Everyone knows the story of Sir Walter Raleigh gallantly whisking off his ornate cloak and placing it over a muddy puddle to spare the dainty slippers of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. I remember it depicted in Warner Brothers cartoons I watched as a child. Even if the story is apocryphal, the theatrical nature of Raleigh and the continuing public delight in everything Elizabethan are evident in the recent films and TV series Hamnet (2025), Becoming Elizabeth (2022), and My Lady Jane (2024). Clive Owen played Raleigh, the main co-star to Cate Blanchett’s Virgin Queen in Shekhar Kapur’s 2007 Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
This makes the reissue of literary scholar and public intellectual Stephen Greenblatt’s Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, first published by Yale University Press in 1973, especially welcome. [While “Raleigh” is the common modern spelling as we use here, Greenblatt uses the authentic spelling, “Ralegh”, in his text]. More than an academic monograph, it can also be read in the context of Konstantin Stanislavski’s famous book, An Actor Prepares (1936), positioning Raleigh as a method actor inhabiting roles as soldier, adventurer, courtier, and finally, tragic martyr. Like a literary psychoanalyst, Greenblatt delves into Sir Walter Raleigh’s inner identity; like a sociological theatre critic, he explores Elizabethan performance while revealing striking parallels to our own time.
Greenblatt is a student of the Renaissance, the great flowering of learning that began roughly in 1480 and ushered in the modern era. He is especially interested in its English variant with Shakespeare and the court of Elizabeth I. His previous book, the popular and rapturously reviewed Dark Renaissance (2025), cemented his reputation as an intellectual able to connect with general readers.
This book’s central premise is that Sir Walter Raleigh constructed everything he did and everything he wrote as a theatrical role. He begins his argument at the end as Raleigh prepares for his execution for treason in 1618. Motivated by society’s expectation that the gentleman should die well, Raleigh turned in an expert performance. On the scaffold, he asked to examine the axe, remarking, “This is sharp Medicine but it is a Physician for all Diseases.” Then, addressing the hesitating axeman, “What dost thou fear? Strike, man.” His long speech from the scaffold included him repeating key parts in a loud stage voice for the benefit of nobles, perhaps among his many enemies, looking on from a nearby tower window.
In his last words and throughout his life, Raleigh was intent on adjusting reality, culminating in his spectacular downfall after a life marked by spectacular achievements. From humble beginnings and an early career as a mercenary, he helped to pacify Ireland for Elizabeth, explored the New World, and was knighted by the queen in 1585. All the while his preoccupation was, as the author puts it, the “fashioning of the self as a work of art.”
In a new foreword for this edition, Greenblatt explains that he was an early proponent of New Historicism, a school of criticism that insists on interpreting literary texts as part of their historical context rather than on strictly aesthetic criteria. Using this approach, he examined Raleigh’s voluminous writings and found that “His writing was not only a form of self-expression and self-representation; it was also a form of action.” Greenblatt also describes “the phenomenon I first glimpsed in Ralegh when it seemed to me that he was asking himself, ‘What would Ralegh feel at this moment? What would he say? How would he act?’” These sound much like Stanislavski’s “What if?” questions.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s role as courtier to Queen Elizabeth takes up a good portion of the book as Greenblatt explores Raleigh’s court poetry. Elizabeth, also a skilled performer, created an elaborate court where courtiers were expected to appear to woo the Virgin Queen. Much has been made of Elizabeth’s desire for veneration and her elaborate myth-making. She participated in annual “progresses” around her realm to be adored by her people with her wigs and gowns and the thick white makeup she used to disguise the ravages of age and the scarring from her near-fatal battle with smallpox.
As Elizabeth: The Golden Age dramatizes, Sir Walter Raleigh was one of her favourites until he secretly married one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting without asking her permission, a serious breach of protocol that deeply wounded Elizabeth. In response, Raleigh was sent to the Tower, where he wrote an epic poem to try to regain the queen’s favor. In his poem, The Ocean to Cynthia (circa 1591), Greenblatt explains that Elizabeth is metaphorically the goddess of the moon and the ocean, whose tides are controlled by the moon, which is Raleigh. Through Greenblatt’s detailed exploration, Raleigh is fully stretched out on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
By then, his courtship of the queen had become “his chief focus of all his intellectual and emotional energies, the central core by which his far-ranging activities derived their meaning.” Then, speaking of Raleigh’s secret marriage, Greenblatt claims that “it does not prove Ralegh a mere hypocrite; there is ample evidence of his power to believe in his own fictions, to commit himself to the role he played.” Raleigh, who did not write for public consumption, oscillated between the bravado his roles demanded and his inner vulnerabilities, which Greenblatt lays bare.
Why Sir Walter Raleigh/Ralegh Now?
In his 2011 book The Swerve, Greenblatt tries to answer the question: why? Why did humanism suddenly take over art and literature? Why the Renaissance? “This is a story then,” he writes, “of how the world swerved in a new direction.” This book, first published 50 years before, was already trying to tell that story. The re-release is timely because it speaks now even more stridently to our present moment.
During the Renaissance of Shakespeare, Galileo, and Michelangelo, human intelligence was at its highest flowering. Today, we have swerved into the world of artificial intelligence. Elizabeth was an absolute monarch, and criticizing her was a capital crime. Today we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian political parties and governments. Meanwhile, corporations, and even individuals, are richer and more powerful than governments themselves. The theatrical courtiers’ culture of the Elizabethan court is today mirrored by highly stylized social media influencers slavishly followed by millions and by news transmitted through memes.
Originating from his doctoral dissertation, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles is academic, which makes his tone, as well as the lengthy Sir Walter Raleigh quotes in Elizabethan English, before standard spelling conventions, challenging for the general reader. Indeed, in the intervening years, Greenblatt has become a more accessible stylist. Yet this is a fascinating look at a man mostly known as a swashbuckler rather than a poet and historian. Using his mostly private writings, Greenblatt has revealed a man seemingly outside his time and, at the same time, in many ways representative of ours.