Customer Reviews

Kenilworth

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Kenilworth is set in 1575 during the reign of Elizabeth I. It is the story of Amy Robsart who has secretly married Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester. But Leicester is the Queen's favourite and fearful that he would lose his status if his marriage became public he keeps Amy secluded in Cumnor Hall. However, such secrets are hard to keep in an Elizabethan England full of plots and intrigues between factions vying for Elizabeth's favour and as Leicester entertains the Queen at Kenilworth castle the truth will out.

As usual Scott tells a good story in Kenilworth. He takes as his point of departure the known incidents of history and weaves his plot around them. He is not always faithful to the historical record, but he captures the mood of the time. His characterisation of Elizabeth is particularly fine, showing her fair and just but swift to take offence and with a devastating temper. Scott builds great tension into his plot, because it is a story rooted in a period where one false step can bring instant downfall, where the highest can be brought to the block in an instant, if Elizabeth's capricious mood turns angry.

Kenilworth is quite a difficult read. Scott's scholarship was such that he often uses the language of Elizabethan times and continually refers to historical events and literary texts which are now obscure. It is for this reason that it is important to read an edition of Scott which uses the best modern experts to clarify and explain the text. The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, published by Edinburgh and Columbia University Press, is the definitive edition of Scott and is a stunning example of modern scholarship. The glossary is full and the notes are detailed and useful. The editor, J.H. Alexander, has gone back to Scott's original manuscript and first edition to provide a text of Kenilworth which is in a number of crucial respects different from that which has been commonly read since 1831. In the end the most important thing is that this edition makes Scott easier to read and easier to enjoy. Scott ought to be enjoyed. He was one of the most popular novelists of his day and with a little practice, reading him becomes a great pleasure. Kenilworth is quite a good place to begin an acquaintance with Scott's writing. Being set in England, it has no dialogue in the old Scots dialect, which can be difficult nowadays even for Scottish people to understand. Moreover it has a fine story with many interesting characters both virtuous and villainous. It may not be one of Scott's very greatest novels, but it is a good one and well worth reading even if at times it may be something of a struggle.

Don't read any of the following reviews unless you've already read Kenilworth. Scott deliberately withholds from the reader key facts (facts which all of the following reviews reveal) until well after the plot has started. Anyway, I've been on a Sir Walter Scott binge recently and, of the three Scott novels I've read -- Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward and this -- I'd place this book well above Ivanhoe but equal to Quentin Durward. It takes place in Elizabethan England; it has some sword fights; it's fairly funny in parts; the plot creaks only occasionally. Still, well worth reading.

As a ardent reader of medieval England stories, this is one book which I found as entertaining and romantic as any other book I have read. It has everything from castles and Knights in horses to damsels in distress. Scott is magnificent in the portrayal of Amy as well as Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth is the crown of his characterisation. A book worth reading..

Readers of Scott know not to read for plot, for even his most highly regarded novels meander and stray wilfully from the strict path of story-telling. Kenilworth, in addition to being a typically marvelous example of Scott's allusive narrative power, also happens to be the tightest and best contrived of his plots, one of the very few of his novels where all the ends are tied together convincingly. The novel has a gloriously conveyed Elizabethan atmosphere, which it is not timid about evoking at all levels and types: there is peasant comedy, taproom humor, stately politics, an aritocratic love story, villainous alchemists, and a sort of self-taught, lesser artisan hero whom its easy to root for (Wayland Smith).

If you're familiar with the movie Elizabeth, you'll recognize some of the situations in this novel. But Scott isn't particularly historically accurate here, nor is he trying to be. His source is an Elizabethan ballad, and he tries to convey that world in all its Shakespearian complexity.

Overall, one of the best, one of my favorite, of the Waverley novels, finally available in a dependable, well-edited edition. Bravo Scott, bravo Penguin Classics! More please!

