Volume 22, Number 5 · April 3, 1975
What Made Ralegh Run?
By Theodore K. Rabb
Sir Walter Ralegh
by Robert Lacey
Atheneum, 415 pp., $10.95
Sir Walter Ralegh may not yet have inspired a great biography, but historians have not failed for want of trying: Edmund Gosse, Charles Kingsley, Martin Hume, and Henry Thoreau are among the dozens of writers who have produced biographies of him, though Edward Gibbon (perhaps significantly) gave up the attempt. Most of them, moreover, recognized Ralegh as the most Elizabethan of the Elizabethans, as the martyr, destroyed by the first Stuart, who epitomized for succeeding generations the reign of Good Queen Bess; yet they could not describe his life with the insight and plausibility that they brought to his era. If, in the last two or three decades, this situation has begun to alter, we still have some way to go before reaching the standard of the lives of Elizabeth herself.
Review, 3719 words
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