Frankenstein’s Bride
A musical by Seth Flynn, Sandra Bishop & Seanie Blue
The story of the teenager Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein, and of her lover Percy Shelley and their grand poet friend Lord Byron, with a surprise twist to the story of a monster who came in from the cold.
Squarespace isn’t quite capable of translating this to cellphones. Sorry!
About the producers
Seanie Blue’s rewrite of the Romantics and Frankenstein.
Act I, Scene 1, Song 1: SHARK
William Godwin and Percy Shelley are in the drawing room of Godwin’s small publishing house in the Polygon, London. As they speak, the background images change into scenes of whalers and jute factories, in Dundee. As they talk, two young girls breezily walk through the drawing room and give Percy the eye, but they are quickly waved away by Godwin.
Percy Shelley
Mr. Godwin, what a pleasure it’s been to meet England’s deep thinker!
William Godwin
You flatter me, but I’m equally pleased to meet one of society’s leading young lights. May you become our shining star, young Percy.
Percy Shelley
I adore your philosophies, but you know my father Sir Timothy is not so fond of your work, because he owns land and slaves and factories, and he would hate to see them all in flame.
William Godwin
But I suspect you would be happy to strike the first match?
Percy Shelley
Give me the phosphorus, and the smell of that strike would put me in heaven.
William Godwin
But you’re known for being atheist!
Percy Shelley
My hatred of religion got me expelled from Oxford.
William Godwin
I thought Oxford was frightened by your bomb making! I suppose an atheist is more dangerous still?
Percy Shelley
A bomb maker I should like to be, but an atheist I am. But don’t worry, I am still the scion of the Shelleys, and Sir Timothy and my grandfather have not disowned me yet. I shall help you publish your books for the edification of all England and foreign lands.
William Godwin
In this case, as a father myself, I beg you to be the good son, if only in the presence of your father. Keep those relations cordial, so you might inherit the means to make the changes in England that we saw so recently in Paris, and which we have hoped ever since might grace our own sweet isle. But I must say, being a father is trouble enough. Never mind the added burden of parenting a free spirit, such as yourself. If Sir Timothy did not abhor my books, I would reach out to him myself and put in a good word for his son Percy, who I find so well spoken, widely read, brilliantly ambitious, and a decent humanitarian with a heart that beats with concern for England’s future.
Percy Shelley
And your free spirits, are they the two young girls who danced through here just now?
William Godwin
I am the father of three girls, not two. Rather, make that two girls and one shark, for my own blood — my daughter with Mary Wollstonecraft — is among whalers and arctic adventurers and jute dealers in Dundee, spending summer with Scotland’s most radical family, that of William Baxter.
Percy Shelley
Why do you call your own daughter a shark?
William Godwin
Mary was born precocious, biting every finger. Her mother on her death bed begged me to teach her all philosophies, to give her an education equal to that of any boy, but the girl astonished me with her capacity for invention and application. She is both researcher and writer, the words drip in her ink with happy energy.
Percy Shelley
And this is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and yourself? What a marvelous mix of heredity. How old is she?
William Godwin
She is almost 15, but might as well be 30 if you consider her in a sailor’s age. There in Dundee she is certainly among the world’s top seafarers. But she is a writer, an inventor of imagination, equally the observant journalist or spinner of fictitious yarns. Such pretty words! She has written me a letter and described with uncanny precision her walk to the wharf to see the whales butchered so our lamps might flicker to life here in London.
Percy Shelley
I look forward to meeting such a rarity, to see mixed in one’s spirit the feminist light of the mother and the rebel force of the father. I suspect she is already quite the philosopher.
William Godwin
Ah, but I am just a fond father, singing his daughter’s praise. Mary is a girl, though I call her my shark.
William Godwin begins to sing, watched by Percy Shelley and the two young girls hiding in the shadows, Fanny Wollstonecraft and Claire Clairemont.
Promo video above, full song can be heard below.
____________________________
Song SHARK begins, sung by Percy Shelley and William Godwin.
