Perkin Warbeck Project

Introduction-Perkin Warbeck 's Womanly Imposture

Historically speaking, critics have been perplexed by Mary Shelley's fifth novel, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830). Certainly, enough ink reproaches Perkin Warbeck 's heavy-handedness as a historical romance. To this end, an 1830 review for the Edinburgh Literary Journal notes the novel's "chief fault" as a failure to "blend together with sufficient skill what is fictitious and what is true" (350).   Displaying a similar spirit of indulgence, the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal states that the book's womanliness--its "peculiar charm" and "feminine delicacy of feeling"--redeems its author's amateurish lapses: her tendency to "overlook the vraisemblance of the romance" and her "eagerness to impress upon readers her own peculiar view of the historical fact" (457). Largely positive, these reviews nonetheless reflect the gendered assumptions that have shaded Perkin Warbeck 's reception by almost two centuries of academics. Routinely passed over in surveys of Shelley's fiction or quickly abbreviated to evidence of what happens when a literary author writes for profit, Perkin Warbeck boasts few admirers. In 1953 Elizabeth Nitchie named Perkin Warbeck the "least alive and least interesting of [Shelley's] works" (168).   Further, according to Nitchie, the novel tries too hard and succeeds too well at imitating dry historiography; it would have been a better novel, she implies, had Shelley contained herself to the feminine space of pure invention. Writing twenty years later, William Walling and Safaa El-Shater agree; they judge it an "essentially lifeless novel" that "deserves the oblivion to which it has sunk" (Walling 102; El-Shater 124-125).   To the extent that these prejudices continue within Shelley studies, since 1970 Perkin Warbeck has been the primary subject of less than a dozen fully developed critical discussions.   Though few in number, however, the researches of scholars amply demonstrate the ways in which Perkin Warbeck defies reduction to a common catalogue of literary crimes and deserves attention as a sophisticated convergence of literary and political discourses.

Indeed, though twentieth-century scholars often address Perkin Warbeck as a transitional work marking Shelley's descent from Romantic visionary to Victorian scribbler, evidence suggests that she began composing Perkin Warbeck in late 1826 and may have started researching and collecting material on the topic as early as 1818. Her letters and journal reveal the vast amounts of time and energy devoted to ensuring its design and authentic detail.   However, the rage for historical novels had been in steady decline since the publication of Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819, and printers such as John Murray, to whom Shelley first offered her novel in 1827, were skeptical of new works in the waning form.   When Murray politely but firmly passed, Shelley offered the in-progress manuscript to Henry Colburn, publisher of the slow to sell Last Man .   "Every one to whom I have mentioned my subject judges it highly interesting," she assured Colburn, and appended a list of Godwin, Scott, and Thomas Moore--three best selling authors--as endorsement ( Letters 90).   A year later and still without a contract, Shelley reassured him that "for a thousand reasons, there is a better chance for "Perkin Warbeck" than the "Last Man"" (92).   In January of 1830, after three years of shopping her idea to publishers and in the full face of her debts, Shelley reluctantly accepted Colburn's disappointing offer of £ 150, a scanty sum for "Poor Perkin Warbeck," a work she designed to have market appeal, political intelligence, and instructive value (98).   

On the topic of design, more often than not, Shelley's choice of subject matter is attributed to a suggestion made by Godwin, who Betty T. Bennett notes had traded correspondence on Warbeck as early as 1803 and whose novel Mandeville (1817) is often said to have influenced Shelley's historiographical, sentimental method ("Political Philosophy" 371).   The figure of Perkin Warbeck, however, has been a prominent feature within English popular culture since the sixteenth century as a notorious "pretender" and trickster figure.   Accounts of him were well known to the English reading public of 1820.   Even then, however, he was considered better fodder for conspiracy theorists than serious scholars. Over the centuries Warbeck has been the namesake of more novels and plays than histories, and, perhaps for this reason, what we know about him as a historical figure remains largely dependent upon the same "partial pages of Bacon, Hall, and Holinshed" Shelley read during the 1820s and condemned in her romance's preface ( PW 5).

Official Tudor historians agree that Warbeck was a Flemish cloth apprentice who arrived in Cork, Ireland, in 1491, and shortly thereafter began to pose as the younger of the Princes in the Tower, the missing sons of Edward IV presumably murdered at the behest of Richard III.   From here, tradition states, the cheat took on a life of its own. For the next eight years, Warbeck bounced between the royal courts of the Duchess of Burgundy, Charles I of France, and James IV of Scotland, each of whom proclaimed him the true king of England at one time or another.   So convincing was he in his role that Warbeck even managed to marry a royal kinswoman of James IV of Scotland, Katherine Gordon.   In addition, he was able to invade England with small mercenary forces on three separate occasions in 1495, 1496, and 1497.   Each invasion was less successful than the one before, a point used in chronicles such as Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) to suggest that Warbeck truly was nothing more than a mighty trifle.   Henry VII hanged Warbeck in 1499 for treason, and, in the process of silencing him, gave ironic power to rumors insisting that Warbeck was the real thing.

Counter-histories insisting Warbeck was the real Duke of York have appeared with regularity ever since Thomas Gainsford's 1618 text, True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck .   From Gainsford forward, the Warbeck tale has appeared at the center of anti-establishment narratives defending Richard III as an ideal king of the people and condemning Henry Tudor as an avaricious, foreign usurper. An essential part of these counter-chronicles is Warbeck's association with the Male Cinderella, a popular motif in the English folk tradition with origins reaching back beyond the twelfth century.   Lisa Hopkins notes that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, literary resurrections of the Yorkist pretender often coincided with periods of socio-political insurrection.   So it was that in 1825 and in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and George IV's public sex scandals, the Warbeck Conspiracy resurfaced as a central part of a popular anti-history, John Bayley's The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London . As an indication of how interest in Warbeck grew subsequently, five books taking him as their subject appeared on the market between 1829 and 1832.  Among the most complex and multi-layered of these was Mary Shelley's revision of Warbeck into an "unfortunate Prince" and a "hero to ennoble the pages of a humble tale" (Shelley, PW 6).   Indeed for a late Romantic writer like Shelley, Warbeck's association with a political counter-culture seems to have only added to his appeal.   Her mere assumption of the subject speaks of a commitment to the ideals if not the methods of liberalism.   Shelley, however, may have also seen the safety provided in Warbeck's marginality. Through him she could speak a subversive tale to those willing to listen while fooling those hostile to her claims into believing that she had said nothing at all.

Because of his marginality, Warbeck's character and movements afforded Shelley a certain liberty in emplotment, speculation, and interpretation. Thus she can make him into a legitimate king and can invent an entire Spanish childhood for him that explains his indoctrination in the codes of chivalry and of classical romance.   In addition, his cultural status as a celebrated "counterfeit" allowed Shelley an opportunity to explore and exploit specific, gender-inflected connotations.   On this it's worth noting that Francis Bacon's famous History of Henry VII , a source-text from which Shelley draws and argues, represents Warbeck as effeminate, illegitimate, and criminal.   As I shall later demonstrate, the intertextual presence of Bacon in Shelley's text suggests she purposefully exploited the subject as a means of entering into an overarching rumination on dissembling and gender politics.   Through the metaphor of effeminate imposture, Shelley could explore her own marginality in a gender-segregated literary market.   And on this point it is worth taking a moment to examine more closely the leading of the "thousand reasons" Shelley felt her historical romance had for success: namely, its selective gestures toward and subtle adaptations of Scott's masculine romance form.