In Sir Walter Scott's 1821 novel KENILWORTH, very young Amy Robsart of the English country gentry had once been engaged to marry a serious young scholar of Cornwall, Edmund Tressilian. But the handsome, rich, powerful Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, comes between them. Tressilian and Amy's father, Sir Hugh, know that Amy has either eloped or been carried off by someone. But they suspect ungainly Richard Varney, not the handsome, vastly wealthy Earl of Leicester. Richard Varney, as it happens, is the hugely influential right hand man of Dudley. And one of Varney's jobs is to scout out pretty women for his Puritan master to seduce.

To this end Varney systematically ingratiates himself with Sir Hugh Robsart and brings his master and Miss Robsart together in clandestine meetings. Amy loves Dudley as woman has never loved man before but will not, like his other conquests, willingly go to bed with him unless and until they are married. The Earl, for his part, is smitten by Amy and impulsively weds her, over Varney's objections that he is ruining his political career. But the great Earl remains ambitious and prudent enough to keep the wedding secret until he can find a time and a way to make it known without doing harm to his rising status with his old childhood friend and onetime fellow prisoner of the Tower of London, Elizabeth Tudor.

Dudley has Varney fit up splendidly as Amy's closely guarded residence a ruined abbey which Varney has been given as spoils from Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. It pertains to the village of Cumnor near Oxford. The Earl hides his new wife in Cumnor Hall, where, after a search at novel's beginning, Tressilian finds her but cannot persuade her to return to her father.

From that point on, the plot becomes more and more complex and the secret marriage harder to keep secret or, once discovered, to explain. Varney assures the inquisitive Queen that Amy is his wife, not Leicester's and Leicester takes his good time telling the truth. Meanwhile Varney convinces the already great Earl to do his best to win Elizabeth's hand and become King of England. The pious Earl trusts the villainous Varney to find a way to make this happen that is both effective and compatible with the Earl's Puritan conscience.

Without revealing precisely what happens to love-smitten Amy Robarts, who remains devoted to Leicester through betrayal upon betrayal, let me quote her keeper's comment to Varney in the final pages of KENILWORTH on how Amy's love of her unworthy husband has scalded her: "It is a seething of the kid in the mother's milk" (Ch. 41).

There are twenty or more other rounded, energetic characters whom readers will enjoy seeing pass across the stage of KENILWORTH. They include Sir Walter Raleigh and his legendary muddied cloak. There is Will Shakespeare, whose rhymes the Queen can't get out of her mind. There are other memorable real and fictional minor characters of both sexes.

Walter Scott is famous for his descriptions of costumes, armor, jewelry and clothing. When the Queen visits Dudley's castle at KENILWORTH, her ladies must moderate their dresses lest they eclipse the vain monarch. But Elizabeth likes her men young and well turned out and the Earl of Leicester outdoes them all in dazzling white: "his shoes being of white velvet ... his stockings of knit silk, lined with cloth of silver ... the scabbard of his sword of white velvet with golden buckles" and on and on (Ch. 31).

This is a rich fable of a Lord who did his devious best to have his cake and eat it too. Its dramatic possibilities led into almost as many Walter Scott operas as did IVANHOE. KENILWORTH inspired Auber, Klein, de Lara, Donizetti, among others, to set the story to music.

Finally: a friend of mine grew up in affluent Kenilworth Village, north of Chicago. She says that street names there are daily reminders of characters from Sir Walter Scot's novel of the same name. My friend cites Amy Robsart as the prime example. An American town created as a monument to Sir Walter Scott! And why not? Sir Walter Scott's great historical, almost gothic, novel of 1821, KENILWORTH, deserves celebrating and is more exciting and heart-stopping fiction than plodding, minutely accurate history. Thank you, Illinois!


-OOO-

As the book opens, Amy Robsart has left her family home and has secretly married Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Amy's father, Sir Hugh and the man her father intended her to marry, Edmund Tressilian, have no knowledge of Amy's whereabouts and suspect foul play at the hands of Dudley's sneaky master of the horse, Richard Varney, and Tressilian goes in search of Amy at an old manor house, Cumnor Place. As Elizabeth I's attraction to Dudley grows, so does Dudley's ambitions to reach for the stars and a greater place at court than he ever dared for, and Amy becomes a bit of a liability -- especially to Varney who hopes to rise in power alongside his master--and thus the game is on.

