Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture)

Staging Early Modern Romance

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

1. Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre P.A. Skantze

8. Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern Literature and Culture Nina Tauton

2. The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb

9. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Ayanna Thompson

3. Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s Legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams

10. Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England Randall Martin

4. Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of History Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey 5. Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America Circles in the Sand Jess Edwards 6. Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse Grace Ioppolo 7. Reading the Early Modern Dream The Terrors of the Night Edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’ Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman

11. Staging Early Modern Romance Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne

Staging Early Modern Romance Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare

Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne

New York

London

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Staging early modern romance : prose fiction, dramatic romance, and Shakespeare / edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 3. Romances, English—Adaptations—History and criticism. 4. Romances— Adaptations—History and criticism. 5. Romanticism—England—History—16th century. 6. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Sources. 7. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Literature. I. Lamb, Mary Ellen, 1946– II. Wayne, Valerie. PR658.R65S73 2009 820.9'003—dc22 2008035566 ISBN 0-203-88207-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-96281-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88207-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96281-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88207-8 (ebk)

This book is for our grandchildren, Venice and Keala.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Part I: Continuities and Incongruities 1

Introduction: Into the Forest

1

MARY ELLEN LAMB AND VALERIE WAYNE

2

The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of the Pericles Tales

21

LORI HUMPHREY NEWCOMB

3

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other”: Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance

47

CYRUS MULREADY

Part II: Page and Stage 4

“A Note Beyond Your Reach”: Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama

75

STEVE MENTZ

5

Hamlet and Euordanus

91

GORAN STANIVUKOVIC

6

Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania SARAH WALL-RANDELL

107

viii Contents 7

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Old Wives’ Tales

122

MARY ELLEN LAMB

Part III: Gender and Agency 8

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles, or “Religious Romance,” in The Winter’s Tale

145

GLORIA OLCHOWY

9

Romancing the Wager: Cymbeline’s Intertexts

163

VALERIE WAYNE

10 John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance

188

JOYCE BORO

11 Undoing Romance: Beaumont and Fletcher’s Resistant Reading of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

203

CLARE R. KINNEY

12 Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger

219

LORNA HUTSON

13 Afterword: Shakespeare and Romance

236

BARBARA A. MOWAT

Contributors Index

247 251

Acknowledgments

This book fi rst began as a seminar on “Women and Romance” that we cochaired at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans in 2004. The participants included Jean R. Brink, Christopher Cobb, Julie Crawford, Huston Diehl, Michelle Dowd, Susan Dunn-Hensley, Susan Frye, Clare Kinney, Alan Lewis, Steve Mentz, Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Gloria Olchowy, Patricia Parker, Constance Relihan, Sasha Roberts, and Edith Snook. We are grateful to all of them for their stimulating papers and productive discussion, which helped us see how we might pursue this subject further through a collection of essays. We want especially to remember the late Sasha Roberts, a vital member of that seminar, whose energetic presence and provocative work in the field of romance we will sorely miss. Our thanks go to Patricia Parker for her early and strong encouragement of this project. The scholarship of Barbara Mowat has always been formative for this collection, and we are grateful for her expertise and clarifying support as we completed it. Mary Ellen Lamb would like to thank Arthur Kinney and the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, where she was a fellow in 2006– 07, for resources enabling her work on this project. She would also like to thank Southern Illinois University for her research leave in 2006–07 as well as other forms of support. She also thanks her husband, Bill, for their many long walks, during which he gave generous attention to her ideas about romance and many other topics. Valerie Wayne is grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for its extraordinary resources and accomplished staff, who supported her work on Cymbeline during a long-term fellowship in 2003 and provided welcome assistance on this book during subsequent summers. Georgianna Ziegler’s expertise has been crucial. She especially thanks her husband, Richard, whose energetic engagement with the incongruities of Cymbeline and the mode of romance speaks volumes of care. Both of us became grandmothers during the last year of working on this book, which may mean that we are “old wives” with tales of our own to tell. As our dedication suggests, we cherish our children and the children they nurture so well.

x

Acknowledgments

The image of Pacolet’s horse from The Hystory of the two Valyaunte Brethren Valentyne and Orson is used with the permission of the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The title-page of Westward for Smelts is reproduced with the permission of The Folger Shakespeare Library. Finally, we extend our thanks to Max Novick and Erica Wetter at Routledge, and especially to Terence James Johnson at IBT Global, whose careful attention to this book was invaluable.

Part I

Continuities and Incongruities

1

Introduction Into the Forest Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: the prose fictions that early moderns referred to as romances, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare’s late plays, which were fi rst called romances by Edward Dowden in 1877. Many of these works were brought together in 1975 in Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume collection, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, which provided access to much of the period’s vernacular literature for an entire generation. Yet scholars now question why texts known primarily as sources for canonical works should be consigned to such a subordinate status. Diana Henderson and James Siemon advise that we attend “not only to a particular verbal root” of the prose fiction and dramatic texts thought to be sources because of their echoes to the plays, but “to the forests of romance from which these plays were cultivated. . . . By relocating Shakespeare’s writing within this welter of change and copia, we may gain a renewed sense of the narrative and discursive energy of vernacular culture” (220). We may also gain a more historical sense of the generic, material, and gendered priorities of prose fiction and dramatic romance. Barbara Fuchs objects to the “strange, ahistorical categorization” by which Shakespeare’s plays came to be called “romantic” or “romances” in the context of a “neglect of prose romance” that “uncritically reflects the hierarchies that have long organized this corpus” (96–97). Our collection addresses this problem directly by examining the connections between prose romances and early modern plays, and by foregrounding the dramatic romances that became popular in England as early as the 1570s and were revived by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the fi rst decades of the 1600s. Appreciating the larger history associated with dramatic romance makes it more possible for us to see the historical continuities between prose fiction and those Stuart plays, continuities that essays in this volume repeatedly explore. Barbara Mowat asks us to “recognize that Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest are part of a larger family of dramatized romances, that they ‘submerge us in romance’” even as they draw on a native form of tragicomedy (“‘What’s’” 143). This volume responds

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to these calls for a more encompassing view of the forest of romance that appreciates both its magnitude and the dramatic as well as narrative forms that crossbred within its fertile terrain. A forest of romance is an apt metaphor in a variety of senses. Corinne Saunders notes that “the forest is an archetypal romance landscape” (Forest ix). The metaphor catches the chaotic proliferation of early modern romances, in prose as well as drama, growing together at the same time and in the same space. It is in the nature of academic institutions to sort, to categorize, to separate in order better to analyze individual specimens. Universities offer courses with titles such as “Shakespearean Romance” or, less often, “Early Modern Prose Fiction.” When overlaps occur, privileged (usually Shakespearean) texts are removed from the forest, paired with their less well-known prose predecessors, and placed neatly sideby-side in a small, hedged, garden plot. This was not the experience of early moderns, who might well have paused at a bookstore to purchase a popular prose romance such as Pandosto, or the more humanist-oriented Rosalynde, before crossing the Thames to see Pericles at the Globe. What romance may have meant to early moderns extended well beyond any single kind of text, for here, to return to the forest metaphor, there were many kinds of trees. Prose romance encompassed much-published retellings of tales of medieval heroes such as Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick; newer foreign imports such as the primarily Italian texts gathered in Bandello’s collection of novellas and the long Spanish romance, Amadis of Gaule; translations and adaptations of newly available Greek romances such as Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History; rhetorically intricate texts by university wits such as Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde; epic romances such as Sir Philip Sidney’s elegant Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; and romances assimilating news of the new world such as Thomas Lodge’s Marguerite of America. They ran the gamut between old-fashioned and very au courant, between easy-to-read and demanding, between titillatingly immoral and respectably English. Dramatic romance, too, was various, and its early seventeenth-century enthusiasts may have indulged in nostalgic memories of romance elements from the earlier Corpus Christi Cycle plays or Guy, Earl of Warwick, even as they chose between seeing the highly popular Mucedorus1 or Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster. As the titles of plays such as The Winter’s Tale and Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso demonstrate, dramatic romance did not exist as entirely distinct from prose, verse, or oral romance; instead, the dramas increased the popularity of nondramatic romances by reiterating their characters, plots, and motifs. The continuity between these texts enables us to see that there is indeed a forest and not just isolated stands of trees. A slightly different version of the metaphor of genre as tree has been offered recently by Franco Moretti, a model that affords an interesting way to conceptualize the development of the loose but connected forms of romance. Deliberately reducing complexities to abstract models, Moretti

Introduction 3 practices a mode of distant reading that approaches literature by means of graphs, maps, and trees. Following Darwin’s tree model for evolution, he explores how forms of a genre diverge from a common origin, growing apart from other forms. 2 Not all forms survive, however, for a literary version of natural selection takes place. Moretti complicates the metaphor by noting that, unlike the one-dimensional direction of an evolutionary tree, culture-trees may reverse course, causing convergences when they turn back to previous branches. By allowing for such convergences and reversals rather than only divergences, a culture-tree reflects “the more plastic, more human” side of culture (81). Romances composed a dense literary growth by generating new forms here and discouraging other forms there, developing, like the genres analyzed by Moretti, according to invisible imperatives seemingly of their own accord. While the essays in this collection do not attempt the kind of distant reading that Moretti performs or achieve his global reach, his model allows new ways of imagining the multiple directions as well as surprising conjunctions and disjunctions that have occurred in the proliferation of romance over time. This diversity and proliferation raise the question of what such works have in common and of how we defi ne romance. Three ground-breaking studies of the last century that work on very different assumptions nonetheless agree that romance is a mode.3 Building on his earlier work in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and on his book on four Shakespearean romances, A Natural Perspective (1965), Northrop Frye, in his 1976 work, Secular Scripture: The Study of the Structure of Romance, designates romance as “the structural core of all fiction” (15) for its embodiment of mythological archetypes. Patricia Parker’s Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (1979) describes romance narrative in terms of the strategies of deferral and dilation and applies this approach to great effect in Literary Fat Ladies (1987). Foregrounding a Marxist approach to history, Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) emphasizes historical and ideological distinctions among romance narratives, which he interprets as socially symbolic acts inseparable from political ideologies. As Jameson’s oft-quoted adage, “always historicize,” became an axiom of new historicists and cultural materialists, the political dimensions of romance provoked new critical attention.4 Extending Parker’s insights, Barbara Fuchs’s book, Romance (2004), adopts a more poststructuralist approach to consider what romance performs rather than what it is, characterizing it as a mode with strategies that include “idealization, the marvelous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscured identity” in the context of stories that pose a quest and then complicate it (9). These strategies recur in the disparate forms of romance developed in the classical and medieval eras. Creating hybrids with other genres, such as saints’ lives, travel narratives, and lyric (57–64), medieval romances developed vernacular narratives of chivalric quests, often complicated by erotic love. As demonstrated by the presence of nuns, hermits, and such

4

Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne

adventures as the quest for the Holy Grail, these romances were strongly shaped by a Christian worldview. Early modern humanists and Protestant reformers expressed some concern about their implicit Catholicism (Cooper 38–39). The humanist Roger Ascham also condemned Malory’s Morte d’Arthur for its lack of taste in its “open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye” (2: 4). While these traits contributed to the falling cultural prestige of medieval romance, for a reading public that increasingly included nonelite readers, they only enhanced the appeal of their early modern derivatives, such as the much-published Spanish romance Amadis of Gaule or Richard Jonson’s native Tom a Lincoln (Cooper 39, Fuchs 78–79, Mentz 33). Helen Cooper’s book, The English Romance in Time (2004), fi nds common ground within medieval and early modern forms of romance through literary motifs or “memes.”5 These memes included exotic settings removed in place or time, far-flung quests by wandering heroes or heroines, the intervention of the supernatural to enable a happy ending heightened by a close encounter with death. As memes recur and mutate (or diverge and converge like culturetree branches), they create new meanings over time; their familiarity to readers may provide comfort, or alternatively surprise, in an unexpected variation of the expected pattern (Cooper 3, 10, 15). Variant forms of these memes described by Cooper—exotic settings, far-flung quests, the intervention of the supernatural—also surface in the Greek romances that made a highly visible entry into the English literary scene in the 1580s. As Steve Mentz ably demonstrates, they exerted a significant impact on prose romances written in the late sixteenth century; Stanley Wells characterizes that impact as “incalculable” (50). Whether read in translation or in early modern adaptations, Greek romances introduced new elements, such as shipwrecks, pirates and brigands, oracles, separations, and reunions, especially between persons thought to be dead (Mentz 44). These elements are all to be found in Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History, which was translated into English about 1569 and reprinted numerous times through the early seventeenth century; the availability of Greek romance was further augmented by English translations of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe in 1587 and Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon and Leucippe in 1597.6 Although we cannot be sure that Shakespeare had direct knowledge of these texts, he certainly knew and drew on the early modern English works strongly influenced by them (Wells 53–56; Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books 206). In addition to such surface plot elements as shipwrecks and pirates, Greek romance affected prose fictions through the prominence of its virtuous heroines, who were often passive but ultimately successful in overcoming both human and supernatural threats (Mentz 44). The influence of these classical romances appears prominently in such prose romances as Sir Philip Sidney’s revised Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, whose early shipwreck episode pays explicit literary homage to the opening scene of the Aethiopian History, and in Robert Greene’s Mamillia and Menaphon (Mentz 73–122).

Introduction 5 The rise of commercial markets in the print trade and in the public theater exploited the tendency of romance to manipulate the responses of readers through familiar literary motifs. The shared memes that print rendered so recognizable to readers of prose fiction created a sense of comfortable familiarity for the otherwise extraordinary happenings that occurred on the stage. As performances of plays now lost, such as Theagenes and Chariclea (1572) and Queen of Ethiopia (1578), would suggest, Greek and specifically Heliodoran romance was rapidly adapted to the early modern stage. The appendix to Cyrus Mulready’s chapter in this book reveals the extent to which the relative newcomers of Greek romances took their place alongside plays drawn from the older narratives of Arthurian legend, such as The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) and Uther Pendragon (1597). The early modern marketplaces both of print and theater offered romances to consumers of every social status, turning back to present an older and chivalric England of the old Arthurian tales while capitalizing on the newer form of Greek romance to dignify mercantile adventures in the New World. As scholars have noted, Shakespeare drew on prose romance and fiction for plays that he wrote throughout his career. Barbara Mowat’s afterword, for example, describes his use of motifs from Greek romance in Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona. He also turned to prose fiction, including Italian novellas, their French translations, and/or English versions of stories, for Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, and Othello.7 The late plays exhibit strong connections with prose fiction and romance narratives. Russ McDonald summarizes the “shared materials and moods” between them and prose fiction in the following list: “adventures, journeys and wandering, shipwrecks, divided families, desert places, temporal leaps, apparent death, providential intervention, joy after despair” (38). Incidents such as these contributed significantly to the primary features of Shakespeare’s own romances, which Walter Cohen identifies as “violence and literal or metaphorical death, the passage of time, an intergenerational orientation, suffering and repentance, forgiveness and the acknowledgment of human frailty” in the context of an “encompassing fi nal reconciliation” (111). Such features were more than literary borrowings. The subjects taken up in Shakespeare’s romances became fashionable at this time because they addressed cultural dilemmas that were shared by readers and theatre audiences alike. While there have always been continuities between Shakespeare’s late plays and other forms of romance, the applicability of the term romance to his work has been much debated. The First Folio of 1623 divided his plays into only three categories: comedies, tragedies, and histories. The Tempest and Winter’s Tale were placed with the comedies, Cymbeline with the tragedies, and Pericles was excluded until the Third Folio of 1664, where it was added as an additional play. It was only in 1874, when the New Shakspere Society performed metrical tests that identified Pericles, Cymbeline,

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The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest as having been written about the same time, that they came to be seen as a chronological group (Mowat, “‘What’s’” 129–31). One year later Dowden described three of them as having a “certain romantic element”; two years after that, in a primer he wrote for use in the schools, Dowden added Pericles and named the four plays “Romances” because their “grave beauty” and “sweet serenity . . . seem to render the name ‘comedies’ inappropriate.”8 Mowat notes the durability of Dowden’s label even though the term tragicomedy was proposed as an alternative as early as 1910 (132–34). In a similar vein, Russ McDonald remarks that “the ease with which ‘romance’ took hold and its persistence in the thinking of scholars, teachers, and producers indicate that the term has met a lasting taxonomic need” (22). Scholars nonetheless debated this terminology for much of the twentieth century and will, no doubt, go on disputing it well into the twenty-fi rst. E. C. Pettet, Philip Edwards, Stanley Wells, Howard Felperin, and Barbara Mowat, among others, argued vigorously for “romance,” which by the middle of the century “had become the default term” (McDonald 23). Still others concurred with Frank Ristine, Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, and Robert Henke in preferring “tragicomedy,” even while noting substantial differences between Shakespeare’s tragicomedies and the Italian form popularized by Giambattista Guarini, which also differed from plays by John Fletcher and John Marston.9 When both terms were called into question, critics such as Simon Palfrey, Kiernan Ryan, Jennifer Richards and James Knowles referred instead to these works as the “late plays,” so they are now referenced through three different labels. In 2003, however, Barbara Mowat pointed out that “romance” and “tragicomedy” should not be treated as mutually exclusive terms. Characterizing English popular plays such as Clyomon and Clamydes and Mucedorus as “simultaneously dramatized romances and tragicomedies” (135), she sees “romance stories as dramatized on the early English stage [as] in essence tragicomic” (140).10 Choosing between the terms romance and tragicomedy is therefore anachronistic and unnecessary because the plays combine elements of both. They belong to “a larger family of dramatized romances” even as “they present highly sophisticated versions of an old form of tragicomedy with native rather than Italianate roots” (“‘What’s’” 143). Raphael Lyne, writing in Shakespeare’s Late Work and in a collection on tragicomedy co-edited with Subha Mukherji, flexibly accepts all three terms as in some ways appropriate, as do Alison Thorne and Russ McDonald.11 Doing so has the advantage of enabling a fuller consideration of the three later plays that Shakespeare co-authored with John Fletcher, Cardenio, Henry VIII or All is True, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Yet as editors of this collection, we agree with Walter Cohen that these three works comprise “a second movement within Shakespearean romance” and “offer a darker view of violence and death than the previous romances” (116). Our primary focus remains, therefore, on the four plays traditionally referred to as romances,

Introduction 7 whose strong connections to prose fiction and earlier dramatic romances have placed them at the center of the debate about Shakespeare’s relation to the mode. It has seldom been recognized that the use of the term romance to characterize a play was not a nineteenth-century innovation. Sasha Roberts located an early use in 1670, in the subtitle of Richard Fanshawe’s English translation of a Spanish play, Hurtado de Mendoza’s Querer Por Solo Querer: To Love only for Love Sake. A Dramatick Romance.12 A century later the term was much more prevalent. It appeared in the subtitle of David Garrick’s popular Cymon: A dramatic romance, of 1767, published in ten editions through 1816.13 It also appears in the titles or subtitles of at least twenty-one other plays performed or published from 1767 to 1852,14 so by the middle of the eighteenth century it was frequently employed to advertise and sell plays. With titles such as Fatal Sisters; or, the castle of the forest (1797), and Blue Beard, or Female curiosity (1806), these plays appear to continue the tradition documented in Cyrus Mulready’s appendix, which records over 40 dramatic romances between 1572 and 1662.15 The information he provides combined with evidence of later uses of the term suggests that dramatic romances were being staged in England from the Elizabethan period to the middle of the nineteenth century. When Hazlitt described Cymbeline as a “dramatic romance” in The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1817,16 he may well have been aware of that dramatic tradition.17 The more scholarly Dowden, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, probably knew what had been on stage for much of his own lifetime as well. As early as the 1760s, then, and even a century before, the kinds of plays performed during the early modern period had produced a recognizable dramatic form, one worth calling attention to on a title page. While literary criticism of Shakespearean romance, tragicomedy, or the late plays has had a century-long history, the same cannot be said for early modern prose romance. Except for a flurry of activity on specific works such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, in the nineteenth century prose romances were primarily considered as archaic source materials for Shakespeare plays or as obscure precursors to the novel. By 1850, John Payne Collier had gathered Ancient Novels, Romances, Legends, Poems, and Histories used by Shakespeare as the Foundation of his Dramas into his two-volume Shakespeare’s Library, which was enlarged by Hazlitt to include plays in 1875. Both collections anticipate Bullough’s later compilation. These gatherings made vernacular literature more accessible to many readers, but it was left to critics in the twentieth century, and especially to those in the fi rst years of the present one, to appreciate the vitality of prose fiction and provide an understanding of its greater importance to early modern studies. Cultural studies has emphasized how early modern prose fiction articulates discourses that shaped not only literary texts but early modern subjects as well.18 Arthur Kinney (1986) examines prose fiction’s development in relation to humanist education, the goal to

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produce subjects able to debate persuasively on either side of a question. For Lorna Hutson (1994), humanist rhetoric worked to redefi ne masculinity as persuasion; but this very persuasiveness introduced the possibility of deceit between friends, who might use rhetorical skill to seduce wives and daughters. R.W. Maslen (1997) fi nds this potential for rhetoric to move towards duplicity in, for example, Italianate novellas, drawing together espionage and early forms of fiction, sometimes written by authors employed as spies. The burgeoning of critical work in colonialist discourses includes Constance Relihan’s (2004) articulation of connections between gender and geography to demonstrate how anxieties about violence against women, or conversely domination by women, were projected onto fictions located in the East. In “Eurasian Fiction” (2007), Walter Cohen begins the important work of locating Western Europe’s indebtedness to Eastern fictional forms that extend as far back as the fi rst millennium BCE and are particularly evident in the frame tale. Finally, in their important collection of essays, Relihan and Stanivukovic (2004) explore how the circulation of episodes of queer sex, cross-dressing, voyeurism, and violence in prose romances introduced subjects to diverse modes of sexuality. While each of these subjects—humanist rhetoric, geographic exploration, and sexuality—recurs in the essays in this collection, its central organizing topics grow out of productive scholarship on the consequences for drama of the lucrative presence of prose romances within a print market, and on the relation between gender and agency in prose fiction and drama. Both topics—the marketplace and gender—are integrally related to a rapidly growing subset of cultural studies known as the history of the book, which has drawn attention to the print culture in which popular prose romances, often addressed to women readers, played a prominent role. Decades ago, the very popularity of prose romances, from Lodge’s Rosalynde to Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, was sufficient reason to dismiss them as vulgar or ephemeral works. With the rise of print studies, their popularity becomes an index to what most appealed, or what was thought by workers in the book trade to most appeal, to early moderns. Three important studies have emerged as especially prominent within the past few years. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of how hierarchies of taste affi rm positions in class status, Lori Humphrey Newcomb (2002) explores a phenomenon she fi nds in early modern print culture—that is, the growing need, in the face of increasing numbers of early modern readers, to create distinctions among consumers of printed texts and to sort readers by class and gender in ways that did not, however, dependably reflect actual readerships. While inventories and other data reveal that members of every social group read prose romances, by the early seventeenth century writers and printers imagined (or at least claimed) that such pleasure reading was the true provenance of the lowest sort of reader, the woman servant. Steve Mentz (2006) argues convincingly for the use of Heliodorus’s Greek romance, the Aethiopian History, by Nashe, Greene, Sidney, and Lodge, to provide a marketable

Introduction 9 alternative to chivalric romance and novellas. In particular, he fi nds that the many fictional versions of Greene’s ghost (a return of Greene from the grave) serve as “a metaphor for the social impact of prose fiction and popular print in general” (212). Developing Newcomb’s approach still further, Naomi Liebler’s collection (2007) explores the resistance by a newly literate public (especially women and those of lower status) to attempts to stratify class hierarchies. Liebler notes that widespread literacy heralded a more profound social revolution. As is evident from this brief account of recent work, discussions of print culture cannot be easily separated from issues of gender. Well before Boccaccio’s Decameron, the genre of romance was ostensibly directed to women readers, who had, it was assumed, the requisite leisure and amorous compassion to sympathize with romance heroes and heroines. Caroline Lucas (1989) ably analyzes the constructions of women readers through titles and prefaces of prose romances by such writers as Robert Greene and John Lyly in the late sixteenth century. Yet, as Juliet Fleming pointed out in 1993, the misogyny of these “ladies’ texts” suggests that the primary audience imagined by their authors was often male (165). In an important study of prose romance as well as Shakespearean romance, Helen Hackett (2000) also considers the paucity of hard evidence for the presence of a significant female readership, observing that this gendered construction of audience was largely a fiction designed in part to advertise books to both genders as lightweight pleasure reading. More recently, Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) fi nds material traces, often signatures on flyleaves, left by readers of such books as the Arcadias authored by Philip Sidney and Robert Greene. While most of these traces remain inconclusive about actual reading practices, they do confi rm the presence of a female readership of romances. One of these flyleaves suggests less about an owner’s response to Sidney’s Arcadia than about the character of the donor: “Elizabeth Pride her Book given her by Lord Larance a ugly Lord a rogue a Folle of a Lord” (161). Despite any apparent intent to denigrate or to advertise romance, dedications potentially empowered women’s reading and eventually their writing. Margaret Tyler, an early translator of the Spanish Mirror of Knighthood, observed, “It is all one for a woman to pen a storie, as for a man to addresse his storie to a woman” (A4v). Four decades later, in 1621, Mary Wroth published the fi rst extant romance written by an Englishwoman. The fi rst volume of her Countess of Montgomery’s Urania was for the most part overlooked by critics until its modern edition in 1995, followed by the first publication of her manuscript continuation in 1999. Wroth’s activity as a writer empowered women readers in still more ways. Often ambivalent struggles over the proper limits of women’s agency became a common subject matter of early modern romances. To affi rm connections between studies of prose fiction, print culture, and gender is not to suggest that the field of Shakespeare studies has lagged behind. On the contrary, issues of the marketplace and of women’s agency

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have long occupied an important place in Shakespearean criticism. The social composition of audience members of the Globe and of Blackfriars and the extent of their impact on his plays is an often revisited question (Cook 1981, 1997; Gurr 1987; Thorne 2003). Noteworthy scholars such as Jean-Christophe Agnew (1986), Douglas Bruster (1992), and Linda Woodbridge (2003) have scrutinized the relationship of Shakespeare to the early modern marketplace. Scholars of print culture have explored what it means that Shakespeare’s plays were printed as well as performed, that their presence as printed texts exerted continued influence on early modern culture (Blayney 1997; Mowat 1997; Lesser 2004), and that he often wrote as a literary dramatist (Erne 2003). Similarly, from pioneering studies by the contributors to The Woman’s Part (1980), by Coppelia Kahn (1981), and Carol Thomas Neely (1985) to more recent work by such scholars as Joan Pong Linton (1998), Dympna Callaghan (2000), Wendy Wall (2002), Natasha Korda (2002), and Phyllis Rackin (2005), feminist work has flourished abundantly in studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.19 In attending to the concerns of gender and class, print and prestige, selling and consuming, this collection includes essays that consider differences as well as similarities between dramatic and prose romances. Each essay examines the relation between at least one prose or dramatic romance and an English play performed from 1570 to 1630; most essays take up several other texts as well. Eight of the thirteen (including the introduction and afterword) address Shakespeare’s plays. Three also consider medieval texts, one includes a list of more than forty non-Shakespearean plays drawn from romance sources, and three more extend the discussion to plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Other authors are also treated at some length: Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Wroth. The collection has three sections: (1) the continuities between those incongruous forms of prose romance and early modern dramatic romance, (2) the consequences for drama of the lucrative presence of prose romances within a print market, and (3) the relation between gender and agency in prose fiction as well as in plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists.

PART I: CONTINUITIES AND INCONGRUITIES Following this introduction, Lori Humphrey Newcomb explores the relationships among Pericles tales, including Shakespeare’s play of that title, earlier verse narratives, and contemporary prose versions of the Apollonius/Pericles story. She argues that the entwined intertextuality in the set of Pericles tales defeats ordinal logic and baffles the reproductive assumptions that underpin traditional “source” study. Instead, the Pericles tales encourage us to appreciate “pattern,” the pleasure of narratives circulating through the sea of romance stories. Cyrus Mulready’s chapter contributes historical background on the form of dramatic romance in the context of

Introduction 11 Sidney’s censure of the early English drama for its disregard of the classical unities. Mulready shows that Sidney’s objections to the broad time frames and widely dispersed locations of stage romances were framed in response to the contemporary appeal of plays catering to a public appetite for tales about global travel and expanding trade. He confi rms the form’s popularity by providing an appendix of more than forty lost and extant nonShakespearean plays arguably drawn from romance sources and performed between 1572 and 1662.

PART II: PAGE AND STAGE Jean-Christophe Agnew’s description of plays as a laboratory by which early moderns could test out possible relationships with a market economy (54) can be applied not only to the stage but to the book market that made romance into an accessible commodity. When Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance reverses a previous textual hierarchy to explore The Winter’s Tale as a reception of Greene’s Pandosto rather than Pandosto as a source for The Winter’s Tale, different questions arise. To what extent did Shakespeare’s plays exploit the popularity of prose romances, which were fast becoming money makers within a growing print market? Although prose romances were widely circulated across a range of social groups, the very popularity of the genre caused its denigration as reading most appropriate to the lower classes. Similarly, the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, filled with “Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries” (Jonson, Induction to Bartholomew Fair 1.125), also rendered them vulnerable to elite scorn. How did this issue of relative prestige play itself out in the relationship between prose romance and stage plays? This part of the book addresses the complex mixture of identification and distinction characterizing the relationship of prose romances and early modern plays. In his account of a running competition between plays and prose romances as an important topic in As You Like It, Steve Mentz observes the greater prestige conferred on printed fictions, such as Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, by university-educated humanists. In Touchstone’s merciless parody of humanist ambitions, Shakespeare’s play responds to this prestige by recasting dramatic and prose romance as rival forms of popular entertainment. Reversing the traditional direction of influence between fiction and drama, Goran Stanivukovic shows how a publisher of prose romance could exploit the popularity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello. An anonymous prose romance, The History of the famous Euordanus Prince of Denmark (1605), recycles Shakespeare’s tragic narratives by incorporating into them some of the patterns of romance. These three texts serve as cultural resources to one another within a shared literary context. The popularity of prose romance may also have enhanced the authority of the printed book, especially for nonelite readers. The

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unprecedented opportunity for diverse groups of readers to acquire their own books enabled a form of self-estrangement that could produce selfconsciousness as readers both lost and found themselves in books. Sarah Wall-Randell explores this potential in the book of prophecies that Jupiter bestows on the sleeping Posthumus in Cymbeline. That potential is also realized in Mary Wroth’s prose romance Urania, when Urania and Veralinda read the events of their own lives in a magical book that is self-referential to its larger text. Her essay approaches the early modern book as a representational solution for dealing with interiority, a form of knowledge that can be challenging either in the theater or on the page. The authority of the book continues as a topic in Mary Ellen Lamb’s account of how The Tempest makes and then disavows an initial bid to reclaim romance as part of a defi nitively bounded form of masterful male authorship. By observing the unities of time and place and marking its genealogy from the classical authors Virgil and Ovid, The Tempest distinguishes itself from popular prose romances, simultaneously denigrated and revered as old wives’ tales in The Winter’s Tale. Yet the boundaries between Prospero’s narrative magic and the “old wives’” witchcraft common to Medea and Sycorax dissolve as Prospero renounces his authority by drowning his book. In The Tempest, the pressures of mortality call into question contemporary modes of literary and social distinction.

PART III: GENDER AND AGENCY The last section explores ways that gender ideologies were evoked and circulated among prose and dramatic romances. The misogynist discourse staged in many early modern plays did not diminish the empowerment potential for women spectators, who were, in the words of Jean Howard, “licensed to look—and in a larger sense to judge what they saw and to exercise autonomy—in ways that problematized women’s status as object within patriarchy” (79). While these texts were also capable of evoking a countermovement to contain female agency, the empowerment of women readers and spectators created gender as a vital subject shared and even heightened by the interaction between prose romances and plays. The strong crosscurrents between gender ideologies explored in prose fiction and drama become especially apparent in plays by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Gloria Olchowy explores a genealogical connection between secular prose romances and the Corpus Christi Cycle plays or “religious romances” and shows how the legacy of the suppressed cycle plays was realized in The Winter’s Tale. She also argues that this Shakespearean romance engages a contemporary cultural debate that opposed the inherited versions of motherhood associated with the cycle plays to a new and more diminished version of the maternal promulgated by the humanists and reformers. Valerie Wayne’s essay decenters the sources of Cymbeline to look at a group of

Introduction 13 stories recounting a wager on a woman’s chastity that circulated in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Welsh, English, and other versions from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries in verse, prose, and dramatic romance as well as in folktales. The story that Shakespeare used had already been rewritten by Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan, staged as a fourteenthcentury miracle play by Parisian goldsmiths, revised for sixteenth-century German and Spanish stages, and redacted into a sixteenth-century Welsh chronicle. Reading twelve different versions of the wager, Wayne shows how often they were “romanced” from one language and country to another, how distinctively British Cymbeline’s adaptation of the story was made to be, and how fully at home this play is in the forest of Greek and medieval romance. One factor in the perceived appeal of the romance genre to women lay in the opportunities it afforded them through action and especially through speech. Joyce Boro attends to this aspect of romance as a means of opening “a space to speke” for its female protagonists in her discussion of John Fletcher’s play, Women Pleased, which engages a contemporary debate on women’s sovereignty that also appears in Swetnam the Woman-hater, arraigned by women. Fletcher’s re-reading of the Spanish romance, Grisel y Mirabella, characterizes the debate about women as such an outmoded and intransient form that he has to turn to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to resolve his comic plot and give voice to his main female character. Clare R. Kinney’s essay reveals that Fletcher did not, however, consistently support the female agency that was prevalent in romance. Reducing women to villains or helpless ciphers, Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, Cupid’s Revenge, provides a resistant reading of Sidney’s Arcadia by shutting down women’s legitimate speech as a consequence of their revision of romance in the direction of tragedy. Through the collaborative efforts of Sidney’s family, his Arcadia had attained cultural prestige; yet as a repository for many plots of contemporary plays and prose renditions, it also became a work popular with readers and playgoers. Ironically, this popularity played a factor in the play’s rejection of the restorative potential of romance to invest in the higher social capital of tragedy. Lorna Hutson explores the deep cultural changes affecting representations of women’s chastity in a work of prose fiction by Matteo Bandello and a play by Philip Massinger. Translated by William Painter as “The Lady of Boeme,” Bandello’s novella rejects the supernatural proofs common in medieval romance to approach women’s chastity as a matter of judicial probability based on principles of humanist rhetoric. The protagonist of Massinger’s play, The Picture, goes a step further by treating the magic picture designed to show degrees of fidelity of his wife not as proof, but as a way of calculating an expedient course of action, in this case whether to accept the sexual advances of the Queen of Hungary. The calculation of personal and fi nancial profit involved in these different uses of the magic picture enables Hutson to consider the effects of historical changes in legal proof on literary treatments of gender.

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In her afterword to this collection, Barbara Mowat offers an overview of Shakespeare’s engagement with Greek romance throughout his career, from The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Cymbeline and The Tempest. Attending especially to his reiteration of “The Man Tried by Fate” stories from the St. Eustace legends, Mowat compares Shakespeare’s early adaptations of romance to the later works. In the earlier plays, he meets the challenge posed by some of Sidney’s and Whetstone’s admonitions against adapting romance to the stage by using a reporter to recount previous events or by limiting the storyline. In his later works, however, he highlights and seems to revel in the very absurdities to which Sidney and Whetsone had objected. Greek romance poses immense problems for its protagonists that may be resolved by a benevolent divine power or may confi rm one’s helplessness as a pawn of Fortune. As Mowat briefly connects both worldviews to the years around 1608, she addresses the actual work done by a dramatist in shaping a narrative for the stage as well as the powers and pleasures of the stories that Shakespeare rewrote. Like Newcomb’s essay that begins this collection, this afterword uses the metaphor of the sea of stories to refer to the body of romance narratives.20 In this introduction and elsewhere, we instead follow Corinne Saunders, Diana Henderson and Jim Siemon in adapting the metaphor of the forest. Each metaphor provides a valuable way of considering romance. While the forest marks differentiation within a vast landscape, the sea suggests continuity and affords conveyance within, even between, romance narratives. The forest is more appropriate to Cymbeline, the sea to Pericles or The Tempest; The Winter’s Tale to both.21 It is the juxtaposition or even the collision of these two metaphors, however, that is perhaps most appropriate to a study of romance, a genre that never fails to unsettle, to evade, to dilate categories. Romances often adapt to whatever terrain is most appropriate to their larger narrative purposes. They embrace incongruities and contradictions within their capacious, fluid boundaries. Taken together, the essays presented here provide new ways to relate early modern prose fiction and dramatic romance to one another and to Shakespeare’s late works. With their attention to several different fields—Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays, drama and prose, Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance texts—they re-stage for our contemporary understanding a sense of the vital cross-currents that flowed through the sea-forest of early modern romance.

NOTES 1. The Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 lists fourteen editions from 1598 to 1639, STC 18230–18241. The editor of Mucedorus, Arvin H. Jupin, adds two later ones of 1663 and 1668, at page 9. In discussing references to it as the most popular of Elizabethan plays, he adds, “if Mucedorus

Introduction 15

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

was not the most popular play of its time, it was clearly one of the more successful and durable” (30). Taking Jane Austen’s indirect style as his example, Moretti describes an abstract “diversity spectrum” that encompasses everything from the free indirect style of Zola’s working class characters to the deeply subjective style of Joyce’s Ulysses (77). The afterword by Alberto Piazza calls for more discussion of cultural selection. Paul Alpers describes a mode, such as pastoral or romance, as larger and more inclusive than a genre and defi nes it as “the literary manifestation, in a given work, not of its attitudes in a loose sense, but of its assumptions about man’s nature and situation.” He sees “the implicit view of the hero’s or speaker’s or reader’s strength relative to his or her world” as key to the understanding of mode (50). Barbara Fuchs points out that “in the narrow literary sense,” the narrative poems written in vernacular or romance languages that emerged in twelfth-century France constitute the genre of romance (4). Expanding on an earlier essay published in New Literary History in 1975, Jameson is responding primarily to Frye’s discussion of romance in his Anatomy of Criticism. Parker’s work also draws on Jameson’s earlier essay. Cooper defi nes meme as a “romance motif,” or “unit within literature . . . that . . . begins to take on a life of its own. . . . [It is] an idea that behaves like a gene in its ability to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt, mutate, and therefore survive in different forms and cultures” (3). At page 432, note 8, she explains that “The idea of the meme was put forward by Richard Dawkins in The Selfi sh Gene (Oxford, 1976), pp. 206–7, and has been extensively developed by Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999).” Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books 205; STC 13041–13048; STC 6400; STC 90–91. See Salingar (298–305), Mowat, Dramaturgy (129–32), and especially Gillespie’s entries on Bandello, Belleforest, Boccaccio, Cinthio, Fiorentino, Gl’Ingannati, Greek Romance, Lodge, Montemayor, and Painter in Shakespeare’s Books. Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) 403; Dowden, Shakspere (1877) 56; Mowat, “‘What’s’” 130. McMullan (69–78), provides a helpful survey and detailed bibliography of these and other works in his footnotes, although he fi nds each term inadequate and has the larger purpose of interrogating the concept of “late writing.” The list of critics in this paragraph is intended to be representative rather than inclusive. Ros King makes a related claim about the mixed modes of English tragicomedies that preceded Guarini in her essay, “In Lieu of Democracy.” Thorne remarks, “Given the large degree of overlap between their narrative vocabularies, ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’ are probably best treated as complementary ‘frames’ through which to view the late plays” (6). McDonald fi nds romance “the most frequently applicable, pointing as it does to the correspondences between narrative structures and stylistic predilections I shall be considering. But at certain points ‘tragicomedy’ casts valuable light on a critical problem” (25). Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, H3798–H3800. Roberts notes that the British Library Public Catalogue lists this as the fi rst use of the term romance. (This information comes from an unpublished essay that Sasha Roberts wrote for our seminar

16

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne on “Women and Romance” at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2004.) New CBEL 2.804. We are very grateful to Fernando Cioni for doing searches for “dramatic romance” on ECCO and Literature Online that located this play and led to further research. This figure was arrived at through a search for “dramatic romance” on Hamnet, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s search engine, combined with a search on Literature Online, and adjusted for any overlaps. Although this research is not complete, it indicates the prevalence of the term. A few of the twentytwo plays use the term “melo dramatic romance.” In a chapter called “The Development of Dramatic Romance: 1570–1610,” Christopher Cobb explores the presentational and mimetic staging techniques of dramatic romance in his book. Hazlitt begins his discussion of the play (and his book) this way: “Cymbeline is one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s historical plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance, in which the most striking parts of the story are thrown into the form of a dialogue, and the intermediate circumstances are explained by the different speakers, as occasion renders it necessary” (1). Later he adds, “The pathos of Cymbeline is not violent or tragical, but of the most pleasing and amiable kind” (3). Coleridge also differentiated all of Shakespeare’s plays from Greek comedies or tragedies by referring to them as “romantic dramas or dramatic romances”: “They are in the ancient sense neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, but a different genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in degree—romantic dramas, or dramatic romances,” from Coleridge’s notes for Lecture 5 of the 1812 series, in Foakes (50). The following discussion must, of necessity, omit many useful studies. For an excellent bibliography of studies of prose romance up through 1995, see Reid Barbour. Paul Salzman provides a classic survey of early modern prose fiction. A bibliography of this scholarship, of which these names are only representative, is outside the purview of this introduction. Many more could be included. Newcomb cites Womack as her source for this metaphor. Dowden (Shakespere, 1877) makes a similar observation when he says of these four romances, “In all there is a beautiful romantic background of sea or mountain” (56).

WORKS CITED Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Ascham, Roger. “Scholemaster.” Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G. Gregory Smith. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1904. 2. 1–45. Barbour, Reid. “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction.” English Literary Renaissance 25 (1995): 248–76. Blayney, Peter. “The Publication of Playbooks.” A New History of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 383–422. Bruster, Douglas. Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Introduction 17 Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 8 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare Without Women. London: Routledge, 2000. Cobb, Christopher J. The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007. Cohen, Walter. “Eurasian Fiction.” The Global South 1.2 (Fall 2007): 100–19. . “Shakespearean Romance.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. Romances and Poems. 2nd ed. 4 vols. New York: Norton, 2008. 103–17. Collier, John Payne. Shakespeare’s Library. A Collection of the Ancient Novels, Romances, Legends, Poems, and Histories used by Shakespeare. 2 vols. London: Thomas Rodd, 1850. Cook, Ann Jennalie. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576– 1642. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. . “Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention.” New History of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 305–20. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Dowden, Edward. Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. London: Henry S. King, 1875. . Shakspere. London: Macmillan, 1877. Edwards, Philip. “Shakespeare’s Romances: 1900–1957.” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958): 1–18. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Felperin, Howard. Shakespearean Romance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Fleming, Juliet. “The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth.” Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Ed. J. G. Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 158–82. Foakes, R. A. Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection. London: Athlone, 1989. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. . A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965. . Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2004. Gillespie, Stuart. “Shakespeare and Greek Romance: ‘Like an Old Tale Still.’” Shakespeare and the Classics. Eds. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 225–37. . Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources. London: Continuum, 2004. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Hackel, Heidi Brayman. Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hazlitt, William Carew. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. London: Reynell for Hunter, 1817.

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. Shakespeare’s Library; a collection of the plays, romances, novels, poems, and histories employed by Shakespeare in the composition of his works. 2nd ed. London: Reeves and Turner, 1875. Henderson, Diana E., and James Siemon. “Reading Vernacular Literature.” A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 206–22. Henke, Robert. Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997. Howard, Jean. The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Jameson, Frederic. “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.” NLH 7 (1975): 135–63. . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Jonson, Ben. Bartholmew Fair. Ed. G. R. Hibbard. New York: Norton, 2001. Jupin, Arvin H. “Introduction.” Mucedorus: A Contextual Study and ModernSpelling Edition. Ed. Arvin H. Jupin. New York: Garland, 1987. 1–74. Kahn, Coppelia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. King, Ros. “In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England.” Early Modern Tragicomedy. Ed. Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne. Cambridge: Brewer, 2007. 84–100. Kinney, Arthur. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Lesser, Zachery. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Liebler, Naomi, ed. Early Modern Prose Fiction and the Creation of Reading Classes. London: Routledge, 2007. Linton, Joan Pong. Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Lucas, Caroline. Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1989. Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare’s Late Work. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Maslen, R.W. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. McDonald, Russ. Shakespeare’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. McMullan, Gordon. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. McMullan, Gordon, and Jonathan Hope, eds. The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After. London: Routledge, 1992. Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Mowat, Barbara. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977. . “The Theater and Literary Culture.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 213–30.

Introduction 19 . “‘What’s in a Name?’ Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Vol. IV. The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 129–49. Mukherji, Subha, and Raphael Lyne, eds. Early Modern Tragicomedy. Cambridge: Brewer, 2007. Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Ed. George Watson. 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969–1977. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Palfrey, Simon. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. . Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London: Methuen, 1987. Pettet, E. C. Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition. London: Staples, 1949. Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Relihan, Constance. Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender, and Elizabethan Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2004. Relihan, Constance, and Goran Stanivukovic, eds. Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Richards, Jennifer, and James Knowles, eds. Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Ristine, Frank H. English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History. New York: Columbia UP, 1910. Roberts, Sasha. “Questioning Women and Romance.” Paper given at the seminar on “Women and Romance” at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans, April, 2004. Ryan, Kiernan. Shakespeare, The Last Plays. London: Longman, 1999. Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction: 1558–1700: A Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Saunders, Corinne. The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. Cambridge: Brewer, 1993. Saunders, Corinne, ed. A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. Comp. A.W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. 2nd ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer. 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991. Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700. 2nd ed. Comp. Donald Wing. 4 vols. New York : Index Committee of the Modern Language Association of America, 1982–1998. Thorne, Alison, ed. Shakespeare’s Romances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Tyler, Margaret. “To the Reader,” preface to O. de Calahorra, The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood. London: T. East, 1580. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Wells, Stanley. “Shakespeare and Romance.” Later Shakespeare. Stratford-UponAvon Studies 8. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1967. 48–79.

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Womack, Peter. “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 169–87. The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Woodbridge, Linda, ed. Money and the Age of Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: MRTS, 1995. . The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999.

2

The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of Pericles Tales Lori Humphrey Newcomb

That romance elements pervade both Shakespeare’s oeuvre and his larger literary culture has long troubled claims for Shakespeare’s exceptionalism. The late plays must be admitted to employ romance tropes, to reflect the period’s enchantment with romance in all its forms, and even, in several cases, to depend heavily on a single nondramatic romance source—all features that undermine the singularity of Shakespearean genius. Even the labeling of the late plays as “Shakespearean romance” has worked precisely to set this single-author subgenre apart from its era’s taste for nondramatic romance.1 In 1877, Edward Dowden dubbed the plays of Shakespeare’s fi nal phase “romances,” but he never used the term romance for their prose sources, which he called “stories” or “tales.”2 In the century since, Dowden’s label has persisted, his nonce category for part of Shakespeare’s “art-life” becoming the name of a genre, a set of “family resemblances . . . key to the generic teleology of the late plays.”3 And, crucial for this volume, over the same period, another branch of Shakespeare criticism, source study, widened the distance between the plays and their known sources in, among other genres, prose romance.4 However, in the case of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, keeping romance distinctly Shakespearean has proven almost impossible, for the play is so inextricably tied to its nondramatic romance intertexts that it has baffled not just source study but even authorial attribution.5 To turn the case around, this essay draws on the Pericles tales—meaning the play and its most immediate verse and prose intertexts—to consider why source study has denied certain kinds of knowledge about the romance lineage of Shakespearean drama and to bring that knowledge more appreciatively to light. Over the last generation, feminist scholarship has explored how romance challenges traditional literary values with its loose formal structure, its apparent freedom from political or didactic purpose, its proliferation of related tales across space and time and vernaculars, and its allegedly addictive grip on readers. Romance, memorably characterized by Patricia Parker as both “inescapable” and “dilatory,” opens up impulses that patriarchal literary cultures fi nd feminine (Inescapable). The dilatory romance fails to be contained to a genre, or even to Northrop Frye’s “romance mode,” and

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becomes “romance strategies” (Fuchs 9) or “memes” (Cooper). Romance tales are not contained within the corpus of single authors, but wash into what Peter Womack identifies as the “sea of stories” of the era, its “narrative reservoir for poets and playwrights alike.”6 In England especially, romance was literature’s siren, the eroticized symbol of all that the belated humanist rationales for literature had to deny. Its very adaptability, its feminine wiles, engendered suspicion. The feminization of romance, then, has been a primary obstacle to investigating the deep connections between Shakespeare’s late plays and nondramatic romances, especially contemporary English romances. The gender trouble that romance intertextuality presents for Shakespearean source study can be further specified as reproductive by considering the Pericles tales. Shakespearean source study and Shakespearean exceptionalism more broadly were challenged by the discovery that three intertexts appeared more or less simultaneously in Jacobean England: a reprint of an Elizabethan prose romance by Laurence Twyne, a stage play credited to Shakespeare, and another prose romance by George Wilkins. Source study’s central tenet is that earlier, lesser sources feed into later and greater plays. “Source” metaphorically positions Shakespeare’s plays as superior to their allegedly immature or feminine prose counterparts, elevating Shakespearean virtù. These gender binaries and generational priorities remain unquestioned subtexts in most source studies. (Indeed, the tenets of “source study” have been investigated less than other editorial assumptions about collaboration, revision, and dramatic publication.) This patriarchal critical model falters, however, when it encounters the late plays. The plays must be distinguished from their feminized romance sources as masculine Shakespearean romances. However, these plays can hardly be masterworks if they participate in feminized romance strategies of adaptability, as Pericles so clearly does with its prose intertexts. This essay therefore attempts to treat the Pericles intertexts apart from the source model; it claims romance as a resource shared in varied patterns across the boundaries of medium and genre. The re-patterning of the Pericles story allowed a number of medieval and early modern writers to experiment with story making and its gender encoding, whether on an all-male stage or in a virtually all-male press. Helen Hackett has called our attention to the late plays’ concern with the “generation of story,” gendered through male and female characters’ struggles for narrative control over their stage worlds and their audiences (“‘Gracious’”). She notes that male voices in the late plays dismiss women’s generation of story in favor of their own controlled plots, or “issue,” which ultimately repress women’s capacity to produce familial and narrative generations. Her view that male-voiced dramaturgy denies the generative power of women resonates with my own argument that the patriarchal logic of source study denies the productive power of the feminized nondramatic romance. I would emphasize, however, that the late plays do

The Sources of Romance 23 intermittently allow female voices to generate story, and in doing so, they credit feminized romance as a body of invention both within the narration and in their meta-theatrical address to audiences. Thus the plays’ romance intertextuality actively experiments with gender and lineage, even if their endings tend to foreclose such experimentation. We can recover more of the gender experimentation of the late plays if we discard the notion of the source, if we stop insisting that Shakespearean romance master its romance intertexts. The converging gender problematics of romance and source are uniquely evident in the quick succession of Pericles texts: Pericles, Prince of Tyre (entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1608 and first printed 1609); Twyne’s Patterne of Painefull Adventures (entered 1576; extant in printings of ca. 1584 and 1607); and Wilkins’s Painfull Adventures of Pericles (1608). Even trickier is the relationship between the play and the 1608 Wilkins book, whose title page reads in part, “The true history of the play of Pericles as it was lately presented.” Despite this reportorial claim, the Wilkins book also contains material that the play appears to recast, thus serving as a potential source as well as a prose adaptation of the play. Peculiar contortions were required to explain how the Wilkins book could be both a source of the play and an adaptation of it, especially once Wilkins was confirmed as the probable co-author of a play only partly attributable to Shakespeare. Dowden had to execute these maneuvers while still claiming the play as one of the uniquely Shakespearean romances, or at least a “preliminary sketch” of them: It must be mentioned that in 1608, presumably after the production of the play, appeared a novel by George Wilkins called the Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which once more tells the story in prose, the version in this instance being in great measure founded upon the play, of which Wilkins himself is conjectured to have been one of the authors. (Shakspere: A Critical Study 144, 145) Dowden figures an ongoing scholarly discomfort with the overlapping of Pericles tales that I fi nd symptomatic of larger anxieties about the dependence of Shakespearean romance on prose romance “sources,” and larger contradictions in the familial coding of source study. Indeed, over the last century editors and critics have portrayed the Pericles tales as such a disturbed lineage, such a misbegotten textual creation, that they seem to echo the reproductive taboos that the Pericles tales, and others of Shakespeare’s late plays, themselves attempt to repress. Romance intertextuality, with its endlessly complex ties among texts, exceeds the simple patrilinear logic that the source model tries to impose. A familial agenda was of course crucial to Dowden’s grouping of the late plays: “the Romances have in common the incidents of reunions, reconciliations, and the recovery of lost children.”7 Dowden downplayed the idiosyncrasy of a romance set whose structurally necessary “reunions” and “reconciliations” reunited

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not marriageable couples but fathers and daughters. His model, then, has mapped onto our model for romance intertextuality an awkward family narrative. In criticism’s intertextual imaginary, Shakespeare fathers his sources, and the feminized prose romance sources disappear. Where are the mothers in Shakespearean intertextuality? If paternal reconciliation is an allegory of intertextuality, which texts are fathers and which are progeny? Can we locate in the Pericles tales another intertextual imaginary, a less patriarchal pattern for using romance resources?

THE SOURCES OF ROMANCE Source study assumes a gendered, generational, and textual norm: it traces single, fi xed lines of descent from a feminized source via the presumed paternity of Shakespeare’s genius to the legitimate inheritance of a play. The various sources of the late plays are feminized both structurally by the source model, and generically when they are romances. Thus source study has strained to explain how Shakespeare, inseminating such degenerate romance sources, managed to yield dramatic “issue” that can be acknowledged as legitimate, viable, and powerful.8 Among the late plays, the most robust instance of issue is The Winter’s Tale; by comparison, the textual and intertextual descent of Pericles attracts charges of illegitimacy, misbegetting, and even incest. The line from source to issue is clear in The Winter’s Tale (performed 1610; published 1623) because so much of the play adapts and supersedes a single but allegedly inferior source, Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto (1585?; frequently reprinted).9 Shakespeare’s word-for-word echoing of Greene’s oracle even allows the “source” to be identified as a pre-1607 reprint of Greene, preserving a distinct gap between the publication dates of prose source and dramatic apotheosis. The most vexed case is that of Pericles, which is generally classified as the fi rst of the Shakespearean romances but which is now by consensus attributed to Shakespeare and Wilkins as co-authors.10 (In this chapter, I refer to Pericles, Prince of Tyre as “the play” rather than “Shakespeare’s play.”11) The difficulty of tracing issue in this case is evident simply in the converging dates and titles of the apparently unauthorized and certainly ill-prepared 1609 quarto and the slightly earlier publication of the novellas by Twyne and Wilkins. (It is compounded by the absence of the play from the First Folio of 1623, which might have furnished a more authoritative text.) Critics are frankly uncertain whether Twyne wholly precedes the play, whether the play wholly precedes Wilkins, and whether Wilkins is the offspring of Twyne and the play or the play is the offspring of Twyne and Wilkins. And although it is now clear that the play was jointly authored, publishing practice muddies even that: Roger Warren puts the name of George Wilkins on the title page of his 2003 Oxford edition of the play, but Oxford omits the name of Wilkins from the cover.

The Sources of Romance 25 Between the covers, both in Warren’s single edition for Oxford (2003) and in Taylor’s contribution to Oxford’s Complete Works (fi rst edition, 1986), the text of Pericles includes even more Wilkins than the 1609 quarto. Taylor and Warren each embrace what Victorian critics might have deemed bastardization. They offer distinct justifications for the insertion of stage directions and even the incorporation of lengthy passages from the Wilkins novella where the quarto text appears incoherent. That practice was anticipated by stage directors who started using passages from Wilkins to fi ll the plays’ dramaturgical gaps and editors who drew line readings from Wilkins to emend the cruxes in the quarto. Taylor in particular extends the practice to controversial new lengths, drawing prose passages from the novella and setting them as blank verse to fi ll out the brothel scene, both Governor Lysimachus’s seduction attempt and the lost daughter Marina’s rebuttal. Warren argues his similar decisions on dramaturgical grounds that recall Dowden’s ordinal contortions: the extremes of passion in the interpolated material “come from Wilkins’s account of the scene, but they are absolutely characteristic of Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of such extreme contrasts in his late plays” (52). Warren frankly justifies re-inserting the Wilkins version of this scene because the quarto’s rendering “has been emasculated” (80). In the gendered logic of source study, the problems of ordering, attributing, and editing the Pericles tales suggest incest, although critics stop just short of invoking that taboo. Indeed, Oxford’s model of authorship seems to drive further into the incestuous tangle that source study suppresses: it replaces Shakespeare as playwright as the father of his sources with the even less comfortable model of Wilkins fathering Shakespeareand-Wilkins. The critical imaginary here echoes the “familial overcloseness, real or imagined” that haunts so many of the late plays (Frey 114). The Pericles family of texts reveals how source studies judges the close intertextual ties (so characteristic of romance) morally unacceptable: if the source material fails to yield its claim, or if the play’s text is considered “bad,” the lineage becomes unthinkable. The threat can be mitigated, and the openness of romance intertextuality embraced, if we replace the one-directional “source” model with a reversible model of “pattern,” in which shared resources are adapted to material forms of publication and performance without cleaving to a single scale of gendered and generational value. As I will adduce from Twyne’s title, the early modern use of the word “pattern” signals a process of imitation without insisting that any one text is the original. I argue that rather than a patrilineal model of source descent, we should study patterns of resource use. “Pattern” helps us imagine not the lineage of source and issue, but the complex circulation of textual resources among authors, media, and genres. Without legitimacy and inheritance at stake, we can better appreciate how textual imitation may be gendered, especially in the romance appropriations that the Pericles tales exemplify.

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The Pericles stories trouble another of the “assumed linear patterns” (Mowat, “Theater” 215) informing the source model: the circulation of material textuality. The source has been assumed to be a printed book at Shakespeare’s elbow, the authorial text to be a manuscript generated by his blotless pen, and the printed text to be the imperfect rendering of those fairest of foul papers. In its relationship to printed books as in its relationship to prior models, Shakespearean authorship is again exceptional: print, normally imagined as fi xed and authoritative, becomes imperfect, even feminine, when Shakespeare’s reading of printed books is compared to the lost but transcendent product of his pen. Again, the set of Pericles tales defeats ordinal logic. As Barbara Mowat pointed out in a brief but crucial 1997 essay, Pericles “in its variety of physical embodiments and in the mysteries clouding [their] relationships” is an “extreme” case for any theory of textual circulation (220). That extremity informs the “dependence of early modern theater on literary culture, on the book as source of the play’s dramatic fiction,” that Pericles reveals “perhaps more obtrusively than any other play of the period” (“Theater” 220). Pericles is uniquely disconcerting in its dependence on prose sources because the prose texts obtrude into a Shakespearean play text that ought to supersede them. In another perceptive article on Pericles, Mowat argues that the play aggressively foregrounds its dependence, not on one source, but on multiple sources: Gower as Chorus is a singular figure, but he tells the audience that his story is “what mine Authors saye” in the plural. Again invoking the metaphor of pattern, Mowat suggests that this play is characteristically Shakespearean in its “pattern of construction” out of multiple stories: several from a common lineage—the set of Apollonius/Pericles stories—and some that are far-flung—the Marian intertexts that Mowat compellingly identifies in the handling of Thaisa. Pericles, according to Mowat, is patterned with a “dramaturgical audacity” that is uniquely and confidently synthetic (“‘I tell’” 17). Of course Pericles is not unique in this plural intertextuality. Renaissance imitatio was omnivorous, and romance especially so. As Mowat points out, Gower too refers to consolidating multiple authorities. I would argue that in Twyne’s title, The Patterne of Painefull Aduentures, the word Pattern has a similar force of composite authority. In that case, the play’s composite authority is itself derived from the tradition that conjoins the Pericles stories. But of course composite authority runs counter to the claims for surpassing genius that source study underpins: as any Victorian explorer knows, the sport of source hunting lies in finding a singular source.12 Nor should we assume that this authorial consciousness of pattern is Shakespeare’s alone, given the play’s other form of composite authority: collaborative authorship that again is merely an extension of the collaboration critics now see elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work.13 Thus another problem with the Pericles tales is that Shakespeare’s contributions can never be isolated, for instead of authorial, ordinal improvement of a single text, we have an unusually vexed case of asynchronous collaboration, of texts gone plural, of begetters begotten.

The Sources of Romance 27 Shakespearean source study, then, is willed re-ordering: it runs counter to the usual Western yoking of original force with chronological primacy, as in notions of a creator, maker, inventor, or originator, or even of the classical “authority” (from whom the modern “author” was wrested with difficulty). Instead, the singular source, obscure but authentic, confi rms the power of a mightier stream precisely by the distance and the difference between the trickling spring and the fi nal outpouring. “Source” stories by defi nition must precede the plays chronologically. This play makes the point unusually explicit when Gower speaks of singing “a song that old was sung” (Pericles 1.1.0). Instead of vaunting the elder as origin, the Shakespearean source model grants sole ownership to the successor. It thus projects onto intellectual property a version of the patrilineal inheritance practices then being consolidated in early modern England: any legitimate male heir becomes sole possessor and rightful user of inherited goods, eliminating any female claims (Spring 18–19). Like patrilineal inheritance, which suppresses women’s literal fertility to men’s capacity to “give birth to the body social,” the source model gives the master poet sole capacity to embody the literary (Murray 129). The property model rests, or rather founders, on its patriarchal logic, for even as such family stories invalidate certain elders’ claims to economic or cultural goods as merely maternal and rule in favor of a male heir, that younger male claimant still holds his inheritance only via the maternal figure’s guarantee of his legitimacy. So, too, the feminized romance source licenses a play’s cultural authority through its own submission. When the Wilkins novella fails to submit its priority to Pericles, this insufficiently feminized source threatens the cultural authority of the play that should be Shakespearean. The perverse re-ordering of source study worsens with the late plays, most of them dependent not just on sources but indeed on nondramatic romance sources. Nigel Smith comments, apparently with tongue in cheek, that studies of romance seem obsessively concerned by their readerships, as if the texts themselves were insufficiently interesting. In no other genre is the matter of identification between characters and readers so prominent in the intention of the author and in the assumptions of the readership. (234) Smith continues this unique “concern with reader response . . . is why prose romance should not be confused with dramatic romance in the period, for while the two forms are related, their production and reception are not” (234). Yet drama critics concur that a signal quality of the late plays is their interest in audience identification: spectacle, tears, wonder, and acceptance of dramatic illusion that both underline and distance spectator from play. The meta-theatricality playfully contracted in the epilogue of Midsummer Night’s Dream—“do not reprehend/If you pardon, we will mend”— becomes imperative to the action in The Winter’s Tale—“It is required/You

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do awake your faith.”14 Smith’s remark suppresses its primary referent, gender: pretending obliviousness to questions of female readership, it continues the work of deflecting Shakespeare’s late plays from being “confused” with the feminized prose romance. The late plays’ prose sources are triply feminized: the feminized romance genre that transfers feminized affect into a feminized dramatic subgenre. Although prose romance and romance intertextuality do bring gender trouble to Shakespeare’s late plays, some feminist critics have argued that the plays are strengthened by this formative engagement with the disputed gendering of stories. I use the term gendering rather than feminizing deliberately. As I argued elsewhere, the traditional feminizing of romance may have some basis in cultural practices, but its ideological drive is nastier. Of course women characters were essential to peopling romance, women writers to producing it, and women readers to consuming it. However, early modern male writers repeatedly denied men’s share in romance reading and in romance concerns. It is increasingly apparent that gender interchange is essential to romance, and not just because its love plots are generally heterosexual. Romance involves male and female protagonists in its classical and medieval exempla, and it was known to be consumed by both men and women in these early oral and manuscript contexts as well as once it reached print. As for early modern England, while powerful recent work by Hackett (Women), Lorna Hutson, Derek Alwes, and Goran Stanivukovic has emphasized male writers’ double-coding romance’s gendered address, foregrounding heterosexual dynamics to conduct homosocial business, that dynamic does not rule out women’s substantial imprint on romance as agents, audiences, and, of course authors. Though surprisingly few English women were sole authors of romance, many featured in disseminating male-authored romances as translators, titular dedicatees, addressees, and continuation writers, suggesting that women did hold a certain authority in the genre (see Newcomb, “Prose”; Lamb, Gender). To return to Smith’s remark: the romances of early modern England did their cultural work by insisting on their appeal to a readership of mixed gender. Romance then, negotiates form and audience between genders more than any other mode, and this quality may have been invaluable to the peculiar self-reflexivity of the late plays in the Shakespeare canon. The prose romance strategy for constructing a dual-gendered audience informed Shakespearean dramatic romance strategies for shaping liminal audience experiences. “Wonder” was the play’s name for affect that arrived unexpectedly. Such affective experience, and such alterations of affect, were hallmarks of prose romance, made strange in plays where experiences and their shapes had been heretofore more regular. And crucially, when the late plays foreground their formal irregularities, they tend at the same time to foreground their debts to romance tales. Mowat (Dramaturgy) showed how wonderful irregularity and romance intertextuality converge in the dramaturgy of Pericles, and of course Hermione’s revival at the end of The Winter’s Tale depends on that convergence. I argued, too, that these formal

The Sources of Romance 29 and intertextual irregularities seem to disrupt gender coding in the performative and even the printed texts of the late plays (Newcomb, “‘If’”). In the case of Pericles, intertextual ties to Gower, Twyne, and Wilkins provoke crises of gender and adaptive cruxes: moments when patriarchal control sways in the narration of events, when textual control resists the “assumed linear patterns” of intertextual succession. These moments of textual disturbance, often centering in stage directions, riddles, and inscriptions set off typographically as bastions of textual certainty, instead reveal more complicated interpersonal and intertextual ties. These cruces do not simply figure romance narrative as feminine, but question the gendered norms that pass narrative “patterns” across genres and media.

THE GENERATION OF STORY I have suggested that in traditional Shakespeare source studies, the narrative source occupies a feminized position in relation to both the author and the stage play. Somehow, the feminized raw material of prose romance is inseminated by male genius to yield a masculinized dramatic romance that has marginal claims on legitimacy. Such gendered struggle becomes central to the late plays’ structure. A narrative origin identified with the feminine, maternal, and oral is asked repeatedly to cede to a masculine, patriarchal, and textual authority. It is then echoed in the source studies tradition. Only the endings gloss over what is clearer in performance: that substantial accommodation is left to the feminine, in the forms of mothers, daughters, and/or goddesses, as story tellers and performers. As many essays in this volume agree, the late plays give the feminine-maternal source a qualified new life as the performative, even when that dynamic is denied by the closing words of the plays’ own heroes. Thus the impetus to create a masculine line of narrative authority for the late plays is not only a critical myth, but also integral to the plays’ structure. Their gender trouble—in which powerful males fi nd the patriarchal isolation of the tragedies threatened by strong female resistance that demands accommodation and next-generation compromise—re-enact the intertextual tension between prose romance “source” and dramatic “issue” that defeats linear succession. Although Shakespeare’s plays never refer to a narrative “source,” their impulse to identify “issue” is explicit in the late plays, especially in The Winter’s Tale. Hackett notes that romances may be obsessively concerned with the “female generation of story” because narration is an activity appropriated by men from women, and by drama from romance, tied to “maternity itself as the source of marvelous narratives” (“‘Gracious’” 37, 35). She concludes that the idea of Shakespeare’s tragicomic romances as maternal in genre is fruitful in so far as maternity is inherently tragicomic, but the tradition

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So, for instance, while the figure of Paulina connects maternity to narrative, the play’s final lines “demand” the story that has been withheld from Leontes, submitting that story to his control and its actors to his masculine pronouns: Good Paulina, Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand and answer to his part Performed in this wide gap of time since first We were dissevered. (5.3.151–55)

Thus struggle between the two genders for narrative control is most explicit in what Hackett spots as the only late play with “a clear and direct source in a single Elizabethan prose romance” (“‘Gracious’” 30). I would argue that it is not just romance or story generating but more specifically adaptation of narrative to drama that stimulates the late plays’ gender anxieties. Indeed, I hope that this gendered struggle over narrative looks more evenly balanced once we credit the late plays’ deep attentiveness to romance intertextuality. These Jacobean stage plays identify the generation of story with women and negotiate with female-generated story up to their fi nal moments. In the case of Pericles and Winter’s Tale at least, they do so more explicitly, perhaps more willingly, than their prose sources, although these themes are also significant in the prose versions. For instance, the statue scene of The Winter’s Tale only partially represses its use of romance resources by figuring Greene’s Pandosto as a dead letter given life. The play’s coup de théâtre, reviving the moribund queen, unleashes, but does not fully justify, the later critical commonplace that Greene’s narrative was moribund (Newcomb, Reading 131). Such a reading assumes that the play was produced solely from the playwright’s imagination without meaningful input from Greene—a view that runs counter to the play’s insistence that legitimate issue must respect both male and female lines. The word “issue” appears eight times in The Winter’s Tale and is systematically redefi ned. In early modern genealogy, “issue” refers to the perpetuation of the line through male heirs, and Leontes’s willingness to expose the “bastard” may be eased by its being a girl. But a broader defi nition of “issue” emerges as husband and wife struggle through the loss and recovery of Perdita. Hermione’s fi nal, authoritative narration reports that “Knowing by Paulina that the Oracle/ Gave hope thou wast in being,” she “preserv’d” herself “to see the issue” (5.3.126–28). Hermione’s phrase not only validates Perdita as a legitimate heir, but also links her recovery to senses of “issue” as the future, or hope, or narrative outcome. Of course, Leontes still wants a male heir, and for all his joy in recovering Perdita, his ambiguous introduction of Florizel as “son unto the king” implies that

The Sources of Romance 31 son-in-law, not daughter, is the issue that demands recovery (5.3.150; see Frey 114; Newcomb, “‘If’”). Although Leontes’s attempted transfer of issue from Perdita to Florizel distances the memory of gestation so visible in Hermione’s pregnancy at the start of the play (see Hackett, “‘Gracious’”), this victory of seminal line over mere container is largely outweighed by the women’s remarkable rescripting of issue. As the theory of the Shakespearean source was spun out in later criticism, it recapitulated Aristotelian reproductive logic. Shakespeare’s genius operates as a seed to the raw material of narrative contained in prose sources and generates a legitimate and masterful play. Although the model for Shakespearean source study appears to be Biblical textual criticism, its rapid emergence in nineteenth-century critical discourse was imperial in vehicle, patriarchal in tenor. The most literal defi nition of source in the Oxford English Dictionary is of a fountain or spring (sense 3). Source does not extend to the foundational sense 4, “The chief or prime cause of something of a non-material or abstract character; the quarter whence something of this kind originates,” until 1640 (a reference to the “spring” of tears in Greene’s prose romance Menaphon suggests the route of its development). When that abstraction does appear, it is quickly accompanied by a patriarchal shift, as sense 4c, “the origin, or original stock, of a person, family, etc.” appears by 1690. By the nineteenth century, the great exploratory era for source study, seeking a literary source is an act of denial (pun intended): the original is not the founding line; the origins are primitive raw material, mere output ready for patriarchal and colonial extraction. The prose romance source is a passive vessel of plot into which genius inserts itself to render the legitimate issue of a Shakespearean play. Thus The Winter’s Tale is redeemed of its heavy reliance on its source, for it revivifies the material “mother” (Hermione) as a purified guarantor of issue: issue is preserved, while it suppresses the femininity of narrative (split from Hermione onto the servant Paulina). As Wells’s still indicative essay from 1967 concludes, the “total effect” of the last plays allows “none of the irresponsibility with which romance literature is often charged”; the romances handle the “extremes of imaginative experience” while confi rming “the total control that Shakespeare maintained over his inherited material” (78–79). More recent, theatrically oriented criticism has shown, however, that this control is not so absolute. On stage, Winter’s Tale and Pericles fascinate because they reveal gendered contestation over story telling, often staged as a battle between feminized performativity and masculinized print-like fi xity (Newcomb, “‘If’”). The romances convey the insistent textuality of sources full of oracles, riddles, inscriptions, and monuments (indeed, such texts often stand in the printed plays without a clear performative function; see Gallagher). Yet they rewrite the tale telling of women equally insistently, converting it to performative spectacle. While men attempt to control verbal narrative, women (or female divinities) perform it in scene-stealing ways, and impress men into dramatic schema. Diana instructs Pericles in 5.1 to

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give “repetition” of his narrative: “Or perform my bidding, or thou liv’st in woe.”15 Performance in her name is necessary for the patriarch to recover wife and daughter. That performative imperative is repeated in Wilkins, but with the agency of the goddess de-emphasized, as I will discuss (also see Bicks 206). Admittedly the pattern in The Winter’s Tale ends with the patriarch getting (and demanding) the last word, and as Hackett and I have pointed out, with narrative “issue” restored in the patriarchal interest (“‘Gracious’”). Still, as that pattern of issue so clearly drives Shakespeare through the late plays, it is notable that the familial story carried across generations is almost always a tale of father and daughter, balancing male- and femalecentered interests on a generic knife’s edge. The temporal gap between older generation and younger, often creating a temporal gap in the stage action, mirrors the plays’ claimed temporal gap between an older prose romance antecedent and an in-the-moment stage adaptation, but in adaptation’s shared world of asynchronous collaboration, the prose narrative and the drama can share a year of publication. The patriarch and his issue, the familiar romance and its innovative performance, are mutually dependent on one another to form a meaningful pattern of meaning and experience, a story of generations that self-consciously generates story as a product of conversation between genders. This pattern need not be seen as an incestuous circle. I would rather see the cross-authorial set of tales as generating a spiral of ever-nuanced meanings.