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READING SCOTT

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, romance was a form of declining and ambiguous value in England's intellectual economy which was increasingly characterized by a passion for active science, a rhetoric of utility, and a burgeoning sense of general improvement.   On this matter, Andrew Welsh notes that Scott, the pervasive example of a levelheaded historical novelist, irked contemporaries such as Coleridge by disavowing any belief in his own fantastic creations.   Even more disturbing to Scott's intellectual readers, Welsh contends, was the fact that Scott seemed equally intent on divorcing romance from its only claim to cultural validity, namely its ability to morally educate.   In stark contrast with Scott's model, Shelley opens her romance by declaring that she not only believes the literal truth of her fiction, but that she gives it moral authority over "real history":  

The various adventures of this unfortunate Prince in many countries, and his alliance with a beautiful and high-born woman, who proved a faithful, loving wife to him, take away the sting from ignominy which might attach itself to his fate; and make him, we venture to believe, in spite of the contumely later historians have chosen, in the most arbitrary way, to heap upon him, a fitting object of interest -- a hero to ennoble the pages of a humble tale. ( PW 6)

Consciously or not, Shelley's claim invites a reading in terms of prevailing assumptions about the potentially invidious nature of fiction and the ambiguous authority of a female romancer who claims to have written a real history.   Running underneath Perkin Warbeck , is an assumption that the politics of genre and of gender are closely linked.

Unlike Valperga (1823), her first historical novel set in medieval Italy, Perkin Warbeck is located in a specifically English context, one where the base brutalities of civil war and the despotisms of rising materialism are definitive atmospheric elements.   In such a way, her novel locates itself inside and askew of Scott's nationalistic model.   Like Scott's Ivanhoe , a text with which Shelley's is often compared, Perkin Warbeck 's view of English history is marked by a sense of foreignness that implies English readers are foreigners even unto their own inheritances and political legacies. This concept raises an interesting issue:   in his Introduction to Ivanhoe , Scott claims that one of the reasons the Scottish historical novel had been so successful with the English was because of the liberty afforded the author. Confident that very few of his English readers had actually seen Scotland beyond the numbing trials of a summer tour, "eating bad dinners, sleeping on truckle beds, stalking from desolation to desolation," he could fudge names, dates and events with impunity (Scott 16). He additionally implies that the Waverley novels worked because of the special effect gained by setting the reader among unfamiliar customs, legends, and terrain but in a time not so very distant from the present.   Waverley , for instance, takes advantage of the contemporaneous sense of the "sixty years since" the 1745 Jacobite rebellion: fashions and manners are not so distant to readers as to require the author's skill in translating them in terms of temporal distance, but only in terms of their cultural remoteness.

Ivanhoe , an English romance, and works like it such as Shelley's rewriting of medieval history, consciously invert this successful formula. In order to see this, one need only glance at the ways in which in Ivanhoe and Perkin Warbeck the geography and people are English, if distantly so, and history itself is the foreign country requiring both mediation and translation.   If such a reversal is to work at all, Scott contends, the author must demonstrate a close familiarity with available historical sources, a keen eye for reading details of an implied domestic life, and a sense of the ways in "old English manners and customs" encourage national pride (Scott 17).   Shelley seems to have followed Scott's formula to the letter.   She called upon Godwin, deep in composition of his four volume History of the Commonwealth of England (1824-1828), for known accounts of the first Tudor court and the real Warbeck. She established correspondence and traded materials with Thomas Croker, the leading scholar on Irish antiquaries and ancient history and gratefully thanked him for his help by writing, "Were I indeed the least learned I might give interest to my pages by a picture of manners & incidents little known--If I get beyond mere generalities --helped or disfigured by <the> my imagination I must owe it to you"   ( Letters 2:65).   For materials on Scotland, she approached Scott himself, to whom she confessed "it is almost impertinent to say how <incongruous> foolish it appears to me that I should intrude on your ground, or to compliment one all the world so highly appreciates" ( Letters 2:78).   There is no evidence Scott replied to her letter.   Nonetheless, it reveals Shelley's interest in uncovering the "details" of history that would allow for her revision of the historical account. To Scott she writes: "You are completely versed in the Antiquities of your country, and you would confer a high favor on me if you could point out any writer of its history--any document, anecdote or even ballad connected with [Warbeck] generally unknown" (78).  

Scott's formula for suspending readers' disbelief hinges on imaginatively penetrating and reconstructing a hidden and nearly lost domestic scene.   In this space of the "everyday," Scott locates the essence of historical realism, that is, in the customs, manners, daily movements, routines, and minutia of everyday life that Shelley anxiously worried in 1830 would forever circumscribe and delimit her new "exclusive life among women" (Shelley, Journals   514). Yet "details" are directly related in Scott's view with the novel's masculine claims to factual authority.   Scott writes that "the severer antiquary may think, that, by this intermingling fiction with truth, I am polluting the well of history with modern inventions, and impressing upon the rising generation false ideas of the age which I describe" (Scott 17).   Scott "cannot but in some sense admit the force of this reasoning" but undermines the force of such a confession by baiting the objections of exacting philosophers (17).   To them, Scott writes,  

I neither can, nor do pretend, to the observation of complete accuracy... [b]ut the same motive which prevents my writing the dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or in Norman French ... prevents my attempting to confine myself within the limits of the period in which my story is laid.    (17)

In such manner, Scott defends inaccuracy not via the Romantic infatuation with the feminine license of the imagination, but via the masculine author's primary purpose, which Scott defines in rationalist terms as making the past intelligible to the present.   Scott meets the challenge of romance's feminine identity by eliding it altogether.   Indeed, according to Scott, the romancer's masculine power and authority rest in the skill with which he acts as a cultural translator: "the subject assumed should be as it were translated into the manners, as well as the language, of the age we live in" (17-18).

