A paper presented to the Queen Elizabeth I Society at
the 66th South-Central Renaissance Conference in Atlanta
All art has a metaphorical quality.
—Keith Oatley
Prologue
STRETCHING BACK to their royal entries, which intertwined genealogy with mythology,
we have over 500 years of Tudor fiction to ponder.1 As this audience knows, we’re now
enjoying a particular resurgence, spanning media and genres. Like earlier efforts, some of
these works stretch veracity. Nonetheless, they provide an intriguing lens on the past.
Young adult novels about sixteenth-century English royalty provide great
possibilities for teaching the period. The foundational text is The Prince and the Pauper
by Mark Twain (1881/2).2 Who has read it? Prince Edward has a poor, common lookalike
in London, one Tom Canty, and by accident, they switch roles. Picaresque, comic
mishaps follow for both, leading to the final restoration of the rightful heir after he’s
learned valuable lessons about life and politics. It resembles the ‘pirate and robber books’
loved by Tom Sawyer, with some fun action sequences.3 Obviously it builds on folktale
tropes and medieval political theology, something I explore in my essay “Poor Little
Princess: Dramatic Destiny and Divine Monarchy in Disney’s Monte Carlo and Princess
Protection Program, or Selena Gomez’s Two Bodies.” Just kidding!
Seriously, such entertainments can be “hooks” for attracting students and drawing
them into the world of the Renaissance. Readers of The Compleat Angler by Izaak
Walton or A Comprehensive Guide to Fishing Canada by Babe Winkelman know,
however, that every lure won’t catch every fish.4 In addition, to make an unfunny
(unfinny?) pun, some might consider the dangling of sparkly, lite alt-histories to ensnare
our students to be tantamount to “hooking” in its prostitutional sense. That is, it’s just
another way for the humanities to meretriciously sell out.5 ‘Am I making myself a motley
to the view, selling cheap what is most dear, and looking on truth askance and strangely?’
as that Shakespeare dude, himself a fast and loose player with historical facts, would put
it?6 Indeed, the dulce et utile, the sweet and useful aspects of education, sometimes push
and pull in opposition. No less an authority, however, than Lady Mary Wroth’s dear
uncle Sir Philip Sidney justifies the value of popular best-sellers in his Defence of Poetry:
“Truly, I have known men that even with reading Amadis de Gaule, which God knoweth
wanteth much of a perfect poesy, have found their hearts moved to the exercise of
courtesy, liberality and especially courage.”7 Certain works of Tudor fiction for teens
can, I contend, get young folk interested in the past, and furthermore, some of them are
good enough to be worth reading on their own merits.
I. Jane of the Jungle
First up let’s look at My Lady Jane (2016).8 The main characters are Jane Grey,
Gifford Dudley, and Edward Tudor (I think it’s cool to see minor royals get some love).
The plotting and machinations mirror recorded history, but with strange tweaks. As the
authors inform us in the prologue, “This is how we think Jane’s story should have gone.
… And we’ve added a touch of magic to keep things interesting” (x). In this universe,
politics are complicated by the existence of a persecuted minority known as Eðians who
can shift from human into animal form and back. Challenging them are the dominant
Verities. Metamorphosis is usually hereditary; sometimes occurring willingly, sometimes
spontaneously when #triggered.9 Without spoiling the plot, Elizabeth eventually ascends
to the throne, but her route is different.
The story works because it’s fun and engaging. The principals face daunting
challenges and reveal human flaws. Furthermore, each has a distinctive personality and
voice. And the mocking, love-hate chemistry between Jane and Gifford crackles. At one
point, they share the following exchange.
“Dear Jane. You are my house. My home. What I have, I pledge to you. I love you.”
“You love me?” she whispered.
“The very instant I saw you, my heart flew to your service,” he said.
“Really?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not exactly. But it’s a good line, am I right?” (463)
Teaching My Lady Jane offers numerous possibilities. Students could investigate
mid-Tudor history and determine what actually befell the characters and nation,
compared to the invented plot twists. Sharp pupils might delve into specific issues. For
example, Jane is described as obsessively bookish. Her “favorite … tragedies [are those]
in which the lovers both died in the end as punishment for a small act of mercy” (28), and
during the course of the novel, she reads, inter alia, Wilderness Survival for Courtiers
(24).10 A research paper might explore the humanist education of the real Lady Jane, or
literacy for females in early modern England more generally.
