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Summary
Summary
A time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation, and political expansion, the Elizabethan age was also more remarkable than any other for the Technicolor personalities of its leading participants. Apart from the complex character of the Virgin Queen herself, A. N. Wilson's The Elizabethans follows the stories of Francis Drake, a privateer who not only defeated the Spanish Armada but also circumnavigated the globe with a drunken, mutinous crew and without reliable navigational instruments; political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; and Renaissance literary geniuses from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Most crucially, this was the age when modern Britain was born and established independence from mainland Europe--both in its resistance to Spanish and French incursions and in its declaration of religious liberty from the pope--and laid the foundations for the explosion of British imperial power and eventual American domination. An acknowledged master of the all-encompassing single-volume history, Wilson tells the exhilarating story of the Elizabethan era with all the panoramic sweep of his bestselling The Victorians , and with the wit and iconoclasm that are his trademarks.
Author Notes
A. N. Wilson is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist. He lives in North London.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The highly prolific author of The Victorians trains his gaze on the resplendent Elizabethan Age. British explorers like Sir Francis Drake, the first commander to sail round the earth, and return home (Magellan was killed in the Philippines), and the Elizabethan navy with its new streamlined, technologically superior galleons defeated the once-mighty Spanish Armada. The reign saw a prodigious artistic flowering with the dramas and poems of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, the music of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and great houses like Longleat and Hardwick. The era's dazzling sun was the Queen-a flirtatious, formidably clever, devious political animal. She was a consummate actress capable of manipulating crowds and of also flying into volcanic rages. Elizabeth's two mainstays were her ultra-Protestant secretary William Cecil, the cunning, humorless lynchpin of Elizabeth's administration, and her favorite, the stunningly attractive, extravagantly dressed nobleman Robert Dudley. The Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots was the greatest threat to Elizabeth's throne but also taught Elizabeth a priceless lesson on the dangers of marriage for a female head of state. Wilson acknowledges that the glorious era had a heinous side: the colonization and subjugation of Ireland and the African slave trade. Wilson's ruminations are cerebral, incisive, witty, and well informed. Illus. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.). (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A political and cultural surveyor of England's Elizabethan era, the prolific Wilson, author of three dozen novels and histories, brings erudition and judiciousness to this ever-popular topic. Whether plumbing the mind of the Virgin Queen herself, characterizing her courtiers, or capturing England's social ferment through the prelates, poets, and buccaneers of the period, Wilson exudes energy that matches the excitement and anxiety Elizabethans felt about their times. How individuals responded to precarious exigencies, such as Elizabeth's succession and adjurations to adhere to Elizabeth's official church, elicits Wilson's incisive imaginings of Elizabethan mentalities in a superstitious and violent age. Hence he dwells on the magus John Dee, recounts draconian methods and instances of justice, and addresses harsh English policies in Ireland, stridently supported by the anti-Irish Edmund Spenser. Yet Spenser also wrote the allegorical Faerie Queene and so embodies for Wilson the difficulties contemporary readers confront in understanding complexities within the Elizabethan mind-set. Viewed through the likes of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, the elements that awe or appall moderns become manifest in Wilson's supple and fluent synthesis.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TWO stories compete for our attention in "The Elizabethans." One recalls an intense period of discovery, creativity and strife; the other is a polemic about what lessons can be salvaged from the past. Only in the final paragraph of the book do the two converge. A. N. Wilson, a prolific journalist, novelist and biographer (who has written more than 40 books in the past 35 years), previously took on the challenge of capturing an era in his "Eminent Victorians." He might well have called his new book "Eminent Elizabethans," since what interests him are not the largely anonymous four million inhabitants of late-Tudor England, but rather a few dozen of those who made the age so memorable, including the most remarkable of them all, Queen Elizabeth. Wilson's book chronicles how Elizabeth went from imprisonment in the Tower of London (confined there by her half sister and queen, Mary) to a triumphant reign that spanned nearly a half-century. He brings a novelist's touch to the portraits of the era's key figures, especially the devoted councilor William Cecil; the queen's favorites (Robert Dudley and Robert Devereux); and Elizabeth's plotting rival, the Queen of Scots, executed on her orders. Wilson is also strong on the great maritime adventures of the day, including Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe and Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to find riches and establish colonies in the Americas. Drake and Raleigh, along with Sir John Hawkins, were among the skilled mariners who helped save the nation in 1588 when the Spanish sent a formidable armada to depose Elizabeth and restore Catholicism. In Wilson's hands these familiar stories