Read Online Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy by Kristin Flieger Samuelian - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Tags: History, England, Europe, 18th Century, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), 2010, 0230616305, Palgrave Macmillan
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10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
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9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 27
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28
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
at Ranelagh pleasure gardens ( Memoirs II. 68). It is also the print-
consuming public, readers of the newspaper paragraphs and gossip
columns whose production soared at this period. The goal of these
publications was to make their audiences feel intimately connected
with the people they read about, emphasizing, in Mole’s phrasing,
“not just the permeability of private and public, but their commer-
cialised interpenetration” ( Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 5). In this new
kind of intimacy literacy replaces rank; anyone who can read can have
the same privileged access—can be in London and close enough to
the Prince’s and Robinson’s boxes at the opera to see their flirtatious
exchanges; can see the miniature pinned to her bosom and identify
veConnect - 2011-04-02
the Prince’s likeness; and, of course, can recognize the lovers’ pet
algra
names for each other, both part of public culture and the signals of a
private in-joke that everybody gets. As Eisner puts it, “At once indi-
vidual and collective, the feelings incited by celebrity are properly nei-
romso - PT
ther public nor private, but help organize through a sense of shared
emotional experience a new kind of public space in which deeply pri-
lioteket i
vate meanings find display” (7).
sitetsbib
Celebrity, Satire, and Family Secrets
Robinson’s description of the gazing multitude comes at the end of her
narrative of her affair with the Prince, suggesting that the apex of this
first stage of her celebrity coincided with, or even followed, the end of
the relationship. Recent criticism of Robinson, however, suggests that
she managed her public image and calculated the public’s reception
of her from at least the beginning of her acting career. Robinson was
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
not only the Prince’s first publicly acknowledged mistress; she was his
first mistress who was a public figure before her association with him.
.palgra
She was an actress, and an actress in a town with only two licensed
theaters and two acting companies, whose principals rotated through
om www
a series of roles and were consequently on view every night during the
season. She had an audience who already felt that they knew her. In a
letter printed in the Morning Post of November 22, 1779, “Bo-Peep”
expresses and eroticizes this fantasy of intimacy by making “criti-
yright material fr
cism” the natural companion of courtship:
Cop
Criticism is a cold exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive
glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I
may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which
are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the
chill, and the acid of the critique. (quoted in Byrne 90)
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a
29
Mole points out that Robinson’s acting career coincided with
“a time when the apparatus of theatrical celebrity was rapidly tak-
ing shape,” and “[a]ttention was increasingly focused on the star”
(“Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity” 187). Principals had mini-
mal rehearsals with the rest of the company and experienced mini-
mal directorial intervention. Thus they could establish direct links
with audience members, who increasingly “tended to sit in silence,
in a darkened auditorium, watching a star actor on a brightly lit
stage” making spectatorship seem “like an interpersonal interaction
between audience member and star” ( Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 19).
When Robinson joined the
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 27
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 27
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
28
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
at Ranelagh pleasure gardens ( Memoirs II. 68). It is also the print-
consuming public, readers of the newspaper paragraphs and gossip
columns whose production soared at this period. The goal of these
publications was to make their audiences feel intimately connected
with the people they read about, emphasizing, in Mole’s phrasing,
“not just the permeability of private and public, but their commer-
cialised interpenetration” ( Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 5). In this new
kind of intimacy literacy replaces rank; anyone who can read can have
the same privileged access—can be in London and close enough to
the Prince’s and Robinson’s boxes at the opera to see their flirtatious
exchanges; can see the miniature pinned to her bosom and identify
veConnect - 2011-04-02
the Prince’s likeness; and, of course, can recognize the lovers’ pet
algra
names for each other, both part of public culture and the signals of a
private in-joke that everybody gets. As Eisner puts it, “At once indi-
vidual and collective, the feelings incited by celebrity are properly nei-
romso - PT
ther public nor private, but help organize through a sense of shared
emotional experience a new kind of public space in which deeply pri-
lioteket i
vate meanings find display” (7).
sitetsbib
Celebrity, Satire, and Family Secrets
Robinson’s description of the gazing multitude comes at the end of her
narrative of her affair with the Prince, suggesting that the apex of this
first stage of her celebrity coincided with, or even followed, the end of
the relationship. Recent criticism of Robinson, however, suggests that
she managed her public image and calculated the public’s reception
of her from at least the beginning of her acting career. Robinson was
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
not only the Prince’s first publicly acknowledged mistress; she was his
first mistress who was a public figure before her association with him.
.palgra
She was an actress, and an actress in a town with only two licensed
theaters and two acting companies, whose principals rotated through
om www
a series of roles and were consequently on view every night during the
season. She had an audience who already felt that they knew her. In a
letter printed in the Morning Post of November 22, 1779, “Bo-Peep”
expresses and eroticizes this fantasy of intimacy by making “criti-
yright material fr
cism” the natural companion of courtship:
Cop
Criticism is a cold exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive
glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I
may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which
are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the
chill, and the acid of the critique. (quoted in Byrne 90)
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a
29
Mole points out that Robinson’s acting career coincided with
“a time when the apparatus of theatrical celebrity was rapidly tak-
ing shape,” and “[a]ttention was increasingly focused on the star”
(“Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity” 187). Principals had mini-
mal rehearsals with the rest of the company and experienced mini-
mal directorial intervention. Thus they could establish direct links
with audience members, who increasingly “tended to sit in silence,
in a darkened auditorium, watching a star actor on a brightly lit
stage” making spectatorship seem “like an interpersonal interaction
between audience member and star” ( Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 19).
When Robinson joined the
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