The other thing that makes My Lady Jane “extra” is that it is an allegory.
Specifically, the Eðians resemble recusant Catholics and the Verities resemble zealous,
militant Protestants.11 The closest literary precedent would be Beware the Cat by William
Baldwin (1553-61), which you all should have studied because it will on the test. In case
anyone’s been slacking to binge-watch Riverdale, Beware the Cat is a peculiar midsixteenth-
century anti-Catholic beast fable.12 Again, it isn’t news to y’all that Tudor
England provided rich soil in which allegory sprouted, like Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
English majors might write fine papers on various aspects of this archive. More broadly,
methinketh inquisitive young people are well poised to consider the open-ended metaquestion
of why raconteuring humans gravitate so eagerly to such an abstract, oneiric
form. Even millennials should know curricular staples like Animal Farm, The Crucible,
and possibly Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (my fave). Adding to such an assignment is the
“literal” explosion of popular, critically acclaimed films and series that are, I’d argue,
profoundly allegorical. We have, for example, The Hunger Games, Black Mirror, Harry
Potter, Wonder Woman, and myriad symbolically over-determined iterations of the
incipient zombie apocalypse.13
II. A Botched Execution; or That Bodgy Boleyn Girl
Put another way, the past is so not even past. An unexpected and bizarre
contribution to this neo-Tudorism is Anne & Henry by Dawn Ius, in which Henry Tudor,
who is Mr. Popular at a private high school in a posh suburb of Seattle, finds himself
inconveniently attracted to the new bad girl in town, Anne Boleyn.14 In this story, The
central couple narrate alternating chapters. It’s an intriguing premise – what if?! – but
unfortunately this book is terrible.
A brief summary reveals its changes (unavoidable plot spoilers below). Like
Henry VIII in 1509, this Henry has recently lost his powerful father and successful older
brother Arthur, but he has inherited beaucoup status as well as Arthur’s perfect girlfriend
Catherine. He seems poised for greatness: on the fast track to Harvard and politically
connected, he’s riding a cursus honorum towards high office. Then Anne comes along.
They have the hots for each other, causing Henry to alienate his demanding, brittle,
mournful mother and the in-crowd he supposedly leads, by dumping Catherine and dating
Anne. Returning on her motorcycle in the rain from a secret tryst where they’d been
drinking and making out, they crash, leaving neither seriously injured but eventuating
their enforced separation. Henry is grounded and his mom blocks Anne’s number on his
mobile, while Anne spends a few days in the hospital recovering from her wipeout. After
she is released while he is still under “house arrest” (212), his friends maliciously intervene.
They invite Anne to a party where they deploy maximum peer pressure to force her
to drink heavily and then snap staged, incriminating photos of her with their cell phones.
The circulation of these images makes Henry doubtful about her, and they also lead
(preposterously) to the school’s Student Council, made up of Henry and his crew, holding
a hearing and permanently expelling Anne from Medina Academy with no recourse to
appeal. But studying at a café with his friends while all this drama is unfolding, Henry
meets a beguiling, demure yet coquettish barista named, yes, Jane Seymour, so his future
is bright once again.
Two humungous weaknesses sink this audacious effort. The first is that the
central conceit doesn’t hold up. This Henry, this Anne, don’t resemble the historical
personages who share their names very much, and so the question of what those starcrossed
Tudor royals would do in similar but modern circumstances isn’t very
compelling. Moreover, mapping a magnificent Renaissance court, ruled by a puissant
hereditary Christian monarch desperate for a legitimate male heir, onto an American high
school doesn’t really work here. The possibilities exist, though. The couple have a dinner
date at a swank restaurant called the London Tower, and a scene at an abandoned theater
and another at a costume party cry out for some role-playing meta-historical overlay.
These potentials should have been developed. For instance, when Henry gives his
girlfriend a gift of jewelry, I was dying for her to receive that ‘B’ necklace the real Queen
Anne can be seen wearing in her painting at the NPG, but that doesn’t happen. The new
Anne isn’t fluent in French either, though having her come from Québec would have
been a nice way to make her so, especially since the author is Canadian. Another
squandered opportunity would have been updated versions of the pleading, adoring letters
King Henry wrote his paramour. But the differences outweigh the similarities—basically
all the unique personalities and cultural, religious, and political conditions that
constituted the Henrician Court.15 We do meet a character named Wyatt, but his role is
negligible – he isn’t the poetic, truth-telling Chorus of this passion play nor Anne’s
special friend, so there are no sonnets, no plaints to his lute (or guitar), no wry aulic
satires that he posts to his blog or YouTube channel.
