Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature 9780773552579

Table of contents :
Cover
Timely Voices
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature
PART ONE Narration and Transformation
1 The Knight and the Hermit: Crossing the Reformation
2 Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene
3 Milton and the Resource of Romance
PART TWO Magic and Wonder
4 Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of “a Devyls Son”
5 Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures
6 Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder
PART THREE Reformation and Mediation
7 The “Romance” of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories
8 Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones
PART FOUR Transmission and Circulation
9 Dramatizing Heliodorus
10 Pericles and Polygenres
11 Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance
PART FIVE Aesthetics and the Politics of Form
12 Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
13 “Romancy-Ladies”: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women
14 “The Visions of Romance Were Over”: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Afterword
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Timely Voices

Timely Voices Romance Writing in English Literature Edited by Goran Stanivukovic

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 isbn 978-0-7735-5139-8 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5257-9 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5258-6 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from Saint Mary’s University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Timely voices : romance writing in English literature / edited by Goran Stanivukovic. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5139-8 (hardcover). isbn 978-0-7735-5257-9 (epdf). isbn 978-0-7735-5258-6 (epub) 1. English literature–History and criticism. 2. Romanticism–Great Britain. I. Stanivukovic, Goran V., editor pr146.t56 2017

820.9'145

c2017-904275-0 c2017-904276-9

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Introduction: Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature | 3 Goran Stanivukovic

part one Narration and Transformation 1 The Knight and the Hermit: Crossing the Reformation | 39 Helen Cooper 2 Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene | 60 John H. Cameron and Goran Stanivukovic 3 Milton and the Resource of Romance | 88 Colin Lahive

part two Magic and Wonder 4 Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of “a Devyls Son” | 113 David Rollo

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Contents

5 Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures | 140 John Carey 6 Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder | 159 Nandini Das

part three Reformation and Mediation 7 The “Romance” of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories | 183 Joseph Falaky Nagy 8 Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones | 199 Marcus Waithe

part four Transmission and Circulation 9 Dramatizing Heliodorus | 221 Helen Moore 10 Pericles and Polygenres | 238 Steve Mentz

Contents

11 Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance | 257 Stuart Sillars

part five Aesthetics and the Politics of Form 12 Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia | 281 Catherine Bates 13 “Romancy-Ladies”: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women | 299 Hero Chalmers 14 “The Visions of Romance Were Over”: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey | 317 Sara Malton Afterword | 339 Patricia Parker Contributors | 351 Index | 357

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Acknowledgments

Some of the essays in this book are based on papers first delivered at the international conference “Romance: Places, Times, Modes,” which Sergi Mainer and I organized at University College Cork in September 2012, during our tenure as Marie Curie Research Fellows. Other chapters were specially commissioned for this book. I wish to acknowledge particularly the assistance and hospitality that the School of English at University College Cork offered generously at the time of the conference, and during my two years at Cork. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at Saint Mary’s University, and the vice-president academic and research (acting), Dr Esther Enns, at Saint Mary’s University for providing financial support towards the publication. I would like to thank Mark Abley, editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his inspiring support and enthusiasm with which he guided my work on this book from start to finish. I am especially grateful to Grace Rosalie Seybold for her invaluable copy editing. The fine production team at McGill-Queen’s University Press made my work on this book easy and enjoyable.

Timely Voices

INTRODUCTION

Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature Goran Stanivukovic

The essays in this volume discuss moments in the history of romance writing in English literature that have affected how we read and interpret this ever-changing form. This book covers literature written between 1375 and 1940. These cutoff points refer to the rounded date of the composition of the earliest work discussed at some length in the book, the anonymous chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (usually dated 1375–late fourteenth century), and the rounded publication date of the latest work analyzed in the collection, David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), respectively. I wish to clarify that these cutoff dates should be understood as temporal boundaries of the individual texts considered by the individual contributors, not as indicators of a comprehensive coverage of literary works within that time. Of earlier dates are translations of Continental romances discussed in relation to writing in English, and the early works treated in the two essays on Irish and Gaelic influences. Because these early sources refer to cultural and folkloric contexts that shaped English romance writing in the medieval period, they stand outside the cutoff dates. But those translations from French and early Gaelic works will be adduced as comparanda and resources for recovering the past of romance writing in later works in the English romance tradition. John Carey’s and Joseph Nagy’s essays on the early Irish and Welsh stories as possible sources for English romance represent a way of bringing out the largely overlooked literary and cultural encounters in English romance writing with the Irish and Celtic material, in an otherwise extensive scholarship on external, mostly Classical and Continental, influences on and source materials for English romance.1 Therefore “English” in the title of this collection also covers non-English material – Classical,

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Continental, Irish, Celtic – as an influence on romance, not as a primary object of analysis. It is in the nature of romance to be made of foreign influences and to be woven out of different kinds of discourses coming from outside a single national culture. This not only makes romance an international genre par excellence, but it also makes any national label attached to “romance” secondary to the origin and, often, orientation of romance in cross-national discourses, narratives, and stories.

Resisting strict generic boundaries and seeing romance as a creative process and a set of possibilities for writing across time, this book treats romance as a resource for creating new writing. Reinvention and transmutation are two of the most prominent features of romance as a literary kind. In doing so, this book adopts a more nuanced approach to the permutations of romance, one that reaches beyond labelling literary writing as a mode, form, or type. When critics write about romance, they often treat it as a given genre. The essays in this volume, however, demonstrate that romance does not realize itself within rigid generic conventions, as does the sonnet, for example. They therefore treat romance not as a genre, but as a strategy of writing. In addressing the various ways in which romance has absorbed and has been absorbed by the traditional literary genres of drama, prose, and poetry, this book shows that if instead of considering romance a fixed and historically determined genre we analyze the strategies of romance writing for new literary creation, we come closer to seeing how romance operates as a literary text and how it produces creative possibilities which engender new writing. The essays in this volume explore a range of texts from the Middle English period to the twentieth century, and from cultural spaces outside England, such as early Irish and Celtic folklore and literature. In doing that, these essays chart new critical directions for analyzing an enduring revival of romance in literature, a project which started by treating romance “neither as fixed generic prescription nor as abstract historical category.”2 Although romance “is situated in and speaks of timeless moments,”3 these moments become most apparent when romance is understood as a process of transference from one text to another in

Introduction

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time, and as a form that self-consciously resists the constraints of its own narrative and stylistic devices. This book is intended to examine how romance works on its own terms, and how it gives vitality to writing by offering solutions to the textual, aesthetic, structural, ideological, and political issues that feature in the texts under investigation. Regardless of the specific approach to romance and the texts or authors examined, each of the essays in this book addresses romance as the origin of influence, where influence is also broadly understood not only as a transfer from one text or author to another, but also as a process by which specific features and devices of romance composition move between texts and create an array of new writing in English literature. The conceptual framework of the book, therefore, lies in the broad idea of influence, where influence is seen not as imitation but as testing the limits, or even the limitlessness, of the creative imagination. There are good reasons to privilege an approach to romance writing that explores concepts that relate to this form’s enduring internal structures, over an approach that focuses on taxonomy and historical progress. When Alastair Fowler states that “[t]he taxonomic problem seems intractable,” his subject is the difficulty of matching labels with the literary form to which they refer, but his point could be applied to romance in particular. Romance is a literary form to which Fowler devotes a significant amount of space in his book Kinds of Literature, which already indicates his interest in the mutability of taxonomy associated with romance as a literary kind. According to Fowler, romance is characterized by retrospection, by a narrative investment in the past, and by future projections of that narrative’s allegories and endings.4 Since approaches to romance taxonomy change with critical interests and theoretical practices, criticism on romance cannot avoid a discussion of taxonomy in general.5 Nevertheless, a polemic about the relationship of the term “romance” and the kinds of texts that term refers to may not lead to a conclusive answer. Patricia Parker captures the essence of the issue of taxonomy in romance criticism, stating that “[o]ne of the problems in discussing the form of romance has always been the need to limit the way[s] in which the term is applied.”6 One way of limiting the application of the term is, as this book demonstrates, to understand it to refer to a resource of writing across time; to make taxonomy secondary to

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analyses of romance in its own terms; and to see it as an authentic way of conceptualizing and crafting texts. However, such a limitation should not be understood as a way out of the problem of taxonomy; rather, it should be taken as an admission of the fact that debates about taxonomy are less fruitful for and helpful to interpretation, because they defer the more pleasurable task of engaging, deeply and analytically, with literary texts themselves. There is another reason for making taxonomy and literary genealogy secondary to exploring texts independently of genealogy, at least in the context of this book. We need only think of Chaucer’s narrative poetry, Shakespeare’s drama, and some contemporary novelists to be reminded how such writers can be seen as troubling romance as a genre, and therefore how imprecise a term such as “romance” can be when it is used to describe a specific text. This book offers numerous examples that illustrate the role romance writing has played in shaping literary forms by reshaping itself during its long life in English literature. It also shows how romance itself provides both space and material for experimentation with the creative imagination. Moments when romance makes an unexpected return in a text, especially in modernist literature, make “romance” a “capacious” term, one that “has an unnerving tendency to metamorphose from text to text or period to period.”7 In contrast to the burgeoning literary criticism on romance, which often focuses on a specific historical period, this volume takes a long view over different periods in order to make the creative capaciousness and durability of romance more apparent and visible. The individual case studies in this book are brought together more generally by the notion of romance as resource, and more specifically by the examination of how specific features, devices, structures, and styles of romance work in other texts and periods. But what is romance? Debates about the nature and structure of romance have a long history, and they still preoccupy literary theory and criticism. They started when Italian humanists launched a series of theoretical quarrels, questioning the nature of the epic poetry by Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. These early critics of romance attacked the “general structure” and unity of romance in particular because it related “many actions by one man” and did not present one action of one main

Introduction

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hero.8 They also questioned those epics’ violation of verisimilitude, as they, like romance, did not treat real and familiar subjects. Less than four decades later, England produced its own version of these humanist debates about the romance nature of epic, with the publication in 1590 of Edmund Spenser’s romance epic, The Faerie Queene. In a letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh, which is dated 1589 but which was published as a preamble to that work, Spenser ponders the relationship between the past and the present, the allegorical style of writing, the connection with Tasso, and the ethical basis of his work, which he describes as “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit.”9 Discussions about the nature and hybridity of romance continue in modern criticism and historiography as well. This collection extends these discussions, not only by treating romance as a resource more generally, but, more specifically, by conceptualizing a range of possible descriptions of the abundance of ways in which romance structure and discourse proliferated from medieval to the modern literature of the first half of the twentieth century, as literary forms, as writing strategies, or, as Steve Mentz says, as a “system of affinities.” New critical approaches and theories of romance have largely, and in differing ways, addressed the fact that the connection between the name or term attached to a text may not correlate with the “identity” of the text to which that name is attached.10 Under the influence of deconstruction, theories about the structure and operation of romance have focused on narrative as a defining characteristic of romance as a literary form, because romance violates verisimilitude in representation and storytelling, cultivates narrative discontinuities, and transgresses time as a category of narration.11 Yet even when criticism and theory examine in depth the generation of narrative in romance, the question of terminology still remains unanswered because the term does not correlate with the critical nuance that has, for instance, separated the novel from romance on the basis of the kind of narrative, the degree of verisimilitude, and the level of fantasy employed in treating subject of the story used in these two literary kinds.12 Thus Parker, tracing romance’s metamorphoses in poetry from Ariosto to Spenser and Milton, and from Keats to Stéphan Mallarmé and Wallace Stevens, considers romance to be a mode of writing. Barbara Fuchs, on the other hand, has debated

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whether romance is a genre or a mode, but has settled, temporarily, on “an instrumental notion of romance as a recurrent textual strategy.”13 Fuchs deserves to be credited for introducing this useful term to critical discussions about the work of romance in literature. But having introduced “strategy” in her book Romance, Fuchs does not define it or elaborate on the term at a greater length. Yet “strategy” is not merely a useful term; in fact, it is a crucial one, for it implies goal and purpose. It does not capture romance merely as a dynamic and practical set of conceptual and structural tools that enable literary production (unlike the term “mode,” which associates writing with specific kinds of styles and structural devices, but not necessarily with themes); instead, “strategy,” when attributed to romance, also points to a set of steps in effective persuasion, outcomes, and solutions to storytelling. In yet another attempt to associate romance with content and structure that writers recycle, emulate, and appropriate, Helen Cooper has explored the life of romance in the medieval and early modern periods, aided by the term “meme.” This term originated in neuroscience, but she uses it to capture those romance motifs that “remain specifically the same, sometime even down to verbal detail.”14 These motifs can vary, and they include the bear and the disguise, such verbal and notional formulas as “in a faraway country long time ago,” threats of burning, and also giants, monsters, dragons, knights, and hermits. Romance, Cooper shows, is replete with stock formulas and motifs that are carried through in transformations of the form. The purpose of memes may change in a recipient text, but memes act as signposts and signifiers that open up new possibilities for reading and interpretation because they signal an association with romance writing in texts that we may not identify as romances. Because of these features, romance has proven to be a convenient place, as well as a conduit, for political, ideological, and intimate inventions. Romance has also provided space for the contact of different media, specifically text and image, to jointly produce literary meaning. Unlike the sonnet, which is a generically fixed form that is oriented inward towards the interiority of a lyrical subject, romance is a resource of writing characterized by “the centrifugal force,”15 turned outward towards creating new narratives and scrutinizing the external world in new ways, including magic. As such, romance is a literary alternative not only to reality and religion, as Cooper argues in her essay in this collection,

Introduction

9

but to the psychological world of persons stylized in literature. The association of romance with marvels and miracles, myths and legends, represents one of the ways in which this turning away from reality is manifested in romance. And that has been the characteristic of romance writing in all times. No discussion of romance can exclude the form’s capacity to shape itself by reaching across linguistic, national, and ethnic boundaries. This multilingual and multinational traffic in which romance participates has also affected the ways in which we define romance. In a further attempt to grasp the ways in which romance works as a transnational literary kind, Fuchs has recently associated romance with the notion of “source,” by which she means not an original text that influences another text, but a broader cultural complex of elements characteristic of one place upon which romance draws in order to create its own new narrative world. In her incisive investigation of structurally different kinds of contact between early modern Spain and England, Fuchs has labelled Spain and Spanish literature, “whether in the original or in intermediary versions,”16 as sources in the production of both drama and romance literature in England, and also of translations. Among the sources that helped produce new literature in England in the 1590s was Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559), a popular pastoral romance, which played a role in the formation of the English romance tradition late in the sixteenth century. Fuchs suggests that a source creates space for a new literary composition. Yet the relationship between that new literary composition and the original “source” that inspired the new writing does not define a connection between an original and a counterfeit, nor between an authoritative text and its imitation. Rather, the value that defines this relationship lies in the freshness and authenticity, or originality, with which new creations are imbued following a contact between the English literature and the Iberian cultures. Source, however, is distinct from “resource.” Treating romance as resource, this book not only explores the absorptive nature of romance, but further rethinks the notions of source and even influence as categories that define the relationship with the direction of contact between texts in romance writing. Resource captures the flexibility and comprehensiveness of romance as inspiration and facilitator of new writing. An old, vernacular genre that started in metrical form, romance comes to

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writers in English literature trailing a long tradition behind itself; that tradition and the resilience of romance’s narrative strategies become resources in both new inventions and new interactions with the past. This approach to romance as a resource, as an ongoing engagement with the past while writing about the present and projecting the narrative towards the future, is a different take on romance than discussing it as a genre that lives in history but does not change in form. In a sense, then, romance has appealed to generations of writers over many centuries because they could approach it as a repository of stories and narrative patterns, of formal devices and wondrous and persistent “memes” – which they could select, twist, and reshape to fit a fresh purpose in a new time. Hence, romance, as such a repository of styles and strategies, is also a theoretical and ideological resource in different kinds of writing.17 Romance mixes with epic, pops up in travel writing, creates drama, moulds itself in prose, integrates folklore and legends, emulates oral literary tradition, and resurfaces allegorically in engravings. When we think of romance as resource we suspend the constraints of a genre and understand resource on its own terms. Different approaches to the idea of romance as resource in this book, therefore, entail asking questions about what it is that is absorbed from romance in other texts, and what possibilities for new creation that absorbing affords in bringing out the larger issues contained within the text. Understood as resource, then, romance is a portable form, moving the subject matter into one of the three main genres, reimagining those genres in the process, and transferring structural devices between texts. This current of romance elements across texts and time is what links romance, in this book, to the idea of influence as a significant new reinvention. And this is why this book, which takes cognizance of the renaissance in the study of romance that has been particularly underway since the 1990s, addresses romance from an angle that has not been used thus far. The focus in each chapter of this book is on illuminating how a specific strategy of romance writing expands both the idea of romance as creative material and our understanding of any new meaning created in the process in a new text. As a whole, this book is intended to explore the attraction of romance as a resource that extends beyond ideological, aesthetic, and historical boundaries of romance as a specific historical category.

Introduction

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The title of this collection, Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, acknowledges the fact that romance has been one of the few literary kinds that have been consistently part of an entire body of English literary from medieval times to the twenty-first century. This title also captures the many critical voices, approaches, and strategies adopted in the essays. The title, Timely Voices, derives from The Faerie Queene, where in book 1, the narrator says that “many Bards, that to the trembling chord / Can tune their timely voyces cunningly” (1.5.3), suggesting voices arrayed skilfully and imaginatively to reach back to the past and into the future. For the purpose of this book, speaking and writing critically of the present via the past while also looking forward recalls the transcendence of time, which this volume on romance writing also does in practice, in the essays it gathers together.18 This volume acknowledges a creative resilience of romance that has not disappeared, despite (or maybe because of) the attacks and acts of disparagement that have followed romance from its inception. Crucially, this understanding of romance as a resource for writing resistant to the exigencies of individual historical periods suggests that romance at once looks backward, towards sources and resources, and forward, towards the recovery of an already romanced past in new works of literature. As the essays in this collection attest, by giving the past new meaning in new texts, romance furnishes readers at any time with an opportunity to experience it not as an antiquated literary kind, but as mediation between past, present, and future. As Nandini Das has demonstrated in her incisive investigation of Renaissance romances, romance is a form characterized by “betweenness,” because it mediates between the past and the future narrative, while belonging to both the temporal and spatial spheres.19 Betweenness, however, does not end when a critic conceptualizes how romance utilizes time and space, but also continues when that critic reconstructs the otherwise opaque and ambivalent relationship between related narratives and texts. This is the case in Catherine Bates’s trenchant discussion in this volume of the narrative strategy of ending in which lies the solution for the ambiguity about the connection between Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia. Every attempt has been made to map out as many authors whose texts demonstrate the potency and multitudinous characteristics of

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romance writing in as many moments in English literature as possible. The goal of this book is to represent main texts and key authors, and to show how drama, prose, and poetry are re-envisaged in contact with romance writing. Inevitably, selection has trumped comprehensiveness, because the emphasis in the book is on the coverage of as many categories as feasible around which romance writing is explored, not on the historical coverage of texts associated with romance writing. My hope is that the book will encourage further research in the archives of English literary tradition, which may lead to a more comprehensive critical engagement with the variety of romance writing in English literature. Yet, this is a moment at which I want to draw attention to the fact that, and explain why, the book features proportionately more essays on the early modern period than on others. Many literary trends and cultural movements in England and in the West since the fifteenth century – since, that is, what we might call the advent of modernity – generate themselves out of either contrast or identification with the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.20 During the early modern period, romance also changed form and flourished as fiction written in prose. After the heyday of predominantly metrical romance writing in the medieval period, at no other moment in English literature did romance burgeon to the extent it did in the early modern period, stretching from about the 1570s to the 1660s, when it dominated the print culture. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was more printed fiction than printed drama, and most of the printed fiction could be categorized as romances.21 In the same period, romance became a dramatic kind as well, and a rather peculiar one. While Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s work on Robert Greene has documented the extent to which printed prose and its chapbook versions changed our knowledge about the importance of romances in the formation of popular readership in England,22 Cyrus Mulready’s study of romance as staged drama has revealed the depth to which early modern English theatre diversified its repertoire by staging romance, and to what extent romance was a popular staged form as well.23 As I show later in this introduction, the early modern period in England was also the time when the term “romance” was first used in connection with drama. The archives which now store significant number of copies

Introduction

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of romances printed in the early modern period provide evidence that romance attracted both noble and vulgar readers. These collections also house printed texts of romances, which are important sources for criticism about the emergence of gendered literature, bearing traces of readership and book ownership by both men and women.24 Helen Hackett has documented the extent to which women as subjects of romances, and as writers and translators, represented agents in the renewed tradition of romance writing in the English Renaissance.25 Yet, as readers, owners, and writers of romance, early modern men resisted the cultural association of romance with feminization. Romances, in fact, offered new ways of increasingly conceptualizing masculinity as romantic rather than heroic, as was the case in Middle English romances.26 Because of the multivalent culture of romance writing and the sheer number of romances printed and performed in early modern England, representing romance to the extent this volume does also means acknowledging the golden age of romance writing and printing in English literature. Romance peaked around the time of the English Civil War in 1640, and the fashion for romance ended with the Restoration. This moment of romance writing is the subject of Colin Lahive’s and Hero Chalmers’s essays. At no other moment after the early modern period did romance achieve comparable popularity to what it had in the early modern period. However, as it transitioned towards modernity, romance, as Sara Malton demonstrates, gained importance because it was part of the literary process that contributed to the development of the novel, bringing to the novel elements of gothic sensibility. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, therefore, the status and form of romance underwent a major transformation. Romance was woven into Gothic fiction, was interpolated in the historical novel, and resurfaced as melodrama in the Victorian period.27 As a way of acknowledging the multitudinous proliferation of romance in the early modern period, a period known as a heyday of staged drama, this collection features a number of essays that capture radically different ways in which early modern romance writing manifested itself. Writers of these essays address romance against the background of politics and aesthetics, as a form that shaped reading habits, as a literary space for imitating the classics, in relation to printed

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images, and as a creative challenge to critical writing. This collection highlights how specific romances transform cultural debate into the subject of their narratives; how non-English romance material and folklore shape English romance; and how modern literature absorbs and transforms both aesthetic and political features of medieval romances. Medieval romance writing is represented in Cooper’s exploration of the knight and the hermit, which are treated as devices out of which romance narrative emerges. It is also the subject of David Rollo’s interpretation of Malory’s writing. Though they are devoted to different texts and topics, the conceptual thread that brings these essays together is their exploration of romance as a secular alternative to the law of religion that determines the context from within which the romance emerges, and which it calls into question. This line of inquiry is further extended in Das’s essay, which begins by tracing the notion of the ordinary, the everyday, and the mundane in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a later-fourteenth-century chivalric romance, as a way into her reading of the ordinary as a kind of wonder in Thomas Lodge’s romance Rosalynde and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Das’s contribution establishes a conceptual connection between medieval and early modern romance, and provides a link between the modernity of the Middle Ages and the everyday as a subject of inquiry in contemporary cultural theory. The persistence of the medieval romance becomes apparent again in Marcus Waithe’s chapter, where it emerges in the form of Victorian medievalism in William Morris’s and David Jones’s writing. The volume is not organized in a linear or a historical fashion, and neither offers an overview of romance as a given historical genre, nor traces a progress of its themes through time. Rather, this is a crosshistorical book in which the essays are arranged around related concepts that address key elements central to the composition of romance. These concepts include narration; transformation; magic; wonder; openendedness; improbability; movement; cultural transmission, mediation, and reformation; reading habits; and ending. Emphasizing the continuity of romance writing has implications for the contexts, allowing different topics, themes, authors, works, and approaches to be pursued in individual chapters. The organization of the book around conceptual categories represents a new approach to exploring romance, because it

Introduction

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allows individual texts to speak with their full narrative voice. The emphasis on categories and themes also provides conceptual coherence within individual chapters, in the five parts of the book, and in the book as a whole, allowing contributors to investigate their topics as resources within a historical period of their specialty without the constraints that are sometimes imposed by chronology. Several common themes emerge from the essays that follow; those essays are thus organized according to the concepts they explore. These themes include the composition of romance around structural devices; romance as a new idea of source; romance writing that emerges from the interaction between the visual and the textual; romance as intimately connected to reading practices; and romance writing as a way of engaging with politics. The book consists of five parts, each focusing on two related concepts that are explored individually or together in the essays grouped in them. As the book moves from one part to another, the concepts within each part are arranged in a way that suggests the progression of argument from general to specific considerations. Coherence of the collection as a whole is established by sequencing the individual parts in such a way that they form a developing argument about romance as a resource of composition and of aesthetic and political contestation. Part 1, “Narration and Transformation,” brings together chapters that are concerned with defining features of the narrative strategies of romance writing as an alternative to religious and political attitudes. Part 2, “Magic and Wonder,” consists of essays that approach magic and wonder, germane to romance writing, by exploring different perspectives of critical understanding of these features derived from Celtic folklore, as the source of the everyday, and in the contest between the language of legality and fantasy. In part 3, “Reformation and Mediation,” two thematically different essays that also address two historically disparate periods are brought together to demonstrate the common structure of transforming medieval material in new writing. One of the features of romance is that it “invokes the past or the socially remote.”28 Yet, as the essays in this section show, the past and the socially remote return. The past is revived in a new form and with a new significance for the present and the future, reminding us that romance writing at any given time is always, in some way, writing about previous as well as

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present and future times. By exploring the reformation of old material in the process of romance writing as a way of literary mediation between different periods of writing, the essays in this part demonstrate that romance writing is a process of uninterrupted revival and transmutation across time. Part 4, “Transmission and Circulation,” builds on the previous part in that it engages with the specific and differing versions of mediation, across different media, and between texts and their cultural circulation. Thus the essays that explore different versions of transmission and circulation in this part explore the intersection of the textual and the visual, Classical texts as suggestive resources for later romances, records of readership, and the commodification of romance. The collection ends with part 5, “Aesthetics and the Politics of Form,” tying together the opening of the book with the ending, by exploring a specific structural device – endings – as a way of contesting both the narrative and the idea of politically recuperative endings; also, it displays how strategies of writing romance as an aesthetic form bear political ramifications. The importance attached to exploring romance as a resource for writing is reflected in the structure of this book, which opens with Cooper’s chapter on the border between religion and secular chivalry in early romances of the Middle English period, and the structural and cultural tensions arising from the transformation of romance narrative as it shifts between religious to secular concerns and functions. From re-evaluating the transformation of the hermit, a single narrative device as it mediates between the secular and the religious in romance writing over a long section of time in the early stages of romance writing, to addressing the medievalism of romance in early-twentieth-century writing, these essays bypass national and generic categories to explore other narrative categories and devices of romance writing, such as marvels, wonder, and transmutation of texts, as well as reading practices. The book closes with essays that examine the intersection of aesthetic and political concerns of romance writing. The book features essays on both canonical and non-canonical writers. It also demonstrates how the resources of romance writing enrich drama, poetry, and prose, not by being imitated as a literary form but by existing as a producer of literature.29 Poetry is addressed by way of an

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exploration of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and a selection of Old Irish, Gaelic, and English romance poetry. The essays which address these texts show how romance infuses poetry with beliefs and contentions that draw themes from religion, law, mythology, folklore, chivalry, and the supernatural. This engagement with romance writing in an assessment of the epic shows that the epic is not a historical and political narrative only, but that the history and politics it purports to stylize are particularly bent and manipulated by the work of romance. The essays on prose show that prose writing in England depended for its literary power on the metamorphic nature of romance in multitudinous ways. From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae to Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; from Heliodorus’s Aethiopica to Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens; from Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters to Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder and Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda; and finally from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to David Jones’s In Parenthesis – prose has absorbed and has been absorbed by romance writing in ways that show that the conceptual, deliberative, rhetorical, thematic, imaginative, and narrative energies of romance have acted as transformers of the prose genre. The amount of prose fiction explored in the book shows not only that in the passage of romance towards modernity the metrical romance of the medieval period was replaced by the prose romance of the early modern period, but that the rhetorical, narrative, and cognitive strategies of romance writing increasingly suited the changing nature of the genre – prose fiction – grounded in inventing and deliberating arguments whose purpose was to hide or reveal a political position.30 In the course of its long literary life in English, romance has become a type of writing that has raised questions, inspired debates and controversies, and scrutinized the world and times that engendered it. Used as a qualifier for drama, the term “romance” was first employed by Edward Dowden, an Irish Shakespearean working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dowden, though still Victorian in many of his approaches, was in other respects also the first modern critic of Shakespeare. He used the term “romance” to describe Pericles

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(1608), The Winter’s Tale (1609), Cymbeline (1610), and The Tempest (1611), the four plays Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. That those four plays were sole-authored, and that some, like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, are also among his most complex drama, tell us that for Shakespeare, the writer and man of the theatre, romance as a way of reconfiguring human experience into highly fantastical literature was an important artistic endeavour. This creative process offered him an opportunity to engage with the literary tradition of romance writing in a new way, and to be challenged and inspired by romance tradition in what resulted in fresh and authentic intellectual, aesthetic, and theatrical experiments with romance writing. According to Dowden, Shakespeare’s late plays did not fit the category of history, yet he connected them, if loosely, with both comedies and tragedies. Dowden maintains that “the Romances have in common the incidents of reunion, reconciliations, and the recovery of lost children.”31 Modern criticism has established that these, some of the most complex and imaginatively unusual plays, are in fact richer, more complex and complicated, than even what Dowden proposed.32 Dowden’s introduction of the label “romance” for a group of plays for which there was no name before is also a reminder that the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, collected in one book by his fellow actors John Heming and Henry Condell and published in 1623, includes the categories “Comedies,” “Histories,” and “Tragedies,” but not a generic signifier “romances,” even if the term “romance” would have been familiar to these early editors because it was used in literature of the time. Also, Shakespeare never used the word “romance” in his writing.33 Like the Renaissance and modern writers whose works are discussed in this collection, who, like Milton, for instance, use the term “romance” in order to concretize and give shape to ideas and forms that at their root have no definite shape at all, Dowden also attempts to imply a shape, form, and generic belonging to such a fluid form in drama. Yet, as Helen Moore’s, Steve Mentz’s, Colin Lahive’s, and, in a different way, Marcus Waithe’s chapters show, by resisting typology and by expanding upon how deviation from fixed categories helps our understanding the ways literary types work creatively, we can see how romance opens up its full creative potential in turning the signification of romance into new

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meanings when romance is transposed from one moment in time to another. It might be that the absence of the label “Romances” in the First Folio reflects an understanding of the late plays as precisely belonging to the kind of drama that was perceived as new enough that it shattered an understanding of generic belonging altogether and that therefore could not, and ought not to, be categorized. Writing at the height of various breakthroughs in knowledge in the late nineteenth century, Dowden’s introduction of the category of “romance” for some of the most imaginatively inventive and generically slippery plays in Shakespeare’s canon is a sign of his modernity. And the moderns prefer labels and categories because they help organize knowledge. Yet, one wonders whether a label such as “romance” when used to describe the late plays in Shakespeare’s canon is actually more a disadvantage than an advantage to literary criticism. As the two essays on drama and as Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s scholarship on readership34 demonstrate, early modern readers and audiences understood romance as something prevalent, potent, useful, dangerous, ubiquitous – without feeling the need to restrict that experience by attaching labels to the texts and “entertainments” (as early modern plays were sometimes called) they enjoyed. When contributors to this book use “resource” as a keyword, they attempt to recreate how many of the writers featured herein understood “romance” – as a reservoir of ideas, images, narrative strategies, aesthetic possibilities, and ideologies – without feeling the need to highlight what can and cannot be termed romance. The essays in this book show that drama reinvents romance resource beyond dramaturgy and language. They also demonstrate how dramatic conventions and sentiments were altered under the creative influence of romance, producing the kind of plays that would never be reproduced again in the history of early modern drama. Romance reshaped plot, encouraged generic mixing, and produced some of the most important examples of hybrid drama in early modern England, and thus created a new reading audience for printed dramatic romance. By exploiting to extremes the supernatural that was central to romance late in his career, Shakespeare, more than at any point in his creative life, made drama a complete play of fantasy, a source of raw material for testing the limits of verbal, visual, and theatrical imagination in the process of troubling

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the limits of the dramatic form. Beyond Shakespeare, this collection also shows that romance was written into both Jacobean and Caroline drama, from Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (performed in 1609) to The Strange Discovery: A Tragic-Comedy (printed in 1640). These are only two examples of drama where allegory and sentiments characteristic of these kinds of increasingly popular drama derived from romance writing of antiquity. By giving new identity to the kind of stage drama and performance that started to flourish in England in the seventeenth century, romance’s adaptability proved again to be one of its most resourceful features.

The specific essays in this book show that romance has been an endless source of novel solutions to and ways out of narrative complications: that it has been a force of imagination that pushes the story and its telling forward. Cooper’s “The Knight and the Hermit: Crossing the Reformation,” which opens part 1 of the book, shows medieval romance at work in the writing of the Reformation all the way to late Elizabethan literature. She explores how romance becomes an alternative to the tension that exists between secular and religious tendencies, recognized allegorically in the figures of the chivalric knight and the hermit and most potently realized in “hostility to the hermit” in Reformation romances, where the removal indicates reaction against a papist way of life. Cooper traces the philologically complex route this excising of the hermit from the centre of religious life in romance writing took by engaging with romance originating in Old Catalan and translated into Latin and several vernaculars, tracing the motif in the third story of Boccaccio’s Decameron, and examining the anxiety over hermits in Protestant neochivalric writing, most evidently in Guy of Warwick. Cooper’s essay shows how in the process of transforming romance narratives featuring the hermit (narratives first associated with Catholicism, adapted in preReformation England, and finally revitalized in Protestant English writing), the hermit, a staple device in romance, became an ideological problem for late Elizabethan and Jacobean romance writing, in which

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the narrative oscillates between upholding or resisting the eremitic life. Cooper’s analysis of otium, or a contemplative retreat into the leisure of “pastoral contentment,” associated with the hermit in Protestant romances, gestures towards Das’s sustained analysis of the duration of “leisure” as a theme in early modern romances, in her exploration of the everyday and the ordinary, versions of otium as a way of life as narrated in Thomas Lodge’s and Thomas Nashe’s fictions. Ranging across different periods of writing, and giving an example of how a persistent device enables and reconfigures romance narrative as it changes in time, Cooper’s essay also lays the ground for a theme that is threaded through the book – the relationship between, on the one hand, the narrative form and the form of narration and, on the other, ideological and political sentiments that affect particular uses of the form in individual texts. John H. Cameron and Goran Stanivukovic’s essay, “Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene,” considers The Faerie Queene as a humanist text. The essay extends Cooper’s discussion of narrative devices, by exploring digression as a narrative as well as a rhetorical strategy that engages the reader to ask questions about the text and the world from which it emerges, questions that extend beyond allegorical and political readings of the legends and of the marvels. The essay’s guiding idea is that narrative in romance writing is often moved forward by accidents, by digressive adventures, and by incidental circumstances that are only seemingly unimportant. Yet such instances are occasions that open up space for a critical discussion about the relationship between narrative and evidence. That epic writing continued to draw on resources of the romance in the late seventeenth century tells us that the humanist polemics about the nature of romance and epic have resulted not in favouring one over the other kind of writing, but in a creative intertwining of both. Thus, Colin Lahive shows in “Milton and the Resource of Romance” that for Milton romance represented both a problem of composition and a resource upon which to draw for narrative and aesthetic strategies to capture the quest motif and grasp “the final revelation in God’s narrative.” Lahive argues that romance became a resource for Milton in part because of its long and prominent tradition in the Renaissance, and because

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of what romance meant to Renaissance readers and writers who deployed it to educate and guide readers of both genders and all classes to prudent action. Milton also uses romance as a narrative tool to help his readers understand the idea of providence in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Lahive contends that Milton’s nuanced appropriations of romance show that romance’s capacity for memory yields energy to the royalist agenda. Romance has frequently been concerned with magic and wonder; at times the supernatural that originates in romance becomes the main imaginative force that moulds the narrative and gives force to fantasy in literature. Part 2 opens with David Rollo’s essay, “Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of ‘a Devyls Son,’” which traces the “rehabilitation” of the magician Merlin in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur in medieval romances as a polyvalent and controversial figure whose association with clairvoyance cuts across his agency in political decisiveness and governance, and as an author of romance narratives as alternatives to truth and the real world. Merlin, that famous invention of romance tradition, becomes, as Rollo argues, a medium through which the culture that produced this figure negotiated its political and historical anxieties. The kind of cultural transmission of marvels and mysteries explored in John Carey’s essay, “Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures,” locates possible sources of English romance in early Irish and Gaelic writing. While source criticism has established Iberian, French, and Hellenic influences on English romance, the role early Irish and more broadly Gaelic sources played in the shaping of English romance has remained largely unexamined. Carey’s essay fills this lacuna of English literary criticism with a plethora of possible influences dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Carey’s detailed examination of motifs, verbal formulas, stylistic patterns used in describing landscape, and most of all the structure and stylization of the Otherworld suggests an extensive traffic in narratives and discourses through which early Gaelic tradition contributed to the development of romance. Carey’s analysis demonstrates that the transnational circulation of romance resources along the Hiberno-English line of influence included also the transformation of Classical stories, such as that of Orpheus, which entered English romance through early Gaelic sources.

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Carey shows that fantasies about the enchanting mysteries of the otherworld narrated in English romances drew heavily on early Celtic romance writing. If Carey’s essay takes us to the heart of the otherworldly moments in romance soaked in the stories from the rich narrative world of HibernoBritish medieval writing, Nandini Das shows us the other “more outrageous” side to the romance otherworld, one that we may not be accustomed to. Her essay “Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder” illuminates romance’s connection with ordinary life, as a respite – at least for the reader – from the iteration of a narrative about the larger panorama of history and politics that otherwise imbues romance. The essay extends in new directions the idea put forward by Gillian Beer that “it is typical of romance to be much occupied with the everyday paraphernalia of the world it creates.”35 Das explores what happens to romance narrative at points when a reader, absorbed in taking in the heroic adventure that is the fabric of romance storytelling, looks away from such grand instances of wonder to attend to the moments of “the ordinary, the inconsequential, and the everyday.” What functions do such moments play in a reading experience, given our expectations of romance? The everyday is embodied in the act of narration. By giving the ordinary, even the trivial, space to define the place of romance discourse, the ordinary, to echo Michel de Certeau, also represents the productive experience of the text;36 the ordinary is both an element of the heroic in the story and a narrative component. Das’s analysis of individual instances of the everyday in romances by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and John Lyly, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the thirteenthcentury French romance La Vengeance Requidel (The Revenge of Raguidel), demonstrates not only the persistence of the everyday and the ordinary in romance, but also readers’ expectations to experience it as an alternative to wonder as strangeness, and magic as supernatural. In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the arrival of a stranger knight interrupts the crisis of hospitality. In Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, that cornucopia of romance writing and other modes of storytelling, the remarkable telling of human death reveals the “untellable” in all of its macabre humanity. In Sidney’s Arcadia, the reader is stunned, and moved to the core, at the

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moment when the narrative pauses for the knight Philanax to see the dead body of his young brother Agenor. This chilling moment is different from another, where Sir Gawain feels snug while slumbering under luxurious sheets, soon to be seduced by a lady. In moments such as these, the everyday frames the symbolic, the allegorical, and the wondrous; it transforms social aspirations and private anxieties and pleasures that would otherwise remain “untellable and untold” into readable and legible revelations about life. It could then be said that it is the everyday as much as the allegorical or wondrous that fulfills romance’s didactic purpose. The ordinary, the everyday, and the leisurely are reminders that for all the allegorical tissue of romance writing, romance’s bond with reality is, as Erich Auerbach argued long ago, a hard one to break.37 Not only does the everyday pierce through the allegorical and heroic fabric of romance, but, as Das shows, it enters the world of heroic moments captured in Albrecht Dürer’s engravings from the early sixteenth century. The cross-disciplinary perspective that Das brings in support of her argument about the continuation of the everyday in the arts of literature and engraving opens up a discussion about the role and importance of the everyday as a trans-media component in the creative imagination that also provides a counterpoint to the fantastical and the magical in romance, bringing romance down from a high level of fantasy to the level of occasional realism. A different kind of mediation in romance writing is the subject of part 3. Opening this part is Joseph Nagy’s “The ‘Romance’ of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories,” which looks at the early Irish and Celtic romances that enriched romance writing in the Hiberno-British cultural archipelago between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Taking us back to the origins of romance as it developed in the early Irish literary traditions with the arrival of the Normans on the island in the twelfth century, Nagy mines a number of texts to demonstrate that early Irish Celtic romance was capable of assimilating British Celtic traditions of storytelling, as a way of mediating between Classical and Continental, especially French, romance traditions. The product of this mediation shows that the reformation of romance writing as a crosscultural phenomenon of fusing elements from several intertwined cultures was exceptionally varied and vibrant. The blend of motifs, myths,

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and legends originating in different cultures in which romances were written in the Middle Ages has made romance a source of new stories in modern literature. This process of literary transmission, whereby medieval literature and culture are re-envisaged in modern writing, represents a version of neo-medievalism, of an appropriation of the Middle Ages in modern literature and culture. Marcus Waithe’s essay, “Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones,” shows that medieval romance is not alien to contributing to modern writing, and that romance is a mediator between times and between the forms the creative imagination takes. Waithe takes as his subject the development of “uncanny romance” in several Victorian and early-twentieth-century literary contexts, focusing on texts in which romance features as a mediator between medieval and modern times. The uncanny emergence of romance in a modern text makes romance the primitive that returns to reimagine modern, secular, and un-heroic contexts. Yet in reappearing uncannily in modern literature, romance loses the archaic charge of the old and becomes itself an expression of modernity. As Waithe shows, the aesthetic and cognitive characteristics of this uncanny textual mediation lie in both contextual and cultural conditions that facilitated the reformation of romance in modern writing. Both the Freudian notion of art as a compromise between the conscious and the unconscious,38 resulting in the unnerving familiarity with an artistic (or, in this instance, textual) form, and Freud’s neglect of medieval texts in his identification of the sources of that familiarity make it possible for Waithe to explore the work of the medieval romance in William Morris’s short stories and in David Jones’s long poem about the First World War, In Parenthesis (1937). Waithe argues that the presence of romance in both Morris and Jones subverts our expectations of romance rooted in an iterative narrative centred on the quest for identity; concurrently, the romance that haunts these texts becomes the source of their modernity by its capacity to disrupt the coherent narrative of identity. As the essays in part 4, “Transmission and Circulation,” demonstrate, literary and cultural transmissions take many forms in romance writing, depending on the space within which the romance circulates. Helen Moore’s essay “Dramatizing Heliodorus,” which opens this section,

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explores “Heliodoran moments” in English romance writing as a space of literary traffic between antique prose and seventeenth-century drama. As the example of Heliodorus’s romance Aethiopica (fifth century ad) suggests, these moments are both suggestive and direct, and they are always multivalent. To capture the fluid nature and scope of this influence, Moore coins the elegant phrase of the “fugitive presence” of Heliodorus in this drama. Writing directly in the spirit of this collection about romance as a resource, Moore uses this phrase to address, as she puts it, the “inherent scholarly inhibition about unprovable romance ‘sources.’” Moore’s formulation therefore extends even further what this collection does; that is, it offers a new “analytical vocabulary” to grasp the richness and only apparent elusiveness of the literary milieu out of which romance emerges but which is in this essay located in the tradition of reading, translating, and adapting Heliodorus in the seventeenth century. The two playtexts on which Moore focuses in her discussion, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens and John Gough’s The Strange Discovery: A Tragi-Comedy, feature in fact as case studies for a much larger discussion of a number of mostly manuscript versions of translations of Aethiopica, which have not yet been uncovered and discussed in extant scholarship devoted to the influence of Heliodorus. In her chapter, Moore puts forward a reading of two kinds of drama as instances of imitation. She unpacks the philological details within the larger picture of the complex, elaborate, and frequent practices of dramatic engagement by using the ideas that emerge out of an assimilation of Heliodorus in Neo-classical English drama. Moore’s essay, therefore, creates a much wider space for the role romance writing played in shaping dramatic practices and crafting dramaturgy in the theatre as well. When the eponymous character in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s play Pericles tells the audience, My education has been in arts and arms, Who looking for adventures in the world, Was by the rough seas reft of ships and men, And after shipwreck driven upon this shore39 his words are a reminder of the place romance reading played in the shaping of stage plays. Imagining Pericles as a knight-errant from ro-

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mance literature, the passage would have reminded early Jacobean audiences of the chivalric fictions of knights’ wanderings in distant lands (often in the eastern Mediterranean, whence Pericles speaks now), of his displays of chivalric virtue in defeating military obstacles and courting damsels, of his dodging pirates and tempests, and of his sometimes being shipwrecked on the shores of unfamiliar lands – this passage raises questions for a modern critic of how to qualify the effect of romance in drama when romance permeates it to such structural and imaginative depths. Influenced primarily by Confessio Amantis, a late-fourteenthcentury narrative poem by John Gower, and Lawrence Twine’s latesixteenth-century Patterne of Painefull Adventures, texts that are generally considered to be the primary sources for Pericles, this play represents one of the early modern plays upon which craftsmanship in the use of romance as resource can best be tested, because the playwrights’ vision is rooted in the use of different structural, rhetorical, and stylistic properties of romance. Steve Mentz’s essay, “Pericles and Polygenres,” turns around the idea of historical genres and their subgeneric types. He puts forward a view that the ever-changing nature of romance may be understood as part of a “polygenetic system.” In such a system, when drama comes into contact with romance as a structural principle and a set of possibilities, romance reveals itself to be not an “unsystemic” structure but a “normative form” that in fact absorbs elements of epic, comedy, or tragedy. Building on the theories of authorship and hybridity in textual composition, Mentz proposes to understand romance not as a singular genre but a “system of affinities” and unfixed “tactical allegiances” which he uses to account for excess and superabundance as principles that comprise romance as a literary resource. Eager to preserve the idea of authenticity in Shakespeare’s writing, some editors have wondered whether this hybrid play should be called “experimental” because some experiments fail, and because experimentation is what Shakespeare does anyway throughout his writing, so it is not surprising that he does it in Pericles as well.40 By extension, thinking of Pericles as an experiment risks acknowledging its achievement as a dramatic whole. Yet Mentz’s essay demonstrates that to approach Pericles even as an experiment does not fully capture the polyphonic depths of this neglected but resourceful play built around complexities and amplifications of the multitudinousness of romance.

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This section ends with Stuart Sillars’s essay “Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance,” which explores a unique way in which romance was transmitted in early modern writing – through woodcuts and engravings, showing scenes of chivalry embedded in printed texts and displayed in their frontispieces, as in Munday’s work. Sillars analyzes the interplay between text and image, derived from the allegorical illustrations in Stephen Bateman’s The Travayled Pilgrim (1569), from which the printer took the images for Munday’s fiction. He argues that the images are a crucial link in a complex and tightly knit network in the transmission of meaning between images and texts, a process which, he argues, has remained largely unacknowledged because of “the habitual academic separation of texts into genres.” His detailed analysis of the ways in which images worked in contact with Munday’s text reveals the essential role engravings played as forms of “meditative entities” in the production of romance meaning, which sets Zelauto apart from other illustrated fictional narratives. Although the role illustration plays in developing arguments about the broader implication of romance as resource on early modern fiction is not the main area of focus in this book, both Das’s reaching out to Dürer and Sillars’s use of the Bateman woodcuts demonstrate a productive link between textual and aesthetic engagement with ideas that drive narrative in romance. The collection ends with a group of essays in part 5, “Aesthetics and the Politics of Form,” which open up discussion about romance as a literary mediator between politics and aesthetics, and also as a form that, by asking political questions about restitution, which is one of the key features of romance, manages to scrutinize the role of narrative in the presentation of identity. Catherine Bates’s essay, “Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,” takes its starting point from the overarching idea that frames this collection, one that views romance as a literary and textual strategy, distinct from the notion of a genre as a defined category. On the foundation of this conceptual principle, Bates builds an argument about endings that raises ontological questions about what we actually know about the sudden interruption of Sidney’s Old Arcadia and its relationship to the New Arcadia, as a separate text, not a sequel, and about how we read these two texts, sep-

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arately and together. A narrative formula whose openness or sudden twist becomes a compositional resource upon which the politics of romance depends, endings ensure that both parts continue to be read as romance. Bates begins by engaging with the historiographic questions raised over time about the uncertain and complex textual relationship between a version of Arcadia that Sidney composed between 1577 and 1582, which he left unfinished for a reason yet unknown and which was first published only in 1926, and a substantially expanded version, on which Sidney worked between 1582 and 1584, but which was published by his friend Fulke Greville in 1590, and then again by Sidney’s sister, Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. Since the publishing history of this work is also a history of often opposing critical views about the relationship between these texts, relationships determined by where one text ends and where the other begins (and where that other text ends, too), Bates specifically engages in a detailed philological analysis leading her to uncover possible clues about the romance formula of delay and specific motifs built into that formula, which assures that the parts are read as romance. Hero Chalmers’s essay, “‘Romancy-Ladies’: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women,” tracks the intersection of romance and politics by considering the unfinished status of two romances composed by writers of different political orientations, republican puritan (Hutchinson) and royalist (Pulter). Chalmers puts emphasis on how the compositional and stylistic strategies deployed in the texts by these two writers produce self-control in managing both “subjugation to excessive emotion” and “submission to harmful religious and political passions.” In the hands of these writers, romance becomes a means for affecting readers to balance their passions between their secular and religious proclivities. Exploring how texts impact on readers’ social and moral position roots Chalmers’s discussion in close textual and cultural analysis, which sets her discussion apart from a general position taken in earlier criticism. She argues that “Romance reading is both an assertion of deeply felt psychological needs and a means for satisfying those needs.”41 Chalmers’s essay is a timely reminder of the fact that mid-seventeenth-century romance was taken as a resource for writing, and also for reading, in a period when both educated and non-educated

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readers had become accustomed to romance conveying a serious message. Those readers would have sought in romance not merely pleasure and entertainment but crucial issues such as political crises, religious polemics, social problems, and debates about gender, sex, and identity issues, all of which mattered to them. Chalmers’s discussion demonstrates that, behind the stylistically rich layer of fictional allegories, romance contributed to English literature some of the most effective strategies for inventing rhetorical arguments and raising questions of social and political significance. Those questions are extended to include the economic and financial issues in Sara Malton’s acute interpretation of the role of romance in Jane Austen’s crafting of the heroine’s plot in Northanger Abbey (1817). Closing this volume, Malton’s chapter confirms the resilience of some of the key compositional and aesthetic components of romance – memory, wonder, miracle, recollection of history as well as historical ambiguities – in both putting obstacles to and facilitating happiness in the future and in marriage, that age-old “meme” of most romance writing. Yet Malton’s chapter also shows that economics has been an enduring conceptual partner of romance writing ever since it first started to appear in the mercantile discourses in the narratives about travelling merchants, which we encounter in some of the earliest instances of Middle English romances.

Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature demonstrates the depth and sophistication with which romance has been deployed in writing across a long period of time. Treating romance as an archive of stories and a rich set of narrative and stylistic tools, writers have embraced the vitality and malleability of romance and its compositional resources to raise crucial questions about time and identity, reading and society, fiction and reality, text and image, and fantasy and narrative. The literary texts discussed in this collection demonstrate how central romance writing was in giving literature space to explore that which lies at the heart of imaginary writing, including delay, straggling, wonder, movement, displacement, reclamation, and restoration. The presence of

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romance in English literature shows not only how English literature evolved, but also how that evolution depended so greatly on the role romance played in it. Despite the criticism that it has often evoked from critics, romance is in fact one of literature’s most resilient, protean, and productive resources, one that has carried English literature across time, into different texts, and into the future.

notes 1 For a select bibliography on the medieval romance, a handy source is The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009); and A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, edited by Corinne Saunders (Malden and Oxford, uk: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 2 Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979), 5. 3 Corinne Saunders, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Romance, 1, 1–9. 4 For an extended discussion of Fowler’s use of the term “romance,” I direct the reader to his book Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1985), 141–2. 5 An overview of the term “romance” and its origin appears in Edith Kern, “The Romance of Novel/Novella,” in The Discipline of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretations, and History, edited by Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Haven, ct, and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 512–15, 511–30. 6 Parker, Inescapable, 4. 7 Helen Cooper, “Introduction,” in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England, edited by Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), xiii, xiii–xxi. Cooper uses “durable” in her description of romance in the opening essay in this volume. Barbara Fuchs elaborates on the use of terminology and the generic features of texts associated with “romance,” in her book Romance (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).

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8 In particular, this is the subject of I romanzi (published in 1554) by Giovanni Battista Pigna. See A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1, edited by Bernard Weinberg (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 445. 9 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1978), 15. 10 Parker addresses this issue in relation to ending in romance texts in particular. Parker, Inescapable, 5. 11 Fredrick Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7 (1975–76): 135–63. 12 For a theory about the distinction between the novel and the romance on the basis of narrative characteristics, I draw attention to Leonard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 40–1; Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1996); and Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “The Romance of Service: The Readers of Dorastus and Fawnia, 1615–1762,” in Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 209–45. 13 Fuchs, Romance, 9. Both Fuchs and Parker form their arguments in part by extending the point made about romance by Northrop Frye in his influential book The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976). 14 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 15 Christina Luckyj, “The Politics of Genre in Early Women’s Writing: The Case of Lady Mary Wroth,” English Studies in Canada 27 (2001): 253–82, at 266. 16 Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia, pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 17 I thank Colin Lahive for a conversation that contributed to the argument about the nature of romance as resource at this point. 18 I am grateful to Jackie Cameron for help with formulating the title. 19 Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Farnham, uk, and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2011), 9. 20 The latter half of this sentence succinctly draws on the formulation and extends the claim made by James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, vol.

Introduction

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22 23 24

25 26

27

28 29

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2 (1350–1547) of The Oxford English Literary History (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. Statistics about the proliferation of printed fiction in relation to drama on the marketplace of print literature in early modern England is explored in English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700, edited by Charles C. Mish (Charlottesville, va: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1967); and Charles C. Mish, “Best Sellers in Seventeenth-Century Fiction,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 47 (1953): 356–73 and “Comparative Popularity of Early Fiction and Drama,” Notes and Queries 197 (1952): 269–70. See also Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “‘Social Things’: The Production of Popular Culture in the Reception of Robert Greene’s Pandosto,” English Literary History 61 (1994): 753–81. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Cyrus Mulready, Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion Before and After Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the material traces of reading early modern literature, see William Sherman, Used Books: Making Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance. Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On men, the erotic politics of masculinity, and romances, see Goran Stanivukovic, Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). In the nineteenth century, romance writing was particularly associated with the Victorian revival of the Middle Ages. See Lori Campbell, “Where Medieval Romance Meets Victorian Reality: The ‘Woman Question’ in William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World,” in Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 169–90. Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), 2. The following authors and their works, and anonymous texts, are explored alone or alongside other works, in the individual chapters of the book: Guy of Warwick, William Caxton’s Book of the Order of Chivalry, Sir Gawain and the

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31

32

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Goran Stanivukovic Green Knight, William Caxton’s printed version of Le Morte D’Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, Sir Orfeo, Vita Merlini, Buchedd Collen, Didot Perceval, Vita Gildae, Lancelot (or Le Chevalier de la Charrete), Lanval, Graelent, Thomas of Erceldoune, Togal Troi, Merugud Uilix, Acallam na Senórach, Feis Tighe Chonáin, Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, Eachtra Airt meic Chuind, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Philip Sidney’s New and Old Arcadia, Anthony Munday’s Zelauto, William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s Pericles, Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life and The Blazing World, Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda, Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, Thomas Leland’s Longsword, or History of the Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance, Sophia Lee’s The Recess of Warbeck, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, William Morris’s “The Hollow Land,” and David Jones’s In Parenthesis. I resort to some formulation about the nature and vitality of early modern prose fiction expressed in Lorna Hutson’s “Prodigal Prose,” Times Literary Supplement (25 July 2014), 13. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1882). I am citing the sixth edition of Dowden’s influential book, first published in 1875. The dates follow the chronology proposed in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., edited by John Jowett, William Mongtomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford, uk: Clarendon, 2005), x. I have in mind especially scholarship on the language, dramaturgy, style, and structure of the late plays, such as Raphael Lyne’s Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Simon Palfrey’s Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1999). Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare and Romance,” in Shakespeare’s Last Comedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, edited by D.J. Palmer (London: Penguin, 1971), 117. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England,” in A Companion to Romance, 121–39.

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35 Beer, The Romance, 3. 36 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, ca, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 5. 37 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard Trask, 50th anniversary edition (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2003). 38 I am aided here by Hugh Houghton’s articulation of the gist of the Freudian sense of the uncanny, “Introduction,” in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), ix. 39 Sc. 7, 78–81. Pericles, edited by Roger Warren on the basis of a text prepared by Gary Taylor and Macd. P. Jackson for the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004). 40 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, edited by Doreen Delvecchio and Antony Hammond, in The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54. 41 Janice A. Radway, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand Oaks, ca, and London: Sage, 1955), 202– 14, at 206.

Part One Narration and Transformation

1 The Knight and the Hermit: Crossing the Reformation Helen Cooper

Romance is a durable form. The impulse behind its original development in the twelfth century seems to have lain at least in part in the desire to create an alternative view of the world to that promoted by the Church: a view that could celebrate both the masculine warrior ethos and female sexuality, and that set a high value on prowess, dynasty, wealth, and reputation. Its archetypal hero was the knight; but just as knighthood claimed to incorporate Christian values to offset its essential military violence, so romance came under pressure to set a model of a good secular life compatible with obedience to religious teachings.1 The relationship of romance with the Church and its ethic was therefore complex, but it was rarely wholly antagonistic. The dubbing of a knight was itself a religious ceremony, aimed at emphasizing the strong Christian element within knighthood. The earliest detailed account of such a ceremony, in the anonymous Ordene de chevalerie of the early thirteenth century, emphasizes its parallels with baptism, the requirement for purity of life, and the knight’s duty to defend the Church, to maintain loyalty to his lord, to uphold justice, and to defend the weak, so that he might ultimately attain Paradise.2 Knighthood was indeed regarded as an “order,” in some ways analogous to the religious orders – in the case of the Templars, the military order charged with the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Land and its religious sites, the two became identical. Knighthood was thus deeply grounded in the practices and beliefs of Roman Catholicism, to the point where its transition to a different theological context might appear problematic. Romances were above all, however, stories, and stories of a kind that had a continuing appeal beyond the constraints of their ideology. The durability of the genre showed itself not least in its ability to outlast its Catholic roots

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through its continuing popularity after the Reformation, often indeed in the continued reading of the same stories, disseminated ever more widely through the medium of print. Generally, the change of religion from Catholicism to Protestantism did not affect its basic values, but there were some narrative elements that had come to be embedded in romance which the Reformation made more problematic. One of these was the presence of hermits. Hermits were by definition associated with a withdrawal from the secular world, of the kind that Protestantism rejected. They were – or were supposed to be – among the most austere of those who had vowed their lives to God, living away from society to devote themselves to penitence and prayer.3 They frequently lived in remote cells in the depths of a forest or in unfrequented places (the term foresta covered both), with a small chapel where they could say the liturgical offices and a garden where they could grow some basic foodstuffs; Normandy and the Marches of Brittany and Maine were noted for their numbers of hermits, locations that are interesting in view of their connections with the world of Arthurian romance.4 The model for their lives lay in the desert hermits of the early Church, though that original extreme asceticism was generally a different business from the lives of medieval hermits. They were distinct from monks and friars, in that they were not attached to a religious order, nor bound by a specific rule; and although, like friars, they could move around freely, it was no part of their formal duties to serve the spiritual needs of the lay community, though they would on occasion provide advice or assist in settling disputes. Their way of life was justified by their function, of intercessory prayer on behalf not only of themselves but often of the whole community and, if they had one, of a patron. Some were priests; some had been monks, who chose a more ascetic form of life; others had retired from an active life in the world to follow a penitential way of living in preparation for death. They were almost always men: if a woman wished for such a life of religious dedication separate from a community of nuns, she would become an anchoress, a recluse. There were male as well as female recluses, but their different way of life from that of hermits – they were more restricted but less isolated, being enclosed in cells attached to churches where they could hear Mass and receive support from a priest and sustenance from

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local laypeople – made reclusion more appropriate for women. The Quest of the Holy Grail, in both its original French and in Sir Thomas Malory’s English version, consistently observes that distinction between male hermits and female recluses. The form of the devotional life of both hermits and recluses involved some of the same vows as those in religious orders, including celibacy and poverty, though that did not mean that the poverty was absolute: their houses were simple, but not necessarily devoid of all comforts. They did not always live in complete isolation. Recluses needed servants to provide them with a link to the outside world, and hermits too would commonly have the assistance of a pious layman or clerk. Malory’s retired knight Bawdwyn of Britain has two servants who help him cure the wounded Lancelot, though his distance from the norm of hermits (in both real life and the rest of the Morte D’Arthur) is emphasized by the unexpected statement that “in thos dayes hit was nat the gyse as ys nowadayes; for there were none ermytis in tho dayes but that they had bene men of worship and of prouesse, and tho ermytes hylde grete householdis and refreysshed people that were in distresse”5 – the sort of household more usually associated with abbots and the heads of the larger religious houses. Hermits might also group together to form a small community, a practice Malory replicates when he has the Bishop of Canterbury retreat to a hermitage and gather around himself a group of Arthur’s former knights, including Lancelot. Eremetism enjoyed a resurgence in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, so romances drew on what was an established practice. Hermits were particularly useful in the quest romances of the sort especially associated with the knights of the Round Table, in which a knight errant would ride out from the court into a largely uninhabited forest: hermitages provided convenient overnight shelter and the opportunity to hear Mass. Hermits are often also credited with skill in healing, for which their gardens or the surrounding woods might supply medicinal herbs. Often, like Bawdwyn, these Arthurian hermits are themselves retired knights – something not completely unknown historically, since becoming a hermit could be a way of atoning for an earlier life of violence. The Italian St Galgano, for instance (died c. 1181), became a hermit in penitence for his earlier life as a soldier after a series

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of visions that directed him to build a church on the hill of Montesiepi, in Tuscany. Without the money for the church, he settled there initially as a hermit, driving his sword into a rock to serve as a crucifix and as a symbol of his renunciation of his past. Despite what sound like legendary elements, there is generous historical documentation for his life, and the still-unexplained stone with the embedded and irremovable sword is still preserved in the church that was eventually built at the site of his hermitage.6 Actual knights who wished to devote their final years to the religious life were in practice more likely to opt for a monastery than a hermitage, especially after the reformation of the monastic orders towards a greater asceticism made such a choice over eremitism more popular.7 The comparative isolation of the hermit suggested other romance roles too. One was as the recipient of unwanted babies. The baby boy born to a princess in Sir Degaré after she was raped by a fairy lord is left beside a hermitage for the “holi man” to find; the hermit has him raised by his sister and her husband until he is ten years old, then takes him back to the hermitage to educate him in “clerkes lore” until it becomes clear that his destiny lies in the secular world.8 In the Knight of the Swan stories, a queen gives birth to septuplets, six sons and a daughter; her jealous mother-in-law claims instead that she has given birth to seven puppies, and has the babies sent off into the woods to be drowned. The designated murderer takes pity on them and abandons them by a river, where they are found by a hermit and suckled by a hind he had befriended (that too is a motif borrowed from hagiography: the hermit St Giles, for instance, is shown iconographically with a hind he rescued from its hunters, at the cost of himself being wounded by an arrow intended for the animal). The queen is imprisoned for eleven years, while her husband resists the efforts of his mother to get her brought to justice. When at last, worn down by her importunity, he agrees, an angel appears to the hermit to tell him to send the eldest son (the rest have by this time been transformed into swans) to take on the defence of his mother. The English Chevelere Assigne makes the bewilderment of both hermit and child charmingly clear. When he is told by the hermit, “Crist hath formeth þe, sone . to fyȝte for þy moder,” the boy responds by asking, first, What is a mother? followed up with, How shall I fight?

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“Vpon a hors,” seyde the þe heremyte, “as I haue herde seye.” “What beste is þat?” quod þe chylde . “lyonys wylde? Or elles wode? Or watur?” . quod the chylde þanne. “I seyȝe neuur none,” quod þe hermyte . “but by þe mater of bokes: They seyn he hath a feyre hedde . & fowre lymes hye.”9 The naivety of holiness can be a drawback in its encounters with the world. The boy gets more practical help immediately before the combat when he asks a senior knight for instructions on how to fight: that he should keep hitting his opponent with the sharp edge of his sword, and then, if he gets the chance, cut off his head; and that is precisely what the boy, with a little miraculous assistance, succeeds in doing. Most romance hermits, however, are given a function more related to their perceived holiness and wisdom than to the mechanics of the story: they serve as the Christian voice within what might otherwise be a narrative of adventure alone. This is especially clear in the hermits who inhabit the Grail quest. This section of the series of French prose Arthurian romances, known collectively as the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail, was possibly written by Cistercian monks in an attempt to give the Arthurian narratives, too popular in their secular emphasis for their own good, a strongly moral and religious spin. Its narrative method is to alternate the adventures of one or more knights – Gawain, Lionel, and others as the sinful knights; Galahad, Perceval, and Bors as the virtuous; and Lancelot as the man who is desperately trying to move from one category into the other – with the exposition of the dreams or adventures they have had by a series of hermits, or on two occasions by a woman recluse.10 Malory’s regular term for such a hermit, after his first introduction, is as a “good man,” but they are rather more than that: diegetically, they have a level of insight that comes directly from God; extradiegetically, they provide the author with a mechanism for expounding a world that has turned allegorical, though the knights themselves do not know that and accordingly keep getting things even more wrong than their basic sinfulness would call for. The Quest narrative thus proceeds on two levels, the knights’ adventures and the running moral exposition of the evils of a life of pride in the world, and the later sections of the cycle acquire a more moralist emphasis. In Malory’s hands,

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by contrast, the flow of the secular narrative closes over the Grail almost as soon as that section of the work is finished, and even within his retelling of the Quest the narrative sympathies remain tilted towards the chivalric as much as the devotional. The impression is helped by his identifying one of the hermits as Ulfin, the name given to one of the older generation of knights who had supported Uther and the young Arthur; and two more of that group, Bawdwyn and Brastias, reappear later to heal Lancelot after he has been wounded.11 The French texts’ practice of casting their hermits as being ideologically opposed to chivalry thus disappears over the course of the Morte D’Arthur: these three hermits are all retired knights, and all express their pleasure at encountering knights errant. After Arthur’s death, and with it the implied end of chivalric life in Britain, Lancelot and the other survivors from the Round Table likewise take to the eremitical life. When Lancelot dies as a hermit, in a state of regret for the past as much as full devotional penitence, the Bishop of Canterbury has a vision of him being heaved up into heaven by the angels. Of his companions, only Bedwere remains with the Bishop as a hermit, the rest either becoming “holy men” in their own countries, or dying in battle in the Holy Land.12 The premise of the use of hermits in the Grail material is that they have something of a hot line to God. Only once here are they other than what they seem, when Bors encounters “a man clothed in a religious wede” who claims to be a priest, but who is riding a “stronge blacke horse” – a bad sign.13 He misinterprets Bors’ dream and gives him advice in a way designed to trap him into sin and so into damnation, but is later revealed as being a fiend. Elsewhere, the hermits’ privileged relation to God can give them a larger function. A number of the hermits of the Quest serve as a kind of godly remembrancer, able to recount the backstories that the knights need in order to understand their own roles. The French Estoire du Saint Graal, which recounts the prehistory of the Grail, expands this function to cover the entire work: it frames its narrative by claiming that it was copied from a book delivered to a hermit priest by Christ Himself (named only as “li parfais Maistres” or “li Haus Maistres”), and which was taken back into Heaven once the hermit had finished copying it. That framing narrative is itself developed in rather odd ways: the volume disappears and the hermit has to seek it out on a mini-quest led by a strange beast, in the course of which he is taken to

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another hermitage whose occupant is possessed by the devil. Only when the hermit of the book has expelled the devil, by way of a fart, does he recover his volume.14 It is the kind of story that itself cries out for a hermit to supply an interpretation, but it is not provided with one. That the Estoire did not unduly disturb the chivalric priorities of its readers is confirmed by another romance loosely linked to it but written a century later. This is the Perceforest, a vast French prose romance that recounts the prehistory of the Estoire and indeed of all Arthurian history.15 It seems an unlikely story to make a hermit a key character, as it is set in a pre-Christian pagan Britain; but Dardanon, who appears at key moments throughout the long narrative, has as much of a hot line to God as the hermit-transcriber of the Estoire claims to have. For all the restrictions of his pagan knowledge, Dardanon has a mystical insight into the nature of a Christian triune God and of the Virgin; and he plays a key role in converting other characters in the romance to share his beliefs. At the end of the work, after seeing the star of the Nativity, he and four of the leading characters of the narrative, now in old age, go away to the Isle of Life to keep themselves alive until after the Redemption, when they can be saved. The four include Perceforest himself and his sister-in-law, the so-called “Fairy Queen,” who has repented of performing magic; but there is no suggestion that chivalric adventure, so long as it is undertaken for the good, requires repentance. The role of the hermit as converter of the pagans appears again in the English Amoryus and Cleopes, a fifteenth-century rhyme royal romance set in the reign of Nero; he is also credited with resurrecting the lovers who have both died Pyramus-and-Thisbe style, a miracle that encourages the mass conversion of their community.16 A still clearer endorsement of chivalry as compatible with Christian teaching was given by the thirteenth-century Spanish mystic and missionary Ramón Lull, in his Book of the Ordre of Chyualry. Originally written in Catalan, it was translated into Latin (no longer extant), French, English, and Scots; its English version was translated and printed by Caxton. Lull himself led a thoroughly worldly life until in 1266 he had a vision of the Crucifixion, which was repeated on five successive nights. He wrote a large number of pious works, including a romance, Blanquerna, which was loosely modelled on his own past: its eponymous hero gives up a life of worldly chivalry to become a hermit (and,

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eventually, pope). If that work has the religious life trump that of knighthood, however, the Book presents the relationship of the two rather differently. It tells of how a “wyse knyght,” who is “moche old / and had a grete berde / long heer / and a feble gowne worne and broken for ouer longe werynge,” has taken up his abode in an out-of-the-way hermitage. There, he is found by chance by a young squire who is on his way to the court to be knighted. The hermit is shocked that the young man knows nothing of “the ordre and rule of knyghthode,” its history and principles and the symbolism of arms and armour. All of this is, he says, spelled out in a book he is reading; and he gives the book to the squire to take to the court to share with all the new knights – the book, of course, being the same one that the readers hold in their hands. As Lull conceives it, knighthood is a Christian vocation made necessary by the Fall, to support “Charyte / Loyaulte / Trouthe Iustyce and veryte,” and therefore as valid a form of good living as the life of withdrawal from the world. Caxton concludes his print with an epilogue in which he laments how far the present knights of England have fallen below the standards Lull sets out, or those followed by their famous predecessors. They should read the “noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot / of galaad / of Trystram / of perse forest / of percyual / of gawayn / & many mo,” and imitate their forebears of the Third Crusade or the Hundred Years War.17 Hermits thus fulfilled a number of useful narrative and ideological functions – too many to be simply jettisoned at the Reformation, even though the eremitic lifestyle was so profoundly opposite to what the reformers approved of. Some could simply be deleted from an existing story; but not only were many kept, others were invented, even within a Protestant culture such as England. Philip Henslowe’s inventory of playhouse costumes includes an entry for “Hermetes Sewtes”; two plays that might possibly have used them are discussed below, and there were no doubt more.18 Any figure with such strongly Catholic associations, however, invited condemnation, even demonization; and that too had a long history. Any individual or group that purposes to live out an ideal life is inviting satire for its failure, and although hermits seem to have been generally highly respected, there are enough randy examples in preReformation literature to show that the very idea of solitary celibacy set them up for a fall in the minds of the average lay sinner. One of the more

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entertaining examples is Boccaccio’s story (Decameron 3, 10) of the ardent young hermit who teaches his equally ardent, and decidedly naive, female disciple how to put the devil back into hell, and it is greeted with appropriate amusement by his largely female audience. Ariosto, for all his impeccably Catholic background, has a lustful hermit pursue Angelica in canto 8 of the Orlando Furioso, and she is preserved from rape only by her attacker’s “broken launce,” a bawdy variation on a hermit-knight’s retirement.19 None of Ariosto’s readers would have been surprised, but hermits of that kind could add an edge of theological propaganda to a romance written in a Protestant culture. Sir John Harington added a marginal note to that same hermit’s first appearance in Canto 2 of his 1591 translation, to deride “the holy Church men that spend much devotion on such Saints,” the saint in question being Angelica. Hermits continued to offer authors a much wider range of possibilities too, occasionally not so very different from their Catholic predecessors; but they also brought with them a decidedly cautious handling of such material. Various writers and publishers adopted various approaches. Some works had their hermits simply excised, as can be seen in the history of the Chevalier delibéré of Olivier de la Marche, a fifteenth-century Burgundian allegory on the need to turn to repentance in old age. It contains a personification of Entendement, Understanding, in the form of a hermit, drawn in the tradition of the wise hermit counsellors of Arthurian romance, and his task is to expound to the protagonist the treasures in the house of Reason, in a kind of ecphrastic equivalent to the Grail hermits’ interpretation of visions.20 The work was given two translations in post-Reformation England. The first was in 1569 by the Protestant Stephen Batman, an associate of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. He entitles his work The Trauayld Pylgrime, so substituting a pilgrim for the original chevalier. Pilgrimage carried a sufficiently familiar metaphorical charge of the journey towards Heaven as still to be allowable (as in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), but the hermit was a step too far: Batman deletes Understanding’s role as hermit, leaving him simply as a personification who provides the protagonist with lodging and instruction. The work was translated again twenty-five years later by the Catholic Lewes Lewkenor, as The Resolved

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Gentleman; and the recusant author this time keeps Understanding as a hermit, complete with cell and chapel, who is passing his old age in moderate austerity as a contemplative.21 The anxiety caused by hermits for Protestant writers can be seen especially clearly in Guy of Warwick, one of the most popular romances from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and later. It was a crucial part of Guy’s story that he had concluded his career as a hermit, so it could not easily be deleted from post-Reformation versions of the text. He was, moreover, believed to have had a historical existence; Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, had set up a chapel with an image of him, and a cave at Guy’s Cliff was identified as the site of his hermitage. He differed from other romance hermits who had retired from a life of chivalry, however, in that he had turned away from martial prowess to penance in the prime of his powers, abandoning his wife and newborn son to do so. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, with battle against the Saracens as a part of that; and when he returned to England, still in his pilgrim’s garb, he was chosen by King Athelstan through an angelic vision to fight and defeat the pagan Danish champion, the giant Colbrand. After that he returned to Warwick, living as a hermit close to his wife’s castle without revealing himself to her until he was on the point of death. When Joanot Martorell retold the story as the opening section of his Catalan Tirant lo Blanc, in a safely Catholic culture, he placed the whole emphasis on Guy’s exploits as a hermit, with a good deal of elaboration along the way: Guy’s culminating function is as instructor in chivalry to the young Tirant, in a passage based on the instruction given by the knight-hermit in Ramón Lull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry.22 In post-Reformation England, however, when the new theology had reclassified both literal pilgrimage and eremitism as superstitious and misguided, Guy was rather more problematic. The Middle English text was reprinted several times in the sixteenth century, though with its penitential ending much abbreviated, and it became a household favourite;23 but when new versions of the story came to be written, the hermit began to be embarrassing. Richard Lloyd made the problem explicit in the version of the legend he wrote for his Briefe discourse of the … Nine Worthies, in which he substitutes the English Guy for the French Godfrey of Bulloigne as the last of the Christian Worthies. Penitence

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may be right and proper, and “punishing his bodie so, as then it was the wonted vse” may “sho a token” of such repentance, but only “through great abuse, / For want of knowledge of the truth, of holie scriptures: the more ruth.”24 Guy would have known better than to become a pilgrim if only he had read the Bible; and eremitism does not even get a mention. The work was never reprinted, but Lloyd’s verses on Guy were reworked as a broadside ballad in the 1590s, and that does allow his sojourn as a hermit back in – or at least, the earliest surviving prints, dating from some decades later, contain it; but it was an exception.25 In other popular versions, the hermit episode is again treated with anxiety – even by one anonymous dramatist whose sympathies were certainly High Anglican, since he incorporates into his Tragical History … of Guy earl of Warwick a chorus spoken by Time that condemns quarrels within the Church of England over issues of church governance and clerical vestments.26 The Tragical History is the one surviving text of what may have been a number of plays about Guy, and it is unusual in giving most space to Guy’s life after he abandons his wife to fight in the Holy Land. It gives only a slight reference to his becoming a pilgrim, however, and it avoids the word “hermit” altogether. Guy retreats to a cave in the forest of Arden, and there speaks an extended declaration of (Anglican) faith before he dies, but he does not live the kind of quasi-liturgical life of prayer of the Catholic hermits. The final speech of the play, spoken by King Athelstan, promises that a hermitage will be erected on the site of the cave, so giving an explanation for what was still visible, and indeed visitable, even while the formalities of being a hermit are kept separate from Guy’s own history.27 Samuel Rowlands likewise never defines Guy as a hermit in his quasi-Spenserian twelve-canto epic The Famous Historie of Guy of Warwick, and he makes as little as he can of Guy’s years of pilgrimage; but he gives him a prolonged meditation on death of the kind acceptable within Protestantism, in the manner of Batman’s Reason, or, more overtly, of Hamlet in the graveyard.28 Any embarrassment caused by the life of a hermit is by contrast completely lacking from the play of The Birth of Merlin, perhaps dating from the first decade of the seventeenth century. Merlin was by tradition the son of an incubus; in the versions preceding the play, his mother is a virtuous woman who makes a single slip into anger, but that is enough

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to allow a devil to get access to her in her sleep and beget the child, through whom the devils are planning to mount a plot against God. In the Vulgate Merlin, her spiritual adviser is a priest named Blaise, who eventually retreats to Northumberland to become a hermit; Merlin makes him the chronicler of his own deeds, and he also dictates to him the backstory of the Grail to write as a book, in a parallel account to that of the hermit’s book at the start of the Estoire.29 The work was translated into English verse around 1300, as Of Arthour and of Merlin, and here Blaisi is a hermit from the start. It was printed at least twice in the early sixteenth century, as The Byrth and Prophecye of Marlin, and it is presumably this that underlies the play; but although the dramatists change the story so much as to make the presence of a hermit unnecessary, they nonetheless supply one, even while giving him a very different function in the plot. He is renamed Anselm and described as a “most reverent holy man,” but his connection with the birth of Merlin disappears.30 Although he is treated as a figure of wise counsel, the principal counselling he does is to encourage two of the leading female characters to spurn marriage and the griefs of the world in favour of entering a nunnery, even though he insists (in best Protestant fashion) that he is not against marriage as such, and the women do most of the work of conversion themselves. It is as if the presence of a hermit was expected as a part of the story, and the playwrights gave the audience what they wanted even at the cost of removing his original purpose. The wisdom allowed to the hermit reappears at the end of As You Like It. Although Shakespeare never has a hermit appear on stage, the offstage figure of the “old religious man,” who encounters the bad duke as he is on his way to destroy his brother, and converts him “both from his enterprise and from the world” to a religious life, is more than just a convenient way to resolve the political upsets of the action. Jaques, the play’s malcontent philosopher, bows out of the celebrations to go to join the ex-duke, since “out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learned.”31 The hermit as a repository of wisdom, and who can use that wisdom to inculcate repentance, was still familiar enough in the cultural memory of Elizabethan audiences to need no further explanation.

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The discomfort over hermits nonetheless left a narrative gap in chivalric romance: what was a knight to do in his old age? Retreat into a life of otium, leisure figured on the model of pastoral contentment, was the obvious course; “contemplation” and “holy thoughts” could then be added in.32 Such a life was, however, most fully represented by the image of the hermit, and it was so deployed by Sir Henry Lee, a key figure in Elizabeth’s Accession Day tournaments. He had first made use of a hermit in the course of Elizabeth’s visit to Woodstock in 1575, when he had a hermit named Hemetes, himself formerly a knight, introduce a miniature chivalric play in honour of the Queen; here, any religious associations of the figure were resolved by specifying Venus and Apollo (and ultimately, of course, Elizabeth) as the deities he served.33 Lee’s most resonant use of the figure was, however, at his retirement appearance in the 1590 tournament, when he was formally disarmed and assumed a humble and uncourtly garb in place of his armour. The occasion was marked by the song “His golden locks Time hath to silver turned,” set to music by John Dowland: His helmet now, shall make a hive for bees; And, lovers’ sonnets turned to holy psalms, A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are age his alms: But though from court to cottage he depart, His saint is sure of his unspotted heart. And when he saddest sits in homely cell, He’ll teach his swaines this carol for a song, – “Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well, Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.” Goddess, allow this aged man his right, To be your beadsman now that was your knight.34 This is the hermit as beadsman, the man who makes intercessory prayer for his patron. Prayer for the monarch was, as it still is, a fixed element of the Anglican liturgy; but for a man who has spent his active life in

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the Queen’s service, making Elizabeth his saint or goddess as well as the subject of his prayer frees him unequivocally from papist pollution. The pagan pantheon, which made no claim to truth, was a safer field of reference in Reformation England than any form of Christianity tainted with Catholicism. Lee’s final appearance in the full role as hermit came two years later, in the Ditchley entertainment of 1592, where he is presented as living out his life in preparation for death and prayers for Elizabeth.35 The Queen is again the focal point of the Elizabethan work that makes the greatest use of hermits, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, though she and her avatars actually take up little space in the text. Spenser’s default position on hermits, however, as set up in the very first canto, is that they are evil. In literary terms, the ancestors of such a figure lie in the lecherous hermit of the Orlando Furioso, and the devil disguised as a hermit who attempts to compel Bors into sin in the Grail quest. The aged and hoary Archimago may look “as one that did repent” when he invites the weary Redcross Knight and Una to spend the night in his “little lowly Hermitage” alongside a chapel, but the reader has already been warned in the quatrain summary at the head of the canto that he is a figure of Hypocrisy, evil disguised as good.36 The simplicity of his life, the apparent contentment he offers, and his promise of an untroubled night are all designed to fool his guests, and only his talk of “saintes and Popes” interlaced with Aves suggests that anything is wrong. Things are of course very wrong, and Archimago is one of the characters who appears recurrently through various sections of the work, just as Hypocrisy is a recurrent danger for those trying to live a good life. He is also a shapeshifter, and can put on the guise of a good knight (indeed, of Redcross, Holiness, himself) as easily as the guise of a hermit (I.ii.10–11). He is countered at the end of the Book by the unreservedly good hermit Contemplation, who spends his life in more genuine devotions. His hermitage, again set beside a chapel, is located on a hill, in contrast to Archimago’s dwelling “downe in a dale”; and from there he is able to see God (I.x.46–7). If Hypocrisy’s function is to make evil appear good, Contemplation’s is to teach Holiness the true path of righteousness, the way to the new Jerusalem, the City of God. He also reveals to the knight

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his true (Saxon) lineage and his name, St George – the patron saint of England, redefined in line with the belief that the Anglo-Saxon church had been uncorrupted by the evils associated with Catholicism. Spenser’s next hermit is not a personification, or not in any formal sense: he is one of the many characters in the more socially oriented books (III, on chastity in the sense of married love; IV, on friendship; and VI, on courtesy) who fills an exemplary role. He is never given a name, as the more fully personified characters are, as what he represents is sufficiently epitomized by his actions. He fulfils the common duty of a romance hermit, to heal the wounded – in this case, Serena and Timias, both injured by the Blatant Beast of slander. He has impeccable credentials for this chivalric romance, since he “had bene a doughty Knight,” But being now attacht with timely age, And weary of this worlds vnquiet waies, He tooke him selfe vnto this Hermitage.37 He is also skilled not only in “Leaches craft,” like so many romance hermits, but also “sage counsel” capable of curing excessive passion – a parallel to the wisdom of Lull’s hermit, or to the insight of the Grail hermits, but here converted to advice on good living in the world given by someone who has both experienced and moved beyond it. When his patients’ wounds begin to putrefy inwardly, he declares that they cannot be healed by recourse to the hermit’s customary medicinal herbs; what he needs to give them is instruction on how to cure themselves. Once one has been attacked by the Blatant Beast, he tells them, the only way to cure the ill is by rigorously controlled behaviour in the world so as to avoid the occasion of any future slander. Spenser presumably chose a hermit to give such advice not only because of the figure’s associations with healing and instruction, but also because as a holy man his advice is implicitly associated with religious teaching even while its explicit emphasis is secular. He also offers a model of the kind of blameless life to which others should aspire even while they remain within the world. His own withdrawal to a hermitage, “far from all neighbourhood, the which annoy it may,” has removed him from the society where gossip and slander can

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flourish. For his patients, too, the time they spend with him allows space both for them to work on the necessary transformation of their manner of living, and to do so while removed from the context in which slander flourishes. The episode comes in the Book of Courtesy; the hermit himself exemplifies the deep courtesy, the unfeigned “entire affection,” that contrasts with those who are courteous only for show. In all these Reformation examples of hermits, their moral standing is a given of the text, easily deducible from their actions. This remains the case in Ralph Knevet’s Supplement of the Faery Queene, probably composed in the early 1630s, but here there is also an attempt to argue the case for and against the eremitic life.38 Knevet’s first hermit is drawn on the model of Archimago, an “aged sire, / Who seem’d one much deuoted to his God,” free of unchaste thoughts, though with a more suspicious “holy Legend” lying before him. He offers overnight shelter to the protagonist of the book, Albanio, knight of Prudence, and the entertainment he gives him seems like a model of Golden Age simplicity; but the narrative rapidly redefines him as a “Hermite slye” who had put on “a vest / Of sanctity” to entrap him.39 Allegorically, he represents the Catholic threat to England in all its deceptive appearance of piety. He turns out to be a character introduced earlier as a “vile Hipocrite,” again like Archimago;40 and his method of diverting Albanio from his quest is, like Archimago’s, by way of a false dream created through magic. Knevet’s second hermit makes his appearance two books later, in the account of Belcoeur, knight of Liberality. He is named Esclavador, “slave of gold”: an evident enemy to the protagonist, though Knevet handles him rather more interestingly than the binary of good and evil might suggest. Esclavador only reluctantly accedes to Belcoeur’s request for overnight shelter, and his hospitality consists of a meal of shamrocks, likened to the “potion full of bitternes” prescribed by a physician, in an asceticism that is miserly rather than penitential.41 Nonetheless, he counsels Belcoeur to renounce the world as a preparation for death: advice that has a long genealogy in hermit literature, not least in La Marche. The knight, however, responds with a defence of life within society as the most appropriate to the natural state of humanity: Men ought to dwell in Townes, and villages, Where they may exercise their functions best,

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Dame Nature hath in euery man imprest A sociability, and without it, A Man’s no man, or vnhumane at least: For men do true humanity beget, Where they each other doe requite, with curt’syes fitt. (9.2.18) He claims furthermore that the solitary life gives no opportunity for the exercise of the virtues; temperance is no virtue when there is no alternative, and wisdom, justice, fortitude, and liberality can only be practised within society. Esclavador responds by trying to seduce him to worship his own god, gold, a temptation Belcoeur counters by asserting that its only proper use is by way of largesse. He also refuses to be cowed by the sight of a multitude of “a thousand Fiends” worse than those of St Patrick’s Purgatory (9.2.37) – a Catholic belief that was still familiar enough for Knevet’s readers to respond with condemnation. An evil hermit was far from being a new kind of character, but this is the first occasion when the rights and wrongs of withdrawal from the world, and specifically of eremitism, had been argued out in the context of a romance. La Marche, The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick, the Ditchley entertainment, and others had all made the case for such withdrawal in allowing a proper preparation for death, but only Knevet makes the complementary (or opposite) case, for the importance of the fully social life. Hostility to the hermit, such as Knevet also generously shows, was the easy reaction against a way of life regarded as papist, but the fair-hearted Belcoeur is allowed something much more interesting: the defence of a life fully integrated into the world, as being most in accord with Nature and humanity.

notes 1 Its notorious association with adulterous love is comparatively unusual, and has a larger part in some cultures, especially French, than others: it scarcely appears in Middle English before Malory’s adaptation of French sources in the late fifteenth century. 2 See further Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, ct, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 1–63, and 6–8 on the Ordene.

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3 The information about historical hermits, in England and elsewhere on the continent, is drawn from Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2011), which emphasizes the density of hermits and recluses at this period. On the terminology, see 10–16. 4 Ibid., 40. 5 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edition revised by P.J.C. Field (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1990), XVIII.13 (all references will be given by Caxton’s book and chapter numbers to facilitate location across all editions). 6 See Franco Cardini, “Arthur in Hagiography: The Legend of San Galgano,” in The Arthur of the Italians, edited by Gloria Allaire and F. Regina Psaki (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 179–89. “Galgano” is potentially cognate with “Gawain,” though any direct link with the Arthurian legends, either of Gawain or of the sword in the stone, remains hypothetical. 7 Licence, Hermits, 32–7, 40. 8 Sir Degaré, in The Middle English Breton Lays, edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, teams (Kalamazoo, mi: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 89– 144, lines 225, 287. 9 The Romance of the Chevelere Assigne, edited by Henry H. Gibbs, eets e.s. 16 (1868), lines 209–17. 10 The recluses appear in Malory at XIV.1 (Perceval’s aunt) and XV.5–6 (a woman who counsels Lancelot). 11 Ibid., I.7, XVII.1 (Ulfin, variously spelled elsewhere as Ulfius and Ulfuns); XVIII.12– 13 (Bawdwyn); 21–2 (Brastias). Bawdwyn is given the role taken by a châtelaine in the French Mort Artu, of giving shelter to the wounded Lancelot in the Elaine of Ascolat episode. 12 Ibid., XXI.12, 13. 13 Ibid., XVI.10–11, 13. 14 Joseph d’Aramathie, in Le Livre du Graal, vol. 1, edited by Daniel Poirion (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 3–22; translated by Carol J. Chase, The History of the Holy Grail, in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, vol. 1, general editor Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1993–96; new edition, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 3–14. 15 Probably written in the 1330s for the marriage of Philippa of Hainault to Edward III, it survives only in a fifteenth-century Burgundian redaction; like the

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18 19

20

21

22

23

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Lancelot-Grail, it gained a new popularity in print in the early sixteenth century. There is an edition in progress by Gilles Roussineau, Textes littéraires français (Geneva: Droz, 1987–), and an abridged translation of the entire work by Nigel Bryant, Perceforest: The Prehistory of King Arthur’s Britain (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011): see his “Introduction,” 24–5, on the textual history. The leading episodes concerning Dardanon are Book I, ch. xxxiv–v, II.xxv–vii, IV.xxi– vi, and VI.lxvii–lxviii. Amoryus and Cleopes, edited by Stephen F. Page, teams (Kalamazoo, mi: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry translated and printed by William Caxton, edited by Alfred T.P. Byles, eets o.s. 168 (1926; repr. 1988), quotations from 7, 10, 14, 122–3. Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed., edited by R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 317.14. Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington, edited by Robert McNulty (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1972), book 8, stanza 44. Olivier de la Marche, Le Chevalier deliberé (The Resolute Knight), edited and translated by Carleton W. Carroll, mrts 199 (Tempe, az: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), stanzas 25–76. Bunyan is working in the same tradition in his House of the Interpreter in the Pilgrim’s Progress, though his Interpreter is not a hermit. See Stephen Batman (also often spelled Bateman), The trauayld Pilgrim (1569), sig. Ciiiv–Eiir; Lewis Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), 5–10, 46–52. Lewkenor was working from the Spanish translation by Hernando de Acuña; Batman presents his work as original, and it is not clear whether he was working from the French or the better-known Spanish. There are fine introductions to both texts by Marco Nievergelt at Early English Books Online (https://eebo. chadwyck.com/home) (stc numbers 1585, 15139). Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc, translated by David H. Rosenthal (London: Macmillan, 1984), 3–51; this section is all Martorell’s. Martorell names Guy as Guillem de Varoic, translated by Rosenthal as William of Warwick. Four editions are known from ?1500 to ?1565, but the degree of its familiarity makes it likely that there were many others that were read to pieces. See further

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27 28 29

30

31

32

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Helen Cooper Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York: Garland, 1996), and Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). Richard Lloyd, A briefe discourse of the most renowned actes and right valiant conquests of those puissant Princes, called the Nine worthies (1584). See “Guy and Phillis,” in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, 3 vols. (London: Trübner, 1868), 2.201–2, and also the later Guy and Colebrande, 2.527–49, lines 516–30. The introduction to the legend of Guy is still useful, pp. 509–20. Chorus preceding Act II; there is a facsimile with introduction by Helen Moore, Guy of Warwick (London: Malone Society, 2007). It was first printed in 1661, but its date of composition is uncertain. Possibilities range from the early 1590s (Helen Cooper, “Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and Mounting Sparrows,” in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, edited by Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne [Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2006], 119–38) to 1607–19 (Moore, Guy of Warwick, xxvi). See Helen Cooper, “Guy as Early Modern English Hero,” in Guy of Warwick, edited by Wiggins and Field, 185–99 (188–92). Samuel Rowlands, The Famous Historie of Guy of Warwick (1609). Le Livre du Graal, edited by Poirion, 1.578–611, 793; The Story of Merlin, translated by Rupert T. Pickens, Lancelot-Grail, 2.6–21, 106. Malory does not include the birth of Merlin in the Morte D’Arthur, but he has Blaise figure briefly in his role of chronicler (I.17). The standard edition is still that by C.F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1908), 349–82; I.ii.163 quoted, and see also I.ii.220–58 on his virtue. It was optimistically ascribed on the title page of its first (1662) edition to Shakespeare and William Rowley. As You Like It, 5.4.158–60, 179, 182–3, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1986). “Happy were Hee,” lines 7–8, in The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For accounts and discussion, see Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge, uk: D.S. Brewer 1980), 36–8, and Gabriel Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments from George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press 2010), 17–28; for a full text, see John Nichols’s The

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35 36

37

38

39

40 41

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Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, edited by Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, and Jane Elisabeth Archer (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.363–80. The text is recorded in various, slightly differing forms: this is Jean Wilson’s modernized version, Entertainments 37. See also Heaton, Writing and Reading, 60–3; Nichols, 3.517–25. See the Ditchley text in Wilson, Entertainments, 136–40. Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed., edited by A.C. Hamilton (Harlow, uk: Longman, 2001), I.i.29, 34. A useful outline of the sources and contexts for Spenser’s hermits is given by John D. Bernard in The Spenser Encyclopedia, general editor A.C. Hamilton (Toronto and Buffalo, ny: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 359–60. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, VI.vi.4; and cf. VI.v.37. The details of the cure are given in VI.vi.5–15 (quotations from vi.3, v.34, v.38). Timias is generally held to be a figure for Sir Walter Raleigh, due to his disgrace in the Queen’s eyes as a consequence of his marriage. An account of Knevet’s life and work is given in the “Introduction” to A Supplement of the Faery Queene by Ralph Knevet, edited by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2015). Knevet, Supplement, 7.9.6, 11, 15 (the work begins with Book 7, as a follow-on from book 6 of the original Faerie Queene). Burlinson and Zurcher note that he represents the Catholic threats to England. Ibid., 7.2.14; he is first named here, as Misanactus, perhaps “bad lord” or “acting wrongly.” Ibid., 9.2.7; the episode runs from 9.2.6–46, with the debate on the virtues of the social as opposed to the solitary life at 9.2.13–24.

2 Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene

John H. Cameron and Goran Stanivukovic Shaped by chance and circumstance, narrative in romance writing is often moved forward by accidents, by digressive adventures, and by incidental or seemingly unimportant occurrences. Yet such seemingly insignificant incidents represent evidence of how romance might also have been read.1 Built around a hypothesis seeking explanation, these circumstantial instances facilitate and promote new ways of scrutinizing rhetoric and inventing arguments that extend beyond allegorical and political readings of the legends and magic narrated in romance as a historical genre invested in aristocratic life, magic and marvels, idealized characters and actions, dynastic conflicts, and inheritance. Rather than serving merely as a narrative instrument to help delay the end of the story, circumstantiality opens up space for debate. It thus serves as a strategy of building arguments, which started to be promulgated with the Reformation and culminated in the treatises of rhetoric and dialectic in the 1590s around which the Tudor humanist education was built. In relation to this, it should be noted that Edmund Spenser’s time at Cambridge University was “marked by curriculum reform,” and the ba he received reflected a “revised” degree program that “emphasised mastery of dialectic … and rhetoric.”2 Framed within the structure of composition and argumentation consisting of evidence, presumption, and explanation, moments of circumstantial writing (and stylizing of the arguments in such incidental narratives) let writers make romance both a space for imaginative experimentation with style and narrative, and a place to deliberate arguments. In the assimilation of the rhetorical strategies of argumentation in late-sixteenth-century writing, “the application of learned techniques” and “the transmission of moral instruction”

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found fertile ground in romances because of the wide readership to which they appealed.3 The multifacetedness of storytelling generated by crafting arguments around circumstantial episodes and digressions represents a signature aspect of romance writing, whose expression in the Renaissance culminated in one of the key texts in English literature: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Spenser builds his romance around a combination of evidence, presumption, explanation, and moralization that intertwines the main strand with the digressive direction of his narrative. However, such digressions do not simply go off topic, for they frequently ally themselves to the main narrative – thus the poet Louis MacNeice’s comment to T.S. Eliot that Spenser’s digressions “aren’t really digressions.”4 At least, they are not digressions that merely stray off the point. Produced by the profusion of words that characterizes the writing in The Faerie Queene, circumstantial and digressive narrative oftentimes reads like orations couched in poetic fiction. Such moments show that the idea of telling a story through a linear and disciplined narrative line represents a flawed ideal, unable to bear the pressure that Spenser’s time period put on the troubled relationship between Catholic doctrine, reformed theology, and the humanist discourse of freedom and autonomy for the subject, a freedom glimpsed in the vision of the romance world that always exists between the magical and political worlds. As Colin Burrow notes, this mix of enchanted wonder and directed focus can be found throughout The Faerie Queene, which he describes as being both “wandering and purposive”: No reader can fail to feel that sometimes Spenser is entranced by moments which delay his heroes’ quests. To pause over a tapestry from which wanton eyes flash out provocatively, to cast a wistful glance at a bathing maiden, to wish to rush off and assist a pitiful but deceptive woman, these are all actions in which knights and readers seem to collaborate with the privy wishes of the author.5 Digression, while in one sense reflective of Spenser’s enchantment with his subject and of his desire to inspire similar enchantment in his readers, also reflects Spenser’s “wishes,” his purposes, and his desire to pursue

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his topics in ways congenial to his more interrogative ends. Hence chance and circumstantiality, this chapter argues, represent narrative spaces where debates about the place of these two worlds in romance writing are debated and contested. One of the contentions of this chapter is that in search of the medium for writing a romance of complex narrative movements, one that narrates multiple journeys with scores of missteps taken by a wide number of knights, Spenser maintained the energies of the wandering storytelling largely by rooting the narrative in the resources afforded by humanist theories of incident and circumstantiality, all of which makes his romance a text deeply rooted in humanist theories of composition and argument. This can clearly be seen in the very form of the nine-line stanza, which reflects this digressive, journeying, straggling style. The back-and-forth of the rhyme scheme, quite probably inspired by the romances of Ariosto and Tasso, contains peculiar rhythms suggesting journeys and quests that, as Simon Palfrey and others have noted, can never, like The Fairie Queene itself, be finished. In Spenser, you never reach the end, or, as Palfrey notes, “you reach an end that is not an end.”6 Movement as a resource of romance writing, a fundamental feature of romance explored by critics from Patricia Parker to Nandini Das,7 shows the extent to which romance imagination was indebted to humanist ideas about crafting meaning in forms of narrative. As instances of humanist theories of persuasion, the circumstantial and incidental strategies of writing represent the frame through which the “pastoral rhythms [play] out across”8 the form and the politics as they are shaped, probed, and tested in Spenser’s romance. Far from straying from these issues, the digressions often allow both Spenser and his readers to interrogate them better. As Book I ends we get a sense of this meandering and wandering coming up against a desire to find the right path, to stay on point: “And then againe abroad / On the long voyage whereto she is bent: / Well may she speede and fairely finish her intent” (1.12.42).9 The path less chosen by his knights then becomes not a misstep leading to a dead end but a different way of reaching the same end. Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene in Ireland, but he did so against the background of the most recent important discussions in England about the nature, forms, style, and uses of persuasive writing presented in the

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rhetorical manuals and treatises on poetry and on the nature and composition of writing, which burgeoned at that time. This explosive growth produced late-Elizabethan rhetoricians and theorists of poetic writing highly attentive to the uses and possibilities of circumstantial narrative in the form of digression. For example, Henry Peacham, in the second and expanded edition of the rhetorical manual The Garden of Eloquence (1593), in the section “Figures of Moderation,” describes the rhetorical figure of paradiegesis, whose Greek etymology, “incidental narrative,”10 links this figure not only with narrative in general, but specifically, as Peacham suggests, with moderating the meaning of narrative. Hence: Paradiegesis is called in Latine Narratio quae sit obiteratque in transitu, and properly in Rhetoricke it is called a form of speech by which the Orator telleth or maketh mention of some thing that it may be a fit occasion or introduction to declare his further meaning: or principall purpose, which is a special and artificiall forme of insinuation. A verie apt example we haue in the 17. of the Acts, of Paul who tooke an occasion by the Aultar which he saw in Athens as he passed by, both to reproue the idolatry of the Athenians, and also to teach them the true worship of the liuing God. The Euangelist Luke doth thus record it: Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars street, & said: Ye men of Athens, I perceiue that in all things ye are too superstitious, for as I passed by, I found an aultar wherein is written unto the unknowne god, whom ye then ignorantly worship, him shewe I unto you, God that made the worlde, and all things that are therein, seeing he is Lord of heauen & earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with mens hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giueth to all life and breath and all things, and so consequently, he proceedeth to the full declaration of his purpose.11 Peacham stresses that digression, far from moving away from the point, actually allows the Orator to better “declare his further meaning” and “principall purpose.” Peacham’s example of paradiegesis comes from the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s attempt to use insinuation to more easily convert the Athenians. What is striking about his rendering of paradiegesis

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is that he describes it as almost a form of misdirection, a kind of magician’s trick, because this rhetorical figure requires cunning to foresee the occasion of its use and also to use it appropriately and effectively. C.S. Lewis famously wrote that Spenser “begins like a man in a trance, or a man looking through a window, telling us what he sees.”12 This sense of entrancement soon reflects the condition of his own readers, who get led down a myriad paths and byways before realizing Spenser’s true interrogative aims. David Quint recognizes such strategic digressions when he notes that “Romance takes the long way around and is suspicious of shortcuts … [It] grants a privileged status to the delaying tactics that are basic to all narrative.”13 However, while Quint suggests that such delay may suggest “a refusal or inability” on the part of the writer “to get to the point,” Spenser’s delays and digressions are far more deliberate in nature, using argument and debate to shape the meaning of the whole. Peacham articulates the idea of incident as a kind of narrative magic or trick even more clearly in the subsection following the description “The vse of this figure,” particularly when he proposes that [i]t is verie necessarie to foresee that the narration may be like to the purpose that shall follow, and then this figure becommeth as it were an artificial & cunning key of speech to open the doore of occasion whereby t[he] purpose & desire of the mind do find an apt and easie enterance unto the desired libertie of utterance, and the way that is thus prepared, is both readie, profitable, and worthie of singular praise, and no doubt a special point of wisedome. (D3r) Incidents are imagined as occasions that the orator cunningly employs to create new meaning, being the door through which the mind may move to think in a new direction. They are equally related to cognition and to structure, both of which give incidents signifying vitality and form. When Peacham cautions the user how to employ the figure of “incidental narrative,” or paradiegesis, he warns that it should not be “abused to find out a fit occasion either for a malicious quarrel, and enuious detraction or a foolish tale” (D3v). Both the basic description of paradiegesis and the warnings bring us to Edmund

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Spenser, as they provide a rhetorical tool for understanding his clever and purposive ways of employing digression. Because Spenser makes the same protagonists agents in the narrative itself, and the territory in which the digression occurs seems to remain the same, sometimes readers do not realize that they have gone down the path of circumstantial narrative. Read against the background of Peacham’s thinking about the possibility incidents play in the composition of narrative, Spenser’s use of circumstantiality, his unique version of paradiegesis, reveals that digressions, while conceptualized in such a way to appear as something unimportant that can be eschewed, are always part of a larger whole. Like subplots in Shakespearean drama, they are not something that can be overlooked, but structural features that crucially shape the meaning of the whole, or else arguments and debates. Digressions offer parallel and perpendicular readings of the main plot by reflecting it, reflecting on it, and even deviating from it in a series of challenging ways. Digression as a tool of rhetoric was discussed by many English rhetoricians and poets during the early modern period. The importance of digression in shaping the meaning of narrative did not escape George Puttenham either. In The Art of English Poesy (1589), Puttenham gives perhaps the most extensive discussion about the role of digressive narrative, one that sheds an important light onto Spenser’s use of circumstantial writing. In his discussion of “Parecbasis, or the Straggler,” Puttenham explains incident as a form of persuasion by digression: Even so again, as it is wisdom for a persuader to tarry and make his abode as long as he may conveniently, without tediousness to the hearer, upon his chief proofs or points of the cause tending to his advantage, and likewise to depart again when time serves, and go to a new matter serving the purpose as well. So is it requisite many times for him to talk far from the principal matter, and as it were to range aside, to the intent by such extraordinary mean[s] to induce or infer other matter as well or better serving the principal purpose, and nevertheless in season to return home where he first strayed out. This manner of speech is termed the Figure of Digression by the Latins; following the

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Greek original, we may call this the Straggler, by allusion to the soldier that marches out of his array, or by those that keep no order in their march, as the battles well ranged do; of this figure there need be given no example.14 But examples are plentiful in both prose and verse romance writing. Puttenham’s description of the rhetorical straggler draws notice to the issue of the reader’s attention, as he acknowledges that tediousness is always a danger when employing this method of storytelling. The imagery Puttenham employs helps us capture Spenser’s strategy of talking far from the matter, of ranging aside, as it seems to evoke a kind of movement and journey. Such digressive journeying is well in keeping with Spenser’s own approach of straggling while telling his story of Red Cross Knight. Puttenham’s word “straggler” brings to mind the soldier out of step and marching out of his array, keeping no order. The image of the wayward soldier pairs well with the image of the knight on a journey, travelling in different directions while also moving towards an end that never seems to arrive. Like Arthur’s promised return from the Isle of Avalon in the romances of Malory and others, Spenser’s romance will remain not just uncompleted but forever incomplete, so much so that Spenser, as Susanne L. Wofford argues, “leaves us wandering in the wide deep, [so that] we are faced with a poetics of incompletion.”15 However, are they simply incomplete, or are these wanderings more purposeful in design and intent? This is where allying the romance elements with Spenser’s grounding in rhetoric proves so fruitful. Attacked on moral grounds and ridiculed for violating decorum, romance in the early modern period nonetheless absorbed and adapted argumentative strategies of circumstantiality clad in the language and ornament of lavish digressions, hence turning romance writing into humanist argumentation in narrative poetry. This sheds new light on Spenser’s narrative design, as discussions about the form of The Faerie Queene have been the staple of Spenser criticism for some time.16 Spenser’s digressions, then, are not simply a product of the influence of romance, but are thoroughly grounded in his rhetorical training. Spenser, “a very learned man,”17 was habituated to rhetorical patterns and structures of composition, argumentation, and figuration.18 As a Renaissance scholar who

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attended the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school in London, Spenser would have been accustomed to crafting rhetorical arguments as vehicles towards achieving political and moral goals. Spenser’s aims were complex, pairing as they did the epic and the romance forms. He notes this pairing at the very outset in his letter to Walter Raleigh, in which he cites as key influences both Homer and Virgil on the one hand, and Ariosto and Tasso on the other. This pairing is compounded in the opening, for Spenser’s opening “lo I the man” (1.1.1) evokes Virgil’s opening to The Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano,” or “I sing of arms and man”; at the same time, romance is equally evoked in the same stanza, as the speaker proclaims his intention to “sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds” (1.1.1). To achieve his ambition to undertake the complex task of writing a national epic that was also a romance, Spenser relied on both his poetical and his rhetorical skills, modelling the craft of rhetoric to the art of romance composition. As illuminating as they often proved to be, modern criticism’s interest in politics and ideology, as well as national and religious controversy, as driving forces of Spenser’s romance epic have led to the neglect in our considerations of strategies that establish grounds for such thematic analyses. A focus on digressions, driven by both romance literature and rhetorical argumentation, helps to shed new light, for example, on the lack of an ending to The Faerie Queene. Spenser famously promised Raleigh that there would be twelve books, but we only have six books and parts of a seventh, generally known as the “Cantos of Mutabilitie.”19 In pausing the narrative, in casting the digressive structure as a debate of positions, and in deferring the end, Spenser not only displays the richness of his poetic imagination in extensive amplifications, but he also demonstrates his facility with using circumstantiality as a resource for building and extending the narrative in his almost never-ending romance. What roles such circumstantial digressions play in The Faerie Queene is a question not only about the narrative composition but also about the nature of the romance form itself. Here one begins to tackle the issue of entrelacement, the interlacing of tales that one can find in romance, from the Irish and Welsh bards to the medieval Arthurian romance writers to Ariosto and Spenser. Ariosto describes entrelacement in Orlando Furioso in terms of weaving, as plot interweaves with plot and digression piles

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upon digression; this is so much the case that, as Peter V. Mainelli argues, “Spenser’s Faerie Queene might be considered one vast interlace.”20 Some have argued that entrelacement “provided Spenser with his most important structural models,” models that provide focus rather than an excuse for arbitrariness.21 Far from being arbitrary, entrelacement has proven to be the strategy that works within a particular romance by keeping its constituent parts together; but Spenser uses entrelacement to bind The Faerie Queene with other romances, showing his awareness of romance writing across time. While engaging to many writers of romance thanks to its digressive and multifaceted possibilities, the “problem” of entrelacement preoccupied and perplexed many writers, as Edward Dudley notes, writers whose works later informed The Faerie Queene, which brings the technique to bear in a variety of startling and challenging ways: That problem is the question of entrelacement, of the interweaving of diverse and separate stories into a metastory which provides an overarching schematic for the whole. It was the debate concerning this feature that exercised Renaissance preceptistas and drew the battle line between the partisans of Ariosto and Tasso … It came to be seen as an unstable border land, a marche dividing the world of medieval Romance from the new ideal of the “unified” Renaissance epic.22 What fascinates some and frustrates others about The Faerie Queene is that it not only finds itself in that marche, that border land, but is more than willing to stay there indefinitely. It is almost as if it begins to stray off and wander the moment it begins to take shape as an epic, while at the same time it starts to realign itself and straighten out its course and purpose the moment its romantic journeys begin to take one step away from the subject at hand. It is a balancing act, and part of the fun of reading Spenser is seeing how long he can keep it all together. How does Spenser manage to keep so many different influences and concerns, so many different knights and journeys, in focus? It should not work, and yet, somehow, it does.

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As we have seen, The Faerie Queene has frequently been maligned for its digressiveness, for its straying too much off the point. Even Spenserians such as Andrew Hadfield have expressed frustration over some of Spenser’s wanderings, such as when he argues that “Book IV … is probably the most diffuse and arguably the least focused of the books of The Faerie Queene.”23 However, while seeming to stray off its narrative course, The Faerie Queene never fully does. Like the knight-soldier out of step with the march, to echo Puttenham’s metaphor, Spenser’s romance seems to find its footing after losing its way. This ties in with Colin Burrow’s point that The Faerie Queene is “a work of which the chief delight is elusiveness. It digresses; it continually changes tone and tack; and it never gets to the point (the vision of Gloriana in all her glory) which it gets as its chief goal.”24 Not getting to the point is the point of this work. As Wofford points out so aptly: While it is possible to see the incompleteness of the poem as a whole as simply the result of Spenser’s hyperbolic ambition … it seems likely that Spenser himself began to make use of the aesthetics of incompletion – of the fragment – as a way not only to conclude his mammoth work but to re-emphasise yet again his central point about the limitations of what can be represented … in human art.25 Again, not getting to the point is the point. This narrative deferral shows how romance might have been read in the 1590s, when rhetorical discourses of effective persuasion and stylistic ornamentation proliferated in theoretical writing and imaginative literature. The indebtedness of Book 1 to understanding Spenser’s “strategy in creating a Protestant romance-epic” has made analyses of form itself as a resource secondary to thematic criticism.26 Book 1, however, is a good starting point for a discussion about Spenser’s strategy of handling circumstantiality to allow the narrative to unfold in this long and winding poem. An overarching question that this chapter addresses is what is authentic about the role that circumstantial digressions in The Faerie Queene play that makes them more particular to romance and even

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more particular to Spenser. For example, the temporary triumph of virtue and faith exemplified in Red Cross Knight and Una’s overcoming of the disgrace posed by Archimago’s ill faith masked in the magic he weaves, is put to another test in Book 1, canto 3. The two “had not ridden far, when they might see / One pricking towards them with hastie heat” (1.3.33). A knight with “Sansloy” embossed on his shield, steaming and sweaty from fierce riding (1.3.33), seething with wrath, and his spear out ready for attack (1.3.35), is set up stylistically and syntactically as an embodiment of Catholic evil and a challenge to “Redcrosse knight,” who kills Sansloy – symbolic evidence of “enemies life,” the old faith from the “mourning altars” (1.3.36). Details in this indirect evidence, the kind of evidence that is one of the defining features of circumstantiality,27 are not mere incidents of narrative; instead, they lead the reader to ask questions about how to read and misread errors of representations, politically and aesthetically: Why Archimago, lucklesse syre, What doe I see? what hard mishap is this, What hath thee hither brought to taste mine yre? Of thine the fault, or mine the error is, In stead of foe to wound my friend amis? He [Archimago] answered nought, but in a traunce still lay, And on those guilefull dazed eyes of his The cloud of death did sit. Which doen away, He left him lying so, ne would no lenger stay. (1.3.39) The two questions in this stanza call on the reader to scrutinize the language of romance in search of answers concerned with ethics. Digression represents a way of presenting complex historical and moral questions to a diverse audience from different social levels. Critics have linked Spenser’s digressive style to the influence of Ovid, but it may be more fruitful to look at the rhetorical underpinnings of these digressions in order to better see how Spenser employs them in the service of his romance. As an aspect of well-ordered style that produces debate by asking questions about representation, allegory, and

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error, digression represents the main building block of the narrative in The Faerie Queene. Spenser turns into the strategy of his storytelling what John Hoskyns identifies as amplification, as an ornament of eloquence stirring the mind towards “admiration and belief.”28 Hoskyns wonders, “how can you commend a thing more acceptably to our attention than by telling us it is extraordinary and by showing us that it is evident,”29 but Spenser turns this precept, about one of the most widely used strategies of the expansion of a topic and of its stylistic embellishment, into a resource for writing. Hoskyns emphasizes amplification’s role in stressing the true extraordinariness of the extraordinary; Spenser likewise diverts into digressions full of extraordinary details that challenge verisimilitude in order to bring his readers to see that the extraordinary is only a way of speaking about the evident, which is the content – anti-Catholicism masked as error – of his narrative. Brian Vickers proposes that “[i]n the Renaissance, as in classical rhetoric, to ‘amplify’ a topic meant to increase its importance and [the] emotional impact on the hearer or reader.”30 Serving functions both stylistic and narrative, the purpose of amplification was also to shape and give force to the argument developed in the text, or in an oration. The narrative architecture of the The Faerie Queene is largely built on circumstantial digressions, which shows that Spenser conceptualized his work as a kind of evidential argument based on religious debate, an argument given force by the digressive amplification. Such digressions represent units of persuasion and occasions for Spenser to put into the practice of writing Puttenham’s recommendations about digression as a compositional principle. Puttenham gives no examples (he even says that it is not necessary to do so) for parecbasis or “the straggler” because he treats it not as a rhetorical figure but as a way or a mode of writing.31 It is important to stress this, as Spenser offers the examples Puttenham fails to provide. Puttenham says that, as a manner of writing, a straggling narrative suggests a lack of order, or of writing that is strictly structured, “as the battles well ranged do” – that is, as “soldiers arranged in battle array.”32 Yet, “to range aside,” Puttenham’s reference to such digressions, is to help the main thrust of the narrative “as well or better” than “the principal purpose,” or than a more conventional approach to storytelling.33 And this brings us back to Peacham’s interest in insinuation, as what seems

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digressive and unnecessary is just another way of getting to the same place. As Burrow notes, within The Faerie Queene there are several “internal” debates, “between the desire to delay and digress, and the need to proceed purposively and significantly onwards.”34 Spenser frequently tackles debate to explore the several wandering journeys of his adventurers, who are thrown off course even before they have begun: They cannot finde that path, which first was showne, But wander too and fro in wayes vnknowne, Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene, That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne: So many pathes, so many turnings seene, That which of them to take, in diuerse doubt they been. (1.1.10) However, soon they overcome this doubt and resolve “forward still to fare, / Till that path some end they finde or in or out, / That path they take” (1.1.11). This image of wandering, of straying from the path, becomes even more potent in Book II, as the waters Guyon and his companions journey make everything even more doubtful and grey; not only is water inconstant and unstable, but even the land cannot be trusted, for, as the Ferryman says to his weary travellers, those same Islands, seeming now and than, Are not firme lande, nor any certein wonne, But straggling plots, which to and fro do ronne In the wide waters: therefore are they hight The wandring Islands. (2.12.11) The description of “straggling plots” that are difficult to stand upon could be equally applied to Spenser’s own narrative plots, which always seem to give way the moment they seem in one’s grasp. However, the ground is firmer than it may appear, for just as Spenser often provides a guide for his wayward heroes, so too does he seek to keep us on point even at the moment that he seems to be throwing us off. This frequent shifting

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of balance helps to give Spenser’s work its strange power. Giving focus to the role that chance and circumstance play in the narrative of romance, Spenser’s use of incidents throughout The Faerie Queene shows that straggling produced forceful and effective argument. Puttenham wrote about the art of digressing against the background of Classical oratory and teachings that shaped ideas about style and rhetoric in England in the 1590s, a background that derived from Classical writings on effective persuasion and rhetorical composition. In keeping with the knight’s quest imagery from Puttenham’s “straggler” and the idea of movement and the journey in romance, we could turn to Quintilian as a source of ideas about digressing as a form that both praises and augments the main narrative stylistically.35 Quintilian recommends digression as a strategy of persuasion aimed at swaying the audience to the side of the orator: “Most of them [orators] are in the habit, as soon as they have completed the statement of facts, of digressing to some pleasant and attractive topic with a view to securing the utmost amount of favour from their audience.”36 This is why Quintilian calls digression egressionibus amoenis, or “charming digressions” (12.10.50). The application of the practice of persuasive oratory in new literary composition was only one of the ways in which judicial rhetoric extended its use to new invention. There are three particular persuasive strategies for the figure of egressus or eggressio (digression) that can be related to digressions in The Faerie Queene. These are the praise of people and of places (laus hominem locorumque), descriptions of regions (descriptio regionum), and tales or records of great historical or legendary events (expositio quarundam rerum gestarum, vem etima fabulosarum).37 These features, as we argue, provide exactly the kind of rhetorical understanding of the meaning and even the purpose of Spenser’s digressions in The Faerie Queene. As David Scott Wilson-Okurama notes, “Cicero and Quintilian both mention digression as a feature of the middle style, and digression is a hallmark of narrative romance.”38 And so, these strategies of egressio also link Spenser’s composition of incidents and his application of rhetorical advice on writing digressions to some of the key features of medieval and Renaissance romance writing. Adventure, quests, marvels, and fantastic characters feature as a staple of that writing, and digression gives richness and appeal to these historical texts

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themselves and extends their imaginative reach to the literature informed by romance writing in other periods as well. For the classics and the humanists they inspired, digressions and incidence were also sources of delight. They were features of narrative play that premodern readers, especially those who had received a Classical education, may have appreciated more than modern readers do. Quintilian states that “we may employ digression and then, after thus delighting our audience, make a neat and elegant return to our main theme.”39 At several points in The Faerie Queene, Spenser does just that. Spenser’s rhetoric of digression is a strong reminder of Quintilian’s legacy in Puttenham’s writing. In Puttenham’s claim, that after digressing in order to “better serve … the principal purpose” of the narrative the speaker should “return home where he first strayed out,”40 we hear Quntilian, advising the speaker to make “a neat and elegant return to our main theme.” In De copia (1512), his treatise on rhetorical ornamentation, Erasmus of Rotterdam describes digression as a form of amplification and seconds Quintilian by noting that a digression or “excursus [should] attach … itself as a natural conclusion of a narrative,”41 be it pleasing or displeasing, beautiful or ugly. When executed well and effectively, such digressions would be concinna digressio, or “an elegant digression.”42 Elegant digressions came out of the period’s love of the copiousness that characterized imaginative writing and of amplification as a syntactic and stylistic development of a topic. As such, digressions became widely used, but they also began to come under attack; this can be seen in a particularly stark light by studying the debates between supporters of Ariosto and Tasso.43 This devaluation of amplification applies equally well to Spenser, whose digressions offer an example of verbal play rather than of narrative copia; for Spenser’s digressive play, joy in language, and composition of argument represent sources of delight.44 Cicero, in Brutus, advances the view that digression, as a kind of embellishment, produces pleasure in those listening to a narration in order “to digress from the business in hand for embellishment, to delight his listeners, to move them, to amplify his theme, to use pathos and general topics.”45 Building his digressions on the Classical recommendation for poetry to offer pleasure, and in keeping with Erasmus’s own distinction between abundance of words and abundance of things, Spenser struc-

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tures digression as a strategic mode of writing for promoting the ethical and humanist program of his national romance epic. Spenser may seem to throw his readers off the path, but, in keeping with the romance resource, he always maintains a guide to move his readers along. The journeying nature of digression, as it finds its way down different and unexpected paths, as it pauses in awe to contemplate this or that sight, links the rhetorical elements described by Classical and humanist thinkers strongly to the romance strategy.46 Perhaps this is why, in his letter to Raleigh, Spenser jumps from Homer to Virgil to Ariosto and Tasso so quickly, all in the same sentence, as though epic and romance were so easy to combine. Certainly Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was important in this creating of such a combination in Spenser’s mind, as Ariosto combats the seeming supremacy of epic by making it subject to his infinitely digressive romance. When only about five years before The Faerie Queene was published, debates about the merit of epic over romance writing raged between Lodovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, Tasso wrote Apologia in difesa della suan Gerusalemme Liberatta (1585), a short treatise that puts forward a theory of romance. He devoted this treatise to Gerusalemme Liberata, the romance epic that influenced Spenser. Tasso singles out “the greatest abundance of events” (that is, multiplicity of action) as one of the most useful characteristics of romance;47 such an abundance of events clearly played a role in the Bower of Bliss, which Spenser modelled on Tasso’s garden of Armida. In Spenser’s hand, thus, multiplicity of action found one of its more imaginative realizations in digressions. In Spenser’s practice of straggling, the sumptuous House of Pride (12.4.6–9) is built on a series of incidents working towards what has been described as the central “mission of healing and regeneration”48 in the fourth canto of Book 1. The “sumptuous shew” (1.4.7) that the House of Pride is consists of a series of descriptive scenes representing the House’s gaudiness as evidence of the deception for which it stands allegorically. From the array of “costly arras” (1.4.6) that covers the interior in which a maiden queen is adorned with “glistering gold and peerlesse pretious stone” (1.4.8), to the coach “Adorned all with gold, and girlonds gay” (1.4.17) in which Duessa (False Faith) rides, to the ornate display of the seven deadly sins that accompany Duessa (1.4.18–36), the digressions of

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the House of Pride turn the argument against Lucifera’s seductive and false faith into a series of visual incidents preparing the reader for the explanation to follow. Sansfoy exclaims that he does not care at all for the charms (“I no whit reck” [1.4.50]) with which Duessa tries to seduce him; he rejects ornament and enchantments as tools of persuasion, and attempts to persuade Fidessa to surrender to him. The pressure for innovation in composing a new kind of national epic, one that draws significantly on the medieval romance, on the Italian epic tradition in the poetry of Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, Lodovici, and Trissino,49 and on Classical learning and mythology in the vein of a true humanist writer, results in bold and ingenious arguments with which to enrich poetry. The heresies referring to the general topic of his romance and visually displayed in the opening stanzas in the House of Pride episode by turning one digression into another are evidence of Spenser’s attempt to mix tradition and ingenuity in composing his romance as a series of exemplary, if allegorical, narratives of virtuous and unvirtuous conduct. From stanzas 35–44, the reader is plunged into a different but not unrelated world of fantasy, this time the gruesome world of pagan mythology. During the House of Pride episode, with its carefully choreographed iconography that mixes biblical and historical allegories of the sins and the court, Sansfoy now narrates a story of healing as a way of leaving behind the sinful and crushing narrative of false faith; it is perhaps no wonder then that a key influence on this scene was another work of romance and digressive wandering, Jean de Cartigny’s The Wandering Knight (1581).50 The errant knight has become the virtuous yet falsely accused youth of Classical mythology. Hippolytus, the “iolly huntsman” (1.5.37) from The Faerie Queene, was accused, in the Greek myth, of treason by his father Theseus, who wrongly believed that his son had slept with his stepmother Phaedra, who in turn was thought to have fallen in love with the virtuous youth. Wrongly accused of incontinence, Hippolytus fled from his resentful father, but could not escape the punishment that Neptune, engaged by Theseus, inflicted on the misfortunate youth. Unable to control his horses, which were frightened by the noise of the sea-calves that Neptune charged at him, Hippolytus smashed against the rocks, tearing his body to pieces. Spenser’s rendering of this myth of error and violence is presented as a narrative of the

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regeneration of vital energies and of faith, compromised and destroyed by paternal error and violence: His goodly corps on ragged cliffs yrent, Was quite dismembered, and his members chast Scattered on euery mountaine, as he went, That of Hippolytus was left no moniment. (1.5.38) The falsehood at the heart of the pagan story, revealed and explored digressively, becomes an occasion to speak about error piercing through Spenser’s Christian romance. Spenser doubles the remedy required as an explanation to the series of circumstantial allegorical evidence and incidents. Fusing the stories of Hippolytus’s dismembered body with the myth of Diana’s dismemberment of Actaeon, Spenser turns Hippolytus into a “wounded knight” (1.5.41), whose torn limbs Diana, on behalf of her friend Phaedra, delivers to Aesculapius, who “by his art / Did heale them all againe, and ioned euery part” (1.5.39). Having just given the reader the satisfaction of the ending, the narrator digresses: There auncient Night arruiuing, did alight From her nigh wearie waine, and in her armes To Aesculapius brought the wounded knight: Whom hauing softly disarayed of armes, To gan to him discouer all his harmes, Beseeching him with prayer, and with praise, If either salues, or oyles, or herbes, or charmes A fordonne wight from dore of death mote raise, He would at her request prolong her nephews daies. (1.5.41) The backward glance towards Classical mythology represents a digression not only into ancient lore but also into humanist learning about the natural world, showing an intricate connection between the reparative power of romance poetry and the humanist interest in the medicinal virtue of plants. Periods of long gestation of Classical knowledge

