“Well, then, perhaps the boxes will be empty—but the stalls and balconies where John Bull sits will be filled to the gills,” said Maria.
Apart from a return to my flat to dress and make my toilette for the premiere, I spent the entire day at Drury Lane, making sure all was ready for Nobody’s debut. All was well enough with the theatrical elements, but on the other side of the stage, a very different sort of production was being set in motion. Following the usual method of reserving the choicest seats, members of the upper crust sent their servants to the theatre on the afternoon of the first performance to secure the premium places until that evening, when their betters arrived to claim them. But the ton had “done up” the play, paying their lackeys to do more than temporarily warm the best seats with their unworthy bums. As soon as the curtain rose on the debut, there was a cacophony from the gods—the cheap seats in the highest galleries where sat the retainers fortunate enough to have employers who permitted them to attend the theatre.
Kemble had remodeled Drury Lane’s interior, enlarging the auditorium until it was nearly cavernous, with a seating capacity of more than three and a half thousand, nearly double the size it was when I had played the house. Actors were now required to have lungs of sterner stuff if they wished to be heard in the gallery, which now seemed miles from the stage.
The ruckus was astounding—louder and more vociferous than anything I had ever seen at Drury Lane. It was customary for an audience to indicate their displeasure with a play or particular performance by issuing no end of catcalls and insults, but rarely had the detractors been so relentless as to disrupt the piece beyond all hearing. That night, not a soul could discern a single word uttered by Mrs. Jordan or any of the other brave thespians who had consented to perform my comedy, for the servants seated in the uppermost galleries drowned out the dialogue with their deafening invective.
The usually imperturbable Mrs. Jordan became so flustered—and affrighted that the vulgar crowd might do her some physical harm—that she fluffed her lines.
From my side box near the stage, I gazed up at the gods and clearly recognized the liveries worn by my vociferous critics. I was intended to do so. Their employers, the most fashionable women of London—and particularly those who knew their fictional counterparts were on the stage—were triumphantly identifying themselves as my conspiring detractors.
I was in tears when Ban tenderly carried me out to my carriage, and I promptly canceled the post-performance dinner I had planned to host, wishing to see no one but my lover and Maria.
By the second performance of Nobody, the novelty had worn off—such was society’s reaction at the time to the latest thing—and the play was given a lukewarm approbation. After that night I sat down to rework it, but at the piece’s third performance, the script, though revised, was not well received and Sheridan withdrew it from the theatre’s repertoire.
Maria refused to allow me to wallow in grief or self-pity, though the funds I had counted on from the receipts of a long and sold-out run would now never materialize. This pecuniary hiccup compelled us to quit our apartments in St. James’s Place and take up residence instead in the less fashionable Burlington Street. Well, at least we were still in Mayfair, never far from the royal residences and the town houses of the nobility.
I took up my pen again and began work on another novel. Though my body had betrayed me, as long as my mind was clear as water I would persevere with ink and quill.
Times were certainly changing. By 1795, some of the more prominent Whigs had begun to sport republican fashions, cropping their hair short and forgoing the use of powder. Though Ban retained the old style, Fox and the Duke of Bedford—the latter always a renegade—were in the vanguard of the new style. Disaffection with the monarchy was in the wind. In October, the king barely escaped assassination when a deranged woman fired a pistol right into his carriage. And that spring, the Prince of Wales had finally buckled to the pressure to marry, wedding the odious (and odiferous) Caroline of Brunswick. His Highness was now vastly heavier and more floridly complected than he had been in his youth, no longer dashing or attractive. Wags whispered in the privacy of their homes that he should now be dubbed the Prince of Whales. I surprised myself with the discovery that I felt not even the slightest twinge of jealousy or regret to see my former royal lover nuptialized.
On January 4, 1796, Angelina, the novel I had begun to write just after the Nobody debacle, was published by Hookham & Carpenter. The entire first edition of the three-volume, 1,030-page novel sold out almost the moment it saw the light of day, and I immediately began the preparations for a second edition.
Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman whose philosophical essays I admired tremendously, wrote a highly complimentary critique in the Analytical Review. She evinced a thorough understanding and approbation of everything I had strived to express about the plight of women and the unappreciated genius of the artist by his social superiors.
Although other critics thought I had created too broad a canvas, with an ensemble of characters too vast for readers to cheer
