Romance

Shamelessly parodying Sir Walter Scott’s vast popular success, a youthful William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a novel loosely based on Scott’s Ivanhoe. Irreverently exploring what happened after Scott’s novel ended, Rebecca and Rowena takes as its premise Ivanhoe’s mistaken marriage to the wrong woman – ‘icy, faultless, prim’ Rowena – and ridiculously reunites the hero with his first love, the Jewess Rebecca. From bawdy and blood-thirsty Richard the Lion-heart, to Wamba, Ivanhoe’s Shakespearean Fool, Thackeray’s characters come into their own as facetious renditions of hackneyed medieval stereotypes. His is a surreal, parallel universe, stuffed with anachronistic props and starring a host of twelfth-century cynics.

• ASIN: ‎ 1843910187
• Publisher: ‎ Hesperus Press Ltd; first modern ed edition (1 September 2002)
• Language: ‎ English
• Paperback: ‎ 112 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 9781843910183
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1843910183