LYRICS
Hunger eats her alive / her first bite / is the start of a life / for a shark who eats to stay alive / alive / stay alive / stay alive / look at her now / she eats just what she likes / see how she grows with every single bite / throw her some chum / yum yum, throw her some chum / yum yum / throw her some chum / yum yum / throw her some chum / yum yum / this girl's a shark / she'll go very far / who knows where she swims / follow her fins / this girl's a shark / she'll go very far / who knows where she swims / follow her fins
Percy Shelley
The girl might be a shark, but she is still just a girl, not even 15. I am sure you remember this at all times, but do not expect much of youth. I am only young myself, just 22, but Sir Timothy put on my neck the yolk of expectation, and by so doing made me long to fail him. You would not want the same for Mary.
William Godwin
Of course, Mary is a girl and not the shark of my dreams. When she is near I fuss like a mother hen, and it is only that she is so far away that I spread my feathers and sing like a peacock.
Mary Shelley in Geneva, 1816
The Polygon, north London, where Mary Shelley grew up in her father’s publishing house.
About the Characters
William Godwin in 1798, the year his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born.
Percy Shelley, expelled from Oxford, minor poet, rich kid, married with children.
Our first Mary Shelley is played by dancer/singer Caitie Belle Yevoli. She starred in Sean’s ballet symphony “Vulkano” about the unknown life of Vincent van Gogh.
Scene Two. The Godwin Publishing House
On Stage: Two girls are looking at William Godwin and Percy Shelley in a shadowed part of the drawing room. The girls are Claire Clairemont (Mary’s stepsister) and Fanny Wollstonecraft (Mary’s half-sister and the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the towering feminist). The stage light is on them, but the girls whisper as they ogle Percy Shelley, who continues to speak with William Godwin.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Do you see his eyes, how Irish?
CLAIRE CLAIREMONT
Are you starstruck already, so quick?
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
I can see you with flirt in your lashes, young lady. You don’t fool me. Your bosom will be under his nose in no time if it were your choice.
CLAIRE CLAIREMONT
I like the way that forelock jumps from his curls, and the dimples in his cheek, and I saw him stare back at me with open mind and wide smile.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
What a shame he is married with children. An Irish god already chained to Hell. He looked at me, too. My tummy went all swimmy when he showed me his teeth.
CLAIRE CLAIREMONT
He could take a bite of me whenever he wished, Fanny. But we shall have to act fast to get his attentions before Mary comes back from Dundee. She will show him her books and speak in Latin and we will be maids in comparison, you and I.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
You don’t speak for me, Claire. I am older and wiser than you and Mary, and Mr. Shelley is over the moon with my mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. He will see that I could carry her mantle.
CLAIRE CLAIREMONT
In that case, we are both screwed. Your father was a chancer, and my father is unknown and my mother a bit of a pig, so Mary will step in front of both of us: daughter of the great Mary Wollstonecraft, the world’s first woman with a brain, as well as of William Godwin, the philosopher who would send kings to the guillotine. If we are to compete, it is to be done now, before the shark swims back from the highlands.
Dundee, Scotland, seen from the East, where Mary lived for a few months with the radical Baxter clan.
Mary Wollstonecraft, a year before the birth of her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Giving birth killed the mother.
Vindication, by Mary Wollstonecraft, the first modern work of feminism.
Researcher and writer extraordinaire: Adrienne Wadewitz, the Wikipedia author whose posts about the Romantics in general and Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft in particular were such critical guides to our examination of Mary and her marvelous story. Adrienne died rock-climbing in Joshua Tree.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Mary! Are you back from Dundee?
MARY GODWIN
Yes, full of stories about Arctic explorers and great whales brought in for our lamps, and from a household of free-thinkers and dreamers, I have returned to the solemn jail of father’s books and deadlines.
Claire Claremont
You just missed Shelley! Expelled from Oxford for being an atheist —
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
And for blowing up his dormitory with chemical experiments. He speaks with flowers on his tongue —
Claire Claremont
And he’s rich! A prince!
MARY GODWIN
Are both of you besotted with him?
Claire Claremont
Fanny is. She thinks he is her type, because he listens to her with eyes unblinking, warm and brown, like a saint Bernard.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Claire likes the way his hair tickles his forehead. She played him the new Beethoven, and I had to explain the Moon and tides for him, until Claire pumped her bosom in and out to show him the tides in the morning and at night.
Claire Claremont
In and out. The saint Bernard turned into a bit of a fox as he watched the waters rise and fall. I fancy he would rescue me if I fell into the sea.
MARY GODWIN
There would be no need, Claire, because those plump orbs of yours would float you all the way to Normandy.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
And he told us he couldn’t swim when Claire stopped gasping for breath with her breasts, so she would probably float all the way to the South Pole.
