Both darkly comic and deeply tragic, Guy's biography of the 12th archbishop of Canterbury Sir Thomas Becket, is a portrait of a saint with plenty of shadows. Does it diminish Becket for us to know that this future martyr in a hair shirt (clothing worn by ascetics) also made sure to keep a fine silk robe handy for his return to Canterbury, a stately progress one chronicler compared to Christ's entry into Jerusalem? That his abstemious diet was partly the result of a lifelong susceptibility to chronic, and debilitating, indigestion? That one of his oldest and closest friends would have found his canonization "utterly absurd"? Only if we prefer the black-andwhite certainties of hagiography to the convincingly human portrayal of a charismatic, contradictory individual who was, as Guy puts it, "as prickly as he was smooth . . . a man with the habits of a hedgehog."

The primary purpose of this passage is to

A. provide insight into the contradictions of a historical figure
B. enumerate the shortcomings of a piece of literature
C. praise a work for favoring a complex portrayal over a simple one
D. criticize practices particular to a certain time
E. present a balanced depiction of a well-known historical person



The author's tone towards Guy's biography of Beckett can best be described as

A. apologetic
B. neutral
C. ambivalent
D. sardonic
E. appreciative