The other crux is that Dawn Ius lacks any semblance of writerly skill.16 The story
falls short with respect to characterization, style, plotting, world-building, and dialogue.
The secondary players are as thin as tissue paper, the big scenes between the principals
sound awfully clunky, and major twists ring false. Anne’s downfall is exceptionally
ludicrous. The bash where this tough, savvy girl is easily and cluelessly manipulated is
obviously a “set up” (268).17 Afterwards Henry and Anne never discuss what did or did
not happen, which would seemingly have resolved matters. Next, the kangaroo court
expels her for that ubiquitous time-honored pastime of underage drinking, where Henry
himself recognizes that “all of this evidence is contrived” (269). Said court operates
without adult intervention or oversight, lawyerly involvement, due process, or any
attention to the conflicts of interest present. While Queen Anne did face her own show
trial in 1536, this one is more like a tribunal by Islamic fundamentalists than anything
remotely resembling what a privileged, pretty white girl would face in America today.
Dawn even blows her money shot, her attempt to create a figurative parallel ending to
Queen Anne’s: Henry rips Anne’s photo off a bulletin board, leaving the image of her
severed head – not unlike a billion online profile portraits. It doesn’t really project
decapitation. Try this with a picture and judge for yourself which is more viscerally
disturbing (see Figure 1). ‘Tis a botched, bodgy execution, in more ways than one.18
Imagine Hilary Mantel’s worst nightmare, in which she takes her Cromwelliad to
Hollywood and the script doctors, test-marketers, craven studio execs and talentless divas
all savage it into something unintentionally satirical, and you have Henry & Anne.
Conclusion
Like other intelligent communal primates, humans obsess over status and mates.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, those things matter because the fate of our genes largely
depends on our attainments in those areas. 19 We’ve therefore inherited powerful,
instinctual impulses to maximize our prominence and monitor our conspecifics. Unique
to humans is our deep-seated love for narrative, dependent on our special linguistic
capacities, our Theory of Mind, and our cognitive skills as self-aware social players and
broadly political creatures striving for success. In stories, we get heightened action
containing invaluable information about the social maelstrom. From Aristotle to the latest
findings in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is a fair amount of
agreement about the power and significance of fictional simulations—they are integral to
our ability to reckon with the Sturm and Drang of communal life.
Tudor history supplies ready-made material in this regard: it’s a real-life romantic
tragicomedy. We get royals behaving badly and telenovela plot twists as blue bloods fight
for the crown. That’s a perennially popular template for high drama.
Since the archival records tell us only so much, authors have had ample space to
dive in and create fiction. Professor Keith Oatley knows a bit about this. He is, foremost,
a cognitivist who explores the smart, tricky, emotional, confabulating, selfish, empathetic
human brain in books like Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (2011), but
he is also a writer of novels set in bygone days, such as A Natural History (1998), about a
Victorian scientist investigating England’s cholera outbreaks.20 When he states that “All
art has a metaphorical quality,” he is extending the normal, poetical idea of metaphor to
art in general. That is, art is always representational, not “literal.” Holbein’s portraits are
paint on wood or canvas, not the people themselves; novels are ink on paper or pixels on
a screen, simulations translated by readers into fleshed-out virtual worlds. When we
process such narrative “metaphors,” we are entering an imaginative allegorical dream: a
comparative vision of both past and present, a magical kingdom where anyone who visits
can, amazingly, be elevated into royalty.21 Thank you!
Handout
Grey Girls, Blue Bloods, and Sparkly Pink Unicorns:
Young Adult Novels about Tudor England
All art has a metaphorical quality.
—Keith Oatley
Musée National du Moyen-Âge, Paris
“Intriguing,” said [the duchess.] “But can your words change the past?”
The Fool considered this.
“More easily, I think,” he said. “Because the past is what people remember, and
memories are words. Who knows how a king behaved a thousand years ago? There is
only recollection, and stories. And plays, of course.”
—Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (1988), p. 139
Works Treated
Hand, Cynthia, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows. My Lady Jane. NY: HarperTeen, 2016.
