Kate Williams Read online

  She lets down her hair, and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc, that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He [the viewer] sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him… standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a headdress.1

  Once the gossips found out that Goethe loved the Attitudes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tourists followed in his wake. Nearly twenty-five years later he included a scene in his novel Elective Affinities in which beautiful young Luciane thrills her audience with Attitudes. Emma’s performance for Goethe when she was twenty-two ensured that she would be asked to present Attitudes for the next thirty years—a move she only occasionally regretted.

  Another early spectator was Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who marveled at Emma’s ability to “suddenly change her expression from grief to joy… With shining eyes and flowing hair she appeared perfect as a bacchante; she could then change her expression immediately and appear as sorrowful as the repentant Magdalene…. I could have copied her different poses and expressions and filled a gallery with paintings.”

  Soon, every guest at the palazzo demanded to see the Attitudes. One raffish French visitor, the Baron de Salis, described how Emma, “covered herself with flowers, gives a living spectacle of masterpieces of the most celebrated artists of antiquity. She is very obliging and gave a performance to a little group of us. You have to have seen her to conceive to what degree this lovely figure enabled us to enjoy the charms of illusion.” Adelaide d’Osmond, later the Comtesse de Boigne, a young refugee from Paris, described how Emma clad herself in a white tunic, her hair over her shoulders, and took up two or three cashmere shawls, an urn, a lyre, and a tambourine.

  With this scanty equipment and in her classic costume, she would take up her position in the middle of the drawing room. She would throw over her head a shawl which trailed to the ground and which covered her entirely, and thus hidden she draped herself with others. Then she would lift the shawl suddenly or sometimes throw it aside altogether; at other times she would half slip it off, and it then served as a drapery for the model she personified.

  Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, by Pietro Antonio Novelli (1791). Novelli’s drawing shows Emma using her shawls to move through the poses, ending with a drunken bacchante, revealing the clever manipulation that thrilled Goethe and made her one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe.

  To the young girl’s excitement, Emma sometimes used her in her performances.

  One day she made me kneel before an urn with my hands joined in an attitude of prayer. Leaning over me, she seemed to be absorbed in grief and we were both dishevelled. Suddenly she stood upright and, withdrawing a little, she seized me by the hair with such a sudden movement that I turned round in surprise and even a little fear, for she was brandishing a dagger! Enthusiastic applause from the artist spectators was heard, accompanied by the exclamations of “Bravo le Medea!” Then, drawing me towards her bosom with the semblance of protecting me from the wrath of heaven, she wrung from the same voices the cries of “Viva la Niobe!”2

  The comtesse’s report shows how the Attitudes worked as a type of parlor game or charades, in which the audience competed to guess the posture she assumed. As Emma knew, there were hundreds of visitors in Naples eager to show off their classical knowledge.

  Emma soon became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Naples, and the political and cultural elite of Europe flocked to see her. Modern researchers claim that Sir William created the Attitudes, but there is no evidence for this. No spectators, even those who found her dismayingly vulgar, credit the idea to her lover, for they knew he was ignorant about fashion and dance. As they recognized, Emma borrowed poses she had struck in Romney’s studio, recalling the artist’s quest to unite classical models with modern sex appeal. Some implied that she learned to pose in the brothel, and indeed the word attitude was often used to refer to postures by courtesans. As one put it, she “improved her skill in Attitudes by the study of antique figures, from which she learned a variety of the most voluptuous and indecent poses.“3 Like the gossip columns in the newspapers already dropping teasing hints about Emma’s performances, the guests describe Sir William as an enthusiastic admirer, awed by his lovely mistress’s skill. If he took a role, it was to encourage her to dance around his finest vases in the hope that one of his visitors might want to buy them.

  The Attitudes reflected Emma’s endeavors to educate herself about classical culture by reading in her lover’s library and accompanying him on his trips to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Portici, as well as to excavations of tombs in search of new vases. In an illustration at the front of one of his catalogues, Emma is pictured in her signature white muslin, peering into a tomb. After listening to Sir William and his friends, she soon had the same smattering of knowledge about classical myths and history as any traveling squire, and her performances were created to suit just such an individual. The Attitudes were neither esoteric nor even accurate, but a hit parade of popular classical stories: Clytemnestra and Niobe, the more attractive goddesses; Iphigenia preparing to sacrifice herself; Helen of Troy; women seduced by Zeus; Cleopatra waiting for Antony; as well as a Magdalen. Since all travelers hoped to see Titian’s Danae at Caserta, the corresponding attitude was always a reliable crowd pleaser as Emma posed as the title figure, a princess visited by Zeus disguised as a shower of gold.

  Travelers wandered around Pompeii and Herculaneum hoping to be, as William Beckford put it, “transported bodily into the realms of antiquity,” but feeling guiltily bored by the mass of soil and dirt. Much remained overgrown because the king refused permits to excavate, dreading anyone finding anything better than his own collection of antiquities. Although guides hunted out the sites of brothels and cafés to please the tourists, few were able to imagine Pompeii as a Roman city.4 Without films or plays to depict classical times (the Neapolitans hardly ever performed classical plays, for they preferred comic farce), they craved a performance that might give them an idea of classical Italy—and also encapsulate the essence of the modern country and its people. Emma fulfilled their desire. As the Comtesse de Boigne suggested, she showed them “the poetic imagination of the Italians by a kind of living improvisation” in easily digestible form. Beloved particularly by tourists who felt ashamed about preferring the shops to grimy ruins they could not understand, Emma’s performances were seen as reviving the ancient past. The Attitudes soon became crucial to any self-respecting visitor’s grand tour and essential to his descriptions of his encounters with classical culture.

  Actors in England and Europe were pigeonholed into either comic (usually sexy) roles or parts as a tragic hero or heroine and were seldom allowed to perform both. Emma’s audiences were stunned by her ability to move swiftly from tragic to comic postures. One onlooker recalled that he had

  never seen anything more fluid and graceful… at one moment I was admiring her in the constancy of Sophonisba in taking the cup of poison… afterwards, changing at a stroke, she fled, like the Virgilian Galates… or else she cast herself down like a drunken bacchante, extending an arm to a lewd satyr.5

  Male spectators wished that Emma would strike erotic poses. A Parisian aristocrat, the Comte d’Espinchal, declared that she should forget dreary Minerva and dance about as lovely Hebe, Venus, and the Graces, then recline in a sumptuous boudoir and pretend to be “Cleopatra ardently greeting Mark Antony.“6

  Since Emma performed from her early twenties until her late forties, the Attitudes were constantly changing. Her performances never fell out of favor because she kept up with the latest fashions, styles, and issues, incorporated new references, and altered her props and costumes. As she became more experienced, she gave roles to guests and servants, retained hairdressers to vary her look, and
added songs. She tried hard to use her face to show the change of mood. Her audience were habituated to seeing acting at a distance onstage, in which loud noise and exaggerated movement often took the place of communication, and they found her ability to show different emotions through facial expression truly startling.

  Emma tailored her Attitudes to her audiences. To spectators in Naples, fresh from art history courses and tours of Pompeii, Emma showed classical postures. In England, she aimed for a populist audience by pretending to be a Neapolitan peasant woman, posing as a captive in a Turkish harem, or, capitalizing on her fame as a model, imitating famous statues and paintings. She also chose her Attitudes to promote her ambitions. As a mistress and then newly married, she performed a Magdalen, the woman penitent for her early life. After 1791, when she was advocating Queen Maria Carolina’s desire to defend Naples against the French, she imitated figures from classical history who resisted tyranny and invasion. When she returned to England, she emphasized her pregnancy by performing postures of a mother and showed herself as Cleopatra, matching the media’s representation of her as the sexy, powerful, exotic queen.

