Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis by John N. King, and: Reading the Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I by Elizabeth W. Pomeroy (review)

Book Reviews111 self-reflection and, as a result, inflicts his kingdom with a paralysis which his enemies quickly exploit to their own advantage. Unlike Coriolanus and Henry VI, Melville's Billy Budd is ignorant ofboth the world and politics. Even though he represents no special political interest or viewpoint, he nevertheless poses a moral problem for Captain Vere, whose "virtue appropriate to politics . . . has to bear the burden of the clash between goodness and evil" (199). Totally unaware of the existence of evil, Billy is unprepared for Claggart's villainy, and when he kills his antagonist, he places Vere in the dilemma ofhaving to make an inadequate choice between goodness and evil, between Billy's appearance of guilt and Claggart's semblance of innocence. Greene's The Quiet American, according to Johnson, shows how a nation like the United States, "certain in the purity of its motives, convinced of its pity for the suffering and inadequate existence of others, and determined in its power and capacity to remove them, can ensnare itself in its moral innocence" so blindly that it makes victims ofthe very people it tries to help (217). The "quiet American" PyIe, a political innocent in the American foreign service in Vietnam, obtusely uses a corrupt tribal chieftain and violence to bring democracy to a nation which has never known any kind of political freedom. PyIe and his real-life counterparts in American politics are characterized, in the eyes ofboth Greene and Johnson, as "Harvard graduates in morality, both untouched by and divorced from the world they claim to rescue but fail to understand" (222). Stating that his book has been written "in praise of politics," Johnson concludes that "certain moral dispositions exclude politics, are deeply incompatible with it, and in fact endanger it" (249), and points out that in real life it is possible for a political innocent like Anna Louise Strong to praise Stalin's slave camps for "remaking human beings" who were otherwise useless to society (255). Johnson's book is fascinating not only as a reading of four literary works but also as a commentary on special interest politics in the last decade of the twentieth century. ROBERT C. STEENSMA University of Utah JOHN N. KING. Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. 285 p. ELIZABETH W. POMEROY. Reading the Portraits ofQueen Elizabeth I. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1989. 98 p. The appearance of two books on Tudor iconography within the year signals the importance that art history and interdisciplinary approaches now have for Renaissance studies. Although both works treat similar subjects, but with almost no overlap, what is striking about them are their very different approaches to iconography and literature. John King studies the evolving 112Rocky Mountain Review iconography of Tudor monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, arguing for a continuity of iconography and image-making from the late medieval period through the post-reformation period that conscientiously links religious and political imagery to the Tudor cause. In contrast to King's historicist study, Elizabeth Pomeroy's intent in analyzing ten ofthe approximately 135 surviving portraits ofElizabeth I is to unsettle previous interpretations by applying new theoretical approaches to the paintings. Acknowledging his debt to the ground-breaking studies of Frances Yates, Roy Strong, and others, King applies Panofsky's iconographical analysis of images in cultural contexts and is able to link royal images to texts and political/theological events in a significant way. This historical approach to iconography also allows King to explain how and why Tudor apologists could appropriate and transform older, Catholic iconography into Protestant or Tudor imagery. King demonstrates how the central paradigms ofTudor iconography derive from and modify orthodox religious imagery from the late Middle Ages as well as from an alternative Protestant tradition stemming from Luther. In particular, the new Protestant and Tudor iconography favored Old Testament models and paradigms in accord with Barbara Lewalski's definition of Protestant Biblical poetics. The new Tudor iconography ofa "godly" monarch could recall earlier imperial themes such as those favored by Charlemagne in its attempts to depict the primacy ofthe Crown over the Tiara. Indeed, part of the value...