Tag: Tudors

The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein (2012-13)

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Holbein: William Reskimer

(Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 April 2013)

Back in 2008, the Queen’s Gallery put on the splendid exhibition The Art of Italy, in which the Royal Collection showed off its wealth of Renaissance and Baroque Italian paintings and drawings, assembled over four hundred years by an Italophile monarchy. It was the first exhibition I saw at the Gallery and I remember being amazed by the richness of the Collection’s holdings. The Northern Renaissance is the natural successor to that 2008 show and, while it includes some glorious objects, it is of necessity a more modest exhibition than its predecessor. It comprises 110 exhibits (compared to The Art of Italy‘s 153), of which 22 are prints rather than unique works and seven are arguably Italian rather than Northern.

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A Dead Man in Deptford (1993): Anthony Burgess

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★★★★

Serendipity was in action when I decided to move onto this after Death of the Fox. Although Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist here, and events take place some thirty years earlier than Garrett’s story, A Dead Man in Deptford also features Raleigh as a prominent character (though morally more ambivalent). Both books are written in a dense, elaborate, semi-archaic style and both create a vivid impression of late Elizabethan England, although these impressions couldn’t be more different from each other.

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Death of the Fox (1972): George Garrett

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★★★½

Early one morning in October 1618, three men are unable to sleep. It is the day that Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) is due to come before the King’s Bench on a charge of high treason. Sir Henry Yelverton worries about serving as the King’s Attorney General, to condemn a man he can’t help but respect. James I lies tormented by paranoia and doubt, clinging to the superficial friendship of his favourites and eager to be rid of Raleigh, who reminds him of the gulf between Elizabeth’s sovereignty and his own. Raleigh himself, imprisoned in the Tower, finds himself remembering the steps which brought him there, and the lost, golden world of Elizabethan England which made his fortune and then brought it down crumbling in its wake.

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Bring up the Bodies (2012): Hilary Mantel

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★★★★ ½

Like many other people (the vast majority of the British public, it seems), I thoroughly enjoyed Wolf Hall and was thrilled when I heard that Hilary Mantel was writing a sequel. I’m pleased to report that Bring up the Bodies offers another satisfying dose of Elizabethan intrigue and treachery, told in Mantel’s strikingly pared-back prose. She focuses not on sets, costumes and locations, but on the events that unfold, the relationships that form and fade between the members of the court, and the man who stands to one side, watching and weighing them.

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