Rudolf Besier's celebrated drama dramatizes the real-life courtship of the poet Elizabeth Barrett by fellow poet Robert Browning, conducted almost entirely in secret within the Barrett family's home on Wimpole Street under the watchful, tyrannical eye of Elizabeth's father, Edward Moulton-Barrett. Confined largely to her sickroom by fragile health and her father's smothering, near-obsessive control over his children's lives, Elizabeth finds in Browning's persistent, ardent letters and visits an awakening of both love and physical vigor that her father's household has long suppressed. As the romance deepens, Elizabeth must weigh her growing devotion to Browning against her father's explicit, almost pathological demand that none of his children ever marry, a conflict that builds toward her secret elopement and escape from Wimpole Street. Besier's drama is as much a portrait of Victorian patriarchal tyranny as it is a love story, with Edward Moulton-Barrett standing as one of the stage's most chilling studies of controlling, quasi-incestuous paternal possessiveness. The play's blend of genuine literary history, suspenseful family conflict, and swooning romance made it an enormous popular success and a favorite of community theaters for its rich, emotionally charged central roles.

Wicomico High School Auditorium