THE CONSOLATION OF POETRY
A Performance by Barbara Neri ©2002
Introduction

The reader need not know anything about Elizabeth Barrett Browning to read this script or see this work. Come with the inklings you may hold of her in your consciousness. That is the beginning we will depart from. There may be scholars among you who know more. But how you will see her in this work is not how she has been seen before. The reader/audience is to experience/witness my becoming her. The becoming her is as much her as the being her. And all that is her is not only her but me, and you. She may not be the her alive from 1806 till 1861. That her is dead and the form we have given her in our culture is a worse death. It is hoped this becoming will replace that death we have given her. Not that the form I give her will bring her back to life. This work is only my down payment on that. But as it is fluid, emotional, personal, beautiful—it is a better death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been presented in the theatre before in a very popular play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besier (1933). Produced all over the world and made into two movie versions (black and white in 1934 and color in 1957), it solidified the image we hold of her in our collective consciousness: The invalid poet who Robert Browning rescued from her despotic father and carried off to Italy.1 A shallow rendering of a brilliant artist and intellectual, and her family. The publication of her Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850, interpreted by most critics, and embraced by the public, as personal poetry glorifying her love for the poet Robert Browning, and the publication of their courtship correspondence in 1899, combined to create the mythic love story that survived them and inspired the play. The mythic romance has helped to ensure the continued publication and sale of her 44 Sonnets from the Portuguese, but the work has not been recognized as the masterpiece it is. That the Sonnets are autobiographical is undisputed and need not be argued, but to think that is all they are is a tragic error.

Be that as it may, I am drawn to this legendary love story. I am also not sure Elizabeth would entirely object to the mythic proportions it has taken on, as she knew the power of myth. She used many Greek and Christian myths in the Sonnets to her own ends.2 And to spite the superficiality, there is the truth of their love and the 'fancy' has kept her in the stream of collective thought. The mythic love story might serve a purpose if her Sonnets were included among those texts that have been seriously regarded and explored: to draw readers to the text where they might discover EBB's other ideas. Thus I capitalize on the mythic love story, and on the name Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and invite those lured (and, for that matter, repelled) by her and her story into my theatre to see a more complex limn of her being and her work—so that her myth might be re-visioned and serve other purposes.

I use EBB's poetry in numerous ways within this performance, turning the spotlight on her Sonnets from the Portuguese. In particular, "Sonnet 43" as it is the most abused of all her 44 Sonnets. It's opening lyric, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," has been exploited to the point of derision. This aroused my suspicions. I had also just published my first paper on the Sonnets and felt frustrated with the idea that what I had to say might take decades before it filtered up from the groundwater of scholarship to the collective tap. It was an enormous challenge to me as a performer, to embody "Sonnet 43," to revive it. The process of doing so became another form of research and it is one of the goals of this project to reveal the artistic process as a valid and fruitful method for research and discovery.

The Consolation of Poetry is a dialogue. I am, among other things, attempting to incorporate aspects of the philosophical dialogue within the performance/theatre dialogue. As I searched back through EBB's precursors, I read my way to Boethius's dialogue with Lady Philosophy (The Consolation of Philosophy c. 524 BC).3 I create both speakers/parts in my dialogue, as Boethius does in his dialogue. However, the question "Who is speaking?" that begins my dialogue, undermines the two speakers, suggesting that many more than two speak here. Also, I constructed my dialogue with Elizabeth on my own ground as she constructed her "A Drama of Exile" on the outside of Milton's paradise—where she stood, in exile. Thus we speak as artists. As EBB said of her own work, I neither imitate nor emasculate.4

Her clothes and mine play a role in the performance. My closet is a kind of autobiography and so, I believe, is hers. Three photographs taken of her in 1858, 1860 and 1861 have become icons seen in most of her biographies and they are, among others, seen in this performance. These three mid Victorian images and what has been presumed regarding them also aid in fashioning our idea of her. When I opened her "closet autobiography" I found another story. Some of that story is told in this performance through four interludes of dressing and undressing. I am compelled to re-create what she wore in all three photographs and have completed two images (1858 and 1860) used in this performance. In the case of her 1858 ambrotype, the proof engraving created from it, and sent by Robert Browning to Dante Gabriel Rossetti so that he might instruct the engraver further, was seen publicly in this performance for the first time in March 2002 and is published here with Rossetti's alterations (plate I).