make for gripping reading. There is fresher material here too, including his account of the contributions of Elizabethans who have long stood in the shadows. The most notable of these is Richard Hakluyt, an unassuming geographer as responsible for the British Empire and the establishment of a permanent colony in North America as any Elizabethan. His "Principall Navigations" "did for explorers and navigators," Wilson writes, "what John Foxe did for the Protestant martyrs" in his "Acts and Monuments." It was an age in which writing made a difference, and Wilson shows how these books, along with the antiquarian John Stow's "Survey of London," Raphael Holinshed's "Chronicles" and Shakespeare's history plays, profoundly shaped English "collective national identity." Wilson derives much of his sense of the age from its writers, and he quotes to great effect from the works of Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and especially Edmund Spenser, who, for Wilson, embodied a "radical conservatism" he clearly admires. But Wilson's immersion in Elizabethan literature lands him in trouble when he extrapolates from imaginative writing what life must have been like back then. Social historians will cringe when reading the old canard that "for Elizabethans, 14 was an ideal age to be married." Wilson's evidence? "Shakespeare's Juliet is, as her nurse reminds us, 'not 14.'" In fact, Elizabethan men and women, excepting a handful of aristocrats, typically didn't marry until their mid-20s - and perhaps a sixth never married at all. When you write a book that covers this much ground, mistakes are inevitable. But there is a difference between factual errors (and there are too many of these) and fundamental misunderstandings of how a vast majority of Elizabethans lived their lives. Wilson unwittingly acknowledges the unreliability of his sources when he claims that "monogamy, chastity and even celibacy must have been practiced by some Elizabethans, but one does not derive the impression from their writings that such conditions of life were the norm" (my italics). Surviving evidence from parish records (which show, for example, very low rates of illegitimacy) calls such sweeping generalizations into question. More troublingly, Wilson then links this sexual license to the period's creativity: "The Berlin of the Weimar Republic, or the New York of Andy Warhol's generation, was perhaps comparable in this respect to Elizabethan London." The opposite argument might as easily be made: the suppression of desire - a byproduct of the long delay between sexual maturity and marriage - helps explain why Elizabethan readers were drawn to writing so obsessed with romance and sex. The tradition of using the Elizabethan era to highlight modern failings goes back to the immediate aftermath of the queen's reign, when Godfrey Goodman (who lived through these times) noted that a nation that had so recently been "weary of an old woman's government" was soon nostalgic for it after a taste of King James's rule. Wilson, like Goodman and many others since, has scores to settle. He recognizes what he calls "the Difficulty" of writing about an age whose heroes turn out to be, from a modern vantage point, villains: Hawkins, of armada fame, helped introduce the English slave trade; Spenser, who left us the glorious "Faerie Queene," also wrote a tract calling for the brutal subjugation of the Irish. But even as the age of uncritical adoration has passed, so too, Wilson argues, should an age in which the Elizabethans are routinely vilified for their legacy of colonialism and imperialism. What enables his fresh appraisal is that the English have at last "lived to see the Elizabethan world come to an end": the empire is lost, Ireland is no longer bloody and the powerful families that once ruled England have long been stripped of their influence. While there is much truth to this, the period nonetheless remains a cultural touchstone. At the Olympics in London, the opening ceremonies will commence with the ringing of a giant bell inscribed with the words of Shakespeare's Caliban: "Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises." The ironies are rich, as the colonized victim gets in the last, oddly reassuring word. RELIGION has dominated much of Wilson's recent writing, from his declaration of atheism in the 1980s to his rediscovery of his Christian faith in 2009. He is especially sensitive to the delicate balancing act that Queen Elizabeth maintained between Puritans clamoring for further reformation and Catholics calling for greater tolerance. In the closing paragraph of the book he finds in Elizabeth's "last statement to the world" a defining message of the age, and by implication, of his book. He describes how Elizabeth "was buried at her request" in Westminster Abbey "in the unmarked grave of her half sister, Mary," and sees in this "a humble nod to her Roman Catholic subjects and a pious aspiration for the flourishing of truth, unity and concord." For Wilson, "Elizabeth in her burial held out the hope that the English people" - then, and presumably now as well - "might learn the lessons she imparted." It is a stirring conclusion (and a sharp dig at the modern world) that ties together the book's two narrative strands. But this is not what happened 400 years ago. Yes, Elizabeth's remains are now interred along with Queen Mary's, but only because three years after her death King James had her dug up from where she had been buried, in the tomb of her grandfather Henry VII; he then dumped her bones with Mary's in an area restricted to childless, dead-end queens and princesses. James would subsequently be buried in the very tomb from which he had evicted Elizabeth. So much for a lesson in truth, unity and concord. Wilson compares Elizabethan London to the Berlin of Weimar Germany and Warhol's New York. James Shapiro is the author of "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599" and "Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" He teaches English at Columbia.
