The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart: A Study of 17th Century Personation (AMS Studies in the Renaissance)

Dust jacket notes: "Prince Henry was the son of James I of England and as Prince of Wales focused the hopes and imaginations of both English and Scottish Protestants on his own mythic role as future conqueror of European Catholicism. The book begins with an analysis of the personae Scots Presbyterians used at Henry's birth (1594) to describe his messianic role. Subsequent chapters show the development of the personations of Christian conqueror applied as the Prince grew older, especially by English writers. At the same time that his mythic presence was being shaped by these symbolic associations, the boy himself was conducting his life as though the trappings were literally true. By the time of his sudden and still unexplained death in 1612, Prince Henry Stuart was a potent threat to the peace of Europe, but this potency was purely the product of a myth which had become indistinguishable from reality. Throughout the book the author integrates biographical technique and the discipline of literary criticism. Since Henry did not live a full life, and since his short life was itself dominated by the symbols and myths created by other men and imposed on him, the author has identified and described the structure and the principal themes of that life as though it were a literary construction - which, in fact, it was. This is the first attempt at a full-scale biography of Prince Henry since Thomas Birch's in 1760. The interpretive use of royal portraiture as part of the mythic biography is effective, and there are new interpretations of Raleigh's History of the World and Ben Jonson's Oberon as well as new suggestions about the work of a score of other writers that extend the interest of the book beyond its historical and religious implications to students of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature."