The Golden Rump facts for kids
The Golden Rump is a farcical play of unknown authorship said to have been written in 1737. It acted as the chief trigger for the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737. The play has never been performed on stage or published in print. No manuscript of the play survives, casting some doubt over whether it ever existed in full at all. The authorship of the play has often been ascribed to Henry Fielding, at that time a popular and prolific playwright who often turned his incisive satire against the monarch, George II, and particularly the "prime minister", Sir Robert Walpole. Modern literary historians, however, increasingly embrace the opinion that The Golden Rump may have been secretly commissioned by Walpole himself in a successful bid to get his Bill for theatrical licensing passed before the legislature.
Background
Plays, prints, pamphlets and journal articles attacking the King, Walpole and the extended Whig faction were not an uncommon feature of early 18th century London. Plays were subjected to the greatest displeasure from royal authority, and individual works like John Gay’s Polly (1729) and Fielding's own Grub-Street Opera (1731) had earlier been prevented from reaching the stage. However the trend itself survived through the 1720s and 1730s, and a number of these satirical works used humour to mock the persons of Walpole and George II. Both the king and the prime minister were men of short, corpulent build. All their personal deficiencies were mercilessly lampooned by Opposition satirists of the period.
The controversy of The Golden Rump dates back to an anonymous allegory published in two parts in the Opposition journal Common Sense on 19 and 26 March 1737. Titled A Vision of the Golden Rump, this work has later been attributed to Dr. William King of Oxford, a staunch Jacobite propagandist. In this satire, the “visionary” in his dream lands up in a pleasant meadow not unlike Greenwich Park, where he encounters "the Noblesse of the Kingdom" on their way to celebrate the Festival of the Golden Rump. The Pagod of the Golden Rump is easily identifiable as George II; the Chief Magician (whose “belly” is "as prominent as the Pagod's Rump”) is without doubt Robert Walpole; while the figure of Queen Caroline is presented as injecting a solution of aurum potabile from time to time from a contrivance that is "a Golden Tube… with a large Bladder at the End, resembling a common Clyster-Pipe” into the Pagod's Rump, "to comfort his Bowels, and to appease the Idol, when he lifted up his cloven Foot to correct his Domesticks.”
An extract of this raucous piece is published in The Gentleman's Magazine during the same month; and its picturesque description is soon turned into a satiric print called 'The Festival of the Golden Rump’ and published in The Craftsman on 7 May. The subtitle of the print reads “Rumpatur, quisquis Rumpitur invidia", dog Latin for what The Common Sense translated as "Whoever envies me, let him be RUMPED.” The reference clearly draws attention to the self-titled Rumpsteak Club that gathered at that time around the figure of Frederick Louis, the disenchanted son of George II and heir apparent to the English crown.
The earliest published reference to the existence of a play called The Golden Rump appears in an anonymous essay in the 28 May 1737 edition of The Craftsman, recently attributed to Henry Fielding. By the time of the publication of this essay the Bill for licensing the stage had already passed through the House of Commons at the Parliament and was presented before the Lords. The play, reports the article, was submitted unsolicited to Henry Griffard, then the manager of the playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields; who put it into rehearsal with his company but also submitted the manuscript – obnoxious beyond any other play on contemporary stage – for the attentions of Robert Walpole. A later reminiscence by Thomas Davies informs that Griffard received a mere amount of one hundred pounds as a compensation for providing the Prime Minister with his most effective weapon for placing a censor over the stage. On reading the manuscript of The Golden Rump Walpole immediately put a stop to any attempt of the public performance of the play. The manuscript was also used as his chief argument before the king and the House of Commons for demanding an amendment of the original Theatrical Licensing Act of 1713.
The role of Sir Robert Walpole
The suspicion that Sir Robert Walpole had commissioned The Golden Rump to specifically aid his cause for the censorship of the stage has existed from the very beginning of the controversy. It was first suggested by Henry Fielding in the same Craftsman essay that announced the existence of the play to the world. Fielding's conjecture is supported by, among others, his theatrical contemporaries Theophilus Cibber (in his autobiography) and Thomas Davies (in his Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick). Modern critic Peter Thomson has written in an essay:
There is, in fact, no convincing evidence that such a play was ever written. Using nothing more than the cartoon 'The Festival of the Golden Rump', a resourceful hack could readily have composed enough scurrilous dialogue to provide Walpole with material for his Commons speech.
It is certainly a matter of speculation, especially if The Golden Rump had gone into rehearsal as Fielding's earliest article proclaims, that not even a hack copy of the play has survived. In the absence of text and other evidence, the true story of The Golden Rump remains a mystery to this day.
In literature
- The novelette Slick Filth: A Story of Robert Walpole and Henry Giffard, to Which is Appended the Farce of the Golden Rump, ISBN: 978-1734184624, by Erato contains a fictionalized account of the play's creation and a reimagined script.
