Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (84 page)

1
(p. 442)
epigraph:
The lines are from Shakespeare’s
Richard II
(act 2, scene 2).

2
(p. 443)
meeting of radical reformers... “dunghills”:
Scott refers implicitly to the infamous Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 (see Introduction). In his sardonic reference to the “heroic language of insurgent tailors,” Scott makes his contempt for the Manchester reformists clear. “Flints” refers to striking workers, and “dunghills” to those who earn lower wages in their stead (what would be referred to today as “breaking the picket line”).

3
(p. 450)
Sadducees:
In Matthew 22:23, the Sadducees are a breakaway Jewish sect that maintains that the soul dies with the body, a mainstream tenet of Judaism today.

4
(p. 451)
Greek fire:
Scott is historically accurate in this case, even to the very year. The Third Crusaders brought this sulfurous, combustible liquid back with them from the Holy Land, where it had been used at the siege of Acre.

1
(p. 454)
epigraph:
The line, slightly altered, is from John Web
ster’s The White Devil
(1612; act 4, scene 1).

2
(p. 458)
good-natured brother.
The reconciliation between John and Richard was initiated by John and presided over by their mother in France in 1194. Richard restored his younger brother’s lands the following year.

3
(p. 461)
the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London:
Edward III officially instituted English, rather than Norman French, as the language of the court in his address to Parliament in 1367.

4
(p. 464)
Johnson ... a
TALE: Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (lines 219-222); “foreign” is substituted for “barren” to signify Richard’s dying in Belgium, and “humble” for “dubious” because that death, unlike the Swedish King’s, contained no element of mystery.

Sir Walter Scott is the father of historical fiction. His work directly inspired writers who followed him, providing a virtual template for the setting of personal dramas against a well-researched background of historical detail. Because of the staggering success of his Waverley stories (named for the first book,
Waverley,
published in 1814), the historical novel became the most popular literary mode of the early nineteenth century, and Scott himself became an icon. The Waverley novels and tales—almost thirty in number, published between 1814 and 1832—portray various episodes in the history of Scotland, with settings in the English Middle Ages, Jacobean England, medieval France, the Middle East during the Crusades, and even the Roman Empire.

Because of Scott’s example and his enormous success, an attempt at historical fiction became routine for serious novelists in the nineteenth century. In his immediate wake, most of the nineteenth-century English heavyweights, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy, wrote at least one novel in the genre. (Jane Austen did not and was criticized for it.) Charles Dickens set
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859) in London and Paris during the French Revolution. George Eliot’s only historical novel,
Romola
(1863), takes place in the fifteenth-century Florence of the Medicis. Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
(1863-1869), composed in Russian and set during that country’s 1805-1814 war with Napoleon, is probably the greatest historical novel in any language. In America, Mark Twain lampooned historical fiction in his intentionally anachronistic
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
( 1889 ) .

James Fenimore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas centered their careers on the historical novel. Cooper, sometimes called the “American Scott,” consciously patterned himself after the creator of
Ivanhoe.
He is best known for his Leatherstocking Tales, most memorably
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) and
The Deerslayer
(1841), which recount the adventures of wilderness scout Natty Bumppo during the French and Indian Wars. Cooper first became famous with his second novel,
The Spy
(1821), and also wrote a series of nautical tales; the opening installment,
The Pilot
(1823), was the first American novel about the sea. Dumas, a Frenchman, began his career as a celebrated historical playwright before turning his attention to fiction.
The Three Musketeers
(1844), the story of four sword-wielding heroes and their marvelous friendship, was set in the seventeenth century and spawned multiple sequels, notably the novel
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne,
better known today as
The Man in the Iron Mask
(1848). Dumas and Cooper, like their predecessor, captured large audiences with their lively stories, which provide a satisfying blend of humor, adventure, and melodrama.

Ivanhoe
(1819), the first of Scott’s novels set in England, had a tremendous impact on the revival of Victorian interest in the Middle Ages, and this fascination with the age of knights and chivalry has lasted into the third millennium. With
Ivanhoe,
Scott also cemented the Robin Hood myth. The legend of Robin Hood had appeared in various forms as early as the fourteenth century, but the version detailed in
Ivanhoe,
which depicts Robin Hood as a high-minded Saxon fighting oppressive Norman lords, is the most universally known. Robin Hood movies—the most notable is
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938), featuring Errol Flynn as the hooded hero—have proven to be an evergreen commodity for the film industry.