I don't like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry. Like is not a word I can use in relation to her work. Her work is about mortality—she writes against a backdrop of death. I am passionate about her poetry; she haunts me, as the specter of a dead artist whose work is not done. And in this work she had faith. She wrote to her brother George from Rome in a letter dated 30 April 1861 regarding Keat's deathbed despair that his work was unfinished: "There would be no answer to such 'divine despairs', if it were not in the facts in which I deeply believe, that life and work, yes, the sort of work suitable to the artist-nature, are continued on the outside of this crust of mortal manhood [...]"5 There is something strange in the way Elizabeth's powerful voice grabs hold of you and demands so much. Our work, like hers, becomes a matter of life and death.

CREDITS
The Consolation of Poetry was performed at the University of Michigan Media Union Video Production Studio on 22 and 23 March 2002 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sponsored by the UM Center for the Education of Women (CEW), it was presented as part of a series of events on gender, power and representation co-organized by the Women's Studies Program and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Conceived, researched, written and performed by Barbara Neri
Produced in collaboration with UM media union producer Tom Bray
Directed by Barbara Neri assisted by Tom Bray
Digital image and video production: Tom Bray, Jacques Mersereau, Linda Kendall and UM Media Union Staff
Lighting Design: Tom Bray
Set design, props and accessories: Barbara Neri
Drawings for "The Dream": Barbara Neri
Vocal Coach: Dr. Lee Stille, Eastern Michigan University
Sound:
The Dream: Roger Winfield's "East Wind."
"Sonnet 43": found sound by Matthew H. Zivich
Dressing Interlude 3: Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," Vladimir Ashkenazy, pianist.
"Big Ben" clock chime: recorded by Ralph Neri
Sound Production: Tom Bray
Garment re-creation:
Mid Victorian underpinnings: Dr. Ruthann Davis Bell
EBB's Wrapper: Erica Mason, Henry Ford Museum
Mid Victorian cage crinoline: Heritage Reproductions
EBB's 1860 garments: Dr. Ruthann Davis Bell
EBB's 1858 garments: Jomarie Ashley Soszynski
EBB's ringlets: Jim McGough, Virginia Opera House
EBB's 1851 Bonnet: Cynthia Amneus, Cincinnati Art Museum.
Likenesses of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and various images used in this performance with permission of the Collection of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Images of EBB from ABL and Wellesley College Library, Special Collections, Wellesley, MA. were also used in the construction of her garments.
CAST
The Speaker (digital video and live): Barbara Neri
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (digital video and live): Barbara Neri
The Dresser: Jomarie Ashley Soszynski

Notes

1. The 1957 movie was retitled Forbidden Alliance for TV. Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin's 2002 Movie and Video Guide (New York: The Penguin Group, 2002) 86.
2. I explore EBB's revisioning use of Greek and Christian myth in "Sonnet 1 and Sonnet 2 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese: Setting the stage for divine reunification" forthcoming in Studies in Browning and his Circle, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco Texas.
3. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, edited with an introduction by P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The other dialogues I read are referred to in subsequent notes with the exception of: Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars, edited and translated by Conrad H. Rawski (Cleveland, Ohio: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1967).
4. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, Vol. 2 (New York: Cowell, 1900) 144-145.
5. Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, edited by Paul Landis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958) 260
6. My thanks to former director of the Armstrong Browning Library, Dr. Mairi C. Rennie; Cynthia A. Burgess, ABL Curator of Books, Rita Patteson, ABL Curator of Manuscripts and Chris Hanson, Baylor Photography Office. Thanks also to Philip Kelley, Wedgestone Press; Ruth R. Rogers, Special Collections Librarian of Wellesley College Library; Christine Nelson, Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Peirpont Morgan library; and librarians Philip Milito, Diana Burnham, Stephen Crook and Curator Isaac Gewirtz of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.