Elizabeth the Great
Milton Waldman’s England’s Elizabeth (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) is for that reader of history who rejoices in brilliant enigmas and the high pathos of opposing moods and fortunes. He offers a spectacle to move the heart or provoke gentle cynicism, and cuts his cloth to suit his pattern. He chooses only the thirty years from Elizabeth’s dubious Coronation Day in 1558 to the moment when victory over the Armada made England’s future anything but dubious. Within those thirty years he takes only a few bold designs to embroider. There is Elizabeth’s long entrenchment against Mary Stuart behind a screen of wit, subterfuge, even sympathy; and the bizarrerie of the long-drawnout courtship by d’ Alençon, that shrewd ugly young profligate who pocketed or unpocketed this or that parcel of Europe as the figures in the dance of coquetry advanced or retired. Foreign ambassadors, foreign assassins, are there. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, beloved, teased, flouted, is never relinquished till his death, falling theatrically at the moment of England’s triumph, made the Queen weep in the shadow of her royal coach as it passed along London lanes ringing with victory.
If one asks for sequence, showing how time passed as it did and why, or expects an account of the Elizabethan world, of the adventures in art and literature which made a frieze behind this jewel-crusted woman’s progress, sometimes altering her direction or coloring her mood, one is disappointed. In fact, the projection from the few great figures falls not upon the substructure of Elizabethan life but upon the superstructure of the author’s fancy. He generalizes from Elizabeth’s life to Life, occasionally with brilliance, often with cleverness, sometimes with sentimental falsity. It is a study of human nature at theatrical moments, fleshed in a dazzling figure, inviting the fanciful reader down the ‘receding, dim-lit galleries’ which Mr. Waldman calls history.
J. E. Neale’sQueen Elizabeth (Harcourt, Brace, $3.75) makes amends to a long-suffering public for past indiscretions on the great Queen. His limelight does not pick out her intrigues and passions, her rhythm of attractions and repulsions, and leave the rest to darkness. He presents her whole life and death; offers the Queen and the world out of which she constructed her royalty. The mass of evidence for such an undertaking might have sunk his caravel or confused its course. But Neale has ‘thought through’ his matter till it has become a part of his mind and imagination: he conveys a clear framework of facts to the reader, while he builds up before his eyes the nap and pile of that velvet-rich world.
The author breaks the story mercifully as a dramatist divides a play into acts. Elizabeth’s girlhood comes first, her education, her growing sense of people and events. Her romantic interest in Seymour is frankly, not stuffily, handled, and taken in the stride oi the book. Once site is on the throne, the presentation of events might have been difficult. The machinery of her government is unfamiliar to the modern mind, yet. the Queen’s personality is revealed chiefly through this network of alien circumstance. Neale, remembering his panting reader, pauses deliberately in the midst of these intricacies for a chapter on ‘the affability of the Prince.’ We see the Queen on progress, her litter piled with cakes and wafers or sprigs of rosemary from the village ‘wives.’ She moves among her Court, nicknaming, jesting, flaring up to reprove boldness. Then back we go after this respite as to another act; on past her passion for Leicester, which ‘turned to kindliness,’ past the execution of Mary, the Armada, the new England of the nineties which was destined to outstrip even the flexible old Queen and leave her a relic of tie Tudor world in the new seventeenth century.
The relationship of Elizabeth with Essex has been shorn of the amorous innuendo which modern subtlety has attributed to it. Essex takes his place, brave, charming, ambitious, and temperamentally unstable, along with other such figures, bred and practised in the intrigue of that time. Elizabeth, old, patient in her cleverness, wise in the uncertainties of men, holds steady rein on her thought of him throughout. When she cannot tame his power for England, she brings upon him his end, lamenting it but not unprepared. In dealing with the Queen in relation to Leicester, Raleigh, and the rest, Neale does not exaggerate or minimize her difficulties as a woman. But he is intelligent, not silly, about them.
The book is not overwritten, not overcrowded. Because it has a broad, deep basis of knowledge, interpreted by a man with perspective and informed imagination, it evokes real people in a real world through whose teeming, crooked ways we step lightly and sympathetically.
It would be ungrateful for the reader to cavil at Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland (Doubleday, Doran, $2.00). He wrote it for acting, not reading. He has altered history, narrowed the broad range of queenliness to personal romance, simplified hlizabeth into a symbol of Renaissance ’policy. But he has constructed a series of effective scenes, not always psychologically related, but furnishing in the course of an evening some moving moments for the theatregoer.
In all conscience that is enough. Not even the tallest critics nowadays call down Shakespeare for cutting up history into the same small pieces of ’good theatre.’ Perhaps a good play is only a series of more or less brilliant moments; perhaps ’dramatic unity’ is a concoction brewed in the study far from the footlights. But Mr. Anderson must pray to be delivered from those critics who call bis blank verse poetry. It has tHe elevation of good rhetoric, easily catching fire if well declaimed, and that is enough. Even Marlowe and Shakespeare were content with this level for a good part of their plays. Let the reader turn himself into a spectator, forget his carping, and enjoy some spinechilling moments.
ESTHER CLOUDMAN DUNN