  In 1794, the German painter Frederick Rehberg drew twelve of her poses, including a sibyl, Mary Magdalen, and Cleopatra. There was such demand for prints that his drawings were published as a book and distributed across Europe. Ladies in their salons, courtesans, and dancers had poses to copy and guidance on dress and they all tried to imitate Emma’s performances. Soon guests were balancing on chairs to see the great beauty of Napoleonic France and intimate of the Empress Josephine, Juliette Re-camier, performing similar poses in her Paris salon. Her elderly banker husband trotted around placing napkins under their feet to protect the upholstery. Increasingly, women began to adopt Grecian dress in imitation of Emma’s fashions in Rehberg’s pictures and abandon their hobbling high-heeled, point-toed shoes for her signature flat pumps. The Attitudes were equally influential on styles of dance. As ballet in the eighteenth century was formal and stilted and the dancers paused frequently between positions, Emma’s plasticity and rapid movement were revolutionary. When Isadora Duncan reworked her techniques a century later, performing sensual, fluid dances in classical garb, she set Victorian London on fire.

  Incorporated into books, pictures, cartoons, and caricatures, the performances inspired artists and writers. Corinne by Madame de Stael, Europe’s most influential writer during the Napoleonic Wars, features a tall, slightly plump Englishwoman living in Italy who has become the most famous woman in England through reciting poetry and performing her Attitudes. Wearing a white dress and a turban, like Emma, she performs the sufferings of a sibyl. Her performances entrance the English sailor and great leader Lord Nelvil (a name too reminiscent of Nelson to be coincidental). Corinne’s performances underline her belief that Italy should resist Napoleon’s armies. By the 1790s, Emma too performed Attitudes that extolled the virtues of martyrs and those who resisted tyranny. Unlike Stael’s heroine, however, Emma never subsumed herself in the figures she represented. She was constantly giving her audience a wink, always saying, “Look at me.” Her aim was to showcase her talents.

  Emma knew that the guests at the palazzo wanted to see her, the famous mistress and muse. She guessed that her notorious past meant that guests would be staring at her body and making suggestive comments about her. By developing the Attitudes, she exploited their attention and ensured that their reports about her focused on her performances rather than her previous behavior. Many arrived determined to judge her as immoral but left seduced by her skill.

  Sir William’s admiration for Emma deepened every day. He was allowing her to act as his hostess, and he gave her grand dresses and jewels in order to do so. On top of his basic allowance to Emma and her mother for clothes and washing of £200 a year, he bought her day dresses and formal gowns and “every now and then a present of a gown, a ring, a feather, etc.” Once, he wrote, “she so long’d for diamonds, that, having an opportunity of a good bargain of single stones of a good water & a tolerable size, I gave her at once £500 worth,” and then paid again to set them in necklaces and bracelets.

  When he planned a trip to Puglia in 1789, she begged to join him, even though they would be walking and riding on “execrable roads” and sleeping in tents. Emma claimed that she could never be upset by poor accommodation, since she had lived in very rough lodgings in her youth. While Sir William Hamilton investigated the area’s infrastructure and found the roads in ruins and the port of Brindisi abandoned, Emma watched the women in the town perform the tarantella, a dance inspired by the energetic movements of a tarantula.7 The performer shook a tambourine as she twirled and danced in a circle. She became more and more frenzied and sometimes collapsed at the end. When Emma returned to the palazzo in May, she incorporated the tarantula into her Attitudes, much to the delight of her audience. The Comte d’Espinchal decided that the beauty and voluptuousness of her performance could inflame the “most insensible man.” Sir William envisioned happy years ahead spent indulging his graceful mistress.

  But Europe was changing.

  On July 14, crowds stormed the Bastille in Paris and thrust its governor’s head onto a pike. In October, the king and queen of France were dragged from Versailles and imprisoned. Parisian nobles fled for their lives, and Sir William reported, “French refugees drop here apace.“8 Neapolitan aristocrats were terrified for the French royal family and worried that their own masses cherished similar revolutionary fervor. As Sir William worried, the revolution “cast a visible Gloom upon the face of this Court.“9 Ferdinand, however, quickly bored of the despondent mood of his acolytes and banned all mention of France at court. His ludicrous attempt to live in a happy bubble was a failure. France remained agonizing, “the only Topic in every Conversation.“10

  Within three years, Emma had emerged as a talented performer and a confident hostess. Glittering with diamonds, she was the image of an ambassadress and she combined natural style with ladylike accomplishments of music and languages. Now all she needed was the title. “I will make him marry me,” she had warned Greville in 1786. As revolution engulfed France and began to tear across Europe, Emma began to realize her desire.