(see www.ladyjanies.com)
Ius, Dawn. Anne & Henry. NY: Simon Pulse, 2015.
Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper. 1881/2. NY: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2006.
Works Cited
Anglo, Sydney. Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy. 2d ed.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
Baldwin, William. Beware the Cat. 1553-61.
Hand, Cynthia, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows. My Lady Jane. NY:
HarperTeen, 2016.
Ius, Dawn. Anne & Henry. NY: Simon Pulse, 2015.
Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011.
—. A Natural History. Viking, 1998.
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defence of Poesy. Ed. Dorothy Macardle. London:
Macmillan, 1962.
Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper. 1881/2. NY: Aladdin Paperbacks,
2006.
Winkelman, Michael. Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama.
Ashgate, 2005.
—. A Cognitive Approach to John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013.
NOTES
1 See Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy; Winkelman, Marriage Relationships in Tudor
Political Drama, ch. 1, “The Pageantry of Establishment,” 17-33.
2 Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper. See also A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court …
3 Mark Twain, Huck Finn, II.
4 Fishing is an age-old conceptual metaphor for attractive stratagems, for example in John Donne’s poem
“The Bait.” The locus classicus is Ovid’s Art of Love.
5 N.b. the crowd-sourced online lexicon Urban Dictionary includes the recent coinage “like whoring” to
describe the ways people “like” others’ social media posts regardless of quality or their actual preferences
in order to make their virtual selves more popular and attractive. Whoring is a prevalent conceptual
metaphor for advancement by selling out. Cf. also the teen slang term “thot”: that hottie/ho over there.
6 See Sonnet 109. N.b. Shakespeare himself is now ironically subject to various tragical-comical-pastoral
unhistorical treatments on the telly.
7 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy. Amadis was a very popular early Renaissance chivalric romance.
8 Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows, My Lady Jane (NY: HarperTeen, 2016).
9 Such transmogrifications obviously hearken back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s AMND.
10 Cf. Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which in some ways dramatizes just that.
11 N.b. some elements of the allegory are a bit fuzzy.
12 William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (1553-61). Beast fables featuring cats and mice have a long history. Cf.
Aesop; the prologue to Piers Plowman, Wyatt’s satire “My Mother’s Maids,” and more recently, Maus by
Art Spiegelman.
13 N.b. Persuasive cases have been made for Harry Potter as an allegory: the wizards trained at Hogwarts are
like the contemporary educated ruling classes, while the ignorant, undereducated masses are the Muggles.
See the blog Spotted Toad, “Getting Your Owl,” February 6, 2017, and Ross Douthat, “The Muggle
Problem,” The New York Times, June 28, 2017.
14 Dawn Ius, Anne & Henry (NY: Simon Pulse, 2015).
15 For more background, including references to primary sources, see Winkelman, Marriage Relationships
in Tudor Political Drama, esp. ch. 2, “The King’s Great Matter; or, Super utroque regis coniugio,” 35-65.
16 Cf. the Bollywood film “Bride and Prejudice” (2004), which successfully updates everyone’s favourite
Regency romance, while the teen flick “Election” (1999) presents a nasty, satirical political allegory of
contemporary shenanigans amongst our governing class. Anne & Henry, however, is more like the eye rolling “Cruel Intentions” (1999), derived from Dangerous Liaisons, than the cute, clever “Easy A” (2010),
inspired by The Scarlet Letter. In fact, it’s closer to Twilight than to Romeo and Juliet.
17 If Anne had been Roofied there it would have probably been more believable, though that’s become a
cop-out plot device in thrillers and melodramas.
18 Cf. the amazing Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin (2005), which imagines a prince and princess of
Wales, modeled on Charles and Diana, who are exiled to America after embarrassing the Crown once too
often. Beyond gently satirizing its subjects, it turns into an adventurous, romantic, brilliant, poetic, neochivalrous
tour de force and epic quest. Long live the King!
19 A more fleshed out argument about the importance of narrative from an evolutionary perspective can be
found in Winkelman, A Cognitive Approach to John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), ch. 8, “’Verse that Drawes Natures Works, from Natures Law’; or, Prolegomenon to a Darwinian
Defense of Literature,” 167-87.
20 Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction; and A Natural History.
21 This paper is in honour of two outstanding historiographers of Tudor history: my great good friends
Professors Charles Beem and Carole Levin.