Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia (Oxford English Monographs)

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors christopher butler john carey kate flint hermione lee a. d. nuttall fiona stafford paul strohm

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Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives Euphues in Arcadia KATHARINE WILSON

CL ARENDON PRESS

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OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Katharine Wilson 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–925253–X (Hbk.)

978–0–19–925253–4

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For my parents

Acknowledgements The subject of this book is the place in literary culture of the printed prose romances published in the late Elizabethan period. The narratives are often very similar, but the changes the authors made to the stories reflect their own anomalous position in relation to developing ideas of vernacular literature. This book has itself undergone many metamorphoses. Emrys Jones provided tactful and incisive supervision of the thesis it once was, and John Pitcher and the late Dennis Kay inspired me with their wit and scholarship. My thesis examiners Helen Cooper and Robert Maslen gave me valuable guidance, and I have been lucky to have had an anonymous reader who offered detailed and stimulating criticism. The Newcastle Renaissance Research Group, and especially Jennifer Richards, has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the early modern period. Gillian Austen has given me many years of friendship and insight into George Gascoigne. The book could not have been written without the help of Mike Pincombe, and I am deeply indebted to his continued generosity and exceptional knowledge of Elizabethan literature. I am also grateful to Michelle O’Callaghan for her interest and kindness, and to the staff of the Bodleian, especially Duke Humfrey’s Library. Hermione Lee first invited me to publish, and Sophie Goldsworthy was very reassuring in my initial dealings with OUP. Veronica Ions has been a meticulous copy editor, and my gratitude for the patient forbearance of my editor Tom Perridge is beyond my power to express. Many have cheered and encouraged me during the writing of this book, especially Roey Sweet, who has remained a loyal and pragmatic friend. I owe much to those in the book trade who have helped me to understand the culture of best-sellers, particularly Colin Shone and Daniel Gothard. Partha, Swasti, and Pamina Mitter have provided warm support, William and Darunee Wilson have given me boundless hospitality, and Miranda and Charlotte have been unerringly cool and fun. My parents have shown me an exemplary marriage of literary and historical interests. And Rana has been the very best kind of secretary.

Vengeance was not his. Down on the road without, not yet looked at but by the steadfast eyes of the Emperors, the last of the undergraduates lay dead; and fleet-footed Zuleika, with her fingers still pressed to her ears, had taken full toll now. (Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson)

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Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction: ‘The Ironicall Recreation of the Reader’ The Making of Master G.H.: Gascoigne, Whetstone, Grange, and Harvey Strange and incredible adventures: Lyly’s Euphues and Greene’s Mamillia Greene’s Glucupilica Knowing Your Place: Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon From Arden to America: Lodge’s tragedies of infatuation Epilogue

Bibliography Index

1 19 52 85 112 138 166 171 181

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Introduction: ‘The Ironicall Recreation of the Reader’ Arcadias For the academic Gabriel Harvey, the pinnacle of Elizabethan romance was represented by the works of Sidney and Spenser. The best-selling fictions of Robert Greene, on the other hand, were a source of perpetual irritation to him. Harvey had good reason to dislike Greene personally; Greene had caricatured Harvey’s family as social climbers in his satirical pamphlet ‘A Qvip for an Vpstart Courtier’ (1592). In return Harvey devoted a series of printed letters to vilifying Greene as a degenerate plagiarist. What particularly annoyed Harvey was Greene’s ability to trade off the reputations of the authors Harvey associated with the revival of vernacular literature. Worse still, the reading public gobbled up Greene’s ‘Nouels’ until they were sick. To Harvey’s dismay, ‘The Countesse of Pembrookes Arcadia is not greene inough for queasie stomackes, but they must have Greenes Arcadia, and I beleeue most eagerlie longed for Greenes Faerie Queene. O straunge fancies, o monstrous newfanglednesse.’¹ As far as Harvey was concerned, the nourishing images in Sidney’s pastoral had been turned into fast food, and Arcadia into a theme park. Had he lived long enough, Greene might have meted out similar treatment to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Harvey’s comment has often been cited as a reflection of the confusion at the heart of late Elizabethan literary culture. The 1580s in particular had seen an extraordinary surge in the popularity of romance, partly due to the rapid growth of the print market. During the course of this expansion, Harvey suggests, distinctions between types of authors had been lost. The relationship between Sidney and Greene’s models of authorship revealed the issues at stake in horrible clarity. As is well known, Sidney’s romance The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia existed in various versions. Many manuscripts survive of his original version, the Old Arcadia, which was probably largely complete by 1580. Sidney later partially revised the ¹ Gabriel Harvey, Fovre Letters, and certaine Sonnets: Especially touching Robert Greene, and other parties, by him abused (London, 1592), sig. D2v.

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text, now known as the New Arcadia. During his lifetime Sidney had avoided the hazards associated with print publication by allowing his romance to be circulated only in manuscript. But after his early death in 1586, Sidney was rehabilitated as a national and literary hero, and a revised version of his romance was finally published in 1590.² Once in print, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia had to contend with ‘Greenes Arcadia’, and the titles alone reflect the difference in authorial style. Sidney’s book featured his sister as the inspiration, ideal reader, and in some sense the ‘author’ of the work. Greene had invaded Arcadia, rebranding it in his own image. And according to Harvey, Greene was winning the popularity contest, and poisoning the consciousness of a nation. The full story of ‘Greenes Arcadia’ comes towards the end of this book, but its creation is one of the starting points. The book is about the place in literary culture of prose romances, what Harvey would call novels, written in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign. Their authors have traditionally been divided into thematic teams, often in opposition to the model of authorship represented by Sidney. For Francis Meres, writing in 1598, ‘eloquent and wittie Iohn Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Greene’ belonged together because they were ‘best for Comedy’.³ Meres reflects the authors’ shared identity as playwrights, but his epithet could equally be applied to their prose. The later fictions of the 1580s in particular are punctuated with self-conscious references to the language of dramatic genres, with ‘tragic’ and ‘catastrophic’ reversals of fortune followed by (usually) comic endings. But the spectacular plot twists are often balanced by the characters’ lengthy debates and monologues conducted in equally spectacular prose, evidence of the witty eloquence particularly associated with the name of John Lyly.⁴ For a later generation of critics, these writers were the ‘university wits’, united by their shared experience of Oxford and Cambridge.⁵ But when they left university, they turned into unemployed graduates, and had to mark out careers as authors by ² The classic statement of the uneasy relationship between gentlemen and publishing was made by J. W. Saunders in ‘The Stigma of Print. A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139–64. Saunders’s thesis was extensively revised by Wendy Wall in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 151–8. ³ Palladis Tamia (1598), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), ii. 320. ⁴ See Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). ⁵ See George Saintsbury, A Short History of Elizabethan Literature, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1925), 280–93.

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writing more or less erotic love stories. The laddish aspect of this culture is best brought out in Richard Helgerson’s exploration of their role as ‘Elizabethan prodigals’.⁶ These are useful terms, which deserve more discussion. The point to stress here is that these writers form a group because they constructed their fictions in relation to each other, and to the changes they saw in the kind of romance writing Harvey would classify as high culture. This book is the study of a narrative phenomenon, which begins with the scurrilous fiction of George Gascoigne, ‘A discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F.J.’, first published in 1573. The compulsive appeal exerted by Gascoigne’s text led to the creation of a canon of imitations, including one contributed by Harvey himself, and culminating in the phenomenal success of John Lyly’s Euphues books. Particular attention is given to the prolific works of Robert Greene, who spent most of the 1580s trying to exploit and eventually distance himself from Lyly’s influence. Lodge’s career runs parallel to that of Greene and bisects it at many points. The fictions these writers composed have long been seen as providing an index to ‘popular literary taste’ and ‘middle-class culture’.⁷ But as Harvey’s comment shows, the boundaries between literary categories were always in danger of being dissolved. Critical attention to the history of the book trade has brought the ideas of middle-class culture and popular literary taste into particularly sharp focus. Pamphlets in this period were produced by a complex network of shifting relationships between publishers, printers, and booksellers, who were negotiating their own literary rights and reputations as well as those of their authors. Recent studies have brought out the extent to which the authors reflect their own awareness of their place in the book trade. Alexandra Halasz has shown how the pamphlets of Harvey, Greene, and others served as a forum for discussion of anxieties about print culture.⁸ Lori Humphrey Newcomb has challenged the traditional distinctions between Sidney as ‘high’ culture and Greene as ‘low’.⁹ By comparing the similar strategies of authorial self-presentation used by Greene and Sidney, she argues that ⁶ Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). ⁷ See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1935; repr. 1958), 383–8. ⁸ See Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). ⁹ See Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). As Newcomb points out, Sidney’s publisher was William Ponsonby, who launched his career by publishing Greene’s early works.

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romance has always had a socially diverse readership. The devaluation of Greene’s works took place because they were read by an elite and highly literate section of society, worried about the growth of literacy among their social inferiors. Literacy rates are notoriously hard to determine in this period, but it is reasonable to conclude that the novels discussed in this book were read by an urban elite, including some aristocratic women, as well as an unspecified number of readers from lower social ranks.¹⁰ The impact of the book trade on Elizabethan fiction is largely outside the scope of this study. But it is founded on one of Halasz’s conclusions: that these writers were popular because they were involved in a highly literate culture. They could also disseminate an impression of that culture to less well educated readers. The point of this book is to look at some of the literary consequences of these factors within the works themselves, and to argue that they represent a growing disenchantment with romance. While Gascoigne and Lyly used their novels to get jobs, Greene was left reflecting on the implications of writing for the press. The ‘fictions of authorship’ of my title refers to the way authors marked out ideas about writing within their novels, often through the creation of writers and readers within the text. The repetition of this theme suggests the authors’ own uncertainty about the role of prose fiction. Like so many Elizabethan fictions, this book has an odd subtitle, and it is worth briefly returning to the response to ‘Greenes Arcadia’ in order to clarify it. The text which infuriated Harvey is itself replete with alternative titles. It was originally called Menaphon, which is the name of one of the shepherd poets in the book. The running title of the book is ‘The reports of the shepheards’, which suggests that Menaphon may be imagined as one of the collators, or ‘authors’, of the text. ‘Greenes Arcadia’ was only officially incorporated into the title in later reprints. Greene and Sidney’s personae have similar names. Like Sidney’s romance, Menaphon was set in the classical pastoral location of Arcadia, and features a plot about courtiers dressing up as shepherds, with hilarious consequences. But Menaphon first appeared in print in 1589—the year before the revised version of Sidney’s Arcadia was published. There is convincing internal evidence that Greene had seen one of the many manuscript copies of the first version of Sidney’s romance, the Old Arcadia. But by the time Menaphon appeared, the Sidney heritage industry was in full swing.¹¹ ¹⁰ See Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). ¹¹ See Dennis Kay, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3–41.

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Newcomb rightly states that Greene could have cobbled together information about Sidney’s book from the commemorative titles already available in print.¹² What matters most is that Greene gave the impression that he knew Sidney’s work. In addition to invading Sidney’s Arcadia, the humble Greene had apparently insinuated himself into the elite world of manuscript circulation. Menaphon attracted a more enthusiastic review from his fellow pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, now more familiar from his later history as Harvey’s arch enemy.¹³ Greene’s death in 1592 prompted Nashe to defend him from Harvey’s slurs, and their subsequent vitriolic exchange of pamphlets kept both of them in the public eye throughout the 1590s. But their animosity concealed a fundamental similarity of outlook. Both Harvey and Nashe were on the lookout for good writing, but found it in different places. Nashe championed Greene by contributing a long introduction to the first edition of Menaphon, addressed ‘to the Gentlemen students’. In so doing, he was helping Greene to rebrand himself as a pastoralist (like Sidney). Greene had begun his career by imitating the bizarre style known as ‘euphuism’ used in John Lyly’s Euphues books (which Sidney hated).¹⁴ But by 1589 Euphues was looking dated. Nashe was helping his friend make the transition from old-fashioned ‘euphuist’ to trendy ‘arcadian’. And while Harvey found Menaphon stomach-churning, Nashe praised its readable style. To illustrate the point in his introduction, he embarks on an exotic but confusing anecdote. According to Nashe, the ancient people of Sheba used to get overwhelmed by the many fragrant spices produced by their native land. To counteract the cloying sweetness they would rush to the river Euphrates to ‘refresh their nosthrills’ with stinking river water and the stench from burnt goats’ beards. Greene’s readers, Nashe explains, have been given a more literary way of understanding contrasting styles. ‘Gentlemen and riper iudgements’, Nashe recommends, can: recreate their rebated witts, not as they once did, with the senting of slyme or Goates beardes burnt, but the ouer-seeing of that sublime dicendi genus, which walkes abroade for wast paper in each seruing mans pocket, and the otherwhile ¹² Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 64–5. ¹³ For the complex networks linking Harvey, Greene, and Nashe, see Clifford Chalmers Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions: John Wolfe and his Press (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 99–120. ¹⁴ In his Apology for Poetry, Sidney attacks ‘similitudes in certain printed discourses’ and ‘stories of beasts, fowls and fishes’. See R. W. Maslen’s revised edition of An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 114. All references to Sidney’s Apology are to this edition.

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perusing of our Gothamistes barbarisme; so shoulde the opposite comparison of Puritie, expel the infection of absurditie, and their ouer-rackt Rhetorique, bee the Ironicall recreation of the Reader.¹⁵

Nashe’s prose is dense, convoluted, full of twisted logic (and a Latin tag from Quintilian). The point he was ostensibly making is that Greene’s prose is outrageously underrated. Readers, he argued, need to compare Greene’s clear prose with the overblown style of so much contemporary writing with a sustained mental attitude: ‘Ironicall recreation’. But Nashe is also enjoying some ‘Ironicall recreation’ on his own account. Greene’s pamphlet, he reminds his readers, is generally useful as toilet paper for servants, and reading it is as much fun as sniffing acrid goat hair or fetid slime. In other words, Greene stinks.¹⁶ Nashe always enjoyed an equivocal relationship with Greene, and his comment indicates the double-edged tone of so much Elizabethan prose.¹⁷ The way he describes the book also raises questions about his own and Greene’s attitude towards it. Nashe strengthens the association between Greene and Sidney by referring to the book as ‘Arcadian Menaphon’, clothed in a simple pastoral style. In so doing he blurs the boundaries between Menaphon the book and Menaphon the fictional shepherd poet. And Nashe was perhaps also pointing out the relationship between Menaphon the poet and Greene the author. Late Elizabethan fictions are full of author figures, and the choice of an author commentator was particularly common in pastoral. Sidney’s Arcadia is home to the punningly named ‘Philisides’, a melancholy courtier poet in exile. Like Menaphon, Greene is a ‘scholler-like shepherd’, a poetic wit who gets displaced from his natural environment. ¹⁵ The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene M.A. in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Huth Library, 1881–6), ix, 13. All references to Greene’s works are taken from this edition. Nashe quotes from Quintilian’s discussion of ‘sublime dicendi genus’ in which he asks, ‘What use is it if we employ a lofty tone in cases of trivial import?’ See McKerrow’s notes on this passage in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), v. 5 447. ¹⁶ In The Word Irony and its Context, 1500–1755 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961), Norman Knox unpacks the complexity of this passage.; ‘irony’ could be taken to imply ‘the mental attitude of an audience as it watches a fool labor for a good effect all the while the very tools he is laboring with are producing a bad one’ (p. 94). ¹⁷ The duplicitous aspect of Elizabethan prose underlies R. W. Maslen’s account of early Tudor fictions. See his Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). See also Edwin Haviland Miller, ‘The Relationship of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe (1558–1592)’, PQ 33 (1954), 353–67.

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But Menaphon is not a flattering self-portrait. At the start of the text he appears to be both hero and readers’ guide to Arcadia. During the course of the plot he loses his place. When the disguised courtiers, the real hero and heroine, appear in Arcadia, Menaphon and his poetry turn into a joke. His fate as comic relief is sealed when he tries to court the noble heroine. Menaphon had ideas above his station. His own type of poetry is represented as hopelessly naïve, and the better pastoralists are revealed as courtiers in disguise. Much of the comedy in Menaphon reflects Greene’s own anomalous authorial position, particularly in relation to Sidney. Throughout the text he takes up various positions on poetry, emerging as both the champion of simple pastoral and the representative of a new and more sophisticated tradition. But I would suggest that at least part of his identification is with Menaphon, the humble author with ideas above his station. Greene was also aspiring, daring to link his short and often chaotic pamphlet to Sidney’s long interlaced manuscript. Menaphon is full of satirical targets, and Greene included himself. Harvey’s anxieties about the phenomenal popularity of Menaphon may now seem remote. Sidney’s Arcadia is less than a best-seller, but it is more likely to be encountered by student readers than most works by Greene.¹⁸ Harvey’s and Nashe’s comments, however, have achieved the status of critical essays in their own right. Yet Menaphon also acts as an essay on contemporary style. At a key point in the narrative the disguised hero and heroine (who are husband and wife) fail to recognize each other because both are trying apparently ineptly to talk like Lyly’s Euphues. This joke may have lost some of its edge since 1589, but that is part of the point. The fiction of this age often advertises itself as transient and ephemeral, and reacts instantly to changes in literary fashion. But the joke also suggests that the hero and heroine of Menaphon are practising what Nashe calls ‘Ironicall recreation’. They exchange inaccurate imitations of Lyly’s works because they have made a mental ‘idea’ of his style, very different from Greene’s own earlier imitations of Lyly. Clearly there is plenty going on in Greene’s Arcadia. Like Sidney’s pastoral, it has roots in sensational ancient Greek fiction, and the literary jokes in it are juxtaposed with outrageous plotlines about incest. It also appears to be engagingly eager to provide as many different types of ¹⁸ Few modern editions of these texts are available, although this situation is being addressed by the publications of the Barnabe Riche society. Gascoigne’s fiction can be read in Paul Salzman’s edition An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For ease of reference, citations in this book are usually made to the most common collected editions, and indicated parenthetically within the text.

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writing as possible, reflecting the mixed nature of so much early modern literature.¹⁹ Armed with alternative titles and prefaces, the book projects a delighted fascination with its own textuality. Evolving a critical lexicon to deal with it is more challenging. Numerous recent studies have illuminated the variety of reading practices advocated and adopted in the early modern period.²⁰ And like their contemporaries, the writers of Elizabethan fiction are keen to pose as their readers’ moral tutors and masters of ceremonies. But it is often hard to know how seriously to take their claims. Elizabethan fictions seem to enjoy a marginal relationship with so many topics foregrounded in early modern literature, especially the concept of imitation. This book offers readings of texts which bear strong but often mysterious resemblances to each other, like Greene’s and Sidney’s Arcadias. Many critics have discussed the variety of contemporary imitative modes inherited from classical and continental theories, the complex differences between following and transforming a source.²¹ Nashe’s attractive if slippery idea of ‘ironicall recreation’ seems to feed into these ideas, and to offer a critical panacea. But another of Nashe’s barbed aphorisms on Greene provides a useful corrective: ‘in a night and a day would he haue yarkt vp a Pamphlet as well as in seauen yeare’.²² For Harvey, Greene was unquestionably a derivative hack, swiftly and unscrupulously borrowing from his literary betters. All the works discussed in this book can be regarded in the same light as what might now be called genre fiction, yarked up in pyramids in branches of Waterstone’s. Harvey’s contempt for ‘novels’, new things, might also serve as a reminder that these works did much to define the norms of commercial literature. His disgust at ‘greene’ writing and reading reflects the author’s success in establishing his brand name and canon. Yet these novels also deal with very old themes. All the works discussed here can be grouped under the umbrella heading of ‘romance’, a mode which is as hard to classify as it is multifarious. But, as Helen Cooper points out in her enlightening study, romance is based on a ‘shared understanding ¹⁹ See Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). ²⁰ See Terence Cave, ‘The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., eds., Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1982), 149–66; Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). ²¹ See esp. G. W. Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ 33 (1980), 1–32; David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). ²² Nashe, Works, i. 287.

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between author and reader’.²³ Part of the reader’s job is to recognize and respond to the recurrence of conventions like trials, accidents at sea and separated lovers, which recur with the same comforting familiarity as they do in a soap opera like Home and Away. As the painstaking research of earlier critics has revealed, Greene in particular borrowed and recycled large passages of prose from his predecessors and, as his canon grew, his own works. But the sameness about these texts is deceptive. Cooper’s work has highlighted the way the usage and understanding of romance motifs changes over time. And despite its apparent naïvety, romance is often concerned with the mode of its own narration. Late Shakespearian drama has long been credited with ironic reflection, and recent research has uncovered this quality at the heart of native romance.²⁴ This self-consciousness is often manifested by the creation of reader figures within the text.²⁵ The narratives discussed in this book are founded on the concept of repetition, varying, comparison in the broadest possible sense. Within the stories themes and motifs are framed, interlaced, and transformed; love scenes are followed by rapes, tragedies rewritten as comedies.²⁶ The idea can be extended to a more general principle of intertextuality between the authors and their canons. And what unites these books are the multitude of readers and writers within the texts, who are often mischievously and self-consciously conflating echoes of earlier literature for new purposes. This book is not (mercifully) an attempt to uncover every source and allusion in late Elizabethan narratives, or to show that they necessarily reveal complex design on the part of their authors.²⁷ But part of the point of this book is to argue that the selection and recombination of elements within them represents the authors’ own marginal status in relation to the revival of vernacular literature. These texts have often been read as ²³ See Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8. See also Gillian Beer, The Romance (London and New York: Methuen, 1970); Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). ²⁴ See Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36–56. ²⁵ See A. C. Hamilton, ‘Elizabethan Romance: the Example of Prose Fiction’, ELH 49 (1982), 287–99; ‘Elizabethan Prose Fiction and Some Trends in Recent Criticism’, RQ 37 (1984), 21–33. ²⁶ For the importance of interlace in romance, see Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). ²⁷ The best general history of prose fiction is Paul Salzman’s English Prose Fiction 1558–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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prodigal autobiographies, but it is possible to trace broader patterns of identification in them, and the constraints of commercial authorship.²⁸ To attempt to do so lays one open to accusations of bookish folly, but the bookish fool is at the heart of these works, and of the next section.

Retailing Cinders Harvey’s anxieties about cultural status are echoed by the authors of Elizabethan fiction. The title-pages, dedications, and prefaces of their novels are typically packed with ruthless self-advertisement juxtaposed with modest disclaimers. Authors take elaborate measures to explain that their works are eminently suitable for old and young, men and women, are packed with instructive precepts but probably only worth an idle hour’s reading, and would never have got into print at all, had it not been for importunate friends, patrons, or publishers. The reasons underlying the authors’ defensiveness are well documented. Not only were these authors selling their wares in print, they were writing fiction. And ever since Plato had expelled poets from his republic, imaginative literature had been bedevilled by accusations about its power to corrupt its readers. The Reformation had intensified debates about the meaning and purpose of non-scriptural writing, and the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign are crammed with treatises denouncing or apologizing for the mode.²⁹ Love stories were particularly hard to defend. One of the most resonant contributions to the discussion came from the educational theorist Roger Ascham, who denounced chivalric romances for promoting ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’. Nor did Ascham see much room for optimism about the current state of literature. The spiritual heirs of these texts were being disseminated everywhere: ‘bawdie bookes . . . made in Italie, and translated in England’.³⁰ Ascham is vague about what these raunchy translations are. But his description could have been made for the anthologies of tales compiled in the 1580s, the direct antecedents of the narratives studied in these books. William Painter and Geoffrey Fenton both translated the exciting but usually unedifying works of the contemporary Italian author Matteo ²⁸ For the economic background to these texts, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 121. ²⁹ See Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word; Developments in English Prose Style, 1380–1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a discussion of the debates about fiction see R. W. Maslen’s revised edition of Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), 14–22. ³⁰ Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 4.

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Bandello. Painter’s collection The Palace of Pleasure (1566–7) seems to pander to the degenerate reading habits deplored by Harvey. In his quest for strange novelties, Painter retold tales about secret love affairs and families at war, like the ever popular story of Romeo and Juliet. Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567) includes the unforgettable tale of the adulterous Pandora, which ends in graphic details of her self-induced abortion. Both Painter and Fenton intervene in their texts to condemn the villainous behaviour of their protagonists, but their authorial asides are sporadic and inconsistent, and easily outweighed by their delight in their work. But these positions were always being revised. In his later anthology George Pettie made a more determined attempt to convince his readers of the morally improving nature of his work. Pettie addressed himself to women readers, and took marriage as his subject. But he also found himself quarrelling with his material. He started his collection with a story about extreme marital fidelity. When the lecherous Sinorix murdered the husband of the chaste Camma, she exacted revenge by killing both Sinorix and herself. Pettie commends her chastity, but cannot help thinking that the situation could have been sorted out better: ‘But it is naturally incident to women to enter into extremities, they are either to lovinge or to lothinge, to courteous or to coy . . . Otherwise shee might with reason sooner then rigour have repressed his rage’.³¹ With a more temperate approach, Pettie implies, everything could have been sorted out much more satisfactorily. Similar debates about the value of positive examples are staged in the fictions studied in this book, and often set out in similar patterns of balanced alliterative clauses.³² Yet the idea that literature could teach morality was still the most widely used defence for its existence. Under this umbrella, fiction crept into the most unlikely works, and was approved by the sternest critics. Ascham was unimpressed by most contemporary Italianate literature, like the sonnets of Petrarch and stories of Boccaccio. But he gave unreserved approval to Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), a series of fictionalized debates about self-presentation at court, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. The popularity of Castiglione and courtesy books is reflected in Elizabethan narratives in the many scenes featuring debates about love and good behaviour. Fiction even found its way into Sir Thomas Elyot’s weighty political treatise The Book Named the Governor ³¹ See George Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576), ed. Herbert Hartman (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 37–8. ³² See Maslen’s accounts of these works in Elizabethan Fictions.

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(1531), in the form of a story about the unshakeable friendship of two young men, Titus and Gysippus. One of the most comprehensive defences of fiction’s exemplary power came from Sidney. His Apology for Poetry, composed in the late 1570s, was a lament for the corruption imaginative literature had suffered in recent years, and probably composed to answer Stephen Gosson’s attack on fiction in The Schoole of Abuse (1579). Literature had the power to make its readers into heroes, like the ancient Persian ruler Cyrus. But instead of demonstrating good examples, contemporary poets preferred writing titillating erotica: what Sidney called ‘wanton shows of better hidden matters’ (p.104). But love stories did not have to be like that, and good literary models could include prose romance. Sidney cited as example the text he himself used as a source for the Old Arcadia, and which Greene also used as a model for Menaphon. This is the complex ancient Greek romance by Heliodorus, translated by Thomas Underdowne in 1569 as An Aethiopian Historie. Sidney commends ‘the sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and Chariclea’ (p.87); the chaste hero and heroine who undergo sensational adventures before being reunited at the end of the book. In so doing, Sidney was echoing Underdowne’s own claim that the love story avoided ‘fornication, and all vnlawfull luste’.³³ Yet Sidney’s own love story lays his views open to question. The heroes of the Old Arcadia are two princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, famous for their deeds of chivalry, and in love with the princesses Philoclea and Pamela. However, both indulge in notably unheroic behaviour while courting the princesses. Pyrocles dresses up as a woman and rapes Philoclea. Musidorus fantasizes about rape and has sex with Pamela before they are married. The princes end up in prison, and escape execution only because of a lastminute plot twist. Old Duke Basilius, believed to be dead, is suddenly revealed as alive, and the story ends happily, if inconclusively, ever after. Sidney’s ambiguous presentation of his princes is one of the factors which links him to Gascoigne, Lyly, Greene, and Lodge. One word which is often used in connection with all these writers is ‘prodigal’, and the link between these writers and the parable of the prodigal son has been explored most fully by Richard Helgerson. In the New Testament, the prodigal son wastes his inheritance on worldly pleasures before returning repentant to his father (Luke 15: 11–32). Gascoigne, Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and Sidney could be said to have frittered away their youth and ³³ See Thomas Underdowne’s translation of An Aethiopian Historie, ed. Charles Whibly (London: David Nutt, 1898).

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university educations writing frivolous love stories instead of serving the Elizabethan state. By rewriting tales about prodigal young men in love, these authors could create thinly disguised autobiography. Since the heroes of the fictions were usually love poets, they could also act as their authors’ publicity agents, and provide them with an opportunity for virtuoso display. Their works could effectively act as job applications, and Gascoigne and Lyly both found employment after writing their debut fictions. Greene, however, did not, and the end of his life is marked by many pamphlets in which a young man repents for writing wanton love stories. Lodge abandoned fiction for medicine. Helgerson develops the idea of a prodigal authorial career in relation to a model of civic humanism, in which literature ideally serves the state.³⁴ And while all the writers of Elizabethan fiction could be classified as jobseekers, it is unwise to assume that they all fantasized about becoming civil servants. Recent work by Mike Pincombe and Jennifer Richards has stressed how much the concept of humanism depends on literary ideas about cultivating graceful writing and good style.³⁵ Arthur Kinney has shown how dependent these works are on classical literature.³⁶ These are the sort of ideas which lie behind Nashe’s not entirely serious praise of Greene. Menaphon, Nashe claimed, was written in an appropriate and easy style—just like what Cicero and Quintilian would have recommended. There are plenty of authors posing as prodigal sons in Elizabethan literature. But the idea of prodigality was a fluid one, and could form a part of what might now be called continuous career development. Describing oneself as a repentant prodigal was a useful way of getting back on the literary scene after a particular transgression. Gascoigne and Lodge both had early works called in by the authorities, and some of their next works show signs of a repentant authorial stance. But these works were composed alongside entirely different kinds of writing. Greene developed the persona of the prodigal son obsessively towards the end of his life, and linked it to his exposés of Elizabethan true crime: the ‘coneycatching’ pamphlets. In so doing, he was probably responding to ³⁴ This is also the model which underlies G. K. Hunter’s reading of Lyly, The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). ³⁵ See Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (London; Pearson Education, 2001); Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a more psychoanalytic response to Helgerson’s thesis, see Derek B. Alwes, Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). ³⁶ Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).

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the fashion for mourning literature given new impetus by the death of Sidney.³⁷ Greene reinvented himself as a repentance expert, and was so successful at establishing the persona of the repentant ‘Robert Greene’ that his name was appropriated by numerous imitators. But to read his earlier works solely in the light of the story is risky. His last romances do show dissatisfaction, but it is disenchantment with romance rather than moral trauma. Greene himself was never sure whether his latest pamphlet was the last of the scurrilous ones or the first in his reformed mode. Notable prodigal authors offered literary ideas of careers which fiction writers were keen to exploit. One of the most frequently invoked models was that provided by the Roman poet Ovid, believed to have been exiled for getting involved in some murky sexual misdemeanour. But Ovid was also the author of the Metamorphoses, and a corpus of love poetry, and the idea of the canon he had formed is important. Gascoigne and Lyly both compare their protagonists to David and Solomon, the biblical prodigals who went on to become the authors of the Psalms and Wisdom literature respectively. Yet following the idea too closely did not necessarily make for very attractive fiction. Gascoigne mischievously misused the model in the ‘Adventures of F.J.’ by creating a host of unrepentant prodigals. Lyly tried to restore the idea to its proper context by making his prodigal hero Euphues into a moral author at the end of the book. But love stories are more fun to read than moral treatises, as Lyly himself realized, and Euphues has to rebrand his image. The underlying point about David and Solomon, and even Ovid, is that they provided examples of prodigal literary careers which culminated in the creation of a canon. Elizabethan writers (especially Gascoigne) were well aware that, if they decided to describe themselves as prodigal sons, they could look forward to repenting at a later date and compiling long lists of the books they should never have written in the first place. The prodigal is a loser, but his folly may help him become an author. Prodigality is often associated with the writing of love stories. But the adoption of a prodigal persona can also be seen as part of the creation of a literary self or fantasy persona, an aspect of the author at play.³⁸ Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’ are oriented around the glosses the narrator G.T. provides on the poetry composed by his friend F.J. Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579) is based on a similar device, with ‘E.K.’ commenting on the new poet, ‘Colin Clout’. Helgerson makes a distinction between ³⁷ See Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 67–78. ³⁸ This is the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, the creation of a speaking person.

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‘laureate’ poets like Spenser, and prodigals like Gascoigne, but the literary techniques they use unite them rather than divide them.³⁹ There is a long tradition of laureate poets maintaining prodigal personae. Kevin Pask has identified the late medieval and early modern period as marking the rise of the ‘name’ author: the writer who is given a life-narrative based around his emerging canonical status.⁴⁰ One of his principal models is Chaucer, commended by Gascoigne’s narrator G.T. as the archetypal prodigal poet. But Chaucer created multiple authorial personae, including the timid scribe dependent on the authority of ‘myn auctor Lollius’ for the matter of the epic love poem Troilus and Criseyde. ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’ was the incompetent narrator of the cliché-ridden romance ‘Sir Thopas’ in The Canterbury Tales. The laureate poet Skelton enjoyed a lively parallel existence as the hero of a scurrilous jest book.⁴¹ One of Harvey’s favourite role models was provided by ‘merry’ Sir Thomas More. The prodigal persona is always close to that of the fool, and the adoption of a foolish persona had obvious potential for satire. More created ‘Morus’ in Utopia, and Erasmus ‘Folly’, who reveals true wit in the course of The Praise of Folly. Towards the latter part of the sixteenth century bookstalls were crowded with the vitriolic insults of satirical personae, fuelled particularly by the ‘Martin Marprelate’ controversy over episcopal authority. Lyly and Nashe were recruited on the side of authority, but they had much in common with the style of their opponents. And Lyly’s persona ‘Euphues’ achieved the same level of celebrity as Harry Potter.⁴² The history of prose fiction is intertwined with the rise of satire in this period but, unlike Martin Marprelate, Euphues is a rebel without a cause, and a writer without a job. All the texts in this book are organized around personae who are not so much rebellious prodigals as debut authors trying to find a literary context for their reading and education, to invent alternative kinds of ‘secretaries’.⁴³ ³⁹ See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literacy System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). ⁴⁰ Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ⁴¹ See Mery tales newly imprinted and made by Master Skelton, poet Laureat (London, 1566). ⁴² Douglas Bruster identifies the growth of ‘embodied writing’ and a ‘climate of satire’ in this period. See ‘The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England’ in Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, eds., Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 49–89. ⁴³ For the importance of the secretary in early modern culture, see Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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The kinds of self-consciously literary personae seen so far are useful to bear in mind when reading the first two chapters of this book. Gascoigne’s short fiction ‘A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F.J.’ shows two bookish fools, one a poet engaged in salacious games of textual exchange, and one a pseudo-academic interpreting them. Both misuse literary language and ignore different traditions of storytelling. The fictions of George Whetstone and John Grange are based on a desire to reset the games of textual exchange in the setting of reformist tragicomedy. Harvey shares the same aim, but for him the story provided the opportunity to create a new persona of a man of letters, whose cultivation of irony and self-conscious fooling show his ability to display his cultural learning outside the academy. Chapter 2 is about the creation of a parallel culture of bookish folly: euphuism, a pseudo-academic language of comparison and allusion. But it is also about Euphues’ attempt to find a career as an author in Elizabethan England, which ultimately turns him into Elizabeth’s flattering fool. The second chapter ends with the creation of a different sort of debut author. Greene’s reading of Euphues led him to create the lady Mamillia, who has read all the right books and makes all the wrong choices. Mamillia knows the stories about women abandoned by their lovers recorded in Ovid’s Heroides.⁴⁴ But she goes on cherishing her faithless lover anyway, thus providing a blueprint for Greene’s stories of abused women, reclaiming and colluding with abusive men. Greene’s paradoxical relationships with the reading women in his romances is also part of the subject of Chapters 3 and 4.⁴⁵ Authorship for the women in Greene’s romances means cultivating relationships with fragments of literary culture, creating different poetic traditions, and appropriating traditionally male literary functions, ‘using themselves for secretaries’ when they want to reflect on their emotions. But they also find that literary language lets them down. Lovers cannot be read like books. The women themselves are always under scrutiny, and always aware that their lives might turn into new exemplary books: ‘mirrors’ of virtue or vice.⁴⁶ ⁴⁴ See Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman (London: William Heinemann, 1958); and Helen Moore, ‘Elizabethan Fiction and the Heroides’, Translation and Literature, 9 (2000), 40–63. ⁴⁵ See Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women; The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1983). ⁴⁶ For the rise of ‘mirror’ titles in this period, see Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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Like Sidney, Greene read ancient Greek romance, and his reading gave him an exotic gallery of fictional motifs: beautiful women, foundlings, trials, oracles, exile, and recognition. But he rarely allows his readers to rest in the response of delighted wonder which typically characterizes the denouements of romance. Instead he developed the self-reflexive narrative modes of Greek fiction to create a phoney culture of debate and supposedly exemplary storytelling. The author figures he invents reflect his awareness of his distance from classical theories of imitation. Greene wrote about Cicero and literary imitation—but a Cicero who gets involved in a love triangle and has to write letters for his best friend. He is equally conscious of his distance from Sidney, and this is the subject of Chapter 4. Lodge also enjoyed an increasingly ironic relationship with the development of literary culture, discussed in Chapter 5. But the readers in Lodge’s books are both more active and more threatening than the collusive women of Greene’s books. Lodge’s understanding of the developments of Sidney and Spenser finally led him to create a novel in which a woman who reads life like romance is not only a figure of bookish folly but of universal disaster. Various themes emerge during the book; plot takes precedence over poetry, and the ‘static and declamatory’ prose identified by C.S. Lewis in these texts gives way to interior reflection.⁴⁷ Yet the story of late Elizabethan prose fiction is in many ways one of cultural fragmentation, and this process is also reflected in the book. The close imitations found in Chapter 1 give way to the ‘ideas’ of prose in the final chapters, the counterfeit Ciceros and phoney Arcadias. Print culture depends on the production of copies, the production of short pamphlets on the destruction of epics. Overarching narrative patterns are hacked to pieces—like the story of the Trojan War, the universal reference point for these fictions. These authors ‘retaile the cinders of Troy’, as Nashe put it.⁴⁸ The themes of its destruction are recreated in endless miniature stories and allusions: Paris’s judgement of Venus as the most beautiful goddess, Troilus’s love for Criseyde, Helen’s desertion of Menelaus for Paris. And all of the protagonists are unsure whether they are there to tell the old stories or are about to star in new ones. But the lack of certainty about what prose fiction can be or do is extraordinarily emancipating for readers, both within and without the text. These fictions make the old stories capable of being transformed by all readers; elite culture is turned into a world of readers’ memories and ⁴⁷ C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 491. ⁴⁸ Elizabethan Critical Essay, ii. 226.

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associations, in which each reader forms his or her canon. Its pleasures are various: ‘similitudes, narrations, messages, descriptions of persons, places, battels, tempestes, shipwrackes, and common places for diverse purposes’.⁴⁹ Ascham is writing about Homer, but he could equally be discussing prose fiction. And Harvey’s horror at the merging of categories, of author, text, and reader, shows how easily these books get under your skin. These common places are created from readers’ own experience, from their ability to deride Euphues in Arcadia, but also to remember him. ⁴⁹ See Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 15.

1 The Making of Master G.H.: Gascoigne, Whetstone, Grange, and Harvey Gascoigne provided many reasons for reading ‘A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J.’ His principal narrator G.T. starts the book by assuring his readers that the point of the narrative is his friend F.J’s great poetry, which deserves to be shared with the reading public. G.T. makes many attempts to help them to appreciate it, chiefly by providing them with what looks like an academic gloss. But G.T. is a bookish fool par excellence. He ends up imagining his friend’s sex life with the married Lady Elinor, and tying himself in knots about how to interpret his friend’s poetry. And he finally admits that the book is not really about the poetry at all; he has been telling his readers a real-life sex scandal and he knows that they will know whom he’s writing about. It is still impossible to know how seriously to take any of the claims made by Gascoigne and his multiple personae. Even the (fictional) printer is unsure about the contents of the text, and modern readers are forced to join him in anxious speculation. What is known is that at least one version of the narrative was banned, perhaps because it was libellous, perhaps because it was thought to be libellous, or perhaps because of G.T.’s overactive imagination. There remains much to enjoy in reading about F.J.’s and Elinor’s affair. Gascoigne represents the conventions of Petrarchan poetry and exchange as ludicrous and counterproductive. This is bookish fooling of another sort, since their courtship involves endless scenes of textual exchange, and it is easy to get lost in all the games, puzzles, and riddles. But F.J. prefers a different sort of literary language, often featuring jokes about pens and penises. Elinor stops being amused when F.J. rapes her, an incident graphically described, but not condemned, by G.T. And as the anthology unfolds, Gascoigne starts writing about a host of young men in love who all turn out to be versions of F.J. and Gascoigne. F.J.’s sordid adventures are turned into a

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source text, and Gascoigne seems obsessed with rewriting them. But he also implies that the text could have ended entirely differently if F.J. had only chosen a worthier woman to fall in love with. Whether the rape scene troubled Elizabethan authorities is impossible to say. But it seems to have bothered three of Gascoigne’s earliest readers and imitators: the law students George Whetstone and John Grange, and the fledgling academic Gabriel Harvey. Whetstone, Grange, and Harvey all seized on the work of rewriting the story which Gascoigne had himself begun.¹ They also seem to have taken his hint that the story could have been different with another sort of woman as the object of courtship. All three authors retained the scenes of textual exchange, but placed them in the context of (more or less) reformist tragicomedy in which rape is either avoided or triumphantly defeated. In the process the narrative features of Gascoigne’s text were appropriated for entirely new purposes. Whetstone seized the opportunity to rewrite ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Grange perhaps got closer to the spirit of Gascoigne’s original text by turning it into a bawdy romp round divine sex scandals which masquerades as Platonic allegory. For Harvey, emerging from a difficult time at Cambridge, the story had a personal charge. Smarting from accusations of social ineptitude, Harvey was determined to prove himself a knowing and witty man of letters. F.J.’s story helped him to create a fantasy authorial persona, whose fluent literacy defeats the machinations of lascivious aristocrats.

‘Originall Copie’: Gascoigne’s ‘A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J.’ and ‘The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi’ It is time now to make an end of this thriftlesse Historie, wherein although I could wade much further, as to declare his departure, what thankes he gave to his Hope etc. Yet I will cease, as one that had rather leave it imperfect than make it to plaine. I have past it over with quod he, and quod she, after my homely manner of writing, using sundry names for one person, as the Dame, the Lady, Mistresse, etc. The Lorde of the Castle, the Master of the house, and the hoste: neverthelesse for that I haue seene good aucthors terme euery gentlewoman a Lady, and euery gentleman domine, I haue thought it no greater faulte then ¹ For the argument that Sidney also based his romance on Gascoigne’s work, see Robert W. Maslen, ‘Sidney, Gascoigne and the “Bastard Poets” ’ in Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, eds., Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 215–33.

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pettie treason thus to entermyngle them, nothing doubting but you will easely understand my meaning, and that is asmuch as I desire.²

Gascoigne’s chief narrator ‘G.T.’ ends his tale in sly complicity with his readers, seemingly confident that they all share the same secret. ‘A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J.’ is not just fiction, he explains, and at least some of the lascivious protagonists could be identified by readers for themselves. Two years later, Gascoigne was bitterly complaining that his readers had followed his advice. F.J.’s erotic adventures first appeared in Gascoigne’s miscellany of poetry, plays, and prose, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573). The revised version of his text, The Posies (1575) was prefaced by a petulant address to the ‘Reverend Divines’ in which Gascoigne explained why he had to rewrite it. Having returned from military service in Holland, he found that F.J.’s adventures had been interpreted as ‘written to the scandalizing of some worthie personages, whom they woulde seeme therby to know’. Gascoigne claimed to be amazed by their naïvety: ‘if I had bene so foolishe as to have passed in recitall a thing so done in deede, yet all the world might thinke me verie simple if I would call John, John, or Mary, Mary’. In order to corroborate his assertion that ‘no living creature’ was referred to in the story, he explained that he had rewritten the tale ‘to the ende all men might see the reformation of my minde’.³ Some of his readers were apparently unconvinced, and the text was called in by the authorities.⁴ What really happened to Gascoigne’s anthologies remains unclear. There is no shortage of early modern rumours which could lie behind the story of F.J., many of them relating to the Earl of Leicester.⁵ But Gascoigne probably kept his references deliberately vague, in order to generate the fevered speculation he pretended to disown. It is also uncertain how much damage the incident really caused his future career. In 1575 ² George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 215–16. References to the ‘Adventures’ are taken from this edition. ³ The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 7. References to The Posies are taken from this edition. ⁴ See Cyndia Susan Clegg’s discussion of the censorship of Gascoigne’s first anthology in Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 103–22, and Pigman’s textual introduction, p. liii. ⁵ See ibid. 116–19. Gascoigne’s biographer C. T. Prouty reads F.J.’s story as part of Gascoigne’s autobiography. His biography, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942) remains the standard published work on the subject, but see Gillian Austen’s important revision of Prouty’s ideas in her D.Phil. thesis ‘The Literary Career of George Gascoigne: Studies in Self-Presentation’, University of Oxford, 1997.

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Gascoigne was writing entertainments for the queen, as well as proving his supposed reformation in an uncompromising prodigal son play, The Glasse of Gouernement. Perhaps most importantly, Gascoigne’s name was known, and his career prospects, if not assured, at least well publicized by the literary debacle. Gascoigne repeatedly drew attention to his own notoriety, and probably played a large part in creating it. The ‘Reverend Divines’ probably did think the story was libellous. But Gascoigne also highlighted specific reasons within the narrative for worrying about F.J. and Elinor. Before they reach the story, readers are given what looks like an exclusive insight into the faction-driven world of publishing, and a unique account of how a manuscript is brought to press. F.J.’s story is preceded by a sequence of letters between characters referred to only by sets of initials.⁶ G.T., a ‘Master H.W.’, and a printer ‘A.B.’ are all anxiously dithering about whether a book which has come to their attention is fit for general readers. G.T., it transpires, has compiled a collection of poems by his friend F.J. and others. He protests that he does not want it to appear in print, and needs the ‘originall copie’ back again. H.W. on the other hand is committed to publishing the manuscript, even though he knows there are parts of it which might shock older readers. Meanwhile A.B. thinks that H.W. and G.T. are secretly in league and conspiring to get the text printed. He himself has only conquered his fear of ‘the daunger of misreport’ because of his conviction that the morally edifying items in the anthology outweigh the ‘two or three wanton places’ in F.J.’s story (p. 3). All the worried men of letters were almost certainly invented by Gascoigne, and their exchange provides one of the many mendacious myths of origin attached to the fiction. Gascoigne was always teasing, enfolding the story of aristocratic adultery in a compendium of unreliable narrators, unsolvable riddles, and ambiguous allegories.⁷ This is one of ⁶ In the text as it stands, A.B.’s letter stands at the beginning of the anthology, and is followed by Gascoigne’s translations of two plays, Ariosto’s Supposes and Euripides’ Jocasta. The ‘Adventures’ is thus the third item in the anthology, but Gascoigne probably intended it to stand first. For discussion of the placement of the items see Pigman’s introduction, pp. liv–lvii; Adrian Weiss, ‘Shared Printing, Printer’s Copy, and the Text (s) of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres’, SB 45 (1992), 71–104; John Kerrigan, ‘The Editor as Reader: Constructing Renaissance Texts’ in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 102–24. ⁷ For accounts of Gascoigne’s narrative strategies, see Paul A. Parrish, ‘The Multiple Perspectives of Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J.’, SSF 10 (1973), 82–4; George E. Rowe, ‘Interpretation, Sixteenth-Century Readers, and George Gascoigne’s Master F.J.’, ELH 48 (1981), 271–89.

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the most attractive features of the text, but also one of the most deceptive. F.J.’s affairs provide the excuse to review an anthology of reading and writing practices. The plot revolves around the conventions associated with literary courtship and the exchange of Petrarchan poetry. Yet these are repeatedly revealed as absurdly inadequate modes of communication.⁸ Readers are given a guide in the shape of the chief narrator G.T., but his commentary is biased, prosy, and irrelevant.⁹ F.J.’s adventures are full of literary jokes. Yet readers may also share some of the anxiety expressed by A.B., H.W., and the ‘Reverend Divines’. For A.B., the ‘two or three wanton places’ he identified within the story are judged to be equally immoral. Only one of these episodes is violent. Towards the end of the story, F.J. rapes Elinor, an event graphically described by G.T., and regarded by him as part of the general comedy. The episode is a literary scandal as much as a moral one, since its unacknowledged source is Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.¹⁰ The triangle formed by Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus is scurrilously recreated with F.J., Elinor, and G.T. But Gascoigne rewrote the story so that Troilus acts at least as badly as Criseyde, and the inconstant mistress has good reason to leave her worthless lover. Chaucer’s example is invoked by G.T. himself, who at the start of the story shows no interest in early modern scandal. It is F.J.’s poetry which forms a vital contribution to the reform of vernacular literature, and this is G.T.’s excuse for publishing it. By acting as editor and publicist, G.T. was engaged in a deeply intimate but also treacherous act, exposing his friend’s inward self to the world.¹¹ To justify the transgression, G.T. places his friend in a great literary tradition: And the more pitie, that amongst so many toward wittes no one hath bene hitherto encouraged to followe the trace of that worthy and famous Knight Sir Geffrey Chaucer, and after many pretie devises spent in youth, for the obtayning a worthles victorie, might consume and consummate his age in discribing the right pathway to perfect felicitie, with the due preservation of the same. (p. 143) ⁸ See Lynette McGrath, ‘George Gascoigne’s Moral Satire: The Didactic Use of Convention in The Adventures passed by Master F.J.’, JEGP 70 (1971), 432–50. ⁹ For G.T.’s role, see Gregory Waters, ‘G.T.’s “Worthles Enterprise”: A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne’s “The Adventures of Master F.J.” ’, JNT 7 (1977), 116–27; Susan C. Staub, ‘ “According to My Source”: Fictionality in The Adventures of Master F.J.’, SP 87 (1990), 111–19. ¹⁰ See M. R. Rohr, ‘Gascoigne and “My Master Chaucer”’, JEGP 67 (1978), 20–31. ¹¹ See Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Houndmills, Hants: Macmillan, 2003), 134.