Choice Review
Wilson's newest work may be added to his books of similar type on The Victorians (CH, Sep'03, 41-0534) and the Edwardians. As with those earlier efforts, the author does not provide a continuous narrative but highlights a few individuals as he examines different aspects of life in early modern England. Insights abound, but not all of them are persuasive. Although Wilson is a trenchant critic, he relies too much on imaginative literature for understanding the social history of the age. Contemporary scholars would not agree that "for Elizabethans, fourteen was an ideal age to be married." This statement appears in a rather bizarre chapter on women that ends up focusing almost exclusively on Bess of Hardwick. Factual errors are distressingly common: Wilson confuses the traitor Sir Christopher Blount with his distant cousin, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and is mistaken when he regards Elizabeth's burial with Mary as evidence of reconciliation between the half sisters and a healing of the religious breach between Protestants and Catholics. James I placed Elizabeth's remains with Mary's after Elizabeth's death. Summing Up: Optional. Public libraries only. D. R. Bisson Belmont University
Kirkus Review
Vivid, opinionated overview of 16th-century Britain by prolific novelist/historian/biographer Wilson (Dante in Love, 2011, etc.). "[M]odern history began with the Elizabethans," writes the author, "not simply modern English history, but the modern world as we know it today." This is rather overstated: While their accomplishments are indeed remarkable, from Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe to the glories of English poetry and prose in the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, they were rooted in the Renaissance cultural explosion across Europe, as Wilson acknowledges. His readable, well-informed survey is strikingly ambivalent. On one hand, he depicts Queen Elizabeth as a political genius who transformed a weak, religiously divided nation into a world power; on the other, he dwells obsessively on her parsimony and indecisiveness. Similarly, Wilson spends inordinate amounts of time arguing with contemporary historians whom he claims have lost sight of the era's magnificent achievements as they berate the Elizabethans for racism, imperialism, cruelty and oppression of Ireland. General readers are unlikely to know what Wilson is talking about, particularly since he gives few specific examples to justify his sweeping generalizations about political correctness. Fortunately, as has been the case in some of his earlier nonfiction works, the gratuitous editorializing doesn't really detract from a colorful narrative packed with great stories and shrewd insights. Wilson's examination of the Elizabethan religious compromise sympathetically depicts a national church trying to make room for everyone from covert Catholics to extreme Puritans. He also does well in reminding us that Elizabethan humanists believed they were rediscovering the wisdom of antiquity, not inventing something new. Nonetheless, his vigorous chronicle shows new energies erupting everywhere. Wilson makes a strong case for his underlying principle: that the English national identity, notable for its paradoxical blend of proud insularity and globetrotting adventurism, was formed by the Elizabethans. Great fun, despite some unnecessary argumentativeness.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The prolific and erudite biographer and novelist Wilson (Dante in Love) offers little that is new in this study of Elizabethan England, but his account is worth reading nevertheless. It's history from the top-monarch and nobles, writers, courtiers, adventurers and explorers-but Wilson doesn't ignore the parlous condition of the poor, and his account of this time is sympathetic. Understandably, given Wilson's interests, a great deal of the text is about the arts, literature in particular. A virtue of this synthesis is that Wilson is aware, as historians as recent as A.L. Rowse were not, that Elizabeth I's age is finally done with. Debates over Church, glorification of empire, the intent to subjugate Ireland-these preoccupations seem irrelevant in today's England. Although occasionally Wilson strains too hard in efforts to make the past understandable (Jesuits compared to suicide bombers, the Pope declaring a fatwa against Elizabeth), by and large Wilson avoids anachronism in favor of helpful comparison. VERDICT The book is heavily anecdotal, but that's a good thing in popular history. As always, Wilson writes elegantly. British history buffs will love this attractive book. Highly recommended.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements | p. ix |
| List of Illustrations and Credits | p. xi |
| Preface | p. 1 |
| Part 1 The Early Reign | |
| 1 The Difficulty | p. 7 |
| 2 The New World | p. 15 |
| 3 Ceremonial - Twixt earnest and twixt game | p. 25 |
| 4 Men in Power | p. 37 |
| 5 Which Church? | p. 59 |
| 6 The New Learning | p. 75 |
| 7 A Library at Mortlake | p. 83 |
| 8 The Northern Rebellion | p. 92 |
| Part 2 1570s | |
| 9 St Bartholomew's Day Massacre | p. 105 |
| 10 Elizabethan Women | p. 122 |
| 11 Histories | p. 140 |
| 12 Kenilworth | p. 153 |
| 13 Ireland | p. 169 |
| 14 Sir Francis Drake's Circumnavigation | p. 173 |
| 15 A Frog He Would A-wooing Go | p. 185 |
| Part 3 1580s | |
| 16 Religious Dissent | p. 193 |
| 17 Sir Philip Sidney | p. 206 |
| 18 Hakluyt and Empire | p. 218 |
| 19 The Scottish Queen | p. 230 |
| 20 The Armada | p. 244 |
| 21 London and Theatre | p. 261 |
| 22 Marprelate and Hooker | p. 280 |
| Part 4 The Close of the Reign | |
| 23 A Hive for Bees | p. 291 |
| 24 Sex and the City | p. 303 |
| 25 The Occult Philosophy | p. 317 |
| 26 My America | p. 331 |
| 27 Tyrone | p. 342 |
| 28 Essex and the End | p. 356 |
| 29 Hamlet: One Through Two | p. 366 |
| Notes | p. 375 |
| Bibliography | p. 395 |
| Index | p. 409 |