William Godwin
Mary, my dear, you’ve come just now from Dundee? And you are dressed in tartan! You’ve gone native.
MARY GODWIN
It’s all I could afford, Papa. But it does make me feel as if I am part of a clan. I hear you’ve made friends with an atheist and chemist?
William Godwin
He came to me, paying his respects, and has offered to help my publishing business stay afloat. Percy Shelley is a wealthy young man, and an answer to our prayers. We must all curry favor with him!
MARY GODWIN
I am sure Claire can show him exactly how to float.
William Godwin
What does that mean?
MARY GODWIN
Where else can he go to see Beethoven played under the pull and pump of the Moon? We will put sweet Claire out like bait, and we will skin the rat when he comes for a bite of her skin.
William Godwin
They’ve radicalized you in Scotland! Where have you learned to talk that? Shocking words, Mary. Let’s stay civil in this house if you please. Percy Shelley is happily married, with children. He is political, a man from the future, and a poet, a man well-read. He does not need Claire flouncing on the piano. But I have some writing and I will ask you ladies to observe some calm before supper. And, Mary, there is a letter for you from America. From the vice president, I am sure. Let me know what he says. We convene in two hours for supper.
William Godwin exits the drawing room, and heads to his office, humming happily as the girls gather around Mary’s suitcase. Fanny hugs her little sister Mary, and Claire is beaming; both girls are delighted that Mary is back.
MARY GODWIN
So the atheistic chemist is married with children. Well we know what he will be thinking when he is in the blissful embrace of his wife tonight!
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Oooh, what, Mary?
MARY GODWIN
He will wonder how bright the moon will shine on the river. Both moons!
Mary Godwin pokes her finger into Claire’s chest and makes a popping noise as if a small balloon explodes, as Fanny and Claire shriek in delight. Mary and Fanny continue to poke Claire’s bosom as Claire tries to fend them off until William Godwin’s booming voice quiets them all:
William Godwin
Girls! I am in thought! Please! Read your letter from the Vice President, Mary, and keep those rowdy sisters of yours quiet.
Mary is given several letters by the girls, and she steps forward to the edge of the stage to read them. As she reads, lights rise above her to reveal Aaron Burr sitting at his desk with his bandaged foot up on an ottoman. He speaks as he writes his letter to Mary, and glances several times at the portrait hanging on the wall in his study: it is of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s mother. The audience here’s the baritone voice of Aaron Burr, former Vice President of the United States, as Mary reads his letter.
A Letter from Aaron Burr
A daughter is a man’s goldmine. When he needs gold, he goes to the same vein and finds the coins he needs to spend on joy and optimism. My daughter Theodosia is so deep in my soul that I am lost without her, and I have just got news that she is sunk off the Carolina coast, or apprehended or murdered — or worse — by the pirates of that coast. The news was a spear in my heart, and my first thought was that I should have swallowed Hamilton’s shot, and died on the spot. But I am alive, miserable, and Hamilton is a martyr, people sing accolades to him while spitting on my grave. How can I go on without my daughter? She was my second thought, young Mary, after wishing I was dead when I received the news from Carolina. You will remember I spoke to you about Theodosia, my beloved daughter, and you wrote me a short play in her honor that your sisters sang and danced when I was there in London with you, and I must confess I regarded you as my own daughter, too. And that was my third thought, to write Mary. I send you this letter in the hopes you are still at your father’s, and in the hopes that you are still writing your plays and unloosing that vivid mind of yours to prank society from its slumber. What great invention do you have for us, Sweet Mary? You are fifteen now, if my numbers add up, and I will enclose a note for your father to tell him that should you ever need a school, it will be my honor to see to it that your education is followed as instructed by your heroic mother, whose portrait stares down on me now, in my study, and I fancy I see on her lips your smile. With utmost affections, Aaron Burr
Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States.
Theodosia Burr, the precocious daughter of Aaron Burr, painted before pirates made her walk the plank off the Carolinas.
SETH FLYNN
Composer of Frankenstein’s Bride musical
SETH FLYNN’s band, The Duskwhales
Lavender Ladies music video shot by Seanie Blue for the Duskwhales
In the foyer of the Godwin publishing shop, a slim young man looks at a few books as he waits for William Godwin. The young man wears a long coat and bright clean boots. He is well-appointed notes Mary Godwin, as she enters the shop and walks behind the counter.
