In choosing to name my hero Victoria in this setting, I cannot help but invite comparison to the most famous Victoria in history, the queen who gave her name to the period. Indeed, I briefly considered titling the second story “Victoria Regina” instead of the more generic “Vivat Regina,” to hammer the parallel home. The first explicit reference I make to this comparison is the conversation in act 1 scene 5 of Vivat Regina. Mary makes the assumption I imagine that many people would make, that Mrs. Hawking would approve of a willful, prominent female leader who wielded so much personal authority. But the queen, despite her own place, was not a supporter of women in public positions, and in fact found the growing feminist movement to be godless and unseemly. She promulgated a social order and a standard of morality that reinforced many of the structures Mrs. Hawking is struggling to tear down, which gives our hero a particular resentment for having been her namesake.
My thinking on her is very influenced by an excellent documentary called Queen Victoria’s Children, which also gave me the idea for who might bring the problem in Vivat Regina. The documentary characterizes the queen as a strong, imperious personality, but also thrown by whims and rages and compelled to regard everything around her as a prop to her own existence. I plan to use this image of her if I ever actually depict her onstage in the story. At the moment I have no plans, but I have established that she and Mrs. Hawking have encountered one another in the past. I’m sure they owe each other favors, in fact, or at least have each other in some sort of Mexican standoff. I’ve not exactly decided what their history is, but I am certain it resulted in an uneasy coexistence where they do not work together, but occasionally find they must work around each other. I’ll have to figure out exactly how that works if I ever write them actually sharing a scene together.