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and learning garnered from European and Classical books51 have led Spenser to integrate mythology, literature, and historiography in a single example of moral agency, narrating an argument about the practical application of knowledge as healing. In the digression of the Gulf of Greediness in Book 2 (canto 12), Una and Red Cross Knight push forward and suddenly find themselves in a desolate “darke and hollow hole” (2.12.6) in the Tartarian steppe, the horrific and dark landscape of Hell. “The Rock of vile Reproch” to which they have come is a powerful picture showing a terrifying image of one of the most hateful of human traits, greed, as greedy seabirds – cormorants, mews, seagulls – perched on a cliff emit ominous shrill sounds while awaiting prey. That is how Spenser renders expanding practices of early modern banking. The evidence of the repulsive nature of early modern banking transforms the reviled social practice of usury into the subject of scrutiny of the readers of Spenser’s romance. The presumption that follows in the next stanza translates that which the imagery signifies in Acrasia’s country. “[B]ehold,” the Palmer says, “th’ensamples in our sights, / Of lustful luxurie and thriflesse wast” (2.12.9). Attacking bankers for their greedy practices represents a way of making romance respond to matters of the contemporary secular world. Allowing a digression to tackle a key theme of romance, the clash between the romantic and the real, can be found in other key works of romance, from Ariosto’s lament that gunpowder has ruined the code of chivalry to the frequent clashes between Alonso Quixano and his romantic alter ego, Don Quixote. In any case, for the next thirty stanzas Spenser advances the argument about this critique through a chain of imagery rooted in mercantile activities – before the next turn in that narrative takes the reader to a very different episode, “The Bower of Bliss,” in which the knight’s sexual virtue is tested. As Quintilian instructs, at the end of a digressive journey (and journey is what this commercial digression is), the narrative should return us to “our main theme.” In canto 12, stanza 87, after Acrasia’s beasts have been restored to their human form, the narrative returns to the knight Guyon’s heroic quest. The fact that Spenser returns again and again in his romance to the connection between religious and secular discourses, between the supernatural and the natural, shows that wonder and dialectic intertwined in shaping the romance writing of the 1590s.52

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Book 3, canto 8, poignantly illustrates the purpose of a digression built around circumstantial narrative to engage in a disputation on a controversial theme. At the start of the canto, the narrator announces an example showing Florimell, the “gentle Damzell” (3.8.1) of his romance, caught in a hopeless situation (“plonged be in such affliction, / Without all hope of comfort or reliefe” [3.8.1]). The evidence of this comes in stanza 7, where “the accursed Hag” (3.8.2) conjures up another Florimell: Instead of eyes two burning lamps she set In siluer sockets, shyning like the skyes, And a quicke mouing Spirit did arret To stirre and roll them, like a womans eyes; In stead of yellow lockes she did deuise, With golden wyer to weaue her curled head; Yet golden wyre was not so yellow thrise As Florimells faire haire: and in the stead Of life, she put a Spright to rule the carkasse dead. (3.8.7) This cross-dressed gothic creature is made to resemble a bedecked carcass (“Decked with many a costly ornament” [3.8.12]), moved as if alive by a spirit (the Prince of Darkness) placed inside this woman-like creation (“Creatresse” [3.8.10]), and dressed in the clothes that Florimell left behind while fleeing in the previous canto. The Hag gives this “Creatresse” to her ailing son as a comfort, because the feeble youth has for a long time desired Florimell (“She was the Lady selfe, whom he so long had sought” [3.8.9]). In the scene which follows, in which the proud knight, Braggadocchio, charges at the odd couple, another knight “by chaunce encountered on the way” (3.8.15) gets embroiled in “this sad encounter” (3.8.16). The clash between Braggadocchio and the other knight turns into an occasion to dispute the conflict of pride as a cultural feature not unlike that which one could encounter in the court. The knight says: Thou foolish knight, that weenst with words To steale away, that I with blowes haue wonne,

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And brought through points of many perilous swords: But if thee list to see thy Courser ronne, or proue thy selfe, this sad encounter shonne, And seeke else without hazard of thy hed. (3.8.17) Before the two knights part ways before the unnamed knight takes the artificial lady, thinking her Florimell, Bragadocchio replies: Sith then (said Braggadocchio) needes thou wilt Thy dayes abridge, through proofe of pouissance, Turne we our steeds, that both in equall tilt May meet againe, and each take happie chance. (3.8.18) The purpose of the dialogue is to separate, as it were, virtuous from unvirtuous action, but, generally, to illustrate to the reader the falsehood and deception of pride. Dialogue gives form to the debate about the subject of pride, a subject controversial and criticized in the period. The presumption that virtue underpins the pride of the other knight’s action is soon dispelled by the revelation that the real Florimell “her selfe was farre away” (3.8.20), having fled the “Monsters crueltie” in a fisherman’s boat. The explanation with which this circumstantial narrative ends, confirming that Florimell is alive and well, contradicts the power of magic to arrange relationships. In its rhetorical richness and narrative resourcefulness, this digression recalls Cicero’s agreement with Brutus when he describes the ability of digression to enliven and make speech pleasing.53 Instances such as this demonstrate Spenser’s competent transmission of rhetorical learning to the service of romance writing, a transmission that instructs and interrogates its subject but that also enlivens and pleases readers. In that, Spenser was at least as attentive to the resource that romance writing afforded to composition in late Elizabethan England as he was to the celebration of Elizabethan nationalist Protestantism, which is how criticism generally portrays him.54 Circumstantial evidence shows that Spenser uses it in digressions to push against his own creation, notably

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in Book 1. These moments of disruption, which are signs of Spenser’s integration of romance strategies into this hybrid work that also draws on the epic tradition heavily, show that Spenser uses romance as a resource for writing by pushing away from romance conventions and making the form his own, and by giving his characters a life of their own beyond the control of the narrative. As we have argued, this issue of control is paramount, for it links Spenser’s digressions to the rhetorical traditions. As Cicero and Quintilian, and Peacham and Puttenham after them, have argued, digression must be pleasing without being distracting. On the whole, Spenser succeeds at the former, and his digressions allow him to explore and interrogate his central concerns in a variety of challenging ways, and yet he does not fully escape from the charge of the latter. Spenser’s potential for distraction as the source of readerly pleasure might be what the romantic poet John Keats had in mind in the most Spenserian of his works, “The Eve of St Agnes,” in which the speaker tells of the bursting forth of “argent revelry, / With plume, tiara, and all rich array,” and “with triumphs gay / Of old romance” (lines 37–41).55 While he seems just about to launch into an extended Spenserian digression, the speaker immediately changes direction and states that we will “wish” that all “away, / And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there” (lines 41–2). As much as Keats admired Spenser (during his final months he actually wrote a very moving letter to Fanny Browne telling her that he was occupying himself with reading Spenser and preparing passages for her to enjoy56), in “The Eve” at least he does seem to want to remain focused on the issue at hand. However, if not getting to the point did not coincide with Keats’s poetic aims in “The Eve,” it clearly does with Spenser’s in The Faerie Queene. In the narrative march through the straggling plots of the Faerie land, romance writing becomes a strategy of adapting humanist theories of persuasion by circumstantiality to the new purpose of romance in the early modern period. Spenser’s unique adaptation is thus well suited to Elizabethan humanism, for it employs persuasion through digression as a way of scrutinizing the many forms of discourse, especially religious and political, that so galvanized his times. To straggle then is not to lose track; instead, it is to reach, as one makes one’s way through The Faerie Queene, the destination by different means. In this sense, Spenser’s not

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getting to the point being the point is perhaps, despite our earlier assertion, not wholly accurate. As paradoxical as it may seem, Spenser’s not getting to the point is, actually, simply just his particular way of getting to the point. This essay extends the argument developed by critics who, like Jeff Dolven,57 demonstrate that romance is not merely a detached mode of literature, existing in its own discursive and narrative vacuum for the purposes of entertainment, but rather is deeply rooted in the strategies of writing informed by early modern practices of humanist education, and concomitantly engaged with issues raised by the external world. By drawing attention to the capacity of romance for rhetoric, dialectic, and instruction, this essay interrogates why writers such as Spenser remained drawn to the form in spite of the barrage of criticism from moralists and literary theorists that circulated in the early modern period. The importance of the role dialectic and rhetoric play in the shaping of Spenser’s narrative also shows that romance writing was partially dependent upon an early modern humanist curriculum – it did not exist on an entirely different playing field from treatises of education and other ‘serious’ kinds of literature read in that curriculum – and, because of this close connection with the practices and strategies drawn from the study of rhetoric and dialectic, romance remained of interest to educated readers. For those readers, romance was capable of communicating something crucially important to an understanding of their lives and culture, something that is lost to us reading these romances from our historical remove from early modern humanist training and habits of reading.

notes 1 In a review of Andrew Hadfield’s biography of Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2012), Charles Nicholl used T.S. Eliot’s idea of a “conspiracy of approval” to ask why Spenser, despite frequently being ranked along the other great English Renaissance writers, is so little read today, at least outside of academia. One of Nicholl’s suggestions is that modern readers are unfamiliar with Spenser’s modes, such as pastoral and

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romance; but he also suggests that the narrative digressions, in the course of which the main protagonists change names, may be one of the reasons the modern reader may not be drawn to Spenser. This chapter shows how such seeming distractions from a unified narrative actually make for a much richer and fulfilling work, even if they also make for a more demanding reading experience. See Charles Nicholl, “Edmund Spenser: A Life by Andrew Hadfield,” The Guardian (20 July 2012). Richard Rambuss, “Spenser’s Life and Career,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, editd by Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 75. John Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 400. Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (Plymouth, uk: Northcote House, 1996), 32–3. “The Faerie Queene,” The Secret Life of Books, season 2, episode 1, hosted by Janina Ramirez, bbc (12 October 2015). Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979), and Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2011). Richard Chamberlain, Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 81. Throughout this chapter, the text of The Faerie Queene is quoted from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987). Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley, ca, Los Angeles, and Oxford, uk: University of California Press, 1991), 107. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (Gainesville, fl: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, [1593] 1954), sig. D3v. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, A Study in Medieval Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1936] 2013), 387. Lewis is sometimes quite critical of the role of digression in medieval romance, such as those in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, but elsewhere in The Allegory of Love he stresses, as we do here, that Spenser’s digressions are always tied to the main narrative in surprising ways. David Quint, “Review of Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode

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J.H. Cameron and G. Stanivukovic by Patricia A. Parker,” Studies in Romanticism 19, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 571–7, at 571. The work Quint reviews, Parker’s Inescapable Romance, discusses the importance of digression in romance, particularly in Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton, with Parker arguing that such wandering and deferral leads to a kind of moral valence, be it in the protagonist, the writer, or the reader. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, ny, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 318. Susanne L. Wofford, “The Faerie Queene, Books I–III,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, edited by Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 110. Harry Berger, Jr, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1990); Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1993); Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 2000). Frank Kermode, Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 35. For more on Spenser’s education, see Lisa Jardine’s entry in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 130–1. Spenser’s digressions have sometimes been referred to as Ovidian; for more on Ovid’s influence on the “Cantos of Mutabilitie,” particularly in regards to both Ovid’s and Spenser’s sense of exile, see Michael Holahan, “Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic,” elr 6 (1976): 259–62. Peter V. Marinelli, “Lodovico Ariosto,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 57; for a discussion of entrelacement and narrative sequence and temporality, see John Whitman, “Romance and History: Designing the Times,” in Romance and History, edited by John Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16. Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1976), 333. Edward J. Dudley, The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 195–6. Andrew Hadfield, “The Faerie Queene, Books IV–VI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, 126.

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Burrow, Edmund Spenser, 27. Wofford, “The Faerie Queene, Books I–III,” 122. Burrow, Edmund Spenser, 126. The oed Online defines “circumstantial” as “indirect evidence inferred from circumstances which afford a certain presumption, or appear explainable only on one hypothesis” (A1a). John Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Brian Vickers (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2003), 398–427, at 411. Ibid., 411. Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 24n411. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 318. In not offering an example for “straggler,” Puttenham follows Cicero and Susenbrotus as models “suggesting that one cannot give examples of commoratio because it is not so much an independent figure as a way of writing that flows through an entire speech or portion of a speech … and is thus inseparable from the whole” (Whigham and Rebhorn, eds., in Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 318n292). Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 318n294. Ibid., 318. Burrow, Edmund Spenser, 133. For more on Spenser and Quintilian, see David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63. “Plerisque moris est prolato rerum ordine protinus utique in aliquem laetum as plausibilem locum quam maxime possint favorabiliter excurrere.” Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, translated by H.E. Butler (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1985), vol. II, book IV.iii.2. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., book IV.iii.12. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 122. “re digressio, in qua cum fuerit delectatio, tum reditus ad rem aptus et concinnus esse debebit.” Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vol. III, book IX. i.28. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 318. Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 2., edited by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 650. Ibid., 467.

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43 For more on this debate, see Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1970), 27–42. 44 “In the seventeenth century, copia was gradually devalued. Erasmus had been able to match verbal diversity with nature’s plenitude, because for him and his contemporaries, the universe delighted in variety. In the world of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, variety was reduced to simple laws … Copia fell to the domain of literature, where verbal play was still licensed.” Thomas O. Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176. 45 “ut egrederetur a proposito ornandi cause, ut delectaret animos, ut permoveret, ut augeret rem, ut miserationibus, ut communibus locis uteretur.” Cicero, Brutus, translated by H.M. Hubel (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1988), xxi.82. 46 For more on this, see chapter 5 of Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1971). 47 Quoted in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. II (Chicago, il: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1010. 48 Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31–2. 49 For an extensive analysis of Spenser’s use of Italian poetry, see Veselin Kosti, Spenser’s Sources in Italian Poetry: A Study of Comparative Literature (Belgrade: Filološki fakultet Beogradskog Univerziteta, 1969). 50 Marco Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 170. 51 Andrew Hadfield provides an excellent summary of Spenser’s “formidable knowledge” of English, European, and Classical texts in his own formidable biography of Spenser, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 120. 52 See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1986), 144. 53 The whole passage appears in Cicero, Brutus, xciii, 322. 54 Andrew King’s assertion that chivalric romance “could be an inappropriate narrative form in which to express the tenets of Protestant theology” serves as a good starting point to think about Spenser’s “‘reformation’ of native romance.” This reformation manifests itself not just at the level of allegorical presentation of political and theological Protestantism but also of the often-

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neglected humanist aspect of poetic composition and argumentation, as this chapter shows. See King, The Faerie Queene, 128–9. 55 John Keats, “The Eve of St Agnes,” in John Keats: Selected Poems, edited by John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988), 143. 56 John Keats, Selected Letters, edited by Robert Gittings and John Mee (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2002), 355. 57 Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, il, and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

3 Milton and the Resource of Romance Colin Lahive

In 1695, the blind and retired Sir Samuel Morland, erstwhile employee of the Cromwellian government and, from 1660, royalist supporter, turned his attention to collecting in one volume “some Observations and Reflections” he had made during his lifetime.1 Morland’s treatise, The Urim of Conscience (1695), is structured around four questions “of great weight and importance” (A1r) and the answers that he provides by way of enlightening and instructing his readers. His overall aim in preparing the work was, he claims in the preface, to assist “especially profest Christians, who ought, every Day of their Lives, seriously to propose to themselves such Interrogatories, and require, at the same time, sincere and direct Answers from their own Consciences” (A2v). But Morland’s ruminations in the first section of his treatise on the question “Who, and what art thou?” (B1r) betray an anxiety, particularly common in early modern Protestant exegesis and theological discourse, centring on the problem of fiction and the threat posed by the faculty of imagination to the accurate interpretation and faithful representation of biblical source material. Anticipating his audience’s desire to read a “short Discourse concerning Blessed and Apostate Spirits” in a section of his book focusing on Satan’s intrusion into Paradise and its repercussions, Morland explains his reluctance to invent what has not been provided by scripture: But I am afraid on the one side, that he would be very little satisfied with my Endeavours, in case I should, in imitation of a late learned Author, try to squeeze a plausible Description of lost paradise, out of St. John’s Vision in the Isle of Patmos, and fancy

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to my self a formal and pitcht Battle, upon a vast and wide Plain, in the North part of Heaven, fought between two mighty Hosts of Blessed and Revolted Spirits, conducted and led up by mighty Arch-Angels, (for their Generals) riding in Brazen Chariots, drawn by foaming Steeds, and clad with Adamantine Coats, one of which was, by a massy Sword, cut down to the wast, and stain’d with Angelick blood: Where the one of these Armies dug up the Terrain of Heaven, and with the Materials they there found, made Powder, Bullets and great Guns … and with them did great Execution upon their Enemies, who in Revenge tore up great Mountains by the Roots, and hurl’d them at their Heads, with a great number of other Romantick Stories, which is Ludere cum Sacris, and much fitter for Poets and Painters, who when they are got to the top of their Parnassus, frame to themselves Idea’s of what Chimera’s or Goblins they please. (B3r–v) The “late learned Author” in question is, of course, John Milton, and Morland, who probably knew Milton when both men worked in the civil service in the 1650s under John Thurloe and were involved in Cromwell’s attempt to solve the problem of the persecution of the Waldensians in Piedmont in 1655, clearly had at least read Book VI of Paradise Lost (1667; 1674) centring on the War in Heaven. The passage is indicative of many of the responses to Paradise Lost and, to a lesser extent, Paradise Regained (1671) that appeared throughout the first century after publication: many of the early critical engagements with the poems were based upon a deeply rooted fear in Protestant culture of fiction, especially romance – which had by the seventeenth century become a synecdoche for fiction – and its perceived ability to, in the words of Arthur Dent, “draw men from the scriptures” by “fabulous deuices.”2 This unease was by no means expressed solely by the hotter sort of Protestants, but rather cut across the party lines of puritan and conformist alike to varying degrees. The prevailing concern was that romance material not only distracted readers from reading the bible, it also inflamed the imagination: romance encouraged readers, whose minds, like Don Quixote, had become infected with the trappings of the form, to read the bible as though it were just another work of trifling

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fiction and equate the giants in Genesis, the dragon in Revelation, and the accounts of God’s wonders in both the Old and New Testaments with the magical and supernatural elements of romance. The problem for Morland and other early readers of the poem, then, was that Milton had no basis in scripture for his embellished account of the Genesis narrative, and his heavily fictionalized description of the War in Heaven, which attracted much contemporaneous criticism because it is only briefly referred to in Revelation 12:7 as the event that resulted in Satan’s expulsion, was regarded as a particularly damnable offence in certain quarters in the seventeenth century. Morland’s identification of romance in Paradise Lost is, on one level, polemical, because his criticism is in line with the vociferous anti-Milton campaign that served to damage further the reputation of the notorious regicide defender – whose writings on civil and religious liberty had become associated with the Whig cause – in the decades after 1660. But on another level it exposes a contradiction at the very heart of the poem: Paradise Lost is built upon the central tenet that it is divinely inspired and not created from memory or the imagination – a poem instructed by the “heavenly Muse” and “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”3 In making such a claim to originality, Milton must implicitly reject all learning so that his poem can function as prophetic verse. This culminates in his rejection of both epic and romance in the final invocation to the Muse in Book IX, in which he excoriates chivalric romance as the product of the “skill of artifice or office mean” (39). Indeed, one of the most overused ways to get around the problem that the presence of romance in the poem registers is to turn to this recusatio and employ the passage as evidence of Milton’s final rejection of the form. But the recusatio should in fact do the very opposite and draw attention to some of the anxieties inherent in Milton’s poetic imagination – the tensions that arise from his creative impulse to respond imaginatively to biblical history on one hand, and his adherence to the truth of scripture on the other. As with any recusatio dating back to Classical models in the poetry of Callimachus, Virgil, or Horace, it should not be taken seriously and should, if anything, put the reader on guard because it usually serves to introduce ambiguity and doublespeak: the poet states that he will not write about a specific subject, oftentimes war, but by outlining his re-

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luctance he has already granted expression to that which he intends to reject. In other words, the recusatio is a dissimulating rhetorical device used to engage the reader by challenging the artifice of generic convention and expectation while at the same time relying upon the very artifice that it attempts to undermine. It encourages the reader to think about the very topic that the poet repudiates as an unsuitable subject for celebration. Milton takes this one step further by revealing that he will not tell of “Wars,” “fabled knights / In battles feigned,” and the “tinsel trappings” of romance (9:28–36). This is especially ironic considering that Milton has already made an entirely fabricated war between angelic forces the subject of a whole book of Paradise Lost, while also making strategic use of romance to provide a framework for his theopolitical vision. For Protestant moralists, events that had no basis in scripture were mere fiction, and most fiction in the early modern period was essentially tainted by the subcategory of romance. By gesturing towards Milton’s theological fictions as the “great number of other Romantick Stories” contained in the poem, Morland reduces Paradise Lost to romance status and undermines its claims not only to originality but to prophetic poetry. Morland’s insight is an example of the ways in which Milton’s denunciation of romance in his recusatio was not taken at face value during the early reception of the poem, but was, on the contrary, regarded as a rhetorical strategy designed to draw readers in or read as evidence of Milton’s own anxiety over the presence of romance in the biblical epic. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Milton was seen to be wilfully drawing on the tropes of romance to embellish his poem, and those readers opposed to the perceived heresies in Paradise Lost, such as its Arianism, were quick to associate them with the form. This stands in contrast to the reception of Paradise Lost in modern criticism, which more often than not tends to accept the outward rejection of romance without ever really questioning its function in the poem. The disconnect between earlier and later receptions of Paradise Lost brings into focus the problem of romance for both early modern and modern audiences, and is indicative of the fact that Milton’s handling of this most contested of literary types, and the tensions that arise from its presence in the poem, pose a number of questions that have yet to be answered.

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Milton engaged with the motifs, narrative strategies, language, and ideology of romance throughout his career, from “Il Penseroso” (c. 1631– 32) through Eikonoklastes (1649) to Paradise Regained. In a reassessment of some of the prevailing critical paradigms upholding the view that Milton rejected romance outright as spiritually and morally misleading and politically inappropriate, this essay demonstrates that romance essentially maintained a powerful hold on Milton’s poetic and political imagination, and that it is possible to trace in his imaginative and polemical writings not only a continuous engagement with romance but a conscious effort to reposition its focus and redirect its ideals in accordance with his own shifting religious and political views. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that Milton remained deeply concerned about romance and committed to its reconstitution as a puritan, anti-royalist mode of expression after the execution of Charles I in 1649.4 But a full historicist critical treatment of Milton’s handling of romance that takes into account the complex status of this literary kind in the seventeenth century and builds upon the work done in recent years on the literary cultures of nonconformity in pre- and post-Restoration contexts has yet to be undertaken. This is despite the fact that Milton’s interaction with romance appears to have been a concern of readers since the seventeenth century for a range of aesthetic, moral, religious, and political reasons. Romance tropes repeatedly come to the surface in Milton’s writings, particularly at moments of crisis, and his use of romance is strategic: romance was a form that offered an idealized representation of human experience that Milton could challenge and realign according to his Christian focus, and he uses it to frame an examination of some of the debates centring on providence, free will, and political obligation that inform his own theopolitical vision. Romance, after all, is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, and shares many of its foundation myths, so it should come as no surprise that Milton thought about romance in biblical and theological terms, especially in his late poems.5 The dominant critical paradigm constructs an image of Milton as an enthusiastic reader of romance in his youth who later rejects the form as a necessary step in writing a Christian epic built around the theme of “patience and heroic martyrdom” (pl 9:32).6 But romance actually becomes more ideologically useful to Milton in the decades after his return from the Continent

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in 1639, because it provides a metaphorical framework for his archetypal conception of truth and error, and true and false religion, which is centrally embedded in the narratives of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and brought into focus in the struggle between the Son and Satan on their respective romance quests. Milton’s output in both poetry and prose over a forty-year period demonstrates his persistent interaction with romance while at the same time registering not only the changes in his attitude towards the form but his aim to reconstitute it – especially after the failure of the republican commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy – as an integral feature of a suitably puritan, politically charged, anti-royalist poetics of dissent. Milton’s understanding of romance was shaped in particular by the immediate contexts in which he wrote, and his handling of the form can be read as a response to the wide range of uses to which romance was put in the period. For example, the royalist appropriation of chivalric and pastoral romance during the 1630s provided a visual language and rhetoric for the unification of marriage and the personal chivalric identity of Charles I. Furthermore, following in the footsteps of John Barclay’s influential Argenis (1621; 1625), romance became exceptionally popular in the middle decades of the seventeenth century as political allegory and romans à clef as means of examining and making sense of contemporary history, as the title page of one romance makes clear: Theophania: or Several Modern Histories Represented by way of Romance: And Politickly Discours’d Upon; By An English Person of Quality (1655).7 The return of the monarchy in 1660 allowed its supporters to interpret the event in romance terms: historical events were now mirroring the archetypal romance pattern of royal loss and restoration, and were, in turn, mapped onto romance plots by writers with royalist sympathies, as in Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria (1653–61). Romance functioned as a politically engaged mode of writing that was used to explore the variegated nature of royalist ideology in the period as well as some of the most pressing concerns of the day regarding monarchical absolutism, hereditary succession, the abuse of power, and the form of mixed government. But at a deeper level romance also survived in the Protestant imagination as a memory of Eden, the world that was lost at the Fall; romance ultimately treats humanity’s wish to return to the Edenic state

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of perfection. It is in this context that romance could be understood and re-inflected by oppositional, puritan, republican, and dissenting writers as a mode of discourse for political engagement, and its capacity to challenge and undermine established institutions was only heightened during the political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century, when the form became a battleground upon which the various factions contended, looking to use romance as an expression of their political and religious experience. As Northrop Frye has shown, romance is, at its very core, “antirepresentational” and characterized by a “revolutionary quality” seeking to interrogate and undermine the “cultural establishment” by comparing it to an incomparable, unattainable ideal.8 Therein lies its attraction to Milton and such other oppositional and dissenting writers as Samuel Gott, Nathaniel Ingelo, Lucy Hutchinson, Benjamin Keach, and John Bunyan, whose treatments of romance, particularly in the way that it is appropriated for didactic purposes, share similarities with the way in which Milton thought about teaching and learning in romance terms throughout his career. Recent criticism has questioned the implications of identifying “Lycidas” (1637) as registering in poetry the moment of Milton’s burgeoning radicalization.9 This is a result of the biographical picture that has emerged in recent years of Milton as a relatively conservative figure in the 1630s, and not the radical-in-waiting that he was hitherto thought to be.10 But if the view of a conservative younger Milton places additional critical pressure on examining “Lycidas” as a turning point in his radicalization, then the movement from conservatism to opposition is equally reflected in his attitude towards romance before and after 1637. The 1630s was a crucial decade in Milton’s intellectual development and gradual politicization, during which time his major poetic aspiration was to write an Arthuriad. His writings on the subject after 1637, however, reveal a certain anxiety about the project, and he abandoned his plans at some stage before 1642. In Mansus (1638), Milton’s language suggests that, even at this point, he may have been reconsidering his longheld plans: If ever I call back into poetry the kings of my native land and Arthur, who set wars raging even under the earth, or tell of the

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great-hearted heroes of the round table, which their fellowship made invincible, and – if only the inspiration would come – smash the Saxon phalanxes beneath the impact of the British charge.11 Milton’s later condemnation of Arthur in The History of Britain (1670) as “the Cheif General for the British Kings” who was “more renown’d in Songs and Romances, then in true stories” have led some critics to suggest that Milton became disillusioned with the historical veracity of the Arthurian legend and changed his mind about the subject of his poem as a result.12 But Arthur’s historicity had been refuted as far back as 1534, when Polydore Vergil subjected the legend to scrutiny in Anglica Historia, and it is highly doubtful that somebody of Milton’s intellectual standing believed in the legend when he mooted his plans as a mature man. It is more than likely that Milton was interested in writing an Arthuriad that could serve as a mythopoeic representation of the nation, but, as his attitudes towards established institutions changed, and he became a voice of opposition, he began to question the moral authority of a legend that had for centuries been so entwined with the monarchy and its attempts at self-preservation. Indeed, even in recent history, Charles I, especially after his delayed Scottish coronation in 1633, was seen to be fulfilling Merlin’s prophecy that a future king would rule a united Britain as Arthur had done. But Milton’s religious convictions, especially those relating to the makeup of the English church, had the greatest impact on his decision to abandon the project. After leaving Cambridge, Milton engaged in a systematic study of civil and ecclesiastical history. This programme of reading led him to realize that Arthur was inextricably linked to beliefs about the early British church founded in apostolic times, and that this church, which Arthur stood to defend, was an episcopal one, and likely to have been schismatic.13 In the early 1640s, in the aftermath of the anticlerical tirade in “Lycidas,” false episcopacy – prelaticism – had become the target of Milton’s ire as a corrupting force within the church and state, and so to celebrate Arthur would simply have been too problematic. The impact of Milton’s emergent radicalization, and specifically his views on the structure and worshipping practices of the church, are also

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tangible in An Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), his final antiprelatical tract. The tract betrays a hint of Milton’s uneasiness about his views of romance that parallels the anxiety that is palpable in Mansus: at the beginning of a passage in which Milton attempts to rewrite his personal history of engagement with romance, he pleads “for heare me out now Readers” (cpw 1:890). The interjection betrays an awareness of the pejorative perception of romance in the early modern period, but Milton proceeds to defend the form and his reading of it. As he casts a backward glance at the “lofty Fables and Romances” that he read in his youth, he singles out the didactic quality of romance and the role that it played in his moral and intellectual development: the “deeds of Knighthood” are recounted in “solemne canto’s,” and Milton sets himself apart from the critics of romances who considered such material to be “the fuell of wantonnesse and loose living” by asserting that he “learnt” from his reading of romance “what a noble virtue chastity sure must be” (cpw 1:891). The passage is suggestive of Milton’s attempts to redefine romance and reposition its ideals, and his praise for the didactic potential of the form from the vantage point of 1642 is revealing: Only this my minde gave me that every free and gentle spirit without that oath ought to be borne a Knight, nor needed to expect the guilt spurre, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to stirre him up both by his counsell, and his arme to secure and protect the weaknesse of any attempted chastity. (cpw 1:891) Milton’s reference to the ceremonial conferring of knighthood has topical resonance. In a letter circulated to the bishops, Charles I had insisted on the church and the state acting as one.14 Accordingly, Charles drew upon the ceremonial practices and ritual of the church to present a sacerdotal, High Church conception of Caroline knighthood, as seen in his reforms of the Order of the Garter, the chivalric institution that he used for the purposes of political propaganda. By 1642, the ritual conferring of knighthood was seen in some quarters as an anachronism from an earlier aristocratic social order, but that is not to say that the moral ideals that it stood to protect were equally outdated. The emphasis on the conferring of knighthood recalls Milton’s reference to St George and

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the dragon in The Reason of Church-Government (1642) published a few months earlier. Turning to one of the archetypal motifs of romance, Milton had called upon the knights of the Order, whose oath binds them to protect true religion from its enemies, to defeat prelacy: Him our old patron Saint George by his matchlesse valour slew, as the Prelat of the Garter that reads his Collect can tell. And if our Princes and Knights will imitate the fame of that old champion, as by their order of Knighthood solemnly taken, they vow, farre be it that they should uphold and side with this English Dragon; but rather to do as indeed their oath binds them, they should make it their Knightly adventure to pursue and vanquish this mighty sailewing’d monster that menaces to swallow up the Land, unless her bottomless gorge may be satisfi’d with the blood of the Kings daughter the Church. (cpw 1:857) In Milton’s re-conceptualization of heroism in An Apology, however, it is the chivalric romance that teaches readers how to behave in a manner befitting a conscientious, godly, and virtuous citizen, because it is every person’s moral and civil duty to protect those virtues that are susceptible to manipulation and traditionally defended by the knight. Milton fashions himself as a reader who looks beyond the trappings of romance to access a deeper meaning, and he highlights his willingness to use the form as a medium for the communication of his own ideals. In so doing, he aligns himself with the view propounded by Spenser, the “better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas” (cpw 2:516), in his Letter to Raleigh: “So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.”15 But the passage also reveals a tempered rejection of the kind of ceremonialism that appealed to Milton when he wrote “Il Penseroso” and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), both of which provide early examples of Milton’s engagement with romance. It appears that Milton is attempting retrospectively in An Apology to bring his attitude towards romance into line with his thinking in 1642, by which time he had firmly adopted, through his four other antiprelatical tracts, an oppositional stance to the governing hierarchy and ceremonial practices of the church. Milton’s conception of romance as it develops over time

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becomes increasingly informed by his theological and ecclesiastical perspectives, and this is brought into focus in his late poems. The sentiments behind Milton’s views of romance in An Apology find a parallel in the views of the older Milton who presents towards the end of Paradise Lost in the dialogue between Michael and Adam an image of the ideal Christian hero who “shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far” (12:586–7). The puritan hero of Paradise Lost – the ideal to which all of humanity must aspire in the context of everyday life – is not part of the armigerous class or aristocratic social order that romance traditionally served to uphold. On the contrary, it is an ideal that is attainable by any person who is willing to “love with fear the only God, to walk / As in his presence, ever to observe / His providence, and on him sole depend” (12:562–4). Furthermore, the emphasis on the individual in the passage – “every free and gentle spirit” – equally finds a parallel in the valorization of the individual over the collective in puritan culture, and in puritanism’s consistent placing of individual liberties and responsibilities before church and state conformity. But if a little more critical pressure is applied, the passage can also be interpreted to hint at Milton’s theological convictions that become more apparent in his later writings. In Miltonic romance, “every free and gentle spirit” is permitted to perform the role of the knight, even if they are “without that oath” and have not been admitted to the select institution of knighthood because it was not their birthright. But on another level the language is suggestive of the Arminian doctrine that every person is free to accept or reject universal and resistible grace, irrespective of whether or not they have been chosen as one of God’s elect.16 Arminian doctrine served as the theology of Laudian Arminianism, which dominated the Church of England in the 1630s and was the ceremonial and sacramental theology to which the young Milton appears to have subscribed before 1637.17 In An Apology, Arminian doctrine – about which Milton was curiously silent in the antiprelatical tracts18 – possibly informs his repositioning of romance. It is, however, an Arminianism that has been detached from the highly ceremonial ritualism that characterized its presence in the Ludlow Masque, which has been described as constituting “the most complex and thorough expression of Laudian Arminianism and Laudian style within the Milton oeuvre.”19 In the

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Ludlow Masque, the Lady is liberated from the enchanted chair not by the power of her virtue, but by the external agency of Sabrina, who performs “a ritual sprinkling redolent of church sacraments, in an elegant display of the beauty of holiness.”20 This intervention secures the Lady’s liberation and salvation. In An Apology, on the other hand, no such ceremonialism or conferring ritual is required, and so salvation will be secured by those godly citizens who choose freely to defend true religion and sound virtue, and accept God’s grace, regardless of the presence of external agents. This is a position that corresponds to Milton’s beliefs regarding religious worship not when he was reading in his youth the romances to which he refers in An Apology, but at the time of writing the tract in 1642 in the midst of the antiprelatical debates. In Areopagitica (1644), the romance metaphor invoked by Milton to frame his understanding of Christian heroism and intellectual freedom registers a similar shift in his understanding of the form: He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. (cpw 2:514–15) The passage looks back to An Apology in the way that the “true warfaring Christian” is presented as the heroic ideal open to any virtuous citizen who exercises temperance and sound judgement effectively. But it is also possible to tease out a theological position in this chivalric romance metaphor that corresponds to the way in which Milton was thinking about the inheritance of sin at this time. Milton appears to allude to the doctrine of traducianism as an integral feature of the knightly condition, and this signals an intensification of the way in which his theological perspectives frame his understanding and handling of romance tropes: “we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much

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rather.” The theological position behind the image is concerned with the creation of souls, which is important because it bears an impact on Milton’s hamartiology. Traducianism upholds a belief in hereditary sin because it maintains that a fresh soul is not created for the human being on conception, but is rather passed on through the paternal line. It contrasts with creationism, which maintains that a fresh soul is created at conception, meaning that humans are born in a state of innocence and subsequently fall into sin, rather than actually bringing sin inherited ultimately from Adam, as in traducianism, into the world.21 Further evidence that traducianist doctrine possibly informs Milton’s conception of romance here can be found in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton’s treatise of systematic theology, upon which he possibly began work in the late 1640s – after a period of bible study that he began to conduct around 164522 – and in which he outlines his own position as a traducianist: “So it would seem that the human soul is generated by the parents in the course of nature, and not created daily by the immediate act of God” (cpw 6:319). This position allows Milton to trace the inheritance of sin all the way back to Satan, the progenitor of sin – represented in Paradise Lost by the image of Sin being born from the left side of Satan’s head (2:752–8) – who passes it on to humanity. To read Paradise Lost as an imaginative exposition of Milton’s theological perspectives examined through literary forms, then, facilitates a tracing of the prehistory of romance as Milton conceptualized it, and sheds light on the ways in which the events of the poem – and by extension Milton’s imaginative response to biblical history – are generically charged. Romance characterizes the devils’ condition in the chivalric world of hell,23 and by fashioning Satan’s quest in romance terms – setting him forth to wander from the diabolic court of Pandæmonium on a quest for subjectivity in order to define himself in opposition to the Godhead – Milton attempts to expose the satanic root of all false versions of the form. Adam and Eve’s response to the romance of Satan draws upon the critique of romance by Thomas Hobbes, who in The Elements of Law (1640) and Leviathan (1651) interpreted the form as a problem of the imagination that excited a desire for imitation and, in turn, became a threat to civil order.24 Furthermore, the royalist romances that appeared in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, such as Percy Her-

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bert’s Princess Cloria, William Sales’s Theophania, and Richard Brathwaite’s Panthalia (1659), place an emphasis on revising Hobbes’s theory of self-interest in favour of valorizing the role of the passions in forging political obligation.25 Milton picks up on these exigent contemporary debates in his framing of Eve’s seduction within the mode of romance: Satan is not only “all impassioned” and “to passion moved” (9:678, 667), but he manipulates Eve’s imagination to encourage her to imitate his actions in eating the fruit in the hope that he will bring about her political obligation to him. One of the aims of the satanic quest is to align Adam and Eve with the devils by fracturing the union of mankind with the Godhead and forcing humanity to share the fallen condition: “Seduce them to our party, that their God / May prove their foe” so that they “partake with us” (2:368–74), as Beëlzebub puts it. Milton’s representation of the events leading up to and including the Fall – an event he frames using romance tropes, such as wandering – encodes this in generic terms. Satan seduces Eve to think of herself as a romance figure on a quest by persuading her that God will praise her “dauntless virtue” (9:694), and both she and Adam understand their situation in terms of knightly trials and adventures: “Bold deed thou hast presumed, adventurous Eve” (9:921). Eve’s fundamental problem, then, is that she allows herself – like the readers of romance that Hobbes criticizes in Leviathan – to think of her own existence in literary terms and to have her imagination excited by Satan’s fictional romance narrative. Satan, on the other hand, is presented as one of the characters from the mid-century royalist prose romances who actively seek to invite imaginative identification as a means of forging political unity. Later, in his invective directed at Eve prior to their reconciliation, the fallen Adam confirms the success of Satan’s romance strategy: “Out of my sight, thou serpent, that name best / Befits thee with him leagued, thyself as false / And hateful” (10:867–9). Satan alters irreparably the human condition by introducing to Eden not only every evil known to man but, by extension, the literary forms that are used to grant expression to false worldly power and corruption. Satan’s faulty romance quest to Eden proves to be such an alluring model for Adam and Eve that they struggle to conceive of their own narrative in alternative terms. This is buttressed by the images of infection and humanity’s newfound kinship with the devils. As Sin tells Death: “Till I

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in man residing through the race, / His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect” (10:607–8). Similarly, Adam’s fallen state only enables him to compare his own situation to the sole example that he can now recall: “To Satan only like both crime and doom” (10:841). The satanic model appears to have inculcated a pattern on the minds of Eden’s inhabitants that they cannot now think beyond. Even when Michael explains to Adam how in the future the Son will redeem humanity on the only true romance quest of which all other quests are a perversion, Adam cannot help but understand the narrative in terms of a physical trial by combat, for which he is duly chastised: “Dream not of their fight,” warns Michael, “As of a duel, or the local wounds / Of head or heel” (12:386– 8). Adam appears as a Don Quixote figure whose mind is so infected from his reading of chivalric romance that he can only understand the world around him in romantic terms. By presenting him in such a way, Milton casts him as the prototype for the negligent reader of romance that a long line of Protestant moralists censured for proving susceptible to romance’s ability to inflame the imagination. The romance of Satan appears to have a powerful hold on Adam’s imagination, and it is the satanic model to which he compares the new knowledge about the saviour. But what Adam has fundamentally misunderstood is that the Son will not defeat Satan per se, but rather, in Michael’s words, “his works / In thee and in thy seed” (12:394–5). The metonymical function of “seed” to imply all of Adam’s progeny, which is to say the entire human race, is equally suggestive of the traducianist nature of hereditary sin as Milton understood it being passed on through the reproductive “seed.” Milton’s representation of the lesson is rooted in scripture: “He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Michael’s words communicate to Adam the nature of his inheritance of sin from Satan, and the subsequent bequeathing of this sin to his descendents. They also provide the rationale for the Son’s true romance quest, which contrasts with the false romance quests of secular heroes who have ultimately inherited their model of romance from Satan. In Paradise Lost, Milton appears to be tracing humanity’s inheritance of false romance all the way back to Satan, the source of all

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proliferating evils, thus implying that this version of romance not only has a diabolic root but could potentially be the source of all social and political ills. The romance model of false heroism, for which Satan claims he was rewarded for “venturing higher than [his] lot” (9:690), is presented to Eve as something that she should strive to emulate, and her mimetic desire results in transgression and disorder that has consequences for all eternity. The satanic romance acts as the catalyst for the futile knightly quest of secular heroes because man, to paraphrase Areopagitica, must be purified by trial as a result of Satan’s successful temptation of Eve. But because it is an imitation of the satanic quest, implanted in the minds, inseminated in the genes, and impressed on the behavioural patterns of Eden’s inhabitants by Satan, it leads the knight always to embroil himself in error. The ending of Paradise Lost, therefore, is, in fact, the beginning of the romance mode in the postlapsarian world: Adam and Eve leave Paradise with “wandering steps” (12:648) in imitation of the satanic romance, and in the process they initiate the pattern of wandering and questing that is later followed by the secular knights of romance on their faulty quests. Satan’s “wandering quest” (2:830) through chaos also poses a number of questions relating to the overarching narrative of the poem and the literary forms that Milton employs to represent the events. Satan’s quest is characterized by uncertainty, confusion, digression, and fortune – typical features of romance quests – while his own lack of foresight and reliance upon the natural processes of the universe to propel him along firmly cast him within a romance plot.26 A tension arises, therefore, between the Father’s foreknowledge of Satan’s objective, which serves as a type of fixed epic conclusion to his quest, and the movements Satan undergoes as a means to achieve that end. The Father appears obsessed with the fixed narrative of the universe, which is predetermined. He observes Satan’s quest “from his prospect high, / Wherein past, present, future he beholds” (3:77–8) and reveals to the Son that Satan “shall pervert; / For man will hearken to his glozing lies, / And easily transgress the sole command” (3:92–4). The Father’s revelation that the Son will be “man among men on earth” (3:283), followed by the Son’s own promise that he will prevail in his battle with evil, ensures that Satan’s quest will

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only ever hold temporal significance as a mere romance digression within the Father’s epic narrative of certitude, foreknowledge, and providence. In contrast, Satan actually believes that he can alter providence through his own plot, and here Milton once again presents him in strikingly similar terms to the heroes of the mid-century royalist prose romances who, in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, placed a greater emphasis on the hero’s role to carve out his or her own fate within a universe that often appeared devoid of God’s providential plan. But Satan’s quest is, however brief in the overarching schematic plan of the universe, integral to Milton’s conception and communication of Christian doctrine. Paradise Lost appears to voice a conflict between literary forms – between epic and romance – that is intricately bound to the Fall and its consequences. Both epic and romance are essential to Milton’s generic understanding of the universe and the human condition, and by contrasting the linear teleology of the Father’s providential narrative with the digressive plot of Satan’s romance, he demonstrates the effectiveness of poetic forms, and the power of poetry, in conveying theological and moral truths to readers. Romance traditionally assumes a belief in an omnipotent God governing the universe, and readers’ understanding of romance resolution – good triumphing over evil in chivalric combat or the natural harmony that is brought about through marriage – relies upon the principle that providence operates within this very world and ultimately ensures that the natural order will be restored at the conclusion of the narrative. But the exposition of romance in Paradise Lost brings into focus the difficulty for Milton in accommodating the idea of man’s free will to God’s predetermined narrative. I want to suggest, therefore, that the romance quest of Satan is God’s word in action, and God’s word is the narrative of human history, so in such a capacity romance becomes a literary form through which the workings of divine providence and free will can be examined and communicated. Romance serves as something of a resource for Milton that supplies him with the textual and theoretical spaces in which he can envisage the debates integral to his own theopolitical vision – providence, free will, tyranny, liberty, heroic virtue, social and political obligation – in the aftermath of civil war, regicide, republi-

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can government, and royal restoration. Paradise Lost encourages readers to think of romance as a strategy that plays a significant role in the representation and communication of God’s providential plan. The overarching framework of providence is such that even romance contingency is accommodated within it. Milton must reconcile the idea of God’s absolute foreknowledge and man’s free will, and the final lines of the poem, in which providence becomes the guide to Adam and Eve’s wandering, bring this tension into focus. Milton’s refusal to seal the narrative ensures us that God’s providential plan of the universe will continue, but so will the false version of romance that Satan bequeaths to humanity, because God’s final victory over Satan – the ending that can only be promised in Paradise Lost – will occur at the end of time, at which point the necessity for various modes of expression to represent human experience will cease to exist. Complete understanding at this point in the narrative of human history will be universal, and there will no longer be a need for humanity to understand providence since, in the words of the Father, “God shall be all in all” (3:341). In Milton’s conception of romance the quest is as important as the final revelation in God’s narrative, because it exists when there is a need to assimilate God’s plan to human understanding and reason. Romance, then, in Milton’s hands, becomes a pedagogical strategy, or resource, that helps the fit reader who looks beyond the recusatio in Book IX to understand the ways in which he asserts “eternal providence, / And justif[ies] the ways of God to men” (1:25–6). In Paradise Regained, Milton attempts to complete the overarching narrative of Paradise Lost, and romance is once again at the centre of his didactic method. The poem is based upon a typical romance plot structure: a displaced youth raised away from court is made aware of his lineage and royal blood, and learns that his kingdom is under threat from an evil enemy that he must now defeat. Satan attempts to seduce the Son by using the trappings of romance that had proven so effective in his seduction of Eve, but the Son’s heroic temperance in rejecting such sensory and worldly pleasures stands in stark contrast to Eve’s lack of self-restraint and susceptibility to mimetic desire. The women designed to entice the Son, for example, are

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Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of faëry damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyonesse, Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore. (2:358–61)27 And when Satan attempts to seduce the Son by offering him an empire, romance once again provides the context: “Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp, / When Agrican with all his northern powers / Besieged Albracca, as romances tell” (3:337–9). But the Son refuses to have his imagination excited by Satan. Unlike Adam, who is “fondly overcome with female charm” (pl 9:999), and unlike Eve, who allows Satan to persuade her that she is “Empress of this fair world” (pl 9:568), the Son proves impervious to such temptations. But if romance functions for readers as a memory of the world that humanity has lost, and Paradise Lost reveals the origins of the displaced or implanted memories of romance, then Paradise Regained does not necessarily rectify the problems of romance with which Milton grappled in the earlier poem. This is because the effects of the victory can only ever be placed in the future – signified in the closing stages of Paradise Regained by the repeated use of the verb “shall” (4:616–29) – and to reflect this problem, the conclusion of the poem actually presents the true, delayed beginning: “Hail Son of the Most High, heir of both worlds, / Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work / Now enter, and begin to save mankind” (4:633–5). In the same way that a central feature of romance treats readers’ aspirations to return to the irrecoverable world of Eden, Paradise Regained only allows readers to anticipate the future consequences of a victory that has not yet been fully understood. In so doing, the poem reinforces the emphasis on futurity and potential endlessness in romance, so that the true romance quest of the Son is essentially understood within a similar narratological framework to all those other romances known to readers. Milton’s attempts to fully revise romance in his late poems, then, are clouded by the memory and inescapability of the tradition that informs part of his and his readers’ literary and cultural imagination. Paradise Regained actually confirms not just readers’

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continued existence in the fallen world, but the perpetuation of romance itself. It is a troublesome reading of Milton’s attempts to reconstitute romance, and while he succeeds in presenting a representation of the true quest, the romance of the Son is left open-ended and, true to the form, potentially endless, as it will not be concluded within the constraints of earthly time. In the Christian framework of the poem, the Son’s victory over Satan is ensured, but it is our fallen condition – the consequence of the false romance of Satan – that prevents us from fully understanding the implications of this victory. And so it becomes a trial of our “patience and heroic martyrdom.” It is through romance, therefore, that the most important Miltonic theme is taught to readers. Examining Milton’s handling of romance as he adapts and moulds it over the course of his career, as this essay has done, draws attention to his consistency in drawing on the form as a didactic resource in his imaginative and polemical writings.

notes 1 Samuel Morland, The Urim of Conscience (London, 1695), Wing / M2785, sig. A2r–v. Hereafter, references are provided in the text. 2 Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heauen (London, 1601), stc / 6626, sig. Dd6r. 3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, revised 2nd ed., edited by Alastair Fowler (Harlow, uk: Longman, 2007), 1:6–16. Hereafter, references are provided in the text. 4 See, for example, Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton: Revaluations of Romance,” in Four Essays on Romance, edited by Herschel Baker (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1971), 55–70; Annabel Patterson, “Paradise Regained: A Last Chance at True Romance,” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 187–208; Emily Griffiths Jones, “Milton’s Counter-Revision of Romantic Structure in Paradise Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 59–81. 5 See, for example, Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957), 186–206. 6 See, for example, George Williamson, “Milton the Anti-Romantic,” Modern Philology 60, no. 1 (1962): 13–21.

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7 For examinations of seventeenth-century romance, see Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2004); Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1994); and Amelia Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1976), 38, 163. 9 For example, Nicholas McDowell, “How Laudian Was the Young Milton?” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 3–22. 10 Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed., edited by John Carey (Harlow, uk: Longman, 1997), 269–70. The translation from Milton’s Latin is Carey’s own. 12 John Milton, Complete Prose Works, 8 vols., edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1953–80), 5:156. All references to Milton’s prose are to this edition, abbreviated in parenthetical citation in the text as cpw together with the volume and page numbers. 13 Thomas Roebuck, “Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism,” in Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620–1642, edited by Edward Jones (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2013), 48–71. See especially 64–5. 14 Instructions directed from the Kings most Excellent Maiesty, Vnto all the Bishops of this Kingdome, and fit to be put in execution, agreeable to the necessitie of the Time (London, 1626), stc / 9247, sig. A2r–v. 15 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, revised 2nd ed., edited by A.C. Hamilton et al. (Harlow, uk: Longman, 2007), 716. 16 Arminianism was highly controversial – and condemned at the Synod of Dort – because it opposed orthodox Calvinism on such fundamental issues as predestination. See, for example, Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1987).

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17 Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, “De Doctrina Christiana: An England That Might Have Been,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, edited by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2009), 424– 35, at 433. Although Milton abandoned ceremonial Laudian Arminianism, he remained a believer in Arminian theology. 18 Thomas N. Corns, “Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts and the Marginality of Doctrine,” in Milton and Heresy, edited by Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–48. 19 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 84. 20 Ibid. 21 Gordon Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110–11. 22 Campbell and Corns, “De Doctrina Christiana,” 425. 23 See, for example, Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1993), 263–75. 24 See, for example, Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 134–70. 25 Ibid., 223–51. 26 See, for example, David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1993), 253–6. 27 Quotations from Paradise Regained are taken from Milton, Complete Shorter Poems.

Part Two Magic and Wonder

4 Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of “a Devyls Son” David Rollo

Early in Le Morte D’Arthur, Merlin visits the island on which the brothers Balyn and Balan have recently fought to the death, each failing to recognize the other because of unfamiliar armour. He takes the sword of Balyn, the perpetrator of the Dolorous Stroke that has brought calamity to three kingdoms, and announces: There shall never man handyll thys swerde but the beste knyght of the worlde and that shall be sir Launcelot other ellis Galahad, hys sonne. And Launcelot with thys swerde shall sle the man in the worlde that he lovith beste: that shall be sir Gawayne.1 He then has these predictions written on the pommel and employs his “suttelyté” to make the sword stand upright in a block of marble which, its massive weight notwithstanding, will float downriver and arrive in the city of Camelot on precisely the day Galahad comes to Arthur’s court. There, Merlin predicts, the best knight in the world will take possession of the sword. Or, as Malory would have it, “and that same day Galahad the Haute Prynce … encheved the swerde that was in the marble stone hovynge uppon the watir. And on Whytsonday he enchevyd the swerde, as hit ys rehersed in the booke of the Sankgreall” (58). The predictions of both soothsayer and author do, of course, come to pass: Galahad, replacing Lancelot as the best knight, does indeed pull the sword from the stone; and he is indeed described doing so in the Book of the Holy Grail. Yet the artefact that Merlin in his prescience committed to future generations has altered since it was first inscribed. Arthur and his retainers inspect the block of marble

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And therein stake a fayre ryche swerde, and the pomell thereof was of precious stonys wrought with lettirs of golde subtylé. Than the barownes redde the lettirs whyche seyde in thys wyse: “Never shall man take me hense but only he by whos syde I ought to honge and he shall be the beste knyght of the worlde.” (517) Thus the written word displays the capacity to change in order to reflect the altered circumstances of the reality by which it is bound; and Merlin, the magical artificer who ordained this miraculous instance of writing, comes to fulfill a role that is not simply clairvoyant, but prophetic. Galahad is not, of course, just any knight: without sin and without stain, the Haut Prince will be one of the three who will fulfill the Quest of the Holy Grail; and he alone will accompany the holy vessel as it is finally subsumed into heaven. Precisely these accomplishments are also foretold by Merlin. On making the Round Table, the soothsayer predicts that one of the three knights who will achieve the Grail will surpass his father “as the lyon passith the lybarde, both of strength and of hardines” (542), and agrees to make a seat that he alone can occupy. This is the Siege Perilous, which proves to be another location of miraculous writing. Shortly before Galahad arrives in court, Arthur and his retinue discover that the Siege displays “lettirs newly wrytten of golde” that state, “Four hondred wyntir and four and fyffty acomplyvysshed aftir the passion of oure lorde Jesu Cryst oughte this syege to be fulfylled” (516). On Galahad’s arrival, the writing is found to have changed: “Thys ys the syege of Sir Galahad the Hawte Prynce” (518). Thus Merlin is the creator of artefacts that not only alter to reflect changes in reality; they can also function as sites through which the Divine Will shall ultimately be articulated. In the following pages I shall consider the relationship between writing and the supernatural in Le Morte D’Arthur.2 As an exemplary mediator between the two, Merlin will be central to my concerns.3 Since the supernatural in question is either Christian in nature (miraculous) or enlisted to the cause of Christianity (benignly magical), Merlin’s exemplarity would at first appear counterintuitive. Although he predicts the fulfillment of the Grail and thereby participates in a process whereby the mysteries of Christ will be known, he is elsewhere dismissed by his

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detractors as “a wytche” (12), a “dreme-reder” (12), a man who “knowith all thynges by the devylles craffte” (74), and, most pointedly, “a devyls son” (77).

The Rehabilitation of Merlin The problems raised by Merlin’s demonic origins and his implication in the Arthurian past were first exposed in response to the text in which the soothsayer gained literary notoriety, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (which is, of course, the ancestor of the early material in book 1 of Le Morte D’Arthur). Writing in the late twelfth century, the English historian William of Newburgh sought to dismiss the Historia regum as an affront to history and, ultimately, Christianity itself.4 The motives behind his withering denunciation were transparently political. In the Proem to his Historia rerum Anglicarum, William announces his intention to follow the precedent of “our Bede” and write “the history of our people, that is of the English” as it unfolded on “our island.”5 Geoffrey’s work is a twofold affront to these glorifying designs: it ascribes to the British a degree of cultural and military accomplishment that would never be matched by the Germanic conquerors and colonists who displaced them; and at crucial junctures it contradicts the testimony of Bede. Anxious to parry these affronts to the English and their past, William identifies Geoffrey as “a confabulator”6 and rejects the Historia regum as a tissue of “ridiculous fictions” in which Arthur achieved otherwise unattested feats of military prowess that rival those of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.7 Not coincidentally, as a staunch defender of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, William resorts to dismissing aspects of Geoffrey’s work as not only false, but antithetical to Christian orthodoxy: Qui etiam majori ausu cujusdam Merlini divinationes fallacissimas, quibus utique de proprio plurimum adjecit dum eas in latinum transfunderet, tanquam authenticas et immobili veritate subnixas prophetias vulgavit … Quid enim minus in praescientia duntaxat futurorum tribuit suo Merlino quam nos nostro Esaiae:

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nisi quod ejus vaticiniis non audet inserere ‘Haec dicit Dominus,’ et erubuit inserere ‘Haec dicit diabolus,’ quippe hoc debuit congruere vati incubi daemonis filio. (Proem; 1.12, 17) With even more effrontery, [Geoffrey] promulgated, as though authentic prophecies imbued with an immutable truth, utterly mendacious divinations of a certain Merlin, to which he undoubtedly contributed a great deal of his own when recasting them into Latin … He claims for this Merlin of his knowledge of the future that is scarcely inferior to the prescience we ascribe to Isaiah. He does not, however, dare insert “So says the Lord” into his divinations, and out of shame he avoids “So says the devil,” even though this would of course be appropriate to a clairvoyant who was the son of an incubus demon. While conceding that Merlin’s prophecies did indeed pre-exist the Historia regum, William makes their Latin iteration a work of dual authorship: Geoffrey, he claims, contributed material of his own composition as he translated the work. Lest the reader miss the point, William returns to this charge of rewriting at a later stage, identifying Geoffrey as “he who translated the nonsense of those divinations from the British and, it is not wrongfully believed, added a great deal of his own invention to them” (“qui divinationum illarum nenias ex Britannico transtulit, quibus, ut non frustra creditur, ex proprio figmento multum adjecit” [Proem; 1.12]). Throughout the prophecies, therefore, Geoffrey’s voice becomes indistinguishable from that of an “incubi demonis filius.” Thus, William would have it, Geoffrey is not only mendacious; he is periodically in mediated collusion with demonic powers. By the early thirteenth century, the rehabilitation of Merlin was nevertheless emphatically underway. Active at roughly the same time as William, Robert de Boron also addressed the negative implications of Merlin’s demonic origins, but did so not to demean, but to glorify. In the romance today known as the Roman de Merlin,8 Robert presents the Brythonic soothsayer as an antichrist recuperated to the service of God. At the beginning of the text, an assembly of demons laments the Son’s

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storming of Hell and the consequent ascent to Heaven of Adam, Eve, and a number of other pre-Christian notables. In an effort to restore the hegemony of damnation, they conspire to create their own product of immaculate conception, the son of an incubus born of a Christian woman, endowed with the infernal powers of his father and devoted to leading humanity to ruin. A woman is chosen, a volunteer in paternity presents himself, and Merlin is duly conceived. In their hubris, however, the demons fail to take two things into account. First, they do not countenance the unwavering faith of the mother, who seeks Christian counsel as soon as she finds she is pregnant and convinces her advisor that she was the innocent victim of malign powers. Second, they proceed without attention to God’s omniscience and omnipotence: He is of course aware of their plan and intervenes to assure it be turned to the cause of good rather than evil. As a result of the mother’s steadfast Christianity and chaste disposition, Merlin escapes demonic control; but, through God’s intercession, he retains demonic powers. Raised a Christian, Merlin comes to serve Christian kings and the Church they protect against the incursions of the Saxon heathen. In this capacity, he remains ever-respectful of the orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy and knows there are limitations to his powers and responsibilities. Although he oversees the conception of Arthur, he plays no part in his coronation, instead repairing to Northumberland and leaving all sacramental duties to the archbishop of Logres. Although working to vastly disparate ends (and with no apparent knowledge of one another), William and Robert show they both understood, with differing degrees of lucidity, a particular aspect of Geoffrey’s enterprise. Beginning in the second quarter of the twelfth century, writers active in England began to configure their literary talents as a form of enchantment and employed the glamorous sorcery of the grapheme either to beguile or to enlighten, depending upon the receptive competence of the reader (or, occasionally, listener). One of the earliest of these self-styled magi of the written word was Geoffrey himself. Through the conception of Arthur, Geoffrey dramatizes his own power to disguise the adulterine and antithetical beneath a veneer of irreproachable respectability: just as Merlin administers the medicamentum (at one and

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the same time “drug,” “remedy,” “poison,” “dye,” and “rhetorical embellishment”) to ensure Uther takes on the appearance of the duke of Cornwall (and in that form impregnates the duchess), Geoffrey deploys the rhetorical resources of the Latin language to ensure his fabrication of the past conforms to contours of conventional and credible history. Albeit in hyperbolically negative terms, William of Newburgh recognizes this latter aspect of Geoffrey’s undertaking, first mentioning his antagonist by name as follows: “Gaufridus hic dictus est, agnomen habens Arturi, pro eo quod fabulas de Arturo, ex priscis Britonum figmentis sumptas et ex proprio auctas, per superductum latini sermonis colorem honesto historiae nomine palliavit” (“This individual is called Geoffrey and takes Arthur as his second name after the Arthurian fables which, derived from the ancient fictions of the British and augmented with additions of his own, he conveyed through the highly-coloured rhetoric of the Latin language and thereby clothed in the honourable name of history” [Proem; 1.12]). Though sensitive to this stylistic sophistication, William nowhere states that Geoffrey dismantles his imposture (whether because he was inattentive to the fact or chose to ignore it for polemical reasons is unclear). Robert, on the other hand, shows a lucid awareness of Geoffrey’s contrivance and, like Geoffrey before him, unveils its mechanisms by antiphrasis. In Robert’s work, Merlin does more than simply advise the kings of Britain; he has their deeds committed to the written word, retiring to Northumberland at regular intervals and there telling Blaise, formerly his mother’s spiritual advisor, all that has transpired since his last visit: Et einsis s’en ala en Norhumbellande a Blaises et li conta les choses, et Blaises le mist en son livre et par son livre le resavons nos encore. (121) And so he went away to Northumberland to Blaise and told him these things, and Blaise put it in his book and by his book we know it still. In case it be forgotten that the romance finds its origin in the words of Merlin himself, Robert reiterates the fact no fewer than six times.9 Under

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these circumstances, the text assumes a veneer of irreproachable authenticity: we know what we know today because in the distant past Merlin had Blaise commit his experiences to writing. The result is a text that Robert identifies by name at the end of the romance, when he refers to himself as “Rebert de Borron qui cest livre retrais par l’enseingnement dou Livre dou Graal” (“Robert de Boron, who composes this book by the teaching of the Book of the Grail” [290]). Subordinate to the lesson of the ancient paradigm, Robert casts himself as no more than a transparent witness to Blaise’s precedent and the life by which it is informed. One of his other assertions to the effect that Merlin takes leave of the court reads: “Et Merlins s’en ala en Norhumbellande a Blaise por conter toute ceste oevre” (“And Merlin repaired to Northumberland to Blaise in order to tell all this work” [173]). “Ceste oevre” signifies on three levels to affirm a consubstantiality of lived and written experience: it is at one and the same time the event that has just taken place in the narrative, the work that was written by Blaise to commemorate that event as it was reported by Merlin, and, finally, the work that has been written by Robert to replicate the work of commemoration that Blaise produced. At issue, therefore, is a doubly mediated transcription of the magician’s firsthand experience: Blaise gives a written account of what Merlin has done or observed; and Robert translates what Blaise has written. Assessed in these terms, the romance is endorsed by the authority of the man whose life it is said to commemorate: it is irreproachably true, because underwritten by eyewitness testimony; and it is irreproachably Christian, because an account of one of God’s elect. Now, of course, these are no more than the implications of the fiction that Robert has created. Authors of the high Middle Ages make hyperbolic gestures toward irreproachably truthful paradigms in order to signal an equally hyperbolic disregard for truth itself (a disregard that would be recognized as such according to a horizon of literary expectations brought to bear by the reader/listener).10 Robert provides a particularly striking example. Despite his claims to an eyewitness veracity originating with Merlin, many of the events he documents are implausible in the extreme. This, after all, is the story of a son of a demon who knows past, present, and future (including the intimate, otherwise hidden details of each individual’s life), alters his appearance and that

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of his associates in order to facilitate a night of adulterous passion, and transports colossal standing stones across the Irish Sea and positions them upright on Salisbury Plain. Not only are there obvious affronts to Christian orthodoxy here, since God has participated in empowering a man at least equal to the Old Testament prophets in secular influence and second only to Jesus himself in Divine insight.11 There are also problems of remembrance. Some of the more incisive remarks that William of Newburgh makes in discrediting the Historia regum are historiographic: if, as the glorifying tenor of Geoffrey’s writing implies, Arthur was indeed the equal of Alexander the Great and Merlin of Isaiah, how is it, William asks, that not a single ancient historian makes the slightest mention of two such extraordinary men?12 A similar argument could be made with regard to Robert’s Merlin. This Christian magician would without doubt have been one of the most remarkable people of his time. Yet, his unquestionable qualification for celebrity notwithstanding, no one seems to have known his biography until Robert came into possession of an otherwise unattested text and translated it into the vernacular. I would like to emphasize, however, that Robert, like Geoffrey before him, was not unaware of the possibility that such arguments would be made. Further, I would suggest that he, also like Geoffrey before him, invited them. By the late twelfth century, recourse to a very ancient book had become a literary topos designed not to mask infidelity to historical fact but conspicuously to avow it. Authors as varied as Gaimar, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Gerald of Wales, and Chrétien de Troyes followed Geoffrey’s precedent in telling picturesque tales of textual inventio that both celebrate the antiquity and veracity of the paradigms they profess to translate and reveal those paradigms to be fabrications.13 As one of its principal effects in the Roman de Merlin, this emphasis upon fiction serves to valorize present over past as the true locus of creation: Merlin, the putative origin of Robert’s writing, is in reality the product of the writing said to have originated from his firsthand experience. Malory uses Robert’s work as the source for the early sections of book 14 1 and, true to its precedent, explains how, at a given juncture, Merlin took leave of Arthur and went to Northumberland, there to meet “mayster Bloyse” with a very specific purpose:

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And there he tolde how Arthure and the two kynges had spedde at the grete batayle, and how hyt was endyd, and tolde the namys of every kynge and knyght of worship that was there. And so Bloyse wrote the batayle worde by worde as Merlion tolde hym, how hit began and by whom, and in lyke wyse how hit was ended and who had the worst. (25) Malory only once specifies that such a meeting took place, unlike Robert, who does so seven times over. But the effect is the same: Merlin bears firsthand testimony to the war that has just ended, and in so doing becomes the source of the earliest recorded written account of Arthur’s reign. Malory, furthermore, supplements his source to explain the continued existence of facts that went beyond Merlin’s purview: And all the batayles that were done in Arthurs dayes, Merlion dud hys mayster Bloyse wryte them. Also he dud wryte all the batayles that every worthy knyght ded of Arthurs courte. (25) Even after Merlin has ceased to play any active role in the governance of the kingdom,15 Bloyse will continue the process he has initiated, committing to writing all the other military engagements of Arthur’s lifetime and all the personal exploits of his knights. Yet again, this act of commemoration has consequences for the very text we read: as an account of not only the Arthurian past, but also the primordial acts of writing through which that past was commemorated, book 1 of Le Morte D’Arthur is, among other things, the story of its own beginnings. Under these circumstances, Merlin is both eyewitness to history and founder of an enduring tradition of historiography that will guarantee the Arthurian past be known to future generations; and Bloyse, his first scribe, is distant precursor to an entire genealogy of future writers, including, of course, Malory himself. But again, as in the French, this act of commemoration is bound by the text in which it is commemorated: Merlin as historical witness exists only within iterations of a narrative that invents him as its own point of origin. As I have argued elsewhere, magic functions as the figure through which this self-propagating textuality is placed en abyme: the written

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word, at one and the same time gramaire and grimoire, conjures its own reality into being.16 At no point, of course, does Malory in his English text use either of the French doublets. Nevertheless, the superimposition is implicit. As my introductory comments on the Sword of Balyn and the Siege Perilous make clear, at defining moments in Le Morte D’Arthur writing is magic, altering itself and prescribing the reality by which it is contained. What, then, are the implications to Malory’s undertaking?