PERCY SHELLEY
Is this Mary Godwin? I’ve been dying to meet you.
MARY GODWIN
You look perfectly healthy to me, Shelley.
PERCY SHELLEY
I might, but inside I am always thinking about poetry to recite, or Science to explore with you, and all the noise of the Godwin household prevents me from speaking candidly. I have a meeting with your father about money, that awful rot. But when can we speak tet a tet, alone without petty gossip competing with our ideas?
MARY GODWIN
But what pretty words, Percy! Do you speak like this to every young lass?
PERCY SHELLEY
Only if the lass is dressed in tartan, still smelling of highland heather, and especially if she has your breadth of reading and study. How can I not wax rhapsodic?
MARY GODWIN
Actually, I find I stink rather of whale. Their spouts, launched high in a magnificent spray, is impossible to wash off, and the dogs on Skinner street follow me as though they intend to roll in my kilt. But if you can stand the smell of the right whale, you can meet me up at the old church, at St. Pancras. I am there every mid-afternoon, lost in a book.
PERCY SHELLEY
I will see you in the afternoon.
PERCY puts on his hat and strolls off stage to where WILLIAM GODWIN is standing. Godwin calls out to Mary:
WILLIAM GODWIN
Mary, do see that Murray’s new books are properly ordered by author name in the very first row behind the till. There’s a good girl. Shelley and I are meeting Murray now about a book on Java, featuring volcanoes and earthquakes, and I will be back after lunch. Come Shelley, we must dine with the publisher who one day shall make your poems famous, as he already has done for Lord Byron.
Men exit stage. And Mary is left in the bookshop. Behind her on the stage are projected hundreds of volumes of literature and non fiction. She picks up a book, goes behind the counter, and begins to read, but is quickly interrupted by her step sister Claire.
Claire Claremont
Speaking of Lord Byron, I will see him speak his poetry at the music room on Friday, when the new Beethoven is unveiled. Byron is as dashing as Percy, and a great deal more dangerous! A society lady has said that Byron is bad, mad, and dangerous to know. I think we should be great friends. Will you come?
MARY GODWIN
If I am not trapped behind this counter on Friday evening, of course, and maybe Percy can be talked into attending as well.
Claire Claremont
My gosh, you are friends already speaking in secrets. I knew this would happen. But be careful because Fanny also has her heart set on his sleeve.
MARY GODWIN
My dear Claire, I have no such desirous intent on a married man, regardless of how cute or poetic he may be. If we speak further, Percy and I, it is to explore literature and Science. He is a chemist, as well as a writer —
Claire Claremont
He makes bombs!
MARY GODWIN
Well, one day, Claire, so shall we.
Light fades out. The scenery is transformed from the inside of the Godwin publishing shop to a graveyard, and Mary strolls to a tombstone with a book she has just picked up from the shop before the changing of the projected scenery. This is the Mary Wollstonecraft grave at Old St. Pancras Church. Mary sprawls on the grass and reads out loud from her book.
MARY GODWIN
Quote from Coleridge
She is surprised by Percy walking up behind her.
PERCY SHELLEY
Hello Mary. What great book do you have your nose in now?
MARY GODWIN
It’s Coleridge, his latest. I wasn’t expecting you today, so soon.
PERCY SHELLEY
I cannot stay long. I have come to ask you if we can meet on Saturdays, here, at the grave.
MARY GODWIN
But of course. Why Saturday?
PERCY SHELLEY
Due to misunderstanding, the bailiffs are on my tail. A fat one and a skinny one, they follow me when I’m in London, waiting to pounce. But on Saturday night the bailiffs by virtue of England’s very best law, are not allowed to make arrests.
MARY GODWIN
So we can speak as poets rather than prisoners? I think I can see skulking around the Church, some distance away, a fat man and a thin man. Why don’t you sit next to me and hide behind this stone?
Percy sits down next to Mary, while Mary looks at her book and he is smiling
PERCY SHELLEY
So it is you and me, and your mother, and Coleridge.
MARY GODWIN
And the bailiffs! My mother had trouble with them too. And I shouldn’t get too comfortable Percy, because the fat man and the thin man have noticed us, and I suspect you have 30 seconds or so before they close in on you like sharks.
