Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France by Estelle Paranque

Author:Estelle Paranque
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030223441
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Tragic Heroine

The Oxford Pageant juxtaposed this careless romance with incidents from the 1640s, ultimately crowning its representation of Charles’s reign with the city’s surrender to Parliament in 1646, a moment when the King’s position became “desperate” and ultimately led him downhill toward execution.61 The barge scene imagined for London was also envisioned as being offset by a scene of Whitehall in 1649.62 The episode’s “nostalgic” element, contrasting with the retrospectively well-known and oft-depicted ultimate destiny of the Stuart king, was noted at the first exhibition of Goodall’s painting in 1853 and was clearly essential in its subsequent cultural resonance.63 The inherent melodrama of jarring reversal of fortune held natural appeal for writers and artists and has allowed the politically controversial Queen to be interpreted as a tragic heroine, mixing to varying degrees steadfast valor and pathetic misery. In historiographically surveying Henrietta’s reputation, White relegates Oliver’s biography, Queen of Tears, to the footnotes because of its primary focus on “historical personality” over analysis, but this interpretation and its alluring lexical marketing was a product both of and for contemporary sympathies of taste and familiarities of reference.64 In the 1870s, Wills was pressured into reworking the ending of Charles the First to focus on domestic tragedy over political commentary, creating a “lachrymose conclusion” by ahistorically including Henrietta in Charles’s pre-execution finale.65 Opposite Irving, first Isabel Bateman, and then Terry played Henrietta. Both were renowned tragic actresses and the part both cemented their reputations as such and became itself identified as such a role, listed in summaries of Terry’s illustrious career alongside the great Shakespearean parts.66 Both actresses compared their own performances to their respective “Ophelia,” Bateman emphasizing her efforts and success in “wringing tears” from the audience, and Terry describing the “wan lily” effect that Oscar Wilde saw in her Henrietta as “perfectly what I had tried to convey, not only in this part but in Ophelia.”67 Adding to the role’s tragic profile, both were photographed in the role, and Kimberly Rhodes has convincingly argued that one image of Bateman in particular appears to have been particularly widely circulated. Julia Cameron’s image of Henrietta with her children awaiting Charles’s execution, Rhodes argues, “capitalizes on pathos, audience recognition of an actress in a familiar role and more commercial practices” to profit from and consolidate a particular view of the character in the public mind.68

Terry’s critical appraisal of her own performances is preoccupied with whether she “cried too much” so as to render Henrietta ridiculous, whilst also acknowledging the dramatic need and commercial value of her emotional and emotive performance, of which it was written she “was so infinitely pathetic that she reached absolute greatness.”69 However, tragic renditions of the Queen have not been wholly passively piteous and pathetic. Twenty-first century titles in popular history marketing Henrietta as “intrepid” or “indomitable” demonstrate the lasting allure of melodramatic misery, but simultaneously emphasize a more stoical and pro-active response to suffering to cater to modern sensibilities of gendered representation.70 Nevertheless, elements of this courageous and enduring Henrietta can be found going right back into the nineteenth century.

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