INTERTEXTUAL INCEST If The Winter’s Tale sets “source” and “issue” in the orthodox relationship of material parent and rightful heir, the “pattern” in Pericles is one of uncertain interbreeding–fittingly enough, of course, in a story that begins in, and never quite escapes the threat of, incest. When Pericles rejects the daughter of Antiochus for having incestuous relations, he also seems to foreclose issue itself: he rejects her “whence an issue I might propagate” (1.2.72). This is a play, then, that must remain anxious about not just whether issue survives, but indeed whether it is lawful. In retelling the classical romance tale of Apollonius and Tyre, his wife, and his daughter (Archibald), Pericles draws on both John Gower’s fourteenthcentury verse Confessio Amantis (Gower appears as an old-fashioned Chorus in this play who invokes the tale’s broad and ancient familiarity) and Twyne’s prose romance narrative (probably derived via a French version from the Gesta Romanorum, in a lineage parallel to Gower’s). The lines of descent for Twyne are troubled enough: its 1576 entrance in the Stationers’ Register seems to produce no immediate edition, the fi rst extant copy can be dated only approximately to 1594, and the 1607 edition shamelessly slots in Twyne’s younger brother Thomas as author. Hoeniger worries

The Sources of Romance 33 about lineage: the 1607 reprint of Twyne “may have been the immediate cause for the play, or the play may have been the immediate cause for it” (Hoeniger xvi, n. 2; Jackson 39). Even worse problems of descent are posed when Wilkins publishes something that we would call a novelization of the play—but in 1608, that is, a year before the quarto. Wilkins claims (on the title page) to offer “the true History of the Play of Pericles” as acted, and his narration breaks the story into scenes much like those of the quarto (Hoeniger xli; Jackson 25–26). At the same time, Wilkins’s tale seems to rely on memorial, not textual, access to the play, fi lled in with narration derived from Twyne, especially in the latter half. Alarmed, Hoeniger concludes that “Rather than ‘the true History of the Play of Pericles’, Wilkins’s novella is a hybrid creation, the product of heterogeneous cross-breeding” (xlii). It is “obviously not a source of Pericles” but based on the stage play or a (muchdebated) ur-Pericles (Hoeniger xli; see Mowat, “Theater”). And yet (and this is the Pericles “problem” that editing has created) Wilkins’s novella, lacking as it may be, has been treated as more than a source. Knowledge of the novellas creates discontent with the 1609 play text, and so postwar stage directors and recent editors have increasingly drawn on Wilkins, as I have mentioned, to fill out the brothel scene—and one critical stage direction that I will discuss below. Hoeniger’s phrase “heterogeneous cross-breeding” denies that the real problem is a lack of heterogeneity: the play and the novella are interbred endogamously, since the play is the offspring of Wilkins and Shakespeare, and the novella the offspring of Wilkins via Twyne and Wilkins and Shakespeare. They are never quite explicit about the sense that Wilkins is both father and son to the play, or rather that the play and Wilkins are in a sibling rather than generational relationship. They simply identify the various texts of the quarto and of Wilkins’s novella as illegitimate issue, and less than healthy births: Wilkins’s memory is “weak” (Hoeniger xli), while Edwards repeatedly accuses the quarto of “feebleness” (196), since it is “not legitimate” (193) but “deficient and corrupt” (194). On occasion a sense of sexual scandal applies to these descriptions of inbreeding: Edwards is editing “a poor text which he can never hope to bring back to its pristine condition” (198). Disgust with the Pericles quarto imputes various kinds of abomination. G. Wilson Knight shudders at “scenes which no one can accept as Shakespeare’s without disquietude,” “queer scenes” whose “form” differs from Shakespeare’s usual “virile growth” (78, 111). Even the broad-minded Roger Warren notes the “more general feebleness” of the quarto text (74).16 The tinge of incest that contaminates critical estimates of Pericles intertextuality has its counterpart in the corrupt play text, where cruxes repeatedly trip on questions of family relationship: the promise of Pericles to leave Marina “unsister’d,” usually emended “unscissored” (3.3.30; see Jackson 220); in the final scene of the play, Pericles’ query “What means the mum?,” usually emended “nun” (5.3.15).17 These are signal instances of what Valerie Wayne calls “the sexual politics of textual transmission”: moments of gender instability that lead compositors and scribes to

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textual instability, and then often communicate that instability intertextually. The sexual/textual cruxes in the Pericles stories seem to originate in its dark heart, in the Latin incest riddle. Some but not all Latin prose manuscripts of the original Pericles tale render one of its riddling assertions, “quaero fratrem meum” (I [Antiochus] seek my brother), with “patrem” (I seek my father); Gower repeats this corruption in his Middle English verse translation and his Latin marginal note.18 Gower transfers such a muddled series of assertions in the riddle that P. Goolden “wonders whether Gower did any more than reproduce the words themselves; whether he penetrated to the darker meaning underneath” (248). Goolden explains that the author of Pericles, “more honest with himself” than Gower, struggles to reconcile the riddle’s various assertions and so alters other clauses to be consistent with this one (249). The riddle’s “subject,” the “I” at the center of its perverse knot, shifts from Antiochus in the “true original Latin form” to his daughter in the play (Goolden 247, n. 3) Somewhere between the “true original” and the play, the focus of concupiscence shifts from father to daughter, but this shift is obscurely produced by multiple agents of textual misdirection. Much “disquietude” over intertextuality in Pericles is displaced onto the quarto’s lapses, skirting the more complex problems of the excessive, nonlinear links among the tales in the set. Edwards ends his introduction with a famous disclaimer: “There is no solution to the problems of Pericles” (41). Jackson echoes him: “the puzzles posed by the Pericles quarto will never be solved to everybody’s satisfaction” (225). These textual scholars begin to sound a little like suitors in Antioch, blind to a solution that is both unthinkable and obvious. The relationship among Twyne, Wilkins, and Shakespeare is not a normal happy intertextual family: for if Twyne is the romance mother, Shakespeare’s Pericles is “father, son and husband mild”; Wilkins is “mother, wife, and yet his child.” (Gower, as the Chorus and as the poet who, according to the Wilkins title page, “presented” the play, more or less stands in for Shakespeare.) Wilkins definitely wrote the novella, which appears to be a child of the play; and perhaps also cowrote the play; the play relies too heavily on Twyne’s novella; the Wilkins novella sometimes “adopts” material from its sibling the play; and scholars and directors “adopt” material to the play from its sibling the Wilkins novella, even though, as all scholars agree, Wilkins wrote the novella surreptitiously, without legitimate access to the play. In sum, the family tree of these painful adventures is one in which the source is not fully prior nor the play’s inheritance a fully distinct next generation. Jackson, after arguing that “collaboration is the key feature of this play” stretching back to its Greek intertexts, tries to press the play into some fi nal lineage: “George Wilkins was the last of a long line of Shakespeare’s helpers. But it was Shakespeare who gave the tale its defi nitive form” (188). Jackson invokes the Aristotelian model with a sentence division that elides the difficulty: Wilkins may have been the last helper, but he is also integral to the tale’s “defi nitive form” in drama, emended or not.

The Sources of Romance 35 The critical desire to fit the Pericles tales into the model of “source” and “issue” leaves critics subconsciously imagining the case as textual incest, but I would suggest that this scandal is one that criticism itself willed into existence. There is nothing inherently blameworthy in the complex links among the play and the two novellas, and indeed no moral force to any intertextual relationship (issues of intellectual property are another matter). In a period when imitation and adaptation were normative, to adapt play to novella, novella to play was an art “lawful as eating” (Winter’s Tale, 5.3.111). If there is a problem with Pericles, directors and editors exacerbate it by using Wilkins as textual supplement on the grounds that Shakespearean dramatic quality demands those passages. When critics try to push away the threat of incestuous contact between Shakespeare and Wilkins, they may simply will its recurrence. In the case of Pericles, the sexual politics of romance intertextuality are rendered more forbidden in degree, and more violent in nature, by modern emendation. There is, fi rst, Taylor’s theory that the “bad” quarto text was a memorial reconstruction by the boy actor playing Lychorida and Marina, a claim that creates very odd familial subtexts. The relative authority of the Gower choruses is explained by the boy apprentice having stolen those pages from the actor playing Gower.19 Edwards long ago stipulated that doubling in the romances is used carefully to head off the threat of incest (139; see Gossett’s Arden 3 edition, 389), but here the doubling of the Marina actor as daughter and nurse, plus the boy actor’s real-life role as an apprentice, enables, at the level of textual transmission, an illegitimate “issuing” of the play text. Much as Pericles greets Marina: “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget” (5.1.195), so could Pericles greet the text stolen by a Marina boy actor. Of course, as Marina has already noted, “If I should tell my history, ’twould seem/ Like lies, disdain’d in the reporting” (118–19). Indeed this quarto has been “disdained” in its allegedly memorial “reporting.” 20 Yet the quarto spelling “hystorie” suggests that the blame for this crime accrues not to the boy actor, but to a woman, an alternate, hysterical Marina. Critics also exacerbate the sexual violence of the intertexts when they turn to Twyne or Wilkins to emend the brothel scene, as I have discussed. Jackson credits Wilkins’s novella for a “handling of the encounter” that “many producers have considered desirable” (231). As Wilkins reports how Lysimachus begins to be “more rough” with Marina, Jackson notes that his threats shift into “fi rst person pronoun,” an immediacy conceivably derived from play dialogue (231). Roger Prior has shown that narrative identification with characters violent against women is characteristic of Wilkins’s individual writings (as individual as they ever were). Furthermore, in his later career as bawd, Wilkins showed a particular fetish for kicking women (one court record charges him with kicking a pregnant woman; Prior 144–46). Warren suggests that this abusiveness might make him “relish” the violence in the Pericles tale (7), that it thus was probably Wilkins who fi rst selected and plotted the tale, and that he thus may have

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“provided Shakespeare with a stimulus for all his late work” (7–8). 21 The appalling, although surely unintended, implication is that Wilkins’s abuse of women was a special “stimulus” to Shakespearean invention. To bring material from Wilkins’s novella into the play cannot merely be a pragmatic solution to an intertextual puzzle if it celebrates gendered violence in either the artists’ or the editors’ choices. Sadly but obviously, Wilkins cannot be held solely responsible for these texts’ violence against women. Charles Nicholl, a biographer of Shakespeare, writes in great disapproval of Wilkins’s brutal record and literary taste, without acknowledging that the pattern recurs in Shakespeare’s single-authored late plays; a similarly violent gesture occurs in Cymbeline. The hero kicks his daughter in Twyne (and in early Latin texts, but not Gower or Wilkins): he “stroke the maiden on the face with his foote, so that shee fell to the ground, and the bloud gushed plentifully out of her cheekes.” In the case of the play, the transmission of violence is probably disrupted only by an accident of textuality. There is no stage direction to accompany Pericles’s “hum, ha!” although he later admits to Marina that he “did push thee back” (5.1.74, 117). Does the play show a push, or a kick as Twyne suggested, or a blow with the hand as Wilkins reports? Recent editors have felt that the context demands an explicit stage direction, albeit in brackets, for dramaturgical reasons: to point up the climactic moment, to bring out the sexual subtext that links this plot to the Antioch episode, to suit the alleged extremity of Shakespearean romance. Warren notes “Editorial directions like ‘pushing her back’ are surely not strong enough” (213). But perhaps the impulse to represent, or to re-insert, a violent act for Pericles here is not entirely regressive. Doing so brings to light, whether the adaptors and editors intend it or not, that Marina is perceived by the patriarch as a threat in the moments before he recognizes her. In Pericles, it must be Marina’s request that her lord “lend ear” that moves him to humming violence within a single verse line; a little later, what draws his admission of violence is clearly her complaint that her “history” will be “disdain’d” (5.1.74, 108–9). Marina’s verbal power, her capacity to generate story, is of course compounded by her youth, her capacity to generate issue. In short, the violent push against the daughter negotiates both sexual and narrative problems of degree that carry intertextual as well as dramaturgical weight. But if Periclean intertextuality implies gender struggle, must that struggle be seen as sexually forbidden? We now accept collaborative authorship as a normal and productive condition of playwriting, reproductive tensions as essential to romance plots (Bicks, Gallagher, Hackett), and romance as a powerful hybrid of tragedy and comedy (Mowat, “‘What’s’”). If we can summon similar insight about the complexly gendered subtext of early modern romance intertextuality, we can better appreciate the extremely complex instance of the Pericles tales. Richard Hillman, in a study of romance intertextuality, defends his sole focus on Gower in a footnote:

The Sources of Romance 37 “Commentators agree that the contribution of Lawrence Twyne’s The Patterne of Painefull Adventures [to the play] was relatively small . . . and I have not found the work interesting from an intertextual perspective” (190, n. 2). Since commentators do not agree, Twyne’s place in the Pericles set is certainly as interesting as any other aspect of this set’s uniquely tangled intertextuality. Isn’t it time to stop pushing it away?

PATTERNS I propose that we take Twyne’s own title, the “Patterne of Painefull Adventures,” as a model of romance intertextuality capable of replacing the source/issue binary. In this reading, “Patterne” most likely refers to the rhetorical practice of imitatio. Alternatively, Twyne’s “pattern” might assert the existence of design despite “pain” and through what appear to be random chances, since the Greek-romance concept of Fortune is the book’s governing trope. This is “pattern” in the modern sense of logic visible only empirically and fleetingly. To modern minds, pattern is abstract, perhaps meaningless and hollow, if its design remains unrevealed to man by a higher power. So Edwards says of Pericles: “there is no pattern, either of providence or of redemption” (30); or, “We have the suggestion of divine love but we never understand its pattern” (31). For Hoeniger, who titles a section of his introduction to the play “Characterization; The Pattern of Pericles’ Adventures,” the only character development of any depth “must be sought in the ‘pattern’—to employ Twine and Wilkins’ term—of Pericles’ experience. . . . The basic rhythm of Pericles’ adventures may be described as one of love, loss, and restoration” (lxxix). If pattern is synonymous with rhythm, Hoeniger’s usage is modern but not nihilist: What matters is the pattern of sudden changes in Pericles’ fortune . . . Twine had portrayed the pattern of these basic experiences merely for the sake of illustrating the whimsical and melodramatic power of the goddess Fortune. But the playwright used the same material for a deeper purpose. (lxxxii) And Marina is merely part of the pattern. She is “part of Pericles’ own personality, a symbol of the fruition of his marriage with Thaisa. She clearly represents. . . . that hope man can find in the younger generation, more especially in his children, of renewal” (lxxxvi). For Hoeniger, the play’s clearest pattern is renewal through issue. However, Twyne never connects the word “pattern” to “Pericles’ fortune.” Since the word appears only in the title and the running title, never in the main text, it seems less an in-text trope for causation and more an intertextual signal of imitatio. 22 Emphasizing the romance intertextuality of this oft-told tale, Twyne promises to retrace a familiar narrative for his

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readers. What is striking about “pattern” in early modern usage is a functional ambiguity. Pattern means a repeated and repeatable ideal, “a model, example, or copy,” says the Oxford English Dictionary. Several Shakespearean examples are glossed, respectively meaning “an original” (sense 1.a), a “model to be imitated . . . a person who or thing which is worthy of copying” (sense 2a), and even “a precedent” to be “appealed or referred to” (sense 7). So “pattern” could mean, to early modern readers and spectators, any original work or act of worth, or the imitation of its example, or the provision of such examples to the future. The early modern usage of pattern is nonordinal; it does not distinguish source from issue. Pattern recognizes that value inheres neither in the fi rst nor last of a series, but in the impulse to repeat, and the pleasure of recognizing such repetition. A pattern can be “taken out,” as Bianca does with the embroidery on Desdemona’s handkerchief, yet it is not a mere pattern (a paper template) except to Bianca; to others the linen’s unique embellishment itself carries and gathers meaning at every appearance. Similarly, when Marina’s needle copies “Nature’s own shape” so that “her art sisters the natural rose” (5.0.7), who is to say which is the original, and which the copy? When Marina “dances as goddess-like to her admired lays” (5.1.4), are we admiring the authorship of goddess or of princess? Or rather, why should their indistinguishability, their refusal to stand as creator and created, or parent and child, be incest, when it could be a rich, meaningful, and variable pattern? So Twyne’s title does not specify whether this story copies a pattern from previous versions of the Apollonius tale, or offers itself as a pattern to other writers, or offers Apollonius as a pattern of endurance for readers to imitate. Pattern confounds the assignment of primacy; it melds content and readership. It thus perfectly captures the way that romance intertextuality defeats issue. Although I have attributed an awareness of intertextuality to all three of these texts, the word “pattern” does not occur in the body of any of them. However, another orthographic variant of pattern echoes in Wilkins’s novella and the play, and carries on the struggle for gender control that is characteristic of romance intertextuality. According to the OED, “pattern,” in the sense of idealized imitation or ideal for imitation, was not, before 1700, distinguished from “patron,” in the sense of an idealized mentor and a mentor in the pursuit of ideals, a similarly reversible notion. (Early modern etymology was as omnivorous as its intertextuality.) Calls to patrons are important in both Shakespeare and Wilkins, in ways that generate the stories and generate their control. Wilkins has the citizens of Tharsus praise Pericles as their “patron and releever” (C2v). Later, in his extended brothel scene, he has Marina summon Diana to aid her defense against Lysimachus at yet another moment of physical contact: “catching her rashly by the hand, as he would have inforced her to his will; she fi rst calling on Diana patronesse of Chastitie to defend her, fell likewise downe at his feete, and besought him but to heare her” (H4v). In this context, Diana is clearly both protector and role model in Marina’s defense of her chastity. The obtrusive

The Sources of Romance 39 feminine ending, -ess, underlines the act of regendering here; if we today derive “patron” from “pater” rather than “pattern,” this patroness is a strongly marked matriarch. The virgin’s calling on Diana as patroness in this scene is a detail unprompted by Twyne, and it neither echoes nor is echoed in the Shakespearean play, whichever comes fi rst. It does of course echo the larger pattern of reference to Diana in both Wilkins’s novella and the play—the Temple of Diana is the site of the denouement of both, for it is there that the lost mother serves as nun. Thus Wilkins’s Marina’s call to Diana is linked by dramatic irony to her lost mother Thaisa, and to Pericles, who learns Diana’s power through the remaining events of the story. That process is narrated hastily by Wilkins but in some detail in the play, where another “patroness” is summoned by the patriarch himself. As Thaisa struggles in childbed, Pericles calls fi rst to the sea-god, and then, for his fi rst time, to a goddess: Lucina, affi liated with Diana and believed to assist women in childbirth (Hart). Pericles calls on “Divinest patroness, and midwife gentle/To those that cry at night” (3.1.11–12).23 His call is apparently unanswered, as is his promised to “bright Diana” to remain “unscissored” (Q has “unsister’d”) until Marina marries (3.3.29, 30). The answer comes in the play’s last act, when Diana instructs Pericles to tell his story before her altar, where her priestess will be revealed as the lost Thaisa. Pericles learns, then, to call on divine women to generate story and to recover living women. Instead of Fortune, an arbitrary woman producing random adventures, the patroness of the last two Pericles tales is Diana, deliberately producing meaning from the cooperation of genders and generation. Thus both texts invoke a female “patroness,” in different contexts, and by differently gendered voices, to maintain a troubled family lineage, to unite fathers with daughters and mothers, to fi nd a pattern of control in disordered events. In both cases, the intervention of goddess figures is necessary for both familial and narrative control. Wilkins merely allows Marina to participate unwittingly in this pattern of female protection (and if editors are right that part of the scene is lost in Q, she may have done so in stage performance as well). The Pericles of the play grasps the point forcefully, repeatedly, and performatively: Diana tells Pericles to recite the narrative of his identity and Marina at her Temple and to the people of Mytilene: Reveal how thou at sea didst lose thy wife. To mourn thy crosses, with thy daughter’s, call And give them repetition to the life. Or perform my bidding, or thou liv’st in woe. (5.1.231–34).

Replies Pericles: “Celestial Dian, goddess argentine/ I will obey thee” (237– 38) and, in scene 3, he makes his obedience explicit, beginning his narration: “Hail Dian! To perform thy just command, I here confess myself / The king

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of Tyre” (5.3.1–3). Although Diana’s “just command” is for Pericles to repeat “to the life,” to re-enact in a lively manner his own griefs and his daughters’, as he does, her verb “call” (5.1.243) must recall the earlier moment when Pericles calls out first to the “god” who “called” the winds “from the deep” (3.1.4) and then to the goddess of those “that cry by night” (3.1.12). Only now has he realized that his call to a goddess has been effectual, a point the stage action renders inarguable. Thus, the Diana/Lucina figure patterns this play much as other goddess figures mediate in several other late romances (Hart). She wields control so deep that she can tell the hero to “perform [her] bidding” in a moment far more dazzling and meta-theatrical than Gower’s lumbering epilogue. In this play Gower literally gets the last word, but Diana performatively enacts the ultimate authority. Gower narrates the story, but Diana has clearly generated it, and Pericles here testifies that it is so. Of course like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Pericles speaks last in the framed tale, gathering the female capacity to generate story: he has a “longing . . . / To hear the rest” (5.3.83–84). The patriarch is in control, but his “longing” still links the maternal state to the generation of story. This call to a female patroness to control the narrative pattern is, then, slightly stronger in the quarto than in the novella, although we cannot trace the direction or agency of differences between quarto and novella. Wilkins gives Diana the most minimal of roles in the novella. The narrator merely mentions that Pericles was activated to “discourse the whole progresse of his life” after “being awake” from the “sweet sleepe” in which Diana visited. Neither Pericles nor the narrator ever again mentions the goddess; the king chooses to take these actions and his subjects support him. Similarly, the recognition scenes of the two texts show that the Pericles of the novella has not learned to respect feminine agency as fully as the Pericles of Q—or rather, he disrespects it violently. Wilkins, as we have seen, makes Pericles brutal in his initial rebuff of Marina; and at the end of the novella, he pushes away the nun who is his wife. When Thaysa standing by, and no longer being able to temper her affections, being assured he was her Lord, shee ranne hastily unto him, imbraced him in her armes, and would have kissed him. Which when Pericles sawe, hee was mooved with disdaine, and thrust her from him, accusing her for lightnes. Pericles’s reversion to abuse of his own wife is unique to Wilkins; no editor suggests bringing it to the play. This final act of violence, like the novella’s “relish” for the blow to Marina and its comparatively cursory treatment of female divinity, demonstrates a suspicion of women’s capacity to read or generate narrative pattern that is virulent, but not unique, to Wilkins’s novella. In Q, on the other hand, the cumulative efforts of our authors (and I would argue, their collaborators in printing and playhouses) create a pattern that just might allow Pericles to reconcile himself to feminine agency.

The Sources of Romance 41 In the fi nal scene of Q, a telling crux, one that may be adaptive but certainly is gendered, could even allow a subtextual communication from Thaisa to Pericles. As the nun faints, but before Cerimon identifies her as “your wife,” Q’s Pericles asks “What means the mum? She dies, help, gentlemen!” (5.3.18, 15). Editors now correct the line to “what means the nun?,” but Pericles’s call for help for a dying “mum” could suggest a deep recall of Thaisa’s troubled shipboard childbed, and perhaps his embodied identification with it, since “mum” was known by the sixteenth century as a diminutive form of mother. “Mum” would then mean Pericles recognized his wife as a mother in a fainting woman. Indeed, this performative stimulus—woman fainting—summons up an intertextual pattern that disputes gender hierarchy: when Pericles calls for aid for Thaisa in the throes of generating issue, the “patroness” he invokes is “Lucina” (3.1.21, 20), the name Twyne gave Thaisa. If Pericles here seems to recognize his wife across a sea of intertexts, “mum” represents a collaborative recognition, an admission to a pattern of meaning beyond the control of either spouse or indeed of any single author. That pattern cannot be controlled by the wife or the patriarch or even the goddess Lucina; it inheres precisely in their interchange. For early modern audiences, “what means the mum?” was more likely to suggest meanings of “mum” surrounding speech and its silencing. The word was used elsewhere by Shakespeare as a command to keep mum. Then, when Thaisa greets Pericles: “You are, you are—O royal Pericles!” (5.3.15) and faints, her recognition of her husband could be visible or audible, in her “refusal to speak, silence” or her “inarticulate sound made with closed lips, usually as an indication of inability or unwillingness to speak” (OED). Thaisa may try to keep a secret or to reveal it. The important thing is that Pericles could, after five acts of secrets and lies, ask the woman, a mother, to explain what she “means”—without kicking her. Of course, in the remainder of the scene, he seeks his explanations from Lord Cerimon, but in this moment he acknowledges that Thaisa, or the intertextual set of Thaisas, can reveal surprising, secret narratives, family histories, issues that complicate issue. Perhaps we too can now hear the patterns of romance intertextuality that this late play almost mums. The set of Pericles tales did not ask early modern audiences to impose textual lineages, to claim textual patrimonies, to isolate singular sources or master authors. It called on early modern audiences to listen carefully for patterns of repetition and difference, to “stand i’th’gaps” and teach themselves “the stages of our story” (4.4.8–9). It invited audiences to draw on romances’ resources to travel an expanding sea of narrative meaning.

NOTES 1. Fuchs (96). For a characteristic example, see Sanders (5–6).

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2. In his much-reprinted Shakspere, written for a series of primers (London: Macmillan, 1877; American editions are dated 1879). The late plays are grouped in his landmark Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, which debuted in 1875, but the term romance is introduced only in the “Preface to the Third Edition” of 1879, where pages ix to xi reprint verbatim pages 56–58 from the primer, including the new table of plays incorporating the label. 3. McMullan (59). On “family resemblance” as a looser defi nition of genre, see Mowat (“‘What’s’” 130). 4. On Dowden’s articulation of the late-play category and the persistence of his terms despite their flaws, see Mowat (“‘What’s’” 131) and McMullan (54). 5. Dowden vacillated about including Pericles among his “romances” on authorial grounds. He calls it a “preliminary sketch” for the romances in his little primer (144) but merely footnotes it as a “Shakespearian fragment” in all editions of Shakspere: A Critical Study (358) and again in 1895 Introduction to Shakspeare. 6. See Womack (172, 170). Womack draws the phrase from Salman Rushdie’s 1991 book for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 7. In his “Preface to the Third Edition” (1879), included in all later reprints of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, x. 8. Alison Thorne notes in her recent collection Shakespeare’s Romances: New Casebooks that modern criticism has struggled merely to claim that these plays are “worthy of serious analysis” (9), that their particularity, coherence, and artistry rise above the presumed triviality, artlessness, and fairy-tale looseness of romance. 9. However, Mowat’s article (“‘I tell’”) uncovers further hybridity in the source material for Winter’s Tale. 10. All recent authorship studies have found that Wilkins is clearly the co-author of the play: see Jackson; Vickers (327); as do recent editions by Gossett (Arden 3), Mowat and Werstine (New Folger), Taylor and Jackson (Oxford Complete), and Warren (Oxford). A few scholars would still argue for a third hand in the authorship, although only Wilkins is granted a double role as both source and co-author. 11. I refer to Wilkins’s and Twyne’s books as “novellas” since the word “novel” (used in most source studies) carries heavier generic baggage. Neither of these is a period term. 12. In 1863, the Royal Geographical Society responded to John Hanning Speke’s telegram claiming that “the Nile is settled”: “we could not positively say that the source of the Nile had been discovered without fuller details.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 7 (3): 109. 13. For a study of Pericles in the larger context of Shakespearean authorship studies, see Vickers. My own sympathy with asynchronous collaboration is no doubt informed by the debt I owe to the pathbreaking scholarship of Barbara Mowat, Mary Ellen Lamb, and Valerie Wayne, which goes far beyond my works cited list. They have been integral collaborators in this essay’s revisions and enormously patient and inspiring. 14. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, eds. Snyder and Curren-Aquino, 5.3.94–95. My subsequent quotations from WT cite this edition. 15. Pericles (5.1.233–34). This and all remaining quotations from the play cite Suzanne Gossett’s 2004 Arden 3 edition of the play. This edition does not carry an authorial attribution in its paratextual material, although Gossett certainly accepts joint authorship. 16. Gossett’s Arden 3 edition of Pericles models a nonjudgemental treatment of co-authorship: “the combined experiences of both authors yield[ed], in

The Sources of Romance 43

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

collaboration, something different from what either wrote alone” (163). She does describe the state of the text as “damaged” by many “hands” and wonders whether its condition would have “disturbed” or “dismayed” its original readers (161, 10, 11). On the crux in Gower, see the notes in Macaulay’s edition of the Confessio, and Goolden. For a psychoanalytic reading of the riddle in the play, see Nevo. In the Confessio, Gower does not mention that he relies on the “prose versions” for the text of the riddle; the source he “avowedly uses,” the verse chronicle of Godfrey of Viterbo, omits the riddle altogether (Goolden 247). Gower, too, is playing a more complicated intertextual game than he can admit. See Taylor, “Transmission.” As Gossett’s edition points out, that would be a serious violation of the terms of apprenticeship (25). It is delicious, but even more suspect, to imagine that the master who played Gower would have been Shakespeare himself (old men were apparently his performative line). For example: “If Marina had been the source of the report, it is highly improbable that the text of one of her own scenes should have such major lacunae” (DelVecchio and Hammond 205.) Similarly, Jackson concludes that Wilkins as a “rough dealer in miseries, travels, travails, and painful adventures deserves our gratitude for starting off Shakespeare’s chimerical masterpiece and ushering in the late romances”; a chimera is, of course, a monstrous offspring (189). The intertextuality that carries Twyne’s trope into Wilkins’s novella extends even into the material practices of authorship and printing. While Wilkins’s title page reads “Painfull Adventures,” with no mention of “pattern,” his running title is “a patterne of the painefull adventures,” echoing Twyne’s title page and running title The patterne of painefull adventures (except for the variant articles). Running titles were added at the printing house, so this repetition suggests that Wilkins or his publisher gave the printer (Nathaniel Butter) a text including not just manuscript pages copied out from Twyne, but marked-up printed pages of Twyne. This is the play’s only reference to Lucina; as it happens, “Lucina” is the wife’s name in Twyne. Wilkins gives Pericles’s cry in the storm only indirectly, but no divinity of any gender is invoked: Pericles was “one while praying to heauen for [Thaisa’s] safe deliverance, an other while suffering for the sorow wherwith he knew his Queene was imburthened, he chid the contrary storme (as if it had been sensible of hearing)” [E4v].

WORKS CITED Alwes, Derek B. Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. Archibald, Elizabeth. Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, Including the Text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English Translation. Cambridge: Brewer, 1991. Bicks, Caroline. “Backsliding at Ephesus: Shakespeare’s Diana and the Churching of Women. Pericles: Critical Essays. Ed. David Skeele. New York: Garland, 2000. 205–27. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Dowden, Edward. Shakspere. Literature Primers. London: Macmillan, 1877. . Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, including “Preface to the Third Edition.” London: Macmillan, 1879. .Introduction to Shakespeare. New York: Appleton, 1895.

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Frey, Charles. “Tragic Structure in The Winter’s Tale: The Affective Dimension.” Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered. Ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1978. 113–24. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2004. Gallagher, Lowell. “‘This seal’d-up Oracle’: Ambivalent Nostalgia in The Winter’s Tale.”Exemplaria 7.2 (1995): 465–98. Goolden, P. “Antiochus’s Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare.” Review of English Studies n.s. 6 (1955): 245–51. Gossett, Suzanne. “‘You not your child well loving’: Text and Family Structure in Pericles.” Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 4. The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 398–64. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. London: Bertellette, 1554. . Complete Works of John Gower, Vol. 3. Ed. G. C. Macaulay. London: Oxford UP, 1901. Hackett, Helen. “‘Gracious Be the Issue’: Maternity and Narrative in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 25–39. . Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hart, F. Elizabeth. “‘Great is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus.” Studies in English Literature 43:2 (2003): 347–74. Hillman, Richard. Intertextuality and Romance in Renaissance Drama. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Jackson, MacD. P. Defi ning Shakespeare—Pericles as Test Case. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Knight, G. Wilson. “The Writing of Pericles.” Pericles: Critical Essays. Ed. David Skeele. New York: Garland, 2000. 78—113. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. . The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. London: Routledge, 2006. McMullan, Gordon. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Mowat, Barbara A. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979. . “‘A local habitation and a name’: Shakespeare’s Text as Construct.” Style 23:3 (1989): 335–51. . “The Theater and Literary Culture.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 213–30. . “‘I tell you what mine Authors saye’: Pericles, Shakespeare, and Imitatio.” Archiv 240 (2003): 42–59. . “‘What’s in a Name?’ Tragicomedy, Comedy, or Late Comedy.” Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Vol. 4: The Poems, Problem Comedies, and Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 129–49. Murray, Mary. “Primogeniture, Patrilineage, and the Displacement of Women.” Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England. Eds. Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A. R. Buck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. 121–36.

The Sources of Romance 45 Nevo, Ruth. “The Perils of Pericles.” The Undiscover’d Country. Ed. B. J. Sokol. London: Free Assoc. P, 1989. 150–78. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. “‘If That Which Is Lost Be Not Found’: Monumental Bodies, Spectacular Bodies in The Winter’s Tale.” Ovid and the Renaissance Body. Ed. Goran Stanivukovic. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 239–59. . “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England.” A Companion to Romance. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 121–39. . “Prose Fiction.” Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Ed. Laura Lungers Knoppers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. . Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Nicholl, Charles. The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street. New York: Viking, 2007. Nicholson, Peter. An Annotated Index to the Commentary on Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989. Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. . Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, and Property. London: Methuen, 1987. Prior, Roger. “The Life of George Wilkins.” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 137– 51. Pettet, E. C. Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition. London: Staples P, 1949. Sanders, Norman. “An Overview of Critical Approaches to the Romances.” Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered. Eds. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978. 1–10. Shakespeare, William. Pericles. Ed. Gary Taylor. The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. 1059–88. . Pericles. Ed. F. D. Hoeniger. London: Routledge, 1962. . Pericles. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. Arden Shakespeare, third series. London: Thomson Learning, 2004. . Pericles. New Folger Library Shakespeare. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square P, 2005. . Pericles, Prince of Tyre. New Cambridge. Eds. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. . Pericles, Prince of Tyre. New Penguin. Ed. Philip Edwards. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. . The Winter’s Tale. New Cambridge. Eds. Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Shakespeare, William and George Wilkins. A Reconstructed Text of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Roger Warren, on the basis of a text prepared by Gary Taylor and MacD. P. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Shakespeare, William [and George Wilkins]. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. London: White and Creede for Henry Gosson, 1609. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Spring, Eileen. Law, Lineage, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993. Stanivukovic, Goran V. “Knights in Armes”: The Homoerotics of the English Renaissance Prose Romances.” Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities 1570–1640. Eds. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003. 171–92. Taylor, Gary. “The Transmission of Pericles.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 80:2 (1986): 193–217.

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Taylor, Gary, and MacD. P. Jackson. “Pericles.” William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. New York: Norton, 1997. 556–92. Thorne, Alison, ed. Shakespeare’s Romances: New Casebooks. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Twyne, Laurence. Patterne of Painefull Adventures. London: Valentine Simmes for Widow Newman, 1594. . The Patterne of paineful Adventures. London: Valentine Sims, 1607. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Wayne, Valerie. “The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission.” Textual Formations and Reformations. Ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998. 179–210. Wells, Stanley. “Shakespeare and Romance.” Later Shakespeare. Stratford-UponAvon Studies 8. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1967. 48–79. Wilkins, George. Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. London: T. P[urfoot] for Nat. Butter, 1608. Womack, Peter. “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29:1 (1999): 169–87.

3

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance Cyrus Mulready

At a crucial moment in his Defense of Poesy, Philip Sidney summons a magical horse. He does so in response to the question: “How then shall we set forth a story which containeth both many places and many times?” Sidney offers: “Again, many things may be told which cannot be showed, if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing. As, for example, I may speak (though I am here) of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calicut; but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet’s horse” (244). Editors of Sidney’s treatise have long noted that “Pacolet’s horse” alludes to a figure from the French romance Valentin et Orson.1 In the story (qtd. here from Henry Watson’s sixteenth-century translation), a dwarfi sh enchanter named Pacolet fashions a magical wooden horse that allows him to travel throughout the world: Euery tyme that he mounted upon the horse for to goo somwhere, he torned the pynne [turned the pin] towarde the place that he wolde go to, and anone he founde him in the place without harme or daunger, for the hors was of suche facyon that he wente throughe the ayre more faster than ony byrde coude flee. . . . (Hystory N4r) In the scene depicted in the following woodcut (Figure 1), two characters are flying over a castle on the back of Pacolet’s magic horse to the wonder of the onlookers below. Sidney’s invocation of this flying wooden horse comes on the heels of his complaint that the English stage is “faulty both in place and time” (243): it disregards the unities associated with Aristotle. But his response also indicates the extent to which the world had changed since the time Sophocles wrote his tragedies, Terence his comedies, and Aristotle his Poetics. In a strange juxtaposition, Sidney brings the expanding world of global exploration, discovery, and commerce into conversation with neoclassical dramatic theory. The figure that he derisively suggests can bridge this gap, that can “represent” such fanciful globetrotting “in action,” is Pacolet’s horse. It is surprising, and clearly ironic, that Sidney, a theorist who rigorously

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Figure 1 Woodcut from The Hystory of the two Valyaunte Brethren Valentyne and Orson. (London, n.d. [1565?]), R4v; by courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

defended classical drama and the stage’s “excelling parts of poesy” (246), would mobilize a character so closely linked to romance. Why, then, would he invoke romance in his discussion of the unities? And why is Sidney, the author of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, so dismissive of romance on the stage? This chapter connects Sidney’s concerns with dramatic unity in Defense to the advent of dramatic romance in the early English theater. Sidney’s call to preserve dramatic unity came as a direct response to the increasing popularity of romance as a stage genre, the “dramatized romances” that Barbara Mowat has recently traced to the earliest years of the commercial theater in England (143). 2 My argument begins with a survey of these early plays and the evidence of their influence on early modern dramatic culture. I then look carefully at Sidney’s objections to the stage and why romance, in particular, presented a challenge to his neoclassical vision of dramatic practice. The ease with which Sidney dismisses the question of representing “many places and many times” belies both the practical and

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 49 theoretical problems dramatic romance created. In translating the elements of romance narrative (travel to foreign lands, feats of magic, fanciful creatures), dramatists stretched the representational capacity of the stage. My argument then turns to the impact of the period’s expanding geography on stage representation. With Sidney’s citation of “Peru and Calicut,” I argue, we see the extravagant geography of an expanding world affecting both the matter and the form of the stage. Finally, I consider how one of the representative plays of the genre, Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, shows the defiance of the popular theater against dictates like those of Sidney. The audience’s taste for extravagant geography and genres prompted playwrights to move beyond the generic and formal restrictions of neoclassical theory. Sidney’s call for dramatic unity, I argue, ultimately proved hopeless against the mounting demand for plays that gave audiences representations of an expanded world. Modern criticism of dramatic romance has been directed almost exclusively at Shakespeare’s “late plays,” which the Victorian critic Edward Dowden fi rst categorized under the rubric of romance. 3 Dowden’s alignment has had remarkable longevity, as critics and editors to this day rely on the term to group together Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles. But it is important to note that Dowden’s criteria for grouping these plays were that he saw them as exceptional in the Shakespearean and early modern dramatic canon. That is, they constituted a category because they did not fit, for Dowden, under the genres established in the fi rst folio; Shakespeare wrote them “in his period of large, serene wisdom” (403). Following Dowden, romance is still largely regarded today as a Shakespearean category.4 With my attention to Sidney and dramatic tradition before Shakespeare, I thus seek an alternative genealogy for the genre of “romance” in early modern drama: one that begins not with Coleridge, Dowden, or even Shakespeare, but with a group of plays from the sixteenth century that attempted to represent England’s broadening horizons.

“THIS PLAY MATTER”: THE EARLY DRAMATIC ROMANCE Despite its limited treatment of the subject, Sidney’s Defense remains one of the most cited and anthologized documents in early English theatrical history and theory. 5 One would be hard pressed to fi nd a treatment of English Renaissance attitudes about genre, dramatic decorum, and unity that does not somehow allude to Sidney. But we also hold on to the notion that Sidney’s condemnation of English drama was, as T. S. Eliot put it, among the “lost causes” of Elizabethan criticism.6 So there remain gaps in our understanding of Sidney’s dramatic criticism and particularly his concerns with unity and genre. While we remember his rejection of “mongrel tragi-comedy” and commentary on the infelicity of mixing

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“hornpipes and funerals” (244), we have lost sight of the relevance of the Defense to early modern dramatic culture in these now well-worn phrases of Sidney’s treatise. We might take Sidney’s citation of Valentine and Orson as a mere turn of his estimable wit: because of the popularity of this romance and numerous allusions in French, “Pacolet’s horse” became “a proverbial equivalent for extraordinary speed” (Dickson 218). Only rarely have critics considered that Sidney was, in fact, a knowledgeable critic of his contemporary dramatic world. His passing reference to Valentine and Orson, a tremendously popular romance in the sixteenth century, gives us some glimpse of that engagement. Sidney’s discourse on drama generally provides descriptions of specific plots, characters, and scenes. It is not surprising, then, that the records of early English stage performances show that Sidney’s allusions should be taken quite literally: the story of Valentine and Orson was indeed adapted for performance several times before the close of the sixteenth century. The Stationers’ Register shows that “An enterlude of Valentyne and Orsson, plaid by hir maiesties Players” was licensed to Thomas Gosson and Raffe Hancock in May 1595, and Henslowe records in his diary that he paid five pounds to Anthony Munday and Richard Hathwaye for “a Boocke called vallentyne & orsen,” in 1598. Finally, in 1600, “A famous history called Valentine and Orsson played by her maiesties Players” was licensed to William White. Printed versions of these plays are lost and we have no record of their performance beyond these entries (Dickson 287–88). The sixteenth-century performance history of the story of Valentine and Orson also dates to before the opening of the commercial theater in London. At coronation festivities in Cheapside for King Edward VI in 1547, an observer reported that: Before the entry of the conduit, stood two persons resembling Valentine and wild Urson, the one clothed with moss and ivy-leaves, having in his hand a great club of yew; the other armed as a knight; and they pronounced their speeches. (Accounts 45–46) Valentine and Orson tells the story of two brothers separated at birth: Valentine, who is raised at court to be a nobleman and chivalrous knight, and Orson, who is snatched away by a wild animal and carried to the woods where he is raised by a bear. Later in the story, Valentine encounters his lost brother and civilizes him with kind and gentle discourse. They become fast friends, Orson is baptized, and the two spend their days battling against the Saracens and pursuing knightly adventures. In the 1547 scene described above, the two actors seem to be representing the moment in the story when savage Orson, clothed in moss and ivy, clashes with the civilized Valentine. Perhaps the “speeches” they “pronounced” showed how the urbane Valentine was able to lead his lost brother out

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 51 of the wilderness. The record of this pageant suggests that even early on, Valentine and Orson was not merely a popular story in print, but one that audiences embraced in dramatic performance. After Edward’s coronation and throughout the century, this romance and others flourished both in print and in performance. Other examples of plays drawn from the annals of romance narrative fi lled the repertoires of English theater companies: stories taken from the cycles of Arthurian legend were typical (The Life [and death] of Arthur, King of England, The Misfortunes of Arthur, Uther Pendragon) as were plays that shared titles with other popular romances (Guy, Earl of Warwick, Huon of Bordeaux, and Orlando Furioso). Bibliographers of drama in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries compiled lists of these titles that have remained largely unrecognized. I have compiled an appendix that gives the titles and dates, when known, for these plays as well as the origins of the stories. Many plays from the 1570s and 1580s were adapted directly from romance. Most of these early plays have been lost, but accounts from the Court’s Revels office preserve the titles of several plays that were most likely dramatic romances, including: Cloridon and Radiamanta (1572), The Red Knight (1576), The Historie of the Solitarie Knight (1577), The Irisshe Knyght (1577), and The Knight of the Burning Rock (1579).7 The last of these, according to records from the Office of the Revels, required the construction of an elaborate, three-dimensional stage “rock” and stage effects that included smoke, an elevating chair, and spirits rising from the stage.8 Was Valentine and Orson among these early plays performed for the court or the public? Although we have no record of a staged production before 1595, a document from the Revels Office suggests the possibility that Valentine and Orson (and Sidney’s magical horse) was a part of the court’s entertainments in the early 1580s. According to a list of payments made by the Office between 1581 and 1582, Elizabeth’s court produced some “v [five] Playes twoe Maskes & one fightinge at Barriers with diuerse Devises” (Feuillerat Table II). Along with payments made to mercers, weavers, and other “artificers,” the report includes wages paid to one John Rose for constructing “a Mount with a Castle vpon the toppe of it a Dragon & a Artificiall Tree” and “a artificiall Lyon & a horse made of wood.” There is no doubt that Valentine and Orson was one of many plays that could have utilized a wooden horse, castle, or dragon (we have no records that show which plays employed these set pieces and stage properties). But this document gives further indication that plays and entertainments fi lled with romance motifs entertained the court audience in the years Sidney formulated and wrote his Defense. Beyond these documents of early performances, we fi nd the influence of dramatic romance in other critics of the stage. Stephen Gosson and George Whetstone both specifically cite the dramatic romance in their

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critiques. In Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), Gosson complains that popular prose and verse romances, such as “ . . . the Aethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce, the Rounde table” have been “throughly ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London” (D5v). In a preface to his 1578 play Promos and Cassandra, George Whetstone describes characteristic English drama in terms similar to Sidney. He maintains that the English playwright of his day, is most vaine, indiscreete, and out of order: he fyrst groundes his worke, on impossibilities: then in three howers ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets Children, makes Children men, men to conquer kingdomes, murder Monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heauen, and fetcheth Diuels from Hel. (A2v) Gosson offers some indication of narratives that fueled theatrical plots, while Whetstone serves as another neoclassically minded writer who was, even before Sidney, discouraged by the lack of “order” in the English theater. By the 1610s the dramatic romance had developed into one of the staple genres of the thriving commercial theater in England. When Thomas Heywood’s Foure Prentises of London, With the Conquest of Jerusalem, popular on stage in the 1590s, fi rst appeared in print in 1615, its author prefaced it with a revealing apology. It comes short of that accuratenesse both in Plot and Stile that these more Censorious dayes with greater curiosity acquire [require], I must thus excuse. That as Playes were then some fifteene or sixteene yeares agoe it was in the fashion. (A2r–v) Although apologetic in his rhetoric, Heywood is also disdainful of his current “more Censorious” time, as might be indicated by his use of “curiosity.” It can mean simply “attention to detail” (“Curiosity” I.1), but according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the word also connotes “care or attention carried to excess or unduly bestowed upon matters of inferior moment” (def. I.4). In this sense of the word, a passage from William Cornwallis’s 1600 essays is remarkably close to Heywood’s passage above: “We of these latter times, full of a nice curiositie, mislike all the performances of our fore-fathers” (P6r). Heywood suggests that the playgoers of this later time are more concerned with verisimilitude or “accurateness” in “plot and stile” (that they are more Sidneian) than those who fi rst watched his play some years ago. A version of the Foure Prentises appeared on stage as early as 1594 when both Henslowe and the Stationers’ Register document a play (now lost) featuring the central character in Heywood’s Foure Prentises: “Godfrey of Bulloigne, with the Conquest of Jerusalem.” The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1609),

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 53 Francis Beaumont’s send-up of The Foure Prentises (and other plays “in the fashion”), shows us that, although “short” of current dramatic standards, by 1615 the romance was well enough established as a theatrical genre to be the subject of rich parody. Furthermore, Heywood, Whetstone, and Gosson all allude to the indecorousness of these plays and their lack of unity, suggesting that these formal transgressions became a hallmark of the genre. Likewise, Ben Jonson, perhaps one of the “Censorious” Heywood alludes to, wryly describes plays like the Foure Prentises in his Magnetic Lady (1632): So, if a child could be born, in a play, and grow up to a man i’the fi rst scene, before he went off the stage: and then after to come forth a squire, and be made a knight: and that knight to travel between the Acts, and do wonders i’the Holy Land, or elsewhere; kill paynims [pagans], wild boars, dun cows, and other monsters. (Act I, Chorus I.15–21)9 For Jonson, the English stage had progressed no further from the outrageous spectacles Sidney catalogued some fifty years before this play. And once again, Jonson’s denunciation of the stage invokes the romance plot for the way that it violates classical representational boundaries. Not only does the plot of the romance require the play to ignore the unities, it also gives the playwright liberty to employ spectacular devices (animals, characters in foreign dress, “monsters”) that compromise the play’s verisimilitude. Though these plays have remained obscure in the study and production history of English drama, they were popular or “fashionable” (to use Heywood’s term) well into the seventeenth century, perhaps for the very reasons that Jonson and others found them so loathsome. Two of earliest dramatic romances that do still exist in print give us a picture of what these plays may have been like: Clyomon and Clamydes (1583) and Common Conditions (1576).10 The anonymous Historie of the two valiant Knights, Syr Clyomon . . . And Clamydes was fi rst published in 1599. The only other information about its early performance history is also on the title page, which informs the reader that the play has “bene sundry times Acted by her Maiesties Players,” suggesting an earlier performance history.11 The play is based on a fourteenth-century French romance, Perceforest, which itself derives from the Alexander cycle of medieval romance. The action of the play begins in Northern Europe when the wandering knight Clyomon (the prince of Denmark) dupes Clamydes (the prince of “Swavia”) out of his title and inheritance. To avenge this dishonor, Clamydes challenges Clyomon to a duel at the court of Alexander. The two knights travel separately to the court in Macedonia, where they are to face off in the king’s annual tournament. Along the way, various dangers waylay each knight: a conniving

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enchanter, a “Forrest of Marvels,” “The Isle of Strange Marshes,” and a deadly serpent. The theatrical performance of Clyomon and Clamydes thus would have translated to the stage many elements from romance narratives: errant knights, heroic battles, magical spectacles, strange lands and people, and an episodic plot. The structuring device of the play’s action is the journey to Alexander’s court in Greece, making travel central to the plot. The play emphasizes this motif of travel with the repetition of words such as “wandring” and “native” that highlight the sense of dislocation inherent to romance. In the play’s opening lines, the weary Clamydes steps foot from the ocean onto a new land. Note that the alliteration in the fi rst line both draws attention to the character’s dislocation and also harkens back to alliterative medieval versification, marking the play from the start as part of an older tradition. As to the wearie wandring wights, whom waltring waves environ No greater joy of joyes may be, then when from out the Ocean They may behold the Altitude of Billowes to abate, For to observe the Longitude of Seas in former rate: And having then the latitude of Sea-roome for to passe, Their joy is greater through the griefe, then erst before it was. (1.1–6)12

Clamydes’s remarks on the joys of passing from sea to land in these opening lines ironically predict continual motion for the characters in the play between land and sea, stasis and travel. Stage directions tell us that both of the title characters are “booted,” a sign that they are travelers and a visual cue to the audience that the scene of the play cannot be static. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson note that “to enter booted is to imply a recently completed journey or one about to be undertaken and by extension to suggest weariness or haste” (35). But this continual fluctuation of the romance plot also causes the characters in the play to mourn their waywardness. After being captured and imprisoned by the enchanter, Bryan Sance Foy, Clamydes laments, “Ah fatall hap, where am I wretch, in what distressed cace,/ Bereft of Tyre, head and sheeld, not knowing in what place/ My body is, ah heavenly gods, was ere such strangenes seene?” (10.872–74). Clamydes’s complaint reminds us of the problem of enactment Sidney feared would plague drama that so frequently changes geographic scenes: “the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived” (243). Members of the audience viewing the wanderings of these knights might fi nd themselves asking similar questions about the staging of the play, “where am I,” “was ere such strangenes seene?” An earlier dramatic romance, Common Conditions (entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1576), shares with Clyomon and Clamydes these frequent shifts in geography. The play portrays the fate of the nobleman

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 55 Galiarbus, who with his two children has been banished from court by the king of Arabia. The three relations are separated in Arabia and travel to Phrygia and Thrace. The play opens with Galiarbus’s daughter, Clarisa, his son, Sedmond, and their servant wandering in a wood, “forst . . . to trace from natiue soyle” (296).13 While in the woods, the sister and brother are separated and Sedmond, Galiarbus’s son, declares: “For now I will betake my selfe a wandryng knight to bee./Into some straunge & forayne land their cumly guise to see” (476–77). In the previous scene, the lost Clarisa and her trickster servant, the eponymous Conditions, had decided to leave Arabia, as well: “For seeing wee are so ny the sea that wee may pas in one day/Cleane ouer the sea to Phrygia” (440–41). Years before Shakespeare’s Pericles, a play that also covers the geography of the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Sea, the play’s scenes move from land to sea and from country to country, touching Arabia, Thrace, and Phrygia. Even from this brief discussion, we can see that Gosson could have had plays such as Clyomon and Clamydes and Common Conditions in mind when he wrote “Sometime you shall see nothing but the aduentures of an amorous knight, passing from countrie to countrie for the loue of his lady, encountring many a terible monster made of broune paper . . .” to which he adds “What learne you by that?” (Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions C6r). In the context of the dramatic tradition I have outlined here, Sidney’s objections to the stage deserve new consideration.14 Although moral apprehensions stoke Gosson’s rejection of stage spectacle, Sidney’s worries are ostensibly artistic or formal. And unlike Gosson, who is skeptical that any good can come from the English stage, Sidney holds high regard for drama. One of Sidney’s central premises in the Defense is that poetry (in all of its forms) is superior to historiography or philosophy in teaching virtue. On this count, he even admits that the romance Amadis of Gaul, though it “wanteth much of a perfect poesy” (227), may teach something to the right audience. Why, then, did Sidney believe these dramatic adaptations of romance to be so deficient? We know from the records of performances from the period that Sidney faced new genres that did not adhere to the classical doctrine of Aristotle, but also a public that wanted to see plays, like Common Conditions or, later, The Foure Prentises of London, plays that adapted “Asia and Afric” into their plots. In turning to romance, the theater capitalized on precisely those features of English drama that Sidney saw as faulty: lack of unity, mixing of genres, representation of outlandish events and “gross absurdities.”

“VERY DEFECTUOUS IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES”: SIDNEY’S UNITIES The fi rst of Sidney’s three objections to the English stage is that it does not follow the model for dramatic practice laid down by Aristotle in the

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Poetics.15 As a result, Sidney writes, plays of his time produce “gross absurdities” (244). He contends “Our tragedies and comedies” observe “rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry” (243). So, while Sidney admires Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc (1561) for “climbing to the height of Seneca’s style” and being “full of notable morality,” he also calls it “very defectuous in the circumstances . . . For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions” and therefore it “might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies” (243). Sidney elaborates on the appropriate “circumstances” for drama by turning to Aristotle: “For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day, there is [in Gorboduc] both many days, and many places, inartificially imagined” (243).16 Sidney’s annoyance with plays that are “inartificially imagined,” conceived without skill or art, recalls both Aristotle and Horace, who believed the poet should artfully construct the plot to meet the demands of the form, not piece the story together incrementally or episodically. Episodic plots, Aristotle says flatly, “are composed by bad poets on their own account” (Gilbert 81). Aristotle advocated for unity in both epic and drama. He argues in the Poetics simply that poetry should provide “one imitation of one thing.” In this comment, Aristotle is specifically addressing plot, which he says, being an imitation of an action, should be concerned with one thing and that a whole, and that the parts of the action should be so put together that if one part is shifted or taken away the whole is deranged and disjoined. (Gilbert 81) Aristotle’s commentary on the unity of plot or action (in chap. 8 of the Poetics) laid the foundation for later theorists to deduce the tripartite rules of unity (action, place, and time). For Aristotle, the labor of the poet involves arranging and compressing, as necessary, the story so as to avoid the disfigurement of plot that Aristotle fears. Sidney therefore criticizes playwrights who do not know that “tragedy is tied to the laws of poesy, and not of history; not bound to follow the story, but having liberty either to feign a quite new matter or to frame the history to the most tragical conveniency” (244). The playwright who rejects these “laws of poesy” is closer to the historian who slavishly ties himself to the chronicling of history than to the poet who has the “liberty” to recreate the story to suit his artistic needs. Sidney’s argument, however, is not grounded entirely on an appeal to the authority of the ancients. He is equally troubled that the “defectuous circumstances” in these plays, their violations of time and place, cannot accommodate “corporal actions” and therefore confound the senses of

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 57 the audience. For Sidney, the movements of the actors’ bodies must coincide with what the audience experiences. The act of translating plot into physical representation thus requires that time and space to be limited. In Sidney’s account, this is rarely the case with English drama, in which even “common reason” reveals gross shortcomings. His satirical rendering of a stage plot highlights, for him, the deficiency of typical English dramatic plots: for ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours’ space: which, how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified. (243) Sidney wittily intends both dominant meanings of “sense”: the physical senses (“how absurd it is in sense”) and cognitive (“even sense may imagine”). As he does throughout this section on drama, Sidney reminds the reader that drama is an enacted form, and for it to be properly mimetic, it must attend to “corporal actions” in ways that other forms of poetry do not. One can see the problems with English drama on this account when he broadens his indictment to include plays beyond Gorboduc, this time detailing violations in representing “place”: But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest, where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived? (243) He goes on to describe once again the kinds of dramatic spectacle one might see on the English stage: in the same play the stage will stand for “a garden,” a rock for a shipwreck, a cave from which a “hideous monster with fi re and smoke” emerges, and fi nally, a battlefield on which “two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers” (243). Such action violates the stricture that the stage should “but represent one place,” but it also taxes the viewer’s credulity when “four swords and bucklers” must stand synecdochically for “two armies.” With this, Sidney concludes his argumentum ad absurdum against drama by emphasizing the discrepancy between the signifying performance and the signified reality. As playwrights attempt to enact more ambitious representations, the actors’ “corporal actions” are incapable of representing the increasingly ambitious demands of the stage. Sidney’s concern that the audience’s “senses” not be offended by implausible representations in dramatic action recalls the Italian critics that he no doubt turned to (and sometimes cites) in formulating his

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arguments.17 Lodovico Castelvetro’s 1571 translation and commentary on the Poetics anticipates Sidney’s emphasis on the role of the audience’s “senses.” It is simply “not possible,” Castelvetro contends, “to make the audience suppose that several days and nights have passed when they have the evidence of their senses that only a few hours have gone by” (Gilbert 310, n.15). Similarly, J. C. Scaliger wrote in 1561, “Since the whole play is represented on the stage in six or eight hours, it is not in accordance with the exact appearance of truth that within that brief space of time a tempest should arise and a shipwreck occur, out of sight of land” (qtd. in Spingarn 96).18 Such drama lacks “the exact appearance of truth” and like Sidney, for whom both “sense” (physical and mental) and classical authority dictate the rules of dramatic unity, Scaliger worries that the audience’s belief will be pressed beyond its limits by the physical impossibilities of drama that represents action over “many places and many times.” The physical limitations that govern the body in dramatic space simply do not allow for these sorts of stories and representations. Sidney thus reflects the arguments of Castelvetro and the other Italian neoclassicists when he suggests that the dramatist use the classical dramatic convention of the reporter, or “Nuntius,” whom he says the playwright should use to report action that cannot be acted on stage (244). Castelvetro also says that the dramatist can range beyond the boundaries of the play’s action through the use of a messenger. But Castelvetro admits that even this practice is not entirely suitable to drama, “because when a messenger or a prophet is introduced, one passes into the field of the epic, and into the narrative method” (Gilbert 355). Castelvetro reminds us of the fundamental generic distinction between drama and narrative in ancient theory. When Sidney later comments on the mixing of tragedy and comedy, he alludes to what must have been a much less radical mixing of genres. Thus, while Sidney the romancer sees no problem in narrating the events that transpire in his Arcadia, Sidney the theorist could not consent to the violations that representing these stories would require. Indeed, perhaps the greatest concern Sidney had with romance’s infi ltration of dramatic genre was its breakdown of the distinction between “reporting” and “representing.”

“ASIA OF THE ONE SIDE, AND AFRIC OF THE OTHER”: THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF DRAMATIC ROMANCE An interesting counterpart to Sidney’s Defense is the prologue to John Lyly’s 1592 play Midas. In it, Lyly apologizes for the mixedness of his play and English drama as a whole: Trafficke and trauell hath wouen the nature of all Nations into ours, and made this land like Arras, full of deuise, which was Broade-cloth,

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 59 full of workemanshippe. Time hath confounded our mindes, our mindes the matter, but all commeth to this passe, that what heretofore hath beene serued in seuerall dishes for a feaste, is now minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole worlde is become an Hodgepodge. (A2r–v) The metaphors Lyly uses here are strong: England has become like a rich but exotic tapestry fabricated from all the nations of the world. According to the OED, arras cloth often depicted “figures and scenes” (def. 1.) That is, like a play or painting, they were representational. Lyly contrasts the “device” of the tapestry with the “workemanshippe” of broad cloth (a “plain-wove” black cloth [“broad cloth”]). The metaphors here not only contrast the foreign (arras derives its name from a town in Artois) with the domestic, the exotic with the plain, but unity with variety. Arras is unlike monochrome broad cloth because it contains designs and often images. Arras requires “device,” a complicated conceit, while broad cloth is simple. He also picks up this contrast of unity and variety with his food metaphors. What Lyly calls a “feast” is a meal served in separate dishes, recalling perhaps the Aristotelian demand that the parts of poetry work together and complement one another, that they should not be mashed together in a “hodge-podge.” What is most remarkable about this apology is that Lyly attributes the changes in dramatic form to the advent of “traffic” (commerce) and travel. The opening of England’s borders to the rest of the world, it seems, necessitates fundamental changes to dramatic practice. While Lyly asks his reader to excuse these fl aws, he also seems to accept them as part of the reality of both his contemporary theatrical culture and the expanding horizons of England. Like Lyly, Sidney responded to the dramatic practice of his time when he urged a stricter adaptation of dramatic rules. Though derived from Aristotle’s ancient poetics, the theory of unity was at least as much a product of the sixteenth century as it was of the ancient world. Lyly further contextualizes for us Sidney’s allusions to the exotic geographies of Africa, Asia, Peru and Calicut (an important trading outlet in the South Indian kingdom of Vijaynagar). These geographic allusions point to the desire among playwrights and poets in the period to turn to romance as a means of “representing” the “many places and many times” of an expanding world. Sidney’s allusion to romance in this discussion of dramatic unity merits further inquiry for its geographic emphasis: “As, for example, I may speak (though I am here) of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calicut; but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet’s horse” (244). At one level, Calicut and Peru simply represent to Sidney and his reader opposite ends of the map: the most remote eastern and western geographic points that Sidney can conjure. Both places were familiar to Europeans by the late sixteenth century. In

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A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553), Richard Eden includes an extensive description of Calicut, a city he introduces with the heading “the most famous market towne of India” (16). Eden’s descriptions highlight the region’s bountiful and exotic commodities. Eden also describes Peru in his 1555 translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe World as the “rychest lande in golde, syluer, perles, precious stones, and spyces, that euer was founde yet to this day” (316).19 What is remarkable about Sidney’s invocation of Peru and Calicut is their very specificity. Sidney chose two geographic areas that, although they had only recently entered into European awareness, had already become important sources of trade, income (particularly for the Spanish and Portuguese), and fiction. The reference to Pacolet’s horse is important because, like many creatures and devices in romances, it presents its reader with a fantasy of unproblematic global travel. 20 According to the story, Pacolet was “full of greate wytte and understondynge, the whiche at the scole of telletee [Toledo] had lerned so muche of the arte of Nygromancye that above al other he was perfyte” (N4r). Pacolet uses his knowledge of magic to build his magical horse “by enchauntemente.” The description of the horse also notes that “in the heade there was artyfycyelly a pynne that was in suche wyse set, that euery tyme that he mounted upon the horse for to goo somwhere, he torned the pynne towarde the place that he wolde go to, and anone he founde him in the place without harme or daunger” (N4r). Pacolet’s horse is contrasted throughout the story to more conventional means of travel, particularly ships (which are featured in several woodcuts in the English edition). Rather than the weeks or months it would take a voyager by land or sea to reach his destination, the horse provides a fantasy of almost instant transport to exotic realms. The magical flying creature, in an era of expanding global exploration and commerce, is the fantastical version of the many merchant ships that reached out to the corners of the world. The “artyfycyelly” placed “pynne” in the horse’s head, which the narrator mentions each time a character mounts the horse for a journey, suggests the compass’s needle or pin, making the connection between the wooden horse and sea travel even more apparent. Sidney seems keenly aware of this connection, as Pacolet’s horse for him bridges the seemingly unimaginable gap between Peru and Calicut.

“YOUR THOUGHTS TO HELPE POORE ART”: DEKKER’S OLD FORTUNATUS AND THE AUDIENCE FOR ROMANCE At the opening of a later dramatic romance, Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1600), the Chorus gives a teasing nod to Sidney’s rejection of romance: And for this smal Circumference must stand, For the imagind Sur-face of much land,

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 61 Of many kingdomes, and since many a mile, Should here be measurd out: our muse intreats, Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, and to allow, That I may serue as Chorus to her scenes, She begs your pardon, for sheele send me foorth, Not when the lawes of Poesy doe call, But as the storie needes. Your gracious eye Giues life to Fortunatus historie. (Prologue 14–24)

By utilizing the classical device of the dramatic chorus, Dekker seems to be putting himself in the theatrical tradition that Sidney calls on the English theater to adapt. But this shift from “the lawes of poesy” (identical to Sidney’s phrase) to “as the storie needes” signals an important departure from the way that Sidney and other neoclassical writers imagined the chorus to function. During the course of Old Fortunatus, the chorus does not merely narrate those moments that defy representation, as Sidney would have it. Rather, the chorus serves the “storie.” By announcing this, Dekker refutes Sidney’s dictate that the dramatist is beholden to the “laws of poesy” and therefore “not bound to follow the story” (244). Further, the chorus positions the “smal Circumference” of the stage and its actors as only a part of the action—it calls on the audience to complete its illusion (“Your thoughts to helpe poore Art”), specifically the many geographic shifts that the play requires. The plot of Dekker’s play does indeed demand frequent intervention from the chorus: characters travel from Turkey to Babylon, from Cyprus to England and back. And as in Valentine and Orson, the characters make these journeys with the help of magic. In this case an enchanted felt “wishing cap” transports its wearer anywhere in the world with a mere thought. Thus, even as Dekker acknowledges Sidney’s neoclassical mandate, he overtly moves away from the tradition of the unities in creating a story about the vagaries of global travel and commerce. In addition to its shifts in geography and magical elements, this kind of engagement with the processes of stage representation and the forms of drama is characteristic of Old Fortunatus as a dramatic romance. Coming, as it does, in the midst of this tradition, the prologue offers further evidence of the significance and pervasiveness the genre had in sixteenth century theatrical culture. “Romance” has almost exclusively been used in dramatic criticism as a category for Shakespearean drama. The origins of that designation in Dowden’s nineteenth-century “mind and art” criticism mark its limitations in describing not only Shakespearean drama, but also the plays that circulated through English playhouses for decades. We see in Sidney’s criticism and the dramatic performances of the time an attempt to accommodate this genre that was not part of the ancient generic taxonomy. Plays such as Old Fortunatus and The Foure Prentises of London also show that playwrights were as actively engaged by questions of representation and genre as the critics.

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The stark contrast between neoclassical theory and early modern dramatic practice illustrates for us an important insight to the formation of new genres in the period. In Defense, Sidney attempts to uphold generic categories, to preserve the difference between epic and tragedy, narrative and enactment, or even historiography and poetry. He argues vehemently for the preservation of Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian rules in dramatic poetry and the genres that those rules support. But he also admits to the power of the poet, who distinguishes himself in his ability to fashion new matter and “forms”: “Only the poet . . . doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature” (216). What Sidney advocates for (particularly in dramatic poetry) is restraint in exercising these abilities. The poet should feign a situation to the most “tragical conveniency,” that is, use his art to create a story that is believable enough to both delight and edify, for Sidney the two ends of all poetry. When he says that actors should “report” rather than “represent” that which cannot be framed within the time and space of the stage (Peru and Calicut), Sidney does not reject outright the attempt to represent exotic geography in drama, but he does require that dramatists use the proper classical conventions. But rather than “report” events, dramatists turned to romance as a solution to the problem of telling stories that take place in both many places and over many times (as Sidney suggests with his citation of “Pacolet’s horse”). As Sidney and Lyly both sensed, England’s expanded horizons were exercising pressure on the matter of the theater in particular plays, as well as on dramatic practice and the very categories of dramatic representation itself.

APPENDIX 1: TABLE SHOWING TITLES AND DATES OF REPRESENTATIVE DRAMATIC ROMANCES The following table collates play titles taken from several sources: Harbage, Greg, Fleay, Ellison, Foakes, Cooper (The English Romance), Hays, and Littleton. I also extensively utilized two electronic resources to identify possible origins for the titles of these plays: Literature Online and the TEAMS Middle English Text archive.21 This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to give a sense of the extent of the tradition of dramatic romance in the period.

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica

Unknown

“The most famous historie of Galiarbus Duke of Arabia” named 1576 on title page—an unknown and possibly apocryphal source

Possibly Medieval English Sir Perceval of Galles

The Irish Knight could possibly be Sir Marhaus from the Arthurian Cycles

Many Middle English romances feature the figure of the solitary knight. See Herzman

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (?) Possibly the same play as Chariclea (1572)

Unknown

Possibly The Siege of Milan, The Sultan of Babylon, or one of the many medieval romances featuring the figure of a Sultan

Perceforest, a French Romance

Chariclea (Theagenes and Chariclea)

Herpetalus the Blue Knight and Perobia

Common Conditions

The Red Knight

The Irish Knight

The History of the Solitary Knight

Queen of Ethiopia

The Knight in the Burning Rock

The Soldan and the Duke of . . .

Clyomon and Clamydes

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Anon.

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Author

1583 (Printed Anon. 1599)

1580

1579

1578

1577

1577

1576

1574

1572

1572

Late medieval French romance by the same title (Caxton printed translation in 1485)

Year

Paris and Vienna

Origin 1572

Title

Titles and Dates of Representative Dramatic Romances

Cloridon and Radiamanta Characters featured in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso

Table 3.1

(continued)

Extant

Harbage/ Schoenbaum (Lost)

Revels (Lost)

Harbage (Lost)

Revels (Lost)

Revels (Lost)

Harbage/ Schoenbaum (Lost)

Extant

Revels (Lost)

Harbage (Lost)

Revels (Lost)

Revels (Lost)

Source/Status

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 63

Siege of Jerusalem—medieval romance (perhaps same as Destruction of Jerusalem, 1584)

Mandeville’s Travels

Popular medieval romance. Early sixteenth-century English translation by John Berners

Many medieval and early modern sources with stories of Godfrey

Titus and Vespasian

Sir John Mandeville

Huon of Bordeaux

I Godfrey of Bulloigne, with the Conquest of Jerusalem (Possibly and earlier version of Heywood’s Four Prentices)

Anon.

Hughes

1594

1593

1592

1592 and 1619

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

1591 (Printed Greene 1594 and 1599)

1589

1594

Ariosto

Orlando Furioso

Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

Unknown

The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune

1587

Palamon and Arcite

Arthurian Legend

Misfortunes of Arthur

Unknown

1584 (records Unknown exist of two separate performances in 1584)

1594

Siege of Jerusalem—medieval romance

Destruction of Jerusalem

1583

2 Godfrey of Bulloigne

Orlando Furioso

continued

Ariodante and Genevora

Table 3.1

(continued)

Henslowe (Lost)

Henslowe

Henslowe and Stationers’ Register 1594 (Lost)

Henslowe (Lost)

Henslowe (Lost)

Harbage (Lost)

Extant

Extant

Extant

Harbage (Lost)

Harbage/ Schoenbaum (Lost)

64 Cyrus Mulready

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Version of The Seven Sages of Rome, a popular medieval Romance

German Romance Fortunatus

The Seven Wise Masters

Old Fortunatus

1600

1600

1599

Middle English Romance, possibly Malory

Tristram de Lyons

Henslowe (Lost)

Harbage (Lost)

Henslowe (Lost)

Extant

Mentioned in 2 Henry IV (Lost)

Henslowe (Lost)

Henslowe (Lost)

Henslowe and Stationers’ Register (Lost)

Dekker

(continued)

Extant

Henslowe (Lost) Chettle, Day, Dekker, and Haughton

Anon.

Unknown

Hathway

1598 (and Anon. sixteen subsequent editions through 1668)

1599

Possibly Sidney’s Arcadia, which also includes a character named Mucedorus

Mucedorus

c. 1597

Possibly Siege of Jerusalem (see 1584 above) or Godfrey of Bulloigne material

Arthurian Legend

Arthur’s Show

1597

Jerusalem

Arthurian Legend

Uther Pendragon

1596

1598

Arthurian Legend (Christopher Middleton wrote 1597 narrative, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England)

Chinon of England

1595, 1598, Anon. 1600

Arthur, the Life (and Arthurian Legend death) of, King of England

Fifteenth-century French romance

continued

Valentine and Orson

Table 3.1

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 65

Unknown

Medieval romance of the same title—Caxton printed English translation in 1489

Unknown

Unknown

Parody of Heywood’s Foure Prentises of London

Richard Johnson romance of the same title

Godfrey of Bulloigne

Guy of Warwick Tradition

The Four Sons of Aymon

Trial of Chivalry, with Cavaliero Dick Bowyer

Sir Giles Goosecap, Knight

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Tom a Lincoln

Four Prentices of London with the Conquest of Jerusalem

Guy, Earl of Warwick

continued

Conquest of the West Indies

Table 3.1

Anon

Robert Shaw (?)

Extant

Harbage (Lost)

Day, Harbage/ HenHaughton, slowe (Lost) Smith

Heywood (?)

Performances recorded in 1618 and 1631 (Printed 1661, but unclear whether this is the same play)

(continued)

Extant Ascribed on title page to “B. J.,” but possibly Day or Dekker

Extant

Extant in MS

Beaumont Extant

Printed 1615 Heywood and 1630

1608-1615

1609

Printed 1606 Anon Extant and 1636 (attributed to Chapman)

1604

1603

1601

66 Cyrus Mulready

Unknown

Multiple sources

Invisible Knight

Seven Champions of Christendom

Arthurian Legend—related to Uther Pendragon (1597) (?)

The Birth of Merlin

List of Printed Plays from Goffe, Careless Shepherdess (1656) (Lost)

Harbage, Cited in Warburton (Lost)

Extant

Mentioned in A Bird in the Hand (1633) (Lost)

Extant Rowley (ascribed on title page to Shakespeare and Rowley)

Unknown

n.d.

Version of Clyomon and Clamydes (?)

Knight of the Golden Shield

Kirke

Unknown

Before 1642 Unknown

1662

Harbage (Lost)

Dekker Revels (Lost) and Ford

Smith

St. George for England

1638

1633

Sir Degare, a middle English romance, features a Fairy Knight, 1624 as does Tom a Lincoln

Fairy Knight

1623

Unknown

continued

Baiting of the Jealous Knight (Fair Foul One)

Table 3.1

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 67

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Margreta de Grazia, Barbara Fuchs, Barbara Mowat, the members of the University of Pennsylvania’s medieval/Renaissance reading group, and this volume’s editors for their thoughtful critiques and suggestions on drafts of this essay.

