Browning

Robert, seized by the idea of a great play for a great contemporary actor, delivered a full text some ten months later in March 1837. It might have been sooner—he was a fast writer once he had settled on his subject and theme—had he not been simultaneously working on the poem Sordello, which he had begun shortly after writing Pauline and which had already been displaced, to an extent, by the intervention of Paracelsus.65 Macready was willing to credit that Strafford, the play, would be his own salvation from some personal professional difficulties and rescue the English stage from the wretched condition into which it had sunk. Any play by Browning, for that matter, might do the trick, for he had surely seen John Forster’s imaginative, puffing article in March, in the New Monthly Magazine, entitled ‘Evidences of a new genius for Dramatic Poetry’, which declared, among other emphatic assertions, that ‘Mr Browning has the powers of a great dramatic poet’ and that his genius ‘waits only the proper opportunity to redeem the drama and elevate the literary repute of England’.

Macready, with his actor’s head sunk into his hands, might have felt his spirits rise a little. On 3 August 1836 Forster told Macready that ‘Browning had fixed on Strafford for the subject of a tragedy’. On 1 November, when Forster reported to Macready on the progress of Browning’s play, he praised it highly, but Macready feared that the young critic and would-be biographer of Strafford might be ‘misled as to its dramatic power; characters to him having the interest of action’. However, ‘Nous verrons! Heaven speed it! Amen!’ Despite pious sentiments, Macready began to feel faintly uneasy.

On 23 November, Macready confided to his diary that he ‘Began very attentively to read over the tragedy of Strafford, in which I find more grounds for exception than I had anticipated. I had been too carried away by the truth of character to observe the meanness of plot, and occasional obscurity.’ On 21 March 1837, when Macready and Robert read through Strafford together, he felt his heart fail. He is frank in his diary entry for that day: ‘I must confess my disappointment at the management of the story. I doubt its interest.’ Familiarity did not improve it. ‘I am by no means sanguine, I lament to say, on its success.’

On 30 March, Macready read the play to Osbaldistone, manager of Covent Garden, ‘who caught at it with avidity, agreed to produce it without delay on his part, and to give the author £12 per night for twenty-five nights, and £10 per night for ten nights beyond … Browning and Forster came in;’ records Macready in his diary for 30 March, ‘I had the pleasure of narrating what had passed between Mr Osbaldiston [sic] and myself, and of making Browning very happy.’ Macready suggested some further revisions that Robert ‘was quite enraptured with.’ Forster said he was trying to induce Longman to publish the text of the play. Robert asked if he could dedicate the play to Macready, who said ‘how much I should value such an honour, which I had not anticipated or looked for’. All of them, thoroughly pleased and in the highest good humour with one another and their prospects, looked forward to the production of Strafford, that most interesting new play by that great new dramatic poet Mr Robert Browning, and a stage success on the scale of, or surpassing, Talfourd’s Ion.

Dramatists, even authors of books, will repress a grim smile when they hear of a celebratory mood in which congratulations are exchanged in circumstances such as these. Elation is excusable, euphoria is understandable—it is the very air that is breathed in a moment of head-spinning optimism and rare agreement: it’s like bouncing on a spring mattress before the bed frame gives way and the whole company is tumbled down, some coming off with worse bruises than others. Macready held fast to his first and subsequent doubts about the stage worthiness of the play that Osbaldistone’s enthusiasm had made all the more urgent to resolve. He went over the play laboriously with Robert himself, and even drafted in Forster to meddle with the text and structure in an attempt to relieve Strafford of what he perceived as its ‘heaviness’ and stiffen what he felt to be its ‘feebleness’. He had read it to his wife Catherine and his children, who were ‘oppressed by a want of action and lightness; I fear it will not do.’66

Quarrels were not unfamiliar to Macready. On 12 April there was positively a dust-up between Macready, Forster, and Browning: ‘There were mutual complaints—much temper—sullenness, I should say on the part of Forster, who was very much out of humour with Browning, who said and did all that man could to expiate any offence he might have given.’ Forster, at Macready’s behest, had been worrying for a while at the text of Strafford and—by Macready’s account—seemed to agree with the great actor’s cuts and alterations. ‘He thought my view of the work quite a clear one, and in the most earnest spirit of devotion, set off to find and communicate with Browning on the subject—a fearful rencontre.’ In fact, Macready seems to have been anxious to ‘furnish Browning with a decent excuse to withdraw the play’, to the extent of trying to find out if the actors who had been engaged were ‘restive about their parts’. But no luck there: Macready was ‘disappointed at their general acquiescence’. In his diary for 13 April, Macready acknowledged that, when Forster returned with Robert in tow, ‘Forster … showed an absence of sense and generosity in his behaviour which I grieved to see. There was a scene.’