Like Scott's model, Shelley's historical romance concentrates on the "extensive neutral ground ... of manners and sentiments which are common to us and our ancestors" (Scott 18). Emphasizing that "human nature in its leading features is the same across the ages," Perkin Warbeck artfully crosses into the space guarded by and protected for the real truths of real history and real historians (Shelley, PW 6).   Indeed, the first lines of the novel's Preface announce its literary "doubleness" as both an entertaining romance and a sober corrective to authoritative history:

The story of Perkin Warbeck was first suggested to me as a subject for historical detail. On studying it, I became aware of the romance which his story contains, while, at the same time I felt it would be impossible for any narration, that should be confined to the incorporation of facts related by old Chroniclers, to do it justice. ( PW 5)  

The Preface immediately locates Perkin Warbeck in terms of what Kristeva termed "relational positionality," that is, in terms of its self-conscious invocations, revisions, and recyclings not only of other literary texts, but also of the various cultural and social discourses upon which those texts depend for intelligibility and meaning. Among the most important of these discourses are the gender-oriented values of readers culturally conditioned to regard "masculine" history and "feminine" romance as warring spheres of possibility. In Shelley's text, romance acts as a sort of corrective to history's regulation of what is both knowable and useful to know about the past.   To this end, when placed beside one another, both the facts and fictions of Shelley's Perkin Warbeck refuse vertical or hierarchical evaluations.   Instead the contiguity of history and romance invites a reading in terms of ideological border crossings, cultural and temporal translations and authorial transliterations. At the core of Shelley's novel is a study of how meaning "happens," how it is formed and reformed, how each word or text contains and illuminates other words or texts.

Indeed, the novel's Preface prompts readers to recognize how the ensuing narrative is constructed as a web: touch upon one textual thread and the whole will resonate.   In the middle sits the "Author of Frankenstein," a signifier for a constructed persona rather than for an actual woman-writer. Typically, Shelley's choice of a nom de plume is ascribed to the legal injunctions of Sir Timothy Shelley rather than to any act of self-authoring. To do so in the case of Perkin Warbeck , however, is to ignore how Shelley appropriates the authority of the master of the historical novel, Scott, who stood behind the "Author of Waverley."   Related to this is the gender-ambivalent "I" of the Preface, who, as in The Last Man , speaks as both a reader and a writer, and thus as both a subject of language and an agent able to transpose the meanings of one tale--one sign or signifying system--onto another. In such a spirit, Shelley prepares us for transposition of a new feminist allegory onto a traditional tale.   Self-consciously aware of how the feminine equates with the immoral or the unlawful in the traditional tale, Shelley's novel revises the political metaphor of imposture to explore her own compromised position in a male-dominated literary market.

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READING FORD, WRITING BACON

Generic crossing and gendered passing were literal as well as textual concerns for Shelley in the years leading up to and through her novel's composition. From her letters, we can surmise that she probably began researching her subject--the rise and fall of Tudor history's most famous imposter--in late 1826.   At around this same time, she took in and became close friends with Isabelle Robinson, an unwed mother from a wealthy family.   A year later, while nursing Robinson through an illness, Shelley wrote her friend Jane Williams, "You may guess how my time is taken up--I steal an hour for writing in the morning, & another for a walk at night"   ( Letters 6). The plots of her new novel and friendship were soon mutually informed by ideas of gender fraud and generic inversion.   To this effect, Betty T. Bennett's study Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and A Scholar speculates that Shelley was not only privy to the mock marriage of Robinson to another woman, Mary Diana Dods, but that she played a crucial role in Dods' and Robinson's impersonation on the Continent of an eccentric but conventionally heterosexual married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Sholto Douglas.  

Certainly, by the fall of 1827 preparations for the "Douglases" masquerade among an elite Anglo-French coterie seem to have fully intersected with Shelley's literary study of imposture and dissembling.   In late September, Shelley wrote two letters: the first, dated September 25, was to her father, William Godwin, requesting information on the Princes of the Tower, the children of Edward IV.   The second, dated September 26, was to John Howard Payne requesting passports for herself, her son, and the "Douglas family."   In both cases, Shelley sought official documents--histories in the case of Godwin, travel papers in the case of Payne--as props for a sustained masquerade.   To the extent that Shelley's efforts were successful, neither Dods, a woman passing as a man, nor Perkin Warbeck , a feminine history passing as a masculine romance, have attracted much attention in the century and a half since.   Both "plots," however, dramatically reveal the intensity with which Shelley's art responds to real-life circumstances and issues, as well as the extent to which she was able to put in to practice the radical ideals of her parents.  

To this end, narrative rupture, anachronistic display, and idiosyncratic reversioning are central rather than peripheral to Perkin Warbeck 's meaning as a text which "undoes" the nationalistic myths upon which it depends for its existence as a counter-narrative.   A romance actively engaged in literally unwriting itself, Perkin Warbeck 's power lies in how it structurally and thematically foregrounds itself as a feminine imposter within English historical and literary tradition.   In such a way, Shelley's historical romance showcases the sociopolitical and the textual as analogous scenes governed by phallocentric hierarchies and contests for dominance.   More importantly it showcases the ways in which England's masculinist traditions--its nationalistic mythology and faith in upward, rational progress--confine the feminine to romance's limited plot lines.  

As noted earlier, elsewhere in Mary Shelley's writing she likens herself to both the fictional Robinson Crusoe and the historical Columbus as powerful though friendless architects of modern ideals.   In Perkin Warbeck , this trope arises again in the figure of Hernan De Faro, an amalgam of several faint historical precedents who is closely associated with Columbus's expeditions to the New World.   An ambiguous cipher of both Spain's expansion into the New World and its retraction upon itself with the barbaric and brutal expulsion of the Moors, De Faro functions as a trope of foreignness and of inner division.   A Christian and a Moor, he is also a walking figure of speech that functions only within the confines of chivalric romance and reveals the ways in which the values of the feudal past, though unrecoverable, are inescapable underpinnings of modern statecraft.   His presence in the narrative participates in a larger argument that history is a site of absolute alterity that must be collapsed into symbols by a romancer who sympathetically understands its legacy and can thereby translate it for successive generations.  

This complex of meanings carries over in her sympathetic but unsparing portrait of Prince Richard, the imposter/pawn upon whom the Yorkists based their claims to power.   In him, Mary Shelley created a character sketch of the Romantic idealist who willingly sacrifices people and institutions to his own self-interested definition of justice.   Neither hero nor con man, Richard's greatest flaw is his inability to free himself from the biases, prejudices, and narrow morality of the aristocratic training upon which his identity as a defrauded king depends.    Mary Shelley's unfaltering intermingling of historical fact with extra-historical sources (inclusive of wholly fictionalized episodes and popular legend), as well as her harking back to texts which did the same with specific aesthetic and political purposiveness, suggest that for Mary Shelley the story of Perkin Warbeck is at once a contemplation of the limits of historical knowledge, a critique of historiography, and an exploitation of romance. On this point its seems important to remember that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her primary source, John Ford's 1634 play, Perkin Warbeck: A Strange Truth , was all but neglected as the work of an author straddling two periods (Jacobean and Carolinian) but exemplifying nor belonging to neither.   Given the aura of critical neglect surrounding Ford, it seems all the more intriguing that Mary Shelley would choose his play as a model for her own work and suggests that for her, as it was for Ford and his seventieth century contemporaries, the figure of Perkin Warbeck resonated with the topical political tensions of her own day.   The general obscurity of Ford's carefully nonconformist text has consequences for interpretation of Mary Shelley's deliberately affiliated account.  

