by Liz Lochhead
BYRON. No!
MARY. There is something wrong in how we all live.
BYRON. Oh yes, look in the mirror of my grief and see yourself. All men hate the wretched. That’s one of yours, eh, Mary? And the wretched hate each other. We are malicious because we are miserable.
Pleasure, freedom, wine, women, song, apes, peacocks, vinegar purges, boys, opium, ocean-going, orgies – I won’t give up any of it, I’ll double my gluttony and double it again.
All just to kill time, eh, Mary? It will be the death of me.
MARY. But we do not live as you do.
BYRON. Oh, I forgot. The Shelleys are political! The Shelleys are principled. The Shelleys do not eat dead animals. How about dead children?
MARY. Truly you are a monster!
The worst pain a mother ever bore, to have her children die before her!
BYRON. I will live with my guilt, can you live with yours?
MARY. I loved my children! And I will never cease from grieving, even when my new child is born!
BYRON. A new baby? Congratulations! And to Shiloh too, is there to be no end to this creation? Well, better luck this time, Mary!
MARY. I lived for my children.
BYRON. Well, I have never pretended to live for anyone but myself, and there’s where we differ.
Infants do benefit from travel, don’t they? Florence, Venice, Padua, a bit of culture and cholera does broaden the mind.
MARY. You are a twisted person!
BYRON. Oh yes, Mary, there is something in us which is very ugly. Do you not think we are somewhat alike? We are put together all wrong.
MARY. A monster!
BYRON. Well, if I am your monster, who, or what are you, Mary Shelley?
Yes, I have read your book. Very powerful it is, too. Remarkable for a girl of… what were you? Nineteen? I’m sure I can’t imagine where you got your ideas from, can you?
MARY. Damn that book! It’s only a book, an idea!
BYRON. Have you read your book? Oh, I know you wrote it, have you read it, though, recently? I’m sure it’s silly of me to read between the lines, though. No profit in noticing an author name a character William after her beloved Baba, blond curls and all, and then strangle him to death on page sixty-nine! Oh, not many mamas, especially not busy-fingered distracted mamas, who have not occasionally, en passant, wished to silence the little darling!
MARY. I’m afraid of you!
BYRON. Don’t be afraid, Mary. Courage! Where’s Shiloh? He wanted to see me.
Excuse me, Mrs Shelley, I’m just off to see a man about a boat!
Exit BYRON.
Lights change. Back to widow MARY.
MARY. Oh, Byron; oh, Shelley –
And, in a flash, back to Italy again.
SHELLEY comes.
SHELLEY. Mary, Mary darling.
MARY. I wanted to die.
SHELLEY. Doctor says wait a while, and then we’ll have another.
MARY. Never! Never another!
SHELLEY. Come on. You’re better, you are. No more blood. Up, for a little while. I’ll wrap you up, and our precious little boy, and we’ll walk, yes we will. Perciflo loves the seashore. Come, Mary, a gentle walk with your husband and your little son in the clean air by the ocean.
MARY. Shelley, leave me here alone!
SHELLEY. Come and see her.
MARY. Your new love?
SHELLEY. Come and see her…
MARY. No.
SHELLEY. New arrived from Genoa, the bonniest boat that ever sailed the seas!
MARY. The Don Juan.
SHELLEY. The Ariel! Every sail unfurled! That other name won’t stick, depend on it. She’s The Ariel. It’s not to be called in Byron’s honour.
MARY. Yet it sailed in, monstrous letters blazoned across the mainsail, ‘The Don Juan’!
SHELLEY. You don’t seem to care how much it grieves me that you won’t sail with me.
MARY. I cannot! Shelley, I won’t come because I cannot! I nearly died, Shelley.
SHELLEY. Oh, Mary, it was too soon. Too soon to have another, you hadn’t your strength back after little Percy.
MARY. I nearly died. I didn’t care if I died. I felt… I go to no new creation, I enter under no new laws. I thought all my life-blood is drained away. No pain. I’m going to die.
SHELLEY. I saved you!
MARY. I… am… in… pain. Inside it. It is a ship, and it’s bearing me away.
SHELLEY. It was pure instinct, the ice.
MARY. My element. I swim in it and I do not die.
SHELLEY. You were losing so much blood, I had never seen so much blood. I ran all the way to the Ice House. I woke Umberto, made him pack the last shard of ice into the bath. He said the shock would kill you, but I lifted you up in my arms, and I plunged you into that bath of ice, and that stopped the flow.
MARY. No baby. I have lost my last. Seven years, Shelley. I’ve put three tiny coffins in the earth, lost two unborn babies in the womb. Our union trails a cortège of dead infants in its wake. Who cursed us? Were we cursed by our own impossible dreams?
Never again, Shelley. Another way of making life, that’s what we need.
Another way to live…
SHELLEY. We have our sweet Perciflo, he’s flourishing, and when you’ve regained your strength, we can try again.
MARY. Never! I will never begin me another!
