Broadside playbill for Presumption! or, The Fate of Frankenstein
London: Theatre Royal, English Opera House, Strand, July 31, 1823
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Broadside playbill for Presumption! or, The Fate of Frankenstein
Transcript below
ELIZABETH DENLINGER: We’re looking at a playbill for Presumption! or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which was the first dramatic presentation of the novel Frankenstein.
NEIL GAIMAN: Dr. Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger is curator of the Library’s Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, and author of It’s Alive! A Visual History of Frankenstein.
DENLINGER: So, Mary Shelley, in the novel of Frankenstein, is very cagey about the creature’s making. There are some wonderful descriptions of how Victor Frankenstein searches for parts, but the actual scene of production is a blank. On the play, you were shown a window into a workshop, and you would see sparks, and you would see all kinds of things flying out the window. But you wouldn’t see what was going on … and then the person playing Frankenstein would run out saying, “IT LIVES!”
GAIMAN: By most accounts, including Mary Shelley’s, the 1823 play’s greatest strength was its star, T.P. Cooke, whose version of the creature was unlike the novel’s in one major way.
DENLINGER: When Richard Brinsley Peake wrote the play of the novel, he cut out the creature’s ability to speak. So it’s a nonverbal role. And T.P. Cooke did everything by body language and by dancing and by, just, physical action, in which he was extremely expressive.
T.P. Cooke was tall, and he was very muscular, and very athletic, and graceful. And his skin would be painted this sort of gray blue, so he looked really weird, which was kind of the point.
GAIMAN: Presumption! also introduced a moral aspect to the tale that wasn’t in the source material, but made its way into many subsequent adaptations.
DENLINGER: The idea of Victor Frankenstein as a scientist who goes too far, or goes against nature is really datable to 1823, it’s really not in the novel. Just titling the play Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein shows you that Peake had decided that this really needed to be presented as an anti-religious error that Frankenstein is committing. Whereas in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, when he’s dying, the last thing he says is not like, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that!” He says, “Maybe somebody else will succeed!”
End of Transcript
Among the extraordinary acquisitions arranged for NYPL by Dr. Denlinger are the only known manuscript fragment of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792) and the exceedingly rare volume ‘Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire’ (1810), P.B. Shelley's first book of poetry, written with his sister Elizabeth.
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