Sophoclecm Tragedy

FANFARE FOR ELIZABETH (227 pp ]--Edifh Slfwell--Macmillan ($2.50)

Henry VIII believed that his new bride, Anne Boleyn, was comparable to the finest products of the royal orchards--"a wife with a strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a soft velvet head like a melicotton [peach]." But old Farmer Brocke insisted that the new Queen was actually the daughter of Old Nick, as was proved by the fact that she had a mole shaped like a strawberry on her white neck, and sometimes touched it with her left hand--on which grew a rudimentary sixth finger. Farmer Brocke believed that King Henry had married a witch, and one rainy day he grumbled to Mistress Higons: "It is 'long of the King that this weather is so troublous and unstable, and I wene that we shall never have better weather whiles the King reigneth, and therefore it makes no matter if he were knocked or patted on the head."

This treasonable grouch caused poor Farmer Brocke to be knocked, not patted, on the head by the royal executioner. But his view was shared by thousands of Englishmen--affected equally by medieval superstition and horror over Henry's conflict with the Pope. Crowds screamed maniacally when the new Queen appeared in public. The very heavens were said to be outraged by the royal sacrilege; the night sky was rent by speeding, flaming symbols of doom, and tongues of lightning came down to earth to meet the blaze of the fires in which the Catholic martyrs were consumed.

"Bell, Book and Candle." Henry VIII stood firm by day, danced the night through with his witch. When the Pope cursed him "with bell, book and candle," and at last excommunicated him, Henry replied that "if the Pope issued ten thousand excommunications, he would not care a straw." Henry exulted because his new Queen was pregnant, and the best necromancers, astrologers and wizards all agreed that the portents indicated an heir to the throne. When, instead, a puling female appeared, Henry's fury was terrible. Was it for this insignificant Elizabeth that he had defied the Pope, divorced his first wife, and even sacrificed to his witch the longest and most comfortable bed in the palace?

Fanfare for Elizabeth is just what the title says (but may not suggest). It is a study not of the reign of the great Queen but of the terrible turmoil and trumpeting that ushered in her birth, childhood and adolescence--years when the lives of privy councilors, dukes, queens, princesses, butchers and bakers hung upon a royal mood, a rash word, or a murderous plot concocted behind velvet curtains.

Esthete Edith Sitwell (Five Variations on a Theme, Victoria of England) is first and foremost a poet, and her book is not the work of a historian but a poetic dramatist. To her the reign of Henry VIII is a "Sophoclean tragedy of passions, faiths, lusts, and ambition that had the fever of lust . . . in a world of giant spiritual upheavals." In the center of the stage stands Henry himself--"that tragic and lonely being, a giant in scale, a creature of powerful intellect and insane pride of cruelty, vengeance, and appalling rages, of kingly generosity and breadth of understanding . . . a great King in the primitive sense, a human being of . . . unsurpassable, irresistible charm [who] helped to bring about the tragedy through two factors, his kingly sense of duty to his people and his curious power of self-deception."

Fanfare for Elizabeth is an admirable example of what a highly intelligent, imaginative mind can create out of the hard facts of history and biography. In Author Sitwell's hands, Henry's syphilitic affliction assumes the stature of a mighty curse, comparable to the incest of the Oedipus legend; his train of ill-fated wives and his infected, still-born heirs become symbols of man's struggle to deny his fate. Fanfare is likely to give beef-bred historians a bad fit of sulks, but delight those who believe that the top of a woman's head is comparable to a melicotton.

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