Shamelessly parodying Sir Walter Scott's vast popular success, a youthful William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a novel loosely based on Scott's Ivanhoe. Irreverently exploring what happened after Scott's novel ended, Rebecca and Rowena takes as its premise Ivanhoe's mistaken marriage to the wrong woman - 'icy, faultless, prim' Rowena - and ridiculously reunites the hero with his first love, the Jewess Rebecca. From bawdy and blood-thirsty Richard the Lion-heart, to Wamba, Ivanhoe's Shakespearean Fool, Thackeray's characters come into their own as facetious renditions of hackneyed medieval stereotypes. His is a surreal, parallel universe, stuffed with anachronistic props and starring a host of twelfth-century cynics.
A satire of Victorian admiration for all things medieval, this early work by Thackeray is decidedly contrary a self-confessed middle-aged novel that begins where most novels end: with marriage. Rebecca and Rowena calls into question the ending of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, exploring the miserable marriage of Sir Wilfrid to the ?icy, faultless, prim' Rowena. In an irreverent and theatrical plot, in which the dead come back to life, marriage is exposed as really quite dull, and imperialism is mocked mercilessly, Thackeray ridiculously reunites Ivanhoe with his first love, Rebecca, claiming they were wrongly separated in the earlier novel.
