available from publisher Palgrave Macmillan.

The book reinterprets British dramas of the Romantic era through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. It is the first book-length study to examine the interplay of early 19th century actors and the dramatists writing for them.

I've tried to answer questions about how and why actors from the Romantic period influenced major writers. The work focuses on four pairs of actors and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and P.B. Shelley.

If you're interested in any of those people, you'll want a copy of this book. Unfortunately, both the e-book and the hardcover version are rather pricey at the moment, but Palgrave Macmillan does frequently have sales, so keep your eyes open for possible discounts to come.

In the meantime, ask your local library to order a copy. The hardcover is still not officially released, but you will be able to pre-order the physical book soon. Electronic versions are available already.

The cover image features Eliza O'Neill. Interior images include a mezzotint of Siddons, a toy theatre version of Coleridge's play Remorse, a close-up photograph of a screen owned by Lord Byron, and a cartoon comparing Siddons and O'Neill.

Candida

Last night, I saw Bernard Shaw's play Candida, which is currently playing in a delightful new production on Theatre Row.

First published in 1898, Candida tells the story of a remarkable woman (the title character) beloved by two different men, her clergyman husband and an eccentric young poet (based in part on Percy Shelley).

The play did not become a hit until 1903, when Arnold Daly produced it in New York, starring as the poet, Eugene Marchbanks. Though Marchbanks is the wealthy nephew of an Earl, the Reverend James Morell finds him sleeping on a park bench, and the two become friends.

A love triangle that develops after Marchbanks meets Candida Morell is what drives the plot. Instead of going for romantic intrigues, however, Shaw has the three characters ultimately discuss their predicament in a comical and delightful manner, questioning Victorian assumptions about marriage and gender roles.

David Staller has reset this production in the 1920s, and moved it to uptown Manhattan in the increasingly vibrant neighborhood of Harlem. Shaw's minister is a Christian socialist, and this seems to fit in with the new setting, a Harlem Renaissance where radical and substantive issues were being hotly debated by celebrity intellectuals of the day.

R.J. Foster plays Rev. Morell with a boundless energy that makes us understand immediately why he is constantly being invited for speaking engagements. Avery Whitted, by contrast, plays Marchbanks with a shy innocence that makes him appear as if he could never be a threat to the charismatic preacher. As Candida, however, Avanthika Srinivasan divides her attention quite evenly between the two men, making the audience unsure of which one she will choose.

The supporting cast is delightful as well. David Ryan Smith, who was hilarious last year in Merry Wives, plays Candida's father, the wealthy businessman Mr. Burgess. In the original script, Burgess speaks with a Cockney accent, but Smith instead gives him a delightful Southern twang. As Morell's secretary Proserpine Garnet, Amber Reauchean Williams brings a primness to the role that makes it all the more delightful when Prossy gets drunk with the junior clergyman Lexy Mills, played impishly by Peter Romano. (Romano was also in the 2017 Off-Broadway revival of Fucking A.)

A set design by Lindsay Genevieve Fuori helps to bring the whole production together, providing a wealth of bric-a-brac that perfectly sets the mood for everything that follows. Christian imagery abounds, but the liberal Rev. Morell has also found space for a Buddha, an Ankh, and a Menorah. A radio and a phonograph are used multiple times to bring music into the world of the play, much to the delight of the audience.

Gingold Theatrical Group, which produced this lovely revival, is also coordinating a companion event next month, bringing in a number of people to discuss the play and how it relates to Shaw's world and our own. I'll be there, and it would be great to see you there, too!

Byron's Plays... and Mine

Today I chaired a panel on "New Approaches to Lord Byron" for the BARS/NASSR 2022 "New Romanticisms" conference, and tomorrow I'll be attending my own play My Fellow Americans at the Secret Theatre in Queens.

Byron was a tremendous dramatist, penning such plays as Manfred, Marino Faliero, and The Deformed Transformed. The first panelist we had was Arif Camoglu, who spoke on Byron and the Ottoman gaze. He showed a rather trivializing account of Byron published within the Ottoman Empire that reproduced the famous portrait of Byron in Albanian dress. Oddly, there was no comment given in the publication about the famous writer wearing dress that was normally worn in the Ottoman Empire, not in Britain!