Quite what the dispute was about is not entirely clear. Whatever offence had been taken by Forster, and whatever its cause, he blew up and—not for the first time—lost his considerable temper. This feature of Forster’s personality was well known, and it was a worry to Robert, who confided in Macready ‘how much injury he did himself by this temper’. The dispute ended when Robert ‘assented to all the proposed alterations, and expressed his wish, that coûte que coûte, the hazard should be made and the play proceeded with’. This seemed satisfactory.

Until the next day. Macready wrote a detailed report in his diary on 14 April of how he found Robert at Forster’s where the poet-dramatist ‘produced some scraps of paper with hints and unconnected lines—the full amount of his labour upon the alterations agreed on. It was too bad to trifle in this way, but it was useless to complain; he had wasted his time in striving to improve the fourth act scene, which was ejected from the play as impracticable for any good result. We went all over the play again (!) very carefully, and he resolved to bring the amendments suggested by eleven o’clock this evening. Met Browning at the gate of my chambers; he came upstairs and, after some subjects of general interest, proceeded to that of his tragedy. He had done nothing to it; had been oppressed and incapable of carrying his intentions into action. He wished to withdraw it.’ Macready sent Robert for Forster and they both came back. They turned over all the pros and cons, for acting the play, for not acting the play. Finally they all decided to go ahead with Strafford, though Robert asked for more time to complete his alterations. ‘It was fixed to be done. Heaven speed us all!’ wrote Macready at the end of a difficult day.

It was one thing to deal with writers and critics, but that was not the end of it for Macready or the fate of Strafford: hardly even the beginning. For as soon as it was decided to perform the play, the complications and intrigues of staging it took over. On 20 April, all Macready’s doubts about the play recurred. He read Strafford again. He groaned. He sweated. He strongly feared its failure: ‘it is not good.’ He had had five days for his fears to be fed by the fact that Osbaldistone was on the verge of bankruptcy and had imposed ‘parsimonious regulations’. That is to say, the production budget had been slashed to the bone. The actors were playing up. Miss Helen Faucit, a fine young actress, only twenty years old and already a popular favourite with audiences, complained to Macready that ‘her part in Browning’s play was very bad, and that she did not know if she should do it. She wanted me to ask her to do it. But I would not, for I wish she would refuse it, that even at his late point in time the play might be withdrawn—it will do no one good.’67

Even as he learned his own part, Macready’s spirits fell further: he felt a certain obligation to Robert Browning that compromised his better judgement that he should withdraw for his own benefit; but he could not help hoping for an accident that should prevent performance, relieve his own decision to proceed, avoid the play and—worse—his own performance in the leading role being grievously hissed by a disappointed house, bringing down his own reputation as much as that of Browning to damnation. Browning might recover some ground and rescue himself with Sordello, but in his worst moments the worried actor considered that the inevitable failure of Strafford would mean it would be all up for the great Macready. ‘It will strike me hard, I fear. God grant that it may not be a heavy blow.’68 The sole chance for the play, he thought, would be in the acting: his own, at least. He had his doubts about the performances of some of his co-players.