NOTES 1. For a detailed account of the publication history and popularity of Valentine and Orson, see Dickson (Appendix II) and Cooper’s “The Strange History” (1999) 2. Mowat analyzes these “early dramatic romances” to consider how Shakespeare’s later plays might be “deliberate transformations of very old forms” (143). Mowat thus argues for the importance of these plays in light of the Shakespeare’s plays: “the rewards for examining this admittedly scanty collection of less-than-stellar early dramatized romances are, for the student of Shakespeare’s late plays, considerable” (136). Likewise, Christopher Cobb identifies plays such as Clyomon and Clamydes and Mucedorus as part of an early tradition of “dramatic romance” to show how Shakespeare sought to “reform the staging of romance” (62) in his later plays. In this chapter, I follow the influence of these plays outside of the Shakespearean canon. 3. Margreta de Grazia credits Dowden with the creation of the category of romance and further explores Dowden’s impact on the editorial tradition in Shakespeare Verbatim (25 n. 37, 149 n. 42). Barbara Mowat offers an excellent summary of the editorial practices that led to Dowden’s use of the word “romance” to describe these plays. Gordon McMullan gives a thorough treatment of Dowden’s biographical criticism and its role in the creation of a notion of a Shakespearean “late style.” See also O’Connell and Wells, who both briefly acknowledge an early, non-Shakespearean tradition of dramatic romance, but characteristically emphasize Shakespeare in their treatment of the genre. 4. In her study of romance, Barbara Fuchs, for instance, concludes that “dramatic romance” is a “highly anomalous category” (94). Fuchs agrees that the critical emphasis on the category of Shakespearean romance has “the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the many genres with a claim to being considered English Renaissance romances” (93–94). 5. There is evidence that Sidney’s treatise was known even in its own time. John Florio’s 1591 collection of proverbs and popular phrases, Florios Second Frutes, contains a clear reference to the Defense, referring to plays that are “not right comedies . . . nor right tragedies” (23). Though not published until 1595 (under its alternative title, An Apology for Poetry), Sidney’s treatise circulated in manuscripts as early as 1580, in which form Florio may well have seen it. For a discussion of its composition date and print history, see Duncan-Jones (371). The Defense is now often in collections of essays and documents in theatrical history. See, for example, Pollard. 6. Eliot’s essay remains one of only a few thorough examinations of Sidney’s treatment of drama in the Defense. More recent, Sidney figures in discussions of dramatic genre in Howard and Orgel. 7. For an early twentieth-century study of stage romances played at court, see Ellison.

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 69 8. See Feuillerat (303, 306–8). Astington uses these details from the court records to give a speculative description of the staging of this play (102–3). 9. Jonson also famously denounced audiences for favoring the “mouldy” and “stale” Pericles (1938). 10. Of these, only Common Conditions was printed during this period from 1570– 1585. Clyomon and Clamydes and a third early stage romance, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, were printed in 1599 and 1589, respectively. 11. This seems to set the earliest date of the play at 1583, the year of the founding of the Queen’s company. Editors and theater historians, however, have typically dated the play to the 1570s. See Littleton (30), for a complete discussion of the dating of the play, though she says “the whole matter is admittedly conjectural.” 12. All quotations from Clyomon and Clamydes refer to Littleton’s edition. 13. Parenthetical citations for Common Conditions refer to line numbers in the Elizabethan Club edition. 14. Other critics have noted the correlation between Sidney’s comments on drama and obscure plays such as Clyomon and Clamydes. See Ellison (132– 33), Wells (52–53) and O’Connell (218), though O’Connell dismissively calls these early romances a “brief vogue” (n. 6). 15. Sidney also proffers two other loosely connected objections to English drama: it is indecorous in its mixing of kings and clowns (tragedy and comedy) and its comedies confuse delight with laughter. All citations of the Poetics refer to Gilbert. 16. Although Sidney credits Aristotle with the formulation of the “precept” of unity of time, most scholars agree that Aristotelian prescriptions on unity begin and end with the unity of action, discussed below. In the Poetics, Aristotle does point out that tragedy “attempts to keep within a single revolution of the sun,” but he does not tie this observation to any requirement that the action represented on the stage take place over such a period of time (Gilbert 75). For further discussion, see Spingarn (89–101). 17. For a discussion of Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italian critics of the sixteenth century, see Myrick and Spingarn. 18. It is unclear whether Scaliger is referring to actual plays that were “six or eight hours” long, or if he is suggesting an ideal for the length of the play. Sixteenth-century commentators on the Poetics in Italy had some disagreement about the meaning of Aristotle’s phrase “within a single revolution of the sun.” For further discussion, see Herrick (91). 19. Martyr’s text was widely circulated and translated into several languages— Sidney almost surely would have been familiar with it. 20. Pacolet’s horse is one of many such devices in romance. Ariosto’s Hippogryph is another flying horse in the Orlando Furioso. Fortunatus’s “wishing cap” (discussed further in the chapter) also allows its wearer to quickly travel across vast spaces. 21. I am also grateful for Jonathan Hsy’s help in locating Middle English sources for these plays.

WORKS CITED Accounts of Fifty-Five Royal Processions and Entertainments in the City of London. Ed. John Gough Nichols. London, 1837. Astington, John. English Court Theatre 1558–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

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Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Ed. Michael Hattaway.London: Black, 2000. Common Conditions. Ed. Tucker Brooke. [Elizabethan Club Reprints No. 1.] New Haven: Yale UP, 1915. Cobb, Christopher. The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique. Newark, Del.: U of Delaware P, 2007. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. . “The Strange History of Valentine and Orson.” Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance. Ed. Rosalind Field. Woodbridge, England: Brewer, 1999. 153–68. Cornwallis, William. Essayes. London, 1600. de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1991. Dekker, Thomas. Old Fortunatus. 1600. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. 1. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953. Dessen, Alan C., and Leslie Thomson. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Dickson, Arthur. Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval Romance. New York: Columbia UP, 1929. Dowden, Edward. Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1962. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Introduction and Notes.” Philip Sidney: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Eden, Richard. A Treatise of the New India. 1553. The First Three English Books on America. Ed. Edward Arber. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971. 3–43. Eliot, T. S. “An Apology for the Countess of Pembroke.” The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. 29–44. Ellison, Lee Monroe. The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court. Menasha, WI: Banta-Collegiate, 1917. Feuillerat, Albert, and Great Britain. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama 21. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1963. Fleay, Frederick Gard. A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559–1642. Burt Franklin Bibliography and Reference Series 51. New York: Franklin, 1964. Florio, John. Second Frutes. 1591. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’, 1953. Foakes, R.A., ed. Henslowe’s Diary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2004. Gilbert, Allan H. Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962. Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions Prouing That They Are Not to Be Suffred in a Christian Common Weale, by the Waye Both the Cauils of Thomas Lodge, and the Play of Playes, Written in Their Defence, and Other Obiections of Players Frendes, Are Truely Set Downe and Directlye Aunsweared. London, 1582. Greg, W.W. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. 4 vols. London: Biographical Society, 1970. Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Harbage, Alfred, S. Schoenbaum, and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim. Annals of English Drama, 975–1700 : An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies & C. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1989.

“Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other” 71 Hays, Michael. “A Bibliography of Dramatic Adaptations of Medieval Romances and Renaissance Chivalric Romances First Available in English through 1616.” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 87–109. Herrick, Marvin T. Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965. Herzman, Robert B., Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. “Introduction.” Four Romances of England. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. Heywood, Thomas. The Foure Prentises of London; with, the Conquest of Ierusalem. London, 1615. Howard, Jean. “Shakespeare and Genre.” A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. The Hystory of the two Valyaunte Brethren Valentyne and Orson Sonnes unto the Emperor of Grece. London, n.d. (1565?). Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady. Ed. Peter Happé. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. . “Ode to Himself.” Ben Jonson, vol. 6. Ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. 1938. 492. Littleton, Betty J., ed. Clyomon and Clamydes: A Critical Edition. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Lyly, John. Midas. London, 1592. Martyr, Peter. The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India Conteynyng the Nauigations and Conquestes of the Spanyardes, with the Particular Description of the Moste Ryche and Large Landes and Ilandes Lately Founde in the West Ocean Perteynyng to the Inheritaunce of the Kinges of Spayne. . . . Trans. Richard Eden. London, 1555. McMullan, Gordon. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Mowat, Barbara A. “‘What’s in a Name?’: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Vol. 4. The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Ed. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 129–49. Myrick, Kenneth. Sir Phillip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935; Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. Norton, Thomas, and Thomas Sackville. Gorboduc, or, Ferrex and Porrex. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. London: Arnold, 1970. O’Connell, Michael. “The Experiment of Romance.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy. Ed. Alexander Leggatt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 215–29. Orgel, Stephen. “Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama.” The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. New York: Routledge, 2002. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. Oxford English Dictionary. 1 May 2007. . Pollard, Tanya, ed. Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defense of Poesy. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 212–50. Spingarn, J. E. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1924. Wells, Stanley. “Shakespeare and Romance.” Later Shakespeare. Ed. John R. Brown and Bernard Harris. London: Arnold, 1965. 49–80. Whetstone, George. The Right Excellent and Famous Historye, of Promos and Cassandra : Deuided into Two Commicall Discourses. Old English Drama. Students’ Facsimile Edition. Amersham, England, 1913.

Part II

Page and Stage

4

“A Note Beyond Your Reach” Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama Steve Mentz

Come foorth you witts that vaunt the pompe of speach, And striue to thunder from a Stage-mans throate: View Menaphon a note beyond your reach; Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate: Players auant, you know not to delight, Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Schollers sight. Thomas Brabine, Prefatory verses to Menaphon (Greene, Works 6:31)

I begin with the suggestion that we love Shakespeare too much. Early modern literary criticism’s longstanding institutional and pedagogical affi liations with Elizabethan drama have led us to distort and misread the relationship between drama and prose fiction in this period, especially in the hybrid genre of romance. If, as Douglas Bruster has argued, “Shakespeare . . . is the center from which countless studies of early modern texts and phenomena take their being” (186), one consequence of this drama-centered critical history is a long tradition that separates the theater from prose romance and other products of the printing press.1 Now that scholarship is taking prose fiction and print culture more seriously, it should reconsider the dynamic overlap between these modes of literary presentation. 2 The separation of dramatic and prose romance, and the trivialization of the latter as mere “sources,” misreads both genres: we oversimplify or ignore narrative romance, and idealize and overgeneralize dramatic tragicomedy. Recovering the cultural ambition of Elizabethan writers like Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe can help correct these failings by recognizing in the print publication of their prose works a considered challenge to drama (including their own drama). As Thomas Brabine’s celebratory poem to Greene’s popular romance Menaphon (1589) announces, the scholarly and literary excellence of these texts intended to shame “thunder[ing]” playwrights and expose their dependence on mere players. Against these “drumming

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descants,” printed prose romance positioned itself as an elite academic pursuit, “worth a Schollers sight.” Many writers of Elizabethan prose romance, especially those who were also playwrights, treated this mode of literary expression as distinct from and superior to drama. Most of these writers defi ned this superiority in terms familiar from their humanist educations (see Kinney). Writing for the press, not the stage, carried classical authority and critical bite. Works of fiction and critical comments about fiction by Greene, Nashe, Lodge, and others articulate a running debate between the printed book and the theater in late sixteenth-century England. Self-consciously major works of Elizabethan prose romance like Menaphon and Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) carefully contrasted their output with the public stage. These books were very successful Elizabethan media events—Menaphon and Rosalynde each went through nine editions before 1640—and they presented themselves as a defi nable “brand” of humanist fiction in response to (and perhaps respite from) the stage.3 The argument for the printed page against the stage emerged as a strand of the so-called antitheatrical polemic that saw defenders of literary culture like Sidney and Lodge engage detractors like Gosson and Stubbes. Defending “poetry,” however, was not always the same as defending drama— even if in some cases (including Lodge’s) they overlapped. Attackers and defenders of the theater often shared a mutual veneration of classical learning and university scholarship. Writers like Lodge, Greene, and Nashe defi ned themselves as university humanists who preferred elite to popular venues. (The traditional category “University Wits” seems broadly applicable, but that term and its critics seldom emphasized the tension between stage and page.) Greene proudly emphasized his academic pedigree on the multiple-title pages that proclaimed him “Utriusque Academia in Artibus Magister.”4 His colleague and one-time protégé Nashe provides in his quasicritical works the fullest and most complex articulation of the relationship between humanist literary production, the market for printed books, and the less elite venue of the stage. Nashe’s view of print culture was more complex than Greene’s, but like Greene he disdained the theater even while writing for it. In his fi rst appearance in print, a long prefatory epistle to Menaphon, Nashe mocks then-current dramatic practices and praises by contrast the intellectual community of his alma mater, St. John’s College. Despite his appreciation for Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays (which, perhaps, he in part wrote) and the acting of Ned Allen, Nashe’s career-long defense of the printed book consistently defended print culture against the public stage (see Mentz, “Day Labor”). Nashe may have drawn this point from Greene, and his works along with texts like Greene’s Upstart Crow letter (Groatsworth 80–87) articulate a late Elizabethan attack on the stage too often obscured by our drama-centered scholarly bias. In addition to recovering this sense of the page’s perceived superiority to the stage, this chapter will demonstrate the value for modern criticism of

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reconsidering prose romance by exploring those elements of Lodge’s Rosalynde, one of the most popular prose narratives of the era, that Shakespeare did not use when he dramatized Lodge’s tale in As You Like It (1599). Critical treatments that value Shakespeare’s transformation of Lodge have long dominated this intertextual relationship, but I suggest that a more evenhanded treatment can find new meaning in the elements of Lodge’s romance that were not immediately translatable to the stage. Shakespeare downplayed two significant figures in Lodge’s narrative, the humble servant Adam Spencer and the evil brother Saladyne. Together these figures present a microcosm of prose fiction’s cultural project in late Elizabethan England. By substantially replacing these figures with theatrical standards— Touchstone the clown and melancholy Jaques—As You Like It responds obliquely to the pro-print antitheatricalism of Lodge and Greene. While it seems quixotic to argue against Shakespearean drama even in a critical climate more sympathetic to print than it has been for decades, reconsidering these strains within the Rosalynde–As You Like It relationship can clarify how narrative forms like romance were reconfigured through rival literary media.

DEFENDING POETRY AND ATTACKING THE STAGE When writers of prose fiction entered the debate on stage plays, they distinguished their authorial project through two main features: classical sanction and critical attitude. The ideal author used his classical training to expose vice and produce virtuous behavior. The most familiar statement of this activist program appears in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, which celebrates poetry as an “architektonike . . . knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only” (219). While the art Sidney celebrates was a manuscript practice, not a feature of print culture, his celebration of the active qualities of literary discourse—“to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (217)—emphasizes its critical and creative functions.5 This version of literary culture made things happen in the world, rather than simply representing them on stage. Sidney’s hostility toward “mongrel tragi-comedy” (244), his copious classical citations, and his singling out of authors of classical prose fiction like Xenophon and Heliodorus (216–17) all connect the Defence with the strain of antitheatrical discourse that distinguished humanist prose fiction from drama. Unlike Greene, Nashe, and Lodge, Sidney did not exploit popular print, but his civic-minded humanism shared key features with their attempts to defi ne prose romance as its own literary discourse.6 Another defense of humanist fiction appears in Thomas Lodge’s Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579), which like Sidney’s tract replies to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579). (Sidney’s pamphlet,

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published in two posthumous editions in 1595 under the competing titles The Defence of Poesie and An Apologie for Poetrie, was probably written a few years after Lodge’s. Both Sidney and Lodge wrote in response to Gosson’s pamphlet, which was dedicated to Sidney.) Lodge defends literary culture against Gosson’s attack on the public theater by emphasizing classical content: “Seneca, thoughe a stoike, would haue a poeticall sonne, and, amongst the auncientest, Homer was no les accompted then Humanus deus” (“Defence of Poetry” 64). Gosson’s error, according to Lodge, is fundamentally interpretive: “you are homo literatus, a man of the letter, little sauoring of learning” (65). The point is not that Gosson is too literary, but that he has forgotten the humanist reading practices he should remember from university: “But you haue dronke perhaps of Lethe; your gramer learning is out of your head; you forget your Accidence; you remember not that under the person of Aeneas in Virgil the practice of a dilligent captain is described” (65). Reading for the letter rather than the spirit, Gosson has forgotten all he has been taught, and Lodge imagines his conflation of poetry with the stage as the despair of Gosson’s former teachers: But our studientes by your meanes haue made shipwrack of theyr labors . . . the universitie is litle beholding to you,—al their practices in teaching are friuolous. . . . No meruel though you disprayse poetrye, when you do not know what it meanes. (66) By describing Gosson’s failure as an error of consumption, not production, Lodge salvages a poetry that can appeal to better readers. The second stage of Lodge’s defense (which Sidney echoes in his Defence) suggests that while Gosson’s poor reading habits can mar any literary product, a properly critical writing practice can forestall such misguided interpretations. Lodge asks not only that playwrights and poets be sufficiently classical, but that they also be critical and use their writing to root out further abuses. Sounding very much like Gosson himself (who includes his own plays in the list of those he condemns), Lodge claims to “wish as zealously as the best that all abuse of playinge weare abolished; but for the thing, the antiquitie causeth me to allow it, so it be used as it should be” (84). The power of classical authority leads Lodge to celebrate the models of Roscius and Terence, but his real desire (which would bear dramatic fruit in the topical satire he cowrote with Greene, A Looking Glasse for London and England, 1586?) was for a public literature that would attack social vice: “If our poetes will nowe become seuere, and for prophane things write of virtue, you I hope shoulde see a reformed state in those thinges” (83). The critical attitude that Lodge recommends caused scandals when it reached the public stage in plays like the now lost Isle of Dogs and other city comedies, but the hectoring style he favors had an Elizabethan precedent in the invectives of Greene, Nashe, and his own Alarum against Usurers (1584). Although Lodge

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defends the stage against Gosson, he advocates a kind of writing that Elizabethan literary culture saw mostly on the printed page.

THE CASE OF THE UPSTART CROW To recover this strain of literary culture that valued a classically sanctioned and critically active prose discourse over the hybridized public stage requires returning to two familiar texts in the history of Elizabethan drama: Nashe’s preface to Menaphon (1589), and Greene’s deathbed letter to his fellow dramatists, including Shakespeare (1592). These texts have been repeatedly cited as announcing the arrival of William Shakespeare—Nashe’s preface cryptically dismisses then-current plays as “whole Hamlets,” and Greene’s letter attacks a “Shake-scene” who has lately emerged in literary London— but they speak more directly to the rivalry between different modes of literary culture than to the familiar narrative of the master’s debut (Nashe 3:315; Greene, Groatsworth 85). Nashe’s preface, written by an as-yet-unknown student just down from Cambridge, defiantly announces prose romance’s challenge to drama. Greene’s letter (perhaps ghostwritten, certainly edited, by Henry Chettle) ends his career by rearticulating the distinction between page and stage and reasserting the superiority of the former.7 In both cases these authors extend Lodge’s claims for the humanist page: its classical heritage merits praise, and its critical bite attacks inferior forms and improves the social order in the process. Nashe’s preface addresses itself “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities” (311), but his polemical style splits London’s literary culture into opposed camps. He attacks playwrights in general, particularly those who practice a style of dramatic oratory that many critics have linked to Marlowe: But heerein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly, as their ideot Artmasters, that intrude themselues to our eares as the Alcumists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to out-braue better pennes with the swelling bombast of bragging blanke verse. (311) Like the remarks in Brabine’s prefatory poem about “the pompe of speech” and “drumming descant,” Nashe’s critique assails the performative aspects of dramatic rhetoric. What Nashe calls the “undiscerning iudgment” (314) of some writers makes their works undeserving. Rejecting “this kind of men that repose eternitie in the mouth of a Player” (312), Nashe implies that real poetic discourse has better vehicles through which it can speak.8 The problem is less a lack of learning on these (mostly unnamed) authors’ parts than their misapplication of learning. The style Nashe attacks is a threadbare humanism of insufficient education and false classicism:

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It is a common practise now a dayes to runne through euery Art and thriue by none, to leaue the trade of Nouerint [scrivening], whereto they were borne, and busie themselues with the indeuovors of Art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck verse if they should haue need. (315) Such writers produce bombastic and derivative poetry, mere “English Seneca read by Candlelight . . . [with] many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar, and so forth” (315). (Excessive alliteration draws the fi re of both Nashe and Brabine [“drumming descant”], and it may be taken as an auditory symbol of stiff, pedantic verse, what C. S. Lewis famously termed “drab poetry” 222–71.) The problem with these writers, says Nashe, is that they fail to appreciate the need for new poetry in modern English. He repeatedly condemns a too slavish form of translation in the writers he calls “our English Italians” (322) and “our triuiall translators” (315). His most memorable quotation in this vein comes from Stanyhurst’s oft-mocked translation of The Aeneid (1582), which attempts to replicate Virgil’s storm: “Then did he make heauens vault to rebound, / with rounce robble hobble / Of ruffe raffe roaring, / with thwick thwacke thurlerie bouncing” (320).9 Poetry like this is not simply incompetent; in Nashe’s view it trivializes the imperatives to be both contemporary and classical. Unlike Sidney, Nashe does not reject generic hybridity or social mixing (each of which he celebrates and practices elsewhere). He rejects an insufficiently intelligent classicism that lacks critical ambition. Against writers like Stanyhurst and the English Italians, Nashe posits two related ideals: fi rst, a particular brand of humanist writing; and second, Greene’s practice of prose romance. Nashe’s humanist ambition organizes itself around a paean to his alma mater, St. John’s College. As Nashe describes it, St. John’s in the sixteenth century produced a series of major intellectual figures (including himself) because it modeled active learning. It was “that most famous and fortunate Nurse of all learning, Saint Iohns in Cambridge, that at that time was as an University within it selfe, shining so farre aboue all other houses, Halles, and hospitals whatsoeure, that no Colledge in the Towne was able to compare with the tithe of her Students” (317). Linking himself to admired Elizabethan authors and classicists such as Gascoigne and Golding (319) and also to “diune Master Spencer” (323), Nashe advocates an English-centered humanist program that would create (in Spenser’s phrase) “new poetes” rather than recycling Senecan tropes. He even champions the English trio of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Gower against their Italian rivals Petrarch, Tasso, and Celiano (322). It is in terms of this engaged, Anglicized humanism that Nashe’s defense of Greene’s romance (itself an amalgam of tropes from classical and Continental fictions) positions itself.10 He celebrates Greene in Ciceronian terms. “I come,” he writes, “to thy Arcadian Menaphon, whose attire (though not so stately, yet comely), doth intitle thee aboue all other to that temperatum

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dicendi genus which Tully in his Orator termeth true eloquence” (312). In addition to humanism, Nashe values Greene’s facility with the new medium of print; he emphasizes Greene’s speed as much as his erudition. His book represents classical eloquence produced quickly, by a writer whose “extemporall veine in any humour will excell our greatest Art-maisters deliberate thoughts” (312). To the young Nashe Greene represents a combination of humanist eloquence and streetwise quickness; he is classical and critical at the same time. Like many modern critics (see e.g., Ryan), I see Nashe’s celebration of extemporality as praising his own methods alongside Greene’s, but the celebration also dovetails with Lodge’s and Sidney’s defenses of humanist learning. All these writers, in their different ways, were attempting to defi ne a more elite version of literary culture than the one playing on the public stage. In this context, Greene’s deathbed letter (whether authentic or not) becomes not simply a dying writer’s jealous carping at a young rival but an attempt to defend a strain of literary culture about to be overtaken by an ambitious theater industry. The letter’s discussion of Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, and Shakespeare recapitulates the classical and critical stance that Sidney, Lodge, and Nashe celebrated. Greene attacks the first three dramatists because they have abandoned this higher calling. As usual, Marlovian bombast makes an easy target. Marlowe’s “pompe of speech” (to use Brabine’s phrase) overreaches into atheism and “pestilent Machivilian pollicy” (Greene, Groatsworth 80). But even Nashe’s “byting” satire has become too indiscriminate in its attacks. “Sweet boy,” Greene suggests, “be advisde, and get not many enemies by bitter words . . . thou hast a libertie to reproove all, and name none” (82). Critical writing, as Greene expounds it, should “reproove” public morals but not risk slander. (Greene here anticipates Nashe’s public quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, which would begin in earnest after Harvey mocked Greene’s death in print.) Peele gets reprimanded for his poverty—“thou dependest on so meane a stay” (83)— and his inclusion among the three worthy writers in danger of losing their status emphasizes that what Greene considered the high road of print was not necessarily a money-making proposition. In the narrative that makes up most of Groatsworth, it is the Player, not the Author, who is rich. While the invective attacking Shakespeare as an Upstart Crow is almost too familiar to quote, Greene’s sense of the debt players like Shakespeare owed to his generation of authors has often been overlooked. The key term is beholding. “Is it not strange,” writes Greene, “that I, to whom they [i.e., the players] have all beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have been beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken?” (84). Greene claims a debt of status as well as literary material: Shakespeare owes Greene’s generation for the words in his mouth on stage and also for whatever respectability (and marketability) the theater had earned by 1592. By usurping the author’s role and “suppos[ing] he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best

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of you” (84–85) the “Shake-scene” disrupts the authorial order as Greene, Lodge, Nashe, and others had begun to construct it. During the Jacobean period Shakespeare and others would develop a new construction of dramatic authorship as a public, even courtly pursuit, but in 1592 the printed page still held itself apart. The central focus of Greene’s deathbed letter is not the attack on Shakespeare but the impassioned plea that Nashe and Peele reform their careers. Unlike Greene himself and Marlowe, who died too young, these living authors could still redeem their authorial careers from the theatrical sink. While a large part of Greene’s moralizing (here and in his other repentance tracts) is theological, the career advice he gives Nashe and Peele unabashedly advocates preserving elite status: O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them all will never prove a kind nurse: yet whilest you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes. (85) The “more profitable courses” Greene advocates are the strategies of print authorship he pioneered. His fear about the encroaching stage (for which he had written extensively) is explicitly about status inversion, in which players (“rude groomes”) lord it over authors (“rare wits”). His dying wish, if these are his words, was for a reversal in the relative fortunes of page and stage. After more than four hundred years during which Shakespeare’s theater has become the ideal model of English literary culture, Greene’s plea remains a difficult to hear.

LODGE AGAINST SHAKESPEARE: A RIVALRY RECOVERED While Lodge’s Rosalynde was a bestseller of Elizabethan prose romance, its critical fortunes have long been overshadowed by As You Like It. As Wentworth noted the “white light” (114) of Shakespeare’s play has often led scholars to misremember even basic features of Lodge’s work. Distinctions between Lodge’s pastoral romance, with its focus on “patience” and anticipation of the Catholic pietism of Lodge’s later works, and Shakespeare’s comedy of wit, with its urbanity and playfulness, are well-represented in modern criticism.11 Rather than retread that familiar ground, I will explore two major elements of Lodge’s romance that Shakespeare fails to emphasize: the despair of Adam Spencer, and the theologically inflected conversion of Saladyne. These features represent Lodge’s extension of the humanist program that Elizabethan prose fiction began in the early 1580s.

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When Shakespeare turned to Lodge’s romance at the end of the 1590s, that cultural moment was gone: Sidney and Greene were dead; Nashe was embroiled in a public controversy with Harvey that led to a ban on both their works in 1599; and Lodge, no longer producing popular successes, was about to convert to Catholicism and leave for France. Shakespeare’s theatrical revision of Lodge’s romance nonetheless carefully responds to the stale challenge of print culture’s self-defi ned humanism and elite status. Through the melancholy wise man and the courtly fool, Shakespeare’s play departs from Lodge’s romance by remaking precisely the criteria that Lodge’s generation had used to celebrate prose fiction. The servant Adam Spencer’s monologue, spoken while he is starving in Arden, exemplifies the tropes and intellectual habits that Lodge’s generation of prose fiction writers used to enter into humanist and academic debates. Adam opens with a familiar humanist trope drawn from the Greek romance tradition of Heliodorus and standard texts like Erasmus’s 1525 colloquy on shipwreck: “Oh, how the life of man may well be compared to the state of the ocean seas, that for every calm hath a thousand storms” (Lodge, Rosalind 141). His quasi-philosophic discourse blends Stoicism with a basically theological belief in mankind’s corrupt nature: “All our pleasures end in pain, and our highest delights are crossed with deepest discontents” (141). Like many romance heroes, Adam debates the inconstancy of Fortune, which he castigates as “double-faced like Janus” (142). Adam’s (and Lodge’s) solutions to enduring inconstant Fortune include “patience” and “a resolute courage to pass over [Fortune’s] crosses without care” (142). Adam exaggerates this Stoic-cum-Christian pose when he offers to “cut my veins” to provide his master with “the warm blood [to] relieve your fainting spirits” (143), but Lodge’s tone suggests that he values Adam’s quasi-academic philosophy. When Shakespeare took up Lodge’s plot, he kept the contrivances of the story but pre-emptively signaled that his discourse of Fortune would be a matter of comic banter, not philosophic weight. Rosalind claims early on that her preferred “sport” will be to “mock the good hussif Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally” (Shakespeare 1.2.30–32). Her joke indicates the play’s desire to undercut the philosophical seriousness of Lodge’s Adam. The comic debate between Rosalind and Celia about Nature and Fortune (1.2.39–45) gets interrupted by the arrival of Touchstone, one of Shakespeare’s invented characters. At the moment when Shakespeare’s play engages Lodge’s moral and intellectual debate, a theatrical addition to the story—the Fool—shifts the discourse. Paradoxes about the relative powers of Nature and Fortune—“Indeed,” says Rosalind, “there is Fortune too hard for Nature, when Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit” (1.2.46–48)—cede the stage to Touchstone’s comic and courtly display. To a large extent, Touchstone’s role in As You Like It disarms the high moral and humanist ambitions of Lodge’s source text by parodying

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them. Adam’s speech on Fortune, which concludes with the moral truism, “despair is a merciless sin” (143), typifies Lodge’s ambition by functioning as what Nancy Lindheim has called a “major-alternative soliloquy.”12 In such a speech, a fictional character performs like a humanist orator, taking up a knotty philosophical question and debating alternative outcomes. Even if the authorized conclusions usually seem foreordained (as in nonfictional versions of this trope like Erasmus’s Colloquies), the function of such a speech in Elizabethan prose romance is to reflect the moral seriousness and topicality of the author. Touchstone mercilessly mocks such rhetoric. He even takes the key term of the major alternative conceit—“if”—as grist for his joke mill near the play’s end. Expounding the progress of a courtly quarrel, Touchstone recreates the counter-factual hypothesis as a means for a hasty retreat: I know when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If, as, ‘If you said so, then I said so.’ And they shook hand and swore brother. Your If is the only peacemaker: much virtue in If. (5.4.97–102) Touchstone explicitly celebrates theatrical wit at the expense of its futile academic rivals; the “seven justices” who cannot patch up the quarrel are the dramatist’s caricature of the high humanist position Lodge and his generation wanted for prose fiction. Even Lodge’s medium (print) receives a subtle dig; Touchstone sets up his joke by reminding Jaques that courtiers “quarrel in print, by the book” (5.4.89). For Shakespeare, books like Rosalynde cannot distinguish themselves from drama by aspiring to humanist standards like those of Nashe’s idealized St. John’s College. Books and plays are simply rival forms of popular entertainment. In addition to Touchstone’s implicit riposte to Adam’s penitent monologue, the other major aspect of Lodge’s tale that Shakespeare minimizes is the conversion of the hero’s evil brother. Saladyne (renamed Oliver in the play) occupies the moral center of Lodge’s romance. In three long set speeches—the fi rst in jail, the second to his still-disguised brother, and the third to Aliena—Saladyne demonstrates Lodge’s hope that literary rhetoric can actively facilitate evil’s conversion into good. In his fi rst speech, after being jailed by Duke Torismond, Saladyne sounds the religious notes that Greene would plumb a few years later in his deathbed tracts. “There is no sting [like] to the worm of conscience,” he laments, “no hell to a mind touched with guilt” (147). In Lodge’s fiction this rhetorical pose reforms his character. Discovering his sin leads Saladyne to discover its solution: “Be penitent and assign thyself some penance to discover thy sorrow and pacify his wrath” (147). The language anticipates the Catholic position Lodge would articulate more clearly in Robin the Devil (1592), but the import of such rhetoric for prose fi ction writers of Lodge’s generation was its self-generating power. Their books

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constructed a fantasy of generating public virtue through the circulation of literary narratives. In As You Like It, Oliver’s conversion is both much shorter and largely unstaged. He narrates his encounter with his brother in maximally compressed syntax. “’Twas I,” he tells Celia and Rosalind, “But ’tis not I. I do not shame / To tell you what I was, since my conversion / So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am” (4.3.135–37). He externalizes and rejects as “not I” his former self, but the quintuple repetition of the word “I” highlights the variability of his own identity. (The play’s cross-dressed main plot, of course, also emphasizes identity’s gender instability.) The “conversion” is so easy for Shakespeare’s play that he does not even stage it, whereas in Lodge’s tale it occasions pages of humanist rhetorical display. The play presents Oliver in the semi-allegorical terms that Lodge uses for Saladyne— when Orlando fi rst sees him he is a “wretched ragged man, o’ergrown with hair” (4.3.106) and he carries a handkerchief stained with the lioness’s symbolic blood—but Oliver’s narrative shift from third person (“Twice did he turn his back” 4.3.127) to fi rst (“From this miserable slumber I awak’d” 4.3.133) replaces the sustained intellectual labor of Lodge’s hero. In Saladyne’s second and third conversion speeches Lodge makes even clearer his role as mouthpiece for humanist ambition and critical piety. He echoes the repentance narratives that preachers like Arthur Dent and William Perkins sounded from Elizabethan pulpits and that Greene would use to defi ne his life story in the repentance tracts of 1592. Saladyne’s encounter with his brother in Arden turns his repentance from internalized contrition to the recognition of divine order in the world, as he says: “The gods, not able to suffer such impiety unrevenged, so wrought that the king picked a causeless quarrel against me in hope to have my lands, and so hath exiled me out of France forever” (176). Worldly exile becomes Saladyne’s ticket to spiritual rebirth, as he recognizes: Passionate thus with many griefs, in penance of my former follies, I go thus pilgrim-like to seek out my brother, that I may reconcile myself to him in all submission and afterward wend to the Holy Land to end my years in as many virtues as I have spent my youth in wicked vanities. (176) Saladyne’s story presents both strands of the cultural ambition of Elizabethan prose romance; his prodigal fall chastises social vices, and his eventual rebirth presents the final triumph of humanist learning in a worldly setting (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, Alwes). Refusing Lodge’s sense of the self-as-pilgrim, Shakespeare’s play eschews conventional conversion narratives. As You Like It exports Saladyne’s (fi nally abandoned) plans to make pilgrimage to the Holy Land to Duke Frederick and Jaques, pointedly decentering repentance as a narrative device. Jaques champions the wisdom of “these convertites” (5.4.183), but

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the play remains focused on the community of four married couples dancing in Hymen’s masque. When Jaques de Boys describes Duke Frederick’s conversion, he emphasizes its abjuration of public matters: “to the skirts of this wild wood he came, / Where, meeting with an old religious man, / After some question with him, was converted / Both from his enterprise and from the world” (5.4.158–61). But the world as Shakespeare’s play presents it is more theatrical space than humanist proving ground. Even melancholy Jaques’s understanding of conversion glosses over Saladyne’s soul-searching and Adam’s despair. For Jaques, conversion is a purely willed experience. He describes Frederick as having “put on a religious life / And thrown into neglect the pompous court” (5.4.180–81). For Jaques, it appears, these are things one can do simply by performing them. Jaques’s smooth transition from wood to cloister matches his theatrical description of the progress of a man’s life in the seven ages of man speech. Compared to the tortured reversals of Rosalynde and other Elizabethan prose romances, Jaques’s easy narrative of the “many parts” of a man’s life from infancy to “second childishness and mere oblivion” (2.7.139–66) presents a thoroughly dramatized early modern biography. These are roles that a man might play without any conspicuous intellectual struggles. That we think of Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” as more typical of English Renaissance literary culture than Lodge’s “despair is a merciless sin” owes as much to our own internalization of Shakespearean drama as to the relative intellectual vibrancy of the prose romance tradition.

BEYOND THE STAGE Reconsidering the rivalry between writers of prose romance like Greene, Lodge, Nashe, and (in a different medium) Sidney, and authors of public stage drama like Shakespeare and Jonson can help advance the critical conversation about early modern English culture in several ways. By way of conclusion, I’ll suggest three possible implications. First, the brief analysis I have sketched highlights how much early modern literary culture was defi ned by rivalry—between media like page and stage, between subgenres like Greek romance and the Italianate novella, and between individual authors like Greene and Shakespeare (see Mentz, Romance 1–45). Some rivalries, especially the so-called War of the Theaters, are familiar, but critical specialties and subfields tend to isolate different aspects of literary culture from each other, especially those that span the dramatic/nondramatic divide. (This collection speaks directly to that oversight in particular.) Somewhat paradoxically, I’ll suggest that Shakespeare suffers from his “not of an age but for all time” isolation as much as figures like Greene and Lodge who linger in his shadow. Shakespeare’s career can be better understood by returning him to the Tudor–Stuart milieu from which hypercanonicity too often purports to liberate him. Jonson’s famous poem in the

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1623 Folio is a case in point: it is better read not as isolating Shakespeare but as positioning his plays within a seventeenth-century debate in which Jonson had a clear stake. The poem makes two distinct claims about Shakespeare’s plays: they displace “sporting Kid, or Marlowe’s mighty line” in terms that recall Brabine’s praise of Menaphon, and their author should be lodged with classical authors like Euripides and Sophocles. Jonson’s point is that printed drama (his and Shakespeare’s) can defeat its recent rivals and lodge with the ancients. What Richard Helgerson has described as a competitive “system of authorial roles” in early modern England can profitably be expanded across such divides as dramatic and nondramatic authorship, manuscript and print cultures, and even rivalries among different linguistic traditions (e.g., Italian vs. French vs. Spanish novelle; see Self-Crowned; also Cheney, Spenser’s, Marlowe’s, Shakespeare). By broadening our sense of the literary discourses alongside and against which early modern writers positioned their works, we can create a more flexible, dynamic, and accurate understanding of the evolution of early modern literary culture. My second speculation concerns the distorting effects of Shakespeare’s posthumous fame. The combination of the apotheosis of Shakespeare and the belated “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth century has marginalized early modern prose romance from two directions. These works neither participate in the fully canonical genre of the novel nor serve as adequate rivals to Shakespeare’s transcendent genius. The counter-example of Cervantes and Lope de Vega in early seventeenth-century Spain can encourage a thought experiment about an alternative literary history in which the prose narrative became the masterpiece and the theatrical career the poor second. But it seems more practical to reconsider Shakespeare’s dominance as a contingent, not necessary, historical development (which largely happened after the early modern period). By granting Elizabethan prose romance its full counter challenge to Shakespearean drama, we can recover a historical diversity of early modern literature that often gets flattened by modern reading habits, even if we cannot expect Greene, Lodge, or Nashe to grace Hollywood billboards any time soon. Finally, I want to speculate about what the debate between page and stage says about the genre both media shared, romance. These two rival technologies of literary circulation each saw the flourishing of a similar kind of Hellenized romance in early modern England, but at different times. Early modern prose romance flourished in the 1580s shortly after the translation into English of the Greek romances of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius in 1569, 1587, and 1597, respectively, and it continued through Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler (1594) and Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596), skeptical works that signal a change in fashion. (A second round of post-Sidneian romance would develop in the 1620s in the works of Mary Wroth, Anne Weamys, and others.) Dramatic romance, by contrast, appeared widely in early comedies like Mucedorus (1598) that drew on medieval sources and then reconfigured itself in late Elizabethan

88 Steve Mentz comedies like As You Like It and the dramatic romances by Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher, and others that appeared after 1607 or 1608. (For a stimulating “alternative genealogy” of romance that places the earlier plays in a central position, see Cyrus Mulready’s contribution to this volume.) The reasons behind these shifts in generic fashion, and the precise contours of the relationship between Elizabethan prose romance and Jacobean dramatic tragicomedy, are only now being fully explored. Romance as a genre, even pastoral Greek romance in a narrower sense, recurs as a literary fashion throughout early modern English culture. The larger questions surrounding this genre’s cultural meanings should not be obscured by our failure to recognize what Shakespeare and his prose sources shared, as well as what the argument between them meant to their own culture.

NOTES 1. Bruster treats the cultural entity “Shakespeare” as a composite representing “the host of associations [his] writings have generated over centuries” (186); similarly I use Shakespeare’s name to represent early modern drama as a whole. 2. For recent studies of popular fiction, see Mentz (Romance), Newcomb, Relihan, Hutson, Maslen, Alwes, and Hackett. For a recent attempt to reconnect Shakespeare with print culture, see Erne. A more measured consideration of the mutual interpenetration of literary and dramatic cultures can be found in Mowat. 3. On the printing history of these books, see Mentz (Romance 38–40 for Menaphon; 155–56 for Rosalynde). 4. Greene received his MA from Cambridge in 1583 and received a second MA as a courtesy from Oxford in 1588. 5. Sidney’s works were not printed during his lifetime; on his involvement with manuscript circulation, see Woodhuyson. 6. On Sidney’s revision of Heliodoran romance in the Arcadia, see Mentz (2006 73–103). 7. On the authorship controversy surrounding Groatsworth (and a forceful argument for Chettle’s authorship), see Carroll’s introduction. For a caveat, see Mentz (“Forming”). 8. On Nashe’s complex celebration of the printing press, see Mentz (“Day Labor”) and Yates. 9. McKerrow in his edition of Nashe notes that Peele, Hall, and Massinger also mock this passage, though Massinger may be alluding to Nashe as much as Stanyhurst (Nashe 4:456). 10. On Menaphon as part of Greene’s Heliodoran project, see Mentz (Romance 114–22). 11. See Mentz (Romance 155–61) for a recent survey. In what follows I draw on my previous treatment of Lodge’s romance, although the detailed comparison with Shakespeare is new. 12. Lindheim objects that Lodge does not employ these soliloquies, which she considers a major intellectual feature of Lyly’s legacy in humanist fiction. I have previously noted how well Adam’s speech (which she does not mention) fits this category (Mentz, Romance 159–60n.)

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WORKS CITED Alwes, Derek B. Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. Bruster, Douglas. “Shakespeare and the End of History: Period as Brand Name.” Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium. Ed. Hugh Grady. London: Routledge, 2000: 168–88. Cheney, Patrick. Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. . Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, and Counter-Nationhood. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. . Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Greene, Robert. The Complete Works in Prose and Verse. Ed. Alexander Grosart. 14 vols. London: Huth Society, 1881–1886. . Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. Ed. D. Allen Carroll. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. . Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Jonson, Ben. “To the memory of my beloved, the Author William Shakespeare: and What He Hath Left Us.” The Complete Poems. Ed. George Parfitt. New York: Penguin, 1988. 263–65. Kinney, Arthur. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1954. Lindheim, Nancy. “Lyly’s Golden Legacy: Rosalynde and Pandosto.” Studies in English Literature 15 (1973): 3–20. Lodge, Thomas. “Defence of Poetry.” Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G. Gregory Smith. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1904: 1:61–86. . Rosalind: Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in his Cell at Silexedra (1590). Ed. Donald Beecher. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1997. Maslen, Robert. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. . “Day Labor: Thomas Nashe and the Practice of Prose in Early Modern England.” Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading. Ed. Naomi Leibler. London: Routledge, 2007. 18–32. . “Forming Greene: Theorizing the Early Modern Author in the Groatsworth of Wit.” Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer. Ed. Kirk Melinkoff and Ed Gieskes. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. 115–31. Mowat, Barbara. “The Theater and Literary Culture.” A New History of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and Kastan Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 213–30.

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Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. Corr. F. P. Wilson. 5 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Relihan, Constance. Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1994. Ryan, Kiernan. “The Extemporall Vein: Thomas Nashe and the Invention of Modern Narrative.” Narrative: from Malory to Motion Pictures. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. London: Arnold, 1995. 40–54. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1975. Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poetry.” Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 212–50. Wentworth, Charles, Jr. “Rosalynde: As You Like It and as Lodge Wrote It.” English Studies 58 (1977): 114–17. Woodhuyson, H. R. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558– 1640. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. Yates, Julian. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

5

Hamlet and Euordanus Goran Stanivukovic

This is the very ecstasy of love, Whose violent property fordoes itself And leads the will to desperate undertakings As oft as any passion under heaven That does afflict our natures. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (2.1.99–103)1

So ruminates Polonius on the effect of love, responding to Ophelia’s report of Hamlet’s “mad” behavior, in the second quarto (Q2, published in 1604– 1605) of Hamlet. Although his words capture the strange and disturbing manifestation of passion in this tragedy, they could also be said to comment on the effects of emotions in prose romances. Reconstructing the crossovers between prose romances and drama is difficult not only because records of the writers’ creative process are tenuous, but also because romances themselves are eclectic, hybrid fictions, often recycling the same texts and sources as drama. Recently, in her study of the development of romances in early modern England, Helen Cooper documented a history of the “transforming motifs” of the romance mode across genres, from verse and prose romances to Shakespearean drama. She shows that at the thematic and structural levels, Shakespeare’s romances have much in common with the late medieval and early Tudor prose romances. Yet, despite their shared heritage with drama, prose romances continue to interest many critics only as sources for plays. Although some recent scholarship has explored the intersections between drama and prose fiction, 2 the view that “prose fiction is the poor relation of poetry and drama as far as modern critical interest is concerned” (Hadfield 134) still remains. This chapter examines the complex relationship among Hamlet and Othello and the anonymous prose romance, Euordanus.3 The plot of Euordanus involves two Hamlet figures, Euordanus, Prince of Denmark, and Griffory, both of whom are melancholy youths. It also contains a Gertrude figure in the princess Allisonne, wife to the King of Denmark, named Frederick. The revenge plot makes up part of Eurodanus’s quest to fi nd his kidnapped father and revenge him, and a ghost figure in the character of

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Martinus instills the idea of revenge into Euordanus’s ears. But it also presents a likeable version of Iago, in the character Prince Iago, Eurodanus’s friend from youth; and a Desdemona figure rewritten in the rehabilitated lady Beleriza. The plot of courtship and quest takes place against the political backdrop of the usurpation of power, of a defeat of the Norwegian army by the Scots and Danes, and an attempt to restore peace by reinstating King Frederick to the throne of Denmark. Euordanus also comments on the motif of a woman wrongly accused. While the “honest” Iago of Shakespeare’s tragedy uses his “honesty” to erode the happiness of the lovers, his counterpart in Euordanus resorts to actions that rehabilitate the wrongly accused Lady Beleriza, rid the kingdom of robbers, free prisoners, and fight the giants in an attempt to recover just society and lawful government. It is as if the narrative of Euordanus gives Iago another life: as a virtuous and morally just (hence less exciting) character, he becomes the antithesis of the Vice figure in Othello. Despite the generic difference between prose romance and drama most apparent on the formal level (drama being a genre based on dialogue while the romance is a prose narrative), romance and drama, especially tragedy, also differ in their treatment of the familial relationships and social order. While tragedy shows the dissolution of the family and destruction of the social order, prose romances are “fictions of felicity” (Kinney 363): their narratives show a positive treatment of women, and they work towards the reconstitution of a dispersed family and the restoration of a shattered royal household, thus symbolically the rebuilding of the social order. Although prose romances and Shakespeare’s tragedies have not yet been substantially discussed together in criticism, the three texts I explore display generic crossovers not just at the thematic level but also with respect to the difference in their approaches to the social order and the treatment of women. While in both Hamlet and Othello women are subject to misogynistic violence, in Euordanus the female-oriented narrative becomes an opportunity to recuperate women’s chastity and vindicate the male aggressor. And Euordanus re-imagines the political violence caused by male ambitions into a story of state justice and reconstitution of the political and royal order, and of family. In a way, Euordanus reverses the narrative of gender relations seen in the two tragedies, by starting with the violence over women and moving towards the celebration of women’s power. While not subject to certainty, elements of Euordanus that point to specific aspects of Hamlet are convincing enough to support the argument about a close relationship between the two texts. Because these two works appeared in print very close in time, and because the publication history of Hamlet still remains a question of critical debate, it is not possible to ascertain in which order they were published. Therefore, any judgment about their print histories is speculative. Euordanus was entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1595, though it was not published until 1605 (Arber 120). This suggests that the

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composition of Euordanus preceded that of Hamlet. So, the question of the relationship of Euordanus to Hamlet is less that of a source to a new text as that of a cultural resource to a new work within a shared literary context, which shows how genres overlapped in the Renaissance and how tragedy is linked with other popular literary forms of the period. The blurred boundaries between genres show us how literary forms were conceptualized and fashioned in the Renaissance. Reading Hamlet alongside Euordanus reveals that there is something in Shakespeare’s great tragedy that structurally and thematically resembled romance conventions, and that romances were a more hybrid genre than has been thought, but also a genre more invested in contemporary cultural production, not just allegorizing contemporary political conditions in its apparently archaic narratives, as Richard McCoy has shown for Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The connection between Hamlet, Othello, and Euordanus reveals itself at the level of intertexts, not direct verbal borrowings. Unlike classical stories, which are already given as sources and are known by Renaissance writers, intertexts are not immediately detectable as direct influences. If sources are reproductive models of literary genealogy, intertexts represent systems, or clusters of shared motifs and affi nities between two or more texts. Intertexts carry meanings from one text, or texts, to another. As Robert S. Miola suggests, an intertext radiates its “presence through numberless intermediaries and indirect routes” resulting in “reifications in other works” (20). Thus, for example, the use of a printed text of Hamlet as an intertext in Euordanus points to a literary transaction between Shakespeare as a “literary dramatist” and one of his contemporaries (Erne 201). One of the intertexts that Euordanus and Hamlet share is the common interest in the earlier Anglo-Danish relationships that predate England’s connection with Denmark in 1600–1606. Margreta de Grazia suggests that critics have often regarded this later connection between England and Denmark as the subject of topical allusions in Hamlet. Yet, England is “pulled into the play [Hamlet]” (de Grazia 65), and I would say the same for Euordanus, through an earlier history of Danish presence in England, known as the Rule of Danes that came before the Norman Conquest. Prose romances typically look back at earlier times (of chivalry, the Crusades, Anglo-Saxon kings) for their inspiration and Euordanus is no exception in that regard. It links England’s past connection with Denmark with a more recent connection between the two monarchies represented in the narrative of travel and references to Elsinore, with King James VI’s travel to Norway and Denmark, while still the king of Scotland, and his prolonged stay in Denmark with Queen Anna, during the winter and spring of 1589–1590 (Stewart 113–14). Therefore, both Euordanus and Hamlet turn different aspects of England’s historical link with Denmark into subjects of fiction and drama, respectively. Euordanus contains most of the stock motifs and compositional clichés—Helen Cooper (7) calls them memes—of the romance. It has an

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interlaced narrative; a multilayered plot involving obstacles and challenges (giants, enemy knights, dragons, outlaws); it narrates travel in foreign lands (mostly across Northwestern Europe); its geography is ambivalent, as characters on board a ship departing Ireland for England in one chapter end up in Hungary in the next; there are women in distress as well as separated husbands and wives; and letters are exchanged between distant lovers. Euordanus is one of the few Renaissance romances whose action takes place entirely on the European continent and briefly in Scotland and England, not in the Mediterranean, as is often the case. The locations include Hungary (Chapter 15 of Part 1), Belgium (Chapter 18 of Part 1), Scotland (Chapter 14 of Part 2), Paris (Chapter 15 of Part 1), Austria (Chapter 16 of Part 1), Wales (Chapter 2 of Part 2), England (Chapter 10 of Part 2), Ireland (Chapters 5, 12, and 13 of Part 2) and Spain (Chapter 18 of part 2). This pan-European orientation of its narrative and the shifting of actions between the historically Catholic and Protestant lands points to a retelling of Europe’s current events and England’s political position and diplomacy between both Protestant and Catholic Europe. Euordanus’s relationship with Hamlet indicates that Shakespearean tragedy appropriated those memes. The motif of revenge represents a distinctive link between Euordanus and Hamlet. It also allows us to read Euordanus as a romance with the revenge tragedy plot sui generis—as a text about revenge that is very recognizable as a romance.4 The print history of Hamlet is part of the cultural production of Euordanus, since there is external and internal evidence of the romance’s relationship with Shakespeare’s tragedy. The mention of “the famous Euordanus, Prince of Denmark” in the title of this romance raises the question whether this reference is to the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy. If it is, how did the connection occur? In 1605, James Roberts, the same printer who printed Q2 of Hamlet, also printed the anonymous romance, The First and second part of the History of the famous Euordanus Prince of Denmark, subtitled With the strange Aduentures of Iago Prince of Saxonie: And of both theyr seuerall fortunes in Loue.5 Roberts printed it for Richard Bankworth, whose initials appear on the title page. The collaboration between this publisher and his printer was well established, as Roberts produced for Bankworth mostly antipapist texts, which sold well in an age of zealous Protestantism. But since Euordanus is not a vehement anti-Catholic fiction, what might have motivated Bankworth to publish a romance thematically related to Hamlet? A recent editor of Hamlet draws our attention to the fact that the publisher’s “blurb” (Hibbard 68) on the title page of Q2 advertizing the play as performed “diuers times” in London, Oxford, Cambridge, “and elsewhere” with “an unqualified success,” suggests the popularity of Hamlet both before the publication of Q2 and its fi rst recorded performance aboard a ship “anchored off the coast of South Africa” (Thompson and Taylor 53).6 Therefore, the printer of Euordanus may have wished to

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capitalize on this early popularity of Shakespeare’s play in theatre by publishing Euordanus at the same time when he published the Q2 of Hamlet, thus counting to turn a bit of profit from an otherwise minor text that had been lying in manuscript around his print house for a decade. The case of the Othello–Euordanus connection is different and equally complex; yet it involves Hamlet as well. The reference to Iago in the subtitle of Euordanus may suggest that Shakespeare named the villain in Othello, a play performed at Whitehall in the fall of 1604 though not printed until 1622, after the character in Euordanus, as suggested by the editor of A New Variorum edition of Othello (Furness 335). The performance of Othello indicates that the play was fi rst staged before Euordanus was published, but after it was written. But how did Iago get transformed from a Machiavellian villain to a Prince of Saxony, from a Venetian with a Spanish-sounding name to a Saxon?7 With the exception of Desdemona, whose name appears in the play’s source, Giraldi Cinthio’s collection of novellae Hecatommithi (1565), all other names in Othello are Shakespeare’s invention. The apparent connection between Hamlet, Othello and Euordanus, therefore, suggests that Shakespeare’s tragedies may have served as a marketing ploy to boost the sales of this rare romance, and that the printer claimed for this work some of the cultural capital of the two tragedies by bringing it out around the time when the two tragedies were either in print or popular on the stage (or both in the case of Hamlet). But who wrote Euordanus? If the writer was alive at the time when the romance was printed, why does his name not appear on the title page? Why are there no preliminary matters? Who is “Master WILSON . . . vnder [whose] handes” Banckroft, the publisher, entered Euordanus (Arber 120)? Since the narrative of Euordanus follows almost all of the conventions of the romance, its author was either an experienced writer wishing to remain anonymous (because romances were often denigrated on the grounds of violence and obscenity), or a novice trying his hand at a popular genre. This is as much as we can conjecture about the authorship. Some of the actions in Euordanus are a reversal of those from the two tragedies. Those actions are represented not as tragic predicaments of their agents, but as deeds of prowess and honor. At the beginning of Euordanus, the narrative warns its readers that “the haughtie deeds of Chivalrie, which they [the Christian knights] hoped to obtaine in strange Countries” (B3v) would only benefit their own “vaine glory” (B4r), not the state. Thus, our interpretation of how the dynamics between the two plays and the romance works will depend on our understanding that early modern romances were written and read as models for action. The epistle to the reader in the 1664 edition of The Famous, Pleasant, and Delightful History of Palladine of England, which Anthony Munday translated from French, states that “the matter” of this romance will “procure delight amongst the ingenious Youth, and cause them to take example by the Famous PALLADINE, who for warlick Actions, Courtesie, and

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Constancy, and other apparent Virtues . . . few could parallel” (A3v). The reader is invited to think of the chivalric deeds narrated in this romance as exemplary models of virtuous behavior. A similar narrative in Euordanus plots individual actions in such a way that they benefit society, as is required of the “protective functions of kinghood” (Ferguson 106) in romances, with the knight as an agent (an extended arm of the body politic) assuring peace, justice, and protection. The narrative that promotes peace and law in Euordanus, then, gives the opposite of the plots of social collapse in Hamlet and Othello, by reiterating the destructive effects of the false accusations of women and the vainglory of the knights. The larger context for the transformation of violent to protective masculinity lies in the early modern cultural symbolism of masculinity. As Deborah Shuger states, “In northern Europe during the sixteenth century, Erasmian humanism and Protestantism conjointly discredited the two principal medieval types of Christian manhood: the monk and the knight,” that is, “two idealized social roles based on the renunciation or mystification of violence” (120). Thus, if the knights of romances are replaced in drama, especially tragedies, by the more ideologically problematic early modern soldier, and if the soldier and the scholar in Othello and Hamlet respectively, could be seen to maintain tension between denying and mystifying violence, then we could read Euordanus as a narrative that corrects and idealizes the role of the knight as an agent in assuring a peaceful and prosperous state because he has learned how to govern his aggressive impulses through marriage and the defeat of militant challenges.

EUORDANUS, OR ROMANCING THE SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY Euordanus narrates the love story of the Danish King Frederick (“one of the most accomplished knights in all Europe” A3r) and the Flemish princess Allisonne. On a May day, when the King, the pregnant Queen, and “a small traine of Lordes and Ladies whome they loued” (A2v) left the court to get some fresh air and “to disport the[m]selues in the forrest” (A2v) not far from the city walls, a band of outlaws banished from France attacked the royal company, separated Frederick from Allisonne, and killed the Queene’s entourage. They did not know that they attacked a king. But the Queen, “being carried forwards with the wings of feare” (A3r), escaped them, hid herself in a nearby forest, where she lost her way (she “strayed two and fro shee wist not whether” A3v), before giving birth to Euordanus. The King, however, decided to defend himself against the outlaws who put him in “a Barke” (B2r) and took him across the seas, but were caught in a tempest and landed in Holland. Martinus, the outlaw in charge of the King, had previously agreed with the Griffory, Duke of Holland in love with Allisonne, that he would deliver King Frederick to him in exchange for the “customes

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and profits of the citie of Hanstance . . . now called Amsterdam” (C4v) for the rest of his life. Ever since he heard of Allisonne’s marriage to Frederick, Griffory has lived withdrawn to himself in a lodge outside Amsterdam. Griffory’s melancholy suggests that Euordanus reverses the dynamics between Claudius and Hamlet as opponents: it is not the offended son—his melancholy largely caused by “His father’s death and our hasty marriage” (2.2.57), says Gertrude—but a former consort who becomes a mighty opposite of the king in Euordanus. Hamlet’s “customary suits of solemn black” (1.2.78), suggesting the outward sign of “all forms, moods, shapes of grief, / That can denote [him] truly” (1.2.82–83) correlate with Griffory’s melancholic withdrawal from the world, which is suggested “by him beeing clothed all in blacke, signifying his great sorrowe” (B3v). If Hamlet refers to “the trappings and the suits of woe” (1.2.86)—actions and clothes that signify his dejected state—his romance counterpart, Griffory, is placed in such actual “trappings”: Martinus fi nds Griffory, Orpheus-like, lute in his hand, “playing a mornefull dittie” in “the thickness of the Arbor” (B3v), to go with his “sad passions” (B4r). It is one of the structural clichés of romance to accompany emotions with literal analogies in the outside world. But the thick darkness of the arbor surrounding Griffory and its “diuers and sundry walkes and allies” and “couered with many kinds of trees, which yeilded such a close shadow, that the Sunne with his splendant beanies [beams] could scarse shinne through” (B4v), symbolically reveal not just Griffory’s gloomy interiority and the contradictions in his mind; they are also a romance version of the dark and menacing maze of Elsinore and the orchard in which, while asleep, the old King, Hamlet’s father, had poison poured “in the porches of [his] ears” (1.5.63), as the ghost reports. It is in that dark grove in which Griffory’s lodge is located that Martinus (Ghost like) urges him to revenge himself on Frederick for marrying Allisonne. Euordanus has to revenge his father, though his plight is heavier than Hamlet’s cause: he fi rst has to fi nd his father. Repeated failures to fi nd him, in fact, become the cause of Euordanus’s melancholy. Thus, in an echo of Hamlet’s “dejected havior of the visage” (1.2.81), Euordanus, who returns to the court after one such failed attempt, “began to ware so melancholy, that hee seemed to take delight in nothing” (S1r). His ignorance of his own name—the Duke of Saxony, who adopted Euordanus, named him the “Gentleman of the Forrest” (J3r) because he found him in the forest—further contributes to his melancholy. While Hamlet’s melancholy pose represents a complex affective intertwining of mourning and his youthful and troubled love for Ophelia, Euordanus’s position, though appearing more complex, is actually more transparent, as suits a romance in which a knight hopes “to atchieue immortall renowne, by his valiant and heroick deeds” (S1r). Euordanus, like Hamlet, is both a drama of thwarted love and a tragedy of revenge and the fragility of youth (Hibbard 49). Like Othello, it is a story

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of a lady falsely accused of infidelity. Like both tragedies, the narrative of this romance constructs masculinity in relation to (even in opposition to) the split between a chaste and unchaste woman, or around “the virgin/ whore split” theme in Hamlet and Othello (Kerrigan 78). Prince Iago’s fighting Giant Furoll (“this huge lump of flesh” X4v) confi rms his strength as a chivalric man and makes him worthy of claiming a woman as his prize. His defeat of Giant Furoll (Z4v) solidifies his victory, while his freeing of all the prisoners taken by the outlaws endorses his mission as a powerful and just knight in a chivalric society. In that community, claiming power and women depends on the heroic deeds in which both prowess and honor are secured, as Lady Beleriza confi rms in a long account of the events of her accusation, “by which he assured himselfe of the innocencie of the Lady” (T1v). Once her account of the events cleared her of guilt, Iago “would hazard his body for her defence” if Beleriza “would accept of him as her Champion” (T1v). But the winning of a lady ought not to be regarded as a woman’s subjugation to the knight’s power, since the success of a narrative that promotes heterosexual unions, conjugal love, and reproduction in fact depends on a woman. Thus, in Euordanus, the recuperation of women reverses the situation from Othello, where Desdemona’s defense of her chastity against Othello’s accusation that she is a whore neither saves her life nor wins back her husband. Although violence against women in the two tragedies is one of the central causes of the collapse of social order, the narrative of romance masculine aggression and violence feature as constructive forces that help to restore order. While individual characters’ actions bring down the social order in the tragedies, the situation is reversed in Euordanus; there, by resolving the conflicts within the state, a single knight’s violence restores the law in the commonwealth. In Hamlet, the murdered King’s ghost haunts Hamlet, but in Euordanus the queen is haunted by her supposedly killed husband. She is visited by her husband’s painted portrait that “seemed to appeare vnto her minde” (A4r) in her slumber, in a version of Hamlet’s demand that Gertrude “Look here upon this picture” (3.4.51)—in the Q1 this part reads, “It is the portraiture of your deceased husband” (11.12)—showing her the picture of his murdered father. Apart from echoing the period’s fashion for portraiture, Alisonne’s dream of the missing husband’s face is not accidental. It occurs precisely at the point at which the rupture of the archetypal wilderness of romance, symbolized in the wild beasts (including a unicorn) of prey and her prayer to God for mercy in her abandonment in the forest, symbolically captures her “feeling the pains . . . most strange and extreame” (B1r) of childbirth. She is alone in the forest, “not having any to comfort and help her” (B1r), except God. Within this literal (and mental) landscape of fear, abandonment becomes a cause for peril and anguish. The only way out of it—a salvation plotted by the narrative—is in the birth of a boy bearing a birthmark in the shape of a dark red cross on his right shoulder. The

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birthmark on the baby’s body signals the three main preoccupations of the romance: its masculinist orientation, the upholding of Christianity, and English nationalism.8 At this point it also assures the continuity of blood lineage. The newborn’s social and masculine roles are already determined: “he should prooue a famous man, and a scourge vnto the enemies of the Christian faith” (B1v). Helen Cooper remarks that in romances, “The sexual act is often insistently associated with the language of nature, so bypassing the penitential discourses that associate it with sin” (240–41). Childbirth reorients libidinal energies towards reproduction and confi rms the legitimacy of noble lineage. It contrasts the temptations within a landscape that implies the animalistic energy of sexual desire, symbolized by a unicorn, tiger, bear, panther, bull, boar, wolf, and fox, which in the popular lore and medieval fabliaux evoke love and sexual aggression. This kind of humiliation of the maternal body in Euordanus is prevented both by childbirth and by the annunciation, invoked in the reference to the Angel (intended to validate the mother’s purity and the childbirth), who in the queen’s vision told her the name of her son: Euordanus.9 This episode comments on a similar set of issues that plague a woman’s body—specifically that of a mother—in Hamlet. If the birth of a son in the forest implies the continued legitimacy of the father’s rule in a romance, Hamlet’s accusation that Gertrude “much offended” (3.4.9) his father is directly related to his disgust with her sexual activity in Claudius’s bed, of her “incestuous pleasure of his bed” (3.3.90), which receives further emphasis in his description of “the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty—” (3.4.90–2). At this point, Hamlet reads like a counter-romance because the action of the play leads toward dissolution, not reconstitution, of a corrupt and disbanded household. What brings tragedy and romance together, however, is the centrality of a woman to the imagined decline of the order in Hamlet, and the reconstitution of the destabilized order in Euordanus. In an extraordinary example that resembles both Hamlet and Othello, Gwaltero undertakes to defend in Vienna a lady wrongly accused by Otho, “a most stirne and rigorous Prince” (K1r) of the Dukedom of Austria, infamous for his “tiranous cruelty” and “beastly sensuality” (K1r). In Otho’s Vienna, “virtue is altogether choked, and swallowed up in vice” (J4v).10 Otho hears of “a most gracious and virtuous Ladie” (J4v), Vitilla, wife to Hostinius, who inherited “large possessions” (J4v) from her deceased father. At this point in the narrative, Otho plays Othello to Vitilla’s Desdemona. His “lustfull heart [has been] set on fi re with report of her beauty” (J4v), so he declares his love for Vitilla, but she refuses him. Otho, in an echo of Claudius, has Vitilla’s husband killed. He hires Estonio, a servant, who kills Hostinius by driving a nail into his master’s head. When the nail is discovered at the funeral, Otho, wishing to find the murderer, summons the whole court, including Vitilla. Estonio lies that Vitilla has expressed

100 Goran Stanivukovic desire for him but that he has refused her on the grounds that he could not betray his master for his wife.11 The violence afflicted on an honorable woman falsely accused of betrayal, the killing of a powerful husband while he was asleep by a mighty opposite who has desired his wife—echo Hamlet and Othello. In these two tragedies, the culprits are punished by death and their tragedy is also the tragedy of their main female victims, Ophelia and Gertrude, Desdemona and Emilia. In contrast, and in the spirit of romance, Vitilla, a victim of masculine aggression, is saved by Gwaltero’s heroic action. If in the two tragedies the fall of women represents a consequence of male aggression, in the romance, a knight’s vindication of a woman suggests the defeat of male violence over women.12 By making a widow in distress the victor at the end of the tragic climax in romance, and by plotting a downfall of unheroic men, the narrative of Euordanus reverses the women’s tragedy in Hamlet and Othello. The motif of a falsely accused woman protected by a knight, which dominates Part II of Euordanus, highlights the importance of a woman’s defense of virtue for man’s integration into society. When in the combat aimed at demonstrating his valor and winning a woman, Iago confronts giants and outlaws—symbolic threats to social stability and heroic masculinity—the narrative of “a most cruell and doubtfull combat” (T3r) turns into an allegory of masculine strength and moral prowess. Iago’s victory of defending Beleriza’s reputation and Gwaltero’s of Vitilla’s are instances of “love service” (Karras 51), a display of heroic masculinity meant to attract women and to serve as a model of chivalrous actions to other virtuous men.13 Yet this episode, featuring a heroic man at its center, only conceals that a woman is crucial to man’s claim of success because her chastity is a guarantee of man’s heroic actions. Unlike Gertrude, who escapes widowhood by marrying the man she loves, the widow Beleriza makes herself both available and vulnerable to man’s ambition and aggression. The romance narrative, however, is concerned with conjugal love, marriage, and reproduction, which are precisely the values that Iago ruins in Othello. Hamlet’s contradictory and confusing attempt to combine the role of a lover with an avenger; and Iago’s manipulation of others as a way of dealing with the injustice done to him as he is passed over for military promotion and with his relationship to women (and men), are redeemed (and redefi ned) in Euordanus, where military, retributory, and romantic identities overlap in Euordanus, Griffory, Gwaltero, and Prince Iago. While Shakespeare’s Iago is not given a chance to prove himself either as a soldier or a lover in Othello’s Venice, the Iago of Euordanus demonstrates his heroic masculinity to later claim his beloved Beleriza. The Fortinbras episode in Hamlet, in which a large army advances toward a relatively insignificant land in Poland, is in Euordanus matched by the advance of the Scottish army, led by the Earl of Douglas, towards Denmark. The clamour of a battle raging in the distance as Frederick heroically enters Meinz (“where he remained by the space of a month” Bb4r),

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where Gwaltero will narrate the story to the gathered (and cheering) citizens of the King’s twenty-year exile, suggests a distant echo of the narrative of Fortinbras’s arrival to Elsinore (“Let us haste to hear it / And call the noblest to the audience” 5.2.370–71]). This larger context of contemporary politics that brings Euordanus, Hamlet, and Othello together represents a further instance of a deeper intertext. The rehabilitation of the Danish kingdom and the reinstitution of Frederick as a king reverse the end of Hamlet, where the old Danish order is decimated and the new foreign regime is installed with Fortinbras. But the honor sought abroad, not at home, suggests that the honor thirsty and adventurous Christian masculinity turns to travel fi rst to satisfy vanity. Thus the author of Euordanus says that the heroes of the state beeing prickt forwards with enuy, will not stick to turne any his good deseruings into euill, and all their counsels, be they neuer so profitable to the Common-wealth, they will goe about to perswade, that it is rather to benefit [and] rayse themselues, then to doe good to their Countries . . . they will not be afraide to whisper into mens eares, that it was done but for vaine glory. (B3v–B4r) Personal ambition is here subsumed under the service to the commonwealth, and heroic valour has been turned into vanity. Sir Henault’s launching of a search party to look for the kidnapped King Frederick only stirs up personal ambition and quest for gain in Lord Gwaltero, who disliked both the “choyse” and the “search” (B4r) because by making such a quest, they should not onely dispoyle themselues of theyr chiefe Captaines and leaders, but also leaue theyr Country naked, and ready for eyery inuasion of the enemy, when it would be too late to call home those for theyr defence whom they should not know where to fi nd. (B4r) The King’s absence creates a gap for an ambitious baron to occupy his place, leaving also the kingdom vulnerable to invasion. The end of Hamlet dramatizes this sort of threat, but Euordanus resists such a danger, by bringing an end to the “warres and rebellion in Denmarke” (Bb1v). Gwaltero’s fantasy of success is predicated on the probability that the outlaws, greedy for money, would have kept the King alive and “sold him to some Prince, who would be content to put him to raunsome” (B4r). This quest that turns into an imagined economic transaction between the outlaws and a legal state, reminds us that, unlike tragedy, romance is concerned only on the surface with individual ambitions and fulfillment. Rather, romances are about collective identities and social endeavors. By turning the Archbishop of Meinz into the source of intelligence about the King’s whereabouts, the narrative of Euordanus links papistry with the

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manipulation of justice. It does so by providing a Catholic participant (the Archbishop of Meinz) in this shady plan of usurpation. Such a resolution of events represents the narrative’s attempt to arrange events at the end by discrediting either Fortune or sudden turns of fantasy. Travel through the lands of north-western Europe, including Saxony, Denmark, France, England and Holland, replicates the political geography of Hamlet. That geography is played out between Denmark, England, and Norway—with Germany featured in the background as the place of Hamlet’s education and France referred to as always being on Laertes’s mind (“My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France” 1.2.55; as he tells Claudius, restlessly waiting to leave the coronation ceremonies). In Euordanus, France is the home of the two giants, Brandofell and Furioll, and a place from which the outlaws come. The connection between kidnapping and France links unruliness and disruption with Catholicism, while the defeat of the outlaws at the end of Part I signifies the victory and justice over Catholicism.

EUORDANUS IN A CULTURAL CONTEXT On a larger political scale, however, the European travels in Euordanus echo King James’s internationalist policy, attempting to bring together the Christian lands of Europe’s Western Christianity against the common Turkish enemy. The Turk threatens the West from the eastern Mediterranean, as suggested in Othello by the conversation between the Venetian Duke and the seamen reporting the Ottoman threat to Rhodes (1.3.34–36). The fratricide and political machinations at Elsinore are staged as forces of the rottenness of Denmark and the cause of the collapse of Claudius’s regime. But the narrative of Euordanus imagines peace even before it is achieved: the wedding of the Prince of England and “the beautiful Emilia . . . the greatest Lady in Christendome” (Q4r) that takes place in Paris is attended by Christians and Saracens alike. This reading of Euordanus in relation to Hamlet and Othello suggests that romance narratives conceal the realism of political and historical conditions that produced them. Euordanus’s focus on Holland, for example, reflects the close link between the Flemish Low Countries and James’s England established through economic, cultural, educational, royal, and political contacts and exchanges during the sixteenth century (Murray 843). The author of Euordanus does not pluck the plot of Hamlet but takes elements of plot and themes from this tragedy and adapts them to romance. What we gain by working on this distant yet recognizable relationship is a new sense of how we read Hamlet—not just as a revenge tragedy, but as a revenge tragedy with romance elements. For example, a passing reference in Hamlet’s letter to Horatio in the 1623, First Folio, text of Hamlet, to “a pirate of very warlike appointment” that “gave . . . chase” (4.2.16) to the ship bound for England on which Hamlet sailed, sounds like a line plucked out of a romance, where a pirate episode is one of its staple

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elements. Hamlet’s fighting the pirates off the ship only to “alone become their prisoner” (4.2.19) and then strategizing a release (“They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy, but they knew what they did: I am to do a good turn for them” 4.2.19–21) echo both the heroic and prudent acts in overcoming obstacles (pirates) undertaken by the chivalric heroes of romances.14 This letter even follows the rhetorical and narrative model of presenting such episodes in romances, and for a moment this tragedy reads like a romance. This implicit generic interplay (one could call it a generic mimicry) suggests how porous the boundaries of early modern genres were, especially when romance was becoming reformed as a new genre of prose fiction. Thus the fact that Hamlet and Othello could furnish Euordanus with thematic and plot elements suggests that these two texts were perceived as having romance potential and that they dramatize material that could enable romance narrative as well. The potential of romance to absorb and transform the tragic mode into a narrative of emotional and social mobility also makes tragedy look like a resource for other genres. Shakespearean tragedy is a monarchical genre, featuring king, queen, and court at the centre of its action. With their ahistorical reworking of chivalric rituals, romances provided not just an alternative to the tragedy of aristocracy but, “as a form of comedy,” were also “designed to qualify the monarchical interests of ‘tragic’ narratives” (Simpson 264). The happy ending of romance and the representation of heroic battles, often including a high level of fantasy, provided an entertainment value when chivalry and romance became popular in the seventeenth century. If the tensions between individuals, the threat to and collapse of the social order, and violence to women characterize tragedy, then the romance, tragedy’s counterpart, narrates a reconstitution of the order, family, and a support for women. Metaphorically speaking, romance starts where tragedy ends—at the point of a personal and collective collapse—and it moves towards a victory of the “nobility of blood” (Simpson 266). In that sense, the end of Euordanus suggests that there is hope for the state after Hamlet and Othello. King Frederick’s triumphant arrival to Meinz on his way to re-take the throne of Denmark restores not just peace and law, but also reunites the dispersed nobility to achieve “a profitable Commonwealth” (B4r), an ideal to which prose romances strive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this essay was helped by a grant awarded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a fellowship by The Folger Shakespeare Library. I thank Laurie Maguire for drawing my attention to Euordanus; Alan Stewart for his advice on the Anglo-Dutch relations; Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Tony Telford Moore, and Ian McAdam for their comments and help; and the editors of this volume for their suggestions on earlier drafts.