Writing and Clairvoyance Early in book 3, Malory says of Arthur: “the moste party dayes of hys lyff he was ruled by the counceile of Merlyon” (59). By this stage in the text, this is incontrovertibly true: Merlin has facilitated Arthur’s conception, has overseen the circumstances in which he is fostered, has presided over his succession, and has advised him to victory over eleven rebellious kings. Or, as Malory says on several occasions, “like as Merlin devysed” (6)17 so things are done. The Merlin who fulfills this administrative function is adapted from Robert’s work and its continuation, the Suite du roman de Merlin.18 Although Malory does not state that Merlin was originally designed by demons as an antichrist, he does present him as a Christian vates committed to the wellbeing of the kingdom. This dynamic intervention in secular and religious affairs begins when the dying Uther attracts the ire of many by declaring Arthur his successor. At this Merlyn wente to the Archebisshop of Caunterbury and counceilled hym for to sende for all the lordes of the reame and all the gentilmen of armes, that they shold to London come by Cristmas upon payne of cursynge, and for this cause, that Jesu, that was borne on that nyghte, that He wold of His grete mercy shewe some myracle, as He was come to be Kynge of mankynde, for to shewe somme myracle who shold be rightwys kynge of this reame. (7) Merlin is not just politically decisive in his intervention, devising the circumstances through which the succession will be assured. He is

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instructing the principal ecclesiastic of the land to prepare for circumstances in which Christ will work a miracle to reveal who the next king should be. Merlin proceeds, moreover, with the certainty that the miracle in question will indeed take place. A similar familiarity with Divine intent appears elsewhere. When Uther contracts the illness that eventually leads to his death, he loses all power of speech and the barony asks Merlin “what counceill were best” (6). The soothsayer replies: “There nys none other remedye … but God wil have His wille. But loke ye al barons be bifore kynge Uther to-morne, and God and I shalle make hym to speke” (7). Merlin presents himself as an earthly medium through which the workings of the Divine Will shall be made manifest, and “a devyls son” (77) comes to assume a quasi-sacerdotal role. In that capacity, he comes to participate in the very narratology of the text. For the remainder of this essay, I shall analyze certain instances in which Le Morte D’Arthur enacts a magical slippage between narrative and diegetic perspectives. Throughout, my aim shall not be to argue that they were intentionally orchestrated by Malory. Like so many eccentric aspects of this work, the ambiguities of perspective I shall be considering may be due to inattention on Malory’s part or on that of the scribe (or a combination of both). But I emphasize that they may not. As I have already demonstrated, Malory inherited a long tradition in which Merlin functioned as a surrogate for the author, and it is quite plausible that he himself continued the process of magical invention it entailed. What follows, therefore, is intended more to be suggestive than conclusive. It is founded, however, upon elements of the text that are demonstrably present and that signify to particularly striking effect under conditions of oral recitation. As already mentioned, Merlin employs his “craufftes” to create the Round Table and the Siege Perilous, and both come to function as locations through which the Divine Will can be expressed. Thus Merlin assures that, even after his death, his clairvoyant mediation of Providence will continue, with his first-person direct interventions replaced by interventions of the written word. With specific regard to the Grail, this process begins long before Merlin is born, and the Siege is but one of several sites for the written word that extend back in time to the Old Testament. The earliest of these artefacts is the Ship of the Coloured

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Spindles, made by Solomon at his wife’s behest and designed primarily to house the sword of King David, which Galahad will eventually come to inherit: That nyght lay Salamon before the shippe with litill felyship. And whan he was on slepe hym thought there com from hevyn a grete company of angels, and alyght into the shippe, and toke water which was brought by an angell in a vessell of sylver, and besprente all the shippe. And aftir he cam to the swerde and drew lettirs on the hylte. And aftir wente to the shippe-bourde and wrote there other lettirs whych seyde: “Thou man that wolte entir within me, beware that thou be fulle in the faythe, for I ne am but fayth and belyve.” (585–6) In his sleep, Solomon witnesses a miraculous act of writing, undertaken by a nameless but clearly celestial emissary who descends from heaven in the company of angels19 and intervenes in the Old Dispensation to anticipate the New, the time when Christian “fayth and belyve” will be the requisites to gain access to the ship. Four hundred and fifty-four years after the passion of Christ, Galahad, Bors, Percival, and Percival’s sister prove they have the necessary spiritual qualifications and enter. Bors and Percival attempt to draw the sword from its scabbard, but fail. Galahad then approaches and encounters a written message that seemed invisible to his companions: Than sir Galahad behylde the swerde and saw lettirs lyke bloode that seyde: “Lat se who dare draw me oute of my sheeth but if he be more hardyer than ony other, for who that drawith me oute, wete you welle he shall never be shamed of hys body nother wounded to the dethe.” (581) These, one presumes, are the words Solomon in his sleep witnessed the heavenly figure write centuries before. But their import has already by this stage been complemented by another piece of proscriptive writing. Immediately before he describes Percival and Bors attempting unsuccessfully to draw the sword, Malory states that its haft was made from the

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ribs of two miraculous animals. The first, the Serpent of the Fiend, protects the bearer from fatigue. The second is the Ertanaz, a fish found in the Euphrates And the bonys be of such maner of kynde that who that handelyth hym shall have so muche wyll that he shall never be wery, and he shall nat thynke on joy nother sorow that he hath had, but only that thynge that he beholdith before hym. And as for thys swerde, there shall never man begrype hym, that ys to sey, the hand, but one; and he shall passe all othir. (580) There is an equivocation of narrative perspective here. Immediately after this passage, Percival exclaims, “In the name of God, I shall assay to handyll hit” (580), ostensibly behaving as though prompted by the preceding challenge. Under these circumstances, the final sentence of this passage would have to be yet another inscription. Vinaver certainly interprets it to be so, placing “And as for” to “passe all othir” between quotation marks and in capitals, thereby following his own convention of typographically distinguishing inscriptions from the main text. Viz: “and as for thys swerde, there shall never man begrype him, that ys to sey, the hand, but one; and he shall passe all othir.” This interpretation is supported by an earlier passage. When the four companions enter the ship, they find no one But they founde in the ende of the shippe two fayre lettirs wrytten, which seyde a dredefull worde and a mervaylous: “Thou man whych shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste beleve, for I am Faythe. And therefore beware how thou entirist but if thou be stedfaste, for and thou fayle thereof I shall nat helpe the.” (579–80) Perhaps, one could argue, the “two fayre lettirs” both gave the text here quoted. But this fails to convince. In context, there is no reason why the

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same message should be inscribed twice over: none of the other inscriptions on the ship is duplicated in this way. It is more satisfactory to read the “two fayre lettirs” as the two passages describing the particular properties of the ship and the sword: “Thou man which shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste beleve, for I am Faythe. And therefore beware how thou entirist but if thou be stedfaste, for and thou fayle thereof I shall nat helpe the.” “And as for thys swerde, there shall never man begrype hym, that ys to sey, the hand, but one; and he shall passe all othir.” In this case, the description of the haft is a lengthy aside, with “and as for” serving as a suture between the two passages: “these are the properties of the ship and, as for the sword, its properties are as follows.” But I stress that we are dealing with an equivocation. The Caxton imprint, for example, does not in any way distinguish the second of these passages from the preceding description of the haft. Under these circumstances, “and as for” to “passe all othir” must be attributed to the narrative voice. To be sure, this reading does not account for the “two fayre lettirs,” since only one passage is reproduced. Yet, elsewhere when Malory provides the import of a given text, he habitually uses the locution “whyche seyde,” or variations thereof: Merlin examines the Round Table and finds “lettirs of golde that tolde”; the four companions enter the ship and see letters “lettirs wrytten whyche seyde”; Solomon in his sleep sees an angel go to the side of the ship and write “lettirs which seyde”; Galahad steps forth to do draw the sword and sees “lettirs lyke bloode that seyde.” The passage beginning “and as for thys swerd” is not introduced in this way, and it can therefore be read as a seamless continuation of what precedes. As its primary effect, the ambiguity at issue blurs the distinction between narrative and diegetic speech acts. This is of some consequence, since, according to Solomon’s witness, the writing on the sword was the work of a celestial presence surrounded by angels, and the words that at

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this juncture constitute the text of Le Morte D’Arthur accordingly become indistinguishable from those of an emissary of heaven. This is not the only occasion in the episode of the Ship of the Coloured Spindles on which boundaries of narrative perspective become permeable. After Galahad has taken possession of the Sword of David, he and his three companions approach the bed above which the spindles hang. At this, Percival’s sister tells the tale of the ship’s origin. In Vinaver’s edition, this diegetic act of narration is punctuated toward its end: ‘“Now lat hyt be,” seyde she, “for ye shall hyre peraventure tydynges sonner than ye wene.”’ now here ys a wondir tale of kyng salamon and of hys wyff “That nyght lay Salamon before the shippe with litill felyship…” Shortly hereafter, Solomon dreams of the lettering on the sword and the side of the ship. Yet it is unclear who is telling this tale of miraculous writing. The first voice I quote above is that of Solomon’s wife as Percival’s sister reports her speaking to Solomon. The declaration capitalized by Vinaver, however, must mark a shift of narrative perspective, since Solomon’s wife would not be announcing to Solomon that he is about to hear a tale about Solomon and his wife. Vinaver no doubt capitalizes because, in the manuscript, these words, standing alone as a new line, give the appearance of a heading and thereby appear to have been interpreted by the scribe as an interpolation on the part of the narrative voice.20 Yet, even under these circumstances, they could also be attributed to Percival’s sister, as a climactic pause in her own lengthy account of Solomon and the ship. If the first of these possibilities is accepted, the consequent shift in perspective could also attribute the “wondir tale” that follows to the narrative rather than the diegetic voice: the story of the ship is begun by Percival’s sister, but its wondrous conclusion is provided by the narrator. There is a distinction, of course, between Percival’s sister and that other figure with whom the narrator can be confused, the celestial emissary responsible for the writing on the sword: she is human and mortal,

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he ostensibly is not. Yet, by her own account, Percival’s sister was ordained to provide the belt for the Sword of David,21 and she too finds her actions prescribed in writing, in this case the lettering on the scabbard: Nother never none be so hardy to do away thys gurdyll, for hit ought nat to be done away but by the hondis of a mayde, and that she be a kyngis doughter and a quenys. And she must be a mayde all the dayes of hir lyff, both in wyll and in worke; and if she breke hir virginité she shall dy the most vylaynes deth that ever dud ony woman. (582) Herself the object of miraculous inscription, Percival’s sister achieves contextual parity with Galahad, the only other figure anticipated in the writing on the ship. And, supplying the final component to the sword Galahad shall wield, she completes the work begun centuries earlier by Solomon and his wife. To these distinctions can be added the fact that, in telling the tale of the ship, she doubles yet another text: Now seyth the tale that a grete whyle the three felowis behylde the bed and the three spyndyls. Than they were at a sertayne that they were of naturall coloures withoute ony payntynge. Than they lyfft up a cloth which was above the grounde, and there founde a rych purse be semyng. And sir Percivale toke hit and founde therein a wyrtte, and so he rad hit and devysed the maner of the spyndils and of the ship: whens hit cam, and by whom hit was made. (586) What Percival reads is precisely the story his sister has just finished telling. It is never directly stated how the author of this writ and Percival’s sister came upon the information they impart. Yet both are drawn into the Providential construct of the ship and, therefore, into the miraculous design it is made to serve. Eliding into the storytelling of the latter, so too is the narrative voice. As I have already stated, these shifts in narrative perspective may be accidental. But, as I have also suggested, they quite plausibly may not be so. Let it be noted that, in each case, they mark a departure from the

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French. In the Queste del Saint Graal, the declaration of the sword’s properties is unequivocally a diegetic inscription. Viz: Itel vertu avoient les deus costes qui estoient en l’enheudeure de l’espee, et si erent covertes d’un vermeil drap trop riche, tout plein de letres qui disoient: Je sui merveille a veoir et a conoistre. Car onques nus ne me pot empoignier, tant eust la main grant, ne ja ne fera, fors un tot sol; et cil passera de son mestier toz cels qui devant lui avront esté et qui aprés lui vendront. Einsi disoient les letres de l’enheudeure. (203) The two ribs that were in the haft of the sword had this virtue, and they were covered by an exceedingly rich red cloth, fully covered in letters which said: I am a marvel to see and to know. For never could any man grip me, however big a hand he had, nor will a man ever do so, except for one only; and that man will surpass in his vocation all those will have come before him and will come after him. So said the letters of the haft. In the original, the lettering is on a red cloth; and its quoted words, couched in the first person rather than the third, are offset at beginning and end from the frame narrative: “tout plein de letres qui disoient,” “einsi disoient les letres de l’enheudeure.” The story of the Ship of the Coloured Spindles, for its part, is told not by Percival’s sister, but by the narrative voice, which pauses at the appropriate juncture to explain that, since many may not believe that the three spindles were indeed coloured naturally and without the use of paint, “si s’en destorne un poi li contes de sa droite voie et de sa matiere por deviser la maniere des trois fuissiax qui des trois colors estoient” (“here the tale turns somewhat from its straight course and its material in order to describe the manner of the three spindles that were of the three colours” [210]). The ensuing tale, moreover, is not punctuated toward its end by an equivalent of Malory’s “Now here ys a wonder tale of kyng Salamon and of hys wyff.” Rather, it proceeds as an unbroken sequence until its end, when the narrative voice announces “Si s’en test li contes a tant et parole d’autre chose. Or dit li

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contes que grant piece regarderent li troi compaignon le lit et les fuissiax” (“At this point the tale is silent on such matters and speaks of something else. Now the tale says that the three companions looked for a long time at the bed and the spindles” [226]). Unlike that of its French paradigm, the textuality of Le Morte D’Arthur comes to assume attributes of the magical writing through which the Grail quest was originally ordained. It not only commemorates, reproducing the narrative whereby the truth of the Grail was known; it also prescribes the conditions in which that truth will be known once more. As Sandra Ness Ihle has demonstrated,22 Malory radically demystifies his source and interprets the Grail to be, quite simply, the vessel from which the Eucharist is administered. This is not to say, however, that his undertaking is any less religious in tenor. What in the French reads as an extended exercise in allegoresis Malory transforms into a series of dramatizations and meditations on the relationship between Christianity and chivalry, ultimately to countenance the conditions in which each earthly knight may himself come to understand the mysteries of Christ through both exemplary knighthood and religious devotion. At the end of Malory’s iteration of the Quest, the original vessel by which Jesus was said to have anticipated Communion may ascend to heaven along with Galahad, the “beste knyght of the worlde” (517). Yet, through its textuality, the tale fosters circumstances in which other less advantaged men and women may aspire to a grail of their own: exemplarity on earth and bliss in heaven. Or, as Caxton, the earliest recorded critic of Le Morte D’Arthur, would have it, not only does the text evoke “noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyté, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse murdre, hate, vertue and synne”;23 it is also “wryton for our doctryne, and for to beware that we falle not to vyce ne synne, but t’exersyse and folowe vertu, by whyche we may come and atteyne to good fame and renommé in thys lyf, and after thys shorte and transytorye lyf to come unto everlastyng blysse in heven: the whyche He graunte us that reygneth in heven, the Blessyd Trynyté. Amen” (xv). This prescriptive function of the text is suggested at those moments at which it elides into the miraculous speech acts that it describes and reproduces to prefigure the achievement of the Grail. As already men-

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tioned, Merlin was creator of the Siege Perilous and the Round Table, and, as such, he not only adumbrated the advent of Galahad, but also prefigured the type of chivalric caritas that Malory himself celebrates. For he made the Table “in tokenyng of rowndnes of the worlde, for men sholde by the Rounde Table undirstonde the rowndenes signyfyed by ryght” (541). The capacity of author and soothsayer to inform the culture in which they live is itself plausibly signified by the type of narrative equivocation I see to mark crucial moments in the episode of the Ship of the Coloured Spindles. As a soothsayer, Merlin of course often predicts the future. The following are but a few examples. At the point at which Ban and Bors prepare to leave Arthur for their own kingdoms, Merlin announces that that their enemies, the eleven kings, will all die in one day at the hands of Balin and Balan (27). Arthur attempts to exile all the children born on May Day in an effort to rid his kingdom of the child Merlin has stated “sholde destroy hym and all the londe” (37). After King Mark has entombed the corpses of Launceor and Columbe, Merlin informs him that in that place the two greatest knights will fight but not kill one another and writes their names on the tomb, “which namys was Launcelot du Lake and Trystrams” (45). In the same episode, he turns to Balin and tells him that he shall commit the Dolorous Stroke with disastrous consequences (45). Later he makes Arthur privy to the same fact (49) and also states that there will be a great battle outside Salisbury in which he will face his son, Mordred (49). After the Dolorous Stroke, Merlin predicts that only Galahad and Lancelot will ever be able to wield the sword of the now-dead Balin, and he predicts that the latter will use it to kill Gawain, the man he loves most in the world (58). There is another medium through which the future is anticipated, and that is the text itself. And there is another agent of writing who knows Arthurian past, present, and future, and that is Malory. The following are some of the cases in which he, for his part, intervenes through the narrative voice. Mordred escapes the wreck of the ship carrying the children born on May Day, is fostered by the man who finds him, and then, at the age of fourteen, is brought to court “as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the Morte Arthure” (37). Incensed by Arthur’s

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response to his demand for fealty, Royns assembles a great host “as hit rehersith aftir in the booke of Balyne le Saveage that folowith nexte aftir” (37). Since “the booke of Balyne le Saveage” concerns the maiming of Pellam and its consequences, it is also the context in which Malory with some frequency anticipates the Grail books: Balin and his female companion encounter the bloodletting custom which, “as hit tellith aftir in the Sankgreall” (52), Percival’s sister will eventually end; after receiving the Stroke, Pellam will lie wounded for many years and might never be whole until healed by Galahad “in the queste of the Sankgreall” (54); Merlin places Balin’s sword in a block of marble that will float downriver to Camelot, there to be pulled out by Galahad “as hit ys rehersed in the booke of the Sankgreall” (58). Accordingly, even after the death of Merlin, the Grail Quest will continue to be anticipated, not only by the Siege Perilous, but by the text in which it appears. Now, of course, there is a difference between these perspectives: the first is diegetic and the second extra-. Even here, however, the distinction is not always maintained. Merlin’s announcement that Balin and Balan will kill the eleven kings reads in full: “Hit shall nat nede,” seyde Merlion, “thes two kynges to com agayne in the wey of warre; but I know well kynge Arthure may nat be longe frome you. For within a yere or two ye shall have grete nede, than shall he revenge you of youre enemyes as ye have done on his. For thes eleven kyngis shall dye all in one day by the grete myght and prouesse of armys of two valyaunte knyghtes,” — as hit tellith aftir. Hir namys [ben] Balyne le Saveage and Balan, hys brothir, that were mervelyous knyghtes as ony was tho lyvynge. (26–7) Vinaver ends Merlin’s quoted speech at “two valyaunte knyghtes,” since “as hit tellith aftir” can only be assessed as an intervention on the part of the narrative voice. Yet in the manuscript, which lacks quotation marks, commas, and dashes, there is a semantic elision between the narrative and the vatic. Circumventing this difficulty, Stephen Shepherd follows, with minor variations, Vinaver’s punctuation up to “two valyaunte knyghtes” and then closes the paragraph with the parenthetical:

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(As hit tellith aftir, hir namys were Balyne le Saveage and Balan, hys brothir, that were mervelyous knyghtes as ony was tho lyvynge.) (29) Shepherd attaches “as hit telleth aftir” to “hir namys,” thereby implicitly attributing this entire sentence to the narrative voice.24 This does not alter the equivocation of the original, however. Again, the manuscript lacks such typographical markers and there is no clear ending to the preceding direct discourse. Perhaps, following the implications of the Caxton reading, Merlin’s words should be interpreted to end “as ye have done on his.” Under these circumstances, all of the sentence beginning “For thes eleven kyngis” and ending “as hit tellith aftir” should be attributed to narrator rather than character. Yet this does not erase the initial slippage. The Caxton imprint also lacks quotation marks and the assumption that the intervention is extra-diegetic can only be made with hindsight, after the problem posed by “as hit tellith aftir” has been encountered. Rather than clarifying matters, the Caxton reading in fact exacerbates these narratological instabilities. The manuscript has two past tenses in the final clause that are quite apposite to the preterit implied by “tho” (“that were mervelyous knyghtes as ony was tho lyvynge”). In the Caxton imprint, these verbs are couched in the present and there is no adverb of time (“that be marvelous good knights as any be living”). If this is an appraisal on the narrator’s part (and the preceding interpretation requires it must be), then Balin and Balan are being compared with any knight living in the late fifteenth century. While this is not impossible, it is improbable. When the narrative voice does intervene to compare past with present (as at the beginning of “The Knight of the Cart”), it is very much to the detriment of the latter. The printed reading in fact sounds much more like a judgment on the part of Merlin himself as he addresses Kings Ban and Bors: “Balyne and Balan … be marvelous good knights as any be [now] living.” In this case, the passage switches from character to narrator and then back to character, and the mutual implication of the two voices becomes even more complex. On another occasion, the slippage works from extra-diegetic to diegetic, with the narrator, rather than Merlin, speaking directly to Arthur.

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Merlin provides Arthur with the following information after constructing the sepulchre commemorating the king’s victory over Lot and Nero: And there he tolde the kynge how that whan he was dede thes tapers sholde brenne no lenger aftir the adventures of the Sankgreall that shall com amonge you and be encheved also he tolde kynge Arthure how Balin, the worshipfull knyght, shall gyff the dolerouse stroke, whereof shall falle grete vengeaunce. (49; modern punctuation removed) The passage is clearly cast as indirect discourse (“he tolde the kynge how that…”). Yet the clause beginning “aftir the adventures” includes a second-person pronoun that would be appropriate only if Merlin’s words were being directly quoted. Mindful of this problem, both Vinaver and Shepherd supply quotation marks: And there he tolde the kynge how that whan he was dede thes tapers sholde brenne no lenger, “aftir the adventures of the Sankgreall that shall com amonge you and be encheved.” Also he tolde kynge Arthure how Balin, the worshipfull knyght, shall gyff the dolerouse stroke, whereof shall falle grete vengeaunce. (respectively 49, 52) This typographical intervention is certainly apposite to a modern text prepared for readers who expect divisions between indirect and direct discourse. Yet the manuscript lacks such divisions and the words of the narrator briefly elide into those of Merlin. The Caxton imprint, for its part, appears to resolve the problem: And there he told the king, When I am dead these tapers shall burn no longer, and soon after the adventures of the Sangreal shall come among you and be achieved. Also he told Arthur how Balin the worshipful knight shall give the dolorous stroke whereof shall fall great vengeance. (65) Here the first two of Merlin’s predictions are cast into direct discourse and the “you” semantically neutralized. However, the sense of the passage

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has been altered. In the manuscript, there is at first an ambiguity over who is dying: either Merlin is telling Arthur what will happen when he, Merlin, has died, or he is telling Arthur what will happen when he, Arthur, has died. The ambiguity is only temporary, however. Still in the manuscript, the next clause specifies that whoever dies does so after the fulfillment of the Grail quest, and this can only be Arthur, since Merlin will by this time have been dead for some time, interred, initially alive, by Nenyve in Cornwall. The Caxton reading, nevertheless, has Merlin envisage the point of his own death (and, inaccurately to later narrative developments, predict that the adventures of the Grail will be achieved shortly thereafter). These ambiguities are greatly accentuated under conditions of oral recitation: in the absence of the iterative procedures that visual scanning permits, any distinction between the voices of the narrator and Merlin is erased. The effect, of course, is fleeting, since the logical exigencies of context oblige the listener to rationalize, correct, or ignore. Yet equivocation briefly makes present a relationship that is subliminal to the entire text: Merlin is a type for Malory himself. On the most obvious level, in the tradition of Bloyse Malory rewrites Merlin’s experiences and observations, thereby emerging as a medium through which the soothsayer’s voice subsists beyond the grave, now to speak in the English language to a fifteenth-century public. Yet, after the death of Merlin, he follows a different kind of magical precedent. Just as Merlin devised an entire realm and employed his “craufftes” to the furtherance of his society, Malory uses the resources of fiction to create a medium through which the aspirations and anxieties of his contemporaries can be negotiated. In the process, he creates an artefact through which the written word will be made manifest and renewed. While Merlin creates the Siege Perilous and the Pommel of the Sword of Balyn with the knowledge that the texts they exhibit will alter, so too does Malory produce Le Morte D’Arthur, an iteration of a literary genealogy that will itself change in the hands of future “magical” artificers.

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notes 1 The edition used is that of Eugène Vinaver, published as Malory: Works (Oxford, uk: Clarendon, 1971). Reference is to page, here 58. For contrastive purposes, I shall also on occasion cite the edition of Stephen H.A. Shepherd, Le Morte Darthur or The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004). The version of the Caxton imprint is that of Elizabeth Bryan, Le Morte D’Arthur (New York: The Modern Library, 1999). References to both of the latter will be to page. 2 There has been a recent monograph devoted to magic in Middle English romance in general, Corinne Saunders’s excellent Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010). The final chapter is on, quite precisely, Malory’s work. At no point, however, does Saunders consider the relationship between the supernatural and the written word. The theoretical underpinnings of the arguments I make in what follows can be found in my Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), particularly the introduction (on degrees of medieval literacy and varieties of reader/listener response) and ch. 2 (on Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae). 3 The definitive history of Merlin as a character of medieval romance remains that of Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophète: un thème de la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans (Lausanne, Switzerland: Payot, 1943). Far more recently, Stephen Knight has complemented Zumthor’s work in Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (Ithaca, ny, and London: Cornell University Press, 2009). As his title suggest, Knight extends his remarks beyond the purview Zumthor sets himself and also considers Merlin’s place in contemporary popular culture. 4 The edition is that of Richard Howlett, published in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, 4 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, “The Rolls Series,” 1884–89. Reprint, New York: Kraus, 1964), vol. I, 3– 408; vol. II, 415–500. Reference will be to volume and page. All translations, from Latin and Old French, are my own. 5 “Historiam gentis nostrae, id est, Anglorum, venerabilis presbyter et monachus Beda conscripsit. Qui nimirum, praesumpto altius exordio, ut ad id quod specialiter intendebat competentius accederet, etiam Britonum, qui nostrae insulae primi incolae fuisse noscuntur, celebriora subtili brevitate gesta perstrinxit.

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Habuit autem gens Britonum ante nostrum Bedam proprium historiographum Gildam” (Proem; 1.11). For a wider discussion of William’s denunciation of Geoffrey’s Historia regum, see my Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England (Lexington, ky: French Forum, 1998), ch. 12, and Glamorous Sorcery, ch. 2. “Ut ergo eidem Bedae, de cujus sapientia et sinceritate dubitare fas non est, fides in omnibus habeatur; fabulator ille cum suis fabulis incuntanter ab omnibus respuatur” (Proem; 1.18). “Quidam nostris temporibus, pro expiandis his Britonum maculis, scriptor emersit, ridicula de eisdem figmenta contexens, eosque longe supra virtutem Macedonum et Romanorum impudenti vanitate attollens” (Proem; 1.11). Edited by Alexandre Micha as Merlin: roman du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Droz, 1980). Reference will be to page. “Einsis s’acointa Merlins a Pandragon et prist congié a lui, si s’en ala a son maistre Blaise et li dist toutes cez choses. Et cil les mist en escrit et par lui le savons nos encore” (138–9); “Merlins s’en ala en Norhumbellande a son mestre Blaises por ractonter toutes ses choses et autres choses por baillier matiere a son livre faire” (163); “Et Merlins s’en ala en Norhumbellande a Blaise por conter toute ceste oevre” (173); “Ensi departi Merlins de Uiterpandragon et vint au Norhumbellande a Blaise, si li dist ces choses et les establissemenz de ceste table et maintes autres choses que vos orroiz en son livre” (190); “Einsis prist Merlins congié dou roi et de Ulfin. Et li rois chevaucha jusque a Tintaguel et Merlins s’en ala a Blaises, si li conta ces choses et il les mist en escrit et par lui le savons nos encore” (235); “Ensi s’en ala Merlins a Blaise et li dist ces choses, ce qu’il sot que a avenir en estoit, e par ce qu’il en dist a Blaise en savons nos ce que nos en savons” (264–5). To these can perhaps be added “Lors prist Merlins congié au roi, si s’en ala a Blaises son mestre” (248). Though there is no mention here of Merlin describing what has happened or of Blaise writing, context has by this time established this to be Merlin’s reason for travelling to Northumberland. As I demonstrate at some length in Historical Fabrication, ch. 3 (on Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gaimar), 6–8 (on Benoît de Sainte-Maure), and 10–11 (on Gerald of Wales). On Chrétien de Troyes in this context, see my “Three Mediators and Three Venerable Books: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mohammed, Chrétien de Troyes,” Arthuriana 8 (Winter 1999): 100–14. Merlin himself talks of Blaise’s written witness to his life in terms of, quite

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David Rollo precisely, the Gospels: “And this will always be your labor and your book will be recited and willingly heard in many places. But it will not be in authority because you are not and cannot be an Apostle, because the Apostles put nothing into writing about Our Lord that they had not themselves seen and heard, and you put down nothing that you have seen or heard, except what I tell you” (“Et toz jorz mais sera ta poine et ton livre retrait et volentiers oïz en toz leus. Mais il ne sera pas en auctorité, por ce que tu n’ies pas ne ne puez ester apolstoles, por ce que li apostole ne mistrent riens en escrit de Nostre Seingnor qu’il n’eussent veu et oï et tu n’i mez rien que tu en aies veu ne oï, se ce non que je te retrai” (75). Merlin complacently speaks as though he rivals Jesus as a worthy object of commemoration. Moreover, he states that Blaise cannot be an Apostle simply because he does not write from an eyewitness perspective. He seems indifferent to theological concerns. “Quomodo enim historiographi veteres, quibus ingenti curae fuit nihil memorabile scribendo omittere, qui etiam mediocria memoriae mandasse noscuntur, virum incomparabilem, ejusque acta supra modum insignia, silentio praeterire potuerunt? Quomodo, inquam, vel nobiliorem Alexandro Magno Britonum monarcham Arturum, vel parem nostro Esaiae Britonum prophetam Merlinum, ejusque dicta, silentio suppresserunt? … Cum ergo nec tenuem de his veteres historici fecerint mentionem, liquet a mendacibus esse conficta quaecunque de Arturo atque Merlino, ad pascendam minus prudentium curiositatem, homo ille scribendo vulgavit” (Proem; 1.17, 17–18). See note 10 above. On Malory’s sources for book 1, see Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), ch. 2. As he knows he surely will, and sooner than anyone suspects. Shortly after leaving Bloyse and returning to Arthur’s court, he reveals that he has foreknowledge of his own ignominious and premature death (29), anticipating how the Damsel of the Lake will inter him alive under a great rock in Cornwall (77). Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, passim, but particularly the introduction, and Rollo, Historical Fabrication, ch. 6–8. For variations on this locution, see 5, 6 (again), 18, 25. Suite du roman de Merlin, edited by Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Droz, 2006). Neither the manuscript nor the Caxton imprint specifies the subject of the verbs “alyght,” “toke,” and “besprente.” The pronoun “he” is introduced only in the context of writing. In the Queste del Saint Graal, the subject is “uns

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hons o grant compaignie d’anges” (“a man with a great company of angels” [225]). Here too, the precise identity remains unstated. In all three cases, nonetheless, the agent of writing is unquestionably the miraculous emissary of God. The edition of the Queste employed is that of Albert Pauphilet, La Queste del Saint Graal: Roman du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1984). Reference is to page. See f. 394v in The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, presented with an introduction by N.R. Ker (London and New York: The Early English Text Society, 1976). “[A]s sone as I wyste that thys adventure was ordayned me, I clipped off my heyre and made thys gurdyll” (586). Malory’s Grail Quest: Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), passim, but particularly ch. 4. Here I quote Caxton’s preface from Vinaver’s edition. In this case, p. xv. Shepherd also supplies “were” (“hir namys were Balyne le Saveage and Balan”). The manuscript itself has no verb here; Vinaver’s bracketed “ben” is adopted from Caxton.

5 Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures John Carey A pervasive theme in the “Matter of Britain” is, naturally enough, the claim that it represents the traditions of the “Britons” – whether these are taken to be the Bretons of the Continent, or the Britons of Wales and Cornwall. This association extends not only to the deeds of Arthur and his knights, and of other heroes such as Tristan, but also to magic and the supernatural. It is for instance taken for granted in the Ashmole ms 61 copy of Sir Orfeo: The Brytans, as þe boke seys, Off diuerse thingys þei made þer leys … And many þer ben off fary.1 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath begins her story with a similar linkage: In th’olde dayes of the king Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.2 Marie de France’s lay Lanval invokes “the Britons” specifically when speaking of the hero’s departure into the Otherworld: He went with her to Avalon – this is what the Britons tell us – into an island which is very beautiful: thither the young man was carried off.3

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In the pre-cyclic Prose Lancelot, similarly, having stated that in Arthur’s time there were more fairies in Britain than in other lands, the author goes on to speak of their magical powers on the authority of “the tale of the histories of the Britons” (li contes des brettes estoires).4 The presence, and the importance, of Celtic elements in the romances cannot reasonably be doubted. But other elements are important as well – notably, especially and obviously in the case of Sir Orfeo, those derived from Classical mythology, but also motifs from apocryphal texts, from the lore of the East, and from other sources. How “Celtic” is the Otherworld of romance? A fundamental problem in any attempt to assess the British component in the “Matter of Britain” is a shortage of comparative material: no secular narrative has survived from early Brittany or Cornwall, and only a modest amount from Wales. Scholars have reacted to this difficulty in various ways. Some have turned to the much more amply attested legendary literature of medieval Ireland, proposing either that the romances were based on lost British tales cognate with those which we find in Ireland, or that the Britons (notably the Welsh) borrowed extensively from the Irish. Those of a more positivist turn of mind have dismissed the explanatory value of stories that we do not have and of links that cannot be demonstrated, and have looked to non-Celtic sources as a more promising avenue of investigation. While each of these attitudes can yield positive results, neither is in the last analysis theoretically satisfactory: the “Hibernocentric” approach makes assumptions about what the lost stories of the Britons were, while the “non-Celtic” approach makes assumptions about what they were not. Since the evidence is in either case not there, neither set of assumptions can be justified: we must resign ourselves to a considerable degree of enduring uncertainty. But we are not left with nothing. Although the Welsh sources are relatively sparse, they do provide us with some indications; and where Irish evidence is closely similar, it seems justifiable to use it to supplement what we have from Wales. This is what I propose to do here: to sketch the Otherworld as it is portrayed in texts reaching us from medieval Wales, citing Irish comparanda where appropriate; and to consider the extent to which this tradition may have influenced the descriptions of supernatural realms that figure in the romances.

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The Welsh word for “Otherworld” is Annwfn (later Annwn): its second element, dwfn, can mean either “deep” or “world,” and various etymologies have been proposed according to which the term’s original meaning could have been “Un-world,” “Under-world,” or “Very deep.”5 The idea of Annwfn as an essentially subterranean region is reflected in the couplet “in Annwfn below the earth, / in the air above the earth” in Angar Kyfundawt, one of the cryptic poems in the fourteenthcentury manuscript known as the Book of Taliesin;6 and the same conception recurs in later poetry.7 The twelfth-century cleric and scholar Gerald of Wales heard a tale in the vicinity of Gower concerning a boy who was led “into a land full of games and delights” (in terram ludis et deliciis plenam) by two of its diminutive inhabitants:8 he went “by a way at first underground and dark (per viam primo subterraneam et tenebrosam), into a most beautiful land, notable for its rivers and meadows, its woods and plains, but dim, not being illuminated by the direct light of the sun.”9 Elsewhere, however, the barrier between the mortal world and Annwfn is one of water. Preideu Annwfyn, another of the poems in the Book of Taliesin, speaks of Arthur’s attempt to seize the “cauldron of the Head of Annwfn” (peir Pen Annwfyn), said to be tended by nine maidens, with three times the crew of his ship Prydwen: here the Otherworld is evidently imagined as lying beyond the sea.10 But the poem Golychaf-i Gulwyd in the same manuscript, speaking of a magical place named Kaer Sidi that is free from “sickness and old age,” states that “around its turrets are the wellsprings of the sea; / and [as for] the fruitful fountain which is above it – / its drink is sweeter than the white wine.” While obscure, these words appear to evoke a region beneath the waters.11 Otherworldly islands figured in Welsh folklore of the nineteenth century: In some parts of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, we have some singular accounts of Islands inhabited by fairies … The islands … were seen at a distance from land, and supposed to be numerously peopled by an unknown race of beings. It was also imagined that they had a subterraneous passage from these islands to the towns.12

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Geoffrey of Monmouth was evidently drawing on the same body of tradition when, in his Vita Merlini (c. 1150), he had the poet Telgesinus (i.e. Taliesin) describe a paradisal “island of apples” (insula pomorum) where the earth produces crops without the need for human labour and where the inhabitants live for a century or more; it is ruled over by nine sisters with shape-shifting powers and gifts of healing, chief among whom is Morgen.13 It is thither that Arthur was taken to be cured of his wound after the catastrophic battle of Camlan: the “island of apples” is evidently to be identified with the island of Avalon (cf. Welsh afal “apple”), where Arthur is taken to be healed after Camlan in Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136).14 Besides being localized underground, underwater, or across the sea, the Otherworld may be portrayed as having no specifiable location at all, or as being magically latent in the mortal landscape. In the first “Branch” of the four Middle Welsh tales collectively known as the Mabinogi,15 the protagonist Pwyll is able to ride directly from his own territory into Annwfn: his way is “without hindrance” (dilesteir) because the king of Annwfn is his guide.16 In the Second Branch, the survivors of a disastrous battle escape from the mortal condition to enjoy eighty-seven years of supernatural feasting; but this happens in different places within Wales (the royal stronghold of Harddlech, the island of Gwales), and when they return to “this world” it is their state of consciousness that has changed rather than their location.17 In the Third Branch a boar hunt leads to a magical fortress which had never been seen before, and we are subsequently told that its entrance was easy to find when there was no “concealment” (argel) upon it; when Pwyll’s wife and son have been made captive there, it disappears.18 In Buchedd Collen,19 a composition of the later Middle Ages, the castle of Gwynn ap Nudd “king of Annwfn” appears on the top of Glastonbury Tor (vynydd glassymbyri), but vanishes again when sprinkled with holy water by Saint Collen.20 Not only are anomalies of space involved in moving between the natural and supernatural realms, but also anomalies of time. In a manner paralleled in stories throughout the world, what seems like a short time spent with the fairies can be a year, or many years, in the human world: sometimes generations have passed, and the subject of the story crum-

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bles into dust or ashes on his return.21 But the converse can also be the case: after the eighty-seven years of supernatural feasting in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, no time at all appears to have passed so far as anyone else is concerned.22 However it may be reached, the Otherworld is generally portrayed as a place of splendour and delight. When Pwyll is at the royal court of Annwfn in the First Branch of the Mabinogi, he concludes that “of what he had seen of all the courts of the earth, that was the court most equipped with food and drink and vessels of gold and lordly treasures”;23 and when Collen visits Gwynn ap Nudd he finds “the fairest castle that he ever saw,” where “the king was sitting on a chair of gold.”24 Although the land of little people in Gerald’s story lacked direct sunlight, and had no moon or stars, it is described as being very beautiful, and abounding in gold.25 We have seen that “sickness and old age” do not affect the occupants of the undersea (?) stronghold of Kaer Sidi; and the participants in the feast in the Second Branch are freed from all earthly cares: “Of all that they had witnessed of suffering, and all that they had themselves received, no memory came to them; neither of that, nor of any affliction in the world.”26 The fertility of the “island of apples” in the Vita Merlini, and the longevity of its inhabitants, have already been mentioned; when Arthur is brought there to be healed, Morgen lays him on a “golden bed.”27 Although sinister, the mysterious fortress in the Third Branch of the Mabinogi is still a place of beauty: its walls are of “new workmanship,” and it contains “a fountain with a structure of marble around it,” with a gold cup that induces the chieftain Pryderi to marvel “at the beauty of the gold, and the fineness of the workmanship of the cup.”28 Although the inhabitants of the Otherworld are of both sexes, women are sometimes particularly prominent: such are the nine maidens who keep the cauldron in Preideu Annwfyn, or the nine sisters who rule over the “island of apples” in the Vita Merlini. This array of characteristics is closely paralleled by what we find in Ireland, suggesting that in this respect at least the various Insular Celtic peoples drew upon a common tradition. In Ireland too the prototypical localization of the Otherworld was underground: when the land was divided between the Gaels and the “Tribes of the Goddess Donu,” the former are said to have been allotted the surface world while the latter

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received “the half of Ireland that was below” (in leth ro boí sís d’Herind);29 and in another tale it is prophesied that Saint Patrick will banish them “into the slopes of hills and crags” (i nd-étnaib cnocc ┐ carracc).30 The immortals are repeatedly associated with síde (singular síd), hills or mounds that are thought to be their dwellings, or to give access to their country; but even when this is not the case, they are still called áes síde (“people of the síde”).31 But they are also portrayed as living beneath springs or lakes or the sea, or in islands beyond the sea; or the world of the supernatural people can be reached simply by losing one’s bearings in this one.32 The principal barrier between the síde and their inhabitants, and ourselves, is “concealment” or “secrecy” (diamair).33 A short time spent in the Otherworld may be a long time among mortals: the traveller may return to find that ages have passed, and may turn to ashes when he touches Irish soil.34 Or else an extended stay there will correspond to only a short time here, or to no time at all.35 There are several descriptions of the beauty and blissful condition of the Otherworld, some of them quite extensive and detailed.36 In the Old Irish tale Immram Brain it is “without sorrow, without gloom, without death,” and its people are “without age, without a covering of earth” since the beginning of the world.37 There is an inexhaustible abundance of food and drink,38 and also of precious things such as trees of gold,39 and strongholds of silver and bronze;40 Immram Brain even speaks of showers of crystals and of silver.41 There are both men and women of the síde, but the women often predominate: the paradisal Otherworld of Immram Brain is referred to as “the land of women” (tír inna mban), and the early tale Echtrae Chonnlai goes so far as to state that “there is no kind there except women and girls” (ní fil cenél and nammá / acht mná ocus ingena).42 To what extent do we find comparable descriptions in the romances? And, if such descriptions are to be found, what can be inferred from this? Are we dealing with Celtic influences, or with different realizations of a broader European tradition, or simply with human universals? While these alternatives need not be regarded as mutually exclusive, there are strong indications that in at least some cases it is the first with which we primarily have to deal. We can begin with the island of Avalon. That Arthur was taken there after his last battle we know from Geoffrey’s Historia; and to identify

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Avalon with Morgen’s paradisal realm, the insula pomorum of the Vita Merlini, does not require much perspicacity.43 But more than this is involved in the story, mentioned above and attributed to “the Britons” by Marie, that Lanval was carried off by his mistress to Avalon, “an island which is very beautiful”; while in Chrétien’s Erec it is one Guigomar who is said to rule over Avalon as the lover of Morgain la fee.44 Still more interesting is the story of a knight named Urbain in the Didot Perceval,45 who reaches the castle of his fairy mistress by following her through a terrible storm in the blackness of night. She gives him the task of guarding a ford so that “no knight who goes through the land will see this castle.” When Urbain is defeated by Perceval, the castle is destroyed or disappears, and the lady and her attendant maidens come as a huge flock of black birds to attack him; when Perceval strikes one of these she returns to human form, but then disappears to Avalon to be healed.46 The maidens who magically become birds are reminiscent of Morgen and her sisters in the Vita Merlini, but for other details in this episode the readiest parallels are in Irish sources: the Otherworld stronghold, usually unseen by mortals, which is reached through storm;47 the woman transformed into a bird who becomes a woman again when wounded.48 The knight’s name is also interesting: Urbain evidently derives from Urb(a)gen, the Old Welsh form of the name of the early north British ruler Urien Rheged.49 Urien’s son Owein was associated with magical ravens in medieval Welsh tradition;50 while the form Urbain points to the Didot Perceval having drawn on a source with names in Old Welsh orthography. These are not the only cases in which names associated with supernatural regions point to Insular tradition. I will consider two further examples. Among the earlier-attested legends concerning Arthur is an anecdote in a twelfth-century Welsh saint’s Life, the Vita Gildae of Caradoc of Llancarfan. Here it is related that Meluas, the king “reigning in the Summer Region” (regnante in Aestiua Regione), raped and abducted Arthur’s queen, taking refuge with her in Glastonbury, “that is, the Glass City” (id est Urbs Vitrea). After seeking his wife for a year, Arthur found her and laid siege to Glastonbury; but the monk Gildas made peace between the rivals, and the queen was restored to her husband.51

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As it stands, there is nothing preternatural here: the “Summer Region” is evidently Somerset, where Glastonbury is located. We have already seen, however, that Glastonbury is portrayed in Buchedd Collen as the stronghold of the king of the Otherworld; and echoes of this little story in the romances have an undeniably Otherworldly character. Thus we find the following in the enumeration of the wedding guests in Erec: There came Maheloas, a lofty baron, the lord of the Island of Glass (l’Isle de Voirre). In that island one hears no thunder, nor does there fall lightning or tempest. No toad nor serpent dwells there; it is not too hot, nor is it wintry.52 Maheloas and the Island of Glass clearly correspond to Meluas and his Glass City. The Island of Glass is not the earthly Glastonbury here, however, but a preternatural paradise. The picture is filled out, and further complicated, by Chrétien’s later romance Lancelot, or Le Chevalier de la Charrete (late twelfth century). Here Meleagant, like Meluas in the Vita Gildae, carries off Arthur’s queen: he takes her to his father’s kingdom of Gorre, a name that may reflect French voirre, Welsh gwydr (“glass”), or both. Gorre’s Otherworldly nature is adumbrated in ways different from what we have seen in the brief description in Erec. The unsummoned visitor can enter it only by one of two bridges:53 one has as much water below it as above it, suggesting a passage to an underwater Otherworld,54 while the other consists of the blade of an enormous sword, recalling visionary accounts of bridges encountered by souls after death.55 That the kingdom of Gorre is, on some level, a land of the dead is also suggested by its description as “the kingdom … from which no stranger returns,”56 and, more elaborately, by a scene in which Lancelot frees all who are held captive there by lifting a slab in a graveyard.57 Here, in a manner paralleled in other cases, the Welsh and the French sources are mutually illuminating: the former provide evidence of the origins of the material, while the latter offer a richer sense of its potential significance. We have something similar in the case of the Welsh hero Mabon. He is said in the Welsh Triads to be one of “the three chief prisoners of

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Britain”; and the brief account of his captivity in the tale Culhwch ac Olwen suggests that he had been confined since the beginning of the world. That the story reaches back to pagan mythology is suggested by the fact that Mabon is a reflex of Maponos (“Divine Youth”), the name of a god worshipped by the northern Britons in Roman times.58 These slender indications are enriched by the account, toward the end of Erec, of a figure named Mabonagrain: he is a giant warrior held captive by his mistress in a paradisal orchard – full of singing birds and healing plants, beyond the cycle of the seasons – which is surrounded by a magical wall of air.59 Several other figures with names clearly derived from Mabon’s are associated with magical prisons in further romances.60 The Welsh antecedents of Avalon, Maheloas/Meleagant, and Mabonagrain have long been recognized, and much discussed. I mention these familiar instances here as examples of evidence that enables us to associate Otherworld descriptions in the romances with Insular Celtic tradition on grounds of linguistic correspondence, not merely of comparable imagery. Against this background we can now consider further accounts which exhibit strong resemblances to Irish and Welsh sources, but where such specific verbal indications are lacking. We have already encountered Guigomar, said by Chrétien to rule over Avalon with his mistress Morgain. The eponymous lay Guingamor (twelfth century)61 relates how its protagonist undertook to hunt a white boar, though none who had attempted this had ever returned. In the forest he came upon an empty castle of such extraordinary beauty that he was distracted from the hunt, and consequently lost track of the boar and of his own hound. Going deeper into the forest, he found a beautiful woman bathing; she agreed to take him as her lover and entertained him at the castle he had already visited, restoring to him the boar and his dog. After three days Guingamor wished to return to the court, but found that in his own land three hundred years had passed: all whom he had known were long dead, his king’s castle was a ruin, and he himself only a distant legend. When he disregarded his lady’s warning and ate mortal food, he was overtaken by the decrepitude of extreme age and came close to death; but two of her attendant maidens rescued him, and carried him back to her realm.62

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This story has clear points of resemblance to other Breton lays, in particular to Lanval and Graelent.63 In other respects, however, the closest parallels are to be found in Wales and Ireland. The hunt recalls the Third Branch of the Mabinogi, in which the young prince Pryderi, hunting a white boar, comes to an empty stronghold where both the boar and his dogs disappear. Filled with wonder at the exquisite workmanship of the objects that he finds there, he is made captive by enchantment and stolen away from his own people.64 The lay’s conclusion, on the other hand, is strongly reminiscent of the Old Irish voyage tale Immram Brain. Bran and his companions find love and lavish hospitality in the paradisal “land of women”; we are told that “it was a year that it appeared to them to be there, [but] it chanced to be many years.” When they go back to Ireland they find that nobody who had known Bran still lives, but that his voyage figures “in tales of former times” (i senchassaib); when one of the company leaps ashore in defiance of the warning of Bran’s mistress, “he was ashes at once, as if he had been in the earth through many centuries.”65 The author of Guingamor was clearly drawing on cognate traditions. One of the most intriguing characteristics of the Otherworld as it appears in the Celtic literatures is, as noted above, its essential unplaceability. Irish sources speak of immortals dwelling “in the hills” (i sídib), and the Welsh Annwfn may be described as lying beneath the earth, but the Otherworld can also be underwater or beyond the sea; it can be reached through darkness or mist or storm; it can lie outside our frame of spatial reference entirely; or it can be somehow “the same” as our own world, but seen through other eyes.66 We find traces of the same paradoxical attitude in the lays and the romances. In Marie’s Yonec, the heroine follows her shapeshifting lover into a hollow hill (hoge), emerging from a tunnel to find herself in a mysterious kingdom where he lies dying in a silver city; but later she comes upon his tomb in a church in southeast Wales, and is told that he had been king of that region.67 The magical and the mortal realms are somehow identical. An analogous ambiguity is found in the pre-cyclic Prose Lancelot. The domain of the Lady of the Lake is said to lie beneath a lake which, “since the time of the pagans,” had been sacred to the

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goddess Diana; but later in the tale it is said that the same lake “was nothing but enchantment” (n’estoit se d’anchantement non), wrought by the Lady with magic that she had learned from Merlin.68 Here a barrier of water gives place to, or coexists with, a barrier to perception. In Sir Orfeo, the “king o fairy” first takes Orfeo’s queen to his kingdom in a dream, nothing being said of the way thither save that they go on horseback; when he comes the next day to carry her off bodily from amid the king’s thousand knights, “þe quen was oway y-tviȝt, / wiþ fairi forþ y-nome / — men wist neuer wher sche was bicome.”69 The scene is reminiscent of the Old Irish tale Tochmarc Étaíne, in which Midir, a lord of the síde, carries the queen of Ireland out of a hall filled and surrounded with her husband’s warriors.70 But when Orfeo finally makes his own way into the fairy kingdom, following a group of ladies among whom is his stolen wife, he follows a path like that in Yonec: In at a roche þe leuedis rideþ, & he after, & nouȝt abideþ. When he was in þe roche y-go Wele þre mile, oþer mo, He com in-to a fair cuntray, As briȝt so sonne on somers day, Smoþe & plain & al grene – Hille no dale nas þer non y-sene.71 The story’s ultimate derivation from the myth of Orpheus might lead one to expect that “þe lond of fairy” would have traits of the Classical underworld; in fact, however, it much more closely resembles the Otherworld of Welsh and Irish legend. Thus the king’s castle is characterized by radiance and splendour: Wiþin þer wer wide wones, Al of precious stones; Þe werst piler on to biholde Was al of burnist gold. Al þat lond was euer liȝt, For when it schuld be þerk & niȝt,

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Þe riche stones liȝt gonne As briȝt as doþ at none þe sonne. No man may telle, no þenche in þouȝt, Þe riche werk þat þer was wrouȝt: Bi al þing him þink þat it is Þe proude court of Paradis.72 Even more striking is the statement that this is not the land of the dead at all: those who are captive there are “folk þat were þider y-brouȝt, / & þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt.”73 The idea that women dead in childbirth, drowned fishermen, and other tragic losses “had not died; what had happened was that they had been carried off ” (ní bás a fuair siad – ba é an rud a tugadh as iad) is an important element in Irish fairy lore.74 The romance Thomas of Erceldoune contains similar elements.75 The “lady of anoþer cuntre” instructs Thomas to “take þi leve … at sune & mone” on his departure from “mydul erth,” and leads him under a hill “wher hit was derk as any hell.” But this subterranean passage also has an aqueous character: Thomas wades through knee-high water, and for three days hears nothing but “þe noyse of þe flode.” Such a combination of traits is reminiscent of Irish tradition, in which the Otherworld can be imagined to lie both beneath the earth and beyond the sea.76 At last his guide brings him into a “fayre herbere, / þer frute groande was gret plente,” and many birds are singing; but she warns him that if he eats any of the fruit he will be condemned to spend eternity in hell.77 Nearby stands the magnificent castle of her husband the king: “in mydul erth is non like þer-till.” Again, there is an ambivalent relationship between the fairies and the realm of the dead: roads lead off to heaven, paradise, purgatory, and hell, but the castle belongs to none of these places, existing as it were between the world of the living and the afterworlds of Christian belief. (A devil, however, periodically comes to claim some of its people for hell.) This is another story in which an Otherworld sojourn involves the bending of time: Thomas thinks that he has stayed only three days in the fairy court, but in fact it has been more than seven years.78 As will be evident, these observations only scratch the surface of a vast and a very rich subject.79 I hope, however, that it has been possible to

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indicate not only some of the reasons for taking seriously the claims of French and English writers that their tales of “fayerye” drew on the older traditions of the Britons, but also to suggest what we may reasonably conceive those traditions to have been. A recognition of these links can help us to a fuller appreciation of the background of romance; and it may also be the case that the lays and romances themselves preserve traces of tales in the Celtic literatures which have not otherwise survived.80

notes 1 A.J. Bliss, ed., Sir Orfeo, 2nd ed. (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3, lines 7–8, 16. The original poem appears to date from the later thirteenth century, the Ashmole ms from the later fifteenth. 2 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, lines 857–9. 3 A. Ewert, ed., Marie de France: Lais (Oxford, uk: Basil Blackwell, 1944), 74, lines 641–4: Od li s’envait en Avalun, / Ceo nus recuntent li Bretun, / En un isle que mut est beaus; / La fu ravi li dameiseaus. Here and in what follows, translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 4 Elspeth Kennedy, ed., Lancelot do Lac: The Non-cyclic Old French Prose Romance, 2 vols. (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1:21. The current view is to assign Prose Lancelot to the beginning of the thirteenth century. 5 Discussion and references in Patrick Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–9. 6 Marged Haycock, ed. and trans., Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, uk: cmcs Publications, 2007), 114, lines 83–4: yn Annwfyn is eluyd, / yn awyr uch eluyd. Various dates have been proposed for these arcane poems. The tenth century has often been tentatively suggested; but Marged Haycock, the most recent editor, favours their attribution to a poet who flourished in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. 7 Thus in the fourteenth century Dafydd ap Gwilym appears to refer to “the land of magic beneath the world” (gwlad yr hud is dwfn): Thomas Parry, ed., Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym, 3rd ed. (Caerdydd, uk: University of Wales Press, 1979), 34. Speaking of a fox, Dafydd says: “It is not easy for me to pursue him, / with his dwelling in the direction of Annwfn” (65).

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8 A student of medieval Irish literature cannot help being reminded here of the early Otherworld designation Mag Mell, which can be translated either “Delightful Plain” or “Plain of Sports.” 9 Itinerarium Kambriae I.8, in J.F. Dimock, ed., Giraldi Cambrensis Itinerarium Kambriæ, et Descriptio Kambriæ, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera 6, Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1868), 75. 10 Haycock, Legendary Poems, 435. 11 Ibid., 277, lines 49–51. The name Kaer Sidi is also found in the poem cited in the preceding note, but nowhere else in medieval Welsh literature. It is generally recognised that the second element in the name is based on the Irish word síd, “supernatural dwelling” (see further below): here at least there is direct evidence of “some Irish input into the Welsh picture of the overseas Otherworld” (Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, 66). 12 W. Howells, Cambrian Superstitions (London: Tipton, 1831), 119. 13 John Jay Parry, ed., The Vita Merlini (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1925), 82–4, lines 908–40. Various scholars have noted the obvious resemblance of this description to the account by the first-century geographer Pomponius Mela of the island of Sena off the coast of Brittany: this is ruled by nine virgins, whose supernatural powers include the ability to take the shapes of animals and “to cure what for others would be incurable” (Chorographia III.48). The similarity is too close to be accidental; since the text of Pomponius appears to have been virtually unknown before the later Middle Ages (thus Catherine M. Gormley et al., “The Medieval Circulation of the De chorographia of Pomponius Mela,” Mediaeval Studies 46 [1984]: 266–320), it is best explained by the hypothesis that Geoffrey was drawing on native tradition here, going back to lore shared by the Armorican Gauls and the ancient Britons. 14 Historia regum Britanniae XI.2: Sed et inclytus ille Arturus rex letaliter uulneratus est, qui illinc ad sananda uulnera sua in insulam Auallonis aduectus. 15 There is a considerable ongoing uncertainty about the dating of “The Four Branches” of the Mabinogi. At the conclusion of the most recent detailed linguistic study, Simon Rodway could only suggest a date “before the middle of the thirteenth century”: “The Where, When, Who and Why of Medieval Welsh Prose Texts: Some Methodological Considerations,” Studia Celtica 41 (2007): 47–89, 73. Also, Patrick Sims-Williams states, “It may be better to think of these texts reaching their current form in the late twelfth or early thirteenth

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John Carey centuries, with some revision taking place even down to the early fourteenth century” (Irish Influence, 2). Ifor Williams, ed., Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, 2nd ed. (Caerdydd, uk: University of Wales Press, 1951), 3. Ibid., 46–7. Ibid., 55–7. The theme of the Otherworld prison (karchar) also figures in Preiddeu Annwn, one of the poems in the Book of Taliesin referred to above: Haycock, Legendary Poems, 435. Precise date uncertain; preserved in a manuscript of the sixteenth century. S. Baring-Gould and John Fisher, ed., The Lives of the British Saints, 4 vols. (London: The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1907–13), 4:377–8. Wirt Sikes, British Goblins (London: Sampson Low, 1880), 70–90. Cf. note 17 above. Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, 4. Baring-Gould and Fisher, Lives of the British Saints. Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Itinerarium Kambriæ, 76: “auri, quo abundabat regio.” Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, 46. Parry, Vita Merlini, 84, line 934. Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, 55–6. From the Middle Irish version of the tale Mesca Ulad: R.I. Best et al., ed., The Book of Leinster, 6 vols. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1954– 83), 5:1171, lines 34594–5. Whitley Stokes, ed., “Acallamh na Senórach,” in Irische Texte, vol. 4:1 (Leipzig, Germany: Hirzel, 1900), lines 7535–6. To give just two examples: in the story of Lóegaire mac Crimthainn, the hero visits an Otherworld kingdom which appears to lie beneath a lake, but then remains there “in joint-kingship of the síd” (Best et al., Book of Leinster, 5:1213, line 36019); in another anecdote, a woman finds a síd at the bottom of a spring (Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Irish Ordeals,” in Irische Texte, vol. 3:1 [Leipzig, Germany: Hirzel, 1891], 183–229, at 191). For a particularly close French parallel to the latter story see my Ireland and the Grail (Aberystwyth, uk: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007), 188. Discussion in John Carey, “The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition,” Éigse 19 (1982–3): 36–43; John Carey, “Time, Space, and the Otherworld,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 7 (1987): 1–27.