Noted Ford scholar and literary historian Lisa Hopkins writes that "Ford's version of events, as part of the early-seventeenth-century reappraisal of Richard III, is clearly concerned to stand in conspicuous opposition to the version of events offered by More and, above all Shakespeare" (265). Shelley's text is similarly concerned, and notions of exile , temporal rupture, and generic unsettledness give Perkin Warbeck its special texture as a story about an age of lack: an age without spiritual or scientific sureties, absent of a stable morality or political ideology, and empty of confident meanings.   Evidence of an embedded intertextual narrative about imitative desire and disquiet comes in the novel's fifty-eight chapter tags.   The majority of these, more than half, are drawn from Shakespeare's politically savvy chronicle plays (most frequently from the Henriad).   Second in frequency to Shakespeare's dramas are epigraphs from Spenser's panegyric allegory of a Tudor myth of origins, The Faerie Queene (particularly Books I and III). Shakespeare's and Spenser's texts represent the dominant strands of nationalistic and ethnographic discourse against which Shelley's tale locates itself as a corrective mythology, that is, as a curative to the falsehoods and corruptions plaguing modern English consciousness and impeding sociopolitical progress.   These implications are reinforced by Shelley's specific invocations of John Ford's play, the intriguing but neglected dramatization of the Warbeck conspiracy that ranks third in frequency among her romance's chapter epigraphs and that provides a tradition if not a model for Shelley's brand of socio-cultural revisionism.

Ford's play is a Jacobean representation of the Warbeck story in terms of characters who, caught in webs of language, busily "make" history before an audience oppressively aware of what history has, in fact, made of them. Given the aura of neglect still surrounding Ford, it seems intriguing that Shelley would recycle so many elements of his play in her own work.   Like Ford, however, she seems to have understood Perkin Warbeck as a figure who could speak to the topical tensions and anxieties of her own age, and her special invocations of Ford imply the ways in which she found precedents for the questions troubling nineteenth-century ideological life.   To this end, she chronologically invokes scenes from Ford's play to contextualize her own version of the Warbeck tale.  By aligning her novel with Ford's play of the similar name--Ford's is subtitled "A Strange Truth" where Shelley's is "A Romance"-- Shelley in effect proposes with Ford an alternative history to the Tudor myth disseminated into the Elizabethan imagination by Shakespeare.   In such manner, she announces herself as an author more in the tradition of Ford than of Shakespeare and thus more in the business of writing against the authority of literary and historical tradition than writing for it.   

Through Ford, Shelley also announces an intent to stand in wary regard of Bacon as a historiographer and a precursor.   Bacon, with whom Ford shared social as well as ideological connections, broached a new kind of historiography in 1622 with the publication of the History of the Reign of King Henry VII .   Bacon's only completed work of civil history, it is a core text for both Shelley and Ford's reimaginations of the Warbeck Conspiracy.   Ford openly drew from it and in his Epistle Dedicatory gave Bacon enormous credit for having "enlightened" the "darkness of a former age" and cast Bacon as a "both learned and an   / honorable pen" (Epistle Dedicatory 1-2).   Thus, Ford announces his admiration for Bacon at a time when Bacon's ethics and claims were most in question.   On this it is worth remembering the history of Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII , a history of which Shelley would have been well aware.  

Bacon's career was virtually eclipsed overnight by charges of corruption.   Having finally achieved a seat in the House of Lords in January of 1621, by January of 1622 Bacon had been removed from his office in the High Court, impeached, briefly imprisoned, fined, and barred from coming within twelve miles of Parliament.   Following a short imprisonment (three days), he retired to his country seat where he entered into a closing period of frenetic scholarship and productivity.   His History of the Reign of Henry VII appeared in March of 1622.   Nearly a dozen more works followed, and Bacon showed little sign of slackening his pace when he was suddenly and fatally stricken with pneumonia in April 1626.   Despite these clear intellectual achievements, in 1634, the year Ford's play probably appeared, Bacon's upstanding image had been irrevocably compromised.   If his political troubles hadn't elided his earlier repute, Lisa Hopkins argues that guilt-by-association had. While Ambassador to France, Bacon's brother, Anthony, was charged with sodomy, a point which Hopkins suggests had specific interpretive consequences for contemporary audiences of Ford's play, consequences pointing to Ford's indirect engagement with themes of sexual deviancy as a metaphor for political transgression through topical allusions to "three, or perhaps even four" scandalous love stories (Hopkins, "Touching Touchets").  

Shelley understood the importance of Bacon's influence on English Letters and philosophy, and allusions to his writings are scattered throughout her own works.   In her own Preface to Perkin Warbeck , she alludes to his work as part of a rich revisionist tradition which sought to provide an alternative and more factually faithful account of Richard III as a popular king treated shabbily by biased historical accounts.   However, equally telling are the ways in which Shelley's romance is preoccupied by Bacon's anxious relegation of fiction and the "Dramatic" to the morally effeminate and liminal.   Indeed, she names him specifically in the Preface as one of the authors against whose work her own should be judged and read.   On this it is worth remembering that in his master plan for human advancement Bacon positions fiction as a great dissembler: as a potential mechanism of an inscrutable God which acts more often as a courtesan, a White Devil, who beautifully enfolds lies. To this end, Bacon dictates that the first step toward advancing human knowledge "ought to be to separate and reject vain speculations and whatsoever is empty and void, and to preserve and augment whatsoever is solid and fruitful, that knowledge may not be as a courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only, or as a bond-woman, to acquire and gain from her master's use, but as a spouse for generation, fruit, and comfort."   (Bacon, "Advancement of Learning" 235-236).   Bacon's elision of gender with levels of usefulness and solidity seems clear.   The feminine is evoked as a pneumenal realm, airy and light, for "pleasure and vanity" only and of little straightforward use to humanity.   This depiction of the feminine is closely aligned with Bacon's later discussion of Poesy as the second principal of learning that, as a "mere imitation of history at pleasure" (236), is as capable of corrupting as it is of improving human understanding.   In a metaphorization of the womb as "empty and void," Bacon consciously engenders valuable knowledge as the antithesis of the feminine.   Science thus becomes a masculine, solid, fruitful, and vigorous pursuit, filled with the seeds of improvement.

Ford's play opens with a speech by Henry VII, a pious king who metes out a bloody form of justice and taxation, not out of malice or smallness of character, but out of largesse of mind.   The play's version of Henry VII differs only in degree from Bacon's laudatory portrait of young Henry Tudor.   Ford's Henry is long sighted, a quality denied him in Bacon's account but in keeping with Bacon's portrait of an ideal king.   Much more in keeping with Bacon's portrait, Ford's Henry opens the drama with an immediate nod to his questionable right to the crown:   "Still to be haunted, still to be pursued" (I.i.1).   Also in keeping with Bacon's model is Ford's dramatic representation of Warbeck shrouded in a language of demonic enchantment and strangeness.   In both Ford's play and Bacon's chronicle, a pervasive and distinctive terminology of witches, witchcraft, and charms are associated with Warbeck's rise.   It is not with Warbeck, however, but with his adoptive aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, that the language occurs most frequently.   As Jean Howard notes, Burgundy appears in both Bacon and Ford as a violent symbol of feminine political power and represents a menacing feminine capacity to undo masculine institutions and authority.   Identified in both Bacon's and Ford's texts as the Conspiracy's mastermind, Burgundy is a "woman-monster" who forwards "devilish policies" with a "meteor strong influence" (Ford I.i.12,15; Bacon, History 99).   In Ford's play, Burgundy's psychological machinations are successful enough to have Warbeck believe himself to be England's rightful king.