And sure enough, the notices of the première of Strafford in the newspapers of 2 May, the morning after the first night, were nothing like as bad as Macready had anticipated: he was gratified to find them ‘lenient and even kind to Browning. On myself—the “brutal and ruffianly” journal observed that I “acquitted myself exceedingly well”.’ When Macready called that day on Forster and found Robert with him, he told him candidly that ‘the play was a grand escape, and that he ought to regard it only as such, a mere step to that fame which his talents must procure him.’ It had been, in Macready’s estimation, a narrow squeak. Some small ill-feeling still rankled between the three of them: Forster had written up the play in the Examiner, judging it more poetic than dramatic, which was to Macready’s mind a ‘very kind and judicious criticism’, though the judiciousness thereof was evidently not to Robert’s liking. Robert suggested that if Forster wanted any future tragedies, he should write them himself. Forster expressed himself hurt by Robert’s ‘expressions of discontent at his criticism’ which Macready thought had, if anything, verged on indulgence ‘for such a play as Strafford’ and he was cross at Robert’s ingratitude ‘after all that has been done for Browning’.69

The first night, on 1 May, had been a triumph: a full house; the end of each act attended with the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience; calls of ‘Author! Author’ from a partisan claque to which Robert did not respond—it is not clear whether he was even in the house—so that the hubbub took some time to die down; the critics generally positive, despite some serious shortcomings in the staging and the general dilapidation of Covent Garden. William Sharp writes sadly that ‘the house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the “scenery” commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid’.70 The less said about the acting and understanding of the actors, the better: though Robert himself had something to say in remarks he made to Eliza Flower, who communicated them eagerly in a letter to Sarah Fox: ‘he seems a good deal annoyed at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a play again, as long as he lives. You have no idea of the ignorance and obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his having to write out the meaning of the word impeachment, as some of them thought it meant poaching.’71

The exceptions were very likely Miss Faucit as Lady Carlisle and Macready as Strafford. Both had acquitted themselves well; she tender and affectingly pathetic, he majestic in bearing and bearded to resemble a Vandyke courtier of the period. Mr Vandenhoff as Pym had taken a purely perfunctory interest in his part, which he reportedly played with a nauseating, whining drawl; Mr Dale as Charles I was deaf as a post; and ‘The Younger Vane’, says Sharp, ‘ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house’.72 The part of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, was taken by Miss Vincent, fresh from her triumph at Drury Lane where she had played with Burmese bulls to the greatest satisfaction of her audiences. It was thus all the more to the credit of the play itself that it transcended these ignoble obstacles. The second night, when Robert sat ‘muffled up in the pit to feel the pulse of the audience’,73 the house received the play with warm-enough applause.

And so on through to the fourth night’s ‘fervid applause’ from an ‘admirably filled house’ and playbills announcing two further performances, one of which took place as advertised, the second fatally handicapped by the absence of Vandenhoff, who, having secured a better offer in America, jumped stage and took ship. He failed to turn up to play the important part of Pym, Strafford’s principal antagonist. The performance was cancelled. The play’s run was terminated. The precarious financial condition of the Covent Garden theatre collapsed entirely, and the promising young author, for his pains, got not a penny of his promised reward of £12 for even four, five, far less the projected first twenty-five nights, and he might whistle forever for the £10 for each of the ten nights further envisioned.

It was something, however, never mind if Robert had made little or no money from the play’s performances, that Longman had at least published the text of his play on the occasion of the first night of Strafford, 1 May. The Brownings had not been required to dip into their own purse to pay for the honour, though neither the book nor the play brought any profit to either party. Five months later, Macready took over the management of the Covent Garden theatre from Osbaldistone with a troupe of good actors, and for two years thereafter indulged his mission and pursued his ambition to improve the English stage. Robert himself stuck for a decent while to the vow of renunciation he had made in the hearing of Eliza Flower: it was to be six years before he next ventured near a stage or a theatre except as a regular spectator.

The blank verse tragedy that was Strafford took as its principal character the English statesman Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), who from 1639 was chief adviser to Charles I. In 1640, Strafford was impeached by the House of Commons. On a Bill of Attainder, and with the assent of the king, he was executed on Tower Hill. The action, such as it is, of Browning’s play—rather, the course of events from which the drama derives—is centred around the character of Strafford himself; his monarch, Charles I; his antagonist, John Pym, formerly Strafford’s closest friend; and his would-be lover, Lady Carlisle. It is a drama of crossed loves and conflicted loyalties, passions and prejudices, public and personal: Strafford loves Pym, who considers himself betrayed by his friend’s defection to the royalist cause; Strafford loves Charles I whose unworthiness and weakness betray his adviser’s loyalty and send him to the block; Strafford is loved by the unhistorical character Lady Carlisle, whose devotion he does not perceive, blinded as he is by his fatal commitment to the king.