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33 Thus Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., “Macgnimartha Find,” Revue celtique 5 (1881– 3): 197–204, at 202. 34 Thus Séamus Mac Mathúna, ed. and trans., Immram Brain (Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1985), 44–5, at 57–8. 35 Analysis of some particularly striking instances in John Carey, “Sequence and Causation in Echtra Nerai,” Ériu 39 (1988): 67–74; cf. Carey, “Time, Space, and the Otherworld.” 36 See for instance the collection of “Otherworld Poems” in Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1956), 92–111. 37 Mac Mathúna, Immram Brain, 35, 40. 38 Thus passages in the tales De Gabáil in tṠída (Best et al., Book of Leinster, 5:1120, lines 32926–9) and Echtra Nerai (Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., “The Adventures of Nera,” Revue celtique 10 [1889–90]: 212–28, at 224, lines 147–9). 39 Kevin Murray, ed. and trans., Baile in Scáil (London: Irish Texts Society, 2004), 34, line 30. 40 Stokes, “Irish Ordeals,” 195. 41 Mac Mathúna, Immram Brain, 35, 37. 42 Ibid., 43; Kim McCone, ed., Echtrae Chonnlai and the Beginnings of Vernacular Narrative Writing in Ireland (Maynooth, Ireland: Department of Old and Middle Irish, National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2000), 123. 43 Thus William Roach, ed., The Didot Perceval According to the Manuscripts of Modena and Paris (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), 277; the idea recurs down to the time of Malory, and beyond. 44 Wendelin Foerster, ed., Kristian von Troyes: Erec und Enide (Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1896), lines 1955–9. 45 Usually assigned to the early thirteenth century. 46 Roach, Didot Perceval, 195–202. 47 Thus the tale Tucait Baile Mongáin, ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer, in Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran Son of Febul to the Land of the Living, 2 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1895–97), 1:56–7. 48 Kicki Ingridsdotter, ed. and trans., Aided Derbforgaill: The Violent Death of Derbforgaill (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 2009), 82–3, with discussion of comparanda, 32–7. 49 This possibility was noted by Idris Foster in his contribution to Roger Sherman Loomis, ed., Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1959), 43. On the forms of the name, the attestations of Urien

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56 57 58

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John Carey himself, and evidence that various traditions concerning him and his son were known to Geoffrey and the romance writers, see Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain, 2nd ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), 508–12. Discussion by R.S. Loomis, “The Combat at the Ford in the Didot Perceval,” Modern Philology 43, no. 1 (1945): 63–71. Hugh Williams, ed., in Gildae De excidio Britanniae (London: David Nutt, 1899), 408–10. Foerster, Erec, lines 1946–51. Mario Roques, ed., Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Paris: Champion, 1969), lines 653–75. See my discussion in Ireland and the Grail, 151–66, especially 159–60. Chrétien’s sword bridge was already linked with vision literature by Rudolf Thurneysen, Keltoromanisches (Halle, Germany: Niemeyer, 1884), 20–1; more recently, see Jeff Rider, “The Other Worlds of Romance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–31, at 115–16. But while there are several instances of extremely narrow eschatological bridges, comparison or identification with a blade is difficult to parallel in Judaeo-Christian sources; note however the afterworld bridge which is like “the edge of a razor” for sinful souls in the ninth-century Zoroastrian work Dādestān ī dēnīg (21:5) by Manūščihr, in the translation of E.W. West, Pahlavi Texts: Part II (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1882), 49. A different view is presented in Laura Hibbard, “The Sword Bridge of Chrétien de Troyes and Its Celtic Original,” Romanic Review 4, no. 2 (April–June 1913): 166–90. Roques, Chevalier de la Charrete, lines 640–1. Ibid., lines 1892–1914. See John T. Koch’s articles “Mabon fab Modron” and “Maponos” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, 5 vols., general editor John T. Koch (Santa Barbara, ca, Denver, and Oxford, uk: abc-clio, 2006). Foerster, Erec, lines 5739–45. I take this invisible barrier to be the counterpart of the barrier of invisibility in so many of the Irish sources: what hinders our access to the Otherworld is our inability to perceive it. Thus Emmanuel Philipot, “Une épisode d’Érec et Énide: La Joie de la Cour – Mabon l’enchanteur,” Romania 25 (1896): 258–94, especially 258–78; cf. Bromwich, Trioedd, 427–8.

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61 It has been attributed to Marie de France by some, but most scholars would put the date of this work a little later. 62 Alexander Micha, ed. and trans., Lais féeriques des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris: G.F. Flammarion, 1992), 62–103. 63 Lanval was written by Marie de France in the second half of the twelfth century. Graelent is anonymous and probably somewhat later. 64 Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, 55–7. 65 Mac Mathúna, Immram Brain, 44–5. 66 Thus the references in note 32 above. 67 Ewert, Marie de France: Lais, 90–3, lines 336–452; 94–5, lines 495–517. I discuss this aspect of the lay in “Yonec and Tochmarc Becḟola: Two Female Echtrai,” in Sacred Histories: A Festschrift for Máire Herbert, edited by J. Carey, K. Murray, and C. Ó Dochartaigh (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015), 73–85. 68 Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 1:7, 24. 69 Bliss, Sir Orfeo, 15–16, lines 154–63; 18, lines 192–4 (Auchinleck ms). With “men wist neuer wher sche was bicome” cf. “no neuer he wist whider þai bi-come” (26, line 288), “ac neuer he nist whider þai wold” (27, line 296). Irish sources frequently state that it was unknown whence Otherworld beings had come, or whither they went: discussion in Proinsias Mac Cana, “On the ‘Prehistory’ of Immram Brain,” Ériu 26 (1975): 33–52, at 38–40. 70 Osborn Bergin and R.I. Best, ed. and trans., “Tochmarc Étaíne,” Ériu 12 (1934– 38): 137–96, at 182–5. 71 Bliss, Sir Orfeo, 31, lines 347–54. 72 Ibid., 33, lines 365–76. 73 Ibid., 34, lines 389–90. 74 For examples, see Seán Ó hEochaidh et al., ed., Síscéalta ó Thír Chonaill (Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1977), 54–60, 64–75. Traces of the same belief have been discerned in the Old Irish tale Echtrae Chonnlai by James Carney, “The Deeper Level of Early Irish Literature,” Capuchin Annual (1969): 160–71, at 165. 75 This work assumed its present form in the early fifteenth century. 76 I have discussed this in “Ireland and the Antipodes: The Heterodoxy of Virgil of Salzburg,” Speculum 64 (1989): 1–10. 77 With this may be compared the widespread belief that a visitor to the fairies who eats or drinks anything among them will never be able to return to the mortal world; examples in Ó hEochaidh et al., Síscéalta, 40–7, 76–7.

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78 James A.H. Murray, ed., The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (London: Trübner, 1875), 11–17 (Cambridge, University Library ms Ff.5.48). 79 In Ireland and the Grail, I have put forward detailed arguments that many elements in the early Grail romances are derived from Welsh (and ultimately Irish) Otherworld narratives. 80 Some possibilities along these lines have been noted above. Rachel Bromwich has made the specific suggestion that some of the lays are based on lost legends concerning the origins of Brittany’s early dynasties: “Celtic Dynastic Themes and the Breton Lays,” Études celtiques 9, no. 2 (1961): 439–74.

6 Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder Nandini Das

I In medieval chivalric romances one event happens with astonishing regularity, till the regularity with which it occurs more or less does away with any astonishment that it could hope to awaken in us. That event is the portentous knocking at the gate. Here is how things begin so often in chivalric romance: there is feasting and drinking, which is only to be expected. There is a late arrival. The heavy doors at the back of the room burst open, and the latecomer enters. He could be a knight, a young and untried stranger in search of fame, name, and fortune. Such an adventurer would be the archetypal le bel inconnu, the Fair Unknown, nameless at the moment of his arrival but one with whose name the readers will soon become familiar. Such is the case in the fourteenth-century Lybeaus Desconus (le bel inconnu) with its eponymous hero, or in Sir Perceval of Galles, where the protagonist, brought up in the woods by his mother and ignorant of the rules of society, rides right up to King Arthur at the start of a feast.1 It is equally likely, though, that the unexpected visitor will be one who is never going to be anything other than strange and alien to the courtly world. The Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is such a one, set apart from the rest of the court by his stature and his otherworldly colour. There is no reason, however, why the latecomer has to be male. She could be a woman, like the damsel Lynet in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney, who arrives at Arthur’s court to seek help for her besieged sister, one among many female arrivants who set the precedent for the much later spectacular arrival of Angelica at Charlemagne’s court in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1484). He or she

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could be a supplicant or an intruder set upon issuing a challenge, someone asking for shelter or for revenge, promising wealth, adventure, or love in return. It is easy to get used to expecting each newcomer to be bigger, better, even more outrageous or otherworldly than others who have come before. That, indeed, is the problem with romance. Its relationship with wonder is famously iterative and incremental. Erich Auerbach’s description of the typical romance narrative as a never-ending assembly line of trials, wonders, and adventures with the knight at the receiving end is a useful one to keep in mind in this context, because it also gestures towards the root of the problem with readers’ expectations.2 Romance teaches its readers to expect wonder and adventure to come literally knocking at the door. Yet the readers, their responses deeply coloured by their familiarity with such generic tropes, cannot help comparing the newest wondrous arrival to all who have come before. Our demands grow as events unfold. Each adventure has to be bigger and better, stories competing not only with themselves, but with all those romances that have come before them. It is a quirk that is as old as romance itself, both its most characteristic feature and its Achilles’ heel. The challenge that it faces is the usual catch of anticipation: we expect wonders and adventures, but the wonders that come can rarely compete with the scale of our expectations. For critics, they seem predictable, suitable only for the easily pleased. For writers, it is pressure that drives one disastrously to the edge of the superlative. Evil knights give way to giants, the latter turn into yet more monstrous versions of evil knights, like Mabonagrain in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec, or the parricide Malduit against Yvain in the Vulgate. Size, limbs, and heads multiply, a feature that Chaucer uses to parodic effect in his tale of “Sir Thopas” in The Canterbury Tales when he introduces the three-headed-evil-giant-knight, Sir Oliphaunt. The result for readers is, at best, disappointment, and at worst, disillusionment. After all, it is a standard law of the romance-readers’ universe that wonders multiply in inverse proportion to our capacity to wonder. This essay, however, aims to steer clear of such wonders in order to focus on something rather different, but to do so we need to retrace our steps to that very familiar beginning and start again. There is a feast; drinks flow. King Arthur sits on his throne, waiting for the heavy doors

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at the back of the room to burst open, and the latecomer to enter. What Arthur is doing is deeply familiar to us. From the oldest twelfth-century continental romances to their sixteenth-century successors, from Chrétien’s Perceval and Ulrich’s Lanzelet to Malory’s Sir Gareth, stories often start this way, with Arthur stubbornly refusing to eat before something suitably wondrous or adventurous comes knocking at the gate.3 Yet in this instance, quite against his expectations and those of his readers, wonder does not arrive on cue. The hour for dinner passes. The court sits around, starving dutifully, while their king, like a particularly gloomy suburban teenager, silently decides that adventure will never arrive in Camelot again, and almost dies of pent-up frustration and anger: …l’ore del mangier passa. Li rois fu mus et si pensa A ce q’aventure n’avient. Dedens son cuer tel corox tient Que poi s’en faut qu’il ne muert d’ire.4 Finally, Arthur tells his knights to begin the feast without him; he himself will simply retire to his room and fast away his disappointment. The knights respond as one expects loyal and honourable knights to respond, with loyal protestations and a collective refusal to eat while their monarch fasts – all except Gauvain, who is nothing like the model of courtly chivalry that one might expect. “Quite willingly, Sire,” he says and tucks in, setting an example for the others to follow. That is how the thirteenth-century French romance La Vengeance Raguidel (The Revenge of Raguidel) begins, not with a bang but a whimper, with an uncooperative universe and the rumblings of a starving Gauvain’s stomach. It illuminates the aspect of romance on which this essay would like to focus – not its obsession with wonder, but its equally consistent, if less noteworthy, return to the ordinary and the everyday. Medieval romances offer frequent instances of the latter, although some like Raguidel offer them perhaps more often than others. There is another striking example of this particular narrative trait soon afterwards in Raguidel, when the adventure that Arthur had been waiting for finally arrives in the shape of a dead knight on an unmanned ship, whose mur-

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der needs to be avenged. A servant notices an unknown knight take away the magical tokens that had come with the body, but that crucial moment is also a supreme instance of domestic serendipity: the servant had happened to poke his head out of the window for a bit of fresh air; his eyes were hurting from all the smoke in the hall since Arthur had decided that the arrival of the dead body presaged an adventure that called for a celebratory feast after all. With most romances, the reading experience moves us from feast to adventure, wonder to wonder, speeding through the duller, more domestic moments. Asking what happens when we look at the bits that do not seem to demand our attention, and pausing where readers’ eyes would usually skim over, however, can illuminate something about the workings of romance that would otherwise remain subsumed under the overwhelming emphasis on wonder. What happens, in other words, if one decides to look away from the wonder and attend to the instances of the ordinary, the inconsequential, and the everyday that often crop up in romance? What function do they play?

II The change of focus which this essay would like to attempt has a visual analogue elsewhere, in the very different yet contiguous world of Renaissance art. In 1513–14, Albrecht Dürer created one of his three master engravings, The Rider, more commonly known as The Knight, Death, and the Devil (see figure 6.1). A perfect representation of the indiscriminate temporal and geographical blend that crops up repeatedly in romance, Dürer’s knight is a stern, Teutonic figure, with a Gothic castle behind him, sitting on a horse that seems to be a perfect artistic product of the Italian Renaissance. Reminders of Death’s inevitable presence lurk at the feet of the knight’s horse in the form of a skull and hover ahead as the gruesome snake-encircled, noseless, and lipless being holding an hourglass, while the Devil leers behind him in the form of a grotesque goat-headed figure. As Erwin Panofsky, the great historian of Renaissance art, pointed out, it is possible that Dürer was influenced by another great humanist image, the Knight of Christ as described by Erasmus in his Handbook of the Christian Soldier (Enchiridion militis Christiani, 1501), fighting constantly against “three relentless enemies, the

Figure 6.1 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), The Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513–14.

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flesh, the world, and the devil” as he travels on the “path of virtue.”5 The drama of Dürer’s engraving has invited countless imaginative, philosophical, poetic responses. Nietzsche famously held a lifelong fascination for it. In The Birth of Tragedy, he would describe “the armoured knight with the hard, steely gaze who, alone with just his horse and dog, knows how to find his way along a path of terror, unperturbed by his dread companions and yet bereft of all hope.” He becomes, for Nietzsche, the superlative symbol of the courage to “actually know,”’ to ride between Death and the Devil – without hope, and without fear.6 Yet it is undeniable that Dürer’s knight shows no sign of acknowledging the castle that he has left behind him in this image, nor the grinning, heavily symbolic presences of Death and the Devil. If, like him, the viewer chooses to ignore those seemingly invisible allegorical symbols of the challenge he has undertaken, then the actual, visible world that he occupies could be said to take shape in the painting through elements that are strikingly mundane: the friendly dog trotting underfoot, and the unkempt and overgrown landscape around him. The latter is particularly noteworthy in this respect. Dürer’s meticulously drawn representation of the narrow gorge with its undergrowth, depicting a tangle of roots, branches, and thorns, is bleakly nightmarish. At the same time, however, it is a strikingly ordinary, everyday jumble that easily blends into the background for the viewer. There is a similarity between that tangled mass of the ordinary and a watercolour painting that Dürer had produced a decade earlier, in 1503 (see figure 6.2). Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf is acknowledged as probably the most brilliant realist painting of nature in the period. It depicts a tuft of roadside vegetation with astonishing accuracy, from meadow grass, daisies, and dandelion, to germander speedwell, hound’s-tongue, and yarrow. An astonishing balance holds the image together. Each supremely ordinary plant is as meticulously depicted as any specimen in a scientific botanical illustration, yet they resist individual examination and isolation as much as they resist blending into one indistinguishable clump. It is difficult to unsee that early vision when looking at Dürer’s knight again, bracketed between the rather nondescript tuft of grass in the foreground and the entangled thorny shrubs at the back. The ordinary surrounds him, even though he may not acknowledge it. Like the

Figure 6.2 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), The Great Piece of Turf, 1503.

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vegetation in the Great Piece of Turf, it is distinct yet rhizomatic, an unavoidable and ever-present fabric that forms a network which holds him in his isolation, but which he also inhabits: its relation with him is far more complex than that of background to foreground. It is the ordinariness of living, the supremely organic state of “being-in-the-world” – from root to leaves, from lushness to thorns and mulch – that all the drama in the centre of the picture is trying to allegorize. It is clear, simple, and ordinary, but it requires the allegory at its centre in order to hold our attention, and the allegory needs the ordinariness to surround it in order to give it a home, a relevance and validity that comes from the world around, not from denial of it. That tension is also the tension of the everyday in romance. To understand its purpose in the narratives of romance, however, it is useful to go back to Gauvain again. The hero in this instance is not the hungry Gauvain of Raguidel, but a sleepy Gauvain a century later, or Gawain as he is called in this incarnation in the fourteenth-century romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sir Gawain is another story that begins with the arrival of a mysterious stranger at Arthur’s court and results in a quest by headstrong Gawain for the Green Knight, who challenges him to a pleasant game of mutual beheading. Halfway through the poem, while his mysterious host rides out to the sound of bugles and the barking of hounds, Gawain lies in his bed in the castle that had so wondrously appeared to him in the middle of his quest. The next stage of his adventure begins almost unobtrusively: So through a lime-leaf border the lord led the hunt, while snug in his sheets lay slumbering Gawain, dozing as the daylight dappled the walls, under a splendid cover, enclosed by curtains. And while snoozing he heard a slyly made sound, the sigh of a door swinging slowly aside…7 Gawain is about to be seduced, cornered by the sudden yet generically entirely expected entry of the lady of the castle. The reader’s awareness of this familiar trope and Gawain’s reputation as a chivalric knight may lead us to believe that he would know what to do in such circum-

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stances, but what follows is another fleeting glimpse of a homely detail. Caught by surprise, he “lay still,” the poem tells us, “in his state of false sleep, / turning over in his mind what this matter might mean”’ (lines 1195–6). When he finally decides to wake up, his play-acting is abysmal: “So he stirred and stretched, turned on his side, / lifted his eyelids and, looking alarmed, / signed himself hurriedly with his hand, as if saving his life” (lines 1200–3). Gawain’s test at Sir Bertilak’s castle is not unusual. In chivalric romance, it is fairly guaranteed that at some point knights will find both their virility and virtue tested by the temptation of female beauty. Yet in a romance full of wonders that counts among its offerings headless green knights, magical tokens, and a final reference to the witch Morgan le Fey, the lady’s attempted seduction of Gawain carries an odd counterpoint to the bloodlust that ranges in the world outside the bedchamber. As the hunt rages on outside, and as the text moves on to later mysteries and greater wonders, Gawain’s real adventure, we realize with hindsight, began in the realm of the everyday and the mundane that we recognize, in the deceptive cosiness of a sun-dappled room and sleep-warmed sheets, in the little social lies and awkward silences of passing acquaintance, and in the business of everyday negotiation of life.

III But what does the “everyday” mean? Asking that fundamental question is important, because it helps to throw some light on why the ordinary and the everyday keep accompanying and framing the symbolic, the allegorical, and the wondrous in romance. Henri Lefebvre, in Everyday Life and the Modern World, described the quotidian as “what is humble and solid.”8 For Lefebvre, the quotidian or everyday represents the prosaic and banal. The world, he argues, “is divided into the world of everyday life (real, empirical, practical) and the world of metaphor.”9 The two, however, are inseparable; they counterbalance each other as one could suggest the landscape and the symbolic do in Dürer’s “The Knight, Death, and the Devil.” Lefebvre saw the concept of the everyday as a quintessential part of modernity, but his observations about two particular characteristics of it are useful for our thinking about romance

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here. The first of these is his description of the everyday as being pervasive and inherently sequential, deeply characterized by recurrence. As he notes, it is “what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence.”10 The second is his observation of its relationship with narratibility. Unlike the world of metaphor, which Lefebvre associates inextricably with writing, the sequential nature of the world of everyday life makes it resistant to description and narration. As Lefebvre notes, “though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable.”11 In the appearance of one version of the everyday within the world of romance, one can see the first of these qualities, the dependence on recurrence and sequence, fairly clearly at work. In all the wealth of detail that both characterizes and exhausts its narratives – the descriptions of feasts eaten and clothes worn, of prizes distributed, places visited, and people met – a frame of expectations is established which, while different from our experience, seems familiar and ordinary because it is regular, part of a sequence that mimics that sequence of the quotidian within the narrative framework. The philosopher Stanley Rosen has argued that “the ordinary is accessible to us as the horizon within which the extraordinary presents itself.”12 One might argue that that is exactly how the instances of the everyday work in romances: they create the fabric that the drama the knight undergoes can inhabit. As Helen Cooper has suggested, “One way to restore wonder is to intensify the naturalism of the background: to portray a world that looks as if it operates by familiar criteria, and then to disrupt it.”13 Basic desires and needs do very well to create that sense of the ordinary. Hunger, as Gauvain’s frankly shocking table-manners in Raguidel remind us, is one of them. The awkwardness of his morning wake-up call in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is another. The otherworldliness of wonder etches itself much more effectively against such a backdrop, scooped out and set apart from the general flow of everyday experience.14 Elsewhere, another version of the everyday appears in narratives such as Huon of Bordeaux, for instance, where the hero acquires a magic ring, but forgets about it completely when crisis strikes and has to lie and fight his way through like anyone else. In La Vengeance Raguidel, when the

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body of the dead knight floats into Arthur’s realm on the unmanned ship, it still has the stump of the lance embedded in him that had killed him. With the body is a letter, helpfully announcing that the lance is magical: only the person who can pull it out like a particularly gruesome version of the Sword in the Stone can avenge Raguidel’s murder, and only that weapon can kill the murderer. Gauvain, headstrong as ever, manages to extract the lance. But he rushes off on his quest to find the murderer without it, and has to come back again. Off he goes a second time, now armed with the magical lance, but although he injures the murdering knight, they decide to continue their duel with conventional armour and weapons. The use of the everyday in such instances is of a different kind. Magic and wonder is the order of the day. However, at moments like these, it seems obvious that the function of the everyday and the ordinary is not simply to make wonder plausible, but to render it possible. There is an important distinction to be made here: the rational and the everyday both stand in contrast to romance wonder, but they are not the same. In fact, the distinction between them is crucial. Huon forgets his ring. Gauvain forgets the lance. Why? There is no reason to it, narrative or otherwise, but in that lack of reason there is likelihood, which makes us reach out towards our own familiarity with the sequence of the everyday, where such forgetfulness is a familiar occurrence. In each case it is that detail, the moment of everyday forgetfulness, which transforms the romance; it brings attention back to human agency, to that awareness of the world and of being-in-the-world that fiction otherwise is tempted to forget. When Huon and Gauvain now fight to victory, like countless other romance heroes put in similar narrative quandaries, their actions produce romance wonder on the foundations of that everyday error.

IV In the late sixteenth century, in the face of rising criticism of both romance and its readers and practitioners, however, that tricky balance between wonder and the everyday was renegotiated, challenged, and transformed in radically different ways. There was a newly urgent social impetus, for instance: it is not surprising that narratives that emerge in

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print in a period of a rapidly growing popular readership show a growing emphasis on accommodating the everyday and the mundane in popular romance. Take a couple more cases of hospitality, or lack thereof, for example. In Zelauto (1580), written by Anthony Munday, who subsequently would translate the innumerable exploits of Amadis de Gaul, the eponymous Venetian hero is wounded by bandits as soon as he sets forth on the adventures that make up his book. “Freendlesse, moneylesse, and displayed out of [his] garments,” Zelauto is lucky enough to find shelter in the well-run inn of Madonna Ursula, where he receives the kind of homely comforts no adventurer would want to deny: “a very great fire, my Chaire ready set for me to sit downe with my Cushion, & my boots pulled of[f], warme Pantofles brought unto me, and a cleane kertcher put on my head.”15 There is supper brought up to the room and “Collation in bed”16 at his hostess’s insistence the next morning, and a guarantor arranged by his father soon replaces the missing money. But Zelauto’s sojourn at the inn is different from Gawain’s experience at Bertilak’s castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Madonna Ursula is no Lady Bertilak. The wonders in Munday’s Elizabethan narrative are as much the wonders of the unexpected kindness of strangers and the efficiency of the intricate networks of communication that made travel itself possible in the Renaissance, as they are of Zelauto’s adventures, which finally end in a contemporaneous England where English beer and the English queen both receive their due adulation. A decade later, in Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), inhospitality and the response it triggers have equally familiar faces. When Rosader returns victorious from the wrestling match, he finds his resentful elder brother Saladyn “walking before the gates to hear what success his brother Rosader should have.”17 His revenge for Saladyn discourteously closing the doors on him and his newly found gentleman companions is to “[run] his foot against the door,” and empty Saladyn’s stores for an impromptu party: “Rosader … seeing the hall empty, said, ‘…I tell you, cavaliers, my brother hath in his house five tun of wine, and as long as it lasteth I beshrew him that spares his liquor.’ With that he burst open the buttery door, and with the help of Adam Spencer, covered the tables and set down whatsoever he could find in the house, but what they wanted in meat, Rosader supplied with drink, yet had they royal cheer,

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and withal such hearty welcome as would have made the coarsest meats seem delicates.”18 Lodge borrows much of the homeliness of his details here from the medieval Tale of Gamelyn, but within the pastoral bounds of the same narrative, his characters also display an intensely pragmatic understanding of rank and money that has its roots deep in everyday Elizabethan social negotiations. Trying to dissuade herself from falling in love with the evidently poor Rosader, Rosalynd tells herself: “Then Rosalynd, seeing Rosader is poor, think him less beautiful, because he is in want, and account his virtues but qualities of course, for that he is not endued with wealth.”19 Rosader, in his turn, laments to Ganymede that he has “reached at a star, my desires have mounted above my degree, and my thoughts above my fortunes. I being a peasant, have ventured to gaze on a Princess whose honours are too high to vouchsafe such base loves.”20 And in the final concatenation of wonderful unions that leave everyone “amazed,” Alinda effects the final revelation – her own identity – by bluntly pointing out to Saladyn: “Why, how now, my Saladyn, all amort? What melancholy, man, at the day of marriage? Perchaunce thou art sorrowful to think on thy brother’s high fortunes, and thine owne base desires to choose so meane a shepherdess? Cheer up thy heart, man, for this day thou shalt bee married to the daughter of a King: for know, Saladyn, I am not Aliena, but Alinda, the daughter of thy mortal enemy Torismond.”21 Such instances respond to romance’s increasingly wide-ranging circulation, presenting its moments of wonder against a backdrop that offers glimpses of concerns that would be familiar to its varied readership of London apprentices and serving maids, young students and gentlemen about town. Wonder here is often the wonder of social transformation, acknowledging and responding directly to the force of the everyday ambitions and anxieties of its readers that would otherwise remain untellable and untold, even as it resorts to the wondrous revelations and metamorphoses of romance to raise its narrative protagonists out of the stream of the ordinary.22 Yet that is not to say that it is the only turn that romance takes in this period in its treatment of wonder. There is a part of it which, famously in the hands of Thomas Nashe, for example, plays with stripping itself of wonder completely in order to tell its

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story. Much has been written about Nashe’s dismantling of chivalry and the tropes of chivalric romance in the Unfortunate Traveller, but perhaps one of his rare references to wonder is telling enough for our purposes. It appears fairly early in his adventures, when Nashe has Jack Wilton describe a moment in which the martial exploits that were celebrated in chivalric romance turn into a nightmarish vision of war. The only wonder here is the “wonderful spectacle of bloodshed,” and human sacrifice easily confused with the slaughter of animals and vermin: Here the unwieldy Switzers wallowing in their gore like an ox in his dung, there the sprightly French sprawling and turning on the stained grass like a roach new taken out of the stream. All the ground was strewed as thick with battle axes as the carpenter’s yard with chips. The plain appeared like a quagmire, overspread as it was with trampled dead bodies. In one place might you behold a heap of dead murthered men overwhelmed with a falling steed instead of a tombstone, in another place a bundle of bodies fettered together in their own bowels, and as the tyrant Roman Emperors used to tie condemned living caitiffs face to face to dead corses, so were the half-living here mixed with squeezed carcases long putrefied.23 Jack’s language, always ready to run amok, grapples here particularly with the untellable. If this is wonder, it is wonder of a very different kind, rooted – if we resort to the visual analogue of Dürer’s images again – in the mulch of the undergrowth, in the extreme familiarity and sheer ordinariness of human life, and human death.

V Negotiations in popular print such as that of Munday, Lodge, Nashe, or their contemporaries such as John Lyly and Robert Greene, among many others, moved romance into a different iteration of prose fiction altogether. The significance of that development has been rehearsed elsewhere, although what happens to the everyday within such narratives could bear further exploration.24 What I want to do in this final section,

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however, is to turn back to wonder again, and at its appearance in two of Elizabethan England’s pre-eminent experimentations with romance. The first of these is Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book III, canto IX, which offers us yet another example of the familiar crisis of hospitality in romance, involving the arrival of strangers. A stranger knight refused entrance to Malbecco’s castle gets into a casual fight with Satyrane and Paridell over who can call dibs on a pig-pen to shelter from the rain. The action moves from petty argument to plans of vengeance against the uncourteous lord of the castle who has shut the gates on all three; under that threat, a grudging admittance and an equally grudging acceptance of shelter follow. Spenser’s verse moves on to the humdrum tasks of “dissembled” politeness and the drying of wet clothes, but then the victorious stranger knight takes off the helmet, and golden hair “like sunny beames” spills down to her feet, to reveal her to be the female knight, Britomart.25 The fact that she had just been rolling around in the mud and the rain and given a man a thorough drubbing over the momentous matter of temporary ownership of a pig-pen is forgotten: … they all on her Stood gazing, as if suddein great affright Had them surprized. At last auizing right, Her goodly personage and glorious hew, Which they so much mistooke, they tooke delight In their first errour, and yett still anew With wonder of her beauty fed their hongry vew. (III.ix.23.3–9) Spenser is far from rewriting or writing out wonder in this instance, and it is evident that the petty, mundane quarrel plays exactly the kind of role here that we have come to expect traditionally from the everyday in romance, against which the wonder of Britomart’s revelation of her identity can shine with particular lustre. The struggle of sheltering from the rain, of petty squabbles whose tediousness and inevitability resist telling, serve at the same time to contain as well as to frame the wonder that Spenser’s allegorical Knight of Chastity evokes. Yet there is something more at play here, which marks a crucial change in the

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treatment of wonder itself, and the pause that Spenser’s readers experience along with Britomart’s challengers in this instance is indicative of it. In some ways it is generically expected, since romance characteristically imagines wonder as an interruption or pause in the regular ticking of everyday time. However, such a pause is also regularly associated with contemplation and knowledge in the Renaissance. In the presence of radical difference, the pause of wonder marks a moment of intense emotional and intellectual response. Like the familiar hourglass or clock-face on the computer screen, it signals the mind’s attempt to compute and understand. There is a problem with that pause, though, because within it lies its own undoing. In the dominant tradition shaping post-Classical European theories of wonder, the concepts that the Renaissance inherited from Plato and Aristotle suggested that wonder sows the seeds of its own expulsion through knowledge. Faced with the unexpected, the unknown, and the unexplained, the pause marks the emergence of the expected human desire to investigate the cause of the object of wonder, which leads ultimately to knowledge and eradicates wonder itself. As Aristotle argues in his Metaphysics: “it is owing to their wonder that men … first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters.”26 For Spenser, as for a number of his contemporaries in the last decades of the sixteenth century, such moments of contemplation engendered by romance wonder are fairly common. They emerge partly as a response to the mounting criticism of both romance and its readers and practitioners that gathered strength throughout this period, partly as an instinctive response that pushes romance’s uneasy and precarious balance between wonder and the everyday into the firmer realm of allegory. For Spenser’s readers, the pause marked in the verse by the moment of Britomart’s revelation of her identity is an invitation to undertake a particular kind of reading, even if her companions within the narrative are unable to do the same. Repeatedly throughout its unfolding, the Faerie Queene encourages such decoding of and through wonder, transforming an allegedly wayward and wandering literary form into a “dark con-

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ceit.” What emerges is distinct not only from culpable romance wonder, but also from the everyday that had helped to frame it in the first place. A problem occurs, however, when that anxiety about romance wonder and its resulting reworking into a form of contemplative astonishment turns into something else: into a disconcerting dissociation from the world, and from ordinary, instinctive knowledge of being-in-theworld, that goes far beyond the “scooping-out” of a moment of wonder from the stream of the everyday. Sidney, who is uncomfortable with both wonder and the repetitiveness and mundanity of the everyday in his Arcadia, demonstrates this in the well-known episode involving the pair of lovers, Argalus and Parthenia.27 In the New Arcadia, one of this exemplary pair discovers that the other has been killed by the knight Amphialus, and challenges him to combat. At its climactic moment, when the victorious Amphialus stoops and takes off the helmet of the fallen, mysterious “Knight of the Tomb” whose costume pictures “a gaping sepulchre” embroidered with “black worms, which seemed to crawl up and down, as ready already to devour him,” Sidney’s description sounds a striking note: But the headpiece was no sooner off but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair which, with the face (soon known by the badge of excellence) witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in despite of the passed sorrow or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbour death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound, which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his own beauties, so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving lustre to the other; with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of unaffected languishing: though these things to a grossly conceiving

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sense might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion which, all-looked-upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.28 The contrast with Nashe’s descent into the untellable reality of human death is remarkable. Amphialus’s “astonishment” here marks the pause of contemplation that sixteenth-century readers may have come to expect from moments of wonder, but the much-discussed density of Sidney’s descriptive prose drives a wedge between the world and the narrative. Like Basilius’s subsequent attempt to “make honour triumph over death” by “giving order for the making of marble images to represent them,” the imagery of Sidney’s description of Parthenia’s wounded body scoops out and displays the moment as an instructive memorial that demands contemplation and commemoration.29 Yet it also turns it into something that is other, that is too exquisitely delineated to have anything to do with the tangled background mess of grief, compassion, shame, or indeed love, that occurs in the everyday. The treatment of wonder here, I would suggest, is marked intrinsically by a deep scepticism about our ability to know, or share, to communicate knowledge or the very possibility of it through ordinary language and empathy.30 Instead, it resorts to mediation, turning to the allegorical relationship between the world and language that is triggered by wonder and its aesthetic and epistemological pause. As the Argalus and Parthenia episode demonstrates, however, such mediation can take on a life of its own, dismantling the possibility of any traffic between wonder and the everyday altogether. But elsewhere in the Arcadia itself, a glimmer of something else appears, in moments where Sidney’s narrative can be breathtaking in the immediacy of its empathy. One such moment is the glimpse he gives us at the height of battle, when the knight Philanax sees the dead body of his young brother Agenor, just when he is about to spare the life of the equally young and impetuous Ismenus. It is a moment about which I have written elsewhere, but it bears repetition:

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Then sorrowing not only his own sorrow, but the past-comfort sorrow which he foreknew his mother would take (who with many tears and misgiving sighs had suffered him to go with his elder brother), Philanax blotted out all figures of pity out of his mind; and putting forth his horse (while Ismenus doubled two or three more valiant then well-set blows) saying to himself, “Let other mothers bewail an untimely death as well as mine,” he thrust him through. And the boy fierce though beautiful, and beautiful though dying, not able to keep his failing feet, fell down to the earth, which he bit for anger, repining at his fortune and, as long as he could, resisting death, which might seem unwilling too, so long he was in taking away his young, struggling soul.31 This pause between life and death demands our attention, but its wonder emerges as much from the fabric of the everyday – the roots and thorns, leaves and mulch, of Dürer’s engraving – as it does from the expansive beauty of the chivalric fiction. It is a perfectly ordinary moment of loss and love, death and beauty that suddenly coheres in front of us, and then drops back into the background. The ordinary and the everyday are “untellable,” as Lefebvre puts it, because they are so hard to pin down.32 If we ignore them, we risk losing them. Yet attempts to capture their natural ebb and flow can be challenging; they resist a stable moment of recognition, or turn strange and alien even as we attempt to grasp them. At such moments in romance, though, we can see the narrative begin to explore that untellable everyday, and it happens precisely through such precarious negotiations that turn the everyday into wonder, and let that wonder morph back into the ebb and flow of the mundane.

notes 1 Lybeaus Desconus, edited by M. Mills (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1969); Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, edited by M.F. Braswell (Kalamazoo, mi: Medieval Institute Publishers, 1995), l.486. There is a double arrival in the latter, since before Perceval can enjoy his first meal with Arthur,

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Nandini Das yet another stranger arrives who will provide Perceval with his first adventure – the Red Knight, who challenges Arthur and his court, and is defeated and killed by Perceval. Erich Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th anniversary ed., translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123–42, at 135. On this trope in medieval romance, see Aisling Bryne, “Arthur’s Refusal to Eat: Ritual and Control in the Romance Feast,” Journal of Medieval History 37, no. 1 (2011): 62–74. Raoul de Houdenc, La Vengeance Raguidel, edited by Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 143. Translation in Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (West Lafayette, in: Purdue University Press, 2007), 59. Desiderius Erasmus, “The Handbook of the Christian Soldier,” translated by Charles Fantazzi, in Spiritualia, vol. 66 of Collected Works of Erasmus, edited by John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 1–128, at 58. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 97. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), lines 1178–83. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 24. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 24. Ibid. Stanley Rosen, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2002), 306n8. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004), 142. In this, one could argue that romance wonder often shows itself akin to metaphor and allegory (literally “other-speaking”): it plucks us out of the ordinary stream of experience just as they pluck us out of the stream of ordinary language.

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15 Anthony Munday, Zelauto, The Fountaine of Fame erected in an Orcharde of Amorous Adventures (London, 1580), 16, 17. 16 Ibid., 21. 17 Thomas Lodge, Rosalynd, edited by Brian Nellist (Staffordshire, uk: Keele University Press, 1995), 40. 18 Ibid., 40–1. 19 Ibid., 42. 20 Ibid., 69. 21 Ibid., 123. 22 On social ambition and romance, see Lori Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 23 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, edited by Paul Salzman (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1987), 205–310, at 228. 24 See, among others, R.W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counterespionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1997); Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction 1570–1620 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2011); Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2006). 25 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by A.C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (London: Longman, 2001), Book III, canto ix, 20.6. 26 Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by W.D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:982b12–15. See also Plato, Theaetetus, translated and edited by John McDowell (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1973). For a useful overview of the Classical traditions of wonder inherited by the Renaissance, see T.G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 1. 27 On Sidney’s treatment of wonder and the supernatural in the Arcadia, see Tiffany Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 40–5. 28 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), edited by Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin, 1977), 526, 528.

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29 Ibid., 530. 30 I agree here with Jeff Dolven’s use of Stanley Cavell’s characterisation of the tension between ordinariness and scepticism as a useful tool to read some of these transactions in Renaissance romance. As he suggests, allegory often functions in these texts as a species of scepticism, a “mediating language” that intends “not so much to access the truth as to keep the world at bay.” See Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 236. See also The Cavell Reader, edited by Stephen Mulhall (Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1996). 31 Sidney, New Arcadia, 472. 32 Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 24.

Part Three Reformation and Mediation

7 The “Romance” of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories Joseph Falaky Nagy It has long been noted that medieval Celtic literatures anticipate many of the characteristics of romance as analyzed by medievalists over a period of more than a hundred and fifty years – that is, “romance” as a heuristic term (or what folklorists would call an “analytic” as opposed to “native” category), applied to texts as diverse as the pioneering poems of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas to the later, more reflexive, and even reconstructionist works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Whether this “anticipation” in medieval Irish and Welsh literature points to the mining by non-Celtic storytellers of Celtic sources in search of what would become the stuff of romance, to a typological affinity between the early Insular vernacular literary traditions and their Continental counterparts, to a common source in late Classical literature, or to all of the above, is still an unanswered question, one that I do not propose to answer here, as compelling as it is. Rather, my intention is to expand the range of early Irish texts we can legitimately examine as comparanda to medieval European romance, and to offer for further consideration elements that are not only firmly embedded in the narrative dynamics of early Irish storytelling but also, I would argue, a staple of the genre of romance as it flourishes in medieval western Europe (features 4 and 5 below). Interrelated features of romance that are particularly relevant to the following examination are: 1. The dominating presence of an introspective hero or heroine, who keeps his/her thoughts to him/herself, or whose inner feelings and conflicts we the audience are allowed by the storyteller to overhear. Unlike,

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say, those of the hero of epic, the expressions of the hero/ine of romance are not limited to powerful statements made in public. 2. The protagonist goes on a quest, but this is provoked, punctuated, or even successfully concluded by means of “adventure,” in the literal sense of someone or something (usually explicitly or implicitly supernatural) coming to, confronting, and challenging the protagonist. To formulate this feature another away, an attachment, obligation, or attraction of the hero/ine to mysterious or supernatural characters or realms drives the story, which, reversing the roles, just as easily pivots its action on the supernatural’s attraction to the hero/ine. 3. A tension exists between among the hero/ine’s loyalties – to his/her kin and lord, and to his/her beloved. The classic examples in Continental romance are the relationships between Lancelot and Guenevere, and Tristan and Iseut. A famous example from early Irish literature is to be found in the Loinges Mac n-Uislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu), from the late first millennium ce, which tells the story of Deirdriu and her choosing to elope with the young warrior Noísiu, in defiance of the king of the province, Conchobar, her guardian, who plans to make her his consort. The “love triangle” is a particular manifestation of this tension, which, however, is not limited in either Celtic traditions or medieval romance to the “older husband–younger wife–younger male.”1 4. Perhaps less appreciated in critical readings of romance than the other features listed above here is the ethnographic or antiquarian pleasure in which the romancier indulges – a desire to paint the story, its characters, or the circumstances that launch it as “quaint,” archaic, even vaguely preChristian – or “Celtic,” in a way that intuits the connotations of the term even before its reintroduction into Western discourse in the early modern period. Perhaps this feature is not all that different from that observed by the editor of this volume, where he describes romance as “a resource … an ongoing engagement with the past while writing about the present and projecting the narrative towards the future.”2 The famous passage in Chrétien’s Le chevalier à la charrette where the significance of the cart (and of being transported in it) is explained by

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the narrator exemplifies this “ethnographic” conceit in Continental romance. As for the intuitive fascination with the Celtic periphery, there is the extraordinary concatenation in the story of Tristan and Iseut by which an Irish princess is married to a Cornish king but falls in love with a knight of either northern-Celtic (Pictish) or southern British-Celtic (Welsh) origin, who then marries a Bretonne in order to try to forget the Irishwoman.3 5. In addition to introspectiveness and the anxiety of trying to quell or conceal the tensions that characterize his/her “romantic” situation, the hero or heroine is also characterized by a restlessness stemming from his/her longing for a past life or setting that has been tragically lost and is now difficult to find – in other words, the hero/ine is driven by nostalgia – or from a longing for a new, liberating life or set of circumstances that are as hard to achieve as returning to the past. Sometimes, the hero/ine is rendered restless by both kinds of longing, or the seemingly opposite points on a spatial-temporal spectrum s/he seeks turn out to be, paradoxically, the same destination. For example, Perceval or Parzival seeks the “newness” of Arthur’s court and knighthood but is destined to keep running into members of his family. Indeed, at the end of his story, he is reunited with a transcendent version of that family (the denizens of the company of the Grail), which prefigures or parallels what a redeemed Arthurian world, or even humanity itself, could be.4 It is surprising and perhaps momentous for the resolution of the question of the origins of romance raised above that these elements are already to be found in pre-Norman (pre-twelfth-century) medieval Irish literature – in fact, they are already operative in the Echtrae Chonnlai (Conlae’s Adventure) and the Immram Brain (Bran’s Voyage). These two texts, like several others that are predominantly in Old Irish (Irish from pre-900 ce) or that have been revealed through careful examination to have an Old-Irish core, are said by our ms sources to be from the Cín Dromma Snechta (The ‘Apex’ of Drumsnat – the latter, in Co. Monaghan, was the location of a monastery/scriptorium that was probably closely associated with the more important and influential monastery/scriptorium in Bangor). The mention of this “lost” Irish manuscript, whether

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it actually existed or not, is code in medieval Irish literary tradition for the earliest stratum of vernacular texts known to early medieval authors and scribes – a repository that, while originating in a monastic milieu (as did all of pre-twelfth-century Irish literature), contained texts more secular than religious or hagiographic in their agenda.5 We turn now, in particular, to the element in some of these very early texts of a confused and confusing nostalgia that pulls the protagonist in opposing directions. One of the most distinctive features of narratives written in Old or Middle Irish (the latter term referring to the Irish of texts written ca. 900–1200 ce) is the frequency with which they resort to the notion of otherworlds existing beyond the boundaries of the human world, supernatural realms (sometimes across the sea) that, clearly different from the Christian otherworlds of heaven and hell, are populated by beings who are neither angels nor demons. Since the evidence otherwise is incontrovertible that these texts came from the hands of Christian clerics, as did literature in general in western Europe in the early Middle Ages, Celtic scholars have often asked the question: how did these authors intend for their readership to understand or interpret these alternative otherworlds? That these realms were not ex nihilo literary fabrications, but were meant to evoke a genuine pre-Christian mythological tradition for those who read or heard these texts, is indicated by the fact that the term early Irish authors most commonly used to refer to such otherworlds, síd (plural síde), is an earlier form of the word (sí, síthe) still frequently used by Irish-speaking tradition-bearers of recent times to designate sites evocative of the supernatural. Frequently these are boundary markers or zones that punctuate the traditional landscape (such as hawthorn bushes), or monuments redolent of olden times (such as ancient earthworks).6 A “trickle-down” model for explaining this continuity (as if the síd and its inhabitants were an invention of medieval literati that in the course of time migrated over into oral tradition) has little to recommend it, given how widely attested and deeply engrained the concept of the sí(d) is, not only in Irish folk culture of the recent past but in its Scottish Gaelic cousin. Thus we can reasonably assume that the síd served as both a literary conceit and a reminder of the pre-Christian past for the

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ecclesiastically based community of writers and readers reflected in the conventions and concerns of early Irish literature. In the Old Irish prosimetric short story The Adventure of Connlae (Echtrae Chonnlai, mentioned above), which has been dated by its most recent editor to the eighth century,7 Connlae, the son of Conn, a legendary pre-Christian high king of Ireland, is approached and addressed by a female visitor from the síd while he is on the Hill of Uisnech, a site rich in pre-Christian sacred connotations.8 The nameless woman, whom Connlae has apparently never met before, claims that she comes from a realm where there is neither death nor sin, professes her love for him, and invites him to come back to that seemingly paradisiacal realm with her. Meanwhile, Connlae’s father and his attendant druid, while they cannot see the woman (only Connlae can), do hear her seductive message, and, fearing the loss of Conn’s son and heir, attempt to silence her with druidic magic. The woman subsequently departs but leaves behind for Connlae an apple, which is all he eats for the next month. Remarkably, neither does the apple diminish nor does Connlae starve during this period. The text says of Connlae’s emotional condition at the end of a month: “Éolchaire [for now, let us translate this word as “yearning”] for the appearance of the woman he had seen took hold of him” (Gabais éolchaire íarom Connle immun deilb inna mná ad:condairc).9 Then, in a different location (on the coast, as we shall see), the woman again approaches Connlae and company. She denounces druidic spells, the effect of which have clearly worn off, since now Conn and Connlae both hear her. She also predicts the coming of a new order, and of a new, more powerful king (that is, a change much more profound than Connlae’s succeeding Conn). Father asks son whether what the woman is saying is “getting through” to him (In: dechaid … fot menmain-siu a rrádas in ben,10 literally, “going under your mind”). Much to Conn’s astonishment, since Connlae had not responded to anything said to him since the woman’s first appearance, Connlae answers his father’s question, with what is arguably the pivotal passage in this story’s dialogue: “It is not easy for me, for I love my people. But éolchaire for the woman has taken hold of me” (Ní réid dam, sech caraim mu doíni. Ro-m:gab dano éolchaire immun mnaí).11 Speaking in verse, as she always does in this story, the

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woman confidently counters the young man’s formulation of his predicament, claiming that his éolchaire is now for the “wave” and is even driving him away from his people (Táthut, air-un:sóer álaib, / fri toinn t’éolchaire óadaib).12 She proceeds to renew her invitation for Connlae to journey with her to her home, a faraway síd populated exclusively by females. Without saying another word, Connlae leaps into her boat (a wondrous crystalline object), and they head out of view, never to be seen again. Recent critical readings of this text have focused on the question of whether the female who lures away the high king’s son, and thereby deprives Conn of a prospective heir,13 represents the non-Christian otherworld of Irish tradition as described above, or the coming of Christianity as previewed or sampled in the mysterious woman’s advent. Her railing against the magic of druids, her seeming prediction of the coming of a messianic monarch, and her characterization of the land from which she comes as free of “sin” (peccad, a borrowing from the Latin) would seem to support the latter interpretation.14 On the other hand, the “girls only” nature of the land to which she lures Connlae, its transmarine location, and her reference to it as a síd (twice) and its denizens as áes síde (“people of the síd”)15 are just some of the tradition-laden elements of the story that pose complications for a straightforward Christian reading. It is possible that for the composer of the text and its intended audience the situation the story presents was far less ambiguous, and that we modern readers are paying insufficient attention, or perhaps too much attention, to certain cues. Yet it is more likely that the female in the glass boat and the mysterious land from which she comes are intended to function as multivalent symbols. Whether we view the woman as representing the pre-Christian past (that is, the present of the characters in the story) or the post-pagan future (the present of the composer and audience of the story), the most salient point is that she comes from a place and perhaps a time that are not “home” to Connlae, but that, she must convince him, could become a new home for him, if he is willing to take the risk of going away with her into an unknown realm. His departure takes the form of a sudden leap into the boat and away from his people, a feat he performs right after hearing her last poetic exhortation

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to him (Fo:ceird iar suidiu Connle bedg n-úadib co:mboí isind noí glandai atach).16 We will never be sure whether the seeming impulsiveness of this action is an expression of Connlae’s definitely having made up his mind or of his realizing that he must act quickly, without a second thought, before his earthly attachments overwhelm his desire. To designate Connlae’s emotional and cognitive state that leads him away from the familiar and quotidian, the composer of Echtrae Chonnlai uses the word éolchaire, apparently a compound of éol, “knowledge,” and some nominal formation of car-, “love.”17 This word, not at all common in the early literature, occurs three times in the Echtrae. Éolchaire is the vital ingredient that renders the story, in generic terms, an echtrae, a noun usually translated into English as “adventure” but cognate with Latin extra.18 Given the composer’s characteristically terse style and the brevity of his text, éolchaire stands out in the way that key words indicating feelings, behaviour, or conditions oftentimes do in Old and Middle Irish texts – valuable clues as to what the composers intended to say or emphasize.19 It receives the following elaboration in a later medieval Irish gloss describing various kinds of sadness: “Éolchaire, that is, about one’s land (home).”20 Furthermore, in what would be a remarkable coincidence if it were mere accident, the most famous and earliest example of vernacular voyage literature from medieval Ireland, the already-mentioned Immram Brain (Voyage of Bran), employs éolchaire, the same word we see in the Echtrae Chonnlai, to describe the knowledge or feeling that impels men to go on a voyage. Here, however, the voyage is an attempt to return home, and éolchaire fuels male resistance to powerful supernatural women who are standing in the way of their homecoming. In this composition, roughly contemporary with the Echtrae Chonnlai (and dubbed an Echtrae as well as an Immram in the manuscript sources),21 a supernatural female visits Bran in his kingly residence in Ireland and poetically invites him to follow her across the sea to her realm, the Land of Women. Her lengthy poem to Bran, otherwise descriptive of a rather pagan otherworld, contains, as does the anti-druidic verse addressed to Conn in the Echtrae Chonnlai, a jarring note: a prediction of the advent of a very Christian-sounding royal saviour. Bran, having received the entrancing invitation, assembles a crew and heads out to sea. After an

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encounter with Manandán mac Lir, a supernatural figure traditionally associated with the sea and travel on it, and after the loss of a crewman at an island that seems populated by distant cousins of the Odyssey’s Lotus-Eaters, Bran and company finally reach the Land of Women. Suddenly struck by indecision in the face of the very destination he had set out to find, or sensing the danger of further loss (and resembling the emotionally torn Connlae), Bran does not dare to land, despite the welcome called out to him from the shore by the “leader” of the women – presumably, the same female who invited him in the first place. At this pivotal point in the story, when esoteric communication between worlds is in danger of breaking down (as when in the Echtrae Chonnlai the druidic spell succeeds in blocking out the supernatural female threat), the woman throws a magical item to the object of her desire. Like the apple, which becomes Connlae’s only food and his lifeline to the beloved female in her absence, the projectile in the Immram (a ceirtle: “clew, ball of thread”)22 draws Bran closer to the otherworldly woman, but in a literal sense. It wondrously adheres to Bran’s hand, and so the woman pulls the boat into port. The men are welcomed by their female hosts, who supply them with their companionship and with food that, like Connlae’s apple, never diminishes. What finally disturbs this idyllic situation is éolchaire, which “seizes” (gabais)23 one of Bran’s men, and then the rest of his mates, who together prevail upon Bran to lead them back to Ireland, leaving behind the Isle of Women and its sensual pleasures. Back in Ireland, a shocking incident, about the possibility of which Bran’s supernatural consort had warned him, shows him and his men that home is no longer a “home” to them. Seemingly the same companion of Bran’s who was originally afflicted by éolchaire eagerly leaves the boat and, as soon as he touches the land, is turned into a pile of ashes – a demonstration to Bran and his men, says the text, that they have been gone much longer than they had realized. Bran comments poetically on this sobering revelation, describing his deceased companion as one who had attempted to “raise (?) his hand against time” (torgad a láme fri aíss).24 Leaving behind in writing an account of his adventures for posterity, Bran and his men leave Ireland, never to be seen or heard from again. Since this is how the text

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concludes the story, the reader is left wondering whether Bran and company returned to the Land of Women, a consolation prize in the wake of their realization that while Ireland is still Ireland, with the insidious passage of time they had become strangers in their own land. Given the title assigned to it in the manuscript sources, the text Immram Maíle Dúin (Máeldúin’s Voyage), composed a century or so after the texts we have discussed so far, represents another example of the same genre to which the title Immram Brain alludes. Sure enough, it too features an episode in which the psychological condition denoted by éolchaire figures prominently, and where the diametric tension between nostalgia and the desire aroused by otherworldly seductresses is vividly displayed.25 The wandering exile Máeldúin and his men, hosted by a woman and her seventeen daughters on an island where she has taken over as queen after the death of her royal husband, are offered food, sex, and unending life. After three months, which seem to them like three years, one of Máeldúin’s crewmates, complaining that they have stayed long enough, urges that they go home. When Máeldúin balks, saying that his crew will not find a better situation at home than what they are currently enjoying on the island, his men, accusing him of being smitten with the queen, say they will go home without him. Máeldúin casts his lot with his men after all, but when they attempt to sail away, the queen throws a clew at them, which is caught by Máeldúin, and which she then uses to pull them back ashore. Three months later, the men, plotting to escape again, express the suspicion that Máeldúin will once again be the means for the queen to thwart their plan. He proposes that someone else on board should catch the clew, and that the latter’s hand should be cut off if the clew adheres to it, as it adhered to Máeldúin’s hand. And so the mortals escape, though at the price of a hand. A metrical retelling of the Immram, somewhat later than the prose version, describes their quandary in this episode thus: “Whenever great éolchaire transported them onto the very green sea, she transported them back; the fair-limbed woman did not hide the fort [from them]” (Nach tan nos bert eolchaire n-oll / fo rian roglass / nos bert for cul / ní cheil a ndun ben ballmass).26 In these examples of the Irish Immram genre, éolchaire appears to be an early Irish anticipation of nostalgia, a word of early modern coinage.27

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A major difference, however, is that éolchaire – unlike nostalgia, originally used in the sense of a disease – strengthens or emboldens instead of enervating those whom, in Irish idiom, it “seizes” or “transports.” As the etymology of the word implies, there is the fortifying ingredient of knowledge (éol) – an awareness of a home, a people, and a time that one has not forgotten, despite temptation or distraction. And yet we have the seeming exception or counter-example presented by the Echtrae Chonnlai. Here, éolchaire is not used to denote Connlae’s strong emotional attachment to his home and kingdom, although that attachment receives unambiguous expression in the text. Instead, it describes his growing obsession with the supernatural female, appearing not just once but twice: first, in the impersonal narration, and the second time, in Connlae’s own description of his lovesick condition. The third time éolchaire appears (in a text, let us note, much shorter than either of the Immrama, where it appears once in each), it is used by the female, both antiphonally echoing Connlae’s confession of how he feels, and expanding the object of his éolchaire well beyond herself: Táthut, air-un:sóer álaib, / fri toinn t’éolchaire óadaib, “You have – let me free us from [all other] requests – your éolchaire towards the wave (and away) from them.”28 If we were to define éolchaire as just unspecified “longing,” there would be less to say about its range of applicability in these three generically related texts.29 Clearly, however, its primary meaning is “longing” specifically for home or the familiar (whether person, place, or era). In the cases of Bran, Máeldúin, and their shipmates, éolchaire impels them homeward, away from the strange otherworlds that embrace them and attempt to lay claim to their loyalty. In Connlae’s case, on the other hand, somehow the impetus of éolchaire is co-opted by the “other side” – by the seducing female (whether she represents the “bad” pagan past or the “good” Christian future). Moreover, she is aided and abetted in this seizure of the word by the text itself, which introduces this use of éolchaire in reference to what Connlae is starting to feel for the woman. And here we face a question that has not been asked (let alone answered) in the scholarly literature on the Echtrae Chonnlai. How can Connlae feel “nostalgic” about a strange woman, or about the “wave,”

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the world beyond or underneath the water from which she comes? Drawing upon the evidence of other stories from early Irish literature of this kind (that is, tales featuring “outings” beyond this world and romantic entanglements with otherworldly beings), we can draw up three theories, all of which require a reading of the Echtrae Chonnlai not simply as a literary text but as an example of a traditional storytelling genre, within which any one tale complements every other. Perhaps the key to understanding the Echtrae lies in better appreciating the narrative conventions of the originally oral genre of which the story this text tells would have reminded its audience. One way to explain Connlae’s curiously directed éolchaire is to see it as the result of a powerful case of “love at first sight” as conjoined with “love from afar or in absentia,” narrative devices amply attested in medieval Celtic literature30 and sometimes conjoined, especially if one of the lovers is from the otherworld. The woman from the síd makes clear that she had been observing Connlae from afar, and possibly had also come to know of him through his reputation, well before the opening of the story. Connlae, on the other hand, has not met the woman before but is seemingly smitten with her as soon as he sees and hears her. Is the power of this mutual love so intense and intimate that, already upon first contact with the female, Connlae feels, to introduce a modern cliché, that he has known her his whole life? This sudden, powerful familiarity could then be the basis for Connlae’s “nostalgic” longing for the woman and for the “wave,” the distant transmarine world to which she invites him. Or are we to infer from the swiftness with which Connlae comes to know the woman that in fact they did know each other beforehand? It is conceivable that the Echtrae Chonnlai operates on the assumption of the audience’s knowing a “prequel” which did not survive in the literary record. Given that metempsychosis is not unknown in medieval Irish literature,31 whether as a vestige of pagan belief and/or a sometimes useful narrative conceit, the woman from a timeless realm may be trying to remind Connlae of one of his previous lives, and of a time when they were lovers. The text known as Tochmarc Étaíne (The Wooing of Étaín) features precisely this situation, except that in this story the otherworldly

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visitor attempting to awaken memories in his reborn beloved is a male from the síd, and the object of his seduction is not the son of a king but a highly prized queen.32 The final answer I would propose to the question of why the author of the Echtrae so pointedly uses the word éolchaire to describe Connlae’s attraction to the supernatural visitor has to do with the ambiguity of her allegorical function. As we have already noted, she may be a figure from the síd representing a concept of the otherworld that the early Christian audience of the story would be familiar with, but would feel must be relegated to the past. At the same time, she may be serving as a preview of the shape of things to come after Conn and Connlae’s time: that is, as a harbinger of Christianity and the institutions it brings, which would give rise to the invention of written Irish and a vernacular literary tradition. Surely this ambiguity in our text accords with the quality of romance that makes it (as quoted at the beginning of this essay) “an ongoing engagement with the past while writing about the present and projecting the narrative towards the future.” The beautiful woman who disrupts the security of Conn’s kingship by depriving him of a future heir, who breaks into the prose of the text with her poetic utterances that inspire the other characters to speak in poetry as well, and who throws an imperishable apple into the normal workings of time and mortality, makes sense according to ancient narrative tradition as an amorous otherworldly visitor. Yet, as a visitor from the future, the strange woman may also be rendering that same tradition obsolete – that is, turning it into a relic of a past that when recalled elicits from Connlae, and perhaps even from modern readers of his Echtrae, the pangs of éolchaire.

notes 1 See the author’s “The Celtic ‘Love Triangle’ Revisited,” in Proceedings [of the] XIV International Congress of Celtic Studies, edited by Liam Breatnach et al. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2015), 221–44. 2 See “Introduction” in this volume. 3 Lines 323–46 of the edition by K.D. Uitti and Alfred Foulet (Paris: Bordas, 1989), http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/lancelo2.html (accessed 23 March 2017). 4 I am referring here primarily to the story as told and completed by the ca. 1200

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German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (Parzival, edited by Karl Lackmann, translated by Peter Knecht [Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1998]). Curiously, in the Welsh version, based on Chrétien’s but with a strong native infusion added, Peredur is made aware of and reunited with his original family, at which point in the story the female component to his heroic heritage undergoes bizarrely systematic erasure. Peredur’s cross-dressing (male) cousin tells him that he, the cousin, was the chiding “Kundry” figure as well as the woman carrying the bloody head (which in this telling replaces the Grail and/or its contents), both of whom had appeared earlier in the narrative. The head was that of another cousin, Peredur is told, whose slaying at the hands of the supernatural women of Gloucester – Peredur’s fosterers and trainers in the martial arts – Peredur must now avenge. He proceeds to do so, with the help of Arthur and his men, and the female fosterers are killed. See Historia Peredur vab Evrawg, edited by Glenys Goetinck (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976); translated in The Mabinogion by Sioned Davies (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2007), 65–102. On the Cín Dromma Snechta and the significance of the association of certain texts with it, see Nagy, “Writing from the ‘Other Shore’ and the Beginnings of Vernacular Literature in Ireland,” in A Companion to British Literature: Volume I: Medieval Literature, 700–1450, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Chichester, uk: Wiley, 2014), 324–36. Tomás Ó Cathasaigh’s article “The Semantics of Síd” analyzes both the word mentioned here and the kindred or identical word síd meaning “peace” in Éigse 17 (1978): 137–55. Surveys of modern traditional beliefs, legends, and customs concerning “fairy mounds” (as they are sometimes referred to in English) include Máire Mac Neill’s introduction to Seán Ó hEochaidh’s collection of Síscéalta ó Thír Chonaill. Fairy Legends from Donegal (Dublin: Folklore of Ireland Society 1977), 17–28, and Séamas Ó Catháin and Patrick O’Flanagan, The Living Landscape. Kilgalligan, Erris, Co. Mayo (Dublin: Folklore of Ireland Society, 1975), 73–224. Feargal Ó Béarra explores the darker side of the supernatural realms featured in medieval Irish literature in “The Otherworld of Tír Scáth,” in Festgabe für Hildegard L.C. Tristram, edited by Gisbert Hemprich (Berlin: Curach Bhán, 2009), 81–100. Kim McCone, ed. and trans., Echtrae Chonnlai and the Beginnings of Vernacular Narrative Writing in Ireland. A Critical Edition (Maynooth, uk: An Sagart, 2000), 29–43. Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and

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14

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16 17

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Joseph Falaky Nagy Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), 156–63; Francis J. Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), 58–9. McCone, Echtrae, 122. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 123. If the female represents (at least on one level of the text) the religion yet to come to Ireland, the Echtrae is employing the theme of Christianity as a new cultural order that deprives decrepit yet still controlling pagan elders of generational continuity, a theme also running throughout medieval Irish accounts of the coming of St Patrick and the conversion of Ireland. See J.F. Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients. The Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1997), 40–103. Alternatively, it has been argued that the denizens of the otherworld are being viewed as existing in a prelapsarian state, here and elsewhere in early Irish literature – see Proinsias Mac Cana, “The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain,” Ériu 27 (1976): 95–115, at 99–110. McCone, Echtrae, 121, 123. McCone presents the argument that the word as used in this text means “peace” at least as much as if not more than “otherworld” (56–7). Ibid., 123. The Dictionary of the Irish Language (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76; hereafter the Dictionary), s.v. eólchaire. Possibly caire (“crime, fault”) is the second element of the compound, but this is a feminine noun, and the nasalization following éolchaire in the passage from the metrical Immram (Curaig) Maíle Dúin quoted below indicates that it is neuter. David N. Dumville examines the parameters of the genre of echtrae, which “may perhaps be rendered literally as ‘(an) outing,’” in “Echtrae and Immram: Some Problems of Definition,” Ériu 27 (1976): 73–94, at 73–4. On echtrae and literary stories designated as echtrai, see also Proinsias Mac Cana, The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies 1980), 69–70, 75–6. In particular, Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has explored this “rhetorical” strategy in medieval Irish storytelling – in, for example, “Sound and Sense in Cath Almaine,” Ériu 54 (2004): 41–7. Eolchaire .i. ima tír – quoted in the Dictionary, s.v. eólchaire, from Kuno Meyer,

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22 23

24 25 26 27

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“The Sources of Some Middle-Irish Glossaries,” Archiv für celtische Lexikographie 3 (1907): 138–44, at 139. See Liam Breatnach, ed. and trans., “‘The Caldron of Poesy,’” Ériu 32 (1981): 45–93, at 84. Mac Cana, Learned Tales, 70, 77, n30. For the text, see A.G. Van Hamel, ed., Immrama (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies 1941), 9–19, and Séamus Mac Mathúna, ed., Immram Brain, at http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/G303028/index.html (accessed 23 March 2017). Kuno Meyer’s translation (originally published 1895) is reprinted in Ancient Irish Tales, edited by T.P. Cross and C.H. Slover (New York: H. Holt, 1936), 588–95. The Dictionary, s.v. ceirtle. Van Hamel, Immrama, 18. John Carey notes that in the Dictionary the only two instances of this idiom given are the ones here and in the Echtrae; see his “On the Interrelationship of Some Cín Dromma Snechtai Texts,” Ériu 46 (1995): 71– 92, at 85 . Van Hamel, Immrama, 19. Hans P.A. Oskamp, ed., The Voyage of Máeldúin. A Study in Early Irish Voyage Literature (Groningen, Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970), 152–8. Oskamp, Voyage, 158. The author has briefly discussed nostalgia as a creative force both in Irish literary tradition and in scholarship centred on this tradition, in his introduction to Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures. csana Yearbook 5, edited by J.F. Nagy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 7–14, at 13–14. Lillis Ó Laoire in his study On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean. Songs and Singers in Tory Island (Oxford, uk: Scarecrow Press, 2005) explores the aesthetic significance of nostalgia (and/or what in Irish is called cumha) in Irish traditional lore (171–8). McCone, Echtrae, 123 (text), 187 (translation). I am following McCone’s reading and translation of these difficult lines, except that I am leaving out his translation of éolchaire (“longing”) and inserting “all other” in square brackets before “requests,” his translation of áil, here in the dative plural – also translatable as “wishes” or even, in this context, “demands” (referring to the Conn and his druid’s desire to hold on to Connlae, and to his people’s need of him, “demands” of which Connlae is acutely aware). For different readings/translations, see Hans P.A. Oskamp, ed. and trans., “Echtra Condla,” Études Celtiques 14 (1974): 207–28, at 227n4, and John Carey, “Echtrae Conlai: A Crux Revisited,” Celtica 19 (1987): 9–11, at 10–11, where Carey notes that “the contrast fri [towards] /ó [from] reflects the shift of Conlae’s eolchaire” (10n7).

