‘My abuse is a gift. It will enrich your diary.’ So sneers Lord Byron at his doctor, William Polidori, in Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry. Entering Byron’s service in 1816, Polidori was paid £500 by John Murray, a publisher, to keep a record of his master’s travels to be written up into a biography.
That the resultant account was so highly censored is indicative of the shocking and extraordinary literary communion he observed. For on the 25th of May, 1816, Byron entered the company of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Claire Clairemont – his lover and Mary’s stepsister. It was the start of a summer that made a dramatic and indelible imprint upon the face of English Romantic poetry, and provided the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Gothic sensation, Frankenstein.
It’s on this day that Brenton begins his play, and the first act traces the extraordinary happenings in Switzerland over those weeks. He shows us that incredible evening, where, sheltering from a raging storm in Byron’s Villa Diodati, the group descends into a wild night of debauchery and ghost stories, bullying the hapless Polidori, recreating the parable of Plato’s cave, and ending with Shelley being plagued by haunting hallucinations. It was on this night that Frankenstein was born.
The Romantic poets are so often portrayed as isolated, troubled, heroic individuals; it takes plays like Bloody Poetry to reveal that their writing was born from their relationships and the social web in which they operated.
Poetry becomes inherently personal between the members of the group. It is an implement for taunting: ‘We tread on fire! The avenging Power his hell on earth hath spread!’ yells Claire, mocking Shelley’s over-serious revolutionary urges. But it is also the medium by which they uncover each other’s private secrets. When Mary accuses Percy of sleeping with Claire, she uses his poetry as evidence: ‘Three nights ago you told me you wanted to sit up, “To write.” Don’t think you were a-writing, my dear, you were ‘going a-down’ Claire’s ‘many a-winding river’. In your boat. No?’
But this intimately social function rubs up against the judgemental, hypocritical scrutiny of the English press, who feed the hungry appetites of their equally judgemental readership. Not much has changed. ‘The world is catching fire, the oppressors have bloodied their hands! But what excites the educated classes? The behaviour of the rich and famous in bed!’ moans Percy. The social utopia briefly experienced by the group in Switzerland quickly becomes an impossibility.
And it’s Shelley who above all feels how achingly ineffectual his writing is in a country that will not listen. In his poem ‘To the Men of England’ which forms part of the opening scene to the play, he pleads: ‘Men of England, wherefore plough for the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care the rich robes your tyrants wear?’ It’s a question which goes unanswered. ‘I write poems,’ he says. ‘But most of the world cannot even read.’
It’s so fitting, then, that this incredible ensemble at the heart of our literary heritage should remain in our cultural imagination. It’s something that Brenton, writing about his own play, was keenly conscious of: ‘Byron, Shelley, Mary and Claire are moderns. They belong to us. They suffered exile from a reactionary, mean England, of which ours in the 1980s (and increasingly ours in the 2010s) is an echo. They were defeated, they also behaved, at times abominably to each other. But I wrote Bloody Poetry to celebrate and to salute them.’ And what a celebration it is.
