Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (18 page)

really a princess (although she doesn’t know it) captures the heart of

a real-life prince. Both the actress’s and the shepherdess’s confusions

are ironic, because both women, it turns out, are the proper choices

for their royal lovers. When Robinson writes that she “blushed [her]

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gratitude” at the Prince’s bow, she is implicitly endowing him with

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the same prescience that Camillo and Florizel display in
The Winter’s

Tale
. Her line echoes Perdita’s “I’ll blush you thanks” at their joint

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compliment that her “breeding” outstrips her birth (4. 4. 572, 568).

On the other hand, Florizel’s boast that “one being dead, / I shall

have more than you can dream of yet”5 could resonate unpleasantly

both with Prince George’s less than filial relationship with his father

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and with his broken 20,000-pound bond to Robinson.6 There is as

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much irony as romance or fantasy in the associations offered by the

plays. One of the more potent examples is the miniature the Prince

gave to Robinson, enclosed with a paper heart on which are written

the words “
Unalterable to my Perdita through life
” (
Memoirs
II. 47).

The line is a paraphrase from Perdita’s final speech in
Florizel and

Perdita
, in which she expresses in equal parts class humility and

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romantic fidelity. She is “all shame / And ignorance itself, how to put

on / This novel garment of gentility” (3. 4. 251–53), but her devo-

tion is a sign that she has not undergone any real transformation, “but

I feel /(Ah happy that I do) a love, an heart / Unalter’d to my prince,

my
Florizel
” (3. 4. 257–59). Composed by Garrick for his version, the

speech exemplifies the “quiescence” written into Perdita’s character

by both Garrick and Morgan, which “tacitly endorses social inequi-

ties, even though audience sympathy with her so clearly feeds fantasies

of class intermingling” (Newcomb 185).7 Love is the real stabilizer,

and love does not recognize the boundaries of rank—except insofar

as the lovers’ desire coincides with the mandates of their class. The

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Prince takes over this transfer of stability from the region of status to

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romance when he, as Florizel, writes these words to his Perdita. As his

status shifts “through life” from underage prince to Prince of Wales

to King (or Regent), his unalterable devotion is a guarantee that he

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will remain unaltered.

It is not, of course. The Prince is more careful in constructing

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this promise than in devising the 20,000-pound bond. By using the

famous pseudonym he both evokes the romance and nullifies the vow.

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Florizel has made a promise to Perdita, but the Prince has not prom-

ised to be always Florizel. When Robinson writes in her
Memoirs
that

“This picture is now in my possession” (47)—unlike the bond, which

she eventually relinquished—she signals the primacy of the pastoral

romance over accounts of her as a famous courtesan for whom this

affair was one among many. She is not “the Perdita” of
Memoirs of

Perdita
or
The Rambler’s Magazine
who trades sex for cash—or sex

for secrets and then secrets for cash. She is “my Perdita”: lost but not

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fallen, the beloved of a Prince whose devotion only looks changeable.

“I most firmly believe,” she writes in the present of the
Memoirs
,

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“that his Royal Highness meant what he professed: indeed, his soul

was too ingenuous, his mind too liberal and his heart too susceptible,

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to deceive premeditatedly, or to harbour, even for a moment the idea

of deliberate deception” (II. 48–49). Consciously adopting a position

she must have known was implausibly naïve, Robinson is committing

to one public identity over another, unaltered from the all-but maiden

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who blushed and curtseyed at the bowing of the royal head.

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Garrick’s Perdita is even more the ingénue than Shakespeare’s. The

heroine of a story that focuses on the restoration rather than the dis-

integration of a family, she is that much further removed than her

original from a sexual context. Her debate with Polixines, when she

calls crossbred plants “nature’s bastards” (4. 4. 83), does not appear in

Florizel and Perdita
, perhaps because it no longer resonates with her

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

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father’s repeated convictions of her own bastardy.8 When they fore-

ground the pastoral romance, Garrick and Morgan avoid the original

play’s preoccupation with illicit sexuality.9 The resulting bowdleriza-

tion not only makes the play more comfortable for consumption; it

also shifts the focus away from questions of truth. Gone are Leontes’s

descriptions of Hermione as “a hobby horse” (1. 2. 278) and a “bed-

swerver” (2. 1. 95), because gone is the spontaneous jealousy that

provokes them and that makes probity as central to the play as sexual-

ity. Katharine Eisaman Maus points out that Shakespeare altered the

story in Greene’s
Pandosto
to foreground Leontes’s suspicions in part

because of the theatricality of sexual jealousy. In plays like
Othello
and

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The Winter’s Tale
, jealousy is spectatorship; “[t]he jealous onlooker

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participates vicariously in his own betrayal” (“Horns of Dilemma”

570), constituting both himself and the audience as sexually aroused

watchers.