SHELLEY. I don’t know how to make you happy!
MARY. I need a faithful mate, to be the true husband of my heart.
SHELLEY. And you have me!
MARY. Yes, I have you.
SHELLEY. That love we found, back in St Pancras Graveyard…
MARY. By my mother’s grave.
SHELLEY. Yes, she died. It’s a terrible thing that her child bed was her deathbed, Mary, but you didn’t die.
But, oh yes! You’re right, Mary. Yes, I am a man. I shall never die in childbirth. Oh no, we’re a different species. Let’s not try to communicate. The cracks appear. We are each on smaller and smaller islands of ice, floating away from each other, further and further away. Goodbye, Mary.
MARY. I don’t want to be alone like this.
SHELLEY. Then reach out! Mary, I’ll never turn from you. To turn sometimes to others isn’t to turn from you.
MARY. Oh, Shelley, to live in the spirit as much as you do puts a great deal of strain on the body.
SHELLEY. Mary, darling, you’re shivering. Come…
SHELLEY tries to kiss her, MARY shrugs him off.
MARY. Don’t always try to kiss me when I try to talk to you!
SHELLEY. Mary, don’t always talk at me when I try to kiss you.
MARY. Leave me alone, Shelley!
SHELLEY. Oh, Mary, I cannot reach you.
MARY. Sometimes, I think there’s not a woman in the world that hasn’t fallen in love with you, and that you haven’t loved back! Oh yes, Shelley, I know ‘True love differs from gold and clay. To divide is not to take away…’ I’m not sixteen years old any longer! I’ve learned to suspect any sentiment which rhymes that easily.
SHELLEY. Back in that graveyard, you said yes! You’d sail away with me for ever. Don’t turn back.
MARY. So I must make myself into the girl you saw in the graveyard?
SHELLEY. The girl I know you to be!
Exit SHELLEY. Lights change. Back to widow MARY.
MARY. But I could not. I disappointed him. Have I a cold heart? He turned to Jane Williams, she and Edward came over from England to join us, share the villa, share –
She was my friend, we were widowed together, we waited together all that last long week as we waited for news.
But all I really remember of that last summer as everything fell to pieces all around us, was the boat, Ned Williams singing sea shanties and Shelley, his head in pretty Jane Williams’s lap, and she playing the guitar and Shelley making pretty songs for her!
Lights change. SHELLEY comes again. Near the very end of his life. Disintegration. In a trembling stat
e.
SHELLEY. Such a dream… God help me, Mary, but I cannot shake it. You were in it. I was in it with you. You… got up from your sickbed and walked naked towards me, your skin all torn and tattered and bloodstained. You said, very brisk, matter of fact – ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is invading the house and it’s all coming down!’ I looked out on the terrace. I thought I had wakened. I dreamed I was awake and the boiling seas came pouring in. Then it changed. I saw my own self, bending over you where you were stretched out sleeping, and I was strangling you. Yesterday, I saw my own ghost walking in the garden and it called out to me –
There is movement in the shadows and a cry.
CREATURE’S VOICE. How long do you mean to be content?
Lights change. Back to widow MARY.
MARY. Not long…
They only knew him by… in his pocket they found the volume of Keats he’d been reading, bent open at the place he’d reached in it. His face, his hands, all parts of him not… protected by his clothing had been eaten away by the fishes.
I wonder what it’s like to drown? Did he expect to breath easy in a brand-new element, plunge straight in, embracing it? I wouldn’t put it past him. What bobbed up at him from the lone and level sands of the sea bottom?
Nymphs? Nereids? Mermaids? All the flimsy, impossible women, glittering hermaphrodites, did they tangle with him, did he clasp his sweet ideal at last? Or was he beating useless limbs, dragged down by sodden duds among the bladderwrack and nosing dogfish, fighting his way back, gulping and struggling with bursting lungs, back to his flesh and blood, Mary?
She gets together paper, quill.
I must write to Claire, tell her Lord Byron, her Albé, is dead.
Calmly, she begins to write.
Light fades.
The End.
LIZ LOCHHEAD
Liz Lochhead was born in Lanarkshire in 1947 and educated at Glasgow School of Art. Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics.
Her original stage plays include Blood and Ice, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Perfect Days and Good Things. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière’s Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L’École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone). All of these plays are published by Nick Hern Books.
A Nick Hern Book
Blood and Ice published in Great Britain as a paperback original in 2009 by Nick Hern Books Limited, The Glasshouse, 49a Goldhawk Road, London W12 8QP
This ebook edition first published in 2014
Blood and Ice copyright © 1985, 2009 Liz Lochhead
Published in an earlier version in 1985 in Plays by Women: Vol. 4 by Methuen Drama
Liz Lochhead has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover image: The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli (The Detroit Institute of Arts / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Cover design: Ned Hoste, 2H
Typeset by Nick Hern Books, London
ISBN 978 1 78001 341 1 (ebook edition)
ISBN 978 1 84842 061 8 (print edition)
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