Ivanhoe’s true love object is chivalry itself, his knightly career, of which Richard is merely the earthly embodiment. Rebecca recognizes the unhealthy grip of chivalric ideology on Ivanhoe’s imagination and, in terms that seem uncannily to anticipate Mark Twain, does her best to disabuse him: “Is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (p. 293). As Cervantes makes plain in his grand satire of chivalry, Don Quixote (1605), knight- errantry was always more a literary phenomenon than an historical one, and Rebecca perceives that Ivanhoe’s self-image is essentially poetic, not a thing of the world. In mockingly pointing this out, Rebecca casts an ironic light on the generic complexities of Scott’s own project, where history lays perpetual siege to the glitter of romance, in fact to literature itself. Scott’s novel might have spawned a global fad for jousting and knights-errant, but his historical critique of chivalry is sincere.
In his essay “Chivalry,” written just prior to Ivanhoe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott shows that he has far fewer illusions about the romance of chivalry than generations of his readers. Because “every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded” by our animal passions, he argues, the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages stood little chance of fulfilling their lofty union of chastity and righteous militarism: “the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentious-ness, —their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, —their generosity and gallantry into harebrained madness and absurdity” (Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6, p. 166). Chivalry, in Ivanhoe, is a form of male self-love that draws its avatars into aggressively homo-social communities such as the Templar Knights or, in the individual case of Ivanhoe, renders him unable properly to love his family, his home, or (we can guess) his wife, preferring instead the wandering life with his fellow narcissist knights. As Wamba the jester is fond of saying, knightly valour is ever the companion of the fool. Even Ivanhoe’s fascination with Rebecca can be read as an extension of self-defeating chivalric desire, of his inability to settle down. The Crusades introduced the exotic, dark-complexioned heroine to the West, and the homeward-returning knights of Ivanhoe have still not left Palestine as a dreamland of desire. According to the orientalist logic of the chivalric romance, Rowena cannot but seem disappointing to Ivanhoe after the seductions of the East, hence the perfunctoriness of his pursuit of her. Rowena might be the blond queen of Ashby, but Rebecca, for both Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, is Jerusalem itself: the irresistible but unreachable goal of the chivalric quest for whom they end up fighting each other rather than the Saracens. It would be wrong to simply equate Ivanhoe with Bois-Guilbert, however. While Ivanhoe’s desperate ride to Templestowe reinforces his militant Christian identity, Bois-Guilbert effectively renounces his knighthood on the field there. He has attempted to break out of chivalric self-love through his passion for Rebecca, and her refusing him that exit forces a kind of libidinal implosion: “yonder girl hath wellnigh unmanned me” (pp. 401-402). To this extent then, it is Bois-Guilbert, not the hometown boy Wilfred, who most represents the condition of England, which, like a spurned suitor, is suffering under a king who does not return the violent love of his people.
King Richard’s reign is more than the setting of Ivanhoe. It is, in important respects, its subject. The early nineteenth century—with its museums and new academic formations—effectively invented History, and Scott was the first writer successfully to commercialize the new nostalgia. The great majority of his nearly thirty novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, are excursions into the Scottish, English, and European past, and his enormous popularity established the historical novel as a literary genre. For the reader, this places a special importance on understanding at least the basic lineaments of the period setting. The action of the novel takes place in the summer of 1194, with King Richard still a prisoner of Leopold, duke of Austria, his erstwhile ally on the failed Third Crusade. More than a century has passed since the Norman Conquest of Britain was secured at the Battle of Hastings, and the Saxons—in Scott’s time the great colonizers of the world—find themselves a colonial outpost of the Franco-Roman commonwealth of Europe. The thirty-year reign of the great Plantagenet king Henry II had brought stability and the rudiments of rule of law to the unconsolidated British Isles, but as a Frenchman, and the ruler of considerable domains in France and elsewhere, Henry spent less than a third of his reign in England. His son Richard, called Lion-Heart, is even less attached to his island dominion. The historical Richard spoke only French and spent but a few months of his ten-year reign on English soil. He joined the Third Crusade to Jerusalem almost immediately after his accession to the crown in 1189, and was ultimately killed a decade later in Belgium, fighting one of innumerable internecine skirmishes among the Plantagenet rulers of western Europe. His last thoughts were not of England, his neglected kingdom, but of the archer who had inadvertently killed him and whom he wished to pardon. This in a nutshell is Richard, for whom the rites of chivalry meant so much more than the duties of kingship. Even his death is a personal affair between warriors, not a matter of state. It is almost fitting that the unfortunate archer was flayed alive, to show how little the fantasies of chivalric beneficence extended into twelfth-century reality. Scott, of course, rehabilitates Richard to a great extent. He bestows on him at least the desire to be a better king, but this is no less a romantic fiction of Ivanhoe than his carousing with Friar Tuck or speaking fluent Saxon.
