A Romance in Three Parts
By Peter Hinton
McArthur & Company
471 pages, $29.95
ISBN: 1-55278-168-1
There has never been a Canadian play as large or as ambitious as Peter Hinton’s historical trilogy. Eleven years in the making, counting the time from its first draft and workshops to its final publication, The Swanne contains over fifty roles (excluding supernumeraries) to be played by over twenty performers. It spans several decades of English history, being a speculation (in its author’s words) on the “last convulsions of Georgian England and the drama out of which the Victorian sensibility was born.” (He could have added that, in the final part, it nourishes the myth of a democratic, reformist Canadian society, but leave that issue to political historians.) Its first inspiration was a coffeehouse circular of 1819 about a black son born to Princess Charlotte, one of George III’s progeny. Exercising Hinton’s broad and deep knowledge of Georgian and Victorian England, the epic exposes “the romance” of royal succession and provokes a re-examination of “the foundations upon which the monarchy and democracy are bound.” The seed of the story is a conspiracy theory: George IV covers up the birth of a royal heir because the baby is black. In seeking to investigate reasons for this cover-up, Hinton seizes on the swan metaphor because though the creature is generally assumed to be a symbol of purity and grace, the royal bird once connoted deceit, its white plumage concealing black flesh. Hinton’s play becomes a “shadow history” or alternative to official English history, but it is far from academic. Its vision is virtually Hogarthian in its robust, lewd, tough, unsentimental disposition, encompassing aristocrats, prostitutes, criminals, and indigents, although its sprawl may prove confusing for many as Hinton braids sequences of time in flashbacks while crowding his dramatic canvas with a wide array of characters spread across several generations and geographies.
In order to enter Hinton’s theatrical world, we have to put aside an obvious objection that Princess Charlotte’s illegitimate son could never rightly be heir to the English throne. We have to know English royal genealogy of the period, and we also need to familiarize ourselves with Hinton’s emblematic codes that are not necessarily clearly revealed or explained. However, such effort will be amply rewarded, for Hinton’s huge ambition is matched by intriguing techniques. His basic frame for the story is the figure of Queen Victoria refracted in dual images—a young woman (Drina) and adult—as she reflects, through plays she has imagined, on events surrounding the dying years of her father’s reign. The first part of the trilogy, George III--The Death of Cupid, is situated in the shift from Georgian society to 19th century bourgeois respectability. Hinton adds layer upon layer to his story, such as a covert and ill-fated gay relationship between a black orphan and a white one, a confrontation between the royal whoremaster and his ill-spoken, outraged wife, and a sequence involving a famous 18th century actress, blinded by gaslight, who is about to play the role of Venus in her farewell performance. These thicken the texture, offering colourful characters that are all caught in a web of camouflage and cruelty, as well as opportunities for the playwright to experiment with various forms of rhetorical style and diction. The problem with this richness is that it lacks clarity. It is difficult to keep track of who’s who in the sinuous tale of bastard children, buggery, whoring, and masquerade, just as it is an arduous task to sort out the metaphors and myths in their relationship to Victoria. However, a reader’s effort bears rich rewards.
Like its predecessor, the second part of the trilogy, Princess Charlotte--The Acts of Venus, displays an astonishing breadth. The second play-within-a-play, it is ostensibly about young Victoria’s fantasy about the high-level conspiracy put into effect when Charlotte dies in childbirth and her infant son William (sired by her black valet, Mr. Stowe) is placed in an orphanage where as an adolescent he falls in love with Jeremy, illegitimate son of seamstress Jaquenetta and reform-minded actor Fred Dobing. The allegorical figure of Venus becomes an active character, and her work is distributed across several sexual or romantic entanglements, one of which involves Charlotte’s husband, Leopold (Prince of Coburg), who has a sexual alliance with Baron Stockmar. Not all the entanglements are treated solemnly--in fact, the Leopold-Stockmar romance is amusingly parodied in a scene of lieder practice—though they are part of a nexus of rancid sexual politics and social mores.
