“Senator and Actors”: Leigh Hunt’s Theatrical Criticism and the Regency

Abstract

Leigh Hunt’s relationship with the Prince Regent is amongst the best-known stories of the Romantic period. One of the leaders of the so-called radical press (having founded The Examiner in 1808 with his brother John), Hunt addressed contemporary issues directly in his “Political Examiner” articles that led, in February 1813, to his imprisonment in Surrey County Gaol for libel against the Prince Regent. This imprisonment made Hunt into a public martyr and his notoriety only grew for having stood up for his personal beliefs. The subsequent two years saw many visits from friends and new acquaintances, the development of alternative venues for creative outlet (with Hunt writing poetry again, first with a revised and extended version of his poem The Feast of the Poets, and then The Story of Rimini), but also Hunt’s ongoing interest in politics, even from the depth of his prison rooms. Hunt offers two interesting takes on his prison years and his relationship with the Prince Regent in the two editions of his Autobiography.¹ But he acknowledges in both editions that the libel itself, which had appeared in The Examiner on March 22, 1812, under the heading “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day,” was “very bitter and contemptuous.”² Was Hunt’s view of the Regent altered after his imprisonment? Several critics have argued that Hunt was indeed tamed and retreated into the apparently less political areas of poetry and periodical publications that focused on literature.