Description

[004685] [Frankenstein Adaptation] Tenth Night of New Romantick Drama – Theatre Royal, English Opera House, Strand. London: S. G. Fairbrother [Printer], 1829. First Edition. Folio. Unbound. Broadside. Fair. Printed broadside, approximately 205mm x 345mm in size

Slightly chipped to edges, some loss affecting a few letters to bottom right hand corner, a couple of small holes to text, catching letters but with no loss of sense

Advertising an evening of ‘romantick drama’, opening with Cherubini’s Ode to Anacreon, then Sister of Charity, followed by The Middle Temple: Or Which is My Son?, which was in turn followed by Presumption! Or, the Fate of Frankenstein. It was written by Richard Brinsley Peake, and first performed in 1823. Here Frankenstein is played by Mr. Baker, and the monster by Mr. O. Smith, “with an entirely new last scene, conformably to the termination in the original story, representing a schooner in a violent storm! In which Frankenstein and the monster are destroyed”

Shelley herself, with her father William Godwin, had seen a staging of the play in its fourth week of performance, according to Seymour, “From then on, hardly a year passed without some adaptation of Frankenstein, usually farcical, never serious, being performed … [However] Peake’s stage production of 1823 marked the birth of a myth. That the monster and his maker had entered the popular imagination was clearly indicated the following year when George Canning, the Foreign Secretary, addressing the House of Commons on the question of emancipation, suggested that freeing rebel West Indian slaves ‘would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance'” (Seymour, Mary Shelley, page 335)