The talk tended towards the literary and theatrical, and Macready ‘overtook Mr Browning as they were leaving the house and said, “Write a play, Browning, and keep me from going to America.” The reply was, “Shall it be historical and English: what do you say to a drama on Strafford?”’64 The Earl of Strafford had been in Robert’s mind, and even more to the fore in Forster’s mind since he happened to be writing the lives of Strafford and other statesmen of the period of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth. Forster had temporarily stalled on his biographies, due partly to some personal difficulties with the fascinating Laetitia Landon, and Robert had been assisting him with some of the literary work on Strafford. Forster’s Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth was published in parts between 1836 and 1839 and his Life of Strafford had been published just a few weeks before the Ion party. Strafford was very much dans le vent.
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