• DOI:10.1080/10509580600816678
• Corpus ID: 144877887

Mary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastrophe

@article{Brewer2006MaryRA,
  title={Mary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastrophe},
  author={William D. Brewer},
  journal={European Romantic Review},
  year={2006},
  volume={17},
  pages={265 - 273}
}

• W. Brewer
• Published 1 July 2006
• History
• European Romantic Review

The premiere of the two‐act comedy Nobody at Drury Lane on November 29, 1794 was an unmitigated disaster for Mary “Perdita” Robinson. She miscalculated the impact of a satire on female gamesters on the upper‐class Whig establishment. The comedy was damned in advance: aristocrats sent their servants to “do up Nobody,” and the farce closed after three performances; ending Robinson’s career as a Drury Lane playwright. This essay examines Robinson’s theatrical catastrophe within its historical context: the upper‐class suppression of Nobody reveals a great deal about social and political anxieties during the revolutionary era. Robinson’s upper‐class contemporaries apparently assumed that her satire on female gambling was an attack on the moral legitimacy of the Foxite Whig elite. By subjecting the play to preemptive damnation, however, they suppressed a good‐natured satire on upper‐class manners in which an aristocratic female gamester is rehabilitated by a virtuous, philanthropical City banker. The alliance of these two characters at the end of the play suggests the advent of a morally renewed society in which the moneyed urban bourgeoisie assume the duties and prerogatives formerly associated with the nobility.