Strafford had not been a critical failure—that the production had abruptly stalled due to external circumstances was no fault of Robert Browning’s, but the fiasco of the fifth night and the abrupt, untimely termination of the play’s intended run has tended to colour posterity’s judgement of its success. Of course posterity has also had an extended opportunity to judge the published text of the play and to review it in the light of developments in drama since 1837. It does not stand out conspicuously in the modern, revised history of the English theatre. It has enjoyed occasional amateur college productions, but it has never been professionally revived—nor is it likely to be. But for all that, Strafford in its time was well-enough received by contemporary critics and those playgoers who happened to see it before it fell off the stage into the pit of English literary and theatrical history.

Robert retired hurt—by the stage, by Forster, by the low conduct of venal and inadequate actors, by a general disgust—though his disappointment did not stop him associating with the many new friends he had made, frequenting the backstage green room when he attended the theatre, dining with Macready and Forster and Talfourd and the rest, all of whom welcomed his good company. He retired for extended periods to Camberwell where, in his room, succoured by his immediate family and surrounded by his familiar and fetish objects, pictures, and books, an idea for another historical play occurred to him. But mostly he set himself back to work on his interrupted poem, Sordello, which he intended to finish during a visit to Italy.

Prompted perhaps by his theatrical disappointments (it is good form to remove oneself abroad temporarily after an embarrassing dramatic disaster), and probably also to add colour not only to his own life but to his poetic work in progress, he embarked on his adventure in the afternoon of Good Friday, 13 April 1838. He sailed from London’s St Katharine’s Docks as the only passenger on the Norham Castle, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste on Rothschild business. It may be supposed that passage had been arranged for Robert by Reuben Browning.

The journey to Trieste, where he was dropped off by the ship’s Captain, Matthew Davidson, took seven weeks. It was as terrible in its episodes of almost Byronic high drama as in constantly wretched periods of dispiritingly low seasickness. It took a full week of gales and snow before they even reached Start Point, Devon. On 26 April, they were off Lisbon; the next day they were sixteen miles north-west of Cape St Vincent. They passed the Straits of Gibraltar on Sunday 29 April, and on 6 May they came upon an upturned boat off the coast of Algiers. On 13 May, they were seven miles from Valetta; the next day they sailed close to Syracuse and were briefly becalmed on 16 May within sight of Mount Etna. It took another fortnight before they reached Trieste. The next evening, 31 May, Robert left by steamer for Venice, where he arrived early on the morning of 1 June.74

A letter to Fanny Haworth in Elstree is normally quoted in full in any account of Browning’s life. It is worth repeating as a rare early example of Robert’s narrative prose. It is dated 24 July 1838, by which time he was back in Camberwell. The introductory passage has been partly quoted already—‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves … bite them to bits … snowdrops and Tilsit …’; it is a charming, literally flowery, preface to saying:

You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen … the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of ‘Euphrasia’ into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was,—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says,—my sister told it to a Mr Dow who delivered it, I suppose to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over etc. etc. etc.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure that she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month—under a blazing African sun … don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and [here Browning inserts three small drawings of the ship, noting (‘All the “bulwarks,” or sides at the top, carried away by the waves’)]—nay, look you, these are the gun rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, good lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other ‘to cover the faces’: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o’clock she should be cut adrift; accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned around, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there—only thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole ‘story.’

The image of the loosed boat as a ‘mutilated creature’ turning to look at Robert Browning and his shipmates before reeling off into a luridly effulgent sunset is stunning—worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, or any of the tuppence-coloured gothic horrors in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. Mrs Orr provides some supplementary detail, which Robert confided to Sarianna but withheld from Fanny as too sensational:75 ‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hand clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and the sight. They stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, etc. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.’

Robert’s letter to Fanny continues with a brisk itinerary: ‘“What I did?” I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see.’ Presumably Robert means that Fanny will see them if not first in poetical form in Sordello, then certainly in other poems in due course—Pippa would soon and significantly pass, in April 1841, through delicious Asolo. ‘Then to Vicenza, Padua and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! Frankfort and Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp—then home.’ Robert here carefully blots out four lines, asking Fanny Haworth to ‘Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation:—shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out—whenever that will be.’76