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29 And Connlae’s malady could be straightforwardly diagnosed as amor hereos. On the Classical and medieval notions of lovesickness, see Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella’s introduction to their translated edition of Jacques Ferrand’s A Treatise on Lovesickness (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 39–82. 30 A comparative approach to the motif of sight-induced love in Celtic tradition is taken by Bernhard Maier in “At First Sight: Notes on a Poem by Donald John MacDonald,” Scottish Gaelic Studies 22 (2006): 221–9. On grád écmaise (“excessive love” or “love for a person without ever having seen him [her]”), see M.A. O’Brien, “Etymologies and Notes,” Celtica 3 (1956): 168–84, at 179. 31 There is, for example, the “story from which it is inferred that Mongán was Find mac Cumaill” (Scél as-a:mberar combad hé Find mac Cumaill Mongán), edited and translated by Nora White, Compert Mongáin and Three Other Early Mongán Tales (Maynooth, uk: An Sagart, 2006), 73–4, 79–81. 32 Osborn Bergin and R.I. Best, ed. and trans., “Tochmarc Étaíne,” Ériu 12 (1938): 137–96.

8 Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones Marcus Waithe

The romance is often imagined as a literary type that happens prior to, or outside, the field of “modern” experience. While the medieval origins of the form make this association understandable, it can impair our sense of its historical range and versatility. Remarking on a similar tendency, Helen Cooper singles out approaches that “require ‘the medieval’ to be dismissed as a category in order for the neo-Classical or protomodern model to be constructed,” leaving the romance “belittled, as being neither Classical epic nor modern novel.”1 Even where the impulse is to integrate, rather than to exclude, the results are not always helpful. In the early twentieth century, writers under the influence of Sigmund Freud began, in Gillian Beer’s words, to recognize “the extent to which each man carries within him an obscure and separate universe.”2 According to Beer, this challenged the supposed conflict between “fancy” and “realism,” and allowed the imaginative qualities of the romance to flourish in the modern era. The risk here is in implying that the romance needed to wait for psychoanalytic insights before its procedures could be made intelligible or artistically credible. The role of Freud in conditioning our reception of the form is inescapable, but the effect of his influence can be to downplay the pre-existing work of the romance in addressing the relationship between desire and the real, and the endurance of this awareness among modern writers. In fact, the romance always possessed resources adequate to the task, and it retained its own way of communicating conflicts that Freudian theory more readily assigns to the structures of Classical myth. This essay addresses the romance’s fundamental structuring device, the quest. I am concerned here not with the triumph of adventure, but with the nature of its failure or unravelling. Far from being a corrective

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development reserved to Modernist works, this effect of unravelling is integral to the type itself. So understood, it is easier to see why T.S. Eliot – whose poem The Waste Land (1922)3 represents the most famous Modernist engagement with romance sources – found so much to preoccupy him in Jessie Weston’s account of the Grail Legend.4 Eliot was not simply exposing chivalric material to the harsh reality of a world traumatized by four years of mechanized war, but activating and recovering an already developed concern with the defeated and misconceived quest. The Waste Land may seem to operate outside the generic constraints of the romance, but the implication of this reading is that Eliot’s version of modernity actually requires us to penetrate the deeper history of the form. My discussion focuses on two lesser-known works that share Eliot’s preoccupation with the “wasted land” motif of medieval romance. Both are acts of revival, serious-minded in their attention to the conventions of the romance, and concerned with the ways in which an inherited form can aid the contemplation of modern problems of purpose and action in the world. Though published over eighty years apart, each spurns what might be termed the stylistic or superficial medievalism popularized by the Gothic Novel, as well as the mixed forms of the Imperial Romance and the Scientific Romance. The first work, a short prose romance published by William Morris in 1856, is entitled “The Hollow Land.”5 Often passed over in favour of Morris’s mature productions, it deserves attention for an experimentalism evident in abrupt narrative cuts, symbolist currents of language, and forms of personal mania imbricated with the architecture of the quest. Morris sets a scene that is feudal, but not tied to a specific time. We follow the experiences of a young man named Florian, a son of “the House of the Lilies.”6 Florian describes an insult dealt to his elder brother, Arnald, by the matriarch of a rival household, a husband-killer called Lady Swanhilda. As soon as he is strong enough, Arnald takes revenge and puts Swanhilda to death, thereby starting a war between the House of the Lilies and Swanhilda’s avenging son, Red Harald. The ensuing battle goes against the House of the Lilies, and Florian finds himself trapped, with the remains of his army, in a “wide moor” about which “many wild stories were told.”7 Just as defeat and death seem certain, Florian is

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miraculously transplanted to a fresh realm, called the Hollow Land, and begins a new existence. There, he falls in love with a mysterious woman, named Margaret. The story takes a further turn, as Florian goes in search of his brother. He is ejected from the Hollow Land, and finds himself back on the familiar earth where he grew up. In this third phase, he fights, wounds, and then nurses a man he has found painting pictures in the hall of his ancestral castle. That man is later revealed to be Florian’s enemy, Red Harald. There is a lineal connection between “The Hollow Land” and the second work I shall examine, David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937).8 Jones’s hero, Private John Ball, shares his name with the rebel priest celebrated in Morris’s fanciful story of a journey back in time to the Peasants’ Revolt, A Dream of John Ball (1886–87; 1888).9 Moreover, the branch of British Modernism to which Jones belonged extended the mixed-media agenda championed by the Arts and Crafts Movement, and it preserved Morris’s concern with the union of fine art and craft. For the purposes of this essay, however, my focus is on the generic connections between their literary works. These are apparent in the way that both writers situate “modern” forms of personal and collective crisis within the field of romance convention. In Parenthesis is a prose poem that follows the experiences of a private soldier, first on the training ground, and then in the trenches of the Great War. The stasis of the Western Front presents an unlikely context for the forward trajectory of the quest, as it does for Jones’s allusions to Welsh and Arthurian legend. But Jones skilfully adapts to this fortified world the Malorian preoccupation with wasted lands, fugitive zones, and the earthworks of “fosse and countermure.”10 Even as the stalemate endures, we anticipate a final encounter between Ball’s Anglo-Welsh compatriots and the Prussian regiment dug in amidst the shattered glades of Mametz Wood.11 The wood becomes a scene of encounter between armed forces, but also between the mundane and mythic realms, between the shell-pitted copse and the sacred wood of Celtic folklore. Unsurprisingly, given their differing dates, Morris and Jones offer distinct artistic visions. Jones focalizes events through Private Ball, but otherwise renders the communal experience and the democratic perspective of the rank and file. By contrast, Morris’s romance is individual

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and aristocratic. Jones concentrates on actual topography, and actual “tribes” (English, Welsh, Teuton), whereas Morris prefers a vague terrain. Jones is concerned with the alienating effects of technological warfare, whereas Morris’s vision admits only the sharp implements of the feudal trial. Finally, Jones’s perspective on the hardships of trench life is conspicuously involved in a re-sacralizing process, whereby the doling-out of food and the “liturgy of a regiment departing” mark out a deeper symbolic rhythm.12 Beyond these differences, marked affinities are apparent. “The Hollow Land” and In Parenthesis are both studies in arrest, where prolonged phases of stillness are punctuated by intense phases of bloody action. In each case, the “special environment dictated by a stationary war” activates an impulse to settle, to become “knit with the texture of this countryside.”13 This instinct is communicated by the “joiner-work” of entrenched camaraderie described by Jones.14 Florian experiences a similar feeling on meeting Margaret amidst the embowered bliss of the Hollow Land. Even weapons are the subject of settling intentions, as where Ball imagines “Instructors in Musketry” enjoining men to propose to their rifles:15 “Marry it man! Marry it! / Cherish her, she’s your very own.”16 That impulse is ritually interrupted by various forms of “Dolorous Stroke,” or hard fighting, that evoke the close intimacy of weapon-keeping even as the blows rain down.17 Jones was indebted to Morris’s revival of Malory’s work in the 1850s, and both were indebted to Malory for the hyper-realities of the combat scene, where hewing and hacking the human body, and well-aimed “buffet[s],” are observed as matters of situational interest requiring detailed description.18 By contrast with The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) and his later works, Morris in “The Hollow Land” does not address the theme of adultery.19 Jones, too, is relatively unconcerned with the theme of love, so that the scandalous freight that Malory inherited from Chrétien de Troyes figures less prominently in these works than, for instance, in most Pre-Raphaelite renderings. This being so, both writers remain vitally interested in the chief good that is threatened by unruly love in Malory, namely the bond of fellowship. In these works, however, knightly fellowship is not destroyed by adultery; instead, the challenge issues from the pure form of adventure itself. And the outcomes are uncertain in a

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way that rarely pertains in works based on the Arthurian cycle. This is because we are not dealing with the stock characters of knightly romance, but with unfamiliar heroes enrolled unwittingly in a mythic pattern. Thus one might say that these are romances not of fulfilled quest and adventure, but of doubt and uncertainty. If the doubts in question affect the outcome of an adventure in one particular instance, they are also entered against the final account of adventure itself. This failing confidence in the quest is most strongly expressed in the sense of lapsed orientation that besets Florian and Private Ball. Something, it seems, has gone awry. This feeling acts on our expectation that adventure should occur only on one plane of action, according to a linear scheme. The knight errant – the knight in search of adventure apart from any prior objective – is of course lodged deeply in the history of the type. In most cases, the object is only deferred or abstracted, as the aimless knight eventually finds his sense of purpose in a purist commitment to adventure for its own sake, and its conversion into narrative on his return to the court. For Morris and Jones, the loss of an obvious cause is joined to an experience of lost bearings that is altogether more unsettling. This is because it applies to the characters’ sense of place, to their belief in a continuous and unitary world, and to their state of selfknowledge, identity, and moral welfare. In “The Hollow Land,” the topography of household, town, and enemy castle incorporates the “wide moor” of Goliah’s Land, which “belonged neither to Red Harald nor to us.”20 Like the “cratered earth” of Jones’s war landscape, there are “plenty of landmarks” in this place of battle. But it is “debatable” in other senses too: the “slimy earth” seems not to hold the fates of characters, or their bodies, firmly on the familiar plane of action.21 Just as they approach the juncture of sternest reality, in a clash of arms, the foundations of the known world begin to slip, and Florian is removed to the tranquility of the Hollow Land. A similar effect is observable in Jones’s work. The preface to In Parenthesis refers to “the sudden violences” of “the Waste Land” (that is, No Man’s Land), and its capacity to speak “with a grimly voice” (quoting Malory).22 It is “a place of enchantment” evoking “a mysterious existence.”23 In “The Hollow Land,” this magical quality heralds the dissolution of our sense that the story inhabits a unitary world. Florian’s comrade tearfully confesses that

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“I do not know if I have been fighting men or only simulacra.”24 This is a strange and sudden displacement, more redolent of postmodern fiction than something one might expect in a medievalist romance. The sense of an alien tradition is misleading, however. The shifting and shifty quality, this panicked appreciation that “everything about you was mere glamour,” does belong to the Arthurian tradition.25 It is apparent in Malory’s account of Lancelot’s madness, and in the transcendent pursuit of the Sangrail.26 Such features endured in the age of revival. In the late sixteenth century, Edmund Spenser’s knights contend with sprites, conjurations, and Elfin foes.27 Writing in 1872, Tennyson alluded to “Merlin’s glamour,” and the enchanted construction of Camelot, in “Gareth and Lynette.”28 In Jones, too, it is the infliction of violence that perforates the skin of known reality. Heavy artillery threatens to withdraw the veil, its action characterized “as a malign chronometer, ticking off with each discharge an exactly measured progress toward a certain and prearranged hour of apocalypse.”29 Similarly, the “spirit” that “slips lightly from sick men” appears to infect the “ebb-time” of deepest night, when “material things are but barely integrated and loosely tacked together.”30 A precarious hold on reality is signalled by the distinctive dream grammar of abrupt cuts, free association, and bewilderment. In Morris’s tale, these effects are accompanied by the sudden swoon, and the protracted sleep that follows Florian’s entry into the Hollow Land. That swoon manages the transition in more conventional terms, but also introduces a further romance motif. This is the figure of the knight whose wounds have caused a delirium, a delirium that conspires with romantic impulses to ensure he falls in love with his nurse. Thus a link is formed between violence and the infliction of wounds, and what one might term a loss of bearings, a loss of control, and even a loss of identity. One of the more surreal moments in the tale sees the “steel sheath” of Florian’s sword swing accidentally so that it draws blood from Margaret’s hand.31 Still delirious, Florian announces that he is going away to “look for my brother.”32 The resolution is not harmless, however, and he bursts “some blood-vessel” in his throat.33 The scene recalls Malory’s Sir Garnish, who beholds his beloved sleeping with a foul knight, whereupon “for pure sorrow his mouth and nose burst out a-bleeding, and with his sword he smote off

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both their heads.”34 The eruption in Florian’s case is largely sympathetic, and happens by dint of the “vehemence” with which he speaks.35 The two lovers are left standing in bizarre sanguinary symmetry, “the blood running from us on to the grass and summer flowers.”36 Implicate in this loss of blood is the incontinent development of the quest. Like many romances before it, “The Hollow Land” dwells on the paradox that combat represents the epitome of manly action – when men “ought to be the masters of simulacra” – and yet delivers the wounded knight into a state of physical and emotional dependence.37 If violence ultimately “unmans,” it also challenges stable identity. Morris’s whole tale is premised on the sudden necessity of a conflict between families. When things are going badly, he is drawn to ask, “Are you my brother Arnald … Or are you changed too, like everybody and everything else.”38 An estrangement is settling on familiar ties and familiar forms. This comes to a head when Florian returns to “earth”: having half slain the man painting in his ancestral house, he accepts the suggestion, “‘Call me Swerker,’” asking in turn that he be called “Wulf.”39 All the while, he remains unaware that this man painting his former home is his old adversary, Red Harald. Florian’s memory is commended as “a good memory,” but it proves an unreliable receptacle, incapable of upholding the idea of a continuous self, defined by friends and against enemies.40 Fundamental to this confusion of identity is the nature of the quest, and the nature of the violence unleashed by it. The first indication, in both works, that something is wrong springs from the strikingly intimate conduct of battle. Ingrid Hanson observes of Morris’s work that “[v]iolence is a form of touch,” one that “takes the intimacy of touch beyond the tentative or exploratory into the forceful and transformative.”41 Hard fighting at close quarters reveals the lineaments and pains of one’s enemy, making the encounter overly close, familial even. This is apparent in Florian’s account of an enemy who “lashed out at me with his sword as I came on, hitting me in the ribs.”42 It sends him “quite wild with rage,” precipitating an action in which he “turned, almost full upon him, caught him by the neck with both hands and threw him under the horse-hoofs, sighing with fury.” The closeness of the grip, the contact of neck and hand, make it difficult to exclude the dire import of murder from these purportedly martial exchanges. In Parenthesis contains a

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similar scene, in which Private Ball finds himself “alone in a denseness of hazel-brush,” and spots the “withdrawing-heel” of a German soldier.43 An exchange of grenades ensues, after which Ball’s victory is announced by a grisly pastoral: “ruby drops from young beech-sprigs – / are bright your hands and face.”44 The passage hesitates tellingly between a knightly duel, and an act guiltily deputed to the timed fuse of an “iron oval.” As if renouncing the deed, Ball mutters, “make yourself scarce,” “you scramble forward and pretend not to see.” Cooper’s account of the history of romance identifies a shift from a “shame culture,” concerned primarily with honour, to “a guilt culture.”45 In the latter case, “virtue is finally a matter between yourself and the judgement of God.” Romance, she avers, “embraces both, sometimes without contradiction, but sometimes in a tension that makes any satisfying ending impossible.” When Florian finds Red Harald painting the judgments of God incognito, Morris is signalling a similar hesitation between the revived honour culture of this romance rejuvenated, and the latter-day forms of personal morality. It is to these that Florian succumbs on hearing the shocking proposition, delivered by Margaret, that “you deserve all God’s judgements.”46 He has been upholding the standard of family allegiance and fraternal honour in the face of Swanhilda’s insults, only to experience an accumulating awareness that it is he who is in the wrong. Florian and Arnald have preserved their honour, but they have violated the standards of courtly love in the process, by putting Swanhilda to death. Signs of lapsed orientation are in this way accompanied by a self-doubt that dwells in a conflict of laws: “Had our House been the devil’s servants all along?” Florian wonders fearfully; “I thought we were God’s servants.”47 A dark rumour instantiates this growing sense of a life and a cause accursed: it was “the fiend,” we learn, who baptised Florian. Meanwhile, his comrade, Hugh, begins to suspect that Swanhilda’s death was a “poor cowardly piece of revenge instead of a brave act of justice.”48 This accursed sense is less acute in Jones, but not entirely absent. The “bright” pollution of Ball’s “hands and face” after the grenade duel suggests a stain on the conscience. And rumours among the men encourage belief in an abstract catastrophe beyond the immediate one. This is most apparent in a passage concerning stories told by the “groom’s brother Charlie.”49 From the perspective of his “posh job” behind the

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lines, Charlie is said to have heard “this torf ” coming “out of ther Gen’ral’s and say as how it was going to be a first clarst bollocks and murthering of Christen men,” a reference to the planned offensive. Having converted the conscientious objections of “this torf” into a broad vernacular, Charlie’s report reproduces the Malorian verdict that “for now … they reckon, is this noble fellowship wholly mischiefed.”50 In Parenthesis is as much about comradeship as about slaughter, and this passage is a study in Chinese whispers, not a plea for pacifism. Even so, Jones does not restrict the idea of mischief to the dissident voice of “this torf.” “Mischief,” in fact, pertains to the very idea of the adventure or quest as Jones conceives it. The entire work is partly dedicated “to the enemy / frontfighters who shared our / pains against whom we found / ourselves by misadventure.” The term “misadventure” signals an alignment with the romance tradition, while crucially invoking the branch to which “The Hollow Land” also belongs, in representing the quest gone awry. The derivation of adventure from the French aventure already admits an emphasis on the chance occurrence or risky venture, but “misadventure” is a term that remains close to that root of unintentionality. It denotes “bad luck, misfortune” (oed), and “an adventure that turns out badly,” as in Malory’s report of Sir Gawain thoughtlessly lashing out at the wife of an assailant, so that “he smote off her head by misadventure.”51 That sense is closely linked to the kind of “fatal mishap” (oed) still denoted in legal contexts by the phrase “homicide by misadventure.” Morris drew on this sense at the close of his career, in his “utopian romance,” News from Nowhere (1890). In that work, a character involved in a love quarrel lands an “unlucky blow” and kills his rival.52 Here, the lack of mortal intent allows the misfortune to shade into an unwilled or fated occurrence. A similar process applies to the representation of war in “The Hollow Land” and In Parenthesis. War in these works is a “misadventure” or bad enterprise that avoids the culpability of mens rea without disguising the dubious character of the act. Jones’s dedication carries a further sense that relates to the inadvertent destruction of submerged forms of fellowship. His allusion to “the enemy / front-fighters who shared our / pains” hints at the strange predicament of the soldier who must kill men whose occupation

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and suffering are almost identical to his own. The medieval orientation of Jones’s allusiveness also implies the deeper sense in which soldiers on both sides shared a pan-European culture and experience. This is suggested by Charlie’s allusion to the “murthering of Christen men,” a remark implying an unnatural reversal, a redirection of that sanctioned enmity aimed in medieval culture at the Saracen foe. Beyond these resonances, there is a clear Arthurian analogue in the story of Balin and Balan. Part 7 of In Parenthesis includes an allusion to “the sweet brothers Balin and Balan / embraced beneath their single monument.”53 In Malory, Balin is a knight who takes “the shield that was unknown and left his own.”54 On meeting with his brother, Balan, the two begin to fight, their identities concealed and confused by their armour and by Balin’s misplaced shield. Thus Balin and Balan slay one another unawares, the awful mistake not dawning on them until their wounds are mortal. This version of misadventure as a case of ruptured and misrecognized fraternity complicates the influential claim that the Great War was the nemesis of Victorian medievalism, according to which the unchivalric realities of modern warfare were pitted against self-styled “knights of the Empire,” ill-equipped to combat tanks and poison gas.55 Far from abandoning the collective ideal of the quest, Jones and Morris place it under critical pressure. They take adventure seriously, but do so by exploring those aspects of the romance tradition most troubled by it. In this way, a critical perspective is achieved without jettisoning the basic principle of the bond, or fellowship. That dual commitment, so eloquently evoked by the story of Balin and Balan, allows for a portrayal of slaughter that humanizes the enemy machine-guns as in some way kindred, offering by means of the romance’s communal mode a perspective on warfare less easily conjured by more individuated fictional methods. This witnessing of a thing apparently alien that actually harbours something already seen corresponds to the psychological and narrative effect known to critics as “the uncanny.” The initial perception of unfamiliarity is crucial in these war-stricken cases. A masked or misplaced emblem generates misrecognition; and that misrecognition enables the commission of hostile acts against familiar objects, which in turn sets the dramatic ball rolling. In his essay on the subject, Freud follows Ernst Jentsch in identifying the tales of the Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann

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as an exemplary literary instance of the “unheimlich.”56 Freud’s particular attention to a fear of blinding, and his interpretation of it as castration anxiety, steers us towards the Classical archetype of Oedipus. With this comes an understanding of the uncanny based on a confusion of genital attraction and repulsion, whereby the “unheimlich place” is “the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings.”57 If Freud’s leap from Hoffmann’s Romantic Gothic back to Classical Tragedy is notable for its “sexual turn,” and its attention to repression in understanding conflicted memory, it is notable, too, for its neglect of romance sources. Freud does address Romantic sources and fairy tales, but instead of tracing them back to medieval antecedents, he refers them to Classical archetypes. The romance tradition nevertheless makes available a distinct version of the uncanny that deserves separate attention. It is to this, rather than to Freud’s sources, that both Morris and Jones look in evoking apparently modern forms of rupture and misadventure. Cooper offers helpful commentary on this aspect of the “romance in time.” When discussing Le Morte D’Arthur, she observes that “Balin’s landscape is the familiar gone wrong: that liminal, unexplained, state that we know as the uncanny.” She nonetheless restricts herself in assigning such features to a “sense of modernity” (or to a coincidence with Freud’s notion of a symbiosis between the heimlich and the unheimlich).58 I would be inclined to go further, in attributing these effects to the romance’s distinct and individual concern with the relationship between quest and recognition. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to make this more ambitious claim in Cooper’s ensuing account of Eger and Grime: the author of that work “exploits this quality of the uncanny to the full” by means of “doublings and repetitions,” and a simultaneous play on “fear and desire” in a “psychological landscape.”59 Beyond that work, one might point to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the narrative tension depends on a hesitation between the world and the game, the part and the whole, a charted landscape and a symbolic progress, and where a return of the repressed disrupts the otherwise definitive end of decapitation.60 All of these features are strongly reminiscent of the dreamlike qualities that characterize Morris’s early work, and while in him they owe a great deal to Romantic literature, and in particular his reading of Edgar Allan Poe,

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their ultimate orientation and origin lies with the romance, rather than the modern Gothic. In “The Hollow Land,” the sense of the uncanny is conjured at the point of return to places and faces once known. A failure of memory is instrumental in complicating the fullness of this return. We feel this as Florian lies on a riverbank after losing his place in “The Hollow Land” and tries “to recollect at any rate something, under those fir-trees that I ought to have known so well.”61 On spotting something that he cannot forget, the “old castle of my fathers up among the hills,” ruined but not fallen, he proceeds to repossess what was, and still is, in some heraldic way, his.62 Florian enters the outer court, according to his old habit, and we are told that he “knew the way so well that I did not lift my eyes from the ground.” Inside, the old hangings are gone, and “instead of them the walls blazed from end to end with scarlet paintings.” A series of recognitions punctate his return, beginning with a partial sense that he knows four of the faces depicted in the interior murals, even if he “did not then remember the names.”63 Some extradiegetic awareness allows us to hear the names as “Red Harald, Swanhilda, Arnald, and myself.” The transfiguration of these personalities into the realm of art intensifies the building sense of recognition and uncanny displacement. A further uncanny episode occurs after Florian has defeated the pugnacious painter of these scenes. Instead of finishing him off, he shows mercy, having noticed “some resemblance to my father’s dead face, which I had seen when I was young.”64 The coincidence of enemy and paternity in one visage is disquieting, and indeed Oedipal. But the fuller significance of this observed resemblance pertains to the quest itself, and is apparent when Florian absent-mindedly calls the painter “by the right name” – that is, “Harald.”65 Having done so, he reports that “[h]e did not seem surprised … but rose and armed himself and then he looked a good knight.”66 We might place these moments of dawning realization within the scheme of Aristotle’s Poetics, as cases of anagnôrisis, commonly translated as “discovery” or “recognition.”67 The effect in this case recalls that described by Terence Cave, when he observes that “[a]nagnôrisis conjoins the recovery of knowledge with a disquieting sense, when the trap is sprung, that the commonly accepted co-ordinates of knowledge have gone awry.”68

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Cave moves straight from the Classical period to the Renaissance, according to the assumption that such tropes are largely reliant on the circulation of Aristotelian models. In The Uncanny, Nicholas Royle helpfully acknowledges that “[t]he uncanny has a history,” but similarly chooses to confine it in arguing that “[t]he uncanny is inextricably bound up with the history of the Enlightenment and with European and North American Romanticism.”69 While the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement are important sources for the uncanny, they should not be seen as exclusive areas for its development. As I have shown, the uncanny was already at work in the medieval romance and its particular operations in relation to the quest attracted the interest of modern authors wishing to evoke forms of collective experience. The medieval nature of this inheritance is apparent not so much in the concern with recognition as in how the uncanny illuminates the preceding phase of misrecognition. In works that take their bearings from the medieval romance, misrecognition carries with it productive, as well as destructive, consequences. “The Hollow Land” and In Parenthesis deal in two forms of the uncanny, one whose effect is solely to disquiet, and one that is positive, in that it forces confrontation with the fact of misadventure, and provides a glimpse of some synthesis beyond it. Like Morris, Jones was an artist-craftsman, and his poetic attention is drawn to the made things in the world. As in the murals scene, where Morris stages a simultaneous disclosure of familiar forms and an estrangement, the homely medium of human manufacture is subject to alarming transformation, as where Jones reports on “the noise of carpenters, as though they builded some scaffold for a hanging – hammered hollowly.”70 The evacuation of what is fulfilling in the hammer’s strike is extended as Ball “wished they’d stop that hollow tapping,” the rhythms of craft reduced to something like a midnight rap on a moorland window.71 The Gothic flavour is enhanced by the hail of supersonic lead: it “rides the air / as broom-stick horrors fly – / clout you suddenly, come on you softly, search to the liver, / like Garlon’s truncheon that struck invisible.”72 In recalling the misadventures of Balin, and in particular his dealings with the invisible knight, Garlon, this passage dwells suggestively on the fickle materiality of modern warfare, where an unseen steel does the killing. The sense of being dispatched by supernatural agency

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is reversed when the foreign object returns to resemble the made thing, as where Ball picks up a discarded German “stick-bomb” and reflects that “You definitely like the coloured label on the handle.”73 In his note on this passage, Jones recalls his own wartime experience, explaining that what was “stamped or labelled on the handle of a German stickbomb” always gave him “some kind of pleasure – just as one likes any foreign manufacture, I suppose.”74 The liking for a familiar object, rendered well, but by foreign hands, and to an alien pattern, proves at once comforting and disturbing. This is true not only from the point of view of the design, but also because it was made with the precise object of killing the appreciative observer. In the forms of lapsed orientation suffered by Florian and Ball, I have identified the signs of a quest gone awry. When these characters experience an uncanny effect, it often involves witnessing the familiar image of a brother, displaced and contorted into the shape of an enemy. By such means, both works challenge what might be termed an “artificial hate.” Jones uses this phrase in the notes to In Parenthesis, when glossing his description of “the instructions given in bayonet-fighting drill.”75 These instructions enjoined men to “look fiercely upon the enemy,” “to shout some violent word – and not to spare his genitals.” Jones admits that this advice was unpopular among those “fresh from actual contact with the enemy,” a fact suggesting that the mask of otherness drops as soon as one sees the enemy at close quarters. Paradoxically, the violence of sword or bayonet requires proximity and therefore intimacy, close relations that eventually countenance sympathy. Such an enemy cannot be violated as the authorities imagine, because the encounter obliges a form of recognition. Once recognition has occurred, and the fact of misadventure dawns on both parties, the act of castration will not be countenanced. Wilfred Owen’s poem of subterranean encounter, “Strange Meeting” (1918), conjures a similarly uncanny enemy, or “strange friend.”76 Ball, by contrast, is not required to undertake a journey to a mythical underworld. To experience the unheimlich, it is sufficient for him to contemplate the form of an enemy trench under occupation. On one level, this presents a further opportunity for the admiration of Teutonic workmanship: this, he reports, is “a place well engineered,” where the British

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soldiers find “all the arrangements of the place like somebody else’s house,” with “nothing gimcrack and everything of the best.”77 Apart from rehearsing a familiar soldierly comparison with enemy “kit,” the sense this lends is of Goldilocks discovering the breakfast arrangements of the Three Bears. The enemy may yet have left “infernal and exactly-timed machines” to maim and kill, but the quality of unease depends on the proximity of one’s own forms of comfort and domestication.78 More particularly, it resides in the unnerving suspicion that one’s enemy might in fact be a brother, or that one’s brother might be an enemy. Morris hints at a similar awakening on describing Florian’s resolution to leave Margaret, in “going alone to look for my brother.”79 Eventually, as I have shown, he experiences a kind of fraternity in the company of his enemy, Harald. But, before that can happen, he must fulfil an appointment with the body of his actual brother, the similarly named Arnald: But what lay at the foot of a great beech-tree but some dead knight in armour, only the helmet off? A wolf was prowling round about it, who ran away snarling when he saw me coming.80 The uncanny spectacle of a partially tame wolf grabs the attention, but the estrangement of this passage resides primarily in the body of a brother, and more particularly Florian’s refusal to accept his death, so that he treats the corpse as a living thing that can be offered draughts of water. Just as the enemy in these romances has a habit of becoming intimate, so the sibling whom Florian has followed assumes the impersonal appearance of “some dead knight,” obscured by helm and armour. The information that “[h]e was as dead as Swanhilda” prepares us for the synthesis to come, the dark understanding that friend and enemy are all fighting in a bad cause.81 I have sought to rescue the literary and psychological effect of the uncanny from an exclusive association with Classical and Romantic sources, and to do so by demonstrating the ways in which two modern revivals of the romance draw their complexity from medieval narrative resources. While it would be unwise to rule out Classical influence on this medieval uncanny, the romance’s distinctive collectivization and

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institutionalization of the quest offers a rationale for separate treatment. Thus it is not by anticipating the family saga of Freud that these writers evoke the tragedy of misrecognition, but by evoking the misadventures of a more capacious knightly household. In reviving “uncanny romance,” Morris and Jones also discover a version of the unheimlich that speaks to modern warfare’s confusingly artificial forms of allegiance and enmity. The signs of this revival are apparent in their emphasis on displacement, and in their re-enactment of the romance’s hesitation between the old shame culture and the emergent culture of guilt. These effects are accompanied by a growing awareness of lapsed orientation, a loss of the self ’s bearings in the environment, and even the dissolution of a continuous or unitary world. The uncanny unnerves us; but, crucially in these romances, the uncanny is also the force that prompts a painful recognition that the quest is fulfilled not by the killing of one’s foe, but by his domestication. In other words, the recognition that the quest was a mistaken enterprise, and that one’s enemy is also a brother, guarantees the exploratory and communal character of these romance revivals. Whether hostilities are based on personal revenge or are statesponsored, the hero is effectively implicated in fratricide. Readers are led in this way to contemplate warfare in the light of kindred slaughter, and ultimately self-slaughter. This is not to suggest that either Morris in the 1850s, or Jones in the 1930s, was entering a plea for pacifism, but rather that their works offer a basis for contemplating the moral complexity of killing, and that this basis is derived less from a modern or liberal conscience, than from the existing dynamics of the romance as a literature of quest and misadventure.

notes 1 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5. 2 Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), 2. 3 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 59–80.

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4 Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). 5 William Morris, “The Hollow Land,” in The Collected Works of William Morris, edited by May Morris, 24 vols. (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1910– 15), 254–90. 6 Ibid., 254. 7 Ibid., 267–8. 8 David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). 9 Morris, “A Dream of John Ball,” in Collected Works, 16, 213–88. 10 Jones, In Parenthesis, 78. 11 For a detailed account of Jones’s personal involvement in this action, see Thomas Dilworth, David Jones and the Great War (London: Enitharmon Press, 2012), 107–16. 12 Jones, In Parenthesis, 4. 13 Ibid., 91. 14 Ibid., 77. 15 Ibid., 224. 16 Ibid., 183. 17 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, edited by Janet Cowen, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin Books, 1986), I, 83; Jones, In Parenthesis, 162. 18 Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, I, 131. 19 Morris, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, in Collected Works, 1, 1–146. 20 Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 267. 21 Ibid., 267–8. 22 Jones, In Parenthesis, x–xi. 23 Ibid., x. 24 Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 272. 25 Ibid. 26 Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, II, 215, 364–5. 27 Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queen, edited by Thomas P. Roche, Jr (London: Penguin, 1987). 28 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Gareth and Lynette,” in The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., edited by Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Harlow, uk: Longman, 1987), 3, 281–323, at 287. 29 Jones, In Parenthesis, 135. 30 Ibid., 181.

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Marcus Waithe Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 278. Ibid. Ibid. Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, I, 86. Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 278. Ibid. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 256. Ingrid Hanson, William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890 (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 7. Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 260. Jones, In Parenthesis, 168–9. Ibid., 169. Cooper, The English Romance in Time, 25. Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 280. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 273. Jones, In Parenthesis, 138. Ibid. Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, I, 102. Morris, News from Nowhere, in Collected Works, 16, 1–211, at 166. Jones, In Parenthesis, 163. Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, I, 87. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1981), 276–93. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17. Ibid., 247. Cooper, The English Romance in Time, 82. Ibid. Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J.J. Anderson (London: J.M. Dent / Everyman, 1996). Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 281.

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Ibid., 283. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 289. Ibid. Aristotle, The Poetics (London: William Heinemann, 1965), XI.4; Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan, 1970), 37. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study of Poetics (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2. Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2003), 8. Jones, In Parenthesis, 138. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 222. Ibid. Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting,” in The Complete Poems and Fragments, edited by John Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press, Oxford University Press, 1983), 148–50, at 148. Jones, In Parenthesis, 148. Ibid. Morris, “The Hollow Land,” 278. Ibid., 278–9. Ibid., 279.

Part Four Transmission and Circulation

9 Dramatizing Heliodorus Helen Moore

The occasional irruptions of Heliodorus’s fourth-century romance the Aethiopica into English literature have long proven staples in the literary diet of those studying Renaissance receptions. However – to continue momentarily the culinary metaphor – Heliodorus provides in critical terms more of a sugar-rush than the slow-burning carbohydrate of an Ovid or a Virgil. From the earliest period of Classical reception studies, as seen, for example, in Samuel Lee Wolff ’s ground-breaking Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (1912), assessing the reception of Heliodorus has been both exhilarating and frustrating. Heliodoran moments, when they come, are memorable – Shakespeare’s glancing reference to the Egyptian thief Thyamis in Twelfth Night, for example, or Sidney’s shipwrecked in medias res opening to the New Arcadia – but they have a tendency to be as elusive as they are exhilarating. Shakespeare’s knowledge of Greek literature is still a matter of debate, but the Aethiopica – like other Greek romances such as Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Klitophon – was clearly well known to Philip Sidney. He makes easy reference to the true lover Theagenes in the Defence of Poetry and describes the Aethiopica as a “sugared invention” when discussing the poeticity of prose; there are many collisions and collusions of plot material between the Aethiopica and Sidney’s Arcadia, such as the passionate queen Andromana, who is indebted to Demainete and Arsake of the Aethiopica.1 Victor Skretkowicz remarks in particular on Sidney’s embracing of the “verbal artificiality” of Greek romance and its “cryptic oracular dimension,” both exemplified by Heliodorus; he further notes that Greek romances in general, and the Aethiopica in particular,

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were pressed into political service in the sixteenth century in order to celebrate monarchy, castigate tyranny, and defend civil and domestic consensus – all causes dear to Sidney’s heart.2 Wolff pinpoints the simultaneously intimate yet distancing relationship between the Aethiopica and the Arcadia when he describes the latter as Sidney’s “conscious attempt to domesticate” Greek romance.3 The verb “domesticate” is well chosen, pointing as it does to Sidney’s sense of the Classical past as a spur to present action, both literary and political, and his prioritization of the vernacular and the modern over the ancient. All of this constitutes an intriguing, but ultimately fragmentary, reception by early modern literature: luminescences of Heliodorus appear with striking specificity, but are then lost to sight amidst the variety and modernity of the heterogeneous vernacular romance. The Aethiopica is also a teasingly absent presence in plays, in theatre history, and in tracts abusing the stage. It features in the two most famous antitheatrical polemics, Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) and William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix (1633), both times in the context of loss and absence. According to Prynne, Heliodorus was deprived of his bishopric for the “wanton amorous Bookes he had written in his youth,” and Gosson claims that The Ethiopian History was one of those bad books “thoroughly ransacked to furnish the play houses in London”; sadly no such play survives.4 Another lost play, called Chariclea (sometimes referred to as Theagines and Chariclea), was performed either at Hampton Court at Christmas 1572, or at Greenwich in February 1573.5 In 1578 a play on the subject of the Queen of Ethiopia was performed in Bristol, but there is no way of knowing whether this was the same play, or even whether it was based on Heliodorus.6 In 1962, Carol Gesner made a determined attempt to establish Heliodorus as an important influence on Shakespeare in “Cymbeline and the Greek Romance,” but the similarities adduced are suggestive rather than direct. Gesner highlighted eight potentially common elements: the infilling of missing action occurring before the start of the play (that is, the story of Posthumus and the kidnapping of Cymbeline’s sons); the interweaving and climactic unravelling of three narrative threads; the placement of the action within a context of war and empire; the couples’ unconsummated “marriages”; the capability in plotting of both Charikleia and

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Imogen; the blows landed upon the unrecognized heroines by their lovers; the denouements in scenes of public assembly; and finally the ending of both works with ritual sacrifice.7 More recently, against a background of increasing scholarly conviction about Shakespeare’s familiarity with cultural “Greekness,” Tanya Pollard has related the “disorderliness” of Cymbeline in generic terms to the variegated styles and matter of the Aethiopica and has remarked on the atmospheric affinity between the Aethiopica and early modern tragicomedy.8 This essay works from the proposition that the fugitive presence of Heliodorus in early modern drama should be embraced without anxiety about the proving of its “source” function for Shakespeare or others. As has been documented by the contributors to the volume of essays Staging Early Modern Romance (2009), a flexible, re-inventive, heterodox sense of textual relationship exists between prose fiction and drama in the early modern period.9 The intertextual presence of prose romance within plays is thus very often of a sporadic, irruptive, mischievous, or fragmentary nature. Mary Jacobus’s assessment of the “irruptions” of Gothicism and Romanticism in Villette – in which she permits and even celebrates the tendency of romance (both as specific text(s) and as mode) to dive in and out of other texts – is potentially very instructive to the early modern period, in which the traditional narratives of close and provable relationships between Classical and English literature (notably in the case of epic) have made the fugitive or irruptive appearances of other texts and traditions difficult to handle and something of a disciplinary embarrassment.10 In order to overcome this inherited scholarly inhibition about unprovable romance “sources,” we need to extend our analytical vocabulary to encompass the operation of those works such as the Aethiopica that intrigue precisely because they appear in English contexts in obedience to logics other than that of strictly defined “source” and “text.” A first step on the way to achieving that is to consider the two extant plays that do actually attempt to dramatize the Aethiopica and that thereby shed new light both on the dramatizing of prose romance, and on the cultural presence of the Aethiopica in early modern England. What these plays show is that even when overtly adapting Heliodorus’s romance, dramatists were, like Sidney, primarily concerned with domesticating and conciliating his material to the existing conditions and

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traditions of English drama. In short, the reception of Heliodorus in both English prose and drama is actively engaged in a process of repurposing that is far more dynamic than the traditional preoccupation with the Aethiopica as a possible Shakespearean source would allow. In order to contextualize further the amorphous “Greek effects” present in early modern drama, as A.D. Nuttall terms them,11 I am therefore undertaking here the first detailed and comparative discussion of the two extant Heliodoran plays from the seventeenth century – John Gough’s Strange Discovery (1640) and the anonymous manuscript The White Ethiopian (bl ms Harley 7313); the latter is written in rhyming couplets with many alterations and corrections, and probably dates from the 1650s. My study of these two plays points to a “Heliodoran moment” in Caroline drama comparable to that identified in the sixteenth century for fiction,12 and provides further, specific evidence concerning the strong affinity between Greek romance and early modern tragicomedy. The Strange Discovery: A Tragi-Comedy is ascribed to the authorship of “I.G.,” identified as John Gough. Gough was a clergyman, born in about 1610, and from 1630 a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. According to G.E. Bentley, the play shows “no evidences of production, and little indication that it was prepared for the stage” (this despite a reference in the prologue to “seeing” the play). Noting the use of the past tense in some stage directions, Bentley observes that it could be “a remembered academic performance” but leans towards regarding it as a “mere translation exercise,” thanks to the tendency of some stage directions to sound like the “fumbling summary of a baffled amateur dramatist.”13 There are evidently inherent difficulties to reimagining the rangy action of the Aethiopica within the physical and temporal constraints of actual or intended performance. The White Ethiopian manifests similar limitations in this respect, with Bentley describing it as “dramaturgically quite crude” and the stage directions as “of the literary type common with amateurs” (III.269). That play, too, is not thought of as having been performed, despite indicating in its prologue that the speaker is “pointing at ye Ladys” (f.2r). The Strange Discovery was probably written in the 1630s, and was still being included in publishers’ lists in the 1690s. One potential context for its composition is the 1630s verse translation of the Aethiopica by William Lisle, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and

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scholar of Anglo-Saxon. The first edition of Lisle’s versification, entitled The Faire Aethiopian and dedicated to the king and queen, was published in 1631, and the second edition (The Famous Historie of Heliodorus) appeared in 1638. As Alfred Harbage observed, Greek romances provided “the original fount of Cavalier dramatic romance.”14 These two plays are indicative of this renewed engagement with the matter of the Aethiopica in the 1630s through the 1650s, an engagement that was probably directed and inflected by the interest of Henrietta Maria’s court in the manifestation of virtuous passion and its effects.15 Richard Brome’s play The English Moor (first performed between 1637 and 1640 by Queen Henrietta’s Men) also bears witness to the currency of Heliodoran subject matter in this context by referencing the motif of the black queen who bears a white child.16 The Strange Discovery is designated as a tragicomedy on its title page. Although there is no ancient Greek genre of tragicomedy, many of the traits of early modern tragicomedy are shared with Greek romance. The conviction that love conquers all, the affirmation of noble blood, the overarching role of providence, the turning of tragedy to happiness, and the emphasis on versimilitude are all features of early modern tragicomedy identified in a recent study of the genre that apply equally to the generic behaviour of Greek romance in general, and the Aethiopica in particular.17 As already noted, Tanya Pollard draws a parallel between the generic “disorderliness” of Cymbeline and the Aethiopica; she also observes that Cymbeline is the Shakespeare play with the largest number of false deaths, a Heliodoran trope that Shakespeare “imitates and escalates” in this play for its “juxtaposition of irony and emotional intensity.” The Aethiopica is, she suggests, “a nondramatic prototype for tragicomedy.”18 Heliodorus repeatedly foregrounds the dramatic potentiality of his romance and signals its mixed mode. Scenes and events are frequently designated as tragic, and the capacity of tragedy to turn to comedy is invoked, for example in the reconciliation between Thyamis and his brother Petosiris.19 The Aethiopica displays a wittily knowing metatheatricality, regularly comparing participants and auditors to the spectators of a play, or invoking the stage effects achieved in Greek theatre by use of a machine (mechane). Wonder, incomprehension, and grief are

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some of the most frequently articulated emotions of the Aethiopica, as they are in early modern dramatic romances and tragicomedies. Furthermore, the aesthetic of variety celebrated in Greek romance (think ships loaded with innumerable goods or bodies sprawled in various modes of death) resonates with that of early modern tragicomedy and, indeed, with Homer’s Odyssey, a text that is frequently quoted in the Aethiopica and that was linked by early modern Italian critics with vernacular tragicomedy.20 A final similarity resides in the fact that the Aethiopica, like so many tragicomedies, is a story of conflicted paternity and father-daughter relationships: at one point, Charikleia even lists her three fathers – the one she never saw, Charikles, and Kalasiris (cagn, 502). In The Strange Discovery, therefore, it is no surprise to see that the conventions and sentiments of Stuart tragicomedy are layered into the matter of Heliodorus’s romance. Gough has selected from the Aethiopica incidents that demonstrate the overwhelming power of love, particularly as it is represented in the narrative of the lovers Theagenes and Cariclea, and the contrasting narratives of Dementa and Arsace, who are rendered in this play as typically lusty wives dangerously besotted by Cnemon and Theagenes respectively.21 Their destructive passions are counterpointed by the chaste love of Theagenes and Cariclea, and by the closing scene in which Cariclea is reunited with her parents and familial harmony is restored. This scene calibrates the Heliodoran material towards the dominant ideologies of Stuart tragicomedy, with its assertion of patriarchal order, marriage, and family over immoderate, female, and potentially tragic desire. This emphasis is very much in keeping with earlier vernacular versions of Heliodorus: the first English translation (a compression of the material in book three by James Sanford) is found in The amorous and tragicall tales of Plutarch whereunto is annexed the hystorie of Cariclea & Theagenes, and the sayings of the Greeke philosophers (1567; sigs. B7r–D8v). Sanford’s dedication to Sir Hugh Paulet reveals that the story of Cariclea and Theagenes is included in this collection to exemplify the dangers of the “Lawlesse lust” which renders men like beasts “when reason ruleth not affection and appetite” (sigs. A2r–v).

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Dramatizing Romance The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian, although not acclaimed pieces of drama, open a window onto the early modern methods of rendering ancient romance for putative, perhaps actual, performance. There are instructive points of comparison with Thomas Heywood’s play Love’s Mistress, performed before the King and Queen at the Phoenix in Drury Lane in 1634. Based on the inset romance of Cupid and Psyche contained in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, this play adapts its source for the Caroline stage by expanding its dialogue; linking the original text’s themes of love and beauty to Neoplatonic thought; removing the “peripheral and unstageable”; and bestowing thematic unity on the episodic construction by elaborating individual words and ideas.22 In broad terms, these are very much the same strategies that are deployed in The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian. The primary challenge of dramatizing the Aethiopica lies in unravelling a stageable plot line out of a famously complex story that is articulated largely by self-exculpatory male speakers and deploys interrupted chronology, hidden causation, and inset reported narratives. On the other hand, the inherently dramatic and oral quality of the Aethiopica can be a godsend to the playwright in providing many examples of high rhetorical drama that can be carried over verbatim from prose romance to play; one such is Gough’s use of Demeneta’s ironic cry to Cnemon, “My young Hippolitus!” (I.iv, sig. C3r; cagn, 360). Hippolytus is Theseus’s son, desired by his stepmother Phaedra, as is the case here, and the allusion is elaborated for the English audience with a shocked aside from Cnemon, “Heavens defend me / From this lewd Phadra.” The dramatic colouring of the Aethiopica is exploited with determination throughout The Strange Discovery and accrues extra depth as characters whose actions are simply reported in Heliodorus can give vent to their fury themselves. The female characters are the particular beneficiaries of this liberation from the constraints of male-reported narrative: Demeneta’s intention to “Inspire my study in his [Cnemon’s] Tragedie” (sig. C3v), for example, is in Gough’s play elevated to the level of metatheatrical malice as the eloquence of her love-turned-hate is enhanced by tonal borrowings from revenge tragedy throughout this scene.

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Two elements emerge as particularly important in this process of vernacular dramatization: first, the realization of narrative prose as stage drama, for example through soliloquy and stage directions; and second, the way in which the original romance’s theme of spectacular strangeness is verbally foregrounded and physically rendered. In pursuit of the former, The Strange Discovery pares down the number of familial plotlines in order to concentrate interest upon the three contrasting love narratives. Hence the Thyamis plot is removed in its entirety from Gough’s play. This comes at a price, however: the motives and “mendacity” of the priest Kalasiris (Thyamis’s father) render him somewhat suspect even in Heliodorus, and this problem is further exacerbated in the English play once Kalasiris lacks his sons as a motivating factor. 23 Whereas for the most part Gough slims down the matter of the Aethiopica, when it comes to the comic potential of the lusty wife routine, he goes out of his way to fill in the stylized narrative lacunae of the original with material that would not look amiss in a city comedy. Knemon’s recalled account of Demainete’s advances in the Aethiopica, for example, mixes physical details with suggestive lacunae as in the following passage: Sometimes she would come up to me and kiss me, and she was forever requesting the pleasure of my company. But when her advances became bolder, her kisses grew warmer than they ought to have been, and the far from chaste look in her eyes aroused my suspicions, then I avoided her for the most part, and when she came near me I kept her at arm’s length. Why should I bore you with all the details of what ensued? Her repeated attempts at seduction, her repeated promises? Sometimes she would call me her child, at others her darling. She would address me as her son and heir and then, a minute later, as her beloved… (cagn, 360–1) Gough’s version, however, elaborates the indecorous and incestuous details of these exchanges for comic purposes and advertises a suggestive affinity with Ovid: Demen. My pretty boy, how dost thou? where has thou beene so long absent from my imbraces; come hither, let mee solace my

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selfe a little with thee, let mee kisse thee my sweet heart, my heire, my owne life. Cnem. Had ever any one a kinder stepmother – aside. Mother, you make too much of mee, I am not able to deserve your love in so high a straine, my duty cannot countervaile it. Demen. How prettily he speakes, I cannot chuse but kisse thee for it. Cnem. What a close and hot kisse was that? I like not this behaviour, would I were delivered hence, please you give mee leave to goe about my exercises? Demen. What exercises? Cnem. My bookes and studies at the Schoole, I shall be shent else by my Tutor. Dem. Come, though shalt not leave me. Cnem. Will you have me prove a truant then? Dem. No, but a student in a better art; hast thou ever read Ovid de arte amandi, or Ovids amorous Epistles? Cnem . Never. Dem. O, I would have thee study that booke above all other, there are very good rules, and worth the observation truly, if thou errest in any thing therein written, I will be thy Mistresse to instruct thee, follow my rudiments good sonne. (I.ii; sig.B3v) A particular challenge facing any writer seeking to turn the Aethiopica into drama lies in adapting its complex chronology and use of inset narration. In both The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian, the acts of retrospection that deliver the plot in Heliodorus are unravelled, so that the tangled narratives are reordered into a more “realistic,” linear chronology; this is in essence a conversion of the complex, “hermeneutic” style of Heliodorus’s narrative (whereby the reader participates in a search for understanding) back to the “linear, proairetic mode of simple storytelling” that it originally overturned.24 As a consequence, the emphasis upon the act of self-articulation, the ego-narrative that gives rise to the many embedded conversations of the Aethiopica, generates an occasionally overbearing preference for soliloquy when dramatized. The White Ethiopian is therefore dominated by the lengthy rhetorical articulations of men, notably Calasiris, one of whose speeches occupies

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the entirety of ff.36v–60r. Furthermore, Thyamis becomes a figure of concentrated narrative and rhetorical attention in The White Ethiopian as he verbalizes his erotic struggles over Chariclea in lengthy soliloquies such as the one that occupies over five sides in the first act (beginning at f.7r). Whereas in the original romance, Thyamis’s conscience is not unduly troubled by his desire for Charikleia (such being the natural response to beauty), in The White Ethiopian he repeatedly claims that he is not submitting to “vulgar appetites” or “wild lusts,” an anxiety also shared with Theagenes (f.7v). This self-examination of motive and displaying of noble sentiment (sometimes in contrast with the events of the original text) is part and parcel of what Harbage describes, without further elaboration, as the play’s “impregnat[ion]” of its Heliodoran matter with “précieuse sensibilities.”25 The narrative stage directions of The White Ethiopian delineate a theatricalized, typically male sensibility that is envisaged and celebrated through acts of embracing, swooning, growing pale, trembling, falling down, weeping, and tearing garments. These stage directions are, in fact, not so much guides to performance as quasi-narrative glosses on the characters’ emotional states akin to those elaborations of sentiment and character found in the French heroic romances popular in English translation in the 1650s. The heroic pathos of seventeenth-century prose romance was itself inherited from Greek romance,26 and so in The White Ethiopian we see the reconvergence of a Classical source with the contemporaneous social models that were inspired by that very source. The overriding impression given by The White Ethiopian is not so much that of a stage play as an exercise in dramatic reimagining on the page, and a response to the powerful male first-person narratives of the original romance. As well as being a dramatic version of the ego-narrative, soliloquy aids in the process of narrative summary, especially in respect of largescale battle scenes: in The White Ethiopian, for example, token military action is signalled by a stage direction such as “Allarum, allarum. Excursions fightings. Pursuits” (f.14v), before Thyamis enters solus and describes in words the typically Heliodoran variety of death that it would be impossible to stage. In The Strange Discovery, Gough not only reduces incident but also infills and elaborates for the purposes of plot coherence events that in the prose romance are retrospectively narrated, such as

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the moment when Charicles is given Cariclea as a daughter (I.iii). The narrative of Demanete, as already seen, is elaborated by being moved out of narrative retrospection and into the dramatic action. The Aethiopica is thematically reiterative and at times repeats incidents for different interlocutors: such reiteration in dramatic form would be too lengthy and unwieldly, so the repeated incidents of the original, such as Demainete’s attempts to seduce Knemon, are in Gough’s play telescoped into a single, emblematic moment. Another technique used by Gough to restructure the narrative in a dramatically palatable form is the addition of a new character, Nebulo (Charicles’s servant), who serves the dual purpose of commenting grumpily on the incessant itinerancy of his master and summarizing action that has not been presented on stage. The added figure of Nebulo also provides the opportunity for a cuckold plot that is reminiscent of Webster’s tragicomedy A Cure for a Cuckold (perf. 1624): while Nebulo has been wandering with Charicles, his wife Nebulina has conceived a child. As is typical in English tragicomedy, this comic cuckold plot counterpoints the adulterous implications of the main plot. Other elements attributable to English dramatic traditions in The Strange Discovery occur in the presentation of Cnemon as a difficult son wasting the money spent by his father on his education (echoes of Shirley and Brome here), and the characterization of Thisbe as a type of the tricksy servant maid. The White Ethiopian, by contrast, is stylistically and generically much closer to Lisle’s verse translation than to the public theatre; one deduces from this that Gough was conversant, even familiar, with the antebellum public stage, whereas the Interregnum author of The White Ethiopian was undertaking a literary experiment, trying his hand at the elevated sensibilities and static scenography of closet drama. Dramatically speaking, The White Ethiopian is at its best in the moments when the conversation-as-action of the original romance can be rendered on stage and enhanced by the realized physical presence of the speakers. The exchange between Cnemon and Calasiris, for example, is staged as a scene of hospitality and familiarity. There is some literary subtlety to the scene as it dwells on the words “care” and “comfort” within the context of age, youth, and loss, and this sense of the tragic familiar is backed up by the stage direction requiring waiting maids and

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a table spread with wine and dishes (f.26v). The properties used or indicated in actual and envisaged performances of Heliodorus offer some insights into how early modern adapters construed its dramatic potential. The performance of Chariclea at court in 1572–73 required an altar, two spears, mitres, and a picture of Andromeda, suggesting that the plot of that play (like The White Ethiopian) espoused the martial and ritual matter of the original rather than the erotic and domestically focused material favoured by Gough.27 Properties referenced in The White Ethiopian in addition to the table and food include a couch, swords, a chair, stools, a crown, and a “chaire of state” for Arsake (f.107r). By omitting the Thyamis plot, Gough relieves himself of the need to stage the difficult scene in which Thyamis and Potosiris race and combat around the walls of Memphis. The author of The White Ethiopian, on the other hand, includes this incident, envisaging different levels of staging as a symbolic solution with the stage direction “Enter aboue as twere on a wall” (f.88v). Later in the scene it is recorded that Potosiris “runs about ye stage three times,” followed by Thyamis (f.92v). The play is confused in its ending, supplying closing speeches and an epilogue (f.131r), then resuming with the apparent poisoning of Cybele and the incarceration of Theagenes and Chariclea; there is, therefore, no climactic scene of the kind that in the lost 1572–73 Chariclea required an altar and the commissioning of a portrait of Andromeda. By contrast, in The Strange Discovery, the beds that figure throughout Heliodorus’s narrative assume an iconic stage presence. In Heliodorus the bed serves as the site of sickness and sobbing, and to an extent it acts as a unifying experiential space common to all the narratives. This symbolic function of the bed is carried over into The Strange Discovery thanks to the play’s foregrounding of the narratives of the lovers and the lustful wives. The play’s scenography uses the bed as a locus of intimacy where, for example, acts of marital conflict are played out (I.iv), and it is furthermore used in this scene and in II.v as a quasi-theatrical space where Demanete feigns sickness. The bed prop also functions as a material demonstration of the moral contrast between Chariclea and Demanete when in II.x and III.vi Chariclea lies genuinely lovesick.

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Spectacles of Strangeness Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens, performed in 1609, was the first occasion on which a full antimasque had been used in England; in it he describes his antimasque of twelve hags as “a spectacle of strangeness” that acts as “a foil or false masque” to that which follows.28 Both of these Heliodoran plays deploy the exotic and unfamiliar elements of the Aethiopica in a manner cognate with the traditions of theatrical strangeness that developed out of the Jacobean masque. Heliodorus’s romance is spectacular (as Shadi Bartsch has described29) and was strange even in its own time, with incidents such as the necromantic reanimation of the dead witnessed by Kalasiris and Charikleia, and the “camelopard” (giraffe; cagn, 577) of Hydaspes’s festival. There is a reiterating tendency in Heliodorus to remark upon scenes and events as strange; the very opening scene of the carnage on the beach and the girl on the rock is designated as “inexplicable” (cagn, 354). Similarly, the main characters repeatedly construe themselves as strangers in foreign lands (cagn, 499, 502), and there is the wonderfully self-ironic muddle of strangeness at the end, when Hydaspes king of Persia legitimately asks Charikleia to make up her mind whether Theagenes is a stranger to her or not (cagn, 574). The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian therefore make great play with this idea of strangeness, in the sense of both the foreign and the bizarre. Whilst the ethnographic and encyclopaedic digressions of the Aethiopica are removed, their trace remains through the continued presence of strange elements that have a plot function, such as Cariclea’s pantarbe ring that saves her from the pyre in The Strange Discovery. The rituals and spectacles recounted by the speakers of the Aethiopica, when dramatized in English, are animated by alignment with the exoticisms of the Stuart masque. Thus, in The Strange Discovery, the Thessalians’ sacrifice in Delphos as described to Knemon by Kalasiris is treated in the manner of a masque (with the unstageable animals omitted), and the hymn to Thetis is translated loosely but deftly into couplets (cagn, 409– 15; II.vii [sigs.E1 r –E2 r]). The banquet in III.ii closes with an inset masque described as a “dance in armour call’d Pyrricha” by Theagenes, in which he takes the lead and which is danced with “a gracefull dexterity” according to the stage direction (sig.F3v). This references the ancient

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Greek pyrrhic dance, a war-dance in armour; the armour envisaged here would probably have been of the antique style sometimes used in designs by Inigo Jones.30 The influence of the masquing tradition on The White Ethiopian is similarly clear: each act ends with music and songs, the tenor of which is salutatory and exhortatory with a focus on love, fortune, distress, and mutability (for example, the end of Act II at f.64r). The spectacular strangeness of the Aethiopica is recast by its cultural and temporal translation into early modern England, and the consequent adoption of that culture’s sense of how the extraordinary, foreign, or unknown is constituted and signalled in a dramatic context. In The Strange Discovery, for example, Calasiris’s rites conducted over Cariclea provide the opportunity for some magical staginess that has the air of an antimasque: “Calasiris begins to burne frankincense, to mumble with his lips, to lay lawrell upon her from top to toe, to gape & make strange gestures, while Cariclea, wagged her head oft and smiled” (III.vi; sig.G3r). The category of the “strange” can also be stretched to encompass sociocultural strangenesses that are typical of the early modern stage. Theagenes thinks it “strange” that Arsace, “whose husband is a man / So farre beyond my ranke,” should love him (IV.iv; sig.I1v), which incorporates simple lust into the category of the “strange” when it defies social norms. By comparison with the dangerous strangeness arising from Arsace’s passion, the wandering status of Cariclea and Theagenes as “strange” and “banish’d” seems infinitely preferable. This “translation” of the category of the strange into an English dramatic context is emblematized by the prologue’s reference to the “strange discovery” that is America, and the playful pretence that the audience will have assumed the play’s subject to be the New World: How’s this, The strange discovery, may some say, Tis likely we shall see some glorious Play Of Christopher Columbus, and his brother, Whose navigable paines did first discover That unknowne world, thinking the far fetch’d sceane, To be Peru, and th’Indies… (sig.A1v)

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Particular facility is demonstrated in handling the motif of the “strange discovery” that is foregrounded by the play’s title. The climactic strange discovery of Heliodorus’s romance is of course the revelation that Charikleia is the white child of black parents, but both English playwrights elaborate this idea of a strange discovery back into earlier elements of the story. Demeneta’s falling in the pit in Gough’s play, for example, acquires a judicial dimension as a “strange discovery” (sig.G2v) of her guilt, a phrase that is also used for the revelation of Cariclea’s identity to her father Hydaspes in V.vi. Strangeness is encouraged to permeate the plot at every level in Gough’s play, and it becomes a byword for the sense of divine destiny with which the Aethiopica ends; The White Ethiopian, similarly, foregrounds the strangeness of divine power with an opening speech delivered by Chariclea that frames the play’s whole narrative as one of heroic suffering and submission to the will of the divine powers (f.3r). In this way, the spectacular foreignness of the Aethiopica is domesticated by assimilation into the existing English traditions of masque and tragicomedy.

notes 1 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, edited by J.A. Van Dorsten (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24, 27. 2 Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2010), 12, 117–18, 139. 3 Samuel Lee Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 353. 4 Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 47; on the lost romance plays of the period see further Cyrus Mulready, Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after Shakespeare (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 5 Martin Wiggins with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. II: 1567–1589 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012–), entry 536. 6 Ibid., entry 625.