Ford's play is firmly rooted in its Jacobean obsession with appearance versus reality and ties this realm of inquiry into the play's notion of its own historicity.   Warbeck is addressed as a historical conundrum: a confessed imposter according to chronicle accounts, on Ford's stage he looks like a king, speaks like a king, and acts like a king. Warbeck is so fitted for his kingly role, that he ill-fits the role of the arch deceiver and seems instead a powerful example of the individual's power to literally will forth an alternative reality.   It is clear that Ford's Warbeck believes himself to be king; the fact that he convinced others to believe him is evidence of a brilliant criminality, a truthfulness to his claims, or a pervading psychosis.   The tension between appearance and reality is sharp as not even Warbeck seems able to decide.   Ford refuses to, and leaves the audience with this largish interpretive problem to sort through.   The problem is further complicated by the ways in which Perkin operates in the text as a feminized monarch who, as Jean Howard writes, "achieves nobility only in a feminine posture of resignation and patient suffering" (270).   In "Touching Touchets: Perkin Warbeck and the Buggery Statute," Lisa Hopkins catalogues the sexual connotations of counterfeiture during the early modern period, its association with effeminacy, theatrical transvestitism, and sodomy.   Hopkins incisively aligns her gender conscious reading of Ford's Perkin Warbeck with the work of Howard, who argues that "by recapitulating and transforming" Shakespeare's history plays, particularly Henry V , Ford's play reproduces the age's "anxiety about royal effectiveness and legitimacy" (Howard 264).   It does so, Howard explains, by focusing on a figure who complicates rather than reinforces the ideological kinship between kingship and masculinity:   "By feminizing both Perkin and the history genre, Ford shows how a patriarchal, absolutist culture unthinks itself" (264).  

Ford's play is an interesting precursor to Shelley's romance because it immediately presences a wary regard for the power of the imagination to will forward an alternative reality, a reality where an imposter can look, speak, act, and, in fact, become king.   In addition, it provides a context for understanding Shelley's study of imposture as a modern metaphor of femininity and for Woman herself.   Ford's play broaches questions regarding Divine Right and, as Howard eloquently notes, wonders what happens when the signs demarcating a king's innate difference dissolve.   In Shelley's novel, the question is posed again though somewhat differently: what happens when the signs demarcating male and female authors as innately different dissolve? What is to stop a woman from writing in the voice and codes of a man, or to stop a romance from speaking in the voice and codes of a history?  

Like Ford's cast, Shelley's characters engage in making history with a clear eye on manipulating and controlling what history will say of them.   To this end, Shelley presents her Perkin Warbeck as he considers himself, as a Prince and an outcast, and she presents his obsession with England and with war-making, not as a product of valiant kingship, but as a consequence of his own anxious desire to be legitimated.   In this textual world, as in the world of book buyers and authors, legitimacy corresponds with masculinity.  

It bears reminding that Shelley composed her last romance during her own foray with the "Douglases" into literal as well as ideological gender bending.   Consciously or coincidentally, Shelley represents the Warbeck Conspiracy through a lens of historical tensions and an awareness of social constructions of gender.   The text questions whether the Truth itself is not gendered and, if so, not more a product of social power arrangements and cultural assumptions than ontological sureties and scientific facts.   Related to this are the six epigraphs Shelley drew from Ford's play to frame her Prince's rise and fall.   Like Ford's model, Shelley's Warbeck conceives of himself in terms of fate-laden language and confounds his enemies with his unshakable belief in his true identity as the Duke of York.   Ford's Perkin Warbeck is oblivious to the ways in which King Henry and his Lancastrian supporters associate him with effeminacy, vipers, poison, and infection as a variety of imposture metaphors that conflate the feminine with social disorder and disease.   A likeable victim, Ford's hero is fully indoctrinated in his Yorkist identity and would have to "turn imposter to myself / Be mine own counterfeit" to admit to being anyone other than the lost Richard (IV. Ii. 27-28).   So too, late in the novel and approaching his last assault for the crown, Shelley's Prince Richard is stunned to hear rumors of his imposture broadly spoken: "As they drew near the bourne, the appellation of Perkin first met the Prince's ear; he was unaware that it had ever been applied to him except by Henry's written proclamations.   It acted as a galling spur" ( PW 339).

On this connection between Ford's and Shelley's heroes, that is, their sense of besieged legitimacy, it's important to note that Shelley's Warbeck additionally resembles Ford's in his bewitching manners and his liberal desire for an affectionate marriage.   Indeed, the issue of Warbeck's marriage to Katherine Gordon, a noble woman and a favorite of James IV, is an important one for both Ford and Shelley.   The question is, why?   In Ford's play Warbeck's desire for his wife's faith, admiration, and affection demarcates him in yet another way as a troubling figure of contaminated masculinity, as "effeminately dolent" and weak-willed (Ford III.iii.75).   To similar effect, Shelley's Warbeck regularly falls into gendered language of self-abhorrence or into the dangerous rhetoric of chivalric virtue immediately following demonstrations of tenderness toward his hapless wife.   Shelley's Prince reiterates throughout the text that he will "not be taken like an unarmed girl" and so underscores his own anxious masculinity, its confusing codes and its protean inflections ( PW 356).  

One illustrative case follows the Prince's marriage to Katherine, their departure from Scotland and embarkation for Ireland.   While literally at sea, Richard falls into a standard pose of the Romantic poet.   Depressed and immersed in self-pity, his dark and beclouded mind is unassailable by the natural beauty all around him.   Closed to the "dim silvery radiance of the stars above" he can see only the ways in which the "sparkling sea mocked their lustre with brighter fires" ( PW 277).   The metaphor is suggestive as it connects the ways in which Richard, like Poesy, may shine and yet be only a reflection, only a copy of a true king, only an imitation of a true man:

[H]e, painting all natural objects with the obscure colouring suggested by his then gloomy spirit, distorting the very scenery of heaven and vast ocean into symbols of his evil fate, gave himself up to the very luxury of woe, -- meanwhile the shadow of a lovely form fell on him . . . (277)

It seems more than a matter of coincidence that Katherine brings Richard back from his own gloomy distortions and imposes a certain realism on his tragical musings.   Through Katherine the sea becomes more than a reflection, more than a mirror to Richard's masculine imagination and expands onto a place of "forgetful extacy" where "nothing mean or trivial or ignoble could visit them" ( PW 278).   Time is stopped.   Visited by such a powerful turn in his emotional perspective, Richard is forced to acknowledge the "power which sentiment possesses to exalt us -- to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration can find no repose on earth except in love" (278).   Possessed of such an insight a rational man might decide to turn away from plans to conquer a kingdom not seen since he was a young child.   Instead, Richard seems threatened by his revelation and in the next chapter he turns to the actions of war-making as a restorative from a bout of effeminate love-making.  