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Chaucer then becomes the archetypal prodigal poet, whose youthful poetry is justified by his later works. Whether this is the pattern F.J. follows is less certain. In the next few lines, G.T. goes on to express an entirely opposite view: ‘I have thus farre lamented, that our countreymen, have chosen rather to winne a passover praise by the wanton penning of a few loving layes, than to gayne immortall fame, by the Clarkely handlinge of so profitable a Theame’ (p. 143). F.J.’s poetry and sexual activity during the text could certainly be described as ‘wanton penning’. But it is hard to know whether F.J.’s love poetry should be regarded as the first step on a poetic career path, or an avoidance of serious writing. G.T. wants to claim there is ‘Aliquid Salis’ (p. 145) or ‘some wit’ in all of the poems: whether the wit is edifying is another matter. F.J. himself shows no interest in reforming vernacular poetry, even though he cites examples of famous prodigal authors. But for him they only prove that sexual passion is impossible to avoid. In the first poem which he is inspired by Elinor to compose (‘Fayre Bersabe the bright once bathing in a Well ’), he compiles a list of literary archetypes who were unable to resist love, starting with David and Solomon. F.J.’s reading of the text suggests that he is deliberately adopting a career as a poetic prodigal, knowing that he can make up the moral writings later. But as the anthologies reveal, F.J.’s adventures form the source of a new canon, not of reformed literature, but of a production line of unrepentant prodigal lovers. After G.T.’s enthusiastic puff for his friend’s talents, readers might expect to see F.J.’s poetry having an immediate effect on his mistress. Instead, F.J. and Elinor barely appear to understand each other. G.T. begins the narrative by providing initially brief prose links to the letters and courtship poems. But the poems are soon subsumed in prose. The text is revealed as the story of F.J.’s affair with Elinor while he is staying in her husband’s house in the north country. The letters between H. W. and G.T. which preface the tale are followed by a correspondence between F.J. and Elinor which seems to leave them both mystified. F.J.’s opening gambit is to recycle one of the most recognizable Petrarchan conceits. In an attempt to convince Elinor of his passion for her, he writes: ‘So that consideringe the naturall climate of the countrie, I must say that I have found fire in frost’(p. 145). Elinor hands F.J. his letters back, apparently baffled by their contents. Only when F.J. has ripped up the piece of paper she has given him does he realize that it is not his own handwriting. When he opens the letter, he finds an elaborate dissection of his metaphor: ‘if I could perswade my selfe, that there were in mee any coales to kyndle such sparkes of

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fire, I might yet peradventure bee driven to beleue that your minde were frosen with like fire’ (p. 147). F.J.’s and Elinor’s bewilderment opens up one of the major sources of comedy in the ‘Adventures’: the gulf between F.J.’s literary style and the progress of his courtship. As G.T.’s commentary is expanded into a narrative, the self-consciously mysterious conventions of textual and material exchange associated with aristocratic literary courtship are laid open to misinterpretation. Letters are always going astray, or are read by other than their intended recipients—as F.J. discovers to his cost. After the initial exchange, he ‘loses’ some verses ‘written in counterfeit’ in Elinor’s chamber (p. 147). But he never finds out whether Elinor does understand his metaphors, because he discovers that she has access to another literary source. F.J. and G.T. establish that Elinor could not have written the letter herself: ‘for as by the stile this letter of hirs bewrayeth that it was not penned by a womans capacitie, so the sequell of hir doings may discipher, that she had mo ready clearkes then trustie servants in store’ (p. 147). In G.T.’s imagination, Elinor’s other lovers are transformed into a busy team of clerks, all circulating manuscript love poems to each other. G.T.s image becomes more charged when F.J. discovers that the author of the letter is another of Elinor’s lovers, vividly described as ‘the proportion of twoo Pigmeys, in bredth the thicknesse of two bacon hogges, of presumption a Gyant, of power a Gnat, Apishly wytted, Knavishly mannerd, and crabbedly favord’. His only attraction lies in his ‘well lyned pursse’ (p. 153). This lover is never given a name or even a set of initials, and he is referred to only as Elinor’s ‘Secretary’. Readers never find out whether this is an official job description or whether it just means that he is privy to Elinor’s secrets. The periodic visits he makes to London during the course of the text suggest links to a public literary life away from the idle isolation of the northern house party. But he is a secretary as far as G.T. is concerned, and this is what matters. The title turns him into a rival to G.T., F.J.’s secretary, as much as to F.J. himself. The overarching joke is that F.J. and G.T. decide that the letter was written by a man precisely because he was able to compose an appropriately literary response to F.J.’s conceit. The language of Petrarchan courtship, Gascoigne implies, is invented for and by men. The fact that Elinor’s lover responded in kind to his conceit only revealed that its author must have been male. Meanwhile F.J. and Elinor discover a relationship between sex and writing which operates on a far more pragmatic level. When the secretary makes a visit to London, F.J. vows ‘to lend his Mistresse such a penne in hir Secretaries absence, as he should never be able at his returne to amende

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the well writing thereof ’ (p. 154). F.J.’s qualities as an ‘author’, as far as he is concerned, lie in his sexual rather than his literary ability. Elinor’s literary style, by contrast, is entirely unambiguous. When she wants to meet F.J., she writes: ‘I pray you come to my chamber’ (p. 153). After they finally have sex, she writes ‘Contented’ on a piece of paper and sticks it in her cap (p. 172). F.J.’s poetry has very little to do with the growth of his relationship with Elinor, who remains enigmatic and largely silent throughout the text. Instead the lovers enjoy a range of non-literary activites: dancing, hunting, wandering around bedrooms in their nightgowns, and playing erotically charged games with ‘naked swords’. G.T. keeps trying to impress his readers with the significance of his friend’s poetry, but he himself becomes increasingly confused about its relevance. In one poem F.J. composes for Elinor (‘Beautie shut up thy shop’) (p. 175), he compares her to ‘Helen’. Elinor takes offence, claiming to believe that F.J. is recycling a poem for an earlier lover. G.T.’s interpretation is just as literalistic: Well F.J. tolde me himselfe that it was written by this dame Elynor . . . comparing also the time that such reportes do spread of his acquayntaunce with Hellene, it cannot be written lesse than sixe or seven yeres before he knew Hellene: mary paradventure if ther were any acquayntance betwene F.J. and that Hellene afterwardes, (the which I dare not confesse) he might adapt it to hir name, and so make it serve both their turnes, as elder lovers have done before and still do and will do worlde without end. Amen Well by whome he wrote it I know not, but once I am sure that he wrote it. (p. 177)

Almost the only hermeneutic possibility G.T. fails to consider is whether F.J. may be attempting a comparison between Elinor and Helen of Troy. But this is only one of the multiple layers in Gascoigne’s joke, as G.T. finally decides that questions of origin and intention are irrelevant. Despite his advocacy of his friend’s poetry, G.T. reveals that he is at least as interested in his sexual behaviour. When F.J. does sleep with Elinor, G.T.’s determinedly historicist approach leaves him in a quandary. He cannot describe what they did ‘for lacke of like experience’(p. 168). But he soon overcomes his scruples: ‘and therefore I shold slaunder him . . . if I should imagine that of tender hart he would forbeare to expresse hir more tender limbes against the hard floore’ (p. 168). G.T. imagines Elinor passively yielding to sex in the same way as she passively receives F.J.’s poetry. The composition and circulation of courtship poetry is only a cover for the aggressive contest in which pens function primarily as double entendres.

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Like G.T., readers are left in the voyeuristic position of watching F.J. and Elinor. But Gascoigne does provide an alternative viewpoint. During his stay, F.J. strikes up a friendship with the lady Frances, one of the gentlewomen of the house, who is also in love with him. From the start of the text her interventions imply that F.J. could have taken a different narrative path. Frances warns F.J. about Elinor’s many other lovers, and together they compete in riddling conversations, very different from F.J.’s functional exchanges with Elinor. However, G.T. warns his readers not to ‘bee drawen in a jelouse suppose’ of Frances, who is also keen to advise F.J. about how to conduct his affair. Frances positions herself on the margins of the narrative, watching the games involving bedrooms and naked swords. After sleeping with Elinor, F.J. is trying to get back to his bedroom: And though he were not much perceyved, yet the Ladie Fraunces being no lesse desirous to see an issue of these enterprises, then F.J. was willing to convey them in secresy, did watch, and even at the entring of his chamber doore, perceyved the poynt of his naked sworde glistering under the skirt of his night gowne: wherat she smyled and said to hir selfe, this geare goeth well about. (p. 168)

Like readers, Frances is left watching to see how the affair with Elinor will turn out.¹² But her presence also hints at alternative ethical and allegorical possibilities for the narrative. Frances is engaged in a process of transformative imitation. While F.J. and Elinor refer to each other as ‘HE’ and ‘SHE’, Frances suggests that she and F.J. adopt the allegorical aliases of ‘Hope’ and ‘Trust’. For G.T. by contrast, allegory means only a revelation of how easily men are ruled by their feelings. When the secretary returns from one of his visits, F.J. falls ill from jealousy. His sickness inspires G.T. to retell a story derived from Ariosto of the jealous ‘Radamanthus’, whose mistrust of his wife resulted in his metamorphosis into the ‘wretched helhound Suspicion’(p. 187). The contrast between male and female modes of authorship becomes unavoidable towards the end of the narrative. As F.J. lies ill, the women of the house try to cheer him up by discussing questions of love. One gentlewoman called Pergo tests F.J.’s reading skills by telling him about her own experience of jealousy. In her youth, Pergo was courted by a knight whose attentions she rejected for seven years. She only started to become interested in him when he finally gave up loving her. When ¹² For a discussion of Frances’s role, see Susan C. Staub, ‘The Lady Frances Did Watch: Gascoigne’s Voyeuristic Narrative’, in Constance C. Relihan, ed., Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996), 40–52.

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Pergo’s parents attempted to arrange a marriage between them, both Pergo and the knight complained. F.J. has no problem in judging this situation as Pergo’s fault. He is equally confident the next evening when Frances asks him to assess her story. Once again the plot concerns sexual ethics. A husband who discovered his wife’s adultery took to leaving ‘slips’ on her pillow whenever he slept with her. When the wife understood that her husband was conveying his knowledge of her infidelity, she ended her affair, although both she and her husband stayed friends with the lover. In response to Frances’s question, F.J. responds that the husband had the most right to feel aggrieved. Pergo and Frances are both plotters, and their tales disprove the disparaging assumptions about female literary style made by G.T. and F.J. Having watched the story of Elinor and F.J. unfold, she starts to imagine the consequences if F.J.’s husband found out, and also decided to play games with textual exchange. F.J. in contrast never considers the consequences of his actions, and his confident judgement on the behaviour of others has no impact on his own. Sandwiched in between the two nights’ storytelling sessions is G.T.’s second account of a sexual encounter between F.J. and Elinor. Once again G.T. makes puns about male ‘pens’, which no longer seem so funny to Elinor. The night before Frances’s story, Elinor visits F.J. in her nightgown. Overcome by guilt at his earlier suspicions, F.J. faints, and has to be vigorously revived by Elinor, ‘biting his lips with hir friendly teeth’. Her resuscitation techniques prove more successful than she might have anticipated. The revived F.J. begs for forgiveness in a ‘darke speech’ which appears to fox Elinor. She rejects his advances: the which did so enrage F.J. as that having now forgotten all former curtesies, he drewe uppon his new professed enimie, and bare hir up with such a violence against the bolster, that before shee could prepare the warde, he thrust hir through both hands, and etc. wher by the Dame swoning for feare, was constreyned (for a time) to abandon hir body to the enemies curtesie. (p. 198)

G.T. hastens to reassure readers with his own conjectures about Elinor’s wellbeing: ‘(bicause shee founde hir hurt to be nothing daungerous) I doubt not, but shee slept quietly the rest of the night’ (p. 198). Unsurprisingly Elinor has a different interpretation of events. She consults with the secretary, ‘aswel upon a speedy reveng of hir late received wrongs as also upon the reformation of hir religion’ (p. 199). In G.T.’s mischievous description of their renewed relationship, Elinor is transformed into a prodigal daughter seeking absolution. Her experience is presented as the

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equivalent of learning to read. She now prefers the secretary’s style: his ‘quils and pennes . . . did now prick such faire large notes, that his Mistres liked better to sing faburden under him, than to descant any longer uppon F.J. playne song’ (p. 199). Throughout the story G.T. had been making jokes suggesting that literary and sexual style could be equated. Now he reveals what they amount to: the secretary is a better stylist because he has not raped Elinor. Elinor has undergone a parody of a humanist literary education, but has finally discovered a more congenial tutor. F.J. himself seems baffled by his loss of favour, which he eventually discovers when he finds the secretary among others in Elinor’s bedroom. In an echo of their first encounter, F.J. ‘loses’ a reproachful sonnet for Elinor to find. But Elinor merely shows the sonnet to Pergo, who passes it on. Among the readers is Frances, who challenges F.J. to confront Elinor with her behaviour. Her response: ‘And if I did so (quod she) what then?’ (p. 215) forms the first line of F.J.’s final disillusioned poem. It has no influence on Elinor, and F.J. leaves the company. As many critics have noted, the widespread circulation of F.J.’s poems among Elinor’s household can be read as a metaphor for what happens when a manuscript goes to press and is exposed to an unknown readership. The poetry is taken out of context, removed from its original purpose. But there are other games being played with ideas of origin across the stories in the anthology. G.T. had given F.J.’s poetry a narrative context, thereby revealing the salacious reality behind a Petrarchan courtship. Gascoigne then presents a canon of similar verse narratives about prodigals in love, with riddles which encourage readers to link them back to the founding narrative of F.J. and Elinor. While F.J. slinks away, his story keeps reappearing. The collection of poems which succeed his tale in the anthology are supposedly the work of F.J.’s associates, but all hint at similar erotic encounters. One of the masks is dropped halfway through the collection when G.T. baldly announces ‘I will now deliver unto you so many more of Master Gascoignes Poems as have come to my hands’ (p. 263). Gascoigne briefly apologizes for his poetry in ‘Gascoignes Recantation’. But, like the retraction which Chaucer appended to The Canterbury Tales, the poem is at least as useful in enabling the poet to present a catalogue of his literary works, as it is in arguing his repentance for wanton verse.¹³ Continued prodigality is the implied context for all ¹³ See Olive Sayce, ‘Chaucer’s “Retractions”: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and its Place in Literary Tradition’, MA 40 (1971), 230–48.

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the poems, and begins to prove positively useful. Gascoigne makes failure into a job. In ‘Gascoignes wodmanship’, the poet, out shooting with his friend Lord Grey, fails to hit any deer but succeeds in writing poetry. In the same way, prodigality becomes a mode of being for the poets, with F.J.’s story merged with the identity of Gascoigne the poet. The march of the prodigals is unending, but none of them seems very sorry. At the end of the ‘Adventures’ is a sequence of poems about the disastrous courtship between ‘Dan Bartholomew of Bathe’ and his inconstant mistress ‘Ferenda Natura’, related by a ‘Reporter’. Dan Bartholomew, however, fares better than F.J. His story is finished in Gascoigne’s revised anthology The Posies. Ferenda Natura returns to her lover, but the reporter predicts that he will probably fall in love again. He justifies his gloom by revealing that Dan Bartholomew should be identified with another of the amorous prodigal poets in the collection, the ‘Green Knight’: Bartello he which writeth ryding tales, Bringes in a Knight which cladde was all in greene, That sighed sore among his greevous gales, And was in hold as Bartholomew hath beene. But (for a placke) it maye therein be seene, That, that same Knight which there his griefes begonne, Is Batts owne Fathers Sisters brothers Sonne. (p. 136)

The mystery is only revealed in a poem called ‘The fruites of Warre’, an autobiographical account of Gascoigne’s ill-fated fighting in Holland. Gascoigne is himself the Green Knight and Dan Bartholomew.¹⁴ Readers are inexorably sent back to the story of F.J. and Elinor, and their shocking prose adventure becomes the implied context for all the poetic authorial surrogates whose stories are then told. G.T. had alluded to the model provided by Chaucer, the prodigal poet whose youthful wantonness ended in serious writing. Gascoigne, however, suggests that Chaucer can be used as the model of a continuing prodigal, whose retraction of his works is really a catalogue of his canon. G.T.’s pretence that the ‘Adventures’ was all about F.J.’s poetry is revealed as a fraud. The story is a source text, the foundation of Gascoigne’s canon. Gascoigne’s adoption of a new prodigal authorial model in The Posies only helps to stress the continuity between the two volumes. The Calvinist ¹⁴ For a full discussion of Gascoigne’s changes to the narrative, see Gillian Austen, ‘Gascoigne’s Master F.J. and its Revision, or, “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet” ’ in W. Görtschacher and H. Klein eds., Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction (Salzburg: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 67–85; Felicity A. Hughes, ‘Gascoigne’s Poses’, SEL 37 (1997), 1–19.

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theologian Theodore Beza had written scandalous amorous poetry in his youth, which he had later republished in a cleaned-up version. But for Gascoigne, the point about Beza was that he published his poems again: ‘But I delight to thinke that the reverend father Theodore Beza, whose life is worthily become a lanterne to the whole worlde, did not yet disdaine too suffer the continued publication of such Poemes as he wrote in youth’ (p. 6). Gascoigne claims to have removed ‘filthie phrases’ from his own work, and added moral examples instead. To reinforce the point, he divides the anthology into three sections, flowers, herbs, and weeds, but these classifications prove largely arbitrary. Even when Gascoigne is explaining his moral groupings to the gentlemen readers, the differences are only of degree. Flowers are ‘more pleasant than profitable’, herbs are ‘more profitable than pleasant’, but every weed in the collection ‘hath in it some vertue if it be rightly handled’. The revised version of F.J.’s adventures is placed among the weeds, and the story is set in a castle in Lombardy. F.J. becomes a young Venetian, ‘Ferdinando Jeronimi’, and Elinor ‘Leonora’. However, Gascoigne soon tires of rewriting, and reverts to the original names with a specious justification: ‘And bicause I do suppose that Leonora is the same name whiche wee call Elinor in English, and that Francischina doth import none other than Fraunces, I will so entitle them as to our own countriemen may be moste perspicuous’ (p. 384). He thus gets to keep his best jokes. The confusion over the poem addressed to ‘Helen’ makes little sense if Elinor’s real name is Leonora, but Gascoigne includes the passage anyway. What he leaves out is G.T. The nameless, omniscient narrator who replaces him only serves to reinscribe the connections between Chaucer, Gascoigne, and F.J.’s transgressions. The author the narrator constantly refers back to is another of Gascoigne’s surrogates, ‘Bartello’, the creator of Dan Bartholomew. His name also suggests comparison with the sensationalist Italian novelist Matteo Bandello. Bartello too turns out to be an established author. Ariosto’s story of ‘Radamanthus’, retold by G.T. in the ‘Adventures’, is reattributed to another misleading fictional source, ‘Bartello the beginning’ (p. 421). While flagrantly associating his text with exactly the bawdy Italian novels condemned by contemporary critics, Gascoigne simultaneously reinscribes his connection with Chaucer and a vernacular canon. The narrator’s unquestioning dependence on telling the story ‘as Bartello sayeth’ recalls the relationship between Chaucer’s persona and his ‘auctor’ Lollius, the supposed source of Troilus and Criseyde. All the changes which Gascoigne made to his tale only turned it into a scandalous literary story rather than a scandalous historical one. Even

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the revised endings which he assigns to his protagonists laid him open to further charges. Ferdinando returns home after his adventures ‘to a dissolute kind of lyfe’, Frances dies of consumption, and Elinor ‘lived long in ye continuance of hir acustomed change’ (p. 453). Evil outlives good, and F.J. and Elinor are more definitively linked to the canon of reoffending surrogates like the Green Knight and Dan Bartholomew. The amorous recidivists continue to pursue more lovers, or as one of the poet personae in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres puts it, ‘I hold me well content, / To live in love, and never to repent’ (p. 262).

‘Grose bodies . . . transformed into a sugred substance’: Whetstone’s ‘Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta’ Gascoigne’s censors produced the most proscriptive response to his narrative. But there were plenty of other readers as keen to transform F.J.’s raunchy adventures into the source of at least more seemingly ethical narratives. George Whetstone and John Grange both published poetry miscellanies featuring stories in which the counterparts of F.J. and Elinor are faithful lovers who celebrate their defeat of lascivious rivals with marriage.¹⁵ The reasons behind the changes they made to Gascoigne’s story were doubtless partly pragmatic. Neither Whetstone nor Grange appears to have courted the same level of notoriety as Gascoigne, and there is no record of any adverse response to their texts. The fictions of Whetstone and Grange are a tribute to the compulsive fascination of the story of F.J., and the games which could be played with it. Whetstone and Grange both understood their source as a collection of narrative features to be appropriated: lovers meet in a long gallery and court each other by the exchange of letters and poems. But Gascoigne’s imitators also knew exactly how dangerous textual exchange could be, and their protagonists have to spend their time dodging the consequences of writing letters which might go astray. And in both their stories, the male protagonist courts not an equivalent of the mysterious and silent Elinor but an eloquent, witty, and virtuous plotter. In Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’, the educative fictions of Frances and Pergo are disregarded by F.J. In Whetstone’s and Grange’s imitations, the women are central to the courtly exchanges. The implication is clear: if F.J. had fallen in love ¹⁵ The connections between these fictions are outlined by P. W. Long in ‘From Troilus to Euphues’ in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kitteredge (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1913), 367–76.

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with Frances, he would have discovered a woman able to participate in the games of textual exchange, divert him from sexual violence, and join him in defeating lecherous challengers. For Whetstone deliberate mystery inevitably leads to confusion. A law student and a friend of Gascoigne, he plainly regarded himself as successor to the more famous George, who died at his house.¹⁶ In the funeral elegy which he rushed into print in 1577, ‘Gascoigne’ appears in his own persona to justify his misunderstood texts. Envious readers wrongly condemned the author’s ‘wanton layes’, but, ‘Gascoigne’ explains, ‘Such did me wrong, for (quod nocet, docet) / Our neighbours harms, are Items to the wise’.¹⁷ In Whetstone’s poem, Gascoigne is overpowered by the power of ‘Suspect’. Whetstone’s interpretation of his predecessor’s life recalls G.T.’s adaptation of Ariosto’s story of Radamanthus, transformed into a monster of suspicion. Whetstone also turned to Ariosto when he came to rewrite F.J.’s and Elinor’s adventures, and by choosing another form of romance was able to make his protagonists function in a world away from long galleries. Courtship gives way to adventure, and the dangers of textual exchange are replaced by duels. Gascoigne had set his revised version of the tale in a castle. Whetstone responded the next year by creating an anthology fortified with invincible moral armour. In The Rocke of Regard (1576) readers are guided on a prodigal’s spiritual journey, from the ‘Castle of Delight’, through the ‘Garden of Unthriftinesse’ and the ‘Arbour of Vertue’ to the ‘Ortchard of Repentance’.¹⁸ Unfaithful women are kept well away from the narrative, and Whetstone’s equivalent of F.J. is never exposed to an equivalent of Elinor. One of her prototypes, Cressida, is already imprisoned in Whetstone’s castle, and she warns her female readers of the dangers of infidelity in a poetic monologue.¹⁹ Having dealt with the dangers provided by lascivious women, Whetstone moves to fiction, or as he disarmingly puts it, ‘bad verse’ is replaced by ‘worsser prose’ (pp. 41–2).²⁰ ¹⁶ For Whetstone’s life, see Thomas C. Izard, George Whetstone: Mid-Elizabethan Man of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). ¹⁷ George Whetstone, A Remembraunce of the wel imployed life, & godly end of Goerge Gaskoigne Esquire (London, 1577), sig. A3r. ¹⁸ For a full account of the contents of the anthology, see Thomas C. Izard, George Whetstone, 36–51. ¹⁹ Cressida appears as a leprous beggar, the guise in which she appears in Robert Henryson’s ‘The Testament of Cresseid’. See Robert Henryson, Poems, ed. Charles Elliott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 90–107. ²⁰ George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (1576). Repr. J. P. Collier, n.d. All references are to this edition.

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The ‘Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta’, he claims, was ‘first written in Italian by an unknowne authour’ (p. 42). But Whetstone had multiple authorial agendas, and Italian authors, in mind. The complex plot twists in the second half of the tale are mainly adapted from Ariosto’s narrative of Ariodant and Ginevra.²¹ In the first half, however, the protagonists play two different kinds of Italianate roles. Rinaldo courts Giletta by sending her poetry in the manner of F.J. The plot turns him into a new Romeo, whose fidelity is rewarded by his escape from his tragic fate. F.J.’s and Elinor’s erotic adventures became instructive tragicomedy, defined in the preface to his later play Promos and Cassandra (1578) as ‘vertue intermyxt with vice, unlawfull desires (yf it were possible) queancht with chaste denials: al needeful actions (I thinke) for publike vewe’.²² Family relationships between texts are built into the plot. Rinaldo meets Giletta at a wedding in her father’s castle in Bologna to celebrate her brother’s marriage to a lady Juliet. They dance together, after which ‘the maskers were invited unto a costly banquet, who (marching with their ladies) with manly force encountred with many a monster, whose grose bodies were transformed into a sugred substance’ (p. 44). Like F.J., Rinaldo courts Giletta with witty exchanges and poetry. But these are highlighted as potentially misleading from the beginning of the story. In comparison to G.T., the unnamed narrator makes only brief comments. After Rinaldo’s first poem, readers are asked to excuse the ‘plainnesse of this invention’ (p. 47). It soon transpires that plainness is a virtue. Rinaldo claims to be destroyed by love: ‘for being reft of heart, the only stay of life, and dying through despaire, I am in no better state then a shadow’ (p. 52). Giletta, however, has no time for metaphor: ‘since your wit serves you to flourish on every worde figuratively spoken, I will deliver the rest of my minde in more plaine speaches’ (p. 52). In contrast to the mysterious Elinor, Giletta helpfully points out why her lover is attracted to her: ‘I thinke . . . my milde disposition, in very deede, makes you a great deale more desirous; yea your knowledge of my inward lyking . . . makes you so earnest a suter’ (p. 56). ²¹ See Orlando Furioso (5.16–6.15); and Charles T. Prouty, ‘Elizabethan Fiction; Whetstone’s The Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta and Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’ in Studies in Honour of A. H. R. Fairchild, University of Missouri Studies, 21 (Columbia, 1942), 135–50. ²² George Whetstone, ‘To his worshipfull friende, and Kinseman, William Fleetewoode’ in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), i. 59.

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Unlike the ‘grose bodies’ of F.J. and Elinor, the ‘sugred substance’ of Rinaldo’s and Giletta’s courtship is a model of communicative action. Giletta in particular is alert to the dangers of trusting to ‘teltale paper’ as a means of conveying emotion. Gifts are accompanied with unambiguous messages. The couple exchange rings, with accompanying mottos on their fidelity. But even their chaste courtship is vulnerable to suspicion. Rinaldo’s poverty means that their love has to stay secret, and Giletta tells her suitor to live in hope. Rinaldo is worried: ‘there is no hope withoute mistruste, and causelesse mistruste woorketh two injuries; the one in distempering the mistrusters minde, the other in suspecting the well meaninge friend’ (p. 60). Rinaldo’s response rewrites the allegorical partnership of ‘Hope’ and ‘Trust’ pioneered by Frances in her friendship with F.J. For Rinaldo, relying on hope represents a deviation from plain certainties. Rinaldo’s prescience is proved by the appearance of his rival, the jealous courtier Frizaldo. Frizaldo is a far less enigmatic persona than Elinor’s secretary. However, his presence forces Giletta to resort to secrecy, and thus leaves her vulnerable to the powers of suspicion and mistrust. Like F.J., Rinaldo becomes lovesick. Giletta can visit him only in company, so she reassures him by giving him a bunch of flowers with a secret message: ‘vouchsafe this posie of giliflowers, which carrieth this vertue, that about whose head they bee bestowed, the same wighte shal not bee much frighted with fearefull fancies’ (p. 65). Like Elinor’s secretary, Frizaldo is both well read in coded courtship exchanges and able to intervene in them. The ironies of Giletta’s message are unpacked when Frizaldo sees the bouquet: ‘his jelious suspicion, both read the letters of their flowers, and wrested out the sense of their subtile wordes’ (p. 66). Giletta is forced into more dissembling and more ambiguous dialogue. She pretends to encourage Frizaldo, and ignore Rinaldo. Her plan backfires when Frizaldo arranges for Rinaldo to overhear one of their conversations. When she tries to reassure her lover by sending him a letter enclosed in an apple, Frizaldo intercepts it. Aided by Giletta’s treacherous maid he forges a note of rejection: ‘let this my hand writing be a witness . . . that thou mayst at once end both thy hope and unregarded sute’ (p. 72). Rinaldo retires desolate to his chamber. When he sees the ring which Giletta has given him, its message on fidelity inspires him to write a poem lamenting his fate, and he eventually retires to a forest to commit suicide. Despite Giletta’s commitment to plainness, she finds herself enmeshed in the deceptive world of textual exchange. Paradoxically, it is her ability

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to write her own letters, to engage in the exchange of literary conceits, which nearly leads to tragedy. In Gascoigne’s narrative, Elinor had initially colluded with the secretary by giving F.J. letters which she had supposedly written herself. F.J. identified her deception by the secretary’s style. But Giletta’s literacy undoes her. Whetstone’s Rinaldo and Giletta are both duped, with Rinaldo unable to spot the fake letter. The consequences for Rinaldo and Giletta initially appear more serious than any faced by the lovers in Gascoigne’s story. Yet by removing his protagonists to a romance landscape inherited from Ariosto, Whetstone also left them open to the power of good fortune. Giletta luckily overhears Rinaldo’s suicidal monologue, and the pair are reunited. In the ensuing events, Giletta emerges as the better plotter. While Rinaldo is left in a ‘browne studie’, she plans their escape. Whetstone confirms her superior ability in a marginal note: ‘The womans wit in matters of loue, quicker then the mans’(p. 80). But Giletta still has to cope with the dangers of secrecy from an unexpected source. She promises Frizaldo that she will marry him unless Rinaldo returns. Rinaldo appears on the day of the wedding, but dressed as a black knight, accompanied by the unfaithful maid, who confesses her part in the treachery. Giletta fails to recognize him, and he unmasks only when he has killed Frizaldo in a duel. Finally, Rinaldo and Giletta are married: ‘and thus after fortune had long threatned the shipwracke of their delightes, their constancie conducted them to the port of their wished desires’ (p. 90). For Whetstone’s protagonists, duels present less of a threat than letters hidden in apples. Only when Rinaldo and Giletta escape into Ariosto’s plot are they able to display their virtue. The rest of the anthology reaffirms the dangers of trickery. In a later collection of poems in the anthology, the ‘Inventions of P. Plasmos’, Whetstone imitates Gascoigne’s ‘Green Knight’ sequence with an apparently semi-autobiographical fiction of a prodigal ruined by tricksters and prostitutes. But Whetstone never attempted to imitate the network of riddling relationships between Gascoigne’s surrogates, and they are in no danger of reoffending. Both Plasmos and his tormentors repent and are suitably punished. Like Cressida, Plasmos’s principal tormentor is stricken with leprosy, a reminder, if any were needed, of the unshakeable moral foundations of the castle. But Whetstone’s castle is also a transformative environment, in which Romeo’s and Juliet’s secret trysts and bad luck could be turned into a fable about the perils of courtly conventions and a comedy about constancy in love.

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‘The frothe of Venus’: John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis For the protagonists of John Grange’s narrative The Golden Aphroditis, courtship by textual exchange is equally perilous, but also irresistible. Like Whetstone, Grange turned F.J.’s and Elinor’s adventures into a tragicomedy about love and marriage. As he trenchantly declares in the epilogue to the text, his book is different from ‘tragedies of inhumanitie . . . not worthy of reading, neither to be put in print’.²³ Like Whetstone, Grange inserts into Gascoigne’s original a series of identifying marker points. Grange’s protagonists meet in a long gallery and dance together. They sign their letters and poems with the aliases adopted by F.J., Elinor, and Frances: ‘Hope’ and ‘Trust’ as well as ‘He’ and ‘She’. The heroine has a secretary; the hero has a rival and a nosebleed. But while Whetstone acted as a prison warder to Gascoigne’s text, Grange set it free in a bawdy allegory about the secret sex life of the goddess of chastity. The text is as much about reading and writing as it is about the highly convoluted plot. Like Whetstone’s Rinaldo and Giletta, Grange’s protagonists act as if they have internalized the lessons to be learnt from F.J.’s adventures. Grange himself borrows heavily from contemporary literature.²⁴ But so does his hero the nymph N.O, who often feels compelled to share his sources with readers. Grange turned allusion into a way of establishing the importance of his story within a developing canon. Grange’s own circumstances may go some way towards explaining the exuberantly satirical tone of the text. Like Whetstone, Grange was a student at the Inns of Court, and the text is stuffed with both legal references and fervent acknowledgements of the sheer exhaustion writing induces. But writing is also a universal pleasure, shared by women. And unlike Whetstone, Grange suggested that textual exchange did not have to end in deceit and misunderstanding. When the evil rival tries to produce misleading textual enigmas, they are unmasked by rigorous interpretation. Grange was certainly not impressed by plainness. As he explains to his dedicatee Lord Sturton, his book is about ‘mysticall propositions’. But the subject of these propositions turns out to be ‘the eleuation or declination ²³ John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London, 1577), sig. N4v. All references are taken from this edition. ²⁴ For Grange’s references and allusions, see Hyder E. Rollins, ‘John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 16 (1934), 177–98; M. P. Tilley, ‘Borrowings in Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’, MLN 53 (1938), 407–12.

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of the Mount of Venus’ (sig. A2v). Gascoigne had linked allegory to ethics, with Frances’ model of ‘Hope’ and ‘Trust’ providing an alternative to F.J.’s and Elinor’s bawdy poetics. Grange responded to Gascoigne with an allegory of the joy of sex, featuring ‘as well the lawfull copulacion betweene Vulcane and Venus, as the vnlawfull combat between hir and Mars’ (sig. A3r). Grange’s protagonists are busy dissociating themselves from the rampant deities who surround them, thus allowing Grange to detail all their scurrilous activities. They spend their time trying to atone for the sexual sins of their ancestors while themselves pursuing worthier forms of love. In the course of their quest, they encounter as many literary puzzles as bawdy deities. Readers are repeatedly urged to join them in solving the mysteries: ‘who wil the curnell of the nut must break the shell’. But the narrator drops heavy hints that the subtext of the story is more likely to be libellous than improving. Even the title hints at the multivalent associations of the presiding deity Venus. As both narrator and hero explain, ‘Golden Aphroditis’ was Homer’s epithet for Venus. It was also contemporary slang for cash. Grange wittily exploits the familiar fears about gentlemen demeaning themselves by publication by posing as pimp to his pamphlet ‘Venus’. He also suggests a more contemporary allusion. In the conclusion to the text, the narrator praises Erasmus, who ‘under his prayse of folly . . . touched therein euen the chiefest poyntes which pertayneth to mans salvation’ (sig. N4r). Erasmus’ Folly is Venus’ sister. Grange provides a companion volume for Erasmus—but one which locates ‘salvation’ in climbing Venus’ mountain.²⁵ The problems of embarrassing families are what first unite Grange’s hero and heroine. The male nymph ‘N.O.’ is the cousin of Hippomanes, who won his wife Atalanta with the help of Venus. When Hippomanes and Atalanta showed their ingratitude by having sex in her temple, Venus turned them into beasts.²⁶ N.O. is left in need of more family. Fortunately he meets the nymph ‘A.O.’, who is also descended from Atalanta. A.O.’s family history is even more shocking. Her name is short for ‘Alpha Omega’, or ‘the beginning and the end’, a phrase traditionally associated with God. A.O.’s origins are both murkier and more contemporary. When Diana, goddess of chastity, got pregnant by her lover Endymion, she fooled the gods into thinking that she was the innocent ²⁵ For a reading of the text as a Platonic love allegory, see Robert S. Knapp, ‘Love Allegory in John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’, ELR 8 (1978), 256–70. ²⁶ See The Myths of Hyginus, trans. Mary Grant (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960), 142–3.

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victim of a stag wound.²⁷ The child was her ‘first and last’, A.O., who was brought up in ‘Pasquilles heaven’. Grange’s allusive genealogy warns readers against believing too implicitly in A.O. as a figure of Christ.²⁸ ‘Pasquil’ is the authorial persona associated with anti-Catholic satire. Grange’s allegorical setting, then, has a distinctly contemporary and local feel; the nymphs encompass heaven and earth in their pursuit of love. But any direct satire is hidden behind Grange’s imitation of Gascoigne’s love story. The process of transformative imitation turns into the main plot. N.O. and A.O. are busy trying to make up for the consequences of their ancestors’ sexual transgressions. N.O. is disgusted at being embroiled in the ‘frothe’ of Venus and is determined to try to reverse Hippomanes’ metamorphosis. In the same way Grange had to find a way of writing a love story which did not end in scandal and censorship. But Grange’s protagonists soon forget about their ancestors. When Venus takes her revenge by making N.O. fall in love with A.O., he is instantly transformed into an enthusiastic courtier. The scene shifts to a sumptuous building complete with long gallery where the nymphs exchange letters and poems, and take on the roles of F.J. and Elinor. What is new about N.O.’s style of courtship is his determination to place it within the vernacular literary canon, and by so doing establish a new frame of reference. Both courtiers borrow heavily from poetical miscellanies and from collections of properties of animals, vegetables and minerals. N.O. strengthens his vow of constancy to A.O. by explaining that ‘the pure loue which I beare unto thee (most lyke to the stone Albeston) cannot be quenched again’ (sig. F2v).²⁹ By enclosing discussion in a web of citations, N.O. is able to distinguish himself from his lusty relatives. After N.O. has come back from a visit to Buxton spa, he tells N.O. that he has been wounded by love: Isidore affirmeth the liquor or iuyce of malowes being tempered with clammy oyle, annoynted vpon mans body forbiddeth the sting of Bees: and Discorides likewise testifieth, that wilde Rue if it were auaylaeable or of the lyke force against the sting of Loue, yet shoulde not my body once taste thereof. By this you seeme (sayde shee) to agree with Plato, who in wryting set downe that the sudden passions and extreeme rage of fervent louers was not only to be imbraced, but also to be desired and wished for, as the happiest and most blisfull life of al. (sig. H1v) ²⁷ For the traditions surrounding Diana’s and Endymion’s relationship, see Edward S. Lecomte, Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944), 108. ²⁸ See Knapp, ‘Love Allegory’, 269. ²⁹ N.O.’s source is John Maplet’s A Greene Forest (1567). See Rollins, ‘John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’, 188–91.

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A.O. is eager to cite Plato in order to distinguish their love from the sort of ‘wound’ which Diana claimed to have suffered for love. But Grange always hints that his nymphs are engaged in an elaborate process of selfjustification. The lovers are merely able to hide their courtship behind a smokescreen of authorities, including the examples provided by contemporary literature. N.O. is keen to contextualize his love in the best-seller charts, urging A.O. to ‘make me leape for joye, transporting my corps (as it were) to Paradise, placing my mind in a Pallace of pleasure, rocking my wittes in a Cradle of Securitie, and penning my harte in a Castle of comforte’ (sig. H2v). He even seems to know what text he is in. A.O. he argues, should ‘finde me as tried in truth, as Romeus and Juliet, and as stedfast in faith as Pesistratus to Castanea, who doest in my sight Homer his golden Aphroditis passe’ (sig. D2v).³⁰ Unlike Whetstone’s nervous Rinaldo, N.O. is entirely confident of rewriting Romeo and Juliet as a story of his own fidelity in love. The self-consciousness which Grange gives his protagonists extends towards his reworking of Gascoigne’s plot. A.O. is happy to receive N.O.’s suit, until she hears a rumour that he has been involved ‘in a strange amorous combat foughten in the north part of the world’ (sig. E2v), a location eerily reminiscent of the northern castle housing Elinor’s guests. She orders her secretary to write a reproachful poem, which worries N.O.: ‘though in deede he had of long tyme bene fostered up with Muses mylke, hir clearklike pen he thought condemned his rurall wittes’ (sig. E3v). But this secretary appears to be primarily useful for his ability to write a secret poem in lemon juice. N.O. writes an answering sonnet protesting his innocence, but A.O. is not convinced. She is only satisfied of his innocence when he embarks on a series of allusive riddles on the theme of deceptive appearances: ‘the higher the Sun, the lesser our shadowes are’. A.O. hardly needs a secretary. While she participates in the textual games, distributing letters and riddles as eagerly as N.O., her joy in ‘Veneriall disputations’ brings her closer to the stereotypical garrulous woman from a fabliau than the archetypal silent Petrarchan mistress. N.O. finds himself having to escape her ‘boysterous blastes’ by engaging in exploits which prove his chastity and devotion. When A.O. believes N.O. has slighted her at a dance, he goes to heaven to steal a jewel from Venus for her: a symbolic transfer of erotic power to the forces of chaste love. But Grange leaves open the possibility that N.O. is also trying to hide from his mistress’s recriminations. ³⁰ Thomas Becon’s The Castel of Comfort was first printed about 1550; Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet in 1562; and Edmund Elviden’s Pesistratus and Catanea in 1570. See Rollins, ‘John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis’, 188.

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A.O.’s ability to talk also saves her from the fate suffered by Gascoigne’s Elinor. N.O.’s main rival for A.O.’s hand is not her secretary, but an old suitor, ‘I.I.’. Grange’s choice of initials suggests a mischievous identification with the narcissistic villain of the story rather than the chaste N.O. (who always says ‘no’ to temptation). But I.I. is an incompetent prodigal. He initially tries to renew his suit to A.O. in a riddling poem rebuking her for her change of heart. The threat represented by the poem starts to take on the physical dimensions of a romance landscape; letters are described as craggy cliffs impeding the progress of true love. But unlike Whetstone’s Giletta, A.O. never gets involved in deceitful textual exchange, and defeats I.I.’s machinations by the power of truth alone. I.I. tries to convince N.O. that A.O. has been unfaithful by carving ‘Veni, vidi’ (‘I came, I saw’) on a doorpost. A.O. points out he has been unable to complete the Latin tag with ‘vici’, (‘I conquered’) because he has not slept with her. I.I. makes a more concerted effort on A.O.’s chastity later in the text, when she overhears him idly slandering women’s constancy in love and cannot resist arguing the point. Spotting his advantage, I.I. takes her on a lonely walk in order to rape her. But he has reckoned without her eloquence. She not only scorns his advances, but suggests that he might at least have bothered to write them down: ‘If needes you woulde haue opened (quoth she) your budget of villainy unto me, yet better mighte you haue done it with penne and inke’ (sig. K2r). A.O.’s image transforms I.I. into a travelling salesman complete with a pedlar’s pack of erotic writings. A.O. herself is as confident of her knowledge of literary good women as she is of maintaining her chastity. As she explains to her hapless suitor, ‘you had neede to rise very early, if that flattering face of yours coulde goe beyonde me herein’ (sig. K2r). By the time she has finished, I.I. ‘wished his words unspoken’ (sig. I2r). Grange turned the scandalous rape at the heart of Gascoigne’s book into a farcical misadventure. He does apologize to his women readers— but only by pretending to find mitigating circumstances for I.I.’s behaviour: ‘it mighte be the merry month of May, or else the prescription of August moued him unto it thorowe the aduice aswell of the Phisition as of the Astronomer for his health sake’ (sig. K4r). Having disposed of the ineffectual rapist, Grange was free to explore the subject which seems to interest him most: the inexhaustible resources of contemporary literature. In Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’, G.T. claimed that his scandalous story was only the backdrop to the poetical miscellany. Grange recalls Gascoigne’s games with sources and origins when he sends the reunited nymphs on a visit to the Muses. There they find themselves entering a poetic ‘source’: the ‘Arbor of Amitie’ (sig. L3v), where they join an

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enthusiastic literary circle exchanging courtship poems.³¹ The arbour is full of flower beds, recalling both Gascoigne and Grange’s poetical gardens. But it also sounds rather like a fantasy version of Elinor’s chamber, complete with a king size floral bedstead and an eager reading group. While avoiding reproducing any of the ‘wanton’ writing which scandalized Gascoigne’s censors, Grange turns his arbour into a vale of innuendo. The newcomers take full advantage of the unusual stationery available in the arbour to exchange poetical New Year’s gifts, and also to assist potential lovers. N.O. writes a riddling anonymous poem with a red ochre stone on the screen of the hall. This is intended as encouragement to one of the gentlemen who is too shy to approach one of the lusty women. When the assembled company are all determined to find out the author, N.O. refuses to confess, but suffers a sudden nosebleed. The knowing A.O. promptly interprets this as a sure sign of authorship, recalling F.J.’s cure of Elinor’s nosebleed in the ‘Adventures’. Grange’s arbour recalls all of the pleasure of textual exchange enjoyed by Elinor’s company, without any definitively bawdy writing. Any suggestion that Grange is acting as an Elizabethan gossip columnist is entirely readers’ responsibility , or, as N.O. starts his poem, ‘Who will the curnell of the nutte, | Must breake the shell’. N.O. and A. O do finally celebrate their marriage at an uproarious heavenly banquet, perhaps intended to represent a pagan equivalent of the Christian eucharist. But Grange characteristically balances spiritual beauty with earthly indulgence and emergency plumbing. There is so much leftover Nectar and Ambrosia after the feast that the world is in danger of flooding, and Neptune has to create a special gulf to receive the excess. The Golden Aphroditis itself acts as a reservoir for Grange’s multiple digressions, which include descriptions of pageants, jestbook anecdotes and a lengthy condemnation of arranged marriages. Grange himself apologizes for including the latter topic, but as he explains, ‘though I swarue from my texte, yet not from the matter’ (sig. L1r). In this book matter is all, the matter of a contemporary bookseller as well as Grange’s own invention. In the process of appropriating as many fashionable texts as possible, Gascoigne is replaced among the ranks of notable satirists. In the conclusion Grange compiles his own canon of literary greats. He praises the literary techniques of Skelton and Erasmus on the same page as he imitates Gascoigne’s G.T.: ‘who so marketh well my glosing stile, shall finde Aliquid salis (as the Prouerb goeth) in the ³¹ Thomas Howell’s The Arbor of Amitie was published in 1568.

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meanest or basest point therof ’ (sig. N4r). The risqué jokes about pens in Gascoigne’s book are sublimated in Grange’s pleasure in writing. Even he admits to being spent by the end of the book: ‘My pen is stubbed, my paper spent, my ink wasted, my wittes gravelled’ (sig. S4v).

Revenge of the Angel Gabriel: ‘A noble mans sute to a cuntrie maide’ The impact of Whetstone and Grange’s anthologies is difficult to assess. The implied reader of Harvey’s imitation of the ‘Adventures’ is even more provokingly obscure. The text exists only in the manuscript letter-book Harvey compiled during the 1570s (BL, Sloane MS 93), and may never have been intended for publication. Like Gascoigne’s fiction, Harvey’s brief narrative is stuffed with counterfeit personae, communications by proxy and surrogate readers and writers. Like the fictions of Whetstone and Grange, Harvey’s text can be read as an attempt to transform Gascoigne’s bawdy story into a moral tale. Like Whetstone and Grange, Harvey replaces the silent Petrarchan mistress with an eloquent and inventive woman. But there are no long galleries, no courtly conversations and no happy endings, and the persona who intercepts the courtship is very different from Frizaldo or I.I. Harvey used the ‘Adventures’ to write a new role: the secretary as hero. According to Harvey, F.J.’s disgrace was all his own fault. His extensively annotated copy of The Posies includes a damning character analysis of Gascoigne’s protagonist: ‘Want of resolution & constancy, marred his witt & undid himself . . . the right flourishing man, in studdy, is nothing but studdy: in Looue, nothing but looue: in warr, nothing but warr’.³² He is equally clear about the women. ‘Frauncheschina, a fixed starr of tru vertu’ is contrasted with Leonora, ‘a blasing starr of false Looue’. In his bracing critique of Gascoigne’s plot, he makes explicit the assumption which underlies both Whetstone and Grange’s fictions. F.J. should really have chosen Frances: The discouerie of his mistres, a false Diamant. His sicknes, & Jealosie did not help the matter, but did marre all. Woomen looue men, & care not for pore harts, that cannot bestead them. Especially at the returne of his riual, her Secretarie, it imported him to emprooue himself, more, then, before, & not to languish like a ³² G. C. Moore Smith, ed., Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford upon Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 166. All references to Harvey’s Marginalia are taken from this edition.

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milksop, or to play the pore snake vpon himself. Ladie Elinor would haue liked the man that would haue maintained his possession by force of arms, & with braue encounters beat his enemies owt of the field. Ladie Fraunces, a fine & politique gentlewooman: a sure freind at a pinch, & a helping hand at euerie turne: a good wench, & worthie to be better requited for her kind hart, & effectual loouing dealing. (p. 166)

However dubious Harvey may be as a guide to what women really want, he is confident about the manly qualities so lacking in F.J. Like Whetstone, Harvey wanted the story sorted out in a duel. But Harvey’s idea of what makes for a ‘right flourishing man’ is more complex, and is refined throughout his marginalia. Like Gascoigne, Harvey creates selfreferential personalities. The quick-witted surrogates Harvey identifies with are both more literary and more flattering than Dan Bartholomew or the Green Knight. The name of ‘Angelus Furius’ embodies Harvey’s relationship to his namesake the avenging angel Gabriel.³³ But this is an accomplished and contemporary angel: ‘ye most eloquent Discourser, & most active Courser, not yn this on Towne or in that on City’ (p. 155). ‘Eutrapelus’ (quick-witted, flexible) is characterized by his ‘Eloquentia, et Vrbanitas’, as well as ‘stylus maxime viuidus’ (pp. 114, 160). ‘Axiophilus’ (lover of worth) is responsible for Harvey’s canon: ‘Axiophilus shall forgett himself, or will remember to leaue sum memorials behind him: & to make an vse of so manie rhapsodies, cantos, hymnes, odes, epigrams, sonnets, & discourses, as at idel howers, or at flowing fitte he hath compiled’ (p. 233). Gascoigne had chronicled the canon of a quick wit, but also his prodigality. Harvey was devoted to shaping the perfect literary man about town.³⁴ The fullest evidence of ‘Axiophilus’’ activity is found in Harvey’s letterbook. While many of the items date from the most successful period of his academic career, the first section of the book movingly recalls his early struggles with student life.³⁵ The middle section of the text is in part a critique of his model Gascoigne and his narrative strategies. Harvey composes two memorial poems for him, and creates a series of seemingly autobiographical personae oriented around love poems, stories, and letters. Gascoigne created an elaborate narrative around the transition of F.J.’s ³³ Compare Nashe’s taunting address to Harvey in Strange Newes as ‘Gabriel and not onely Gabriel, but Gabrielissime Gabriel, no Angell but ANGELOS, id est Nuntius’, i: 264. ³⁴ See Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of his Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 173–90. ³⁵ Harvey became praelector of rhetoric at Cambridge in 1574, and won a fellowship at Oxford in 1578. He moved to London in the 1580s in order to practise law. See Stern, Gabriel Harvey, 33–9.