Mary and Percy stand up and begin to sing the song Saturday. As they reach the chorus of the song, a fat man and a thin man burst on into the scene and try to capture Percy as he dodges in between the stones. They keep on singing and at the end of the song Percy shouts out to Mary.
PERCY SHELLEY
Never fear, dear Mary. These sheriffs eat pig and sheep, and have grease in their feet, while I am vindicated by my natural diet. Nothing but vegetable, I am light as a feather and shall soon leave them like bobbing likes blobs of butter in my wake!
With one last feint, Percy exits the stage with the thin man stumbling after him in pursuit. The fat bailiff is doubled over, panting, and he looks at Mary.
FAT BAILIFF
Beg pardon Miss, but the company you keep is dodgy, I warrant, and no good shall come of frequenting even a graveyard with someone headed for the tower of London, with all the other debtors we catch like mice. Beg pardon Miss, but I must rejoin this chase.
MARY GODWIN
Right, Bailiff, more carrots tonight and less mutton, and you might catch Percy a few weeks hence. Good luck, sir.
The fat bailiff exits the stage and leaves Mary with her book of Coleridge.
MARY GODWIN
Oh Coleridge, you are so serious, and look at what excitement Percy Shelley has brought me in two minutes. I suspect we will have more to speak about, Percy and I, and I shall impress upon him your marvelous meters and rhymes, in the hopes that one day his dashing spirit can be wedded to your majestic compositions. You write like Beethoven sounds, what a shame you are not as young at heart.
She reads lines from the ancient mariner.
Raffles was the governor of Singapore and was in Jakarta when the Tambora volcano blew up in 1815, one year before this scene at Godwin’s shop. Raffles had come to London on business and was pitching his history of Java to publishers.
SANDRA BISHOP
Composer of Frankenstein’s Bride musical
Claire Clairmont is fussing with Mary’s hair and dress as the two get ready to go out. Fanny Wollstonecraft looks glum, but she is helping her half-sister and her stepsister to get ready for their outing. William Godwin makes a brief appearance and gives some books and accounts to Fanny.
WILLIAM GODWIN
I shall expect you both back at eight o’clock for late supper. I have flagged a coach and it is outside waiting on your vanities.
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
The vain ones will be at the recital. It is Lord Byron’s night tonight, even if the headline is the new music from Beethoven. Where there is Byron, there will be scandal, bosoms heaving.
WILLIAM GODWIN
Claire, mind that snake of a tongue, or there shall be no symphony for either of you tonight.
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
It’s not a symphony, that I will miss. It is a sonata, just one person on the piano. Next year it will be me playing the Beethoven!
WILLIAM GODWIN
I hear he is going deaf. And yet still he hears the music in his mind, and puts it in our fingers. Remarkable. But keep talking as you do, Claire, and one day you’ll find yourself wagging silently without listeners. Young ladies in this house must be versed in decorum and generously delicate. No foul language in a customer’s presence.
Lights dim, as Claire and Mary exit stage left and Fanny is center stage. A spotlight falls on her as a small crowd of people circle in the shadows in the background, which has been transformed from the Godwin bookshop into the foyer of a small music theatre. But Fanny holds center stage, hands folded, as she is still in the bookshop foyer despite the murmurs from the theatre going crowd at the back of the stage.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
It is my turn to mind the bookshop, but we could have closed it for the late afternoon so I could also attend the Beethoven and meet Byron, but instead I must add and subtract the shillings in and out for the philosophy books and children’s books sold. It is a misery to be left behind, knowing wherever Mary goes she will be acclaimed the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. But what am I, if not the first daughter of that magnificent mother? I sucked her breast, and Mary was given a dog to suckle as our mother lay dying. Mary saw nothing of her passing, but I watched every second until the house was concussed by loud silence and her new husband William Godwin jotted down the time of his wife’s death in his journal as though it were another appointment. I must claim this heritage, I am the true daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and I nurtured for three years by her caresses and voice. But . . . my tongue is tied in Mary’s presence. We both read, but she remembers, and we both see, but Mary calculates the meaning of every scene. We both sing and dance, but Mary writes. Does she have no role for me, her sister, in the narration of her life? How different it would be if our mother lived! I would be the center of attention, instead of a shopkeeper’s assistant.