It is here--the site of Warbeck's third and least successful attempt to invade England with a ragtag, ill-trained, and professionally unsupported troop of Cornish yeoman--that the last of Shelley's direct allusions to Ford comes,.   This final nod to Ford is the ostensible departure point for her own fifth act, the odd apologia for Katherine Gordon.   From a military point of view, the results of this last invasion are disastrous.   Thick in the heat of battle and in the midst of performing his kingly masculinity, Richard is oblivious to how with each blow he seals his own fate as one of history's most notorious frauds.   Instead, he is convinced that with enough blood will come proof of his own legitimacy, and he takes joy in war as if the ability to murder and dominate confirms his very right to exist:   "The excess of chivalrous ardour, the burning desire to mingle in the thickest fight made danger happiness, and all the terrible shows of war entrancing joys to York" (283).   What Richard fails to perceive are the ways in which his romanticized sense of his own chivalric ideality is in fact a bare covering for a self-interested thirst for glory, a thirst that causes him, against all common sense, to risk not only the lives of his men but of his own kingly person.   With maniacal zeal, he turns his sword upon his enemies and becomes a character in a chivalric romance, a walking figure of speech, absent of historical complexity and operating according to pre-scripted plot lines:   "the heart that had animated him in Andalusia was awake; as there he smote to death the turbaned Moor; so now he dealt mortal blows on all around" (283).   In defense against charges of his rashness, Richard later justifies his reversion to war in terms of chivalric honor and as the only lasting tribute to the wife he would ultimately leave without a home and at the mercy of his archenemy, Henry VII:  

Cousin, I must have some part of my inheritance: my kingdom I shall never gain --glory -- a deathless name-- oh, must not these belong to him who possesses Katherine?   The proud Scots, who looked askance at my nuptials, shall vow at least that she wedded no craven-hearted loon.   (283)

The irony, of course, is that history vows exactly that Warbeck was craven-hearted, that he fled the battlefield, that he abandoned his troops, and that he was a "loon" so in love with his own deception that he forgot not to believe it.    Thus history's "partial pages" eclipsed the romance of Richard's tale.  

The reasons for Shelley's emulations of Ford's play were no doubt complex and myriad, but clearly in both works there are definitive engagements with a series of interrelated anxieties: anxieties regarding the contradictions of history, the unsettled nature of monarchical power, and the malleability of language. Shelley and Ford treat these anxieties in similarly engendered ways that speak directly to Francis Bacon's contradictory position that Poesy--as the highest of the three faculties of the rational mind, that is, as the most divine--is also the most dangerous and susceptible to corruption. In Ford's play, as in Bacon's history, women are connotatively defined as monstrous undoers of masculine institutions and as contaminations of patriarchal power.   In Shelley' text, however, women such as the Duchess are barely visible.   In fact, the Duchess remains a shadowy figure in Shelley's text, looming in the background but undefined.   The narrative instead concentrates on defining the fates of the purely fictional Monina, the semi-historical Lady Brampton, and the historically maligned Katherine Gordon, all of whom exit the text as vulnerable pawns or victims of powerful men.   Rather than portray vanity, zealousness, and duplicity as innate sexual traits, Shelley argues through figures such as the eager Lady Brampton and the chivalry poisoned Monina that patriarchal, masculinist systems teach women to be victims of their own power and train men to warily regard both women and the feminine as illegitimate, impotent, and irrational.   Nature does not make woman subordinate, Shelley argues, man does, and through various means.   Chief among these means, Shelley's text argues, is the tension separating history from romance, a tension that teaches women their limited plot lines and cautions men to be wary of effeminate corruptions.  

The last of her novels of the 1820s, Perkin Warbeck is also the last of Shelley's novels to be temporally dislocated.   The movement toward temporal realism would culminate in Lodore , a novel she worried might fail because there is "no writhing interest--nothing wonderful or tragic" (emphasis in the original; Bennett, Letters 183).   Shelley's interest in historiography is amply recorded in a series of letters to John Murray in the months following Perkin Warbeck's publication outlining different historical projects for his family library.   The list included a "history of Woman." Murray refused Shelley's confident proposals.   In 1835, she instead went to work for Lardner and wrote a remarkable series of Lives for his Cabinet Cyclopaedia , a series lauded in the press as "one of the most valuable contributions that has ever been made to the cause of general knowledge and national education" (Kucich 209).   As Greg Kucich notes, the social circumstances surrounding the Cabinet Cyclopaedia --its "mass educational appeal" to a general readership openly inclusive of women--"afforded special opportunities for a dissenting contributor like Mary Shelley to address   . . . a female readership's desire for "advancement" while participating more broadly in the shaping of social codes and practices for a newly ascendant class of readers" (209).  

Perkin Warbeck regards itself as a book made from and about other books.   It seems to reserve certain of its meanings for a specially initiated audience, one able to recognize the ways in which its eclectic blend of the political, the temporal, and the poetical explores the limits of its own imitative identity.   It imitates works of historiography proper (Bacon, Hall, & Holinshed); it imitates best selling fictional works by best selling authors (Scott, Godwin); more importantly, it imitates the popular consciousness within which these opposing literary species dwell.   As a sign of its literary hyper-consciousness, Perkin Warbeck is a text defined by rivalries inside rivalries inside rivalries. In such a way, it overtly presences its desire for a special kind of readerly activity: one open to not only the critical implications of its explicitly referenced predecessors and antagonists, but also to those implied in its recycling of the unspoken models confining its own structural and thematic development as a historical novel.   In such manner, Perkin Warbeck functions as a multi-leveled socio-literary critique steeped not only in the nuances of its late fifteenth-century historical subject, but also in the aesthetic and ideological inheritances informing its own production and reception.   At its core, Perkin Warbeck is a text about the loss of meaning, about the mutable nature of gender and about linguistic slippage over time and over genres.  

Frankenstein (1818/1831), Mathilda (1819/1859), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837).

For a sense of Perkin Warbeck's reception in 1830, see reviews in The Athenaeum (29 May 1830), Bell's Weekly Messenger (23 May 1830), The Edinburgh Literary Gazette (12 June 1830), The Edinburgh Literary Journal; Or, Weekly Register of Criticism and Belles Lettres (12 June 1830 and 19 June 1830), The Globe (26 May 1830), The Intelligence (30 May 1830), The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres (22 May 1830), Monthly Magazine, or British Register of Literature, Sciences, and the Belles Lettres (October 1830), New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (November 1830), and The Spectator (8 May 1830).  

Nitchie states, "The novel ... remains one of the least alive and least interesting of her works, talented, as one reviewer said, but a little tedious and heavy" (169).   

