Mary Robinson’s Theatrical Imagination: Chastity, Melancholy, and Milton’s A Mask

ABSTRACT This article takes up a question that has vexed feminist Milton scholars for the past fifty years: does Milton inhibit women’s writing? Mary Robinson’s 1796 sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon would suggest that the answer is no. This article examines Robinson’s loose adaptation of Comus, an abridgment of Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in which Robinson herself had performed the role of the Lady. It contends that Robinson, like Milton, presents a positive construction of the melancholic poet who preserves chastity. Robinson’s inclusion of Milton’s Sonnet 1 in the preface to her sequence directs readers to her own use of the nightingale. As Robinson rehabilitates the image of Sappho, she uses enjambment in depicting heavenly bodies, which this article argues puns on her own embodiment as mobility impaired.