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manuscript poems into a printed book. Harvey’s manuscript is riddled with often indecipherable cancellations and revisions, many of which appear to be unwittingly self-revelatory.³⁶ The experience of reading his book is inevitably different from that of confronting Gascoigne’s printed works. Yet Harvey also turns his readers into G.T., and leaves them guessing at his intentions. Harvey appears to have wanted part of the book to be published, probably by Spenser, and one folio shows a heavily revised table of contents. He was equally determined to appear as if nothing could be further from his mind. In one exchange of letters, ‘E.S. de London’ urges ‘G.H. de Cambridge’ to allow his book to appear in print, despite the latter’s reluctance (pp. 64–5). The reason for the non-appearance of Harvey’s book remains obscure, but he may simply have missed the moment. After Whetstone’s and Grange’s works, the narrative strategies Harvey experimented with would have lost some of their novelty. Harvey’s desire for publication may also have receded as he became more established in his academic career. His later success contrasts starkly with his earlier difficulties in taking his MA. These were not only work related. Harvey tried hard—too hard—to socialize with his peers at Cambridge. Despite being, in his own account, ‘as fellowli as the best’, he remained baffled by his own unpopularity: ‘What thai cale sociable I know not’ (p. 4).³⁷ Many of the items in the letter-book read like Harvey’s attempt to reconstruct ‘what thai cale sociable’, to counterfeit the ebullient attitude to life and literature shown by a writer like Grange. One of Harvey’s fantasies of social acceptance is set at his midsummer commencement at Cambridge, when he and his peers are talking about love. A ‘Mistress Katharine’ attempts to divert the conversation, on the grounds that the subject matter is ‘no university peece of lerning’ (p. 96). Her intervention provides the cue for Harvey to show that he was more than just a university wit. He makes a concerted effort to develop a ³⁶ See James Nielson’s revealing study, ‘Reading between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey’s Drafts’, SEL 33 (1993), 43–82. Nielson provides an illuminating gloss on the many revisions Harvey made to his text. For ease of reference, citations are made to page numbers in Edward John Long Scott’s transcription, The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–1580 (London: Camden Society, 1884). See also the accounts of the text given by Josephine Waters Bennett in ‘Spenser and Gabriel Harvey’s Letter-book’, MP 29 (1931), 163–86, and Henry Woudhuysen’s D.Phil. thesis, ‘Leicester’s Literary Patronage: A Study of the English Court 1578–82’, University of Oxford, 1981, 149–61. ³⁷ For an account of Harvey at this period see Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism, 84–91.

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prodigal persona in a ponderous Skeltonic poem called ‘The Schollers Loove, or Reconcilement of Contraries’ (pp. 102–36), an account of the poet’s passion for his mistress, the intriguingly named Elinor.³⁸ Harvey claims a literary inheritance from Thomas More, in his dual persona as scholar and jestbook hero, and this assertion provides an excuse for selfconscious naïvety. The poet confesses: ‘I never wente to riming schoole’, a contention he supports with such lines as ‘Her legg, her thighe! Alas I sighe!’ (p. 102). Yet despite his lack of formal training, the poet is a keen reader. In the epilogue, he confides that ‘Nowe and then a spare hower is allotted to Gascoyne, | And sum time I attende on gentle Master Ascham’ (p. 134). Harvey later crossed out ‘Gascoyne’, ‘gentle’, and ‘Ascham’, substituting ‘Chaucer’, ‘sage’, and ‘Gower’ respectively. Even at his most mirthful, Harvey was constantly reassessing what the well-read man should be seen to be reading. Harvey plainly allotted far more than a spare hour to Gascoigne, Chaucer, and Ascham, and his letter-book stresses continuities between medieval authors and their successors. In one of his memorial poems for Gascoigne, Harvey suggests that the poet should be ranked not only with Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but also with Scoggin, Skelton, and Thomas More. Gascoigne was a ‘merry mate’: the identity Harvey craved for himself. One of the ways he proved his merriment was to pose as a medieval fabliau poet, eavesdropping on the love lives of country labourers. But he makes sure they know their place. In his pursuit of the ‘honest Cuntrye Mayde’ ‘Nan Nobodye’, the miller ‘Nick Nobodye’ sends her poems, letters, and a ring. The response is scathing. Nan explains that she herself uses ‘playne Inglish, and flatt Storteford speache’ (p. 94). She ironically begs for pardon, ‘thowgh I use not those same fine, and superfine soverayne milltermes, wherewith your mealemowthe letter, and whitebredd sonett are in most superabundante measure decorate, and illuminate’ (p. 92). Country maids are not only courted by aspirational millers. One of the least revised items in the letter-book, not listed on the title-page, is a prose narrative interspersed with poetry entitled ‘A noble mans sute to a cuntrie maide’ (pp. 144–58). The plot is simple: a married nobleman, referred to alternately as ‘Milord’, ‘Milord A. S.’, or ‘Phil’ attempts to seduce the maid ‘M’. Only at the end of the text is the maid revealed as Harvey’s sister Mercy. The identity of the aristocrat remains a mystery.³⁹ Like G.T., Harvey ³⁸ Harvey even echoes the confusion in Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’ over Elinor and ‘Helen’: ‘Parisses Helen not like my Ellena’ (p. 104). ³⁹ G. C. Moore Smith identifies the nobleman as Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, in ‘Gabriel Harvey’s Letter-Book’, N&Q, 11th ser., 3 (1911), 261–3.

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poses as a historian. But if the events he recorded were true, Harvey wove them into a narrative which shares strong similarities with the adventures of F.J. and Elinor. Like Gascoigne, Harvey makes his readers play guessing games. Many of the letters which Milord sends to Mercy are represented by blank folios, perhaps because Harvey never read them. His acknowledged sources are Milord’s servant ‘P’ and Mercy herself, and the story ends with Harvey’s own letter to Milord. But Milord’s shadowy presence in the tale reflects the humiliating role he is forced to take in the courtship. In Harvey’s narrative the milksop aristocrat dares to stray out of his social milieu, and is beaten out of the field for his pains. Gascoigne’s Italian castle is replaced by an English mill, and the courtly company with a rural community which wreaks its own revenge on the lascivious lord. Mercy herself is an enigmatic source of eloquence and intrigue. And her role in the story provides a vehicle for another facet of Harvey’s identity: the moral (but witty) defender of his family’s honour. Harvey gives no hint of the starring role he is to take in the denouement of the tale. Instead he concentrates on the vulnerability of the lascivious plotters to their unfamiliar environment. Milord’s man P. knows that whitebread sonnets are not enough to win over country maids and substitutes edible alternatives. The courtship is initiated when P. invites Mercy ‘to ye eating of a coople of cunnies in ye towne, which ye yung lord was privie too, as P. swore afterward’ (p. 144). In the circumstantial world of the millhouse courtly conventions have to be severely modified. F.J. made frequent analogies between food and erotic poetry, courting Elinor with a poetic ‘Frydayes breakfast’ and a ‘moonshine banquet’. P. buys Mercy a ‘halliday breakfast’ of malmsey and cakes before telling her that Milord is attracted to her. Mercy refuses to believe that Milord has noticed a ‘plaine cuntrie wench’. On the contrary, P. assures her, Milord once noticed her hat blow off. Strangely unreassured, Mercy continues to reject her suitor’s advances, although she does begin to accept his presents: a girdle, gloves, and a ring. These gifts, P. stresses, are very personal: ‘Milord would as leeve have sent her half a score ould aungels, but that those might as likely cum from sum other man’ (p. 145). P. himself claims to be astonished by Mercy’s behaviour, ‘swearing that if she were his owne sister he would counsell her, and desier her too, to yeeld unto him’ (p. 145). Eventually, however, P.’s persistence seems to be rewarded, and the maid agrees to a meeting at the millhouse. The upshot is frustration and embarrassment rather than seduction. When Milord and P. arrive they are confronted by the massed ranks of the maid’s relatives, and beat a hasty

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retreat ‘well mirid and weried for ther labour’ (p. 146). Mercy, however, denies that she is mocking her suitors, and promises to explain everything in a letter. But the seducers—and readers—have to wait for it. Harvey represents the series of delays on the page: P. cummes me the next night for her letter. It was not finnishid. He cummes againe ye next daye. She could not be spoke with all.

When the letter finally appears, it is less than encouraging. Despite claiming a ‘homelie’ and ‘milkmaidelike’ upbringing, Mercy reveals a ready stock of proverbial wisdom. ‘Pore M.’, as she signs herself, continues to distrust Milord, adding that ‘I haue hard mie father saie, Virginitie is ye fairist flower in a maides gardin’ (p. 147). Like F.J., Milord is alive to the prospect of surrogate authorship, ‘fearing, as P. said, that she had her secretarye’ (p. 148). The subsequent exchange of letters is equally discouraging. Milord protests his sincerity, but perhaps unwisely observes how convenient an option Mercy is: ‘I might more safely dele with thee then with many other common gallantes’(p. 148). Mercy remains unconvinced. But she keeps writing. Despite acknowledging that ‘Tis not inke and paper . . . that can content Milord’, she starts composing riddling verses on the theme: ‘What, then, but put up mie pen, | And pray God amende you?’ (p. 151). Mercy is both a more subtle correspondent and a better plotter than the oafish Milord, and she rebuffs his unwanted sexual overtures as easily as his letters. The inadequacy of ink and paper as a mode of communication is fully revealed during the Christmas holiday of 1574, in an incident which echoes F.J.’s rape of Elinor. Mercy finally agrees to meet her suitor at a neighbour’s house. She arrives to find Milord ‘stud reddie in a litle parlour in his dublet and his hose, his points untrust, and his shirt lying out round about him’ (p. 152). Harvey stresses that Milord is prepared to rape Mercy: ‘[he] woulde needs have laid ye maide on ye bed’ (p. 152). But Mercy has a cunning plan, which immediately takes effect. The neighbour, who has been lying in wait, lets herself out into the street and knocks at her own front door, on the pretext of a message from Mercy’s mother. Milord abandons the attempt, but only temporarily. He leaves ‘swearing that she should . . . use him as familiarly and bowldly at any time as her owne brother’, and offering ‘to dooe with no other, but only her and his wife’ (p. 153). Mercy accepts his more practical offer of thirteen shillings, and agrees to another meeting ‘(only, as she saied, to be rid of him at that time)’ (p. 153).

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Undisconcerted by Milord’s overtures, Mercy continues to evolve increasingly inventive strategies to defer his pleasure and continue the romance. She avoids the planned assignation by taking a seven-mile journey before six o’clock in the morning to visit a friend. Once again she writes her suitor a mocking apology on the theme of textual and sexual exchange: ‘Therefore, in steade of a leifer gift | I bequeath you this paper for a shift’ (p. 154). She also takes him up on his offer to use him as if he were her brother. Mercy explains that her post is normally delivered by an illiterate messenger. Instead, she suggests, Milord should send her a letter, ‘and write thus in ye backside, in a small raggid secretary hand,— | To mie loving brother Mr G. H. on of ye fellowes of Pembrook hal in Cambridg’ (p. 155). If challenged, Mercy would claim that she had written the letter, ‘to be sent my brother Gabriell at sutch time as he cam home to mie fathers’ (p. 155). Milord follows Mercy’s instructions, and Harvey even copies the ‘small counterfet secretary’ hand which Milord forges on the address. But readers never learn what Milord wrote, and the final letter in the collection is in a very different style. Milord and Mercy have reckoned without Harvey, who thwarts the plot and ends the tale. His unexpected apparition in the narrative imitates a characteristic strategy of romance. By shamelessly appropriating Harvey’s name Milord and Mercy have unwittingly conjured up his presence. His story collides with that of the plotters, and brings the narrative into the present. Harvey appears to prevent disaster like an avenging angel, ‘Angelus Furius’ in action. But he never loses his gift of witty eloquence, even though it is wasted on a rustic postman. Harvey’s letter to Milord explains the sequence of events. Harvey was riding towards Cambridge on New Year’s Eve when he encountered one of his father’s servants from Saffron Walden. The man seemed to be carrying a letter from Harvey’s sister. Harvey expressed his astonishment in a wry quip: ‘her letters, said I, ar sumwhat daintie, they cum so sildom’ (p. 156). He was even more surprised when the countryman refused to give him the letter, on the grounds that ‘noboddie’ should see it. Harvey becomes embroiled in a lengthy exchange on the concept of ‘noboddie’, by implication reminding Milord that his identity cannot be lightly misused. Even when he finally reads the ‘verie amorous and glosing discours’ in the letter, he continues to make pointed puns. Hoping for a tip, the messenger suggests that the letter might contain an ‘ould Angel’. Mindful of his sister’s virginity, Harvey responds that he fears a ‘crackd grote in ye opening’ (p. 157). The letter does indeed contain money, but although Harvey finally allows the messenger to deliver it, he adds an alternative ‘tokin’: ‘will her in mie

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name to looke ere she leape’ (p. 158). Harvey’s business prevented him from pursuing the matter any further. He ends by expressing exaggerated bafflement at the contents of the letter: ‘what should be ment by ye loftie subscription within, and ye suttle superscription withoute’ (p. 158). Milord must himself have been the victim of identity fraud, Harvey concludes with heavy irony, and he himself is determined to find out ‘whoe this lustie suter should be’ (p. 158). Harvey acts like a true ‘secretary’ to his sister, confounding the forgers and preserving both her honour and her poetry. Moving between the worlds of Cambridge and of Saffron Walden, his urbane wit and learning provide a counterpoint to the randy nobleman, the taunting maid and the ignorant servant. Wherever he goes, Harvey displays true humanitas, remaining witty and graceful in the most difficult circumstances. Whether he intended to blackmail Milord with his evidence remains unclear. The last section of the book contains a letter to the wife of Harvey’s friend and kinsman Sir Thomas Smith, asking her to find a job for his sister.⁴⁰ The narrative as it stands provides an unusual insight into Harvey’s home life. Famously sensitive about his humble origins, Harvey generally showed more interest in the Mistress Katharines than the Nan Nobodyes. Mercy remains mysterious. Despite her flirtatiousness, her adroit manipulation of Milord’s advances places her closer to Harvey’s analysis of the ‘politique’ and ‘effectual’ Frances than to Elinor. Within the context of the letter-book, the story reads like part of Harvey’s revenge on his privileged companions at Cambridge. Gascoigne’s model allowed Harvey to weave a narrative in which the milksop aristocrat got his just deserts. F.J.’s rape of Elinor turns into a bedroom farce starring Milord untrussed. As in the ‘Adventures’, letters and poems are ‘lost’, diverted, and exposed to unexpected readers, but Harvey ensures that the end of the story is the exposure of vice. Counterfeiting secretary hands only leads to the arrival of a heroic secretary. But Mercy’s plotting also suggests that Harvey delighted in fiction as much as he distrusted it. His lack of conclusion is reminiscent of the ever reoffending surrogates created by Gascoigne. Like Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight, the lecherous Milord lives to love another day. The censorship of the Reverend Divines was far from the last word on Gascoigne. His censored text has become one of the most accessible Elizabethan fictions, while Harvey is most likely to be remembered as the ⁴⁰ Compare also Nashe’s reference to Harvey’s ‘baudy sister’ in Haue with you to Saffron Walden, Works, iii. 129 and his joke in The Vnfortunate Traueller: ‘beeing by nature inclined to Mercie (for in deede I knew two or three wenches of that name)’, Works, ii. 213.

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archetypal pedant, his fertile personalities remaining manuscript fantasies. By the time Harvey was ready for publication, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar had appeared in print, and perhaps most importantly, Lyly’s Euphues. As Harvey bitterly recorded, ‘young Euphues hatched the egges his elder freendes laide’.⁴¹ Euphues laid the eggs; Harvey missed the boat. ⁴¹ Harvey, Pierces Supererogation (London, 1593) 14r. See Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 4.

2 Strange and Incredible Adventures: Lyly’s Euphues and Greene’s Mamillia Harvey’s quick witted persona ‘Eutrapelus’ retained his status as gentleman amateur, a marginal figure in Harvey’s notebook. Lyly’s quick-witted persona ‘Euphues’ became a celebrity, a phenomenon in print on his first appearance in 1578, his name evoking an instantly recognizable author, narrative, and style. Euphues also got Lyly a job. Lyly’s first volume, Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt (1578) was dedicated to Lord Delaware, whose relationship with Lyly remains obscure. The second volume Euphues and his England was dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, Lyly’s new patron. Harvey had been busy forging secretary hands in his account of his sister’s narrowly averted downfall. Lyly became a real secretary. Lyly got his job by sketching the career path of a debut author of prose to rival the scandalous trajectory of Gascoigne’s F.J. Like Whetstone, Grange, and Harvey, Lyly started the story in a reformist mode. From the beginning the narrator stresses that Euphues will turn into a moral author. But once he gets involved in matters of plot and style, the meaning of ‘authorship’ becomes much more complex. Like Gascoigne’s other imitators, Lyly exposed his hero to a witty and eloquent heroine, but she turns out to have narrative plans of her own. When Lyly’s first book proved phenomenally successful, Lyly had to invent a new mode for Euphues, who once again found himself confronting a powerful woman—the queen. Faced with women readers, Euphues became less reformed prodigal and more celebrity fool. When Greene read the text, the woman reader became the author, and the prodigal fool her destiny.

‘The iniquitie of the author’—Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt Euphues has a specific source which is nothing to do with Harvey. Roger Ascham, who famously denounced Italian fictions, unwittingly gave his

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name to the protagonist of Lyly’s Italianate fiction. ‘Euphues’ is the first classification of the ‘anatomy of wit’ Ascham created in his educational treatise The Scholemaster (1570). Euphues ‘is he, that is apte by goodness of witte, and appliable by readines of will, to learning, hauing all other qualities of the minde and partes of the bodie, that must an other day serue learning, not trobled, mangled, and halfed, but sounde, whole, full, & hable to do their office.’¹ ‘Euphues’ is a distinctively virile persona, with ‘a voice, not softe, weake, piping, womanishe, but audible, stronge, and manlike . . . a personage, not wretched and deformed, but talle and goodlie’ (p.194). But the quick-witted are also potentially vulnerable. Those embodying the quality, Ascham explains, are likely to ‘delite them selues in easie and pleasant studies, and neuer passe forward in hie and hard sciences’. As Gascoigne had already realized, there were the makings of a prodigal son drama in Ascham’s explanation. The Glasse of Gouernement (1575) was part of Gascoigne’s attempt to present himself as a reformed prodigal. In Gascoigne’s play, Ascham’s theory was taken to its uncompromising conclusion. Two older quick-witted brothers fall prey to temptation and face whipping and execution at the end of the play. Their younger, slower siblings are rewarded for their virtue.² Lyly’s use of Ascham’s persona is less likely to be a cheeky act of rebellion than an attempt to follow Gascoigne’s lead. Lyly also needed to make his work sell, and in order to do so he looked back to Gascoigne’s more attractive earlier prose work. There are plenty of indications within the opening pages of the Anatomy that Lyly intended Euphues to be a prodigal who, unlike F.J., undergoes a conclusive reformation. And his reformation would turn him into the kind of successful author that Lyly wished to be himself. In the opening description of the protagonist, the narrator cites three exemplary figures to prove that youthful prodigality can turn to virtue: ‘Tullie eloquent in his gloses, yet vayneglorious: Salomon wyse, yet to too wanton: Dauid holye but yet an homicide: none more wittie then Euphues, yet at the first none more wicked.’³ In the first poem which Elinor inspired him to compose, F.J. had cited David and Solomon as examples of men rendered helpless by beautiful women. Lyly’s narrator restores the example to its moral context. Euphues is ¹ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570) in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 194. All references to Ascham’s work are to this edition, unless otherwise stated. ² See Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism, 117–20. ³ The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), i. 182. All references to Lyly’s work are taken from this edition.

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currently as vicious as David, but will eventually turn into a moral author like him. But by adding ‘Tullie’ to the group, he implies a literary connection between David, author of the psalms, Solomon author of Wisdom literature, and Cicero, model of eloquence. Cicero’s model of authorship highlights one of Euphues’ biggest problems within the text. There are obvious reasons why the Anatomy looks very different from F.J.’s ‘Adventures’. First it is all in prose, and secondly it is in Lyly’s prose. Unlike F.J., Euphues has no canon of courtship poetry lovingly recorded by a G.T. ‘Euphuizing’ depends on conversation. Euphues himself discovers he has to compete with the other personae in the book, all of whom are busily exploiting the sheer oddness of Lyly’s style for their own purposes. Lyly’s central persona becomes an author in the course of the book. But he is also exposed to a different model of authorship, which involves fluent selection and mobilization of Lyly’s examples. And despite his name, Euphues is far from the most able euphuist in the book. ‘Euphues’ has a source. ‘Euphuism’ does not, which is part of the point of the style. Lyly’s personae are always experimenting with alliterative and balanced clauses, with classical allusions and bizarre natural phenomena. There are many possible antecedents for the particular stylistic quirks they deploy, particularly in the writings of Pettie and Grange.⁴ But all Lyly’s personae have different ideas about what they are there for. Euphuism is reinvented by every new speaker in order to make his or her point. This is a trend started by Lyly himself in the dedicatory epistle. For Lyly, euphuism was about getting his book noticed. This is an aspiration which he explicitly denies in the epistle to Delaware: ‘He that commeth in print bicause he would be knowen, is lyke the foole that commeth into the market bicause he would be seene’ (i. 182). Lyly came into print to be known and therefore employed, and spends most of the preface and dedication acting the fool. Lyly jokes because he has nothing else to do. He appoints himself to the fantasy job of ‘anatomist of wit’, while stressing his lack of qualifications: ‘For if the butcher should take vpon him to cut the Anatomy of a man bicause he hath skil in opening an Oxe, he would proue himselfe a Calfe’ (i. 180).⁵ Anticipating the jesting of the ‘fine wits’ among his readers, Lyly apologizes for the fact that ‘a foole hath intruded himselfe to discourse of ⁴ For accounts of Lyly’s style, see Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Prose Style of John Lyly’, ELH 23 (1956)14–35; Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word, 372–423; J. Swart, ‘Lyly and Pettie’, ES 23 (1941), 9–18. ⁵ For the contemporary popularity of ‘anatomy’ literature, see Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1985), 1–19.

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wit’ (i. 180). Now readers are turned into the true ‘euphues’, fine wits confronted by unqualified public speakers. Lyly’s repeated conflation of ‘folly’ and ‘wit’ suggests that he wished his readers to link his text with Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly. And the primary ‘follies’ of which euphuism is composed are those of excessive allusion: to the gods, to literature and especially to the properties of animals, vegetables and minerals—all those elements, in fact, which Grange had used when he rewrote F.J.’s story in The Golden Aphroditis. But whereas Grange provided a haven for source hunters, Lyly spends much of his time faking it. In The Golden Aphroditis the nymph N.O. compared the progress of his love affair to minerals and best-sellers, leaving readers to assess the similarities. Lyly plunges his readers into a world of competitive clauses in which the real and the fantastic are equally valid, in which the fish Scolopidus and the bird Trochilus are as relevant as toads and treacle. Just as ‘one leafe of Colloquintida marreth and spoyleth the whole potte of porredge’ (i. 189), so the familiar is always in danger of invasion by extreme nature. The Anatomy turns the world into a giant anthology of natural plots insinuating themselves into the euphuistic conversations, the historical citations mingling with Lyly’s own inventions. They have no relevance to the story. Analogy was a traditionally low level of proof, and Lyly’s fabulous beasts patently do not offer a useful perspective on moral dilemmas.⁶ What Lyly’s prose style does do is to tempt readers to concentrate on it, while allowing the love story to go unnoticed. In F.J.’s ‘Adventures’, the glossing of literature had been confined to G.T.’s comments on F.J.’s poems. Lyly’s style invites readers to turn into G.T., analysing rhetoric rather than reading the story.⁷ Within the narrative, the most successful ‘euphuists’ are those who succeed in using Lyly’s examples to prove their own foregone conclusions. Lyly provides plenty of hints that reading the Anatomy should be regarded as an aesthetic rather than a moral experience. Like Grange, he turns back to Venus as the chosen goddess to preside over his book, and her presence displaces moral judgement. Lyly tells Delaware: ‘PARATIVS drawing the counterfaite of Helen (right honourable) made the attier of hir head loose, who being demaunded why he did so, he aunswered, she ⁶ In The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft (1573), Raphe Lever places ‘similitude’ nineteenth in his list of twenty-four places ‘to yelde a reasoner store of argument’ (17v). As he explains: ‘Learned men in arguing, make small accompt of any similitude. For by a similitude you maye as soone proue a wrong matter, as a righte’ (N2v). For contemporary ideas of wit, see Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, 200–1. ⁷ See Mike Pincombe, ‘Lyly’s Euphues: Anatomy or Peep-Show?’ in Görtschacher and Klein, eds., Narrative Strategies, 103–13.

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was loose. Vulcan was painted curiously, yet with a polt foote. Venus cuningly, yet with hir Mole’ (i. 179). Lyly offers his readers a range of different representational practices, beginning with the ancient painter ‘Paratius’, who made moral judgement into a visual pun. But Vulcan’s physical defect has no moral valency. Venus’ mole by contrast positively enhances her attractions, as Lyly makes clear when he introduces Euphues on the first page of the narrative. Euphues’ combination of ‘fine wit’ and a ‘wanton will’ means that he may turn out like the authors David and Solomon. But it also makes him into a source of attraction: ‘Venus had hir Mole in hir cheeke which made hir more amiable. Helen hir scarre on hir chinne which Paris called Cos amoris, the Whetstone of loue. Aristippus his wart, Lycurgus his wenne’ (i. 184). Now the different categories appear to be firmly based on sex divisions. Ugly Aristippus, Lycurgus and Vulcan are different from Venus and Helen, whose blemishes only make them more beautiful. By the end of the dedication, Lyly is giving his readers no room to disagree: ‘We comonly see that a black ground doth best beseme a white counterfeit. And Venus according to the judgement of Mars, was then most amiable, when she sate close by Vulcanus. If these thinges be true which experience tryeth, that a naked tale doth set foorth the naked truth’ (i. 181). ‘We’ leap from black and white colour combinations to joining Mars in lusting after a Venus made more attractive by the side of her ugly husband. Lyly places his readers in the same position as Frances in Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’, watching the antics of F.J. and Elinor. He seems to offer his readers a justification for their voyeurism: ‘If these thinges be true which experience tryeth.’ But Venus and Mars are nothing to do with truth and experience, and mention of nudity is likely to remind readers of the gods’ adultery rather than honest truth. Even Lyly leaves the sentence in the conditional form. Like Grange, Lyly was introducing exactly those ‘wanton shows of better hidden matters’ which Sidney had identified with the worst type of imaginative literature. Like Grange, Lyly is consciously fooling, sweeping his readers into agreeing that enjoying a story of adulterous gods is a moral duty. Whenever Venus and Helen are mentioned, moral categories are pushed to one side, and this is exactly what happens within the narrative. Lyly’s aims in writing the Anatomy appear to have been to revise F.J.’s and Elinor’s adventures, ending with a portrait of a reformed author which would reflect Lyly’s own literary skills. He composed the whole text in a showy and distinctive style of eloquence shared by personae and narrator—including Elinor’s counterpart, the argumentative Lucilla. One of the first jokes in F.J.’s courtship of Elinor lay in the fact that his Petrarchan style of literary

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courtship was utterly unsuitable to his mysterious mistress, and could be understood only by her male secretary. Lucilla is more than capable of arguing back, and mobilizing Lyly’s examples to her own advantage, especially those of Venus and Helen. In the process, the male author gets knocked off the top spot. The recent censorship of Gascoigne’s revised anthology The Posies cannot have been far from Lyly’s mind. In contrast to the long galleries or millhouses described by Gascoigne and Harvey, Euphues is left in a narrative hinterland, referred to only as a young Athenian with a large patrimony. His prodigal career is sketched in the most general terms. He travels to Naples, ‘the Tabernacle of Venus’, where, the narrator vaguely observes, he is surrounded by companions ‘who courted hym continuallye with sundry kinds of deuises’ (i. 186). The main point about Euphues is that he has no distinguishing features, even his great wit ‘beeinge lyke waxe apte to receiue any impression’ (i. 185). This is what makes him so much in need of guidance, according to an old man called Eubulus: ‘for hee knewe that so rare a wytte woulde in tyme eyther breede an intollerable trouble, or bringe an incomparable Treasure to the common weale’ (i. 186). Unlike F.J., whose prodigality flourished unchecked, Euphues is placed in a narrative situation common to innumerable prodigal son plays.⁸ The rebellious youth is placed in opposition to a figure of good counsel, whose sentiments resemble those of Ascham himself. But Eubulus is also committed to arguing by analogy in a manner which links him as closely to Lyly as to Ascham. Eubulus blames the parents, who should have nurtured their son with a mixture of discipline and affection, just as gardeners mix hyssop and thyme. Eubulus varies a common proverb with a simile which recalls Lyly’s own description of his text. Euphues’ parents should have acted ‘as cunning Painters, who for the whitest woorke caste the blackest grounde, to make the Picture more amiable’ (i. 187). Euphues will succumb to temptation, he continues, just as ‘the fine christall is sooner crazed then the harde marble . . . the Caterpillar cleaueth vnto the ripest fruite’ (i. 189). Eubulus’ terms of reference are the same as those used by Lyly in the dedication. Raising children has turned into an aesthetic experience of comparing colour contrasts, which readers might remember as being comparable to watching Venus with Mars. Euphues’ own future career is determined by the behaviour of caterpillars and crystals. ⁸ ‘Eubulus’ is the name of the good counsellor in Gulielmus Gnapheus’ influential prodigal son play Acolastus (1529), in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s tragedy Gorboduc (1565), and in Richard Edwardes’s tragical comedy Damon and Pythias (1571).

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Like any prodigal son, Euphues rudely rejects the advice of his elders. But in so doing he finds himself making more sweeping statements about the nature of Lyly’s prose. Euphues is just as keen as Eubulus to enlist natural phenomena to help him prove his point. Not all things change in the same way: ‘Though all men bee made of one mettall, yet they bee not cast all in one moulde . . . the Sunne doth harden the durte & melte the waxe’ (i. 190). Some things change: ‘Though yron be made softe it returneth to its hardnes’. Others do not: ‘the Diamond lyeth in the fire, and is not consumed’ (i. 191). Anyway, Euphues argues, ‘it is ye disposition of the thought yt altereth ye nature of ye thing’ (i. 193). Euphues does not have to act like a piece of metal, and nor does any other creature capable of rational thought processes. The disposition of the thought is also responsible for which examples are picked. Euphues rightly argues that arguing by analogy means that anyone can prove anything they want.⁹ In so doing, he exposes the mendacious nature of Lyly’s prose, which he is nonetheless committed to using throughout the text. Citing examples is no more useful when choosing friends. Euphues leaves Eubulus lamenting over his wickedness and stays in Naples. There he makes a friend called Philautus, who has the same name as one of the prodigal son brothers in Gascoigne’s The Glasse of Governemente. Euphues, however, is thinking of different sorts of plots. His idea is that he and Philautus will impersonate pairs of exemplary male friends from literature: ‘Damon to his Pythias . . . Titus to his Gysippus . . . was neuer found more faithfull then Euphues will be to his Philautus’ (i. 198). But these examples are less easy to manipulate by thought than iron and diamonds, and come with stories of self-sacrifice already attached.¹⁰ Pythias saved Damon from false accusation and execution. Gysippus renounced his bride to Titus, and Titus later saved Gysippus when he too was falsely accused of murder. Euphues seems to have been reading a very different book on friendship; ‘I haue red (saith he) and well I beleeue it, that a friend is . . . at all times an other I, in all places ye expresse image of mine owne person . . . by so much the more I make myself sure to haue Philautus, by how much the more I view in him the liuely Image of Euphues’ (i. 197). Euphues turns Philautus into an exceptionally solipsistic form of mirror literature, in which both friends reflect each ⁹ For further analysis of Lyly’s false logic, see Raymond Stephanson, ‘John Lyly’s Prose Fiction: Irony, Humor and Anti-Humanism’, ELR 11 (1981), 3–21. ¹⁰ See Elyot, The Book Named the Governor [1531] (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), fos. 145v–160r; Richard Edwardes, Damon and Pythias (1571), ed. Arthur Brown and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Malone Society, 1957).

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other. But he fails to realize that he is himself embodying the meaning of Philantus’ name: ‘lover of self ’. As the narrator informs his readers, Euphues has no intention of remembering the plots of the friendship tales he cites so glibly: ‘Unto [Lucilla] had Philautus accesse, who wanne hir by right of lawe, had not Euphues by straunge destenie broken the bonds of marriage, and forbidden the banes of matrimonie’ (i. 199). Unlike the other imitators of F.J., Lyly has merged the categories of friend and rival. Like F.J., Euphues is a poor reader. Just as F.J. was unable to apply Frances’s tale about adultery to his own situation, so Euphues is unable to see the implications of his citations of famous friends. When Euphues meets Lucilla, he discovers a much more active reader. Lucilla is Philautus’ mistress and the daughter of Don Ferardo, one of the governors of Naples.¹¹ Euphues joins them at a dinner party hosted by Ferardo, and is instantly smitten with Lucilla. But he has to find different methods to court her from those used by F.J. The only courtship mode available to him is by debate in open company—a topic at which Lucilla proves noticeably more fluent than Euphues.¹² When Euphues starts a debate about whether men or women are most constant in love, he chivalrously offers to adopt the opposite position to Lucilla. But she wrong-foots him: ‘Lucilla seing the pretence thought to take aduantage of his large profer, vnto whome she sayde. Gentleman in myne opinion Women are to be wonne with euery wynde, in whose sex there is neither force to withstande the assaults of loue, neither constancie to remaine faythfull’ (i. 203). Euphues now has to start arguing for women’s fidelity himself, but ends up retreating into silence, and the party breaks up. As far as Euphues is concerned, the point of arguing is to debate opposite positions endlessly. But Lucilla refuses to play the expected role, teasing Euphues, but also forecasting her own role in the plot. Lucilla spends the text taking advantage of the ‘large profer’ offered by the range of euphuistic examples on hand, and using them to her own advantage. ¹¹ Lyly’s immediate source for Lucilla was the exuberant daughter of Marcus Aurelius, who appears in Antonio de Guevara’s treatise The Dial of Princes, first translated by Thomas North in 1557. But Lyly also repeatedly associates Lucilla with ideas of light and shade, thus implying that she is a female Lucifer. See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, 31–3, 242. Lyly’s use of ‘light’ imagery suggests that he is an artist like Paratius (probably Parrhasius), who represented loose Helen with loose hair. ¹² For Lyly’s ideas of courtly debate, see Catherine Bates, ‘ “A Large Occasion of Discourse”: John Lyly and the Art of Civil Conversation’, RES NS 42 (1991), 469–86; The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 89–135.

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The difference between her reasoning and that of Euphues is immediately apparent when the company retire for the night. Both Euphues and Lucilla retire to their respective bedrooms in order to meditate on whether to consent to love, in internal monologues. This above all is the narrative element which distinguishes Lyly from Gascoigne, and was eagerly adopted by Greene. Elinor had a secretary to confide in, a source of private knowledge which infuriated F.J. and G.T. F.J. expressed his feelings in poetry or crude sexual metaphors. Lucilla and Euphues have only themselves to talk to, and can express their thoughts only in Lyly’s style. How well they can use themselves for a secretary, and construct a self-fulfilling argument determines their later roles. Lucilla is attracted to Euphues, and needs to justify abandoning Philautus. Like everyone else in the text, she resorts to collecting properties from natural history. But instead of gathering up random manifestations of bizarre creatures, Lucilla starts to refine her definition of nature: ‘For as the Bee that gathereth Honny out of the weede, when she espyeth the faire flower flyeth to the sweetest . . . So I, although I loued Philautus for his good properties, yet seing Euphues to excel him, I ought by Nature to lyke him better’ (i. 206). Lucilla understands Philautus and Euphues as embodied collections of properties, walking euphuisms. She herself is a far more efficient anatomist of wit than Euphues, identifying, classifying, and grading the value of her lovers according to her own natural desires. But she also gravitates towards particular examples. Lucilla is interested in the behaviour of precious stones, which, she argues, provides a blueprint for her own behaviour in love: ‘Is not the Dyamonde of more valewe then the Rubie, bicause he is of more vertue. Is not Euphues more prayse worthy then Philautus being more wittie?’ (i. 206). Wit, virtue, and the attractions of precious stones are effortlessly conflated. Like the narrator, Lucilla understands Euphues as impressionable wax. But she remoulds the idea in order to imagine Euphues stamped like a coin with his father’s inheritance: ‘as the softe waxe receiueth what soeuer print be in the seale, and sheweth no other impression, so the tender babe being sealed with his fathers giftes representeth his image most lyuely’ (i. 207).¹³ Meanwhile Euphues is floundering. When he gets to his bedroom, he also resorts to natural history: ‘The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the ¹³ See Joan Pong Linton’s perceptive discussion of Lucilla as consumer in ‘The Humanist in the Market: Gendering Exchange and Authorship in Lyly’s Euphues Romances’ in Constance C. Relihan, ed., Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 73–97.

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Sea Crabbe and is immediately recurred . . . the Dogge hauing surfeited, to procure his vomitte eateth grasse, and findeth remedy’. But Euphues can never forget that he is not a dog or a sea crab, and ends up complaining, ‘And can man by no hearb, by no art, by no way procure a remedye for the impatient disease of loue?’ (i. 208) Lucilla pioneers a ruthlessly self-interested model of euphuizing, which she extends to one of its most notable aspects: the excessive citation of classical allusion. The text which is used throughout the Anatomy is Ovid’s Heroides, and the example which is dominant is that provided by the love triangle existing between Paris, Menelaus, and Helen.¹⁴ For Euphues, the story provides an opportunity for him to rewrite history, and to justify his own behaviour in deceiving Philautus: ‘Did not Paris though he were a welcome guest to Menelaus serue his hoste a slippery prancke? If Philautus had loued Lucilla, he woulde neuer haue suffered Euphues to haue seene hir’ (i. 210). Once again, Lucilla reads differently. When she finally accepts Euphues’ affections, she does so in a speech which is directly based on a single source: Helen’s epistle to Paris in the Heroides.¹⁵ And for Lucilla, the model provided by Helen becomes part of her literary self-definition. She is a more ambitious and a more inclusive reader than Gascoigne’s Elinor, who took umbrage when she believed F.J. was recycling a poem for an ‘elder lover’ called Helen. Lucilla uses the model provided by Helen to dignify her position, and in so doing seizes the narrative energy of the text. She starts a liaison with Euphues, although the narrator is careful to stress the difference between this relationship and that of F.J. and Elinor: ‘arguing wittily vpon certeine questions, they fell to such agreement as poore Philautus woulde not haue agreed vnto if hee had bene present, yet alwayes keepinge the body vndefiled’ (i. 220). Yet it is not Euphues whom Lucilla finally chooses. When Ferardo tries to hasten the marriage between her and Philautus, she confesses her feelings for Euphues. Philautus denounces Euphues in fury, and leaves town with Ferardo. While Euphues is also absent, Lucilla discovers another lover: ‘one Curio a gentleman of Naples of lyttle wealth and lesse witte haunted Lucilla hir company, & so enchaunted hir, yt Euphues was also cast off with Philautus’ (i. 237). The repellent Curio is reminiscent of Elinor’s secretary. As Lucilla explains to the disenchanted Euphues, her serial inconstancy turns her into an emblem of inconstancy: ‘I think ¹⁴ See Moore, ‘Elizabethan Fiction’, 51. ¹⁵ See M. P. Tilley, ‘Euphues and Ovid’s Heroical Epistles’, MLN 45 (1930), 301–8.

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God gaue it me for a just plague, for renouncing Philautus, & choosing thee, and sithens I am an ensample to all women of lightenesse, I am lyke also to be a myrrour to them all of vnhappinesse’ (i. 238–9). Despite her words, Lucilla rejoices in her status as negative example, which she continues to amplify: ‘Venus was content to take the black Smith with his powlt foot . . . As for chaunging, did not Helen ye pearle of Greece thy countriwoman first take Menelaus, then Theseus, and last of all Paris?’ (i. 239). Lucilla not only inserts herself into a history of literary bad girls, but picks the same examples used by Lyly in the dedication. By her action within the narrative, Lucilla has made the text all about her. Yet Lucilla’s self-definition as a new negative example is also a sop to the men. By inviting them to use her as a new euphuism, she places herself within a familiar canon of misogynist literature. The real threat to the narrative posed by Lucilla lies in her determination not to make the story of the text about prodigality, but about love. She is thus very different from her most obvious prototype, Gascoigne’s Elinor. Lucilla turns the ‘Anatomy’ into a romance. Despite her relentless assessment of the relative value of Euphues and Philautus, she finally chooses the worthless Curio, and, as she argues to her father, ‘To giue reason for fancie were to weighe the fire, and measure the winde’ (i. 245). The unpredictability of love is part of the nature of romance. And since Lucilla has done nothing but talk throughout the text, there is no reason for her not to assume the identity of a comic heroine who lives happily, and wealthily, ever after. Ferardo eventually dies of grief, ‘leauing Lucilla the onely heire of his landes, and Curio to possesse them’ (i. 245). Even the narrator appears taken aback by her success, but what ende came of hir, seeing it is nothing incident to the history of Euphues, it were superfluous to insert it, and so incredible that all women would rather wonder at it then beleeue it, which euent being so straunge, I had rather leaue them in a muse what it should bee, then in a maze in telling what it was. (i. 245)

Even as Lucilla is dispatched from the pages of the narrative, the narrator confirms her status as romance heroine, a source of wonder and strangeness. Moreover, previously unacknowledged women readers are invited to compose their own sequel: ‘the strange and incredible adventures of Lucilla’. Gascoigne concealed a story about rape in a framework of elaborate fakery, involving poetry, commentary, and a snapshot of aristocrats at play. Lyly enfolded his narrative in a counterfeit culture of allusion and absurdity, in which Lucilla predominates. She even appropriates the

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example of a prodigal author, David, which the narrator had associated with Euphues. Lucilla, however, has no intention of taking reformed prodigal authors too seriously. When Euphues first begins to court her, she keeps him guessing by toying with the idea of dressing up as a penitent: ‘I meane so to mortifie my selfe that in stead of silkes I will wear sackcloth, for Owches and Bracelettes, Leere and Caddys, for the Lute, vse the Distaffe, for the Penne, the Needle, for louers Sonnettes, Dauids psalms’ (i. 224). Lucilla’s parodic vision of a female prodigal suggests a hopelessly effeminate vision of literature. Lyly seems determined to replace it with a more masculine model of authorship at the end of the book. Euphues starts writing—although not repenting. Lucilla’s influence remains impossible to ignore, and Euphues and Philautus effectively follow her suggestion of using her as a negative female example. Euphues’ treachery to Philautus is lost in their common disgust at Lucilla’s infidelity. While Philautus goes to court and Euphues stays at university, they renew their friendship without any suggestion of reformation. Their reunion acts as an ironic commentary on Euphues’ earlier allusions to friendship tales. Euphues and Philautus eventually bond not over selfless sacrifice but deceit, and prove more successful at retaining their friendship by letters than by actions. The Anatomy ends with Euphues’ collected works, a corpus of exemplary letters to Philautus and others. At last, then, he achieves the status of author. Yet like F.J., Euphues shows little sign of moral reformation. For his first work he seems to be playing safe by picking a topic and an author with instant appeal to a young male readership. His letter ‘A cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond louers’ is a misogynistic rant based on Ovid’s Remedia Amoris. As if to rebut Lucilla’s fantasy of dressing up as a reformed prodigal, Euphues argues that women are all monsters beneath their clothes: ‘Take from them their periwigs, their payntings, their Iewells, their rowles, their boulsterings, and thou shalt soone perceiue that a woman is the least part of hir selfe’ (i. 254). But Euphues has reckoned without the female readership who might be busy composing their own sequel to Lucilla’s adventures. He immediately follows up the ‘cooling card’ with a hasty disclaimer addressed to honest Italian women, pointing out that ‘as ther hath beene an vnchast Helen in Greece, so there hath bene also a chast Penelope’. The two letters act like one of the ‘double prefaces’ so common in the works of Greene. Euphues begins to develop the strategies of a commercial author, shamelessly advertising his text as simultaneously misogynistic and a celebration of female virtue.

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But Lyly pulls him out of his training. Euphues was meant to be a reformed author like David, although the closest he comes to repentance is the narrator’s statement: ‘the ficklenesse of Lucilla enforced him to alter his minde’ (i. 259). Instead, Euphues returns to Athens to the marginal existence of an independent scholar. The marriage between didactic author and supposedly reformed prodigal is an uneasy one. Euphues establishes his brand name easily enough. ‘Euphues and his Ephoebus’ is a treatise on childrearing largely borrowed from Plutarch. ‘Euphues and Atheos’ is a conversion dialogue. But the moral Euphues is unlikely to make many converts among his readers. The problem is one of tone, and Euphues’ pompous piety is especially repugnant when he starts tying up the loose ends of his narrative. Lucilla’s story returns only to be definitively shut down. In a letter to Philautus, Euphues reveals that she, like Cressida, has died a leprous beggar. Euphues is not sorry, and does not think anyone else should be either. He laughs at Eubulus for grieving over his daughter’s death, and tells Philautus that Lucilla got what she deserved: ‘Thou sayest that for beautie she was the Helen of Greece, and I durst sweare that for beastliness she might be the monster of Italy’ (i. 312). Ironically, Euphues is continuing to follow Lucilla’s suggestion of using her story as a negative example. Lyly dropped plenty of hints at the start of the text that he was planning to tell an excitingly erotic story in which readers would end up peering at Venus and Mars. But he was also keen to avoid the scandal associated with Gascoigne’s text. In the dedicatory epistle he begged his readers not to blame ‘the iniquitie of the author’ (i. 180) if Euphues turned out to be too ‘light’. But during the course of the text the narrative energy is shifted to Lucilla. The text is not very erotic, or moral, and is always teetering on the brink of becoming a romance. The iniquitous author of this plotline is Lucilla herself. And her dominant role is replaced by another woman in Lyly’s second book. The first book ends with Euphues’ correspondence with Livia, one of the women he met at Ferardo’s house. Livia is planning to leave a corrupt court, despite the presence of a virtuous empress. Euphues commends her decision, since he is himself planning a pilgrimage to visit ‘a woman that in all quallyties excelleth any man’ (i. 323)— Elizabeth herself.

‘Venus back’: Euphues and his England As an author, Euphues is an unappealing figure—as Lyly himself soon realized, despite the popularity of his book. He seems to have been

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genuinely surprised by its success. In the epistle to the gentlemen readers, Lyly had provided a gloomy forecast of its brief shelf-life: ‘We commonly see the booke that at Christmas lyeth bound in the Stacioners’ stall at Easter to be broken in the Haberdasshers shop, which sith it is the order of proceding, I am content this winter to haue my doings read for a toye; that in sommer they may be ready for trash’ (i. 182). The Anatomy broke the order of proceeding. Lyly rushed out a second edition in 1579 with minor changes and an even more defiant and eloquent Lucilla. But already he was competing with imitators. Stephen Gosson’s brief narrative The Ephemerides of Phialo (1579) is inspired by the ingenious idea that Lucilla’s persona could be merged with that of Euphues’ correspondent Atheos to form an evil composite: the prostitute Polyphile. Rivalry is dispensed with along with narrative conflict. Instead the moralizing young Italian Phialo rebukes his friend Philotimo for falling in love with Polyphile, and later harangues her himself. When she eventually panics at the thought of an avenging God, she gives up her job and changes her name to Theophile. Gosson may not have been a typical reader. But the need to integrate narrative and morals was also felt by some women readers, as Lyly acknowledges in the epistle addressed to them at the beginning of Euphues and his England (1580). The moral discourses, he promises, will no longer be ‘clapt in a cluster’. Instead they will be artfully distributed, ‘heere and there, lyke Strawberies, not in Heapes, like Hoppes’ (ii. 9). Lyly had belatedly understood the value of his women readers. His new book is for them and about them. The letters which preface Euphues and his England reverse the order and value systems of the letters at the end of the Anatomy. In the ‘cooling card’ Euphues had denounced women as nothing but elaborate clothes horses. In the new book fashion is essential, and Lyly’s book is the latest accessory. Lyly knows what his readers like: You chuse cloth that will weare whitest, not that will last longest, coulours that looke freshest, not that endure soundest, and I would you woulde read bookes that haue more shewe of pleasure, then ground of profit, then should Euphues be as often in your hands, being but a toy, as Lawne on your heads, being but trash, the one will be scarce liked after once reading, and the other is worne out after the first washing. (ii. 9–10)

Euphues and his England is designer ephemera offering instant gratification. Yet even while Lyly stresses the brevity of his text’s pleasures, he suggests that women build the text into their daily lives, play with it as if it were a lapdog, pass it on to maidservants, keep the book safe: ‘Euphues

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had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open in a Schollers studie’ (ii. 9). Lyly’s images recall the devious exchanges of texts among the noblewomen at Elinor’s house. The new Euphues, Lyly argues, should offer a communal reading experience openly shared among gentlewomen and their maids.¹⁶ Euphues and his England is centred round a portrait of court life which is full of honest women talking about love. Yet the image of female creativity with which Lyly begins the letter is not of community but of competition. The epistle to women readers opens with the myth of the weaver Arachne. Lyly tells the story so that it becomes a celebration of the diverse elements in his book, and an elaborate modesty topos. When Arachne was criticized for not including all the colours in her tapestry, she suggested that spectators imagine them for themselves. What Lyly does not tell his readers is that Arachne was weaving her tapestry as part of a daring project to rival Athena’s creative power, and was punished by being turned into a spider. Lyly was himself writing for all women readers, but for one powerful woman in particular. The queen lies at the heart of Lyly’s book, but she has to be approached with caution, as both Euphues and Philautus discover. Like Arachne, Lyly was attempting a daring enterprise: creating a commercial representation of a queen who exercised strict control over commercial representation of her image. Euphues and his England is a highly marketable anthology with different kinds of writing for different kinds of readers. But the impact of the queen on Lyly’s text is never far from his mind. After the example of Arachne, Lyly reverts briefly to Venus, the vision of beauty who had hung lubriciously about the prefatory material of the first book. The new book is also about love, and the presiding goddess returns in what looks like a conventional modesty topos. Arachne asked her readers to imagine the missing colours in her tapestry, so readers should imagine the questions of love which might be missing from Lyly’s book: ‘When Venus is paynted, we can-not see hir back, but hir face, so that all other thinges that are to be recounted in loue, Euphues thinketh them to hang at Venus back in a budget, which bicause hee can-not see, hee will not set downe’ (ii. 8). One of Euphues’ principal functions in the book is as spectator. Lyly explains to the gentlemen readers that he has just spent a month in Italy ‘viewing the Ladyes in a Painters shop’ (ii. 11). Now he is looking at a picture of Venus which makes him imagine her as a heavenly author, a celestial pedlar equipped ¹⁶ For further discussion of Lyly’s relationship with his women readers, see Victoria Burke, ‘Constructing the Woman Reader in Barnabe Riche, John Lyly, and Marguerite de Navarre’ in Görtschacher and Klein, eds., Narrative Strategies, 114–31.

