Felicia's fantasy : the Vespers of Palermo

Abstract

Given the number of works from contemporary pens which were set in Italia, it was strange that Walter Scott did not add to them. In his fragment of autobiography he confessed that Tasso and Ariosto, even in translation, had convinced him that the Italian language contained a fund of romantic lore. He even enrolled in a class of Italian and acquired 'some proficiency,' tackling Dante, Boiardo and Pulci, in the original. Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata were part of the inspiration for his crusading novels, The Talisman, Ivanhoe and Count Robert of Paris. But he did not have enough Italian to help him with his conversations, many years later, with the King of the Two Sicilies and the Archbishop of Tarentum, where his French and their Italian was mutually incomprehensible. If he did not publish an Italian tale, he certainly belonged to the 'stiletto school. ' But his Scotland was an Italia in itself, and could provide for 'the Master Spirit of the history of the Middle Ages [ ... ] spectres, magic, abbeys, castles, subterranean passages and praeternatural appearances' enough. He confessed that he had once toyed with writing a romance about Giovanna of Naples, a figure who, like Mary Queen of Scots, was either 'a model of female virtue or a monster of atrocity. ' But he was too good an historian to alter the past to make a novel. His portrait of Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbott, is probably as near the mark as can be, and William Gell thought he gave up the idea of writing about Giovanna of Naples because he was inclined to take her part. That would have been good history but a poor story.