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NOTES 1. I quote the text of Hamlet from Thompson and Taylor’s edition. 2. See Newcomb’s work on Robert Greene; Hutson’s study of fictions for women and the literary formation of masculinity; and essays on prose fiction and early modern sexualities in the volume edited by Relihan and Stanivukovic. 3. Only two copies of this romance have survived: one is in the Folger Shakespeare Library and the other is at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. 4. As Warren and Wells suggest, Shakespeare emulates Laurence Twine’s fiction, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, in Pericles and resorts to Emanuel Forde’s romance, Parismus in Twelfth Night (18–19). Barnabe Riche’s fiction, Brusanus, and Thomas Goodwin’s rendering of William Caxton’s romance, Blanchardine, translated from Latin, are also intertexts in Twelfth Night. 5. For the chronology and bibliographic evidence pertaining to the printing of Q2 of Hamlet, I rely on Wells et al. (396–402). Three of the seven extant copies are dated 1604, four 1605 (Wells et al. 396). 6. Hibbard argues that the publication of the 1603 edition meant that “The stationers of the day were interested only in the manuscripts of plays that had proved popular on the stage” (14). 7. The name Iago might have derived from the Spanish place names, Iago de Compostella and Santiago, as Jonathan Bate suggested in a talk delivered at the International Shakespeare Association World Congress in Valencia in 2001. Santiago is also the patron saint of Spain and of the foreign legion of soldiers in Spain, which links the cultural meaning of this form of the Spanish name with Iago’s military profession. Ruskin observes that “‘Iago’ and ‘Iachimo’ have, evidently, the same root—probably the Spanish Iago, Jacob, ‘the supplanter’” (335). The only echo of the Spanish provenance of Iago’s name in Euordanus is “Don Iago” (Z1v) in the signature of a letter by Iago in Part 1. I thank Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce for help with the Spanish etymology and meaning of Santiago/Iago. 8. My reading of romances as masculinist texts differs from Hackett’s take on them as a “feminine genre” (9). 9. The biblical subtext of this episode can be traced back to the New Testament (Luke 1.31 and Matthew 1.23) where the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and names the child (Jesus Christ the Saviour), Emmanuel. 10. This makes Otho’s Vienna similar to Shakespeare’s Vienna in Measure for Measure. 11. Her virtue tainted, Vitilla became an easy victim of the false accusation of her husband’s murderer. When found out, Estonio would be burned on the stake prepared for the allegedly false Vitilla, while Gwaltero will fight with Otho to defend Vitilla’s virtue. 12. In defense of her chastity and rejection of his advance, Vitilla says to Otho: “assure your selfe my Lord, that whilst I haue power and strength to resist, you shall neuer obtaine the same, wherefore I would with your honor to giue ouer all such wicked imaginations” (K1r). 13. The phrase “love service” captures the act of one man demonstrating to another his power in the competition for a woman, who has to be persuaded of the man’s honor before she responds to his courtship. 14. The 1603, Q1 text, does not mention the pirates. Horatio only reports the event in a letter he received from Hamlet: “he writes how he escaped the danger/And subtle treason that the King had plotted” (15.1–4).

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WORKS CITED Anon. The first and second part of the History of the famous Euordanus Prince of Denmark. London: Bankworth, 1605. Anon. The Famous, Pleasant, and Delightful History of Palladine of England. Trans. Anthony Munday. (1588). London: Andrew Kembe, 1664. Arber, Edward. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, Vol. 3. 5 vols. London: 1875–1876. Bate, Jonathan. “Shakespeare’s Islands.” Paper presented at the International Shakespeare Association World Congress in Valencia, 2001. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. de Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Ferguson, Arthur B. The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1960. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writings in the English Renaissance 1545–1625. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Hibbard, G. R., ed. “Textual Introduction.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 67–130. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Karras, Ruth Mazo. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Kerrigan, William. Hamlet’s Perfection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Kinney, Arthur F. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. McCoy, Richard C. Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia. Hassocks: Harverster P, 1979. Miola, Robert S. “Seven Types of Intertextuality.” Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality. Ed. Michele Marrapodi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. 13–25. Murray, John J. “The Cultural Impact of the Flemish Low Countries on Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England.” American Historical Review 62:4 (1957): 837–54. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Relihan, Constance C., and Goran V. Stanivukovic, eds. Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ruskin, John. Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy. Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent: 1886. Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution. Vol. 2: 1350–1547. Oxford English Literary History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. . Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1985. . Othello. Ed. Horace Howard Furness. Philadelphia: 1886. Shuger, Deborah Kuller. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

106 Goran Stanivukovic Stewart, Alan. The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. Warren, Roger, and Stanley Wells, eds. Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Wells, Stanley et al. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

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Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania Sarah Wall-Randell

Toward the end of Part 2 of his adventures, the hero of Cervantes’ antiromance Don Quixote is spending the night in yet another crowded travelers’ inn. While eating dinner, he and Sancho Panza overhear someone speaking in the next room. Thomas Shelton’s 1620 English translation renders the scene this way: [I]t seemed that in another chamber next Don Quixotes, diuided only by a thin Lath-wall, hee might heare one say, By your life, Signior Don Ieronimo, whilst supper is to come in, let vs reade another chapter in the second part of Don Quixote. Don Quixote scarce heard himselfe named; when vp he stood, & watchfully gaue eare to their discourse concerning him; & he heard that the aforesaid Don Ieronimo answered, Signior Don Iohn, why should we reade these fopperies? (399) In the book they are reading, Don John notes, Quixote abandons Dulcinea. The “real,” eavesdropping Quixote loudly protests this insult, and the two strangers appear at the door of his room, both surprised and apparently pleased to meet the hero of the tale they are debating. They offer Quixote the book, which he peruses silently, and then returns in disgust, condemning it as inaccurate. Before parting from the men, Quixote vows to prove the author of this “idle Pamphlet” wrong by not doing what his character “Don Quixote” is supposed to do next (402–3). In this dizzying comic moment, Quixote’s quest, born from his excessive immersion in chivalric romances, comes full circle when the reader reads himself, encountering himself in his own romance. Cervantes is here making several gestures at once: not only a retort to the opportunists who published ersatz sequels in the wake of the success of Don Quixote, Part 1, but also a self-reflective comment on the ambitions of fiction more broadly (exposed as flimsy next to “reality”), and a send-up of the nature of romance (fantastical and preposterous, just as its critics claim). At the same time, and more seriously, the episode is part of the intricate and sophisticated textuality of Don Quixote, a narrative-within-a-narrative that documents its own imaginary

108 Sarah Wall-Randell provenance (a manuscript found by chance) even as it acknowledges its actual bibliography of popular fictions. It is a mise-en-abîme that draws us, as its readers, in as well, to find ourselves symmetrically aligned with Quixote, holding his story in our hands. In a larger sense, as we will see in two other examples, the scene is characteristic of early modern romance’s pervasive fascination with books, both as media for containing text and as objects of wonder and contemplation in their own right. In the matter of the book and the self, as in so many respects, Don Quixote is a limit-case, an idea taken to extremes. And yet many texts in the romance tradition that leads up to and informs Quixote’s parody also experiment boldly with depictions of interiority and selfhood, making books (and the circumstances of their materiality) central to their exploration of these issues. In this chapter, I propose to examine two early seventeenth-century texts that participate diversely in the mode of romance, in each of which a reader discovers her- or himself in a book: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline King of Britaine (1609?) and Mary Wroth’s Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621). The tragicomedy and the long prose fiction share many preoccupations and representational strategies: the centrality of the search for identity; the juxtaposition of the familiar and the supernatural; the intimate mapping of the pain and joy of constancy in love. Most important, both are deeply invested in exploring the imaginative and mimetic possibilities of the book, placing the book and the self in a distinctive spatial and cognitive relationship. In Cymbeline and in Urania, magical books tell the identity-seeking subject something about him- or herself, and yet present that revelation as in some way already understood, preread. How can thinking about what you already know—your own life story—reveal anything useful? In these fictions, stories overlay stories within the main narrative: characters’ pasts and parentage become braided into the text’s account of the present. Within this complex structure, so much a part of the “interlaced” aesthetic of romance, the book is used as a way of materially delineating one story from its surrounding narratives. At the same time, even as they are being read by us, Posthumus and Urania are magically able to read themselves. The life story reconstituted as a book—in fact, a supernaturally-endowed, hyperdramatically presented book—enables these subjects to stand apart and regard themselves. By making Posthumus’ and Urania’s stories remarkable and yet unremarkable, familiar and yet strange, and by working within romance’s self-conscious narrative modes, Shakespeare and Wroth seek to fix in language the curious action of thinking about oneself. Magical books in both these texts literalize the historically emerging association between reading and privacy, enabling characters to conduct mental exercises in self-regard. What books enable the texts themselves to do is something even more remarkable: to experiment with new ways of representing subjective interiority, in fiction or on the stage. In true early modern romance style, books appear both historically and ahistorically in Cymbeline and Urania, both “naturalistically,” as pastime and pleasure, and fantastically or supernaturally, as touchstones of prophetic or oracular truth. Probably the best-known scene of reading in Cymbeline

Reading the Book of the Self 109 is a thoroughly domestic and yet literally nightmarish one: the scene (2.2) in which the heroine Innogen peruses a book containing the Ovidian story of Philomel and Tereus, immediately before the villain Iachimo intrudes on her bedroom and her life. At one moment Innogen is reading a fictional narrative of a rape, and at the next moment she has been symbolically raped by the too-effective creation of a fictional narrative: the story Iachimo will invent about his supposed seduction of her. Since Iachimo emerges, as Innogen sleeps, from the trunk he has placed in her room for safekeeping, the impression is almost created that he is actually coming out from the book, stepping out of the story of rape: the suggestion is that Innogen has somehow opened her private space to sexual invaders by reading—by going to bed with—such a salacious book as Ovid.1 At the same time, because the mechanics of the scene are identical to early modern stage conventions for the representation of dreams, in which the dreamer falls asleep onstage and then other actors enter to perform the action of the dream (as in Act 5 of Richard III), we are not sure at fi rst that Innogen isn’t dreaming Iachimo’s night visitation. The question is significant because the play’s other staging of an encounter with a book, completely different, entirely supernatural, happens within the context of a dream. Toward the end of the play, as Britain fends off a Roman invasion, the despairing Posthumus, who believes his wife has been killed on his orders, allows himself to be arrested by the British authorities as a Roman sympathizer. What ensues closely resembles court masque in its static tableaux and use of machinery. In jail, Posthumus dreams that his parents and brothers, long dead, all gather and entreat Jupiter to have pity on him: “Since (Iupiter) our Son is good, / take off his miseries,” his mother implores the god (5.5, TLN 2685–6). 2 Jupiter “descends in Thunder and Lightning, sitting uppon an Eagle: hee throwes a Thunderbolt” (TLN 2692 s.d.), assures the family that everything will end happily for Posthumus, and leaves a book on Posthumus’s chest. 3 As Posthumus wakes up, all of the dream figures exit, but the book remains physically with him. [Post.] What Fayeries haunt this ground? A Book? Oh rare one, Be not, as is our fangled world, a Garment Nobler than that it couers. Let thy effects So follow to be most vnlike our courtiers, As good, as promise. Reades.

When as a Lyons whelpe, shall to himselfe vnknown, without seeking fi nde, and bee embrac’d by a peece of tender Ayre: And when from a stately Cedar shall be lopt branches, which being dead many yeares, shall after reuiue, bee joynted to the old Stocke, and freshly grow, then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britaine be fortunate, and flourish in Peace and Plentie.

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Sarah Wall-Randell ‘Tis still a Dreame: or else such stuffe as Madmen Tongue, and braine not: either both, or nothing, Or senselesse speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot vntye. Be what it is, The Action of my life is like it, which Ile keepe If but for simpathy. (TLN 2733–50)

Posthumus, who has hit bottom in the cosmic registers of luck and happiness, reads out this cryptic message, ostensibly delivered by the ruler of the gods, which seems to prophesy a happy ending for himself and his embattled country. His reaction, however, suggests neither relief nor scorn but utter noncomprehension. He does not seem to recognize his own name in the next-to-last line—“Then shall Posthumus end his miseries”—even as he pronounces it. In his Poetics, Aristotle famously devalues the “casual” dramaturgy that makes recognition depend on inanimate objects, “lifeless things” like props (Bruster 95–6), but here, rather than summoning an anagnorisis ex machina, Shakespeare conjures a highly dramatic prop, the magic book that ends all miseries—only to dissipate its energy in anticlimax. Posthumus’s “rare” book acts as a physically realized metaphor, a materialized way of thinking about his immaterial self. For a person to stand apart and regard himself is a dizzying mental exercise. For him to see his personal story, to read it, reconstituted as a book—in fact, a supernaturally endowed, hyperdramatically presented book—is a useful and appropriate way of imagining self-regard. By making Posthumus’s story remarkable and yet unremarkable, familiar and yet strange, Shakespeare seeks to fi x in language the curious action of considering oneself, and to explore how such reflection could be anything other than reflexive, productive rather than a closed-off loop. For Posthumus, the book becomes a detached and metaphorized way of thinking about himself as estranged from himself and yet accessible to contemplation. Cymbeline’s temporal and generic commonalities with The Tempest might encourage us to read Posthumus’s prophetic book as a cousin of Prospero’s magic book. While it seems that Shakespeare was certainly thinking about books as supernatural objects in the composition of both plays, it is also clear that Posthumus’s book, far from glowing with magical agency, is strangely inert, illegible to its intended reader. For Posthumus, the riddle rings only a distant bell: “The Action of my life is like it, which Ile keep, / If but for simpathy.” His language here, “my life is like it,” and “simpathy,” describe similarity between two things while explicitly disallowing that they could be one and the same. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists as current in 1610 the defi nition of “sympathy” as “agreement, accord . . . likeness, conformity” (sympathy, n. 2) and Shakespeare’s ten recorded uses of “sympathy” always signify symmetry, only sometimes including the modern meaning of “fellow-feeling” or “tenderness”: “Oh what a simpathie of woe is this,” says Titus Andronicus, reflecting on the

Reading the Book of the Self 111 common misfortune that unites his family (3.1, TLN 1164). Yet things that are like each other cannot, by defi nition, be the same thing. Posthumus hangs onto the book because it reminds him of himself. Instead of overidentifying, imagining, like Don Quixote, that he is a romance-narrative hero, Posthumus thinks that he isn’t a character in this romance story: that a communication actually directed at him is a unrelated fiction that merely happens to resemble his situation. Posthumus seems, as the riddle says, “to himselfe unknown.” Leah Marcus reads Cymbeline as a complicated political allegory aimed at a coterie audience who would have enjoyed decoding this pièce à clef. “Cymbeline repeatedly invites its audience to ‘reading’ and decipherment. . . . [B]ut [reading] is also directly and repeatedly thematized as fraught with dangers, almost inevitably ‘misreading’” (140). The cryptic texts that Marcus refers to as being read and misread are figurative and literal indicators: the submerged evil motives that Cymbeline is blind to in his Queen; the headless corpse that Innogen mistakes for Posthumus; the vision of the westering eagle that the Soothsayer wrongly interprets as a portent of victory for Rome. But for all these misunderstood signs in the play, when an actual moment of reading takes place, as here when Posthumus reads Jupiter’s book, the act is notable not for misinterpretation so much as for its lack of any interpretation at all: “either both, or nothing, / Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such / As sense cannot untye.” Either there is no meaning to interpret, Posthumus says, or if there is one, he declines to take it on. This lacuna or refusal of meaning is all the more remarkable given the extraordinary dramaturgy of the scene—a god descending from the heavens, combined with the rolling cannonballs and pyrotechnics of “Thunder and Lightning,” perhaps the Shakespearean stage’s biggest-ticket effects— which seem especially spectacular when contrasted with the low-key, almost naturalistic representation of readers’ interactions with books that the play has already given us in Innogen’s bedtime ritual. Jupiter appears, and the magic book is handed down from on high, dramatically overdetermined and purporting to resolve all of Posthumus’s griefs and “take off his miseries.” Instead, the reward of interpretation is strangely absent. The last scene of the play underscores the sense that Posthumus’s book represented a false or empty interpretive crux. Subsumed into the play’s long denouement, Posthumus’s revelations of identity are drained of dramatic effect. When the king’s soothsayer fi nally unpacks the prophecy in the last scene, strikingly, nothing happens: there is no import to the revelations, since everything that was foretold by Jupiter has by now already taken place. The “prophecy” becomes just one more anticlimax, especially because of the pointedly strained wordplay required to get the riddle to make sense.4 The play ends a few lines later without a chance for Posthumus to speak again. With the romance-revelation aspect of the prophecy erased, we realize in retrospect that the real significance of Posthumus’s riddle book is not in the moment of its unraveling but in the moment of its

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gnomic wholeness in the scene in which he receives it. This is a paradoxical role for a book, which is supposed to provide, not suspend, information, but perhaps for Posthumus, the gift of being able to un-know himself—to have, through a bookish distance, the “sympathy” for his own life that we in the audience might have for him—is the dramatic function of the book in Cymbeline. When Posthumus finds himself named in Jupiter’s book, he seems, through a kind of forgetting, or through a withdrawal from interpretation (from reading), to dissociate himself from himself.5 In this moment, his identity is materialized by the book, which tells his story and yet is distinct from him: “My life is like it.”6 What does Posthumus gain by not recognizing his own name, forgetting himself? Is the process of self-forgetting in a way the ordeal through which Posthumus must pass to be renewed—in the same way Innogen must “die” through the Queen’s narcotic potion and be reborn? Even his name, Posthumus Leonatus, tells the story—born after death—and so it is fitting that the moment of dying and being renewed should turn on that name itself, its own rebus encrypted, unrecognized, unread. The tragicomic extremes of romance require and shape this metamorphosis of Posthumus’s character. After he has committed the unthinkable, ordered his beloved wife to be killed, Posthumus must undergo some dramatic reconfiguration of his self-conception, literally, to live with himself, and for the audience to be able to accept the “happy ending.” Other romances that end in reunion and forgiveness stage magical scenes in which loss, pain—and whatever anger and resentment might hinder reconciliation—are dissolved in wonder: the dead Hermione turns from a statue into a living woman; Pericles hears the music of the spheres; and Diana descends to tell him (in a dream) where to fi nd his wife. For Cymbeline, this is the supernatural moment, the play’s only exploitation of the smoke and pulleys of stage magic, and yet the divinely enabled reconciliation here is not between Posthumus and Innogen, or Innogen and Cymbeline, but between Posthumus and himself. “My life is like it, which Ile keep / If but for simpathy”: it seems at fi rst that the referent of “which” is the book, and that Posthumus is simply taking it with him; but could “which” also refer to “my life”? In this moment, whose oddness, whose anticlimactic deflation could signal its very interiority, its privacy, its particularity to Posthumus himself, is Posthumus given the gift of perspective on himself? With his life enclosed in a book, Posthumus is able to look at it from outside, and, from the depths of regret, feel a glimmer of “sympathy.” Both Innogen and Posthumus think they are reading fiction, but turn out to be reading about themselves. The uncanny experience of unexpectedly fi nding one’s own story in a book also becomes an important and perplexing event in Wroth’s Urania. In this enormous narrative, as in Don Quixote, books, reading and writing constitute a major part of the representational texture, and like Don Quixote, Urania is highly aware of itself as a romance, self-consciously participating in the forms and conventions

Reading the Book of the Self 113 of the mode.7 As readers have observed, the Urania freely acknowledges its many romance influences, taking formal cues and adopting character names and plot motifs from the catalog of major sixteenth-century romances, among them Montemayor’s Diana, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and The Faerie Queene, as well as from its author’s family heritage, the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia of Wroth’s uncle Philip Sidney. The opening scene of Wroth’s text, walking a narrow line between pastoral and parody, introduces us to the beautiful shepherdess Urania, a young woman who has sustained the classic romance trauma of being kidnapped as a baby and brought up humbly, in ignorance of her true origins. Having just been told by her rustic foster parents that she is not really their daughter, she laments in the euphuistic key of one who knows her Lyly—“Miserable Urania, worse art thou now than these thy Lambs; for they know their dams, while thou dost live unknowne of any”—and promptly breaks into a sonnet to give proper vent to her feelings (I.i.1–2). Within the fi rst pages, many more generic markers appear: Urania counsels a prince who has abandoned civilization and become a wild man through grief; stumbles on a king in pastoral exile; falls in love at fi rst sight; hears that she was probably born the Princess of Naples; and boards a ship, which is promptly seized by pirates—who turn out to be men of gentle birth gone bad through tragic circumstance. This breathless succession of events, and a confusing panoply of noble, beautiful characters, strongly suggest that Wroth is both working within and sending up the romance mode.8 Later, to illustrate the “bacenes” of a rebellious and stupid Lord, the narrator remarks archly that “for learning, ore reading above a Romancie, hee never troubled him self withal” (II.ii.213). Even as she is flattered by inclusion in the text, the reader is herself caught in the act of enjoying such “low” reading. This self-reference to a “Romancie” is also illustrative of the way in which, in the enormous volume of Wroth’s text, books, reading, and writing constitute a major part of the narrative texture. Considering the status of the text as the fi rst prose narrative published in English by a woman, and the many possibilities for reading it as a multidimensional autobiography, it is unsurprising that the Urania’s various portrayals of writing and self-writing, particularly by female characters, have attracted particular critical attention. Mary Ellen Lamb has also discussed women as strong readers in the text, arguing that Wroth is responding to early modern critics of women’s romance reading, who suggest that fiction’s dangerous mimetic spell will entrance the passive woman reader into erotic temptation. Portraying women as moved by reading but ultimately in control of their own emotions, Lamb suggests, Wroth negotiates an alternative model (218–19). Yet in addition to its scenes of private reading, the Urania features a very public, highly ritualized central episode showcasing a magical book, an episode set up by the text to carry a huge amount of narrative importance and rhetorical weight, which nevertheless—as in Cymbeline—turns into a mysterious anticlimax.

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As noted above, Urania hears of her royal lineage as the text opens. After some further adventures, she is reunited with her father, the King of Naples, hears the story of how she was kidnapped as a baby, and is welcomed into the company of her royal siblings and cousins. Many pages and many episodes later, Urania is shipwrecked off the coast of Corinth with her cousin Pamphilia, the primary heroine of the story, and other noble ladies, when they magically become imprisoned in an Enchanted Theater, a circular neoclassical building that features marble pillars, golden chairs, and rich carpets.9 There they remain for almost a hundred pages, transfi xed by illusory images of their lovers, while more and more of the main characters of the text are drawn into this powerful enchantment. Eventually, with the arrival of Amphilanthus, Pamphilia’s lover, and the shepherdess Veralinda, the spell is broken: Apollo appear’d, commanding Veralinda to touch them with a rod he threw her down; she did so when they all awaked, and held each one his lover by the hand, then stood they up, and as amazed gazed on the Shepherdesse, and Nimph. . . . When this was done, and all the couples stood round as the roome was, suddenly the Chaires were vanished, and a Pillar of Gold stood in their stead, on which hung a Booke, every one there strove to take that down, but none could gaine it; Pamphilia and Urania came, they both resolved to try, but the first place was given by both their consents unto Urania, who tooke it downe, wherewith the inchantment partly ended as the Musique and charme, but the house remayning and the Pillar of Gold, as memory of the bravest inchantment that inclosed the number of the worthiest the world did ever know. The Booke Amphilanthus tooke and tryed to open, but though Urania had got it, she must have Veralindas help to open it, which being lent her she got, the house then vanished, and they found in the Booke the whole story of Urania, and how that after shee was stollen by the Duke as before was confessed by himselfe, and then from him by robbers. This wise man who had made this inchantment preserved her, tooke her from those robbers, left the purse and mantle with her to be the meanes for those that took her up to cherish her, and then being Lord of this Island, framed this inchantment, whither he knew she should come and give part of the conclusion to it . . . : the next story was of Veralinda, which was this. . . . (I.iii.455–56) As Veralinda’s story unfolds—her birth as a princess, her infant kidnapping, her captor’s flight by sea, her adoption by a kind shepherd, and the shepherd’s dispatching her to her true destiny when the time comes—we see that it closely parallels Urania’s. The envy of a treacherous courtier motivates both kidnappings; like Urania’s, Veralinda’s kidnappers are ultimately moved to repent, even, as the text says, “by the same divine power Urania was protected by” (456).

Reading the Book of the Self 115 This episode of the Enchanted Theater, embellished with extensive, detailed description, of which I have quoted only a small part, is one of just three such large-scale, allegorical set pieces in the whole text—highly symbolic real estate in the mode of the House of Alma or the Bower of Bliss in the Faerie Queene, and unlike the nonmagical, though fantastic, courts and gardens of the majority of the narrative.10 Indeed, in its elaborately detailed scenery, its sudden disappearances and transformations, and even in the descent of a classical god, the Enchanted Theatre is highly suggestive of the equally lavish, and similarly static and tableau-like, masques in which Wroth is known to have danced at Queen Anne’s court.11 A portentous, highly inflected dramatic and rhetorical buildup is thus given to what ought to be a climactic moment of reading. Here, as the language, pace, and tone of the text suggests, Urania will discover at last the true circumstances of her being lost as a child. Yet nothing really happens: Urania is not even given a chance to respond, because—with only a semicolon, not even pausing for a period—the narrative goes right on to the story of Veralinda. Without a reaction shot, as it were, Urania seems unchanged, unaffected by the presumably momentous episode. We are never told how she receives the information, and when she reappears in the next scene, her attention as well as that of the narrator is wholly focused on her cousin Pamphilia’s romantic woes, where it remains for much of the rest of the story. The great revelation of “the whole story of Urania” in a magical book, heralded by the descent of Apollo and framed by “the bravest inchantment . . . the world did ever know” (455), comes as a profound anticlimax.12 In fact, there could have been no satisfaction in a release from suspense because Urania has long known the truth of her identity. As the romance begins, she has just received the news that her parents are not really her parents. Almost immediately she meets Parselius, nephew to the King of Naples, who recognizes her as his long-lost cousin Urania. Urania soon has the opportunity to hear her story again from the sorceress Melissea, and without much delay she is conveyed to Naples, reunited with her father the king, and clothed in the rich robes of her true station. But there is another batch of evidence, and another reiteration of the authenticity of her identity, to come: while the celebrations for her return are still going on, an old man appears at court, and explains that he is the Prince of Istria (later identified as the Duke), who stole the infant Urania as a hostage while he concocted a plan to bring down the royal heir Amphilanthus, only to have her stolen from him in turn by “Robbers” (I.ii.232). Virtually from the start, then, Urania has known who she was, and her identity is confi rmed and reconfi rmed by this series of revelation and reunion scenes. The Enchanted Theater is thus already drained of consequence and impact, even as the reader’s attention is drawn forcefully to it. Wroth ultimately does devise a way to make the stale revelation of Urania’s story release its dramatic energy once again, through a displaced retelling. Veralinda’s story is essentially a dramatically condensed version

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of Urania’s, with the difference that while Urania’s story is ongoing, Veralinda receives a neat happy ending in this very scene. For her, the book is indeed an effective oracle: Veralinda had not yet known she was a princess, nor that the supposed nymph who had been accompanying her is really Leonius, her future husband, in disguise. The last line of her story has a resounding ring of “happily ever after”: “[T]hus was she preserved and in her true love had a faire dwelling” (I.iii.457). The eventful, distinctive part of Veralinda’s narrative, her courtship by her true love, the most important aspect of anyone’s life in the world of Urania, is happily wrapped up. Urania is not surprised to read the record of her own life in the book, because she already knows it; it is her own story. Yet hearing it told again, this time as the revelation of Veralinda’s personal mystery, Urania witnesses what is substantively her biography, told in a neater and shorter form—the fictionalized version, in a sense, which the truth is stranger than. And yet “happily ever after” is not necessarily the nature of “romance,” since, as is vividly illustrated by the endings of both parts of the Urania, which, like Sidney’s Arcadia, halt dramatically in midsentence, romance can deny neat endings—as another way of calling attention to the disjunction, the seam, between life and art. Urania’s story will not end; not even her discovery of who she is can seem to end; but Veralinda’s story does end, satisfyingly. In her important discussion of women as storytellers and poets in the Urania, Barbara Lewalski argues that, for women in the text, narrating their own adventures and writing about themselves are major means of self-defi nition and agency. . . . These stories allow the narrators to shape their lives artfully, giving them meaning and rhetorical power. . . . For Wroth’s storytellers inside the text, the implied fictional ideal is to attain enough aesthetic distance to give artful shape to life experience. (277–78) For Lewalski, the act of authoring one’s own text is congruent with the act of assuming independent agency in one’s life. What does it mean, then, not to write, but to read your own story? Significantly, Urania’s life story is not an autobiographical or creatively quasi-autobiographical narrative that she herself spins, in the manner of, for instance, Pamphilia’s masking her own experience in a “fi xion” (I.iii.505), but something exterior to her and invested with great authority by the text in its portentously theatrical presentation. The dramatic function of the book is closely related to the function of narrative in Lewalski’s account of female storytellers, and yet the materiality of the enchanted book adds another dimension. Veralinda’s story appears as an object separate from Urania, the separation significant in this text in which, through many scenes of private reading, personal books and private bodies are linked, and in its distinction it makes Urania’s own life strange and new to her. In this work in which reading, as well as writing, serves as an important practice of inwardness, Urania’s

Reading the Book of the Self 117 self-in-a-book can be appreciated by her objectively, as an artifact. Does Urania (like Posthumus in Cymbeline), enjoy her own story more, fi nd it more aesthetically pleasing, when it seems to happen to someone else? What is the value of discovering new interest in one’s own life, and a new regard for it as a consequential thing? Critics of the Victorian novel have recently explored the question of the reader’s varying engagement with a long prose text, and suggested that we consider the reader’s attention and inattention as another element in the flow of the narrative, a kind of reader response that the narratorial voice acknowledges. As readers of Urania, written in the context of another era of long prose narratives, perhaps we are accustomed to understand the vagaries of attention, and to recognize the honor paid to a text, “The Whole Story of Urania (and Veralinda),” when its reader fi nds it interesting and engaging—as both Urania and we are obliged to do by the Urania’s dramatic presentation of the text. A magical book tells the identity-seeking heroine something about herself, and yet presents that revelation in such a way that it is already understood, preread. How can rereading a story you already know well—your own life—reveal anything useful? In Wroth’s text, stories overlay stories within the main narrative. More than a dozen significant, ongoing plot threads are woven together, with characters’ pasts and parentage becoming braided into the text’s account of the present, and an almost uncountable number of inset, self-contained accounts and tales bringing the narrative to many temporary halts. Within this complex structure of the “interlace,” so much a part of the aesthetic of romance, the book is used as a way of materially, as it were visually, delineating one story from the surrounding narratives. At the same time, as she is being read by us, Urania is magically able to read herself, through the magic book’s mimetic displacement of her story onto Veralinda. Her life story reconstituted as a book about someone else—in fact, a supernaturally endowed, hyperdramatically represented book—enables her, as a reading subject, to stand apart from herself and regard herself. By making Urania’s story remarkable and yet unremarkable, familiar and yet strange, and by working within romance’s self-conscious narrative modes, Wroth seeks to fi x in language the curious action of thinking about oneself. The magical book in this text literalizes the automatic association between reading and interiority, in an age of silent reading, and at the same time it enables the fictional reader to conduct a mental exercise in self-regard. We might say, then, as Lamb has suggested, that it is not only in the model of the woman writer or storyteller that Wroth offers a pattern of agency, but also in the woman reader. Going further, we could argue that it is not only by being a strong reader, by refusing to identify too facilely with the text (as Pamphilia refuses to do when she throws away the romance, the opposite of Don Quixote becoming one with his romances), but also by identifying readily, by succumbing to the spectacle, by fi nding oneself in the book after all, that one can read productively, engagedly and, even if the story is well-known, with surprise and pleasure.

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Another hint as to what is gained by reading one’s own life is provided in the love story of Urania and Steriamus. Each of them at fi rst had been attached to someone else—Urania, although she met Steriamus fi rst, had fallen in love with Parselius instead, while Steriamus had pined unrequitedly for Pamphilia—but they are cured of these early affections by magic, when they jump into the ocean near the rock of St. Maura on the instructions of the sage Melissea (I.ii.230–31). When Steriamus pledges his love to Urania, they must negotiate trust in one another around the inconvenient ideal of true love at fi rst sight. Steriamus tells Urania his story: “‘[S]hee [Pamphilia] rejected me; I now thanke Heavens for it, since I was kept for this happinesse. . . . Give me this second [love],’ said hee, ‘which as the fi rst I will esteeme, and cherish it; for a new created one it is’” (I.ii.265). What is perhaps even more interesting than Wroth’s remarkably progressive vision of romantic relationships, in which Urania as well as her mate is considered no less pure or true for having loved before, is the way Urania herself later describes second love. Her cousin Philistella questions how Urania’s passion for Steriamus can be as true as her fi rst love, and how she can forget what she felt for Parselius. Urania replies that the groundwork for her relationship with Steriamus was actually laid when she fi rst met him and admired him, even though he did not at that time inspire her love. “[T]hus if I changd, twas from sweete Steriamus to Parselius, for his excellency wonne me fi rst; so this can bee no change, but as a booke layd by, new lookt on, is more, and with greater judgement understood” (I.ii.333). The second look at the old book makes all the difference for Urania, just as it perhaps does when she is given a dramatically new vision on the old story of her life. It has often been argued that part of the generic mutation of early modern romance, as it led toward the form now called the novel; lay in fi nding new ways of illuminating interiority or “character.”13 I would suggest that the roots of late romance’s apparent innovations lie in the mode’s most traditional expressions. If the representation of interiority deepens in complexity and “psychological” dimensionality in seventeenth-century narrative, it does so in part by externalized means: the books in Cymbeline and Urania could be read as a gesture at a kind of concretized, allegorized interiority. In the same way that, for instance, the House of Alma in The Faerie Queene functions both as a highly formalized symbol for the virtue of Temperance and also, just as important, as a real house where Arthur and Guyon rest and rejuvenate, books in Cymbeline and Urania are metaphors for the self that also have an objective reality in the narrative as books. Books belong to a unique class of objects in that they are both physical reality, paper and ink, and the stories they contain. They are thus inside and outside the symbolic schema at once, oscillating between literal and metaphoric—a kind of hybrid mimesis that, fittingly, flourishes in the endlessly experimental mode of romance. Books, especially such impossible or supernatural books as the riddle of the “lion’s whelp” or “the whole story

Reading the Book of the Self 119 of Urania,” enable these texts to experiment with ways of representing selfreflection onstage and in fiction. Reading one’s own story in a book is like looking in a mirror. And yet, despite its rich array of metaphorical uses in the early modern period (in contexts including book titles, such as A Mirrour for Magistrates or Margaret Tyler’s romance translation The Myrrour of Knighthood), a mirror, strictly speaking, is dependent on the gazer: a reflection only moves when the observer moves, only reveals what the observer shows it. The Narcissus myth suggests the folly (and the attraction) of imagining that the person in the mirror is an autonomous, other being. A book, however, is another thing, separate from the body, which the reader expects to remain separate from him- or herself. Thus it is an object on which one can get a genuine perspective, from a suitable distance. And if the book is analogous to the self and one can regard that self as if from another person’s perspective, then self-contemplation can escape from self-consciousness and become unpredictable, unanticipated, and thus truly interesting. In The Instruction of a Christen Woman, Vives (in the 1529 translation of Richard Hyrde) dismisses the appeal of romances (“bokes writen in our mothers to[n]ges . . . [of] none other matter but of warre and love” [E3r]) to women as mere vanity: “For often tymes [th]e onley cause why they [readers] preyse them is bycause they se in them theyr owne conditions as in a glasse” (F1r; see also Carrell 80–82).14 This moralistic perspective on romance dictates that such reading is “vain” in both senses, the original “erroneous, not useful,” and the modern “prideful” that was coming into use in the seventeenth century (OED vain I.4; vanity 3a). Yet perhaps selfrecognition, or significant nonrecognition, in the “glasse” of a book is the only kind that is not in vain; perhaps it is there that, like Posthumus and Urania, one can fi nd the kind of closure that only happens in fiction.

NOTES 1. On early modern moral condemnation of women’s romance reading as associated with overactive imaginations and sexual looseness, see Hackett (4–19), Sanders (67), and Lamb. 2. Quotations from Cymbeline are cited by through-line number, following Oxford’s Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition. 3. The actual ontological status of this book is a matter of argument. Jupiter calls it a “tablet” in 5.5 (TLN 2709), and this is how Howard, in her introduction to the Norton text, refers to it (2963), as does Teague (191). Yet, here, as Scott notices (51n.34), Posthumus sees it as a “book,” and however many or few pages it seems to have, it does feature an elaborate binding, or “garment,” more appropriate to a volume of paper and boards than to a wax or stone tablet. Perhaps the object changes names when it changes hands, going from almost Mosaic monumentality in Jupiter’s possession to Posthumus’s more domestic reality? The book/tablet question may be more of a productive multiplicity—and a challenge for the director—than a confusion.

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4. Mikalachki notes that such “pseudo-etymology” was well-known as one of the less creditable features of nationalist histories such as Camden’s Britannia (113). 5. Sullivan has recently considered the idea of forgetting as a necessary act of selfcreation in Shakespeare’s plays. Memory, in the proto-psychological discourse of the Renaissance, was considered central to personhood (53–6). Yet, Sullivan argues, without the facility to forget, the self cannot act autonomously, but only react; it is necessary to get out from under the weight of everything one remembers so that one can think new thoughts. “Forgetting . . . allows for the production of a distinctive interiority, a subjectivity outside of and in no relation to ideology,” Sullivan claims (55–56). Rather than a mere loss of something, an instance of damage or blotting in the book of memory, forgetting becomes a generative and even a creative act. On Posthumus’ non-comprehension of the book as a kind of “illiteracy,” see Scott (51–54). 6. Wayne notes the connection between two other key props in the play and Posthumus’s selfhood, arguing that “[h]is loss of the ring and the manacle . . . [is] fundamentally related to the loss of his identity and confi rm[s] the inter-animating relations of objects and identities” in the play (295). 7. Carrell makes the connection between Wroth and Quixote “reading” themselves “into” romance texts. 8. Hackett remarks on Wroth’s sophisticated double consciousness of genre and parody (174–82). Roberts, in the introduction to her edition of Wroth’s text (Wroth xx–xxv), notes the self-parody of the Urania as one of the influences of Don Quixote on it. 9. For a rich discussion of the concept of “theater” in early modern England, and the diverse architectural as well as epistemological associations the word could conjure, see West, 43–78. 10. The other two are the Temple of Love and the Hell of Deceit, both of which are more reminiscent of Spenser’s allegorical places, and have received far more critical attention, than the Enchanted Theater. 11. Walker points out the masque-like way in which Wroth’s emblematic scenes of enchantment call attention to their “machinery” (178–79). 12. Although she does not refer to the scene of the Enchanted Theatre, Cavanagh notices the way in which “[i]n the world of the Urania, supernatural occurrences tend to be greeted with equanimity. When characters meet figures or events from this realm, they respond without surprise or undue concern” (151). 13. See e.g., Ker (404–5) or more recently Doody (272–73). 14. See Carrell for an extended and excellent treatment of the metaphor of romance as a mirror.

WORKS CITED Bruster, Douglas. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan 2003. Carrell, Jennifer Lee. “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance.” Studies in English Literature 43.1 (Winter 1994): 79–107. Cavanagh, Sheila T. “Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania.” Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England. Ed. Corinne S. Abate. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 151–65.

Reading the Book of the Self 121 Cervantes, Miguel de. The Second Part of the History of the Valorous and witty Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha. . . . Trans. Thomas Shelton. London, 1620. Doody, Margaret. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Howard, Jean. Introduction to Cymbeline. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. New York: Norton, 1997. Ker, W. P. Epic and Romance. London: Macmillan, 1922. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Women Readers in Wroth’s Urania.” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Eds. Naomi Miller and Gary Waller. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 120–27. Lewalski, Barbara. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Marcus, Leah, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Mikalachki, Jodi. The Legacy of Boadicea. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sanders, Eve Rachele. “Interiority and the Letter in Cymbeline.” Critical Survey 12.2 (2000): 49–70. Scott, Charlotte. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. . Titus Andronicus. Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition, op. cit. Sullivan, Garrett A., Jr. “‘Be This Sweet Helen’s knell, and now Forget Her’: Forgetting, Memory, and Identity in All’s Well that Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50.1 (1999): 51–69. Teague, Frances. Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1991. Vives, Juan Luis. A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instructio[n] of a christen Woma[n]. London, 1529. Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne, 1996. Wayne, Valerie. “The woman’s parts of Cymbeline.” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 288–315. West, William N. Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. . The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Eds. Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999.

7

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Old Wives’ Tales Mary Ellen Lamb

If there be never a servant-monster i’ the Fair, who can help it? he says; nor a nest of antics? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his head with other men’s heels, let the concupiscence of jigs and dances reign as strong as it will amongst you; yet if the puppets will please anybody, they shall be entreated to come in.

In Ben Jonson’s induction to Bartholomew Fair, most critics interpret the Scrivener’s mention of “Tempests” to refer specifically to Shakespeare’s Tempest, and the “servant-monster” to Caliban, called that name by both Stephano and Trinculo (3.2.4–5).1 Jonson’s Scrivener seems to fi xate specifically on Trinculo’s wish, never realized within the play, to show Caliban at a fair for money (2.2.28–32) as a metonym for The Tempest, designed with similar “drolleries” and lower class “jigs” to appeal to the lowest denominator of taste. This fi xation suggests more about Jonson’s concerns for his own play, titled as a “fair” and featuring a memorable episode of puppets, than it does about Shakespeare. Jonson’s apparent hesitation in lowering himself to employ Shakespeare’s alleged strategies for appealing broadly even to the lower sorts—apprentices, thieves, idle women—is wittily exposed as a futile posture. In this chapter, I argue that the commercial–aesthetic confl icts described in Jonson’s references to Shakespeare’s plays in 1614 also engaged Shakespeare when he wrote The Tempest, whose fi rst known performance was at court only three years earlier in 1611; and that The Tempest represents Shakespeare’s own exploration of issues of aesthetic taste relevant to the genre of romance. Jonson’s accusation directed toward “those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries” singles out features common to romance, a genre whose characteristically far-flung settings and unlikely reunions might, in their lack of realism, be said to “make Nature afraid.”

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 123 In classifying Tempests with Tales, he conflates the far-fetched plots of romance with those of an oral tradition denigrated as “old wives’ tales.” It is deeply ironic, in this context, that Jonson’s Scrivener does not distinguish between The Tempest and Tales, whether The Winter’s Tale to which G. R. Hibbard perceives “an obvious reference” (12) or the old tales to which The Winter’s Tale pays tribute in its title. I argue that a forceful differentiation from The Winter’s Tale or the tradition of old tales from which it emerged was in fact formative to The Tempest; and that this contrast foregrounds the social nature and motives of romance as a central topic shaping both plays. While The Winter’s Tale affi rms the cross-class appeal of romance, confl ated with the “old tales” stereotypically told by old women before a winter’s fi re but shared among all social fractions, The Tempest initiates a bid to reclaim romance as part of a defi nitively bounded form of an emergent male authorship. As Prospero abjures his art, however, The Tempest fi nally questions the grounds of its own bid for distinction and even the value of social distinction itself. Rather than a choice or compromise between virtual elite or allegedly popular tastes, the fi nal act of The Tempest represents a complex meditation on their relationship founded, as I argue in the conclusion, on recognition of a common mortality.

VIRTUAL AUDIENCES Jonson’s put-down of Shakespeare’s Tempest as like other “drolleries,” an uncontrolled and vulgar jig, represents a caricature strikingly at odds with its fi rst recorded performance at Whitehall in 1611 and its subsequent performance in the festivities honoring the marriage of James’ daughter Elizabeth in 1613. The censure makes visible, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a cultural field structured along a continuum stretching between popular works designed for mass appeal and the high art designed for more restricted audiences (Field). By the early seventeenth century, as no doubt in ours, the opposition between these poles was already complicated by sophisticated marketing practices appealing to various audiences at once. Paul Yachnin, for example, applied to Shakespeare’s plays the concept of a “populuxe market,” circulating to nonelite buyers versions (often less expensive versions) of luxury goods perceived as signifying high status. By affording nonelite buyers the opportunity, or the illusion of an opportunity, to play the role of elite consumer, this populuxe market affi rmed social hierarchy by appealing to buyers’ desires temporarily to “become” their social betters through their modes of consumption, and it also critiqued hierarchy by exposing its dependence on commodities, including in this case plays themselves, to confer social distinction (40–44, see also Hine). This increasingly nuanced view of the operations of a consumer economy furthers interrogations, from different perspectives, of a widespread

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critical assumption that the courtly aesthetic of The Tempest was directed primarily to a court audience. 2 Critics have noted that Shakespeare’s late plays freely circulated, apparently with some success, between public and aristocratic venues (Cook, “Audiences” 319–20; Barroll, Politics 199–202); and the prime placement of The Tempest as the fi rst play in the 1623 folio further implies its anticipated appeal to “The great Variety of Readers” addressed in its prefatory letter. The concept of a populuxe theater accounts for both venues. The play’s refi ned aesthetic was highly appropriate to a court audience; and its performances at court would, by this logic, only enhance its value to public consumers, by providing them an insider’s glimpse at royal culture, and a fleeting opportunity to engage in social masquerade by taking on the role of aristocratic observer (Yachnin 44). This role offers consumers the simultaneous delights of enjoying a virtual form of social distinction and, in the process, perhaps (even more deliciously) recognizing that distinction as only a social construction. This virtual distinction also dignified the vocation of playwright. Wearing the king’s livery as the “King’s Men,” Shakespeare’s players could present themselves as court insiders, ideally situated to market their knowledge of an aristocratic aesthetic. 3 This role as court insider did not, however, resolve other cultural anxieties aroused by catering to a mass market. As Ben Jonson’s famous induction to Bartholomew Fair demonstrates, the very act of pleasing a public audience, whatever the actual status of its members,4 made even The Tempest vulnerable to allegations of vulgarity. Even as a pleasure in social distinction (and arguably in critiquing the grounds of social distinction) elevated wealthy merchants and lowly apprentices alike to imaginary peers of the realm for the duration of a play, other forces degraded them as mere “clapper clawers,” a “multitude” whose “smoky breath,” according to an anonymous letter from “A Never Writer to an Ever Reader” prefacing the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, “sullied” any play performed before them (Mowat and Werstine 7). Such caricatures make visible the social struggle inherent in the operations of distinction. As a mass audience enjoys a socially elevated image of itself, class stratifications come to seem less inevitable, less carved-in-stone. In response, a more elite group simultaneously strives to defend its own threatened social distinction by denigrating the art enjoyed by large numbers of the nonelite. In both cases, the representations of audiences express social pressures rather than any accurate reflection of their actual composition. While there may be some inevitable and accidental overlap with actual persons, these represented audiences are, by design, primarily virtual. Representations of readers of romance were just as virtual, and they expressed very similar struggles for distinction in ways that ultimately affected plays, such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, that drew from them. Like plays, books define their readers, as Michael Saenger described, not by how they are, but how they wish themselves to be for the time they

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 125 are reading the book. Prefatory material gratifies these consumer desires by engaging in “the marketing value of exclusivity” (Saenger 48) to sell books both to the already elite, to elite want-to-bes, or, more subtly, the “middlebrows,” a heterogeneous readership of romances “indebted to but slightly outside of elite culture” (Mentz, Romance 20). This relaxation of social barriers was more than merely theoretical. By the seventeenth century, increasing literacy was creating a reading revolution. With the attainment of some level of literacy, even previously marginalized groups came to think of themselves and of their relationship with other selves, in new and less limited ways.5 As Lori Newcomb ably demonstrated, this rise in literacy created among elite readers a need to impose distinctions according to class status and also according to gender (Reading 1–16, “Gendering”). Because of their widespread popularity, romances became especially vulnerable to trivialization. It was the undiscriminating reading public that demanded, it was supposed, the lowest reading pleasures. Educated males were (ideally) to read for profit, noting useful passages in commonplace books; while women were imagined to read solely, and frivolously, for pleasure (Newcomb, “Gendering” 121). While romances in fact appeared on the bookshelves of socially eminent males, a virtual audience not only of women readers but of women servant readers was increasingly projected as their most common and appropriate readership (Newcomb, “Gendering” 135, Reading 86–95). Recognized as a virtual readership by contemporaries, this attempted debasement of romances as women’s reading came to announce its readerly pleasures for both genders. As Helen Hackett surmised, an early modern writer might well direct a romance to women to “advertise his wares to readers of both sexes as racy, lightweight and fun” (11). The social forces that operated on prose romances and plays were not identical—the virtual audience imagined for prose romances was more often gendered—but neither were they entirely separate.6 As plays reached publication, they, too became subject to a hierarchy organizing printed texts. Sir Thomas Bodley famously consigned playbooks, together with almanacs and proclamations, as “riffe raffe” or “baggage books” unsuitable for a noble library (Hackel, “‘Rowme’” 113–17). In response, workers in the book trade attempted to raise the value of the playbooks they sold. The anonymous writer of the letter prefacing the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, for example, promoted the text’s suitability for an elite “eternal reader,” contrasted to vulgar playgoers.7 Plays were also vulnerable to become elevated or conversely tainted by the printed works that furnished their plots. Jonson again becomes a valuable informant, as he denigrates Pericles as “some mouldy tale / . . . and stale / As the shrieve’s crusts, and nasty as his fish-/ Scraps” fit only for “the common tub” (“Ode to Himself” Poems 355). This play tale was “mouldy” because it was old (as based on the Greek romance Apollonius of Tyre redacted in Gower’s fourteenth century Confessio Amantis) and also commonly available (as in Laurence Twine’s prose romance A Pattern of Painful

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Adventures published c. 1576). For Ben Jonson, the same sweaty hands of the marginally literate that soiled the pages of a prose romance also clapped at the end of a public play. For the writer of the letter prefacing the Troilus and Cressida quarto, on the other hand, the “eternal reader” was by far the social superior to vulgar playgoers. Both writers were operating according to their own social agendas. Whether imagined as elevated or debased, the social meanings expressed through the creation of virtual readerships of printed works became one of several conditions shaping the struggle for distinction on the early modern stage.

THE WINTER’S TALE: PANDOSTO AND OLD WIVES’ TALES With its conspicuous use of Robert Greene’s Pandosto, The Winter’s Tale rode the crest of the wide-spread public consumption of printed prose romances (Newcomb, Reading 81–82, 262; Mentz, Romance 5). It is not only modern scholars who recognize the play’s appropriation of plot elements from Greene’s romance; this was fully accessible to the reading members of Shakespeare’s audience as well. The enthusiastic readership that probably increased the play’s box office receipts also posed a risk to the play’s cultural capital. The cultural forces were already in effect that only four years later would present Pandosto as reading matter most suitable for humble chambermaids (Newcomb, Reading 89). The Winter’s Tale addresses this difficulty in contradictory ways. It appeals to a populuxe audience in its opening exchange of exaggerated compliments between courtiers, in the naming of the Italian sculptor Julio Romano, in the restoration of Hermione in a private chapel (Yachnin 204–6). The play also confronts this problem head on, by implicating the debased virtual audiences of women and the lower sorts in its reflections on its own art. The country clowns who enjoy (and buy) Autolycus’s ludicrous ballads impersonate the virtual low readership imagined for Greene’s Pandosto, and their gullibility exposes the commercialism tainting prose romances (and plays) censured for improbable plots. Foregrounded from the fi rst appearance of a very pregnant Hermione, the play’s emphasis on maternity dignifies the highly gendered concerns of the virtual woman reader of prose romance. In its self-defense against both of these charges—its indiscriminate commercial appeal even to low audiences and its supposedly trivial narrative pleasures enjoyed by women—The Winter’s Tale addresses the larger concern not only of its own status as a literary work, but also of the codes for determining cultural distinction itself. The play’s primary intervention in this cultural system appears most prominently in its title, The Winter’s Tale, which refers to a genre of narrative even more debased than prose romance, and for similar reasons: its cross-classed and cross-gendered appeal, as well as its apparent lack of any purpose beyond giving pleasure.8 Linked with old wives’ tales in

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 127 its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term winter’s tale summoned up a homely scene of narration, usually by an old woman, before a fi replace during long winter evenings (Hackett 151). Early modern renderings of this scene were commonly denigrating, from Boccaccio’s deprecation of “a maundering old woman, sitting with others late of a winter’s night at the home fi reside, making up tales of Hell, the fates, Ghosts and the like” (54) to Shakespeare’s own Lady Macbeth, who castigates her husband for his “fl aws and starts” more appropriate to “a woman’s story at a winter’s fi re / Authorized by her grandam.”9 Both scenes allude to the frequent cross-class sharing of stories with their elite charges by servants and nurses, often represented as old crones, although old tales were told by other equally debased female narrators, such as the impressively flatulent alewife Mother Bunches or the distractable blacksmith’s wife Madge Clunch of George Peele’s Old Wives Tale (1595).10 Old, fat, and ugly, these often grotesque representations measure the extent to which they too, were virtual, performing the ideological work of demeaning this oral tradition. Paying tribute to this low and female domain in its title, The Winter’s Tale brings to visibility the centrality of these low oral narratives to its own production. At the same time, the title of The Winter’s Tale simultaneously evokes another, quite different scene of narration, explicit in the assertion by the young prince Mamillius that “a sad tale’s best for winter.”11 The young boy’s tale of “sprites and goblins” whispered in his mother’s ear, as the pair are surrounded by her waiting gentlewomen, identifies Shakespeare’s play with the widespread circulation of tales among women and children. The play does what it can to ease anxieties elicited by this scene of narration: the narrator is a boy instead of an old female nurse; he speaks to his mother rather than to a mixed group of low servants and family; the scene is set in the daylight in a royal court rather than at night by a winter’s fi re. Yet his opening line (“There was a man . . . Dwelt by a churchyard” 2.1.28, 30) elicits the creepy-crawly feeling anticipating the later “flaws and starts” typical, according to Lady Macbeth, for young boys. The appeal of a ghost story of “sprites and goblins,” and the agreeable fright it inspires, crosses the social boundaries of gender and class (Fox 192). John Aubrey expresses great nostalgia for just such “fabulous stories . . . of Sprights and walking of Ghosts” told by “old women and mayds” in his pre-civil war childhood (xxix). The differences between these two forms of “winter’s tale” make visible the threat of this close relationship with women to the elitist and sexist ideologies of early modern England. The cultural significance of Mamillius’s tale lies not in its content but in the intimacy of his interaction with his mother, who asks for his story (“Pray you sit by us, / And tell ‘s a tale” 2.1.22–23), who praises his former efforts (“do your best / To fright me with your sprites. You’re powerful at it” 2.1.27–28), and who invites him to sit close to her so he can whisper it (“Come on then, and give ‘t me in mine

128 Mary Ellen Lamb ear” 2.1.32). While Leontes does not knowingly interrupt Mamillius’s tale, the fear which causes the boy’s violent removal from his mother’s presence (“Give me the boy . . . you / Have too much blood in him” 2.1.56, 57–58) gives expression to a similar cultural fear of female influence evoked by oral tales enjoyed in childhood. Erasmus would also remove young boys from the influence of the “stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women” (214). In early modern gender ideology, the tender bond with women threatens a boy’s eventual attainment of a full masculinity best inculcated by the study of Latin writings in a humanist schoolroom (Ong, Fletcher 303–5).12 By staging the bond between Mamillius and Hermione in its full heart-rending closeness, The Winter’s Tale suggests the hollowness of the stereotype denigrating winter’s tales, and the distortion of their debased virtual narrator—the old crone, the “maundering old woman,” the “grandam.” The actual winter’s tale—the tale Mamillius whispers to his mother—makes visible an intimate and generative female sphere lying outside—beyond and anterior to—narratives shaped either by a struggle for distinction or for economic profit. While a tale of “sprites and goblins” has little evident cultural or even literary value, the narrative pleasures shared between Mamillius and Hermione are far from trivial. Through its three references to its own events as unlikely as an “old tale,” The Winter’s Tale foregrounds a continued adult identification with this early narrative tradition. Paulina describes Hermione’s apparent coming-to-life as so unlikely that “were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.116–17). Leontes’ recovery of his daughter Perdita is “so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (5.2.25); and the bear’s killing of Antigonus is “like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (5.2.53–54). In the process of comparing its own events to those of absurd old tales, the play also defends them. When the living Hermione embraces Leontes, no onlooker mocks or ridicules her unexpected transformation. In their sympathetic joy, Camillo and Polixenes provide a prompt to the audience to respond instead with pleasurable acceptance. These references set up the same double sense of “old tale” as the play’s title does with “winter’s tale.” The very improbability of the “old tale” of Hermione’s transformation only increases its power to move an audience who remains open to its power. The enjoyment of this event requires a surrender of logic not possible for those whom Alfred Hitchcock called, in a different context, “the plausibles” (Denby 148). “Plausibles” might ask a series of questions about Hermione’s preservation: did no one notice her presence in the chapel for a period of sixteen years? Didn’t anyone wonder about the food Paulina must have taken there? How could she remain alone, except for visits from Paulina, for that time without losing her mind? Those who willingly surrender this desire for answers open themselves to a nonanalytical experience of pleasure shared indiscriminately with

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 129 anyone: with children, with chambermaids, with country clowns as well as with kings and queens. There are many forms of narrative pleasure, many analytic and some hyperrational. Pleasures often indicate and, according to Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction), function to reify hierarchies of class (Sebek). Some narrative pleasures are inextricably tied to political understandings (Jameson; McLuskie; Zizek). These pleasures are quite different from the naïve or perhaps even mindless delight, from the “flaws and starts” that reveal a child’s total absorption in old wives’ tales. Also experienced by adult early moderns, this child-like pleasure is perhaps best expressed in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. Describing the intense delight imparted by “a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner,” Sir Philip Sidney asserts the childishness of the pleasures experienced even by grown men: “So is it in men (most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves): glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas” (358). Rather than a sentimental reflection about childhood, this sense of imaginative pleasure as experienced most directly by children has been recently advanced by Michael Witmore as at the core of an evolving early modern concept of fiction. Early moderns tended to distrust the imagination, but they also were aware of its potential uses. As Witmore explains, children’s cognitive incompleteness rendered them an ideal test case or laboratory for exploring the ontology of fiction as, he argues in different terms, occurs in A Winter’s Tale.13 Paulina’s role as midwife suggests this acceptance of inner childishness and even of a domination by women like that experienced in early childhood. As various critics have observed, Paulina acts as “a sort of midwife of events” (Hackett 158, also Wells 255–56, Wilson, “Observations” 138); and in her homely and direct garrulity, she resembles the “old wife” narrator of tales. As she attests to the baby’s paternity, Leontes insults her as a “midwife” as well as a “mankind witch” and “a callet / Of boundless tongue” (2.3.67, 90–91, 159). Leontes later comes to understand that her words are “as medicinal as true, / Honest as either” (2.3.37–38). Her role as midwife merges with her role as playwright in her sixteen-year long fiction that Hermione is dead and that, as she brutally affirms, Leontes killed her (5.1.15). Paulina’s role as midwife and sage wisewoman suggests the healing energy possible to old tales for adults who, like Leontes, become receptive to their power. From a tyrant, Leontes becomes a penitent. His neurotic need to dominate yields to a submissive obedience to a woman beneath his rank. As Leontes follows Paulina’s instructions to him, to the onlookers, and to the audience, that “it is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–95), he models an openness to narrative that eludes rational analysis.14 This choice offered the audience to marvel rather than to disdain (or to hoot) at the play’s implausible events dignifies simultaneously play, old tale, and finally prose romance. As Newcomb observes, antimimeticism formed a “bedrock of the attack on romance” as a genre; in Plato’s writings, contempt

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for foolish stories designed to dupe the ignorant masses “cloaks the arbitrariness of social differentiation as an absolute aesthetic or moral law” (Reading 119–20). In its differences from Pandosto and especially in its miraculous revival of Hermione, The Winter’s Tale defends prose romance by placing even more pressure on an audience member’s willingness to defy this aesthetic of plausibility. Following a similar strategy, The Winter’s Tale defends the supposed feminine orientation of prose romance by including even more “of the feminine and maternal” (Hackett 158) in for example, the considerable narrative authority wielded by Paulina, a character not present in the Pandosto plot. In supporting the maternal condition as a legitimate topic and in valuing the recovery of a daughter, the play validates the concerns of a female readership of prose romance.15 For elite readers as for Leontes, this valuing of women’s matters and “feminine” prose narratives represents another recovery of “that which is lost” (3.2.132–33). With the addition of Autolycus to the Pandosto source, The Winter’s Tale legitimates prose romance by presenting another worst-case scenario for a commonly described failing. In perhaps the “fi rst public staging of the book market” (Newcomb, Reading 124), The Winter’s Tale addresses the crass commercialism alleged both for the book market and the theater as they arguably exploit the credulity of an audience of the ignorant lower sorts. Autolycus’s invitation to the Bohemian peasants to buy his ballads, along with other trivial items such as gloves, ribbons, bracelets, pins, perfumes (4.4.212–24), is presented less like marketing than thievery, as one of a series of other congames, some taken directly from Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets (Mentz, “Wearing Greene”; Mowat, “Rogues”). Ingenuously exclaiming “Why should I carry lies abroad?” (4.4.259), Autolycus palms off outrageously ridiculous ballads as factually true. He pretends that the signature of one undoubtedly fictional midwife, “one Mistress Taleporter, and five or six honest wives that were present” (4.4.257–58), authenticates a ballad of a usurer’s wife, while the signatures of five justices attest to the truth of a magnificently absurd ballad of the singing fish. Their printed form only enhances the deception. As Mopsa exclaims, “I love a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.249–50). The play implicates both itself and Pandosto in the commercialism of this market for ballads. In his account of Leontes’ recovery of Perdita, the second gentleman exclaims that “such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” (5.2.20–23). Autolycus’s fictional midwife Mistress Taleporter gestures back to Paulina in her function as Hermione’s midwife (Wells 248). For both Paulina and Mistress Taleporter (literally a tale-porter), the role of midwife is inextricably connected with the telling of fictions. This ballad-selling scene also implicates Pandosto for, like Autolycus’s ballads, the prose romance is in print. The sordid commercialism of the transactions, however, does not taint the pleasure represented as experienced by the country folk. In competition with each other for the affection of the shepherd’s son, Dorcas and

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 131 Mopsa immediately relate their own situation to the ballad “Two Maids Wooing a Man,” which they sing in such pleasant harmony that their common suitor buys for them both (Newcomb, Reading 127). Their pleasure, and the pleasure usually afforded theater audiences in their performance, demonstrates the irrelevance of factual truth to the value of the ballad. In their receptivity to the truth of the ballad to their own lives, instead of to some outside factual reality, Dorcas and Mopsa model an openness to the positive effects of a text, whether a ballad, a prose romance, or a play.16 The Winter’s Tale does not idealize country folk. The blatant sexual allegations exchanged between Dorcas and Mopsa move the shepherd’s son to exclaim, “Will they wear their plackets where they should bear their faces?” (4.4.233–34). Their crudeness contrasts with the graceful eloquence that naturalizes Perdita’s superior social status; and the play cannot end happily until Perdita assumes her rightful place as a princess. The play does not romanticize oral tales as somehow more authentic or existing in a purified realm removed from print. As shown by Mistress Taleporter’s forged signature, oral tales are not separate from written culture. The absurdity of Autolycus’s ballad of the singing fish, transformed from a maiden because she “would not exchange flesh with one that loved her” (4.4.267–68), even suggests the equivalent absurdity of the numerous transformations of chaste maidens in classical works, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Classical texts mix promiscuously with vernacular, as the thefts perpetrated by Autolycus, described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the thieving son of Mercury, derive from Robert Greene’s low cony-catching pamphlets. Yet while printed ballads, romances, and even classical myths may be corrupted by market forces, the pleasure elicited by their improbable narratives is not, ideally, distinct from the intense pleasure elicited by old tales told to children. The Winter’s Tale locates the agency especially of improbable narratives—whether oral or printed, whether vernacular or classical—in the forms of pleasure they elicit. This episode of the play set in Bohemia presents nonrational pleasure in narratives, perhaps like the more healthy forms of laughter, as a social leveler.17 The choice to marvel rather than to disdain dissolves the elitist hierarchy of distinction responsible for creating virtual audiences of the lower sorts and women. One might say that in the authentic experience even of a highly developed work of art, it is necessary that the most sophisticated consumers awake their faith, to become at least temporarily open to narrative, absorbed in the moment like country clowns, themselves not unlike children listening to old tales, listening in fact to The Winter’s Tale. If this perception seems sentimental, there is another way to frame it. In this experience of narrative pleasure and, more to the point, in the commodification of this experience, perhaps lies the closest connection between Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Greene’s Pandosto. I claim that for early moderns, both the pleasure and the embarrassment at that pleasure in reading implausible prose fictions replicated an earlier narrative

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experience generating intense pleasure but later a sense of awkwardness or even shame, as the marker of a childhood subjection to women. The pleasurable aspect of that experience itself becomes commodified and is offered for sale—by Autolycus, by Greene, by Shakespeare himself—without, it is inferred, changing the nature of that pleasure for the audience or reader. Or is this connection—this shared childish delight in implausible fictions—between Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale itself only a clever marketing ploy? That is, the commercial ploy is this: come buy this prose romance—come see this play—and you will again feel the delight you felt as a child in listening to improbable narratives. Or, to push this point further, are clever marketing ploys successful precisely because they address, with uncanny accuracy, unspoken, and unspeakable consumer desires—in this case, a desire to return to a form of narrative delight once experienced in the company of lower class women not unlike Dorcas and Mopsa—now perceived as “low” and even, for adults, ridiculous?

THE TEMPEST The social and ultimately political functions possible for aesthetic taste are perhaps no more evident than in The Tempest. Given the play’s colonialist interpretations, the once-common staging of a beneficent Prospero, masterfully employing his white magic for the benefit even of his enemies, has become more difficult to market to audiences savvy to the heinous crimes committed by Europeans on indigenous peoples of the New World. In performances, in criticism, in rewritings of The Tempest, Caliban has arguably become the play’s new protagonist, whose own aesthetic taste—his moving sensitivity to the island’s “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not” (3.2.127)—provides a powerful counter-argument to Prospero’s dismissals of him as “hagseed” (1.2.365) and “this thing of darkness” (5.1.273) acknowledged only grudgingly as his. Caliban’s perspective disrupts the play’s effacement of power ably described by Paul Brown as also based on aesthetic pleasures: its graceful conformity to classical unities, its refi ned language, its “rhetoric of romance” through which it mystifies the ugly facts of colonialism.18 Consistent but not identical with colonialist discourse is the mode of domination operating through a consumer economy, in which attributions of social distinction (or the lack thereof) assume a prominent role in struggles by producers and consumers alike to fashion their social identities. This struggle for distinction would seem to shape the fi rst four acts of The Tempest, as they enact a version of romance that takes meaning from its pointed contrasts to that of The Winter’s Tale, probably written only shortly before.19 Their differences are so blatant as to suggest a deliberate opposition: The Winter’s Tale occupies sixteen years and two countries, while The Tempest adheres to the unities of time and place; The Winter’s

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 133 Tale primarily identifies itself with the low prestige genres of old tales and implausible romances, while conspicuous citations from Ovid and Virgil align The Tempest with classical texts conferring high cultural status; a woman described as a midwife and a witch oversees the magic of The Winter’s Tale, while an exiled duke and learned magus oversees the magic of The Tempest. This section argues that The Tempest uses these differences to explore a similar issue—the creation of a virtual audience—from a contrasting perspective. Before Prospero’s abjuration of his art, the fi rst four acts of The Tempest would seem to initiate a bid to reclaim romance as a genre appropriate for consumption by the elite (whether the learned or courtly elite) and those populuxe spectators wishing to masquerade, for the space of the play, a privileged social status. But just as this masquerade ultimately points to the constructedness of an elite social role, so The Tempest fi nally obliterates the social distinctions that underlie its own art, not to detract from the very real pleasures of high status texts, but to question the validity of the status they bestow in the face of a common mortality. Critics have long discussed the classical citations so conspicuous in The Tempest: the direct quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid (“o dea certa”) in Ferdinand’s “Most sure, the goddess” on meeting Miranda (1.2.420); the use of harpies recalling not only Virgil but also early modern commentaries on the Aeneid describing them as the gods’ avengers of human sin (Lindley 174 n. 52); and especially the translation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Prospero’s renunciation of magic.20 These citations are more than sources. Breaking through the surface of the play, they are, as Barbara Mowat has ably noted, “strangely obtrusive,” a matter not of merely of “authorial intentions” but of “literary effect” (“Knowing” 28–30). Their prominence demands interpretation, and critics have willingly obliged by ably identifying numerous webs of meaning linking citations to the play, such as Mowat’s underlying classical subtext alluding to foundations of empires all doomed to ruin (“Knowing”). 21 Without discounting these interpretations, I would ask not what these citations mean, but what they do. One primary effect, I would argue, is the construction of a virtual audience able to recognize them. To early moderns, this audience evoked a specific social milieu primarily composed of elite males educated in classical texts. Since this education was not offered to most women or lower status males, it came to mark a form of early modern masculinity appropriate, it was thought, to future leaders of the nation. 22 This privileged virtual audience appealed to a populuxe market as well, for English translations (Richard Stanyhurst’s Aeneid in 1583 and Arthur Golding’s Metamorphosis in 1567) also made these works available to non-Latin readers. Whether read in the original Latin or the vernacular, these classical texts enabled the self-identification by those members of its audience who recognized their presence, as learned. This marketing technique had the advantage of playing up the social superiority of those who identified the citations without insulting those who remained unaware of this textual transaction. 23

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If the classical citations in The Tempest appeal to the superiority of a virtual audience of the learned, its masque appeals to a virtual audience of aristocratic spectators. This is a spectacle, complete with descending chariot, gorgeous costumes, and graceful dancing. The names Ceres, Juno, and Iris contribute a classical flavor to personae resembling those performed by countesses at court. Here, too, critics find meanings within the masque that link it to the play.24 As with masques themselves, however, as they were performed in court, their social context—their performance before royal and aristocratic spectators—determined a primary significance, at least to the masquers. In addition to (or sometimes in spite of) Ben Jonson’s elaborate allegories and topical allusions, a primary meaning for courtly masquers was the opportunity to enhance their power at court through a display of charisma (Bishop 91); similarly, aristocratic observers displayed their discernment in their ability to evaluate the performance. Social significances pervade Prospero’s masque as well, in this case by the creation of the role of courtly spectator as modeled for the audience by an admiring Ferdinand (“This is a most majestic vision” 4.1.118). This play’s appeal to virtual aristocrats is perhaps more populuxe than genuinely aristocratic; for this entertainment represents a less expensive version of a courtly masque. Instead, it is “a playhouse version of the most up-todate fashion in court entertainment” (Fuller 169). David Bevington describes its stagecraft as designed “for a paying audience interested in what a court wedding masque would be like” (“The Tempest” 231). Without the courtly context, much of the suspense—will the Duke of Buckingham repeat his virtuoso caper? Will the king be pleased?—is gone. The actors are sprites who never fall (although of course the actual human actors playing them may fall), and there is no king to confer power on them for their dancing. In most productions, according to Lindley, this masque is sadly a “theatrical flop” (17). This may be the point. The masque’s evocation of an aristocratic event does not compensate for its lack of inherent dramatic appeal (although the degree of this lack may vary among performances). Even more, its stylized actions and long speeches implicitly expose the fundamental tediousness not only of the masque, but of the aristocratic ostentation that it calls to mind. What in a public playhouse serves as a critique becomes in a royal venue a timely, perhaps even a prophetic, warning. The approach of Caliban’s rebellion reveals the fragility of this aristocratic status when confronted by even a small, resistant physical force. Both of these forms of virtual audience—the learned elite and the aristocratic elite—play into early modern justifications for colonization, a subject also imported into the play through citations—of Gonzalo’s quotation from Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” of echoes from Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas and William Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wrack. The European right to colonize the allegedly barbaric cultures of the new world was based, on a deep and nonrational level, on the same grounds as Prospero’s authority to rule over the island despite Caliban’s prior claim. Reports

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 135 of nearly naked natives who allegedly speak gibberish from anywhere—from the New World, Africa, Ireland, (and I suspect even some wards of overcrowded London)—evoke the same cultural assumptions of readers’ superiority through their learning and advanced civilization. The issues of power and control extending beyond the play itself were also inherent in the social forces discernable in these virtual audiences of the first four acts. The play’s creation of elite virtual audiences is, finally, a means of entrapment. The brooding sense of mortality expressed in Prospero’s speech terminating the masque (“Our revels now are ended”) declaims the transience not only of his own theater, “the globe itself” that will, like palaces and towers, “dissolve, / and . . . Leave not a rack behind” (4.1.148,153–56); it also transforms the composition of his audience. In a moment, this role of courtly spectator is rendered meaningless before the more inclusive identity of merely mortal beings, as “such stuff / As dreams are made on,” whose “little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156–58). In the “we” that includes Prospero and the onstage spectators, they become, like the “insubstantial pageant faded,” emblems of the nothingness into which they also will dissolve, as mortals like any others, powerless before death and time.25 In this mortal identity, this audience is no longer virtual. It is, suddenly and unexpectedly, very real. The learned virtual audience suffers a similar dissolution in Prospero’s speech renouncing his art. It seems no accident that this speech from Ovid’s Metamorphoses showcases Shakespeare’s virtuosity as a translator, successfully outstripping Arthur Golding’s more pedestrian efforts. Identified by Jonathan Bate as “Shakespeare’s most sustained Ovidian borrowing” (249), this speech creates a common bond with those classically trained members of the audience capable of recognizing the source and appreciating his virtuosity.26 But, as numerous critics have noted, this passage written by Ovid is voiced by Medea; and as Prospero speaks Medea’s words, the distinctions between his high magic and her witchcraft dissolve. Thought by contemporaries to be an actual witch’s spell, this speech also dissolves the binary distinguishing the learned magus Prospero from the illiterate witch Sycorax.27 I would add to this series another dissolved binary: that between an emergent author (a relatively unfamiliar virtual figure newly inscribed in The Tempest with his authoritative meanings [Masten 108]), and the nameless, equally virtual garrulous old wives who tell tales. While Shakespeare’s translation of “di” as “elves” (5.1.33) follows Golding, his other additions evoke old wives’ fairylore as their source: the fairies who are the “demi-puppets, that / By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make”; the fairies “whose pastime / Is to make midnight mushrooms” (5.1.36–39), so much a part of the homely domestic realm.28 It is these “weak masters,” according to Prospero, that make possible his immense powers and “so potent art” (5.1.41, 50). To the collaborations Jeffrey Masten has described for playwrights, I would add one more: the nurses and old women who told tales of fairy rings and “midnight mushrooms,” whose power lay in their often intimate interactions with children later evoked by such tales. Soon thereafter, Ariel’s desires expressed in his

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song “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” confirm Stephano’s earlier identification of him as a “fairy” (4.1.196); Ariel is tiny enough, like the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to lie “in a cowslip’s bell” or to fly on a bat’s back (5.1.89–91).29 The Tempest, with its masque and classical citations, is no longer entirely distinct from a homely fairy tale.30 This dissolution of previously secure distinctions renders insignificant the social meanings of high status art, without disparaging the art itself, in a sense of common mortality that returns the play to its opening shipwreck, with its famous line, “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” (1.1.15). As Kiernan Ryan argued, the Boatswain’s declaration demonstrates how “common mortality . . . makes nonsense of rank and the distribution of power and prestige that attends it” (41).31 Mortality exposes not only political systems, but also most social forms of identity founded on those systems, as a form of charade. This charade is cast aside in Prospero’s epilogue. The play returns full circle in his vulnerable request not only for applause, but for prayer. If in the first acts Prospero was a virtual author appealing to the learned and social elite, at the end he becomes a common mortal, as the actual actor speaking the lines. Prospero, like Lear, presents his mortality as outweighing his restored title as duke of Milan; even as a duke he foresees that “every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.309). The form of mastery conferred by learning and class status, whether over an island, within early modern society, or in the new world, is finally an illusion in the face of mortality. In his final lines, Prospero addresses a new and nonvirtual audience made up of common sinners like himself: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (5.1.19–20). Obliterating any social or gendered distinctions between himself and his audience and also among members of his audience, these lines represent all of them, including Prospero (and the actor playing Prospero), as mortal, and all sinners who themselves require prayer. This construction renders meaningless those social distinctions that meant so much in the first four acts. As Prospero bows to the audience, he models for them an exploration of a new identity based not on domination but only on “what strength” he has that is his own, “which is most faint” (5.1.2–3). Rather than a step down, Prospero’s newly found humility, so absent from the first four acts, signals a vulnerability that is surely a source of wisdom. In his form of wise vulnerability, Prospero models a form of receptiveness quite distinct from the urges for distinction elevating or degrading early modern consumers of plays and printed books. This response draws from an early modern understanding of fiction that is understood to appeal, as Michael Witmore noted, to imaginations most developed in childhood. This is not to privilege a child’s response over an adult’s, or simple tales told to children over complex narratives read in print or acted out on the stage. The rigorous demands made by Shakespeare’s plays on audiences, actors, and readers are still with us today; our attempts to meet such demands will never be exhausted. This receptiveness to art, to The Tempest itself, founded in a sense

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 137 of mortality that confounds issues of social status, invites listeners from any social group to experience, even in highly sophisticated narratives, a pleasure that many once experienced in tales heard in childhood.