  CHAPTER 23

  Manipulating Sir William

  All my ambition is to make Sir Wm happy & you will see he is so,” Emma wrote to Greville. She lied: she wanted to be more than his mistress. Emma sought to share his work as the ambassadress, to visit the English court, and to settle down with him for good. Eighteenth-century women were trained to wait modestly for a proposal, but Mrs. Cadogan was hardly able to play the role of the pushy mother, intent on wringing the question out of the envoy. In late 1788, however, after only two years of living with him, Emma was sure that she could persuade him to make her Lady Hamilton.

  Emma never lost an opportunity to stress to Sir William how she loved him and longed for him to marry her. She emphasized that her sense of gratitude would make her an excellent wife and, as she put it, she would be the “horridest wretch in the world not to be exemplary towards him.” In the hope of sprinkling rumor in the newspapers, she began to encourage gossip that they were secretly married (reports that reached the horrified ears of Sir William’s family and friends). The English tourists who arrived in the winter of 1789 believed they were already married, and Sir William made no effort to stamp out the rumors, knowing that such illustrious guests would flinch from being entertained by a mere mistress. As he boasted, “many seek Emma’s acquaintance, & we have the best company in Naples at our house. The Duchess of Argyle & that family doat upon Emma, & really she gains the heart of all who approach her.” Sir William was so intent on promoting an intimacy with the new Spanish ambassador and his wife that he had implied to them he was married, enabling Emma to charm the stolid señora, gloating that “we are allways together.” Feeling newly respectable because everyone believed her married, Emma reveled in her role of hostess. “Every night our house is open to small partys of fifty and sixty men & women. We h
ave musick, tea etc, etc.” She welcomed guests to “the first great assembly we had given publickly,” a ball for nearly four hundred, “all the foreign ministers & their wives, all the first ladies of fashion, foreyners & neapolitans, our house was full in every room. I had the Banti, the tenor Casacelli & 2 others to sing.” The other ladies dripped with diamonds and brocade, but she was proudly resplendent in white satin, with her hair loose and unpowdered in the fashionable Grecian look she herself had popularized.

  When his friends wrote demanding the truth, Sir William declared they were not married and never would be. His mistress, he told Greville, was “welcome to share with me, on our present footing, all I have during my life, but I fear her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute; & that when her hopes on the point are over, that she will make herself & me unhappy, but all this entre nous, if ever a separation should be necessary for our mutual happiness, I would settle £150 a year on her, & £50 on her mother.” He explained to his friend Joseph Banks that “I have no thoughts of relinquishing my Employment and whilst I am in a public character, I do not look upon myself at liberty to act as I please.“1 Marrying her might affect his position at court. Moreover, as he wrote to Mary Dickenson, “of all Women in the World, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad. I fear eternal tracasseries, was she to be placed above them here, & which must be the case, as a Minister’s Wife, in every Country, takes place of every rank of Nobility.” The problem was Emma’s famous reputation: every visitor knew about Amy Lyon of the gossip columns, and Mrs. Hart, star of Romney’s studio, and the queen of Attitudes.

  Women, Sir William claimed to Banks, were “subject to great change according to circumstances and I do not like to try experiments at my time of life. In the way we live we give no Scandal, she with her Mother and I in my apartment, and we have a good Society. What is to be gained on my side?“2 Sir William told his friends what they wanted to hear—lying to Banks that Emma lived with her mother when in fact she was installed in his apartment. But the letters veer between declaring he would never marry and praising her excessively, emphasizing how she “really deserves everything and has gained the love of everybody” as well as “universal esteem.” When he admitted that Emma “makes my house more comfortable,” he inadvertently revealed the truth of the whole matter: he could not bear to lose her and pension her off in the country. As the year wore on, Sir William realized she was not going to settle for being his mistress much longer. He had a choice: a comfortable house or the approval of his society friends in England. He began to plan a journey to England to check on his Welsh estates. Senior diplomats could not marry without the permission of their sovereign, and he aimed to test the waters with King George about the possibility of taking Emma as his bride.