It is not a Nintendo game; rather, it was a wildly popular book back in the day.
The Prisoner of Zenda, written by Anthony Hope in 1894, is about a man forced by circumstances to pretend to be a king, for the sake of the real king, the kingdom, and the woman the pretender loves. It is a fascinating story of a man who does many noble things and displays many noble virtues, yet the story is itself a counterfeit, insofar as it (and its protagonist) pretend great evils are actually lofty and noble. Because Zenda, consciously or not, embraces the lie that society and the state are the highest goods, it also excuses sacrilege and adultery.
The Prisoner of Zenda begins and ends with the protagonist, Rudolf Rassendyll, in England, to all appearances an unambitious, languid country gentleman. However, while attempting to do some sightseeing in the European principality of Ruritania, he meets the soon-to-be-crowned king of that territory, to whom he is almost identical in physical appearance. When the king is drugged and captured by his rival for the throne, Rassendyll impersonates him to bide time while planning a rescue. He puts his life on the line again and again, dusting off skills and virtues no one ever suspected him of having, all the while falling in love with the beautiful princess Flavia.
If you can’t already appreciate something of the good of this story, well, you are precisely the one who needs to read it. For the most part, it is healthy entertainment, and healthy entertainment, as Daniel McInerny points out, is prescribed by Thomas Aquinas as a virtue in itself. Beyond entertainment, swashbuckling stories prepare the passions to desire the virtuous. They inspire our irascible emotions, the ones that move us to accomplish difficult things for the sake of the good. Finally, as my friend and colleague Sean Fitzpatrick has noted, the story is in one sense an antidote to cynicism, because it is about a man who sacrifices self for others.
Yet even the ideal of self-sacrifice can become perverted, or even turn on itself, and the perversity in the novel is a danger. So it is not only appropriate to use this book as an illustration of an error, but also to forearm readers who take the worthwhile risk, to unmask the counterfeit morality lurking in the corners of this tale of the counterfeit king.
The first and most example of perverse self-sacrifice occurs early in the book. As part of the tradition of coronation in Catholic Ruritania, Rudolf receives the Holy Eucharist, although he is a Protestant. No objection is made by the loyal men of the king who are aiding and abetting him, although they are Catholics. In this way, late Victorian England, by the pen pf Anthony Hope, makes it clear that when it comes to duty, duty toward our maker can be peremptorily dismissed. It also sounds a false note in the rest of the appeals to God and his providence made through the rest of the book by the protagonist and his friends.
The second example of the Victorian noble lie is perhaps most illustrative. Rudolf, pretending to be king, in all truth falls in love with Princess Flavia. However, after Rudolf succeeds in rescuing the king, both agree that their love cannot be consummated, since the best thing for Ruritania would be her marriage with the real king and the consolidation of the royal bloodline. So far, though a bittersweet disappointment to the reader, it is perfectly right behavior. The commitment of matrimony is more fundamentally of the will than of the emotions, and Christian monarchs have sacrificed their personal attachments for the sake of their countries before.
However, the relationship becomes unchaste in the most insidious and deceptive way. Although Rudolph and Flavia do not physically consummate their love, they keep the fires burning in their hearts, even when Flavia finally marries the king. In what is meant to be a touching scene at the end of the book, Rudolf describes his yearly pilgrimage to Dresden, where a Ruritanian comrade brokers an exchange of roses between the old lovers. No physical sight of each other, much less physical proximity . . . and yet, what echoes through the chamber of our hearts is the idea that adultery can be fine, even noble, as long as it remains spiritual and, even more importantly, not disruptive to the interests of the state.
In this way, Hope joins a chorus of other Victorian English people of various creeds and political persuasions, such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot: the useful is what matters, not questions of God, the metaphysical, or even truth. However, this belief, prominent in The Prisoner of Zenda, too, presages the fall of Victorian England. For if God is important only so far as belief in him upholds the state, public morals, and decency, probing questions are opened up that the state, society, and decency cannot respond to. Aren’t the state’s rights, isn’t duty itself, important only insofar as they help individuals attain individual desires? If blasphemy is permitted in the interest of the state, why can’t treachery be moral in serving the interests of individuals? If adultery in the will and desire can be indulged in, why can’t promiscuity be justified if consenting adults aren’t hurting anyone?
In this way, we can begin to see that The Prisoner of Zenda as a pretense itself, based on a god that is not a god: the state. The only hope of what is noble in the novel is virtues that themselves receive their justification and status from a theology and philosophy that goes beyond those endorsed by the characters.
Nevertheless, if it is read in the right spirit, it not only serves some wholesome food for the imagination, and not only presents an unconscious history lesson on Victorian England, but also allows us to take part in the rescue of the book from its own imprisonment in a kind of relativism.