Rassendyll, Sapt, von Tarlenheim and ten picked men go "hunting" nearby.
She confirms that the King is being held in the castle at Zenda. Antoinette de Mauban, Michael's mistress, does not want to lose him to Flavia. Despite himself, he falls in love with her, and she with him. He learns that everyone expects them to wed. While Sapt searches for the King, Rassendyll becomes acquainted with the beautiful Princess Flavia, who is beloved by the people. Rassendyll must continue his deception, but at least Duke Michael cannot unmask him without incriminating himself. However, when they go to retrieve the real King Rudolf, they find that he has been abducted. They hide the King in the cellar of the lodge and proceed to the capital. He persuades the Englishman to impersonate the King. Not showing up for the coronation would prove disastrous, but Sapt believes that fate has sent Rassendyll to Ruritania. His friends cannot rouse him the next morning.
However, Rudolf V's younger half-brother Michael, Duke of Strelsau, sees to it he is presented a bottle of drugged wine. The future king and his loyal attendants, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, wine and dine their new acquaintance at a hunting lodge. On the eve of the coronation of Rudolf V of Ruritania, he encounters his distant relative, English nobleman Rudolf Rassendyll, come to witness the festivities. The popularity of the novels inspired the Ruritanian romance genre of literature, film, and theatre that features stories set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, for example Graustark from the novels of George Barr McCutcheon, and the neighbouring countries of Syldavia and Borduria in the Tintin comics. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.Ī sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, was published in 1898 and is included in some editions of The Prisoner of Zenda. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. The Prisoner of Zenda is an 1894 adventure novel by Anthony Hope, in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Frontispiece to the 1898 Macmillan Publishers edition, illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson
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