"Making the Stage my Profession": Girlhood and Performance in Mary "Perdita" Robinson's Memoirs

Abstract

Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800) was one of the most famous actresses of her time. A notorious affair with the Prince of Wales, sparked when he saw her in David Garrick's adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, left her indelibly marked with the nickname "Perdita." While it may seem a stretch to connect the adulteress Mrs. Robinson to Shakespeare's sixteen-year-old virgin, Robinson did just that when she constructed her girlhood self in her posthumously published Memoirs. The similarities between Shakespeare's lost girl and Robinson's invented one suggest that she was using Perdita's tale to negotiate and produce her own story. Although Robinson was twenty-one, married, and a mother when she played Perdita in Garrick's adaptation, I contend that Robinson uses Shakespeare's young heroine to do two things: first, to produce herself as a sexual innocent attempting to preserve her "natural" girlhood against the demands of a culturally mandated sexual role; and second, to re-imagine the whore-making space of the theater as a stage of girlish freedom and refuge from the social and biological demands of womanhood.