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with a bag full of love pamphlets. The briefly irreverent image suggests an impossible unity between Lyly’s commercial readership and the queen. One other factor unites Euphues and the queen: they are both hard to draw. Fewer strange animals insinuate themselves into the analogies of Lyly’s second narrative. Their place is largely taken by stories about ancient painters faced with impossible commissions.¹⁷ Representing the queen is as difficult as writing a sequel, bringing Euphues out of his private study and giving him a new narrative identity. The new Euphues had to be both different and the same, and Lyly discusses the process of imitation in a variety of anecdotes about odd couples. In his letter to the Earl of Oxford, Lyly tells him about the ancient painter Phydias, who painted a self-portrait to see what sort of a reception it would get. In the same way, Lyly explains, he was sufficiently encouraged by the response to his first book: ‘to set an other face to Euphues, but yet just behind the other, like the Image of Janus, not running together, lik the Hopplitides of Parrhasius least they should seeme so vnlike Brothers, that they might be both thought bastardes’ (ii. 4). Lyly poses as an anxious parent, his first child a ‘blind whelp’ and the second an unruly monster. But all these metaphors, Lyly explains, only show how impossible the act of representation is. He is left feeling like the artist who was trying to paint ‘The Twinnes of Hippocrates’ and eventually had to be content with writing the title instead. Euphues himself now appears to be the oddest natural phenomenon of all: a half-finished monster whom viewers have to complete for themselves: ‘For he that vieweth Euphues, wil say that he is drawen but to the wast, that he peepeth, as if were behinde some screene, that his feet are yet in the water’ (ii. 6–7). Euphues looked at Venus and was left imagining her back. Readers are asked to peer at Euphues hiding behind a screen as if he were emerging from his bath. Both Euphues and Venus are fleetingly sketched in irreverent images which stress their absurdity. Throughout the text Lyly evolves the metaphor of the odd couple as a way of discussing Euphues, text, hero, and style in two very different books. This book is full of pairs, unlike twins, dissimilar namesakes, sons who do not resemble fathers. Lyly amplifies the idea to explain how he is catering for the differing demands of his readership. Euphues and his England, Lyly explains, is like a huge miscellany with something for everyone, love stories intertwined with moral tales. Readers can pick whatever kinds of writing they want, as Lyly shows in an image which recalls Gascoigne’s anthologies: ‘And although ¹⁷ For a full discussion of Lyly’s artistic metaphors, see Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620 (Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981).

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some shall thinke it impertinent to the historie, they shall not finde it repugnant, noe more then in one nosegay to set two flowers, or in one counterfeit two coulours’ (ii. 14). In the narrative the idea turns into a running joke. Euphues likes moral discourses; Philautus is only interested in love, and both fall asleep during stories which bore them. But the tension between Lyly’s identity as a commercial author and his desire to appeal to the queen is less easy to resolve. Lyly had written the Anatomy with an eye to avoiding scurrility. When he wrote Euphues and his England the stakes were far higher. Lyly created a text celebrating marriage for a virgin queen.¹⁸ In the process, Euphues and Venus end up looking like the oddest couple of all. Lyly’s uncertainty about what to do with Euphues is reflected in the anthology of tales with which the book begins. Euphues and Philautus are on a voyage to England, and Euphues is keen to be in charge of the entertainment. Philautus’ lack of enthusiasm for Euphues’ storytelling allows Lyly to anticipate criticism from his readers. But Lyly was also casting about for a way to make Euphues into a more saleable author. He settles on a familiar narrative topos, with a new twist—a miniature anthology of prodigal son stories with a happy ending. There are more confusing male relatives, who like the two Euphues are both the same and different. In Euphues’ first tale a usurer called Cassander has a son called Callimachus, whom he ‘nothing resembled’. Callimachus wastes his inheritance, but meets his uncle, also called Cassander, who is nothing like his thrifty brother. Uncle Cassander had also been a prodigal before becoming a hermit, but hearing his story does not stop his nephew from repeating the pattern Callimachus gets a better deal. When he comes home repentant he gets the ten thousand pounds his father had secretly left in trust for him and lives happily ever after. Callimachus ends up with an inheritance derived from usury—but extracting harsh morals is not the point of the book. Euphues has other authorial ambitions. He wants to write a guidebook to England, and he uses the story as an introduction to a discourse on travelling. But he refuses to tell travellers’ tales. As he explains to Philautus, Euphues has been reading up on their destination in ‘no worse Author then Caesar’. He proceeds to summarize the findings of his research by translating the passages about England from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. Philautus is not impressed: ‘In fayth Euphues thou hast told a long tale, the beginning ¹⁸ Lyly must have been remembering Elizabeth’s recent marriage negotiations with the Catholic Duc d’Alençon, and carefully avoids any specific references.

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I haue forgotten, ye middle I vnderstand not, and the end hangeth not together: therefore I cannot repeat it as I woulde, nor delight in it as I ought’ (ii. 33). Euphues’ plans of authorship are a hopelessly outdated mixture of prodigal son stories and ancient history. Yet in this book up-to-date information is hard to come by. The narrator will not tell travellers’ tales either. Instead readers are left ‘to gesse what is to be sayd’, a phrase which gains in significance in the course of the narrative. Even when the travellers reach England, their thirst for news goes unsatisfied. Euphues and Philautus arrive at Canterbury, Lyly’s own home town, and home also to the elderly beekeeper Fidus. The narrative situation looks familiar; like Callimachus, Euphues and Philautus have arrived at the home of an old recluse, and expect to hear a story. But they are soon disappointed. Fidus refuses to tell Euphues about England and the queen, because he cannot possibly do them justice. Fidus resorts to the same analogies with ancient art that Lyly himself had used in the prefatory material. Art must know its limitations: ‘the paynter draweth a vale ouer that he cannot shadow, and the Orator holdeth a paper in his hand, for that he cannot vtter’ (ii. 38).¹⁹ The only story Fidus allows himself to tell about contemporary England warns of the dangers of trespassing on politically sensitive territory. A beast fable summarizes the point. A wolf and a fox spied on a lion, Fidus tells his guests, when they believed that the lion was asleep. But the lion foiled their foolish attempt. Fidus points the moral: ‘this is sufficient for you to know, that there is a Lyon, not where he is, or what he doth’. Good citizens should be like worker bees in a hive, content with their allotted roles without interfering in affairs of state. Readers are not allowed to dwell on this repressive vision of an England which cannot be discussed and a queen who cannot be represented. Instead it is displaced by another old-fashioned and less controversial story—Fidus’ own autobiographical tale of his life as a courtier in the reign of Henry VIII. Euphues promptly falls asleep, and even the narrator apologizes for the story: Gentle-menne and Gentle-woemenne, in the discourse of this loue, it may seeme I haue taken a newe course . . . But hauing respecte to the tyme past, I trust you will not condempne my present tyme, who am enforced to singe after their plaine-songe, that was then vsed, and will followe heare-after the Crotchetts that are in these dayes cunninglye handled. (ii. 57) ¹⁹ Fidus’ strictures are an artful reference to Elizabeth’s attempts to restrict royal portraiture. See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, 279.

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The narrator’s musical metaphors recall the ironic contrasts Gascoigne made between F.J.’s rape (plain style) and the secretary’s harmonies. And like the guests at Elinor’s house party in the ‘Adventures’, or Ferardo’s dinner party in the Anatomy, Henry VIII’s courtiers spend their time talking about love. Their motivations are strictly honourable. The young Fidus fell in love with the witty lady Iffida, and they spent their time playing courtly games of ‘would you rather’. Iffida asked Fidus to select an imaginary mistress out of a familiar threesome: the dumb beauty, the unfaithful wit, and the plain but good woman. When Fidus picked the middle option, Iffida took offence. Fidus tried to turn the question back on her but she refused to play the game. Fidus fell ill from unrequited love. Only later did he discover why Iffida was so angry. Far from being a ‘witty wanton’, she was already betrothed to a knight called Thirsus. Together they made the perfect couple, until Thirsus was killed in battle. Even then Fidus’ hopes were thwarted. After five years of mourning, Iffida was beginning to think about Fidus as a suitor, when she herself died of fever. Fidus retired to his hermitage. Despite the similarity of their names, Fidus and Iffida were never united. Instead it was Iffida and Thirsus who are compared to the twins of Hippocrates, ‘who laughed together, wept together, and dyed together’ (ii. 79). Fidus’ story is billed as a nostalgic recreation of a simpler court life, when women were witty and faithful and everyone talked about love. Yet if Euphues had wanted to know more about Elizabeth’s court, he should really have stayed awake. When he and Philautus reach London, they enter a court which is full of faithful witty women talking about love. Chief among them is the lady Camilla, ‘one that shameth Venus, beeing some-what fairer, but much more vertuous’. Her perfection appears to make her unobtainable. Philautus falls in love with her, but believes himself unworthy: ‘none must wear Venus in a Tablet, but Alexander’ (ii. 86). The only substantial difference between the court of Henry VIII and that of Elizabeth is the use of a newer source text. Most of the courtly debates in Euphues and his England are adapted from Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship (1568). Tilney was himself creating a flattering vision of English court life which is dependent on the re-creation of Italian ideals of companionate marriage. Erasmus and Vives join Tilney and fictional personae to debate the ideals of Boccaccio and Castiglione.²⁰ ²⁰ See Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). For Lyly’s courtly narrative strategies, see Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature, 89–135.

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Elizabeth’s court is a flattering fiction, but it is also dedicated to the ideal of marriage. The question of how to respond to it divides Euphues and Philautus. Neither lacks enthusiasm. While Philautus is reflecting on his love for Camilla, Euphues launches into praise of the women at court with such vehemence that Philautus cuts him off and accuses him of being secretly in love. As in the Anatomy, the two friends quarrel, with Euphues as concerned about Philautus’ style as his argument: ‘Hast thou not read since thy comming into England a pretie discourse of one Phialo, concerning the rebukinge of a friend?’ (ii. 99). Underlying the literary in-joke is Euphues’ fury at not being considered a plain speaker. Euphues defends his reputation for honesty: ‘What haue I done Philautus, since my going from Naples to Athens . . . did I euer vse any vnseemelye talke to corrupt youth? tell me where: did I euer deceiue those that put me in trust? tell me whome’ (ii. 101). Euphues is protesting too much. For him and Philautus, Lyly’s representation of the English court represents two entirely different ideals. For Philautus, it involves a courtship narrative which ends in marriage. For Euphues it has to be a place where he can flatter Elizabeth—and get Lyly a job. The divisions between the two ideals grow more pronounced as the fiction progresses. The story of Philautus’ adventures at court allows Lyly to suggest that life has moved on since the world of the Anatomy. Taking euphuism too seriously is a waste of time, as Philautus discovers when he makes a valiant attempt to test its conclusions. When he finds out that Camilla is already in love with a courtier called Surius, he visits a magician called Psellus for a love charm. Psellus lets him down gently. Outlandish natural manifestations are useless, and neither ‘the Thistle Eryngium’ nor ‘seauen hayres of Hyenas lyppes’ will make Camilla into Philautus’ bride (ii. 115–16). What Psellus does suggest is writing, ‘where thou mayst so sette downe thy passions and hir perfection, as shee shall haue cause to thinke well of thee, and better of hir selfe’. Writing, Psellus explains, is a far more effective weapon than pictures: ‘the picture of Venus in Uirgin Wax, or the Image of Camilla vppon a Moulwarpes skinne’ (ii. 119). Nobody makes paintings like that in the English court, says Psellus firmly, before explaining that he is really a mathematician and only does magic for fun. Like Fidus, he is careful to distinguish himself from contentious issues of representation. Duly warned, Philautus steers clear of moleskin paintings. But he does engage in the sort of textual exchange familiar to readers of F.J.’s ‘Adventures’. He writes to Camilla, but wraps the letter up in a pomegranate and gives it to her as medicine for a stomach ache. But since Camilla is more like

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Iffida than Elinor, this mode of courtship also falls flat. Camilla points out that she is ‘no Italian Lady, who commonly are woed with leasings, & won with lust’ (ii. 128). The rejected Philautus he writes to Euphues, and finds him as pompous as ever. Like all the other imitators of Gascoigne, Lyly knew what should have happened to F.J. As he explains to his readers: ‘I haue not forgotten one Mistres Frauncis’ (ii. 156). Frances is also the name of Camilla’s niece, who is ‘not much inferiour’ to her aunt. And just like Gascoigne’s anthologies, the women at court form a garden of complementary flowers, Camilla a rose and Frances a violet. After a few more angry letters, Philautus bows to the inevitable or, as he puts it, realizes ‘on which side my bread was buttered’ (ii. 221). By the end of the text he is engaged to Frances. Euphues also has to find a way of writing to women which does not involve wrapping letters in pomegranates. After an exchange of exemplary sentiments on friendship with Philautus, he returns to court, with every intention of participating fully in the debates on love. This is more difficult than it appears. All the courtiers regard love as ending in ‘lawfull Matrimony’. Euphues thinks looking at and talking to women is quite good enough: ‘many we see more delyghted with pictures, then desirous to be painters’ (ii. 157–8). Philautus tells him his opinion is an ‘absurditie’. The narrator agrees, and starts joshing with his women readers: I must needes conclude with Philautus, though I should cauill with Euphues, that the ende of loue is the full fruition of the partie beloued, at all times and in all places . . . But I will not craue herein your resolute aunswere, bicause betweene them it was not determined, but euery one as he lyketh, and then! (ii. 160)

The rest of the courtiers start discussing the best way to conduct a courtship, with Euphues as judge summarizing the need for secrecy, constancy, and fidelity. For the courtiers these discussions lead to the progress of their own love affairs. Euphues takes a different path. Called away by business to Athens, he is next heard of through his book project, the long awaited guide to England. Yet once again Euphues seems to be behind the times. His pamphlet is addressed to the women of Italy and cast in the form of mirror literature: ‘Euphues Glasse for Europe’. Its author is as sternly moralistic as ever. England is like a mirror: ‘Not a Glasse to make you beautiful, but to make you blush, yet not at your vices, but others vertues, not a Glasse to dresse your haires but to redresse your harmes’ (ii. 189). Euphues then is out of sympathy with Lyly, who spent his letter to women readers stressing the text as fashion accessory. But his visit to England does not appear to have given him any firsthand experience. Most of the

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description of England is from William Harrison’s Description of Britaine, which was added to Holinshed’s chronicles in 1577. Euphues then has found a more contemporary source than Caesar for his travelogue. But it is still secondhand, a familiar text passed off as a novelty—just as Elizabeth’s court was represented by imitations of Tilney’s courtiers. Like Fidus, Euphues is careful to avoid dangerous historical questions. Readers learn instead that England has a wide variety of dogs and mineral deposits, but no smelly vermin. The counsellors and women are excellent. It is inadvisable to ask whether Oxford University is older than Cambridge. But at the heart of the mirror lies the figure who cannot be shown: the queen. When Euphues tries to describe her, he can only resort to the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, and place himself in a great tradition of classical artists unable to do their subjects justice. Yet even in the anecdotes he cites a sense of the absurdity of Euphues’ task creeps in. Euphues resorts to the experiences of the ancient painter Zeuxis. Unable to find a suitable model for his portrait of Venus, Zeuxis ‘drew in a table a faire temple, the gates open, & Venus going in, so as nothing coulde be perceiued but hir backe’ (ii. 211). When Apelles saw the picture, he longed to see Venus’s face: ‘saying that if it were in all parts agreeable to his backe, he woulde become apprentice to Zeuxis, and slaue to Venus’. In the same way, Euphues explains, he has only been able to show the back view of Elizabeth’s court. The anecdote recalls Lyly’s image in the epistle to women readers of Venus with her bag of writings about love. Like Lyly, Euphues can only stare at a partial representation of Venus, and imagine the rest. The only way he can represent her is to imagine her breaking into all the old stories of literature. The Anatomy was full of references to Lucilla as a reincarnation of Helen. Now Elizabeth is replaced at the heart of the story of Troy. In a Latin poem on the Judgement of Paris, Euphues decides that Elizabeth’s beauty surpasses that of Pallas, Juno, and Venus herself. Euphues is revealed in his true colours as a flatterer, the opposite of the plain-speaking moralist he had professed himself to be to Philautus.²¹ He did his job well. Lyly’s second book appears to have been just as successful as the Anatomy, and by 1583 Lyly was composing plays for the Blackfriars. But Euphues himself ends up living at the bottom of ‘Mount Silixsedra’, thinking about his ‘olde griefes’, although not before he has delivered plenty of sententious advice on marriage to Philautus. Euphues retires ²¹ Pincombe notes that Euphues has been transformed into an Aristippus, the courtly flatterer whom Richard Edwardes portrayed as a foil to the true friends Damon and Pythias. See Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly, 11–14.

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with an impressive canon of writings to his name, ranging from the ‘cooling card’ to the ‘Glass for Europe’. But by revealing the story behind the composition of his works, Lyly like Gascoigne makes his hero into a figure of fun. F.J. tried to court Elinor only to discover that he was writing to one of her other lovers and kept having his poetry read by everyone else in the house. Like Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight, he never learns from his mistakes. Euphues is better at adapting to circumstances. In his first incarnation, he writes a misogynistic rant when he is rejected by Lucilla, and letters of advice to his elders and betters when he has decided he has learnt wisdom. While travelling to England he tries to compose prodigal son stories and history books, but his stories are too complex and his historical sources out of date. Fidus teaches him to steer clear of controversy and represent court life and Elizabeth in terms of flattering fictions. His actions are paralleled in Lyly’s main narrative. Henry and Elizabeth’s courts turn into centres of virtuous love debates where F.J.’s adventures find a satisfactory conclusion. Euphues does live up to his name, but his wit is ultimately more clearly shown in his flexibility than in his ability to compare odd natural phenomena. He is like a comic Ulysses, who adapts to circumstances as necessary. This ability to change is reflected in one phrase, added into the second edition of the Anatomy: ‘if I be in Crete, I can lye, if in Greece I can shift, if in Italy I can court it: if thou aske whose sonne I am also, I aske thee whose sonne I am not’ (i. 186).²² What Euphues does in the course of the books is to adapt this flexibility to authorship. The learning curve he undergoes in the course of the text is that of an inexperienced Elizabethan author, who starts by abusing women, realizes that many of his readers are women, and ends up abasing himself before them. Euphues is a bookish fool forced into using his literary talents to flatter the queen, and the relationship between a powerful ruler and a submissive lackey is endlessly re-created in Lyly’s plays. But Euphues’ identity is always multiple. For his successors, his name became an idea of style which could be endlessly exploited, and by no one more than Robert Greene.

‘Ill prints and perfect presses’: Robert Greene’s Mamillia Despite his exile to Mount Silixsedra, Euphues was rarely far from the public eye in the 1580s. He makes a guest appearance in Munday’s ²² The phrase is also adapted to suit the travelling Uncle Cassander in Euphues’ prodigal son story (ii. 24).

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Zelauto (1580), and hosts Simonides on Mount Silixsedra in Barnabe Riche’s Don Simonides (1584). Euphues’ successors, meanwhile, find themselves doomed to re-enact his adventures. When Riche’s Philautus meets Simonides in England, he greets him ‘for this is yong Euphues’.²³ Simonides returns home from Seville to marry his old love Clarinda, only to find that she has already run off with ugly old Baldio. The heroes of Brian Melbancke’s Philotimus. The warre betwixt nature and fortune (1583) and Austen Saker’s Narbonus. The laberynth of libertie (1580) make similar discoveries. Saker’s Narbonus joins with his friend Phemocles to write a new ‘cooling card’ on the dangers of women, youth, and the court. For Lyly’s immediate successors, the Anatomy offered the prospect of long speeches involving fabulous fauna and flora. Little emphasis is placed on male prodigality. The Anatomy was for them about a male lover jilted by an unfaithful mistress, whose experiences often lead to the composition of misogynistic pamphlets. Quite how different Greene’s Mamillia is can be seen from the title alone. Greene picked not a male surrogate but a woman whose name links her with ideas of nurturing and storytelling: ‘mamillia’ is derived from the Latin word for the female breast. Greene answered Lyly’s story of two men jilted by one unfaithful woman with a narrative in which two good women, Mamillia and Publia, are deceived by the inconstant Pharicles. Greene had probably written the first part of Mamillia before reading Euphues and his England. By the time the book appeared in print in 1583, it was given a title-page which echoes the narrative strategies of Lyly’s second book. Like ‘Euphues Glasse for Europe’, Mamillia is billed as exemplary literature: ‘A Mirrour or looking-glasse for the Ladies of Englande’. But Greene was testing the waters. The success of the first part presumably left him feeling assured of some female readers.²⁴ The second part is given a subtitle invoking the power of the goddess of wisdom, ‘The triumph of Pallas’, and the titlepage informs them that they will find ‘the constancie of Gentlewomen is canonised’. The text is prefaced by a verse epistle by Richard Stapleton addressed in imitation of Euphues and his England, ‘To the Curteous and Courtly Ladies of England’.²⁵ ²³ Barnabe Riche, The second tome of the trauailes and aduentures of Don Simonides (London, 1584), sig. R2r. ²⁴ The first part of Mamillia was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 October 1580, although the first extant edition dates from 1583. As Newcomb notes, if this was a reissue, Greene’s text must have sold extremely well. See Reading Popular Romance, 41–3. ²⁵ The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. (London: Huth Library, 1881–6), ii. 146.

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Yet Mamillia is also the debut work of a university wit written for men, both his male dedicatee Lord Darcy and Greene’s peers. Underneath the title is a description of the text which makes the book sound much more appealing to gentlemen readers of the Anatomy: ‘Wherein is deciphered, howe Gentlemen vnder the perfect substaunce of pure loue, are oft inueigled with the shadowe of lewde luste: and their firme faith, brought asleepe by fading fancie, vntil wit ioyned with wisdome, doth awake it by the helpe of reason’. Greene’s determination to remind readers of his graduate status is most pronounced at the beginning of the second part of the book, published in September 1583 by William Ponsonby. The text has a separate letter to gentlemen readers, and is dedicated by Greene to his cronies Robert Portington and Roger Lee in a letter dated ‘from my Studie in Clarehall the vii.of Julie’—the day Greene received his MA.²⁶ The letter suggests that Greene was well aware of the absurdities of dedicating a book about women to men. Portington and Lee are addressed as ‘the two Saints to whome in heart I owe most dutiful deuotion’ (ii. 143), a phrase frequently used by the male protagonists of Greene’s fictions to describe the women they adore. Portington and Lee are ironically figured as the male equivalents of Mamillia and Publia, nurturing their prodigal author. Portington justifies his dedication with a commendatory poem attached to the first part of the text, in which Greene features as the native successor to Homer, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. According to Portington, Greene’s ‘stately style in English prose . . . beautifies this Brittayne soyle’ (ii. 12). Greene’s claims on the other hand are modest, but knowingly so. In the letter to the gentlemen readers, Greene pointedly avoids referring to Euphues. Only after writing Mamillia, Greene explains, did he happen to start reading ‘diuers Epistles of sundrie men written to the readers’. He claims to be impressed by the modesty of ‘those learned men’: ‘they cal their bookes . . . more meete for the Pedler then the Printer, toyes, trifles, trash, trinkets’ (ii. 9).²⁷ Greene is of course thinking of the Anatomy, and claims that his book is so much worse than those of the unnamed authors that it is obviously too bad for modesty topoi. Greene is fooling, and his playful awareness of the shadow cast by the Anatomy is ever present in Mamillia. ²⁶ Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 43. Roger Portington came from a Yorkshire family, which is part of the evidence leading Brenda Richardson to challenge the traditional identification of Robert Greene with a saddler’s son from Norwich. See Richardson, ‘Robert Greene’s Yorkshire Connexions: A New Hypothesis’, YES 10 (1980), 160–80. ²⁷ Compare Lyly’s ‘I was driuen into a quandarie Gentlemen, whether I might send this my Pamphlet to the Printer or to the pedler . . . I am content this winter to haue my doings read for a toye, that in sommer they may be ready for trash’ (i. 181).

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Greene’s book is an attempt to displace Lyly with a witty reversal of his plot, calculated to appeal to both sexes. The narrator pointedly reminds his male readers that his work is very different from some authors: ‘who when they take vp a peece of work in hand, and either for want of matter, or lack of wit are half grauelled, then they must fill vp the page with slaundering of women’ (ii. 106). Greene then, is pointing out that he is not writing a ‘cooling card’. However, since much of the text is taken up with Pharicles’ low opinion of women, he has the opportunity to include plenty of misogynist exempla anyway. But the narrative is also imbued with a sense of its own belatedness. All Greene’s personae act as if they have just finished reading the Anatomy, and are wondering what to do about it. The least problematic aspect of Lyly’s style for Greene was the recurrence of obscure flora and fauna. Greene cites fewer examples of weird nature in his works than Lyly, and these steadily decrease during the 1580s. And he shows less interest in how these phenomena behave than in whether they prove useful as indicators of literary and social status. For Greene euphuism acts as a test, a way of checking that the person you are talking to speaks the same language. When Pharicles first approaches Mamillia, he swears undying love. Mamillia does not believe him: ‘I am not so madde to thinke, that the hearb Sisimbrium wil sprout and sprig to a great branch in a momente.’ Pharicles disagrees: ‘though the hearbe Sisimbrium growes not to a great braunch in a moment, yet the tallest blade of Spattania hath his full height in one moment’ (ii. 23–4). Of course neither Mamillia, Pharicles, nor Greene care about the growth rate of the herb Sisimbrium, but citation of its alliterative habits was an easy way to establish euphuizing as a social reference point shared by author and personae. Yet the Anatomy had also highlighted troubling questions about the nature of exemplary rhetoric, and its consequences for male and female readers. For Greene, one of the most provocative aspects of the text was the opportunity it provided for monologues on consenting to love. Most of Greene’s romances contain an equivalent of the speeches in which Euphues and Lucilla separately debate their attraction for each other after their first meeting. In Mamillia, such speeches take up most of the first part of the book. Greene’s emphasis on privacy and inwardness reflects his indebtedness to earlier fictions, but also his response to them. When Pharicles resolves to keep his feelings to himself, his decision is described in one of Greene’s most characteristic phrases: he ‘vsed himself for a secretarie, with whom to participate his passions, knowing that it were a

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poynt of meere folly to trust a friend in loue’ (ii. 29–30). The showy exchanges pioneered by Lyly had replaced F.J.’s world of lost sonnets and secret liaisons. Greene moves the debate inward, with Lyly’s books as implied referents. Euphues and Philautus fell out over Lucilla, and Pharicles knows not to make the same mistake. When everyone is his or her own secretary, the citation of examples becomes an individualistic business. Like Euphues and Lucilla, Mamillia and Pharicles frequently remember the stories of women deserted by their lovers in Ovid’s Heroides.²⁸ For Pharicles, however, Ovid’s examples typically provide a way of justifying prodigal behaviour: ‘Iason was uniust to Medea, and yet returned safe to Greece’. Pharicles tends to dissociate himself from his unfaithful behaviour by ascribing his fate to fortune or destiny—the strategy Greene himself routinely adopted in his later works. For Pharicles, examples are useful only in confirming preconceived ideas. When he is wondering whether to consent to love, the narrator seizes the opportunity to throw in a few jestbook anecdotes about the evils of women. But, the narrator adds: ‘though perhappes he read these, or such like examples, yet his hot loue warmed his affection: so whatsoeuer he mused in his minde, it would not abate his deuotion’ (ii. 54). Greene knew that the knowledge of prior example never stops prodigal lovers from pursuing the object of their affections. Like Lucilla, Pharicles resolves to follow his own impulses: ‘and therefore whatsoeuer learning willes, I will consent vnto Nature, for the best clearks are not euer the wisest men’ (ii. 34). But examples never stop young women in love either, however virtuous they may be. For Mamillia the questions raised by Ovid’s and Lyly’s examples are far more troubling. Mamillia is herself a keen reader. Pharicles first meets her when she is reading alone in her garden, and she spends most of the first half of the text trying to read him like a book. The metaphor is made explicit by Mamillia’s nurse: ‘If a smooth & learned style in an ill print, importes some credit, what doth that which cometh out of a perfect presse?’ (ii. 45). Pharicles is beautiful, a ‘perfect presse’, but Mamillia is always trying to work out whether Pharicles is as beautiful as he is honest. The analogical value system imported from Lyly’s ‘smooth & learned style’ is only of limited use in reassuring her. Mamillia knows that not all examples are the same: ‘Though the Polipe chaungeth colour every houre: yet the Saphyre will cracke before it consent to disloyaltie. As al things are not made of one mould; so all men are not of one ²⁸ See Moore’s discussion in ‘Elizabethan Fiction’.

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minde: for as there hath beene a troathlesse Iason, so hath there beene a trustie Troylus’ (ii. 61). Yet Mamillia is always aware that men are more likely to resemble trothless Jason than trusty Troilus. Even Pharicles’ name suggests alarming alliterative possibilities: ‘Pharicles is fayre, so was Paris, and yet fickle’.²⁹ While Lyly’s Lucilla cheerfully wrote herself into a canon of unfaithful women like Helen, Mamillia imagines herself as Paris’ deserted first wife Oenone. Mamillia is always trying to work out whether alliterative connections are liable to predict behavioural patterns: does Pharicles have to act like Paris because their names sound the same? Or is Pharicles likely to act like Paris because ‘fayre’ and ‘fickle’ can be made into an alliterative pair? Greene’s personae are always experimenting with euphuistic balanced clauses, but are always unsure how much interpretative weight the patterns of sound and speech can be made to bear.³⁰ Since Mamillia has no idea of how Pharicles might be using examples, she is none the wiser. Even though much of Mamillia is given over to inward reflection, the shared reliance of all personae on euphuistic thought patterns only demonstrates the impossibility of ever knowing what anyone else is thinking. Mamillia is as intimately involved in rewriting exempla to her own advantage as Pharicles. Like her prodigal lover, she decides she can only hope for the best—whatever the examples say. The fragility of her hopes is summed up when she finally accepts Pharicles as a suitor. Like Pharicles, she is reminded of the story of Medea and Jason. But for her the story makes uncomfortable reading: ‘Medea knew the best, and did followe the worst in choosing Iason, but I hope not to finde thee so wauering’ (ii. 67). Yet even a prodigal lover, Greene mischievously suggests, is better than an equivalent of the reformed Euphues. Like Lucilla, Mamillia is the daughter of a rich Italian official. Before she meets Pharicles, she attracts the attention of a young Venetian courtier called Florion. Their relationship is represented as a triumph over recent literary history: we may well thinke, and easily perceiue this sacred bond of friendship betweene Florion and Mamillia was altogether founded vpon vertue, and the more it is to be credited, because hee had beene deceiued by the lightnesse of one Luminia, ²⁹ See ibid. 52. Pharicles is also derived from ‘phaos’, the Greek word for light. Lyly’s Lucilla was similarly associated with ‘light’ imagery, so Pharicles is doubly likely to prove untrustworthy. ³⁰ For further discussion of Greene’s style, see Robert B. Heilman, ‘Greene’s Euphuism and Some Congeneric Styles’ in George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds., Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 49–73.

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and knew very well, that there was litle constancy in such kites of Cressids kind. (ii. 16)

But Florion has not allowed his experience to sour him: Yet he would not altogether, (although hee had cause with Euripides to proclaime himselfe open enimie to womankind) seeme so absurd a Sophister, to inferre a general conclusion of a particular proposition . . . No, no, he knew all hearbes were not as bitter as Coloquintida . . . that as there is a changeable Polipe, so there is a sted fast Emerauld . . . and as vertuous a Mamillia, as a vicious Luminia. (ii. 17)

Unlike Euphues the ‘absurd Sophister’, Florion has not written a ‘cooling card’, and instead expresses the more balanced sentiments contained in Euphues’ letter to the women of Italy at the end of the Anatomy. Greene is not just jibing at Euphues’ misogyny. Throughout the narrative the personae talk about the dangers of inferring a general conclusion from a particular proposition—a process which is at the heart of euphuism. Not that their awareness of their own practice ever stops them from drawing general conclusions. Greene never mentions Lyly’s books, but he repeatedly inserts parallel phrases and episodes while pointing to the superior reactions of his own personae. Just as Euphues had done at the end of the Anatomy, Florion retires to the countryside and writes letters to Mamillia on the dangers of the court.³¹ But Florion’s strategy backfires, and he becomes the unwitting catalyst for another story about an unfaithful lover. Mamillia is so impressed by his advice that she returns to her father’s house in Padua, and tries to retire from society. When she leaves one of her father’s banquets, she is followed by Pharicles, who professes his love for her. The Anatomy provided no model speech for a virtuous woman accepting her lover. Like Lucilla, Mamillia is well aware of her own status as part of mirror literature. The difference is that Mamillia wants to be part of a tradition of positive exempla, and fears losing her position: ‘Shal they, who deemed thee a mirrour of modestie, counte thee a patterne of lightness?’ (ii. 24).³² Yet consenting to love is presented as the only realistic choice. When Mamillia considers vowing herself to perpetual virginity, her father sends her nurse Castilla to dissuade her. Like Pharicles, Castilla discovers Mamillia reading alone, and this time she is reading a letter from Florion warning her of the dangers of love. Castilla is unimpressed by Florion’s virtue: for there is none more witty, and yet few lesse wilfull: none so curteous, yet few lesse curious: as his nature seemes very precious, and yet very perillous . . . the ³¹ Compare Euphues’ letters to Livia at the end of the Anatomy. ³² Greene published Mamillia’s imagined ‘source’, The myrrour of modestie, in 1584.

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smoothest silke, though it last the wynding, wil scarse abyde the wearing . . . so the nature of Florion by how much the more it is precious, by so much ye more it is to be doubted. (ii. 41)

Florion is the opposite of the young Euphues, witty and wilful. The nurse reconfigures Lyly’s description to suggest that Florion is too good to live, whereas Pharicles’ beauty provides an obvious recommendation. Mamillia, however, disagrees, and cites her reading to support her arguments: Who so is addicted to maryage, findeth it easie but in one respect, and that is, if she chaunce on a good husband, which indeede you brauely set out in his colours. But so did Aristotle his happy man: Tully, his Orator, Plato, his common Wealth, and in our countreye heere, one of my kinsmen sets out the liuely Image of a Courtier. But as these spoke of such, but could neuer finde them: so you haue described such a husband, as can neuer be heard of. (ii. 50–1)³³

Mamillia regards ancient history as a far more reliable index than philosophy. There are far more accounts of unfaithful men: ‘for neither the Romish recordes, nor Grecian hystories haue made any, or at the least so oft mention of the disloyaltie of women’ (ii. 65). All Mamillia can do is attempt to suppress her recurrent memories of Jason and Medea, and consent to love. All her worst fears are justified when Pharicles meets her cousin Publia, who is unaware of his attachment to Mamillia. Pharicles secretly begins to court Publia. Like Mamillia, she wonders about the propriety of loving: Venus loued a black smith with a poult foote: and thou a Gentleman of singular perfection: yet as there is a difference betweene thee and Venus in bewtie: so is there a greater distaunce betweene Vulcan and him in deformitie. Then Publia, yeelde when thou must needes consente. (ii. 73–4)

Examples from Lyly’s Anatomy only demonstrate their own irrelevance, and Venus and Vulcan are no help to Publia. But like Mamillia, Publia does not really need examples. When Pharicles sends her a secret letter, she rejects his advances, but leaves him plenty of room for hope at the end of her answer: ‘pray that both my heart m[a]y turne and my vow may be broken’ (ii. 102). Pharicles reads only the beginning, and in his fury at being rejected, he gets engaged to Mamillia. When he rereads the letter he starts up a secret courtship with Publia by letter, and eventually decides to ³³ Mamillia is adapting ‘Euphues and his Ephoebus’, (i. 283–4). ‘Tully, Plato and Baldassar’ is one of Greene’s favourite combinations of authorities. The addition of Castiglione provided Greene with a frame of reference for love debates not derived from Lyly.

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abandon Mamillia. On the last page of the first part she finds out about his treachery, and Pharicles is forced to flee to Sicily. Mamillia is advertised as a book celebrating the constancy of women. The narrative soon turns into a male fantasy in which Pharicles simultaneously maintains verbal courtships with two women who despite all their reading are enthralled by his beauty. In the second part the balance is redressed, but only partially. When Mamillia and Publia discover that both have been duped by Pharicles, they remain constant to each other and to him, behaviour commended by the narrator. Publia enters a nunnery in order to adore Pharicles chastely for ever, and dies leaving him her inheritance. Meanwhile in Saragossa Pharicles runs out of money and repents of his treachery. But he fully realizes the consequences of his actions only when he meets his mirror image. Besotted by his beauty, a prostitute called Clarynda falls in love with him and writes to him. Now Pharicles is left worrying about being regarded as ‘a patterne of leawdenese’ and writes her a letter of rejection. The enraged Clarynda has her revenge when she accuses Pharicles of being a spy, and has him thrown into prison. Clarynda presents one example of ‘natural’ female behaviour. But Greene wants to show a more profitable one. Mamillia is mourning the death of her father when she hears about Pharicles’ arrest. She resolves to buy him off, despite knowing that her father had forbidden her to marry him. Now Mamillia redefines her behaviour as conscience: ‘No, I will obey my father as farre as the lawe of Nature commands me, but to crack my credit and clog my conscience, I will not consent’ (ii. 242). Pharicles’ and Lucilla’s self-serving references to nature are replaced by Mamillia’s new ethical law. She accordingly arrives disguised in Saragossa when Pharicles is on the point of execution, and delivers a passionate defence of his honesty. But what ensures Pharicles’ release is the fact that Mamillia has mysteriously obtained copies of the correspondence between Clarynda and Pharicles. Mamillia’s reading then finally saves her unworthy lover. Greene is hazy on the details of Pharicles’ great escape, but meticulous in recording its economic consequences. The magistrates are so impressed by Mamillia’s actions that they give her permission to marry Pharicles: ‘but also, contrarie to her fathers last will & testament, let her peaceably enjoy all his landes and possessions’ (ii. 248). Pharicles begs Mamillia for forgiveness, but the narrator has doubts about his enduring repentance: ‘Marrie whether Pharicles proued as inconstant a husband as a faithlesse wooer, I know not’ (ii. 248).

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Pharicles thus ends up with the love of one good woman and the inheritance of two. Mamillia lives up to the nurturing implications of her name by providing a permanent source of financial and emotional succour. She herself becomes a new author and ends the book by writing a source for further narratives in which men are supported by rich wives. Mamillia composes ‘The Anatomy of Lovers Flatteries’, a collection of letters appended to the main text and separately dedicated to Portington’s granddaughter Mary Rogers. Now married, she takes on the role of agony aunt to the lady Modesta, whom Pharicles had earlier met at a dinner party. She initially warns Modesta against love. But her advice has little effect. Modesta writes back to say that she has fallen in love already, but is worried about the poverty of her lover. This, however, is not a matter of concern for Mamillia. In her answering letter, she tells a story about a noblewoman who rejects the advances of a rich old man and a handsome fool in order to marry a poor but witty suitor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mamillia endorses her decision, since she has already made the same choice. A commendatory poem by ‘G.B.’ attached to the appendix expresses the hope that Mamillia would not displease ‘her noble Majestie’ (ii. 250). Greene is unlikely to have maintained any real hopes of royal favour. In stark contrast to the vision of Euphues engaged in endless flattery of the queen, Greene created a domestic vision in which the errant protagonist is nourished by his rich and practical wife. The narrative is a comically wish-fulfilling fantasy for his male readers, and thoroughly profitable for Pharicles. But Greene also leaves the traces of a more mysterious narrative featuring Mamillia’s secret discovery of the letters between Clarynda and Pharicles. Harvey saved his sister by discovering the correspondence between her and Milord. Mamillia intervenes to act as Pharicles’ secretary. By gathering up and exposing his correspondence she saves the carpet knight. While Pharicles gets the cash, it is Mamillia whose experiences transform her into a debut author with her own Anatomy. Greene had published the book from his study in Clare Hall. Mamillia writes letters from her own private study, and her attitude suggests future stories may be forthcoming. Mamillia characterizes both herself and Modesta as innocent and gullible victims of male treachery. Yet Mamillia’s behaviour throughout the book is predicated on her knowledge that even though all the evidence of her reading would suggest otherwise, love has to be obeyed. She concludes: ‘to live we must follow the aduice of our friends, but to

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loue, our own fancie’ (ii. 267), a sentiment strongly reminiscent of Lucilla’s defence of her affection for Curio. Mamillia is a bookish fool, but she is also a fool for love. Her authorship is centred around her validation of her love for Pharicles, and her justification of her choice provided Greene with the source of future plotlines. Lyly had gestured to the ‘strange and incredible adventures’ women might have in love; Greene turned them into a model for his own authorial career.

3 Greene’s Glucupilica Few of Greene’s protagonists enjoy the same level of autonomy as Mamillia. The surrogates in Greene’s books, usually women, are likely to be wrongly accused of infidelity, imprisoned or exiled, or forced to escape from predatory or tyrannical rulers. They typically bear their trials with exemplary patience, but are often overheard by a voyeuristic male author or a tyrannical ‘overloving’ male when they are in the midst of attempting to create a private space in which to reflect on the abuses they have suffered. Nowadays, the story of the suffering woman is most likely to be associated with the legend of patient Griselda, which was equally popular in Greene’s time. Yet Greene never uses the story, perhaps because Griselda’s unshakeable patience gave him little space for creativity. What Greene shows most interest in are women who find ways of reclaiming their men in a literary way. Many of his surrogate authors find ways to reconcile themselves with their abusers which involve either writing, composing, or gaining access to a secret cache of letters which they read, distribute, or archive. These surrogates enact Greene’s own organic process of composition, gathering up literary fragments and rewriting them in different genres or narrative dimensions, placing a new story under an old canonical name. Within the context of the plot these surrogates are usually trying to return to their old lives, to seek reconciliation with their abusive and suspicious male lovers and relatives. In the process they often find themselves creating alternative canons and literary records in which the old names and stories only remain as memories of a lost literary culture. As is often noted, Greene’s approach to his women readers seems bizarrely oppositional. Despite the promise of his title-pages, he routinely denigrates his subject matter to male readers who, he claims, can at best have a voyeuristic interest in women’s prattle.¹ What the device provided was an excuse for his male readers to enjoy the alternative culture which ¹ See Derek B. Alwes, ‘Robert Greene’s Duelling Dedications’, ELR 30 (2000), 373–95.

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Greene billed as suitable only for less well educated women. Euphuism confined classical allusion to the margins of its narratives. Greene made them the subject of his tales. Instead of writing about the matter of Troy, Greene imagined a rest from the fighting. Instead of publishing a paraphrase on Homer, Greene wrote about Penelope waiting for Ulysses to come home and validate her role in historical epic. Greene bills himself as the historian of forgotten narratives and the margins of history, a status which reflects the contradictions of his own position as a well educated commercial author. Greene’s development of euphuism is itself an alternative form of culture, which looks arcane but is based on the familiar. Lyly characteristically resorted to examples his readers might never have heard of, the fish Scolopidus and the bird Trochilus; Greene tends to amplify his points by resorting to examples drawn from folk wisdom, readily available to his readers. For Greene euphuism becomes a process less of comparison as of confirmation. While the strange creatures lurking in Lyly’s prose were typically locked into oppositional patterns of behaviour, Greene evolves a prose style in which elements are continually forming themselves into a tragicomic balance. In Gwydonius. The carde of fancie, Valericus observes: But alasse, I see euerie prosperous puffe hath his boisterous blaste, everie sweete hath his sower, everie weale his woe, everie gale of good lucke, his storme of sinister fortune: yea everie commoditie his discommoditie annexed: the bloud of the Viper is most healthfull for the sight, and most hurtfull for the stomacke, the stone Celonites is verie precious for the backe, and verie perillous for the brain. (iv. 45–6)

Lyly’s euphuism turned the world into a dictionary of odd phenomena with unbelievable habits. For Greene euphuism makes the world into an apothecary’s shop, in which knowledge of where to apply the viper’s blood and the stone Celonites turns poison into medicine. The twin properties of natural phenomena are a manifestation of the power of fortune, one of Greene’s most frequently invoked deities. The eponymous hero of Perimedes the Blacke-Smith (1588) sums up Greene’s theory of the interaction of fortune and tragicomedy over a card game to his wife: ‘these cardes (wife) may rightly be tearmed Glucupilica sweete & sower, double faced, bearing in their foreheads pleasures and peace, and in their backes sorrowes & Stratagemes’ (vii. 43).² The emphasis on fortune’s power to influence plot is part of Greene’s inheritance from his reading of Greek romance, and his ² ‘Glucupilica’ is apparently a compound derived from the Greek ‘glucu-pikros’, ‘sweetly bitter’. See James S. Dean, ‘Antedatings from Robert Greene’, N&Q, NS 16 (1969), 126–8.

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many sensational conclusions seem designed to leave readers lost in wonder at the end of every recognition and reconciliation.³ But Greene rarely allows the moments of wondrous recognition to go unchallenged. The onward march of his balanced clauses seems designed to drive the reader to focus on a particular point of view, to point a moral. As Reid Barbour points out, Greene’s prose is an act of ‘deciphering’. Greene regulates his narratives and the copiousness of his speeches by assembling visual emblems, signs, and collections of premises. These serve as marker points, themes amplified within the text.⁴ Yet Greene rarely lets his readers enjoy undisputed possession of the truths which his narrators wish to convey in their tales. Like Gascoigne and Lyly, Greene features many scenes of self-consciously Italianate debate about questions of love or morality. Yet the stories tend to complicate the moral issues rather than explain them. Greene creates circles of debate in which the discussion of virtues is undertaken by partisan narrators and rebarbative readers. His relationship with his argumentative storytellers is again part of his debt to Greek romance. Greene never tries to imitate the labyrinthine network of interrelationships between teller and tale characteristic of Heliodorus. But he typically conveys an impression of narratological complexity, which allows him to play simpler games with unreliable narrators.⁵ Greene makes narration into the subject of the story, constantly recycling his materials, transposing them into new narrative modes. But he also draws attention to the motivations of his biased orators. Like Greene himself, his band of disgruntled lovers and prosy labourers are always redressing old stories in order to publicize their own agendas.

‘Witlesse prodigalitie’: Gwydonius and Arbasto The publication of Mamillia had helped Greene inherit much of the cultural cachet attached to Lyly’s Euphues books.⁶ What he did not have ³ See S. L. Wolff’s The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 367–458. For Greene’s emphasis on wonder, see Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 181–229. The best general study of Greene’s major sources and influences is René Pruvost’s Robert Greene et ses romans (1558–1592) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1938). ⁴ See Reid Barbour, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (London: Associated Universities Press, 1993), 29–30. ⁵ The most significant Greek romances for Greene are Heliodorus’ Aethiopian Historie, Angel Day’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. The most accessible edition is B. P. Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). ⁶ As Newcomb notes, Greene’s early works are given elaborate borders and title-pages. Sidney’s publisher William Ponsonby launched his career as a fashionable publisher by acquiring the second part of Mamillia. See Reading Popular Romance, 42.

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was Lyly’s job, although at the start of his career he may well have hoped for something similar. The year 1584 saw the publication of four books dedicated to aristocrats, including the dedicatee of Euphues and his England, the Earl of Oxford. The texts act as a showcase for Greene’s varied abilities. The myrrour of modestie is an adaptation of the biblical story of Susanna and the elders, dedicated to Margaret, Countess of Derby. Spied on by lecherous elders, Susanna is only released from accusations of immorality by a male orator. Daniel tricks the elders by revealing that they cannot agree whether Susanna committed adultery under a myrtle or a fig tree—possibly the only occasion in euphuistic fiction when natural history unequivocally proves a point. By 1584 Greene had begun to read translations of Greek romance. Traces of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon appear in the other books he published that year: Morando. The tritameron of loue, a collection of fictionalized debates on courtship, and two romances: Gwydonius. The carde of fancie and Arbasto. The anatomie of fortune.⁷ Of these, the romances were the most enduringly successful.⁸ Greene was marking out a different literary terrain; instead of writing misogynistic ‘cooling cards’ Greene’s Italianate protagonists are caught up in a world of lucky chances and love. Greene’s two long fictions are both acts of translation, in which Lyly’s themes are redescribed in the narrative settings of Greek romance. Greene offers Oxford a text which is effectively ‘Gwydonius and his Greece’. Like Lyly, Greene abandons prodigality for courtship. The narrative opens with the depraved protagonist quarrelling with his father, wasting his goods, and ending up in prison on suspicion of being an alchemist or an undercover tax collector. Gwydonius repents, but is soon released anyway when the magistrates find no evidence against him. The magistrates let him go with a warning against ‘witlesse prodigalitie’. Gwydonius duly leaves for Alexandria and more exotic narrative paradigms. But Greene never wasted his influences, and while the names are strange the stories are familiar. Once in Alexandria, Gwydonius falls in love with the daughter of his father’s enemy, and is betrayed by a rival. Greene creates an extra pair of lovers, Gwydonius’ sister and friend, and most of the narrative is given over to their euphuistic speeches of courtship. Only at the end of the book does he remind readers of his deviation from a narrative trajectory in which sons return repentant to their fathers. Gwydonius defeats his father in single combat, but shows mercy at the last moment. The whole ⁷ Greene seems to have read the text in Italian; see Joseph de Perott, ‘Robert Greene and the Italian Translation of Achilles Tatius’, MLN 29 (1914), 63. See Wolff, The Greek Romances, 375–408. ⁸ Gwydonius went through four early editions, and Arbasto five.

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company are struck with wonder, and the universal reconciliation is cemented by a double wedding for the two pairs of lovers.⁹ In Gwydonius, moral issues are submerged in reconciliation, the tyranny of Gwydonius’ father fortunately overcome in his reunion with his son. The principal narrator of Arbasto is determined to persuade his readership that he is the victim of fortune, and employs a gallery of representational devices to do so. These are part of Greene’s inheritance from Leucippe and Clitophon. Achilles Tatius’ narrative starts with an ecphrasis, a scene in which a picture inspires a story. The device collapses the boundaries between author, narrators, and readers, as the image is vividly unfolded before them. In Leucippe and Clitophon, the unnamed narrator is washed up on the coast of Sidon after a shipwreck, and discovers a painting of the rape of Europa. He is joined by another spectator, Clitophon, who is reminded by the subject matter of the picture of his own sensational erotic adventures. The first narrator then becomes a listener; the rest of the narrative is Clitophon’s story, and readers never learn what the listener thinks about it. Greene produces a close imitation of the ecphrasis in Morando. But in Arbasto he finds a different way of representing it, and of engaging with the slyly ironic tone of Achilles Tatius’ text.¹⁰ Greene makes his narrator meet a storyteller, Arbasto, who himself forms an emblematic picture. But the picture does not tell the story—even if Arbasto is determined to believe otherwise. Like Leucippe and Clitophon, Arbasto opens with a first-person narrator shipwrecked on the coast of Sidon. While touring the city he meets a sobbing ‘Archflamin’ clutching emblems: he ‘held in his left hand the counterfeit of fortune, with one foote troade on a polype-fish, and with the other on a Camelion, as assured badges of his certaine mutabilite’ (iii. 179). Lyly had confined his curious beasts to analogies. Greene’s Arbasto carries them around with him as props. Arbasto’s story has resulted in violent mood swings. As the narrator watches, Arbasto moves ‘from mourning to myrth’, a transition he explains in a song: ‘Thus doo I triumph at my fo, | I weepe at weale, I laugh at wo’ (iii. 180). Despite his gallery of special effects, the role of fortune in Arbasto’s story is questionable. As he tells the narrator, he used to be king of Denmark. When his brother was murdered at the French court, Arbasto ⁹ The double wedding is an example of what Heilman calls Greene’s ‘conceptual euphuism’, with the paired lovers forming a narrative chiasmus. See Heilman, ‘Greene’s Euphuism’, 56. ¹⁰ See B. P. Reardon, ‘Achilles Tatius and Ego-Narrative’, in J. R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London: Routledge, 1994), 80–96.

