Sir Walter Ralegh (Raleigh)

Agnes Latham once wrote that everything Ralegh (b. 1554–d. 1618) did “seems to have been tainted by a curious impermanence, to have had something sketchy and amateurish about it. Not one of his Virginian expeditions succeeded, and his schemes for Guiana came to nothing. His history was never finished and his poetry is lost” (see Latham 1951, cited under Editions: Poetry, xi). Notwithstanding this—or perhaps precisely because of this—Ralegh’s figure has always attracted historians, literary critics, writers and politicians, as one can easily see from the Biographies section. Once Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite and the “best hated man” in the kingdom, almost paradoxically he came to be regarded over the centuries as the epitome of the Renaissance man, the champion of parliamentary freedom and, quite predictably, the perfect test case for new historicist methods of scholarly enquiry (see, for example, Greenblatt 1973). It is little surprise that, at the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most distinguished Ralegh biographers, William Stebbing, could already observe that “students of Ralegh’s career cannot complain of a dearth of materials” (see Stebbing 1891, cited under Biographies, vii). Anyone writing these days could now perhaps complain that the wealth of materials is almost overwhelming. Modern Ralegh scholars, however, are blessed with the existence of detailed Bibliographies from the sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries. While the aim of this essay is not that of duplicating existing information, many items cited in these books are mentioned here as well, as they represent significant contributions that one should not ignore and that are frequently good starting points for research and study. Even a casual glance at the entries below, however, will show that some curious gaps and some degrees of “curious impermanence” are still present in contemporary Ralegh scholarship. What appears to be a limited collaboration between historians and literary scholars has frequently thwarted attempts to do justice to this almost iconic figure in both popular and “highbrow” British and American culture. One example will probably suffice: no modern complete edition of his oeuvre has been published since the Oxford Works of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1829. More work on Ralegh is certainly needed. It is hoped that the present bibliography may be of use to scholars who intend to pursue such a task—and that it will also help students and Ralegh enthusiasts to keep enlarging our understanding of this remarkable writer and man of action.