![]() Directed by the Oscar-winning film and stage director Danny Boyle, this version of Frankenstein was internationally broadcast worldwide via satellite in more than three hundred cinemas, arguably offering a level of public exposure analogous to Peake’s in 1823. ![]() Although this recent version is but one of scores of film and stage adaptations that have seized the public’s imagination over the past half-century or so, Dear’s adaptation is surely one of the most successful, popular, and aesthetically satisfying. In 2011, playwright Nick Dear’s stage adaptation of Frankenstein opened at the Royal National Theatre in London with two celebrated actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, alternating nightly in the central roles of Dr. Subtitled, “The Modern Prometheus,” Frankenstein exquisitely captured the defiant Zeitgeist of the Romantic Age in its combination of all of these elements, both scientific and literary.īut Frankenstein’s brilliant engagement with the Romantic Weltanschauung does not explain why the myth should still speak so powerfully to us today. All these elements are central to Frankenstein, with its Faustian exploration of the limits of scientific enquiry, and its Promethean defiance of divine order. Together with the late-eighteenth-century interest in the Gothic and Romanticism’s exaltation of the properties of the human imagination and the Sublime, a revolution in the arts was sweeping across Europe and England. Frankenstein’s sudden hold on the contemporary imagination may be attributed to its appearance at the nexus of late-Enlightenment discovery (a time when theories of evolution were being hotly debated), and the excitement surrounding the Romantic movement in the arts. Peake’s Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein (1823)įor Mary Shelley, a first-time novelist whose work had been anonymously printed in an edition of just 500 copies, this international explosion must have seemed amazing. Indeed, such was the enthusiasm inspired by Peake’s melodrama that by the mid-1820s more than a dozen different versions of Shelley’s novel had appeared on stages in England, France, and the United States. If it does, it will be some sort of feather in the cap of the author of the novel, a recommendation in your future negotiacions with booksellers.” After attending a performance at the Lyceum Theatre on August 23, 1823, Mary also offered qualified approval: “The story is not well managed-but Cooke played -’s part extremely well…I was much amused, & it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience.” 1 Observing the budding controversy surrounding his daughter’s novel, William Godwin saw not scandal but a marketing opportunity, and wrote his daughter about the adaptation: Such was the enthusiasm inspired by Peake’s melodrama that by the mid-1820s more than a dozen different versions of Shelley’s novel had appeared on stages in England, France, and the United States. Shelley, and the daughter too of the well-known Godwin-a precious breed and association.” ![]() Shelley, and philosophers of that stamp, it might appear a very fine thing to attack the Christian faith…and burlesque the resurrection of the dead…,” while Theatrical John Bull noted Peake’s adaptation was “taken from a Novel, by a woman who…is one of the coterie of that self-acknowledged Atheist, Percy B. As The Morning Post observed of Presumption, “To Lord Byron, the late Mr. ![]() It was there, beside Lake Geneva, where Mary-just eighteen years old!- composed her terrifying novel about a man of science who dared to create human life from dead body parts, contravening the laws of God and Christian morality. Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin had eloped to Switzerland, where they met up with an even more famous reprobate, the notorious Lord Byron. To make matters worse, young Mary Godwin was pregnant and living out of wedlock in Switzerland with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the young poet who had been expelled from Oxford University for publishing a pamphlet provocatively entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Mary Godwin (later Shelley) was the offspring of the late eighteenth century’s most notorious power couple: free-thinking philosopher/novelist William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman launched modern feminism. Much controversy revolved around the play’s violent, possibly blasphemous subject matter, which Gentleman’s Magazine termed “replete with too many horrors.” But the work was also decried because of the parentage of the female novelist whose book inspired Peake’s adaptation. In 1823, an apprentice engraver turned dramatist, Richard Brinsley Peake, suddenly became the celebrated author of a new melodrama entitled Presumption or The Fate of Frankenstein.
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