A remarkable Victorian-era love story will come to life this month at the Jacksonville Public Library.
Sherri Mitchell and Dr. Robert Seufert will present “How Do I Love Thee? An Evening with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning” Wednesday, September 23rd at 7 p.m.
The two-person dramatization tells the story of Elizabeth Barrett, a celebrated poet who spent much of her life bedridden and under the control of a father who forbade his children from marrying.
That changed when fellow poet Robert Browning became captivated by her work. Their courtship eventually led to an elopement to Italy.
Sherri Mitchell says she began conceiving the two-person show some time ago: “Well, the show was conceived several years ago when my brother Andy had the bookstore downtown. And it was like 2014. There was a beautiful old volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese. And that was part of my first Chautauqua presentation. So I hung onto that volume and loved that poetry and learned a little bit about Elizabeth at that time. Then a few years later, I came across another beautiful, old book. It was a play entitled The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolph Bessier. And it’s Elizabeth and Robert’s love story basically written in this old, 1930s play, like five acts or whatever they used to do back in the old days.
“I really, really wanted to do that play. Well, it never happened, just never happened. But then when Robert and I finished our last program last October, we did the post show here at the library and at the old school museum. I said, “Okay, Robert, our next thing, would you do the love story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning?” And he said, “Sure.” So I had him read the play. We’d both seen the movie that came from the play and then more research about Elizabeth and Robert, but the play was just remarkable. It really gave us so much information. Robert found a lot of Robert Browning’s poems. I already had the ones that I needed from Elizabeth, and then I got a book of their letters. They had written 574 letters to each other before they got married. And of course that was in the day before texting and phone calls. So we’ve just put together what we call a dramatization and it includes letters, poems, two scenes that are edited from the play, and then narration that has been written and pretty much gleaned a lot from the play. So the play’s just brilliantly written. So that’s how it all came together. And here we are just a couple weeks out.”
Mitchell says she brought the idea to her partner in art shortly after their previous performance in October and they’ve been rehearsing the show since.
Mitchell says the program is ultimately a story of hope overcoming obstacles.
Seufert says he had the difficult task of finding poetry by Robert Browning’s that would work inside the show’s structure: “I actually had the harder task because I focused mostly on Robert. Elizabeth wrote a lot of love poems. I mean very, very direct, very focused. Well, Robert had as a young poet who had been basically in the romantic tradition, wrote some poetry that had his heart on his sleeve in romantic fashion. And the problem is they’re entering a new era of Victorianism and he got slammed for it by critics that didn’t like all of this self-revelation confession. So he moved in the direction of doing dramatic monologues about characters and kept himself out of it. In other words, they tended to be more or less objective revelations of character in different time periods and situations. And so he had very little poetry that was directly addressed to Elizabeth. And so when we came upon ‘In Three Days,’ which is his poem to Elizabeth on the eve of their elopement, we saw that we had hit a pay dirt. I was very glad for that because I couldn’t find a lot of other material, but it all just comes together very well.”
Ultimately, the research paid off and the poem will be one of the highlights in the show.
The performance is free and will last about an hour.
An encore is scheduled for October 9th at 7 p.m. at the Old School Museum in Winchester.