Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (9 page)

affair ended. She confided in friends and acquaintances informa-

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tion about the length of their assignations, or about how the Prince

eluded his parents’ vigilance by climbing—Romeo-like—over the

garden wall to be with her (Byrne 122–23; quoting Steele,
Memoirs of

Mrs. Elizabeth Baddely
, 1787). Newspapers scrutinized and reported

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her public behavior, chronicling when she began wearing his min-

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iature around her neck, for instance, or when she began driving a

new carriage with an ambiguous blazon that looked, from a distance,

like a coronet. The affair with the Prince was first mentioned in the

newspapers—and the couple was first referred to publicly as Florizel

and Perdita—in July 1781 (Byrne 117). Both novels drop plenty of

references to details and events the public was likely to recognize.

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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

27

Effusions of Love
records the gift of a “miniature picture,” which

Florizel promises to wear “ever” on his bosom, attached with a rib-

bon, “as it would be imprudent to fix it to my watch” (28). The phras-

ing here possibly alludes to Lady Craven’s
The Miniature Picture
, in

which Robinson played Sir Harry Revel, one of the “breeches” roles

for which she became famous and which she was playing on her last

night at Drury Lane before retiring from the theater. In her
Memoirs
,

Robinson reports that the Prince once proposed that she meet him

dressed as a boy, but that she refused because of “The indelicacy of

such a step, as well as the danger of detection” (II. 50).
The Budget of

Love
reverses the transaction: Florizel gives Perdita a diamond-framed

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miniature, and she assures him that “The setting is most excellent;—

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the brilliancy of the diamonds are [sic] surpassed by nothing but the

celestial lustre that sparkles in the eyes of FLORIZEL!” (72).16 She

tells him she has decided to have her portrait painted, “presuming that

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my FLORIZEL may give it some indifferent place in his Cabinet,”

although she adds disingenuously, “perhaps it will not be proper to

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present, or be thought a gift worthy his reception” (78–79). This is

most likely a reference to one of a pair of portraits of her by Romney.

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According to Robinson’s biographer Paula Byrne, she began sitting

for this picture two weeks after her breakup with the Prince, and it

“was published as an engraving at the height of the letter negotiations

on August 25, 1781” (Byrne 154).

The authors of both novels include details like these, which they

can assume the public already knows, in order to establish the verac-

ity of those they encounter in these stories. Theirs is a finely calcu-

lated management of the “hermeneutic of intimacy” that Tom Mole

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describes, in which direct personal engagement with a celebrated fig-

ure is “marketed as a commodity” and at the same time offered as “an

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escape from the standardised impersonality of commodity culture”

(
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
25). Mole and others locate the origins of

om www

modern celebrity culture at the end of the eighteenth century, when, as

Eric Eisner puts it, the public “emerged not just as an abstraction but

also as a spectatorial body; “a ‘gazing [. . .] multitude”—produced by

an accelerating set of technologies of publicity” (
Nineteenth-Century

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Poetry and Literary Celebrity
21).17 Eisner is quoting from a passage

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in Robinson’s
Memoirs
in which she describes being “overwhelmed

by the gazing of the multitude” at the height of the public’s preoccu-

pation with the affair (II. 67). This multitude, “massive, anonymous,

socially diverse, geographically distributed” (Mole,
Byron’s Romantic

Celebrity
3), is not only the crowd that inconveniences Robinson at

the shops or that, with “staring curiosity,” gathers around her box

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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

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the Prince’s likeness; and, of course, can recognize the lovers’ pet

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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-

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ther public nor private, but help organize through a sense of shared

emotional experience a new kind of public space in which deeply pri-

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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

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not only the Prince’s first publicly acknowledged mistress; she was his

first mistress who was a public figure before her association with him.

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She was an actress, and an actress in a town with only two licensed

theaters and two acting companies, whose principals rotated through

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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-

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cism” the natural companion of courtship:

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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)

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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 Drury Lane company in 1776, Garrick

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was no longer manager, and his innovations, most of them designed

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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

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stage and even into the wings. Robinson writes about being aware

of the Prince’s eye on her, and hearing him make “some flattering

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remarks” as she stood chatting with Lord Malden before going on

stage (
Memoirs
II. 38). This intimacy between actors and audience,

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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-

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ures (McCreery 100, Runge 567). The term courtesan, as McCreery

points out, was in flux throughout the century. Although it “was

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theoretically interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ . . . in practice, prints,

newspapers, and other commentaries increasingly drew distinctions

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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-

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women” (Runge 567) and were the subjects of popular biographies,

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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

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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

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Lane as Juliet (
Memoirs
I. 191). Through strategies of partial conceal-

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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-