Although it is set in the recent past, many critics felt it was more of a piece with Dumas’ Three Musketeers (1844) or even the tales of the Round Table. Some hailed it as an escape from the more intellectual fin-de-siècle literary tendencies of Naturalism, Aestheticism and ‘New Woman’ fiction.
Reviewers and readers delighted in this thrilling yarn of instant royalty, chivalric love and swashbuckling action. A sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, appeared in 1898. The player king must now part with his beloved Flavia and he returns to England to daydream of further Ruritanian adventures. But his better self prevails and after much scheming and swordplay the real king is rescued from the Castle of Zenda.
His royal role-play goes well until the real king is abducted and Rassendyll finds himself trapped in his part worse, he falls in love with Princess Flavia, the king's intended. When King Rudolf is drugged by his half-brother, the scheming Duke Michael, the Englishman is recruited by the king's loyal men, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, to impersonate him at the coronation, foiling a possible coup. At a loose end in London, he travels to Ruritania where he discovers that he bears a striking resemblance to the new king, also named Rudolf, who is due to be crowned. Rudolf Rassendyll is the younger son of an earl and a distant relation of the Elphbergs, the ruling family of Ruritania, a small, bucolic German state bordering Saxony. Wodehouse, John Buchan, Marion Davies, Ivor Novello, the Marx Brothers, Peter Ustinov, Dick Van Dyke and Anne Hathaway are just a few of those who at some point have crossed the border into such Ruritanian territories as Samavia, Mervo, Evallonia, Graustark, Krasnia, Freedonia, Concordia, Vulgaria and Genovia.Īnthony Hope had already published novels and short stories, including a tale of mistaken identity set in the fictional principality of Glottenberg, and the plot for Zenda came to him quickly. While there have been many adaptations of Zenda on page, stage and screen, there followed countless ‘Ruritanian’ adventure stories, costume dramas, operettas, stage musicals and films. But its setting, Ruritania, has cast an even longer shadow in popular culture. The resulting book, The Prisoner of Zenda, became a bestseller and has never been out of print since it first appeared a year later in 1894. In November 1893, Anthony Hope Hawkins, then a struggling young barrister, was strolling back from court to his chambers in Middle Temple when he came up with a story about lookalikes set in a fictional pocket kingdom.
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