Tea at Trianon: The Madness of George III

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 19, 2020

The Madness of George III

From The Arts Desk:

It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in history as a comic figure, most famed for losing first America and then his mind. This Nottingham Playhouse production tells his story with all the wit and elegance of a tune played on a harpsichord, yet it is made remarkable by the way in which it simultaneously excavates the pain and pathos underlying his condition.

That is due not least to an extraordinary performance from Mark Gatiss in the title role. Gatiss arrives in this production on the wings of a prolific and varied TV career, yet here he demonstrates himself to be every bit as much a creature of the stage as he charts George’s decline from benign eccentricity into verbally incoherent despair.

Gatiss fans are familiar with the biographical detail that he grew up opposite Winterton Psychiatric Hospital in County Durham, where his father was chief engineer. Many have connected that time of his life with some of the more gothic manifestations of The League of Gentlemen, but he himself has declared that it was far more helpful for his portrayal of what he has diagnosed as the king’s “massive nervous breakdown”. (Read more.)