All right.
Time to return to Mary Shelley’s story—to her efforts to become a playwright. Pamela
Clemit, who has edited the scholarly edition of the two plays, notes that Mary
and Bysshe more or less worked together on these two short projects in 1820 in
Pisa. (He wrote the lyrics for songs that appear in both plays.) Clemit
believes, as well, that the plays were
designed for a young audience. She adds that Mary could have been
influenced by “Mrs. Mason” (whom Mary's mother had tutored) because it was for that
daughter of that friend—as I wrote above—that Mary wrote Maurice, the children’s story not published until 1998, not long
after its discovery.[1]
Proserpine is a retelling of the story
of Persephone (Mary used the Roman rather than the Greek spelling), and the
play begins as Proserpine is begging her mother, Ceres, not to leave her, but
her mother, recognizing her duty to serve the gods, says, My lovely child, it is high Jove’s command.[2]
Of course,
it’s hard to read this little exchange without thinking of Mary’s yearning for
the mother she’d never known, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who had died not long
after delivering little Mary.
Anyway,
Ceres tells Proserpine not to separate herself from the two nymphs who attend
her, Ino and Eunoe, but, of course, she does. Ceres returns later in the day,
finds her daughter missing. And she vows
(ending Act I) I will away, and on the
highest top / Of snowy Etna, kindle two clear flames. / Night shall not hide
her from my anxious search, / No moment will I rest, or sleep, or pause / Till
she returns, until I clasp again / My only loved one, my lost Proserpine.[3]
And once
again I think: By the time she had written these words, Mary had already buried
a premature daughter, her daughter Clara, her son William. And so these lines,
for me, shudder with the grief of a bereft mother, a grief that Mary did not
need to imagine but only to remember.
[1] “Mathilda, Dramas, Reviews
& Essays, Prefaces & Notes.” The
Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Vol. 2. (London: William
Pickering, 1996), 69–70.
[2] Koszul, 6. All subsequent
page references will be to this 1922 edition, which is the one I read well
before I acquired Clemit’s scholarly edition.
[3] Ibid., 25.
No comments:
Post a Comment