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Satiric and pornographic reworkings of the Florizel and Perdita

story that depict Robinson as a whore reinsert the sexuality that

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Garrick had excised. Engravings such as Gillray’s 1782
The Thunderer

(BM Satires 6116) offer the “ocular proof” of sex that Othello

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demands10 and that Leontes believes he has found. The audience can-

not endorse Leontes’s conviction of Hermione’s infidelity, not because

proof does not exist, but because such proof is unperformable. Maus

points out that, in their jealous voyeurism, Leontes and Othello rep-

licate the role of the audience by desiring what cannot be represented

on stage, where “the domain of the characters’ sexual activity is taken

for granted but inevitably eliminated from view. There are things the

characters know that we do not” (575). We don’t
know
, for instance,

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if Othello and Desdemona ever consummate their marriage, or if

Gertrude was sleeping with Claudius before her husband’s death, or

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if she continues after Hamlet confronts her. “What the audience actu-

ally sees” in Act 1 of
The Winter’s Tale
“is Hermione in a flirtatious

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conversation with her husband’s friend. If she were guilty we would

not be shown much more” (Maus 575).

Gillray’s engraving explodes this distinction by offering a Robinson

both publicly and privately “known.” Her two lovers, former and cur-

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rent, stand talking to one another in front of a tavern. In the char-

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acter of Captain Bobadil from Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
,

Banastre Tarleton boasts of his military conquests to the Prince of

Wales, whose head has been replaced with a crown of feathers. The

tavern, “The Whirligig,” promises “Alamode Beef—hot every Night.”

The sign of the house, above the door, is the figure of Robinson,

breasts exposed, legs apart, impaled on a pole. She inclines her head

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toward Tarleton, saying, “This is the Lad’ll kiss most sweet. / Who’d

not love a solder?” The whirligig, in addition to being a spinning

toy, was also a punitive device designed to cause nausea, in which

the victim was enclosed in a spinning cage. Anne Mellor points out

the added relevance that whirligigs were often used to punish army

prostitutes (234). Robinson’s position “of fixed and absolute exhibi-

tion” (Pascoe,
Romantic Theatricality
140) in the engraving parodies

the spectacle of Hermione frozen and restored to life at the end of

both plays. In this case, however, the two men look not at her but

at each other (as far as the featherheaded Prince can be considered

to look at anything). The spectacle is for our benefit, not theirs, and

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what is “preserved” (
The Winter’s Tale
5. 3. 128) for our view is not

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the image of the woman “as she lived peerless” (5. 3. 14) but ease of

sexual access. The men’s lack of interest and her exposure in combina-

tion prove her a whore.

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Garrick’s version of the play obviates the question of whether

illicit sexuality can be proven. The audience does not need to decide

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whether to believe that Leontes sees what he thinks he sees, or that he

interprets it correctly. Already the older generation, Leontes is of no

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concern. Questions of proof linger, but they are limited to the realm

of comedy. Garrick retains most of the dialogue in Act 4 between the

rustics and the ballad-seller, Autolycus. He cleans up the language a

little, omitting references to dildos and to plackets where faces should

be, but the central event, the cozening of the Clown and shepherd-

esses, remains as it was in the original play. Newcomb observes that

the rustics’ credulity highlights class anxieties about popular liter-

ature in the early modern period.11 Street ballads were often mar-

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keted as popular forms of news; their apparent truth value was both

a standard selling point and the basis of criticism.12 “I love a ballad

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in print alife,” declares the shepherdess Mopsa, “for then we are sure

they are true” (4. 4. 251–52).13 Newcomb points out that this line

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“literalize[s] and materialize[s] the central question of textual truth

posed by the oracle of Apollo” who declares Hermione’s innocence to

an unbelieving Leontes in Act 3 (128). That an item is “in print” is no

guarantor of truth for Leontes. Like Sophocles’s Creon, he rejects the

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oracular words and reverses his position only upon the death of his

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son. Garrick removes this tragic context, and the ballad-selling scene

becomes a comic set piece about credulous “simple folk” (Newcomb

122). Leontes’s rejection of the oracle’s testimony makes incredulity

seem as irrational and ill considered as credulity; in Garrick’s version,

however, only credulity looks foolish. Believing is the same as being

cozened. When Robinson claims to believe “firmly” that her prince

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is incapable of “deliberate deception,” she sentimentalizes this indict-

ment and strips it of class inflection: her faith is charming innocence

rather than clownish stupidity. It would be difficult, in 1801, to read

Robinson’s words without irony, although she clearly means for her

readers to acquit her of conscious irony. That the Prince was more

than capable of deceiving “premeditatedly” she must have known

not only from her own experience of him but also, after 1788, from

the events surrounding the regency crisis. When the King’s madness