Kenilworth (1821)

Engrossing historical novel in which pageantry of Elizabethan court is described fully. Not historically accurate, more of a character study of ambition vs. love.

Much more fiction than history, Kenilworth is still an engaging page-turner. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and favorite of Queen Elizabeth has quite the problem: rumor has it that Elizabeth would like to marry him, but he's already got a secret wife. Walter Scott takes the reader through political and personal machinations and numerous plot twists, some more plausible than others, but all interesting. The climax of the story, at a multi-day party in honor of Queen Elizabeth at Leicester's Kenilworth Castle, made me realize just how involved with the characters I was. In the end, mayhem ensues, people die, and none of the characters get precisely what they wanted. All in all a truly fabulous read. ( )

1006 Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott (read 2 May 1969) This book has a slow beginning, then hits its lively pace...but a precipitous and disappointing ending. It deals withe the Earl of Leicester's marriage to Amy Robsart, but rearranges events of history to suit the story. The story is laid in 1574 and 1575, but Amy actually died in 1560! Will Shakespeare is freely quoted, and appears in the story--but he wasn't even born when Amy died! I was impressed while reading this book, but now feel somewhat cheated by it. ( )

[Since I'm busy helping to put Scott's library into LibraryThing, I thought I'd better re-read at least one of his books...]

Kenilworth is set in 1575, in and around the court of Queen Elizabeth. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and one of the most powerful men in England, has rather unwisely made a secret marriage to Amy Robsart, daughter of a lowly Devon knight. Since the Queen is famously jealous, and definitely doesn't like her favourites to fall in love with anyone except her, he's not too keen on telling her about Amy, and has stashed his wife away at Cumnor Place, near Oxford. Meanwhile, Amy is beginning to get fed up with not being able to tell anyone that she is Countess of Leicester, and Amy´s fiancé, Edmund Tressilian, is out looking for her. Events build to a climax when the Queen invites herself to Dudley´s castle at Kenilworth for an Elizabethan Fête.

As usual with Scott, everything happens at a breathtaking pace, and, once you've come to terms with the deliberately quaint language, you find yourself turning the pages as eagerly as any nineteenth-century reader. The structure of the novel feels a little unsatisfying, largely because there is no single character the reader really gets a chance to identify with. We see the action from the point of view of a succession of minor characters, like a kind of relay race. Tressilian, a sort of Don Ottavio character, is frankly a bore, and the author clearly doesn't approve of either Amy or Dudley - Amy's weakness and opportunism got her into this mess; Dudley's vacillation prevents him from owning up to the Queen until it is too late. Since history prevents Scott from having Dudley end up on the scaffold, he can't really be portrayed as a protagonist of classical tragedy either, although this is clearly what Scott would have liked. However, the impressive characterisation of Dudley in the later chapters more than makes up for this structural flakiness.

My late-Victorian edition (copiously annotated by my late-Victorian great-great-aunt) comes with extensive notes, presumably by Scott himself, listing his sources and giving every indication that the whole story is built on solid historical fact. A few minutes research on Wikipedia is enough to make it clear that Scott was being very economical with historical truth (or, to put it another way, made the story up as he went along and used his sources only for the authentic period detail): Dudley and Amy were in fact the same age, grew up on neighbouring estates, and married quite openly and with the full consent of their parents and the then King. Amy died in 1560, when they had been married for more than ten years (and two years before Dudley was made Earl of Leicester). Scott seems to have conflated the story of her controversial death with Dudley's (never proven) secret marriage to the widowed Lady Sheffield in 1573, which did upset the Queen and damage Dudley's career. ( )

19th century, English literature