Prologue

ELIZABETH, age fourteen, hangs upside down, her knees crooked over the branch of a huge tree in the garden of her father’s vast estate at Hope End, Herefordshire, 1820.

ELIZABETH:

The view from here is decidedly overrated.

And accompanied by a multitude of inconveniences:

blinking against gravity.

Blinks.

Perpetually empty pockets.

And the false interpretation of a frown.

Demonstrates.

(calls out) I am not happy, Papa!

It’s impossible to see things from your point of view—look: it’s upside down.

To think that you could silence me!—I: who am halfway through Homer and commanding in Greek—I who could teach the world its declensions!

Is this what you would have me do: just hang here suspended?

Turns right side up.

To say that everything will fall into place is a monstrous understatement.

It is the sky that will fall. It is the natural order of the world upended if I am left to the cultivation of a milk-white skin and a tedious good humour, tatting away my life to the soft, gloved applause of feminine outrage.

The warships of the world are now capsized and bleeding—the very oceans blush with shame that ever they supported them, Papa: I will taint their holy wars with perpetual disgrace: I will turn the world on end and speak it right.

For I shall be a poet.

A force to stay the tide of advancing shallow minds, to pierce their wooden barks and spark their souls, ignite their minds and carve the face of passion on their shores of stone. The lamp-lit creatures of the ocean floor, who cruise the impenetrable dark, will surface and illuminate the depth of my longing to speak.

ELIZABETH climbs higher.

There are conquering worlds out there, and I mean to have them. Worlds beyond the highest perch, so high up, all that will exist of me is song.

ELIZABETH hangs upside down.

I defy your most unnatural perspective.

She undoes her hair and lets it hang.

I’ll grow my hair at an alarming rate—

She kicks off her shoes and exposes her legs.

I’ll dispense with the constraints of footwear and clothing—

She swings, barefoot, her hair flying as WILSON enters the garden.

I’ll live a life of blood and fire, and at the hour of my death my fall from grace will lie beyond the height of any disgrace you name because I—

WILSON soaks a rag in ether and places it over ELIZABETH’s face.

I’m not here.

Only a butterfly, horror in the wings,

pinned to dust in a little glass box,

where’s the coffin for my thoughts—

WILSON helps ELIZABETH out of the tree and leads her to a Victorian chaise downstage centre. A shift of time and place as the dishevelled girl becomes the grown woman. Her voice deepens. She holds the rag to her face and inhales deeply another draught of ether.

Nowhere, in the shadow of my own mind—because I need more… give me more… more… more…

WILSON hands ELIZABETH a glass of laudanum. ELIZABETH drinks, picks up a pen, dips it in ink, writes. Fade on ELIZABETH.