Fanny begins to sing, hands still folded. The sound of the theatre crowd is absent, but we still see their shadows flitting at the end of the stage.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Mother, I need you now
You brought me down to Earth
But now I orbit without my star
I have become a motherless child
A heart without its star
Motherless child
While Fanny sings, from stage right we see Mary Godwin emerges to the edge of the limelight. She watches her half-sister sing, and joins in the chorus, before singing this solo section:
MARY GODWIN
Sister, I know how you feel,
sometimes life doesn’t seem real
I will always be here for you
You can depend on me,
Motherless child
MARY GODWIN & FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT (together)
A heart without its star
Motherless child
That’s who we are
MARY GODWIN
Fanny, you can go hear the Beethoven with Claire and Lord Byron, I will mind the shop. The coach is waiting outside, just hop in.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Look how I am dressed, my hair a tousle, and my face without cream. I am hideous, a monster, I can’t go to the theatre.
MARY GODWIN
Nobody sees you that way, Fanny. They know you are big-hearted the moment you smile, the moment they look into your eyes —
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
I know they see a monster, because that’s how I feel. Go, the coach is waiting. I will make sure the shillings are counted.
MARY GODWIN
It will be your turn to go out next, Fanny, I will mind the store and help you with your dress and creams. I promise.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
It’s guilt that makes you say this, Mary, not sisterly love.
MARY GODWIN
(Pause) I do not feel guilty because our mother perished giving me birth. Blame the doctor and his dirty hands. Not me. I clung to life the same way you would have, or our mother would have. But it wasn’t my grip that killed my mother.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
My mother.
MARY GODWIN
Our mother would weep to see us talking this way. We don’t have her, but we have each other. And we don’t have much more than that. I am happy you are my sister. I am happy when we exchange notes or hide in the closets from Claire, or picnic at St. Pancras. You make me happy, Fanny, more than anyone else.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
You have your father. You love him madly.
MARY GODWIN
I have enough love for both a sister and a father. As much as either of them would ever need.
FANNY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Go to your sonata, Mary. I am fine, I am sorry to moan all the time.
MARY GODWIN
I will mind the store next time. Your turn is coming.
Fanny Imlay Wollstonecraft, the doomed half-sister
William Blake’s wood engraving for Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Stories from Real Life”
April 21st, 1816 Music salon in Polygon, north London
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
This is my famous sister, Mary Godwin. And this is the infamous Lord Byron.
LORD BYRON
Ah. The daughter of your gender’s great hero, the pinnacle of womanhood, the magnificent mother, Wollstonecraft! My pleasure, Miss.
MARY GODWIN
What did you think of the Sonata?
LORD BYRON
I confess I thought there would be an orchestra. More than a single musician tickling the keys. I suppose this makes me very English, no more than a perky shopkeeper, whose throbbing ear aches for orchestras he pays to hear.
MARY GODWIN
The piano itself is rather new, and opera not even two centuries old, so I wonder what the shopkeeper listened to before the mighty orchestra?
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
All of England would still sing songs about beer, or the Celtic legends of vikings and shipwreck and red-headed maidens.
LORD BYRON
I suppose we had the Gregorians humming, and a flute with banjo or Lyre, the Greek strings which seduced Alexander and Socrates. But not much else! Music would have been poets speaking their rhymes as birds sang in the forest. We have come too far, quickly.
MARY GODWIN
And where do you think we end, if society like a train travels ever more fluidly to its future, where is the limit?
LORD BYRON
Do you mean musically or socially?
MARY GODWIN
Music surely is society, no?
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
My heavens, listen to the two of you. Everyone else in this hall is talking about that woman’s hem or that man’s hat! And the two of you write a book as easily as a drunkard farts. Such a shame Percy Shelly is not here to put his oar into this beautiful stream of thought.
LORD BYRON
Percy Shelley, Oxford? The poet?
MARY GODWIN
The anarchist, the vegetarian, the Irish defender. Yes, he is our special friend.
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
I told you about him and his vivid talents. He should like to meet you.
LORD BYRON
Everyone thinks they would like to meet me, until they do. The affliction of a reputation, deserved or not. But I deserve mine.
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
It is said of Byron that he is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I could sing a song right now.
Claire begins to hum gently and Mary acts as a chorus as the girls whisper and sing “so mad, so bad, you are too dangerous to know.” They repeat so bad, so mad, so dangerous to know, we speak to you even though good girl shouldn’t do, which we all know, but cannot help to do, look at us now, we speak to you, mad, bad, and so very dangerous to know.
