2 - “Sports and Follies Against the Pope”: Tudor Evangelical Lords of Misrule

Summary

BEFORE WE can re-examine the early Lord of Misrule in the context of comic history, a little perspective is necessary. Consider the following illustration, undoubtedly the most arresting Tudor likeness in the National Portrait Gallery, London, William Scrots's anamorphosis (NPG1299). As if modeled after a funhouse mirror reflection, this colorful oil on panel painting depicts within a stretched oblong, framed within a thin horizontal rectangle, the profile of a grotesque figure with red hair and a head far wider than it is tall; measuring 63 x 16¾ inches, the portrait itself is, the Gallery website reports, its “squattest” (“nearly 4 times wider than it is high”). Its short-lived sitter's nose juts out, Pinocchio-like, under a low bump of overhanging brow, as the chin recedes cartoonishly under a marked overbite. The subject seems to prefigure the whimsical grotesques of Inigo Jones's antimasques decades later rather than to depict, as it does, the heir apparent of Henry VIII. Such is underrated Flemish master Scrots's tour de force portrait of a nine-year-old Prince Edward in 1546, a year before his accession. As the gallery's website explains, “[Edward] is shown in distorted perspective (anamorphosis).” When viewed from the right, however, i.e., from a small cut-out in that side of the frame, he can be “seen in correct perspective.”