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began a massacre in France until the French king Pelorus was forced to make peace. Arbasto fell in love with Pelorus’ disdainful elder daughter Doralicia. He rejected the love of her sister Myrania, although he pretended to court her when she rescued him from prison. Disdained by Doralicia, Arbasto then genuinely switched his affections to Myrania. But by that time Myrania had found his letters of courtship to Doralicia, and died vowing revenge. Pelorus also died, leaving Doralicia to inherit the kingdom. Arbasto had his own interpretation of events: But yet see how Fortune framed vp this tragedy, who ment to cast Doralice from most happy felicitie to most haplesse misery, for she seeing that no sinister chance could change my affection . . . musing I saye on this my inuiolable constancie, Cupid meaning to reuenge, seeing hir now at discouert, drew home to the head, and stroke her so deepe at the hart, as in despight of Venus she valed bonnet, and giuing a grone, sobbed for me secretly to her selfe these wordes: Alas I loue Arbasto and none but Arbasto. (iii. 245)

Doralicia then fell in love with Arbasto, and died of grief. Arbasto returned home to discover that his kingdom had been usurped by his best friend, and decided to retire to his cell to muse on the power of fortune: ‘one while sorrowing for the mishap of Myrania, and another while ioying at the miserie of Doralicia, but alwayes smiling, that by contemning fortune, I learne to leade hir in triumph’ (iii. 253). Like Achilles Tatius, Greene never returns to the narrator of the text. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Arbasto remains convinced of his own fidelity in a plot which is essentially comic. The surprise intervention of the love gods suggests that Greene may have been remembering Lyly’s Sappho and Phao, first printed the same year. In Lyly’s play the ferryman Phao is subjected to the unpredictable machinations of Venus and Cupid. By the end of the play he is left alone spurning Venus, whom he had previously loved, and being spurned by his former admirer Sappho. He consequently resolves to give up love and spend his live ‘sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Saphoes good’ (ii. 415). But Phao really is the victim of the gods. Arbasto is a victim of his own deceit, inconstancy, and tyrannical neglect of his kingdom. Arbasto’s narrative sounds like Mamillia rewritten as a hard luck story by Pharicles and then refigured as a Greek romance. Tragic and comic elements are pasted together, and Arbasto himself is left waving the emblems of fortune at those who listen to his tale—just as Greene did throughout the 1580s. Arbasto is typical of Greene’s marginal surrogate authors, defiantly reassembling familiar narrative motifs in order to make them

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look fashionably exotic. As he claims, Arbasto presents a ‘counterfeit of fortune’. Even the ‘assured badges’ which are co-opted in the service of fortune, the polyp-fish and the chameleon, could equally be euphuistic analogies in a different narrative. Throughout the 1580s Greene looked for the coincidences between narratives and genres. Arbasto is like a walking title-page, selling his emblematic wares to those who are prepared to buy the partisan interpretation they are made to bear.

Endless Webs: Greene’s Anthologies If Arbasto’s claims for the power of fortune are unconvincing, Greene’s pose as champion of virtue is just as unlikely. Throughout the 1580s, Greene assembled a miniature canon of pamphlets based around one structure: a discussion of particular virtues with three accompanying inset tales. As ever, Greene was responding swiftly to new narrative circumstances. The year 1584 saw the publication of William Warner’s Pan his Syrinx, a collection of interlaced tales from Greek romance.¹¹ Warner’s collection was designed around a popular mythological story uniting metamorphosis and authorship. The nymph Syrinx escaped the lustful Pan when she was turned into reeds. But Pan found a new way of conquering her, since he created a pipe out of the seven reeds. The reeds are represented by Warner’s ‘sevenfold history’, which featured stories of love, adventure, and separation. Greene adapted the format so that he could paste together elements of old tales and claim that they were central to the discussion of pressing moral issues. Even Greene’s discussants are rarely convinced by this strategy, and spend most of the frames insulting each other or pointing out the inadequacies of each other’s tales. Greene’s frames allowed him to create anthologies of surrogate authors appropriating cultural themes. And as the canon continued, Greene made the act of appropriation the theme of the anthology. As ever, Gabriel Harvey plays a mysterious role in the history of fiction. Greene’s first collection may have been designed in reaction to the Harvey brothers. The year after the publication of the card, anatomy, tritameron, and mirror, Greene created a more conventionally academic authorial pose. Planetomachia (1585) is designed to demonstrate ‘the generall opposition of the seuen Planets’, and composed by an author who billed ¹¹ See William Warner’s Syrinx or a Sevenfold History, ed. Wallace A. Bacon (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1950). In the second edition of the text in 1597, Warner accused two unnamed writers of having plagiarized his text, of whom one is almost certainly Greene.

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himself as ‘Master of Arts and Student in Phisicke’. There is no other evidence of Greene’s medical studies, although his friend and collaborator Thomas Lodge did later become a doctor. Perhaps more significantly, Gabriel’s brothers Richard and John had both written controversial pamphlets on astrology. Greene is more likely to have been distinguishing himself from their work rather than attempting to engage in contemporary scientific debate. His narrative is prefaced with a dedication to the Earl of Leicester, four commendatory poems, and two prose essays on astronomy, one in Latin and one in English. But Greene’s show of erudition is characteristically misleading. The English treatise is a translation of Pontano’s Aegidius. The Latin dialogue is borrowed from Lucian, and Greene inserted the names of himself and a friend as the speakers, thus turning it into a dialogue of two university wits.¹² The pseudo-academic frame of the anthology dissolves to reveal a more familiar narrative world. Like the bickering gods in Lyly’s plays, Greene’s planets are bent on denigrating their peers, which they do by accusing each other of having adverse influences on the human world. Venus insults Saturn, who responds by blaming Venus for adultery. Jupiter has a private feud with Mars. Yet even within the old tales new images of women authors keep spilling out. Venus’ story is another interpretation of the familiar motif of divided lovers. When the melancholy ‘Saturnist’ Valdracko discovers that his daughter Pasilla is in love with the son of his enemy, he kills both father and son. Pasilla also resolves to kill herself, but first, ‘she took pen and incke, and wrote the effect of this tragicall discourse, that al might know the cause of this bloody fact’ (v. 96). Jupiter explains how he met a woman drinking from dead men’s skulls as a punishment for murdering her lover, who had himself previously killed her brothers. The woman herself is marginal to the story of violent men (inspired by Mars). Greene makes her the emblem and author of the tragedy. Women frequently remain on the sidelines in Greene’s tales, reminding readers what not to look for in the book. Often the implied referent is Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.¹³ But although Greene reproduces some popular attitudes derived from Castiglione, he is as usual transmitting an ‘idea’ of culture, and finds ways to release himself from close imitation. ¹² For full discussion of Greene’s sources, see D. F. Bratchell’s introduction to his edition of Robert Greene’s Planetomachia and the Text of the Third Tragedy: A Bibliographical Explanation and a New Edition of the Text (Trowbridge: Avebury, 1979). ¹³ For Greene and Castiglione, see S. L. Wolff, ‘Robert Greene and the Italian Renaissance’, ES 37 (1907), 321–74.

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Like Morando, Greenes farewell to Folly is a collection of courtly debates and tales.¹⁴ In the midst of the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Count Farneze moves his family from Florence to a farm near Vienna. The countess is derided by the young courtiers for preaching patience, at which point the countess’s daughter invokes Greene’s favourite canon of authorities to explain what Greene is not going to do. Her mother, she explains, ‘seekes not with Tullie to frame an Orator in conceipt, with Plato to build a common wealth vpon supposes, nor with Baldassar to figure out a courtier in impossibilities’ (ix. 243). With the philosophers disposed of, Greene was free to tell stories about deposing tyrants and restoring virtue to its proper place in society. Yet Greene always allows his readers space to contemplate the gap between the ideals of the tales and the courtiers’ own lives. In the last tale, the pauper Rustico is exploited by the gluttonous duke Antonio. Rustico gets Antonio drunk and publicly humiliates him, at which point Rustico is made governor instead. This is one of many scenes of social transformation which Greene included in his tales, but he was always careful to make them comically unthreatening. In Farewell to Folly, the discussion ends with the nobles hurrying into supper in order not to annoy the cook.

‘Homer of women’: Euphues his censure to Philautus and Penelopes web Greene’s frames were spaces for him to invoke and displace multiple layers of association. In 1587 he published two anthologies ostensibly dealing with the matter of Troy. These were designed as companion volumes. Euphues his censure to Philautus is a collection of tragedies about martial values, and Penelopes web a group of comic stories illustrating female virtues. But in both texts Greene retreats from the canonical narrative. Instead he marks out a storytelling space in the interstices of official history. Everyday life is transacted against a backdrop of epic. And the underlying theme of both texts is provided by the women of Greece and Troy, ejected from Euphues his censure and briefly eloquent in Penelopes web. These are the texts which most justify Nashe’s ironic nickname for ¹⁴ The text was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1587, but did not appear in print until 1591. The prefatory material was presumably written later. The dedication to Robert Carey includes a reference to Martin Marprelate, and in the epistle to the ‘Gentlemen Students’, Greene alludes to the publication of Greenes mourning garment (1590). Greene may have been saving the text for a turn of the century ‘repentance’, but it is equally likely that he got taken up with other projects in the mean time.

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Greene, the ‘Homer of women’.¹⁵ By telling their stories, Greene places himself with them at the centre of popular literature but at the margins of literary history. Even when dealing with ancient history, Greene was careful to exploit modern celebrities. In Euphues his censure to Philautus Lyly’s protagonist reappears in the unlikely guise of military strategist, and the text is the manuscript of his advice to General Philautus which has mysteriously come into Greene’s hands. A further link to Greene’s earlier work is added by the addition of an alternative title ‘SOPHOMACHIA’ on the first page of the narrative. This is a ‘war of wisdom’ like Greene’s earlier ‘war of the planets’. None of these claims is fulfilled within the narrative. Euphues’ brief was to show a perfect soldier to match Castiglione’s perfect courtier. But Euphues disappears from the narrative after the frame. Instead the Greeks and Trojans turn out to be as rancorous as Greene’s warring planets, and the stories designed to celebrate the martial virtues of wisdom, courage and liberality are repeatedly questioned by their listeners. Like many of the other anthologies, Euphues his censure is set in a brief moment of stasis in the midst of conflict. The scene of the debate is the Greek camp, which is visited by a Trojan embassy during a month’s truce.¹⁶ Greene constantly reminds readers of the sexual agendas at the heart of the political debates. Hector and Achilles are both trying to impress Polixena. It is the women who are arguing over politics, with Cassandra summing up the cause of the war to the Greek women: ‘wee through ignoraunce haue fetcht a Harlot from Greece, and you that are learned make a challeng to recall vyce with the sword’ (vi. 171). But Cassandra’s reference to Helen also writes women out of the discussion, and during the storytelling sessions they are either ‘silent auditors’ or absent from the discussion. Instead Ulysses takes on Greene’s role, reducing the love triangle involving Helen, Paris, and Menelaus to an Italianate tragedy. In his tale the unfaithful Moedyna deserts her husband Prince Polumestor for other lovers. But when Polumestor writes to reproach her she is seized with remorse and commits suicide. Polumestor accepts the situation with equanimity: he ‘kept a solemne show of hir funeralls, which performed with magnificence, hee passed the rest of his yeeres in quiet’ (vi. 198–9). In Ulysses’ sly revision of the tale of Troy, Helen is more trouble than she is worth. ¹⁵ Nashe, Works, i. 12. ¹⁶ J. S. P. Tatlock suggests that Greene is remembering the brief discussion of a Greek banquet in Ovid, Metamorphoses (xii. 146 ff.). See ‘The Siege of Troy in Shakespeare and Heywood’, PMLA 30 (1915), 673–770.

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The tale causes uproar. Mention of Helen is banned from the rest of the debate, and the women disappear. Yet the messages the men try to transmit keep getting lost in the narrative. Helenus tells a story about wisdom, in which a wily general wins a city by a trick. But the plot ends with the women of the city poisoning the invaders and running the city themselves. Hector points out the tale’s ‘dismall counterpoise of reueng’ (vi. 231). His own narrative leads to angry discussion which is averted only by the reappearance of the women. But it is the women who are associated with the epic narrative, which Greene alludes to only in throwaway lines. Achilles ends the text still lusting after Polixena, and Cressida dreaming of Troilus. Greene shows the vision of the perfect soldier degenerating into bellicose anecdotes. The real story, Greene implies, is carried by the women, who are tolerated only on the margins of the discussion. Throughout Euphues his censure Helen is conspicuous by her absence. Penelope, haviny acted as her virtuous opposite number in so many euphuistic anecdotes, is finally allowed to speak for herself. Penelopes web is the first text since Mamillia to be given an exclusive dedication to women. Once again Greene writes the untold story behind the epic narrative. The book is composed of Penelope’s conversation with her maids while she awaits Ulysses’ return from war. Her web of discourses and stories is paralleled by the tapestry which she works during her storytelling. The image of Penelope at her tapestry forms a commentary on Greene’s own formation of his interlaced anthologies.¹⁷ Like Greene, Penelope is engaged on an ‘endless’ work. Having promised to marry one of her suitors when the tapestry is finished, she has to untwist the threads every night. Greene was similarly engaged in a perpetual process of interlacing fragments of old stories into a pamphlet, and unpicking them for the next one. Like Greene’s canon, Penelope’s web is endless yet necessarily ephemeral. Both Greene and Penelope need to use storytelling to preserve their identities, Greene as an author and Penelope as a wife. But the topics they are revealing are paradoxically those which should be kept most secret: chastity, silence, and obedience. This is where Greene differentiates himself from Penelope. As he reminds his male readers: ‘Mars wil sometime bee prying into Venus papers, and gentlemen desirous to heare the ¹⁷ Compare Lyly’s use of the example of the weaver Arachne in the letter to women readers of Euphues and his England. For the relationship between Greene’s metaphor and contemporary art, see Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Penelope and the Politics of Woman’s Place in the Renaissance’ in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance (London: Harvester, 1992), 25–45.

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parlie of Ladies’ (v. 145). Greene is eavesdropping on women as well as celebrating them, reading them as well as writing their stories. Penelope’s identity is predicated on her own loss of self. As a wife she is participating in a specialized form of mirror literature, which she explains to her maids: As a looking Glasse or Christall though most curiously set in Ebonie, serueth to small purpose if it doth not liuely represent the proportion and lineaments of the face inspicient, so a woman, though rich and beautifull, deserueth smal prayse or fauour, if the course of her life be not directed after her husbands compasse. (v. 163)

Yet Penelope cannot reflect the absent Ulysses, and is forced to adopt a temporarily autonomous existence. She also cannot forget what conventional mirrors are there for. In discussion with her maids, she argues that the experience of looking at them is different for wives: Socrates was wont to say, that when a maried wife holdeth her looking glasse in her hand, she should speake thus to her self, if she be foule: what then should become of me if I were also wicked? and if she bee faire: how shall my beautie be accounted of if I continue wise and honest: for a hard fauoured woman that is renoumed for her chastitie, is more honourable then she which is famous for her beautie. (v. 201)

Penelope has to make herself believe Socrates. Unlike the conventional young unmarried heroine of romance, she can only hope Ulysses will return to her. While she waits she spends her time sketching the most active possible interpretation of the traditional wifely virtues. These are the subject of the tales, all of which feature surrogate wives escaping from the tyrannical demands made upon them. Penelope’s definition of obedience is the way a wife can ‘make a conquest of her husband’ by ‘honest gouernment’ (v. 162). Her first tale looks like a dramatization of her own fears. In her story, the sultan Saladyne banishes his wife Barmenissa in favour of the whore Olynda. But Barmenissa remains patient throughout, even counselling Olynda not to exploit her position. Her policy pays off when Olynda demands Barmenissa’s banishment, and Saladyne comes to his senses. Olynda, he sees, is the wrong sort of example: ‘a very mirror of vicious affections’ (v. 190). He banishes her and restores Barmenissa to her rightful place. Not all Penelope’s listeners are impressed. The nurse falls asleep during the course of the tale. Even the maid Eubola, who liked the tale, argues that ‘ye discourse of obedience is not the discouerie of affection’ (v. 193) Like the men in Euphues his censure, Penelope is engaged in an elaborate

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process of self-justification. Despite preaching passive submission, she imagines an autonomous existence, as becomes clear in the second tale, supposedly designed to exemplify chastity. This time the tyrant tries to transgress social as well as emotional boundaries. The nobleman Calamus plans to rape Cratyna, wife of the labourer Lestio. Both husband and wife are forced to flee. Lestio takes work as a collier, and Cratyna, disguised as a boy, joins him at the coalface. Calamus goes in search of her but fails to recognize her. He realizes who she is only when he overhears her telling her husband about the encounter. Seized with remorse, he reports the matter to Prince Menon at court, and the two men make a secret visit to the coalface. What most impresses them is Cratyna’s eloquence: Menon, who al this while had his eye on Cratyna, asked her what he was: May it please your Grace (quoth she) I am seruant to this man who is owner of the pit, but vnder this other who is ouerseer of my work: So then (quoth the King) you serue two maisters, the one by day, the other by night: Nay my liege (quoth Cratyna) but one maister, for we make smal account of any seruice that is done in the night. How say you sirha (quoth the King to Lestio) is not this boy your man: No my Lord (quoth he) only my bedfellowe, and that is all the seruice I craue at his hands. (v. 217)

Only when Menon offers to employ the ‘boy’ herself does Cratyna confess. The story ends in one of Greene’s upwardly mobile metamorphoses; Cratyna is made into a gentlewoman. But she loses her voice to her repentant oppressor. Readers are told that ‘Calamus in the behalfe of Cratyna thanked the King’ (v. 218). While they were at the coalface, Cratyna had been able to exchange witty sexual puns with the men. In the process she and Lestio refine a definition of ‘service’ in marriage: shared work, sex, and conversation. The shared conversation is easily the most noticeable aspect of the story. Even Penelope’s nurse stays awake for it, and comments: ‘I liked the tale for the good speeches’ (v. 220). There is no danger of any good speeches in Penelope’s last tale. Just as Calamus imposed his voice on Cratyna at the end of the second tale, so the epic male narrative breaks into the private female space shared by Penelope and her maids. On the third night of the discourses Penelope’s son Telemachus interrupts his mother’s supper in order to tell her about the day’s hunting he has enjoyed with the suitors. When she escapes to her maids, the topic for discussion is paradoxically silence. While Penelope’s first two tales were set in a fantasy land in which lust is thwarted by female virtue and eloquence, her last tale emphasizes the realities of her position. Penelope tells a folk tale about a wife who wins a kingdom for her husband by remaining silent. The tale acts as a prediction of Penelope’s own loss of

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eloquence. As she finishes the tale, a messenger arrives with news of Ulysses’ return: leauing the endlesse Web, Penelope called for her Sonne, and that night sent him post to the Sea: where what newes he heard of his father I knowe not. But thus abruptly this night was the discourse broken of: but for that fell out after his home comming, I referre you to the Paraphrase, which shortly shalbe set out vppon Homers Odissea: till when let vs leaue Penelope attending the returne either of her husband, her sonne, or of both. (v. 234)

Greene characteristically promises an academic work, a ‘paraphrase’ which never appeared in print. But Greene’s readers would have known the end of the story. Only Penelope is left in limbo, awaiting a male relative who will impose the canonical narrative.¹⁸ Her story is as fragile as her web.

Alternative Authors: Perimedes the blacke-smith, Alcida Greenes metamorphosis, Greenes Orpharion Penelope had marked out a temporary space for herself within the epic narrative. But in Greene’s later anthologies his stance grows more aggressive, as canonical tales are displaced in favour of Greene’s canon. The immediate reason for his defiant pose was the failure of his first play, The Comicall Historie of Alphonsvs, King of Arragon.¹⁹ Greene lists the charges made against him in the angry dedication of Perimedes the blacke-smith to unnamed ‘Gentleman Poets’. According to his critics, Greene could not make his verses iet vpon the stage in tragicall buskins, euerie worde filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne’ (vii. 8). His response appears to be determinedly anti-elitist: the pamphlet is the prose transcription of ‘the tattle between a Smith and his wife’. Yet the commendatory poems which preface the text suggest that Greene’s friends were equally keen to mark out a space for Greene in the history ¹⁸ A provocative alternative reading is suggested by the possibility that Greene knew of the tradition that Penelope was promiscuous: see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Harmondsworth, 1955, rev. 1960), ii. 373–4. Lyly did. When Euphues is debating the likelihood of Lucilla’s chastity, he writes ‘Penelope no lesse constaunt then shee, yet more wyse, woulde bee wearie to unweaue that in the night, shee spunne in the daye, if Vlysses hadde not come home the sooner’ (i. 211). ¹⁹ All Greene’s plays were published posthumously. Alphonsvs was probably composed in 1587, followed by his far more successful fusions of romance and history, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Orlando Furioso and James IV and the moralistic drama he wrote with Lodge, A Looking-glasse for London and England.

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of English prose. One ‘I. Eliote’ places him in a direct line of succession from Euphues, ‘qui a bien connu fils-aisne d’eloquence’. Greene joins Lyly as one of ‘deux raffineurs de l’Anglois’ (vii. 10). Humility and aspiration are equally intertwined in Perimedes and Delia, the husband and wife storytelling team who live in exotic domesticity in Memphis. Their modest eloquence is so famous that it is always in danger of getting appropriated by the literary establishment: ‘the Egyptians, as a great monument kept diuerse of their discourses, which some by chance had ouerheard, and put downe as a Iewell in their librarie’ (vii. 13). The eavesdropping Egyptian librarians are the first sign of the untold stories of textual transmission in the anthology. Delia herself has hidden resources. Perimedes the moralist is the dominant partner in the conversations which frame their tales. But Delia is more skilled at getting access to elite manuscripts. During the first night’s discourse she unlocks a chest containing a secret recipe: ‘certaine precepts of physick’ given by ‘Rabby Bendezzar’ to the King of Memphis. But the promise of the royal prescription dissolves into a homespun recipe for happiness: ‘twenty ounces of merrie conceipts, pounded in the mortar of a quiet resolution’ (vii. 18). Whether Perimedes and Delia are convinced by the Pharaoh’s prescription is not certain. Despite their determination to celebrate whatever fortune brings, Perimedes and Delia both like tales in which poor but honest suitors marry above their station.²⁰ And the theme of belated recognition is extended beyond both tale and frame. The narrative ends with an apparently conventional formula about the storytelling of Perimedes and Delia: ‘If the rest of theyr discourse happen into my hands, then Gentle-men looke for Newes’ (vii. 85). This promise is fulfilled sooner than expected. On the next leaf is a letter from Greene’s friend William Bubb, who has also been discovering hidden texts. Having enjoyed reading Perimedes, Bubb explains, he entered Greene’s study while the last sheet of text was ‘hanging in the Presse’. When he opened Greene’s desk, he found ‘certaine sonnets, fained to be written by the Caldees, what time the poore Smith and his wife liued so contentedlye, which she kept as iewells in her Chest, and you as relikes in your Chamber, not letting any but your familiars to peruse them, for that you feared to discouer your little skill in verse’ (vii. 86). Bubb explains how he pressed Greene to ‘annex’ them to the text, to which ‘the Author’ reluctantly agreed. Delia’s poetry collection reveals elite and popular love poems. One sonnet ²⁰ The first two tales are adapted from the Decameron (ii. 6; v. 2), both dealing with the themes of exile and recognition. The last tale is Greene’s own invention, although he borrows names from Orlando Furioso.

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sequence relates the story of a prodigal prince, composed by one of the Chaldeans. But Delia’s favourite is a pastoral poem the young Perimedes gave her when they were courting, even though she knows Perimedes himself had a secretary. As Delia explains: ‘hee got a learned clarke to write this dittie, subtilly contriued as though it had beene betweene Shepheards, but he ment it of me and himselfe’ (vii. 91). In Perimedes every piece of writing is wrapped up in interlocking networks of elite and popular modes of circulation. Bubb, Greene, Delia, Perimedes’ secretary, and the Chaldean librarians collaborate in producing the text in a manner reminiscent of the publication fictions created by Gascoigne and Harvey. On the one hand, Greene suggests that the divisions between rank can be dissolved. Perimedes and Delia’s Egypt is a hub of manuscript circulation, in which priests, princes, clerks, and blacksmiths are engaged in a perpetual process of transmission. Greene himself poses as the retiring author hiding his best poetry until his friends insist on it being exposed to view. Greene implies that his failure to produce tragic poetry in his drama is compensated for by his secret identity as a manuscript love poet. But his pose did not go unquestioned. In The Old Wives Tale (1595) George Peele wittily imagines Delia’s early years as a feisty princess imprisoned by the evil Sacrapant. Peele’s Delia by implication married beneath her and turned into the wife of Perimedes. Her future is represented in the play by Madge the garrulous old wife, whose stories are always in danger of being interrupted. While the author assumes an ever more modest atttitude, Greene’s later anthologies are presented as a competing series of deceptive allusions. Readers of Alcida Greenes Metamorphosis are warned by Greene ‘not to look for any of Ouids wittie inuentions’ (ix. 9). The text, Greene tells his gentlemen readers, is derived from a conversation he overheard about women discussing their faults. But in a Latin commendatory poem, ‘G.B.’ makes an explicit link between Greene’s text and Ovid, and places the author in a line of descent from Chaucer, Gower, Ascham, Cheke, Gascoigne, and the ‘English Cicero’ Lyly. ‘Ed. Percy’ imagines Greene as a more conventional researcher ‘searching the secrets’ of ‘learned authors’. In fact the story is an adaptation of a passage in Boccaccio’s Filocolo (1337–9), in which four nymphs suffer transformations as punishments for mocking the gods. Greene turns the episode into Alcida’s lament for her three daughters, Fiordespine, Eriphila, and Marpesia, who all suffer metamorphosis for mocking love. But he is also rewriting Arbasto, and refining an authorial surrogate who herself becomes the all-consuming source of narrative.

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Throughout the text readers are reminded of all the stories which might be on the point of being revealed. As in Arbasto, the unnamed narrator finds himself washed up after a shipwreck. But this time the storyteller is placed in a more fashionable literary environment, an island which ‘seemed a sacred Eden, or Paradise: much like that faire England the flower of Europe’ (ix. 17). Greene is remembering Lyly’s England, but also the ‘Elizium’ invented by Peele as the backdrop to The Arraignment of Paris (1584).²¹ As in Arbasto, the narrator is asked to read the text by unpacking emblematic representations. The sobbing Alcida guides the narrator around a multimedia sculpture park. When they encounter a marble statue of a woman, decked with emblems symbolizing pride and beauty, the narrator remembers the story of Pygmalion. But this is not the story he is about to hear. Alcida explains how her daughter was punished for disdaining a suitor. The other two daughters are similarly commemorated. By the end of the text the gap between emblem and narrative is becoming more pronounced. The youngest daughter Marpesia is remembered by a tomb decorated with tablets on silence and constancy— the virtues Marpesia is supposed to have lacked during her lifetime. But as Alcida’s story reveals, while Marpesia’s revelation of her secret lover led to her death, she remained entirely faithful to him. The narrator and readers are left at the mercy of Alcida’s interpretations, and her authority is reinforced when she herself is transformed by the gods into a fountain, an emblematic representation of the source. Narrator and readers are left remembering canonical tales only to have their memories displaced by unexpected sources. In Greenes Orpharion, even the gods are no longer allowed to tell their own stories. The musical myth of origins in the title is Greene’s answer to Warner’s Pan his Syrinx. The controlling metaphor of the text is provided by the myth of Orpheus, who gave his name to the lute commemorated in the title. Greene could hardly have picked a more fundamental myth of origins than Orpheus’ loss of his lover Eurydice and his subsequent commemoration of her in song. Yet when Orpheus turns up in Greene’s world he finds himself singing a different tune. The old myth of Orpheus is part of a lost literary culture, as the nameless narrator of the book discovers. He is in love, and embarks on a quest for the source of love, Venus. But he cannot find her in any of her canonical homes, her palace in Cyprus or her temple in Paphos. When he passes the ‘Alcidalion fountain’ he finds female followers of Venus laughing at their lovers. The narrator finds names of ²¹ See Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly, 55–7.

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women inscribed on trees, ‘but so long since as hardly I could read them, yet I found out Hero, Penelope, Thisbe, Artemisia’ (xii. 12).²² Times have changed, and legends of good women survive only as almost obliterated traces. The legend of Troy has subsumed all the old stories, as the narrator discovers when he sees a tableau of the destruction of the city. The narrator still cannot find Venus, but he does meet a misogynistic shepherd who, he later discovers, is Mercury in disguise. Mercury promises the truth about women. Lulling the narrator to sleep with his pipe, he leads him to the great hall of the gods. Here the visionary and allusive atmosphere of the text is abruptly shattered. Mercury and Jupiter are still bickering about women, just as they had been doing in Planetomachia. In this text they have hired celebrity guests to help them make their points. Apollo, god of music, summons the ghosts of Orpheus and also of Arion, master of the dithyramb and inventor of the lyre. The deeply disenchanted Orpheus is determined to set the record straight about his reputation. Contrary to popular belief Eurydice was entirely to blame for her fickleness in leaving him.²³ When asked about women, however, he is wary of assuming authority: ‘I note (quoth Orpheus) if your question tendes towards men, because my particuler instance may be no generall Example’ (xii. 25). Nonetheless, he tells a story about female cruelty which he first heard in the underworld. In his tale, princess Lidia spurned a suitor for his lowly rank, then imprisoned him and starved him to death while parading food in front of the window of his prison. All the disputants are fully alive to the difficulty of regarding the story as exemplary. As Venus points out: ‘her instance serueth rather to bee produced for a wonder, then for example to condemne women’ (xii. 64). The balance is redressed when Arion appears. His claim to fame also lies in his musical talents, since he was once saved from death by musicloving dolphins.²⁴ But Arion also ends up on the margins of another narrative. He tells the gods how the King of Thrace invited him to act as entertainer at one of his feasts. But as Arion was beginning to tell his story, he noticed the king’s son Philomenes, who fell in love with the lady Argentina during the course of the feast. Philomenes and Argentina later got married, but when Philomenes’ father died, Argentina was ²² ‘Alcidalion’ may be an allusion to Mount Acidale, home of the Graces. But the fountain is surely also Greene’s Alcida, who was transformed at the end of her text. ²³ Greene is probably thinking of the rumours that Orpheus became homosexual after losing Eurydice. See Graves, The Greek Myths, i. 112–13. ²⁴ See ibid., i. 290–2

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terrorized by the lustful king Marcion. She agreed to become his mistress on one condition: he had to fast for three days and then sleep with her before he touched any food. Marcion failed the test, but was so impressed by Argentina’s policy that he restored the kingdom to her and her husband. Arion’s tale is a witty reversal of Lidia’s trial by starvation. Yet, as Mercury points out in the rancorous discussion following the tales: ‘these extremes therefore infer no certain conclusions’. The narrator awakes and the interlocking textual frames dissolve around him. The text ends with the narrator out of love. But he soon gets caught up again: ‘ere I could get home, I was ouertaken with repentance’ (xii. 94). This is the topic which Greene himself was ‘overtaken’ with for the last years of his life. The narrator’s journey reveals an allegory of Greene’s career. Greenes Orpharion highlights all the questions latent in the anthologies. Extremism masquerades as exemplarity, and even the storytellers remind readers not to take them seriously. Canonical stories belong to the past; Orpheus and Arion turn into faded celebrities working the dinner party circuit, and the stories which made them famous are either debunked or dislodged. The frames of Greene’s tales show the author as quick change artist, busily rewriting myths as his impatient readership demands, commercially successful and a scholarly fraud.

Not Living up to Your Name: Philomela and Ciceronis amor Greene’s anthologies show a literary culture which is up for grabs. In Greene’s long fictions, he begins to remind his readers of what they might expect to find in the text even as a different story is enacted before them. Philomela. The Lady Fitzwaters nightingale appeared in print only in 1592, even though Greene seems to have written the book much earlier. It shows every sign of having been revised to suit Greene’s later pose as a pastoralist. The text, Greene claims, was one of his early unregenerate efforts, written ‘at the request of a Countesse in this land to approue wemens chastitie’ (xi. 110). He himself has only now dug the ‘orphant’ narrative out of his old papers as a compliment to Lord Fitzwater and at the pressing request of his printer. Without ever mentioning Sidney’s text, Greene suggests the same level of association between Lady Fitzwater and Philomela as exists between the Countess of Pembroke and Arcadia. But instead of making the comparison explicit he adds himself to a canon of commemorative writing. In the dedicatory epistle Greene claims he is ‘imitating heerein Maister Abraham France, who titled the Lamentations

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of Amintas vnder the name of the Countesse of Pembrokes Iuie Church’ (xi. 110).²⁵ The complex layers of fiction surrounding the text distance Greene from any real relationship between himself, Sidney, France, or Lord and Lady Fitzwater.²⁶ But behind the elite reference points lies another tale Greene pointedly does not tell. Greene’s book is ‘Philomela’ the ‘nightingale’ in allusion to one of the most famous stories of Ovidian metamorphosis. Ovid’s Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus, who cut her tongue out and her hands off in order to prevent her spreading her story. But Philomela weaves her story into a tapestry which she sends to her sister Procne. Together the women exact revenge on Tereus by baking his son Itys in a pie and feeding him to his father. The women are subsequently changed into birds, with Philomela becoming a nightingale.²⁷ It is hard to think of a narrative more calculated to appeal to the author of Penelopes web. Greene never tells the story. Yet Ovid’s nightingale keeps turning up in unexpected places, as the narrative unfolds into a very different sort of metamorphosis. Greene returns to the old themes of friendship and love, but weaves them into a new story about communication. The inventiveness of Ovid’s Philomela is embodied in the secret canon of poetry created by Greene’s Philomela, which saves her from her Ovidian fate. The question of whether spouse or best friend makes the best type of secretary is highlighted from the start of the text. The Venetian count Philippo is married to Philomela, a woman who embodies all the virtues celebrated by Greene’s Penelope. But Philippo becomes convinced that his wife is unfaithful. The growth of his suspicions is represented as a lack of restraint: ‘he so ouerloued hir, that he plagued her more with ielousy then recompenst hir with affection’ (xi. 117). He confides his fears to his friend Lutesio: ‘his second self, his onely repositorie of his priuate passions’ (xi. 120). Philippo’s willingness to confide in his friend rather than his wife opens up questions about the ‘second self ’ which resonate throughout the text. Philippo’s and Lutesio’s friendship is an ideal, like that aspired to by Euphues and Philautus, or Titus and Gysippus. ²⁵ For further discussion of Greene and Sidney’s strategies, see Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 53–4. ²⁶ What is known about Lord and Lady Fitzwater raises intriguing questions. The couple separated in 1602, apparently owing to the earl’s infidelity. See The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–3, ed. R. P. Sorlien (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for the University of Rhode Island, 1976), 97. Lodge also dedicated Euphues Shadow to Lord Fitzwater (1592), and Greene oversaw the publication. ²⁷ Pettie tells the story in A Petite Pallace, 40–55.

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Yet their closeness leads to Philippo’s belief that Lutesio is his rival. Lutesio reluctantly agrees to Philippo’s suggestion that he should test Philomela’s chastity, and report her response.²⁸ Part of the reason why Philippo is confused by Philomela is paradoxically because she is quite such a good wife. In contrast to the close friendship of the men, Philomela follows the blueprint for marriage set down by Penelope. Bewildered by her husband’s suspicions, she resolves to ‘recouer’ him by ‘obedience, loue and silence’ (xi. 122). Like Penelope, she expresses her eloquence only in secret, as Lutesio discovers when he overhears her composing poetry. This is the situation of a man eavesdropping on a woman which Greene exploited in so many knowing prefaces to his gentlemen readers. Lutesio’s experience of listening to Philomela is like reading one of Greene’s ‘women’s books’. Philomela is appalled when she discovers that she has been overheard: ‘had I knowne you had beene so nie, I would haue byn more silent’ (xi. 125). Lutesio, however, is fascinated by having discovered an unfamiliar poetic tradition. Philomela uses her poetry to reflect on the importance of chastity, rather than as erotic autobiography. As Lutesio comments: ‘mens poems follow their passions, and they conclude as they are contented’ (xi. 126). When he remembers his mission, Lutesio pretends to be in love with the wife of a friend, and asks for advice. Philomela’s response is to focus on the woman’s role, recalling the story of Lucrece raped by the emperor Tarquin: ‘A Ladie Lutesio that regardeth her honour will die with Lucrece before she agree to lust’ (xi. 132). The example Philomela picks is the first hint of the untold stories of sexual violence woven into the narrative. Philippo’s unbelieving response to Lutesio’s favourable report on his wife is a bawdy pun which conceals a reference to Ovid’s Philomela: ‘Tush saies Philippo, womens tongues are tipt with deceite: they can sing with the Nightingale, though they haue a prick at their brests’ (xi. 137). He insists that Lutesio try again, and the ensuing courtship rituals read like a parody of the negotiations between Gascoigne’s F.J., Elinor, and the secretary. Lutesio writes Philomela a love letter which is approved by Philippo. Lutesio then persuades her to read it by playing on the wifely discretion which is an essential component of her identity: ‘please it you you shall be my secretary, both to read my letter and see hir name, for I knowe you wil conceale it’ (xi. 144). When Philomela discovers that the letter is addressed to her, she rips it into a ²⁸ Like Pandosto, Philomela is a ‘calumny romance’. For the prevalence of this motif in Elizabethan literature, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance, 274–92.

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thousand fragments. But she pieces it together again, and decides not to tell her husband, in case he murders Lutesio. Instead she writes a sonnet of her own praising faithful love. Once again Philippo remains unconvinced, and gradually begins to suspect that Philomela has been unfaithful to him with Lutesio. When she gets pregnant, Philippo is unable to contain his suspicions. Having suborned false witnesses, he has his wife and friend convicted of adultery. Lutesio is banished and Philomela divorced. Unwilling to shame her husband by staying in Venice, she gives herself the allegorical name of ‘Abstemia’ and sets sail for Palermo. Philomela is an extraordinary exploration of the consequences of carrying out Penelope’s ideas on married life. Philomela is committed to silence, but her virtue is truly revealed only when her eloquence is overheard. And the experience of being overheard ultimately saves her from the fate of her Ovidian namesake. While she is in her cabin, Philomela reflects on her mistreatment. When she starts composing poetry, questions of guilt and innocence become less clear-cut. For Philomela the poet, there is little distinction between being unfaithful and being accused of infidelity. She turns to Ovid for analogies with her own state, and picks the stories of Io and Callisto, nymphs raped by Jupiter. As far as Philomela is concerned, both nymphs were to blame: ‘Both did fault, and both were famed, | Light of loues whome lust had shamed’(xi. 178). But Philomela’s rigorous interpretation of rape is what stops her being raped herself. Once again she is overheard. The captain of the ship, Tebaldo, lusts after Philomela, and goes to her cabin to court her, or rape her if she refuses his advances. But he stops to listen outside the door: hauing heard all her secret meditation, was driuen in such a mase, with the conceipt of her incomparable excellence, that he stood as much astonished to heare her chaste speeches, as Actaeon to see Dianas naked beauties, entring with a percing insight into her vertues, & perceiuing shee was some greater personage than hee at the first tooke her for, his loue was so qualed with the sureness of her qualities, that he rather indeuored to honor her as a saint, then to loue her as a paramour: desire now began to change to reuerence, and affection to an honest deuotion: that hee shamed he once thought any way lust towards so vertuous a creature: thus Metamorphosed, he stept into her cabin, and found her reading, to whome he did shewe more then accustomed reuerence. (xi. 179)

The metamorphosis of the lecherous sea captain allows Greene to display the full range of his tragicomic abilities. This is one of many moments of wondrous transformation in Greene’s canon. However, by mischievously unpacking Tebaldo’s thought processes, the revelation dissolves into

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comedy. As ever the spectres of Ovidian sex and violence haunt the narrative. Tebaldo could have been like Ovid’s Actaeon, who spied on the goddess Diana while she was bathing and was torn to pieces by her hounds.²⁹ Because of Philomela’s eloquence, Tebaldo is saved from Actaeon’s fate. Yet his motivations are never completely revealed. Tebaldo has a sudden ‘percing insight’ into the fact that Philomela is a ‘greater personage’, a nicely ambiguous phrase which could refer equally to Philomela’s virtue, social status, or pregnant belly. Tebaldo’s unwitting re-enactment of the earlier scene of overhearing highlights Philomela’s vulnerability. But underneath it lies the possibility of a more comic encounter, in which Tebaldo flees in horror at the thought of raping a pregnant countess. Instead Tebaldo takes Philomela home to his wife, and she gives birth to her son Infortunatus.³⁰ Like Greene, Philomela is in a constant process of rewriting the canon. Instead of becoming like Ovid’s Philomela, she changes her name and creates an alternative narrative existence. For her last act in the tale, Philomela has another story to rewrite. Back in Venice, a parallel conversion is under way. Lutesio clears his name and prosecutes Philippo, who is seized with sudden repentance. Having confessed his crimes, he travels to Palermo in search of his wife. When he gets there he becomes embroiled in another plot, and is falsely accused of the murder of a young Italian, Arnaldo Strozzo. Philippo is so appalled by his behaviour to Philomela that he welcomes the death penalty. But she has other ideas. Hearing of his fate she confesses to the murder herself, as part of her wifely duty: ‘Why else did Alcest die for Admetus? . . . if it were not that wiues ought to end their liues with their loues’ (xi. 198). At Philippo’s trial, the judges are baffled by Philippo’s and Philomela’s rival confessions—until Strozzo turns up alive and well and a victim of mistaken identity. Philippo dies from shock. But Philomela rejects Strozzo’s proposal and lives alone, her reputation for chastity finally restored. Philomela is one of Greene’s most active readers, whose ability to mobilize useful examples leaves her able to transform the canon. The murder plot in which she becomes embroiled recalls the ends of exemplary tales of male friendship. But Philomela reads it as the story of Admetus and Alcestis, and in so doing converts the plot into an exemplary tale of a good wife.³¹ ²⁹ See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002), 97–102. On Philomela, see 190–99. ³⁰ Harvey refers to Greene’s ‘base sonne Infortunatus Greene’ in Fovre Letters. ³¹ Alcest is sacrifices herself in order to extend her husband’s life. See Pettie’s account of the story in A Petite Pallace, 126–46.

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At the heart of her story lies the contradiction that her identity as an eloquent female poet must necessarily remain secret for her to fulfil her brief as a good wife. But fortunately she is overheard by men—an experience which Greene twice shares with his readers. Philomela is one of Greene’s wittiest justifications for his paradoxical attitudes to male and female readers. Greene celebrates women, but can do so only by making his readers share the viewpoint of their male oppressors. Only by exposing their eloquence to the world can he reveal their chastity, silence, and obedience. Philomela provided a model for women. For male writers, Cicero provided the perfect literary archetype. In the eyes of detractors like Harvey, the writings of Greene and Cicero could hardly be farther apart. By becoming a professional author of romances, Greene had excluded himself from the academic discussions of Cicero’s influence which resulted in texts like Harvey’s own Ciceronianus. Yet in Ciceronis amor. Tullies loue (1589), Greene discovered a deft way of accommodating a show of academic debate in a love story by making Cicero the hero of his romance. Greene once again bills himself as the chronicler of the topics neglected by conventional historians. As he tells his dedicatee Lord Strange, his book as ‘an indeuor to pen downe the loues of Cicero, which Plutarch, and Cornelius Nepos, forgot in their writings’ (vii. 100). The timorous and boastful Cicero depicted by Plutarch was twice married and divorced. His first wife Terentia is described as ‘a cruell woman, wearing her husbandes breeches’.³² Greene’s Cicero, however, is an ironic fantasy of authorial wish-fulfilment. Despite his humble birth, Cicero’s eloquence ensures that he not only triumphs over Rome, but wins Terentia, the archetypal romance heroine, and remains true to his rival and best friend.³³ Not only is he the model author and romance hero, he also rewrites Euphues. Greene had built his career on imitating Lyly’s plot and style. Greene summoned the model of eloquence to solve a familiar fictional love triangle. Instead of abandoning Euphues for Cicero, Greene turned Cicero into a better Euphues. Although Greene returns to old narrative scenes in Ciceronis amor, he also foregrounds questions of writing, or perceptions of writing. Not that Greene noticeably changes his style; the text is as broadly euphuistic as the rest of Greene’s later romances. But he introduces a variety of devices to ³² Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North [1579] (London: David Nutt, 1896), v. 313–71; 343. ³³ The historical Cicero was the son of a wealthy eques, although Greene may have been thinking of his triumph as a ‘new man’ without advantages of birth in the consular election of 64 bc.

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make the book appear to be stylistically different from his previous works. Of these the most obvious is the Latin letter by Greene’s Cicero which the narrator transcribes and translates. Characteristically, Greene enfolds the letter in a framework of evasive strategies to defend himself from the charge of writing un-Ciceronian prose. Just as Philomela was linked by a network of allusions to France, Sidney and Lady Fitzwater, so Ciceronis amor claims associations with the canon of Ciceronian prose while avoiding stylistic imitation. Yet even if Greene’s Rome is full of euphuists, Greene also embeds his narrative and his protagonist in a range of literary scenes which evoke comparison with the academic tradition of Ciceronian discussion. Cicero’s main function is as a writer of familiar letters. The Latin letter in the text is written on behalf of Cicero’s friend Lentulus to Terentia. The letters which the historical Cicero wrote to Terentia were singled out for praise by Harvey in his Ciceronianus. Greene situated his romance in the middle of contemporary debates about Cicero—even though Harvey would doubtless have been horrified at the idea of being co-opted to praise Greene’s prose style.³⁴ Greene creates an ‘idea’ of domestic Roman culture long before Cicero makes his first appearance. On the one hand, the narrative situation looks familiar enough. The beautiful senator’s daughter Terentia is an enemy to love. The soldier Lentulus falls in love with her at a dinner party. But Rome is full of different kinds of oratory. When Lentulus sees Terentia is angered by his love, he drops his knife on the plate and ‘saide aloude, Non fortuna non bellum’ (vii. 116) When the company ask for an explanation of this ‘soudaine embleme’, he tells an anecdote about a faithful husband and wife he had encountered during one of his military campaigns. They choose to die together rather than face capture, thus showing that neither fortune nor war could conquer their love. Lentulus tells the story to show the depth of his love for Terentia. He unpacks his emblem as if he were one of the narrators of Greene’s anthologies, an Arbasto or an Alcida. But Greene’s customary form of storytelling is not enough to win Terentia. Instead it is replaced by another type of eloquence. Archias the poet continues the debate on love with a discussion of jealousy, thus allowing Greene to insert another authorial cameo. Archias was noted by the historical Cicero as a gifted improviser, and Greene allots him the topic with which he had himself begun one of his most recent best-sellers, Pandosto.³⁵ ³⁴ See Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus, trans. Clarence A. Forbes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1945), 46–9. ³⁵ See the Pro Archia Poeta in Cicero in Twenty-eight Volumes, trans. N. H. Watts (London: William Heinemann, 1961), xi. 27.

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Terentia, however, still remains immune to love. Lentulus needs a new style. He accordingly cultivates the friendship of the up and coming orator Cicero, and decides to use him as a secretary: Lentulus despairing of his owne stile and methode, required Tully to write him a letter passionate and full of familiar eloquence, which at his request Cicero contriued after this manner; where by the way gentlemen, I am to craue you to thinke that Terentia kept the copy secrete, so that neither it can bee founde amongst Lentulus loose papers, nor in the familiar epistles of Cicero. If the phrase differ from his other excellent forme of writing, imagine he sought to couer his style, and in his pen rather to play the blunt souldier, than the curious Orator. (vii. 148–9)

Greene adds one more defence against the harsh judgements of readers. He adds a translation, but not verbatim, since the narrator does not dare ‘to wrest Tullies eloquence to my rude and barbarous english’ (vii. 153). The letter is lost in multiple layers of translation. Greene’s fiction involves the narrator having access to Terentia’s secret archive in which he found a letter by Cicero imitating Lentulus, which is then converted into a version which does not reproduce the style of the original. Yet despite all Greene’s ingenious defence mechanisms, the eloquence of the letter shines through. When Terentia reads the letter to her band of gentlewomen, the lady Flavia identifies Cicero’s style and ‘verie phrase’ (vii. 155). Terentia falls in love with Cicero, and his prose style. Greene is looking back to the narrative paradigms of Gascoigne and Lyly, and has sent Cicero to the rescue. Cicero himself begins to fall in love with Terentia, but, the narrator notes sternly, ‘the faith to his friend, was a cooling carde to his affections’ (vii. 154). Meanwhile Flavia pines for Lentulus, who falls ill with unrequited love, just as Gascoigne and Lyly’s Frances loved F.J./Philautus. And of course, by the end of the story, Terentia and Cicero and Lentulus and Flavia are neatly paired off. Greene’s Cicero is a fixer, and his virtuous eloquence sorts out the old stories about love letters by secretaries, friendship, and love. But Cicero also has to confront the matter of romance on a more challenging level. Terentia eventually declares her love to Cicero in a valley ‘resembling Idas’, the place where the judgement of Paris took place. Cicero eventually agrees to stop interceding on Lentulus’ behalf if Terentia really cannot love him. But at this point in the text a servant appears to tell Cicero that Lentulus is sick. He returns home, enigmatically observing that ‘Terentia shall frame the argument’ (vii. 176). The women are left in the ‘vale of Loue’ (vii. 176), where they hear varied pastoral narratives in prose and verse, and eventually fall asleep. When they wake up, Terentia discovers

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that she has become part of a new narrative. The sleeping Terentia is watched by the fool Fabius, who is incapable of ‘learning or civilitie’. But after watching Terentia the scene turns into a new judgement of Paris. Fabius ‘became to bee a judge of beautie’ and becomes a model student.³⁶ But Fabius refuses to stay within the confines of an inset tale. Back in Rome, Lentulus finally renounces his claims on Terentia when he discovers a love letter which she has written to Cicero. Meanwhile the reformed Fabius presents himself as a suitor to Terentia, who rejects him on the grounds of her love for Cicero. Lentulus and Fabius come to blows; factions are formed and Rome is on the brink of insurrection. But Cicero and Terentia save the day. In an address to the Senate he relates his own humble birth and Terentia’s extraordinary preference for him over the gifted and well-born Lentulus. The Senate are impressed, but the last word goes to Terentia, who defends her emotions: ‘love is not cirucmscript within reasons limits’ (vii. 216). Terentia thus fulfils Cicero’s earlier claim that she should ‘frame the argument’. Unlike Helen, she saves the city from destruction. Everyone is reconciled, and even Fabius marries one of Terentia’s gentlewomen. Cicero triumphs by his eloquence, but only because he gets involved in romance. Greene introduces the source of what he calls ‘the new learned poetrie’, and shows him rewriting the works of his predecessors. But Greene also shows a Rome which gets overtaken by pastoral and inset love stories which spill out of the frame and begin to determine the course of the city’s history. Greene may not produce markedly Ciceronian Latin in his texts, but he does use Cicero to upgrade his romance, to write it back into the annals of literature. Greene’s Cicero is a fantasy of the triumph of low-born eloquence, which Greene uses as a cunning plea for patronage. As he tells his dedicatee Lord Strange: ‘Meane schollers haue hie thoughtes, though low fortunes’ (vii. 101). But Greene’s annexation of Cicero as a defender of his own genre is shot through with irony. By 1589, Greene had become a representative of an ornate prose style and of romance writing: a ‘Cicero’ — but only when the topic is love.