This is the first Walter Scott that I have read, with the exception of Ivanhoe and that was many years ago when I was a young child. I admit to almost giving up a couple of times, as the vernacular used by the characters was hard to follow at times, but it's worth slugging through the first 50 or so pages until the story starts cooking along as Scott takes the reader on a grand ride through the court of Elizabeth Tudor. Even Walter Raleigh makes a wonderful secondary character, his characterization of Elizabeth I was spot on, and I loved the way Scott worked Dudley's famous fete of Elizabeth at his castle at Kenilworth into Amy's story.

Although Scott based this tale on an old English Ballad (which is printed in the back of the book) and not known history, it's still a jolly good yarn peopled with interesting characters, poison, astrology, treachery and all the well known intrigues of the Court of Elizabeth I. Those of you who are well versed in Tudor history already know the fate of Amy Robsart and I will have to warn those potential readers who are picky about historical accuracy that Scott definitely diddles with history in this tale. But for those readers who are willing to forget what's in the history books and ready to enjoy a jolly good yarn by a master storyteller about Elizabethan England, this is one book worth checking out, and I intend to read other books by this author. Five stars.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is Scotland's greatest novelist. The poet and lawyer turned to fiction after Lord Byron's poetic star ascended while his declined. Scott is the father of the historical novel. In his Waverly novels he revolutionized the novel and won glowing immortality in English literature.
Kenilworth (1821) shows Scott moving south of the border to Great Britain. Tne book is set in 1575 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Historical figures such as Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare (fleetingly) appear in the excitingly melodramatic tale of intrigue, murder and court politics at Elizabeth's court.
The plot: Amy Robsart is secretly married to Dudley Lord Leicester. Leicester wishes the marriage to remain secret as he is courting Queen Elizabeth. Dudley dreams of becoming King of England. Amy is also loved by the Cornishman Tresillian who seeks to help her escape from Cumnor Place where she has been forced into seclusion by her husband. Scott is good at imprisonment images: Amy is often described as a bird in a cage.
Leicester and his chief henchamn Richard Varney want it believed that Amy is wed to Varney. Elizabeth learns the truth. Amy is murdered by Varney and the thughs who are in his employ (this is a fictional account; historians are divided as to what led to Amy's early death). Richard Varney is the most interesting figure in the novel. He is an amoral overachiever whose Machiavellian plotting leads him to disaster. He is one of the most dastardly villains in all of English literature.
The novel is divided into three parts:
Part One-Set in Cumnor Place and a local inn. Part II-The Elizabethean court in London. Part III-The estate of Kenilworth, owned by Leicester, where he is holding a magnificent reception in honor of his guest Queen Elizabeth.
Scott adds humor in his minor characters such as innkeeper Giles Gosling and Flbbertigibbet. Kenilworth is free of the Scotch dialect of most of his novels but is still a formidable read for 21st century eyes. The book is filled with excerpts of poetry and quotes from literary works. Scott is an acquired taste since his style is convoluted, formal and difficult to decipher.
As a fan of Scott I love the new Penguin Revised edition of his works based on the Edinburgh Edition. The Penguin edition includes a glossary of words used by Scott and over 50 pages of footnotes explaining the many arcane references.
Scott committed many literary crimes! Among them:
a. Difficult sentence structure hard to understand on a first reading.
b. Implausible plots based on coincidence
c. Wooden characters who are one dimensional. They are puppets.
4. Intrusive authorial comments on the plot development and characters.
5. Creaking plot manipulation.
6. Unrealistic dialogue. The characters talk as if they are on stage declaiming and revealing themselves to the audience. At times I thought I was watching a Shakespearean drama.
7. Too many words! The books needed better editing.
With all these failing Scott excells in the primary fictional requirement of an author. The author of Waverly knew how to tell a story! His tales will long be remembered by readers who soldier through the prose to reach their final page. Great Scott! What a genius was this father of the historical romance novel!

Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832): Kenilworth. A Romance. Edited and with an Introduction by J. H. Alexander. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1999. xlvi and 467 pages.

Scott started his literary life as a poet and only later turned to novel-writing. Perhaps that is why his plots are not always as brilliantly conceived as his descriptions of the life and times about which he writes. "Kenilworth" was his second novel, after "Ivanhoe", in which England and not Scotland stood in the centre of attention. Unlike "Ivanhoe", however, "Kenilworth" is set in the Renaissance, during the long reign of Elizabeth I (the year 1575 is mentioned at one point). And I suspect that it is Scott's description of Elizabeth and her court which remains in most Englishmen's common memory of this period until today. The story Scott tells is based, as is usual with him, on historical reality, which he has, using his incredibly full antiquarian knowledge of the period, described and expanded to cover a large canvas with some of the most colourful scenes and characters to be found in any historical novel. Next to the wonderfully evocative descriptions of Elizabethan pageantry I would name the profoundly skilful dialogues between the Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth or between the Earl and Varney, his master of horse, as the high points of the novel. These are reported in such detail that, inevitably, the story-line or plot only develops comparatively slowly, although this, of course, builds up enormous tension towards the end of the book until the whole is tragically resolved. The detailed descriptions and reports of conversations also create character, and Scott has here very ably created some of literature's most fascinating characters. Other reviewers have pointed to Elizabeth herself, here most wittily characterized, but personally I found equal pleasure in the power-hungry, wavering Earl of Leicester, in the cringing, miserly Forster, in the hypocritical astrologer Alasco, in his former assistant Wayland and in the grimassing, inquisitive boy known generally as "Flibbertigibbet". The villain Varney is painted in very black colours, almost too black to be true; the tragic heroine, Amy Robsart, has, interestingly enough, been compared with Lucy in "The Bride of Lammermoor", but for my taste Amy seems a little too passive and submissive. If there is a "hero" to the story, I suppose it is Tressilian, who is, however, lost sight of during considerable chunks of the story.

Reading Scott is always something of a daunting task because of his immense vocabulary and his constant use of antique or antiquarian terms. The Penguin Edition of "Kenilworth" makes this task somewhat easier by providing copious notes and an extended glossary, although these practically entail one in reading with two fingers in different places at the back of the book and constantly turning the pages back and forth. Scott's unbounded delight in quotes from the Bible, from Chaucer, from Shakespeare, from Webster and from Ben Johnson as well as from more obscure literary and historical works is perfectly documented in the notes. The "introduction" should only be read after studying the novel, not before, and should really have been printed at the end, not before the text. There are various other aids to understanding here, too, including a comparison of the novel with the known historical facts, and some 16th century maps and charts of Kenilworth Castle where the majority of the "action" in the second half of the book takes place.

"Kenilworth" is definitely one of Scott's major novels, although I would recommend that novices start with his more popular tales of Scotland: "Guy Mannering" Guy Mannering (Penguin Classics), "Old Mortality" Old Mortality (Oxford World's Classics), "The Heart of Midlothian" The Heart of Midlothian (Oxford World's Classics), "Rob Roy" Rob Roy (Oxford World's Classics) or "The Bride of Lammermoor" The Bride of Lammermoor (Oxford World's Classics), all of which were published some years prior to "Kenilworth".

This is a brilliant evocation of the world of Elizabeth the First as seen through the events surrounding a visit by the queen to Kenilworth, the mansion of her favorite. The descriptions and characters are wonderful. The tragic ending is handled in a manner worthy of Shakespeare. Indeed, I must say that if Shakespeare had lived a few centuries later and written historical novels, the result would have been the same as here.

Being a fan of Scott and his writings, I expected much more from this book than it was able to offer. Although the actual writing of the book is excellent, conveying wonderfully the flavor and character of the times as well as the vanity of the monarchs and suitors, the plot ends abruptly with a tragic ending. Aside from altogether disliking tragedies, I found this ending a surprising disappointment because the book gave very little indication of the horrific climax which was to come. After finishing the last page, I almost felt as though I had finished reading two separate books - a romance and a tragedy