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7 Carol Gesner, “Cymbeline and the Greek Romance: A Study in Genre,” in Studies in English Renaissance Literature, edited by Waldo F. McNeir (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1962), 105–31. 8 Tanya Pollard, “Romancing the Greeks: Cymbeline’s Genres and Models,” in How to Do Things With Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, edited by Laurie Maguire (Oxford, uk: Blackwell, 2008), 34–53, at 36. As an example of the renewed attention being paid to the diverse ways in which Greek culture was disseminated in early modern England, see Sarah Dewar-Watson, “The Alcestis and the Statue Scene in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2009): 73–80. 9 Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, eds., Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2009). 10 Mary Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, edited by Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 42–60. 11 A.D. Nuttall, “Action at a Distance: Shakespeare and the Greeks,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, edited by Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 209–22, at 215. 12 As described in Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2006). 13 Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1941–68), IV.515. 14 Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama: An Historical and Critical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Modern Library Association, 1936), 220. 15 As described in Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 16 Richard Brome, The English Moor, Modern Text, edited by M. Steggle, at Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, accessed 4 September 2015), Act 4, scene 5 (tln 783–4). 17 Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne, eds., Early Modern Tragicomedy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 1–13. 18 Pollard, “Romancing the Greeks,” 41, 45. 19 Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, translated by J.R. Morgan, in Collected Ancient

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24 25 26 27 28

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Greek Novels, edited by B.P. Reardon (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1989), 494 (hereafter cagn). Sarah Dewar-Watson, “Aristotle and Tragicomedy,” in Early Modern Tragicomedy, 15–27. When referencing characters in the early modern plays, the name-spellings used are those of the English texts. Thomas Heywood, Love’s Mistress, or the Queen’s Masque, edited by Raymond C. Shady, in Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 65 (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), xliv–lv, at lv. John J. Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by Simon Swain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 286–350. J.R. Morgan, “The Story of Knemon in Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, 259–85, at 259. Harbage, Cavalier Drama, 220. Mark Bannister, Privileged Mortals: The French Heroic Novel, 1630–1660 (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1983), 15. Wiggins, British Drama 1533–1642, vol. II, entry 536. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, edited by David Lindley, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, ll. 9 and 13 (accessed 4 September 2015). Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1989). Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, eds., Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (London, Berkeley, ca, and Los Angeles: Sotheby Parke Bernet and University of California Press, 1973), I.185, 188; II.471.

10 Pericles and Polygenres Steve Mentz

Genre problems are hierarchy problems. Genre solutions are hybridity solutions. To expand upon that somewhat gnomic opening, the long history of genre provides many examples of hierarchical systems that order literary culture around ideals of centrality or wholeness. From Aristotle’s championing of tragedy and epic to early modern Italianate literary criticism that attempted to organize sixteenth-century poetic multiplicity according to Aristotelian principles, genre systems have demanded legible and hierarchal structures.1 In practice, however, Polonius’s hodgepodge of “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral” better describes the observed multiplicity of early modern literary texts.2 Without digging too deeply into the intricacies of early modern genre debates, which I briefly considered in relation to Elizabethan prose fiction some time ago, I propose in this chapter a polygenetic system that turns observed variety from problem to structural principle.3 In this system hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks. An unsystemic structure that risks incoherence at every turn, this polygeneric system takes romance, not epic or tragedy, as its normative form. Its archetype is one of Shakespeare’s most structurally wayward and evidentially co-written plays, Pericles. The complex literary system collectively known as early modern romance operates more as network than singular form. Taking Shakespeare’s Pericles as exemplary case, this essay seeks to craft a language to describe the variety and instability of early modern romance fictions. Building on the notion that distinctive generic features serve as pieces in a dynamic, competitive game of formal likeness and difference, I treat

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this multi-authored play as an experiment in maximizing plurality in many forms. The action of Pericles overflows in temporal range from classical to medieval to early modern settings. The characters travel obsessively through space, shuttling across the eastern Mediterranean islands and shores. In formal terms, the plays swallows multiple dramatic sub-genres, including medieval narrative verse, Classical incest riddles, chivalric tournaments, musical interludes, and storms at sea. Early modern inter-generic principles of imitatio and contaminatio dominate the play’s structured variety, of which the stormy sea is perhaps the richest narrative symbol and incest the most pressing fear. Connecting this variety to Shakespeare’s relationship with co-author George Wilkins and also with the play’s internal narrator John Gower creates a version of romance authorship that attenuates and pluralizes itself. Drawing on the decentralized network theories of Bruno Latour, the genre theory of Jacques Derrida and Éduoard Glissant, and recent literary critical work by Caroline Levine enables this essay to articulate a flexible language for romance as polygenre, a principle of narrative excess that roughly inverts Foucault’s influential understanding of authorship as a “principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”4 Romance, as this play helps theorize it, becomes less singular genre and more system of affinities; literary forms become less assertions of fixed identities than tactical allegiances. Generic elements comprise principles of excess and superabundance, not thrift. In the service of this plural and flexible conception of genre, this essay proposes Pericles as both leading case and structural model. Especially considering the somewhat vexed place of this play in the Shakespearean canon, placing it at the centre of an expanded polygeneric system of early modern romance can change how we read and understand this dynamic literary form. Crafting this unstructured structure requires the resources of several theoretical models. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory provides our most robust and thoroughgoing articulation of hybridity and accumulation in contemporary thought. In connecting his theoretical models directly to genre theory, I will also draw on several more explicitly literary theorists, including Derrida’s influential early essay “The Law of Genre” and Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of Relation.”5 To bring Latourian networks all the way into the particular practices of literary

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criticism, I’ll also rely on the recent work of literary critic Caroline Levine, whose book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) articulates what she terms the “affordances” of different ways of thinking about genre and literary structure.6 Bringing these philosophical, historical, sociological, and literary points of view together enables romance-as-polygenres to function structurally while retaining the fluidity and variety that these modes work hard to maintain. As the Renaissance humanist critics who developed the complementary terms imitatio and contaminatio knew well, structures built on internal contradictions contribute in practical range and generative force what they lose in theoretical elegance. Polygeneric romance aims to bring together multiple modes in complex relations without sacrificing too much of each mode’s explanatory power. Singling out Pericles as the exemplar of polygeneric Renaissance romance has a certain perverse appeal. While many of the great romances of the period, including Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, make a topos of incompleteness and fragmentation, Pericles is, as its Arden 3 editor Suzanne Gossett notes on the first page of her introduction, something of an “anomaly” – both in the Shakespeare canon and in standard accounts of Renaissance romance.7 Its combination of multiple authorship, clear popularity on both early modern and modern stages, and sometimes bizarre transitions in terms of plot, location, and dramatic mode mark Pericles as inescapably hybrid. While the dense speculations about the relationship between Shakespeare and shady co-author George Wilkins lie outside my writ in this chapter, I draw inspiration from the notion of historical exchanges and biographical hybridity lurking behind the text.8 Placing Pericles, a play not included in the 1623 Folio, at the centre of Shakespeare’s experiments with romance as polygenre has the salutary advantage of defamiliarizing Shakespeare as writer of Renaissance romance as well. This play does not call up images of the triumphant Prospero-Bard gazing down at the globe from cloud-capped towers. Instead, this multi-authored, stylistically and geographically varied play provides a rich and at times dissonant example of how plurality undergirds early modern romance as a literary form.

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Theory 1: ANTS at the Literary Picnic Bruno Latour appears on his way to becoming perhaps the most influential French thinker in Anglophone literary studies since Derrida.9 Though his intellectual background includes the history of science and sociology, many literary critics have been drawn to his accounts of networks and plural agencies that draw together human and nonhuman contributions. Several of his key terms shed light on aspects of literary genre that traditional hierarchical systems fail to elucidate. In particular, Latour’s expansive concept of “network” as a centreless system – “more supple than the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity” – maps onto a dynamic and energized conception of literary genres.10 Operating within Latourian networks are the forces known as “actants,” a term Latour claims to have derived both from a “fictive sociology” and from the study of literature.11 The play of actants within networks combines maximum freedom with observed alliances and ever-changing collectives. The task of criticism, in a Latourian mode, is descriptive as much as analytic. It is also, significantly, narrative, as his description of a “good account” makes clear: “A good ant account is a narrative or description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there.”12 This position parallels formalist principles of literary interpretation, in which all features of a text or performance are assumed to produce meaning rather than being simply inert. Latourian collectives, including his famously political and dizzyingly multiple “Parliament of Things,”13 resemble literary genres in their complex flexibility and intertwined formal relations. A Latourian account of literary genre simply returns actants and collectives to the literary contexts from which Latour claims to have first adapted them. The benefit of bringing ants into literary studies is the richer sense of hybridity and multiplicity that is Latour’s signature theoretical innovation.

Theory 2: Glissant’s Relation and Derrida’s Law Latour’s theoretical model of hybridity and collectivity appears to have borrowed from French semiotics and literary theory, but it also has

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suggestive parallels with higher theoretical work on literary genre.14 Jacques Derrida’s classic essay “The Law of Genre” enacts a typically double deconstruction of generic structures. In this model, the “law” that connects a text to a genre becomes “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy.”15 Generic identity, like a Latourian collective, becomes a type of provisional identification without stasis, “a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”16 Genre in this model is flexible but still powerful, and in fact – such is the Derridean paradox – perhaps all the more useful and powerful because of its flexibility. The double-bind structure Derrida finds in genre recalls Latour’s repeatedly doubling and expanding networks and alliances. The past quarter-century of literary theory has made these deconstructive paradoxes somewhat familiar, but reading genre through the Derridean lens can also connect these old-fashioned literary forms to the post-colonial structures of the Caribbean theorist and poet Éduoard Glissant. What Glissant calls “Relation” is a principle of plurality and anti-homogeneity, a desire for differences to thrive. “Relation,” Glissant writes, “is spoken multilingually … [and] rightfully opposes the totalitarianism of any monolingual interest.”17 It is a project of “degeneralization” and a representation of the “chaos-monde relating (to itself).”18 What in Derridean critique is a refusal or severing, as in his rupturing of genre’s constituitive “law,” becomes for Glissant an ecstatic affirmation of plurality and even chaos. A new formulation of literary romance can use Latourian principles to steer between Derrida’s skeptical critique and Glissant’s triumphant celebration.

Theory 3: Levine’s Accommodating Forms The third theoretical model that I will employ to assemble a polygeneric structure with which to read Pericles, and through which to use Pericles as a generalizable example, is Caroline Levine’s recent book on the history of genre criticism in the context of the Victorian novel, Forms: Wholes, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Deeply immersed in the technical practices of literary analysis, Levine’s monograph sits oddly next to the high theory of Latour, Derrida, and Glissant. Her practical sense of how

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readers engage generic forms, and how critics make sense of them, provides a necessary positive element for genre analysis: she shows why and how genres are good for thinking about textual meanings in specific contexts. While the particular contours of generic forms risk dissolving in many theoretical accounts, including Latour’s dizzying accumulations, Derrida’s skeptical analysis, and Glissant’s ecstatic pluralizations, Levine’s focus on interpretive practice adds the crucial concept of “affordances,” which she borrows from design theory.19 For Levine, affordances give genres their public force and practical power: “attending to the affordances of form opens up a generalizable understanding of political power.”20 Reading genres as both flexible and meaningful, Levine provides a language, or really four different languages, for understanding the power of literary forms. For my purposes, her four-barrelled subtitle is best conceived as itself a hybrid, whole-rhythm-hierarchy network, a kind of twenty-first-century lit-crit version of Polonius’s genre theory. Multiple and strategic uses of the affordances of all four of these forms create a genre system flexible and varied enough to do justice to how literary forms act in the world – and, as I shall show, to account for the multiplicity so evident in a difficult case such as Pericles. Levine presents five distinct notions about how literary forms work in the world. In addition to the four structures her chapters describe, these five notions represent her version of Derrida’s “law” or Glissant’s “Relation”: they are the master-metaphors of her genre system. In this context, I’ll emphasize how concerned each of the five is with generic mixing and crossing: 1. Forms constrain. 2. Forms differ. 3. Various forms overlap and intersect. 4. Forms travel. 5. Forms do political work in particular historical contexts.21 Levine’s notion of generic forms emphasizes variation and difference, and in particular intersections with local historical conditions. In this structure, genre is less a given identity, in the sense of something a text belongs to, than a set of vectors or tendencies within which or through

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which a text produces meaning. Levine emphasizes that “one of the great achievements of literary formalism has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms.”22 But genre theory as she practises and theorizes it always includes both constraint and affordance, both difference and repetition. If literary forms are, at their roots, “patterns of repetition and difference,”23 these definitional precepts present schemes through which such patterns assume meaning. Throughout Levine’s analysis of different ways that genre has been theorized in literary history, she emphasizes plurality and meaningful variation. The chapter on “Whole” begins by citing Aristotle and Coleridge on the “unity” of the work of art, but ends by proposing that we consider “literary texts not as unified but as inevitably plural in their forms.” Her shrewdly chosen concluding example in this chapter of “unity in multiplicity” is that familiar quasi-utopian space, “the seminar room.”24 “Rhythm” as she articulates it is “plural and colliding, jumbled and constantly altered.” “Hierarchy,” a meta-form with troubling political implications, undercuts itself through attention to “the consequences of colliding hierarchies,” especially those of gender, class, and race.25 Finally, her discussion of “network” in terms of genretheory, which begins with a nod to Latour,26 ends by treating familiar features of Victorian novels, from “plotted suspense” to kinship structures to law to disease, as “always emerging, perpetually in process.”27 The dynamic systems that Levine uncovers within her four mastermetaphors of genre all contribute to her underlying commitment to plurality and significant change. She does not use the term “polygenres,” but her sense of form as meaningfully unstable collections of changing elements and patterns undergirds my sense of how genre operates in Renaissance romance, and particularly in Pericles. Moving from theoretical models of genre plurality to practical examples in a Renaissance text provides a series of examples of how unsettling hierarchical genre systems can reopen familiar literary works. In the case of Pericles, long considered an outlier among Shakespeare’s romances in part because of its co-authorship and absence from the 1623 First Folio, a dynamic sense of generic change can turn this play’s well-known problems, including its complex textual history, into structural principles.

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The play’s rapid movements across time and space and its refrain-like returns to maritime disaster as the plot’s prime mover suggest that its operating principles include spilling over as many borders as it can find. Unlike The Tempest, which uncharacteristically for Shakespeare remains firmly inside the Classical dramatic unities, Pericles overflows. While the precise details of chronology in Shakespeare’s career remain quite uncertain, it seems likely that this play represents the first of the four “late romances”; it was almost certainly written before Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.28 Rather than a red-headed stepchild, the play may be better conceived of as a radical experiment in which the playwright plunges into the hybrid world of generic diversity at which he poked fun in Hamlet. Opening into chaos, Pericles makes maximizing and resolving disorder a structural principle to an even greater extent than did the comedies, tragedies, and histories of Shakespeare’s earlier career.

Pericles 1: Breaking Time The peripatetic voyaging that structures this play lurches back and forth across the exotic eastern Mediterranean, but in some ways the distance travelled in dramatic time exceeds even the nautical miles sailed. The action opens in Antioch, an ancient city known in Classical and Biblical sources. The opening episode, with its incestuous royal family and oracular riddle, gestures toward Classical Greek tragedy. Even in this straightforward allusion, however, the play mixes its signals. The hero’s name refers doubly to Pericles the Athenian statesmen and Pericles the hero of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia, perhaps the most influential English prose romance of the Elizabethan era. Scholars have identified the intermingling of Classical and Biblical sources throughout the play.29 Time, as much as place, varies over the course of the drama. In Antioch, ceremonial structures imprison Pericles. If the larger narrative of the drama unfolds an uneven story of liberation, the Classical/Biblical hybrid of the opening act appears maximally constricted. The clearest victim of this hyper-controlled, over-connected milieu is Antiochus’s unnamed daughter, who is often doubled with Marina in modern productions. The daughter sits imprisoned inside a system that

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allows her no freedom and only the barest spoken will. “Of all ’ssayed yet, mayst thou prove prosperous,” she says to Pericles, “Of all ’ssayed, yet, I wish thee happiness” (1.1.60–1).30 The near-repetition of her lines represents on a verbal level her consumption by and imprisonment within her father’s lust. Pericles later names her “eater of her mother’s flesh” (1.1.131); it appears that consuming and being consumed are equally culpable in Antioch. The king’s daughter, in inverse anticipation of Pericles’s own daughter, stands mute while her suitor and her father trade false conceptions of her. To Antiochus she is “fair Hesperides / With golden fruit” (1.1.34–5). To Pericles she is at first a “fair glass of light” (1.1.77) and later exposed as a “serpent” (1.1.133). Her brief lines shift between wishing Pericles to be visibly “prosperous,” which his play-long trials overtly contradict, to a longer-term desire for his “happiness,” which describes the play’s fortunate end, which itself is the single definitive narrative feature or polar star of romance plots: assuming they end at all, they end redemptively.31 The key to Pericles’s survival in the Classical world is linguistic indirection. The tangled rhetoric through which the hero tells Antiochus that he knows the riddle’s answer without directly stating the King’s crime displays his rhetorical acumen. “Few love to hear the sins they love to act” (1.1.93), the prince observes to Antiochus, before drawing an analogy between the King’s corporeal body and the kingdom in which he rules: King’s are earth’s gods, in vice their law’s their will; And, if Jove strays, who dares say, Jove doth ill? It is enough you know, and it is fit, What being more known grows worse, to smother it. All love the womb that their first being bred; Then give my tongue like leave to love my head. (1.1.105–9) This elliptical speech defines heroism in Antioch as partial submission to unjust power while also carving out “leave to love” one’s own survival. In the confined world of Classical riddles and incestuous interconnec-

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tions, heroic self-assertion limits itself to hints that peek beneath overt submission. The implied connection between Antiochus and Jove may call up a Christian subtext in which pagan deities must be overwritten, but the Greek-named hero does not fully inhabit a post-Classical world, at least not yet. Following the play’s rapid trip forward in literary history, the farthest point away from Classical Greek tragedy is Jacobean city comedy, at which setting Pericles arrives in the brothel scenes in Mytilene (4.2 and 4.5). In putting a daughter, in this case Marina, under sexual stress, these scenes replicate the opening scenes in Antioch through inversion. Against the opacity and near silence of Antiochus’s daughter, Marina defends herself with rhetorical acumen that is only slightly less passive than that employed by her father in Antioch. She fences with the Bawd and calls on the gods to defend her (4.2.81), but her opening strategy is incomprehension of the corrupt world in which she finds herself. “I understand you not” (4.2.114), she insists to the Bawd and Bolt. In her scene with the governor Lysimachus, however, she transforms incomprehension into a strategy of reversal. “Who is my principal?” (4.5.89) she asks the governor, and then challenges him to prove his worth: If you were born to honour, show it now; If put upon you, make the judgment good That thought you worthy of it. (4.5.96–8) Unlike Pericles in the opening scene, whose speech was constrained by his fear of openly revealing the truth, Marina in the brothel requires Lysimachus to speak what he knows. The city comedy trope of discovering unlikely virtue amid urban corruption inverts the secret incest plot of Classical tragedy. The last religio-temporal and generic shores of the play appear in its final scene in Ephesus, which liberates Biblical and Classical sources from their incestuous Antiochan opening. In this ceremonial scene, which opens with Pericles making a formal oration to the goddess Diana, the lost wife first faints and then recovers her speech. Thaisa’s language

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in this scene takes her from the repetitive opacity of Antiochus’s daughter – “You are, you are, O royal Pericles!” (5.3.14) she exclaims before she faints – to powerful rhetoric of resurrection and command: O, let me look! If he be none of mine, my sanctity Will to my sense bend no licentious ear, But curb it in spite of seeing. O my lord, Are you not Pericles? Like him you spake, Like him you are. Did you not name a tempest, A birth and death? (5.3.28–34) Echoing both the incestuous daughter and the heroic virgin in the brothel, Thaisa steps out from these embattled positions to represent a principle of complex female agency that often surfaces in early modern romance.32 As long-lost symbol of generic multiplicity and reunion, she recombines multiple dramatic times and places. The reunion in this play represents a suturing of broken times as well as a geographic rendezvous.

Pericles 2: Scattering Geography The Mediterranean geography of Pericles has been a favorite topic of recent criticism, particularly in terms of the Turkish domination of the eastern Med during Shakespeare’s lifetime.33 The play’s itinerary from Antioch to Tyre to Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, and Mytilene represents a thorough tour of Shakespeare’s favourite maritime geographies.34 The hybrid geographic drama that these half-dozen ports of call create matches the generic variety of the romance. The mid-stations in this journey, Tarsus and Pentapolis, provide Pericles with destinations by which to fulfill his wise advisor Helicanus’s advice to “go travel for a while” (1.2.104). This advice, which Pericles follows to avoid falling victim to the vengeful Antiochus, serves as both a geographic and generic imperative. Travel also means “travail,” following the alternative early modern spelling that undergirds the titles of both Lawrence Twine’s prose source for the play, The Patterne of Paineful Adventures (1576), and

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George Wilkins’s Painful Adventures of Pericles (1608), a prose summary published by Shakespeare’s presumed co-author.35 Geographic travail parallels generic hybridity, with Machiavellian political intrigue marking the royal family of Tarsus and Sidney-esque chivalric romance the seaside kingdom of Pentapolis. Turning from the Classical tragedy of Antioch, Pericles the prince and Pericles the play seek in their travels more hospitable generic homelands. The first stop on his voyage emphasizes the political risks of bad rulers and also of bad luck. As in Machiavelli, an unruly city invites forceful rescue, though Pericles eschews Machiavellian ambition. Before the prince of Tyre arrives, Tarsus teems with cannibalism and political unrest: Those mothers, who to nuzzle up their babes Thought naught too curious, are ready now To eat those little darlings, whom they loved. (1.4.42–4) Like Antioch’s incest, the maternal cannibalism of Tarsus requires a generic response from the play’s hero, who counters scarcity with abundance. The store of corn that the prince provides to the hungry city, however, does not entirely dispel the cruel hunger of Tarsan mothers, the fury of one of whom, Queen Dionyza, will later be visited upon Pericles’s daughter. Pericles’s description of his gift of food notably frames itself through an act of generic refusal. He is not the sailor-hero of epic who masterminded the end of the Trojan war.36 Instead, his corn places Tarsus under his political protection and within his play’s overflowing generic repertoire. His travails amount to an accumulation of multiple generic modes. The arriving hero fulfills the Machiavellian role of the prince, leveraging wealth and fame for political gain. No generic shift in this multi-modal play is more shocking than the arrival of shipwrecked Pericles on the shores of Pentapolis, to find himself taking part in a full chivalric romance, complete with tournament, dancing, and elaborate suits of armour. Excavating the hero’s lineage from Sidney’s New Arcadia, which provides a clear source for the tournament episodes, these scenes (2.1–3, 2.5) remake the shipwrecked traveller as masculine knight.37 The most striking feature of the chivalric

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Pericles is his versatility: he processes, dances, jousts, sings (off-stage), and even makes philosophical small talk with fishermen. He also attracts the romantic interest of the princess Thaisa, who salvages a metaphor for sexual desire from corrupt Antioch. While in Antioch the incestuous daughter represented a forbidden fruit (1.1.20–5), in Pentapolis the lady herself wants to feed: By Juno that is queen of marriage, All viands that I eat do seem unsavoury, Wishing him my meat. (2.3.29–31) This passage shows how generic plurality operates in Pericles. Thaisa’s words recall and repurpose the sexualized hunger that had been activated in the first act. Generic addition – the layering of faux-medieval chivalric romance on top of Classical tragedy – solves narrative problems by reframing and restaging them. In Glissant’s terms, the play arrives at multigeneric Relation by the multiple accumulation of competing and collaborative discourses.

Pericles 3: Shipwreck as System The two generic pathways this essay has so far charted through Pericles – from Classical Antioch to early modern Mytilene, or from Machiavellian Tarsus to chivalric Petapolis – mark two fairly straightforward routes through the play’s episodic morass. But neither comes to terms with the fundamental disorder through which the play lurches from location to location and from one generic mode to another. The shock of the play’s shifts, which can be muted by a professional Shakespearean’s overfamiliarity with the text, appears in its salt-water transitions. Shipwreck is a familiar feature of Shakespearean drama from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest, but no other play repeats the trope. In Pericles, shipwreck is not only a mariner’s risk but a structural imperative. I’ve written previously about the two shipwreck scenes in this play (2.1 and 3.1) as refrains in the drama’s interrogation of agency and the maritime environment.38 In polygeneric terms I propose thinking of shipwreck less as

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a transition between places or systems and more as representing the system as a complex whole, a polygeneric system composed of constant and repeated rupture. The characters who assume their symbolic places most clearly in relation to this shipwreck system are Gower, the play’s driest figure, and Marina, who is born at sea. The function of “ancient Gower” (1.0.2) as speaking medieval source both anchors the play’s textual history in the English fourteenth century and, perhaps more importantly, provides a through-line of narrative stability. The clearest dramatic representation of this clarity is Gower’s fourbeat couplets, a rhythmic back-beat that lends structure to this wayward play. The play has a plural rhythm, to borrow one of Levine’s terms of description, but Gower’s beat holds steady: To sing a song that old was sun From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man’s infirmities To glad your ear and please your eyes. (1.0.1–4) Tidying up wayward plot points such as the divinely caused deaths of Antiochus and his daughter (3.0.25) and the symbolic importance of minor characters such as Helicanus (5.Ep.7–8) and Cerimon (5.Ep.9– 10), Gower serves as still point in seething chaos. The poet-narrator represents a blank generic slate, and it is worth recalling that his version of the story that gets told in the play is part of his massive compendium, the Confessio Amantis, a virtual encyclopedia of medieval narrative types. Gower through narrative clarity and rhetorical consistency enables the play to assume multiple hybrid forms.39 Gower’s calm surrounds the audience’s experience of the play, but Marina lives its essential plurality and disorder. “Thetis’ birth-child” (4.4.41) swims into disorder at her stormy birth, and in rhetorical and geographic plurality she rivals or perhaps exceeds her father. She does not quite touch all of his ports of call, interestingly omitting only Pentapolis, where Pericles and Thaisa will rule after the play’s end. Her rhetorical and dramatic variety – mourning maid in Tharsus, virginal heroine in the brothel, musical prodigy on the boat with her father,

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queen in Tyre after the play’s end – display the same versatility as he does. Like many of Shakespeare’s young heroines, she goes silent at the drama’s end, but Marina’s control over the unfolding of the crucial recognition scene matches the control exerted by comic heroines such as Rosalind and Portia. Unlike those figures, however, her removal of the play’s disguises also entails discovering her own identity: Is it no more to be your daughter than To say my mother’s name was Thaisa? (5.1.198–9). Marina as musician and Aquawoman flourishes inside generic flux; she rides the storms that threaten to engulf all the other characters, even her father.40 Like Glissant’s heroes of Relation and Levine’s conception of the work of art as incessantly plural, Marina’s role in Pericles makes multiplicity legible. The model she provides represents the human experience of a polygeneric world.

Conclusion: Polygenres as Literary Environments Pericles is far from the only early modern dramatic romance to feature multiple generic identities. Not only do the other romances of Shakespeare share this structure, so also do dramatic romances by Fletcher, Beaumont, Jonson, and other playwrights, as well as prose romance narratives by Sidney, Nashe, Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and others.41 Pericles represents an extreme case that reveals, in part through its own awkwardness or excess, the underlying structure of the system. No generic identities are complete or unambiguous, as Derrida’s skeptical perspective emphasizes. Genres are colliding and interpenetrating systems operating in a mobile universe of invention and contamination. Genre-systems can be stable for periods of time – the form toward which Pericles points, Jacobean dramatic romance, would remain popular from 1608 through at least the middle of the next decade – but they are creatures of unpredictable change. The composite nature of historical genre-systems, which alternate periods of apparent stability with sudden drastic changes, suggests a par-

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allel to another area of systems-thinking that is influencing contemporary literary criticism: ecological systems. As ecological models have shifted from stable models of homeostasis toward “post-equilibrium” or dynamic ecologies, so literary conceptions of genre should embrace discontinuity and change.42 Thinking about genre in terms of literary environments enables critics to generate richer senses of how formal concerns both constrain and enable literary creation. The relationship between individual texts and generic identities is powerful but also flexible; this identity is constantly renegotiated, work by work and even page by page. Granting to genre theory some of the intellectual heft currently being given to environmental forms and forces will work to the benefit of both ecocritics and literary formalists. A plural and hybrid system of genre identities has the possibility of generating something along the lines of a Latourian Parliament of Genres, in which the contributing forces of all levels of artistic creation become legible. Renaissance romance is not the only genre that stands to benefit from this critical reconception and recomposition – the modern novel also comes to mind – but romance, stepchild of epic and ungainly sister of comedy, presents the best laboratory available in the early modern period for making sense of genre-systems in their messy plurality. This genre, perhaps more than any other, operates by accumulation and excess, and Pericles as much as any play highlights those wayward structures. Reimagining Polonius’s hodge-podge as a deliberate if anarchic celebration of literary plurality may open doors to reading Renaissance romance, and romances beyond the Renaissance, in terms that make sense of this enduring and popular form. Romance hybridity may allow criticism to rewrite stories of genre hierarchy into more capacious structures.

notes 1 For multiple strands of European genre theory during the Renaissance, see chapters by Daniel Javitch, Paul Salzman, and Glyn P. Norton in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, ma: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 2.2.397–8. 3 On early modern genre systems and prose fiction, see Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2006), esp. 26–41. 4 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, translated by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101–20. 5 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32; Éduoard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 6 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2015). 7 William Shakespeare, Pericles, edited by Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 1. Further citations from introduction and play in the text. 8 On the possible historical connection between the death of Susanna Shakespeare’s daughter, the writing of Pericles, and the later publication of Wilkins’s Painful Adventures, see Gossett, “Introduction,” 61–2. 9 For a helpful introduction, see Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne, vic: Re:press, 2009). 10 Latour’s description of networks as the “Ariadne’s thread” of his work appears in We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Portor (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3. 11 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54–5. 12 Ibid., 128. 13 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142–5. 14 Latour cites Greimas’s Semiotics and Language and Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds (Reassembling, 55n). 15 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 206. 16 Ibid. 17 Glissant, Poetics, 19. 18 Ibid., 62, 94. 19 Levine, Forms, 6–11. 20 Ibid., 7 (italics in original).

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21 Ibid., 4–6. This quotation omits the substantial paragraphs discussing each of these five precepts, some of which I return to below. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Ibid., 3. 24 Ibid., 40, 46. 25 Ibid., 82, 92. 26 Ibid., 113. 27 Ibid., 129. 28 For representative dates, see J.J.M. Tobin’s “Chronology and Sources” in the Riverside Shakespeare. Tobin dates Pericles 1607–08, along with Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. The three other romances appeared in 1609–10 (Cymbeline), 1610–11 (Winter’s Tale), and 1611 (Tempest). See Riverside Shakespeare, 86–7. 29 See, for example, Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s Pericles and the Acts of the Apostles,” Christianity and Literature 49 (2000): 295–309; Robert Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1994). 30 William Shakespeare, Pericles, edited by Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004). 31 Several of the most influential Renaissance romances, including The Faerie Queene and The New Arcadia, foreground their own incomplete status. 32 On the replacement of male martial prowess with female heroism in Renaissance romance, see Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern England (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 33 See, among many others, John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds., Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in the English Renaissance (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); Linda McJannet, “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors,” in Playing the Globe, edited by Mason and Vaughan, 86–106. 34 On Shakespeare’s interest in the eastern Med, see Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009). 35 On Twine and Wilkins, see Suzanne Gosset’s Arden 3 “Introduction,” 49–50, 55–63, and passim. 36 On Pericles and Odysseus, see ibid., 153–4.

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37 On the connections between these scenes and Sidney’s Arcadia, see Victor Skretkowicz’s introduction to Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1987). 38 Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, 65–83. 39 The Confessio Amantis contains more than one hundred stories. 40 “Aquawoman” is my earlier reading of Marina’s oceanic qualities (At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, 82–3). 41 For a partial survey of Elizabethan prose romance, see Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate Publishing, 2006). 42 On post-equilibrium ecologies, see Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a literary consideration of Botkin’s ideas, see Steve Mentz, “Strange Weather in King Lear,” Shakespeare 6, no. 2 (2010): 139–52.

11 Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance Stuart Sillars Munday’s three-part romance, published in 1580, has attracted little critical attention, being known, if at all, as a source for The Merchant of Venice. The edition by Jack Stillinger1 makes available its text and adds valuable critical and contextual commentary, and this is usefully supplemented in a detailed analysis of the book’s form by Paul A. Scanlon.2 Significantly, however, neither of these makes serious engagement with the volume’s illustrations or its overall form and design, Stillinger merely noting the original uses of many images and Scanlon wholly ignoring them. The omission is a large one. The twenty-three woodcuts appearing in the first two parts of the story are, as I shall argue here, a major element of the overall significance of the text, with much to reveal about its own identity and its place, and by inference that of other contemporary romances, in the larger literary, publishing, and reading practices of the period. The images are an essential part of a complex network that, perhaps as a result of the habitual academic separation of texts into genres, perhaps because Zelauto may easily be dismissed as a very early example of Munday’s work, and not least because the book itself exists only in a single copy held at the Bodleian Library, has too long gone unnoticed. One aspect of this relationship has been suggested in a study of a more general kind by David Davis.3 In exploring depictions of Elizabeth I, Davis examines the link between Munday’s text and the book from which thirteen of its woodcuts are taken, Stephen Bateman’s The Travayled Pilgrim, focussing on an image showing Queen Elizabeth in procession (Figure 11.1). In the earlier book, the Queen is shown within a winding, recessive

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perspective culminating in Death enthroned, appearing precisely above Elizabeth. In Munday’s text, the figure of Death has been crudely stopped out, and above the image the following text appears: Let all true English harts, pronounce whyle they have breath: God save and prosper in renown, our Queene Elyzabeth. Viuat, vincat, regnat, Elyzabetha As the Queen is shown in profile and Death frontally enthroned, the inference is clearly that Elizabeth is not subject to his power. Davis persuasively asserts that, whereas in Bateman’s 1569 text the inference is that even monarchs live under the sway of death, in Munday’s, published eleven years later, the political situation prohibited such an assertion, and the Queen is shown without such limitation. Two further points should be added to Davis’s remarks. One is that the sheer crudeness of the excision draws attention to itself, in visual parallel to the exhortation “Viuat” that appears exactly above the deleted figure of Death and the lineation that earlier appeared above it, emphasizing that death is not present, a reminder to those readers familiar with the earlier use of the image that it has now been changed, to show that death is not a powerful force over Elizabeth. This serves to draw attention to the second point. The figure of Death in the original is presented in exactly the full frontal perspective used to present Christ in Glory in Bateman’s earlier Batman upon Bartolomeo, and thereafter the accepted iconography for portraits of reigning monarchs, beginning with Richard II and including Elizabeth herself. For those who recognized it, the resonance of such a compositional allusion would surely have been strong, suggesting in visible terms the immanence of death within the personhood of rule. The woodcut’s alteration is crude, certainly, but the very awkwardness draws attention to the original, and the difference between the two images and their meanings and political attitude are made clear to anyone aware of the earlier text. There is a balance here, again not mentioned by Davis, in the frontispiece to Munday’s work (Figure 11.2). At its foot, after the date of publication, an early hand has added “22 of

Figure 11.1 Anthony Munday, Zelauto, 34. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Douce mm 474, p. 34. 170x130 mm (6.7x5.1⬙).

Figure 11.2 Anthony Munday, Zelauto, frontispiece. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Douce mm 474, frontispiece. 170x130 mm (6.7x5.1⬙).

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Eliz,” 1558 being the twenty-second year of the Queen’s reign. In the cartouche at its foot is written “1558–45. 1603,” indicating the years of her reign at its conclusion. Clearly the political significance was apparent to the anonymous reader who made this annotation; and this and the link to Bateman’s work are both factors that extend far beyond the single image and the very important relationships that Davis draws from it. Important in itself, this modification of an actual woodcut plate from an earlier text is part of a more extensive dimension of the images in Zelauto, in that Bateman’s work was not the first to employ them. The Travayled Pilgrim relies for much of its text as well as the design of many of its woodcuts upon El Cavallero Determinado by Hernando de Acuña, itself, according to its title page, a verse translation of the prose by Emperor Charles V.4 This in turn – as the title page again asserts – reworked designs from Le chevalier délibéré by Oliver de La Marche.5 The history of the images thus reveals them as significant elements in texts concerned with moral progress, together with the nature of monarchy and belief in Catholic Europe during the very late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. As Davis points out, Munday has skilfully appropriated and reconfigured an image originally employed to celebrating a Burgundian, Catholic dynasty, directly beneath the hand of Death, to present the Protestant, Tudor reign of Elizabeth, enhancing through alteration its own immortality. The use of Catholic iconography is not, of course, unusual in the Elizabethan period, exploiting to the full the parallels between the virgin queen and the Virgin Mary. But what is striking here is the visual appropriation from two celebrated earlier texts, which places Munday’s romance within a different kind of political theology. The result is important itself in terms of the status of the romance genre and the place of Zelauto within it; that it is made largely by the images suggests its rarity within the genre, both in the form and style of the images and in the very fact of their appearance, far from usual within the tradition of the literary romance. While this particular appropriation has so far drawn critical attention, it is only one of the large number of woodcuts taken from Bateman’s volume, which were bought by the printer-publisher John Charlewood from its original publisher Henry Denham in 1579.6 In The Travayled

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Pilgrim, the illustrations supplement the narrative by adding immediacy through a series of visualized moments, contributing their conceptual stillness to the unfolding allegorical progress, so that the text combines two major forms of Renaissance organization of the world as imagined and understood. The same is in essence true of their use in Zelauto, but there are fundamental differences. One is that they have no captions to link them with moments of the story; the other, that individual images occur more than once in the sequence of the story. The obvious reason for this, at first sight, would be economy, saving expense through repetition. But when combined with the absence of captions, this recurrence suggests something rather more revealing about the way in which the book’s material identity and the way in which it was read are both constructed. The larger significance of the use of images from Bateman’s work should not be overlooked. For Munday, at the start of his career, to be associated with Stephen Bateman, author of Batman upon Bartolomeo, a lengthy and comprehensive, not to say encyclopaedic, work whose author was a respected cleric and writer, would surely have been valuable – as valuable, perhaps, as the dedication to the Earl of Oxford, whose arms appear on a verso page facing the beginning of the book’s dedicatory preface. The use of woodcuts from earlier works in English books was widespread at this time, the most frequently noted case being that of Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes,7 which employed the original cuts from Alciati, Sambucus, Paradin, and some other Continental works of the kind along with its own English texts.8 This suggests that the use of images extant in other settings was for reasons other than simply economic. Whitney’s appropriations place its emblems within the burgeoning European tradition of emblem books, an important indication of the status of the English work. The use of Bateman’s images by Munday and Charlewood – an important sharing of responsibility noted by Davis as a key element of sixteenth-century publishing in England – reflects a similar imposed transfer of significance. The Travayled Pilgrim is a Christian allegory of the path through life towards death and salvation, a narrative of the way of the soul later made familiar in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The use of images from such a work suggests that Munday’s book is not simply an entertainment, a vain

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bauble of a genre already encountering critical response, but something from which sober moral lessons may be learned. One recurrent aspect of this is shown in a detail of the image of Elizabeth, that also figures in several other woodcuts in Zelauto taken from Bateman’s book: the figure of the horse on which the Queen is mounted. In the allegory of The Travayled Pilgrim the animal represents reason, making visually actual the concept of the intellect as spiritual guide through the earthly journey – “reason thy viceroy in me,” in Donne’s words. The longer iconographic history of the horse adds to this a further layer of allusion, coming as it does directly from the designs of Leonardo for his two projected statues of Roman emperors and subsequently employed by Albrecht Dürer and others. There, the image is of the horse as embodiment of power, reflecting the rider’s aristocratic force. Its significance in this manner was well known at the time of Munday’s writing and beyond. Shakespeare makes playful reference to it in the “breeding gennet” stanzas of Venus and Adonis,9 and a horse of quite clearly the same design appears in the frontispiece of Samuel Rowlands’ 1632 version of Guy of Warwick10 and, in rather cruder form, in the anonymous 1689 version of Sir Bevis.11 In The Travayled Pilgrim, the horse adds to this thrust a spiritual function, manifesting inward self-control rather than outward display. Its subsequent absorption into the narrative of Zelauto suggests an attitude of mind typical of later Renaissance emblematic and narrative play, in which the developmental force of copia as imaginative extension of an earlier form reveals associations both comically irrelevant and deeply serious. In this way, the detail may perhaps be seen as offering in little the larger structure of the first book of Munday’s romance, as something both apparently diverting in its exotic storytelling and more seriously suggestive of the way of the soul, the complex tracery of involuted narratives itself an allegory of the spiritual progress apparent in the earlier volume from which the image is taken. This should not, of course, be taken too far: but it does suggest at another level the richness of Zelauto’s text and, most particularly for the purposes of this discussion, its dense and, for want of a better word, rhizomic relationship to a number of earlier textual genres and structures.

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Seen in this light, Munday’s text becomes not something to be dismissed as an incomplete early work but something much more serious: an attempt to bring together the romance with other forms regarded as more valorous within the pantheon of contemporary writing. While the woodcuts in Bateman’s book are used in a clear narrative sequence, each relating to a specific stage of the central figure’s spiritual journey, and supported both by a caption and by the continuing awareness of the place of each figure in the unfolding allegory, the relation between word and image in Zelauto is more fluid. Some, including and perhaps most importantly that of Queen Elizabeth discussed above, are linked to significant verbal statements. More frequently, however, they are either included within the letterpress to mark changes of setting, or placed at the heads of chapters to define location or event. Most striking is the use of some woodcuts more than once, in similar but far from identical situations of the narrative. The most direct use of this occurs in the cut showing a three-masted galleon facing towards the right, which is used on pages 29 and 36 of the original edition.12 In the first, it comes at the end of Zelauto’s account of his time with Ursula, beneath the final sentence of the text: “we journeyed to S. Lucas, and within fewe dayes I tooke shipping into the so famous bruted realme of England.” This is presented next to a marginal gloss clarifying the text’s movement with the sentence “Zelauto goeth with the Merchants to S. Lucas, so towards England.” The next verso page is headed “Heere Zelauto telleth how with cer- / tayne English Merchauntes he sayled into Eng- / land, and what happened vnto him.” The placement of the image is thus part of a carefully constructed mise-enpage, contributing to the larger design of the text as a whole by marking the end of one narrative section and the beginning of another. In this way the ship becomes part of the book’s sequence through precise placement within its sequence of events as well as its visual identity. This suggests a considerable subtlety of design unusual in the few illustrated romance texts of its time and later, hinting at its importance in other dimensions, as will be discussed below. In its second appearance (Figure 11.3), the same cut comes towards the close of Zelauto’s account of what he saw in England, coming just after the image of Elizabeth in a royal progress already discussed, and

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introduced by a reference to “this seemely Shyp whereto I have spoken” at the foot of page 36. The page that follows begins with a short verse spoken by Zelauto: In Countryes cause, I mount upon the Seas, with shivering shot to daunt my furious foe: It dooth me good all strife for to appease, to keepe my Land free from all forrain woe. God save my Prince, that keeps a Navy huge: In time of neede to stand for her refuge. Immediately after this assertion of Elizabethan maritime force – an assertion which many sailors at the time, and the majority of present-day historians, would have found difficult to share – the image of the galleon appears again. On the following recto, page 37, Astræpho speaks in awe of Elizabeth’s England as described by Zelauto, and a gloss reinforces this by describing “The admiration of Astræpho at the passed tale of Zelauto” (38). Here it is perhaps pertinent to point out that “tale” at this time does not automatically refer to a fiction but may be used in the oed’s sense 3, “that which one tells,” as opposed to sense 5, “A mere story, as opposed to a narrative of fact” – an ambivalence which will become important later in my discussion. As in the previous use, the mise-enpage is carefully constructed, Zelauto’s verse about Elizabeth’s navy set in a larger, and rather elegant, italic, so as to occupy the whole upper part of the page and so balance the woodcut’s place beneath, before the next page returns to the usual black-letter of the dialogue between Zelauto and Astræpho. Important here is the subtle difference in significance of the two uses of the ship woodcut. In the first it is the actual ship in which Zelauto voyages to England. In the second, it has changed into a representative and emblem of the “navy huge” allegedly maintained by “my Prince,” Queen Elizabeth. Strikingly, though, there is no difference between the merchant ship of the first appearance and the naval vessel of the second, a revealing yet quite implicit statement of the relation between privateer and official vessel of the time, an elision achieved within the text and made manifest in the repeated image. Striking, too, is the precision

Figure 11.3 Anthony Munday, Zelauto, 36–7. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Douce mm 474, pp. 36–7. 170x130 mm (6.7x5.1⬙).

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of typography and layout so that the narrative dialogue, gloss, and woodcut all come together to mark significant moments of event, in this case to present the important physical and narrative departure. The use of the same image to present both suggests a special kind of visual imagination to mark such a moment, moving above fictional narrative of the kind experienced in a later novel to something more symbolic and functioning at a deeper, yet perhaps more widely recognized, level. To this should be added the source from which the cut was obtained: A regiment for the sea: conteyning most profitable rules, for all coastes and countrey.13 An expanded version of a manual of seafaring and navigation dating from 1567, this was itself reprinted in 1577 and 1580, and in six further editions up to 1601. That Zelauto uses a cut from the 1574 edition imbues it with a more serious quality, placing the voyages of the central figure within a larger sociopolitical frame, balancing and extending the moral force of the images inherited from Bateman. That the woodcut includes the arms of Lord Admiral Clinton, the dedicatee of the Regiment, enhances this: that it is the largest woodcut of a ship in volumes of all kinds published in the second half of the sixteenth century14 further underlines the stature of Munday’s work and its material presentation. This complexity is shared in the other main use of an image on more than one occasion. This is the image of three figures seated around a table, which appears on three occasions, twice in part one and once in part two (pp. 12, 20, and 64). The first (Figure 11.4) comes beneath a heading that presents the event: “Astræpho and Zelauto goeth to / dinner, and their talke after / they had well refreshed themselves.” That three figures and not two are shown may easily be attributed to lack of concern, reflecting Stillinger’s comment about the woodcuts that “generally they have little relevance to Munday’s text.”15 But this first usage suggests a larger and more general use of the image. The page opening in which it appears is given over to a general discussion of the pleasures of conversation, introduced by a gloss beneath the image: “Honest talk passeth away the time pleasantly.” This is, of course, a frequent topic in writing of all kinds at the time, being the basic structural principle of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano through Hoby’s translation, and embracing the song “Pastime with Good Company” reputedly by Henry VIII. On the facing verso appear quotations on the subject from Cicero and Cato,

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continuing onto the next page with lines from Lucullus and references to Aesculapius and Tully. The point, then, is that the image presents a celebration of relaxed, intimate conversation, rather than a precise account of the situation of the story. It is this that reveals what is arguably the major function of the illustrations, which marks this book off from later illustrated fictional narratives, and which suggests something of major importance about the operation of Zelauto. Rather than presenting images that are directly related to the characters, situations, and events, it offers larger statements of circumstances, both literal and metaphoric, almost as meditative entities, to introduce or conclude sections of the book. The result is not to effect greater emotional and experiential involvement with the text as in the manner of the modern novel – by which I mean the bourgeois novel of reader involvement from the later eighteenth century onwards. In this way, the text stands revealed as not merely a reading document of pure pleasure and idle amusement, something the romance was at the time of Zelauto often accused of being. That this distancing is accompanied by, and indeed presented within, a text the physical identity of which displays considerable complexity and richness reinforces this sense of readerly distance. Every page includes marginal glosses, something generally associated with texts of factual or descriptive intent; the text moves into italic for passages of verse; each section is introduced by the caduceus employed to suggest the beginning of a new section in serious factual texts; and the mise-en-page suggests considerable care in design to ensure that all elements appear with equal force and clarity. Add to this the presentation of the main outline of the story before the main narrative and the sophistication of plotting structure noted by critics, and it becomes clear that Zelauto works in a manner more complex than do the majority of romance narratives of the period – and here it is worth recalling that it appeared before the Arcadia and John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, the two major pillars of late-sixteenth-century romance. My concentration on woodcuts repeated in different settings should not be taken to lessen the use of the others. While the image of Elizabeth is significant in a major political sense, the others are also important in their presentation of the narrative with something of the

Figure 11.4 Anthony Munday, Zelauto, 12–13. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Douce mm 474, pp. 12–13, 170x130 mm (6.7x5.1⬙).

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complexity of a moral progress, achieved through what we might call the kinetic energy of association through their earlier appearance in The Travayled Pilgrim – a text that would have been well known through having appeared in multiple editions before the purchase of its cuts by Charlewood, an act that itself suggests the text’s value as a publishing document. Each woodcut appears at a key moment, generally at the beginning of a new section, where it both slows the reading process and reinforces its importance. This it does in two ways, both stressing the excitement of the events by showing Zelauto about to engage in combat of some kind, or in another moment of tension, working with the verbal narrative by intensifying the action and encouraging the reader to move forward within it. But the significance of such engagements is deepened by the allegorical resonance the images bring with them from their earlier use in Bateman’s allegory; and both are strengthened by the precision of layout already mentioned, giving the full text of word and image a unity and force not common in illustrated romances, or indeed many illustrated texts of other kinds, from the period and later. What emerges from all this is the conclusion that, in the complexity of textual design both material and conceptual, Zelauto presents itself alongside literary texts of serious factual interest, defining itself as something far more worthy of serious consideration than many earlier or contemporary works. Keeping the reader at bay in the use, and the manner of use, of images that bring with them a history of serious moral exploration is one dimension of this, and one much overlooked in the limited discussion the work has received. It is not the only one to have done so; but, taken within the book’s larger identity, this technique reveals Zelauto as something remarkable in its day, paradoxically making it much more significant than do claims that it is one of the most important early novels. This apparently deliberative location of the text within a larger, more serious discursive tradition is indicated at the outset of the text in what in present-day parlance would be the title page but in the vocabulary of the time would be termed the frontispiece. The difference is important: borrowed from architecture, the term indicates a fronting statement of the identity and purpose of the structure, and in its bibliographic usage

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thus reveals this first recto page as a presentation in words and images of the identity, the purpose, and often the key narrative elements or ideas of the book. Unusually in romances of the period, the frontispiece is of the form generally found in works of more serious genre – medical, historical, or philosophical books that lend themselves to the presentation of deities, personified abstractions, or other features represented emblematically, together presenting the books’ contents in visual synoptic form. The two romances mentioned above, along with many others, are more immediate, generally presenting the central figure of the story in a contemporary representational style. By contrast, Zelauto follows the more complex synoptic design, comparable within the romance tradition only with the 1593 extended version of Sidney’s Arcadia.16 Yet whereas the iconography there is complex,17 relating both to the narrative and to Sidney himself, that in Zelauto is far less straightforward. It follows the usual pattern of a series of design elements surrounding a central text giving the title and other information, yet relating these to the text is not easy. The title is flanked on the left by a figure holding two tablets, traditionally thought to show Moses, and here made surer by the inclusion of horns, based on a mistranslation of light issuing from the prophet’s head. At the left is a figure holding a harp, traditionally King David. Above is a bare-breasted figure, perhaps suggesting nature, and strapwork embellishments of a kind associated with Dutch design. Centrally at the foot, a winged head appears above an empty cartouche atop which on both sides crawls a snail. On either side appears a horned demon, each with a grasshopper in flight before its face. The snail traditionally symbolizes sin and laziness; the grasshopper, referring to the locust, suggests either one of the plagues of Egypt or conversion to Christianity, John the Baptist having fed on locusts. Seen together, the emblems suggest a religious allegory of some kind, but one bearing no specific relation to the content or progression of Zelauto. Along with the emptiness of the cartouche at the foot, this suggests that the plate has been taken from another source, as yet unidentified – a suggestion supported by the break in the lines running across the whole design just above the lowest passage of the design that contains the demons and the cartouche.

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The reason for the use of an emblematic title page which has no direct relevance to the book that it fronts is at first hard to explain, save for reasons of simple economy. The full title perhaps helps: Zelauto THE FOVNtaine of Fame. Erected in an Orcharde Of Amorous Aduentures, containing A Delicate Disputation, gallantly discoursed betweene two noble Gentlemen of Italye. Given for a freendly entertainment to Euphues, at his late arivall Into England. By A. M. Seruant to the Right Honourable the Earle of Oxenford. Honos alit Artes. Imprinted at London by Iohn Charlewood. 1580. This places the book firmly in the tradition of the romance, making its reference to Lyly’s Euphues a nicely contrived parody of its syntactic style. But at the same time it recalls the much more extensive titles found in learned dissertations on physicke or botany, so that again there is a combination of seemingly opposite modes of address, enhanced by the appearance on its verso of the arms of the Earl of Oxford. All this suggests a desire to present the volume as a serious work in its own right, amplified but by no means undermined by the comic incongruity this represents; and it is a duality that recurs throughout the book, finding its most immediate statement in the woodcut illustrations that appear throughout its first part.

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Zelauto is not the most significant of the Tudor romances, but in its textual and material design it is teasingly suggestive of the relation between romance and other kinds of writing now fenced apart by the applied discipline of genre, of the use of illustrations as part of a text, and (perhaps most beguilingly) of the practice of reading that it suggests. The importance of the book as Munday’s first work has been stressed by Paul A. Scanlon, who claims that if finished it would have been one of the most sophisticated narrative structures of its time – an assertion echoed by Stillinger’s introduction to his edition. To this should be added the complexity and richness of its printing. The text in black-letter, stressing its heritage in the longer romance tradition, is enriched by passages of prose or poetry in a larger italic, and marginal glosses of a frequency approaching those in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar of 1579, just a year before Munday’s volume. This adds to the textual diversity presented by the use of images from a moral allegory and a manual of seafaring, some of which occur more than once in the book, all coming after a frontispiece borrowed from a source as yet unidentified which shares the elaborate synoptic design of volumes of all kinds of literary and scientific natures. This has serious implications about the nature of Zelauto as a special kind of romance text. Stillinger describes it as the “fifth or sixth of the Elizabethan novels” and argues that, had it been completed, it would have been “one of the most structurally sophisticated novels of the period.”18 The first comment assumes that all early fictional prose falls into the same, later, generic category; the second allots praise which, while in many ways quite justified, overlooks one of the major achievements of the book’s design and identity. Like many retrospective applications of terms and concepts, often associated with a race to find the first instance of their appearance, the labelling of Zelauto as a novel or proto-novel is reductive and misleading, blunting the precision of both orders of writing that it seeks to unite. Images and design are one aspect of this larger, different importance, but there is another that marks the text out as something remarkable: the repeated use of the same cuts. This suggests that the volume was read in a manner quite different from that suggested by the use of the word

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“novel.” Repetition acts against the habit of reading in which the reader is brought into the experience of the narrative’s events and characters by offering a continuous, evolving visual parallel to those presented in the verbal text – the process later deplored by Coleridge as “a kind of beggarly day-dreaming”19 and diagnosed by Queenie Leavis as “[l]iving at the novelist’s expense.” The stratagem of keeping the reader at bay has already been employed in the opening pages of the book, which outline the whole story, taking away the dynamic of suspense important in much fiction, then as now, and offering a rather different kind of enjoyment to the reader, an order of distanced familiarity that, in preventing identification with character and event, throws the interest more directly on the aesthetic, material form of the book. The approach has much to suggest about the identity of Zelauto. In one sense it becomes almost a metafictional contemplation on the romance genre, encompassing as it does many traditional elements but repeatedly distancing the reader from them. It would be intriguing to suggest this as representative of late-sixteenth-century reading habits, but that would be to take this too far. At least, though, in conjunction with the iconographical significances taken over from the earlier uses of most of its woodcuts, and the typographic variation that surrounds them, it suggests that the book places itself within a broader and more serious literary frame. In this it moves beyond the common conception of the romance as a frivolous form of entertainment, and reminds us of the sheer complexity of the Tudor printed book.

notes 1 Anthony Munday, Zelauto The Fountaine of Fame, edited by Jack Stillinger (Carbondale, il: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963). 2 Paul A. Scanlon, “Munday’s Zelauto: Form and Function,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 18 (1980): 11–15. 3 David Davis, “‘The vayle of Eternall memorie’: Contesting Representations of Queen Elizabeth in English Woodcuts,” Word & Image 27, no. 1 (2011): 65–76. 4 El cavallero determinado Traduzido de lengua francesa en castellana por H. de Acuna [put into verse from a prose translation of the Emperor Charles V], y di-

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6

7 8

9 10 11

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rigido al Emperador [etc.]. Anvers: en casa de I. Steelsio, 1553. 21 cuts (1 on titlepage) by A. Silvius [?]. Oliver de La Marche, Le chevalier délibéré (Paris: Guy Marchant or Antoine Caillaut, for Antoine Verard, 1488; second ed., Gouda, France: Collaciebroeders (?), 1489; manuscript, Flandres, ca. 1484). The sale was recorded in the Stationers’ register on 31 August 1579. See Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers in London, 5 vols., 1875–77, 1894, vol. 2 (London: Privately printed, 1875), 359. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Frans Revelenghien, 1586). The borrowings are listed in full by John F. Leisher in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes and Its Relation to the Emblematic Vogue in Tudor England (New York and London: Garland, 1987), 502–8. I have discussed this in more detail in Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61–8. The Famous History of Guy Earle of Warwicke (London: E. All-de, 1632). The famous and renowned history of Sir Bevis of Southampton: giving an account of his birth, education, heroick exploits and enterprises, his fights with giants, monsters, wild-beasts and armies, his conquering kings and kingdoms, his love and marriage, fortunes and misfortunes, and many other famous and memorable things and actions, worthy of wonder; with the adventures of other knights, kings and princes, exceeding pleasant and delightful to read. Printed for W. Thackeray at the Angel in Duck-Lane, and J. Deacon at the Angel in Gilt-Spur-street, 1689. The title, itself mirroring the synoptic function of many earlier frontispiece designs, also reveals the degree to which the more serious, hieratic functions of the horse design have moved into the sphere of what might be called the more relaxed, recreational reading of the romance in its latest incarnations. Throughout, page numbers refer to the edition of 1580 which, although surviving in the unique copy in the Bodleian, is freely available in photographic reproduction at Early English Books Online (https://eebo.chadwyck.com/ home). London[?]: H. Bynneman for T. Hacket, 1574. stc 3422. See the illustrated catalogue of woodcuts depicting ships in Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–1603, Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 166 (Tempe, az: Arizona State University, 1998), II, 103–13. Stillinger, in Zelauto the Fountaine of Fame, 190.

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16 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended (London: printed for William Ponsonbie, Anno Domini 1593). 17 It is fully explored in Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England 1550–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 59–65. 18 Stillinger, in Zelauto the Fountaine of Fame, vii, x. 19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited by James Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford, uk: Clarendon, 1907), I.34n; Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), 235.

