Rebecca and Rowena (Hesperus Classics)

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.