Perdita’s mirrors: Mary Robinson, The Winter’s Tale, and pastoral play in Georgian London

This talk will consider a performance of The Winter's Tale at Drury Lane in the late 18th century as enabling a kind of pastoral roleplay within the urban environment. 

Abstract

Mary Robinson, the actress, Romantic poet and novelist, became famous in her youth as one of the young George IV’s first mistresses after he saw her play Perdita in David Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Notoriety and relentless print satires made Robinson synonymous with that role (though she had been playing it for less than two weeks before the royal command performance in December 1779), and she is now sometimes remembered as ‘Perdita’ Robinson. This paper will look at The Winter’s Tale alongside Robinson’s posthumously published Memoirs and consider the role of pastoral fantasies in the late eighteenth-century city. I suggest that the conventions of pastoral romance work in both texts to provide a comforting alternative narrative for the affair between Robinson and the Prince of Wales which obscures the hierarchies of gender and class upon which the idea of monarchy is founded. 

About the Speaker

Sally Barnden is a Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea University. She is the author of Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance (Cambridge, 2019) and Shakespeare and the Royal Actor (forthcoming from Oxford), and co-creator of the database ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’ (www.sharc.kcl.ac.uk, 2021).  Her work has also been published in Shakespeare Bulletin and Theatre Journal. Before joining Swansea in 2023 she taught early modern literature at King’s College London, the University of Oxford, Queen Mary, Brunel, and Central School of Speech and Drama. 

Reading extracts hyperlinked on the LLRG site:

David Garrick, Florizel and Perdita, Act 2 pp. 17-41

Mary Robinson, Memoirs, vol. 2 pp. 29-52  

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