After Arif, I spoke on shaping a new Marino Faliero at Drury Lane. Byron published the play in 1821, not intending to have it performed (at least not any time soon). However, Robert William Elliston, the lessee of Drury Lane at the time, wanted to perform it anyway, so he sent a cut copy of the text to the Examiner of Plays to get it approved by the censor. Unfortunately, in order to get the play passed the censor, quite a bit had to be excised, including some of the most stirring passages. I got a chance to see the cut copy of the script at the Huntington Library, though images of it are now available online.

Our third panelist was Lesley Thulin, who spoke on deformity in Byron's unfinished drama The Deformed Transformed. Lesley is writing a dissertation on disability and political economy in Romantic literature. She noted that Byron, who had a clubbed foot, could in some ways relate the the play's disabled protagonist, but in general, she tried to steer clear from biographical readings of the drama, since the aristocratic Byron was economically insulated from many of the effects of a disabled body that the title character had to endure. Though Byron left the play unfinished at his death, Mary Shelley later wrote a short story called "Transformation" that re-envisions Byron's story and supplies it with an ending.

The conference continues until August 5th, the rest of it held in person at Edge Hill University outside of Liverpool. I couldn't get back over to the United Kingdom to attend in person, though, in part because tomorrow is the fourth performance of My Fellow Americans, which is being produced as a part of the Secret Theatre's One Act Festival. If you haven't seen it yet, please come! Make sure you get tickets to Program D.

Rachael Langton directed the play, which stars Rebecca Ana Peña as the President of the United States. I hope you can make it!

Theatres in London

I am currently in London for two things, a research appointment with the National Portrait Gallery which I had on Monday, and a Dickens conference that starts tomorrow with an event at the Charles Dickens Museum.

Since I am here, though, I knew I had to also take in some theatre. As I wrote in my last blog post, I spent Sunday night at Shakespeare's Globe, where I saw Kathryn Hunter perform the title role in King Lear. The Globe is a unique place to see a play, since it is probably closer to Shakespeare's original Globe than any other theatre.

That wasn't why I was there, of course. I've always enjoyed seeing Hunter on stage, back to when I first saw her in Kafka's Monkey. Still, there is something to be said for getting to experience a play in a particular building. One thing I've learned is that doing what many of Shakespeare's original audience members did, renting a cushion for the duration of a performance, is a good idea.

I had never paid extra for a cushion before, but if I ever go back, I think I will again. I will probably also try to get a seat against the back wall as I did this time, so I can have something to lean against during the play. Notice that until you are in a physical theatre space, a lot of issues just seem academic. Who cares if audience members paid to rent cushions? Well, after you've felt the difference of watching a show on a wooden bench with or without a cushion, this little tidbit about the past seems much more tangible.

Monday I went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to see Only Fools and Horses. In this case, I did choose the play for the theatre building. I've watched a bit of the television series the musical is based upon, but I'm not a die-hard fan. (Many other audience members clearly were.) What I really wanted was to experience seeing a show at the Haymarket. I did something similar back in 2016 when I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory primarily so I could get inside the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane.

As with getting tickets to Drury Lane, I made sure to get tickets in the gallery, so I could experience the show the way working class people might have going all the way back to the Regency period. When I went to Drury Lane, I tried to enter through the lobby, but I was redirected around the corner to a separate side entrance. That's right, poorer folks had to use a different entrance so wealthy patrons in the nice seats didn't have to mix with the riffraff like me! At the Haymarket today, audience members in the gallery don't have to walk around the corner, but they still have a separate entrance!

The other thing I noticed was how small the theatre was. Yes, I knew that the Haymarket was the "little" theatre generally just open in the summer, and its house wasn't as large as the two main patent theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Still, knowing that is one thing, while feeling it in the actual space is quite another. I'm glad I went, both because I got to experience the space, and because the show itself was delightful. The songs were catchy and fun, and there was a sweetness to the musical that I didn't always get from the original television series.

Tuesday night I went to see Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution, which was staged in London's old County Hall on the south bank of the Thames, right near the London Eye. The play is performed in the old Council Chamber, where the city's government used to meet. This seemed fitting, since much of the play takes place in a courtroom, and the Council Chamber was already arranged with a central chair, seats on the main level, and galleries for the public. The main chair is now occupied by the judge in the play, and to his side is a jury box where some audience members sit.

Before the play began, and again at intermission, the woman who played the court stenographer gave instructions to the audience members in the jury box. I wasn't seated in the jury box, though. Again, I was in the gallery, but this time the gallery was also a performance space! At one point, a woman appeared in the gallery near where I was seated. (She hadn't been there before, by the way.) A spotlight shined on her, and she yelled at the prosecutor. The judge ordered her removed from the gallery, and so she was. This was all a part of the play, of course. It was nice to see how the production made full use of the improvised space.

