51 Mary Robinson.Pdf

J1iary 'RQbinson (1758-1800) Mary Robinson's prolific literary career spanned a quarter-century, from her first book in 1775 to her last collection, Lyrical Tales, published shortly be fore her death in 1800. She was not only a poet but also a novelist, actress, playwright, translator, noted beauty, and, for a time, paramour of the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV. Robinson was born in Bristol on 27 November 1758 to Mary Seys and John Darby, a prosperous American sea captain, who left his family to pursue commercial schemes in Lapland and America when Robinson was not quite seven. He returned to England, though not to his family, three years later, his fortune lost. Robinson had been a pupil in the school run by Hannah More's sisters but now was sent to Chelsea to become the student of Meribah Lorrington, a learned woman and an alcoholic, who was to profoundly influence her student. When Robinson's mother then established her own small school in Little Chelsea, Robinson taught English. After only eight months, though, Robinson's father forbade his wife to work and closed the school. As a child Robinson read the poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld "with rap ture; I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures." 1 At fifteen Robinson attracted the attention of David Garrick, the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, who wanted her to play Cordelia opposite his Lear. Instead, her mother pressured her into marrying Thomas Robinson on 12 April 1774 at St. Martin's in the Fields. Thomas Robinson was an articled clerk at Lincoln's Inn and a gambler who borrowed heavily. They lived a fashionable life for a short time, until 1775, when he was sentenced to debtor's prison; Robinson and her infant daughter, Maria, stayed with him there for fifteen months. During this period she wrote a long poem, aptly r. Mary Robinson, Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, ed. M. J. Levy (London, 1994), 54-55. 590 Mary Robinson 591 titled Captivity. Georgiana, wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire, became her patron, introducing her to Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Shortly after his release from prison, Thomas Robinson agreed to allow Mary to pursue the stage career she had earlier forgone. Sheridan encour aged her, and Garrick, now retired from the stage, became her tutor. She debuted as Juliet on IO December 1776. The next day the Morning Post noted that "her person is genteel, her voice harmonious and admitting of various modulations;-and her features, when properly animated, are striking and expressive. -At present she discovers a theatrical genius in the rough; which, however, in elocution as well as action, seems to require considerable polish ing." The second time she played the part, she was paid the handsome sum of twenty pounds.2 Robinson was to play three dozen parts during four sea sons on the stage. In the summer of r778 the birth of her second daughter, Sophia, who died at six weeks, prevented her from playing in the premiere of A School for Scandal. But she was back on stage by November, and on 30 April 1778 she played Lady Macbeth in a performance for her benefit, the evening concluding with her own composition, The Lucky Escape, a musical farce; only the songs appear to have survived. During the 1779-80 season she was on stage for fifty-five nights. Robinson's performance of 3 December 1779 was the turning point of her life. She played Perdita in Garrick's alteration of The Winters Tale at a command performance for the royal family. The Prince of Wales, then only seventeen, found her captivating, and in the spring of 1780 she became his lover; their much publicized affair made her the object of both scandal and satire, earning her the sobriquet "Perdita." By December the prince had lost interest, and she was seven thousand pounds in debt. But she continued to live the fashionable life, and it was during this period that Romney, Gains borough, and Reynolds all painted her portrait. From October to December r78r she was in Paris, feted as "la belle Anglaise"; there she met the queen, Marie Antoinette. Although her daughter claims that Robinson never re turned to the stage, in fact she did for most of the 1782-83 season, playing Rosamond in Henry the Second at Covent Garden on 31 December 1782 and Alicia in Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore on 27 January 1783. The Morning Herald for 29 March 1783 praises her Victoria in Hannah Cowley's comedy A Bold Stroke for a Husband; she also added to her repertoire Oriana in The Knight of Malta and Alinda in The Pilgrim. The king granted her five thousand pounds 2. Philip H. Highfill Jr., Kahnan A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictio nary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, 1973-93), vol. 13. 