NOTES 1. Cartelli, Hibbard (12), Pask (739–40), Fuller (160), Thorne (6), O’Connell (216), Newcomb (Reading 139–40). All citations from The Tempest will be from David Lindley’s edition. 2. For the perception of The Tempest as a primarily courtly play, see Schmidgall, Demary, Sturgess; for opposition to the view see, for example Orgel, “Introduction” (1–4), Thorne (13–15), and a radical utopianism described by Patterson, Norbrook, and Ryan. 3. As Yachnin (42) notes, the role of Shakespeare’s players as servants also fostered alienation from courtly modes of distinction. My discussion of a populuxe market is indebted to his seminal chapter (38–165). Any discussion of distinction is of course deeply influenced by Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction). 4. Cook, “Audiences,” ably summarizes contrasting discussions of the social composition of Shakespeare’s public audiences. See Cook (Privileged), Gurr (Playgoing 85–94), Barroll (“Social” 47–49). 5. Leibler (4), see also Sharpe and Zwicker, Hackel, “The ‘Great Variety,’” Spufford. 6. For arguments against the binary of play and printed book, see Lesser, Blayney, Mowat (“Theater”). 7. This is not to say that Troilus and Cressida was never staged. As Mowat and Werstine note in their introduction to the Folger edition of that play, the quarto including this prefatory letter existed in two states; the other state describes it as acted at the Globe (liv). 8. An exception is Scot’s description of women’s tales as a mode of control (7.15.139). 9. Macbeth 3.4.63, 65–6 in Bevington’s edition of Complete Works. 10. For discussion of the use of these debased women narrators, see Hackett (15– 16), Pamela Brown (77), Fox (173–212), Lamb (“Old Wives Tales,” Popular Culture 48–50). 11. The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.25 ed. by Snyder and Curren-Aquino; all further citations to this play will be taken from this edition. 12. In “Old Wives’ Tales,” I argue that the excellence of early modern literature may lie not only in the influx of classical literature, but in the inventive, unpredictable, and often partial resolutions to the confl ict between the cultures of women caretakers and the Latinate schoolroom confronting schoolboys; see also Lamb (Popular Culture 45–62). Many explications of the play mention this pattern. See Wells, Hackett (150–58), Newcomb (Reading 118), Lamb (“Engendering”), Snyder and Curren-Aquino (5). 13. Witmore devotes a chapter to Mamillius as demonstrating the impetus of a fiction able to continue after its youthful originator has ceased to exist (137– 70). After his discussion of the “naïve and corny nature” of the plot of The Winter’s Tale, Northrop Frye provides a modern version of a similar claim: “Perhaps literature as a whole, like so many works of literature, ends in much the same place that it begins. The profoundest kind of literary experience, the kind that we return to after we have, so to speak, seen everything, may be very close to the experience of a child listening to a story, too spellbound to question the narrative logic” (51).

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14. The Catholicism implicit in this command, uttered before a statue of a woman in a chapel, has been discussed ably by, for example, Lupton (210–18), who describes it as contained as one of the “afterlives of the saints” (title), and by Richard Wilson, Secret (263–65), but like Wilson, I do not see the implicit Catholicism as contained. Interesting for the argument of this paper, Catholicism was itself sometimes denigrated as composed of “old wives tales” (Fox 175). Following out these associations is beyond the scope of this argument. 15. This is not to argue that the play follows a feminist agenda. For its antifeminism, see Wilson, “Observations” (144), Traub, Orgel (The Winter’s Tale 272). 16. In this, the play follows the focus in early modern defenses of fiction on the effect of a work on the reader. See Sidney, Vickers (7–22). 17. See for example Bakhtin (474), Patterson (70). 18. Paul Brown (66). Following Homi Bhaba, Brown presents this resistance as an inherent feature of colonialist discourse unthinkingly reproduced within the play. Following Willis and Skura, I perceive the play as an analysis rather than a defense of colonialism. Lindley (38–43) cites further sources. 19. Most editors agree that The Winter’s Tale was the play written closest to The Tempest. In their edition, Snyder and Curren-Aquino summarize the problems with dating this play, settling on a date “between 1609 and the fi rst few months of 1611” (63). The editors of the Norton Shakespeare (3388) date The Winter’s Tale in 1609; Bevington dates it 1609–11 (Complete 1484); while Orgel (Tempest 64) dates both around 1611, arguing that “Shakespeare was writing [The Tempest] just after, or just before, or at the same time as The Winter’s Tale.” 20. Prominent among many are Hamilton, Mowat (“Knowing”), Tudeau-Clayton, Bate, Lyne. See also James (189–221). 21. See also the Virgilian conflation of discourses of imperialism with the soul’s progress (Hamilton 26–32, 65–66), and the”metamorphic romance” created by the pattern of Ovidian citations (Bate 240). 22. See, for example Ong, Fletcher (303–5). In a letter to his son Philip at Shrewsbury, Henry Sidney advised obedience to his schoolmasters, for obedience is the fi rst condition for knowledge of how later to rule (Osborn 12). 23. Saenger (47–49) elegantly discusses this technique for the 1593 frontispiece of Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, with its Latin motto excluding low porcine readers—but they were not really excluded because they wouldn’t be able to read the Latin. As he notes, “Any act of creating the identity of a customer/reader must necessarily begin with both identification and negation” (49). These seemingly exclusive categories excluded no one, for virtually no readers counted themselves among the denounced readers. 24. Of many examples, Orgel reads in the masque itself signs of the limitation of Prospero’s authority over Miranda’s chastity (1987 49) while Bevington interprets it to advocate a need to balance competing European powers, while it also eloquently expresses “the power of art to inform, to move, to persuade” (“The Tempest” 221, 236). 25. Gillies (190) movingly discusses how this speech moves audience members to acknowledge how “our life is founded over the abyss—the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’—and must eventually be swallowed by it.” 26. Lindley (28) claims that “a significant number of the original audience would immediately have recognized its provenance, and been able to register its departures from its original.” If so, this would be a result of the humanist pedagogy of double translation. 27. Orgel (“Prospero’s” 11), Bate (252–54), Orgel (The Tempest 19) notes that the etymology of Sycorax refers to Medea, with “sy” as Scythian and “korax” for “raven.” See also James (214–5).

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 139 28. Wall (112–26) elaborates on the domestic domain of fairies. 29. This identification, although not its implications, is a commonplace; see for example Lindley (204 n. 90). See Duffy (174), but also Briggs, who makes a technical distinction between “elemental” and fairy (53). 30. Warner argues that the play’s “supporting cast of spirits, monsters and apparitions, its noises (its babble and tunes and charms), its magical mutations and phantasms belong in a faery realm” (105). 31. See also Patterson (154–62), Norbrook, James (189, 200–1).

WORKS CITED Aubrey, John. “The Life and Times of John Aubrey,” preface to Brief Lives. Ed. Oliver Lawson Dick. London: Secker and Warburg, 1950. xxi–cxiv. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Barroll, J. Leeds. “Social and Literary Context.” The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 3: 1576–1613. Eds. Alexander Leggat et al. London: Methuen, 1975. 1–94. . Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 1997. . “The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque.” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 218–43. Bishop, Tim. “The Gingerbread Host: Tradition and Novelty in the Jacobean Masque.” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 88–120. Blayney, Peter W. M. “The Publication of Playbooks.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 383–422. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Boccaccio on Poetry. Ed. Charles Osgood. New York: Liberal Arts P, 1956. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. . Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Briggs, Katherine. Anatomy of Puck. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959. Brown, Pamela Allen. Better a Shrew than a Sheep. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Brown, Paul. “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 48–71. Cartelli, Thomas. “Bartholomew Fair as Urban Arcadia: Jonson Responds to Shakespeare.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 14 (1983): 151–72. Cook, Ann Jennalie. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576– 1642. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. . “Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 305–20.

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Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Demary, John G. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. Denby, David. “Bad Behavior.” New Yorker (June 11 & 18, 2007): 148–49. Duffy, Maureen. The Erotic World of Faery. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972. Erasmus, Desiderius. “De pueris instituendis.” Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education. Ed. W. H. Woodward. New York: Columbia UP, 1964. Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Frye, Northrop. Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976. Fuller, David. “Shakespeare’s Romances.” A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Malden, MA: Blackwell; 2004. 160–76. Gillies, John. “Place and Space in Three Late Plays.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 4: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 175–93. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Hackel, Heidi Brayman. “The ‘Great Variety’ of Readers and Early Modern Reading Practices.” A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 140–55. . “‘Rowme’ of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 113–130. Hackett, Helen, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hamilton, Donna. Virgil and ‘The Tempest.’ Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990. Hine, James. Populuxe. New York: Knopf, 1986. Hibbard, George R., ed. Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson. New York: Norton, 1998. James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Jameson, Frederic. “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” Formations of Pleasure. London and Kegan Paul, 1983. 1–12. Jonson, Ben. “Ode to himselfe.” The New Inne. London, 1631. A2v. . Bartholomew Fair. Ed. George Hibbard. New York, Norton, 1998. Lamb, Mary Ellen, “Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest.” Criticism 40.4 (1998): 529–54. . “Old Wives’ Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection,” Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 28–43. . Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. London: Routledge, 2006. Lesser, Zachery. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Liebler, Naomi Conn, “Introduction.” Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading. New York: Routledge, 2007. Lindley, David, ed. The Tempest. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Lupton, Julia. Afterlives of the Saints. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Lyne, Raphael. “Ovid, Golding, and the “Rough Magic’ of The Tempest.” Shakespeare’s Ovid. Ed. A. B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 150–64.

Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors 141 Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. McLuskie, Katherine. “The Patriarchal Bard.” Political Shakespeare. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 88–108. Mentz, Steve. “Wearing Greene: Robert Greene, Autolycus, and the Structure of Romance in The Winter’s Tale.” Renaissance Drama 20 (1999–2001): 73–92. . Romance for Sale in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Mowat, Barbara. “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed.” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 58–76. . “The Theater and Literary Culture.” A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 213–30. . “‘Knowing I Loved My Books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually.” The Tempest and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 27–36. Mowat, Barbara, and Paul Werstine. “An Introduction to This Text.” Troilus and Cressida. Eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square P, 2000. li–lxv. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. . “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England.” A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 121–38. Norbrook, David. “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest.” New Casebooks: The Tempest. Ed. R. S. White. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. 167–90. O’Connell, Michael. “The Experiment of Romance.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy. Ed. Alexander Leggatt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 215–29. Ong, Walter. “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. Orgel, Stephen. “Prospero’s Wife.” Representations 8 (1984): 1–13. . “Introduction.” The Tempest. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987. . “The Winter’s Tale: A Modern Perspective.” The Winter’s Tale. Eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square P, 1998. 257–72. Osborn, James M. Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972. Pask, Kevin. “Caliban’s Masque.” ELH 70.3 (2003): 739–56. Patterson, Annabel. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Ryan, Kiernan, “Shakespearean Comedy and Romance: The Utopian Imagination.” New Casebooks: Shakespeare’s Romances. Ed. Alison Thorne. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003. 27–52. Saenger, Michael. Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Scot, Reginald. Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Ed. H. R. Williamson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964. Sebek, Barbara Ann. “Peopling Profiting, and Pleasure in The Tempest.” The Tempest: Critical Essays. Ed. Patrick M. Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2001. 463–81.

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Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. . The Tempest. Ed. David Lindley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. . The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Sharpe, Kevin, and Stephen Zwicker, eds. Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Skura, Meredith. “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in ‘The Tempest.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (1989): 42–69. Sidney, Philip. “A Defence of Poetry.” English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. 366–91. Snyder, Susan, and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, eds. The Winter’s Tale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982. Sturgess, Keith. “‘A Quaint Device’: The Tempest at Blackfriars.” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. New York: Hall, 1998.107–29. Thorne, Alison, “Introduction.” New Casebooks: Shakespeare’s Romances. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003. 1–26. Traub, Valerie. “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power.” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 215–38. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret. Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Vickers, Brian, “Introduction.” English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. 1–55. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Warner, Marina. “‘The foul witch’ and Her ‘freckled whelp’: Circean Mutations in the New World.” “The Tempest” and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wells, Marion. “Mistress Taleporter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 247–59. Willis, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29.2 (1989): 277–89. Wilson, Richard. “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Enclosure Acts. Eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. 121–50. . Secret Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Witmore, Michael. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Yachnin, Paul, and Anthony Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge UP, 2001. Zizek, Slavoj. “Eastern European Liberalism and Its Discontents.” New German Critique 57 (1992): 25–49.

Part III

Gender and Agency

8

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles, or “Religious Romance,” in The Winter’s Tale Gloria Olchowy

While critics of The Winter’s Tale, for the most part, have been blind to the romance genre’s kinship with the subject matter and dramatic mode of the Corpus Christi Cycles and the expansive versions of motherhood that informed them, to the romance genre’s participation in the cultural debate about the scope and leverage of the maternal in the early modern period, and, more specifically, to the strong resonance of both the matter and the mode of the Corpus Christi Cycles in this particular Shakespearean romance, early modern audiences would not have been so oblivious. First, they would have experienced the reformers’ denigration of the romance and forceful suppression of the cycles and other cultural manifestations of the traditional forms of motherhood all over the country. Second, their spirituality as well as their conception of motherhood would more than likely have been profoundly hybrid due to the rapid and often erratic changes of the period. Third, they would have been keenly aware that the meaning and influence of motherhood were indubitably at issue in their own culture. I not only make a case for a strong genealogical connection between the Corpus Christi Cycles and the secular prose romances, but also contend that the cultural nutriment of these cherished religious organisms in matter and mode was largely absorbed by the early modern secular drama despite, or even because of, their forcible suppression. This contention applies perhaps nowhere more thoroughly than in Shakespeare’s late plays, The Winter’s Tale in particular, at a historical moment when the vast “forests” of the cycles and their notions of motherhood were truly at risk of being cleared away—not just hewn down but thoroughly uprooted—with the seeds of new and very different trees planted in their place.1 And the manner of this absorption of religious materials, as I demonstrate, is not reductively allegorical but richly evocative. It is also significantly indebted to the theatrical aptitude cultivated by the innumerable artisans who staged the cycle plays over a period of two centuries all over the country and to the very hybridity of the romance genre that assuredly facilitated its own remarkable—and, again, centuries-old—adaptability up until this moment. While until the latter part of the twentieth century many influential investigations of Shakespeare’s late plays deplore the romance’s lack of regard for

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the classical parameters of generic form and the classical unities of drama, I want to insist on the viability of these characteristics and to assert that the romances’ hybridity of form and highly elastic treatment of time and place provided Shakespeare, as well as the numerous other writers of his time who showed a predilection for flouting generic boundaries and the dramatic unities, with a more capacious means of exploring the radical hybridity precipitated by the trauma of the period—whether the hybridity of religion, of the culture as a whole, of subjectivity, or, more specifically, of notions about motherhood. To a degree, my assertion of a genealogical relationship between the secular romance and the native legacy of the Corpus Christi Cycles, with their enactment of the biblical Creation to Doomsday story of salvation, fi nds precedence in Northrop Frye’s characterization of the romance as a “secular scripture” thirty years ago in his study of the genre, which both Helen Cooper (5) and Velma Bourgeois Richmond (18, 106) reference in their own investigations of the shared pattern of the romance and the doctrine of salvation. As Cooper observes, “an opening disruption of a state or order” is typically “followed by a period of trial and suffering, even an encounter with death” and then a “resurrection and fi nal restoration” (5). Richmond also fi nds this same pattern in the Corpus Christi Cycles that dramatize the biblical stories depicting the doctrine (17, 22, 41, 166). In addition, both the secular prose romances and the salvation narrative share most of the same native motifs, or “memes” (Cooper 3), as they are identified by Cooper and Richmond throughout their studies. Parallels may readily be drawn between memes such as the vindicated woman and Jesus’s mother, Mary, whom Joseph accuses of unfaithfulness until she is exonerated in a vision; the recovered child and Jesus who is found in the Temple; the experience of reconciliation after great pain and the experience of restitution after the trial and torture of Christ; and the return to life after death and the resurrection of Christ. These parallels point to the aptness of the characterization not only of the romances as “secular scripture,” but also of the cycle plays as “religious romance.” What further points to an affinity between the romances and the cycle plays is the enormous popularity of both cultural formations. While Cooper and Richmond, as well as Helen Hackett, provide abundant documentation for the widespread appeal of the secular romances in their investigations, other scholars provide ample evidence for the prevalence of the Corpus Christi Cycles. John C. Coldewey highlights the rapid spread and development of a great variety of dramatic activities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, noting that the “most popular” and “most frequently produced” were the Corpus Christi Cycles (77–101). Alexandra F. Johnston, the Coordinator of the REED (Records of Early English Drama) project, points out that the recovery and scrutiny of records testify to the veritable ubiquity of dramatic activities in the late medieval period and the special commitment to and sophistication of the Corpus Christi pageants in particular

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 147 (“What” 1–19, “‘All’” 117–29).2 The enthusiasm for and prevalence of both the secular romances and the Corpus Christi Cycles is not surprising if one takes into account that they share the same pattern and cultural memes and are both written in the vernacular. However, their kinship may be understood in even more historically specific terms through consideration of the feminizing features that Hackett identifies as distinctive to the romance, especially in Shakespeare’s handling of it—features such as the significance and influence of mothers, the invocation of narrative forms associated with mothers or mother-figures and of narrative content generated by the experience of maternity, the characters’ nearly obsessive employment of maternal metaphors to express a range of intense emotions, the pervasive theme of regeneration, and the link between the risks and promises of maternity on the one hand and the mix of tragedy and comedy in the romance genre on the other (140–58). These features may all be linked to the particular versions of motherhood that inform the cycles as well as to the dramatic mode and the subject matter of the esteemed cycles themselves.3 One of these versions of motherhood that, based on extensive work by other scholars,4 I refer to as “incarnational” motherhood, takes literally the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. This doctrine, by decreeing that no earthly father was involved in the divine conception, assumes that Christ’s physical being must be made solely of his mother’s. Incarnational motherhood also construes Christ’s side wound as both a womb and a breast, which associates Christ’s bleeding and suffering with the process of giving birth, his bleeding with Mary’s lactating, and his blood and her milk with the Eucharist, and affiliates the nutrition provided by his body to Eucharistic recipients through the digestive process with that provided by the mother’s body to the fetus through the gestative process. The gender ambiguity characterizing this form of motherhood made it possible to maternalize both humanity and the church as a whole, to regard the priest’s consecration of the Eucharist as comparable to Mary’s conception of Christ, and to view Eucharistic recipients, whether female or male, as capable of delivering their own salvation. It encouraged holy men in the later Middle Ages to depict themselves and their sustenance of the poor in maternal terms. It enabled the holy women in the period to develop a multifaceted imitatio Christi—or practice of imitating Christ—which focused on physicality and maternity and, in rigorously tragic-comic fashion, registered the pains and the joys associated with both of them. These mystics starved themselves as a means of duplicating Christ’s suffering in their own. They understood their hunger as both the desire to become one with the body of Christ in the Eucharist and the agony induced by the separation of the mother and child in labor. They perceived their consumption of the Eucharist as the consummation of their desire to unite with Christ and their achievement of salvific birth. The women’s practice of emulating Christ also included feeding those who were impoverished or ill with ordinary food or with the milk or oil of the women’s own distressed bodies.5

148 Gloria Olchowy This incarnational form of motherhood was greatly influenced by the much longer-standing form practiced by the low-status women in the majority, which I refer to as “calculative motherhood.”6 Explored in detail by numerous historians,7 calculative mothers typically managed the matters pertaining to food and to physical care more generally in their households. They incorporated their breast milk in medicinal drinks, salves, and washes, and breastfed their own offspring and the children of high-status women who seldom nursed their own children. The calculative mothers’ wet-nursing cultivated a perception of motherhood as a fluid designation that could be determined by the womb or the breast or by both of them, since the blood of the womb and the milk of the breast nourished and “reproduced,” whether or not they were from the same maternal body. Crucial to recognize is both the calculative and the incarnational versions of motherhood enabled women to exert enormous control over their sexuality and their reproductive capacities as well as considerable clout both within and beyond their homes. The calculative mothers often managed their fertility through extended, sometimes nonexclusive nursing, and through the judicious use of herbal concoctions.8 They not only met their reproductive obligations, but also made necessary contributions to their households, which counted for at least half of the total household economy, so that most scholars are compelled to conclude that the medieval era registers the peak of women’s employment.9 The incarnational mothers revised the misogynist view by directing their sexuality toward an ambiguously gendered, divine being rather than a heterosexual, human one, and by developing an understanding of family based on charity and a “re-productive” capacity focused on feeding, rather than breeding, bodies.10 They were so influential, in fact, that documenting a women’s movement in the period, historians have determined that these women provided the template for lay piety.11 It was also one of these incarnational mothers who inspired the universal Feast of Corpus Christi.12 Most scholars see the institution of this festival, with its public procession and adoration of the Host, as denoting a significant moment in the history of drama since it prompted the widespread development of the Corpus Christi Cycles that entire communities, for a duration of two hundred years, participated in.13 I see the festival as also marking an important moment in the history of motherhood and the history of romance because of the relationships that may be discerned among the dramatic mode, the notions of motherhood that prevailed at the time, and the genre of romance. First of all, the concepts and practices of incarnational motherhood, themselves informed by the beliefs and behaviors of the calculative motherhood, may be aligned with the theatricality of the cycles that developed rapidly after the institution of the festival. As Michael O’Connell argues, it is a “short step” from the parallel between the union of divinity and humanity in Christ and the union of the soul and body in the human person, “to the enactment of Christ’s physicality, his actions while in the flesh,

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 149 by means of other human bodies” (“God’s Body” 71–72). As well, the portrayal of ecclesia—Christ’s body, the mystical body, the church—in the incarnational frame as a maternal body which members of the community both partake of and make up established a remarkably dramatistic model, especially for the development of plays that also depicted Christ as the food-that-is-the-mother’s-body and to which the entire community, to a large degree, contributed. Also likely adding substantially to the growth of dramaturgical capability was the belief that the physiological intermingling of the divine and the human in the most primary physiological processes of digestion and gestation was central to salvation, since it intensified the experiences of seeing and of eating Christ’s body during the Mass which, in turn, made Christ’s body simultaneously the most spectacular and the most common body. Though many scholars point to the emphasis on “showing” and “seeing,” which the heightened focus on consecration fostered as an indication of the increasing power of priests, the growing hierarchization of the church, the widening of the gap between clergy and laity, and the reduction of lay people into passive, even alienated onlookers,14 others contend that the consecration which signified the awesome transformation of the “inanimate into the animate” (Camporesi 226) encouraged a greater theatricalization of the Mass and, consequently, new types of performance and interaction not just for the clergy but for the laity.15 Finally, the prevalence of a religious practice that encouraged a very physical imitation of Christ as a means of acquiring knowledge of him, suffering with him, and serving the needy as he did, must also have fostered theatrical aptitude. As Sarah Beckwith observes, it is likely that “we return obsessively to the metaphor of theatre to describe this form of spirituality, for it is in the nature of the theatrical medium to foreground the human body through the mechanism of the actor” (61). We should also note that while scholars often direct attention to the relationship between Franciscan piety which encouraged the literalist approach to the practice of imitatio Christi and the rise of the vernacular drama (Rubin 276–77, O’Connell, “God’s Body” 66–82, Jeffrey 17–46), the distinctive role of the pious women who most rigorously undertook the literalist approach, eventually setting the devotional standard for the laity as a whole, should not be overlooked, particularly since it was, after all, one of these influential women whose vision led to the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi, which then prompted the formation of the cycles. The cycles not only replicate the same pattern and employ most, if not all, of the same memes which Cooper and Richmond fi nd in the secular romances, they also served as long-standing mechanisms to disseminate the many facets of the incarnational version of the maternal, and, in doing so, again exhibit virtually all of the same characteristics that Hackett identifies as the distinguishing—and feminizing—features of the romance genre. For example, the references to Christ’s relationship to his mother—his being born only of Mary and his absence of earthly paternity—function like a

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refrain in the Corpus Christi Cycles, clearly marking the significance of the maternal that Hackett highlights as one of the signatures of the secular romance. Likewise, the frequent use of the word “foode” to refer to Christ encourages the association of Christ’s body with his nursing mother’s, underscored by the late medieval conflation of Christ’s Eucharistic body and the maternal functions of feeding and breeding. The cycles also connect the reproductive labor of Christ and other incarnational mothers with the remunerative work of common people, both women and men, who labor, sometimes painfully, with their bodies to “re-produce” the bodies of others by ministering to the physical need for food, clothing, shelter, and so forth. The homey language and the construction of the work of Christ, of other incarnational mothers, and of common laborers in maternal terms recalls the narrative forms most often associated with mothers and the ambivalent emotions commonly generated by the experience of maternity which Hackett fi nds so evident in the secular romance. Foregrounded by the extended torture of Christ in the cycles’ passion plays, the alignment of Christ’s wounded body with the salvific food of the Eucharist and the painful labor of giving birth to eternal life also points to a link between the perils and pleasures of maternity on the one hand and the commingling of tragedy and comedy on the other, which Hackett identifies as a key characteristic of the romance genre.16 The parameters of motherhood and the cultural organisms of the Corpus Christi Cycles and the secular romances, including the romances of Shakespeare and other early modern writers, were deeply implicated in the epistemological shift precipitated by the Reformation. First of all, the reformers reject the doctrine of transubstantiation integral to incarnational motherhood and develop their own Eucharistic theories. While the theories they propound vary, they generally insist that the Eucharist does not reenact Christ’s sacrifice and effect salvation, but instead commemorates, strengthens, and confi rms the faith in salvation freely given to human beings by God through Christ.17 Moreover, the “feminine aspects” of the Virgin Mary and the female saints are “replaced by those of a[n] . . . overtly masculine God” (Eire 315); Christ himself is construed as a “judgmental Father” (Roper, Holy Household 263–64); and “God the Father, God the Son (the Word incarnate in the man Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit [become] the sole focus of devotion” (Eire 315). Neither Mary nor the saints, many of whom were female, any longer have intercessory powers. Nor are they to be venerated.18 The reformers, with the help of the humanists, also formulate their own version of motherhood.19 This “new motherhood,”20 more recognizably oedipal in its delineation, clearly distinguishes the spiritual from the physical and the masculine from the feminine, and, in doing so, repudiates the maternalization of God’s body. It promotes marriage rather than valorizing the single life of service, condemns the practice of birth control, and insists that the work of mothers be limited to the bearing and rearing of children,

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 151 as many as possible, within the patriarchal family and household. It also advocates maternal nursing and discourages wet-nursing, which I see less as demonstrating a concern about the well-being of children than as manifesting a desire to fuse the breeding and feeding forms of reproduction in one woman. Such a fusion is conducive to the enclosure of motherhood and an acceptance of the procreative imperative for women, both of which undermine the capacity of women to earn an income and retain independence and thus help to establish a newly subordinate status for them despite the ideologies of marriage and family that suggest otherwise. The reformers’ alteration of the late medieval relationship between the spiritual and the physical is also evinced in the new importance they attribute to sola scriptura or the Word of God by itself—as opposed to the Word made flesh, or certainly the Word made food and maternal flesh— and in their renunciation of religious images, religious drama, and even secular drama, 21 all of which they disparagingly characterize as female. 22 They also acknowledge the link between traditional religion and the secular romances and thus register a comparable distaste for the latter (Hackett 10–11, Cooper 38–39, Richmond 16–17). Still, the secular romance, unlike the Corpus Christi Cycles, managed to elude suppression. Why? Though recent work on the secular romance in the late medieval and early modern periods goes beyond either condemnation or commendation of the genre’s hybridity, I want to assert that this characteristic of the genre contributed to its ability to address the monumental changes induced by the Reformation while functioning as both a secular cultural organism and a formation that validated the inherited, as opposed to the new, religious beliefs and behaviors. Further, though the cycles themselves came to be prohibited, their legacy, especially the expansive notions of motherhood that inform them, both in subject matter and dramatic mode, continues to nourish and hybridize the early modern drama, perhaps most obviously in Shakespeare’s romances, particularly The Winter’s Tale, at a historical moment when the legacy itself, due to the radical reformation of ideas and practices, is going to seed on increasingly inhospitable cultural ground and, thus, is at great risk of being lost altogether.23 Over twenty years ago, Darryll Grantley examined The Winter’s Tale in relation to the tradition of religious drama. In his essay, he recognizes the futility of drawing simplistic parallels between Shakespeare’s romance and the Corpus Christi Cycles but also fi nds an irrefutable correspondence between the narrative materials of the two cultural formations (29). To begin, he explores in detail how the central characters of The Winter’s Tale evoke the characters of the Corpus Christi Cycles. He contends that Leontes’s tyrannous rage, cruel treatment of the infant Perdita, paranoia, and anguish over his son’s death, bring to mind the character of Herod in the cycles’ Slaughter of the Innocents pageants, and that Leontes’s manner of judging his wife is reminiscent of the cycles’ depiction of Pontius Pilate. Grantley also asserts that Hermione’s overall comportment at her

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trial as well as her “death” and “resurrection” associate her with Christ, and that her visible pregnancy on stage, her subjection to her husband’s accusations, her affi liation with grace, her bearing of a redemptive child in adverse conditions, her fi nal speech at her trial, and her posing as a statue within a recessed space, affi liate her with Christ’s mother. He maintains that the inauspicious circumstances of Perdita’s birth, the discovery of Perdita by a shepherd, the juxtaposition of Perdita’s newborn status with Antigonus’s violent death, and the purity, humility, courage, and power that Perdita exemplifies as a young woman, associate her, too, with Christ (17–20, 29–36). I want to develop Grantley’s astute analysis of The Winter’s Tale by considering the resonance of the Corpus Christi cycles in this Shakespearean romance in relation to the notions of motherhood that inspired and were disseminated by the cycles. Extending Grantley’s work in this manner enables me to go beyond the influential psychoanalytic studies of The Winter’s Tale. 24 Despite the remarkable insights the psychoanalytic critics generate into the destructive effects of paternal power in the political arena, the family, and the formation of male subjectivity, and the deviations from the absolute exercise of this power they puzzle over, they are limited by an overly monolithic understanding of the maternal very closely connected to the new motherhood. That limitation itself underscores the eventual cultural hegemony of the kind of motherhood promulgated by the humanists and reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While The Winter’s Tale unquestionably registers paternal power, reading the play historically makes visible that the form of paternal power being interrogated is new, and that the play participates in the early modern cultural debate about the domain of the paternal and the maternal by evoking multiple aspects of the inherited forms of the maternal to significantly qualify the new power of the father. Reading in this way also makes it possible to see that the play affi rms the value of the traditional versions of motherhood and underscores the secular romance’s—even the early modern secular romance’s—kinship with both the inherited forms of motherhood and the Corpus Christi Cycles which were vital aspects of the embedded culture of the time. The very fi rst scene of the play alludes to the authority of fatherhood with a discussion of the importance of male issue in general, and of King Leonte’s son, Mamillius, in particular. This scene also refers to the relationship between Leontes and Polixenes, two kings whose concerns about their paternal status propel much of what follows. No mention is made of the kings’ wives or the mother’s role in the production of royal progeny. The fantasy of a world without females is even more directly invoked by Polixenes in the next scene, when he situates the boyhood of Leontes and himself in an “all-male Eden” (Adelman 223). In this femaleless paradise, the two princes as “twinned lambs” have not yet been introduced to “[t]he doctrine of ill-doing” which Polixenes links to the wives of the two kings

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 153 (1.2.66, 69). 25 Not long after Polixenes’s construction of a paradise without the contamination of the feminine, Leontes, in a jealous rage and in a far less jesting manner than Polixenes, also repudiates the feminine when he grabs Mamillius from his wife, Hermione, and tells her, “I am glad you did not nurse him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (2.1.56–58). Whereas Leontes’s statement may seem to distance him from the new motherhood because of the imperative to maternally nurse which was an integral part of the new ideology, it also recalls another imperative of the new ideology: the need for boys to renounce the mother both without and within to achieve full masculinity. Leontes’s tyranny—as manifested in his refusal to consider the counsel that others offer him, his threats to have Hermione, Paulina, Antigonus, and the newborn child executed, and his cruel treatment and public humiliation of his wife—also points to the new power of the paternal in the family and the state. His imprisonment of the pregnant Hermione may be construed as an exaggerated version of the new effort to enclose mothers within the household. That Paulina is prohibited from seeing Hermione, who is forced to give birth in prison, and must accept the presence of the Gaoler to confer even with one of Hermione’s women, also sheds light on the increasing male intrusion into matters historically managed by women. 26 Other aspects of the play are clearly consistent with the diminution of the feminine and the maternal and the extension of the masculine and the paternal that characterize the new forms of motherhood and fatherhood being promoted in the culture at large. For example, neither the words of Hermione’s outspoken friend, Paulina, nor the body of Leontes’s newborn daughter are able to deter the angry Leontes from his persecutory course of action. Leontes hurls numerous misogynist epithets at Paulina during her efforts to change his mind about Hermione’s fate. Hermione herself is unable to sway Leontes, and, shortly after having given birth, “dies” and is absent from most of the play. In addition to according importance to the paternal, the play also elicits recollection of many aspects of the inherited versions of motherhood, some of which Grantley highlights and all of which notably qualify the authority of the father. The opening scenes of the play may very well emphasize the preeminence of fathers and male issue and neglect or reject outright women’s reproductive capacities, but the physical presence of Hermione, the very pregnant wife of King Leontes, in the midst of the two father-kings and the young Mamillius makes it hard to deny the central role women play in the generation of issue, royal or otherwise. 27 That the visibly pregnant Hermione also initiates the focus on boys in much of the conversation connects her all the more to the issue of procreation and progeny. All the boys alluded to in the dialogue were born of women, even if Polixenes or Leontes want to fantasize about a born-of-man alternative. Moreover, the term “lambs” used in the opening scene, in view of Hermione’s pregnancy and the image of a mother and a son whose name is a diminutive of the

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Latin word for breast, would have reminded an early modern audience of the long-standing Corpus Christi Cycles, which featured not one but two pregnant bodies on stage—that of Mary and of Elizabeth—as well as the paradigmatic mother and son formation of Mary and Jesus, whose bodies had been affi liated for centuries. Leontes may well refer to Mamillius as his “collop” (1.2.136), a piece of his own paternal flesh and blood, but Mamillius is named after a distinguishing part of the mother’s body, a part which had a very particular resonance for those in attendance when the play was initially performed. The intimate bond between Hermione and Mamillius is also foregrounded in other parts of the play: when Mamillius, unlike the younger versions of Leontes and Polixenes, enjoys spending time with his mother and other women, when Hermione asks Mamillius to tell her and her women a tale that he whispers in her ear, when Mamillius becomes ill due to Leonte’s repudiation of Hermione, and especially when Mamillius dies immediately after Leontes refuses to accept that the divine Oracle has vindicated Hermione. Hermione’s death due to the news of Mamillius’s death and Leontes’s request that Hermione and Mamillius share a grave underscore this bond. Hermione’s second child, Perdita, extends the association of the mother’s and child’s bodies because Hermione breastfeeds her. While Hermione’s doing so when in prison may be interpreted as a necessity because of her confi nement and, thus, as an allusion to a drastic version of the enclosure that was a central component of the new motherhood, her nursing may also be understood as a defiant means of making her second child more hers, more of the mother’s body, especially in view of Leontes’s earlier comment about nursing and Perdita’s later resemblance to her mother, and of the link between Perdita’s return and Hermione’s. This understanding would connect Hermione’s breastfeeding to the inherited incarnational version of motherhood that construes Jesus’s body as made not just primarily but solely of his mother’s. Hermione’s nursing also affiliates her with other nursing mothers: to Mary who nursed Jesus, and to the majority of mothers who were maternal nurses and some of whom were wet-nurses as well. As Grantley points out, the circumstances of Perdita’s birth, abandonment, and rescue would also have been historically and culturally resonant for the audience members at the time this play was fi rst performed. Like Jesus, Perdita, due to the rage and cruelty of a tyrant, was born in a very humble place and found in a very humble place. The Old Shepherd who fi nds her is looking for his sheep, which have a strong historical relationship with Christ, one that the shepherds’ plays of the Corpus Christi cycles fully elaborate on. That Antigonus is “dined on” by a bear would amplify the historical resonance (3.3.95), since the proximity between “things dying” and “things newborn” in the play (3.3.101–2), the man eaten by a bear and the child in a “bearing-cloth” (3.3.102), recalls the conflation of Jesus’s birth and murder in the moment of Eucharistic consumption and, more generally, in the incarnational version of motherhood.

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 155 Female speech in the play, like the female bodies, also works to temper the paternal power associated with the ideology of the new motherhood/ fatherhood. Polixenes, reluctant to extend his visit in Sicilia, claims that no one’s tongue could move him as much as Leontes’s, yet it is Hermione who persuades Polixenes to stay longer. While Paulina is unable to persuade Leontes to halt the persecution of his wife and is herself subjected to his threats, she continues to confront him—by accusing him of betraying all the members of his family, by pointing out how much the newborn child looks like him, and by characterizing him as tyrannous. She also challenges the lords whom she sees as overly tolerant of the king’s outrageous behavior. Subsequently, after the loss of his wife and children and the experience of deep grief, Leontes surrenders an enormous amount of control to Paulina. Eventually, even the divine powers align their forces with her. The critics who characterize Paulina’s character as deviant due to the silence, obedience, and subordination being advanced for women in early modern sermons and marriage manuals perceive motherhood too reductively. They do not see that the ideology being advocated is only one of several ideologies of the maternal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or that the ideology is a new development for the majority of women, who were also working women—a development that is in competition with the two versions of motherhood inherited from the medieval period that differ strikingly from it. Though the inherited versions did typically make a distinction between “within” the home and “without” it and place women “within,” women’s traditional involvement in the public sphere—whether buying and selling goods at the market, dining and drinking in taverns themselves often owned and staffed by women, or participating at feasts, christenings, and other public events—was accepted, even expected, by most people. In addition, precisely because the women were so routinely engaged in both economic and social life, their so-called “gossip” was considered “an important source of political, economic, and social intelligence” and, thus, a key element in the formation of public opinion (Cahn 39). The biblical character of Mary Magdalene, regularly featured in the Corpus Christi Cycles, also depicted feminine strength and influence. Initially rebuffed by the Apostles, she ends up having her story validated by God. And the real-life, holy women in the late medieval period not only set the model for lay piety and prompted a woman’s movement, but also sometimes counseled even popes.28 An understanding of the historicity of motherhood in the early modern period thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Paulina’s relationship with her husband and the king, her political power, and her alignment with the divine. Many critics who have examined the vexed relationship to the maternal body that seems to fuel Leontes’s jealousy and accusations of infidelity also conceive motherhood too simplistically. 29 While Gail Kern Paster does begin to historicize this relationship by exploring it in relation to the wet-nursing practices of the time (260–80), the troubled relationship may

156 Gloria Olchowy be better understood if analyzed in relation to the competing versions of motherhood in the culture as a whole. The tension is due not just to the anxiety about a child’s, especially a male child’s, relationship to the mother, or even to the anxiety about a wet-nursed child’s relationship to the blood mother and to the milk mother, but also to the anxiety about Christ’s relationship to Mary, which, undergoing momentous changes over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has huge implications for all mothers and fathers. The last two scenes of The Winter’s Tale refer to these radical changes in the concepts and practices of the maternal and the paternal, but, in the end, like much of the rest of the play, they endorse the traditional versions of both parental roles more than the new versions and, in doing so, recall the theological legacy and dramaturgical fi nesse of the Corpus Christi Cycles. The power of the Reformation dictum “words alone” is thoroughly undercut when the excessive telling of the penultimate scene throws into special relief the powerful theatrical effect of the maternal body coming to life in the fi nal scene. The divine and the theatrical are also evocatively allied with the female characters. Not only is the place where Paulina houses Hermione’s statue referred to as a “chapel” (5.3.86), the statue itself is comparable to the kind of effigy seen in churches at the time, often characterized as female and targeted by early modern iconoclasts (Wickham 263–65). In addition, as if specifically addressing the critiques of the iconoclasts, Perdita falls on her knees before the statue and declares, “[D]o not say ’tis superstition, that / I kneel”; Leontes tries to kiss the statue and insists, “Let no man mock me”; and Paulina specifically tells all in attendance, “It is required / You do awake your faith,” as well as asserts, “Those that think it is unlawful business / I am about, let them depart” (5.3.43–44, 79, 94–95, 96–97). All the characters, Leontes in particular, gaze on the statue with wonderment and longing, with Leontes pointing out, “[T]his affl iction has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort” (5.3.76–77), and thus evoke the nuanced relationship of seeing and eating, which so thoroughly informed late medieval experiences both within and beyond the church. However, perhaps the religious associations and “incarnational religious aesthetic” of the scene (O’Connell 1985 305) are most vivid when Hermione’s statue moves because this animation not only denotes the art of sculpture transforming into that of drama but also invokes the resurrection of Christ, as Grantley (23–24) and many others—for example, Julia Reinhard Lupton (175–218), and, more recently, Frances E. Dolan (227) and especially Karen Sawyer Marsalek (271, 277–91)—have observed. The experience of seeing the statue come alive is also directly affiliated with food again when Hermione descends from the pedestal and Leontes proclaims, “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.110–11). Considering the vast inheritance of incarnational motherhood makes Louis Montrose’s characterization of “the climax of The Winter’s Tale . . . [as] a rite of communion” (62) even more resoundingly appropriate.

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 157 Bringing the history of the competing versions of motherhood to bear on this Shakespearean romance makes it possible to understand why its two mothers are able to effect such a powerful religious rite and dramatic performance. It also makes it possible to comprehend that the hybrid genre of an ostensibly secular romance functions to resurrect the theatricality and the subject matter integral to the centuries-old form of incarnational motherhood—a genre with which this motherhood, itself radically hybrid, is so genealogically attuned. And, yes, early modern audiences would indeed have been more receptive to this resurrection and issue in Shakespeare’s romance than we are today because they would have been much more aware of the culture in which the dispute about the maternal and the paternal was rooted than we who must strain to see the vast forest in the few trees left standing.

NOTES 1. I am alluding to the metaphor of “forests” used by Diane Henderson and James Siemon to describe the embedded traditions of vernacular literature from which early modern writers derived much nutriment for their own works (220). 2. See also Ashley (57–66) and Richardson and Johnston (13). 3. I also summarize these versions of motherhood in my essay “Murder as Birth in Macbeth.” I explore them in detail in Chapters 2 and 3 of my dissertation, “Bearing Men.” 4. Bynum (passim), Lagorio (15–37), Petroff (217–19), Atkinson (119–24, 162– 63), Rubin (26–28), Dickman (150–68). 5. My discussion of the gender inflections in late medieval religious piety is deeply indebted to Bynum’s insightful exploration of them. See also the studies of Lagorio, Petroff, Atkinson, Rubin, Dickman. 6. I chose to call this version of motherhood “calculative” since the word has often been used by influential historians of the early modern period to describe this form of motherhood. However, while they employ the word to disparage the careful deliberations of the women practicing this form of motherhood, I use it to commend the women’s prudent reproductive strategies. 7. Hajnal (132–34), Spengler (433–42), Noonan (159–60, 220–22, 228–30), Stephen Wilson (186–87), Cahn (94–96, 104–5), Riddle (passim), Herlihy (53–55), Heinsohn and Steiger (194–95, 199–200, 204). 8. For a detailed examination of medieval and early modern birth control practices, see especially Riddle. For the amenorrheal effects of prolonged and nonexclusive nursing, see McLaren. See also Noonan (esp. 200–30), Roper, “Luther” 35–37), Heinsohn and Steiger (passim), and Crawford (18, 20–21). 9. My assertions about these women’s traditional employment are significantly influenced by Clark. Originally published in 1919, Clark’s work still stands as the most comprehensive introduction to women’s traditional engagement in productive activities and to the devaluation of their involvement over the early modern period. For women’s productive contributions, see also Hilton (139–55), Prior (93–117), Cahn (passim), Wiesner, Working Women (passim), Roper, Holy Household (1–55). For remunerative wet-nursing, see McLaren and Paster. 10. My interpretation is based on material from innumerable sources, especially those provided in note 4.

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11. For discussion of the late medieval, holy women’s movement, see Bynum (passim), Petroff (esp. 3–24, 51–79, 129–30), Dickman (152–57, 166). For material concerning the template set by the women, see, for example, Bynum (13, 20–21, 120, 226–37, 239), and Atkinson (164, 186). 12. Dickman (152), Bynum (55, 77), Rubin (169–72). 13. Kolve (47–49, and chaps. 3 and 4), McDonald (117), Stevens (43), O’Connell (“God’s Body” 66). 14. This perspective is still so pervasive that it hardly requires source notation. As Beckwith points out (36), two historians of the liturgy, Dix and Klauser, emphasize the degree to which the medieval Mass was a “clerical spectacle” rather than an occasion for lay participation. Duffy highlights additional works that encourage the view of the clergy and laity as increasingly separated and estranged from the activities of the Mass (110–11). McDonald (115–18) and McCue (428–29) also construe the laity as basically passive during the Eucharist. 15. See, in particular, Duffy (esp. 20, 26–27, 31, 95–104, 109–16, 129–30). See also Rubin (35–82, 93–98, 103–8), Jungmann (1: 119–25), and Camporesi (225). 16. My assertions about the Corpus Christi Cycles summarize a much longer piece of work. See “Bearing Men” (55–68). 17. For a more comprehensive analysis of the various Protestant Eucharistic theories and their relative importance in English theology, see Davies (76–123). 18. Eire (315), Wiesner (“Luther” 303–5), Roper (Holy Household 263–64), Coudert (72, 83–86). 19. Betty S. Travitsky provides an annotated bibliography of humanist, Protestant, and Puritan tracts which provide abundant evidence for the reformers’ version of motherhood (63–89). I develop my own position on this version in Chapter 3 of “Bearing Men” by considering many of these primary texts as well as many secondary works on the subject, especially Crawford (3–38), Wayne (1–93), Lucas (224–40), Neely (“Constructing” 1–26), Coudert (61– 90), Brauner (29–42), Wiesner (“Luther” 295–308), Cahn (passim), Atkinson (194–235), Roper (Holy Household). 20. My term new motherhood is derived from “The New Mother,” a colloquy written by Erasmus, which participated in the reconfiguration of motherhood in the sixteenth century. 21. Chambers (236–68), Gardiner (50–93), Wickham (60–97), O’Connell (“Idolatrous” 279–310), Collinson (8–15), Davidson (“Anti-Visual” 33–46, “Devil’s” 92–144). 22. See Huston Diehl’s discussion (160–61). 23. See Beatrice Grove’s recent book, especially the chapter “Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic: The Mystery Plays and Catholicism” (26–59), for an excellent summary of the evidence for the ongoing influence of Catholicism in general and the mystery plays in particular on Shakespeare. 24. See especially the work of C. L. Barber, Peter Erickson, Carol Thomas Neely (Broken Nuptials), Janet Adelman, Valerie Traub, and Gail Kern Paster; see also Thorne (18–21). 25. All references to The Winter’s Tale are to the edition edited by Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino. 26. See especially Richard Wilson’s discussion of the attempts of men to take over control of matters historically managed by women (121–50). 27. For a discussion of the impact of Hermione’s pregnant body, see, for example, Erickson (819), Neely (Broken Nuptials 192), Adelman (220–23), Paster (261–65). 28. See the sources provided in note 11.

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 159 29. I am thinking here especially of the work of Erickson, Neely (Broken Nuptials), Adelman, Traub, and Paster.

WORKS CITED Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. New York: Routledge, 1992. Ashley, Kathleen. “Cultural Approaches to Medieval Drama.” Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama. Ed. Richard Emmerson. New York: MLA, 1990. 57–66. Atkinson, Clarissa W. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Barber, C. L. “‘Thou that Beget’st Him that did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59–67. Beckwith, Sarah. Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. London: Routledge, 1993. Brauner, Sigrid. “Martin Luther on Witchcraft: A True Reformer?” The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal, 1989. 29–42. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Cahn, Susan. Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500–1660. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Camporesi, Piero. “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess.” Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Vol. 1. 1987. Trans. Anna Cancogne. Eds. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi. 3 vols. New York: Urzone, 1989. 220–37. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. Clark, Alice. Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. Ed. Amy Louise Erickson. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1992. Coldewey, John C. “Some Economic Aspects of Late Medieval Drama.” Contexts for Early English Drama. Eds. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 77–101. Collinson, Patrick. From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation. Reading: U of Reading, 1986. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Coudert, Allison P. “The Myth of the Improved Status of Protestant Women: The Case of the Witchcraze.” The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal, 1989. 61–90. Crawford, Patricia. “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England.” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. Ed. Valerie Fildes. London: Routledge, 1990. 3–38. Davidson, Clifford. “The Anti-Visual Prejudice.” Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama. Ed. Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan U, 1988. 33–46. . “‘The Devil’s Guts’: Allegations of Superstition and Fraud in Religious Drama and Art during the Reformation.” Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama. Ed. Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan U, 1988. 92–144.

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Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England: From Cranmer to Hooker 1534–1603. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. Dickman, Susan. “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Ed. Marion Glasscoe. Cambridge: Brewer, 1984. 150–68. Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Dix, Dom Gregory. The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Dacre, 1949. Dolan, Frances E. “Hermione’s Ghost: Catholicism, the Feminine, and the Undead.” The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 213–37. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Eire, Carlos M. N. War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Erasmus, Desiderius. “The New Mother.” The Colloquies of Erasmus. Ed. and Trans. Craig R. Thompson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965. 267–85. Erickson, Peter. Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976. Gardiner, Harold C. Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1946. Groves, Beatrice. Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Grantley, Darryll. “The Winter’s Tale and Early Religious Drama.” Comparative Drama 20 (1986): 17–37. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hajnal, J. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.” Population in History. Eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley. Chicago: Aldine, 1965. 101–143. Heinsohn, Gunnar, and Otto Steiger. “The Elimination of Medieval Birth Control and the Witch Trials of Modern Times.” International Journal of Women’s Studies May/June 1982:193–214. Henderson, Diana, and James Siemon. “Reading Vernacular Literature.” A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Kastan. 1999. 206–224. Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Hilton, Rodney H. “Women Traders in Medieval England.” Women’s Studies 11 (1984): 139–55. Jeffrey, David L “Franciscan Spirituality and the Rise of Early English Drama.” Mosaic 8 (1975): 17–46. Johnston, Alexandra F. “What if No Texts Survived? External Evidence for Early English Drama.” Contexts for Early English Drama. Eds. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 1–19. . “‘All the world was a stage’: Records of Early English Drama.” The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama. Ed. Eckehard Simon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 117–29. Jungmann, Joseph A. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development. 2 vols. New York: Benziger, 1951. Klauser, Theodor. A Short History of the Western Liturgy. 1969. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.

The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale 161 Lagorio, Valerie M. “Variations on the Theme of God’s Motherhood in Medieval English Mystical and Devotional Writings.” Studia Mystica 8 (1985): 15–37. Lucas, R. Valerie. “Puritan Preaching and the Politics of the Family.” The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon. Eds. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990. 224–40. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Marsalek, Karen Sawyer. “‘Awake your faith’: English Resurrection Drama and The Winter’s Tale.” ‘Bring furth the pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston. Eds. David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 271–91. McCue, James F. “Liturgy and Eucharist.” Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation. Vol. 17. Ed. Jill Raitt. 25 vols. New York: Crossroad, 1988. 427–38. McDonald, Peter F. “Drama in the Church.” The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 1. Ed. Lois Potter. 8 vols. London: Methuen, 1983. 92–121. McLaren, Dorothy. “Marital Fertility and Lactation, 1520–1720.” Women in English Society. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. 22–53. Montrose, Louis. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 65–87. Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. . “Constructing Female Sexuality in the Renaissance: Stratford, London, Windsor, Vienna.” Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama. Eds. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson. Lewiston: Mellen, 1991. 1–26. Noonan, John T., Jr. Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965. O’Connell, Michael. “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater.” ELH 52 (1985): 279–310. . “God’s Body: Incarnation, Physical Embodiment, and the Fate of Biblical Theater in the Sixteenth Century.” Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Eds. David G. Allen and Robert A. White. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 1995. 62–87. Olchowy, Gloria. “Bearing Men: A Cultural History of Motherhood from the Cycle Plays to Shakespeare.” Diss. U of British Columbia, 2000. . “Murder as Birth in Macbeth.” Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. 197–209. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Prior, Mary. “Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800.” Women in English Society: 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. 93–117. Richardson, Christine, and Jackie Johnston. Medieval Drama. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance. New York: Continuum, 2000. Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992.

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Roper, Lyndal. “Luther: Sex, Marriage and Motherhood.” History Today 33 (1983): 33–38. . The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Eds. Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Spengler, Joseph J. “Demographic Factors and Early Modern Economic Development.” Daedalus 97 (1968): 433–46. Stevens, Martin. “Medieval Drama: Genres, Misconceptions, and Approaches.” Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama. Ed. Richard Emmerson. New York: MLA, 1990. 36–49. Thorne, Alison. “Introduction.” Shakespeare’s Romances. Ed. Alison Thorne. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. 1–26. Travitsky, Betty S. “The New Mother of the English Renaissance (1489–1659): A Descriptive Catalogue.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979): 63–89. Traub, Valerie. “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 215–38. Wayne, Valerie. “Introduction.” The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage. By Edmund Tilney. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 1–93. Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages, 1300–1660. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986. . “Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys.” Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy. Eds. Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge, 1987. 295–308. Wilson, Richard. “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England. Eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. 121–50. Wilson, Stephen. “The Myth of Motherhood A Myth: The Historical View of European Child-Rearing.” Social History 9 (May 1984): 181–98.

9

Romancing the Wager Cymbeline’s Intertexts Valerie Wayne

As productive as the identification of sources for Shakespeare’s plays has been, especially in appreciating what he read and which literary and cultural traditions he drew on, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century preoccupation has sometimes prevented our seeing the forest for the trees. In this essay I explore le cycle de la gageure, the cycle of European stories about a wager, in relation to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. This narrative tradition included at least forty-one European stories (Paris), a number that does not even take into account the many folktale versions. Most of these are unlikely to be sources for Shakespeare’s play in any conventional sense; only two, Boccaccio’s story from day two, number nine in The Decameron, and the anonymous story called Frederyke of Jennen, are generally agreed on as the play’s sources. Although I do not suggest in what follows that Shakespeare had most of these versions of the wager to hand, I argue that the parallels between some of them and Cymbeline qualify them as significant intertexts for the play. One of them shows a god figure descending to the repentant husband; another includes a malicious female magician and her ugly, inept son; two liken the heroine’s body mark to a flower; most stage combat between the husband or lover and the woman’s accuser. None of these events occurs in The Decameron or Frederyke. The parallels between these intertexts and Cymbeline are not evident as verbal echoes, but they do occur as reiterated motifs within an extensive narrative tradition that Shakespeare had reason to know about. Recounted orally over a period of at least five centuries, these stories conveyed the cultural stakes associated with women’s fidelity and men’s trust, performing, reproducing, and reinventing those investments for multiple and changing audiences. Although we cannot be certain which of these stories Shakespeare had heard or heard about, it is likely that he knew the breadth of the narrative tradition within which he was working. Wager stories exhibit primary affinities with medieval, chivalric romances and attest to what Barbara Fuchs calls the “iterability” of romance, its continuous and varied repetition, which is “a key sign of its cultural currency and historical importance” (38). Cymbeline also draws on another narrative tradition in the form of Greek romance, but Shakespeare’s indebtedness to those stories in his late romances has also not

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been established on the basis of verbal echoes. His use appears instead through the reiteration of various motifs or incidents, such as the lamentation over a body mistakenly taken to belong to the beloved, and the misrecognition and striking of the beloved by her lover just when they are about to be reunited. It is difficult to determine whether Shakespeare encountered these incidents in Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History,1 or drew on the former in Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon and Leucippe,2 or the latter in the two intertexts for Pericles in which the father strikes his daughter, Laurence Twyne’s Patterne of Painefull Adventures and George Wilkins’s Painfull Adventures of Pericles (Newcomb, this volume). Yet just as the importance of Greek romance to his late plays— and especially Cymbeline3 —has met with considerable acceptance although it cannot be confirmed through verbal echoes, so the reiteration of incidents in the wager cycle suggests we should look at that broader narrative tradition rather than just two of its texts. If we move beyond the realm of certainty that has been maintained by a positivist approach to sources, we can see how productively this play draws on both the Hellenic and medieval traditions of romance and then transforms the wager into a distinctively British story.

DECENTERING THE SOURCE One way of considering the relation of stories in the wager cycle to Cymbeline is to assume with Julia Kristeva that texts are produced by discursive systems as well as individuals. If we grant “that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality),” as Kristeva proposes, then we may accept “that its ‘place’ of enunciation and its denoted ‘object’ are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated” (60). “Intertextualité” has been variously applied since Kristeva first introduced it in 1966, and Elizabeth Harvey’s interpretation is especially relevant to my own project: rather than describing the bounded property of a stable author, as source studies or influence studies do, then, intertextuality focuses on utterances whose possible sources are illusionary points of origin, or whose origins are either infinitely regressive or at least multiple, so that they cannot be identified as belonging either solely to a particular author or even to a particular historical moment.4 This approach enables what I want to call a decentering of the source, which is one consequence of “a semiotic polyvalence” of texts (Kristeva 60). Decentering sources seems especially appropriate to the ways in which romance narratives draw on diverse and overlapping stories in nonlinear, recursive, and often untraceable ways. I hope to convey here the plentitude of this gathering of stories while resisting “critical axiologies that raise Shakespeare’s plays above their sources”

Romancing the Wager 165 (Newcomb, Reading 13) by decentering Cymbeline and viewing even its sources within the larger context of romance wagers on women’s chastity. That story tradition is sufficiently large and unwieldy that I cannot begin to treat all of its versions, which extend to folktales in Finnish, Hungarian, Iranian, Turkish, Indian and many other languages (Uther ATU 882). I discuss here ten of the oldest recorded versions, which appear first in Old French, then in Middle French, Italian, German, Spanish, Welsh and English variants, as well as the two recognized sources for Shakespeare’s wager plot. Geoffrey Bullough claimed that “the wager-story basic to Cymbeline is almost as widespread in folk-lore and literature as the ‘terrible bargain’ of Measure for Measure” (8.12). When Shakespeare took up the narrative, it had already been rewritten by Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan, staged as a fourteenth-century miracle play by Parisian goldsmiths, revised for the sixteenth-century German stage by Hans Sachs and Jacob Ayrer, for the Spanish stage by Lope de Rueda, and redacted from an oral tale into a sixteenth-century Welsh chronicle. These versions comprised an oral as well as written tradition that included narrative and dramatic romances in verse and in prose. Cymbeline is also related to the dramatic romances that were popular in the 1570s and 1580s, specifically Clyomen and Clamydes, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, and the later Mucedorus, which was revised and revived by the King’s Men in 1610, the year that Shakespeare probably wrote this play.5 These romances were “simultaneously dramatized romances and tragicomedies”; their nondramatic prototypes are the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Mowat, “‘What’s’” 135–36), so they offer indirect means of relating Cymbeline to Greek romance. The wager cycle, however, appears more directly indebted to medieval, chivalric romance. Shakespeare’s own contribution to it was not, until relatively recently, considered the most significant version of the story. The French and Italian versions had a very wide influence on subsequent retellings from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, as is evident from an impressive Italian website6 that charts the fonti (sources) and fortuna (literary fortunes) of the Intertestualità (intertextuality) of “La Novella di Zinevra” by Boccaccio. Two charts on this site list six sources of the novella and twenty-nine European descendants, positioning it at the center and effectively decentering Shakespeare’s play. Viewing this site is a useful way to dislodge some of the assumptions that Shakespeareans bring to this material, and in the rest of this essay I will try to decenter the sources as well as the play by repositioning The Decameron and Frederyke in relation to some of the other wager stories. We can get a fuller sense of this part of the forest of romance if we do not dwell too long on any particular item and do not assume the superiority of a romance authored by Boccaccio or Shakespeare. The critical axiologies that position Shakespeare’s plays above his sources also privilege his sources in contrast to other texts and privilege texts over oral narratives. Instead of trying to locate the points of origin for any given story, I hope to convey the interconnections between narratives in this textual community and consider

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the cultural work those stories may have been doing. This way into the forest is more speculative and distanced than source study and offers fewer certainties, but it is informed by a genealogical approach that opposes a search for ultimate origins or essences. Foucault claims that “what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (79). Later he adds, “the genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin” (80). Part of my project, then, is to historicize the diversity among the wager stories preceding Cymbeline. The dissension foundational to this genealogical model is worth combining with another approach to romance advocated by Barbara Mowat when she uses Alastair Fowler’s reworking of Wittgenstein’s “theory of family resemblances” to approach generic classifications as “more like families than classes” (“‘What’s’” 134) because their members are related in some ways without having any one feature in common. Mowat applies Fowler’s model to the resemblances between romance and tragicomedy. While Foucault’s approach helps us recognize intertextual diversity, Mowat’s provides for intertextual resemblances. Lori Newcomb’s chapter in this book adds a further component to the method used here by proposing the language of “pattern” as preferable to that of source in approaching Shakespeare’s romances because “pattern confounds the assignment of primacy. . . . It thus perfectly captures the way that romance intertextuality defeats issue” (38) and disrupts the “patrilinear logic that the source model tries to impose” (23). My approach focuses on the reiteration of patterns or motifs between the wager stories and the play rather than relying on linguistic parallels to confirm their connections. The language used by each of these critics—genealogy, family resemblances, patriarchy and its disruptions, and Helen Cooper’s adaptation of Richard Dawkins’s concept of “meme” referred to below—draws on generative, familial and biological models for exploring relations among texts. These affiliations create the larger field through which individual texts are read and interpreted. Exploring such a field may be especially helpful for approaching premodern works that have survived centuries of retelling. Geraldine Heng stresses that medieval romances were both the inheritors and transmitters of a collective culture: Because it is the sedimented repository of what medieval culture has sought to retain across vast temporal divides, each romance that survives communicates the resultant aggregated will of a collective culture, and transmits the cumulative purposiveness of a diachronous endeavor in a way that is almost unimaginable to moderns habituated to the signed cultural works of mere single individuals. (8) Decentering the source requires a decentering of the signed works of individuated authors to help us recognize the collective cultures, the family resemblances and the diversities that intertexts exhibit in relation to one another. That decentering brings into view the various literary, cultural and

Romancing the Wager 167 oral traditions that texts generate and transmit. Conversely, approaching a text and its sources apart from their intertexts or the literary and historical communities that also created them requires reading them in isolation from their linguistic and cultural affiliations. Much is lost through that analytic isolation.

LE CYCLE DE LA GAGUERE Stories in the wager cycle focus on a woman, usually a wife, whose chastity is called into question when her husband or lover boasts about her fidelity and ends up making a bet with another man, who claims he can seduce her. When that villain of the story is rejected by the faithful woman and unable to win the wager honestly, he presents the husband or lover with false evidence in the form of his knowledge of a mark on the woman’s body in a location that implies intimacy, or special tokens associated with her, or both. The husband or lover becomes convinced by the evidence and tries unsuccessfully to kill her or to have her killed. Then he becomes despondent at having lost her and his belief in her, causing each of them to wander separately far and wide until some event occurs to reunite them. Most frequently, the woman identifies the villain through one of the tokens he has stolen from her, brings her husband or lover to her location, and discloses the villain’s identity to both men and an authority figure whom she has come to serve. The villain is then punished, the woman’s chastity is confirmed, and she is reunited with the man she loves. This story comprises most of the first two acts of Shakespeare’s play; it is briefly touched on during acts three and four, and it returns in full during act five. Wager stories are a subset of what Helen Cooper in The English Romance in Time calls “the calumny romance,” the story of the falsely accused woman (274), where “the text constitutes a kind of trial” and the “‘sentence’ in the forensic sense exonerates the heroine” (270). Cooper sees the emergence of medieval romances in the twelfth century as a reaction against the enforcement of universal clerical celibacy imposed by Pope Gregory VII one century earlier, and posits that “one element in its rise may have been a secular backlash against the anti-sexual attitudes that accompanied that imposition.” The approach to sexuality and women advocated by those romances would then have functioned in the “vested interests of the great secular majority of the population” (272), an observation that seems particularly appropriate to the calumny romance, which provided occasions for articulating, as well as opposing, the antimatrimonial, antisexual, and antifeminist positions often taken up in support of celibacy. Cooper cautions that romances of this sort make no pretence to “sexual liberation” for women and do not try to undermine “the system of patrilinear descent that made a wife’s chastity a matter of crucial political and economic import,” but she argues that they do resist the sexual double standard and the denigration of women’s sexuality (272).7 According to Cooper, many variants of the “meme”8 of the falsely accused woman appeared during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance (275).

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Shakespeare bases five of his plays on the meme (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale) and makes further use of it in Henry VIII, or All is True (276), where the king’s treatment of his first two wives reminds us that “the frequent threat to burn an adulterous queen in romance may sound like a fantasy element; it was not” (278). The version of the meme in which a husband bets on his wife’s chastity is “most familiar now from Cymbeline” (275). If the imposition of clerical celibacy affected the development of continental romances in general from the twelfth century on, then the proliferation of the calumny romance in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was also influenced by the accusations of adultery that led to the executions of Anne Boleyn and of Henry’s fourth wife, Catherine Howard. Cooper argues that the stories of accused wives “must have read very differently after those events than they had done before” (278). In this context it is appropriate that both Innogen in Cymbeline and Hermione in Winter’s Tale are royal women. Bullough’s remark that the wager story “is almost as widespread in folklore and literature as the ‘terrible bargain’ of Measure for Measure” (8.12) relates especially well to the narrative gathering of le cycle de la gaguere because some of its versions include a bed trick in which the woman or wife substitutes another woman in her place; the proofs adduced by the villain to support his claim that he has slept with her in these instances are most often “a finger, finger-ring, and head, or braid, of hair (one of these, or more)” (Child 5.23). The intersection between a storyline that Shakespeare drew on for Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well with another that he used in Cymbeline and for the wager on wives’ obedience at the end of The Taming of the Shrew9 confirms how productive this narrative material was for Shakespeare throughout his career, and shows how interwoven its various strands could be. The critic who most extensively categorized this narrative material was Gaston Paris, whose seventy-page article on wagers, “Le Cycle de la Gageure,” published in 1903, built on seven previous studies in French, German and English and established a thematic classification for distinguishing some forty-one variants based on characterizations of the primary figures.10 In addition to the literary texts of the wager, there exists a folktale tradition that may go back as far as the fourteenth century (Rosenberg 64). “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity” is folktale type ATU 882, and its extensive variants were recorded most recently by Hans-Jorg Uther in 2004. He lists versions from fifty-five different cultures. The primary motifs include the high stakes of the wager, the steadfastness of the woman, tokens of the alleged seduction (ring, hair) procured by bribing a maid, expulsion of the wife and a design to kill her, the journey of the despairing husband, and the unmasking of the traitor (Moser-Rath 190–91). This type also overlaps with folktale type ATU 892, the bed trick. Two entries in the distinguished German encyclopedia of folktales, Enzyklopädie des Märchens, explore the connections between these tales and Cymbeline, the most detailed being E. Moser-Rath’s article of 1981, which emphasizes the mutual relations between

Romancing the Wager 169 literary and oral versions.11 Most versions of the story, including a Welsh variant, Hanes Taliesin, reflect both forms of transmission. The ubiquitous distinction between oral and written versions breaks down with this material, since “there is no question that oral reading and recitation were common means by which medieval audiences received romances” (Huot 73), and “it was clearly as popular performance art, with strong elements of mimicry and burlesque, that [medieval chivalric romances] initially brought pleasure to the majority of their earliest listeners” (Hahn 230). Many of the wager texts present the story as being told orally, sometimes by a woman, to a group that includes women, as in Boccaccio’s version, or is directed to an audience of women, as in Roman de la Violette and Christine de Pizan’s version. The intertexts I will discuss further in this essay are presented in clusters below to convey their linguistic, national and geographic affinities.12 Most of these stories were “romanced” in the sense of being written in vernacular, frequently romance, languages (Fuchs 37). They were resituated geographically within the country associated with the language of the narrative as well, creating a connection between the language of the text, the place of the action, and the nationality of the characters. This means of categorizing them is also an attempt to resist implying any simply linear, chronological pattern of intertextual succession between them, for their interconnections are far more complicated.13 French Texts Le Roman du Comte de Poitiers, c. 1170–1240. Old French. (Poitiers) Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, by Jean Renart, c. 1209– 1228. Old French. (Guillaume) Roman de la Violette ou de Gerart de Nevers, by Gerbert de Montreuil, c. 1227–1230. Old French. (Violette) Le Roi Flore et Belle Jehanne, c. 1250. Old French.14 (Flore et Jehanne) Ostes, Roy d’Espaigne, from Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, performed between 1339 and 1382. Middle French. (Ostes)15 Gérard de Nevers, 1435–1464, later French editions in 1520, 1526, and 1586.16 Middle French. (Gérard) Italian(ate) Texts Decameron II, 9, by Boccaccio, 1349–1351. Italian. (Decameron) Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, II, 52, by Christine de Pizan, 1405, published in English in 1521. Middle French. (Cité de Dames) Germanic Text Frederyke of Jennen, published in German in Nuremberg c. 1478 as Historie von vier Kaufmännern (Tale of Four Merchants) and in four more editions by 1510, then in English in 1517?, 1518, and 1560?17 (Frederyke)

170 Valerie Wayne Spanish Text Eufemia, by Lope de Rueda, 1567.18 (Eufemia) British Texts and Tales Hanes Taliesin, a tale first recorded in Elis Gruffydd’s sixteenth century Welsh manuscript of a world chronicle, c. 1552–1553.19 (Taliesin) Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare, performed c. 1610, published 1623. English. (Cymbeline) Westward for Smelts, by Kinde Kit of Kingstone (pseud.), 1620. Second story, told by the Wife of Stand-on-the-Green. English. (Smelts) When Boccaccio takes up the older French narrative in The Decameron, he retains the wager in Paris but recasts the participants as “great Italian Merchants” and then shifts the action to Genoa (“Jennen”), the home of the husband (Bullough 8.51). Christine de Pizan follows suit even though she is writing in French. The Spanish Eufemia moves the events to Spain among Spaniards, Taliesin moves them to Wales, Cymbeline to ancient Britain among Britons and Romans/Italians, and Smelts to England. 20 The linguistic, national and geographic alignments among most of these versions are significant. The first of the French texts antedates Boccaccio by at least a century, and all but the last of them were extensive verse narratives. Guillaume de Dole varies the story by having the woman send tokens to the villain after he has reported the mark on her body as proof that she is unchaste. She then accuses him of rape and theft, adducing the tokens he possesses as proof, and conducts her own defense. This resolution through “the heroine’s ingenious verbal manipulation” makes Guillaume perhaps the most proto-feminist of all the stories here.21 Roman de la Violette does not include any tokens, but the proof offered is a body mark, shaped like a violet, on the woman’s breast. In Guillaume, whose original title was La Roman de la Rose,22 the mark is a “crimson rose on her soft white thigh” (64). The mark on Innogen’s body in Cymbeline is a mole on her left breast, which is “cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / I’th’bottom of a cowslip” (2.2.38–39),23 the familiar English wildflower. There is no association between the mark and a flower in either The Decameron or Frederyke,24 and in both it is a wart instead of a mole.25 Roman de la Violette was put into prose and published in three sixteenth-century French editions as Gérard de Nevers, so the text or story could have been accessible to Shakespeare. As much as two centuries later, Violette became the basis for Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe, which premiered in Vienna in 1823 (Moser-Rath 192). When read in relation to these intertexts, Cymbeline’s simile conjoining the mole with the flower “opens [the] text to other voices and echoes of other texts” (Harvey 10), echoes that can be heard even if they cannot be located with precision. The titles alone of these two French texts could have conveyed the body mark’s association with a flower.

