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 dust” historians, and even provides a fictional source for his tale, an Anglo-Norman manuscript belonging to Sir Arthur Wardour, himself a character in one of Scott’s earlier novels. As far as literal historical truth in the novel is concerned, we should take Scott’s prefatory follies to heart, and take an expansive, “romantic” view.
But this is not to say we should not take the historical lessons of Ivanhoe seriously. Scott’s most acute critic, György Lukács, extends the argument of Scott’s preface to challenge all those readings of the novel that equate its historical pastiche with shallow theatricality or, in the common phrase of contempt invented for Scott, mere “tushery.” “Scott’s greatness,” declares Lukács in his seminal work The Historical Novel, “lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types… [his] way of presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of history” (p. 35). Scott’s choice of historical subject is never accidental, far less ornamental. Heroes such as Ivanhoe or Edward Waverley might think of themselves romantically, but they are not themselves romanticized. Both are examples, says Lukács, of Scott’s distinctly modern “middling” heroes, whose imaginations far outstrip their real achievements. After his flirtation with the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Waverley retreats to his safe English estate and the bland anonymity of an English gentleman. Ivanhoe likewise has his day of glory at Ashby, only to recede thereafter into pale ineffectuality. His behavior during the battle for Torquilstone—where, from his sickbed, he encourages Rebecca’s lurid commentary on the fighting—is particularly pathetic, like a rabid sports fan shouting at the television. Then, when his spirit finally revives for the showdown with Bois-Guilbert at Templestowe, Scott denies his hero the crowning chivalric deed he so desperately desires. Ivanhoe does not so much as scratch his Templar foe: Bois-Guilbert merely self-destructs.