59 2 Mary Robinson in cash (reputedly in return for the prince's love letters) and eventually a life time annuity of five hundred pounds a year in lieu of a bond the prince had signed promising her twenty thousand pounds when he came of age. Robinson settled at Windsor with Col. Banastre Tarleton (1754-1833), a well-known British officer who had fought in the American War of Inde pendence but also an inveterate gambler.3 By 1783 her five-hundred-pound "lifetime annuity" had ceased, and in June Tarleton retired from the army on half-pay, his gambling debts still mounting.4 Robinson fell seriously ill, either from rheumatic fever (as her daughter insists) or from a miscarriage (as others suggest). Whatever the case, she was bedridden for six months, with both legs paralyzed. She and Tarleton eventually went to France, and her belongings were sold at auction on 7 January 1785.5 From February to May 1787 she played several roles in Edinburgh, including Lady Macbeth, Alicia in Jane Shore, and the title role in The Irish Widow. Robinson's literary career began in earnest in 178§. Like Lord Byron, she was a notorious personality, her life and works inextricably linked in the pub lic consciousness, each contributing to the interest and success of the other. She is said to have composed extemporaneously "Lines to Him Who Will Understand Them" for Richard Burke, son of Edmund Burke, who published the poem in the Annual Register. During the winter of 1790 Robinson carried on a poetical correspondence with Robert Merry, the Della Cruscan. In reply to his "Laurel of Liberty;' she composed, reputedly in only twelve hours, her Ainsi va le Monde. Her Poems (1791) had nearly six hundred subscribers, headed by the Prince of Wales. The Analytical Review wrote, "If a great variety of refined sentiments, sometimes of the tender but more commonly of the plaintive kind, adorned with rich and beautiful imagery, and expressed in sweetly harmonious verse, can entitle the Poetical Productions of a Female Pen to public praise, Mrs. Robinson's Poems will obtain no inconsiderable share of applause." 6 Eventually Robinson became known as the "English Sappho." Her poetic works, comprising more than a dozen volumes, portray vividly what she was to term in her memoirs "this world of duplicity and sorrow." Works such as "The Lascar" and "The Negro Girl" champion the plight of the disenfran chised while chronicling the moral bankruptcy surrounding and victimizing them. She explores the irrational-the realm of madness and dreams-in poems such as "The Maniac" and "The Lady of the Black Tower." Here, as in 3. He became the Whig M.P. for Liverpool in 1790 and was made a baronet in 1815. 4. Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans, Biographical Dictionary, 13 :36. 5. Whitley Papers, British Library; Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York, 1957), 238. 6. IO (1791): 279. Mary Robinson 593 Keats, the line between the waking world and the dream world blurs, leaving the nature of reality itself in question. Her settings are often gothic, peopled by those such as the Alien Boy-the isolated, the abandoned, the confined, the despairing-tormented people who long for oblivion. Robinson's uni verse is littered with shipwrecks, drownings, stabbings, and murderers lying in wait. Injustice prevails, merit goes unrecognized and unrewarded, and love fails to triumph. Nature offers no consolation to human woes, and psychic pain seems strangely pointless. God is nowhere in evidence, and religious institutions only offer another form of tyranny. Her best poems, such as "London's Summer Morning," heap image upon image with striking energy, concreteness, and immediacy to make a cacophony of human experience. Her poems are often not without humor, as she pokes holes in the facade of conventional life, exposing its hypocrisy and emptiness. Many of her poems first appeared in periodicals under pseudonyms.7 In 1799 she became poetry editor of the Morning Post, where she published a series of satirical odes. Robinson was the friend of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called her "A woman of undoubted genius" and observed, "I never knew a human being with so full a mind-bad, good, & indifferent, I grant you, but full, & over flowing." 8 We know that in 1799 Coleridge showed her an early draft, now lost, of "Kubla Khan," for she quotes parts of it in her poetic tribute, "To The Poet Coleridge." 9 After her Lyrical Tales appeared in 1800, Wordsworth seriously considered changing the title of the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads.

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