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To illustrate a point, a simple keyword search of the MLA bibliography database for Frankenstein on January 27, 2004 garnered 501 "hits" inclusive of journal articles, book chapters, and books.   A similar search for The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck returned five.   To date, less than a dozen articles or chapter length studies have been devoted to Perkin Warbeck.   As a general observation, most treatments concern themselves with reasserting Shelley's indebtedness to or departure from precedents. The result is a mixed impression of Shelley's text as a cumbersome, derivative, yet masterful yoking of research and ideas.   Betty T. Bennett was the first to note in the "Political Philosophy of Mary Shelley's Historical Novels" (1978) the ways in which masculinist assumptions blinded critics to Perkin Warbeck 's radical feminist agenda.   Noting the tendency to view Shelley's novel as either a calculated imitation of Scott's popular Waverley novels or a superficial gesture toward P. B. Shelley's progressivism and philosophy of free love, Bennett argues instead that the oppositional structure of Perkin Warbeck reveals Mary Shelley's emulation of her parents' philosophies and the alternate presentation of Godwin's ideas about social activism with Wollstonecraft's notions of domestic utopianism and gender equality. Mary Shelley demonstrates that both ideals are largely ungraspable by men and women in their current state of evolution, and this, says Bennett, is proof positive that Mary Shelley was not backing away from liberal philosophy but championing it as the distant reward of gradual, if not sluggish, progress.   I would argue, however, that Mary Shelley's novel is distinctly more pessimistic and strident than Bennett contends. See also Lidia Garbin's study, "Mary Shelley and Walter Scott: The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck and the Historical Novel" (2000) where Shelley's "shift" from the ""Gothicism" of Frankenstein (1818) to the "historical romance" of Valperga (1823) and   Perkin Warbeck (1830)" is explained in terms of a mentorship with Sir Walter Scott and his development of the historical novel as an incomplete "retreat from the great social and political issues of his time" (150).   Garbin's study builds upon Muriel Spark's earlier investigation in Mary Shelley (187) of the novel's multi-layered textuality: Spark documents Shelley's extensive research and reading, her correspondence with Scott, her study of Francis Bacon's True History of Henry the Seventh and of John Ford's seventeenth century play True and Wonderful History Of Perkin Warbeck .   Spark eventually surmises that the novel's "confusion of attitudes" and "lack of integration" reflects the "conflict [Shelley] experienced between nostalgia for her rarified existence with [P. B.] Shelley and her new life of social observance" (205-206).   By way of contrast, historian Lisa Hopkins distinguishes Shelley's novel from other contemporary versions of the Warbeck story in "The Self and the Monstrous: Mary Shelley's Perkin Warbeck " by arguing that Shelley does not follow the model of the historical novel provided by Scott but "instead steers the historical novel toward historiography proper as she uses her text to challenge rather than reinforce the version of events that we think we know" (261).   Also departing from the Scott connection, William D. Brewer argues in "William Godwin, Chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck " (1999) that "Mary Shelley's conception of chivalry was ... most profoundly influenced by the writings of her father, William Godwin," and more specifically his novel St. Leon (188).   Through extensive comparison, Brewer develops his thesis that Shelley's novel mourns the ideas and ideals of chivalry, but ultimately recognizes that a "new commercial spirit that ... subordinates everything to the acquisition of wealth" has eclipsed chivalric selflessness (195).   Utilizing a feminist, psychoanalytic approach to arrive at a similar conclusion, Anne M. Frank Wake writes in "Women in Active Voice: Recovering Female History in Mary Shelley's Valperga and Perkin Warbeck " (1997) that Shelley's historical fictions were preparatory work for the formal history of women which she proposed to her publisher in 1830.   Wake makes an interesting case for regarding Shelley's proposal as the first attempt to produce a Women's Studies textbook, but more importantly suggests "that Shelley not only used ... fiction to voice her concerns about women's traditional roles and positions but that in the process she came to challenge and ultimately reject two of the more tantalizing views of history in her day, namely the doctrine of meliorism and the notion that the Middle Ages were somehow a "golden age"" (236).  

See Mary Shelley's letters to Jane Hogg (née Williams) as well as her Journals, which place Warbeck 's composition around the autumn of 1826.   Jean de Palacio has hypothesized that she may have started gathering ideas and material as early as 1818 when she read Hume's History of England .   Emily Sunstein contends that her research began in the summer of 1826.   More recently, Miranda Seymour writes that Shelley began composing the novel in 1828 after her Parisian tour, but this date seems late and out of tune with the evidence provided in Shelley's correspondence.  

Jean de Palacio has catalogued the works devoted exclusively to the question and character of Perkin Warbeck during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.   See pages 148-49 of Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre for a complete list; what follows are some of the more notable treatments: Warbeck is the namesake of plays by John Ford ( Perkin Warbeck: A Strange Truth , 1634), Schiller ( Warbeck , 1798), and L. M. Fontan ( Perkins Warbec , 1828).   He is also the principle in eighteenth-century novels by La Paix de Lizancour ( Le Prétendant, ou le Faux Duc d'York , 1716), Baculard D'Arnaud ( Nouvelles historiques , 1774-1783), and Sophia Lee ( Warbeck: A Pathetic Tale , 1786).       

Among the better known of these are Shelley's romance; Alexander Campbell's politically conventional, fictionalized account, Perkin Warbeck Warbeck : Or the Court of James the Fourth of Scotland , also published in 1830; and an 1835 American collection of tales inspired by and dedicated to Richard of York; or, the "White Rose of England ."  

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I am of course echoing Tilottama Rajan's observations in "             "

Though the topic of literary transvestism has been until recently the domain of Early Modern and Eighteenth-century scholars, recent readings of cross-dressing in Shelley's fiction are worth noting:   See Scott Simpkins persuasive account in "They Do Men in Different Voices" (1992) of the ways in which Shelley and George Sand similarly utilized "cross-dressing narrative" to manipulate readers' "gender-oriented expectations" by providing plot lines that "on the surface support male-oriented values but, below that surface, effectively undermine them" (400).   See also A. A. Markley's "Cross-dressing and Disguise in Mary Shelley's Short-stories" (2000) where Markley reviews contemporary theories of literary transvestism to argue that throughout Shelley's short fiction and novels, narratives of cross-dressing appear to reestablish the normative social order while at once demystifying the system of male domination.   Looking at the relationship between paratext and text in The Last Man, Michael Eberle-Sinatra similarly writes in "Gender, Authorship, and Male Domination: Mary Shelley's limited Freedom in Frankenstein and The Last Man " (2000) that though seemingly resigned to male domination of the literary market place, Shelley consciously attempts to destabilizes the naturalness of that gendered hierarchy by juxtaposing a genderless narrator in the Preface with the male speaker, Lionel Verney, of the text proper.   In all cases, critics' searches for signs of Shelley's open rebellion against the gender system garner proof that Shelley was a master of disguise, often hiding what we seek in plain sight.  