Romancing the Wager 171 Many parallels between the fourteenth-century miracle play, Ostes, and Cymbeline have already been observed by Collier, Hazlitt, Dowden, Furness, Hunter, Salingar, Bullough, and Gibbons.26 W. C. Hazlitt first noted that the villain’s proposed deadline for the bet is very close in both texts (merely two conferences with the wife), and part of his seduction is a lie that her husband has had another lover while in Rome (2.188–89). Salingar argues that where Shakespeare “changes the wager story as he found it in the Decameron and Frederyke, removing the mercantile setting and altering the wife’s adventures, he brings it much nearer to the old romance” (57)27 and, it must be added, to some of the other French romances. Salingar notes a series of significant parallels in both plays.28 Perhaps the most important of these is that both dramatize a form of divine intervention: when Ostes repents his denial of Christianity to fight the Saracens and asks God for pardon, God descends with the Virgin Mary to console him, tells him his wife is innocent, and requires his return to Rome to do penance for his sin. This event has parallels with Jupiter’s descent to Posthumus in 5.3 after he has repented Innogen’s death at the opening of 5.1 and decided to fight for Britain instead of Rome. Ostes turns the secular story into a form of “religious romance,” which makes it more appropriate to the 39 other miracle plays performed by the Parisian goldsmiths in their guild’s hall between 1339 and 1382 (Runnalls 3–4, 10) and gathered together in manuscript as Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages (Frank). Its religious focus relates it to the Corpus Christi cycle plays that Gloria Olchowy discusses in her chapter in this book, making this perhaps the first dramatic romance developed from the wager narratives. Brian Gibbons concludes that “the relevance of this romance to Cymbeline . . . seems indisputable” (29). Christine de Pizan’s version of the story has never been discussed before in relation to Cymbeline. She may have known about Ostes and the earlier French romances as well as Boccaccio’s version: she draws on Les Miracles for the story in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames that precedes her account of the Wife of Bernabo the Genovan (no. 52 in Book II). In creating her defensive fortress of a city to resist medieval misogyny by recounting the lives of virtuous women, she extensively revised the lives in Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris and, in a few instances including this one, his Decameron. Her story is briefer than Boccaccio’s but grants the wife a much stronger voice in condemning both the villain and her husband. When Bernabo admits he was convinced of his wife’s infidelity based on the description of the wart on her breast and the tokens of her purse and belt, the wife, still in male disguise, calls Bernabo a “beest” and says he deserves to die for killing his wife with insufficient proof.29 There is no such speech from the wife in The Decameron or Frederyke, although Boccaccio’s husband does ask his wife “to forgive his rash transgression” (Bullough 8.62).30 Maureen Quilligan remarks of all the lives in Cité des Dames that “Christine rewrites Boccaccio to insert an active female subjectivity within each story” (256), and the observation applies fully to this one. Christine also reduces the voyeurism of the narrative. In versions

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from Flore et Jehanne on, the cross-dressed wife’s display of her female body was a crucial event in the anagnorisis. The wife in Christine’s version shows her breasts, but only to her husband; in Ostes, she displays them to her husband, her father, and the Emperor.31 In Decameron, however, she reveals her breasts to the Sultan and his assistants, and in Frederyke she appears naked before the king and his lords except for a kercher of silk before her members, an event illustrated in a woodcut in the 1560? edition (sig. D3v). No such display of the female body was possible for Shakespeare’s boy actor, so Pisanio rushes to identify Innogen to others on stage and Cymbeline acknowledges the sound of her voice (5.4.231, 238). Shakespeare’s voyeuristic staging of the female body occurs in the bedroom scene (2.2) but not in this final scene, and Christine’s version moderates both. Hers is the only version of the wager definitely written by a woman. While her works were better known in England than we have generally assumed (Malcolmson, Summit, Coldiron), this intertext does not exhibit any clear connections with Cymbeline, although it does show how the story could be changed to appeal to an audience of women and attests more generally to its popularity. In the two texts traditionally identified as sources for Shakespeare’s use of the wager, Decameron and Frederyke, the participants are all merchants and the story is given a largely bourgeois focus.32 Boccaccio initiated this shift to the mercantile context of Renaissance Europe, and the change probably increased the popularity of the story. According to Sean McDaniel, the considerable range of merchant portrayals in the entire Decameron “has led one critic to call the text ‘the epic of the Italian merchant.’”33 The more trade grew over the centuries, the more the wager involved persons of the merchant class. Boccaccio also appears to have introduced the trunk into this narrative tradition: it is a “faire and artificiall Chest” (Bullough 8.54) thought to contain wealthy goods but instead holding the threat of the villain himself. Older versions of the story, however, were not about wagering merchants who met at an inn but about aristocratic men at court. Roman de la Violette’s central male character, Count de Nevers, is at the court of King Louis; Guillaume de Dole is a knight invited to the court of Emperor Conrad; Ostes is a nephew of Lotaire, the Roman emperor. Taliesin opens with Ceridwen, the wife to a nobleman during the days of King Arthur, and later moves to the court of King Maelgwn Gwynedd. Robin in Flore et Jehanne is a squire to a knight in Flanders, but he is knighted and given lands before his marriage to his master’s daughter in order to make him worthy of her; in some respects the problems of his rank parallel those of Posthumus. Most of Cymbeline is closer in its setting, characters and incidents to these aristocratic romances than to the stories of merchants initiated by Boccaccio. Fuchs’s remark that medieval romances constituted an “elite court genre” in which “the court is more than a setting: it often anchors the narrative with an almost centripetal force,” also seems relevant to Shakespeare’s play (39). Yet when he stages the wager between gentlemen34 in the more mercantile context of Renaissance Italy, his Boccaccian setting is a marked departure in

Romancing the Wager 173 time, place and tone from ancient Britain. This disjunction follows the shift in le cycle de la gageure from an aristocratic to a mercantile context. The difference between the primarily French aristocratic wagers and the Italian/Germanic merchant wagers goes far to account for the anachronistic disjunction in Cymbeline between the royal characters of Roman Britain and the contentious gentlemen of Renaissance Italy. The wide gap of time as well as place in the play’s locations replicates the two major strands of wager stories. The aristocratic emphasis in most of the older versions is sustained by a scene of combat between the lady’s husband or lover and the villain,35 just as Cymbeline stages combat between Posthumus and Iachimo during the battle between Britain and Rome. Although no combat occurs in Decameron or Frederyke, this event was a staple of the French romances. Comte de Poitiers includes combat between the Count de Nevers and the Duke of Normandy. In Roman de la Violette, Gerart engages in a duel with Lisiart, his amie’s accuser. Robin of Flore et Jehanne does battle with the villain in that story, although his cross-dressed wife Jehanne wants to fight instead. In Ostes, the cross-dressed Denise/Denis challenges the villain Berengier, but her husband arrives just in time to take her place. Posthumus’s physical triumph over Iachimo in the context of battle demonstrates his increasing worthiness to resume his role as Innogen’s husband, and his victory is extended to all the Roman forces when he fights alongside Belarius and the king’s sons in the narrow lane. Combat was the primary means by which the villain was put down in most aristocratic versions of the wager and the means by which the husband became worthy of reuniting with his wife. Citationality is a way of affirming resemblances between texts, just as the need to make them new or update them ensures their diversity. The prose tale called Frederyke of Jennen was named after the pseudonym that the wife takes when she assumes a male disguise, and it gives that character considerably more independence than Boccaccio’s version. Frederyke was an English translation of a German text, Historie von vier Kaufmännern (Tale of Four Merchants), printed at Nuremberg in 1478 and four more times by 1510. Bullough says the anonymous story “became well known in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Britain” (15), which may account for the 1518 Antwerp publication of an English translation and another in England from Wynken de Worde around the same time.36 Still another appeared in England about 1560.37 Unlike the previous versions of the wager, where the participants are from different provinces within the same country,38 Frederyke’s four rich merchants come from France, Spain and the Italian provinces of Florence and Genoa. The inclusion of participants from different countries may be an allusion to the places where the wager stories were known to have been retold: France, Italy and Spain.39 The merchants present for the wager in Frederyke appear to serve as traces of its earlier retellings. Cymbeline’s first wager scene (1.4) includes a Frenchman, Italians, a Spaniard and a Dutchman. The Spaniard and Dutchman do not speak, but most scholars follow Thrall (115) and J. M. Nosworthy (note to 1.5) in claiming they attest to Shakespeare’s

174 Valerie Wayne dependence in this respect on Frederyke of Jennen as distinct from Boccaccio. Yet no one has remarked that Shakespeare’s Dutchman adds still another national representative to this gathering. I would argue that Cymbeline follows Frederyke in alluding to previous versions of the story through the presence at the wager of men from three places of its previous retellings and then includes still another character to mark that text’s Dutch associations.40 By including this nonspeaking character, Shakespeare replicates the citationality of another text in le cycle de la gageure while extending it to allude to his own source. He may also allude to those earlier versions in which a woman, usually a servant, is bribed to provide the villain with tokens (Poitiers) and/ or information about the body mark (Guillaume, Violette, Flore et Jehanne, Ostes) when Philario objects to the presentation of the ring as adequate evidence by asking, “Who knows if one her women, being corrupted / Hath stol’n it from her?” (2.4.116–17).41 The Welsh version of the wager is of particular interest to Cymbeline because part of the play is set in Wales, it grants repeated attention to Milford Haven, and it may have been influenced by events associated with the investiture of Henry as Prince of Wales in June of 1610, all of which suggest to Martin Butler that Shakespeare “had suddenly become preoccupied with the iconography and cultural significance of Welshness” (5). Hanes Taliesin (The Tale of Taliesin)42 includes two tales, of Gwion Bach and Taliesin, which create a myth associated with the birth of the historical sixth-century Welsh poet whose creative work was first commemorated in the Historia Brittonum 43 and published as The Book of Taliesin (Haycock). The wager story is part of Hanes Taliesin and includes two characters who parallel the Queen and Cloten, because the tale begins when a maternal magician, Ceridwen, gathers herbs for a cauldron and brews it for one year so that its drops will endow her hideous son, Morfran, with some much-needed wisdom. In the event, the drops fall instead on her assistant, Gwion Bach, who is eventually reborn as an infant, found by Elphin, a member of the Welsh court, and named by him Taliesin for his radiant forehead. Years later, Elphin boasts that his wife and his bard are superior to King Maelgwyn Gwynedd’s, for which the king throws him in prison. This version of the wager includes the substitution of a servant for her mistress and the presentation of her finger with a ring on it as proof of the seduction, but unlike other husbands in the wager cycle, Elphin refuses to believe his wife has been unfaithful. When Taliesin sings songs to prove himself a superior bard and produces the wife with all fingers intact, he gains his patron’s release. The tale closes with Taliesin’s prophetic song about Britain’s Trojan past that laments the loss of British lands to the Saxons—all except for wild Wales44 —and predicts their eventual recovery. The tale was written down in the early sixteenth century as part of a “Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World” composed by Elis Gruffydd, a Welsh soldier and scholar (Jones, Oxford DNB). Two dozen manuscripts of the prose tale as well as “a lively oral tradition . . . coexisting with the manuscript tradition” date from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.45

Romancing the Wager 175 Cymbeline’s Queen and Cloten parallel this version’s female magician with her strong ambitions for her ugly son, and the play devotes an entire scene (1.5) to the Queen’s herb-gathering and her creation of drugs, including one that causes Innogen’s apparent death. Gruffydd’s sixteenth-century chronicle characterizes Henry VII as “the long-prophesied deliverer of the Welsh” and a descendant of Cadwallader, “the last supreme ruler of the Britons” (Jones 16); that historical figure was also the source of Arviragus’s pseudonym, Cadwal. The bard’s prophetic song predicting that Britons will recover their land and crown after a long period of servitude (Ford, Mabinogi 181, Guest 152) is in some respects similar to Jupiter’s prophecy, read out twice in the play, that Britain will eventually be fortunate and “flourish in peace and plenty” (5.3.207, 5.4.440). Taliesin combines the wager story with attention to Wales’ mythic past and Britain’s national future. It is the only text to do that: Holinshed and the other historical texts associated with Cymbeline do not recount the wager, and other versions of the wager do not engage with British history. Given the mythic importance of Taliesin in Welsh culture (Humphreys 3), its conjoining of the wager with Welsh and British history, and the lack of other counterparts for the Queen and Cloten,46 this intertext has a particularly provocative relation to Shakespeare’s play.47 While there is evidence that this Welsh version of the tale was transmitted orally even before the sixteenth century, Westward for Smelts, a text of 1620, presents the wager as a tale still being told a decade after Shakespeare wrote his play. In this frame tale, six fishwives recount stories to one another on a ferry while returning to their homes between London and Kingston after having sold their smelts in the city during Lent (Figure 2). Most of these stories come from novella and fabliau (Brown 105–10, Relihan); all of the wives are not old, but the association with old wives’ tales is also close (see Lamb, this volume). The wife from Stand-on-the-Green tells the familiar story of the wager, relocating it to England during the Wars of the Roses and, when she is finished, invites responses to her story. The wife from Brainford48 remarks of Mistress Dorrill, the central character of this version, “I like her as a garment out of fashion; shee shewed well in that innocent time, when women had not the wit to know their owne libertie: but if she liued now, she would shew as vild as a paire of Yorkeshire sleeues in a Goldsmithes shop” (sig. C4v). Brainford’s comparison of this story from an “innocent time” to her seventeenth-century moment objects that Mistress Dorrill does not sufficiently claim her own freedom. Her remark about a goldsmith’s shop may refer to the goldsmiths’ guild that had performed Ostes over two centuries earlier;49 or it may just mark the wide difference in fashion between provincial Yorkshire, where some of the story takes place, and urban London, where the story is retold. In any case, although some of the other wives “praised her . . . extraordinarily” (sig. C4v), Brainford is not fully pleased with Mistress Dorrill and implies that the story has not been sufficiently updated to create an independent wife. One wonders whether Shakespeare’s play had met with a comparably mixed response from some wives in his audience ten years earlier,50 especially since Smelts’ Mistress

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Figure 2 Westward for Smelts title page. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Dorrill—who becomes a favorite of King Edward, uncovers the villain’s deception on her own, and determines her husband’s fate—has more agency than Innogen after she cross-dresses. Smelts suggests that some members of Shakespeare’s audience might have felt that this old tale posed problems for its reception, especially by women, in the early seventeenth century.

Romancing the Wager 177 One obstacle to considering many of these versions in relation to Cymbeline has been how distant they are in time from the play and how inaccessible the texts probably were. However, most scholars including Bullough were not aware that the story of Violette was retold in prose as Gérard de Nevers and appeared in three French editions during the sixteenth century, the last as late as 1586 (see note 16). Gérard extends the travels of the heroine and adds an additional episode, but it is otherwise close to the Old French version.51 Shakespeare probably had “passable French” (Gillespie, “Shakespeare’s Reading” 101) and may have read The Decameron in a French translation by Maçon since there was no English translation until 1620 (Wright), so he could have read Gérard as well.52 Yet he would not have had to read it at all to make use of it in the ways proposed here. Hanes Taliesin was even closer to hand: it was circulating in oral as well as manuscript versions from the sixteenth century on, and three of the manuscripts date from the seventeenth century, one around 1607 by John Jones of Gellilyfdy (Ford, Ystoria 55–56, 58). News of the sixteenth-century German plays by Hans Sachs and Jacob Ayrer and the Spanish play by Lope de Rueda might have been conveyed by traveling players. De Rueda’s Eufemia made the story as it was told in the Old French Guillaume available in the sixteenth century. Both versions include the heroine’s brother in the narrative. The Spanish play stages Eufemia’s reading of her brother’s letter accusing her of being dishonorable in a scene that recalls Posthumus’s ambiguous letter to Innogen in 3.2 and his more explicit accusations in a letter to Pisanio that is read aloud by Innogen in 3.4 (Bullough 8.79–87). The largest difference between Shakespeare’s play and all of these stories is that Innogen is not given the independence and agency that she has in other versions. In Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan, the wife’s disguise takes her as far away as Alexandria, where she serves a sultan and achieves great influence with him. In Frederyke of Jennen she travels to Cairo, is promoted to “lord and defender” of the land when the king must leave (C4v), overcomes the king’s enemies during an attack, and lives there for twelve years. In Flore et Jehanne she exhibits skill as a baker and runs a successful hostel in Marseilles. Shakespeare contracts the time frame and geographical reach of these stories, avoiding some of the episodic plotting that Sidney inveighed against when romances were put on stage, and constructing a last scene that brings the plot points more tightly together. Rather than following the wife’s adventures when she was alone, he honed the rambling narrative with its later episodes associated with an “oriental tale” into a more structured dramatic romance. He also heightened the events in act five, giving Posthumus a bloody cloth as a way of staging the evidence of his wife’s murder, foregrounding his regret, and writing him lines advising others in the audience—“You married ones” (5.1.2)—not to do likewise, departing from other versions as he did so. Just when Innogen is about to reveal her identity to her husband in the last scene, Shakespeare appears to draw on Greek romances or some later version of them and has Posthumus strike her down when he does not recognize her

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in disguise,53 deferring their long-delayed reunion just a little longer (Parker) and debasing her once more. This play humbles Innogen more fully than any other story, just as most of its predecessors had humbled Posthumus: both characters undergo symbolic deaths before they are reunited and, in that sense, attain a kind of low-grade parity. This humbling seems in keeping with the passivity of Greek rather than medieval romance protagonists. However, another variation in Cymbeline’s version of the wager is that the wife is an heir to the British throne, and her role raises national as well as familial concerns. While the negotiations between Rome and Britain that begin the third act initially seem a marked change in tone and substance from the previous two acts, Innogen, named after the wife of Brute and sole heir (it appears) to the King, is an important link to the national plot, as G. Wilson Knight observed long ago (149ff.). Shakespeare introduces very different material into the wager story through the plot that begins in Act 3, enlarging his dramatic romance to engage with contemporary British concerns such as the relation between its colonized past and colonizing present; James’s still unachieved goal of uniting England, Scotland and Wales into a British nation; and the celebration of British heroes and Tudor imperialism associated with Prince Henry’s investiture in 1610. 54 The shift to national concerns enlarges the wager stories’ exclusive focus on the husband and wife because Innogen is also the daughter of a king and the sister of princes. She is not an independent heroine but a member of a family with dynastic significance, 55 which makes the control of her chastity all the more important. Her future is implicated in Britain’s, its future in hers, and both converge in the recovery of her family, which receives major attention in the last scene. Shakespeare follows the alignments of earlier versions of the wager between the location of the action and the language of the text by “romancing” his play into a story that is distinctively British, enlarging the reunion of husband and wife to include the recovery of their families and then extending the peace to the relations between Britain and Rome. This conclusion probably would not have pleased the Brainford wife in Smelts, but it is consistent with the way that Shakespeare’s dramatic romances move beyond husband–wife dyads to parents and children and foster-parents and long-lost relatives in order to affi rm the affi liations of family in a manner more consonant with Greek romance. It is also in keeping with Walter Cohen’s observation that Shakespeare’s “romances reduce the efficacy of human agency. Their virtuous, redemptive young women are less activist than emblematic. They are part of the pattern rather than its creator” (111). What distinguishes Cymbeline from Shakespeare’s other romances is the conjunction between recovering one’s familial and one’s national identities, which enlarges Innogen’s importance more as an enduring heroine than an independent one, while it subordinates her to Britain’s larger history.

Romancing the Wager 179 We cannot know for certain which of these intertexts Shakespeare knew or knew about, but it is likely that he was aware of some, perhaps many of them. He did not have to have them to hand to incorporate their elements into his play. These stories had circulated widely in oral forms for five centuries, and they were still being retold at the time he was writing the play: even the 1620 publication of Smelts presents the wager as an oral tale. Reading Cymbeline through them provides a larger sense of the narrative tradition that he was following and changing and contributing to. Intertexts cannot usually be confirmed through verbal echoes but, like folktales, they do become evident by the reiteration of multiple motifs or patterns. Innogen’s mole being likened to a flower points to a possible awareness of the older French romances, as does the presence in Cymbeline of a combat between the husband or lover and the accuser. The two traditions of wager stories, aristocratic and mercantile, may account for the play’s unusual conjunction between royals in Ancient Britain and wagering gentleman in Renaissance Italy. Jupiter in Cymbeline functions very like the visitation of God to Ostes; the Queen and Cloten are close to the magician Ceridwen and her ugly son in Hanes Taliesin; that text also connects the wager to Britain’s past and future. These and other parallels speak to the possibility that Shakespeare knew and drew on versions of the wager story well beyond The Decameron and Frederyke, and that he was aware of the larger narrative tradition within which he was working. Juliette Wood remarks of Welsh literature that “a medieval writer’s ‘creativity’ lies less in creating novelty than in his ability to incorporate the disparate elements into a smoothly flowing work” (“Calumniated” 25). She is alluding to a concept of imitation that applies equally well to the English Renaissance (Pigman). Few of us would describe Cymbeline as “smoothly flowing”: it is “a difficult play to see whole,” as Martin Butler remarks, although “its capaciousness is its great virtue” (1). Its assemblage of remarkably diverse material includes the reiteration of motifs from Shakespeare’s own plays as well as a long and impressive finale that brings many disparate elements together. But the wager story does provide the play with a beginning and a focal point: even those versions of the wager which are not sources reiterate some of the play’s motifs. The relation of that story to the play is also suggested in Iachimo’s remark to the king in the last scene when, like many of his predecessors, he starts to confess what he has done, digresses from his oral tale into incoherence, is twice interrupted by his irritated auditor, and then recovers his narrative thread by saying, “Your daughter’s chastity—there it begins” (5.4.179). Cymbeline’s way of combining diverse characters and improbable events across large gaps of time, place and culture is very true to the traditions of romance, especially to the many versions of a story that was fundamentally a romance narrative, whether in verse or prose or drama. Decentering the sources of this play in order to view its multiple intertexts enables us to see that flourishing forest rather than just a few trees, and to perceive how at home this play is within those vast expanses of Greek and medieval romance.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This essay is dedicated to the memory of my sister-in-law, Lady Sheila Moore, who was so much alive when I wrote the first draft in her home in 2007, contributed to it through her active engagement with its ideas as it developed, and was gone before I had completed the final version. Her friend Marcia Lord was also of great help in securing an illuminated page of Ostes from the Bibliotheque Nationale. I am very grateful to Georgianna Ziegler of the Folger Shakespeare Library for her invaluable advice on how to locate the older French romances and other materials for this essay. Betsy Walsh and the Folger staff generously assisted this work in many ways. I also benefitted from Cristina Bacchilega’s expert guidance on how to research folktales; from Fernando Cioni and Daniela Minerbi’s translations of Italian texts; from Bernhard Klein and John Zuern’s translations of German accounts of folktales; from Anne Coldiron’s, Judith Kellogg’s, and Carol Symes’s advice on the French texts; from Leeds Barroll’s mention of John Taylor in connection with Smelts; and from Mary Ellen Lamb’s, Barbara Mowat’s, and Susan Frye’s very helpful comments on earlier versions. I thank my students for the questions they posed in a graduate seminar on Cymbeline at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2006, to which this essay is a partial answer. An earlier version was presented at a conference on “Shakespeare, le français, les France” in June, 2007 at Université Paris 7, organized by Ruth Morse, and I thank the participants for their responses.

NOTES 1. These parallels were first discussed by Wells (51), and further taken up by Gesner (98–115), Butler (9), and Pollard (40). 2. Gesner (107–8), Mowat (Dramaturgy 131–32), Gillespie (Shakespeare’s Books 206). 3. Almost four decades ago, Gesner proposed that Cymbeline “was meant to be a Heliodoran romance” (113). Simon Reynolds made a similar observation in 2004 (48). 4. Harvey (9–10) who quotes from Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (59–60). In his introduction to Kristeva’s Desire in Language, Leon S. Roudiez defi nes intertextuality as “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position,” and observes that “it has nothing to do with matters of influence by one writer upon another” (New York: Columbia UP, 1980: 15). He is following Kristeva’s objection in Revolution that between 1966 and 1974, intertextuality “has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources,’” hence she comes to “prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality” (60). Her own shift in usage reflects an awareness that writers do not have full control over the meanings of the words they use. By 2004, Robert Miola could explore the word’s multiple meanings in “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” including one in category II “traditions,” where “the originary text may never have ever been read by the author at all” (20). The term

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

has proved helpful for describing certain forms of textual affi liation that are not source-related, hence my use of it here. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defi nes intertextuality as “the need for one text to be read in the light of its allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts; the (allusive) relationship between esp. literary texts”; it defines intertext as “a text considered in the light of its relation (esp. in terms of allusion) to other texts; a body of such texts considered together.” Nosworthy is a strong advocate for Love and Fortune (xxv–xxvi), continued by Bullough (8.21–22, 90–103); Mowat (“‘What’s’” 139) discusses Clyomon and Clamydes; Gibbons (38–39) emphasizes Mucedorus, for which the Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland (STC) lists fourteen editions from 1598 to 1639 (18230–18241). Jupin adds two later ones of 1663 and 1668 (9). The web address is http://www.rose.unizh.ch/static/decameron/seminario/ II_09/ . This remarkable site was created by Sara Alloatti Boller and Barbara Kaeppeli. For readings of the medieval French romances of the wager that differ substantially from Cooper’s approach to the calumny romances, see Krueger’s work. See the “Introduction” to this book, note 5. Compare Frederyke of Jennen’s complaint by John on Florence, the story’s villain, before the wager is made that men “labour dayly both in wynde and in raine and put often out [stet, for our] lives in jeopardy and in aventure on the sea for to fynde them withall, and our wyves syt at home and make good chere with other good felowes, and geve them parte of the money that we get” (Bullough 8. 65), with Katherine’s last speech in Shrew where the husband “commits his body / To painful labour both by sea and land, / To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, / Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe, / And craves no other tribute at thy hands / But love, fair looks and true obedience—/ Too little payment for so great a debt” (5.2.148–54). Subsequent work on wagers in connection with Cymbeline has appeared from Hulme (1909), Lawrence (1920, 1931), Thrall (1931), Koenig (1946–1947), and Bullough (1975). The other article, by Thomas Kullmann, discusses all of Shakespeare’s plays. I have excluded from this list “The Lady of Boeme,” in part because Gaston Paris does not include it in his essay, “Le Cycle de la Gaguere,” although he writes about it elsewhere. See Lorna Hutson’s chapter in this book for a full discussion of this story in Bandello and in Massinger’s play, The Picture. The texts in this list are alphabetized in the Works Cited section under the abbreviations of their titles, which appear here in parentheses. However, since I refer most often to Cité des Dames by the name of its author, that text appears under de Pizan. This list is selective and is not meant to imply that these are the only versions of the wager that Shakespeare could have known about. The dates for Guillaume, Violette and Flore et Jehanne are taken from Krueger (Cambridge Companion xv–xvi). See Krueger (Women Readers 284, note 17), for the date of Poitiers. Runnalls (3). Woledge (47, n. 66), Bossuat (1143–45), Pocock (149). Bullough (8.15–16). Bullough (8.14, 79–87). “Elis Gruffudd,” Oxford DNB (24.144–45). There are two exceptions to this pattern: Guillaume occurs largely in Germany, and Ostes, Roy d’Espaigne transposes the events to Spain and Italy. Krueger (Women Readers 144) considers only the first four French romances on this list. Yet I would apply that assessment to all of the texts listed here. See also Krueger’s earlier treatment of those French romances in “Double Jeopardy.”

182 Valerie Wayne 22. Roman de la Rose was renamed Guillaume de Dole by Claude Fauchet, a seventeenth-century critic, to distinguish it from the better known Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. See Terry and Durling (1, n. 3). 23. All cites to Cymbeline are to Martin Butler’s edition except where noted. 24. In The Decameron the wife has a small wart under her left breast with a few golden hairs growing out of it; in Frederyke it is a black wart on her left arm. 25. In Flore et Jehanne, the mark is a black mole. See Krueger (Women Readers 285, n. 22), and Flore et Jehanne (76–77). 26. Collier (2. iii–xvi). Some of these scholars, including Collier, discuss Ostes in relation to other old or middle French romances. The tendency to ignore them in preference for The Decameron and Frederyke has increased over the last fifty years, especially since Nosworthy’s Arden edition dismissed their relevance. 27. By “old romance,” Salingar means Ostes or, as he refers to it using the name for the hero in later texts, Oton. One reason this text has not received more attention may be that scholars refer to it under different titles. Roger Warren’s Oxford edition refers to it as Otto at 34ff. 28. In both texts the heroine serves her own kinsmen at table while in male disguise (also in Flore et Jehanne); she accompanies an army and helps to make peace; her husband joins the national enemy (the Saracens) after having condemned her; he repents, has a divine vision, then returns to his own people, where he is taken prisoner for a time; and he does combat with his wife’s accuser (Salingar 57). 29. Sig. N1v in 1521 translation. 30. I disagree with John Pitcher, who says in his headnote to 5.1 that Posthumus’s regret would have surprised Jacobean audiences and that “in all versions of the wager plot before Cymbeline the husband’s behavior goes uncriticized and unpunished” (275). Most wager stories imply some criticism; in many it comes from the king or sultan or the figure whom the wife serves in the final stages of her adventures. 31. “La Fille’s” words appear to be directed to all three characters when she says, “regardez ma poitrine: j’y ai des mamelles comme une femme; it n’y a pas de honte à les montrer,” Monmerqué and Michel ed. (478). 32. The title of the German work behind Frederyke foregrounds the merchant status of those making the bet, and the 1567 Spanish El Patrañuelo by Timoneda does so as well. 33. McDaniel (459) citing Vittore Branca. “L’epopea mercantile.” Boccaccio Medievale. Florence: Sansoni, 1956. 71–84. 34. Butler notes at 1.4.0 SD that Shakespeare upgrades the merchants to gentlemen. 35. The exception here is Guillaume, where the heroine entraps the villain instead. See Krueger (Women Readers 144). 36. STC 11361, 11361a. 37. STC 11362. This was probably the edition in the collection of Captain Cox, the Coventry mason who performed with others before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575. See Salingar (47). 38. The exceptions are again the two texts mentioned above that do not align language, place and persons of the text, Guillaume and Ostes. 39. Feliciano’s Justa Victoria, of 1474, may be the first Spanish version: it precedes Frederyke. Like Eufemia, it appears to be related to Guillaume de Dole. I do not know whether Historie von vier Kaufmännern includes participants from three different countries. Another Spanish connection with the story is in Ostes, Roy d’Espaigne. 40. The publication of the 1518 edition in Antwerp (a city in the Southern Netherlands at the time) and the spelling of the text’s title could prompt associations with the Dutch. 41. Decameron and Frederyke include the bribing of an old woman, but she only claims that the chest in which the villain is hidden belongs to her and requests

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

that it be kept in the wife’s home for a short time; she provides no tokens or information and is not a servant. This story is also known as Ystoria Taliesin (Ford Ystoria). It is not technically part of the Mabinogian legends but has been published in connection with them (Guest, Ford Mabinogi). “Taliesin” (Oxford DNB 53.737–38), Wood, “Virgil” 98), Evans (95). Ford’s translation in Mabinogi has “Save wild Wales” (181), and Lady Guest’s has “Except wild Walia” (152). Ford (Ystoria 57, 58).The story was in Britain by the late fifteenth century because the Worcester manuscript containing tales of Alphonse’s Disciplina Clericalis includes the wager story. See Hulme. This version also seems connected to the Tours MS 468 discussed by Paris. Butler suggests a parallel between the Queen and Cecropia in Sidney’s Arcadia (10), but that romance provides no clear counterpart for Cloten. Wells mentions a similarity with the wicked stepmother in the Aethiopica (51), which could have influenced Sidney. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads includes a ballad close to this story called “The Twa Knights” (no. 268), where a niece substitutes for the wife and loses her ring finger, but Child suspects that story was known through print and had no currency in Scotland. He notes its similarity with the Medieval Greek story of Maurianos, the German Von Zwein Kaufmännen, Jakob Ayrer’s sixteenth-century comedy, and a Danish ballad popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as with Taliesin (5.21–25). This character may take her name from Robert Copland’s Jyl of Brentford’s Testament (c. 1560); Jyl is referred to as “the fat woman of Brentford” in Merry Wives of Windsor. The village of Brentford was formerly named Brainford (note to MWW 4.2.71–72). In this version the proof of infidelity is a crucifix belonging to the wife, which might link Smelts to the more religious version of the wager story in Ostes. Although George Steevens claimed in 1773 to have seen a 1603 edition of Smelts, no edition earlier than 1620 has been identified. The text was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 15 January 1620, and there is no earlier entry. Smelts’ publisher, John Trundle, licensed Hic Mulier and Haec Vir within the next 31 days, so he was probably trying to make money by bringing out works associated with women at a time when the Swetnam controversy had made them particularly popular, and when John Taylor, the “Water-Poet,” had become well known for writing similar stories about a London waterman (see Capp). The English translation of The Decameron also appeared in 1620. Thrall notes parallels between Smelts and Cymbeline (648–49). Gérard (xii–xvii), also Lowe. The character Gérard also travels to the Forest of Orleans, unlike his counterpart in Violette (Lowe 47), and Cymbeline’s Frenchman mentions meeting Posthumus in Orleans (1.4.27). See notes 1 and 2 and Newcomb (this volume) for parallels with Greek romances and the intertexts of Pericles. These issues are too large to address adequately here, but see Butler (36–54) for an excellent overview. “There is a level on which Imogen has to die as an heiress in order to be reborn as a wife,” Thompson (84).

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Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Old Wives’ Tales.” Staging Early Modern Romance. Eds. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009. Lawrence, William Witherle. “The Wager in Cymbeline.” Shakepeare’s Problem Comedies. PMLA 35 (1920): 391–431. . “The Wager in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1931. Lowe, Lawrence F. H. Gérard de Nevers: A Study of the Prose Version of the Roman de la Violette. Princeton: Princeton UP; Paris: Les Presses Universitaires, 1923. Malcolmson, Cristina. “Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England.” Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Eds. Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 15–35. McDaniel, Sean. “Creating the Merchant Subject in a Patraña by Timoneda.” Hispanic Review 73.4 (Autumn 2005): 449–66. Miola, Robert S. “Seven Types of Intertextuality.” Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality. Ed. Michele Marrapodi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. 13–25. Moser-Rath, Elfriede. “Cymbeline.” Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Vol. 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981. 190–97. Mowat, Barbara. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977. . “‘What’s in a Name?’: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. 4 vols. The Poems, Problem Comedies and Late Plays. Vol. 4. Eds. Jean E. Howard and Richard Dutton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 129–49. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. . “The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of the Pericles Tales.” Staging Early Modern Romance. Eds. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009. Nosworthy, J. M. ed. Cymbeline. The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd Series. London: Routledge, 1955. La Novella di Zinevra. Novella II, 9 del Decameron di Giovanni Boccaccio. Italian website by Sara Alloatti Boller and Barbara Kaeppeli. Downloaded 28 June 2008. http://www.rose.unizh.ch/static/decameron/seminario/II_09/ Ohle, Rudolf. Ueber Die Romanischen Vorläufer von Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1890. Ostes. “Un Miracle de Nostre-Dame.” Théatre Français au Moyen Age. Ed. MM. L. J. N. Monmerqué et Francisque Michel. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1842. 417–80. Ostes. “Miracle de Oton, Roy D’Espaigne.” Miracles de Nostre Dame Par Personnages. Eds. Gaston Paris et Ulysse Robert. 8 vol. Vol. 4. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1879. 315–88. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Paris, Gaston. “Le Cycle de la Gageure.” Romania 32 (1903): 481–551. Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies. London: Methuen, 1987. Pigman III, G. W. “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 33.1 (April 1980): 1–32. Pitcher, John, ed. Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2005. Pocock, Sharon A. “Development of Narrative Scope in the Mise en Prose: A Study of Guy of Warwick and Gérard de Nevers.” Diss. U of Chicago, 1984. Poitiers. Le Roman du Comte de Poitiers. Ed. Bertil Malmberg. Lund: Itakan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1940.

Romancing the Wager 187 Pollard, Tanya. “Romancing the Greeks: Cymbeline’s Genres and Models.” How To Do Things with Shakespeare. Ed. Laurie Maguire. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 34–53. Quilligan, Maureen. “Translating Dismemberment: Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan.” Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991): 253–66. Relihan, Constance C. “Fishwives’ Tales: Narrative Agency, Female Subjectivity, and Telling Tales Out of School.” Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading. Ed. Naomi Conn Liebler. New York: Routledge, 2007. 46–59. Reynolds, Simon. “Cymbeline and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika: The Loss and Recovery of Form.” Translation and Literature 13.1 (April 2004): 24–48. Rosenberg, Bruce A. Folklore and Literature: Rival Siblings. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. Runnalls, Graham A. “Time and the Mystères, or, How long did French mystery plays last?” New Approaches to European Theatre of the Middle Ages. Eds. Barbara I. Gusick and Edelgard E. DuBruck. New York: Lang, 2004. 3–12. Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Ed. Martin Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. . Merry Wives of Windsor. Ed. Giorgio Melchiori. Walton-on-Thames: Thomson Learning, 2000. . The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Ann Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. Compiled by A.W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. 2nd ed. by W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer. 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991. Smelts. Westward for Smelts, Or, The Water-mans Fare of mad-merry Western Wenches. By Kinde Kit of Kingstone (pseud). Ed. Holger M. Klein. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1978. Summit, Jennifer. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Taliesin. See Ford and Guest. Terry, Patricia, and Nancy Vine Durling. “Introduction.” The Romance of the Rose, or Guillaume de Dole. by Jean Renart. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Thompson, Ann. “Person and Office: The Case of Imogen, Princess of Britain.” Literature and Nationalism. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1991. 76–87. Thrall, William Flint. “Cymbeline, Boccaccio, and the Wager Story in England.” Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 107–19. Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Part I. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. 505–6, 518. Violette. Le Roman de la Violette. Par Gerbert de Montreuil. Ed. Douglas Labaree Buffum. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1928. Warren, Roger, ed. Cymbeline. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Wells, Stanley. “Shakespeare and Romance.” Later Shakespeare. Eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris. London: Arnold, 1966. 48–79. Woledge, Brian. Bibliographie des romans et Nouvelles en Prose Française antérieurs a 1500. Genève: Librarie Droz; Lille: Librairie Giard, 1954. Wood, Juliet. “The Calumniated Wife in Medieval Welsh Literature.” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 10 (1985): 25–38. . “Virgil and Taliesin: The Concept of the Magician in Medieval Folklore.” Folklore 94.1 (1983): 91–104. Wright, H. A. “How did Shakespeare come to know the ‘Decameron’?” Modern Language Review 50.1 (January 1955): 45–48.

10 John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance Joyce Boro

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased (c. 1619–1623) exploits the interpretive uncertainty of its historically remote medieval romance sources to situate itself within contemporaneous Jacobean debates on women and their reading material. The play adapts and combines two highly ambiguous and popular romances—Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (c. 1390–1396) and the Spanish Grisel y Mirabella by Juan de Flores (c. 1495)—crafting them into a defense of the romance by demonstrating the genre’s ability to articulate pervasive social commentary. While for many dramatists the enduring appeal of the romance is its abundance of plot material, Fletcher’s Women Pleased suggests a mode of reading and rewriting romance that does more than avail itself of a good storyline. The drama plays with the interpretive ambiguities of its sources, expanding on the space to act and space to speak that they provide for their female protagonists. The play’s heroine, Belvidere, is cast as the dreaded female reader whose exposure to romance makes her “resolv’d to run out of her selfe, and become a Ladie Errant” (Overbury 243).1 Belvidere is a pro-active, romance hero(ine), and her successful completion of her quest enables the play’s happy resolution. Her strength is rooted in her discursive practices, which develop those of her romance predecessors, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Grisel’s Mirabella and Braçayda. The tendency of the romance genre to ascribe power to female utterances and experiences is amplified in the figure of Belvidere; Fletcher exploits the discursive space of the genre through Belvidere as she acquires sovereignty through the emulation of her romance sources. While Chaucer’s text is as known to us as it was to Fletcher and his contemporaries, we ought not to be misled by Grisel’s modern obscurity. Grisel was one of the most popular vernacular texts in sixteenth-century Western Europe, circulating more than sixty editions in Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, German, and English. It underwent three separate English translations (1527–1535, 1556, and 1606) and it was twice adapted into dramatic form as Women Pleased and as Swetnam, The Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women. Grisel’s heroines show that fighting for power within the constraints of the formal debate will lead only to tragedy. But

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 189 while this Spanish romance exposes the limitations of the controversy about women, it fails to provide an alternate mode of attaining female sovereignty. Fletcher, therefore, turns to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and adopts the Wife’s more creative discursive practices, namely the tactic of using her opponent’s language to her advantage. By moving from Grisel to the Wife, Women Pleased implies that the formal debate can only go so far. It suggests that literature, specifically the feminine space of romance fiction, is a more successful venue for evaluating women’s worth. In this play, sovereignty is linked to the debate about women through its sources and protagonists, and issues of female empowerment are intrinsically related to paradigms of reading. Belvidere, who embodies the pro-woman position, can read and rule; the play suggests that she acquires her leadership skills through the edifying reading of romance. Through Belvidere’s romance education and through the play’s reformulation of its romance sources, Women Pleased thus exposes the genre’s pedagogical appeal through these extra-textual engagements with critiques of the romance. Operating from within the romance tradition, Belvidere’s comportment and speech illuminate the latent potency of romance reading, highlighting the genre’s ability to empower a female readership. Her success, and the play’s extra-textual success, depends on the contemporaneous feminization of the romance genre. By the early seventeenth century, romance had achieved the status of a derided, popular, and decisively female literary form. However, despite the professed aversion to the romance, its publication history, its regular presence in library inventories, the evidence of its manuscript circulation, and the abundance of romances adapted into dramatic form suggest its continued appeal to a readership of both sexes. The genre was feminized through a variety of textual and paratexual strategies including prefatory dedications and narratorial asides to female readers, the popularity of female eponymous characters, and moral attacks and satires of female readers of the genre. Comments about the genre written by and directed to men present romance reading as a sexualized experience whereby male readers can spy on a private female sphere. Yet while these factors gender the genre as feminine, they do not necessarily point to an audience comprised exclusively, or even preponderantly, of women. Scholars of the romance and of female reading practices have identified this association of genre and gender as a potent literary convention serving to validate male authorship at the expense of a largely imagined female readership (Newcomb 37–47, 104–17, Hackett 4–19, Fleming, Hutson 87–114, Alwes). Whether writers attempted to avoid the stigma of print by rhetorically seducing female readers through their romances, or whether they tried to debase romance to point to their superior authorial skills in other genres, these scholars demonstrate that for male romance writers and readers the trope of the feminized romance was central to homosocial strategies of literary advancement. Despite their conventional feminization, the authoring and reading of romance were primarily masculine activities.

190 Joyce Boro However much men dominated the reading and writing of romance, it is important to recognize that women did read romances, and they did not necessarily read them for the eroticized experiences imagined by their male contemporaries. Many scholars have convincingly argued for the possibility of subversive female reading practices, in which romance was read “against the grain” (Lamb 111–12, Krontiris 26–28, Alwes 390–94, cf. Radway). Romances often narrate the adventures of female protagonists fighting seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve emotional fulfillment. Such accounts may have presented modes of behavior that were in stark opposition to that of the ideal woman—stationary, domestic, chaste, silent, and obedient—which women were consistently encouraged to emulate. In fact, given the consistent aspersions cast on the morality of women who read romance, Lynette McGrath characterizes the very activity of reading them as rebellious (116–17). Yet regardless of who read romances or why, it is incontestable that the genre was gendered as feminine and that it offered a recognizable imaginative space of female agency that a play like Women Pleased could use to its advantage. In electing to combine Grisel and The Wife’s Tale, Fletcher chose well. Not only were they popular romances with storylines and characters likely to be recognized by his audience, but they also shared a defi nite preoccupation with women’s status, an issue of critical importance at the time of Women Pleased’s composition, revision, and performance (c.1604–1623). This question of women’s status is also of great relevance to the play. Although there were fewer works in the debate about women published from the 1590s through 1615, in the later half of the 1610s through the early 1620s the debate enjoyed a renewed currency (Woodbridge 74–77). Scholars have attributed this shift to the climate of hostility towards women emanating from the Jacobean court. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski describes a “court ethos shaped by the patriarchical ideology and homosexuality of James I,” which instantiated a climate ripe for the “outpouring of antifeminist or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays detailing women’s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewishness, and natural inferiority to men in the hierarchy of being” (2). The Jacobean furor was largely centered on the Swetnam controversy, which had its genesis with Joseph Swetnam’s immediately popular, misogynist The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615). One of the many responses to Swetnam’s tract, the play Swetnam, The Woman Hater, launches a sustained attack and reformation of the eponymous character through its adaptation of Grisel. The use of Grisel as source material for this drama as well as for Women Pleased indicates the relevance of the Spanish romance to the Jacobean debate. It also indirectly links Fletcher’s play to the Swetnam controversy. Yet while the Swetnam controversy was only part of the Jacobean revival, Women Pleased participated directly in the debate as a whole. In addition to this mini-debate cluster, attacks and defenses proliferated as writers of pamphlets, drama, verse, and fiction

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 191 expounded on topics ranging from women’s education and reading material through their clothing to their behavior. The material of the entire debate is inextricably woven into the fabric of Women Pleased through its manifest preoccupation with the acceptable scope of female activity and with the possibility of female sovereignty, as I will discuss in detail below. The play enters into dialogue with the debate through presenting a clash between Belvidere’s constructive behavior and the Duchess’s unjust misogynist actions; the presentation of antiwoman platitudes as archaic; the depiction of restorative female activity; and through its defense of the feminized romance genre. The socioliterary climate created by the controversy about women, coupled with the interpretive ambiguity of the very popular romance sources for Women Pleased, facilitates the play’s intervention into current debates on women and romance reading. The Wife of Bath’s pronouncements on female sovereignty were well known to Fletcher and his contemporaries. Her Prologue and Tale were reprinted at least eighteen times throughout the early modern period as part of The Canterbury Tales. Moreover, they were quoted, echoed, paraphrased, and adapted about twice as often as any other tale (Boswell and Holton). Women Pleased seems to wink ironically at this intertextual tradition by using an adaptation of The Wife’s Tale— The Old Wife’s Tale from the Cobbler of Canterbury—as the source for one of its subplots.2 References to the Wife of Bath and her Tale appear in both learned and popular texts on matrimony and women throughout the period, suggesting her authoritative reputation in those fields (Boswell and Holton). The contradictory, multifarious responses the Wife elicits highlight the challenges that she poses for her readers: “She is shrew, virago, femme fatale; she is the voice of feminism, or the projection of centuries of male misogynist fantasy” (Cooper, “Shape-Shiftings” 168). Grisel is an equally challenging and controversial text. The romance begins when the King refuses to allow his daughter, Mirabella, to marry. Many suitors have died of love for her, and so to prevent the death of the entire male population the King imprisons her. Despite her confi nement Grisel manages to woo Mirabella, and she eventually returns his love. When the King discovers their affair, the lovers are tried under an ancient law that declares that the lover who instigated the relationship will be sentenced to death and the other will be banished. At the trial, the judges are unable to determine who is most guilty since Grisel and Mirabella each claim full responsibility for their relationship. It is decided that a public debate on the subject of whether men or women are guiltier in love will resolve the fates of the lovers. Torrellas, a well-known misogynist, engages in a disputation on the worth of women with the virtuous Braçayda. The judges decide in favor of the men: Mirabella is declared guilty and condemned to death. Only the King and his sycophantic courtiers and justices fail to see the male bias of the verdict, and debates as to its relative justice ensue. Distraught at the outcome, Grisel kills himself. Mirabella’s suicide follows. Enraged, the

192 Joyce Boro Queen desires revenge on Torrellas, whom she blames for Mirabella’s tragic death. When Torrellas falls in love with Braçayda, the Queen uses Braçayda as bait, luring Torrellas to the palace where all the women viciously torture him. They ensure that he dies a slow, painful death. After the gruesome murder, his body is burned and each woman preserves some of his ashes as a memento. Grisel’s structure, paratextual arrangement, and interpretative framework are heavily influenced by the academic debate. The romance is structured as a sequence of disputations, which encourage its readers to re-think preconceived notions about love, gender, and good governance, and to view confl icting ideas from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Grisel represents an important intervention into the Spanish formal controversy about women, but intriguingly, it can also be situated on either side of the debate. It ridicules the antifeminist position and attacks the notorious, historical misogynist, Pere Torrellas (fl. 1438–1476); however, paratextual and textual markers presenting women as vicious potentially sanction misogyny. Grisel’s ambiguity facilitates multiple interpretations, enabling the text to conform to new sets of expectations. While each edition and adaptation offers a different version of the romance, paratextual markers consistently are used to gear the text towards audiences with an interest—either defamatory or laudatory—in women. For instance, the prefatory material to the 1556 quadrilingual edition configures the romance as a defense of women and female learning. Grisel’s female characters and ample classical exempla are harnessed in support of this vindication of women. In contrast, the 1608 quadrilingual edition replaces the prefatory material of the 1556 edition with an antifeminist dedication to noble men, in which the writer describes the corrupting influences of women. Not only is the 1608 Grisel used to make the opposite point to that made in 1556, but the same classical exempla are employed to contrary purposes. Likewise, the third English translation, A Paire of Turtle Doves (1606), is geared towards a male audience and presented as a warning against woman. The play entitled Swetnam, The Woman Hater, however, vocalizes a radically feminist position and a profound attack on the misogynist tradition. This interpretative tension is equally visible in modern readings of Grisel: while most critics have moved away from interpreting the romance as a univocal feminist text, the consensus remains undecided on the subject of Grisel’s protofeminism or misogyny.3 Because The Wife’s Tale and Grisel articulate conflicting positions regarding women, these romances provide Women Pleased with an abundance of thematically loaded material. In fact, the interpretive challenges posed by these texts may suggest an additional reason why Fletcher chose to adapt them. By combining two popular romances that vocalize such well-known and indeterminate positions regarding women, the play can exploit their intertextual resonances. Not only can it manipulate audience expectation through the alteration of its recognizable sources, but such

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 193 sources promise an audience a challenging, highly nuanced theatrical experience that is fi rmly situated within the controversy about women. Grisel fully participates in the formal debate about women, as defi ned by Linda Woodbridge. It is formed of a series of debates. There are real combatants—Torrellas and Braçayda—who engage rhetorically to articulate defi nitions and assess the value of women. These disputes rely heavily on exempla, and they catalogue female vices and virtues. Moreover, while the argument purports to solve the problem of how to punish Grisel and Mirabella, it is theoretical and its lessons are inapplicable to the eponymous characters: Grisel and Mirabella are not stereotypes, but fully developed characters. This incongruity between theory and practice typifies, in fact, how Flores uses the debate to critique its own efficacy. In Grisel, the move from trial to debate invokes the formal controversy’s reliance on exempla because it enacts the flawed argumentative shift from discussions of the vices (or virtues) of one woman to condemnations (or praise) of the entire female sex. Moreover, the trial and debate reveal their own fundamental injustice, since the general arguments about men and women cannot resolve the issue. Mirabella’s crime leads to a condemnation of woman in general. Then, that general denunciation is used to judge her. The irrelevance of the debate to the actual circumstances of the lovers on trial is further affi rmed by its outcome: it condemns Mirabella, despite the fact that Grisel instigated the relationship and so according to the law he is the guilty party. In addition, the romance shows that Mirabella and Braçayda fail to attain justice through no fault of their own; rather, their failure is the direct result of their participation in the formal controversy about women. Work by R. Howard Bloch and Woodbridge illuminates the debate’s ineffectuality as well as its functionality as a literary or scholastic game. Both attacks and defenses are shockingly situational and repetitive. The similarities among different texts reside largely in the fact that both attacks and defenses operate within the same stereotypical notions of good and bad women and rarely problematize the underlying premise that such extremes exist. The debate’s arguments and exempla are continually recycled; they are not original, nor are they meant to be. Diane Purkiss observes that such citational rhetoric acts “as an authenticating discourse which validates the misogynistic enterprise by aligning it with what is always already apparent” (72). Defenses of women function likewise. As a result, the debate turns in circles; its very terms prevent any resolution. Rather than seeing the formal controversy as advancing the feminist cause, Woodbridge observes that it may have hindered its progress (133). By narrating the debate’s inability to provide justice, Grisel exposes the debate’s inherently problematic nature. Coupled with the conflicting textual and paratextual markers that prevent the romance from being read as a proto- or an antifeminist intervention, this strategy suggests that a move away from the debate is imperative. It is precisely such a move that Women Pleased executes.

194 Joyce Boro Women Pleased preserves Grisel’s storyline until the lovers’ trial. Rather than narrate or dramatize the debates—between the King and Queen and Torrellas and Braçayda—which form the second half of the romance, Fletcher’s play turns to the Wife’s Tale and recasts the debates as comical subplots that present examples of virtuous women and wicked men, and as a question that has a definite answer. When Silvio is found guilty of corrupting Mirabella, he is sentenced to death unless he can solve the Duchess’s riddle and determine: . . . what is that onely thing, For which all women long; Yet having what they most desire, To have it do’s them wrong. (5.1.126–30)

If he discovers the answer he will win Belvidere and his life. These exempla and this riddle are not mere substitutes for the debates in Grisel; rather, they are physical enactments of the textual and extra-textual debates regarding women’s power to which Grisel contributes. What these narratives, the plot and subplots, have in common is their focus on women’s ingenuity and sovereignty. The subplots, in which we meet the jealous miser, his disgruntled servant, his fl irtatious but ultimately virtuous wife, and a number of her suitors, highlight the virtue (and resourcefulness) of women. They depict the male characters as lecherous and greedy, and the women as virtuous. Moreover, because women are entirely responsible for the progression and resolution of the plot, the comic conclusion of the drama achieved by the women strongly contrasts with the tragic outcome of the romance’s male-dominated world. The play shows that women deserve the control that they desire. It ends happily and all women are pleased. Belvidere shows her leadership skills and wins Silvio, and the Duchess is reunited with Belvidere and engaged to the Duke of Sienna. In the subplots, Rhodope’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity enables her to regain control of him and their relationship. Her chastity revealed, Isabella is reconciled with her husband. Women are granted control and their rule enables both women and men to be pleased. The changes made to Grisel move Women Pleased away from tragedy and the formal debate and into a new discursive context. Like The Wife’s Tale and unlike the Spanish romance, Fletcher’s play adopts a comic, more literary way of addressing the woman question. This allows the play simultaneously to respond to Chaucer’s text, which, like Grisel, offers readers an interpretive challenge in terms of its proto- or antifeminism. But rather than determine on which side of the debate to situate its sources, Women Pleased is more concerned with the discursive space that its sources afford their female characters, a space that is characteristic of Renaissance romance fiction. Whether the Wife presents an ultimately misogynist argument matters less than her ability to use the language of

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 195 authority to create a locus in which she can validate female experience. Likewise, although Braçayda loses the debate and Mirabella commits suicide, they are both given a space to speak for themselves and they use that space to eloquently decry the fundamental injustice of the patriarchal society that condemns them. Braçayda’s and Mirabella’s difficulties may explain why Fletcher looks to the Wife of Bath and her Tale to provide a comic plot resolution and to serve as model for Belvidere’s speech practices. Just as the Wife of Bath emulates the misogynist discourse of auctoritas to combat it, so Belvidere speaks in the Duchess’s language to the same ends. In the play’s opening scene, Silvio and Bartello liken mother to daughter. Silvio declares that Belvidere “is as truly vertuous, faire, and noble, / As her great Mother’s good” (1.1.18–19). Bartello describes Belvidere as partaking in her mother’s sensory and linguistic abilities: with the Duchess’s “eyes she sees all things, / Discourses with her tongue” (1.1.23–24). It is precisely because Belvidere has inherited and internalized the Duchess’s language and vision that she can dupe, dominate, and then pacify her at the end of the play. Belvidere self-consciously acknowledges this ability to speak as her mother in her dialogue with Sienna: “I could say more Sir, / But in another’s tongue ‘twere better spoken” (3.1.58–59). The immediate signification of her words suggests that the task of flattering him belongs to the Duchess, but her statement also alerts us to Belvidere’s tactic of rhetorical ventriloquism. Her words would be “better spoken” in “another’s tongue” because they give voice to her mother’s beliefs rather than to her own. The same strategy enables Belvidere to solve the Duchess’s riddle. As the Duchess predicts, the answer eludes Silvio. Belvidere succeeds where he fails, uttering the following answer: . . . In good or ill They desire, to have their will; Yet when they have it, they abuse it, For they know not how to use it. (5.1.138–41)

The Duchess had no intention of accepting any answer as correct (3.1.95– 101). Therefore, the fact that Belvidere solves the riddle further suggests that she “sees all things” with her mother’s eyes and “discourses with her tongue.” The daughter plays to her mother’s lust for power by attributing sovereignty to women in the solution. She also replicates her mother’s language and convictions, by stressing women’s inability to use their wills: Belvidere’s actions throughout the play, as she crafts the happy resolution, show that she does not hold this belief herself. While the answer of the riddle enables the lovers’ union, it also functions as a rebuke to the Duchess, who “has her will” and “know[s] not how to use it.” Although the Duchess accepts the answer to the riddle, she does not recognize that she has abused her will, and her behavior never changes. Rather, Belvidere’s solution to the

196 Joyce Boro riddle highlights her ability, modeled on the Wife of Bath’s, to discursively manipulate her enemy. Just as the Duchess’s linguistic legacy enables Belvidere to use that language to her advantage, her inherited vision functions likewise. Endowed with her mother’s eyes but not her partial vision, Belvidere exploits her mother’s incapacity to assess situations in their entirety. For instance, when the Duchess promises Belvidere to both Sienna and Silvio, her lack of foresight leads to war. The Duchess’s partial vision also leads to her inconstant vacillation between pity and harsh justice; it effects her interpretation of the riddle and its answer; and it also prompts her own eventual, flawed marriage to Sienna. The Duchess’s fi nal words, which end the play, are as follows: “ . . . you young men that know not / How to preserve a wife, and keep her faire, / Give ’em their sovereign wills, & pleas’d they are” (5.3.111–13). She focuses on what suits her, ignoring the second half of the riddle that articulates women’s inability to use their wills properly. In contrast, Belvidere’s vision and leadership skills are wide in scope. While the Duchess is fickle vis-à-vis Silvio, Belvidere is constant, having loved him since infancy. The Duchess has inherited her power, which she abuses; Belvidere uses the power gained through her rhetorical prowess and ingenuity to overcome her mother’s irrational authority. In what appears to be a hopeless situation, Belvidere orchestrates her own escape, fashions herself a new identity, and helps Silvio to win the war, to solve the riddle, and by learning the value of female power, to show himself to be worthy of her and the dukedom. Much like As You Like It’s Rosalind/Ganymede, Belvidere also uses her disguise to teach Silvio how to be a good lover and to recognize her true value, ensuring that he loves her for her virtue and intelligence, and not just for her beauty. Fletcher’s return to the Wife of Bath’s tactics suggests that despite the passage of time—from The Wife of Bath’s Tale through Grisel to Women Pleased—the formal debate has not advanced the female cause. This recognition, of course, allies Fletcher with many of his and our contemporaries, including Flores. It is thus unsurprising that the play presents the debate and the antifeminist position as outmoded. It suggests that literature is a more successful venue in which to advance the female cause, and that creative discursive practices like those used by the Wife of Bath are essential if any progress is to be made. But Fletcher adapts as he returns to Chaucer, and in Women Pleased the Wife’s dream of female sovereignty becomes tinged with the reality of the debate about women through the Duchess’s misogynist discourse. Not only does the play insinuate that little has changed since the Wife’s fantasy, but through the Duchess, it reflects the heightened anxiety regarding women that became apparent under James. Opposed to the Duchess in every way, Belvidere embodies the hope of a progressive future society in which sexual equality prevails. Yet in the context of the misogynist slant of the Duchess’s riddle and its answer, the anticipation of productive female sovereignty and sexual

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 197 harmony exemplified by Belvidere may have seemed as preposterous as the Wife’s “lond fulfi lled of fairy” (G6v), and as impossible as the female victory declared by the narrator at the conclusion of Grisel.4 Helen Cooper notes that the riddle’s “apparent sellout to conventional misogynistic views, while it may be designed to remove any overt threat from the issue of women’s sovereignty, is not supported by the action of the play itself” (“Jacobean Chaucer” 192). This incongruity is a major interpretive crux. The contradictions regarding female sovereignty that hinge on the riddle and its textual application are shared by Chaucer’s and Fletcher’s text. Just as Belvidere reformulates the discursive practices of her sources, so does Fletcher to Chaucer, creating another text full of ambiguities. But whereas the “conventional misogynistic views” vocalized in the riddle’s solution in Women Pleased are only hinted at in Chaucer’s text, they are fully articulated by Fletcher’s Duchess. Chaucer’s Queen asks the knight to discover what women most desire, and his correct answer is unqualified “soverainte” (H1v). The Wife of Bath approves of the response, cursing husbands who “will not be governed by [their] wives” (H2v). Yet, while this answer attributes unconditional “mastry” to “wives,” the couple’s happiness depends on the hag’s absolute obedience to the knight (H2v). Neither the Queen nor the Wife of Bath declares that women cannot rule, but their respective interventions may suggest as much: the Queen’s decision to treat a rapist so mercifully is certainly questionable, as are the Wife’s fi nal suggestions that this reformed rapist is the ideal husband, and that “parfit joye” derives from the hag’s unwavering obedience to him (H2v). In Women Pleased, the situation is reversed, but the tension remains: the riddle posits women’s inability to rule, while the plot alludes to the fallacy of such an assertion. Belvidere, Isabella, and Rhodope take control of their relationships, averting potential tragedy. Moreover, by associating the riddle’s misogynist discourse with the Duchess and by positioning her at its origins, the action of the play is further distanced from the riddle. Hence, when Belvidere provides Silvio with the riddle’s answer she emulates the Duchess’s language and bias: she must craft an answer that the Duchess will accept. This ventriloquism is a key element in Belvidere’s systematic manipulation of the Duchess. Like the Wife of Bath and the hag, on whom Belvidere is modeled, Belvidere employs misogynist discourse to her own ends, to fight it. For Belvidere, the Duchess signifies political and maternal authority, both of which block her happiness. This dual function, which the Duchess herself fi nds problematic, renders her especially potent. As in traditional New Comedy, the older generation represents an obstacle that must be overcome by the younger generation, enabling a festive conclusion and the establishment of a new order. At the end of Women Pleased, a new generation is poised to rule, but the Duchess does not cede power to Belvidere. She will continue to rule despite her incompetence. The New Comedy paradigm reinforces the Duchess’s obsoleteness, as does the judicial system that she institutes through the riddle. As stated

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above, the riddle is closely tied to the Duchess: she represents its origin; its lesson is uniquely applicable to her; and like her, it is antiquated. The ideological incongruity of the riddle with the dominant value system of the play is highlighted through its textual and intertextual history. Within the play, it is situated within the previous generation where Belvidere’s grandfather’s “fiery . . . understanding” grappled with it (3.1.109). The riddle also looks back to The Wife’s Tale. And, within the Tale itself, the riddle evokes a form of justice which dates to “the old daies of king Artour . . . many an hundred yere ago” (G6v). In Women Pleased, Penurio compares the present age to “the old daies” and fi nds his era lacking: “’Tis a sore age, very sore age, lewd age, / And women are now like old Knights adventures, / Full of inchanted flames, and dangerous” (3.2.63–65). These lines allude to the Wife’s nostalgic opening gambit: she explains how the rapist-knight and the friars have replaced the enchanted incubi who would hide “in every bush, and under every tre” to “dishonour” women (G6v). Penurio’s allusion stresses the temporal distance between the Wife’s narrative and his reality. It suggests that the “holy freres” and the “lusty bacheler” have in turn been replaced by “inchanted . . . and dangerous” women (G6v). But the difference he notes is not apparent in the play. In Women Pleased, the men are “[f]ull of inchanted flames and dangerous”: they are repeatedly described as “fiery” (1.1.15, 1.3.80, 2.3.36–37, 2.4.2, 2.5.57–58, 3.1.109, 3.3.49, 4.3.95, 4.3.127), and their attempts to barter food and jewelry for women mark them as “dangerous.” Penurio’s comments, like the riddle’s textual history, signal the riddle’s inapplicability to the dramatic world. Configured as a relic, the riddle mirrors the Duchess’s leadership and judicial style. The Duchess revives the riddle and, as in the Wife’s Tale, employs it for a judicial purpose. But the riddle, like the debate in Grisel, cannot guarantee justice. Even in the Wife’s Tale, the riddle is linked to problematic legality: should the Queen intervene to save this rapist-knight? Is he really reformed? Is female obedience the key to a successful marriage? Like the riddle proposed by Chaucer’s Queen, the legal system advanced by the Duchess is flawed: it is partial and leads directly to war and destruction. The Duchess is equally responsible for the judicial system’s implicitly outdated misogynist bias: uttering the slight on women, she is representative of the female figure who “know[s] not how to use” her power. In this respect, she is opposed to Belvidere, Isabella, and Rhodope who exemplify the redemptive nature of female mastery, highlighting the inapplicability of the riddle to their gender. The yoking of antifeminism with the archaic Duchess connects her to the figure of the stage misogynist. According to their antimasque function, stage misogynists represent a barrier to a protagonists’ success. When they are removed from a play or converted from their beliefs, they take their misogyny with them, enabling a happy resolution. These characters force misogyny out of its hiding place of invisibility so that a protagonist can successfully fight it (Woodbridge 290). Valerie Wayne describes how

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 199 the tendency to associate misogyny with a single character who is recuperated at the text’s conclusion led to “[t]he illusion that misogyny was contained or destroyed by these Renaissance texts,” and to the presentation of misogyny as residual, archaic, and incongruous with the dominant worldview (156). This strategy facilitated the marginalization of the misogynists, opposing them to those deemed progressive and “superior for having spurned such outmoded ways of thinking” (157). The association did not mean that misogyny was dead; rather, such texts are insidious for the way that they feed into the “dominant discourse [that] could simultaneously reject and promulgate residual misogyny in order to enforce women’s continued subordination within the culture” (159). As Herbert Blau argues, although Belvidere “deviate[s] from subservience to a masculine power,” and although “women seem to be running the show . . . the working out of marital fortunes occurs within the libidinal economy of the old phallic structure into which the laughter subsides” (540). The patriarchy affi rmed through marriage at the play’s conclusion is undeniable (and totally in keeping with the generic conventions of comedy), but Women Pleased can question both residual and dominant discourses regarding women by placing the convention of antiquated misogyny, together with its stage misogynist, within the New Comedy paradigm to thematize the temporal remoteness of its sources. The dated nature of misogyny is further emphasized by the few antifeminist comments scattered throughout the play. These statements, uttered by male characters to manipulate their female interlocutors, suggest a conception of the debate as game and of misogyny as residual. To manipulate Rhodope, Silvio employs the stereotypes of women’s desire for social mobility and their inability to keep secrets or to be true friends (2.1.41–48). Penurio reminds Isabella of the history of woman’s sin, originating with Eve so as to encourage her to deceive Lopez (2.6.24–26). Claudio invokes woman’s frailties as he feigns breaking up with Isabella, only so that she will beg him to reconsider (5.2.38ff.). Yet while these remarks still have the power to effect the literary women in the play (just as the formal debate could still enrage their real-life contemporaries), there is no sense that these characters actually believe what they say: Penurio’s comments are nonsensical; Claudio and Silvio use both pro- and antiwoman comments to achieve their aims; and as Isabella’s brother, Claudio will say or do anything to test her virtue. Like the riddle, these invocations of the formal debate are reliquary apparitions that are incongruous with the reality of the characters and their beliefs. They also sit uncomfortably with Belvidere’s, Isabella’s, and Rhodope’s actions, which indicate that women are deserving of sovereignty. Only the Duchess shows and believes otherwise. Once the Duchess reveals her true intentions and shows herself to be an unjust, misogynistic, unmovable obstacle to true love, Belvidere takes on the role of the comic, romance heroine who is determined to overcome the Duchess and to craft her own future. Just as the masque was used to critique James’s

200 Joyce Boro policies while seemingly glorifying him and his court, Belvidere also uses it to intimate her victory over her mother. The Duchess is excluded from the masque. Instead, the performance is centered on the revelation of Belvidere’s identity; hence it symbolizes her centrality within the ideal court. The production’s conclusion represents Belvidere, and not the Duchess, victoriously surrounded by her loyal subjects (5.3.32). Moreover, Belvidere’s masque shows the “merry spirits” of youth overcoming the “Cares and sorrowes” of age in an harmonious vision of a youthful court (5.3.33, 36). It thus foreshadows Belvidere’s final transformation from (disguised) old hag to youthful beauty that will symbolize the necessity of her succession. Celebrating Belvidere’s power, the masque unites the performers, emblematic representatives of Florence’s entire population under Belvidere’s progressive moral agenda. While the masque provides Belvidere with an effective medium in which to articulate her sovereignty, her power is ultimately derived from the romance. It is through a careful emulation of romance models that Belvidere exposes her mother’s failings, achieves power, and restores justice. Braçayda and Mirabella show the impotence of even the most sophisticated arguments within the context of the formal controversy. Fletcher, therefore, has Belvidere strategically adopt the Wife’s linguistic ventriloquism. The Wife may quote auctoritas and utter recycled exempla, but unlike her counterparts writing within the formal debate tradition, her rhetorical mode is not citational. Through careful reiteration of past arguments and examples she makes the old auctoritas fight against itself to reveal its own folly. She is, thus, ultimately able to supplant authority with her own experience. Belvidere’s adoption of her mother’s language is equally nuanced. Emulating the Wife, Fletcher has Belivdere use her mother’s language to her advantage, promulgating her own cause. Fletcher thereby presents Belvidere as a careful reader who has learned from her sources. That he finds the language to powerfully articulate political sovereignty and autonomy in earlier romance models attests to the value inherent in the genre. Belvidere’s educational progress, from Grisel to The Wife of Bath’s Tale, is mirrored by the play’s structure, which highlights the same shift from the formal debate to a more exclusively literary realm. This development is as crucial to the play’s extra-textual argument as it is to Belvidere’s success. By moving away from the debate and into a more literary discursive sphere, the play highlights romance’s ability to tackle significant issues. This shift also demonstrates romance’s primacy over more serious literary forms— such as the debate—in terms of its ability to affect social change. Grisel suggests that a retreat from the debate is needed if women are to achieve social justice. With its reliance on exempla and stereotypes, the debate is incapable of providing justice to Mirabella (or to Grisel): their deaths are the direct result of the debate’s limitations. But while the debate is criticized clearly and powerfully through Grisel, it fails to provide an alternative discursive mode. Women Pleased offers that alternative by reaching beyond Grisel and the debate towards the Wife of Bath’s subversive rhetorical

John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 201 strategies. Belvidere exemplifies the success of such a discursive movement. Through Belvidere’s actions, and through the shift from the debate to the romance, the play demonstrates the didactic and socially progressive worth of romance. This vision of the romance could not be more distant from the sexualized, feminized, and frivolous genre vilified by so many of Fletcher’s contemporaries. Yet as dissimilar as these two conceptions of romance are—as didactic or corrupting—both attest to the large influence that the genre could have on its readers. Women Pleased shows that, in the hands of the right readers and writers, romance can be powerful and subversive. Perhaps Overbury was right to worry that a woman reading romance might “run out of her selfe, and become a Ladie Errant.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to Valerie Wayne, Mary Ellen Lamb, Helen Cooper, and Katie Musgrave for their invaluable assistance with this chapter.

NOTES 1. In his satirical Characters, Thomas Overbury portrays a chambermaid who is an avid romance reader. She is so “carried away” by her reading that she desires to emulate the romance heroes and heroines by becoming “a Ladie Errant.” 2 The subplot of Women Pleased that is based on The Old Wife’s Tale from the Cobbler of Canterbury involves the characters of Isabella and her husband, Lopez. Isabella is young, beautiful woman and Lopez is an old, miserly, jealous man who deprives Isabella of food and clothing. Isabella engages in flirtations with two suitors, but she remains chaste. When Lopez thinks he has discovered her infidelity, Isabella uses her wits to convince him of her chastity, thereby attaining sovereignty over him. 3 While Barbara Matulka (3–45, 88–157) began the trend of labelling Grisel as feminist, more recent scholars such as Marina Brownlee and Lillian von der Walde Moheno have attended to the ambiguous nuances of the romance, observing that it advances opposing positions regarding women. 4 In all quotations from The Wife of Bath’s Tale the uses of u/v and i/j have been modernized.