William Makepeace Thackeray, author of
Vanity
Fair (1848), wrote a satirical sequel to
Ivanhoe.
Mocking the nineteenth-century fascination with the Middle Ages,
Rebecca and Rowena
(1850) takes issue with Ivanhoe’s “icy, faultless, prim” wife, a complaint about Rowena that was by no means uniquely his. Thackeray’s short novel reveals the faults of Ivanhoe’s bride and remarries him to Rebecca, the character most critics call the more interesting figure.

Ivanhoe
was dramatized as early as 1819, when stage productions went up in both London and New York. Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini composed his opera
Ivanhoe,
never widely performed, during the following decade. Sir Arthur Sullivan, best known for his comic operetta collaborations with W. S. Gilbert, chose
Ivanhoe
as the subject of his one serious opera in 1891. Silent movie versions of
Ivanhoe
appeared by two different film companies in 1913.

Richard Thorpe’s classic MGM film
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
(1952) stars the amazingly photogenic Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine as Rebecca and Rowena, respectively, with a suitably chivalrous Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe. George Sanders gives a convincing portrayal of the tormented Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and Guy Rolfe mesmerizes as the slimy Prince John. Attractive cinematography on location in England and high production values make the film an enjoyable adventure. Miklos Rozsa’s marvelous score lends excitement to the well-staged action scenes. A television series starring James Bond actor Roger Moore appeared in 1958, with numerous other versions emerging in its wake.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.

—from a letter to Anna Austen (September 28, 1814)

 

The champion novelist of the day has again exhibited himself on a new arena,—in
Ivanhoe,
or the
Jew of York,
—equipped in the trappings of the feudal times, and in the chivalric character of an accomplished young Saxon of the woods. Though not perfectly historical in giving such a pompous picture of chivalric society at so early a period, (as it rather resembles Francis I, than Richard), yet, as it serves to represent characters of untamed life, judiciously mingled with those of ‘high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,’ the union of two different periods of society may be admissible in
a romance.
With this, and the single exception of the want of a real story, we do not recollect perusing any work of Walter Scott’s that has afforded us more pleasure than the present. The exquisite description, and dramatic power of character, are sufficient to redeem greater faults than are perceptible in the novels of this original author.

—February 1820

 

[I hold Scott] for a man of
very extraordinary
powers; and when I say that I have read the far greater part of his novels twice, and several three times over, with undiminished pleasure and interest; and that, in my reprobation of
The Bride of Lammermoor
(with the exception, however, of the almost Shakspearian old witch-wives at the funeral) and of the
Ivanhoe,
I mean to imply the grounds of my admiration of the others, and the permanent nature of the interest which they excite. In a word, I am far from thinking that
Old Mortality
or
Guy Mannering
would have been less admired in the age of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, than they are in the present times; but only that Sterne, &c., would not have had the same
immediate
popularity in the present day as in their own less stimulated and, therefore, less languid reading world....

Scott’s great merit, and, at the same time, his
felicity,
and the true solution of the long-sustained
interest
novel after novel excited, lie in the nature of the subject; not merely, or even chiefly, because the struggle between the Stuarts and the Presbyterians and sectaries, is still in lively memory, and the passions of the adherency to the former, if not the adherency itself, extant in our own fathers’ or grandfathers’ times; nor yet (though this is of great weight) because the language, manners, &c., introduced are sufficiently different from our own for
poignancy,
and yet sufficiently near and similar for sympathy; nor yet because, for the same reason, the author, speaking, reflecting, and descanting in his own person, remains still (to adopt a painter’s phrase) in sufficient
keeping
with his subject matter, while his characters can both talk and feel interesting to
us
as men, without recourse to
antiquarian
interest, and nevertheless without moral anachronism (in all which points the
Ivanhoe
is so woefully the contrary, for what Englishman cares for Saxon or Norman, both brutal invaders, more than for Chinese and Cochin-Chinese?)—yet great as all these causes are, the essential wisdom and happiness of the subject consists in this,—that the contest between the loyalists and their opponents can never be
obsolete,
for it is the contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration for permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason—in short, the mighty instincts of
progression
and
free agency,
on the other.

 

—from a letter to Thomas Allsop (April 8, 1820)