Pretty much every month from now on till April 2024 marks the anniversary of something significant in the lives of those hectic, high-achieving younger Romantics. But this summer’s anniversary is special even by their standards. From May to July 1816 Lord Byron took up residence in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. On 27 May he met the poet Shelley for the first time, accompanied by Mary Godwin. He had already become intimately acquainted with Mary’s stepsister Claire, who facilitated the introductions.
The Shelley party moved next door and the two poets procured a boat for excursions on the lake (one perilous outing almost caused the death of Shelley; but the Fates dictated he was not to drown until 1822). However, the rain was so incessant and the skies so dark that many days and evenings were spent around the fire at Diodati. The friends talked of galvanism and new scientific theories; then they all tried to spook each other with a ghost story competition. The result, famously, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Yesterday John Murray’s legendary premises in Albemarle St opened for a one-off exhibition of letters, drafts and original reviews connected with Frankenstein and its slighter sibling, The Vampyre, a novella by Byron’s doctor, Polidori. In addition, a specially commissioned performance, ‘One Evening in Summer’ allowed visitors a peek into the gloomy, candlelit salon of Diodati. Jay Villiers was a saturnine, brooding Byron; Richard Goulding a tense, febrile Shelley; Nicholas Rowe charmed as the poignantly eager Polidori; and the poet Pele Cox, director and deviser of the piece, played a cool and playful Mary.
The celebrations began over croissants and coffee with readings from Frankenstein by Damian Lewis as a savage yet poignantly needy monster, and Helen McCrory as a chilly, intense Mary/Frankenstein. In the audience I spotted some old friends, chatting to Miranda Seymour, author of a wonderful biography of Mary, and talking about Romantic science and ballooning with Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The Pursuit and The Age of Wonder. It was also good to see Giuseppe Albano, curator at Keats-Shelley House in Rome, who hosted two previous Pele Cox productions, ‘Unbound’ and ‘Lift Me Up, I Am Dying’, the latter an evocation of Keats’s last days, supported by his artist friend Joseph Severn – brilliantly played by Rowe, again.
Cox’s short drama played out four times in all, and I had volunteered to set the scene with an introduction to each performance. I decided to focus on a different aspect of the story each time rather than repeat the same speech, stressing the piecemeal evidence we have for what actually happened on those wild, wet nights, and what each person’s role might have been in the psychodramas that ensued.
Then it was over to the actors. The protagonists sat around a rumpled table in candlelight, mulling over their wine as though they’d long finished dinner but were loth to go to bed. Although I must have heard the piece seven or eight times now, including rehearsals, the text, taken almost entirely from the diaries, letters, prose and poetry of the protagonists, cast its spell every time. Subtle differences and nuances developed as the day went on. ‘Did you like my grape work?’ laughed Jay in the green room.
As first Byron, then Polidori, then Shelley left, Mary remained at the table alone, mourning the loss of everything she loved. That was the reality, she affirmed; all the rest of her life proved to be the dream.
Many thanks to John Murray VII and his wife Virginia for their generous and jolly hospitality during the day, and to the performers for allowing me to be part of this thrilling and memorable experience.