WORKS CITED Alwes, Derek B. “Robert Greene’s Dueling Dedications.” ELR 30 (2000): 373–95. Blau, Herbert. “The Absolved Riddle: Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher.” New Literary History 17 (1986): 539–54. Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Boswell, Jackson Campbell, and Sylvia Wallace Holton. Chaucer’s Fame in England: STC Chauceriana 1475–1640. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004.

202 Joyce Boro Brownlee, Marina S. “Language and Incest in Grisel y Mirabella.” Romanic Review 79 (1988): 107–28. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The workes of our antient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed. Ed. Thomas Speght. London: [Adam Islip and] George Bishop, 1598. Cooper, Helen. “The Shape-Shiftings of the Wife of Bath, 1395–1670.” Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Eds. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 168–84. . “Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays.” Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance. Ed. Theresa M. Krier. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998. 189–209. Fleming, Juliet. “The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth.” Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Ed. James Grantham Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 158–81. Fletcher, John. Women Pleased. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Vol. 5. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966–1996. 443–538. Flores, Juan de. Grisel y Mirabella. Ed. Barbara Matulka. The Novels of Juan de Flores and their European Diffusion. New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Krontiris, Tina. “Breaking Barriers of Genre and Gender: Margaret Tyler’s Translation of The Mirrour of Knighthood.” ELR 18 (1998): 19–39. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Matulka, Barbara. The Novels of Juan de Flores and their European Diffusion: A Study in Comparative Literature. New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931. McGrath, Lynette. Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: ‘Why on the ridge should she desire to go? Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Overbury, Thomas. Characters. Ed. Donald Beecher. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2003. A Paire of Turtle Doves, or, the Tragicall History of Bellora and Fidelio. London: Francis Burton, 1606. Purkiss, Diane. “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate.” Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760. Eds. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss. London: Routledge, 1992. 69–101. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Swetnam the Woman-Hater: The Controversy and the Play. Ed. Coryl Crandall. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1969. Walde Moheno, Lillian von der. “El episodio fi nal de Grisel y Mirabella.” La Corónica 20 (1991–1992): 18–31. Wayne, Valerie. “Historical Differences: Misogyny and Othello.” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Valerie Wayne. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 153–79. Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.

11 Undoing Romance Beaumont and Fletcher’s Resistant Reading of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia Clare R. Kinney

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia spent almost a century after its 1593 publication provoking further improvements. The work’s rhetorical complexity, its play of genres and its exfoliating plotlines offer, in the words of Martin Garrett, “an impression of inexhaustible riches, possibilities which do not end when the book is completed” (7). Its many literary offspring, which include both prose continuations and adaptations of the romance into other forms, potentially constitute case studies in reception-as-reinterpretation. Redactors’ attempts to contain the narrative copia of the Arcadia or to temper the work’s more provocative experiments with mixed modes may produce moments of significant resistance to the agendas of the (officially) “onely to be admired Sir Philip Sydney” (Markham A2v), quite egregiously erasing some of the possibilities Sidney fi nds in romance. It is one such “undoing,” the dismantling of the Arcadia’s heterogeneous representation of female speech and agency in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge that concerns me here. During the seventeenth century at least seven plays were based on larger or smaller portions of the Arcadia and to transform the sprawling text into a manageable drama, its adaptors necessarily had to be selective.1 Playwrights who focus on the Pyrocles/Musidorus/Philoclea/Pamela love plots tend to prune the darker and more highly politicized material of the revised text, paring away the narratives of Cecropia’s machinations and Amphialus’s rebellion and often amplifying the comedy provided by the work’s “low” pastoral characters. John Day’s Isle of Gulls (1605) offers a farcical and intermittently bawdy and satirical spin on Sidney’s disguise plot; James Shirley’s more elegant The Arcadia, A Pastoral (1632) offers a relatively decorous romantic comedy (although Shirley, like Day, amplifies the comic grotesqueries associated with the clown Dametas). Other dramatists sidestep the revised Arcadia’s main plotlines and borrow plot material from its many subsidiary and embedded narratives: Henry Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia (1639), for example, draws together the episodes involving its noble and exemplary eponymous lovers to fashion a sentimental tragedy that barely touches on the civil war that dominates Book 3 of the New Arcadia and precipitates their deaths.

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One of the earliest products of the Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration, Cupid’s Revenge (c.1608–1610), represents a particularly intriguing instance of the second variety of Arcadian adaptation.2 The play has never attracted much critical attention; commentators tend to emphasize its preliminary experiments with the authors’ signature combination of “black comedy, broad farce and sentimental melodrama,” a combination that will be deployed more deftly in such tragicomedies as A King and No King and Philaster (Astington 220). I prefer to approach it as a particularly interesting resistant reading of the erotics and politics of Sidneian romance. The play brings together three of Sidney’s secondary or “flashback” narratives, transforming them into what one might term comi-tragedy. Beaumont and Fletcher’s rampages in the margins of the Arcadia’s main plot lines reshape the stories of Erona, princess of Lycia; Plangus, son of the King of Iberia; and the lady Zelmane. In the Arcadia, Erona tries to suppress the worship of Cupid and is subsequently possessed by a destructive passion for a faithless commoner; Plangus is jilted by his mistress, Andromana, when his own father offers her marriage, and is eventually driven into exile by her murderous machinations; Zelmane’s love for Pyrocles leads her to serve him in a page’s disguise: after her death he reverently appropriates her name when he disguises himself as an Amazon. In Cupid’s Revenge, characters acquire new names (often borrowed from elsewhere in the Arcadia) and everybody is now related rather incestuously to one another (for example, the Plangus character—who eventually falls in love with Erona in the Sidney text— is here the brother of the Erona character, and joins her in desecrating Cupid’s altars, while the Zelmane figure, renamed Urania, becomes the Andromana character’s virtuous daughter). My particular concern here is the way in which Beaumont and Fletcher’s excision, replotting and “genre-bending” of material from the Arcadia re-imagines and resists the earlier work’s quite wide-ranging exploration of the power and dangers of female agency and female speech. It is my contention that the awkward movement into tragedy eventually enacted by Cupid’s Revenge represents a withdrawal from the more capacious possibilities of romance. On preliminary inspection, to be sure, we seem to be in familiar territory. Cupid’s Revenge has a nonrealistic plot (Cupid appears as a speaking character to wreak his revenge on Hidaspes [= Erona] and her relatives) and seems to encompass romance’s mixed modes. Its fi rst two acts contain a significant amount of comedy, especially in Act 2’s extended portrayal of King Leontius as a ludicrously self-flattering senex amans in his courtship of Bacha ( = Andromana); its middle acts are dominated by the destructive machinations of Bacha and by the miseries of Prince Leucippus (= Plangus); its fi nal act offers a version of pastoral when Leucippus and the disguised Urania flee the court and take refuge in the natural world. At fi rst glance, its authors may seem to be exploring the “wide range of emotional registers” and the new perspectives, transcending the limits of everyday social structures that Alison Thorne associates

Undoing Romance 205 with Shakespearian romance (6–7). But as Lee Bliss rightly notes, Beaumont and Fletcher “refer to rather than re-create romance’s special world” (“Tragicomic” 158)—and they are not really interested in the way that the multifariousness of romance can fi nd space for discursive complexity, for the generation of resistant or interrogative voices. As they gradually nudge their play’s Arcadian borrowings in the direction of tragedy, they unravel Sidney’s intricate web, undo the complicated framing of his episodes, and in the process erase the text’s insistent multiplicity. A play embodies a narrative, gives it the illusion of presence. In the New Arcadia, by contrast, the stories of Erona, Plangus, and Zelmane are all mediated by storytellers: their sufferings are thus afforded a certain distance even as their vicissitudes prove to be inextricably tangled up with the events taking place in the foreground of the action. The unfolding of the Erona/Plangus narratives begins with a text within a text, a record of a mournful exchange between King Basilius and Plangus rendered as a verse eclogue: when the poem is read aloud and Pyrocles/Zelmane asks for an explanation of Plangus and his sufferings, Philoclea begins to relate the story of Erona and the results of her desecration of Cupid’s altars. Plangus hovers on the margins of this history: he is introduced as the exiled son of the King of Iberia fighting in the army of Tiridates of Armenia (a rejected suitor who invades Lycia when Cupid directs Erona’s desires to the lowborn Antiphilus). Later on, Pamela takes up the earlier history of Plangus, describing Andromana’s unsuccessful attempt to have Plangus reprise their affair after her marriage to his father, and the plots she subsequently levels against him that result in his exile. Finally, Basilius relates what he learned from Plangus himself: his falling in love with the captive Erona (imprisoned by the vengeful sister of Tiridates) and his quest to solicit the aid of Pyrocles and Musidorus in rescuing her from imminent execution. The history of Andromana’s niece, the original Zelmane, is entangled with these events in that she falls in love with Pyrocles when Sidney’s heroes are held captive at the court of Iberia by her aunt; the story of her service to Pyrocles in male disguise and her eventual decline and death is recounted by the prince when he describes his pre-Arcadian adventures to Philoclea.3 The stories of Plangus and Erona remain unfi nished in the revised Arcadia: Basilius reports that Plangus, believing Musidorus and Pyrocles to have perished in a shipwreck, is now seeking aid from King Euarchus of Macedon; the day of Erona’s execution has not yet arrived.4 What the text foregrounds is the repeated act of framing their histories—and the dialogue this establishes with the main action of the romance. Sidney seems to have taken some care in developing and positioning his embedded narratives. The preliminary versions of the Plangus/Erona/Andromana material in his Old Arcadia are confi ned to its Eclogues and related by shepherds who have no role in the main action (60–4, 128–37), but in the revised romance they support the work’s more developed interest in the intersection between personal desires and state politics. Erona’s love for Antiphilis leads to the

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invasion of her kingdom by Tiridates and the eventual overthrow of her monarchy; Plangus’s entanglement with Andromana leads to the loss of his Iberian inheritance and unhappy exile. All of this is related by persons who are themselves embroiled in the messy political and personal consequences of Pyrocles’s and Musidorus’s disguised pursuit of their passions. Furthermore, Philoclea’s relation of Erona’s history generates a fleeting but very pointed gloss on the stories people tell about themselves in Arcadia. Speaking of the passion that overtakes Erona, she wonders whether “‘Cupid be a god, or that the tyranny of our own thoughts seems as a god unto us’” (304). The status of Cupid’s godhead is very much under negotiation in the main action of the romance, and the clownish Miso will interrupt Philoclea’s storytelling to deliver her own version of Cupid in some verses which present him, in a parodic Ovidian aetiology, as the offspring of Argus and Io: his many-eyed physiognomy offers a caricature of the lover’s lustful— i.e. cupidinous—gaze, and Miso portrays him as flattering and deceiving the desires of all who serve him (307–10). Musidorus and Pyrocles have tellingly externalized and deified their own problematic desires for the sequestered princesses (and thus rationalized the dubious disguises under which they pursue them). Invoking love’s deity, they insist that although their formerly virtuous behavior has been “‘wried to these crooked shifts,’” the god who “‘disguisest [their] bodies and disfigurest [their] minds’” nevertheless “‘hath reason, for though the ways be foul, the journey’s end is most fair and honorable’” (173–74). Philoclea’s rhetorical question makes a quiet but telling intervention in the debate, demystifying in passing the self-exculpating idolatry of the male voices.5 These multiplying and interrogative discourses disappear in Cupid’s Revenge, short-circuited by its authors’ plot redaction. The only aspect of the play that suggests Sidney’s framing devices is the cynical running commentary on events offered at the beginning or end of several scenes by three male courtiers: the univocality of their urbane misogyny (it is as if they speak for the patriarchal court) offers us something very different from the story passed from voice to voice and between the sexes in the Arcadia. 6 The open-ended narrative that holds open the hope of redeeming the falls of princes (turning tragedy into romance) is erased, moreover, when Beaumont and Fletcher make their Leucippus and Hidaspes brother and sister instead of possible lovers. Sidney’s romance celebrates the wanderings of exogamy; Cupid’s Revenge builds its tragedy endogamously when a potential rescuer becomes brotherly co-conspirator. Sidney’s Plangus eventually meanders out of his own unhappy history into a universe where his desires are directed towards saving another; Beaumont and Fletcher’s Leucippus joins his sister in her austere acts of sacrilege and is subsequently driven towards death by the exfoliating consequences of his Cupid-impelled desire for Bacha. Significantly, when Cupid himself appears as a speaking character to pronounce his doom on those who have scorned him (1.3.1–20; 2.1.1–13), we lose the possibility that Eros Tyrannos may be a construct of

Undoing Romance 207 the desiring self. At the same time, Sidney’s exploitation of shifting genres (as in Miso’s comically vulgar rendition of Cupid) to interrogate the absolutism of particular stances or perspectives is lost. Cupid’s Revenge offers violent shifts in tone, but the Arcadia’s suggestive polyglossia gives way to discrete and grandstanding monologues that offer a bricolage of voices rather than their mutual engagement.7 The loss of this Sidneian poetic goes hand in hand with Beaumont and Fletcher’s telling modification of the romance’s gendered dynamics. Of their play’s three significant female characters, Hidaspes perishes before the end of Act 2, and Urania’s speeches and actions are almost entirely confi ned to the end of Act 4 and to Act 5. The dangerous wit, dissembling speech, and destructive machinations of the scheming and promiscuous Bacha monopolize her creators’ interest. After Hidaspes provokes Cupid’s revenge upon herself, her brother, and her father, Bacha’s ambitions take over the drama; unlike the members of the royal family, she is a free agent, untouched by Cupid’s wrath. In Sidney’s romance, Andromana’s dangerous verbal skills are summarized in the “past historic” of other people’s speech, whether it is the sober narrative of Pamela or the half comic and ultimately dismissive relation offered by Pyrocles. (His version of Andromana indeed renders her not only dead but ridiculous, thanks to his tongue-in-cheek account of her attempt to woo both himself and Musidorus simultaneously [348].)8 Even more important, in the New Arcadia Andromana is only one among many women who have erotic and/or political power; Pyrocles’s narrative very carefully complements his account of her ill governance with a panegyric of a distinctly “Elizabethan” female ruler, Queen Helen of Corinth (351–52). In Cupid’s Revenge one feels that Beaumont and Fletcher have concentrated (and demonized) within their characterization of Bacha the access to powerful language intermittently granted to all the New Arcadia’s major female characters, whatever their status as moral or immoral agents (and whatever freedom of agency they in fact enjoy). Some context may be useful here, because Sidney’s exploration of the potency (for good or ill) of female speech makes him one of many early modern romancers preoccupied by this matter. In the two decades preceding Mary Sidney Herbert’s publication of the composite Arcadia, the representation of female eloquence is very closely bound up with Elizabethan experiments in prose fiction. This is a phenomenon that has been explored to some extent in the scholarship of Mary Ellen Lamb and Helen Hackett, who have not only examined the ways in which prose romance is socially constructed as a genre primarily read by women but also addressed the models it may offer for “heroic” female behavior (Lamb 101–4, Hackett 106–11).9 I would like to press things a little further and argue that these early modern fictions are not only hospitable to female voices but also in some sense dependent on them.10 When John Lyly gives voice to Lucilla in Euphues (1578) and Camilla in Euphues and his England (1580) and George Gascoigne creates Frances in The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), they depict witty, articulate women

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who offer obstacles to the consummation of male desire and come close to kidnapping a kind of authorial power. Thomas Lodge, of course, creates the precursor to Shakespeare’s witty Rosalind (1590); Robert Greene’s Fawnia in Pandosto (1588) offers a remarkably hard-hitting response to Dorastus’s initial seduction attempts, and in the less well-known Pan His Syrinx of William Warner (1584), a female ruler ends the wanderings and enmities of the work’s male characters by teaching them to fi nd contentment in a version of the pastoral good life.11 The revised Arcadia’s multifarious representations of the power of both virtuous and transgressive female speech are particularly striking examples of a cultural trend. Sidney’s own experiments in representing female eloquence climax in Book 3’s battle of wits between Pamela and Cecropia: the author offers a striking and newly gendered version of the humanist dialogue as the women debate the existence of a Prime Mover (484–91). This episode is interesting to ponder in light of Simon Palfrey’s remark that there is a peculiarly potent intersection between the interests of humanism and those of romance in early modern England: [Both] romance and humanism raided and renovated the past; both sought transformation through varieties of fantasy, lyricism, engagement, critique; if either are “escapist,” then they are so in a peculiarly rhetorical fashion, designed to persuade and challenge as much as delight. (14) It is Palfrey’s point about romance’s embrace of rhetoric, its fascination with acts of persuasion that is especially relevant here. Anyone who has delved into the sixteenth-century prose fictions usually classified as romance will be all too familiar with the highly stylized and elaborately ornamented speeches (sometimes directed towards others, sometimes articulating the internal strife of a single character), which seem at times to substitute for narrative action.12 This stylistic strategy shapes the imagined voices of characters of both sexes: unlike “monologic” lyric, romance dialogizes acts of persuasion, and permits the lady to talk back.13 If one considers early modern romance as a literary mode in which plot is intermittently driven by what women say, and by the stories they tell, and which tends to construct worlds in which the power of female speech provokes both anxiety and affi rmation, one must also invoke Shakespeare’s late plays. In Pericles, Dionyza’s lies nearly ruin both the hero and his daughter, but Marina’s eloquence converts her would-be ravishers in the brothel and sets in motion the healing of her father. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes construes Hermione’s persuasive speeches to Polixenes as evidence of her adultery and in 2.3 dismisses Paulina’s vigorous protestations of Hermione’s innocence as the utterances of a shrew or a witch; the larger movement of the play, however, tends to rehabilitate female word power. Florizel declares that when Perdita speaks, he would “have [her] do it ever” (4.4.137);

Undoing Romance 209 and Paulina presides over reconciliations and reunion as both royal councilor and mistress of ceremonies, requiring Leontes to “awake [his] faith” (5.3.95). Sidney’s capacious prose romance might be said to anticipate this dynamic: its narrative exfoliation allows the work to encompass both an anxious re-inscription of culturally driven fears of errant female desire and dangerous female rhetoric (located especially in the figures of Cecropia, Gynecia, and Andromana) and a striking moral investment (especially in the chaotic action of Book 3) in “heroic” female speakers who articulate certain ideals rather more clearly than their male counterparts.14 I have already mentioned Pamela’s passionate arguments against atheism, but Philoclea also has her own striking rhetorical moment when she is begged by her fellow captive Pyrocles/Zelmane to “pretend some affection” for Amphialus to postpone her demise. Philoclea quietly responds, “‘For dissimulation, my Pyrocles, my simplicity is such, that I have hardly been able to keep a straight way: what should I do in a crooked?’” (562). Given the valorization of dissimulation and disguise (in both speech and outer show) and the devotion to the “crooked paths” of love we have seen in Musidorus and Pyrocles, her position statement could be read as a gendered critique of their entire modus operandi.15 Sidney’s commitment to multifariousness in his imagination of female rhetorical possibilities and the revised Arcadia’s intermittent interest in investing some potency in varieties of female agency that are redemptive or morally illuminating rather than transgressive disappear from Beaumont and Fletcher’s project. An onlooker viewing the earlier scenes of Cupid’s Revenge would not necessarily be able to predict that the play would end tragically, but its darker turn seems to be powered by the authors’ displacement on to their version of Andromana a nexus of anxieties that in Sidney’s narrative are associated with the actions of the articulate, astute and ruthlessly goal-directed Gynecia and Cecropia. Although Sidney generally treats Gynecia’s all-consuming passion for Pyrocles sympathetically, he nevertheless has her threaten disastrous consequences for Pyrocles and Philoclea if the prince does not comply with her desires (637); her fury is echoed in Bacha’s ruthless attempt to pressure Leucippus into an adulterous affair after her marriage to his father: Yeeld quickly, or by Heaven Ile have thee kept in prison for my purpose, Where I will make thee serve my turne, and have thee Fed with such meates as best shall fit my endes And not thy health, why doest not speake to mee? (3.2.185–89)

When her threats fail to move her former lover, Bacha makes Leontius believe his son is plotting to usurp his throne, and Leucippus is forced into exile. Beaumont and Fletcher follow Sidney fairly exactly here, but a significant plot change aligns Bacha more closely with the scheming Cecropia

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than with Andromana. In the revised Arcadia, Andromana hopes to make her son by Plangus’s father the new heir to Iberia; in Cupid’s Revenge, Bacha seeks to elevate a low-born daughter from her previous marriage: her devices are thus more reminiscent of Cecropia’s desire to bypass the proper order of succession and make her son king of Arcadia. Cecropia, to be sure, is of royal blood and Amphialus is the princesses’ cousin. Bacha’s evil is rendered particularly threatening for Beaumont and Fletcher’s Jacobean audience because she not only wants to ignore primogeniture but also wishes to institute an unorthodox matriarchy: “Ile make Urania / My Daughter, the Kings heyre, and plant my Issue, / In this large Throne” (3.2.250–2). Bacha is a preternaturally gifted dissembler and fiction maker, a nightmare version of the female “romancer” who is at times nastily reminiscent of Iago (“Ile make his virtues his undoing,” she says of Leucippus).16 The particular loathing and fascination she inspires in Leucippus and others is heightened by the fact that she transgresses in terms both of her class and her gender. Beaumont and Fletcher exacerbate her evil, furthermore, by representing her liaison with a (non-Sidneian) courtly parasite, Timantus, who is an accessory in her plots. Bacha’s dangerous agency and speech seem to swallow up all other possibilities for representing potent (or at least alternative) female voices and actions in the world of the play. As a result, we are offered, on the one hand, a drastic attenuation, in the work’s portrayal of Hidaspes and Urania, of the narrative resonance that accrues to Erona and Zelmane in the Arcadia; on the other, a genre-bending refocusing of Cupid’s Revenge that confers heroic status on the tormented Leucippus and promotes the “masculine” values of tragedy. Sidney isolates Erona as a desiring subject, insists on her individual agency in her iconoclasm, and has his narrators anatomize at considerable length her consequent sufferings and her hopeless, helpless fidelity to an unworthy object. Beaumont and Fletcher attenuate Hidaspes’s agency from the start by having Leucippus co-author her request that her doting father destroy Cupid’s altars (1.1.37). Tellingly, they completely change the nature of Cupid’s punishment. Hidaspes does not fall in love with a faithless and cowardly commoner and lose a kingdom as a result of her actions; she becomes enamored of Zoilus, the court dwarf. Both the political significance and the poignancy of Erona’s problematic desire are erased. Hidaspes’s impassioned declarations to Zoilus are undercut by the halfamused, half-appalled comments of her attendants (one of whom declares her to be mad “To talke thus with a fellow that will hardly / Serve i’th’dark when one is drunke” [1.4.66–67]); her father, moreover, immediately executes the dwarf and Hidaspes perishes of grief. For a female heir apparent to love an unworthy commoner is a transgression that must perforce have major consequences; for a politically less important royal daughter to desire a dwarf is merely construed as a grotesque lapse in taste (and Beaumont and Fletcher get plenty of comic mileage out of Zoilus’s consternation at being propositioned by the princess). Hidaspes’s decline is barely noticed

Undoing Romance 211 by her male relatives; their own problematic dealings with Bacha have now become the play’s main concern. She is permitted a tearful death scene, but since we have not been allowed to take her transgressive desire entirely seriously, the potential pathos of this episode is rendered incongruous, not least because it closes with the one of her gentlewomen drawing the cheerful moral that women should not attempt to legislate chastity but should marry with all haste: “Till then we keepe a piece of man, /Wrongfully from them that owe it” (2.5.43–44). If Hidaspes’s desires are marginalized at the start of Cupid’s Revenge, Urania’s actions and speech are equally undercut in its fi nal scenes. Although she makes only a relatively brief appearance in Pyrocles’s narration of his prior adventures, her precursor, Sidney’s Zelmane, acquires significance within the larger narrative of the New Arcadia far outlasting the few pages devoted to her. Describing Zelmane’s revelation of her disguised identity at the moment of her death, Pyrocles remarks to Philoclea: I must confess for true that if my stars had not wholly reserved me for you, there else perhaps I might have loved, and—which had been most strange—begun my love after death: whereof let it be the less marvel, because somewhat she did resemble you, though as far short of your perfection as herself dying was of herself flourishing: yet something there was which, when I saw a picture of yours, brought again her figure into my remembrance, and made my heart as apt to receive the wound, as the power of your beauty with unresistable force to pierce. (367) Pyrocles’s gloss makes Zelmane’s actions the fons et origo of his Arcadian experience, the starting point for his entry into the romance universe. She models a self-metamorphosing and devoted love; her name becomes the sign of his own disguised identity; the feelings her death inspires in him begin his sentimental education—and she foreshadows in her own person the woman he will eventually desire. There is a ripple effect here that transcends the pathos of the isolated episode. Philoclea becomes the fulfilment of what is promised in Zelmane, and her own identity will be amplified beyond her role as Pyrocles’s perfect object of desire when her eloquence comes to suggest an ideal of moral action that escapes the confi nes of her lover’s Petrarchist discourse. Beaumont and Fletcher, however, are only interested in Sidney’s Zelmane as an object of pathos. Their renaming of her is telling: undoing Sidney’s double signifier, they separate the faithful cross-dressed attendant from the New Arcadia’s Amazonian virago. Urania now bears the name of an entirely “feminine” absent presence in Sidney’s romance: the pastoral beloved whom Claius and Strephon celebrate at the start of Book 1. Sidney’s Urania seems to represent an almost impossible ideal that has already absconded from his Arcadia (Duncan-Jones 123–32); the Urania

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of Cupid’s Revenge is equally marginalized, permitted only to offer an ultimately impotent performance of selfless, loving femininity. Unlike that other absent presence, the Sidneian Zelmane whom Pyrocles maps on to Philoclea, she has no afterlife. Instead of suggesting an occluded but significant beginning, she becomes a supporting character in a tragic conclusion. Her authors are primarily interested in having the disguised girl engage in sentimental (and tear-jerking) exchanges with the unperceptive beloved whose exile she is sharing: Leucippus. Why dost thou sigh my childe? Urania. To thinke that such A fi ne man should live, and no gay Lady love him. Leucippus. Thou wilt love me? Urania. Yes sure till I dye, And when I am in heaven Ile eene wish for you. (5.4.35–38) Urania does live long enough to save her beloved from an attack by treacherous Timantus but, dying from the wounds she suffers, is unable to save him from the knife of her mother. She has none of the authority granted to Sidney’s Zelmane (who ends her life entrusting Pyrocles with a whole set of commands to be followed after her death [366–67]).17 If she lends some decorative pathos to the play’s last scene, she is nevertheless not even empowered to reveal her true sex to Leucippus; it is Timantus who rudely informs the prince she is no boy. Leucippus, lamenting as his page-girl expires, remains oblivious to the last: Leucippus. Alas, why camst thou hither? Urania. Feth for love, I would not let you know till I was dying; For you could not love mee, my Mother was So naught. (5.4.136–139) Urania seems to have internalized the play’s own logic. The word “naught” here encompasses its early modern connotations of both worthlessness and wickedness: Bacha’s “naughtiness” cancels out the possibility of any other female being valuable or desirable. Not surprisingly, as Cupid’s Revenge mutates into tragedy, the only mutual love it is prepared to affi rm is between men. Leucippus’s weary nobility as he prepares to go into exile and his refusal to revenge himself on those who have betrayed him provoke his soldierly cousin Ismenus to a declaration: Ismenus. Heart, you shall take no leave of me. Leucippus. Shall I not?

Undoing Romance 213 Ismenus. No, by the gods shall you not: nay if you have no more wit but to goe absolutely alone, Ile bee in a little. Leucippus. Nay prethee good Ismenus part with me. Ismenus. I wonnot yfaith, never move it any more; for by this good light I wonnot. (4.5.38–43) In a play where a dangerous female object of desire is all too eloquent, Ismenus’s lack of rhetorical polish as he affirms the homosocial bond seems rather revealing. The fact that these men are cousins gives us a glancing echo of the Pyrocles/Musidorus relationship, but the Arcadian plot dynamic is reversed here: Sidney’s cousins must reorganize their loving friendship to accommodate their newly awoken desires for Philoclea and Pamela; Ismenus and Leucippus confirm theirs in the aftermath of a ruinous female betrayal. In the Sidneian universe, Plangus’s potentially tragic alienation from family and country is counterposed by his constructive passion for Erona. His dogged determination to save her life is an important marker of genre, for as Russ McDonald notes, “the opportunity to remedy self-absorption signifies one of the central distinctions between romance and tragedy” (Shakespeare’s 227). In Cupid’s Revenge, by contrast, even though the last act unfolds within the green world of the forest that might promise the amelioration of suffering were we in a romance universe, there is no healing escape for Leucippus. There is nothing particularly regenerative about his weary tenderness to the disguised Urania, nor can her own loving words evoke a world where female speech is recuperative as well as destructive. Beaumont and Fletcher sever their connection with their source in resisting the restorative possibilities of romance. Perhaps more interested in the higher cultural capital associated with tragedy, they reaffirm that genre’s interest in privileging the subject position of an alienated, often solipsistic and usually male protagonist as well as a generally “masculine” ethos that puts a higher value on actions in the public sphere (tellingly, the warrior Ismenus is the only major character left standing at the end of the play, and its three principal females are all dead). We no longer have a woman character who can (like Philoclea in one of the captivity scenes in the New Arcadia) talk a prince out of self-destructive despair (566–67); persuasive female speech (Bacha’s skillful verbal manipulation of Leontius from their very first encounter) has here produced Leucippus’s tragic plight. The power of Sidney’s Andromana is contained by the plotline that sends Plangus out of her clutches and into the territory of both chivalric and pastoral romance—and also by Pyrocles’s narrative transformation of her dangerous promiscuity into her comic simultaneous wooing of himself and Musidorus. Bacha can only be disposed of by relocating her eloquence within a tragic universe where this “usurper” can die, Macbeth-like, rather more nobly than she lived: turning the knife that dispatched Leucippus on herself, she declares, “I will not bee so base and colde, to live / And wayte the mercies of these men I hate” (5.4.190–91).

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Beaumont and Fletcher will move on from transforming prose romance into what I have termed comi-tragedy to compose their better known tragicomedies; they do, however, remain attached to their sentimentalized version of Sidney’s Zelmane, the cross-dressing women hopelessly faithful to her unattainable beloved. She will reappear in Philaster as the supposed page Bellario, wandering forlornly in the woods where she is literally wounded by the man she loves (in that play she will survive to see him marry another). She will reappear more darkly in The Maid’s Tragedy, when Aspatia, disguised as her own brother, challenges the man who jilted her and dies even as he reasserts, too late, his love for her. These figures are still defi ned by their impotence and their decorative pathos: they may be permitted some rhetorical flourishes (as when Aspatia lengthily and eloquently laments her loss of Amintor, or Bellario eloquently offers up her body to Philaster’s jealous wrath) but their speech in a very real sense does not signify. It is left to another author to break this pattern and, as it were, restore a voice to Zelmane/Urania. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a play that may well have been influenced by Cupid’s Revenge (Astington 221), Innogen does not cross-dress and exile herself from court to pursue an unattainable beloved but to escape a murderous spouse. Living in the wilderness with her unknown brothers, she is reconstructed as the fragile pretty youth who appears to have “died, a most rare boy, of melancholy” (4.2.209)—but who revives, survives the nightmare of seeing (she thinks) her husband’s corpse, enters another man’s service as loyal “Fidele,” and finally moves through and beyond the space of pastoral towards the recuperation of what she has lost. The pathos of her sufferings in the pastoral world does not defi ne her or reduce her to a piteous object of the audience’s gaze: she survives both to bring Giacomo to justice and to lay emphatic claim to her own husband: “Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? / Think that you are upon a lock, and now/ Throw me again” (5.6.261–63). And she hears some very suggestive words from her father: Cymbeline. Innogen, Thy mother’s dead. Innogen. I am sorry for’t, my lord. Cymbeline. O, she was naught, and ‘long of her it was That we meet here so strangely. (5.6.269–72) Let us recall the early modern connotations of “naught” as both “wicked” and “worthless.” Bacha was the bad mother (and, to Leucippus, wicked stepmother) whose wickedness and naught-ness emptied out the value of all other women; Cymbeline’s Queen is the “naughty” (step)mother whose actions have not silenced or killed Innogen or rendered her without agency but have instead become part of a larger tapestry of regenerative events. In Shakespeare’s romance, moreover, although the Queen’s actions estranged blood

Undoing Romance 215 relatives (so that they meet as strangers), Innogen herself causes estranged members of a family to be “strangely” (mysteriously) reunited, lost beloveds found, sins forgiven, tragedy transcended (something Beaumont and Fletcher’s Urania could never do). Tellingly, the exfoliating disclosures and reunions of the last scene are set in motion when Innogen, granted a boon by Cymbeline, does not reaffirm martial homosociality by fulfilling the expectations of her erstwhile master, the captive Roman commander Lucius, and asking for his life. Instead, she asks that Giacomo explain how he acquired the ring she gave Posthumus that now adorns his hand, a ring (we learned earlier in the play) she had herself inherited from her mother (1.1.113). Her request moves us back into a romance world that can imagine virtuous female agency. Giacomo’s subsequent confession restores female property and female propriety as he describes her resistance to his seduction and discloses the lies and machinations that won Innogen’s token from her husband. Innogen has in effect obliged Giacomo to “undo” tragedy. The death of Sidney’s Zelmane is in some sense the only begetter of the narrative proliferation of (new) Arcadian romance; the death of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Urania suggests, by contrast, an undoing of romance possibility. Shakespeare’s Innogen is threatened with death and later appears to die. Later still, in Act 5’s labyrinthine (one might almost say Sidneian) denouement, she is nearly slapped into silence by her own husband, as if she were an intrusive actor in an important scene (“Shall’s have a play of this?” shouts Posthumus. “Thou scornful page, / There lie thy part!” 5.6.228–29). But Innogen doesn’t die, and if you hit her she gets up again and discloses her gendered identity and keeps on speaking “the woman’s part”—the part that Posthumus had once desired be excised from himself (2.5.19–32), the “speaking part” that he is not, however, allowed to banish from the world of this romance. Perhaps obliquely invoking the Sidneian universe where princesses survive their ostensible murder, where bad women do not drown out the eloquence of their more virtuous sisters, and where a peculiarly female heroism is not sidelined by the gendered logic of tragedy, the tragi-comedy of Cymbeline rewrites the ending of the comi-tragedy of Cupid’s Revenge. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the superbly astute editorial feedback I have received while writing and revising this essay from Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne; I am also grateful for the generous suggestions of Russ McDonald. NOTES 1. The dramas inspired by the Arcadia are summarized in Greg (319–34) who also mentions two works in manuscript based on the main plot of the Arcadia by unknown authors: Love’s Changeling’s Change (Egerton MS.1994)

216

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Clare R. Kinney and (in the Bodleian) The Arcadian Lovers, or the Metamorphosis of Princes (Rawl. poet.3). There is little previous critical discussion of Beaumont and Fletcher’s adaptation. The most extended account of Cupid’s Revenge is in Bliss (Francis Beaumont 57–69); see also Finkelpearl (128–35). Pyrocles also recounts in passing the death of Andromana. For Philoclea’s tale of Erona, Pamela’s tale of Plangus, Basilius’s tale of Plangus and Erona and Pyrocles’s tale of Zelmane see The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (295–306, 312–20, 398–406, 359–67). The unfi nished state of the revised Arcadia allowed readers to offer their own conclusions to Erona and Plangus’s histories. In his supplementary “Sixt Book” to the Arcadia (1627), Beling had Erona, despairing of rescue, commit suicide before Plangus’s return with reinforcements. In Anna Weamys’s Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), Plangus arrives in a more timely fashion and the two are united in wedlock. For fuller discussions of these issues, see Clare Kinney (465–70). For examples of the male courtiers’ commentary, see 1.1.104–65; 2.3.1–40. I’m consciously using a term more often associated with postmodernism: for an interesting account of Beaumont and Fletcher as deploying a “postmodern” aesthetic, see McDonald (“Fashion” 171). For a brief but still very helpful account of Sidney’s heuristic genre-play in the revised Arcadia, see Greenblatt. Sidney often “contains” Andromana by way of his (or Pyrocles’s) tonal effects: for example, speaking of the dotage that moves the king of Iberia to allow her to govern his country while he indulges his desires, Pyrocles offers irony rather than somber moralizing: “A thing that may luckily fall out to him that hath the blessing to match with some heroically-minded lady” (347). Newcomb’s work should also be mentioned here, although her discussion of the commodification of early modern romance is less focused on the models of gendered agency and speech it may generate. As will no doubt be obvious, I believe that Hutson’s argument that the apparent centrality of females in early modern prose fictions masks an actual emphasis on masculine social agency in the erotic economy of courtship does not always hold true when one is looking at a wide range of fictions. For a useful recent overview of the importance of representations of female desire and female speech in shaping both medieval and Renaissance romance, see Cooper (218–68). One could make this list much longer. Barnabe Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581), for example, contains some notable representations of female eloquence and agency in the tales of “Apolonius and Silla,” “Nicander and Lucilla” and “Two Brethren and their Wives.” Even the most conservative and exemplary narratives can offer surprises: for suggestive discussions of the treatment of female agency and gender politics in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566–1567) and Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567), see Maslen (86–94, 108–12). For more on this topic, see Arthur F. Kinney’s lengthy and learned study of the convergence between humanist modes of thought and Elizabethan fiction making. Unlike Mikhail Bakhtin, I do not think we have to wait for the official rise of the novel to fi nd instances of the dialogic imagination. For some particularly suggestive accounts of the particular inflections of female heroism in the revised Arcadia, see Lamb (101–12) and Hackett (122–29).

Undoing Romance 217 15. It is true that Philoclea’s insistence that she cannot contemplate any kind of dissembling may also be a result of Sidney’s desire to separate his heroine from any notion of “feminine” guile and deception (i.e., it may be shaped by cultural conventions). 16. A later adaptation of the Andromana material will make her an even more extravagantly evil figure: in Andromana or The Merchant’s Wife, (written by one J.S. somewhere between 1642 and 1660), which seems to have both the Arcadia and Cupid’s Revenge as its sources, the character begins, as she does not in Sidney or Beaumont and Fletcher, by murdering her fi rst husband; see Andrews (296). 17. Urania’s rhetorical impotence is underlined by her countrified accent and occasional use of dialect words (we are told that she was brought up “rustically”): she literally isn’t speaking the same language as the courtiers— “Lawe Master, there’s one, looke to your sen” (5.4.48).

WORKS CITED Andrews, Michael C. Andrews. “The Sources of Andromana.” Review of English Studies ns 19 (1968): 295–300. Astington, John H. “The Popularity of Cupid’s Revenge.” Studies in English Literature 19 (1979): 215–27. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Beaumont, James, and John Fletcher. Cupid’s Revenge. The Dramatic Works in The Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. 9 vols. Vol. 2. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. Bliss, Lee. “Tragicomic Romance for the King’s Men, 1609–1611: Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher.” Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Eds. A. R. Braunmuller and James C. Bulman. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986. 148–64. . Francis Beaumont. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Sidney’s Urania.” Review of English Studies ns17 (1966): 123–32. Finkelpearl, Philip J. Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Garrett, Martin, ed. Sidney: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1996. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode.” Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 269–78. Greg, W. W. Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. New York: Russell & Russell, 1959. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Kinney, Arthur F. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. Kinney, Clare. “The Masks of Love: Desire and Metamorphosis in Sidney’s New Arcadia.” Criticism 23 (1991): 461–90. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Markham, Gervase. The English Arcadia. London, 1607.

218 Clare R. Kinney Maslen, R. W. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. McDonald, Russ. “Fashion: Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Vol. 4. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 150–74 . Shakespeare’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Palfrey, Simon. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, Walter Cohen, and Katharine Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. . The Winter’s Tale. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, Walter Cohen, and Katharine Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. . The Old Arcadia. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Thorne, Alison, ed. Shakespeare’s Romances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

12 Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger Lorna Hutson

Staging Early Modern Romance aims to reconsider Shakespeare’s late plays, commonly termed “romances,” in relation to the prose and verse “romances,” or narratives, on which they draw. Specifically, the editors hope it will do so in such a way as to undo the interpretative stasis and subordination of the vernacular texts of prose and verse narrative known to modern critics as romance. It seems an inescapable paradox of our times that Shakespeare’s transcendence will continue to operate at the level of marketing, and hence be reaffi rmed, even or especially when the scholarly purpose of the publication is to challenge it. However that may be, the stated purpose of this collection of essays is to relocate Shakespeare’s late plays within ‘‘the forests of romance from which these plays were cultivated” (Henderson and Siemon 220), rather than treat those forests as inert matter, without any dynamic formal and cultural impact on the plays, the mere “narrative and dramatic sources” of Bullough’s indispensable collection. Interestingly, the works of Shakespeare’s successors in the mixed genre of romance or tragicomedy—Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger—were not felt to transcend their sources to the same extent, with the effect that the prose and verse romances that informed their dramaturgy were granted a shaping energy and power that Shakespeare’s sources were denied. As Eugene Waith effectively showed, the common formal element in Elizabethan prose romance and Jacobean and Caroline tragicomedy was rhetoric, or more precisely, the art of declamation (75–85, 86–98). Waith traced the influence of the declamatory exercises of the late Roman republic and early empire—disseminated mainly by way of texts of the Controversiae and Suasoriae of the Elder Seneca (c. 55 BC to c. 40 AD)—on Heliodorus and Greek romance, as well as on the romances of Sidney, Lyly, Lodge and Greene. He noted, for example, that the speech characteristic of sixteenthcentury English prose romance—such as that of Sidney’s Pyrocles, when faced with multiple-sensational dilemmas arising from his female disguise (being loved in female and male forms by the Arcadian King and Queen, and failing to make himself known as a lover to the woman of his choice)— is best described as declamation. He then went on to defi ne Fletcherian

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tragicomedy as characteristically combining a familiarising, satirical and politically critical perspective with the distancing artificiality and improbability achieved by the use of declamation within pastoral romance. The Roman declamatory exercises recorded by the Elder Seneca took the form of setting up sensational and highly unlikely legal dilemmas (comparable to Pyrocles’ dilemma of being loved and unloved in different personae), to be resolved by the arguments of various orators, each approaching the dilemma according to various argumentative angles, or “colours” (colores). Fletcherian and Massingerian tragicomedy is demonstrably structured in a similar way. So, of course, are a number of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, or “problem plays,” and late romances. Neil Rhodes recently offered some stimulating examples of Shakespearean indebtedness to the Senecan controversiae across a range of plays (85–117). And yet Rhodes’ approach will remain unusual, mainly because Shakespeare’s building of a controversial dramaturgy on the improbable hypotheses characteristic of declamatory romance has tended to be rendered intelligible or “probable” in terms that universalize its propositions. (This is partly why Shakespearean romance is thought to transcend its prose romance sources). When, for example, a philosopher such as Stanley Cavell turns to the ostentatiously fantastical denouement of A Winter’s Tale and asks how we are to understand Leontes’ acceptance of the magical restoration of Hermione, he seeks the answer not in generic, but in cultural and psychological terms. By treating A Winter’s Tale as a commentary on Othello, Cavell can interpret Leontes, as he does Othello, as an example of the cultural and psychological effects of Cartesian scepticism. “What philosophy knows as doubt,” Cavell proposes, “Othello’s violence allegorizes (or recognizes) as some form of jealousy.” What Othello and A Winter’s Tale thus have in common is that both are apparently plays about the emotional consequences of scepticism, “both plays involve a harrowing of the power of knowing the existence of another (as chaste, intact, as whatever the knower knows his other to be)” (7, 125). Stanley Cavell’s reading of Shakespeare’s plays as meditations on “the skeptical problematic” is, of course, by no means incompatible with a form of criticism which investigates the interrelations of cultural and generic shifts in the modes by which knowledge and faith are tested in drama and romance. And yet it is odd that no romance antecedent or analogue of The Winter’s Tale is likely to be attributed such significance as an expression of the harrowing power of scepticism and doubt, in spite of the fact that the antecedents and analogues involving similar trials and ordeals of a wife’s chastity are legion. This chapter will not attempt to answer the question of why the improbable hypotheses on which Shakespeare’s romances are based tend to be ascribed a universal significance denied both to the romance narratives on which they draw, and to their successors in Jacobean and Caroline tragicomedy. But it will ask a narrower question that might be a starting point for that broader investigation. Focussing on

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 221 one particular seventeenth-century stage adaptation of a magical romance narrative about the testing of chastity, this chapter asks how that story comes to be transformed from a trial of trust and faith into an inquiry into the ethics and practicalities of acting on uncertain, merely probable and conjectural knowledge. This chapter suggests, then, that there is a way of anchoring Cavell’s reading of Shakespeare within a broader history of how Renaissance romance narratives and plays register the cultural transformations wrought by the humanist reanimation of scepticism as an instrument of rhetorical probability. But it also argues that as the techniques and concerns of Renaissance humanism transform older narratives of the magical testing and proof of chastity into tragicomic dilemmas concerned with different aspects of the problems of justice and knowing, they also take an unexpected step in the direction of anticipating a new cultural defi nition of probability as a science of calculation and quantification. My subject will be the successive transformations by which an old tale became a Caroline tragicomedy. The old tale in question apparently exists in Sanskrit, as well as Persian and Turkish versions, and was assimilated to medieval Christendom’s collections of gestae, fabliaux and romances. In about the year 1508 it was given shape as a Renaissance novella by the Italian cleric, Matteo Bandello (c. 1480–1562). Bandello’s novella was subsequently translated into English by William Painter in 1567 and variously adapted and versified by George Whetstone in 1576 and 1578. Finally, in 1629, Philip Massinger transformed the story into a tragicomedy in the manner described by Waith: that is, he refashioned it into an emotionally heightened sequence of improbable dilemmas that are suffused with a critical and satirical sense of relevance to the contemporary political scene. From the fi rst the story participates in the history of “probability” in the word’s earliest senses of proving or making good (Lat., probare, to judge, approve, make good), for it belongs to a clearly identifi able type, the “testing of chastity” or “testing of fidelity /faith” amply represented in folklore and romance. The central motif of the tale as traditionally told is a magic pledge that enables a husband, who is obliged to leave home to fi nd wealth, to have certain knowledge, beyond all doubt, of whether his wife (who stays at home) is keeping her marriage faith. The original tale thus engages questions of epistemology and belief to the limited extent that it asks, how can we know, how can we believe, how can we continue to act and work every day, when we cannot see the thing in which we have grounded our faith? Bandello set his version of the tale in Hungary, in the reign of the historical King Matthias Corvinus (c.1443–1490), asserting that it was a true story (Steiner 401–3). The researches of nineteenth-century critics, however, showed that the story existed in at least five accessible versions before Bandello made it his own (Paris 76–116). These include, in addition to the Turkish and Persian versions already mentioned, the sixty-ninth tale in the late thirteenth-century Latin collection, the Gesta Romanorum, a fifteenth-century English poem

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by Adam of Cobsam known as The Wright’s Chaste Wife, and a prose and verse version in books four and five respectively of the sprawling fourteenthcentury French romance, Perceforest. In all these stories the hero, either an impoverished knight, or a clever architect or carpenter, is obliged to leave his beautiful and virtuous young wife to serve at the court of a Lord, King or Emperor. In the versions where the husband is a carpenter or architect, the work is, of course, commissioned—he is called on, because of his exceptional ability, to build a palace or a room for the King or Emperor—and the story’s concern with marital faith is a variation on the theme of the tales of cuckoldry or near-cuckoldry told about merchants who are similarly always obliged to be absent from home for profit’s sake. In the versions where a knight has been substituted, the narrative is careful to specify that he received no dowry with his wife, and therefore has to go to court to seek to improve his fortunes. The absence from the wife has thus, in all versions, an economic motive, and (especially in the versions where the heroes are knights) represents in itself a sort of wager—the undertaking of a risk set against the uncertain hope of gain in a potentially hostile foreign court. In each of the pre-sixteenth-century telling of the story, the wife or her mother present the husband with a talismanic pledge of faith—a bouquet of marjoram, a garland or chaplet of roses, a single rose in an ivory box, a white shirt—all of which have the property of remaining fresh and sweet as a long as the young bride remains faithful to her husband in his absence. The hero’s secret is somehow revealed, prompting envious lords, courtiers or stewards to see if they can make the flowers wither, or the shirt need washing, by travelling to the hero’s home and attempting to seduce his wife. In some versions the courtiers actually wager their lands that they will be successful, thus fully realising the sense of wager implicit in the husband’s leaving wife and home in the first place. However, in all tales the would-be seducers are not only unsuccessful in their hope of depriving the hero of his honour, but are actually obliged to enact the economic implications of the wife’s resistance to them by falling, or being led into, a secret chamber where they are imprisoned and forced to earn their bread in the spinning of hemp or flax or cotton, supervised by the virtuous wife. The hero, on his return home, congratulates his wife and either liberates her prisoners freely, or claims their fiefdoms according to the wager. In the pre-sixteenth-century versions of the story the qualities of sweetness and freshness attributable to the flowers, herbs or garment which variously constitute the pledge seem to speak not of rhetorical evidence or proof of fidelity, but of marital fidelity, or faith, itself. The story in these versions is less engaged with testing and evaluating knowledge than with problems of keeping mutual faith and trust; that is with “troth” or “trowth” as opposed to the modern “truth.” As Richard Firth Green argued in the context of developments in English language and culture, the older English word “troth,” unlike the modern abstraction “truth,” signified primarily in the sense of actively constituting a mutual relation, a binding of two parties (11). In these earliest versions of the tale, no distinction is made between

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 223 the lady’s “truth” or “faith” as her promise to be remain chaste, and what in English would be her “troth” pledged to him in the form of the marjoram or rose garland, the single rose in the ivory box, or the white shirt. So, as Green explains, in the folklaw contract of preliterate society the more “thinglike” a promise or agreement can be made, the longer it will last in memory. Trust inheres in the pledge. It and the “troth” it represents are one and the same (44). At the same time, there is a lack of the circumstantial detail that we now associate with the narrative construction of a distinction between outer and inner, between the woman’s keeping of faith as manifest in the magic pledge, and our sense of the personal change in her as she goes from being untested, to being tested. We have no sense of her inward responsiveness to the contingent particularities of the courtiers’ attempt to seduce her. In The Wright’s Chaste Wife, for example, the wife responds to her seducers simply that she will not yield, because “My husbond wolle wete wyth-owtyn mare / And I hym dyd that unryght; / I would nott he myght yt wete / For alle the good that I myght gete / So Ihesus mutt me spede” (Adam of Cobsam 9). It is not clear whether she would do him unright could he not “wete,” or whether her declaration that she wishes, above all things, that he might not “yt wete” constitutes in fact a wish that she might not ever do him unright: there appears to be no distinction. The magic pledge and the performance of female faithfulness it secures cohere. The object, rendering her transparent, performs her continued continence or exhibits its loss without distinguishing changes either in external circumstances that might lead to that loss, or the degrees of inner commitment with which she prevents it. In this verse tale it is the bride’s mother who (lacking a dowry for her daughter) fashions the chaplet of roses, but in the earlier Perceforest the bride herself does so. The earlier romance thus emphasizes not just a lack of distinction between her transparency and the magic object that secures it, but an identification of the latter’s power with the power of her faith. The narrator reports that Margon, the knight and husband, told those at the court of Perceforest that his beautiful wife, Lizane, “fist je ne sçay par quel art ceste rose de telle nature que s’il advenoit qu’elle meffeist de son corps, que ceste rose devendroit toute seche” (“made this rose (by what art I know not), of such a quality that if it should happen that she were to betray him with her body, it would become all dried and withered” (Perceforest 341). In this sense the logic of the pledge in the story is also the logic of another ancient form of manifest proof: that of the ordeal. Recourse to the ordeal— the grasping of hot iron, walking on coals or immersion in water—was most commonly had in legal cases where there were no witnesses, or the accused was not “oathworthy”—that is, when his low social status, or lack of estimable friends and kin, made it impossible to accept his invocation of God as witness to his innocence; women were less “oathworthy” than men, regardless of social status. The ordeal, as Robert Bartlett says, was “the ‘manifest proof.’ It was a device for dealing with situations in which

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certain knowledge was impossible but uncertainty intolerable” (33). Yet its efficacy, as Howard Bloch has written, “rests upon a belief in the immanence of supernatural powers within the natural sphere” (19). It belonged, in other words, to a system in which human reasoning about questions of motivation and intention, or evaluative weighing of circumstantial evidence, had almost no place. And it was a mode of proof that was especially strongly identified with women and questions of sexual purity. Robert Bartlett remarks on the ordeal’s importance in literary narratives about women accused of adultery; it was “natural . . . for medieval story-tellers to move their plot from accusations of adultery to the drama of the ordeal. This charge and this form of proof belonged together” (19). The power of the wife’s pledge to manifest the cleanliness of her body and the correspondence between her given word and secret act is the logic of ordeal in reverse: in ordeal a woman’s marital infidelity, a heretic’s lack of faith, or a promise-breaker’s fraudulence, are made manifest by the suppuration of the flesh after holding a hot iron, or swearing an oath of innocence. In this story the noncontaminable pledge performs or manifests an inviolable troth and an inviolate body (Schlauch). Bandello alters two crucial aspects of the story. These alterations at fi rst seem not only unconnected but even mutually contradictory, yet they are, as we shall see, two facets of the same cultural and humanistic transformation. The fi rst change he makes involves endowing the wife with persuasive skill. Bandello gives her a long, eloquent and well-argued speech designed to persuade her anxious husband of her entire loyalty to him, and she delivers this speech as equivalent to a pledge of faith “io non so né posso darvene altro pegno che la mia sincere fede” (I neither know how to nor can give you any other pledge than my sincere faith) (1.206). The speech is the more remarkable for deploying a series of misogynistic commonplaces on the topic of woman in such a way as to prove the woman who speaks is able to transcend the faults attributed to her sex. The wife (whose name is Barbara in Bandello’s version) invokes the common speech of men to the effect that women are timid (“di povero core”), and reminds her husband that she, by contrast, is large-spirited and full of ambition. However, she goes on to say that she knows how to tailor her ambition to their fortunes, and will live privately in their castle with few servants. Knowing in part her husband’s mind, which esteems an ounce of honour more than all the gold in the world, she will content herself in his absence, resolving rather to die than contaminate, in the smallest degree, her husband’s honour. She has thus argued effectively to prove, in a rhetorical sense, that her self-enclosure in the house would not merely defi ne, in Aristotle’s and Xenophon’s terms, her sex’s well-known property of timidity, but would rather show her ability to moderate and temper, in a virile fashion, the great-hearted ambition for honour that is peculiar to her (Bandello 1.204–6, Foucault 82–5). In granting Barbara this ability to deploy classical commonplaces and arguments in a decorous, prudent and therefore “probable” fashion, Bandello seems to be rounding out the sovereign individuality of woman in the manner

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 225 Burkhardt praised in him as typical of the modernity of the Italian Renaissance (252, 279–83, 289). However, it then seems odd that this impeccable speech has no effect whatsoever on the doubts and anxieties her husband entertains about his wife’s probable adultery. The husband (whose name is Ulrico) listens to her speech “with the greatest delight” (Bandello 1.206), but then immediately entertains more doubts and goes off secretly to consult a necromancer. It is the necromancer, Pollacco, who gives Ulrico the equivalent of the magic pledge. However, Bandello’s magic pledge is no longer the manifestation of sweetness and freshness—no longer flowers or fresh garments— but an icon, a visual simulacrum, a rendering of the radically unknowable as knowable, or probable, in relation to the techniques or skills of imitation. Pollacco fashions for Ulrico a miniature portrait of Barbara to be carried with him in a little box wherever he goes, which has the capacity to change colour according to the degrees of suspiciousness and guilt evidenced by her thoughts and behaviour. The picture is to turn yellow when anyone attempts to seduce her, to grow pale if she herself is thinking of being unfaithful, and finally, to turn black and malodorous if and when she actually commits adultery. What was Bandello thinking of when he transformed the wife into a persuasive orator, and the magic pledge into a colour-changing image? In Adam of Cobsham’s tale there are references not only to the fading and withering of the flowers, but to their changing of colour: “And yf my wyfe loue a paramoure, / Than wylle my garlond vade coloure, / And change wylle yt the hewe” (4). But the hue-changing capacity of Bandello’s imagined portrait is crucially and innovatively semiotic: in it the husband may read signs that enable a conjecture of probable circumstances and a hypothesis of his wife’s reactions to them. This transformation is both fundamental and oddly gratuitous, oddly in excess of what the plot seems to require. For, since the point of the story is still the proof of the wife’s fidelity, chastity and huswifery, the picture’s capacity to reveal by degrees causes for her husband to suspect her seems strictly unnecessary. Or, rather, it seems to reverse the social meaning of the story: the story seems to prove the value of wagering on probabilities rather than to symbolize the power of good faith. In Perceforest, the knight Margon, already trusting in the pledged “leauté” of his wife, make “leal serment” (loyal oath) to the courtiers who offer him all the towns, chateaux and lands they hold from Perceforest if they don’t succeed in seducing his wife within six months (345–46). Apparently similarly, Ulrico, the Bohemian knight, as Painter tells us, was so assured of his wive’s great honesty and loyall faith, beleeved so true as the gospell the proportion and quality of the image, who in all that time that hee was farre of never perceived the same to bee either pale or black. (162) At the crucial point of being asked to wager on his wife’s faith, however, he does perceive something: “But at that time lookinge upon the image, hee

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perceived a certaine yealow color to rise, as hee thought his wife was by some love pursued, but yet sodeinly it returned againe to his naturall hewe” (162). It is this moment of looking, and being reassured, that “boldned him” to accept the Hungarian barons’ wager of all their lands and goods that they will be able to vanquish his wife’s honour in the space of five months. In Bandello’s story, then, the knight becomes bold enough to venture his dishonour in the split second in which, perceiving his wife to have successfully resisted an amorous suit, he predicts she will be able to resist another. The story now seems to describe the payoff not of the wife’s faithfulness, but of the husband’s ability to reason conjecturally, and to deliberate, selecting a course of action by imagining its likely outcome. It was clearly Bandello’s transformation of the story that ensured its English Renaissance afterlife in the writings of Painter, Whetstone and Massinger (and in Shakespeare, insofar as he drew on Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra). That this was motivated by humanist concerns with rhetoric, probability and equity seems borne out by Bandello’s choice of the story’s setting. Matthias Corvinus became famous as Hungary’s Renaissance monarch, codifying the country’s laws, patronizing the arts, inviting Italian artists and architects to his court and building up the magnificent Bibliotheca Corvina (Rosenauer 53–55). Writing from the Inns of Court in the 1570s, George Whetstone, author of a versified version of Bandello’s story of Ulrico and Barbara, associated the humanism of Matthias Corvinus with the sensational dilemmas of tragicomedy, and their resolution by equitable legal investigation. As well as versifying the story of the magic picture in 1576, Whetstone set his experimental tragicomedy, Promos and Cassandra (1578) in Hungary during the reign of Matthias Corvinus. It is perfectly clear that in Promos and Cassandra King Corvinus is supposed to embody the virtues of the equitable hearing of causes that constitutes true justice: he comes to the city of Julio on hearing of Cassandra’s “detestable rape” by Promos, and judges what turns out to be a Senecan-style legal dilemma, as the death sentence he gives against Promos is opposed by Cassandra’s arguments for his life, and fi nally secured by the reappearance of Andrugio, her brother, whom Promos was supposed to have murdered. (Andrugio, who has gone into hiding, deliberates with himself in a declamatory manner about the ethics of returning to help mitigate Promos’ sentence for his sister’s sake 2.508). Thus the tragicomic structure typically recognizes the provisional quality of knowledge and the contingencies of justice, but stops short of the tragic possibilities of this recognition, offering instead a vision of probable argument and Senecan color as productive of justice and honour. Interestingly, Whetstone, having two years previously versified Bandello’s story of Ulrico and Barbara, gives the name of “Ulrico” to the knight who, in Promos and Cassandra, acts as Corvinus’ chief justice, judging the causes of citizens with unfailing equity. In Bandello’s, Painter’s and Whetstone’s story, then, the magic picture is the domestic equivalent of the resources of probable argument that

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 227 equitably resolve the legal dilemmas of the polity. The story’s final action takes the form of a trial at court to decide the rights and wrongs of Ulrico’s and his wife’s case against the barons who had attempted her seduction. The King sends his Lord Chancellor and two counsellors to the Bohemian castle to investigate the circumstances, and they “digested the whole discourse of this history,” after which, there is “mutch talk and discourse of this performaunce of the compact, pro et contra,” and a decision is reached which “to most men seemed to be pronounced with great justice and equity” (Painter 174). This combination of investigative procedure and argument pro et contra on the whole “discourse of this history” is precisely what Whetstone’s tragicomedy represents as Corvinus’ characteristic judicial procedure, but in the context of Ulrico’s and Barbara’s bizarre and sensational case, we can imagine that the final debate would take the form of a Senecan controversia, in which the counsellors argued about the probable motives and actions of the barons, the Bohemian knight, and his wife. Ulrico’s picture, with what we might call its “colourable colours,” thus represents the way in which similarly impassioned pro et contra arguments of likelihood would shape the daily consciousness of the married and aspiring knight. Writing about Philip Massinger’s The Picture (1629), the critic Ira Clark is in no doubt that the changing colours of the magical portrait should be read thus, as punning on the rhetorical colours of controversiae: [I]n the probing pun on colors, the picture displays Massinger’s abiding esthetic tenet—the power of art to effect reformation. For its colors illustrate the emotional and moral status of the person portrayed, just as colors constitute the fundamental figures in Seneca the Rhetorician’s Controversiae. Such rhetoricians were showing off their skills and ingenuity in fantasy and displaying their abilities to argue any side of an issue. But mainly they were intent on describing the attitudes, the motives, the wills of litigants. (172) The husband’s picture of his wife in Massinger’s play, Clark suggests, encapsulates the oscillating movements of tragicomic drama from dilemma to dilemma, from one argumentative color to another, and suggests that such a dramatic structure was designed to stimulate and sharpen a reforming awareness of the reciprocal obligations of husband and wife, monarch and subject, in the Caroline state. There is no reason to disagree with Clark’s thorough and sensitive contextual reading, but it plays down changes Massinger made to the story he found, changes that affect the emotions depicted in the play and which become intelligible in the broader context of developments in the history of thinking about probability. First, Massinger’s play, unlike Bandello’s and Painter’s story, contrives symmetrical tests of marital fidelity for husband and wife. Massinger thus, as Clark acknowledges, reverses the polis-oikos exemplarity of the earlier story: though his Bohemian knight and lady suffer from a lack of mutual

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trust, their relationship is evidently more virtuous, less corrupt, than that between the weak Hungarian King and his tyrannically whimsical Queen. This means that the lessons in the value of mutual trust and dependence learned by the Bohemian couple have the effect of spectacularly reforming the decadent court: the Bohemian household instructs the Hungarian state. To emphasize this, Massinger calls his Bohemian knight “Mathias,” alluding to the historical Hungarian King’s exemplary equity; and his wife, no longer “Barbara,” is called “Sophia,” expressing the tempering of desire by wisdom to which the couple must aspire. The second major change that Massinger makes is to insist that the magic picture, unlike its antecedent in prose romance, is not able to communicate the wife’s thoughts. Painter’s picture is said to “waxe pale” if Ulrico’s wife should “meane to abuse her honesty” (157). But the magic picture that Massinger’s necromancer, Baptista, gives to Mathias is specifically unable to let her husband “diue into” Sophia’s “hidden thoughts, or know what her intents are” (1.1.155–156). Consequently, there is almost no difference between the supernatural device Mathias acquires and the simple mental habit of conjecturing vivid likelihoods by probable reasoning. If Mathias’ picture of Sophia discolours and turns black “tis an assurance,” Baptista says, that “The fort by composition, or surprize / Is forc’d or with her free consent surrendered” (1.1.184–85). The double set of alternatives—composition or surprise, rape or free consent—sets off its own oscillation of lurid alternatives, wildly divergent mental images prompting opposing emotions, allied only in their equivalence as mental representations of likelihoods or “probabilities” in the limited terms established by the magic technology. Another recent critic of the play, Subha Mukherji, agrees with Clark in seeing Massinger’s interpretation of the concept of the magic picture as critical of the sexual double standard, construed as an asymmetrical surveillance. The last scene of the play stages Sophia’s public chastisement of her husband for effeminately conniving “[w]ith this inchanter to survey my actions,” for which she desires a divorce (5.3.177). Mukherji reads this scene, and the play as a whole, as expressive of “the illegitimacy of ‘bare suspition’ as a motive for enquiry” (224) while Clark likewise argues that husband and wife learn “to see values reflected in the spouse as part of the self” (54). Both critics argue, rightly, that the play advocates mutuality and trust. Interestingly, though, it is the apparent feminism of the play— apparent in its advocacy of this mutuality—that cannot be separated, in spite of these critics’ excellent recuperative efforts, from an older criticism’s judgement of the play as an artistic failure (the kind of judgement no longer voiced, but eloquently corroborated by the market). Stanley Cavell, we remember, thought Shakespeare’s portrayal of Othello’s and Leontes’ sufferings had something to tell us about our post-Cartesian condition. By contrast, T. S. Eliot thought Massinger had nothing to tell us because he did not portray real or important emotions. “The emotion of Othello in Act V is the emotion of a man who discovers the worst part of his own

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 229 soul has been exploited by someone much cleverer than he,” wrote Eliot, but, “When Massinger’s ladies resist temptation, they do not appear to undergo any important emotion; they merely know what is expected of them; they manifest themselves as lubricious prudes” (159). Eliot is contrasting the reality or importance of the emotions suffered by one who is persuaded to believe in the probability of a beloved’s infidelity with those experienced by one who uses probabilities to reason about whether or not the beloved is unfaithful, and consequently whether or not to yield to temptation. Sexual difference seems essential to the distinction. Othello suffers; Massinger’s ladies merely know what is expected of them. But though Eliot omits to mention Massinger’s heroes, everything he says is applicable to them. In The Picture both Mathias and Sophia reason conjecturally about the likelihood of the other’s having been unfaithful, and each reasons, consequently, about the ethics of betraying in return. The result is certainly not tragic, but neither is it unemotional. It is just that the emotions that interest Massinger—important or not—are those aroused by reasoning about probability and likelihood in relation to the future. These are the emotions of hope and fear. *When, nowadays, we use the term “probability” in common parlance, the word is generally taken to have a future oriented meaning. This is borne out by the fi rst defi nition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, “probability, n. 1.a. . . . The extent to which something is likely to happen, or be the case.” Mathematical probability is the quantification of this art of conjecturing likelihood, measuring it by the relative frequency of the projected occurrence within a finite course of past experience. Quantitative or mathematical uses of the term “probability” did not occur, however, until the last decade of the seventeenth century. Prior to that time, though the word might be used in the future-oriented contexts of deliberative rhetoric, it primarily referred to the “informal,” or rhetorical rather than logical modes of proof by which a legal decision might be arrived at, or a political course of action recommended. In 1553, Thomas Wilson wrote of “gatheryng of coniectures, in causes that are doubtfull, when probabilitie onely, & no assured knowelege, boulteth out the trueth of a matier” (Iiiiv). In the second half of the sixteenth century in England, the intensification of lay participation in matters of local and judicial governance had the effect of diffusing concepts of rhetorical probability as Justices of the Peace and juries were required to evaluate testimony at pretrial and trial stages of criminal procedure (Shapiro). For example, in 1608 the Surrey Justice of the Peace, Bostock Fuller, reported in his notebook that though one man had accused another of stealing a horse, he found that the circumstances of this accusation “being examined on bothe sydes before me hathe noe probabilytye” (182). Lorraine Daston argued that the emergence of a quantitative sense of probability from the qualitative senses that had dominated in earlier legal, philosophical and rhetorical contexts, had a great deal to do with what

230 Lorna Hutson seventeenth-century mathematical probabilists conceived of as problems of equity. They translated the legal terms for an equitable contract into a projected mathematical expectation and, in doing so, drew on the Romancanon law codification of proofs as degrees of certainty. “The early probabilists,” she writes, “had for the most part little idea of how their new calculus might be applied to ‘the economy of natural facts,’ being primarily concerned with ‘the rules of equity’” (Classical Probability 7, 6–48). In this context, the transformation by which the marital pledge of the old romance becomes the variable colours rendering the wife’s appearance now chaste, and now like a whore, seems to leave it intriguingly poised between the rhetorical-legal defi nitions of probability—whereby an orator or advocate “colours” the case for or against the defendant by mitigating or condemnatory interpretations of circumstance and motive—and the emergent mathematical senses that would harness calculations of probability to the economics of insurance and risk management. The sense in which Renaissance tragicomedies and Shakespearean “problem plays” use the “colours” of Senecan declamatory practice to present us with several different moral perspectives on a single deed has been often noted. Neil Rhodes likens Senecan declaimers to spin doctors, whose spin “could include emphasis on certain circumstances, questions of motive or intention, or the technique of redescription” (92). But these qualitative colourings or probabilities offer something like a simultaneous or atemporal sense of multiple perspectives or moral points of view, as the common visual analogy has it. The peculiarity of the way in which the story of the magic picture’s changing colours emblematizes or makes concrete the husband’s experience of reasoning probably lies in the magic portrait’s implications for the husband’s ability to conjecture about the future. Already present in Bandello’s novella and Painter’s translation of it was an odd but distinct sense that the changing colours of the picture could function as insurance, or underwrite a form of risk. This, oddly enough, is the aspect of the story that Massinger’s dramatic treatment realizes most fully, not least in his depiction of the characters’ emotions. Luke Wilson has recently proposed a suggestive analogy between early seventeenth-century developments in Shakespearean romance and tragicomedy, and the emerging risk culture evinced by the London insurance market. Wilson notes that ‘Shakespeare was interested in the evaluation of risk in relation to the probability of reports . . . [of] maritime adventures’, sceptically drawing attention, in plays like Othello and The Merchant of Venice, to the problems such speculations cause to the imperatives of genre (Drama 135). Even as dramatists like Shakespeare were experimenting with modes of rhetorical probability to challenge the limits of genre and produce different kinds of affect, however, new forms of marine insurance were developing which “expanded the reach of probability analysis beyond the bare probability that a ship will be lost to include the probability that reports of a loss are true.” No longer “framed in terms of belief and thus

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 231 of truth,” uncertainty has become “a matter of probability and thus of risk” (Drama 135). At the same time, among philosophers, thinking about uncertainty as a matter of degrees of ignorance rather than as man’s condition of sublunary subjection to Fortuna prompted a reassessment of the value of certain forms of emotion, or passion. “Once Fortuna had been banished,” Lorraine Daston writes, “and probabilities therefore conceived as descriptions of human ignorance rather than of genuine chance, our irremediable uncertainty about past and future events which occasion hope and fear also took on a different cast” (“Fortune” 27). Where earlier philosophers had counselled forms of resistance to Fortuna—Christian stoicism, for example—René Descartes, as Daston shows, begins to recuperate the passions aroused by uncertainty, hope and fear, and suggests that they are valuable in preserving the body (“Fortune”). Hope and fear, though opposites function as complementary responses to the instrumental use of conjecture to imagine the likelihood of a future state of affairs. “[I]t is to be noted,” he writes, “that though these two Passions be contrary to one another, yet a man may have them both together, to wit, when he fancies to himselfe severall reasons, whereof some make him conceive the accomplishment of his Desire is easie, the other make it seem difficult” (137, italics added). Here Descartes harnesses the probable reasoning of orators, which offers competing interpretations or colores of the same set of circumstances, to the future-oriented accomplishment of desire, urging his readers to “attend to the reasons that make it [desire] hope to a greater or lesser extent” (Daston, “Fortune” 29). Massinger’s Mathias begins his Hungarian journey already “strangely troubled” not with hopes and fears in relation to a particular desire, but, in a peculiarly Cartesian way, with fears of his own desire to insure himself against fear by counter-productively representing fearful probabilities to himself. “I this, / But foolishly inquire the knowledge of / A future sorrow, which if I fi nd out, / My present ignorance were a cheape purchase. Though with my losse of being” (1.1.113–17). We have already seen that Baptista’s insistence that he cannot “diue into” Sophia’s “hidden thoughts” produces a magic picture which is more like Descartes’ conception of the “severall reasons” that generate alternating passions of hope and fear. (Descartes’ translator even defi nes jealousy as causing a man “to dive into the least occasions of suspicion” 138.) The thoroughly conjectural form of knowledge afforded by this magic picture produces a parallelism between husband and wife. Mathias’ position in relation to knowledge and probability is scarcely distinct from that of Sophia, who seems perfectly capable of subjecting herself to fancies generating hope and despair without any magic to help her. The very fi rst speech she makes after her husband’s departure is a hauntingly memorable expression of the self-annihilating horror of contemplating opposing probabilities: I was flatter’d once I was a Star, but now

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Lorna Hutson Turn’d a prodigious meteor, and like one Hang in the aire between my hopes, and feares, And euery howre, the little stuffe burnt out That yeelds a waning light to dying comfort, I doe expect my fall and certaine ruine. In wretched things more wretched is delay, And hope, a parasite to me, being vnmasqu’d Appeares more horrid then despaire, and my Distraction worse then madnesse: eu’n my prayers When with most zeale sent vpward, are pull’d downe, By strong imaginary doubts and feares, And in their suddaine precipice orewhelme me. (2.1.1–49)

The primary emotional relation of either spouse is not, then, to the other, but to the pull of these competing probabilities: “strong imaginary doubts and feares.” “The Picture illustrates the potency of our manipulations of mental constructions of the world to consider and react to changing situations and stimuli,” argues Clark, and I agree, though not to the extent of finding it as reassuring about marital fidelity as does Clark (54). For it is precisely because of their emotional relationship with probabilities, with mental constructions, that neither spouse seems to experience the emotions Eliot designates “important” (that is, sexual jealousy and remorse for that jealousy, or sexual temptation and remorse) in relation to the other. What really provokes either’s passion is a future-oriented play of probabilities, the shifting of masks that reveals the parasite hope as the horrid impostor, despair, and vice-versa. If we return, at this point, to Eliot’s damning comparison of Massinger to Shakespeare, we can see how his dislike of Massinger’s interest in the passions excited by new forms of probability expresses itself in a universalizing misogyny that obscures everything that might be of interest in Massinger’s play as a product of an emergent seventeenth century culture of risk. Eliot contrasted the emotions occasioned by Othello’s recognition with the insignificance of those experienced by “Massinger’s ladies” when they “resist temptation.” Eliot’s odd choice of adjective for these women (“lubricious”) is defined as meaning “slippery,” “uncertain,” “inconstant” and, of course, in relation to women, “promiscuous.” Eliot suggests that Massinger’s women are both supremely uninteresting because they have no credible sexual feeling to restrain, and, at the same time, repulsively lubricated, sexually aroused. It is unthinkable that Eliot should apply such a phrase to Massinger’s depiction of masculine characters, yet the sexes are perfectly indistinguishable with respect to what he most dislikes in Massinger’s plays. When Honora, Queen of Hungary, first attempts to seduce Mathias, he professes, after having resisted her, to have felt desire: “How my blood / Rebels! I now could call her backe . . .” he mutters to himself, after her exit. The reasons that “stay” him, however, are nothing if not evidence of his wedded love for the lubricious—slippery,

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 233 uncertain, inconstant—doubts, conjectures and calculations of probability. Here is the whole speech: How my blood Rebels! I now could call her backe and yet Ther’s something stayes me: if the King had tenderd Such favours to my wife ’tis to be doubted They had not bene refus’d, but being a man I should not yeeld first, or proue an example For her defence of fraylty. By this sans question She’s tempted too, and heere I may examine . . . Lookes on the picture. (3.5.180–86)

In this scene, the picture is the concrete expression of the mental images— the probabilities of his wife’s sexual submission to the King—that Mathias fancies to himself as reasons to encourage or stay him in the pursuit of his desires. At this point in the play, the picture is perfectly coloured, supporting his image of himself as the one who “should not yeeld fi rst,” in spite of his conjecture that Sophia would have yielded, had the King tendered his favours to her. Later, however, in Act 4, Mathias turns to the picture again to fi nd it overspread with dark lines, as a result of Sophia’s own conjectures and doubts about his fidelity. He immediately responds in words that echo those spoken by Sophia in the aftermath of his departure: I am throwne From a steepe rocke headlong into a gulph Of misery, and find my self past hope In the same moment that I apprehend That I am falling. (4.1.54–58)

Moments later, he regrets his own previous “hazard” of the danger of not yielding to Honora, with all its consequent courtly disadvantages, for the poor exchange of Sophia’s infidelity: “and haue I made / Suche a returne from thee?” (4.1.76–77). Eliot’s ugly word, “lubricious,” does convey the way in which Massinger has turned the colours of the rhetoricians into a productively calculation on the returns of different courses of action: “I’ll mould / My thoughts into another forme,” Mathias says, only too ready, unlike Othello, to pursue another desire, take another risk (4.1.87–88). What this chapter has tried to show, however, is, first, that criticism like Eliot’s grounds perceived artistic inferiority in very ancient rhetorical commonplaces about women, where it would be more illuminating to examine changes in the deployment of those rhetorical commonplaces in plays and romances themselves. Second, it proposes that more significant shifts in cultural sensibility than either Eliot or Cavell found might become apparent if we were to examine Shakespeare’s

234 Lorna Hutson romances in the context both of their prose romance antecedents and Caroline tragicomic successors.

WORKS CITED Adam of Cobsam. The Wright’s Chaste Wife. Ed. Frederick Furnivall. London: Early English Text Society, 1865. Bandello, Matteo. “Mirabil beffa fatta da una gentildonna a dui baroni del regno D’Ongaria.” Le Novelle a cura di Bruno Cagli. 5 vols. Bologna: E. R. Sampietro, 1967. Bartlett, Robert. Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval French Literature and Law. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Burkhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Clark, Ira. Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1992. Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. . “Fortuna and the Passions.” Chance, Culture and the Literary Text. Ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh. Michigan Romance Studies. Vol. 14. 1994. 25–43. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. London: 1650. Eliot, T. S., “Philip Massinger.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin, 1987. Fuller, Bostock. Granville Leveson-Gower, esq. “Note Book of a Surrey Justice.” Surrey Archaelogical Collections relating to the History and Antiquities of the County. Vol. 9. Ed. Granville Leveson-Gower, esq. London: Surrey Archaeological Society, 1888. 161–232. Green, Richard Firth. A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadephia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Henderson, Diana E., and Siemon, James. “Reading Vernacular Literature.” A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999. 206–22. Massinger, Philip. The Picture. The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger. Vol. 3. Eds. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. 181–287. Mukherji, Subha. “False Trials in Shakespeare, Massinger and Ford.” Essays in Criticism 16 (2006): 219–40. Painter, William. “The Lady of Boeme.” Italian Tales from the Age of Shakespeare. Ed. Pamela Benson. London: Everyman, J. M. Dent, 1996. 149–74, 311–14. Paris, Gaston. “Le Conte de la Rose dans le Roman de Perceforest.” Romania 23 (1894): 76–116. Perceforest, quartrieme partie. Ed. Gilles Roussineau. Geneva: Droz, 1987. 327– 82. Rhodes, Neil. Shakespeare and the Origins of English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Rosenauer, Artur. “Review: Shallaburg. Matthias Corvinus and the Hungarian Renaissance.” The Burlington Magazine 125.958 (1983): 53–55.

Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger 235 Schlauch, Margaret. Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens. New York: Gordian, 1969. Seneca the Elder. Declamations. Ed. M. Winterbottom. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974. Shapiro, Barbara J. “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and “Probable Cause”: Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Steiner, Arpad. “Massinger’s The Picture, Bandello and Hungary.” Modern Language Notes 46.6 (June 1931): 401–3. Tales of the Monks from the Gesta Romanorum. Trans. Charles Swan, rev. Wynnard Hooper. New York: Dial P, 1928. no. 69, 103–4. Waith, Eugene. The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher. New Haven: Yale UP, 1952. Whetstone, George. “The Arbour of Vertue,” in Rocke of Regarde. London: Robert Waley, 1576. 105–123. [free translation of Bandello’s “Mirabil Beffa”] . Promos and Cassandra (1578). Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: The Comedies 1597–1603. Ed. Geoffrey Bullough. 8 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. Wilson, Luke. “Risk, Genre and the Insurantial Imaginary in Late Shakespeare.” Unpublished paper delivered at the Shakespeare Association of America, 2006. . “Drama and Marine Insurance in Shakespeare’s London.” The Law in Shakespeare. Eds. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 127–42. Wilson, Thomas. The Rule of Reason. London, 1553.

13 Afterword Shakespeare and Romance Barbara A. Mowat

From the beginning to the end of his career, Shakespeare was drawn to romance story, especially in the form we call Greek (or Hellenic) Romance. The two kinds of romance inherited by Elizabethan England had remained relatively distinct, with Greek Romance telling stories of family separations, storms at sea, apparent deaths, and eventual reunions, all under the control of Diana or Fortune, and with Arthurian or courtly romance recounting knightly quests for love and honor in a primarily Christian world (Perry 50). By the 1580s, though, both kinds had proliferated, forming what this volume refers to as a “forest” or “sea” of romances (Newcomb, this volume). The proliferation was not only in manuscript and printed fictions but also onstage, with playwrights ransacking “the Aethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce [and] the Rounde table . . . to furnish the Playe houses in London” (Gosson, Plays Confuted 1583, quoted by Mulready, this volume, 52). Shakespeare fi rst dramatized narrative romance in The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and these plays would suggest that he took as a challenge the difficulty of putting romance—specifically Greek Romance—into proper dramatic form. Many playwrights had made the attempt, as Gosson noted, but romance story—whether Hellenic or Arthurian—presented what Philip Sidney considered almost intractable difficulties for the dramatist, so much so that he advised playwrights to abandon any idea of following such a story lest they be led into “gross absurdities.” Unlike Plautus, unlike Terence, unlike Sophocles or Seneca, the earlier English playwrights, wrote Sidney, failed to follow the “laws of poesy” in shaping their plays, failed to grasp the difference between “telling” and “showing,” between “narrating” and “dramatizing,” between “reporting” and “representing,” and as a consequence created ridiculous plays in which, for example, “two young princes fall in love. After many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child. And all this in two hours space! Which, how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified” (Sidney 115–16). Nor was Sidney alone in his condemnation of early dramatic romance. In 1578, George Whetstone had described the English drama

Afterword 237 of the 1570s in language much like Sidney’s, maintaining that the typical English playwright “fyrst groundes his worke, on impossibilities: then in three howers ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets Children, makes Children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder Monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heauen, and fetcheth Diuels from Hel” (quoted by Mulready, this volume, 52). Both Sidney and Whetstone seem to be describing plays ransacked from the Arthurian “Rounde table,” but plays based on “the Aethiopian historie” were subject to the same improbabilities, decadeslong time spans, and far-flung settings. Sidney and Whetstone argued that romance story, transferred to the stage with the storyline virtually intact, made for very bad plays. According to Sidney, the pleasure provided by “ancient examples” of drama was not to be had from performances of such plays as Clyomon and Clamydes or Common Conditions or of the many other plays that staged romance narrative in all its narrativity. We may or may not agree with such attacks on early dramatic romance. After all, these plays were in their day immensely popular (Mulready; Mowat “‘What’s’”), and the fact that Mucedorus never lost its popularity would suggest that Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences found considerable pleasure in the kind of play that Sidney called “absurd.” Shakespeare, though, may well have shared Sidney’s perception of the difficulty of turning romance story into a good play—that is, into dialogue, spectacle, and action that pleased an audience and did not flout dramatic plausibility. That very difficulty, however, was apparently seen by Shakespeare in his early career as a challenge rather than a deterrent. Such, at least, is suggested by Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the fi rst of these, he stages romance by surrounding an adaptation of Plautus’s Menaechmi with a Greek Romance story that he brings into the play through Egeon’s account of shipwreck, family separation, abduction, and loss. Shakespeare uses this opening-scene narrative to take us well into this romance plot— one reminiscent of the Apollonius of Tyre story—at which point the Plautine comedy takes over.1 Egeon is, in effect, the “reporter” recommended by Sidney and, before him, Castelvetro, both of whom had proposed that the playwright make use of a narrator to recount material that lies outside the limited time and space proper for representation (see Mulready, this volume, 58). Comedy of Errors can be seen as an experiment in the “reporter” strategy, one with mixed success. The long opening narration is often problematic for actor, director, and audience alike, but the strategy pays off remarkably well in the play’s denouement, where Egeon’s romance story once again comes to the fore, this time fully dramatized, and the play’s discoveries—some foreseen, some unexpected—lift Plautine comedy into the larger, more complex, and more joyous world of Greek Romance revelations and multiple reunions. A different strategy is employed in Two Gentlemen of Verona, again one that, in principle, would have been applauded by Sidney. As if in accord with Sidney’s advice, Shakespeare makes no attempt in Two Gentlemen

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to put onstage an unwieldy romance story but selects instead an episode from such a story more adaptable to the “corporal action” of the stage. From Book II of Montemayor’s Diana he chooses a small inset story that contains the romance motif of the girl disguised as a page attending on her beloved, and to this he adds such compatible motifs as the device of the heroine’s portrait, the flight into the forest, and the nobleman turned captain of a band of brigands. The play he creates would not fully satisfy Sidney—it is episodic, the time it covers is considerably more than a day, and its places of action are dispersed—but, like Comedy, it puts romance onstage while avoiding the grosser absurdities that Sidney and Whetstone found in earlier such attempts. These two plays, then, can be viewed as early Shakespearean experiments in solving the problem of dramatizing romance, employing, perhaps coincidentally, two of Sidney’s proposed solutions: use a reporter, or limit the story so that it better fits the stage. It would be many years before Shakespeare again addressed head-on the challenge of staging romance. In the intervening years, he worked romance elements from the Orlando Furioso into his dramatization of Lodge’s Rosalynde to create As You Like It, putting both Lodge and Ariosto into the service of high comedy. 2 And he interwove Italian comic drama with elements of Greek Romance (taken directly from Heliodorus and indirectly via Barnabe Riche) to produce, in Twelfth Night, a rich comic blend that embeds high comedy and near farce in a romance story of shipwreck, assumed deaths, seeming betrayal, murderous fury, and miraculous discoveries and reunions. Nor did he abandon Greek Romance in his tragedies (see Stanivukovic, this volume; Gesner 70–75), infusing Hamlet and Othello, in particular, with Greek Romance elements—pirates, battles at sea, storms, threats of shipwreck, and (centrally, in Othello) a handkerchief dyed in mummy conserved of maidens’ hearts. When, around 1608, Shakespeare returned to the challenge of dramatizing romance, it was with a new purpose—or so his late plays suggest. No longer weaving romance elements into comic or tragic fables, no longer working to avoid or conceal the difficulties presented to the playwright who would dramatize narrative romance, his strategy now is to highlight those features of prose romance that Sidney and Whetstone had considered absurd when staged. Indeed, the stories told in Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and, to a lesser extent, The Tempest have much in common with the very plays mockingly described by Whetstone as “worke” grounded “on impossibilities,” “in three howers [running] throwe the worlde,” and, in those “three howers” portraying a marriage, a subsequent birth, the infant’s growth to adulthood, along with men conquering kingdoms, murdering monsters, and fetching gods from heaven and devils from hell. The plays themselves make clear that the highlighting of prose romance features is, in fact, strategy and not accident. Gower opens Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by announcing that he has come to tell us an old tale, and the

Afterword 239 narrative/drama which he then alternately tells and shows is a story that covers more than fi fteen years of time and that “ronnes . . . throwe the worlde” before the Fortune-tossed, widely dispersed family, with Diana’s help, fi nd each other and themselves. The Winter’s Tale is almost as overt in calling attention to its narrative structure and its grounding in impossibilities: it links itself openly to old wives’ tales (Lamb, this volume); instead of smoothly covering over its sixteen-year gap in time, it brings onstage Father Time himself to point out the immensity of the gap;3 and it foregrounds the play’s diverse geographies, making enormous the distance separating the scenes of action by introducing sea storms and shipwrecks between Sicilia and the fictional coast of Bohemia. Cymbeline, like The Tempest after it, stages only the fi nal chapters, as it were, of its Greek Romance story, folding the decades-long preceding action into accounts narrated by characters within the play itself. But, in its opening scene, it signals its romance context by highlighting the impossibilities and the “old wives’ tale” quality of the story that Cymbeline will go on to enact. Posthumus’s “name and lineage,” recounted in this scene, are reported as wonders not to be believed (1.1.20–60),4 as is the story of the lost heirs: FIRST GENTLEMAN He had two sons—if this be worth your hearing, Mark it—the eldest of them at three years old, I’ th’ swathing clothes the other, from their nursery Were stol’n, and to this hour no guess in knowledge Which way they went. SECOND GENTLEMAN How long is this ago? FIRST GENTLEMAN Some twenty years. SECOND GENTLEMAN That a king’s children should be so conveyed, So slackly guarded, and the search so slow That could not trace them! FIRST GENTLEMAN Howsoe’er ’tis strange, Or that the negligence may well be laughed at, Yet it is true, sir. SECOND GENTLEMAN I do well believe you. (1.1.65–78) This account of a father and his lost sons is reminiscent of the early action of many a Greek Romance, especially those romances in which tales of separation and loss begin with a father losing his child or children.5 In the play that Cymbeline enacts, we pick up the story of the bereft father two decades on, long after the search for the sons has ended and Cymbeline has reconciled himself to leaving the kingdom to his daughter and a suitable son-in-law. Only in midplay do we learn, long before Cymbeline does, that he is still living out the bereft-father story—that his heirs are, in fact, alive.

240 Barbara A. Mowat The news comes through an apostrophe addressed to Cymbeline by the supposed father of two young mountaineers, whom we have just met: O Cymbeline, heaven and my conscience knows Thou didst unjustly banish me, whereon, At three and two years old I stole these babes, Thinking to bar thee of succession as Thou refts me of my lands. (3.3.106–10)

The story of Cymbeline and his lost sons reaches its Greek Romance ending much later when, at a fi nal moment of crisis and danger, this same man confesses to the king: These two young gentlemen that call me father And think they are my sons are none of mine. They are the issue of your loins, my liege, And blood of your begetting. (5.5.401–4)

As if to call attention to the romance narrative that underlies the more pressing actions of the play, Cymbeline highlights the improbabilities and nonrepresentational qualities of the moments when the familiar “Man Tried by Fate” story surfaces, fi rst, by noting the strangeness of these moments (1.1.75–77), then by shifting the language to a highly artificial, presentational style (3.3.106–10; see Mowat, Dramaturgy 35–68), and, fi nally by setting the story’s conclusion among the play’s improbably numerous revelations and by then grounding its particular disclosures in recognition tokens—a “curious mantle, wrought by th’ hand of” the younger son’s “queen mother” (a mantle which “for more probation” can be produced), and a mole on the neck of the older son, “a sanguine star,” a “mark of wonder,” given him by Nature to “be his evidence now” (5.5.436–46). From fi rst scene to last, the play announces, it is part of the sea of romances. The Tempest in many ways sets itself off from Shakespeare’s other dramatic romances, especially in openly linking itself to epic material rather than to romance or old wives’ tales (Lamb, this volume). It also tightens up the dramatized part of its story so that the enacted play obeys the classical unities of time and space. But built into the play is not only the narrated 24-year-long-story of Sycorax, Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero (Mowat “The Tempest”), but also a version of the “Man Tried by Fate” story, imagined as covering at least a dozen years and extending from Naples to Africa and thence to Prospero’s island. The “hero” of this particular story is Alonso, king of Naples, whose participation in Prospero’s expulsion has led to the death of his son, Ferdinand—or so Alonso believes. The key elements of this kind of Greek Romance story—the separation of father and child, the father’s subsequent grief, the failed search, the father’s despair, and the fi nal, unanticipated restoration of the lost child—are not imagined as spread out

Afterword 241 over many years, as they are, for example, in Comedy of Errors and Cymbeline, but instead are set many years after the event that indirectly triggered the son’s loss, and are then crowded into the compressed onstage time and localized space of The Tempest itself. But the Greek Romance pattern of separation, suffering, and restoration are clear. Within Alonso’s romance tale, Prospero plays the role of “the old man on the island” who, like Philetas in Daphne and Chloe, watches over the young lovers (Gesner 131), and, like the exiled prophet Phineus in the Argonautika, uses his supernatural powers to aid the shipwrecked travelers, sending them on their way wiser than when they arrive on his island (Mowat, “Knowing” 32–34). It need hardly be said that Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest are far more than staged Greek Romance. As the above accounts demonstrate, to focus on these plays’ romance story lines is to be forced to ignore much that makes the plays potent and memorable—the powerful stories of the young lovers, villains, sleeping potions, decapitations, and Roman armies in Cymbeline; the psychological turmoil and repentance of Leontes, the dramatic force-fields embodied in Hermione, Paulina, and Autolycus, and the Florizel-Perdita pastoral in The Winter’s Tale; and the many roles of Prospero—conjurer, colonial settler, masque-presenter, pastand-future duke, and doting father—in the stories that dominate The Tempest. Further, such a focus ignores the host of factors, beyond an interest in putting Greek Romance onstage, that undoubtedly influenced Shakespeare in writing these plays, with the company’s expansion into the Blackfriars Theatre and the influence of the court masque being only two. However, focusing for a moment on Shakespeare’s return to Greek Romance is in two ways useful. First, it calls our attention to the actual work of the dramatist in shaping narrative for the stage. We can assume, I think, that in deciding to stage Greek Romance, Shakespeare did not abandon the primary goal of the dramatist—namely, to please the audience. After all, as Kenneth Burke writes, “the drama, more than any other form, must never lose sight of its audience: here the failure to satisfy . . . is most disastrous” (37). Nor did he abandon primary poetic techniques—of language, of character, of allusion—that he had employed throughout his career in turning story into gripping drama. More often than not in these late plays, familiar Shakespearean eloquence, insight, poetic density and complexity captivate and intrigue; further, for long stretches of the plays’ actions, they obey what Bert O. States calls the primary law of drama: namely, that “the interest and pleasure of the audience arise from the gap between the predictable and the unexpected” (122). For example, as Cymbeline 2.2 begins, we as audience predict that Iachimo will betray the heroine’s trust; we do not, however, expect that he will appear out of the trunk beside her bed (see Wayne, this volume). In The Winter’s Tale 3.2, we expect Leontes to be punished for scorning the oracle; we do not expect the death of Mamillius. In The Tempest 3.3, as we watch Alonso and his courtiers search the island, we expect that Prospero has in

242 Barbara A. Mowat store for them some long-planned punishment; we do not expect a Harpy and a disappearing banquet. In these and many other scenes in these plays, then, we fi nd the masterful control over “the gap between the predictable and the unexpected” that is, throughout Shakespeare’s work, the hallmark of his dramaturgy. Where it is abandoned in the dramatic romances, to a greater or lesser extent, is in the plays’ larger structures, where storytelling suspense replaces controlled dramatic expectation (see Mowat, Dramaturgy 69–94). This fact, coupled with the obtrusive citing of narrative elements in the plays, suggests to me that Shakespeare strongly believed in the pleasure afforded by narrative—believed that Greek Romances, epics, old wives’ tales, novelle, and popular prose fictions all provide pleasure in themselves, a specific narrative pleasure. Which brings us to the second way in which focusing on Shakespeare’s staging of Greek Romance in his late plays is a useful exercise: namely, it forces us to take seriously the prose romance form, to ask ourselves what kind of power, what kind of pleasure, lies in story—and, specifically, in Greek Romance story. Most readers of fiction understand basic narrative pleasure. The sensation of being in the hands of a great storyteller, of reading or being told a story that happened long ago (the very keystone of the narrative art form, according to Suzanne Langer 258–325, esp. 264, 321), of being led in imagination toward an unpredictable end, hoping for but not expecting a “happy ending”—this is a pleasure that surely vies with that afforded by onstage dramatic action. Shakespeare may well have been trying to provide a hybrid version of this narrative pleasure when he tied his dramatic romances so closely to narrative form. He would have seen in the Aethiopica, in Gower’s version of Apollonius of Tyre, in Clitophon and Leucippe, a mingling of the narrative and the theatrical: in these works, the narration is interwoven with scenes of action and dialogue; and, at highly charged moments, the given scene’s theatricality is emphasized by the narrator. Pericles clearly gives us a version of this narrative/drama hybrid, and The Winter’s Tale retains some of the interweaving, with narrators of sorts appearing not only in the Father Time scene but also in the scenes of dialogue among unnamed gentlemen and in the story-telling soliloquies of Antigonus, the Old Shepherd, the Young Shepherd, and Autolycus. Cymbeline and The Tempest, in their own versions of narrative/drama interweaving, can also be seen as experiments in creating a pleasure as close to narrative as to drama (Mowat, Dramaturgy 69–94). As for the pleasure provided by the Greek Romance form in particular: Moses Hadas addresses this very question in the introduction to his edition of three of the Romances. He writes, suggestively, that the reputation of Greek Romances as being frivolous is unfair. “What the serious reader fi nds most objectionable in the Greek novels,” he writes, is their shrieking implausibilities. There is no logical nexus between event and event or between event and character. But in a world where the links of causality are broken and Fortune has taken control of the affairs of

Afterword 243 men it is the very incalculability of events that absorbs interest. Logic is supplanted by paradox and emotion [is] . . . savored for its own sake. The cavalier attitude to probability is not a mark of indifference but a true reflection of current beliefs. Consequently, by making virtue triumph in the end as they regularly do, [Greek Romance] authors are consciously arguing that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a divine power which does guide and protect its special charges. (7–8) Hadas’s explanation of Greek Romance in terms of a worldview in which, despite the world’s apparent chaos, one takes comfort from faith in a benevolent divine power is not unlike the account of Greek Romance given by Ben Edward Perry, who explains the shift from tragedy to epic and thence to romance in terms of these forms as literary expressions of their times: It is only in a relatively small world that the individual man can be thought of as poetically great and heroic and his experience or fate felt to be symbolical of that of mankind in general at its best or most typical. The hero, epic or tragic, must signify, to the instinct of a popular audience, something that is fraught with more meaning than his own curious particularity. . . . In the vastly expanded world of Hellenistic and Roman times the individual lost nearly all his quondam importance and representative significance, having become too tiny to be tragic, or heroic, or poetic, or symbolical of anything more than himself or a particular segment of contemporary society. . . . Faced with the immensity of things and his own helplessness before them, the spirit of Hellenistic man became passive in a way that it had never been before, and he regarded himself instinctively as the plaything of Fortune. All this is conspicuous from fi rst to last in the Greek romance. (48) In the light of these comments by Hadas and Perry, it is tempting to suggest that, in the years just before 1608, the London world began to seem particularly chaotic or immense, and, as a consequence, Greek Romance form became especially attractive. Substantiating bits of evidence from those years—global exploration, shifts in religious beliefs, economic changes—immediately leap to mind. But this is “evidence” that would have weight only if it were supported by a proper investigation of the times and culture. It is true that Shakespeare’s dramatic romances do insist on the implausibility—or the benign providentiality—of their happy endings. (To select only one such moment: “Look down, you gods, / And on this happy couple drop a blessèd crown, / For it is you that have chalked forth the way / Which brought us hither.”6) However, in a rush to find deep significance in Shakespeare’s return to Greek Romance, we should not forget that Mucedorus, in all its wonderful silliness, was, in 1610, revised, reprinted, and staged by the King’s Men.7 Maybe Shakespeare and his audience just loved “moldy tales.” Or maybe the sea of romance suddenly looked particularly enticing and Shakespeare simply jumped in.

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NOTES 1. Ben Edward Perry discusses the connections between the “ideal Greek Romance” and closely related forms, such as, on the one hand, the Latin romance Apollonius of Tyre and, on the other hand, the New Comedy of the Athenian and the later Roman stage. Perry’s comments on Greek prose romances and New Comedy are found on pages 54–57, esp. 56. His study of Apollonius of Tyre in the context of Greek Romance is found on pages 294–324. On Apollonius and Greek Romance, see also Elizabeth Archibald (7–26). For Greek Romance (especially that of Heliodorus) and the prose fiction of early modern England, see Mentz, “A Note Beyond,” this volume. 2. For Shakespeare’s use of Rosalynde in As You Like It, see Mentz. 3. That Shakespeare was highly skilled in the concealing of long passages of time is demonstrated most notably in Macbeth, where the aging of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth takes place in the background of action that seems almost continuous. 4. Quotations are from the New Folger Library edition of Cymbeline. 5. This particular set of stories triggered by a father’s loss of his children has been traced by Gerald Gerould to the medieval legend of St. Eustace, the fi rst example of which he fi nds in sixth-century Sanskrit. The plot of these stories, grouped by Gerould under the rubric “The Man Tried by Fate,” is summarized by Gerould as follows: “A man for some weighty reason, often religious or resulting from religion, departs from home with his family. He loses his sons (usually twins) and his wife by accident or human violence, or both. After various adventures and considerable suffering, the several members of the family are at last reunited” (388). In these stories, in other words, the focus is on the husband/father who loses his wife and children and, after being tossed about by fate, is restored to some or all of those lost. (While Greek Romances in general include loss, suffering, and reunion, most of the extant works that we call Greek Romances center instead on the separation of two lovers, their tumultuous adventures and adversities, and their fi nal reunion.) The relationships among the various sets of Greek Romance stories—that is, not only those works called by Perry “ideal Greek Romances” but also such works as Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the Ps.-Clementine Recognitions, the line of stories growing from the St. Eustace legend, and so forth—have not yet been worked out, though Perry has made a good beginning. For a longer discussion of the St. Eustace legend, the “Man Tried by Fate” stories that it spawned, and how this plot plays itself out in earlier dramatized romances and in each of Shakespeare’s own dramatic romances, see Mowat (“‘What’s’” 136–43). 6. The Tempest 5.1.240–44 7. For the fortunes of Mucedorus, see Jupin, and Mowat (“‘What’s’” 146, n. 27).

WORKS CITED Archibald, Elizabeth. Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, including the text of the “Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri” with an English translation. Cambridge: Brewer, 1991. Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1953. Gerould, Gordon Hall. “Forerunners, congeners, and derivatives of the Eustace legend.” PMLA, n.s. 12 (1904): 335–448.

Afterword 245 Gesner, Carol. Shakespeare & the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1970. Hadas, Moses, trans. and ed. Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe, An Ephesian Tale, The Hunters of Euboea. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953. Jupin, A. H., ed. Mucedorus: A Contextual Study and Modern-Spelling Edition. New York: Garland, 1987. Langer, Suzanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1952. Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Mowat, Barbara A. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: U Georgia P, 1976. . “The Tempest: A Modern Perspective.” William Shakespeare. The Tempest. The New Folger Library Shakespeare. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 1994. 185–99. . “‘Knowing I Loved My Books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually. “The Tempest and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 27–36. . “‘What’s in a Name?’ Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 4. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard. 4 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 129–49. Perry, Ben Edward. The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, New York: Washington Square Press, 2003. . The Tempest. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press. 1994. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry. Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Peter C. Herman. Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2001. States, Bert O. The Pleasure of the Play. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1994.

Contributors

Joyce Boro is associate professor of English literature at Université de Montréal. She is the author of The Castell of Love: A Critical Edition of Lord Berners’s Romance (2007) and articles on romance, Lord Berners, and book history. Her current book project focuses on the reception and translation of late medieval Spanish romance in early modern England. She is also completing a critical edition of the anonymous romance, A Paire of Turtle Doves, Or The Tragicall History of Bellora and Fidelio (1606). Lorna Hutson is Berry professor of English literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Thomas Nashe in Context (1989), The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century England (1994) and of The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007) as well as of numerous articles on Renaissance literature and drama. Clare R. Kinney is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot (1992) as well as numerous articles on both medieval and early modern writers. She is currently editing a collection of essays on Mary Wroth for Ashgate’s Critical Studies in Women Writers in England, 1550–1700. Mary Ellen Lamb is professor of English as Southern Illinois University– Carbondale. She is the author of Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1990) and The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (2006) as well as numerous essays on Shakespeare and early modern women writers. She is co-editor of Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern English Texts (2008). She is the general editor for the forthcoming Ashgate series Critical Studies in Women Writers in England, 1550–1700. She is on the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance and editor of the Sidney Journal.

248

Contributors

Steve Mentz is associate professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City, where he teaches Renaissance literature and literary theory. He is the author of Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006), co-editor of Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004), and has written articles on early modern prose fiction, Shakespeare, and related topics for numerous journals and essay collections. His current work explores early modern maritime culture and includes a new book, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, forthcoming in 2009. Barbara A. Mowat is director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, executive editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, chair of the Folger Institute, and editor (with Paul Werstine) of the New Folger Library Shakespeare. Her major fields of research interest are Shakespeare’s dramatic romances, early modern printed dramatic texts, and Shakespeare’s reading practices. Before coming to the Folger, she was Hollifield professor of English literature at Auburn University and the dean of the College at Washington College. She has served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America and has for some years been a member of the Advisory Board of the International Shakespeare Conference (Stratfordupon-Avon). Cyrus Mulready is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His book project, Romancing the Globe: Romance, English Expansion and the Early Modern Stage, recasts the dramatic category of romance as it has been understood since the nineteenth century and argues for an approach to dramatic romance that takes into account the social, economic, and intellectual forces of the early modern period. His essay on the nineteenth-century creation of “romance” as a Shakespearean genre will appear in the special issue of Shakespeare Yearbook, “Romantic Shakespeare.” Lori Humphrey Newcomb is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the author of Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (2002), along with articles on drama in print and performance, pastoral, life-writing, and the history of prose fiction. Her current research explores the compound literacies of Elizabethan popular stage audiences. Gloria Olchowy holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia. She teaches literature, composition, and drama courses at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta. Her essay “Murder as Birth in Macbeth” recently appeared in the collection Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (2007). She is currently working on an article historicizing the treatment of motherhood in Hamlet and a book length manuscript

Contributors 249 titled Bearing Men: A Historicized Understanding of Motherhood in Shakespeare. Goran Stanivukovic is associate professor of English at Saint Mary’s University in Canada. His publications include a critical edition of Emanuel Ford’s romance, Ornatus and Artesia (2003), edited volumes Ovid and the Renaissance Body (2001), Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 (with Constance C. Relihan, 2003), and Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (2007); and articles on English Renaissance drama and nondramatic literature, Shakespeare, queer early modern studies, and prose romances. He is currently completing a book on the eastern Mediterranean and romances in early modern England. Sarah Wall-Randell is assistant professor of English at Wellesley College. She has published essays in SEL, in Renaissance Quarterly (with historian Thomas S. Freeman), and in the collection John Foxe and His World (2002). She is currently at work on a manuscript about books, reading, and the romance mode, entitled The Immaterial Book in Early Modern England. Valerie Wayne is professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly. She has edited A Trick to Catch the Old One for The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007), for which she served as an associate general editor; Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage (1992); and The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1991). She is at work now on an edition of Cymbeline for the Arden Shakespeare, third series.

Index

A

B

Achilles Tatius, 4, 87, 164, 165. See also romance, Greek Adam of Cobsam, 222–3, 234 adaptations, dramatic, 2, 4, 13–4, 23, 30, 32–5, 55, 165, 188–201, 203–215, 221, 237 Adelman, Janet, 152, 158n24, 159n29 Africa, 47, 55, 57–9, 94, 135, 240 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 10, 11, 16 Alexandria, 177 Alpers, Paul, 15n3, 16 Alwes, Derek B., 28, 43, 85, 88n2, 89, 189–90, 201 Amadis of Gaul, 2, 4, 52, 55, 236 anagnorisis, 110, 172, 178 Andrews, Michael C., 217 Antioch, 34, 35 Apollonius of Tyre, 22, 26, 32, 38, 43, 125, 237, 242, 244n1 Apuleius, 244n5 Arabia, 55, 63 Arber, Edward, 70, 92, 95, 105 Archibald, Elizabeth, 32, 43, 244n1 Argonautika, 241. See also romance, Greek Ariosto, 51, 63–4, 69, 113, 238 Aristotle, 47, 55–6, 59, 69n1, 110, 224 Ascham, Roger, 4, 16 Ashley, Kathleen, 157n2, 159 Asia, 8, 17, 47, 55, 57–9 assurance, 208 Astington, John H., 69n8, 204, 214, 217 Atkinson, Clarissa W., 157nn4–5, 158nn11,19, 159 Aubrey, John, 127, 139 Ayrer, Jacob, 165, 177, 183

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 138n17, 139, 216n13, 217 ballads, 126, 128, 130–1, 183n47 Bandello, Matteo, 2, 13, 15, 181n12, 185, 219, 221, 224–7, 230, 234–5 Bankworth, Richard, 94, 105 Barber, C. L., 158n23, 159 Barbour, Reid, 16n18 Barroll, Leeds, 124, 137n4, 139, 180 Bartlett, Robert, 223–4, 234 Bate, Jonathan, 104n7, 105, 135, 138nn20–1,27, 139 Beaumont, Francis, 10, 53, 66, 88, 202, 204–6, 210, 216n7; 217n16, 235, Cupid’s Revenge, 13, 203–4, 206–7, 209–215, 216n2, 217; King and No King, 204; Knight of the Burning Pestle, 52, 66, 70; Maid’s Tragedy, 214; Philaster, 2, 204, 214. See also Fletcher, John Beckwith, Sarah, 149, 158n14 Benson, Pamela, 234 Bevington, David, 134, 138nn19,23 Bevis of Hampton, 2 Bible, 31, 104–5, 146–7, 150, 154–6, 161 Bicks, Caroline, 32, 36, 43 Bishop, Tim, 134, 139 Blau, Herbert, 199, 201 Blayney, Peter, 10, 16, 137n6, 139 Bliss, Lee, 205, 216n2, 217 Bloch, R. Howard, 193, 201, 224, 234 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 10, 13, 15, 127, 139, 165; Decameron, 9, 163, 165, 169, 170–3, 177, 179, 181–4, 186–7; De Mulieribus Claris, 171

252

Index

Bodley, Sir Thomas, 125 book trade, 8, 23–6, 43n22, 125. See also commerce, print books, physical representations of, 109– 110, 119n3. See also “readers” Bossuat, Robert, 181n16 Boswell, Jackson Campbell, 191, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 123, 129, 137n3, 139 Brauner, Sigrid, 158n19 Breitenberg, Mark, 139 bricolage, 207 Briggs, Katherine, 139n29 Brown, Pamela Allen, 137n10, 175 Brown, Paul, 132, 138n18 Brownlee, Marina S., 201n3 Bruster, Douglas, 10, 16, 75, 88n1, 89, 110, 120 Bullough, Geoffrey, 1, 7, 17, 165, 168, 170–3, 177, 181nn5,9–10,17– 18, 184, 219, 235 Burke, Kenneth, 241, 244 Burkhardt, Jacob, 225, 234 Butler, Martin, 174, 179, 180n1, 182nn22,34, 183nn46,54 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 157nn4–5, 158nn11–12

C Cahn, Susan, 155, 157nn7,9, 158n19 Cairo, 177 Calicut, 47, 49, 60, 62. See also India Callaghan, Dympna, 10, 17, 160 Cambridge University, 76, 79–80, 84, 88, 94 Camporesi, Piero, 149, 158n15 Capp, Bernard, 183n50 Carrell, Jennifer Lee, 119, 120nn7,14 Cartelli, Thomas, 137n1 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 58, 237 Catholicism, 4, 82–4, 94, 102, 138n14, 158n23 Cavanagh, Sheila T., 120n12 Cavell, Stanley, 220–1, 228, 233–4 Caxton, William, 63, 66, 104n4 Cervantes, Miguel de, 87, 107–8, 111–2, 117, 120–1 Chambers, E. K., 158n21 chastity, women’s, 13, 38, 92, 98, 100, 104n12, 138n24, 163, 165, 167–8, 178–9, 190, 194, 201n2, 211, 220–2, 225 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10, 80, 197, 201–2, 235; Knight’s Tale, 64; Wife of

Bath’s Tale, 13, 188–9, 194, 196–7 Cheney, Patrick, 87, 89 Chettle, Henry, 65, 79, 88n7 Child, Francis James, 168, 183n47 Christ, 104, 146–50, 152, 154, 156. See also Bible Christianity, 83, 95–6, 99, 101–2, 221, 231, 236 Cinthio, Giraldi, 15n7, 95 citationality, 173–4 Clark, Alice, 157n9 Clark, Ira, 227–8, 232, 234 Clyomon and Clamydes, 6, 53–5, 63, 67, 68n2, 69nn10,12,14, 71, 165, 181n5, 237 Cobb, Christopher J., 16nn15,17, 68n2, 70 Cobbler of Canterbury, 191, 201n2 Cohen, Walter, 5, 6, 8, 17, 178, 184, 218 Coldewey, John C., 146, 159 Coldiron, Anne, 172, 180, 184 collaborative authorship, 13, 22, 24, 26, 32, 34, 36–7, 40–1, 42n13, 43n16, 135, 204 Collier, John Payne, 7, 17, 171, 182n26, 184 Collinson, Patrick, 158n21 colonialism, 132, 138n18 comedy, new, 197, 199, 244n1 “comi-tragedy,” 204, 214–5 commerce, 5, 47–52, 59–61, 122, 126, 130, 132. See also market, book trade Common Conditions, 53–5, 63, 69–70, 237 controversia, 219–220, 227. Cook, Ann Jennalie, 10, 17, 124, 137n4, 139 Cooper, Helen, 4, 15n5, 17, 22, 43, 62, 68, 70, 91, 99, 105, 140, 146, 149, 151, 159, 166–8, 181, 184, 191, 197, 201–2, 216n10 Cornwallis, William, 52, 70 Corpus Christi plays, 2, 12, 145–157, 158n16, 160, 162, 171 Corvinus, Matthias, king of Hungary, 221, 226–7, 234 Coudert, Allison P., 158nn18–19 Crawford, Patricia, 157n8, 158n19 Curren-Aquino, Deborah, 42n14, 45, 137nn11–12, 138n19, 142, 158n25, 162

Index D Daston, Lorraine, 229, 231, 234 Davidson, Clifford, 158n21 Davies, Horton, 158n17 Dawkins, Richard, 15n5, 166 Day, John, 65, 66, 203 de Flores, Juan, 188, 193, 196, 202; Grisel y Mirabella 13, 188– 201n3 de Grazia, Margreta, 68n3, 70, 93, 105 de Mendoza, Hurtado, 7 De Pizan, Christine, 10, 13, 165, 169–71, 177, 181n13, 184, 187 De Rueda, Lope, 165, 170, 177. Also see Euphemia Dekker, Thomas, 47, 60–1, 65–7, 70 Deloney, Thomas, 8 Demary, John G., 137n2 Denby, David, 128, 140 Denmark, 11, 53, 91–4, 96, 100, 101–3, 105, 183 Dent, Arthur, 85 Descartes, René, 220, 228, 231, 234 Dessen, Alan C., 54, 70 Dickman, Susan, 157nn4–5, 158nn11– 12 Dickson, Arthur, 50, 68n1 Diehl, Huston, 158n22 distinction, social, 8, 11–12, 123–9, 131–7, 137n3, 139n29 Dix, Dom Gregory, 158n14 Dolan, Frances E., 156, 160 Doody, Margaret, 120n13 Dowden, Edward, 1, 6, 7, 15n8, 16n21, 21, 23, 25, 42nn4–5, 43, 49, 61, 68n3, 70, 171, 184 Duffy, Eamon, 158nn14–15 Duffy, Maureen, 139n29 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 68n5, 70, 90, 211, 217, 218 Durling, Nancy Vine, 182n22, 185, 187

E Eden, Richard, 60, 70, 71 Edward VI, 50, 176 Edwards, Philip, 6, 17, 33–5, 37, 45, 234 Egypt. See Cairo Eire, Carlos M. N., 150, 158n18, 160 Eliot, T. S., 49, 68n6, 70, 228–99, 232–4 Elizabeth I, Queen, 154, 182n37 Elizabeth of Bohemia, 123

253

Ellison, Lee Monroe, 62, 68n7, 69n14, 70 Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 168, 185, 186 epic, 2, 56, 58, 62, 172, 240, 243 equity, 226–8, 230 Erasmus, Desiderius, 83–4, 128, 140, 158n20, 160 Erickson, Peter, 158nn24,27, 159n29, 160 Erne, Lukas, 10, 17, 88n2, 89, 93, 105 Eucharist, 147, 149–50, 154, 158nn14,17 Euordanus Prince of Denmark, 11, 91–103, 104n7 Eufemia, 170, 177, 182n39, 184. See also de Rueda Evans, Stephen S., 183n43

F Fanshawe, Richard, 7 Felperin, Howard, 6, 17 Fenton, Geoffrey, 216n11 Ferguson, Arthur B., 96, 105 Feuillerat, Albert, 51, 69n8, 70 Finkelpearl, Philip J., 216n2 Fleay, Frederick Gard, 62, 70 Fleming, Juliet, 9, 17, 189, 202 Fletcher, Anthony, 128, 138n22, 140 Fletcher, John, 6, 10, 12–13, 88, 219–220; Cardenio (with Shakespeare), 6; Cupid’s Revenge, 13, 203–4, 206–7, 209–215, 216n2, 217; Women Pleased, 12, 188–202; See also Beaumont, Francis. See also Shakespeare: Henry VIII, Two Noble Kinsmen Flore et Jehanne, 169, 172–4, 177, 181n14, 182nn25,28, 184 Florio, John, 68n5 Foakes, R.A., 16n16, 70 folktales, 13, 163, 165, 168–9, 174–6, 178–80, 181n11, 183nn42,47. See also “old wives’ tales” Ford, Patrick K., 177, 183nn42,44–5, 184, 187 Forde, Emanuel, 67, 104n4, 175 forgetting, 112, 118, 120n5 Foucault, Michel, 166, 184, 224, 234 Foure Prentises of London. See Heywood, Thomas Fowler, Alastair, 166 Fox, Adam, 127, 137n10, 138n14, 140

254

Index

France, 5, 13, 15n3, 32, 47, 50, 53, 63, 65, 83, 85, 87, 95–6, 102, 165, 168–73, 177, 179–80, 181nn7,21, 182n26, 183n52, 188, 222. See also Paris Frank, Grace, 171, 184 Frederyke of Jennen, 163, 165, 169– 174, 177, 181n9, 182nn25,28, 184 Frey, Charles, 25, 31, 44 Frye, Northrop, 3, 15n4, 17, 21, 137n13, 140, 146, 160 Fuchs, Barbara, 1, 3, 4, 15n3, 17, 22, 41n1, 44, 68n4, 70, 163, 169, 172, 184 Fuller, Bostock, 229, 234 Fuller, David, 134, 137n1, 140 Furness, Horace Howard, 95, 105, 171, 184

G Gallagher, Lowell, 31, 36, 44 Gardiner, Harold C., 158n21 Garrett, Martin, 203, 217 Garrick, David, 7 Gascoigne, George, 80, 207 geography, 8, 49, 54–5, 61–2, 94, 101, 239 Gérard de Nevers, 169–173, 177, 184, 186 Gerould, Gordon Hall, 244n5 Gesner, Carol, 180nn1–3, 184, 238, 241, 245 Gesta Romanorum, 32, 221, 235 Gibbons, Brian, 171, 181n5 Gilbert, Allan H., 56, 58, 69nn15–16 Gillespie, Stuart, 4, 15nn6–7, 177, 180n2, 184 Gillies, John, 138n25 Glapthorne, Henry, 203 global travel, 11, 26, 31, 47–9, 54–62. See also geography, travel goddesses, 29, 32, 37–41, 133 Golding, Arthur, 80, 133, 135, 140 Goolden, P., 34, 43nn17–18 Gorboduc, or, Ferrex and Porrex. See Norton, Thomas Gossett, Suzanne, 20, 35, 42nn10,15– 16, 43n19, 44–5, 121 Gosson, Stephen, 51–3, 55, 70, 76–9, 236 Gower, John, 26–7, 29, 32, 34–6, 40, 43nn17–19, 44–5, 80, 125, 238, 242

Grantley, Darryll, 151–4, 156, 169 Greece, 54. See also romance, Greek Green, Richard Firth, 222–3, 234 Greenblatt, Stephen, 216n7 Greene, Robert, 8–10, 75–7, 79–87, 88n4, 104n2, 132, 141, 201, 219; Arcadia, 9; Cony-catching pamphlets, 130–1; Groatsworth of Wit, 76, 79, 81, 88n7; Looking Glass for London (with Lodge), 77; Mamillia, 4; Menaphon, 4, 31, 75–6, 79–80, 87, 88nn3,10; Orlando Furioso, 2, 59, 64; Pandosto, 2, 11, 24, 30, 126, 130–2, 208; “upstart crow” letter, 76, 79, 81 Greg, W.W., 62, 70, 215n1 Grisel y Mirabella. See de Flores, Juan Gruffydd, Elis, 170, 174–5, 181n19 Guarini, Giambattista, 6, 15n10 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 175, 183nn42,44 Guillaume de Dole, 169–170, 172, 174, 177, 181nn14,20, 182nn22,34,38–9, 185, 187 Gurr, Andrew, 10, 17, 137n4 Guy, Earl of Warwick, 2, 51, 66, 186

H Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 9, 17, 125, 137n5 Hackett, Helen, 9, 17, 22, 28–32, 36, 44, 88n2, 104n8, 119n1, 120n8, 125, 127, 129–130, 137nn10,12, 140, 146–7, 149–151, 160, 189, 202, 207, 216n14 Hadas, Moses, 242–3, 245 Hadfield, Andrew, 91, 105, 185 Hahn, Thomas, 169, 185 Hajnal, J., 157n7 Hamilton, A.C., 70 Hamilton, Donna, 138nn20–1 Hanes Taliesin. See Taliesin Harbage, Alfred, 62–7, 70 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 39–40, 44 Harvey, Elizabeth, 164, 170, 180n4 Harvey, Gabriel, 81, 83 Haycock, Marged, 174, 185 Hays, Michael, 62, 71 Hazlitt, William Carew, 7, 16n16, 171, 185 Heinsohn, Gunnar, 157nn7–8 Helgerson, Richard, 85, 87, 89

Index Heliodorus, 2, 4, 8, 52, 63, 77, 83, 87, 164–5, 183, 187, 219, 236–8, 242, 244n1. See also romance, Greek Henderson, Diana, 1, 14, 18, 157n1, 160, 219, 234 Heng, Geraldine, 166, 185 Henke, Robert, 6, 18 Henry, Prince of England, 174, 178 Henry VIII, 168 Henslowe’s Diary, 50, 52, 64–6, 70 Herbert, Mary Sidney. See Sidney, Mary Herlihy, David, 157n7 Herrick, Marvin T., 69n18 Herzman, Robert B., 63, 71 Heywood, Thomas, 52–3, 64, 66, 71 Hibbard, George R., 18, 94, 97, 104n6, 123, 137n1, 140 Hillman, Richard, 36, 44 Hilton, Rodney H., 157n9 Hine, James, 123, 140 Hitchcock, Alfred, 128 Hoeniger, F.D., 32–3, 37, 45 Holinshed, Raphael, 175 Holton, Sylvia Wallace, 191, 201 Homer, 78 homosociality, 28, 189, 213–5 Hope, Jonathan, 6, 18 Horace, 56 Howard, Jean, 12, 18, 68n6, 71, 119n3, 121 Hulme, W.H., 181n10, 183n45, 185 humanism, 2, 4, 7–8, 11–13, 18, 22, 76–86, 88n12, 96, 128, 138n26, 150, 152, 158n19, 208, 216n12, 221, 224, 226 Humphreys, Emyr, 185 Hungary, 13, 94, 165, 221, 226, 228, 231–2, 234–5 Hunter, R.G., 171, 185 Huon of Bordeaux, 51, 64 Huot, Sylvia, 169, 185 Hutson, Lorna, 8, 13, 18, 28, 44, 88n2, 104n2, 181n12, 185, 189, 202, 216n10

I imitatio, 26, 35, 37–8, 179 imitatio Christi, 147, 149 India, 59–60. See also Calicut interiority, 12, 97, 108, 112, 117–9, 120n5

255

intertextuality, 10, 21–41, 33–8, 41, 43n22, 164, 166, 180n4, 191–2, 198. See also Marian intertexts introspection, 108, 110, 112, 116–9 Ireland, 63, 94, 135 Isle of Dogs, 78 Italy, 2, 5–6, 8, 13, 18, 57–8, 69nn17– 18, 71, 80, 86–7, 105, 126, 165, 169–70, 172–3, 179–180, 181n20, 186, 188, 221, 225–6, 234, 238

J Jackson, MacD. P., 33–5, 42n10, 43n21 James IV of England (James VI of Scotland), 93, 102, 123, 178, 190, 196, 199 Jameson, Frederic, 3, 15n4, 18, 129, 140 Jeffrey, David L., 149, 160 Jerusalem, 52, 64–6 Johnson, Richard, 4, 66–7 Johnston, Alexandra F., 146, 157n2, 160–1 Johnston, Jackie, 161 Jones, Thomas, 174–5, 185 Jonson, Ben, 86–7, 126, 134; Bartholomew Fair, 11, 18, 122–4, 139; Magnetic Lady, 53; “Ode to Himself,” 69n9, 125 Jourdain, Sylvester, 134 Jungmann, Joseph A., 158n15 Jupin, Arvin H., 14, 18, 181n5, 185, 244n7

K Kahn, Coppelia, 10, 18 Karras, Ruth Mazo, 100, 105 Kempe, Margery, 160 Ker, W. P., 120n13 Kerrigan, William, 98, 105 King, Ros, 15n11 King’s Men, 124, 165, 217, 243 Kinney, Arthur F., 7, 18, 76, 89, 92, 105, 216n12 Kinney, Clare, 13, 216n5 Klauser, Theodor, 158n14 Knight, G. Wilson, 33, 44, 178, 185 Knowles, James, 6, 19, 44 Koenig, V. Frederic, 181n10 Kolve, V. A., 158n13 Korda, Natasha, 10, 18, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 164, 180n4 Krontiris, Tina, 190, 202

256

Index

Krueger, Roberta L., 181nn7,14,21, 182nn24,35 Kullman, Thomas, 181n11

L Lagorio, Valerie M., 157nn4–5 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 12, 28, 42n13, 44, 113, 117, 119n1, 121, 140, 180, 186, 190, 201–2, 207, 215, 216n14, 217, 239, 240 Langer, Suzanne K., 242, 245 Lawrence, William Witherle, 181n10 legitimacy, 24–5, 27, 29, 33–4, 99 Lesser, Zachary, 10, 18, 137n6, 140 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 116, 121, 190, 202 Lewis, C. S., 80, 89 Liebler, Naomi Conn, 9, 18, 140, 187 Lindheim, Nancy, 84, 88n12 Lindley, David, 133–4, 137n1, 138nn18,26, 139n29, 140, 142 Linton, Joan Pong, 10, 18 literacy, 9, 125 Littleton, Betty J., 62, 69nn11–12 Lodge, Thomas, 8, 10, 15, 75–9, 82–3, 86–7, 219; Alarum Against Usurers, 78; Defense of Poetry, 76–8, 81, 89; Looking Glass for London (with Greene), 78; Margarite for America, 2, 87; Robin the Devil, 84; Rosalynde, 2, 8, 11, 76–7, 82–6, 88nn11–12, 90, 208, 238 London, 50, 52, 79, 94, 135, 175, 183n50, 230, 236, 243 Longus, 4, 87. See also romance, Greek Lucas, Caroline, 9, 18 Lucas, R. Valerie, 158n19 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 138n14, 140, 156, 161 Lyly, John, 9, 62, 88n12, 113, 219; Euphues, 207; Euphues and His England, 59, 207; Midas, 58, 71 Lyne, Raphael, 6, 18, 138n20, 140

M Mabinogi, 175, 183nn42–3, 184–5 Malcolmson, Cristina, 172, 186 Malory, 4, 65 Marcus, Leah, 111, 121 Marian intertexts, 26 market, 5, 8–11, 47, 60, 76, 81, 95, 123–5, 130–3, 137n3, 155,

171–3, 179, 219, 228, 230. See also book trade, commerce Markham, Gervase, 203, 217 Marlowe, Christopher, 79, 81–2, 87, 89 Marsalek, Karen Sawyer, 156, 161 Marston, John, 6 Martyr, Peter, 60, 69n19 Maslen, R.W., 8, 18, 88n2, 89n11, 216, 218 masques, 86, 109, 115, 120n11, 134–6, 138n24, 198–200, 241 Massinger, Philip, 10, 13, 88nn8–9, 181n12, 219–21, 226–34 Masten, Jeffrey, 135, 140 maternity, 29–31, 39–41, 126, 147, 150 Matulka, Barbara, 201n3 McCoy, Richard C., 93, 105 McCue, James F., 158n14 McDaniel, Sean, 172, 182n33, 186 McDonald, Peter F., 158nn13–14, 161 McDonald, Russ, 5, 6, 15n11, 18, 213, 215 216n7, 218 McGrath, Lynette, 190, 202 McLaren, Dorothy, 157nn8–9, 159, 161 McLuskie, Katherine, 129, 141 McMullan, Gordon, 6, 15n9, 18, 42nn3–4, 44, 68n3, 71 Mediterranean Sea, 55, 94, 102 memes, 4, 5, 15n5, 22, 93–4, 146–7, 149, 166–8 Mentz, Steve, 4, 8, 11, 18, 76, 86, 88nn2–3,6–8,10–12, 125–6, 130, 141, 244n1, 245 midwife, 39, 129–30, 133 Mikalachki, Jodi, 120n4 Miola, Robert S., 93, 105, 180n4, 186 Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, 169, 171, 186 mirrors, 119, 120n14 Mirrour for Magistrates, 119 Misfortunes of Arthur, 5, 51, 64 misogynist, stage, 198–9 misogyny, 9, 12, 92, 148, 153, 167, 171, 190–99, 224, 232. See also misogynist, stage Montaigne, Michel de, 134 Montemayor, Jorge de, 15n7, 113, 238 Montrose, Louis, 156, 161 Moretti, Franco, 2, 3, 15n2, 18 mortality, 12, 123, 133, 135–7 Moser-Rath, Elfriede, 168, 170, 186 Mother Bunches, 127

Index motherhood, calculative, 157n6, 148; incarnational, 147–50, 154, 156–7; new, 145, 147–57, 158n20. See also maternity Mowat, Barbara A., 1, 5–6, 10, 14, 15nn7–8, 18, 26, 28, 33, 36, 42nn3–4,9–10,13, 44, 48, 68nn2–3, 71, 88–9, 124, 130, 133, 137nn6–7, 138n20, 141, 165–6, 180–1, 186, 237, 240–2, 244n5,7, 245 Mucedorus, 2, 6, 14n1, 18, 65, 68n2, 87, 165, 181n5, 185, 237, 243, 244n7, 245 Mukherji, Subha, 6, 18–19, 228, 234 Munday, Anthony, 50, 95, 105. See also Valentine and Orson Murray, John J., 102, 105 Murray, Mary, 27, 44 Myrick, Kenneth, 69n17 Myrrour of Knighthood. See Tyler, Margaret

N Nashe, Thomas, 8, 75–84, 86–7, 88n9, 89–90 Neely, Carol Thomas, 10, 19–20, 158nn19,24,27, 159n29, 161 Nevo, Ruth, 43n17 New World, 2, 5, 60, 132, 134–6 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 8–11, 14, 16n20, 19, 28–31, 45, 88n2, 90, 103, 104n2, 105, 125–6, 129–131, 137nn1,12, 141, 164–6, 183n52, 186, 189, 202, 216n9, 218, 236 Nicholl, Charles, 36, 45 Nicholson, Peter, 45 Noonan, John T., Jr., 157nn7–8 Norbrook, David, 137n2, 139n31 Norton, Thomas, 56, 57, 71 Nosworthy, J.M., 173, 181n5, 182n26, 186 novel, 7, 23, 42n11, 87, 117–8, 216n13, 242 novellas, 2, 5, 8–9, 13, 24–5, 27, 33–40, 42n11, 86–7, 95, 165, 175, 221, 230, 242

O O’Connell, Michael, 68n3, 69n14, 71, 137n1, 141, 148–9, 156, 158nn12,20, 161 Office of the Revels, 51, 63, 67, 70

257

Ohle, Rudolf, 186 Olchowy, Gloria, 12, 161, 171 Old Wife’s Tale. See Cobbler of Canterbury old wives’ tales, 12, 122–3, 126, 127nn10,12, 135, 137n12, 140, 142, 175, 186, 239–40, 242. See also “folktales,” Peele, George Ong, Walter, 128, 138n22, 141 Orgel, Stephen, 68n6, 71, 137n2, 138nn14,19,24,27, 141 Orlando Furioso. See Ariosto Osborn, James M., 138n22, 141 Ostes, Roy d’Espaigne, 169, 171–5, 179–180, 181n20, 182nn26– 7,38–9, 183n49, 186 Ottomans, 102 Overbury, Thomas, 188, 201n1 Ovid, 12, 109, 131, 133, 135, 138n21, 139–40, 206

P Pacolet’s horse, 47, 50, 59–60, 62, 69n20 Painter, William, 13, 15n7, 216n11, 221, 225–8, 230, 234 Paire of Turtle Doves, 192, 202 Palfrey, Simon, 6, 19, 208, 218 Palladine of England, 95, 105. See also Munday, Anthony Paris 13, 63, 94, 102, 163, 165, 170–1 Paris, Gaston, 168, 181n12, 183n45, 186, 221, 234 Parker, Patricia, 3, 15n4, 19, 21, 45, 178, 186 Pask, Kevin, 137n1, 141 Paster, Gail Kern, 155, 157n9, 158nn24,27, 159n29,161 pattern, 10, 24–6, 32, 36–41, 43n22, 146–50, 166, 169, 178, 181n20, 214, 241 Patterson, Annabel, 137n2, 138n16, 139n31, 141 Peele, George, 81–2, 88n9, 127, 140 Perceforest, 53, 63, 222–3, 225, 234 performativity, 31–2, 39–41, 148–9 Perkins, William, 85 Perry, Ben Edward, 236, 243, 244nn1,5 Peru, 47, 49, 59–60, 62 Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, 157nn4–5, 158n11, 161 Pettet, E.C., 6, 19, 45 Pigman, III, G.W., 179, 186 pirates, 4, 102–3, 104n14, 113, 238

258 Index Pitcher, John, 182n30 Plato, 129 Plautus, 236–7 Pocock, Sharon A., 181n16 Poitiers. Le Roman du Comte de Poitiers, 169, 173–4 Pollard, Tanya, 68n5, 71, 180n1, 187 polyglossia, 207 popular taste, 1–2, 6–9, 11–14, 48–53, 65, 68n1, 75–7, 83–4, 88n2, 93–5, 99, 103, 104n6, 108, 123, 125, 146, 165, 169, 172, 183n50, 188–92, 235, 242–3 populuxe, 123–6, 133–4, 137n3 print culture, 8–10, 26, 75–7, 83, 87, 88n2 Prior, Mary, 157n9, 161 Prior, Roger, 35, 45 probability, 13, 128, 220–1, 226–7, 229–233, 243 prose fiction, early modern, 163, 165, 169–77, 179, 181n9, 182nn37,40–41, 183nn42,48– 50, 207–8, 216n10, 242, 244n1 psychoanalytic critics, 43n17, 152, 155 Purkiss, Diane, 193, 202

Q Queen of Ethiopia, 5, 63 Quilligan, Maureen, 171, 187

R Rackin, Phyllis, 10, 19 Radway, Janice, 190, 202. Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, 64, 69n10, 165 readers, elite, 11, 76, 81–3, 123–5, 127, 130, 133–6, 152, 172; nonelite, 4, 11, 123–5, 127; virtual, 38, 125–6; women, of romance, 8–9, 12, 27–8, 113, 117, 119, 125, 130, 188–90 REED (Records of Early English Drama), 146, 160 Reformation, 150–1, 156 Relihan, Constance C., 8, 19, 88n2, 90, 104n2, 175, 187 Reynolds, Simon, 180n3, 187 rhetoric, color, 220, 226–7, 231. See also humanism rhetoric, gendered, 21, 29, 207–9, 213–5, 217n17 Rhodes, Neil, 102, 220, 230, 234 Richards, Jennifer, 6, 19

Richardson, Christine, 157n2, 161 Riche, Barnabe, 104n4, 216n11, 238 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, 146, 149, 151 Riddle, John M., 157n7, 161 risk, 81, 126, 145, 151, 222, 230–3 Ristine, Frank H., 6, 19 Roberts, James, 94 Roberts, Josephine, 20, 120n8, 121 Roberts, Sasha, 7, 15n12, 19 Roman de la Rose, 169–70, 182n22 Roman de la Violette, 169–74, 177, 181n14, 183n52, 184, 186–7 romance, Arthurian, 5, 51, 63–7, 236–7; chivalric, 9, 107, 163–5, 169, 172–3, 213; courtly, 236; dramatic, 1–2, 7, 10, 12–14, 16nn13–17, 28–9, 48–54, 58, 60–3, 68nn2–4, 87–8, 145, 147, 165, 170–1, 177–9, 181n5, 236–7, 240, 242–3, 244n5; French, 47, 53, 63, 65, 165, 169–74, 177, 180, 181nn7,13– 14,20–1, 182nn25–8,31,38–9, 183nn51–2, 222; Greek, 2, 4–5, 8, 14, 15n7, 37, 83, 86–8, 125, 163–5, 177–9, 180n3, 181n7, 183nn47,53, 219, 236–243, 244nn1,5; medieval, 3, 4, 13, 53, 63–6, 163–7, 169–74, 177– 9, 181n7,14,20–1, 182nn26– 28,35,38–9, 183nn47,51–2, 188–9, 191–5, 196–8, 200, 216n10; pastoral, 82, 113, 204, 211, 213–4, 220; prose, 1–2, 4–5, 7–12, 16n18, 21–4, 27–32, 75–88, 91–93, 103, 125–6, 129– 132, 145–6, 170, 173–9, 181n9, 182nn37,40–1, 183nn42,48–50, 207–9, 214, 219–20, 228, 234, 238, 242, 244n1; religious, 12, 145–6, 171; sentimental, 188–9, 191–4, 198, 200, 211–2 Roper, Lyndal, 150, 157nn8–9, 158nn17,19, 162 Rosenauer, Artur, 226, 234 Rosenberg, Bruce A., 168, 187 Rubin, Miri, 149, 157nn4–5, 158nn12,15, 162 Runnalls, Graham A., 171, 181n15, 187 Ruskin, John, 104n7 Ryan, Kiernan, 6, 19, 81, 90, 136, 137n1, 141

Index S Sachs, Hans, 165, 177 Sackville, Thomas. See Norton, Thomas Saenger, Michael, 124–5, 138n23 Salingar, Leo, 15n7, 19, 171, 182nn27– 8,37, 187 Salzman, Paul, 16n18, 19 Sanders, Eve Rachele, 119n1, 121 Sanders, Norman, 41n1, 45 Sanskrit, 221, 244n5 Saracens, 50, 102, 171, 182n28 Saunders, Corinne, 2, 14, 19, 45 Scaliger, J.C., 58, 69n18 Schlauch, Margaret, 224, 235 Schmidgall, Gary, 137n1, 141 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 63–4, 70 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 141 Scot, Reginald, 137n8, 141 Scotland, 92–4, 100, 178, 183n47 Scott, Charlotte, 119n3, 120n5 Sebek, Barbara Ann, 129, 141 Seneca, 56, 78, 80, 226–7, 230, 236; the elder, 219–20, 235 Shakespeare, William, descriptor, “late plays,” 1, 5–6, 15n11, 21–25, 27–30, 32, 36, 42n2, 49, 68n2, 124, 145, 164, 208, 219, 238, 241–2; descriptor, “romances,” 1–3, 6, 15, 23, 241; descriptor, “tragicomedies,” 6–7, 15n10, 75, 88, 108, 165–6, 204, 214, 219–221, 226–7, 230, First Folio, 5, 24, 102. Plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, 5, 121, 168; As You Like It, 5, 11, 77, 82–3, 85, 88, 90, 196, 238, 244n1; Comedy of Errors, 5, 14, 236–7, 241; Cymbeline, 1, 5, 7, 12–4, 16, 36, 49, 107–8, 110–15, 117–9, 121, 163–6, 168, 170–5, 177–84, 186–7, 214–5, 218, 238, 242, 244–5; Henry VIII or All Is True, 6, 168; Hamlet, 5, 11, 79, 91–103, 104nn1,5,14, 238; King Lear, 136; Macbeth, 127, 137n9, 140, 157n3, 161, 213, 244n3; Measure for Measure, 5, 104n10, 165, 168; Merchant of Venice, 5, 230; Merry Wives of Windsor, 168, 183n48, 187; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 27, 136; Much Ado About Nothing, 5, 168; Othello, 5, 11, 91–3,

259

95–103, 105, 168, 202, 220, 228–30, 232–3, 238; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1, 2, 5–6, 10, 14, 21–41, 42nn5,13,16, 43n23, 49, 55, 69n9, 104n4, 112, 125, 159, 164, 183n53, 186, 208, 238, 242; Richard III, 109; Romeo and Juliet, 5; Taming of the Shrew, 168, 187; Tempest, 1, 5, 6, 11–12, 14, 49, 110, 122–4, 132–6, 137nn1–2, 138nn19,24,27, 142, 186, 238– 242, 244n6; Titus Andronicus, 110, 121; Troilus and Cressida, 124–6, 137n7, 141; Twelfth Night, 5, 104n4, 106, 238; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 5, 14, 236–7; Two Noble Kinsmen, 6, 202; Winter’s Tale, 1–2, 5–6, 11–12, 14, 24, 27–32, 35, 40, 42nn9,14, 44–5, 49, 122–4, 126–133, 137, 138nn15,19, 140–3, 145, 147, 149, 151–3, 155–157, 158n25, 159–162, 168, 186, 208, 218, 220, 238–9, 241–2. See also Fletcher, John Shapiro, Barbara J., 229, 235 Sharpe, Kevin, 137n5, 142 Shirley, James, 203 Shuger, Deborah Kuller, 93, 105 Sidney, Mary, 207 Sidney, Sir Philip, 8, 10, 88nn5–6, 138n22; Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13, 86, 88, 93, 113, 116, 138n23, 183n46, 203–215, 216nn4,7–8, 217nn15–16, 219; Defense of Poesy, 11, 14, 47–62, 65, 68nn5–6, 69nn14–17,19, 70–71, 76–78, 80–2, 129, 138n16, 177, 236–8 Siemon, James, 1, 14, 18, 157n1, 160, 219, 234 Simpson, James, 103, 105 Skura, Meredith, 138n18, 142 Smith, Nigel, 27–8, 45 Snyder, Susan, 42n14, 45, 137nn11–12, 138n19, 142, 158n25, 162 Sophocles, 47, 87, 236 source study, 10, 21–7, 29–31, 163–7, 179, 180n4 Spain, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13, 60, 87, 94–5, 104n7, 165, 170, 173, 177,

260 Index 181n20, 182nn32,39, 188–190, 192, 194 Spengler, Joseph J., 157n7 Spenser, Edmund, 80, 87, 113, 115, 118, 120n10 Spingarn, J.E., 58, 69nn16–17 Spring, Eileen, 27, 45 Spufford, Margaret, 137n1, 142 St. Eustace, 14, 244n5 St. John’s College. See Cambridge University stage properties, 51, 109–110, 119n3 Stanivukovic, Goran V., 8, 11, 28, 45, 238 Stanyhurst, Richard, 80, 88n9, 133 States, Bert O., 241, 245 Stationers’ Register, 23, 50, 52, 54, 64–5, 92, 105, 183n50 Steevens, George, 183n50 Steiger, Otto, 157nn7–8 Steiner, Arpad, 221, 235 Stevens, Martin, 158n13 Stewart, Alan, 93, 103, 106 stoicism, 83, 125, 231 Strachey, William, 134 Stubbes, Philip, 76 Sturgess, Keith, 137n2 Sullivan, Garrett A., Jr., 120n5 Summit, Jennifer, 172, 187 supernatural, 108, 112, 114–5, 117, 241 Swetnam, Joseph, 190 Swetnam, The Woman Hater, 13, 183n50, 188, 190, 192, 202

T Taliesin, 169–70, 172, 174–5, 177, 179, 183nn42–44,47, 184–5, 187 Taylor, Gary, 25, 35, 42n10, 43n19, 45 Taylor, John, the Water-Poet, 180, 183n50 Taynor, Neil, 94, 104n1 Teague, Frances, 119n3 Terence, 47, 78, 236 Terry, Patricia, 182n2, 185, 187 Theagenes and Chariclea, 5, 63 Thompson, Ann, 94, 104n1, 183n55 Thomson, Leslie, 54, 70 Thorne, Alison, 6, 10, 15n11, 19, 42n8, 46, 137nn1–2, 141–2, 158n24, 162, 204, 218 Thrall, William Flint, 173, 181n10, 183n50

Tom a Lincoln. See Johnson, Richard tragedy, 204–6, 210, 212–3, 215, 238, 243 tragicomedy, 6, 7, 15n10, 75, 88, 108, 165–6, 204, 214–5, 219–221, 226–7, 230 Traub, Valerie, 138n15, 142, 158n24, 159n29 travel, 5, 11, 49, 53–5, 59–61, 64, 69n20, 93–4, 102, 177, 241 Travitsky, Betty S., 158n19, 161–22 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 138n20 Twyne, Laurence, 22–6, 29, 32–9, 41, 42n11, 43nn22–23, 46, 104n4, 125, 164 Tyler, Margaret, 9, 19, 119, 202

U unities of time and place, dramatic, 11–12, 47–8, 53, 55–8, 61, 132, 146, 240 university wits, 2,76 Uther Pendragon, 5, 51, 65, 67 Uther, Hans-Jorg, 165, 168, 187

V Valentine and Orson, 50–1, 61, 65, 68n1, 70 Vickers, Brian, 42nn10,13, 46, 138n16, 142 violence, 5–6, 8, 16n16, 35–6, 40–1, 92, 95–8, 100, 103, 128, 152, 220, 244n5 Violette. See Roman de la Violette Virgil, 12, 78, 80, 133, 138n21, 140, 142, 183n43, 187 Vives, Juan Luis, 119, 121 voyeurism, 8, 171–2

W wager, 13, 163–80, 181nn7–10,13, 182n30, 183nn45,49, 222, 225–6 Waith, Eugene, 219, 221, 235 Walde Moheno, Lillian von der, 201n3 Wales, 13, 94, 165, 169–70, 174–5, 178–9, 183n43, 184–5 Walker, Kim, 120n11 Wall, Wendy, 10, 19, 139n28 Warner, Marina, 139n30 Warner, William, 208 Warren, Roger, 24–5, 33, 35–6, 42n10, 45, 104n4, 106, 182n27, 187 Watson, Henry, 47

Index Wayne, Valerie, 12, 33, 42n13, 46, 121, 162, 198, 201–2, 215, 241 Weamys, Anne, 87, 216n4 Wells, Marion, 129–30, 137n12, 142 Wells, Stanley, 4, 6, 19, 31, 45, 68n3, 69n14, 71, 104nn4–5, 106, 121, 180n1, 183n46, 187 Wentworth, Charles Jr., 82, 90 Werstine, Paul, 42n10, 45, 124, 137n7, 141, 245 West, William N., 120n9 Westward for Smelts, 170, 175–6, 179–80, 183nn49–50, 187 wet-nursing, 148, 151, 154–6, 157n9 Whetstone, George, 14, 51–3, 71, 221, 226–7, 235–8 Whitehall, 95, 123 Wickham, Glynne, 156, 158n21 Wiesner, Merry E., 157, 158nn18–19, 162 Wilkins, George, 22–5, 27, 29, 32–40, 42nn10–11, 43nn21–23, 45–6, 164 Willis, Deborah, 138n18 Wilson, Luke, 230, 235 Wilson, Richard, 129, 138nn14–15, 142, 158n26, 162 Wilson, Stephen, 157n7, 162 Wilson, Thomas, 229, 235 witchcraft, 12, 129, 133, 135, 208 Witmore, Michael, 129, 136, 137n13

261

Woledge, Brian, 181n16 Womack, Peter, 16n20, 20, 22, 42n6, 46 women, debate about, 13, 171–2, 183n50, 188–96, 200–1 women. See chastity; maternity; misogyny; readers, women wonder, 27–8, 47, 53, 108, 112, 130, 156, 239–40 Wood, Juliet, 177, 183n43, 187 Woodbridge, Linda, 10, 20, 190, 193, 198, 202 Woodhuyson, H. R., 88n5, 90 Wright, H.A.,177, 187 Wright’s Chaste Wife. See Adam of Cobsam Wroth, Lady Mary, 9–10, 12, 20, 87, 107–8, 112–3, 115–8, 120nn7– 8,11

X Xenophon, 77, 224

Y Yachnin, Paul, 123–4, 126, 137n3, 142 Yates, Julian, 88n8 Ystoria Taliesin. See Taliesin

Z Zizek, Slavoj, 129, 142 Zwicker, Stephen, 137n5