Abandoned by her lover who joins the Cato Street rebels, Jaquenetta falls under the spell of St. John Voranguish, royal whoremaster and problem-fixer. Their scenes alternate with events in the White Swan Tavern some sixteen years later where the brothel-madam Mother Needham runs a brisk business with the help of Peter Rue, a transvestite. This tavern becomes the site of alternative English history, for William is forced to seek refuge there from pursuing government forces during his flight from the orphanage.
So, in the course of Hinton’s sprawl of history, the permutations of love and the problems of independence, identity, and justice are manifold. England seems poised on the brink of a revolution deeper than the Cato Street rebellion that protested the Reform Act of 1832, and the early 19th century is dramatized as the Age of Riot. The final part of the trilogy, Queen Victoria—The Seduction of Nemesis, is charged with acts of political sedition, violence, bigotry, and persecution. It is, as Hinton claims in his notes to Part Three, “the world of Queen Victoria’s childhood: her Nemesis.” It was an age that offered responsible government and universal suffrage while also strengthening the powers of colonialism and free trade. “It was an age that saw the abolition of slavery, yet at the same time created the enslavement of a poverty-stricken underclass. It was an age of socialism and economic struggle, free enterprise and imperial conquest.” It was an age when democracy (as Victorians understood it) was born.
The subject of Drina’s third and final imagined play is democracy, but in order to appreciate the idea of this democracy and its fruits, we have to follow Drina’s contention with Nemesis, the ancient Greek goddess of fate. As Hinton describes it, the meanings of Nemesis are multiple, and “the outcomes of her acts hold all of us accountable. …Nemesis demands that we ruthlessly examine ourselves. She is depicted as a great egg encircled by two serpents representing Time. She is the mother of war and the Gemini twins—to remind us of the nobility in friendship. She is also the mother of Beauty.”
The complex plot is finally unfolded, though because of its density and intricacy readers may remain in some confusion. Nevertheless, it is a brilliant job of theatrical engineering where the foundation supports an entire city of a fertile imagination. Fortunately, too, there is a genealogical table (drawn up by Emma Tibaldo) to assist readers, and the main characters remain sharply drawn. Fundamentally, this final part of the trilogy focuses on forces of dissent in showing how democracy is born out of bloodshed. Hinton argues in his foreword that Nemesis demands “that we ruthlessly examine ourselves,” and that while she is the mother of war, she is also the mother of beauty. The opening scene makes the point of strife eminently clear with a fractious mob hurling abuse at an infamous bawd, Mother Needham, in stocks because she allowed homosexuals into her tavern. Mother Needham is all spleen. She charges that the agents of religion, state, and the upper class have exploited the poor and have profited from the scandal of the royal black bastard. The law has sentenced four gay men to hang for buggery, and orphan Jeremy (Jaquenetta’s illegitimate son), who has never seen his real father, says that the country is wracked by unemployment and fear of revolution. Later in the play, Fred Dobing recounts the horror of Peterloo (where 11 were killed and 200 were wounded during a demonstration in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester in favour of reform in British law). While the social and political temper is turbulent, Hinton does allow sociology to swamp the play at times, and so the main lines of action in the plot about the two orphans do become fuzzy.
Part Three is the murkiest section of the trilogy, and it is also the most sentimental. It brings the very human story about the love affair between Jeremy and William to a conclusion, puts an inglorious end to St. John Voranguish, and looks to Canada as a haven for those English exiles who can no longer abide England. In addition to being overly crowded with characters and political details, it imposes a closure that is not altogether satisfying after the hectic turmoil of the preceding plays. Yet, it is admirable for its extraordinary breadth of vision, even though much of the writing seems pursy. When was the last time Canada had a playwright of such sharp intelligence, shrewd wit, large ambition, and vivid theatricality? Those of us who value Canadian culture should be proud of Hinton’s extraordinary achievement in this trilogy, and Hinton should be proud, in turn, of the attractive job that McArthur & Company has done in producing the book, with colour photos for the cover, a Foreword by Richard Monette (Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival that first staged the entire trilogy spread over three seasons), Production Notes to each play, and a Glossary. All in all, it’s a winning combination.
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