Tonight, I didn't go to a play, as there was a poetry reading linked to the upcoming anniversary of the death of Percy Shelley. Kelvin Everest read some of Shelley's later poems, and mentioned that "When the Lamp is Shattered" was originally intended to be part of a play Shelley was working on but never finished. There were also Shelley poems read by biographer Richard Holmes and poet George Szirtes, who read "Ozymandias" both in English and in Hungarian!

Anyway, the conference begins next, so I'm back to work.

Mazeppa

Today is the 234th birthday of George Gordon Byron. Not only was Lord Byron a dramatist, but many of his narrative poems have been adapted for the stage, including Don Juan and Mazeppa.

Why would Mazeppa, a tale of a man strapped naked to a wild horse, be adapted over and over again for the stage? The answer is the 19th century's love of hippodrama: the performance of plays involving onstage horses.

H.M. Milner (who also adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) adapted Mazeppa to be performed at Astley's Amphitheatre in 1831--with a live trained horse--and countless imitations followed. Perhaps the most famous performances of Mazeppa were by the actress Adah Isaacs Menken, who played the hero as a breeches role, though in her case the "breeches" were a skin-tight body stocking that realistically mimicked nudity. Men flocked to see her tremendous... acting skills.

The play was also adapted numerous times for the toy theatre. The Boys of England Edition included an original script for home performances. Entitled Mazeppa; or, The Wild Horse of Tartary, the play begins in the Castle of Laurinski, where the lovers Cassimer and Olinska meet. Unfortunately, Olinska is engaged to Count Palatine, but Cassimer competes nobly in an armed tournament. (The stage directions indicate that sound effects of the tournament could be created for the toy theatre by "striking two pieces of steel, or old knives together.") The night after the tournament, Cassimer attacks the count, but he is caught. That's when Olinska's father devises the punishment of lashing him to a horse's back and using torches to chase the animal away in a mad gallop.

In Act II, Cassimer is portrayed "on a Horse, pursued by Wolves and Wild Horses." Anticipating the hero's death, a vulture is supposed to descend "by means of a thin piece of wire." As is the case in Byron's poem, however, the young man does not die. In the following scene, a shepherdess in the woods hears the story of the Volpas, a mythical giant horse that is supposed to be an ill omen. When the play does include a song, it isn't poetry composed by Byron. Instead, the reveling shepherds and shepherdesses sing:

     Let the lovely shepherd maid,

     Most of all his sight evade;

     Quick to your tents hasten back,

     The pursuer is on your track;

     Fly, maiden, fly! the Volpas is nigh.

A storm comes on, and the stage directions indicate that the sound of rain could be mimicked by "peas in a tin canister" while thunder can be made with "a sheet of copper to be shaken" and lightning with "a pinch of powder in a small earthen bowl." Cassimer enters on the horse, which collapses, exhausted. The shepherdess resolves to inform the local leader, Abder Khan, who recognizes Cassimer as his long-lost son Mazeppa. Then, there comes another piece of non-Byronic verse:

     Gracious powers whom we adore,

     Our future monarch now restore.

     That our triumphant shouts may raise,

     In songs of gratitude and praise.

Like the earlier song, this actually comes from Milner's stage adaptation, not Byron's poem. Anyway, Cassimer--now Mazeppa--saves his father's life. Proclaimed the new King of Tartary, he should be happy, but he cannot be so without his beloved Olinska. He leads the Tartars back to Poland to besiege the castle and claim his love.

Act III begins in the castle, where preparations are underway for Olinska's marriage to Count Palatine. A group of wandering Tartars has been hired to provide entertainment, and Mazeppa is disguised among them. He reveals himself to Olinska, who is happy to see him. At the wedding procession outside the castle, Mazeppa claims the princess as his own bride. There is another great battle, and the curtain falls.

Curiously, Milner's adaptation ends the same way, with a climactic battle and no further dialogue. The script for the Boys of England Edition is ambiguous as to who wins, but Milner's stage directions make it clear that Mezeppa gets Olinska in the end.

That's not in Byron's poem, by the way. In the original, Mazeppa simply ends his tale after the part of the story where he is made king. Stage adaptations took little from Byron's work, but the poem still inspired countless productions.