and characteristic.’15 Her willingness to defy the fashion of hoops and powder for the sake of dramatic verisimilitude, even though this was only her second role on the stage, was impressive. She also knew that her abandonment of contemporary attire for traditional costume would draw extra publicity.
A week after playing Statira she was Amanda in Sheridan’s adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s venerable Restoration comedy The Relapse. The play was announced as a new piece under the title A Trip to Scarborough. The audience were furious when they realized that they had been duped and began hissing (ladies usually hissed through their fans). The leading actress, Mary Ann Yates, swept off the stage, leaving Mary to ‘encounter the critical tempest’ alone. The terrified Mary was rooted to the spot, but Sheridan – from the side wing – bade her to stay on the stage.
Then there was an intervention from the most prominent member of the audience. The King’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, was the black sheep of the royal family. He was a libertine, socialite, and avid theatregoer; his union to divorcée Anne Horton had been one of the causes of the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, which restricted the young royals’ freedom to marry. He called out to Mary from his side box: ‘It is not you, but the play, they hiss.’ She curtsied in response and ‘that curtsy seemed to electrify the whole house’. There was a thundering peal of applause and the play was allowed to continue. It ran for ten nights and remained a staple of the Drury Lane repertoire for many years to come. As one contemporary noted, the great attraction of A Trip to Scarborough was that ‘it gave an opportunity for producing, in one night, three most remarkable actresses, Mrs Abington, Miss Farren, and Mrs Robinson – the first at the very top of her profession for comic humour – the second of surpassing loveliness and elegance – and the third, one of the most beautiful women in London’.16
Mary’s aplomb in response to the Duke of Cumberland had saved Sheridan’s new show. The following morning’s Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser would have added to her delight: ‘Mrs Robinson’s acting had certainly a just claim to the encouragement of the audience … We will venture to affirm, that success cannot fail to attend her theatrical abilities.’17
Mary was at last gaining the financial independence that she had always wanted. In April she was given her first benefit. The benefit was the key to an actor’s earnings. It was a special performance from which the financial proceeds, after deduction of expenses, were given to a member of the company, who was allowed to choose the play for the evening. Being nearly eight months pregnant by this time, Mary chose the role of the pregnant Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage, an exceptionally popular comedy of which Garrick was co-author. It was a brilliant choice, which at once fitted her figure, flattered Garrick and guaranteed a good box office return. The playbill announced that she was selling advance tickets herself, from 19 Southampton Street, Covent Garden. Receipts for the night amounted to a very satisfactory £189 (about £8,000 in today’s terms). But her increasing size as she entered the final stages of pregnancy forced her to turn down Sheridan’s offer of a role in his new play, The School for Scandal. It went to her school friend Priscilla Hopkins, who was also in the company. The play opened on 8 May and was an instant hit.
The Robinsons’ new home in Southampton Street – where Garrick had lived for many years – was a stone’s throw from Drury Lane. The area was full of actors and actresses. It was a hub of activity, with the Covent Garden Piazza, a cluster of market stalls in the centre, hotels, coffee houses, and shops, bathhouses, and taverns. The shops stayed open from seven in the morning till ten in the evening, lit by elegant double-branched street lamps. Unusually for eighteenth-century London, the streets were paved and clean. Nearby on the Strand the huge government office building Somerset House was in the early stages of construction. To the west, new streets were being laid out – Bedford and Portman Squares and Portland Place, opening onto the fields of Marylebone. Money and the confidence of money were in the air. In Hyde Park the rich and elegant paraded on horseback or drove about in the latest carriages.
Mrs Robinson began to enjoy the fruits of her talent and popularity. She played light romantic roles, ingénues and virtuous wives – all parts that made the most of her beauty and fine figure. Sheridan lavished attention upon her, she received a handsome salary, the theatre boxes were full of people of rank and fashion. In her Memoirs she records the complete turnabout of her life: ‘I looked forward with delight both to celebrity and to fortune.’18
She gave birth to another daughter, who was baptized Sophia on 24 May 1777. At the age of 6 weeks, the baby started having convulsions, as Maria Elizabeth had once done in Wales. This time the child did not survive. She died in her mother’s arms. Sheridan called on Mary that very day. She would never forget his face as he entered the room and saw the dying baby on her lap. ‘Beautiful little creature,’ he said with ‘a degree of sympathetic sorrow’ that pierced Mary’s heart. His sympathy was a harsh reminder of Robinson’s lack of sensibility: ‘Had I ever heard such a sigh from a husband’s bosom?’19 Throughout this period, Tom continued with his infidelities, but all she cared about now was that he could not even be discreet. With a disarming candour, she admits that her husband did not love her: ‘I never was beloved by him … I do not condemn Mr Robinson; I but too well know that we cannot command our affections.’
Meanwhile, her friendship with Sheridan flourished. He gave Mary time and attention, despite all the demands of running Drury Lane – a company of 48 male actors, 37 actresses, 18 adult dancers, 2 child dancers, 30 dressers, and a whole panoply of box-keepers, porters, messengers, fruit-sellers, sweepers, carpenters, prompters, set-builders, and musicians. He was plagued with the business of the choice and casting of plays, but also more mundane matters such as the failure of performers to buy their own white silk stockings, dressers pinching leftover candles from the dressing rooms, late return of gloves and hats to wardrobe. Mr Sheridan and Mrs Robinson were kindred spirits, with their Irish blood, strong passions, high ambitions, and sharp sense of humour. They were both chameleons, players one moment and politicians the next. Perhaps they shared their thoughts on female education: Sheridan had written an essay sympathizing with the plight of impoverished gentlewomen and proposing the foundation of a new female university – just as Mary would do in her polemical Letter to the Women of England at the climax of her literary career twenty years later.
Sheridan’s unremitting attentions initiated a whispering campaign. Up until now the press had been supportive, but the rumour mill was beginning to turn – though Mary always insisted that the relationship was merely a good friendship. When she was too weak and distressed to finish the season after the death of Sophia, Sheridan suggested convalescence in Bath. From there, she returned to nearby Bristol for the summer. In the autumn, she went back to London, to new lodgings in Leicester Square. Her second book of poetry – the volume dedicated to Georgiana, containing ‘Captivity’ and ‘Celadon and Lydia’ – was published at this time. The reviewers were kind. According to the Monthly Review, ‘Two reasons preclude criticism here: the poems are the production of a lady, and that lady is unhappy.’20
For her second season, 1777–8, Mary opened in Hamlet at the end of September, taking the role of Ophelia, the commoner who is wooed and then rejected by a prince. According to one newspaper, ‘Mrs Robinson looked Ophelia very beautifully, and for so young a theatrical adventurer, played it very pleasingly.’21 A week later she played Lady Anne in Richard III, the widow wooed over the body of her father-in-law by the man who has killed her husband. Despite these successes in tragedy, Sheridan was keen that she try her hand at comedy. Her roles over the following weeks included Araminta in Congreve’s popular Restoration comedy The Old Bachelor – the part is of a wealthy, witty, independent woman who runs rings round at least three male characters – and Emily, the ingénue in The Runaway, the first play of a woman dramatist who was beginning to make a name for herself,