On comparing notes they find out that they are cousins, far, far, far removed. The king, who has already had a few, says, "It is too early in the day to be seeing double. The king Rudolf V and the commoner Rudolf stare at each other.
While fishing in what turns out be to extremely troubled waters, he is spotted by the king and his body guards, an old Colonel and his aide, the young David Niven, also out hunting. Actually, minus his goatee, he has a striking resemblance to the soon to be crowned king of the principality.
His English humour is lost on his audience. By way of explanation he says Of course you dont dress this way in your country, but you see we dont dress your way in England. He notices that people keep staring at him. He is asked whether he is here for the coronation, he tells them he is on a fishing holiday.
Having got off the train, Rudolf Rassendyll, a British subject, dressed up in the typical tweeds of an English sportsman, is going through passport check at a small principality somewhere in Europe. However, what is truly striking in Hope's assessment of his "little book" is his emphasis on the "novelty" of hair color in combination with royalty, as well as his casting these elements in almost biological terms as "variants." In The Prisoner of Zenda, red hair and royalty are in fact.The synopsis below may give away important plot points. Red hair also serves in the novel as a strong visual characterization of the sanguine, lusty Elphbergs. Rassendyll's hair, as well as his "Elphbergian" eyes and nose, allow him to successfully pose as King Rudolf when the monarch is kidnapped just before his coronation and during the time it takes to rescue and restore him. In the story Hope crafted, red hair is the characteristic feature of both the "English gentleman" Rudolf Rassendyll and his distant cousin Rudolf V, scion of the royal Elphberg family and titular king of Ruritania. On the surface, Hope's analysis seems obtuse, ignoring as it does the obvious elements of action and romance in the novel but the author's favoring red hair as a cause for the novel's appeal deserves exploration. But late in life, when Hope tried to explain the popularity of The Prisoner, he concluded only that "the two variants which struck the popular fancy in my little book were royalty and red hair the former is always a safe card to play, and its combination with the latter had a touch of novelty" (quoted in Mallet 1968, 76). The name of the fictional Germanic country in which most of the action is set, "Ruritania," even became British shorthand for the imaginary small European monarchies that would appear in subsequent fictions (see Goldsworthy 1998, 46-8), much as James Hilton's "Shangri-La" would later serve for Asiatic mythscapes, albeit without the connotation of earthly paradise. It was soon imitated by other writers and starting in 1914 it would become the source of several film adaptations (see Watkins 1994, vii). 
It was an immediate international bestseller, went into several editions, and was quickly dramatized. The novel succeeds in championing the role of women as proper guardians of biological inheritances in demonstrating that the "hybrid" Britons-a mixture of Anglo-Saxons and others-are the ideal "breed" for meeting the needs of the upcoming twentieth century and in revitalizing the otherwise masculine genre of the New Romance.Īnthony Hope's (1) 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman, was the kind of publishing phenomenon more associated with the twentieth century than the nineteenth.
What is more, Rudolf Rassendyll springs from "hybrid" blood, which runs counter to much Victorian thinking that hybrids were inclined to weakness. This "light" adventure novel can be seen as being influenced by Weismann in that the hero benefits from unchanging heredity traits that allow him to take the place of his distant cousin, a king, and rescue him from his captors. The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) was conceived and written as the "heredity debates" between Herbert Spencer and August Weismann raged in the popular press.
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