It's worth remembering that reports in The Gentleman's Magazine were not always to be trusted. Mollie Hardwicke, in 'Emma, Lady Hamilton, a study' quotes their totally erroneous report of Emma's funeral February 1806:
'In the village....there was no Protestant clergyman, and no Catholic would officiate because she was a heretic; she was even refused Christian burial; no coffin was allowed, but the body was put into a sack and cast into a hole. An Englishman, hearing of this barbarity, had the body dug up and interred, though not in the churchyard.'
This gloatingly malicious and totally fanciful report was later corrected, but the damage was done. As Mollie Hardwicke notes, 'the legend of a pauper's funeral was firmly attached to Emma's reputation'.
However, Mollie Hardwicke doesn't question the Fonthill performance, but she has an interesting comment which rather supports my suppositions above:
'It has been argued by those who think that Emma foisted off someone else's child on Nelson, or that the adoption story was a true one, that this performance could not possibly have been given before an audience, in intimate surroundings, by a woman only just over a month away from childbirth. A study of the Rehberg sketches, however, shows that Emma had always portrayed Agrippina as a matronly figure heavily draped. Her outline is not even slightly visible in the drawing of Agrippina seated. The character did not call for any dancing or activity, the animation being given to it by changes of posture, arm movements, alterations of hair and headdress. Emma was, as has been said, an actress manquée, and in her day professional actresses were adept at the clever concealment of pregnancy so that they could go on drawing a salary up to the last possible moment. The Mrs Vincent Crummleses and Sarah Terrys of an even later generation would represent Lady Macbeth or Lady Randolph in 'Douglas' when eight months gone, but nothing more juvenile in which a portly figure would be ridiculous. Emma knew the trick of it, and had besides the actress's gift of making an audience see only what she wished it to see. So on that December night at Fonthill the spectators drifted away in the light of 'the declining lamps and torches, and the twinkling of a few scattered stars ina clouded sky...as if waking up from a dream, or just freed from the influence of some magic spell.'
_________________ Anna
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