Cryptic but suggestive evidence gleaned from the correspondence and papers of Mary Shelley's extended circle help to substantiate Bennett's claim that Dods was an adept scholar and writer who first played with gender boundaries by publishing under the name David Lindsay and then later took the masquerade a step further by posing as Walter Sholto Douglas.   Dods/Douglas was accepted as the witty if sickly husband to Isabelle Robinson by an elite Anglo-French coterie that included Frances Wright, the Garnett sisters, Prosper Mérimée, Stendahl, Victor Hugo, and General Lafayette.   Flirtatious letters from 25-year-old Prosper Mérimée to Mary Shelley record his disgust at the "married" Isabella Douglas's coquettish behavior, and correspondence between members of the Garnett family register a growing dislike for the sickly "Mr. Douglas."   In all cases, the gender of Mr. Douglas is never called into question, and this, as Bennett elegantly argues, was largely thanks to letters of introduction and government documents obtained for the "Douglases" by Mary Shelley.

See Vincent Petronella for a brief discussion of Perkin Warbeck and its relationship to Elizabethan theatre and representations of women.  

For example, Shelley prefaces Warbeck's reception by Charles I of France with lines from Ford's drama spoken by Earl of Surrey referencing the rumor that Warbeck's appearance was the direct result of the Duchess of Burgundy's political conjuring: "She had styled him -- the fair White Rose of England"   (Shelley 213; Ford I. i. 123-24).    In volume two, Shelley punctuates her hero's voyage to and reception by James IV of Scotland with lines from Acts II (his reception and embrace by Scotland's king), III (his marriage to one of James IV's most favored kinswomen, Katherine Gordon), and IV (James's eventual betrayal of the Yorkist cause in the name of a "general peace" with Spain ).   In volume III, Shelley's invocations are fewer in number but as pointed in meaning.   The volume opens with lines spoken by Ford's Katherine--"I am your wife, / No human power can or shall divorce, / My faith from duty" (Shelley 269; Ford IV. iii. 101-03)--and in so doing raises the specter of Katherine's trapped position as chattel with confused loyalties to her biological father (Lord Huntley), her political father (James IV), and the heavenly Father, all of which are superceded by her legal and spiritual possession by a new husband.   The last of Shelley's direct allusions to Ford comes in chapter six of volume three, the site of Warbeck's third and least successful attempt to invade England with a ragtag, ill-trained, and professionally unsupported troop of Cornish yeoman.   This final nod to Ford is the ostensible departure point for her own fifth act, the odd apologia for Katherine Gordon.

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Scholarly Rationale

For the beta-model, we have chosen to utilize hypermedia to disseminate and investigate a web of texts related to the historical figure of Perkin Warbeck.   The core text of the proposed web is Mary Shelley's rich historical novel which is ideally suited for this digital format for several inter-related reasons.

First, Perkin Warbeck is a book made from and about other books.   It reserves certain of its meanings for a specially initiated audience able to recognize the ways in which its eclectic blend of the political, the temporal, and the poetical explores the limits of historical and fictional constructions of truth.   Her novel invokes works of historiography proper (Bacon, Hall, & Holinshed) and of popular fiction (Scott, Godwin).   Equally important, it constructs the popular consciousness within which these opposing literary species dwell.   As a sign of its literary hyper-consciousness, Perkin Warbeck is a text defined by rivalries inside rivalries inside rivalries, and in such a way makes silent homage to one of the authors and texts that appears throughout the Mary Shelley canon, Cervantes and his most famous book, Don Quixote. In such a way, Shelley's novel encourages a special kind of reading activity uniquely suited to a web environment: one open to not only the critical implications of its explicitly referenced predecessors and antagonists, but also to those implied in its recycling of the unspoken models governing the structural and thematic development of the modern historical novel.  

As a second but allied point, the novel belongs to a class of anti-establishment narratives that have appeared with regularity ever since Thomas Gainsford's 1618 text, True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck and that have historically coincided with periods of socio-political insurrection.   In 1825 and in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and George IV's public sex scandals, the Warbeck Conspiracy resurfaced in half a dozen books published between 1829 and 1832.   By centering the Web upon Shelley's novel, the richest and most complex of the nineteenth-century Warbeck tales, we will also have recourse to the variety of texts with which her novel is in dialogue.   These texts range chronologically from Gainsford's seventeenth century text through Josephine Tey's twentieth century iteration, The Daughter of Time, and generically from authoritative histories to popular romances, providing yet another avenue for intertextual exploration and discovery of the mechanisms institutionalizing certain narratives and marginalizing others.  

Third, the parallel position of Perkin Warbeck (a controversial historical figure triumphed by some as a hero and declaimed by others as a fraud) and of Mary Shelley (a controversial woman writer recognized by some as a genius and by others as merely a satellite of geniuses) would encourage a particularized understanding of how interpretive subjectivity informs both the cultural production and suppression of texts and narratives.   Related to this last point is yet a fourth recommendation for such an archive, and that is the fact of the great unevenness that demarcates Mary Shelley's presence on the Web and in the classroom.

A survey of current hypertextual editions of Mary Shelley texts quickly uncovers the lack of authoritative editions of her works after The Last Man .   Steven Jones's elegant hypertextual edition of The Last Man set the standard by which all other Mary Shelley archives will necessarily be measured. It also brought important attention to Shelley as more than a one book author.   The PWP would continue the work of Jones and of the Romantic Circles archivists (1) by providing a collaborative yet countering voice to existing digital projects and archives, and, more pressingly, acting as a specific contrast to a recently announced plan by Pickering   (currently the sole print publisher of Mary Shelley's collected novels) to offer subscription based access to digital editions of their print products; (2) maintaining affordability of design and accessibility by the general public; (3) contributing to the dissemination of information about advanced technology in the humanities to up and coming generations of scholars; and (4) exploiting the dynamic, organic nature of hypermedia environments to explode artificial and specious categories and thus encourage an understanding of how such categories institutionalize some narratives and subordinate others.

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Methods

The initial transcription and editing process of the core text is currently underway.   Students enrolled in upper-level English courses are currently engaged in an initial electronic editing process designed in collaboration between the English Department and the University's Teaching in Learning Center.   This process is designed to be (1) a learning process for students in the humanities and (2) a recursive process.   Therefore, the initial stage involves work to be completed by upper level undergraduate and graduate students over the course of several semesters.   Approval will be solicited from Radford University's research review board to utilize student journals, small group observations, and interviews under an informed consent process to collect data that will be intended to (1) inform the project team as to the needs of the overall project, (2) inform the general process of student-based collaborative research and text digitization, and (3) discern from the data possible future instructional strategies related to collaborative learning in a hyper-text environment. Graduate students will be utilized expressly for the purpose of line-by-line editing and assisting in the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of data collected during the process.  

In addition to advice on how to best implement student participation as planned for the project, the English department and the TLC seek information regarding (1) encoding of the texts to conform to appropriate standards and (2) developing or modifying existing tools for student annotations and manipulation of the text by student investigator.

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