Byron by Richard Westall
Byron’s manuscript of Childe Harold (1811)
His very own voice
LORD BYRON
I like this about Claire, such a gorgeous singer. More than her smile, more than her bosom, this gift of melody is precious. But I can sing my own song, in my defense, if you don’t mind, and please be my Greek chorus, so I can understand better the character I am in my own words!
Byron begins to sing the song Nice guy, with Mary and Claire as his chorus for the first half of the song and then all of the theater-going audience in the great halls foyer as an added chorus in the second half of the song, when they join on to sing the lines, “such a very nice guy.”
Next Scene in the Eastern Section of the grounds of the Old St. Pancras Church, Percy finds Mary sitting against a tombstone, while she reads a book, Percy is nibbling on a flower or dandelion that he has plucked during his walk to the Church.
PERCY SHELLEY
At last, alone, I can unleash the words of my heart.
MARY GODWIN
You seem always rather smooth with pretty language, Percy, whether your words spring from your mind or your heart. I am glad you’ve found me.
PERCY SHELLEY
It wasn’t hard, since you gave me the clue, and I imagine it is the headstone of your renowned mother that has you propped up reading what exactly?
MARY GODWIN
Oh, Coleridge. He has become dark, where once Coleridge was light and deft and like sunshine in winter. But age has circled him like a curtain, and now to read him is to sink rather than to swim.
PERCY SHELLEY
You are a great reader, according to your reputation.
MARY GODWIN
My father boasts a great deal, but I would rather he loved just as much.
PERCY SHELLEY
Yes, William Godwin strikes me as a bit concentrated on his own fortunes, both literary and in his accounts. I pressed him often for information about you, the remarkable daughter of two grand writers, and he always spoke of you in a future tense, of who you would become, and what great things you might do.
MARY GODWIN
And I warrant he always said this in the context of my gender?
PERCY SHELLEY
Yes, as if you would overcome your female sex, rather than be emboldened or strengthened by it. Your mother is an example of just that, a woman full of thought, with the keen sense of how to shaper her philosophy in a pill we could all swallow. Revolution, the great salvation of all of us, in your mother’s hands will always be an immortal entertainment! She is like Orion, or the Big Dipper, something all other searchers can be guided by.
MARY GODWIN
Well these are grand thoughts, and though I have a wide imagination, I must confess I never think them. Life seems more a challenge of leaving my father’s comfortable book shop, of gaining of winning a station in life greater than managing other people’s writings.’
PERCY SHELLEY
This means you will write yourself?
MARY GODWIN
I am 16, so I haven’t got any where near that far. You must be patient, Shelley. But tell me about your own poetry, or about your chemical experiments. I am sorry I have not read your Queen Mab, and I have looked for it keenly.
PERCY SHELLEY
I could speak about Religion, and how I dispossess it, find it childish. I could speak about Ireland, and make it seem a romance, or I could quote from Queen Mab, but what I have in mind right now is a treatise on carrots, and cabbage and chocolate, that new wonder of the kitchen.
Quote here from Vindication of Natural Diet, which ends with the line, how much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death.
MARY GODWIN
Look how you treat the simple notion of the daily menu! Is everything dissected with such precision?
PERCY SHELLEY
Well I could recite three blind mice, if you’d rather.
MARY GODWIN
Which you would turn into an inquisition of why one mouse wrinkles his snout when he sniffs while another mouse blinks his eyelashes, and while a third sniffs flour or sugar rather than rotting cheese, and you would give us the reasons for the difference in wrinkles of each mouse foot, and the colors in hue and tint of each mouse’s hair, I suspect?
PERCY SHELLEY
Yes, I am a bit too inquisitive. I admit. I must also be patient, and learn that words can make big ideas shine in very small spaces. Elaboration sometimes hides the beauty of unvarnished wood. Instead of reciting the trees great age, I wish to make you feel the mystery in its rings. What is so complex should be rendered simple, in rhyme, and then I might unravel a rainbow not by its colors but by the waters it captures in time.
MARY GODWIN
(Pause) Well done, Shelley. Is this your normal manner of speaking? Or is this a performance for me?
