Lade, who later managed the Prince’s racing stables, affected to dress and speak like a groom. He eventually married a girl called Letty, who had been a servant in a brothel. Lady Letty Lade went on to have affairs with both the Duke of York and a highwayman known as ‘Sixteen-string Jack’.
As rumour spread that Lade had won the affections of the actress, every rake in London began seeking the acquaintance of the beautiful Mrs Robinson. Sheridan was worried that his star would be tempted away by one of the men who were paying court to her. He warned Mary about her expensive lifestyle and the company she kept. The image of her younger self that she presents in the Memoirs is, to say the least, wide-eyed: ‘I had been then seen and known at all public places from the age of fifteen; yet I knew as little of the world’s deceptions as though I had been educated in the deserts of Siberia. I believed every woman friendly, every man sincere, till I discovered proofs that their characters were deceptive.’10 Given all that she had seen in both high society and low, she could not really have been that naive.
Despite the fact that she was treated as public property by the men who pursued her, Mary evoked this time as a golden age of theatre. Sheridan was at the peak of his reputation as a playwright and manager, following the success of his School for Scandal. He was beginning to turn his mind towards a political career and had recently met the young radical politician Charles James Fox. The green room was frequented by the nobility and ‘men of genius’ such as Fox and Lord Derby, who was to marry Elizabeth Farren: ‘the stage was now enlightened by the very best critics, and embellished by the very highest talents’. Mary also remarked that one of the reasons for Drury Lane’s popularity during this season of 1779–80 was that nearly all the principal women were under the age of twenty (a slight exaggeration). As well as herself and Farren, the lovely Charlotte Walpole and Priscilla Hopkins were on the payroll.
The public’s appetite for news, gossip, and scandal about the stage was insatiable. One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with a small group of actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives. The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to discover the intimate details of actors’ lives. A successful player could only have a public private life. Actors’ journals and memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals and magazines rolled off the press. Prints and caricatures of actresses could be bought cheaply. Theatre gossip could be picked up from the newspapers, together with instant accounts of the latest performances – this was the age when professional theatre reviewing grew to maturity.
Sheridan launched his new season on 18 September 1779 with Mary as Ophelia. ‘Natural and affecting,’ said the Morning Chronicle. ‘Ophelia found a more than decent representative in Mrs Robinson,’ judged the Morning Post, ‘except in her singing, which was rather too discordant even for madness itself!’ It also noted that ‘the house, though not a very brilliant [i.e. aristocratic], was a crowded one, and both play and entertainment [the musical Comus] went off with considerable éclat’.11 Mary was Lady Anne in Richard III a week later.
Next, she reprised her Fidelia in The Plain Dealer. Her costume drew attention, though the critic in the Morning Post tried to give the impression that he was only looking at it from the point of view of dramatic verisimilitude, not that of the shapely leg to which it clung:
Fidelia was performed with great ease and feeling by Mrs Robinson, and is by far the best character she has hitherto attempted; but as propriety of stage dress should always be strictly attended to, particularly in the professional characters, it may not be improper to inform Mrs Robinson, that Fidelia as a Volunteer cannot wear a Lieutenant’s uniform, without a violation of all dramatic consistency.12
She played fifty-five nights that season, adding to her repertoire Viola in Twelfth Night, Nancy in The Camp, Rosalind in As You Like It, Oriana in George Farquhar’s The Inconstant, Widow Brady (‘with an Epilogue Song’) in Garrick’s The Irish Widow, and Eliza Camply in The Miniature Picture by Lady Elizabeth Craven. As Oriana, she had to win over a reluctant lover by engaging in various schemes including dressing as a nun, feigning madness, and disguising herself as a page-boy. As the Irish Widow, she had to mimic a strong brogue, put down an assortment of men, talk about her clothes, claim that she despised money, and cross-dress as a sword-bearing officer called Lieutenant O’Neale. But it was the Shakespearean breeches roles of Viola and Rosalind that were her greatest triumph. She revealed a gift for both the expression of Shakespeare’s language and the characters’ emotional range – from pathos through wit to fortitude and command.
Admirers began to address her through the medium of the daily press. The Morning Post printed a long and not a little voyeuristic letter to her. ‘Madam,’ it began,
Criticism is a cold exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the chill, and the acid of the critique. I am the veriest bigot to old Shakespeare. – The Genius himself could not have gazed upon you with more delight; nor have forerun your motion, action, and utterance, with more tremulous solicitude for your excellence in Viola, than I did. Shakespeare’s principal substantives should never be sunk, nor kept back, as it were, from the attention, by an emphatic tone upon his epithets.
In the manner of speaking the ‘green and yellow melancholy,’ I would, sweet woman, that the yellow tinge appeared no more than equal to the green; and, that the melancholy so coloured should have a principal share of your voice to mark the subject.
I have seen you too in Fidelia, and am apt to think, that the tone, force, and manner of tragedy make a kind of apparel, both too magnificent, and too solemn, for the sentimental part of comedy.
BO-PEEP13
The author sounds as if he would very much like to pay a private visit to her dressing room in order to advise her upon her Shakespearean epithets.
She also played the female lead in Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s 1756 version of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was revived by Sheridan, after fourteen years’ absence from the repertoire, on Saturday, 20 November 1779, in memory of Garrick, who had died earlier that year. It centred on the young lovers, Prince Florizel and Perdita, who is supposed to be a shepherd’s daughter but is really a princess. It included a sheepshearing song, sung by Perdita, and a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses. Mary’s performance was a success, though the Morning Post complained ‘Mrs Robinson’s Perdita would have been very decent, but for that strange kind of niddle to noddle, that she now throws into every character, comic, as well as tragic.’14
At the second presentation, the following Tuesday, she was honoured by the presence of such leaders of London society as the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Lord and Lady Melbourne, Lord and Lady Spencer, Lord and Lady Cranbourne, and Lord and Lady Onslow. After this performance the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser published a long criticism. It said that the piece ‘is in general well cast and ably performed’, but reservations were expressed about the costumes:
The dresses on which much of the effect depends, were liable to very glaring objections. Shakespeare has been particularly attentive to the dress of Florizel and Perdita:
Your high self you have obscur’d
With