Scott's Pageants: The Example of "Kenilworth"

Abstract

KENILWORTH FALLS INTO THAT ABUNDANT CATEGORY OF SCOTT NOVELS forgotten by most twentieth-century readers, yet it is an important book in context both of Scott's career and of cultural history of novel. In some respects it marks apex of his popularity and influence. Brought out by Constable in January 1821 at literally unheard-of price of thirty-one shillings, it was first published in triple-decker format: a fact that in itself makes Kenilworth arguably most influential work of fiction of nineteenth century. Despite its high price, book sold briskly: 10,000o copies in first three weeks, another 3,000 in next month, a second edition within six weeks of first.(1) And if you read through contemporary reviews, what you find is one unending hymn of praise. In 1821 Author of Waverley was almost beyond criticism. Balzac called plot of Kenilworth the grandest, most complete, most extraordinary of Scott's achievements.(2) The novel's popularity lasted, too: Kenilworth was one of half-dozen Scott novels most often reprinted in nineteenth century. What did nineteenth-century readers respond to in Kenilworth that later readers have trouble discerning? The short answer, I believe, is spectacle. A fuller answer would involve an inquiry into way twentieth-century criticism has gone about writing history of novel. For all good work done over last twenty years on nineteenth-century fiction--and there has been a lot of it--when we come to write histories of form we continue too often to equate the novel with the of domestic realism. Such definitions exclude much more than they include, leaving vast tracts of prose narrative unaccounted for. If, as John Sutherland contends, map of nineteenth-century fiction has shrunk to Lilliputian dimensions,(3) that is partly because we remain enthralled by what we might call Jamesian theories of novel. By those criteria, narratives like Kenilworth simply don't signify, at least not in ways we have agreed to consider interesting. Kenilworth does offer a domestic drama in form of marital tribulations of Amy Robsart and Earl of Leicester, but it is just about as dull as it could be. If you trace reception history of this in nineteenth century, one thing you learn is that few readers have ever found Leicester-Robsart plot terribly compelling or have made mistake of considering it focus of narrative as a whole. Instead, what nineteenth-century readers responded to most enthusiastically in Kenilworth are precisely those aspects that are apt to seem least novelistic to us, namely elaborate spectacles surrounding figure of Queen Elizabeth. The entire narrative builds towards climactic revels at Leicester's castle in honor of Queen, and Scott's descriptions of them dominate last third of novel. For critics inclined to dislike or dismiss Scott, these sections of Kenilworth provide abundant ammunition. For one thing, they are full of egregious historical inaccuracies. For another thing, all that fictional pageantry and spectacle, all that wassailing and declaiming and striking of poses, all that gadzookery, somehow just doesn't seem sufficiently serious. Collectively we remain puritan enough in our sensibilities to insist that novels, if we are going to waste our time reading them, ought somehow to improve us. Kenilworth inaugurated--and this is another mark of its importance in history of novel--that thriving subgenre of Victorian fiction, lusty (and utterly unserious) Elizabethan costume drama, kind of thing Thomas Carlyle so roundly disapproved of in nineteenth century and Georg Lukacs disparaged in twentieth. The kind of thing serious literary critics have always tended to dismiss. Yet it is worth asking what cultural work such novels performed. As Nicola Watson has recently reminded us, Victorian iconography of Elizabeth was complex and diverse. …