PERCY SHELLEY
It is my sense that you are special, all those books, have been met by your great appetite, like a whale who is curious and opens its great maw to drink in all manner of bait in order to savor a single egg of a rare fish.
MARY GODWIN
We read, or we are dead. We read not to win but to look. We read so we move into our futures with a sense of what we must bring from the past, not every grain of sand but a sense of the shore, the contours of the beach, and the mechanics of the waves that have shaped it. I read to know where I go and what I must find when I step an inch into my destiny, and to be clear to you, the atheist expelled from Oxford, to you, the man who thinks a priest is nothing more than a swindler taking bets, to you I must be clear that destiny is not something shaped by any grand scheme other than my own. I will invent myself, and in so doing, I will paint my own future.
PERCY SHELLEY
You cannot imagine how these words of yours entrap me even further in my doomed marriage. What a rash fool I have been. I love my wife and child and even the child that is now in the oven, but they are not my destiny. And I feel impotent now in the shadow of your mother and in the shine of your mind, and I wonder where I might find the strength to rescue myself from such tawdry domestic prison.
“Cities were consumed, men gathered round their blazing homes to look once more into each other’s faces, and happy they were who lived in the volcano’s eye, their mountain torch, hope was all they contained as forests were set on fire, the crackling trunks extinguished with a crash, until all was black.”
Look at this mountain, Shelley,” says one poet to another. “How can this be summer?”
Shelley, the minor poet of the two, shrugs; he is leaving with the women for the Alps, and is distracted by this obligation. He would rather stay at the Lake and take the boat out, partly to get away from his lover and her stepsister, but he has come for another mountain, and he will go with them there, even as a tourist. That mountain in the Alps, a day by carriage in the distance, might give him the language he wishes to put in verse but has not yet learned how to.
“Stupid mists, fog, rains, perpetual density, when there should be light,” says the major poet. “I am writing something unusual about this impossible rain.”
Now Shelley looks up at the hill beside them and notices the storm impaled on its tip. He wants to say nothing, because if he says something he knows the major poet will recite, and there is nothing one poet detests more about another poet than the second man’s lines read aloud, but Shelley is curious about ‘something unusual.’ How could he not be? “What is it you’re writing?”
The major poet does not look at the minor poet. His piece isn’t written. It is still a thought. He is cautious without ink, because he might not remember what he says. But this view prods his thinking, sparks his tongue: “It is still an infant, but there are two lines that stand out:
‘The bright sun is extinguished, and the stars wander darkling in space, rayless and pathless’
. . . that is one line, and the other is
‘the icy Earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air, as morning came but brought no day.’
But it is not finished, hardly begun, Percy.”
The minor poet says nothing: the small mountain seems to be changing in front of his sight. Are there two hills? One emerges from behind, a shadow he has never seen. But he knows this hill well! Is he seeing things? He wants the mountain to become a single mass, but no, there are two: a rock and its shadow.
“What do you think, man?”
“Exquisite, Byron. It is beastly again today, so here is your reason to stay inside and write it out. What is it called, this extinguished sun of yours?”
“Darkness.”
Shelley keeps looking at the mountain hoping Byron does not ask him about anything he himself might be writing, because he has spent no ink to paper. He has nothing. Even the women are writing, and even Byron’s young doctor friend is writing, and now the major poet reveals how keenly he feels the weather, and makes ready to celebrate in verse this Winter in July. Shelley hates this feeling of following, of being a step back. Nobody has his language, but he doesn’t speak it enough, and as if for proof he stares stupidly at the mountain and wonders if he is seeing things again as the hill’s shadow peeks from the storm and changes the contours of the land he thought he knew. This is a sign, he knows, that he should not go to the Alps, but should stay and write about his own shadow, ‘the other’ he keeps sensing, but his lover Mary and her sister have ruined his privacy, muted the stream of rhyme he has not spoken for months, doubly silenced by this terrible weather.
“Have a good voyage, man,” says Byron with a smile, before he walks off, not looking back. It is raining, again, but now with wind. Shelley imagines there is ice on his eyebrows and in his hair. The mountain recedes into its shadow.
“Darkness.” Damn.
Hiking in the Alps, 1800s
Female alpinists, making history
Byron as hero to the Greeks
All songs, stage treatment, teleplay, moviescripts and print and audio books are copyright 2021 Seth Flynn, Sandra Bishop and Sean Harris