³⁶ Greene borrows from Bocaccio; the foolish Cimone is transformed by his love for Iphigenia, and wins her by fighting. See Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 318–28.

4 Knowing Your Place: Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon Euphues got a mention in Greene’s Arcadia. Sidney never did. Yet by the time Sidney’s romance appeared in print, Greene and Lodge had both published two pastoral prose romances, each bearing strong similarities to Sidney’s work. Both Greene and Lodge used their pastoral environment to interrogate Lyly, Sidney, and their own literary identities. Greene used his Arcadia to confirm his ironized identification with alternative authors and readers, as he translated Sidney’s themes into material suitable for his reading public. In contrast to Sidney, he shows notably more sympathy to the native shepherds of his Bohemia and Arcadia. He was also aware of the questionable morals of Sidney’s princes. In Greene’s pastorals the disguised royals always win out in the end, but they are also shown as lustful carpet knights in need of re-education. What distinguishes the nobles from the shepherds is what they have read. In both pastorals, Greene uses reference to Lyly as shorthand for nobility. But the references are complex, and involve Greene’s inventive attitude to his sources. In Pandosto Greene wrote an unwritten scene from Lyly’s Campaspe to turn his love comedy into potential tragedy. In Menaphon only the truly noble understand how false Lyly’s idea of court culture really was. In Perimedes the blacke-smith Delia kept an elite pastoral manuscript locked up in a secret chest, and never revealed how she discovered it. Greene’s relationship with the manuscript of the Old Arcadia is similarly mysterious. The most likely explanation is that Greene knew of Sidney’s text via the agency of his one-time collaborator Thomas Lodge. Lodge’s first literary work was a defence of poetry composed in answer to Gosson’s attack on fiction in The Schoole of Abuse. The text may have brought him to Sidney’s notice. Lodge’s next pamphlet, An Alarum against Usurers (1584), is dedicated to Sidney’s ‘vndoubted protection’. The work is in

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three parts, the second being a pastoral narrative ‘The delectable historie of Forbonius and Prisceria’. The plotline is similar to that of the Old Arcadia, and contains within it a close imitation of the blazon Pyrocles sings to Philoclea at the end of Book III (‘What tongue can her perfections tell’).¹ Lodge’s second pastoral Rosalynde also shows strong signs of Sidney’s influence, and was probably composed well before it was eventually published in 1590.² Lodge may have shown Greene a manuscript as early as 1584, and there is evidence that some version of Pandosto existed as early as 1585.³ There is no particular reason to believe that Greene read a manuscript of the New Arcadia.⁴ The pastorals of Greene, Lodge, and Sidney are linked by a variety of allusive networks which may never be fully uncovered. Yet the similarities between their plots provide strong internal evidence that Greene and Lodge both knew enough about the Old Arcadia by the middle of the 1580s to be consciously imitating its themes.⁵ With characteristic economy, Greene wrote the same story twice, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. What Greene shared with Sidney was a story about a ruler who receives a message from an oracle and consequently exiles his daughter to the countryside. The king’s daughter, disguised as a ¹ See F. L. Beaty, ‘Lodge’s Forbonius and Prisceria and Sidney’s Arcadia’, ES 49 (1968), 38–45. ² Rosalynde is dedicated to the two sons of Lord Hunsdon, Lodge’s contemporaries at Oxford, who are addressed by Lodge as ‘Master’ even though they were knighted in 1587. Greene may have revised Rosalynde while Lodge was away at sea, since the text includes many of Greene’s characteristic stylistic traits. Lodge may have published the text because Sidney’s Arcadia appeared in print. See Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 304–14. ³ An entry in the stock records for 1585 of the stationer Roger Ward lists a ‘Triumphe of Time’. This may be a pirated edition of Pandosto. Both Ward and the publisher of the 1588 edition, Thomas Cadman, enjoyed a lively relationship with regulatory authorities. See Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 56. ⁴ See H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 264, 300–3, 328–31; As Woudhuysen points out, there are many suggestive, if inconclusive, links between Greene, Lodge, and aristocratic families with connections to Sidney. Greene dedicated Pandosto and Greenes mourning garment to George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland, and there may be associations between the family and the ‘Clifford’ manuscript of the Old Arcadia. Lodge was godfather to one of the brothers of Sir William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. He dedicated Rosalynde to Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon; Henry Stanford, compiler of a miscellany containing poems from the Old Arcadia, worked in the Carey household. Newcomb argues that Greene only knew of the Old Arcadia secondhand until after its publication; see Reading Popular Romance, 62–6. See also Richard Helgerson, ‘Lyly, Greene, Sidney and Barnaby Rich’s Brusanus’, HLQ 36 (1972–3), 409–18. ⁵ See S. L. Wolff, The Greek Romances, 440–6. Wolff ’s analysis is based on his belief that Greene knew the New Arcadia. For the relevance of the Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre, see Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 197–8.

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shepherdess, is wooed by a prince who is disguised as a shepherd. The prince’s courtship leads to a threat of execution, although he has a lucky escape at the last moment. Greene avoided reproducing many of the most scurrilous and the most ludicrous aspects of Sidney’s text. In the Old Arcadia Prince Pyrocles dresses as a woman and rapes the princess Philoclea during his courtship. His best friend Musidorus fantasizes about raping her sister Pamela, and elopes with her. Both the foolish Duke Basilius and his wife Gynecia also fall in love with the cross-dressed Pyrocles, although only Gynecia sees through his disguise. Pyrocles escapes their affections through trickery, and arranges for them to end up in bed together instead of with him. Prince Musidorus dresses as a shepherd in order to court the princess Pamela, and elopes with her. The princes are later tried by King Euarchus for their sexual crimes, and for murder of Duke Basilius, who appears to be dead. When he is found alive, seemingly ‘resurrected’, the princes are forgiven. There is general reconciliation, although the ending is in many ways inconclusive. As the narrator comments: ‘so uncertain are mortal judgements, the same person most infamous and most famous, and neither justly’.⁶ Greene avoids premarital sex, cross-dressing, lascivious queens, accusations of murder, and comic resurrections. But he translates the themes into other modes. Instead of farcically confused families sleeping with each other, Greene created plotlines involving fathers brought to the brink of incestuously raping their daughters. Instead of the sensational but morally questionable ending of Sidney’s plot, Greene inserted last-minute plot twists featuring violent oscillations between tragedy and comedy. Both Sidney and Greene were dependent on Heliodorus’ An Aethiopian Historie for many features of their plots: separated lovers, exile, oracles, trials, and shipwrecks.⁷ Greene also borrows from Angel Day’s translation of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (1587).⁸ But Greene and Sidney’s pastoral ⁶ Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 416. ⁷ See S. L. Wolff ’s chapter on Greene in The Greek Romances; A. C. Hamilton, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia as Prose Fiction: Its Relation to its Sources’ in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 119–50. ⁸ See Angel Day, Daphnis and Chloe, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David Nutt, 1890). Day was using Jacques Amyot’s translation of the text and himself takes a transformative attitude to translation. The prurient tone of the Greek original is excised, and Day inserts a panegyric of Elizabeth. Greene borrows only the account of Fawnia’s upbringing, and could have inserted it into the 1585 version, if it existed. For parallels between Day and Greene, see Wolff, The Greek Romances, 448–50.

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environments also look very different, not least because of their native inhabitants. Sidney’s pastoral location is largely derived from Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a compilation of prose and eclogues which first appeared in print in 1502. Sannazaro was writing aristocratic pastoral about love, in which the differences between gentlemen and real shepherds are always maintained.⁹ Divisions of rank are also clearly visible in Sidney’s work. In addition to the exiled aristocrats, there are two kinds of shepherd in Sidney’s Arcadia. The ‘art’ pastoralists are the singers of the eclogues which punctuate the five ‘acts’ of narrative. The other kind of shepherds are represented by the naïve family consisting of Dametas, his wife Miso, and his daughter Mopsa, who act as guardians to the princesses in Arcadia. Musidorus deceives them by pretending to court Mopsa when he is planning to escape with Pamela. Dametas and his family are ignorant yokels easily duped by their social superiors. Greene, however, always shows the impact of the choices of his lustful aristocrats on the lower ranks of society. One of the most distinctive features of Pandosto is the amount of attention Greene gives to the motivations and thought processes of the servants and shepherds who are affected by the behaviour of the royal family. But Greene is certainly not writing democratic pastoral, and Menaphon sets up a more complex dynamic. The shepherd poets turn into comic relief in the course of the text as the social divisions become more marked. This is part of the point. Both Pandosto and Menaphon revolve around the restoration of princesses dressed as shepherdesses to their proper place in society. In both texts the nobility of the princesses shines through their pastoral disguise. Greene is always interested in the difference between appearance and reality, especially when this involves a disjunction between speech and social status. Both Pandosto and Menaphon contain a scene in which the noble speech of the shepherdess surprises the hero. Behind these scenes lies one of the most popular stories in Elizabethan England: the tale of Argentile and Curan in William Warner’s Albions England. Argentile is a princess whose kingdom is usurped by her uncle Edel when her father dies. When Prince Curan falls in love with her, he disguises himself as a kitchen servant in order to court her. Since Edel refuses to allow Argentile to marry anyone of her own status, he is delighted by the idea of her marrying a servant. Argentile, however, refuses, and escapes to the countryside disguised as a maid. Curan later ⁹ See Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 104–7.

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also arrives in the countryside disguised as a shepherd. Neither recognizes the other, but both fall in love. Curan initially practises what he believes to be pastoral decorum by matching his courtship techniques to the maid’s supposed status, and offering her unlimited bread and cheese. But he is so bewitched by Argentile’s beauty that he is moved to start composing a courtly blazon. Argentile accuses him of being really a noble: ‘Credite me, thy latter speech bewraies | Thy clownish shape a coined shew’.¹⁰ The pair discover each other’s identities and are able to marry, and be restored to their rightful place in society. For Warner’s readers, the story had an immediate political resonance. Argentile represents Elizabeth, the temporarily dispossessed princess who returns triumphant to her kingdom.¹¹ Greene however turns the scene into a literary experience, which suggests his own self-conscious relationship to the conventions of romance. One of his most striking deviations from Sidney lies in the fact that in neither of Greene’s pastorals do the princes knowingly search for their lovers in the countryside. In Pandosto Prince Dorastus is baffled by the witty speech of the maid Fawnia, whom he believes to be a shepherdess, and ends up falling in love with her. But Greene links this scene to other darker scenes in the book by his use of one particular text: Lyly’s first play Campaspe. In Menaphon the scene becomes an elaborate in-joke about Marlowe and Lyly which ends in a husband and wife still not recognizing each other. But while in both cases neither party knows the other’s identity, they have both established a similar frame of cultural reference. In each case, the non-recognition scene reflects on Greene’s relationship with Sidney. Greene never reproduces the sexual crimes of Sidney’s Pyrocles and Musidorus. But he was well aware of the potentially tragic consequences of ‘overloving’, and of tyrannically lascivious aristocrats. In Pandosto Greene uses the scene to highlight the prodigal motivations of the young prince, and to suggest that these are close to the sort of behaviour associated with the tragic elements of the plot. In Menaphon Greene turns the satire on himself. The disguised princess and her husband act as if they are exiles from Sidney’s manuscript and exposed to the teeming world of hackneyed print culture. Shepherd poets who try to break into their world are doomed to failure. In his Arcadia Sidney could ¹⁰ William Warner, Albions England (London, 1586), sig. L4r. For the popularity and significance of the story in Elizabethan literature, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance, 265, 343–4. ¹¹ This aspect of the text is not overtly emphasized in Pandosto, although the text later gave rise to many politicized readings. See Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 131–207.

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be identified both with ‘Philisides’, the marginal courtier poet, and with his prodigal princes. Greene identifies with the new poet in Arcadia, the disguised gentleman Melicertus, but also with the foolish shepherd Menaphon. Greene’s success in print finally placed him closer to Menaphon the scholar-like shepherd than to Melicertus the gentleman wit.

Campaspe in Bohemia: Pandosto. The Triumph of Time In Samuel Richardson’s gargantuan novel Clarissa (1747–8), reading Pandosto nearly causes tragedy. Or at least this is what Robert Lovelace claims when he has been offered a rare opportunity to gain access to Clarissa Harlowe. Lovelace describes an early morning fire alarm in Clarissa’s bedroom, which he later explains was ‘all owing to the carelessness of Mrs Sinclair’s cook-maid, who, having sat up to read the simple History of Dorastus and Faunia when she should have been in bed, had set fire to an old pair of calico window-curtains’.¹² The bathetic conclusion to a potentially tragic set piece is strongly reminiscent of Greene’s own style, and Clarissa and Lovelace themselves recall the many suffering women and ‘overloving’ husbands depicted by Greene. On this occasion Clarissa escapes Lovelace’s unwanted advances. But he rapes her in the end. Greene always confines himself to hints of sexual violence which end in comedy. But in Pandosto the threats come from an unusual source. In Clarissa the abusive Lovelace acts as a parody of a romance hero. In Pandosto the distinction between romance hero and lecherous villain becomes more difficult to draw. The multiple tales and generations enfolded in Pandosto are suggested by the competing titles of the text. The tale which supposedly enthralled Clarissa’s cook-maid is referred to by its running title: ‘The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia’. On the title-page the book is listed as ‘PANDOSTO. The Triumph of Time. Wherein is discouered by a pleasant Historie, that although by the meanes of sinister fortune, Truth may be concealed yet by Time in spight of fortune it is most manifestly reuealed’. Yet the text is far more about human motivations than the power of fortune. The first half of Pandosto is very like Philomela.¹³ The narrative is another calumny ¹² Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 723. Newcomb reveals Lovelace’s plotting in Reading Popular Romance, 230–2. ¹³ However, the events of Pandosto can also apparently be paralleled in medieval Polish history by the actions of Ziemowit III, who wrongly imprisoned his wife for adultery and later murdered her, while casting out the son which she bore to him in prison. See M. A. Biggs, ‘The Origin of “The Winter’s Tale”’, N&Q, 12th ser., 3 (1917), 164–5.

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romance, with a jealous husband who believes in his wife’s infidelity with his best friend. However, in Pandosto the conflict is extended into the next generation. In Philomela the traduced mother became the exile. In Pandosto her role is undertaken by the daughter. Pandosto begins the text alone, and consumed with jealousy of his wife, Bellaria. When his friend Egistus king of Sicily comes to stay, Pandosto becomes convinced that he and Bellaria are having an affair. But Pandosto is given no deliberative or euphuistic speeches. The brevity with which his feelings are related highlights the ease with which he mobilizes proverbs and alliterative examples: ‘thinking that Love was aboue all Lawes and therefore to be staied with no Law, that it was hard to put fire and flaxe together without burning . . . that where fancy forced friendship was of no force’ (iv. 238). The infiltration of euphuism into prose style has become so universal that other thought patterns appear impossible. The opposing voice of reason is provided not by another noble, but by Pandosto’s servant Franion, whom Pandosto wishes to persuade to assassinate Egistus. Franion is a lucid and articulate reasoner: ‘he layd before his face, that Egistus was his friend, a King, & one that was come into his Kingdome to confirme a league of perpetuall amitie betwixt them . . . also his own subiectes would repine at such treacherous cruelty’ (iv. 240). Pandosto will not listen, leaving Franion to debate the options. Unlike Pandosto, who is ruled by jealousy, Franion is faced with a genuine dilemma. In his world, ‘Kings are knowne to command, seruants are blamelesse to consent’ (iv. 242). Nonetheless, he chooses an alternative option: ‘Prefer thy content before riches, and a cleare minde before dignity; so being poore thou shalt haue rich peace, or else rich, thou shalt enioy disquiet’ (iv. 242). He accordingly helps Egistus to escape. Throughout Pandosto Greene stresses the connections between servants and their masters and mistresses. Franion’s comparative freedom of action lies in stark contrast to the constraints placed on Bellaria, now imprisoned on suspicion of adultery. She unwittingly echoes him in her lament in prison: ‘Ah happy life, where poore thoughts, and meane desires liue in secure content, not fearing Fortune because too low for Fortune’ (iv. 249). Bellaria’s daughter is born but, suspecting her parentage, Pandosto orders her to be exposed in a boat. When Bellaria is tried for adultery, she appeals to the Delphic oracle, which vindicates her, Egistus, and Franion. The oracle also delivers a mysterious prophecy: ‘the King shal liue without an heire: if that which is lost be not found’ (iv. 258). But in the midst of rejoicing, tragedy strikes. News is brought of the sudden death of Pandosto and Bellaria’s son Garinter, and Bellaria dies from the violent

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combination of emotions she is forced to endure. Pandosto buries wife and son together in the same tomb. But like Sidney’s foolish Duke Basilius, Pandosto discovers that his ability to control his family is limited. His daughter is a child in a rudderless boat, a romance convention so familiar that Greene’s readers could have predicted a plotline ensuring her restoration.¹⁴ The impoverished shepherd Porrus who discovers her immediately recognizes her noble origins. Pandosto’s daughter is shipwrecked off the coast of Sicilia, where she is discovered by the shepherd Porrus hung about with signs of her status as romance heroine, ‘wrapped in a Mantle of Scarlet, richley imbrodered with Golde, and hauing a chayne about the necke’ (iv. 245). When he picks her up, a purse stuffed with gold falls at his feet. Like Franion, Porrus is caught in a dilemma between virtue and self-interest. He eventually salves his conscience by resolving to use the money in order to raise the child. On his return home, his wife is struck with jealousy: ‘seeing her husband with a yong babe in his armes, [she] began to bee somewhat ielousse, yet marueiling that her husband should be so wanton abroad, sith he was so quiet at home’ (iv. 267). Porrus escapes a beating from his wife only when he reveals the purse, at which point Mopsa eagerly colludes with his fostering plans. By the time the girl they call Fawnia is 16, Porrus is a rich leaseholder with a farm of his own. Greene’s cameo of the shepherds’ home lives forms a miniature parody of the main plot, starring Mopsa as the jealous spouse. But Pandosto has another more sinister surrogate. The rest of the plot revolves around two courtship scenes between Fawnia and the two suitors who also arrive in Sicilia. The first suitor is Dorastus, Egistus’ son and Fawnia’s eventual husband. The second is Pandosto himself. Greene’s addition of a plotline involving unintentional incest may be a reflection of the confused families in Sidney’s book. But in the Old Arcadia there are far clearer distinctions drawn between the irrational but comic desires motivating Sidney’s Basilius and the sex crimes of the prodigal princes. For Greene the lustful king becomes a tragic figure—but he also speaks the same language as the romance hero. And the source of both the courtship scenes lies in Greene’s relationship with another story altogether: Lyly’s first play Campaspe.¹⁵ Like Pandosto, Campaspe is about a whimsical ruler’s attempt to exert control over love. The play opens when Alexander ¹⁴ For the importance of the motif in early literature, see Cooper, The English Romance, 106–23. ¹⁵ See G. C. Moore Smith, ‘Lyly, Greene, and Shakespeare’, N&Q 10th ser., 8 (1907), 461–2.

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has just sacked Thebes and become infatuated with Campaspe, one of his captives. He commissions his court painter Apelles to paint her portrait. But when he discovers that Apelles has himself fallen in love with Campaspe, he relinquishes his claim to her. Two scenes in Campaspe are crucial to Greene’s understanding of Lyly. The first is the nervous conversation Campaspe has with her fellow captive Timoclea and Alexander’s servants Clitus and Parmenio. The worried women know they are in Alexander’s power, but seek reassurance from their knowledge of their own virtue: t i m o. Alex. Hath ouercome, not conquered. p a r. To bring al vnder his subiection is to conquer. t i m o. He cannot subdue that which is diuine. t i m o. Vertue is. c l i t u s. Alexander as he tendreth virtue, so he will you . . . c a m p. Then if it be such a thing to be Alexander, I hope it shalbe no miserable things to be a virgin. For if he saue our honors, it is more then to restore our goods. And rather doe I wish hee preserue our fames, then our lyues, which if hee do, wee will confesse there can be no greater thing then to be Alexander. (ii. 318)

Lyly suggests the women have good reason to be worried. In a later scene Alexander confides his infatuation with Campaspe to his general Hephaestion. Hephaestion is horrified at Campaspe’s lack of social standing: ‘But you loue, ah griefe! But whom? Campaspe, ah shame! A maide forsooth vnknowne, vnnoble, & who can tell whether immodest?’ (ii. 330). But, as Hephaestion reminds Alexander, his agency is limited. Alexander thinks that he can get whatever he wants: ‘I am a king, and will command’. Hephaestion responds: ‘You may, to yeelde to luste by force, but to consent to loue by feare, you cannot’. Alexander could rape Campaspe, but not make her love him, and in the end he does not attempt to do either. Lyly confines the hints of sexual violence to the secret fantasies of the men, and the play concludes in a celebration of Alexander’s magnanimity. What Greene creates from his memories of Campaspe is an unwritten scene: Alexander’s attempt to seduce Campaspe and her refusal to compromise her chastity. Greene’s first allusion to this imaginary scene is woven into the sentimental education of his romance heroine. Dorastus initially despises love: he ‘delighted rather to die with Mars in the Fielde then to dally with Venus in her Chamber’ (iv. 272). He therefore escapes his father Egistus’ plans to marry him off to a rich princess and arrives in Bohemia, where he catches a glimpse of Fawnia. Both are stunned by the other’s beauty, but

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appalled by the disparity in rank which would seem to make courtship impossible. When they meet, Dorastus is equally surprised by Fawnia’s behaviour. Her noble origins shine through in the witty defence she gives of the pastoral life: ‘our greatest wealth not to couet, our honour not to climbe, our quiet not to care’ (iv. 283). But although Dorastus is impressed, he is still thinking in terms of the power his rank and masculinity confer on him. The courtship is interrupted when Dorastus’ companions appear: ‘yet before they drewe so nie that they might hear their talke, he vsed these speeches. Why Fawnia, perhappes I loue thee, and then thou must needs yeelde, for thou knowest I can commaund and constraine’ (iv. 284). The ‘speeches’ which Dorastus ‘uses’ are adaptations of the conversation between Alexander and Hephaestion in Lyly’s Campaspe. But Fawnia also knows her source text. In response to Dorastus’ promises to ‘constrain’ her, she echoes Lyly’s Campaspe and Timoclea: ‘Trueth, sir (quoth she) but not to loue: for constrained loue is force, not loue: and know this sir, mine honesty is such, as I hadde rather dye then be a Concubine euen to a King’ (iv. 284). In the Old Arcadia the lustful princes adopt disguises and rape or elope with their mistresses. But in Greene’s narrative the lustful prince has to learn that neither pastoral disguise nor satisfying sexual desire is as uncomplicated as it might seem. Fawnia agrees to accept the prince as her suitor only ‘when Dorastus becomes a shepheard’ (iv. 284). Dorastus puts on a shepherd’s coat, and congratulates himself on his ‘right decorum: base desires and homely attires’ (iv. 287). But Fawnia has a broader definition of pastoral identity: ‘shepheards are not called shepheardes because they weare hookes and bagges, but that they are borne poore, and liue to keep sheepe’ (iv. 289). Only then is Dorastus gradually persuaded into swearing fidelity: ‘If my desire were against lawe, thou mightest iustly deny me by reason, but I love thee, Fawnia, not to misvse thee as a Concubine, but to vse thee as my wife: I can promise no more, and meane to performe no less’ (iv. 289). Greene wittily adds a reminder that his pastoral heroine has her own aspirations: ‘Fawnia, poor soule, was no less ioyful . . . hoping in time to be aduanced from the daughter of a poore farmer to be the wife of a riche King’ (iv. 291–2). Dorastus thus rejects the identity of tyrannical rapist which Lyly’s Alexander fantasized about. But he still has a lot to learn about pastoral. While the identity of Sidney’s Musidorus is never uncovered by the real shepherds, Dorastus’ disguise fools nobody. All the shepherds know who he is, and warn Porrus that his daughter is being courted by a prince. Porrus’ fears that Fawnia will be exploited echo the earlier threats of force: ‘where

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poor men intreate, and cannot obtaine, there Princes may commaund and wil obtaine . . . it is a hard case where Kinges lusts are lawes’ (iv. 293). Porrus’ philosophy echoes throughout the rest of the narrative. While he resolves to explain the mysterious circumstances surrounding Fawnia’s adoption to the king, Dorastus and Fawnia flee by boat, and are captured by Pandosto, now a lascivious fifty-something. He is instantly captivated by the beauty of Fawnia—unaware that she is his long-lost daughter. Like Sidney’s foolish Duke Basilius, Pandosto is led by his uncontrollable lusts to court a member of his own family. In the Old Arcadia the incident is converted into comedy. Basilius falls in love with Pyrocles while he is disguised as a woman. Pyrocles escapes from him by tricking him into sleeping with his own wife. Greene, however, turns the episode into a potential tragedy. Once again Campaspe provides a language which enables the threat of force to be formulated and withstood. When Pandosto meditates on his love, he adapts the words of Lyly’s Hephaestion: ‘Dooth Pandosto then loue: Yea: whome: A maide vnknowne, yea, and perhapps immodest, stragled out of her owne countrie: beautifull, but not therefore chast: comely in bodie, but perhappes crooked in minde’ (iv. 306). The echoes of Lyly’s play are even more pronounced when Pandosto confronts Fawnia, and their encounter is set out in four alternate speeches. Like Dorastus, Pandosto reminds Fawnia of his superior status: ‘thou art now in that place where I may commaunde, and yet thou seest I intreate: my power is such as I may compell by force, and yet I sue by prayers’ (iv. 310). Fawnia in turn uses the words of Lyly’s Timoclea and Campaspe: ‘Pandosto, the body is subiect to victories, but the minde not to be subdued by conquest . . . where lust ruleth it is a miserable thing to be a virgin, but know this, that I will alwaies preferre fame before life, and rather choose death then dishonour’ (iv. 310–11). But Greene is writing tragicomedy. Pandosto never rapes his daughter, although he behaves tyrannically enough before the final resolution of the text. Egistus arrives in Bohemia in order to try and save his son. In order to reconcile himself with his old friend, Pandosto agrees to Egistus’ request for the release of Dorastus. He also asks Pandosto to execute Fawnia, her father, and the sea captain who had helped her to escape. Infuriated by her rejection of his advances, Pandosto agrees. With unwitting irony, Pandosto condemns Porrus for being an ‘old doating foole’, and Fawnia for ‘disordinate lusts’ (iv. 314). Only when Porrus reveals how he adopted Fawnia as a baby does Pandosto realize that she is his daughter, and her restoration marks the fulfilment of the oracle. Pandosto instantly transforms himself into a loving father, embracing his daughter and future son-in-law. But while

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the miraculous turn of events leads to universal rejoicing, the narrator is reticent about the reactions of those most closely affected by them. Fawnia, we are told, ‘was not more ioyfull that she had found such a Father, then Dorastus was glad he should get such a wife’ (iv. 316). Earlier in the story Fawnia had been ‘no less joyful’ at the thought of turning from a farmer’s daughter into a king’s wife. Now her expectations have been fulfilled, if not quite in the way she might have expected. Readers are left to speculate on how glad she is to have discovered that her father wanted to rape her, or how relieved Dorastus is that he has discovered his wife is a princess after all. Greene does not allow his readers to lose themselves in wonder at the events of the text. His last compendious sentence packs in a swift succession of tragicomic reversals: Eighteene daies being past in these princely sports, Pandosto willing to recompense old Porrus, of a shepheard made him a Knight: which done, prouiding a sufficient Nauie to receiue him and his retinue, accompanied with Dorastus, Fawnia, and the Sicilian Embassadoors, he sailed towards Sicilia, where he was most princelie entertained by Egistus: who hearing this most comicall euent, reioyced greatly at his sonnes good happe, and without delay (to the perpetuall ioy of the two yong Louers) celebrated the marriage: which was no sooner ended, but Pandosto (calling to mind how first he betraied his friend Egistus, how his iealousie was the cause of Bellarias death, that contrarie to the law of nature hee had lusted after his owne Daughter) moued with these desperate thoughts, he fell in a melancholie fit, and, to close vp the Comedie with a Tragicall stratageme, hee slewe himselfe; whose death being many daies bewailed of Fawnia, Dorastus, and his dear friend Egistus, Dorastus taking his leaue of his father, went with his wife and the dead corps into Bohemia, where after they were sumptuouslie intoombed, Dorastus ended his daies in contented quiet. (iv. 317)

Quite how many of the royal family survive the events remains uncertain. Greene sets up a self-conscious clash of interpretations between the generations. Old Pandosto reads the story as his tragedy; young Dorastus and Fawnia’s marriage turns it into comedy. Yet for Dorastus, the ending of the text appears to be a solitary pleasure. The logic of Greene’s sentence demands that he leave Bohemia with a living wife and a dead father-inlaw and return only after ‘they’ have been safely entombed. There is no reason to assume that Greene was especially careless in choosing his pronouns. The plot thickens if Pandosto is compared to the story of Ulysses’ tragedy in Greene’s anthology Euphues his censure to Philautus. Pandosto shares many passages with the story of Moedyna’s infidelity to her husband Polumestor, which culminates in her suicide. Polumestor exhibits the

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same equanimity as Dorastus when he discovers his wife’s ‘tragical stratageme’ (v. 198–9). After a brief period of mourning, ‘somewhat comforted, he kept a solemn show of hir funeralls, which performed with magnificence, hee passed the rest of his yeeres in quiet’. Dorastus was initially introduced into the narrative as an enemy to love who flirted with a shepherdess by reminding her that he could always rape her if he wished. Having had his ideas of literary pastoral subjected to a rigorous review, he marries the shepherdess when she is revealed as a princess. But it appears that he lives happily ever after only when his wife has mysteriously joined his troublesome father-in-law in the family tomb. Even on the last page of the narrative Pandosto and Dorastus are battling for generic control of the text. The denouement is a reflection of the way the narrative paths taken by the men in the story are interlaced in a series of similar scenes. Pandosto’s story of jealousy, exposure of his child, and subsequent suicide is given a comic counterpart in the cameo of Porrus, the willing foster father who is rewarded in an unthreatening social transformation. Egistus and Pandosto are portrayed as equally vindictive. More suggestive still are the parallel careers of Pandosto and Dorastus, who use the same words to flirt with Fawnia and who both find themselves entombing their relatives. But in contrast to the trial at the end of the Old Arcadia, it is Fawnia and her foster father who face punishment, while Dorastus is saved by his father. Dorastus has of course not committed the same sex crimes as Pyrocles and Musidorus, thanks to Fawnia’s determination to marry a prince rather than end up as his concubine. But in keeping with the tone of the text, Greene shows the labourers being prosecuted for the aristocrat’s offences, even though Porrus himself turns into an unlikely member of the aristocracy at the end. Like the narrators of ancient Greek fictions, Greene frequently reminds his readers of the wondrously unpredictable oscillations of fortune. Yet Greene achieves his tragicomic effects as much by analysing the multifaceted nature of human motivations, and the possibility of untold stories lying beneath the narrative. Euphuism provided a smokescreen of misleading examples and rhetorical devices. Pandosto still contains set piece deliberative speeches in a euphuistic mode. But Greene reveals more about his personae through occasional narratorial asides, and suggestions of secret plots. Balanced clauses are increasingly used less as tools of rhetorical argument, and more to reflect balances of human emotions and experiences. Fawnia is both the archetypal chaste heroine of romance, and a social climber who is determined to make sure she marries her prince. Unlike either of the princes in the Old Arcadia, Dorastus is made to revise

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his ideas about raping a shepherdess and infiltrating the local community by adopting a pastoral disguise. But beneath his sentimental education Greene offers his male readers a witty alternative reading. Dorastus had begun the text an enemy to love, and he (perhaps) escapes his wife at the end. In the most famous adaptation of Pandosto, marriage is definitely not optional. In The Winter’s Tale (1616) Shakespeare omits the theme of the unwittingly incestuous father, thus allowing for universal reconciliation. Hermione, the equivalent of Bellaria, does not die, but lives in exile with her maid Paulina for sixteen years. Paulina finally reintroduces husband and wife by presenting Hermione to Leontes, the equivalent of Pandosto, as a statue. Leontes admires the sculptor’s skill, but comments that Hermione looks older and more wrinkled than he remembered. This is surely the nightmare scenario imagined by Penelope in Greene’s Penelopes web: the return of a husband to a wife who has suffered from the ravages of time. Leontes and Hermione are reunited, but the awkwardness of the moment is suggested by Leontes’ determination to involve all those around him in marriage whether they like it or not. During the course of the play, Paulina’s husband Antigonus has been killed by a bear. Like Greene’s Philomela, Paulina proposes to spend the rest of her life alone in mourning. Leontes has other ideas, and marries her off to one of the courtiers. For Greene truth was the daughter of time; for Shakespeare it was the wife. Shakespeare’s ruling family are if anything more insistent on the divisions of rank than those in Pandosto. In a famous discussion on grafting plants, Perdita, the equivalent of Fawnia, rejects the idea that wild plants can be combined with noble stocks. Yet the play is full of discussions of succession and imitation, with endless parallels drawn between social and literary interbreeding. It is also saturated with memories of Greene. Leontes’ and Bellaria’s young son is called Mamillius, the male equivalent of the name of the heroine of Greene’s first book. And Mamillius is a storyteller; his last line in the play before his untimely death is the beginning of a ghost story. Like one of Greene’s romances, the play forms an anthology of fragments of other tales, ways of showing and telling. The irresistible appeal of old themes is embodied in the figure of the trickster and itinerant ballad seller Autolycus.¹⁶ But Autolycus never threatens the main plot. The Winter’s Tale is a homage to popular literature, but it also keeps it in its place. ¹⁶ Newcomb argues convincingly that Autolycus is a representation of Greene; see her analysis of Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale in Reading Popular Romance, 117–29.

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‘Scholler-like Shepherd’: Menaphon The land where literature does not know its place is Greene’s Arcadia. Everyone in Menaphon is making a bid for control of the burgeoning literary environment, and the aristocrats are forced at least temporarily to compete with the shepherds. Menaphon was Greene’s most satirical romance, and one of the most popular.¹⁷ Like Ciceronis amor, it was published in what appears to have been the triumphant year of 1589. Greene’s first dramatic romance, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, probably dates from this year, and its popularity rescued Greene’s reputation as a playwright after the failure of Alphonsvs. But Menaphon is as elusive as it is exuberant. Like Ciceronis amor, the text is about style, or what Greene wanted to present as an idea of style. His satire is often inconsistent and inaccurate, and he passes over writing on one page which he singles out for ridicule on another. At the end of the story, the narrator intervenes to commend a naïve pastoral tradition, while himself adding a sonnet to prove his own sophisticated poetic techniques. Greene was both selfconsciously celebrating and dissociating himself from simple pastoralism, a double-edged movement which is typical of the text. Greene created an Arcadia which is struggling to assimilate recent literary events, and no one knows where the boundaries lie. Menaphon is Greene’s revenge on his critics, and an ebullient debunking of the topoi of Elizabethan literature. The book is about comparison, and comparative ideas of style. The overarching theme is the danger of using too many similes, a charge which had been levelled at both Theocritus’ and Virgil’s pastorals.¹⁸ Greene updated the idea in order to snipe at euphuism, and to demonstrate the superiority of his own style. He also wickedly makes Lyly guilty by association. Lyly’s comparisons are very different from pastoral similes. Greene’s repeated reminders of Lyly’s excessive comparisons leave the impression that he was also responsible for everything that was wrong with pastoral. Satirizing Lyly’s style did not prevent Greene from exploiting his influence. The subtitle contains a miniature fiction which serves to enshrine Euphues and the canon Greene had created around him as a subject of urgent debate. Menaphon is billed as ‘Camillas Alarum to slumbering Euphues, in his melancholie Cell at Silexedra’. Greene explains to the ¹⁷ Menaphon went through five early editions, and Ciceronis amor nine. ¹⁸ See Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 252.

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gentlemen readers that ‘Camilla’, heroine of Euphues and his England, ‘thought it necessarie not to let Euphues censure to Philautus, passe without requital’ (vi. 4). In addition to adding a plug for his own earlier work, Greene was thus able to bill the work as another ladies’ text.¹⁹ As a dedicatory poem by Henry Upchear makes clear, Lyly’s writing is there to be outgrown by mature readers: Of all the flowers a Lillie once I lou’d Whose labouring beautie brancht it selfe abroad; But now old age his glories hath remoud, And Greener obiectes are my eyes aboade. (vi. 29)

Thomas Brabine expands the debate to generic categories: One writes of loue, and wanders in the aire, Another stands on tearmes of trees and stones: Where heauens compare yeeldes but the praise of faire, And christall can describe but flesh and bones; Yet countrey swaynes, whose thoughts are faith and troth, Will shape sweete wordes of wooll and russet cloth. (vi. 32)

Greene is by implication the humble pastoralist, restoring literature to a world before Lyly. Or, as Harvey might say, the text is Greene’s shepherd’s calendar. But Greene is not so simple a shepherd. Nashe had praised the text for allowing the ‘Ironicall recreation of the reader’. Greene himself warns the gentlemen readers that the story encompasses mysteries: ‘If Gentlemen you finde my stile either magis humile in one place, or more sublime in another, if you finde darke Aenigmaes of strange conceipts . . . thinke the metaphors are well ment’ (vi. 4). Arcadia for Greene was a place where he could exploit and satirize his rivals, including Peele, Marlowe, Sidney, and Lodge. The persona around which Greene’s satire revolves is Menaphon himself. In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, which Greene had so disastrously imitated in Alphonsvs, Menaphon is an attendant lord who describes the arrival of the shepherd turned tyrant Tamburlaine. In Greene’s Arcadia, Menaphon is a shepherd poet who rejects his sweetheart Pesana and dares to aspire to the hand of the noble heroine Samela. In Greene’s text aspirant shepherds get what they deserve. But Greene’s Arcadia is predominantly a riotous exploitation of pastoral and the eclogue tradition as exemplified by Sidney and Lodge. ¹⁹ Greene’s choice of dedicatee is remarkable. Menaphon was supposedly written to console the widow of Sir James Hales, a judge who was convicted of fraud and committed suicide by drowning. Whether Lady Hales was cheered by a story of a married couple reunited after a shipwreck remains unknown.

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Greene had probably read Lodge’s Rosalynde by 1589. Lodge’s Arden is a comparatively decorous environment, containing set piece eclogues by gentlemen and shepherds with little difference in style. In Arcadia, Greene wittily inserts eclogue competitions at the tensest moments in his plot. Menaphon’s role is probably derived from that of Lodge’s Montanus in Rosalynde. Montanus is a more stereotypical pastoral poet who is in love with the shepherdess Phebe. Phebe in turn desires the disguised heroine Rosalynde. But Lodge seeks no particular identification with Montanus. In his introduction Nashe had dropped heavy hints that Menaphon should be understood as a surrogate for Greene, ‘your schollerlike shepherd’. The relationship evokes comparison with Sidney’s chosen persona, ‘Philisides’ the melancholy courtier poet who has taken refuge in Arcadia after being disappointed in love. Menaphon, however, is a very different sort of poet and, unlike Philisides, he refuses to stay on the margins of the plot. Menaphon is a dispossession romance with a difference. Though Menaphon himself begins the text as the protagonist, he and his poetry begin to be subjected to mockery as soon as he falls in love with the disguised heroine.²⁰ Menaphon’s story is displaced by the arrival of Samela, the equivalent of Sidney’s heroine Pamela, and Melicertus, the counterpart of Sidney’s Prince Musidorus. But, as ever, Greene does not let his aristocrats escape mockery either. The ruling family triumph, but only when they have been revealed as lust-crazed tyrants. According to Greene’s running title, Menaphon is a collection of memories, ‘the reports of the shepheards’, and at the start of the narrative it is Menaphon who is appointed unofficial reader’s guide. Like Heliodorus, Greene begins his story in the middle of events. Arcadia has been ravaged by plague, so the just king Democles applies to the Delphic oracle to find out the future of the country. As at the start of the Old Arcadia, the oracle is mysterious. Arcadians will be happy only when a series of impossible conditions have been fulfilled: ‘When swelling seas haue neither ebbe nor tide’ (vi. 34). But since the oracle appeares to be incomprehensible, life returns to normal. Menaphon the king’s shepherd is an enemy to love, and reflects on his very literary feelings as he surveys the landscape: Seeing thus the accord of the Land and Sea, casting a fresh gaze on the Water Nimphs, he began to consider how Venus was feigned by the Poets to spring of the froathe of the Seas which draue him straight into a deepe coniecture of the inconstancie of Loue . . . calling to minde certain Aphorismes that Anacreon had ²⁰ Menaphon’s narrative trajectory is the opposite of that taken by the foolish Fabius in Ciceronis amor, who becomes civilized by love.

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pend downe as principles of loues follies, being as deepe an enemy to fancie, as Narcissus was to affection, began thus to scoffe at Venus Deitie. (vi. 37–8)

But just as Menaphon imagines Venus rising from the waves, he sees the picture re-enacted before him. He notices a shipwreck, and the assorted survivors gradually resolve themselves into an enigmatic tableau: ‘at last he might descrie it was a woman holding a childe in her armes, and an olde man directing her as it were her guide’ (vi. 42). Their story is pieced together as Menaphon overhears them talking. The woman Sephestia is Democles’ daughter. Her husband Maximius has been banished by Democles, for unknown reasons. She believes him dead, and has herself been washed up on the shores of Arcadia with her son and her uncle Lamedon. Sephestia resolves to adopt a pastoral disguise and call herself Samela: ‘with my cloathes I will change my thoughts; for being poorelie attired I will be meanelie minded, and measure my actions by my present estate, not by former fortunes’ (vi. 49). When put to the test, however, Samela has no intention of being ‘meanlie minded’. Menaphon immediately falls in love with her, and tries to assimilate her to his intensely visual mental landscape: hee noted her tresses, which hee compared to the coloured Hiacinth of Arcadia, her browes to the mountaine snowes that lie on the hils, her eyes to the gray glister of Titans gorgeous mantle, her alabaster necke to the whitenesse of his flockes, her teates to peale, her face to borders of Lillies interseamed with Roses. (vi. 49)

When Menaphon proposes to her, he offers her pastoral pleasures: ‘the milke of my ewes shall by meate for thy pretie wanton, the wool of the fat weathers that seemes as fine as the fleece that Iason sent from Colchos, shall serue to make Samela webbes withall’ (vi. 58). Only now is Menaphon definitively revealed as the object of ridicule: ‘This was spoken with such deepe effects, that Samela could scarce keep her from smiling, yet she couered her conceipt with a sorrowful countenance’ (vi. 59). Menaphon tries to convince Samela of his love with a poetic parable in which an eagle condescends to a fly. But this is exactly what cannot happen in Arcadia, as Samela explains: ‘for where the parties haue no simpathie of Estates, there can no firme loue be fixed’ (vi. 61).²¹ Samela is Greene’s most cheerful heroine, and her smiles highlight Greene’s satirical targets. Menaphon is forced to be content with playing host to her, as the narrative of the displaced aristocrats unfolds. ²¹ The need to maintain social rank is also part of Greene’s inheritance from Lyly’s Campaspe. Compare Campaspe’s opinion: ‘In kinges there can be no loue, but to Queenes: for as neere must they meete in majestie, as they doe in affection’ (ii. 349).

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Unbeknown to Samela, her husband Maximius also arrives in Arcadia believing his wife and child to be dead. He disguises himself as the shepherd Melicertus, and takes up residence with Doron, another local poet, who entertains him with a blazon of the new shepherdess: ‘Her tresses gold, her eyes like glassie streames’ (vi. 65). Husband and wife finally encounter each other at a pastoral feast. Like Dorastus in Pandosto, Melicertus is amazed at the wit shown by a country girl. But in this text Greene slyly varies the conventional praise of the rustic life. Melicertus proposes for discussion another of Greene’s favourite topics: metamorphosis. When he asks Samela what animal she would want to turn into, she responds that she would rather be a sheep: ‘my supposition should be simple, my life quiet, my food the pleasant Plaines of Arcadie’ (vi. 75). These are effectively the pleasures Menaphon offered to Samela in his proposal, and by implication best left to dumb animals. Neither Melicertus nor Samela recognize each other, but both are baffled by the similarities to supposedly dead spouses. Melicertus confides to Doron that he once loved a woman above his social station. Unlike Menaphon, however, Melicertus is a gentleman and a discriminating reader. Greene proves his credentials in a set piece scene in which he picks off his literary rivals. When Melicertus next comes across Samela, he decides to test her wit by addressing her in literary hyperboles: Mistres of al eyes that glance but at the excellence of your perfection . . . Oenones ouermatch, Arcadies comet . . . I was by a strange attractiue force drawne, as the adamant draweth the yron, or the ieat the strawe . . . I shall be glad of such accepted seruice, as Paris first was of his best beloued Paramour. (vi. 81)

Samela responds in kind by addressing Melicertus as ‘Arcadies Apollo, whose brightnesse draws euerie eye to turne as the Heliotropion doth after her load’ (vi. 81–2). But in case readers are unclear about the significance of the terms of reference, the narrator provides a gloss: Samela made this replie, because she had heard him so superfine, as if Ephaebus had learnd him to refine his mother tongue, wherefore thought he had done it of an inkhorne desire to be eloquent, and Melicertus thinking that Samela had learnd with Lucilla in Athens to anatomize wit, and speake none but Similes, imagined she smoothed her talke to be thought like Sapho, Phaos Paramour. (vi. 82)

Samela apparently does not remember much about Euphues; Lucilla learned to ‘anatomize wit’ in Naples rather than Athens. By 1589 it hardly matters. Melicertus and Samela only need mention the adamant and the heliotrope to signify that both have read, and outgrown, Euphues. Greene

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avoids reproducing the style of his own earlier works, and substitutes what he defines as recognizable euphuistic catchphrases and hyperboles. His next target is Marlowe. Samela challenges Melicertus to describe his mistress in a sonnet. Melicertus cannot dissemble, ‘for that hee had a farther reach, would not make anie clownish description’ (vi. 83). He accordingly rejects analogy as inadequate, even though he uses the same frames of reference as Menaphon and Doron: Shall I compare her forme unto the sphere Whence sun-bright Venus vaunts her siluer shine? Ah more than that by iust compare is thine, Whose Christall lookes the cloudie heauens doo cleare. (vi. 83)

Samela understands the coded message; she ‘perceiued by his description, that either some better Poet than himselfe had made it, or else that his former phrase was dissembled’ (vi. 84). She encourages him to name his mistress, and reveals a more favourable attitude to social climbing than she had expressed to Menaphon: for be she base, I reade that mightie Tamberlaine after his wife Zenocrate (the worlds faire eye) past out of the Theater of this mortall life, he chose stigmaticall trulls to please his humorous fancie. Be she a princesse, honour hangs in high desires, and it is the token of a high minde to venter for a Queene. (vi. 84)

Like so many of Greene’s female personae, Samela has access to her own secret source. In no version of the Tamburlaine legend does the hero resort to prostitutes.²² Samela’s self-conscious allusion slyly reworks the cliché of life as theatre in order to suggest that Marlowe had failed to write the dismal end of the story in his own drama. Meanwhile Samela is dropping heavy hints of her own regal status. Melicertus confesses his fear of the ‘too high born parentage’ of his mistress but denies Samela’s flirtatious accusations of being in love with another by confirming his cultural literacy: ‘Whosoeuer Samela descanted of that loue, tolde you a Canterbury tale’ (vi. 85–6). Melicertus is obviously in a different league to Menaphon. Even though Samela is a princess, Melicertus is a gentleman and a witty poet. The love of a gentleman for a princess is the stuff of romance; the love of a shepherd for a princess is a joke.²³ ²² Samela’s reference to Zenocrate as ‘the worlds fair eye’ is from the second part of Tamburlaine (I. iv); see H. C. Hart, ‘Robert Greene’s Prose Works’, N&Q, 10th ser., 4 (1905), 484–7. ²³ The reason why Democles exiled his family in the first place is never made entirely clear, but it is implied that he objected to Melicertus because he was a commoner.

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Melicertus and Samela never recognize each other until the end of the text. But they do recognize what each other has read, and this is what matters. Samela herself proves to be an inventive reader, as is proved when Greene shows her watching her son Pleusidippus. Samela is far removed from the conventional associations between maternity and storytelling. Menaphon sends Pleusidippus to a wet nurse, and by the time Samela and Melicertus are reunited, Pleusidippus is 5. While he is playing with his friends one day, he is chosen as Lord of the May, a role he interprets by beating one of the other children when they disobey his orders. Samela, who is watching, ‘could not choose but smile aboue measure’. Now Pleusidippus is displaying his origins, as Samela believes: But when she saw him in his childish termes condemne one to death for despising the authoritie bequeathed to him by the rest of the boyes, then she bethought herself of the Persian Cyrus that deposed his grandfather Astyages, whose vse it was at like age to imitate maiestie in like manner. (vi. 90)

Pleusidippus’ boyhood exploits anticipate the spectacular end of the plot. But Greene also lays Samela’s reading strategies open to scrutiny. Pleusidippus reminds Samela of Cyrus, one of the exemplary models also singled out by Sidney in his Apology. Yet in Herodotus’ accounts of his boyhood the young Cyrus never sentences any of his playmates to death, and Samela’s fond interpretation of Pleusidippus’s ‘more then jesting justice’ as indicative of future heroism is soon called into question by the succeeding events.²⁴ Samela herself thinks her son is in need of ‘some good and liberall Education’. But before she can intervene, Pleusidippus falls victim to one of the occupational hazards of Greek romance. Like his mother, he is extraordinarily beautiful, and catches the attention of a lascivious Thessalian pirate. When Pleusidippus is asked whose son he is, he turns the question back on the pirate, prompting one of his henchmen to make a prescient comment: ‘wise are the children in these dayes that know their own fathers, especially if they be begotten in Dogge daies, when their mothers are franticke with loue, & young men furious for lust’ (vi. 92). The pirate kidnaps him anyway, but decides to curry favour with the king and queen of Thessaly by presenting him as a gift. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the party arrive at court when the king and queen are in the middle of discussing the properties of herbs and flowers. Even in Thessaly there is a groundswell of reaction against comparisons, voiced by the queen. The king is busy ²⁴ See The Famous Hystory of Herodotus, trans B.R. (London, 1584), sig. f4r–v.