Richard’s prolonged absence from England in the 1190s created a vacuum of power and a return to the political instability of a half century before, when the first family of Norman kings had exhausted themselves fighting a two-front war against the local population and ambitious French barons. In Ivanhoe, the ambitious rival is Richard’s own brother, John, and the embers of Saxon resistance flare once more in the shape of Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, the arch-nostalgist who dreams of a return to Pre-Norman days and the renewal, through the union of his noble cousin Athelstane with Rowena, of the ancient line of King Alfred. But if Cedric thinks in terms of ancient blood, he lives in a modern world of money. The Norman barons—those for whom the Crusades were a folly—have shown, in the absence of the King, an insatiable appetite for taxes and the extra-legal appropriation of Saxon land. Their self-aggrandizement is further funded, in turn, by the Jewish moneylenders, represented in Scott’s novel by Rebecca’s father, Isaac. Almost everyone in the novel, from Ivanhoe to Robin Hood to Prince John himself, is indebted to Isaac, whose tense and ambivalent relationship with his clients is modeled on Shakespeare’s Shylock. Like Shylock, Isaac’s representation as a gross anti-Semitic stereotype is mitigated by Scott’s evident sympathy for his suffering at the hands of Christians and, more importantly, his deep love for his daughter. It is striking that the Jews of the novel fund both the hero’s appearance at the Ashby tournament (as well as John’s production of the event itself) and heal his wounds after it. Ivanhoe’s career, we must infer, is not self-sustaining, and the chivalric ethos of beneficence and charity no substitute for responsible government. England’s condition, as a leaderless state without standard currency or centralized system of credit, is, as Scott puts it, “sufficiently miserable” (p. 84). While the knights defend their honor and prose on about the purity of their souls, it is the Jews who hold the world of Ivanhoe together. We fear for England at the novel’s conclusion when Rebecca announces that she and her father are to leave the country. By sending Isaac and Rebecca away to Moorish Spain, Scott presages the disastrous expulsion of the Jews from England a century later.
Such is the broad historical backdrop to the novel. But the subtitle of Ivanhoe describes it as a “romance” not a “history,” and Scott certainly plays fast and loose with historical detail. The most striking image of the opening chapter, Gurth’s iron collar declaring him to be a serf of Cedric’s, is simply made up, and the novel’s most famous scene, the tournament at Ashby, has no historical foundation earlier than the fourteenth century. In his fascinated description of clothing, heraldry, and domestic interiors, Scott felt little qualm in borrowing from sources spanning a century or more, and this is to say nothing of his description of startled characters as “electrified,” perhaps the most notorious anachronism in English fiction. Indeed, for all its rich weave of Saxon and Norman vocabulary, the language spoken by the characters is entirely bogus, a pseudo-medieval patois Scott patched together from the Elizabethan canon of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The stagy feel of the novel is due in large part to the characters’ tendency to declaim and sermonize as if before a large audience.
Critics have long taken Scott to task for this form of novelistic license, but from the very beginning of his text Scott assumes an ironic relation to historical writing. When Ivanhoe first appeared in 1819, Scott had not yet acknowledged authorship of any of his novels. To the titillated press, he was the “Great Unknown”: Scott’s attachment to his barely credible anonymity (almost everyone saw through it) is difficult to understand beyond his abiding passion, shared by so many of his characters, for feint and disguise. An instance of this appears in the form of the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe, in which Scott, writing under the name “Laurence Templeton,” defends himself in advance against the petty corrections of the “dry as
