Read Online Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy by Kristin Flieger Samuelian - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Tags: History, England, Europe, 18th Century, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), 2010, 0230616305, Palgrave Macmillan
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Drury Lane company in 1776, Garrick
veConnect - 2011-04-02
was no longer manager, and his innovations, most of them designed
algra
to increase the distance between audience and actors, had been in
place for over ten years.18 But members of the quality and royalty still
occupied boxes that allowed them to look almost directly over the
romso - PT
stage and even into the wings. Robinson writes about being aware
of the Prince’s eye on her, and hearing him make “some flattering
lioteket i
remarks” as she stood chatting with Lord Malden before going on
stage ( Memoirs II. 38). This intimacy between actors and audience,
sitetsbib
Mole suggests, was increased by “the rise of a distinct genre of thes-
pian biography,” which “fed the audience’s interest in actors’ private
lives” (“Mary Robinson” 187). “A successful player,” as Paula Byrne
observes, “could only have a public private life” (89).
If star actors were one locus of this commercial interpenetration
of public and private realms, courtesans, many of whom were also
actresses, were another. Both Cindy McCreery and Laura Runge mark
the 1780s as the period of greatest interest in courtesans as public fig-
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
ures (McCreery 100, Runge 567). The term courtesan, as McCreery
points out, was in flux throughout the century. Although it “was
.palgra
theoretically interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ . . . in practice, prints,
newspapers, and other commentaries increasingly drew distinctions
om www
between expensive, exclusive prostitutes and their cheaper, more
numerous counterparts. A courtesan and a streetwalker were viewed
as the two extremes of the spectrum of prostitution” (McCreery 81).
Courtesans were often indistinguishable from “notorious noble-
yright material fr
women” (Runge 567) and were the subjects of popular biographies,
Cop
gossip columns, and caricatures throughout the decade. As a star
actress, however, Robinson would have been a practiced participant
in the hermeneutic of intimacy even before she became either the
“Perdita” of these early novels or “the Perdita” of the satiric and por-
nographic literature that followed. In Romantic Theatricality: Gender,
Poetry, and Spectatorship , Judith Pascoe suggests that Robinson’s own
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
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30
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
account of her life is the narrative “of a female subject under constant
surveillance.” From her debut in London as a young and pretty bride,
the object of rakish aristocratic gazes, through her theatrical career
and “notorious liaison” with the Prince, her Memoirs “can be read as
a record of increasing public exposure” (140). In “Mary Robinson’s
Conflicted Celebrity” Mole shows that Robinson was an adept man-
ager of this exposure in an age when female celebrity was at odds
with an emergent ideology of domesticity and separate spheres.19
Throughout her career, both as an actress and as a writer, Robinson
engaged in “a dialectic of revelation and concealment” (187), figured
by the transparent veil she wore in her debut performance at Drury
veConnect - 2011-04-02
Lane as Juliet ( Memoirs I. 191). Through strategies of partial conceal-
algra
ment on and offstage, and a “rhetoric of physiognomy” in her poems,
essays, and novels, Robinson appeared to be offering her audience a
privileged access, including them, as Mole puts it, in “an asymmetri-
romso - PT
cal relationship in which they could come to know her without being
known themselves” (193).
lioteket i
Readers of the Florizel and Perdita novels did not need to be
convinced that they contained “the genuine copies of letters which
sitetsbib
passed” between the lovers in order to believe that, through reading
them, they
veConnect - 2011-04-02
was no longer manager, and his innovations, most of them designed
algra
to increase the distance between audience and actors, had been in
place for over ten years.18 But members of the quality and royalty still
occupied boxes that allowed them to look almost directly over the
romso - PT
stage and even into the wings. Robinson writes about being aware
of the Prince’s eye on her, and hearing him make “some flattering
lioteket i
remarks” as she stood chatting with Lord Malden before going on
stage ( Memoirs II. 38). This intimacy between actors and audience,
sitetsbib
Mole suggests, was increased by “the rise of a distinct genre of thes-
pian biography,” which “fed the audience’s interest in actors’ private
lives” (“Mary Robinson” 187). “A successful player,” as Paula Byrne
observes, “could only have a public private life” (89).
If star actors were one locus of this commercial interpenetration
of public and private realms, courtesans, many of whom were also
actresses, were another. Both Cindy McCreery and Laura Runge mark
the 1780s as the period of greatest interest in courtesans as public fig-
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
ures (McCreery 100, Runge 567). The term courtesan, as McCreery
points out, was in flux throughout the century. Although it “was
.palgra
theoretically interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ . . . in practice, prints,
newspapers, and other commentaries increasingly drew distinctions
om www
between expensive, exclusive prostitutes and their cheaper, more
numerous counterparts. A courtesan and a streetwalker were viewed
as the two extremes of the spectrum of prostitution” (McCreery 81).
Courtesans were often indistinguishable from “notorious noble-
yright material fr
women” (Runge 567) and were the subjects of popular biographies,
Cop
gossip columns, and caricatures throughout the decade. As a star
actress, however, Robinson would have been a practiced participant
in the hermeneutic of intimacy even before she became either the
“Perdita” of these early novels or “the Perdita” of the satiric and por-
nographic literature that followed. In Romantic Theatricality: Gender,
Poetry, and Spectatorship , Judith Pascoe suggests that Robinson’s own
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
30
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
account of her life is the narrative “of a female subject under constant
surveillance.” From her debut in London as a young and pretty bride,
the object of rakish aristocratic gazes, through her theatrical career
and “notorious liaison” with the Prince, her Memoirs “can be read as
a record of increasing public exposure” (140). In “Mary Robinson’s
Conflicted Celebrity” Mole shows that Robinson was an adept man-
ager of this exposure in an age when female celebrity was at odds
with an emergent ideology of domesticity and separate spheres.19
Throughout her career, both as an actress and as a writer, Robinson
engaged in “a dialectic of revelation and concealment” (187), figured
by the transparent veil she wore in her debut performance at Drury
veConnect - 2011-04-02
Lane as Juliet ( Memoirs I. 191). Through strategies of partial conceal-
algra
ment on and offstage, and a “rhetoric of physiognomy” in her poems,
essays, and novels, Robinson appeared to be offering her audience a
privileged access, including them, as Mole puts it, in “an asymmetri-
romso - PT
cal relationship in which they could come to know her without being
known themselves” (193).
lioteket i
Readers of the Florizel and Perdita novels did not need to be
convinced that they contained “the genuine copies of letters which
sitetsbib
passed” between the lovers in order to believe that, through reading
them, they
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