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refining his ideas about the relationship between marigolds and wives; in his view, a wife should organize her life around her husband’s movements just as a marigold orients itself around the sun. The queen is having none of it. She hates ‘seruile imitation’, and tells her husband that she would scorn ‘a wife so slavish as your similitude would inferre’ (vi. 94). The discussion is broken off when both are equally dazzled by Pleusidippus’ beauty. They begin to make ‘hyperbolical’ comparisons until Pleusidippus interrupts them by yelling for his dinner. The Thessalians are even more dedicated to the outmoded world of comparison than the Arcadians. But Greene is setting the scene for a more far-reaching satire on the nature of likeness and imitation. Pleusidippus is fostered, and becomes engaged to the princess with the Marlovian name of Olympia. When he hears about the beauty of the Arcadian princess Samela he resolves to seek her out. Olympia expresses her fury in terms which condemn her to the world of similitude: ‘I scorne thy clownish Arcady with his inferiour comparisons’ (vi. 109). Pleusidippus reaches Arcadia, dresses as a shepherd and discovers Samela, now engaged to Melicertus, who asks him what he is looking at. Greene is beginning the multilayered joke on romance conventions which is refined in the sensationally absurd set piece. Two indescribably beautiful icons of romance confront each other, but they are mother and son rather then separated lovers. Pleusidippus is a foundling child restored to his rightful home. However, these are the ‘dogge-daies’, as the Thessalian pirate put it, and the young prince has not turned into a chivalric hero but a lustful young man on the brink of unwittingly committing incest. Greene also has more recent literary targets in view. Neither mother nor son recognize each other, but Samela rebukes him for his compliments: ‘I thinke you haue lost your witts with your eyes, that mistake Arcadie for Ida, and a Shepheardesse for a Goddes’ (vi. 115). This is a critique which could as well apply to Sidney’s Pyrocles. Pastoral has become the province of lewd young men who are determined to overwrite Arcadia with their own desires. Pleusidippus is not the only persona to believe that he is starring in a remake of the tale of Troy. In Arcadia Samela has achieved financial independence by buying a house and flock from Doron’s brother, the imaginatively named Moron. Menaphon’s condemnation of her action turns him into a parody of Menelaus: ‘Strumpet of Greece, repaiest thou my loue with this lauish ingratitude’. Vowing revenge, Menaphon spends ‘whole Eclogues in anguish’. His chance soon comes. Pleusidippus’ courtship has been overheard by Democles, who has also appeared in Arcadia, heard

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about Samela’s beauty, and dressed up as a shepherd. When he sees that the young man has been rejected, he hatches a plan, advising Pleusidippus to capture Samela in a castle and rape her. As soon as Pleusidippus has kidnapped her, Democles himself begins a pragmatic courtship: ‘telling how he was a King, what his revenewes were, what power he had to advance her’ (vi. 117). Now Samela is horrified to recognize her father. But the time for long speeches of self-examination belongs to the old euphuistic mode. Democles ‘gaue her no time to deliberate’, and instead she finds herself forced to use her love for Melicertus as an excuse for not agreeing to her father’s courtship. Embarrassed to be defending her husband to her father, she escapes to her room. Greene again rejects the sort of monologue with which he had made his career, restricting himself to noting that she ‘after her wonted manner, bewailed her misfortunes’ (vi. 118). Experienced readers, Greene implies, could compose the speech themselves. The parameters are now set up for a denouement involving multiple incest, and a new judgement of Paris in which Samela is courted by father, son, and husband. But there is one other contender for Samela’s hand, and Greene breaks off from the action to eliminate the non-starter. When Menaphon and Melicertus discover Samela’s imprisonment, they compete for the honour of rescuing her in a poetry competition, chaired by the obliging Democles. Once again the deciding factor is comparison. Menaphon’s entry is a blazon of Samela: Hir cheekes like ripened lillies steept in wine, Or faire pomegranade kernels washt in milke, Or snow white threds in nets of crimson silke, Or gorgeous cloudes upon the Sunnes decline. (vi. 123)

Melicertus’ response shows where literature has gone wrong: Stones, hearbes and flowers, the foolish spoyles of earth, Flouds, mettalls, colours, dalliances of the eye: These shew conceipt is staind with too much dearth: Such abstract fond compares make cunning die. (vi. 126)

Menaphon’s poetry is condemned for a ‘pretie tale | Which modern Poets may perhaps allow’ (vi. 126), which relies entirely on ‘stale’ invention. Melicertus of course wins the competition. But this eclogue competition is only the first of the deferrals which Greene inserts into his sensational denouement. Knowing that Pleusidippus will carry off Samela to Thessaly if he wins, he asks the combatants to wait in terms which reveal him to be the only real euphuist in the book: ‘knowe

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that Bitches that puppie in hast bring forth blind whelpes, that there is no herbe sooner sprung vp than the Spattarmia, no sooner fadeth’. (vi. 131). As in many of Greene’s and Lodge’s later works, euphuism is not only absurd but a sign of the mendacity of the speaker. Democles proposes a formal single combat between Melicertus and Pleusidippus, and plans an ambush while they are preparing for it. Father and son confront each other, and are both baffled by the fact that they are wearing the same device on their shields: Venus rising from the waves. But this is another deceptive likeness. Melicertus is wearing the armour because he is in mourning for his mistress, while Pleusidippus is using Venus rising from the waves to represent his own capture by pirates. Mythological emblems can be wrested into any meaning. What neither of the combatants realizes is that they should be wearing the arms of the same family, since they are father and son, and both are equally inappropriately besotted with Samela. But before they can interpret the signs, both father and son are ambushed by Democles and imprisoned in the castle. Greene meanwhile embarks on his most mischievous satire of pastoral structure. Temporarily abandoning the plot, Greene records the wooing eclogue of Doron and Carmela. Now comparisons are good—but only comically rustic ones. Like Menaphon, Doron celebrates his love in a blazon: ‘Thy lippes resemble two Cowcumbers faire, | Thy teeth like to the tuskes of fattest swine’ (vi. 138). The narrator asks readers’ indulgence: ‘Gentlemen, if it be stufft with prettie Similes and farre fetcht Metaphores, thinke the poore Countrey Louers knewe no further comparisons then came within a compasse of their Countrey Logicke’ (vi. 139). Nostalgic for the old simplicities of pastoral, the narrator also knows the literary world has moved on, and adds a sonnet on love in his own voice. The new pastoral world is all about the multiple corruptions wrought by love. In a reworking of the end of Pandosto, Democles’ love of Samela turns to hatred, and he sentences her and Melicertus to execution. Both choose to die together rather than reveal their true identities. But just as they are about to be executed, Pleusidippus suffers a sudden attack of wonder at the sight of Samela: ‘not loue, but reuerence, not fancie, but feare began to assaile him’ (vi. 142–3). Democles refuses to listen to pleas for clemency for Samela. But just as he is poised to chop off Melicertus’ head, an old woman appears from the crowd to give a tortuous explanation of how the oracle has been fulfilled in all points.²⁵ Even the fact that ²⁵ Some of the details of this episode, including the arrival of the prophetess, are borrowed from the ‘Pheone’ chapter of Warner’s Syrinx.

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father and son were in competition was meant to be: ‘& the seas that had neither ebbe nor tide, was the combate twixte the father and the sonne, that gaue the waues of the seas in their shieldes’ (vi. 144). Identities are revealed, and general rejoicing follows. Democles begs forgiveness from his daughter and son-in-law, and crowns Pleusidippus king of Arcadia on the extraordinary grounds that he is ‘a matchlesse paragon of approued chivalrie’ (vi. 145).²⁶ Pleusidippus marries Olympia. Even Menaphon finally realizes that, given Samela’s ‘high parentage’, ‘his passions were too aspiring’, and marries his old rustic sweetheart Pesana instead. Menaphon is Greene’s most playfully manipulative satire. The only named target is Lyly, but by placing the satire of his artificial comparisons in a text full of cumulative similes, Greene implies that Lyly is responsible for a multitude of literary sins. Greene consciously distinguishes his own mode of writing. Instead of inserting long speeches of deliberative rhetoric, he privileges plot and narrative. Inward thoughts are shown not wrapped up in misleading euphuistic similes but in eclogues and inset scenes of stylistic identification. The representative of this new mode of thought is Melicertus, and his rejection of comparison links him to the narrator who emerges to sing love sonnets at the end of the text. Not that Melicertus is really writing in a new style. Despite stigmatizing Menaphon, Greene credits him with love poetry which might as easily have been assigned to Melicertus. Everyone in Arcadia is busy making comparisons with Venus and Cupid, which are the working equivalent of the euphuistic fillers Greene had claimed to reject. And as Greene’s joke about Melicertus’ and Pleusidippus’ armour shows, the world of emblematic representation is just as misleading as euphuism. Behind all the jokes about romance in the dog days Greene is asking more far-reaching questions about what pastoral should be. The reformation of faulty comparisons is associated, however inconsistently, with Melicertus. But the other aristocrat in the text is the thuggish Pleusidippus, who despite his conversion at the end of the story, emerges with an entirely undeserved reputation for chivalry. Part of the point about Pleusidippus’s shield is that he is constructing an identity as a child snatched from the waves. The most famous ‘gentleman of the sea’ was Amadis de Gaule, ²⁶ However, the word Greene uses to describe the crowning is ‘impald’, which has overtones of a forceful coronation. One parallel for the career of the erratic Democles is provided by Lyly’s Midas (1589), which also features a father, a daughter, and an oracle. Midas concludes that ‘There is no way to nayle the crowne of Phrygia fast to my daughters head but in letting the crownes of others sitte in quiet on theirs’ (iii. 161).

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the foundling whose deeds of chivalry ran to many volumes.²⁷ Pleusidippus, however, is so driven by lust that he nearly strays into an oedipal tragedy. He thinks he is re-enacting the legend of Troy, which is one of the targets of Greene’s satire. Like most of his later works, Menaphon is full of allusions to the judgement of Paris on Mount Ida, a story popularized by Peele’s play The Arraignment of Paris (1584). Greene reverses the plot involving one man’s choice of three goddesses so that three male suitors contend for one woman. Samela herself makes the connection when she rebukes Pleusidippus for confusing Arcadia with Ida, and worshipping a shepherdess as a goddess. Her comment suggests that, thanks to Peele and Sidney, pastoral narratives are now overrun by stories of lustful young men and are always likely to turn into re-enactments of the tale of Troy. In a rare monologue, Samela regrets almost in passing that she is ‘as haplesse as Helena’ (vi. 133). But Greene’s lament for the lost innocence of pastoral is highly mendacious. Greene created his identity by exploiting every literary topos he could find. The narrative of Menaphon, like Arcadia itself, is in a constant state of flux. Menaphon’s story gives way to that of Melicertus the new poet and Samela the sharp if partisan reader, who are busy rejecting Marlowe and Lyly in favour of a more elite style. But they have spawned Pleusidippus, the infant tyrant who sees Arcadia solely in terms of beautiful shepherdesses for him to lust after. For Greene, this was the literary world after Sidney. Readers have the choice of losing themselves in wonder at the miraculous transformations with which the text ends or, as Nashe suggests, in ‘Ironicall recreation’.

²⁷ Greene often borrows names from Amadis, which he would probably have read in a French translation. A translation of stylistic extracts had been published in The Treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce (1572). See Helen Moore’s introduction to her edition of Amadis de Gaule, trans. Anthony Munday (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

5 From Arden to America: Lodge’s Tragedies of Infatuation Greene wrote about good, beautiful women worshipped by lascivious male relatives. Lodge showed more interest in what would happen if the iconic beauty did not generate lust and admiration. Lodge wrote about women who are ignored, abandoned, or forced to reclaim lovers seduced by fake glamour. But the women in Lodge’s books are far more actively persistent than the politic good wives invented by Greene. The unrequited female lover can be a comic monster who terrifies the men she fixates on. Like Greene, Lodge used pastoral to reflect on his own situation as a writer of printed romance, especially in relation to Sidney. Unlike Greene, he lived long enough to see the changes in romance brought about by Spenser, and begins to interlace the two modes within his pastorals, to make Spenser answer Sidney. The answer he produced was ultimately a tragic one. In his last work the unrequited female lover becomes an agent of destiny, and romance itself is annihilated. Even by contemporary standards, Lodge led a varied existence. For his many biographers, he represented the archetypal Elizabethan: law student, litigant, explorer, and eventually doctor.¹ His writings were equally diverse. As one fellow playwright noted, Lodge had ‘his oare in euery paper boate’.² The obvious comparison is with Greene, co-author of the dramatic vision of urban vice, A Looking-Glasse for London and England. Yet Lodge appears to have been far less interested than Greene in publication, or in identifying with surrogate authors within his works. His earliest publications hint at more elite connections, especially with Sidney. Lodge stuck ¹ See e.g. N. Burton Paradise, Thomas Lodge: The History of an Elizabethan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931); Charles Sisson ed., Thomas Lodge and other Elizabethans (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1933). The best general study of Lodge’s life and sources is Éliane Cuvelier’s Thomas Lodge témoin de son temps c.1558–1625. Publications de la Sorbonne (Paris: Didier Érudition, 1984). ² The second part of the return from Parnassus in The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1949), 238.

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his oar into the debate over literature in 1579 in a pamphlet probably called Honest Excuses, a reply to Gosson’s attack on fiction in The Schoole of Abuse.³ As Lodge acknowledged, the work was largely a translation from Badius Ascensius’ preface to an edition of Terence’s works (1502). Like Sidney, Lodge stressed the exemplary power of fiction: ‘Chaucer in pleasant vain can rebuke sin vncontrold, & though he be lauish in the letter, his sence is serious’.⁴ Derivative as the pamphlet was, it caused enough controversy to be suppressed on its first appearance, although not before it reached its intended target. There is no evidence of a response to the text from Sidney. But by 1584 Lodge was confidently dedicating his next book, An Alarum against Usurers, to Sidney’s ‘vndoubted protection’. An Alarum contains a short pastoral fiction which appears to have been written as a compliment to the author of the Arcadia, and Lodge eventually followed it up with his bestselling pastoral Rosalynde. Rosalynde did not appear in print until 1590, perhaps because it was intended to coincide with the publication of Sidney’s Arcadia. It was almost certainly written much earlier and was probably imitated by Greene in Menaphon. While Greene used Menaphon to snipe at his critics, Lodge shows a more sustained interest in the sort of issues addressed both in Sidney’s Apology and in the Arcadia: the nature and function of love poetry and the form it should take. Arden, the site of Rosalynde, is more neatly mapped out in eclogues and set speeches than Greene’s chaotic countryside, and is often closer to Sidney’s Arcadia. The heroine of Rosalynde often seems to echo Sidney’s voice in the Apology, criticizing the effete poetry characteristic of contemporary England. Yet it is significant that these criticisms are given to the disguised heroine when she is attempting to gain the attention of her poet lover. Like Greene, Lodge wrote about aristocratic women readers eagerly assimilating contemporary literary debates. But he subjects them to far more rigorous satire than Greene. Rosalynde is an active wooer pursuing a less enthusiastic man, a theme which is repeated with tragic consequences in Lodge’s last fiction. It is also the definitive narrative situation of the epyllion, a genre which could be said to have been founded by Lodge. The erotically subversive side to Lodge is best shown in a narrative poem written for Lodge’s fellow students at the Inns of Court, possibly never ³ Gosson refers to ‘certaine Honest Excuses’ in his Apologie for the Schoole of Abuse (1579). See J. Dover Wilson, ‘The Missing Title of Thomas Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’s “School of Abuse” ’, MLR 3 (1907–8), 166–8; William Ringler, ‘The Source of Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’, RES 15 (1939), 164–71. ⁴ The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, ed. Edmund Gosse (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883–7; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), i. 11. All references to Lodge’s works are taken from this edition.

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intended for publication. In the dedication to Scillaes Metamorphosis, Lodge implies that he was bringing the text out only because it was already circulating in a pirate edition. Scillaes Metamorphosis is an adaptation of Ovid’s story of the sea god Glaucus, initially rejected by the disdainful nymph Silla. Cupid steps in to reverse the roles. Silla becomes infatuated with the indifferent Glaucus, who has to jump on a dolphin in order to avoid her unwelcome embraces. Throughout the narrative Lodge draws attention both to the comically overblown passions of Glaucus and Silla, and to the narrator’s inability to do them justice. When the narrator is cataloguing the beauties of Silla’s body, he gives up when he gets as far as her thighs: ‘Confounded with descriptions, I must leaue them; | Louers must thinke, and Poets must report them’ (i. 16). The narrator is of course himself a reporting poet, wittily disappointing readers who expect him to progress upwards from Silla’s thighs.⁵ The active loving woman is at the heart of Lodge’s works. When Lodge imitated Sidney’s Arcadia the episodes he dwelt on are those which feature Gynecia, Basilius’ tormented wife who is besotted with the disguised prince Pyrocles. Like Basilius, Gynecia is turned into a figure of fun by her lust. But she is also a figure of tragedy who suffers sleepless nights for love. These experiences are re-enacted in Lodge’s works by all the women, including the comic shepherdess, Phebe, who falls in love with the heroine during the course of Rosalynde. Greene made tragicomedy out of violent reversals of fortune and the inevitably mixed nature of human motivations. Lodge found tragicomedy in love itself, and described the experience as common to all social ranks. Part of the reason for this shift probably lies in Lodge’s reaction to the writing of his old schoolfellow Spenser, especially The Faerie Queene (1st part 1590), 2nd part 1596 Lodge like Spenser turned back to native medieval romance archetypes.⁶ But he also turned to Spenser’s own work, and especially to the first book. This is the story of Una, the representative of Protestant truth led astray by the Catholic enchanter Archimago. Lodge’s own life was interwoven with Catholic connections. He himself left England in the mid-1590s to pursue medical studies when the cult of Elizabeth was at its height.⁷ His last novel, A Margarite of America, ⁵ See William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 36–51. ⁶ See Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and the Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). ⁷ Lodge published a devotional sonnet sequence to Mary, Prosopopeia, in 1596. In 1604 he married Jane Aldred, widow of a recusant spy, who had herself been associated with the

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depicts a perverted villain deserting the female embodiment of truth to worship a false beauty called Diana. The loving woman who represents simplicity is duped by a lover of Machiavellian cunning. However, she unintentionally destroys him by loving too much. It is tempting to read the text as Lodge’s (Catholic) Faerie Queene, in which the Roman church wreaks revenge on Protestant duplicity. It is certainly possible to identify conflicts about the worship of earthly women in romances by Spenser, Greene, and Lodge. Lodge looked back beyond Spenser to the allegorical images of native medieval romance, but also to ancient tragedy. Greene showed tyrannical ‘overloving’ men who had to be converted by loving women. Lodge displays a bleaker world view; the ‘overloving’ woman turns into a figure of truth whose purity inadvertently wipes out a perverted romance world.

‘Wryting amorets’: ‘The delectable historie of Forbonius and Prisceria’ and Rosalynde In Lodge’s first pastoral, the story of the loving woman was given a happy ending. ‘The delectable historie of Forbonius and Prisceria’ is sandwiched in the middle of the volume entitled An Alarum against Usurers, and is firmly buttressed by instructive items: the seemingly autobiographical story of a gentleman falling prey to usury, and the verse satire ‘The lamentable complaint of Truth over England’. Lodge’s determination to present himself as a moral author was doubtless partly due to the furore caused by his first pamphlet. Yet Lodge was also making his debut in fiction, translating Sidney’s ideas into print, and by implication distinguishing himself from Lyly’s style. His story is about a young woman, Prisceria, exiled to the countryside by her father because he disapproves of her suitor Forbonius. Her suitor follows her to the countryside, and courts her while disguised as a shepherd. When her father finds out, his anger is eventually quelled by the force of Forbonius’ arguments in favour of love. The failure to understand love is represented as the fault of the irrational older generation, but one which can be cured by effective eloquence. Lodge provides a more humane and less sensational conclusion to his narrative than Sidney, who relied on the sudden resurrection of Basilius to stop the harsh elder Euarchus from inflicting punishments Catholic Arundel household. These and other connections may have been responsible for Lodge’s later difficulties with obtaining a licence to practise medicine in England. See Cuvelier, Thomas Lodge, 465–519; Alice Walker, ‘The Life of Thomas Lodge’, RES 9 (1933), 264–81; 10 (1934), 46–54.

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on the erring princes. Lodge is also producing an answer to Lyly. Lodge’s prose style is reliant on balanced and antithetical clauses which are more reminiscent of Sidney than Lyly, and he avoids excessive allusion. But he does contrast the inner thoughts of the lovers in a manner that recalls Euphues’ and Lucilla’s meditations. When he uses a euphuistic sentence structure he does so to point up the difference in the assumptions of his protagonists. Lyly’s and Greene’s personae typically had to persuade themselves to surrender to the dangers of an erotic adventure. Prisceria never considers not consenting to love, since she knows it will end in marriage: ‘For Forbonius seeketh Priscerias fauor, not Solduuius friendship: but Prisceria cannot enioy Forbonius, without Solduuius fauor. But Forbonius will by happie marriage conclude all mallice, but thy father hauing an enuious mind, will haue a suspitious eare’ (i. 57). Lodge’s fiction is part of his presentation as a reformed author, and a defence of the behaviour of Sidney’s princes. But Lodge also embeds allusions to Sidney’s narrative, which show his appreciation of the more erotic aspects of the Arcadia. Lodge’s relationship to Sidney’s narrative is only revealed halfway through the text. Throughout the first half of the story, he flirts with possible narrative identities for his personae, reminiscent of both Sidney and Greene. Forbonius and Prisceria live in Memphis, and are descended from Theagenes and Chariclea, the lovers in Heliodorus’ narrative. For Lodge the main point of Greek romance was that the power of fortune legitimated the love story. This is Forbonius’ first sight of Prisceria: ‘But the fates hauing registred his last opinion in euerlasting & permanent destinie, made his manifolde aspects (as yet not stayed) to light vpon one seemely impression, and to allow of but one onely paragon’ (i. 53). Greene typically presented fortune as a capricious goddess addicted to changing tragedy into comedy. For Lodge fortune provided an unavoidable framework, and he repeatedly stresses the martyrdom of lovers forced to accept its precepts. Lodge is far more emphatic about this point than Sidney. Since their families are feuding, Forbonius (like Romeo) is forced to loaf around underneath his beloved’s window composing poetry. Always attentive to the processes of transmission, Lodge notes that Prisceria does not actually hear any of the poetry he sings to her, but makes an informed guess about its likely content. Both Forbonius and Prisceria reflect on their feelings, and their enslavement to fortune. In contrast to Sidney’s heroine, neither are troubled about morals. When Sidney’s Philoclea is still under the impression that Pyrocles is a woman, she reflects on the confusion of her feelings. She also appeals to fortune: ‘ “My parents,” said she, “have told

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me that in these fair and heavenly bodies there are great hidden deities which have their working in the ebbing and flowing of our estates” ’.⁸ But she is also quite clear about the consequences of unlawful desire. Prisceria accepts her fate, but her confidence in marriage allows her to make an active pursuit of her lover: ‘my freend shall know my zeale, and I will continue my affection, which being begun with wonderful causes, must needes finish with a miraculous effect’ (i. 57). Fortunately, Forbonius is equally active, and his inventive pursuit of his mistress provides an intriguing parallel to the courtships depicted by Lyly and Greene. Forbonius visits a gymnosophist, one of the wise sages frequently invoked in Greek romance, who proves to be both more pragmatic and more technologically advanced than many similar figures in Elizabethan fiction. After briefly attempting to dissuade Forbonius from love, he gives him a mirror, not a moral exemplum but a ‘practicke in prospectiue’, so that Forbonius can reflect his letters to Prisceria by sunbeam. The method works, and Forbonius starts plotting to steal Prisceria away. But when she calls out Forbonius’ name in a dream, her father in fury exiles her to a neighbouring manor house to be guarded by shepherds. Prisceria’s exile signals the relevance of the Old Arcadia in the narrative. Like Sidney’s Gynecia, Prisceria reveals her love in a dream. Like Pamela, Prisceria is guarded by foolish shepherds, ‘subtil’ Sotto and his daughter Sarracca, the equivalents of Sidney’s Dametas and Mopsa. Like Musidorus, the disguised Forbonius pursues his love and establishes himself as a popular pastoral poet. The only example Lodge gives of his poetry is also imitated from the Old Arcadia. Forbonius sings a blazon to Prisceria which bears strong similarities in form and language to the lyric ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’, sung by the cross-dressed Pyrocles to Philoclea just before he has sex with her (p. 238).⁹ The blazon is infolded in a pastoral verse narrative about the love of Corinna for the initially reluctant Corulus, a plot which is strongly reminiscent of Scillaes Metamorphosis. Lodge uses the same joke about not describing female pudenda: ‘For art concluding all perfections there, | Wrote this report, All graces bideth here’ (i. 72). The difference is that this story is given a happy and moral romance ending: ‘Confirmed thus with mutuall glad consent, | They finisht vp the marriage that they ment’ (i. 76). Lodge’s imitation neatly translates one of the most erotic moments in the Old Arcadia into the confines of his moralistic pamphlet. In the Old ⁸ Sidney, Old Arcadia, 111. ⁹ For verbal correspondences, see Beaty, ‘Lodge’s Forbonius and Prisceria’, 42.

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Arcadia, Pyrocles’ blazon is wrapped up in layers of jokes about textual transmission and authorship. The song was written not by Pyrocles, but by Sidney’s authorial persona Philisides for his own reluctant mistress. Pyrocles himself only remembered the ‘general fancy’ of it. In the Old Arcadia the poem is placed in the narrative as a surrogate text for readers to enjoy while Pyrocles is enjoying Philoclea. The blazon satirically implicates readers in the process of authorship. While Philoclea (or Philisides’ mistress) is the ‘author’ or inspiration of the poem, readers are reminded that ‘all pens may dwell’ on her many physical attractions (p. 238).¹⁰ Lodge uses the allusion as a recognition scene. When Prisceria hears it, she realizes who her shepherd courtier must be. For Forbonius, the poem is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, and also prefigures the end of the text. Forbonius and Prisceria escape to a castle. There they are discovered by Solduvius, ‘almost ouercome with pleasaunt imaginations’, and are interrupted ‘when most circumspection should be had’ (i. 80). The furious Solduvius accuses Forbonius of violating his daughter and imprisons him. But he calms down. The Old Arcadia ended with the harsh judgements of the elders on the inordinate passions of the princes. For Lodge, however, it is the father figure who is a slave to his rancorous passions and the lovers who present reasoned arguments in favour of love. Both Forbonius and Prisceria point out that since the destinies have appointed them as lovers, Solduvius had no business trying to interfere. Solduvius eventually gives in, and blesses their marriage. Lodge thus rewrites the arguments about the relative merits of reason and passion running through the Old Arcadia in order to stress that young love is not only inevitable, but ought to be encouraged in marriage. Whether the book ever reached Sidney’s notice is unknown. Lodge himself returned to Sidney’s pastoral possibly as early as 1585. He claims to have composed Rosalynde while travelling to the Canaries with Captain Clarke, probably the voyage Clarke undertook in 1585. What is immediately obvious about his next book is how much more indebted to Lyly Lodge appears to be. This aspect of the text is probably at least partly due to Greene, who appears to have revised it before it appeared in print.¹¹ On its first appearance in 1590, Rosalynde was subtitled ‘Euphues golden ¹⁰ Sidney, Old Arcadia, 238. Sidney’s poem appeared in many anthologies. See William Ringler’s edition of The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 410; and Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 113; 117–18. ¹¹ The narrative contains many words and phrases characteristic of Greene, analysed by Paula Burnett in ‘Thomas Lodge: Rosalynde. A Critical Edition’, B.Litt. thesis, University of Oxford, 1968.

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legacie: found after his death in his Cell at Silexedra’. By 1592, the fictional frame had been expanded to include a ‘scedule’ addressed by the dying Euphues to the sons of Philautus and Camilla. In 1589 Greene had co-opted Lyly’s Camilla to shake Euphues awake in the subtitle of Menaphon. By the turn of the century, he or Lodge had decided to kill Euphues off. But Lodge’s reference is misleading. Lyly’s Philautus had married Frances after being rejected by Camilla. As Catherine Bates has pointed out, this mistake is significant in a text which ends in tidy couplings and multiple marriages. Lodge had apparently forgotten that Lyly chose a less obvious narrative ending.¹² Rosalynde is certainly full of reconciliations, between men as well as couples. But behind the stories of heterosexual couples reunited lie more troubling correspondences between erotic experiences. Of the multiple plots enfolded in Lodge’s Arden, stories about prodigals prove the easiest to resolve. The source of the first half of the narrative is the anonymous medieval romance Gamelyn. This is a swashbuckling story similar to Robin Hood, in which a younger brother revenges himself on his siblings with the aid of a gang of outlaws.¹³ Lodge rewrote it as a euphuistic prodigal son story, in which Rosader, youngest son of Sir John of Bordeaux, is given a larger bequest than his elder brothers in his father’s will. Rosader is terrorized by Saladyne, who tries to get him killed at a wrestling match. However Rosader triumphs, and falls in love with the watching Rosalynde, niece to the king. He escapes to the forest of Arden with his faithful servant Adam Spencer. The dysfunctional brothers are paralleled by the warring royal family. Torismond has usurped the throne of good King Gerismond, who has been forced to set up court in the forest of Arden. The machinations of the evil brothers are contrasted with Rosader’s unwitting re-enactment of old narratives. When he escapes to Arden he carries Adam Spencer on his back, thus recreating a familiar epic topos: Aeneas’ rescue of Anchises from burning Troy. ¹⁴ ‘Arden’ itself has overtones of ‘Eden’. When Rosader later discovers the repentant Saladyne in the forest about to be mauled by a lion, Lodge’s account of their confrontation has overtones of the story of Cain and Abel.¹⁵ Both Rosader and Saladyne are given separate ¹² Bates, ‘ “A Large Occasion of Discourse”: John Lyly and the Art of Civil Conversation’, 469–71. ¹³ See Donald B. Sands, ed., Middle English Verse Romances (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 154–81. ¹⁴ This is one of the topoi singled out by Sidney in the Apology as an example of instructive heroic poetry (p. 99). ¹⁵ Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 380–1. The attack by a lion parallels a similar incident in the Old Arcadia.

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meditations on their feelings, but both end up mirroring each other’s sentiments on brotherhood. Rosader saves Saladyne, and the two brothers are reconciled. Yet the men in the story are given less of the narrative energy in the plot. Within the framework of the warring brothers, Lodge inserts another reworking of Warner’s story of Argentile and Curan, in which a young woman escapes her tyrannical uncle’s court. Rosalynde is the daughter of the exiled King Gerismond, and lives at court with Torismond’s daughter Alinda. Despite the enmity of their fathers, the women swear eternal friendship: ‘I will euer bee thy Alinda, and thou shalt ever rest to me Rosalynd: so shall the world canonize our friendship, and speake of Rosalynde and Alinda, as they did of Pilades and Orestes’ (i. 35). When Torismond exiles Rosalynde to the forest of Arden she disguises as the page ‘Ganimede’, and Alinda accompanies her as the shepherdess ‘Aliena’. The friendship of the two women invokes multiple narrative referents. Rosalynde and Alinda are better friends than Lyly’s Euphues and Philautus. They also unwittingly imitate the actions of Sidney’s Musidorus and Pyrocles. In Lodge’s fiction Rosalynde ends up marrying Rosader, and Saladyne marries Alinda. The similarities in their names are markers of their suitability as marriage partners; each acts as the source of each other. But Lodge also suggests other latent partnerships within the narrative: ‘Rosalynde’ is an almost perfect anagram of ‘Saladyne’. There are other more provocative connections. When they get to the forest, the shepherdess Phebe becomes obsessed with Rosalynde, whom she believes to be the page Ganymede. One other parallel to the adventures of the women is suggested by Lyly’s play Galatea (1584–5), in which two women are forced to disguise themselves as shepherds and fall in love with each other. Venus offers to change one of them into a man at the end of the play for the sake of convention. But Lyly stresses that the emotional transference between the two women does not change. Lodge also portrays love as universal, and within the course of the novel Phebe’s love for Rosalynde is treated in a similar way to Rosalynde’s love for Rosader. Rosalynde’s choice of alias suggests that Lodge was joking at the expense of his hero and heroine. She chooses to be ‘Ganymede’, the beautiful page who became an icon of male lust. Rosalynde does attract same-sex love—from Phebe. Rosader, however, never penetrates her disguise and shows more interest in poetry than love. Both Rosalynde and Phebe find themselves acting like the comically aggressive wooers from an epyllion, forced to reclaim their reluctant men.

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Lodge was playing games with pastoral conventions, and these include Spenser. Arden is a site of manuscript circulation, and different kinds of pastoral writing are held up for critique. When the women reach the forest they discover a familiar metaphor for a literary source: ‘they came to a Fountaine, compast with a groave of Cipresse trees, so cunninglie and curiously planted, as if some Goddesse had intreated Nature in that place to make her Arbour’ (i. 239).¹⁶ Like Greene’s Samela, Aliena in particular is a knowing reader. Well aware that she has just entered a pastoral scene, she is disappointed that ‘they could not so much as meete with a shepherd’. But she is cheered by the discovery of a poem entitled ‘Montanus Passion’ written on a tree. Her literary knowledge enables her to identify it as the work of ‘some perplexed shepheard, that beeing enamoured of some faire and beautifull Shepheardesse, suffered some sharpe repulse, and therefore complained of the crueltie of his Mistress’. This is the scene which the women then see acted out before them. In the heart of the forest is an arbour ‘in the forme of an Amphitheater’, inhabited by two shepherds. The narrator drops into the first person as the boundaries between author, heroines, and readers collapse: drawing more night wee might descrie the countenance of the one to be full of sorrowe, his face to bee the verie pourtraiture of discontent, and his eyes full of woes, that liuing, he seemed to dye: wee (to heare what these were) stole priuilie behind the thicke, where we ouerheard this discourse. (i. 239–40)

The women, and readers, look at an emblematic picture and listen to/read a poetic eclogue. This is the literary model which structures Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar. The pastoral debate which the women hear is an imitation of the ‘June’ eclogue, the centre of Spenser’s text. Spenser uses the eclogue to discuss the different kinds of pastoral. For his persona the young Colin Clout, pastoral is about unrequited love, since he has been spurned by his beloved Rosalind. He envies his friend Hobbinoll, who can still appreciate the pastoral environment as a paradise. Hobbinoll is sympathetic, and condemns ‘faithlesse Rosalind, and voide of grace’.¹⁷ In Lodge’s version, Montanus is in love with the disdainful shepherdess Phebe. The eclogue surprises Rosalynde, who seems less ¹⁶ The description is strongly reminiscent of Bartholomew Yong’s translation of Montemayor’s Diana; see Judith M. Kennedy’s introduction to A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp.xxxix–xli. ¹⁷ The Shepheardes Calendar in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 442. All references to Spenser’s works are to this edition.

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familiar with pastoral conventions than Aliena. When she asks Montanus: ‘Can shepheards love?’, she learns that ‘country swains intertaine fancie with as great delight as the proudest Courtier doth affection’(i. 47). Lodge’s heroines, then, discover Spenserian pastoral inset in what turns out to be an Arcadian plot. The moment forms an extraordinary network of literary allusion. Rosalynde has the opposite experience to a typical heroine in one of Greene’s romances. Instead of being overheard by lustful men, she spies on male poetic traditions. By listening to an imitation of Spenser’s eclogue, Rosalynde hears her cruel Spenserian namesake discussed. Phebe, Montanus’ cruel mistress, is a surrogate for Rosalynde, an idea Lodge develops in the course of the plot. Lodge’s Rosalynde spends the rest of the narrative proving herself the reverse of Colin Clout’s faithless, graceless Rosalind. Instead of remaining the absent, silent object of love, Rosalynde both composes poetry herself and becomes the author of the plot. Instead of only listening to the inset tale of Montanus’ love, Rosalynde starts interlacing. She eventually succeeds in bringing Montanus out of the world of unrequited love into a comedy about mismatched courtship like the Old Arcadia. Far from hiding secret eloquence, like the women of Greene’s works, Rosalynde spends her time trying to rewrite poetic traditions.¹⁸ But before she sorts out Montanus’ love affairs, she has to manage her own. Montanus is not the only poet who has to be wrenched out of Petrarchism. Disguised as Ganymede, Rosalynde meets Rosader carving poems on trees to his mistress. Rosalynde pointedly asks him if he has invented a poetic persona for her: ‘Or is shee some shepherdesse, that haunts these plaines whose beautie hath so bewitched thy fancie, whose name thou shaddowest in couert vnder the figure of Rosalynde, as Ouid did Iulia vnder the name of Corinna?’ (i. 62). Rosalynde has apparently been reading up on The Shepheardes Calendar since questioning Montanus. She quotes from E.K.’s gloss to the January eclogue, which contains the first mention of Spenser’s Rosalind: a feigned name, which being wel ordered, wil bewray the very name of hys loue and mistresse, whom by that name he coloureth. So as Ouide shadoweth hys loue vnder the name of Corynna, which of some is supposed to be Iulia, themperor Augustus his daughter and wyfe to Agrippina (p. 423).

But Rosalynde’s allusion leads on to a literary recognition scene like that between Melicertus and Samela in Menaphon. Rosader is busy ¹⁸ See Clare R. Kinney’s discussion, ‘Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind’, MP 95 (1998), 291–315.

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compiling his canon of poetry celebrating Rosalynde, which includes a blazon and a sonnet sequence. As Rosalynde points out, Rosader is wedded to the ‘feigned persona’ and his own identity as Ovidian love poet: ‘Such gentle Forrester we may deeme you to bee, that rather pass away the time heere in these Woods with writing amorets, than to bee deepely enamoured (as you saye) of your Rosalynde’ (i. 73). Rosalynde’s words echo Sidney’s criticisms of contemporary love poetry in the Apology: ‘But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of irresistible love; if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings . . . than that in truth they feel those passions’ (p. 103). In the Old Arcadia, Sidney had made his princes into transgressive lovers. Lodge however turns Rosader into an effete love poet, who has no idea he is confronting his mistress. Rosalynde tries to insinuate herself into Rosader’s canon of love poetry by making him participate with her in a ‘wooing eclogue’. She proposes to impersonate herself, to play Rosalynde. Yet Rosader dominates even the eclogue. Rosalynde tries to test her lover’s sincerity throughout the exchange, but is forced back into the traditional position of a woman who does not know whether to believe her lover’s vows: ‘The simple heart by subtill sleights is solde’ (i. 78). Rosalynde and Rosader swear allegiance, but the eclogue foregrounds the inevitable contradiction in love poetry. Rosader has successfully played the part of a faithful lover, even though he believed himself to be only acting. Rosader never suspects Rosalynde’s identity. The narrator stresses his blindness by using the male pronoun for the disguised Rosalynde: Rosader ‘tooke him flat for a shepheards Swayne’ (i. 73). He meanwhile ends up in the position of comic dupe, as Alinda proposes to arrange a mock wedding. Rosader agrees, ‘little thinking he had wooed and wonne his Rosalynd’ (i. 81). Rosalynde as Ganymede is comically unable to attract her male lover. But love comes from unexpected sources. Once again she and Alinda overhear a poetry debate, between Montanus and his disdainful mistress Phebe. And Rosalynde discovers that she is not the only female poet in the forest. Phebe’s arguments against love recall Rosalynde’s own arguments in the wooing eclogue. Male promises, Phebe argues, cannot be trusted: ‘Whilest Loue in deed and word | Most faithfull did appeare | False semblance came in place | By iealouzie attended’ (i. 103). But while Phebe proclaims herself an enemy to love, Rosalynde intervenes to argue on Montanus’ behalf, and warn her that she may herself prove vulnerable. Her prophecy is fulfilled when Phebe, believing Rosalynde to be a man, falls in love with her.

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Phebe’s adoration of Rosalynde is ostensibly comic relief. Yet her infatuation is treated in a very different manner from the ludicrous aspirations of Greene’s Menaphon towards Samela. Lodge makes little differentiation in speech and style between nobles and shepherds, and gives almost equal space in the narrative to the poetic courtships of Rosalynde and Rosader, Saladyne and Alinda, and Montanus and Phebe.¹⁹ All the lovers share a common romance experience of encountering the impossibly beautiful object of affection. One of the most distinctive features of Lodge’s style is his fondness for set piece descriptions, of beautiful landscapes and beautiful people. These too are shared by both courtiers and shepherds. When Rosader first sees Rosalynde at the wrestling match, he understands her as a collection of topoi: her eyes were like those lampes that make the wealthie couert of the Heauens more gorgeous, sparkling fauour and disdaine; courteous and yet coye, as if in them Venus had placed all her amorets, and Diana all her chastitie. The trammells of her haire, foulded in a cal of golde, so farre surpast the burnisht glister of the mettall, as the Sunne dooth the meanest Starre in brightnesse. (i. 21–2)

Phebe has a similar experience: ‘As she lay in her bed, she called to minde the seuerall beauties of young Ganimed, first his locks, which being amberhued, passeth the wreathe that Phoebus puts on to make his front glorious’ (i. 114). But the point is not just that Lodge is sympathetic to the shepherds. What differentiates Phebe from Rosader, and links her to Rosalynde, is that for her the experience of love is an essentially tragic and lonely one. When Rosader sees Rosalynde he embarks on a traditional courtship, sending her a jewel and a sonnet. When he gets to Arden he finds consolation for the absence of his beloved in the compilation of a canon of love poetry. When Phebe sees Rosalynde she suffers a sleepless night, and sends a letter to her protesting that neither ‘physic nor reason’ can drive away her love. Rosalynde also spends a sleepless night in Arden. In a speech which Lodge subtitles ‘Rosalynde Passionate Alone’, she reflects on her love for Rosader: ‘Ah Rosalynde, how the Fates haue set downe in their Synode to make thee vnhappie: for when Fortune hath done her worst, then Loue comes in to begin a new tragedie’(i. 67). While Lodge stresses that falling in love is the same for men and women, their assimilation of the emotions is very different. The only time Saladyne and Rosader are given deliberative internal monologues, they are considering ¹⁹ The primary source of courtiers’ and shepherds’ poetry is Desportes; see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 102–14.

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their relationship to each other. Love is reserved for poetry. For the women, even though they write poetry, love is expressed in lonely prose. The story ends in comedy. Rosalynde laughs at Phebe’s letter, and promises that she will marry if her ‘love can be suppressed for no reason’ (i. 133). When she reveals herself on the day of Saladyne’s and Alinda’s wedding, she duly asks Phebe ‘if she had shown sufficient reason to suppresse the force of her loues’. Phebe agrees, and marries Montanus. Rosader says nothing, and Lodge leaves judgement to readers: ‘At this sight, if Rosader was both amazed & ioyfull, I refer my selfe to the iudgement of such as haue experience in loue, seeing his Rosalynd before his face whom so long and deeply he had affected’ (i. 134). Tragedy is briefly threatened when Torismond’s army invades. But with a rapidity worthy of Greene, Lodge speedily dispatches the threat of evil: ‘To be short, the Peers were conquerours, Torismonds armies put to flight & himselfe slaine in battaile’ (i. 138). Lodge’s ending also recalls Greene’s characteristic emphasis on social elevation: Montanus is made lord of the forest, Adam Spencer captain of the guard, and Coridon master of Alinda’s flocks. Lodge (or possibly Greene) adds a euphuistic moral: ‘Here Gentlemen may you see in Euphues Golden Legacie that such as neglect their fathers precepts, incur much preiudice’ (i. 139). Lodge’s story is not really about the precepts of fathers, nor is his way of writing tragicomedy defined by last-minute plot twists. Rosalynde is an anthology of speeches and poems about love in which patterns can be traced between all the couples. The elaborate parallelism is part of Lodge’s response to euphuism, and the balanced clauses in his prose are replicated by balanced love affairs. The wooing eclogue between Rosalynde and Rosader is paralleled by the disdainful exchange between Montanus and Phebe. Rosader and Montanus are both given canons of love sonnets. The subheadings which are given to the poems and speeches encourage readers to seek coherence in the narrative by comparing them. Yet they also serve to emphasize the isolation of the personae and the difference between the sexes. Rosalynde attempts to make poetry into a shared activity with Rosader, but finds herself forced into a subordinate position. The only way she can really express her emotions is when she is alone, and speaking in prose. Lodge’s attitude to tragicomedy is reflected in his analogies. Like Greene, Lodge uses balanced clauses to reflect the difference between appearance and reality. As the narrator comments on the unreformed Saladyne: ‘The Tiger though hee hide his clawes, will at last discouer his rapine; the lions looks are not the mappes of his meaning, nor a mans

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physnomie is not the display of his secrets’ (i. 15). Within the plot, this antithesis is embodied in the figure of the cross-dressed Rosalynde. When she is dressed as Ganymede the narrator tends to refer to her in the male pronoun, just as Sidney’s narrator refers to the cross-dressed Pyrocles as ‘she’. This is in keeping with Rosalynde’s own attitude to pastoral decorum. When she is dressed as a boy, she adopts the role of the stereotypical youth who satirizes women’s attitude to love. But when Rosalynde shows emotion, the narrator again refers to her with female pronouns. Rosalynde is ‘she’ when she cries for the wounded Rosader, but also when she hears Montanus crying for Phebe. When she herself is the object of Phebe’s affections, she is described as ‘the amorous Girle-boye’. The comic conventions in which heterosexual couples are united in marriage is presented as sufficient ‘reason’ for Phebe to ‘suppress her loves’ and turn to Montanus. But Lodge’s most characteristic emphasis, as in ‘Forbonius and Prisceria’, is on the impossibility of reason to suppress love, especially from women. And in his last novel, passions are not so easily suppressed. Rosalynde’s Shakespearian namesake in As You Like It (1599/1600) takes the opposite approach to passion. When she is disguised as Ganymede, she rewrites Lodge’s citations of faithful lovers, ‘as trusty as Troylus, as constant as Leander’ to prove the opposite point: ‘Troilus had his brains dash’d out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have liv’d many a fair year though Hero had turn’d nun, if it had not been for a hot mid summer night . . . men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’²⁰ Like Lodge’s Rosalynde, her guard drops when her lover is injured. But Shakespeare’s Rosalind is less challenged by a multiple experience of love. Shakespeare’s Phebe is regarded as comic relief from the start, and her aspirations towards Rosalind are treated in much the same way as the love of Greene’s Menaphon for Samela. Orlando, Shakespeare’s equivalent to Rosader, also shades into comic relief, since he turns out to be a bad poet. But this makes his poetry easier to resist. While Rosader’s addiction to sonnet making is never defeated by Lodge’s Rosalynde, Shakespeare’s heroine is able to manage her lover so that he gives up poetry and becomes devoted to her. Yet Rosalynde the cross-dressed boy actor also ends up alone, refusing to choose a role in the epilogue (ii. 18–19): ‘If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me.’ The boy actor ends up admitting what ²⁰ As You Like It in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), iv. i. 100–7. All references to Shakespeare are taken from this edition.

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Shakespeare’s Rosalind has been denying: that the experience of love cannot be classified so easily, and that she remains an amorous girl or boy according to the wishes of the audience.

‘Theater . . . of tragedies’: Euphues Shadow, The Famous, true and historicall life of Robert second Duke of Normandy In Rosalynde the norms of The Shepheardes Calendar were absorbed into a pastoral ending in multiple marriages. In Lodge’s later work it is Spenser’s influence which comes to predominate, and the narratives he composed in the 1590s are perhaps what Harvey would call his ‘faerie queenes’. Spenser’s valorization of native medieval romance traditions provided Lodge with an easy way to distinguish himself from Greene’s representations of contemporary moral issues. Lodge wrote two prodigal son stories set in legendary history: Robert second Duke of Normandy and William Longbeard. His decision to embed his stories in romance and chronicle sources may be due to his religious sympathies. His later works all show the danger of excessive worship of earthly women as romance icons. Lodge took from The Faerie Queene what Greene took from ancient Greek fictions: a way of creating vivid emblematic romance pictures which draw readers into the action. But the novels which he produced suggest that he understood the dangers implicit in romance motifs misdirected passion can have horrific consequences. Rosalynde’s comment that ‘love comes in to bring another tragedy’ is most fully borne out in Euphues Shadow (1592), brought to press by Greene while Lodge was at sea with Cavendish and dedicated to the Earl of Fitzwater. This is Lodge’s most euphuistic work, but also shows quite how outmoded Lyly’s style had become. Having killed off Euphues in the framing fiction to Rosalynde, Lodge sketches a theory of imitation as a rationale for the text. The book is sent by Philautus to his sons to warn them that the court they live in is a ‘Theater of [Fortune’s] tragedies’ (ii. 4). Philautus is consequently sending them Euphues’ shadow, ‘conteyning the substance of his young desire’. But the process starts to get confused almost as soon as Lodge begins the narrative. Euphues’ role is adopted by the prodigal Philamis, who is counselled by old Anthenor. But while the story is packed with moralistic asides, remembrances of Lyly’s works start to lose coherence. When Anthenor rebukes Philamis, he laments: ‘Oh that vertue might want his shadowe, in seeing all like hir selfe, none loser than he should bee; I but Alexander had a finger to couer his scar; I but had Alexander no scarre what need he so vse his

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finger?’ (ii. 13). ‘Shadowing,’ in Anthenor’s terms, is an activity for the fallen world. The doom-laden atmosphere of the piece soon breaks into the euphuistic debates. Lodge creates a quartet of mismatched lovers. Philamis makes friends with Philamour, who falls in love with Harpaste. But Harpaste is in love with Philamis, who spurns her for the disdainful Eurinome. They begin fruitless discussions about the nature of friendship, but find themselves unexpectedly interrupted by a refugee from another romance mode: ‘a faire and beautifull Ladie . . . attired all in mournefull colours of black, hir goulden haire scattered along hir goodly shoulders, in the one hand she bare a lighted Taper, in the other a naked Sworde’ (ii. 28). The apparition is Claetia, who tells the disputants the tragedy of her cruelty to her suitor Rabinius. She set him three tasks: to fight in three combats, to bring her the heads of three monsters, and to ‘rid him of life that most troubled my delights’ (ii. 30). In accomplishing the first two tasks, Rabinius becomes enmeshed in violence. His last task could be fulfilled only by suicide, which he commits. The inset tragedy collides with the main narrative when the repentant Claetia stabs herself in front of the assembled debaters. Lodge shows euphuists being forced to listen to a very different style of romance. How they read Claetia’s tragedy determines the rest of the plot. Philamis is immediately transformed into an author of didactic epistles. Like Euphues, he quarrels with his friend, but even this incident from Lyly’s book takes on a more violent complexion. Philamis and Philamour have a stand-up fight. Philamis loses, and retires to the countryside to convalesce. The women find different ways of ‘shadowing’ Claetia’s tragedy in their own lives. Eurinome imitates her death and kills herself for her cruelty to Philamis. Harpaste, still in love with Philamis, imitates Claetia’s life. Undeterred by the tragic example she has witnessed, she sets Philamour a quest narrative, promising to accept his love if he can both find Philamis alive, and make the river Laite as big as the Danube. This quest ends in comedy. Philamour accomplishes the task with the help of Philamis, who has learnt magic, and Harpaste reconciles herself to the prospect of marrying Philamour. Lodge returns the narrative to its roots in Lyly’s book by concluding with the corpus of Philamis’ assorted letters, chief of which is ‘The Deafe mans Dialogue’. This is Lodge’s equivalent of ‘Euphues and his Atheos’ at the end of Lyly’s Anatomy. Philamis records his conversation with ‘Celio’, a spiritual goatherd who is deaf to the temptations of the world. But whereas Euphues fulminated to Atheos about the evils of heretics and pilgrimages, Celio sticks to safer topics: the vanity of earthly knowledge and the wisdom of early church fathers.

