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Webling, Peggy

Entry updated 16 September 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

Working name of UK playwright, poet and author Margaret Webling (1871-1949), active from the mid 1890s; she is of sf interest for her stage adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) as Frankenstein: A Play in a Prologue and Three Acts (first performed 1927), which was revised more than once before being adapted by John L Balderston and Robert Florey for the film Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale. The play went unpublished during her lifetime; the 1927 and 1928 versions, plus the prompt script for the movie, are included in Peggy Webling and the Story Behind Frankenstein: The Making of a Hollywood Monster (2024) by Bruce Graver and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum.

After a century of tongue-tied melodramas,Webling's adaptation expresses an innovative sympathy for the Frankenstein Monster, whom she treats as a Doppelganger of the Baron, giving both figures the name Frankenstein. Her Frankenstein also focuses – as does Shelley's original, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992), and the film Poor Things (2023) directed by Yorgos Lanthimnos – on the monster's acquisition of language (see Linguistics). Some of this recuperation of the original novel survives in Whale's film. [JC]

Margaret Webling

born London: 1 January 1871

died London: 27 June 1949

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