Robinson,Mary, Drama

Abstract

Trained by the great actor and dramaturge David Garrick and cast in a variety of tragic and comic roles by the playwright and theatre manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1758?–1800) became a popular and well‐compensated Drury Lane actress. She subsequently achieved literary fame as a novelist, poet, polemicist, and essayist. Her career as a playwright was, however, marred by negative reviews, audiences’ disruption of her afterpieceNobody(performed 1794), and the reluctance of theatre managers to produce her plays. Robinson blamed the failure ofNobody, which starred the most celebrated comedienne of the Romantic period, Dorothy Jordan, on the vindictiveness of the patrician female gamesters who were the targets of her satire. Her tragedyThe Sicilian Lover(1796) languished in ‘that pandemonium ofgeniusanddulness, theprompter'scloset’(Robinson 1806) and was never performed. Robinson had the play printed, but it sold only 32 copies in four months, and she ended up owing her publishers £22 (Fergus & Thaddeus 1987). Her comic operaKate of Aberdeen, written in the early 1790s, has been lost, and she published only the songs fromThe Lucky Escape(performed 1778) and the prologue and epilogue toNobody. Licensing manuscripts ofThe Lucky EscapeandNobodyhave been preserved, however, in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and have been recently reproduced in volume 8 ofThe Works of Mary Robinson(2010).