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Philamis and company began by shadowing Euphues’ existence, but find themselves having to accommodate the examples of quest narratives and magic in an imitation of Lyly’s work. One of the benefits for Lodge of appropriating such motifs was that he could insert the sort of spectacularly violent narratives which disgusted critics like Ascham. The protagonist of Robert second Duke of Normandy (1591) makes Greene’s prodigals look shy and retiring. Lodge chose an old romance about a pre-Reformation prodigal which gave him scope to show the horrific consequences of idolatrous worship.²¹ The first victim is Robert’s mother Editha. Unable to conceive a child, she and her husband find themselves by chance in ‘a closed Arbor beawtifyed with Roses, paued with Violets, on the top whereof, the byrds with melodious musick animated the flowers’ (ii. 7). Seduced by the natural images of fertility with which she is surrounded, Editha prays that ‘if God vouchsafe me no sonne, the Deuill send me one’. Her prayer is answered, and the child who is born becomes known as ‘Robin the Devil’. His evil origins allow him to get away with murder. As a baby he bites off his nurse’s nipples. As a child he kills his tutor and cuts beards off elders. When he grows up, he rapes a nun in a wood and murders newlyweds. The wood is important. Editha prayed to the devil in an enclosed arbour. Robert is eventually brought to God in a wood, and the location gains significance when he tries to atone for his sins. But less stress is laid on Robert’s crimes than on his new understanding of God and nature.²² Robert looks at the stars: ‘Then called he to mind, that since there was a Moouer which disposed & ordered al things, so in due ordinance of gouernement it was requisite too as hee prescribed rewards for good deserts, so he should also ordaine punishments for vice’ (ii. 30). He repents, is comforted by a hermit, and begins a pilgrimage to Rome. What is not in Lodge’s sources is Robert’s journey to Rome. Once again he reaches a densely planted wood, ‘giuing scarce any license to the Sunne beames to enter those shadie limits’ (ii. 41). There he encounters a lion, which he slays with his palmer’s staff, and correctly interprets as ‘that ²¹ Lodge’s main sources are found in the Croniques de Normandie (printed 1487), and in Wynkyn de Worde’s translation: see W. J. Thoms, ed., Early English Prose Romances (London: William Pickering, 1828), 169–206. For the many sources and analogues of the tale, see Donna B. Hamilton, ‘Some Romance Sources for King Lear: Robert of Sicily and Robert the Devil’, SP 71 (1974), 174–91: Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ²² Lodge adds Robert’s convertion by nature, a standard way of appreciating God’s power. For a reading of the text as Calvinist, see John Selzer, ‘The Achievement of Lodge’s Robin the Devil ’, TSLL 26 (1984), 18–33.

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roring Lyon which seeketh to deuoure my soule’ (ii. 41).²³ After he has resisted a vision of a wanton ‘Hamadriade’ and escaping earthquakes, giants, and tigers, the full allegorical context of his adventures is revealed. An old man informs Robert that he was in ‘the wood of temptation, where through many holy men haue attempted to passe, but they haue either been withdrawne by delight, or driuen back by feare, and finally perished through their own follies’ (ii. 43–4). Having passed through a repentance experience, Robert becomes a poet, and enters a syncretic version of the first two books of The Faerie Queene.²⁴ In the first book of Spenser’s romance, the holy Redcrosse Knight enters a ‘shadie groue’ with ‘loftie trees . . . that heauens light did hide’ (i. i. 7), and the heroine Una encounters a lion. Like Guyon in Book II, Robert then encounters a sensual vision offering ‘dalliaunce’. Guyon defeats the wanton Phaedria in the Bower of Bliss, after which he and the Palmer are confronted by rampaging animals and natural portents (ii. xii). Like Redcrosse and Guyon respectively, Robert exemplifies holiness and temperance. Lodge returns to his medieval sources for the end of his adventures, which allow him space for another scene of idolatrous worship. Robert is condemned to play the silent fool at the court of the Roman Emperor, a punishment which is the more frustrating since he has fallen in love with the emperor’s daughter Emine, herself born dumb. His rival is an evil sultan, who has built a temple to her and Cupid and worships her with inventive poetry. When Robert defeats him, Emine’s speech is restored, and they marry. Finally Robert reconciles himself with his mother, and the narrator encouragingly concludes: ‘Here may the dispayring father finde hope in his sonnes vntowardnesse’ (ii. 90). Robert’s return to Rome may be a representation of Lodge’s own journey to Catholicism. But concealed within the narrative lies the story of the evil poet sultan. It is the fictional descendants of the sultan who dominate later works.

‘Idolatrous constructions’: The Life and Death of William Long beard, A Margarite of America Lodge’s transformation of the Robin the Devil legend was the last time he created any equivalent to the Protestant heroes of The Faerie Queene. ²³ Compare 1. Peter 5: 8: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking, whom he may devour’. ²⁴ See Claudette Pollack, ‘Romance and Realism in Lodge’s “Robin the Devil”’, SSF 4 (1976), 491–7.

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The theme which dominates Lodge’s works in the 1590s is the apprehension of evil in the world. Two moral pamphlets printed in 1596 offer a commentary on the variety of present dangers. The Diuel conjured warns readers of the immanence of supernatural powers. In Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse, ‘incarnate deuils’ are classified according to the seven deadly sins.²⁵ One of the sons of Leviathan is ‘ambition’: In former times it was he only that peruerted lawes, neglected affinity, inuented conspiracie, circumuented authority, giuing those pens occasion to report his exceeding tragedies, who were resolued to ground their eternity on the happy peace earnestly affected among all ciuill policies. (iii. 11)

The fictional incarnation of ‘ambition’ is the subject of The Life and Death of William Long beard (1593). Lodge chose a familiar chronicle history, the story of the downfall of a ‘famous and witty traitor’ from the reign of Henry II.²⁶ He defends the contemporary relevance of the narrative to his dedicatee William Web, whom he praises for his ‘wisdome to establish the poore estate of Citizens sonnes decaied’ (ii. 3). Given William Longbeard’s career, this seems an equivocal commendation. Lodge combined Greene’s and Marlowe’s characteristic themes of prodigality and overreaching in the figure of William, a quick wit with the wrong aspirations: ‘as years increased the minde ordained for mightie things began to mount, the rather because ambition sealed his eies, which made him with the Doue soare so hie, till his own cunning and labour made him be ouerturned’ (ii. 5–6). William is active in public life and a poet, but also a model of duplicity. He is particularly adept at inciting revolution among the poor, and ‘wrested manie stories of antiquitie: First the Laconian state, next the popular gouernement of Athens, wherin peace neuer flourished better said he, than when the Commons had freedome of speech’ (ii. 9). Throughout the story the narrator seems uncertain whether to regard William as tragic hero, prodigal poet, incarnate devil or Robin Hood.²⁷ He is most dangerous when he is doing good, aiding the poor and oppressed, and encouraging republican sentiment. Meanwhile he pursues a parallel career of vicious prodigality, and is eventually arraigned for high treason. He repents in prison, and leaves a canon of repentance poetry, which the narrator commends for ‘high spirit and deepe inuention’. What Lodge is ²⁵ Lodge’s primary source is Jean Benedicti’s Somme des Pechez (first printed 1584). See Alice Walker, ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’, RES 8 (1932), 264–81. ²⁶ See John Stow’s The annals of England (London, 1592), 233–4. ²⁷ One possible analogue is the presentation of Buckingham in More’s The History of King Richard III (1516).

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really critical of are the ‘idolatrous constructions’ of the people, who worship William as a second god (ii. 34). Idolatry meets its nemesis in possibly the goriest, the most allusive, and the most ironic of Elizabethan novels. A Margarite of America is enfolded in so many romance associations that it acts as an index to Elizabethan taste. Lyly, Greene, Sidney, Spenser, Marguerite de Navarre, Castiglione, and the paradigms of medieval romance are all invoked. But they are also all dismissed as naïve and irrelevant, and are displaced in the fiction by the harsher norms of Bandello, Machiavelli, and finally Seneca. Part of the reason for Lodge’s emphasis on violence and duplicity in the novel may lie in the ‘America’ of his title. In the narrative this is represented only by a brief mention of the villain Arsadachus’ homeland of ‘Cusco’. The rest of the action takes place in ‘Mosco’, for reasons which are probably more linguistic than geographical. Moscow and Cusco look like standard romance locations, but they turn out to be very different to Arden or Arcadia. Lodge had just discovered the reality of the New World for himself. A Margarite was published in 1596 after his return from a disastrous voyage with Thomas Cavendish, ‘whose memorie’, Lodge tells his gentlemen readers, ‘if I repent not, I lament not’ (iv. 4).²⁸ The narrative is framed by one of the most contradictory pairs of prefaces in Elizabethan fiction. The story which Lodge calls ‘A Margarite of America for Ladies delight, and Ladies honour’ is dedicated to the widow of Thomas Hoby, translator of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Lodge claims to be sheltering his ‘English duety’ under an ‘Italian copie of humanitie and curtesie’ (iv. 3). The multiple ironies of Lodge’s choice of dedicatee are ramified throughout the narrative. Gentlemen readers are given a different account of the text’s genesis. The source, Lodge claims, is a Spanish history from a Jesuit library he discovered on his travels. He began work on it in a ship, ‘where many souldiers of good reckning [found] disturbed stomackes’ (iv. 4). His book is the by-product of seasickness, and the moral is unsentimental: ‘To be short, who liues in the world, let him wincke in the world; for either men prooue too blinde in seeing too litle, or too presumptuous in condemning that they should not’ (iv. 4). The extended metaphor of blindness and sight runs through the text, as the victims of Arsadachus’ plots tragically fail to perceive the deceptions practised upon them.²⁹ ²⁸ See Josephine A. Roberts, ‘Lodge’s A Margarite of America: A Dystopian Vision of the New World’, SSF 17 (1980), 407–14. ²⁹ See James Clyde Addison’s discussion of the theme in his introduction to An OldSpelling Critical Edition of Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596) (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1980), 14–38.

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Women readers who fail to read the dedication to gentlemen are in danger of being as blind to its message as Margarita, the horribly innocent heroine. Her name alone is freighted with romance associations.³⁰ ‘Margarita’ is the Latin for ‘Pearl’, the title of an anonymous medieval poem about an emblem of virtue, ‘a precious pearl withouten spot’. ‘Marguerite’ is the French for a daisy, the flower which opens its petals with the dawn. Lodge’s Margarita is habitually associated with light and daybreak. On one occasion she even dresses like a daisy: ‘no sooner gan bright day to chase away black darkenesse . . . but Margarita arose, apparelling herself freshly like Maie, in a gowne of greene sendall, embroidered with all kind of floures in their natiue colours’ (iv. 39). The twin associations of pearl and daisy are brought together in the figure of Marguerite de Navarre, author of the Heptameron (1558). The book is a collection of stories told by noblewomen, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron. Most of the tales are about abused women, and one of the chief narrators is a woman called ‘Parlamente’. Her name is perhaps derived from ‘perle amante’, ‘loving pearl’, thus making her a surrogate author figure. Lodge’s Margarita never tells stories, but she is a loving pearl with a vengeance, and her presence inspires old tales to collide with each other in new and alarming ways. However, the key to Margarita’s identity lies in more recent romances. Lodge returns to the model he had begun to experiment with in Robert, the first book of The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s narrative is the allegorical story of the true (Protestant) church in the form of Una, the innocent heroine guarded by the Redcrosse Knight. Una represents purity, oneness, and truth, but she is surrounded by the forces of evil. Chief among them is the enchanter Archimago, who is associated with the heresies of Roman Catholicism. Lodge’s Margarita imitates some of Una’s adventures, and the equivalent of Archimago is the Machiavellian villain Arsadachus. But Lodge imagines what would happen if Una had fallen in love with a persona as duplicitous as Archimago, and there was no Redcrosse Knight. Margarita becomes the reluctant Arsadachus’ fiancée, and pursues him to the bitter end of the text. Lodge takes the figure of the persistent female wooer from Scillaes Metamorphosis and Rosalynde, and places her in a tragic recreation of Una’s adventures. Romance, like Margarita, is too fragile to survive in a perverted world, an idea Sidney had also explored. The revised Arcadia, published in ³⁰ See Anne Falke, ‘The “Marguerite” and the “Margarita” in Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America’, Neophilologus, 70 (1986), 142–54.

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1590 and 1593, was a far darker book than Sidney’s original comic fiction, and there are plenty of hints in the text that Lodge knew the text. Sidney added to his original story the figure of the wise counsellor Kalander, who lives in an ornate summer house where art and nature exist in harmony.³¹ Lodge describes a similar house for his wise counsellor Arsinous. The revised Arcadia contains the figure of the tormented and destructive lover Amphialus and the evil Cecropia. Lodge reproduces the themes of destructive love in the innocent Margarita. But Sidney’s book was unfinished at the time of his death, and Lodge turned to revenge tragedy for a moral conclusion to his work. Margarita’s narrative trajectory mirrors that of Spenser’s Una, but it is set into a plot which is close to the anonymous neo-Senecan tragedy of Locrine (printed 1595).³² The play dramatizes a story from ancient British history. Locrine, eldest son of Brutus, abandons his wife Gwendolen for the captured princess Estrild or Elstred, and fathers Estrild’s daughter Sabren. Gwendolen’s revenge culminates in the suicides of Locrine, Estrild, and Sabren. Lodge had already adapted part of the legend as The Complaint of Elstred in his pastoral sonnet sequence Phillis (1593). In A Margarite the most striking aspect of the story is the romance heroine’s lack of awareness. Margarita never realizes she is in a Senecan tragedy. For her the narrative is a romance, and Arsadachus is a romance hero. Margarita represents both virtuous innocence and tragic blindness. Her inability to understand duplicity destroys her enemies, but also herself. Throughout the narrative Lodge recalls the lost innocence of Arden in set piece romance descriptions. Rosalynde ended with a battle which was soon superseded by multiple marriages and apparent harmony. A Margarite starts with the threat of human conflict contrasted with natural beauty: The blushing morning gan no sooner appeare from the desired bed of her old paramour, and . . . watered the bosome of sweete floures with the christal of hir teares: but both the armies (awaked by the harmonie of the birds, that recorded their melody in every bush) began to arme them in their tents. (iv. 5)

However, the threat of war is soon dispelled by the wise words of the old counsellor Arsinous, and the situation is resolved by dynastic partnerships. The feuding emperors Protomachus of Moscow and Artosogon of Cusco are appeased when a marriage is arranged between Artosogon’s son ³¹ See The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1977), 73–4. ³² See Jane Lytton Gooch’s introduction to The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1981), 4–10.

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Arsadachus and Protomachus’ daughter Margarita. As in Rosalynde, the hero and heroine are paralleled by another loving couple. Minecius and Philenia also get engaged, and the four lovers exist in a romance environment in which art and nature are in perfect harmony. Arsinous is rewarded with a dukedom, and lives in a fortress surrounded by trees and flowers. Margarita’s room is a reflection of her jewel-like purity. The walls are painted with ‘al the chaste Ladies of the world, inchased out of siluer; looking through faire mirrours of chrisolites, carbuncles, sapphires and greene Emeraulds’ (iv. 5). But Moscow is not Arden, and pastoral norms are only self-consciously recreated. Minecius occasionally dresses up as a shepherd, but in a form of courtly role play. The new ethos is represented by Arsadachus, who carries ‘Macheuils prince in his bosom’ (i. 20). Arsadachus is himself a model of treachery: ‘His crueltie he shadowed with a kind of courtly severitie; his lust under the title of love; his treasons under the pretext of true meaning’ (i. 19). His villainy goes unnoticed by Margarita: ‘(assisted by the vertuous, constant, and unspotted simplicitie of her nature) she seemed not to suspect whateuer she saw’ (i. 20). Yet Margarita’s simplicity is paradoxical. She is so convinced that she is living in the middle of a romance that she assumes all those around her are guided by romance conventions. This enables Arsadachus to be completely honest with her. He tries to seduce Philenia, and reveals his duplicity in euphuism: ‘Ah Philenia, if I did not hope, that as the hard oake nourisheth the soft silkeworme, the sharp beech bringeth for the savourie ches-nut, the blacke Bdellium sweete gumme; so beautiful lookes concealed pitiful hearts, I would surffet in my sorrowes to the death’ (iv. 22). When Philenia remains loyal to Minecius, Arsadachus plans to murder him on their wedding day. Meanwhile, ‘counterfeiting marvellous melancholie’, he presents the company with a poem which reveals his own sinister designs: ‘My words, my thoughts, my vowes, | Haue soild, haue forst, haue stainde, | My tongue, my heart, my browes’ (iv. 24). Nobody believes him. Margarita ‘supposed it to be some melancholie report of his prettie wanton discourses with her’ (iv. 25). She reassures him with unwitting prescience: ‘passion is no more but the effect of action, the one whereof I haue gathered in these lines, the other thou must shew in thy life’. Arsadachus promptly shows the effects of passion by murdering Minecius and Philenia and framing the loyal courtier Thebion for the crime. He even persuades Margarita to give him an alibi, and counters her doubts with self-reflexive irony: ‘why madam, where is greater treason, there where is least mistrust?’ (iv. 34).

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Margarita’s jewel-like purity leads her to believe that ‘all [was] golde that glistered’ (iv. 35). In a prince this level of naïvety becomes culpable. Arsadachus executes Thebion and throws his body to lions. His behaviour is approved by his father Protomachus: ‘so great is the tyranny of princes which are subject to light beliefe, and led by subtil suggestions’ (iv. 39). Protomachus’s gullibility leads him to depend on Arsadachus for protection, and imitate his violence. Arsadachus’ rise to power is briefly challenged when Arsinous produces a pageboy who witnessed the murder of Minecius and Philenia. But when Arsadachus threatens to leave court, Protomachus becomes so fearful that he banishes Arsinous. With unwitting irony, he punishes the page by putting his eyes out. Meanwhile the oblivious Margarita is busy exchanging questions of love with Arsadachus. She argues that the eye alone distinguishes ‘the true diamond from the counterfet glasse’ (iv. 56). Arsadachus challenges her in a poem: ‘Judge not my thoughts, ne measure my desires, | By outward conduct of my searching eies’ (iv. 57). Margarita interprets his words according to what she believes are the conventions of love poetry, and playfully rebukes him: ‘So faire a man, and yet so false a heart’ (iv. 59). Romance has turned into a distorting mirror. Lodge interlaces Arsadachus’ career of increasingly violent acts with elaborate descriptions of courtly pastimes to show how easily he can infiltrate and manipulate them. Desperate to escape his impending marriage to Margarita, he visits his father’s court, where he himself becomes the victim of blind infatuation. Arsadachus is smitten by the sight of the cruel lady Diana, who parodies Margarita’s goodness in the same way that Spenser’s Duessa parodies Una. Aided by her Machiavellian father Argias, Arsadachus breaks his vow to Margarita. Argias commends his policy: ‘It is therefore vertue in you (good prince) if . . . you rather trust other mens wisdoms, then your owne wit’ (iv. 67–8).³³ Arsadachus’ courtship of Diana is represented as a solipsistic parody of pastoral courtships. He dresses up as a shepherd, ‘attiring him like a second Diana readie to chace’ (iv. 74). But Arsadachus’ unchecked lust finally leaves him vulnerable to irony. The true meaning of his love poem ‘I see with my hearts bleeding’ (iv. 76) is first revealed to the gullible rulers of Moscow and Cusco.³⁴ Their bloody ³³ As Claudette Pollack notes, this is a thoroughly Machiavellian sentiment. See Pollack, ‘Lodge’s A Margarite of America: An Elizabethan Medley’, Renaissance and Reformation, 12 (1976), 1–11; 5. ³⁴ Like most of the poems in the narrative, this is a translation of the Italian poet Paschale, although Lodge often misattributes them to Dolce. See Alice Walker, ‘Italian Sources of the Lyrics of Thomas Lodge’, MLR 22 (1927), 75–9.

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ends recall the tamer stories of feuding fathers and prodigal sons in earlier fictions. Furious at the news of Arsadachus’ new engagement, his father Artosogon murders and mutilates Diana’s father: he ‘presently caused him to be torne in peeces at the tailes of foure wilde horses, then casting his mangled members in a litter, hee sent them to Diana in a present, vowing her to serve her in the same sawce her father had tasted’ (iv. 70). Arsadachus in turn deposes his father, cuts out his tongue and the hand which signed Argias’ death-warrant, and dresses him as a fool. Only now does Artosogon gain true vision: ‘I see, I see with mine eies the subuersion of this Empire . . . woulde the losse of thine eies might recompence the lewdness of their errours’ (iv. 71). All the horrors Arsadachus’ duplicity leaves in his wake can be paralleled in the novels of Bandello. But Lodge recycles them in the service of divine justice. Arsadachus’ mother is the first to suggest that there are higher powers involved: ‘O you iust gods, can you see these wrongs without remedie?’ (iv. 73). The unwitting instrument of the gods is Margarita, who sets out for Cusco to find her lover. Her journey parallels that of Una in The Faerie Queene.³⁵ Like Una she meets a lion, which instead of attacking her lays its head in her lap and licks her hand. But Lodge also inserts a joke at the expense of Greene. In folklore lions protect virgins. Margarita however is accompanied by her maid Fawnia, who shares a name with the chaste heroine of Greene’s best-seller Pandosto. Lodge’s Fawnia is torn to pieces by the lion because ‘she had tasted too much of fleshly love’ (iv. 81). Margarita meets Arsinous, now a skilled magician, who has plotted his own revenge, and together they arrive at Cusco. For the bleak conclusion of A Margarite Lodge turned back to Seneca. Margarita and Arsinous arrive as Arsadachus is in the middle of an elaborate feast in Diana’s honour. Only now does he remember the parting gift Arsinous had instructed Margarita to give him: a jewelled box which he was to open if he ever forgot her. When he opens it the ‘judgement of just heauens’ is finally enacted. A flame flies out of the box and drives him mad. He murders Diana under the impression that he is sacrificing to Nemesis: ‘with the caruing knife he slit up the poore innocent ladies bodie, spreading her entrailles about the pallace floore, and seizing on her heart, hee tare it in peeces with his tyrannous teeth, crying Sic itur ad astra’ (iv. 87).³⁶ In the ensuing carnage, Arsadachus murders his son by ³⁵ See Pollack, A Margarite, 8. ³⁶ Lodge adds yet another layer of irony by making Arsadachus quote from Apollo’s praise of Iulus’ triumph in battle from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘You have become a man, young Iulus, and we salute you. This is the way that leads to the stars’. See Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. David West (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990), 235.

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Diana, his mother and Margarita. He is only arrested in his slaughter when he is put to sleep by Arsinous, who expounds the true genre of the narrative: ‘if neuer as yet any tyrant liued without his tragedie what should you expect?’ (iv. 89). When Arsadachus awakes, he himself understands that ‘life is a stage-play, which euen unto the last act hath no decorum . . . rightly I may say with Hercules: Plenus malorum sum iam, nec superset locus | Allis nouis recipiandis’ (‘I am now full of evils, nor is there room to receive new ones’ iv. 91).³⁷ Like his father, he gains true insight: ‘I see with mine inward eies the ghosts of these poore slaughtered soules calling for justice at my hands’. He accordingly finishes his performance with suicide. The last scene of A Margarite is an extraordinary conflation of tragic memories, in which revenger and victim become impossible to separate. Arsadachus gradually realizes that he has to play the role of Hercules, who is driven mad and murders his wife and children under the impression that they are his enemies. Lodge combines motifs from Seneca’s Hercules plays. The story of his madness in Hercules Furens is woven into Hercules Oetaeus, the tale of Deianeira, Hercules’ vengeful wife who gives him a poisoned shirt. Deianeira’s shirt provides one parallel to Margarita’s box, but the principal referent is the mythical story of Pandora. Again Lodge is remembering two different versions. ‘Pandora’ can mean ‘all giving’ or ‘all gifted’. The latter sense applies in the Greek myth of the first woman, Pandora, who has every gift bestowed on her by the gods. Pandora is also given a jar or box which contains all the plagues and evils of the world. When she opens the box, they fly out, and only Hope is left inside. However Lodge is also thinking of the grisly story of Pandora in Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567). Fenton’s Pandora is ‘all giving’ because she is highly promiscuous. When one of her lovers leaves her pregnant, she aborts the foetus herself and smears the remains round the room: ‘she beats with all her force against the walls, painting the posts and pavements in the chamber with the blood and brains of the innocent creature newborn’.³⁸ This is the source of Arsadachus’ murder of Diana and his son. Lodge’s collation of the stories makes the mythic Pandora’s narrative even starker. Order is finally restored with Arsinous as governor, but hope is conspicuous by its absence. ³⁷ Arsadachus’ speech is similar to the lament of Hercules in Hercules Furens when he discovers that he has killed his wife and children. See Seneca, His Tenne Tragedies, trans. Thomas Newton et al. (London: Constable and Co., 1927), i. 51. ³⁸ See Matteo Bandello, Certaine tragicall discourses of Bandello. Trans. Geoffrey Fenton (London: David Nutt, 1898), vol i., discourse iii.

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A Margarite is Rosalynde rewritten as tragedy. The persistent female wooer destroys not only her unwilling lover, but also herself and the Machiavellian corruption with which she is surrounded. The remarkable sustained tone of the text demands what Nashe would call ‘Ironicall recreation’. But the irony is directed at romance itself, at least in the style Spenser had made his own in The Faerie Queene. Lodge himself moved to France the following year to train as a doctor, and it is easy to read dissatisfaction with Protestant England into his last novel. One constant factor in Lodge’s life was provided by the influence of Seneca, whose works Lodge translated in 1614. For Lodge, Seneca’s works provided a model of endurance in difficult times, and the preface to his translation recalls the end of A Margarite: Learne in him these good lessons, and commit them to memory. That to be truely vertuous is to be happy, to subdue passion is to be truly a man, to contemn fortune is to conquer her, to foresee and vnmaske miseries in their greatest terrors is to lessen them, to liue well is to be vertuous, and to die well is the way of eternitie. (iv. 39)

Yet despite Lodge’s apparently determined annihilation of the mode, this is not the end of the narrative’s existence as romance. The exceptional violence and scenes of mutilation in A Margarite invite parallels with Shakespearian tragedy especially Titus Andronicus. The humiliation of Argias is reminiscent of the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. But the story also returns as cynical romance, and provides a vision of what would have happened had Margarita reclaimed her lover. In All’s Well that Ends Well, the aristocrat Bertram abandons his fiancée Helena in favour of Diana. Helena is a figure of healing and restoration, and her message is the opposite to A Margarite: ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, | Which we ascribe to heaven’ (i. ii. 216–7). She wins back her errant husband with a bed trick and a jewel, reminiscent of Margarita’s jewelled box. But Bertram remains unrepentant, and even the king can only conclude ‘All yet seems well’ (v. iii. 333).

Epilogue Many stories can be added to the vibrant bookish folly of late Elizabethan narratives. One of them is about image, and the figure at the heart of it is ‘Robert Greene’. Greene’s loss of control over his historical identity is one of the strongest testaments to his own ability to separate names from their original referents. Having spent his career writing debate fictions which were not like Castiglione and metamorphoses which were not Ovidian, he himself became the victim of his own pseudo-culture. The last pamphlets with which his name is associated pose their own probably insoluble questions of authorship. But they are also wickedly funny, as ‘Greene’s’ struggles to manage his image led him to pick ever higher authorities to validate his writing. His professed horror at the loss of control over his name is clearest in Greenes vision, a work published posthumously, but possibly written by the historical Greene in about 1590. Greene poses as the indignant victim of misattribution, accused of writing the pseudo-Chaucerian pamphlet The Cobler of Canterburie (1590). The book is certainly nothing like his style. Passengers on a barge trip tell ‘Canterbury Tales’, while an opportunistic cobbler plans to gather up the tales and ‘match Lilly, Greene, or any other for excellency of stile’.¹ The accusation, true or false, allowed Greene to create a network of literary allegiances in which he could situate his canon. He goes straight to the top. In the Vision Chaucer and Gower appear to the sleeping Greene to argue about Greene’s literary merit. They also end up imitating his style. Chaucer wants to reclaim Greene as an amorous writer, and tells a fabliau itself adapted from The Cobler of Canterburie. This is sheltered under the Horatian motto Greene used for his earliest works: ‘Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci’. Gower, however, tells a story about a jealous husband reformed by his wife whom he overhears quoting from Wisdom literature. This tale is much more like Greene’s usual style, but is tagged with the motto of his later writings ‘Nunquam sera est’. But a greater author is conjured up by quotation. Solomon appears, and Greene promises to abandon philosophy for divinity. His Wisdom books ¹ The Cobler of Canterburie (London, 1590), sig. k4v.

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are his prodigal son stories, Greenes neuer too late and Greenes mourning garment. Like Marlowe’s Faustus, Greene finds all his learning subject to review. But he characteristically becomes a Faustus whose canon is validated by the highest authorities, and who goes on writing even when he is supposedly on his deathbed. His supposed fury at being understood as ‘the new Chaucer’ conceals a typically syncretic frame of reference. Greene ends the pamphlet as an author readers might remember as easily mistaken for Chaucer or Gower, with his love stories reclassified as philosophy. The drive to reclaim Greene’s image only adds to the process of dissemination. But Greene did not get it all his own way, and he is now most likely to be remembered for his anxieties that his image would be superseded. In Greenes groats-worth of witte (1592) fiction is ostensibly abandoned after the hero Roberto is outsmarted by his fellow coneycatchers and forced to take up playwriting. Readers should ‘suppose’ the author to be Roberto himself, who famously accuses ‘the onely Shakesscene in a country’ of plagiarism. Shakespeare is now a more marketable brand, a name which can be appropriated as shorthand for drama. Greene’s name could only be kept alive by conjuring up his ghost to apologize to Shakespeare, as Greene’s editor Henry Chettle did in Kindharts dreame (1592). Since Chettle may have been responsible for writing both pamphlets and certainly ensured their circulation, Greene’s reputation itself turns into a fiction.² Greene dominates in death, as he did in life. For his successors, his ghost became an occupational hazard. In Greene in conceipt John Dickenson explains how he was interrupted by a ghost ‘who seemed to write as fast as I could read’. This is of course Greene himself, who dictates an uncharacteristic story about a promiscuous woman. Despite assigning Greene a romance, Dickenson is determined to associate Greene with satire. Greene’s friends in the underworld are the satirists Diogenes and Menippus, and Dickenson pointedly hopes his readers will not think he has stolen the idea out of Lucian’s works. But Greene and his literary reputation were themselves the object of satire. In Greenes Newes both from heauen and hell, the author B.R. (probably Barnabe Riche) explains how he spotted ‘a most grislie ghost’ clutching a scroll.³ Despite crossing ² See also Greene’s new identity as Falstaff in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 205–20. ³ See R. B. McKerrow’s introduction to his edition of Greenes Newes both from Heauen and Hell (1593) and Greenes Funeralls (1594) (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911). All references are taken from this edition.

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the road to avoid him, B.R. is buttonholed by Greene, who is determined to tell him about his failure to get into heaven. Harvey might have been consoled by the thought that the pamphlet in which Greene abused his family comes back to haunt him. Greene finds himself in company with ‘Velvet Breeches’ and ‘Cloth Breeches’ out of A Qvip for an Vpstart Courtier, and his personale are eagerly continuing the debate about pretension versus honest poverty which they had begun in Greene’s pamphlet. Greene desperately tries to persuade them to expand their reading: for if you had but seene Greenes farewell to folly, me thinkes the bare title, without turning ouer leafe to looke further into the matter, might haue moued you to the consideration, that the very ground of your contention is meere folly and flat foolishness . . . and in one other of my bookes, called Greenes groats worth of wit: why if there were but one peny worth of wit equally distributed betweene you both, you would never vse to quarrel. (B2r–v)

But for Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches Greene is merely a satirist. Even St Peter only knows his true crime books, and greets him in heaven with ‘it was you that writ the Bookes of Cony-catching’ (C1r). However, since he thinks Greene’s repentance was a publicity stunt only Cloth Breeches gets into heaven. Velvet Breeches gets into hell, but Greene nearly causes a riot among the angry coneycatchers whose crimes he has exposed. Lucifer ejects him, and he is left a restless spirit, rejected by the ungrateful dead. Nobody believes that Greene was a repentant prodigal. The most obvious successor to Lyly and Greene is determined to deny his literary inheritance. Nashe’s proud boast is: ‘the vaine which I haue . . . is of my own begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe, neyther Euphues, nor Tarlton, nor Greene’.⁴ His one prose fiction The Vnfortunate Traueller (1594) is both a parody and a commentary on his predecessors. Stripped of examples and deliberative rhetoric, Nashe’s prose initially gives a spurious impression of plainness. But Nashe never stops playing games. The page and narrator Jack Wilton is a coneycatcher let loose among the topoi of a late Elizabethan romance. The textual courtships and misleading sources turn into Nashe’s repeated puns on the ‘authentical’ and counterfeit pages and the ‘waste paper’ of his pamphlet.⁵ Unlike Greene, Jack gets a literary patron. Jack’s master the Earl of Surrey himself becomes a counterfeit page when he exchanges roles with Jack. Together they go time travelling, and meet the literary ancestors Nashe might have preferred to claim allegiance to: More, Erasmus, and Cicero. ⁴ Nashe, Works, i. 19.

⁵ Ibid., ii. 208.

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Surrey writes a sonnet to a vision of his mistress, a moment of courtship shared between men which recalls the negotiations of F.J. and G.T. The old literary world can only be recalled in nostalgia. Nashe’s fiction is very different from those of his predecessors, not least because of the moralizing tone adopted by Jack himself. His jestbook adventures are interlaced with events more threatening because moral boundaries are no longer certain. When Jack sees Anabaptists massacred at Leiden, he understands them as martyrs to their faith. This is a very different sort of violence from Bandello’s sensationalist gore: ‘the violence of faith, the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering’ (ii. 234). But Jack also reflects that the Anabaptists are equally receiving the reward of spiritual pride. Greene devoted many works to ‘the violence of patient suffering’, but it was uncomplicated by contemporary religious dispute. Jack finds himself a helpless spectator. Yet Jack himself becomes a victim of the culture of violence. In a horrible parody of one of Greene’s woman in peril plots, a bandit’s wife called Heraclide is raped by her abusive husband. Her conviction of her own sin involves her in a complex thought process in which she is guilty not only of being raped but of not dying of plague. In an episode which recalls the mirror imagery of earlier fictions, she looks in a glass to see if her sin is reflected on her forehead. But the glass has no exemplary message, and Heraclide kills herself uncertain of divine forgiveness. Jack himself is perhaps closer to the model of the repentant prodigal than any of his literary predecessors. As if to compensate for the indiscriminate bloodshed with which he is surrounded, he marries his courtesan Diamante and does charity work. Lodge showed romance topoi perverted and revenged by Senecan tragedy. Jack’s world is as chaotic as Greene’s Arcadia, but his attempts to find moral coherence in it are equally problematic. He is left trying to find space for romance in world where there is no divine justice left. The Vnfortunate Traueller is a blend of satire and nostalgia, a mixture which characterizes the reception of Lyly and Sidney in the 1590s. In 1589 Greene was still making jokes about Euphues in Arcadia, even though ‘euphuism’ had turned into random hyperboles. The logical consequences of Greene’s jokes are felt in the occasional retrospective romances of the 1590s. Dickenson brings Lyly’s hero back to a dormant life by subtitling his Arcadian pastoral Arisbas ‘Euphues amidst his slumbers’. In John Hind’s Eliosto Libidinoso (1616), Sidney’s Philoclea is dead. Her daughter Cleodora embarks on an adulterous affair with her stepson, aided by her euphuizing maid Lucilla, whom she makes her ‘secretary’.

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Sidney and Lyly are both recruited into a plot about excessive passion and perverted royals, and all the lewd protagonists, Lucilla included, are executed at the end. The most obvious legacy these texts leave behind them is in drama. Greene’s ideas of style can be seen everywhere, the atmosphere of Euphues his censure reflected in Troilus and Cressida, an inset tale in Mamillia recreated in King Lear, the absurdities of the oracle at the end of Cymbeline a remembrance of Menaphon. And making connections is part of the pleasure of reading the texts. Yet the anxious readers and writers of late Elizabethan fiction deserve to be rescued from the back pages of editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Renaissance romance has long been celebrated for the multiplicity of its forms, and the range it encompasses needs further investigation. F.J. and Euphues are now beginning to regain a little of their celebrity status. But their obscurer descendants also amply repay their readers. There is plenty of room for other Ciceros and Philomelas, Arcadias and Faerie Queenes.

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Index Actaeon 106–7 Addison, James Clyde 158 n. 29 Admetus and Alcestis 107 Aeneas 145 Alexander 70, 153–4 Alwes, Derek 13 n. 35, 85 n. Amadis de Gaule 136 Apelles 120 Arachne 66 Ariosto, Lodovico 27, 33–4 Ascham, Roger 100 Scholemaster, The 10, 18, 53 Atalanta 38 Athena 66 Austen, Gillian 21, 30 n. Bandello, Matteo 31, 163–4 Barbour, Reid 87 Barish, Jonas A. 54 n. 4 Bates, Catherine 59 n. 12, 70 n., 145 Beaty, F. L. 113 n. 1, 143 n. 9 Beer, Gillian 9 n. 23 Bennett, Josephine Waters 45 n. 36 Beza, Theodore 31 Biggs, M. A. 117 n. 13 Boccaccio, Giovanni 11, 70 Decameron 99 n., 111 n. Filocolo 100 Brabine, Thomas 127 Bruster, Douglas 15 n. 42 Bubb, William 99 Burke, Victoria 66 n. Burnett, Paula 144 n. 11 Caesar, Julius 73 De Bello Gallico 68 Castiglione, Baldassare 70, 166 Book of the Courtier, The 11, 92, 94, 158 Cave, Terence 8 n. 20 Cavendish, Thomas 158 Chaucer, Geoffrey 46, 100, 167 Canterbury Tales, The 15 Troilus and Criseyde 15, 23, 31 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 113 n. 2 Cheke, Sir John 100

Chettle, Henry 167 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 13, 54, 76, 108–11, 168 Pro Archia Poeta 109 n. 35 Clegg, Cyndia Susan 21 Cobler of Canterburie, The 166 Colie, Rosalie 8 n. 19 Colin Clout 14, 148 Cooper, Helen 8–9, 116 n. 10 Cressida 33, 36, 64 Cuvelier, Eliane 138, 141 n. Cyrus 12, 132 Damon and Pythias 58, 63–4, 73 n. Dan Bartholomew 30, 31, 44, 50, 74 David 14, 24, 53, 56, 64 Davis, Walter R. 2 n. 4 Day, Angel Daphnis and Chloe 87 n. 5, 114 Dean, James S. 86 n. Deianeira 164 Diana 38, 106, 141 Dickenson, John Arisbas 169 Greene in Conceipt 167 Edwardes, Richard Damon and Pythias 58 n. 10, 73 n. Elizabeth I 10, 62, 69 Elyot, Sir Thomas The Book Named the Governor 11, 58 n. 10 epyllion 139–40, 146 Erasmus, Desiderius 42, 70, 168 Praise of Folly, The 15, 55 euphuism 16, 54–5, 62, 78–80, 86–7, 135 Eurydice 101 Falke, Anne 159 n. Fenton, Geoffrey Certaine Tragicall Discourses 10–11, 164 fortune 36, 89, 90, 117, 140 Fraunce, Abraham 103–4, 109 Frye, Northrop 9 n. 23

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Gamelyn 145 Gascoigne, George 14, 50, 62, 100, 105 ‘Adventures of Master F. J.’ 19–32 Glasse of Gouernmente, The 22, 37, 43, 52–3 Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, A 21, 32 Posies, The 30 Gent, Lucy 67 n. Gnaphaeus, Gulielmus Acolastus 57 n. Gosson, Stephen Ephemerides of Phialo, The 65 Schoole of Abuse, The 12, 112, 139 Gower, John 46, 100, 167 Grabes, Herbert 16 n. 46 Grange, John 52, 54, 56 Golden Aphroditis, The 32–43 Graves, Robert 98 n. 18, 102 n. 23 Greek romance 12, 87–9, 90, 91, 113–14, 132 Green Knight 32, 44, 50, 74 Greenblatt, Stephen 167 n. 2 Greene, Robert 14, 60, 112, 143 Alcida 100–1 Alphonsvs 98 n. 19, 126 Arbasto 88, 89–91, 101 Ciceronis Amor 108–11, 126 Euphues his Censure to Philautus 93–5, 96, 170 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 98 n. 19, 126 Greenes Farewell to Folly 93 Greenes Groats-worth of Witte 167 Greenes Mourning Garment 167 Greenes Neuer too Late 167 Greenes Orpharion 101–3 Greenes Vision 166–7 Gwydonius 86, 88–9 James IV 98 n. 19 Mamillia 74–84, 87, 139, 170 Menaphon 4, 8, 13, 126–37, 150, 170 Morando 88, 93 Myrrour of Modestie, The 88 Orlando Furioso 98 n. 19 Pandosto 109, 117–25, 135, 163 Penelopes Web 93, 95–8 Perimedes the Blacke-smith 86, 98–100, 112, 163 Philomela 103–8, 109, 117, 118 Planetomachia 91–2, 102 Quip for an Vpstart Courtier, A 1, 168 Griselda 85 Guevara, Antonio de Dial of Princes, The 59 n. 11

Hackett, Helen 16 n. 45 Halasz, Alexandra 3 Hamilton, A. C. 9 n. 25, 114 n. 7 Hamilton, Donna B. 155 n. 21 Harrison, William Description of Britaine, The 73 Harvey, Gabriel 1–8, 11, 16, 18, 20, 52, 57, 91–2, 109, 168 Ciceronianus 108 Foure Letters 1 Letter-book 44–51 Marginalia 43–4 Pierces Supererogation 51 n. Harvey, John 92 Harvey, Richard 92 Heale, Elizabeth 23 n. 11 Heilman, Robert B. 79, 89 n. 9 Helen 17, 46, 55, 56, 61–4, 73, 79, 94, 95 Helgerson, Richard 3, 12, 113 Heliodorus An Aethiopian Historie 12, 87, 114 Henry VIII 69, 70 Henryson, Robert 33 Herodotus 132 Hind, John Eliosto Libidinoso 169 Hippomanes 39 Hodges, Devon L. 54 n. 5 Home and Away 9 Homer 76, 86 Hopkins, Andrea 155 n. 21 Huffman, Clifford Chalmers 5 n. 13 Hughes, Felicity A. 30 n. 14 Hunter, G. K. 13 n. 34 Hutson, Lorna 10 n. 28 Hyginus 38 n. 26 Inns of Court 139 Izard, Thomas C. 33 n. 16 Jason 78–9, 81, 129 Kay, Dennis 4 n. 11, 14 n. 37 Keach, William 140 n. 5 Kerrigan, John 22 n. 6 King, Andrew 140 Kinney, Arthur F. 13, 87, 113 Kinney, Clare R. 148 n. Kintgen, Eugene R. 8 n. 20 Knapp, Robert S. 38 n. 25 Knox, Norman 6

Index Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, The 160 Lecomte, Edward S. 39 n. 27 Lee, Roger 76 Leicester, Robert Dudley Earl of 21 Lever, Raphe 55 n. 6 Lewis, C. S. 17 Linton, Joan Pong 60 n. 13 Lodge, Thomas 2, 5, 112–13, 138–65 Alarum against Usurers, An 112, 139, 141 ‘Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria’ 141–3 Euphues Shadow 153–5 Margarite of America, A 140–1, 158–65 Robert second Duke of Normandy 153, 155–6 Rosalynde 113, 139, 140, 141, 144–53, 160 Scillaes Metamorphosis 140, 143, 159 William Long beard 153, 156–8 Long, P. W. 32 n. Lucas, Caroline 16 n. 45 Lydgate, John 46 Lyly, John 2, 14, 74, 142–3, 158 Campaspe 112, 119–20 Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt 51, 52–64, 74–8 Euphues and his England 64–74, 75 Galatea 146 Midas 136 n. Sappho and Phao 90 McGrath, Lynette 23 n. 8 Machiavelli, Niccolò 158 n. 33 Manningham, John 104 Marguerite de Navarre Heptameron 158–9 Marlowe, Christopher 167 Tamburlaine the Great 98, 127, 131 n. 22 Marprelate, Martin 15 Mars 56–7, 64, 92, 95 Maslen, R. W. 6, 20 n., 69 n. Medea 81 Melbancke, Philip Philotimus 75 Menelaus 61, 62, 94 Mercury 102 Meres, Francis 2 metamorphosis 91, 104 Miller, Edwin Haviland 6 n. 17 mirrors 16, 58, 62, 72, 75, 80, 82, 96, 169

183

Moore, Helen 16 n. 44, 61 n. 14, 78 n. Moore Smith, G. C. 43 n. 32, 46, 119 n. 15 More, Sir Thomas 15, 46, 157, 168 History of King Richard III 157 n. 27 Utopia 15 Mueller, Janel M. 10 n. 29, 54 n. 4 Munday, Anthony Zelauto 75 Nashe, Thomas Haue with you to Saffron Walden 50 n. Strange Newes 44 n. 33, 50 n. ‘To the Gentlemen Students’ 5–6 Vnfortunate Traueller, The 168–9 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey 3, 5, 75 n. 24, 87 n. 6, 116 n. 11, 125 n. Nielsen, James 45 n. 36 Norton, Thomas Gorboduc 57 n. Oenone 79 Orpheus 101, 103 Ovid 104–5, 106, 107, 140 Heroides 16, 61 Metamorphoses 14, 94 n. 16, 100 Remedia Amoris 63 Oxford, Edward de Vere, Earl of 52, 67, 88 Painter, William Palace of Pleasure, The 10–11 Palfrey, Simon 9 n. 24 Pandora 11, 102, 164 Paradise, N. Burton 138 n. 1 Paris 17, 56, 61, 62, 73, 79, 94, 134 Parnassus plays 138 Parrish, Paul A. 22 n. 7 Pask, Kevin 15 pastoral 4, 6, 110, 111, 112–37, 141–53, 162 Peele, George Arraignment of Paris, The 101, 137 Old Wives Tale, The 100, 128 Penelope 63, 86, 95–6, 102 Percy, Ed. 100 Pettie, George 54 Petite Pallace, A 11, 107 n. 31 Petrarch, Francis 11 Philomela 103–9 Pigman, G. W. 8 n. 21 Pincombe, Mike 13, 45 n. 37, 51 n. 41, 55 n. 9, 73 n., 101 n. Plutarch 64, 108

184 Pollack, Claudette 156 n. 24, 162 n. 33 Ponsonby, William 3 n. 9, 76, 87 n. 6 Portington, Robert 76 prodigality 12–15, 29–30, 44, 62, 88, 157 Prouty, C. T. 21 n. 5, 34 n. 21 Pruvost, René 87 n. Quint, David 8 n. 21 Quintilian 6, 13 R., B. Greenes Newes 167–8 Rambuss, Richard 15 n. 43 rape 19–20, 23–4, 50, 114, 117, 123, 125, 134 Raymond, Joad 3 n. 8 Reardon, B. P. 70, 87 n. 5, 89 n. 10 Richards, Jennifer 13 Richardson, Brenda 76 n. 26 Richardson, Samuel Clarissa 117 Riche, Barnabe Don Simonides 75 Ringler, William A. 139 n. 3, 144 n. 10 Roberts, Josephine A. 158 n. 28 Robin Hood 145, 157 Rohr, M. R. 23 n. 10 Rollins, Hyder E. 37 n. 24, 39 n. 29, 40 n. Romeo and Juliet 11, 20, 34 Rome 109 Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. 126 n. 18 Rowe, George E. 22 n. 7 Sackville, Thomas 57 n. Saintsbury, George 2 n. 5 Saker, Austen Narbonus 75 Salzman, Paul 7 n., 9 n. 27 Sannazaro, Jacopo 115 Saunders, J. W. 2 n. 2 Sayce, Olive 29 n. Scoggin 46 Scott, Edward John Long 45 n. 36 Selzer, John 155 n. 22 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Hercules plays 164–5 Shakespeare, William All’s Well that Ends Well 165 As You Like It 152–3 Cymbeline 170 King Lear 165, 170

Index Titus Andronicus 165 Troilus and Cressida 170 Winter’s Tale, The 125 Sharpe, Kevin 8 n. 20 Sidney, Sir Philip 1–8, 14, 17, 128, 138, 139, 140, 140–2, 152, 169 Apology for Poetry, An 12, 132 Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (New Arcadia) 1–2, 113, 159–60 Old Arcadia 1–8, 12, 112–15, 119, 121–2, 124, 143–4, 148, 149 Sisson, Charles 138 Skelton, John 15, 42, 46 Smith, Sir Thomas 50 Solomon 14, 24, 53, 56, 166 Spenser, Edmund 1, 15, 138, 141, 158, 162 Faerie Queene, The 153, 156, 159, 163, 165 Shepheardes Calendar, The 51, 147–8, 153 Staub, Susan C. 23 n. 9, 27n. Stephanson, Raymond 58 n. 9 Stern, Virginia 44 n. 34 Stow, John 157 Susanna 88 Swart, J. 54 n. 4 Tarquin 105 Tatius, Achilles Leucippe and Clitophon 87–8 Tatlock, J. S. P. 94 n. 16 Theocritus 126 Tilley, M. P. 37 n. 24, 61 Tilney, Edmund 70 n. Titus and Gysippus 12, 58, 104 Troilus 17, 79, 152, 170 Troy 73, 102, 133, 137 Ulysses 74, 86, 94–6 Underdowne, Thomas 12 Upchear, Henry 127 Venus 38, 39, 56–7, 62, 64, 66, 67–8, 70, 73, 81, 90, 92, 95, 101–2, 129, 131, 135–6 Virgil 76, 126 Vulcan 55, 56, 81 Walker, Alice 141 n., 157 n. 25, 162 n. 34 Wall, Wendy 2 n. 2

Index Warner, William Albions England 115 Pan his Syrinx 91, 135 n. Waters, Gregory 23 n. 9 Webb, William 157 Weiss, Adrian 22 n. 6 Wheale, Nigel 4 n. 10 Whetstone, George 52 ‘Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta’ 32–6

Promos and Cassandra 34 Rocke of Regard, The 33 Wilson, John Dover 139 n. 3 Wolff, Samuel Lee 87 n. 3, 88, 113 Woudhuysen, H. R. 45 n. 36, 113 n. 4 Wright, Louis B. 3 n. 7 Zeuxis 73 Ziegler, Georgianna 94 n.

185