Review of 'Elizabethan Architecture'
by Mark Girouard

 
In 1966 Mark Girouard published a book called Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era.  I first came across it in its revised, 1984 edition, as a 21-year-old student, and it determined the course of my life.  After reading about the author’s tantalising treasure hunt for the lost marvels of Elizabethan architecture, I decided to become an architectural historian myself.

This new book returns, brilliantly and poignantly, to the same subject forty-three years later.  As he warns in his introduction, Girouard has left the vernacular to other people.  He writes about the most bizarre and thrilling works of an extravagant era, ‘adventurous, strange, outrageous and beautiful’. 

We begin with a survey of the Elizabethan building world: the queen, the court, the clients of great houses, their artificers and the developing architectural profession (Girouard has found nineteen people so describing themselves between 1600 and 1640, as opposed to three in the previous forty years).

Next comes a survey of the rooms within a grand Elizabeth mansion: hall, gallery, banqueting-house.  There’s a particularly eye-catching vignette of the famous interrogation of Arbella Stuart in Hardwick Hall’s long gallery, with characterisation worthy of a novelist: Bess of Hardwick is a ‘tough octogenarian widow, black dress, huge multiple strings of pearls, dyed red hair; her son, dutiful, cautious and mean; her clever, neurotic grandchild – three small figures walking up and down in the huge gallery’.  I can’t think of any other architectural historians who can bring buildings to life like this.

There are chapters on the arrival of classicism, and then the Elizabethan mania for huge windows.  The craze for glass among the most competitive patrons came about partly because it showed just how rich you were: triple the conventional size and everyone know you had at least doubled the cost.  (But I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, and must agree with Francis Bacon, who wrote that in a house ‘full of Glass … one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sunne or Colde’.)
The crafts of building get their own chapter, and there’s a conclusion on the continuation of the gothic style.  Yet the chapter I enjoyed the most was ‘Speaking Buildings’, perhaps because it recreates the sensation of a mad quest after meaning that Robert Smythson conveyed so well.  The messages often hidden in Elizabethan buildings were intended ‘to inform, to encourage, to delight or to mystify’.  As Sir Thomas Tresham believed, the harder they were to unravel, the better.  He was a master of the art, with triangles alluding to his name (Tres am, ‘I am three’) and to the Holy Trinity in his manor and garden lodges.

Some of the same ground is covered as in Robert Smythson, but there is much that is new.  The biographical section is expanded with John Thorpe and William Arnold, and there is a vast new section on carving and interiors.  The book’s sub-title, ‘Its rise and fall’, suggests a straightforward, one-thing-leads-to-another analysis of style.  This may not be particularly innovative, but it doesn’t matter a bit when the writing is this good.  The pictures are of varying quality but very often some ravishing and unfamiliar building or a new view of an old one pulled me up short.

While the greatest hits of the Elizabethan age are exhaustively and magisterially catalogued, they are also glowingly, upliftingly described.  Robert Corbet, builder of Moreton Corbet in Shropshire, was described as ‘smit with the love of architecture’.  Read this book and you will be smit with the love of Mark Girouard, all over again. 

Reproduced from 'Cornerstone', the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Volume 30, Number 4, 2009