Part Five Aesthetics and the Politics of Form

12 Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia Catherine Bates More of a “literary and textual strategy” than a distinct literary form, genre, or mode, as such (one of the “parts, kinds, or species” of literature, as Sidney might call them), romance promiscuously attracts and attaches itself to all of these, and in any combination, to make, in its adaptation of and to epic, pastoral, chivalric, allegorical, and other such forms, for a positively Polonian profusion of categories.1 It is therefore difficult to generalize, especially about a formal matter such as endings, except perhaps to say, along with Patricia Parker, that the “strategy” of romance is typically one of “delay”: that is, it is a form that in one way or another problematizes questions of closure and, with them, of reclamation and restoration.2 For the purposes of the present essay, Sidney’s Arcadia therefore presents itself as a test case. Composed between 1577 and 1582, the first version of Sidney’s romance – a complete narrative based on the five-act structure of Terentian comedy and now known as the Old Arcadia – was not published until 1926.3 Although it circulated in manuscript well into the seventeenth century (ten of these manuscripts still survive), and was described by Fulke Greville as being “so common” in 1586, this version of the text was subsequently lost to view and did not reappear until Bertram Dobell rediscovered three of those manuscripts in 1907.4 Revised and massively expanded by Sidney between 1582 and 1584, the second version, now known as the New Arcadia, was left unfinished, although whether this was for internal reasons (the text in its new form had become “unfinishable”) or external ones (Sidney died unexpectedly in 1586, aged only thirty-two) is unknown: the possibilities are not, of course, mutually exclusive. In 1590 the revised text was published by Greville in its incomplete form, and in 1593 it was published again by Sidney’s sister, Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, this

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time with the ending of the Old Arcadia tacked on in order to complete the truncated text and provide it with a conclusion. This composite text came to be the “Arcadia” that was published and read for the next three centuries and more. Quite apart from the content and form of Sidney’s text, therefore, its complex compositional and publication history could be said to constitute a romance in its own right, comprising as it does so many of the “memes” that are instantly recognizable as belonging to that tradition: an aristocratic text hidden largely from view, its maimed status unknowably the result of design or chance, rescued by a loyal friend, restored to wholeness by a caring protectoress (Sidney and his sister both play on the motif of the text as an outcast or orphaned “child”), its earlier iterations lost and then found.5 This romantic history of the romance continues to affect the way in which the Arcadia is received, read, and understood. The Old Arcadia begins when Pamela and Philoclea, the daughters of Arcadia’s ruler, Duke Basilius, being seventeen and sixteen, respectively, come of marriageable age. Clearly, what their father ought to do next is to arrange the dynastic alliances that would ensure the preservation, continuity, and good health of the body politic by regulating the “flows” of blood and property through those normal circuits of exchange that effect and legitimize the transfer of power: that is to say, through the traffic in women. Notwithstanding Sidney’s advice in the Apology for Poetry that the poet should depict what “should be,” however, such an ideal of exemplary good governance would have made for a very dull story.6 The narrative thus launches on an errant path in which Basilius does not do this but – having little “care for his country and children” and being, rather, “desirous to know the certainty of things to come” (oa 5) – chooses to consult the Delphic oracle instead. Punished for seeking what is not his to know, Basilius thereby unleashes the multiple delinquencies that, through the classic transgressions of class and gender, constitute the body of the text. The princes of Thessalia (Musidorus) and Macedon (Pyrocles) who arrive on the scene – and who, under normal circumstances, would have made for very eligible sons-in-law – are forced by Basilius’s pastoral retirement (a vain attempt on his part to evade the oracle’s dire predictions) to disguise themselves as a shepherd (Dorus) and an Amazon (Cleophila), respectively. As a result, confusion

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reigns: Pamela falls in love with the former, seemingly her social inferior, and the rest of the family all fall in love with the latter, presumed to be a woman by Basilius, perceived to be a man by his wife Gynecia, and vaguely understood to be something between the two by the baffled and inexperienced Philoclea. The entanglements that follow – in which, among other things, Musidorus abducts and nearly rapes Pamela, Philoclea sleeps with Pyrocles, Basilius commits “adultery” with his wife (mistaking her for Cleophila), and Gynecia inadvertently poisons her husband with a love-potion (mistaking him for Cleophila) – culminate in a trial in which, while Pamela is spared as her father’s rightful (though still, of course, unmarried) heir, Philoclea is committed to life imprisonment in a nunnery, and the queen and the princes are condemned to die. Only at this point, the crisis in the narrative having been reached, is disaster duly averted. Basilius comes back to life (not poisoned after all, it turns out), everyone is exonerated, the marriages that should have happened at the outset are arranged and celebrated, and in their prompt production of children – “the son of Pyrocles [and Philoclea] named Pyrophilus, and Melidora the fair daughter of Pamela by Musidorus” (oa 417) – the future of the family and the kingdom is finally assured. Basilius’s symbolic resurrection defies death by supplying the continuity of a comic “ending” – which is not really an ending at all since another pen is invoked to pick up the story where Sidney’s leaves off in order to recount the “admirable fortunes” (oa 417) of this next generation – in place of the finality of a tragic ending which would have yielded no further issue, either familial or textual. For all its definitively sudden appearance, however, the deus ex machina that thus restores the errant course of events to the straight and narrow path it should have been on from the beginning has, of course, been there, in the background, all along. Not only is the oracle fulfilled, that is to say (all its dire predictions coming to pass), but so is the wider providence in which human hubris and folly are ultimately punished and corrected by a higher power, and the divine plan (a benign one, naturally) is shown to unfold in its own sweet time, quite unaffected by any mortal attempt to know or to direct it. To the extent that the short-term future of the immediate year ahead (as foretold by the oracle) is held inside or contained within the longerterm, trans-generational future that this wider providence more slowly

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unfolds, the Old Arcadia could be said to approximate the “fat lady” that Patricia Parker sees as a figure for romance more generally: “dilation,” she writes, “occurs in the context of propagation or generation, the postponing of death through natural increase.” This is “one of the principal arguments against the premature closure of virginity,” she goes on, “and a meaning crucial to the potential identification of the rhetorical tradition of ‘increase and multiply’ with the more fruitful dilation of another kind of ‘fat lady’ – the pregnant female body, promising even as it contains and postpones the appearance of an ‘issue.’”7 With their baroque plot-complications, tangle of interlaced narrative threads, and copia of characters and descriptions, the errant stories that romance typically tells generate an abundance of rhetorical matter (mater) that expands, dilates, and fleshes out what would otherwise have been the barest bones of a very short and very boring story (in this case, had the poet stuck to depicting what “should be” and not come up with the oracle at all, that of Basilius’s successful succession planning). The story as it gets to be told eventually arrives at the destination it was destined to arrive at anyway (characters get married, get pregnant, and give birth to the next generation), only now it does so by means of the devilishly circuitous paths and multiple adventures that their errors have set in motion, and that go on to fill the vastly expanded space and time accordingly. As it swells to fill the infinitely expandable gap between beginning and end, one might say that the Old Arcadia, like romance more generally, comes to provide an extended meditation on the notion of repletion or fullness.8 Bodies (whether those of the princesses or of the text) get to be filled up; the oracle gets to be fulfilled; providence or destiny gets to be fulfilled; and if the resulting contents have contented the reader the while as well, then it would not be an exaggeration to say that wish-fulfilment has been achieved all round. The New Arcadia is entirely different. So much so that the inevitable, though no more answerable, question arises: not why this text was left unfinished but why the Old Arcadia was – why, that is, Sidney evidently felt compelled to go back to the latter, not to provide (in telling the “admirable fortunes” of Pyrophilus and Melidora) the next instalment of an ongoing story, but rather to submit the original narrative to radical revision. While the actions of Basilius that initiated the story remain

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more or less the same, and while Book I of the New Arcadia retains some of the pastoral atmosphere of the Old, virtually everything else is changed. The omniscient narrator of the first version gives way to a multitude of voices, as the proliferating back-stories come to be narrated by individual characters and inflected with their particular and far from impartial points of view. If the deus ex machina of the Old Arcadia had been present all along, in a benign, overseeing kind of way, the patron deity of the New – the goddess-like Astraea-figure, Urania – is a dea abscondita conspicuous by her absence, her departure mourned, as the story opens, by the “hopeless” shepherds, Strephon and Claius.9 In Ovid’s version of the myth, Astraea had been the last of the immortals to leave the “blood-soaked earth” in despair at the human cruelty, wickedness, and injustice that characterized the new Age of Iron.10 Before Basilius’s errant actions complicated matters, the Old Arcadia had opened in a world of peace and plenty that was reminiscent of the Golden Age, and to this its happy ending seems to promise a return. In the godforsaken landscape of the New, by contrast, any such age of primary order and propriety recedes into the distant past, and the Age of Iron has long been in the ascendant. The princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, are born into a world already torn by the cursed hunger for war and gain, as, indeed, were their parents, and theirs before them. When Euarchus (Pyrocles’s father and Musidorus’s uncle) ascended the throne of Macedon, we learn that he – himself an orphan, his father and grandfather having both died young – found his country to be in a state of chaos, “disjointed even in the noblest and strongest limbs of government” (na 159). Although he eventually succeeds in persuading them that “he with his people made all but one politic body whereof himself was the head, [and] even so cared for them as he would for his own limbs” (na 161), the situation nevertheless remains sufficiently dangerous – “because the war continued in cruel heat betwixt him and those evil neighbours of his” (na 163) – that he is forced to send his infant son, Pyrocles, away to Thessalia to be brought up by his sister (Musidorus’s mother); Pyrocles’s mother and Musidorus’s father are both dead. If the body politic in the Old Arcadia begins and ends full and whole, replete and reproducing, in the New it is already in pieces long before the action starts and remains so for the duration, the disintegration of that body being figured throughout in

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internecine conflict and interminable family feuds, in the tormented self-division of new characters like the suicidal Amphialus who is terminally at war with himself, and in the graphic depictions of bodies mutilated and eviscerated, whether in battle – Argalus, to cite just one example, dies from “so horrible a wound that his guts came out withal” (NA 411) – or on the political stage, as in Cecropia’s mock beheadings of the princesses (none of this is in the original version). If the Old Arcadia ends by looking forward to the next generation, there is no such issue in the New, neither of mothers (no-one gets pregnant in the narrative present of the revised text) nor of rhetorical material: the story ends abruptly in medias res, in the middle of a sentence in the middle of what would, had the original structure been maintained, have been the middle of five books. It was this bleak outlook, presumably, that Mary Herbert sought to correct by grafting the ending of the Old Arcadia onto this raw stump of the New, thereby, as the prefatory letter to her 1593 composite edition put it, “supplying the defects” (oa xlix). Indeed, her supplied ending might very aptly be described as a “supplement” insofar is it completes, rounds off, and perfects the unfinished story while also remaining infinitely additive and expandable in its own right: the possibility of new issue and new stories inherent in this “ending” allows for the perpetuating without interruption of the romance’s continued defiance of death.11 Mary Herbert effectively re-pastoralizes the Arcadia not only by restoring the entr’acte eclogues that Greville had excised from his 1590 edition, but, more importantly, by reinstating the central function of the princesses as guardians of the proper (that is, legitimate) transmission of property and power. This and nothing else (that is, the virtuous, obedient, fecund, aristocratic female body) is what holds the body politic together: maintains it, grows it, nurtures it, and ensures that there is something to hand down. For Sue Starke, sixteenth-century pastoral romance thus pays extraordinary attention to the “moral authority of the virginal aristocratic daughter,” for the “family body is a vital symbol of civic and moral order, an order which the daughter of the family has a key role in maintaining. While the son’s family identity is fixed at birth … the daughter’s status as a member is one of pure possibility, of unrealized and unpredictable future exchange value.”12 It is not just that the

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princesses are unimpeachably chaste in the New Arcadia (any hint of the premarital sex and rape attempts of the Old being removed), but rather that their reintroduction, in the conclusion supplied to the 1593 text, as the mothers of the generation to come serves to restore and refill the body politic that had been so thoroughly ripped apart and emptied out by the political horrors of Sidney’s revised text. In the composite Arcadia, Mary Herbert’s reapplication of a comedic ending ensures that tragedy is averted, loss reclaimed, order restored, debt redeemed, the deus absconditus recalled, and providence provided for. Her restorative labours had been prompted in large part by Greville’s issue of the New Arcadia three years earlier, for his 1590 edition had not only, to her mind, discourteously displayed “to the common view” (oa xlix) her brother’s imperfect, unfinished text (bluntly breaking off in mid-sentence without explanation) and cut out the eclogues, but had also subdivided the text into chapters and to these added his own, sometimes tendentious, chapter summaries “for the more ease of the readers” (na lvi). By means of these chapter summaries, Greville had brought to bear on Sidney’s text the “politically cynical strain of Tacitean Neostoicism” that was increasingly being identified with the court faction to which Sidney had belonged (now led by the Earl of Essex) and that seems to have reflected Greville’s own sombre, gloomy, pessimistic, and arguably misogynistic political views.13 A major preoccupation of this group was the question of how subjects (especially aristocratic subjects) should respond to situations that bore, in their view, all the hallmarks of tyranny, Greville’s particular take on this problem being to locate the answer in scenes of acute and chronic female suffering: the “passive resistance appropriate to women” providing him with a model of how the powerless might resist oppression, and manifesting itself in the stoicism if not martyrdom of an idealized female constancy.14 One such scene in the New Arcadia is that in which the princesses, imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental torture by their evil aunt, Cecropia, respond to their torments with what Greville summarizes as “sweet resistance” and “patience.”15 Pamela, for example, is described thus: “with so heavenly a quietness and so graceful a calmness did she suffer the divers kinds of torments they used to her that, while they vexed her fair body, it seemed that she rather directed than obeyed the vexation” (na 421–2).

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There is an undeniable misogyny, not to mention sadism, at work in the readiness with which women are made to bear the symbolic brunt of political oppression and then heroized if not eroticized for it: a trend that goes back to Lucretia. Whatever Sidney’s own views on the subject – and, as Roland Greene suggests, the New Arcadia certainly opens up and expands the meanings of “resistance” that were available to him at the time, trying out various scenarios of such resistance, from the political to the emotional – Greville’s chapter summaries may have foregrounded this misogynistic aspect in a way that Mary Herbert found objectionable.16 Nevertheless, for all its difference from the latter’s composite version of the text, Greville’s 1590 edition could still be said to operate within a broadly providential framework. As a cultural production symptomatic of what Helen Cooper calls the “great age of faith” (roughly, the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries), romance was capacious enough to absorb, cogitate, and rehearse understandings of the Christian, providential universe that took very different confessional and sectarian forms during that time.17 True, Greville does not relocate the unfolding of providence within the pregnant female body, in the swelling and issue of which the divine plan for the stewardship of nature, preservation of (human) creation, and continuance of political order and stability (all these being contiguous) is made consolingly visible. In his version, by contrast, God’s dark plan is not only thoroughly obscured from human view but remains profoundly and doctrinally unknowable: its baffling turn of events, often in defiance of human reason or justice, being the ultimate test of human faith in a divine revelation that refuses to reveal itself. To this extent, while Mary Herbert’s version might be truer to the pastoral atmosphere and comedic structure of the Old Arcadia, there is a case for saying that Greville’s is, if not “purer” or “artistically superior,” then truer to the darker spirit of the New insofar as it follows in the direction that Sidney’s revisions themselves seem to take: away from the happy affirmation of God’s providential plan, in the eventual working-out of things to everybody’s satisfaction, toward putting faith in that plan very severely to the test.18 Either way, however, whether it affirms that faith or tests it, the Arcadia has increasingly come to be read as an exemplum of Protestant poetics, in which the charge or debt incurred by human sinfulness

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is understood to be redeemed in Christ.19 Since Protestant orthodoxy dictates that human subjects can have no part to play in their salvation, any more than they can know or direct God’s plan, believers are required to surrender themselves wholly to his will, regardless of the doubts or torments he sends their way. Yet this itself “redounds to [the believer’s] benefit,” as Andrew Weiner writes, “for by making God perforce the author of his salvation he makes his salvation sure.”20 As Philippe du Plessis Mornay put it, “if neither yt world nor man can dischardge man against God; what remayneth to doe it, but God himselfe, whom Religion must offer to man for his discharge; euen God mercifull, to God iust; God a paymayster, to God the creator”; since human beings are so deeply “indetted to god” and yet unable to discharge that debt themselves, God solves the problem by being both “the creditor and the payer” at once.21 Helpless in effecting their own salvation or “discharge,” the very incapacity of Protestant believers serves as a constant reminder of their dependence on and indebtedness to God: the result being, in practical terms, a life of daily repentance. Although such repentance will never save the sinner, Weiner notes, “the consequence will be another repentance, another turning – or returning – to God,” thereby setting in motion an “ever repeating pattern” that makes the emotional life of the godly Protestant “extraordinarily rich and varied” (or, alternatively, quite exhausting).22 For Robert Stillman, this movement between the knowledge of human indebtedness and the faith that it will ultimately be redeemed or repaid is what constitutes the “economy of God.” “By the sixteenth century,” he writes, “the metaphor of a divine economy had long enabled providential readings of history – God’s stewardship and preservation of his creation – just as it had framed early Christian understandings about the nature of that history’s central event, the Incarnation of Christ.”23 In what remains of this brief essay, I would like to probe this orthodox Protestant reading of Sidney’s romance somewhat, and to suggest that – insofar as it is possible to separate out his revised text from the ways in which it subsequently came to be shaped by the hands of his sister and friend – the Arcadia may have been straining to go beyond these retrospectively providentializing designs, no matter how different from one another. In particular, I would like to suggest that the New Arcadia

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has the potential to go beyond even Greville’s stark assessment of the human condition, in which utter powerlessness in the face of situations that are emotionally felt to be intolerable and cognitively known to be unjust comes to place an immense pressure (one, arguably, no less intolerable and unjust) on the faith required to believe that God’s providential plan is neither of these things. When taken to extremes, what is the point at which such faith breaks? Critics are now generally more open to the possibility that thoughts of a sceptical if not downright atheistic nature could be and were entertained in the sixteenth century, and that – even if such thoughts were often represented as those of an advocatus diaboli whose purpose was nothing other than to test and so strengthen Christian resolve – that did not render them either “unthinkable” or “thinkable only as the thought of another.”24 The New Arcadia famously stages just such a debate between the wicked, atheistic queen, Cecropia, and her virtuous, godly niece, Pamela, in a scene that takes place during what has come to be known as the “captivity episode.” At the beginning of Book 3, the princesses and the disguised Pyrocles (in this version taking the name of the Amazon Zelmane) are treacherously lured to an ominously dark “place in the woods” (na 315) where they are promptly set upon, hooded, abducted, and carried off to and subsequently incarcerated within Cecropia’s brooding, sinister, and gothic castle. There they remain for the rest of Book 3, this violent raptus from their pastoral surroundings marking the symbolic rupture of that generic mode, and the captivity episode that follows having, therefore, no parallel in the Old Arcadia. It is in this setting that Cecropia – who is doing everything in her power to arrange the marriage between her son, Amphialus, and one or the other of his cousins, the princesses (from Cecropia’s perspective, either would do), so as to secure the Arcadian succession (in plotting such a dynastic alliance she is effectively doing what Basilius should have done all along, paradoxically making her, for all her Machiavellian schemes, conform to the role of a wise and good ruler) – comes to tempt and torment Pamela in her prison cell. There she finds the princess busy with her embroidery: working upon a purse certain roses and lilies, as by the fineness of the work, one might see she had borrowed her wits of the sorrow

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that then owed them, and lent them wholly to that exercise – for the flowers she had wrought carried such life in them that the cunningest painter might have learned of her needle, which with so pretty a manner made his careers to and fro through the cloth as if the needle itself would have been loath to have gone fromward such a mistress, but that it hoped to return thenceward very quickly again, the cloth looking with many eyes upon her, and lovingly embracing the wounds she gave it. (na 354–5) This purse provides the occasion for a disquisition between the two women on whether the universe is governed by chance (Cecropia) or design (Pamela) and, by extension, on whether a belief in the operation of a divine and benign intelligence overseeing human affairs is therefore tenable (as Pamela holds) or not (as Cecropia does). Pamela gets the better of her aunt in the argument, and although this does not spare her further torments (on the contrary, it makes them worse and submits her and others to the horrors of the torture and mock beheading scenes still to come), it nevertheless prompts most critics to read the debate as dramatizing the triumph of belief over unbelief, and as setting Pamela – by now a proto-Protestant heroine if not a saint – over her diabolical and nay-saying temptress who thereby shrivels down to little more than a thoroughly negative example. As a result, Pamela’s purse has come to be invested with symbolic significance: read as a synecdoche of her own martyred body (like the cloth, willingly “embracing the wounds” to which it is subjected) and of the larger work of art to which it belongs. A “little world made cunningly and presided over by its natural deity, the demiurgical Pamela,” the purse comes to represent, in miniature, the idealist “golden” world that the poet is enjoined to create in the Apology for Poetry – perfect, patterned, and providential – and that, in such readings, the Arcadia is taken to be.25 These idealized readings, however, do not necessarily consider every aspect of Pamela’s purse – they have a way, indeed, of closing some of them down – and it is on these less than ideal aspects that I would like, therefore, to dwell a little here. In the first place, for example, while it may be perfectly formed, the purse is, for all that, small: rebuffing Cecropia’s exaggerated flattery of her handiwork, Pamela herself values it “but even as a very

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purse” (na 356). As Lynne Dickson describes it, the purse is “carefully designed … judiciously planned and justly proportioned.”26 If this does indeed represent the poet’s golden world, then it also draws attention to everything that such an aesthetically pleasing, controlled, and well-executed work of art is unable to compass or contain: namely, a world that is manifestly ugly and cruel, a world in which unspeakable atrocities take place, among them the incarceration and torture of this princess of the realm. Like Kalander’s equally well-wrought and “well-arrayed” (na 14) garden, to which it is often compared, Pamela’s purse is bounded and bordered: a beautiful but small, closed, limited, ineffective, decorative, and ultimately pointless object, its quality of constrained-ness emblematizes the situation of its imprisoned maker. As Pamela is locked inside her prison cell, so her perfect purse is contained within a radically imperfect world that it is manifestly incapable of containing itself, even when her aesthetic values of “perfect order, perfect beauty, perfect constancy” (na 360) and correspondingly ethical values of virtue, faith, and reason are firmly believed to reflect those of “the heavenly Maker of that maker.”27 Pamela and her purse could be said, rather, to represent the limitedness if not inadequacy of such an aesthetic, which can operate only within a strictly delimited, idealized, garden-like, pastoral space but is woefully impoverished and completely at sea outside. Cecropia, by contrast, while she might be Pamela’s nemesis, could also be said to represent the diabolical double or perverse reverse of the Apology’s “right poets”: an evil genius whom Sidney uses “not to restrain his own fiction but to set free the darkest side of the ‘Zodiac of the wit’”: to range in a place where the imagination, the thinkable, know of no restriction.28 If so, the debate would not, ultimately, be between Pamela and Cecropia but rather between “Sidney’s desire for an overarching form, for a symmetrical architectonic, and the centrifugal forces of the imagination that challenge all teleology.”29 In the second place, Pamela’s purse is empty. Notwithstanding the view that, with “her purse full of Philippist ‘proofs’ about God’s existence,” Pamela provides a “rich reminder” of Sidney’s piety, the purse she actually embroiders has, literally and symbolically, nothing in it.30 Her embroidered flowers reify, perhaps, the “flowery style” that characterized what one critic has called the “ornamentalism” of the period: the

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idea of Ornatus gratia ornatus (“ornament for the sake of ornament”) that, however lovingly cultivated by Renaissance writers and theorists, is still capable of arousing in modern critics the suspicion of something “external, detachable, or superficial.”31 Cecropia, who behaves as if the purse is being made for Amphialus, ingratiatingly tells the princess that, it being “by this hand wrought,” her son will “account it not as a purse for treasure, but as a treasure itself ” (na 355). As Lisa Klein has argued, such gifts of embroidery – “hand-made by handmaids” – exemplify female agency in the period, in the reproduction of culture and the exchange of gifts: a “gift of needlework allowed the giver a moment of elaborate, often complex self-presentation that was at once personal and social, and often political as well.”32 Although the practice had declined from the mid-to-late 1570s, it had been customary until then for the higher nobility to give Elizabeth “purses filled with coins,” and often elaborately embroidered as well, in the ritual exchange of New Year’s gifts that served purposes of self-promotion quite as much as generosity.33 In Pamela’s case, however, since she is clearly not making the purse for Amphialus nor proposing to give it to him, any such stratagem or agency on her part must be disallowed. Cecropia speaks of how Amphialus will find the purse “worthy to be pursed up in the purse of his own heart” (na 355) – emotional blackmail, of course, and all part of her ploy to persuade Pamela of the personal and political advantages to be gained from making a dynastic match with him – but the empty reticule points rather to the princess’s refusal. She is not going to marry Amphialus nor bear his child, future heir to the Arcadian kingdom and opportunity for further, endless romance-production. In symbolic terms, the empty purse of the New Arcadia represents the obverse of the replete, pregnant, full body and “fat lady” of the Old and, as such, it is more of a piece with the chopped bodies and the disabled and disjointed body politic, in which whole families are capable of dying out, that in the revised text is everywhere apparent. This skin container – the word “purse” derives from Latin bursa and Greek βύρσα, in both cases meaning leather or hide (clearly the material from which such objects were originally made), and from the Middle Ages could be used to denote the scrotum or any cavity within the human body resembling a pocket or purse – is void, eviscerated, turned inside-out, and looks likely to remain

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that way (it certainly does in the unfinished text).34 While not morally bankrupt by any means, Pamela and her beautiful empty purse are nonetheless incapable of redeeming the unspeakable situation that she and every other person in the New Arcadia is in.35 In the Old Arcadia – its world still governed, happily, by the providential conceits of comedy and pastoral – a crisis could be engineered in the knowledge that it would be averted just in time, in the faith that God’s good plan was for the preservation and continuity of his creation, and in the surety that the unrepayable debts of a congenitally foolish, enamored, imperfect humanity would ultimately be forgiven by “the creditor and the payer.” In the New this never happens. On the contrary, Pamela’s virtuous resistance only makes things worse for everybody, and the paradoxical scenario of the permanently indebted/discharged Protestant subject seems to be parodied in the complicated transaction whereby, in embroidering her purse, Pamela becomes a kind of internal pawnbroker of her own emotions: “she had borrowed her wits of the sorrow that then owed them, and lent them wholly to that exercise.” In this world, like that of King Lear (which famously borrows from the New Arcadia, of course), providence is nowhere to be found: not just in the sense that foreknowledge (from Latin providere) is absent, but in the material sense that no provisions have been set by for an uncertain future, there is nothing to purvey, and humanity in this all-too-observable world is left unhoused, unaccommodated, unprovided for.36 In the New Arcadia (as in King Lear) nothing is full, filled, or fulfilled, and the crisis is not averted in time. Mary Herbert had to do it herself, retrospectively sewing a providential outcome onto the end like a prosthetic limb on an amputee. Her action ensured that the Arcadia would remain and continue to be read as a romance, but at the price of its tragic vision of a world that is not to be borne.

notes 1 Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9, emphasis in original; Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd, revised and expanded by R.W. Maslen (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2002), 97.

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2 Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979), 5. 3 In volume 4 of The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912–26). 4 Fulke Greville, letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, November 1586, quoted in H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1996), 416. 5 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3; Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), edited by Jean Robertson (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press 1973), 3, 1, hereafter oa. 6 Sidney, Apology, 87, 92. 7 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 15. 8 “To fulfil” and “to fill full” are related. When used in the sense of “to carry out or bring to consummation (a prophecy, promise, etc.) … to work out one’s destiny; to develop one’s gifts and character to the full” (oed, sense 5), the verb “fulfil” was “a literal translation of the Vulgate adimplere, implere, from Hellenistic Greek πληροῦν … literally ‘to fill’”: see oed, s.v. “fill” v. and “fulfil” v. All references to http://www.oed.com. 9 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), edited by Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3, hereafter na. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.149–50: “victa iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit” (“Piety lay vanquished, and the maiden Astraea, last of the immortals, abandoned the blood-soaked earth”), translated by Frank Justus Miller, revised by G.P. Goold (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1916). 11 On the supplement, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, md: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144–5. 12 Sue P. Starke, The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 1, 38. 13 Joel Davis, “Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke,” Studies in Philology 101, no. 4 (2004): 401–30, at 408. 14 Ibid., 417. 15 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, written by Sir Philippe Sidnei (1590), 325v.

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16 Roland Greene, “Resistance in Process: On the Semantics of Early Modern Prose Fiction,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 32, no. 2 (2010): 101–9. On Mary Herbert’s alternative position, see Richard Wood, “‘The representing of so strange a power in love’: Philip Sidney’s Legacy of Anti-factionalism,” Early Modern Literary Studies 16 (2007), unpaginated. Julie Crawford, conversely, reads Mary Herbert as an advocate of female “constancy,” in Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30–85. 17 Cooper, The English Romance in Time, 5. 18 Elizabeth Dipple, “The Captivity Episode and the New Arcadia,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 70, no. 3 (1971): 418–31, at 420, 423. 19 See e.g. Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2008), and Tiffany Jo Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 20 Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 12. 21 A vvoorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion, written in French: against atheists, Epicures, Paynims, Iewes, Mahumetists, and other infidels. By Philip of Mornay Lord of Plessie Marlie. Begunne to be translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney Knight, and at his request finished by Arthur Golding (1587), 364. 22 Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney, 16. M.J. Doherty describes this constant renewal of gratitude as Calvinism’s “lightsome side,” in The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1991), xxviii. On moral reformation as an ongoing process, see also Stephen M. Buhler, “Pre-Christian Apologetics in Spenser and Sidney: Pagan Philosophy and the Process of Metanoia,” Spenser Studies 13(1999): 223–43. 23 Robert E. Stillman, “Fictionalizing Philippism in Sidney’s Arcadia: Economy, Virtuous Pagans, and Early Modern Poetics,” Sidney Journal 27, no. 2 (2009): 13– 37, at 14, 18. 24 The influential positions put forward by Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: A. Michel, 1942), and Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social En-

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26 27 28 29 30 31

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ergy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1988), 22, respectively, in response to earlier histories of unbelief such as George T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1932), William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, ca: Huntington Library, 1966), and D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972). For contrasting views, see: Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1988); William M. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1992); Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: from Savonarola to Bayle (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1979); Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1995), and The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1994). Claire Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–29, at 123; Sidney, Apology, 85. See also Stillman, “Fictionalizing Phillipism,” 31: “Nothing is left to chance either in that providentially ordered universe of Pamela’s conception or the economical arrangement of Sidney’s own text.” Lynne Dickson, “Sidney’s Grotesque Muse: Fictional Excess and the Feminine in the Arcadias,” Renaissance Papers (1992): 41–55, at 52. Sidney, Apology, 86. Ibid.; Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1985), 247. Levao, Renaissance Minds, 248. Stillman, “Fictionalizing Philippism,” 19. David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 156, 147; on the “flowery style,” see ch. 3, esp. 79–84.

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32 Lisa M. Klein, “Your Humble Handmaid: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1997): 459–93, at 484, 483. 33 Jane A. Lawson, ed., The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges, 1559–1603 (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20. 34 See oed, s.v. “purse” n. 35 It is Shakespeare who makes the purse/person pun: see The Merchant of Venice, I.i.138, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, ma: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 36 See oed for the related terms “providence” n., “purveyance” n., and “provision” n.

13 “Romancy-Ladies”: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women Hero Chalmers Expatiating on “our Feminine Sex” in Sociable Letters (1664), Margaret Cavendish offers the view that Their Passions and Appetites govern and rule the whole course of their Lives … the truth is, the chief study of our Sex is Romances, wherein reading, they fall in love with the feign’d Heroes and Carpet-Knights, with whom their Thoughts secretly commit Adultery, and in their Conversation and manner, or forms or phrases of Speech, they imitate Romancy-Ladies.1 These comments reflect the (by then) well-established conception of romance as especially associated with female readers and apt to privilege the high emotion to which women were perceived as being particularly susceptible.2 Cavendish, who evidently knew of Mary Wroth’s Urania, also refers to romance as favoured by women writers.3 The critical consensus now recognizes that the notion of a predominantly female readership for romance is a construct designed to help negotiate anxieties about the form’s potentially deleterious moral and social impact on readers of either sex.4 Nevertheless, as Helen Hackett shows, the idea of women’s propensity to be readers and even writers of romance seems to have become widely accepted by the mid-seventeenth century.5 Hence the present chapter starts from the premise that women writers engaging with the mode at this point in time are inevitably aware that their texts will be read in the light of existing assumptions concerning the relationships between women and romance. While such assumptions might support the idea of their possessing particular authority as writers

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deploying the form, they could also lay them open to identification with the kinds of foolishness or moral laxity outlined in Cavendish’s aforementioned comments. This study examines what kinds of impact such a context has on the formal and stylistic properties of some of their writing. In the case of Cavendish, even though the paratexts to her works of prose fiction overtly acknowledge the influence of romance, the structure of the texts themselves consistently works to deflect the reader from becoming over-invested in the “Passions and Appetites” she fears they might feed.6 In one of many prefatory epistles to Natures Pictures (1656), for example, Cavendish issues a specific caveat: As for those Tales I name Romancicall, I would not have my Readers think I write them, either to please, or to make foolish whining lovers, for it is a humor of all humors, I have an aversion to … if I could think that any of my writings should create Amorous thoughts in idle brains, I would make blotts insteed of letters; but I hope this work of mine will rather quench Amorous passions, than inflame them. (C2r–v) These remarks can be read as informing her repeated emphasis on the idea that the volume is structured so as to intermingle different genres and moods.“Though my work is of Comicall, Tragicall, Poeticall, Philosophicall, Romancicall, Historicall and Morall discourses,” admits Cavendish in a later preface, “yet I could not place them so exactly into severall Books, or parts as I would but am forced to mix them one amongst another” (C4r). Meanwhile, the next epistle compares this approach to that of “Musicians … when they … mix light Aires, with solemn Sounds” (C5r). Although she professes concern that she has therefore “disadvantaged” the work, she also recognizes that such a formal device functions as a means of deterring readers from becoming too bound up with their affective responses: the Comicall & Tragicall discourse mixt together, will so disunite the thoughts and disturbe the passions as my Readers will hardly fix their minds seriously on either, for my Readers will be like one that is intreated or rather pulled by two Companions, one to

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accompanie him to a house of Mourning, the other to a house of Mirth … in which posture, he can neither condole with the unfortunate, nor mourn with the afflicted. (C5r–v) Although this chapter is not chiefly concerned with the minutiae of Cavendish’s own approach, her aesthetic of generic mixing as a means of avoiding readers’ over-immersion in the powerful feelings valorized by romance acts as an illuminating starting-point from which to begin examining works by her two contemporaries, Lucy Hutchinson and Hester Pulter. For the form and style of their texts are, I suggest, shaped by a desire to mine the mode’s capacity to dramatize strong emotions whilst simultaneously offering a critique of the ethical pitfalls attendant upon the ascendancy of such feelings. The handling of romance conventions in Hutchinson’s Genesis epic, Order and Disorder, and in Pulter’s manuscript romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, both apparently composed between the mid-1650s and the late 1660s, has so far received little critical attention.7 In juxtaposing the two texts we can moreover investigate how far their authors’ apparently divergent politics impinge on their approach to the form.8 Although, during the 1640s and 1650s, romance became markedly identified with royalist literary culture, the comparison between Hutchinson and Pulter illustrates how the equivocal response to the role of the passions in this type of writing reaches across partisan boundaries.9 For both the republican, puritan Hutchinson and the royalist Pulter, their self-scrutinizing deployments of romance advance rational self-control as a means of combatting both subjugation to excessive emotion and – by extension – submission to harmful religious and political passions. In the preface to the printed edition of the first five cantos of Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder (1679), she portrays the rejection of romance as the mark of a mature puritan poetics. Her regrets that “the vain curiosity of youth” led her to embark on her translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura have, she claims, driven her to “have recourse to the fountain of Truth.” Stressing repeatedly that Order and Disorder is in no way a work of the imagination, she asserts that “had I had a fancy, I durst not have exercised it here; for I tremble to think of turning Scripture into a romance.”10 Yet, as Robert Wilcher has noticed, her text does go

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on to exploit elements of the romance tradition.11 Wilcher situates this aspect of Order and Disorder as an extension of its deployment of the techniques of “scriptural paraphrase” most notably exemplified in the work of Francis Quarles, who offers Hutchinson a precedent for expanding on the often fairly minimal biblical narrative even by dramatizing the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists.12 In Wilcher’s analysis such a strategy bears comparison with the embellishments of history defended by Madeleine de Scudéry and other proponents of seventeenthcentury French heroic romance in expounding the “doctrine of vraisemblance.”13 Hence, he regards Hutchinson’s deployment of romance convention as a means through which she allows herself to lend vividness and authenticity to the unfolding of Genesis in later manuscript books of Order and Disorder. Yet, although her preface links the success of her text as a work of spiritual edification to the extent to which her public will have been “affected and stirred up in the reading as I have been in the writing,”14 Wilcher’s account tends to elide the degree to which the text’s engagements with romance underline the moral dangers of stirring up intense emotion. Indeed, the clear sense in which certain passages mark themselves out as engaging secular literary forms such as romance warns readers to remain alert to their propensity to be drawn into indulging passions that deflect them from the path of religious virtue. Where the opening of Hutchinson’s preface figures the exercise of writing Order and Disorder as “fixed upon to reclaim a busy roving thought from wandering in the pernicious and perplexed maze of human inventions,”15 the recourse to romance serves as a means of representing the persistent attraction of both the errancy inherent in its narrative structure and the pull of literary invention. The figuring of the eruption of powerful passions through the medium of a morally suspect literary mode is first apparent in the fallen Eve’s lament in Canto 5. For Wilcher, the framing of the lament is designed as an anxious admission of “its fictional status,” but, beyond this, I would suggest, it points more specifically to the fact that Hutchinson is consciously engaging the genre of the female complaint with all its connotations of sexual ruin and unbridled emotion, sometimes bordering on insanity.16 In lines that recall the mise-en-scène of Shakespeare’s

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A Lover’s Complaint (1609) – “From off a hill whose concaue wombe reworded, / A plaintfull story from a sistring vale”17 – the narrator intimates: “Methinks I hear sad Eve in some dark vale / Her woeful state with such sad plaints bewail” (5: 399–400, my emphasis). Although Adam responds to Eve’s extended lament by admonishing her lovingly to seek comfort in the certainty of God’s providential benevolence, the narrator’s own reaction shows her drawn towards Eve’s uncontrolled grief: “Ah! can I this in Adam’s person say, / While fruitless tears melt my poor life away?” (5: 599–600).18 Here the seductions of a profane literary form represent the temptation to tether the spiritual elevation of the soul to the dead weight of the body and its passions. Only “if our souls above our sense remain, / And take not in th’afflicted body’s pain,” counsels the narrator, can we free ourselves from an “anguish … nourished with complaint” (5: 609–10, 612, 614, my emphasis). Hutchinson’s choice of language here finds an echo later on, in Canto 14, during what Wilcher refers to as the “affecting romance episode,” which recounts the plight of Hagar and Ishmael, driven out by the latter’s “injurious stepdame” and “wandering in a desert waste and wild” (14: 352, 340).19 Yet, alongside such markers of the romance mode, we once again encounter the problem of unfettered emotion as Hutchinson features the desperate Hagar “abandoning herself to sad complaint” (14: 348, my emphasis). Just as the narrator in Canto 5 castigates herself for indulgence in “fruitless tears” that “melt … away” her life, so an angel sent from God admonishes Hagar, “why melt’st thou so in tears?” (14: 394). The sense that human “despair” (14: 415) constitutes a failure of faith in divine providence is underlined by the fact that the toils of Hagar and her son end in their being blessed by the Lord. Whereas the cantos involving Eve and Hagar use profane modes of romance and female complaint to amplify the temptation toward excessive grief, the prelude to Hutchinson’s account of the destruction of Sodom mines the fault-lines between epic and romance in a manner that draws attention to the destructive effects of intense sexual passions. The dichotomy is played out as Hutchinson draws on the epic topos of recreational games but (like Milton in Book II of Paradise Lost) goes on subtly to undermine the apparent wholesomeness of such pursuits.20

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When Sodom’s children, who with day begun Their works, conclude them with the setting sun And to the circumjacent fields repair For the refreshment of the evening air. Here th’active youths to several games addressed. In manly exercises some contest, Run, wrestle, pitch the bar; in Jordan’s streams Some swim with art, some cool their sweaty limbs … (13: 3–10) The sensuality that has begun to creep in with the image of the young men bathing their perspiring bodies breaks the surface of the narrator’s description in the lines which follow: All several ways to one conclusion move: Tempting or tempted to lascivious love. The elder sort, sitting without the gate, Seem gravely to discourse affairs of weight; Meanwhile among the sportful youth their eyes Are searching to find out a lustful prize. (13: 11–16) The generic deformation of epic in the direction of romance here challenges readers to recognize their own potential to be drawn towards the carnal titillations of the episode – a failing that resonates with the story of Lot’s wife which soon follows. Like the “sportful youth” of the city turning their “eyes” towards the “lustful prize” or the readers beguiled by a story of sexual transgression, Lot’s wife fails to control the desires which give rise to her fatal voyeurism: “she longed to see how Sodom was o’erthrown” (13: 177). Turning back to witness the city’s destruction, she flouts divine sanction and famously finds herself turned to a pillar of salt and “for example to her sex remained, / Teaching how curious minds should be restrained” (13: 173–4). The harsh disciplining of Lot’s wife’s curiosity is reflected in the way that Hutchinson’s description of her fate seems to choke off any of the erotic gratification commonly offered to readers by the blazoning of female beauty in

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amatory discourses such as romance. Instead, readers find themselves presented with an anti-blazon: A sudden horror all her blood congealed. Her lips and cheeks their lively colour lost; Her members hardened with death’s chilling frost; Her hands grew stiff, her feet stuck to the ground; Striving to cry, her voice no passage found. (13: 156–60) Hutchinson’s deployment of romance conventions as a means of both engaging readers and encouraging them to scrutinize the moral risks posed by the emotions and desires that forge these engagements reaches its apogee in Cantos 19 and 20 of her poem. These last two manuscript cantos deal with the story of Jacob’s exile, his love for Rachel, and her father Laban’s insistence that Jacob marry his other daughter, Leah, before finally allowing him to wed Rachel. As Wilcher notices, such biblical narratives, couched in pastoral settings and concerned with banishment, wandering in the wilderness, questions of contested inheritance, and courtship, lend themselves readily to mediation through the conventions of romance.21 Recognizing that Hutchinson’s recourse to romance in Canto 19 allows her to depict with empathy the “swelling passions” (19: 407) of both sisters as they compete for Jacob’s love and offspring, Wilcher nevertheless considers that these excesses are finally moderated by puritan self-control as Rachel submits herself to God and is granted a child.22 However, this is to underplay the degree to which the volatility of romance persists into the final, unfinished canto of the poem. The idea that destructively extreme emotions have been tempered proves misleading when we consider the narrative intrigues and surging feelings which continue as Jacob plans to steal his two wives away from their hostile father. In particular, the high passions valorized by romance as a narrative medium resurface in a new guise as a way of figuring the dangers of misplaced religious “zeal.” Outraged to find that his daughters have fled with Jacob, Laban “to his gods in furious passion went,” only to discover that Rachel’s own febrile affections have led her to steal away with his graven images: “For, yet her mind / Unto her youth’s idolatry

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inclined” (20: 79, 83–4). The crescendo of violent religious feelings continues as Laban’s army “with unanimous ardour” vow to exact vengeance “in their great zeal” (20: 94, 95). It is at this point that the narrator interjects with a vehement warning against the perils of allowing flawed human passions to masquerade as religious commitment: Under devotion’s name thus they do hide The rage of their own envy, hate, and pride, Perhaps even from themselves: mistaken zeal Hath made more wounds than Gilead’s balm can heal; Engaged rash erring multitudes oft-times Into rebellious parricidal crimes; Made regal shepherds kill the gentle sheep Which the Almighty gave them charge to keep; Made subjects ’gainst their sovereigns to conspire, With civil discord set the world on fire, Made fathers sons and sons their fathers slay, Brought flourishing kingdoms into sad decay. (20: 97–108) The interruption by the narrator’s historically plangent tirade at this point serves to distance readers from the emotional engagements solicited by the sustained build-up of romance-style narration through the last two cantos. Such emotional engagements, it warns, may become the catalyst to disastrous political partisanship. The effect by which the sympathies evoked by romance are pursued and then repudiated is underscored in Hutchinson’s handling of the pastoral dimension here. For, although Wilcher characterizes the depiction of Jacob’s first meeting with Rachel in Canto 19 as drawing on “all the paraphernalia of pastoral romance,” Hutchinson’s vision of a zeal that makes “regal shepherds kill the gentle sheep” refuses to allow readers to shelter in the beguiling pastoralism of the previous canto.23 Yet, for all Hutchinson warns the reader off too comfortable an indulgence in the pleasures of reading scripture as a romance in these closing cantos, she evokes the limited human perception of her protagonist, Jacob, by suggesting that he himself cannot but perceive his toils through

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the lens of romance convention. Believing himself safe, Jacob’s sudden discovery that Laban’s host are nearly upon him assails him like the sudden twist of a romance plot complete with an epic simile graced by the stalwarts of the form, merchants and pirates: The unlooked-for spectacle surprised his sight And to his soul conveyed such dire affright As merchants have who with swift sails and oars From pirates fly till their own native shores Appear in view, and, slackening then their haste Where they the assurance of their safety placed, By some more daring man-of-war pursued And even in the harbour’s mouth subdued, On whom their chains fall with a sadder weight Than if they’d in wide seas met the same fate. (20: 125–32) Where Wilcher considers that Order and Disorder sets the vicissitudes of romance plotting against the “providential control of human lives,” these closing stages of Hutchinson’s unfinished manuscript suggest instead that the very twists and turns of romance narrative are themselves part of the providential plan but that fallen human perception prevents Jacob from fully grasping this: “for God at first did send / An unseen guard of angels to attend / His servant home, though yet he knew it not” (20: 143–5).24 The reader is granted a glimpse of the larger divine plan whilst recognizing the partiality of Jacob’s own view. Unlike Order and Disorder, The Unfortunate Florinda takes the form of a fully fledged romance with no prefatory apology. Yet both foreground the need for a discerning reader whose ethical capacities will be honed in the process of questioning their response to the conventions of romance. My contention that we should read Pulter’s text as one which expects a reader to develop through making considered judgments is supported by the fact that it seems to have been conceived, in part, as advice to a daughter. Although there is no evidence of a wider readership for Pulter’s writings, the two parts of The Unfortunate Florinda appear as

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additions to an extensive manuscript collection of poems, a number of which address her daughters.25 A notion of her romance specifically as advice to a daughter is supported by its pointed riposte to Francis Osborne’s Advice to a Son (165[5]), a text paraphrased in a set-piece debate scene between the misogynistic Don Alonsoe and one of the heroines, Fidelia, who offers an oration in favour of the female sex (328– 33).26 Indeed, Fidelia’s own narrative within the romance begins with an account of her mother’s dying words, which take the form of a series of precepts by which her daughter should seek to live, stressing above all the need to be guided by “choice and reason” rather than “customary education” in matters spiritual and matrimonial (286–7). Pulter’s surviving daughter, Anne, was twenty and possibly still unmarried and living at home in 1655, the earliest year in which the manuscript could have been composed.27 Such maternal counsel speaks feelingly to the challenges she would have faced in a world that required her to negotiate both marital arrangements at a familial level and religio-political disputes at a national one. Even were Anne already married, Pulter’s concerns here are clearly catalyzed by her thinking through the dilemmas of her female offspring. Fidelia’s mother’s privileging of “reason” over “custom” in religion and marriage is redolent of Milton’s approach in Areopagitica (1644) and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644).28 For Herman – who posits two different brief allusions to Milton – any debt to the puritan poet supports his theory that The Unfortunate Florinda is a Restoration text grounded in a critique of Charles II’s libertinism and thus a concerted retrenchment from what he regards as the unequivocal royalism of Pulter’s verse.29 Yet, although Pulter’s romance is likely to have been added to her manuscript poems between 1661 and 1662, it may well have been started in the mid-1650s.30 Whether it is a pre- or post-Restoration text, its concern with questions of personal and political liberty is, I suggest, less indicative of a specific attack on Caroline immorality than of a more subtle set of meditations on the problems faced by subjects seeking to preserve the integrity of their beliefs in the teeth of coercive power, be it sexual, religious, or governmental. Such dilemmas resonate not only with the particular challenges that may face the daughter Pulter seeks to counsel, but with her own predicament as an Interregnum royalist and with

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that of close friends and relatives who, as erstwhile Parliemantarians, must find their place in a restored Stuart monarchy.31 Pulter may have any or all of these constituencies in mind in choosing to open her narrative with a poignant example of how the reasoned choice (later advocated by Fidelia’s mother) might lead to an intelligent religio-political compromise that best preserves mental freedom under the threat of coercion. Finding herself unexpectedly shipwrecked on the Spanish coast, the “African Moorish” Princess Zabra discovers the native prince infatuated with her: “the royal Zabra, wisely considering the violence of the king’s affection, chose rather to yield upon honourable terms than to be taken by storm, modestly desiring only a little time to wipe off her tears that she might meet him with an equal affection” (273). While Zabra finds a degree of self-determination within her political subjugation by quenching the harmful impact of excessive passions (both the king’s and her own), Pulter’s two main female protagonists, Florinda and Fidelia, show themselves too ready to embrace the strong emotions that accompany the tragic potential of the romance narrative, thus providing a caveat to readers who might similarly be tempted to submerge their faculties of “choice and reason” owing to the weight of their “customary education” as consumers of the form. Fidelia’s propensity to read events through the medium of the tragic mode is offset by Pulter against a providential narrative trajectory that the heroine fails to recognize. From the inception of her own firstperson relation within Pulter’s romance, Fidelia announces it as “my intended tragic story” (286). A few pages later she once again requests permission “to go on in this tragic theme” (293) and appears positively elated in casting herself in the role of Iphigeneia when her father decides that he will “willingly offer her up (Agamemnon-like) a virgin victim to Diana” (310), rather than see her violated by the lust of a rapacious monarch. “I must confess,” she intimates, “when I heard this it did exhilarate my spirits to so noble a height that I could scarcely hide my joy from being discovered by my looks, for now I saw I had a noble cause to expire in” (310). But, just as her beloved Amandus turns out to be wrong in “expecting nothing but a fatal catastrophe” (302), Fidelia proves to have been over-eager in imposing a tragic telos on her narrative. While she embarks on telling her tale in the belief that she and Amandus have

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been permanently sundered, both lovers find their tragic instincts confounded and we see Amandus “throwing up his eyes to heaven, adoring those celestial powers by whose providence he had the happiness to view once more his admired mistress” (336). The first part of Pulter’s romance concludes with the nuptials of Fidelia and Amandus, and the thirdperson narrator underlines the idea that it should lead the reader to reflect on the providential outcome in the face of perceived human adversity: “Thus you see that that love which began in religion and continued in virtue had (though through various afflictions) not only a durable felicity but a happy” (352). Nevertheless, the motif of characters’ attempts to direct the romance narrative towards its interface with the tragic mode becomes even more starkly apparent in the second part of The Unfortunate Florinda. Here Pulter returns to the story of King Roderigo’s (as yet) unconsummated lust for Florinda, bringing it to its inevitable conclusion in a distressing rape scene. On one level, the invocation of tragic topoi in the wake of Florinda’s violation seems an entirely fitting way to mark the enormity of the event and elicit a commensurate affective response from the reader. Yet it also offers a cautionary sense of how the matter of romance narrative may lead it to figure forth the eruption of passions whose momentum can take over the thoughts and actions not only of characters but of readers. When Florinda’s companion, Castabella, discovers that the former has been raped, she counsels her friend to try and achieve the kind of mental and spiritual liberty redolent of Fidelia’s mother’s earlier advice on privileging rational choice: “let not the sin of others provoke you (by revengeful thoughts) to sully your unspotted soul, which remains still in its virgin purity” (355). However, the all-consuming revenge drive of Florinda and her parents remains unstemmed and finds its expression through their progressive saturation in the language, images, and dramaturgy of Classical and Renaissance revenge tragedy. Responding angrily to Castabella’s pleas for moderation, Florinda retorts, “What? Have the heathens their Nemeses and Rhamnusias, their Adrasteas, to avenge their wrongs, and Christians must be put off with patience? … Medea’s napthian robe was nothing to what I intend to do” (355–7). In keeping with the tradition of Renaissance revenge tragedy, Count Julian,

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her father, chooses to seek his retribution by means of a striking coup de théâtre. After dinner … all followed him through two rooms, hung all with black, into a third which was top, bottom, and sides all black velvet. In the middle, a great black velvet chair in which sat the unfortunate Florinda all in mourning, her hair disheveled, her neck and arms naked, in each arm a vein pricked. Her father and mother in mourning stood on each side of her with their fingers on the orifices to stay the blood. (358–9) Rehearsing Florinda’s fate to the assembled company, Count Julian then announces that he has “called all you together that you might be witness of this tragic catastrophe,” whereupon he and his wife remove their fingers from Florinda’s incisions and allow her blood to flow into “two huge golden bowls set underneath to receive it, her sad parents preparing to give a period to their lives” (360). It is at this moment that the audience of guests, raised to a pitch of “rage and revenge” by this performance, vow to avenge Florinda by raising an army against her ravisher, King Roderigo of Spain. Peter Herman regards this act of collective, military revenge as a fitting culmination to an episode which he reads as adopting an “Augustinian view of rape, one that blames the rapist, not the victim.”32 Given that the rapist in this case is a monarch whose overthrow is sought by Florinda’s would-be avengers, he views such an approach to rape as reinforcing his idea that Pulter’s text is diverging from her earlier ardent royalism by regarding regicide as a legitimate action.33 Yet, where Herman detects in all of this Pulter’s repugnance at the libertine antics of Charles II, it should be noted that the ruler who attacks Florinda is marked specifically as a “usurper” and thus potentially linked to Pulter’s conception of Cromwell as tyrant (361).34 It is certainly true that the narrative has already countenanced one regicidal act of retribution for another king’s sexually predatory approaches to Fidelia, and equally true that, as Herman argues, the text echoes – but departs from – Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece by pointedly refusing to condemn Florinda to suicide, choosing instead to direct her violent emotions as a victim

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against her perpetrator, not herself.35 Nevertheless, although Pulter’s writing evokes the reader’s sympathy for Florinda’s suffering and outrage at the abuse of power over her, it raises important concerns as to the legitimacy of the violent responses of her family and friends. Once again, the reader is invited to scrutinize their own related propensity to submerge “choice and reason” in the tide of strong emotions that their “customary education” in the modes of romance or revenge tragedy may encourage them to relish. As Florinda’s father announces that he has assembled his guests to witness “this tragic catastrophe,” the reader is reminded that their own generic conditioning may predispose them to read for the voyeuristic pleasure of just such a tragic outcome. The notion of readers seeking gratification through the fulfilment of such narrative anticipation is underlined by Pulter’s heavily theatrical language as she describes the guests invited “to a banquet to which their former treatment was but a praeludium. This doubled their wonder, their entertainment having, as they said, far exceeded their expectations” as they witness the “spectacle” (359). While Herman reads the text as endorsing the avenging action to which the guests are finally goaded, the fact that it emerges out of an uncontrolled upwelling of “rage and revenge” fostered by Count Julian’s carefully staged masque of cruelty raises questions of moral legitimacy. Although Herman regards Pulter’s source at this point – Rowley’s popular play, All’s Lost by Lust – as an authority for her endorsement of a vengeful rape victim, it seems important to notice that she leaves the revenge unachieved in a manner that points the reader towards a recollection of the dénouement of Rowley’s version.36 The Unfortunate Florinda deploys the structural conventions of romance narrative to abandon Florinda’s story at a point of irresolution where her would-be avengers are gathering an army under the aegis of the Moorish monarch, Almanzor. Yet, those familiar with Rowley’s play will be aware that the recourse to the Moorish king Mulymumen’s aid ultimately fails to bring justice to Florinda and her father when his promise of succour turns to betrayal. Herman regards The Unfortunate Florinda as a “romance” turned “revenge tragedy” which then “departs from convention by dropping the tragedy” because it refuses to show the avengers dying along with the villain.37 Yet, by leaving Florinda’s story hanging in the balance, Pulter invites the reader to remember Rowley’s tragic closure in which

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Mulymumen engineers the death of the deflowered daughter and her father.38 As so often in The Unfortunate Florinda, the ends to which human agents imagine they are driving events are ultimately overruled by the unforeseen machinations of providence. As in the case of the manuscript cantos of Order and Disorder, the short, second part of The Unfortunate Florinda breaks off in the midst of the narrative, faltering in mid-sentence having jumped from Florinda’s unresolved fate back into the midst of a separate story concerning Fidelia’s brother. These failures of closure may be read as one more means by which the form and style of Hutchinson’s and Pulter’s texts disrupt excessive emotional engagement on the part of their readers. Both their texts work against the reader’s thoughtless collusion with the affective imperatives of literary form. In Order and Disorder, this becomes more overtly linked to topical political conditions as the narrator’s invective against misplaced religious zeal exposes the cost of failing to govern one’s passions. Yet, in The Unfortunate Florinda, the refusal to endorse characters’ – and by extension readers’ – over-investment in the emotional excesses associated with the tragic strand of romance narrative appears calculated to privilege reason over reflexive adherence to custom in a manner pertinent to the political deliberations of her family and friends with differing partisan loyalties. Despite Lucy Hutchinson’s more markedly Calvinist predestinarian outlook, both Order and Disorder and The Unfortunate Florinda share a sense that the narrative structures and emotional subjectivity of romance can help to evoke the rift between the spiritually clouded human perception of worldly sorrows and the unimaginable hope offered by the operations of divine providence.39 In each of these texts, the distant promise of the latter seems bound up with their unfinished status.

notes 1 Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, edited by James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, on: Broadview, 2004), 67–8. 2 Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2011), 152; Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

314

3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12

Hero Chalmers sity Press, 2000), 4–10; Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England,” in A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary, edited by Corinne Saunders (Oxford, uk: Blackwell, 2004), 121–39, at 121, 136; Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1985), 6, 41, 50–1, 111; Elizabeth Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 28, 30–2, 35. Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), A3v; Cavendish, Sociable Letters, 38, 167. See, for example, Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 4–10, 12; Newcomb, “Gendering Prose Romance,” 121–3. Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 9. See, for example, Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656), A5r, B1r, C2r; Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, edited by Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1994), 124. For dates of composition, see Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, edited by David Norbrook (Oxford, uk: Blackwell, 2001), xvi, xvii and below, 308. Eardley, in Lady Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems and The Unfortunate Florinda, edited by Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 29–31, briefly situates Pulter’s text in relation to French heroic romance. Yet only Peter Herman, “Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2010): 1208–46, and Robert Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis: Paraphrase, Epic, Romance,” English 59 (2010): 25– 42 (both discussed below), have seriously engaged the question of romance in considering either text. For these writers’ politics, see Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, xiv–xvi, xviii– xxi, xxxv–xliii; Pulter, Poems, 5–10, 18–21. For romance and royalism, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 167–210; Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72–112; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640– 1660 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1997), 233–46. Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, 3, 5. Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis,” 25, 35–40. Ibid., 28–30. Sarah Ross, in Women, Poetry and Politics in Seventeenth-Century

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17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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Britain (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2015), 191–206, reads Order and Disorder in relation to women’s biblical verse paraphrase. Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis,” 34–5. Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, 4. Ibid., 3. Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis,” 31. For the generic context discussed here, see Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and the “Female Complaint”: A Critical Anthology, edited by John Kerrigan (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1991). Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, ll.1–2, in Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 209. For a pertinent discussion of the way in which Eve’s lament becomes identified with Hutchinson’s own grief at her husband’s incarceration as a political prisoner, see Ross, Women, Poetry and Politics, 188. Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis,” 37. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., edited by Alistair Fowler (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2007), II.522–69. Wilcher, “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis,” 41. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 41. Pulter, Poems, 1, 33–4. Ibid., 21n73, 328–33, 330n285. Ibid., 21, 33n118. See, for example, John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Vol. 2, 1643–1648, edited by Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press,1959), 223–4, 543. Milton knew Pulter’s sister, to whom he addressed an admiring sonnet; see Pulter, Poems, 14. Herman, “The Unfortunate Florinda,” 1208, 1211, 1223–4, 1238–9n17. Pulter, Poems, 21. For her bipartisan connections, see Ross, Women, Poetry and Politics, 137, 139, 140: Pulter, Poems, 15, 18–19. Herman, “The Unfortunate Florinda,” 1208. Ibid., 1208, 1232–3. For Pulter’s approach to Cromwell, see Pulter, Poems, 8. Herman, “The Unfortunate Florinda,” 1225–7. Ibid., 1226–7. Anna Fahraeus, “eebo Introductions Series” introduction to William Rowley, All’s Lost by Lust, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed 21 July

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2015), outlines the evidence for All’s Lost having been first performed in 1619 or 1620 and revived on a number of occasions. She notes that its printing in a quarto edition of 1633 also attests to its popularity. 37 Herman, “The Unfortunate Florinda,” 1227. 38 William Rowley, William Rowley His All’s Lost by Lust, and A Shoe-Maker, A Gentleman, edited by Charles Wharton Stork (Philadelphia, pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1910), [V.v.] 152–93. 39 For Hutchinson’s Calvinism, see Order and Disorder, xv, xvi–xvii.

14 “The Visions of Romance Were Over”: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey Sara Malton

Every thing indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation of a heroine from her family ought always to excite. Her father, instead of giving her an unlimited order on his banker, or even putting an hundred pounds bank-bill into her hands, gave her only ten guineas, and promised her more when she wanted it. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)1

This rather “unpromising”2 moment of prudent expenditure rightly suggests that Catherine Morland’s journey will from the outset be circumscribed by financial imperatives. Importantly, Catherine’s father determines to give her guineas – gold coins – when, as Austen’s narrator tells us, he could have provided her with either bank notes or permission for an unlimited draw at the bank. His decision to present her instead with tangible, yet limited funds apparently does not bode well for her romantic adventures, placing what he presumes to be sensible restrictions on her autonomy, financial and otherwise. He may go so far as to permit Catherine to travel to Bath with the Allens, but when it comes to the governance of his daughter’s financial affairs, Mr Morland will not transfer his paternal authority to either the bank or its paper instruments. Cognizant of the perils of such intervention, he prefers to keep matters squarely in the palm of his hand.

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And he is no doubt well advised. For although Catherine is instructed by her mother to keep “some account of the money [she] spend[s]”3 while in Bath, she is proven for much of the novel to be rather unsuccessful at accounting for the intimate relationship between monetary dealings and moral integrity. Such figures as Isabella and John Thorpe exemplify the connection Austen perpetually draws between relentless expenditure and bad character or excess; the acquisition of the ability to make prudent use of both words and money, the novel suggests, is critical to the development of the contented and socially productive individual. Mr Morland’s decision to give Catherine guineas rather than notes encapsulates the crucial tension between the real and the representation, between fantasy and reality, that plays out over the course of the novel. Here, I would suggest, the novel draws extensively on forms of romance in its treatment of the heroine’s plot. Connecting Northanger Abbey to such mythical tales as Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone, and Pandora, Marilyn Gaull aptly observes that Austen’s novel embodies a tale derived from ancient courtship rituals describing adventures of a favorite daughter abandoned or sent off by her father to confront danger, find a mate, and rescue the family. She trespasses, enters a forbidden room, eats a forbidden fruit, opens a forbidden chest, and must, therefore, be redeemed by some kind of task or ordeal that often includes a visit to the underworld.4 From the story of King Midas to the fable of the Goose with the Golden Eggs, gold has long been central to stories of mythical transformation. In the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, the king’s sinister desire to see raw material made into gold is fulfilled at the painful expense, we recall, of the heroine. Distinguishing gold, the genuine article, from its mere imitation is a distinction that Austen’s unlikely heroine is repeatedly called to make in Northanger Abbey. Yet only after a rather intensive course of training can she call to account those fraudulent interventions that would disrupt her progress toward domestic and economic happiness. Compelling arguments made elsewhere by such scholars as Ian Haywood, Patrick Brantlinger, and Mary Poovey emphasize the connections that can be productively drawn between financial realities and realist

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representation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5 By turning our focus toward the relationship between finance, interpretation, and, importantly, the past – and its control – in Northanger Abbey we can, I would suggest, add a new and significant dimension to our understanding of Austen’s fiction. In its treatment of the construction and recollection of history, financial and otherwise, the novel’s engagement with romance becomes most resonant. For while Catherine’s plot reveals the extent of women’s vulnerability as a result of their relative lack of financial authority, what proves equally – and dangerously – fluid and corruptible in the novel is memory itself. As Fanny Price of Austen’s Mansfield Park observes in her well-known treatise on the operation of the mind, If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient – at others, so bewildered and so weak – and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! – We are to be sure a miracle every way – but our powers of recollecting and forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.6 Fanny links memory to the realm of wonder, to the miraculous, and, importantly, to unreliability. In Northanger Abbey, through her tendency to wonder, Catherine challenges, albeit unwittingly, a cultural tendency toward historical inaccuracy and erasure. Yet her increasing interpretive competence is significant for the particular terms of its retrospective application. She may initially wonder, but she must ultimately illustrate the strength of her ability to interpret the world around her, both financial and interpersonal, through a tempered consideration of the past. That is, Catherine must not so much remember as she must revise, calling up the past in a manner that will enable her to turn toward a more profitable future. In this regard, the characterization of the heroine’s incremental removal from the realm of wonderment anticipates the characterization of later heroines, such as Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times

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(1854), who receives from her father that fierce and well-known invective, “Louisa, never wonder!”7 As Emily Jane Cohen rightly points out, the “most ancient myths” – from the tale of Lot’s wife to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – “tell of the transgressive nature of the backward glance.”8 In its engagement with romance’s retrospective orientation, Northanger Abbey invites us to attend carefully to the complexities of Austen’s “nostalgic” project, as it may be termed. In his discussion of “Austen’s Nostalgics,” Nicholas Dames contends that “forgetting is as constitutive of selfhood in Austen as obsessive remembering is to the novelistic character of the twentieth century.”9 In this way, Austen reveals a prescient alertness to the way that novels themselves function, and will continue to function, particularly in the form of fictional autobiography, from Jane Eyre to David Copperfield. With increasing precision such novels distill the unevenness of turbulent histories of uncertainty and unrest down into a narrow vision of future happiness in their marital conclusions, “winnowing,” as Dames suggests, “reminiscience into a diluted, vague, and comfortable retrospect.”10 I would thus argue that Austen’s financial romance anticipates, especially in its portrait of Henry Tilney (a man whose very name conjures up both the ringing of the cash register and the cultivation of the land),11 the very “amnesiac” character that Dames identifies as constitutive of the nineteenth-century novel. A happy ending thus proves a kind of doubleedged sword, as marriage ensures that a woman’s history can no longer be tampered with: security, as the plots of Eleanor and her mother, Mrs Tilney, suggest, can be stifling. Catherine’s response to her father’s gift of gold thus marks an early and crucial moment of misrecognition on her part; such moments will recur throughout the novel in varying ways. For to see her father’s actions as an “unpromising” extension of mere guineas is to fail to see the power inherent in his golden gift, whose tangibility and precious integrity ought to empower the heroine in turn. It will be some time, however, until Catherine sees things in this golden light and reaps her just reward. As I shall show in what follows, attention to the novel’s engagement with forms of romance enables readers to better see the way that such moments are informed by what Ian Duncan has termed the “transformative dynamics of romance.”12 Sonia Hofkosh is right to sug-

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gest that if, as Walter Scott claimed, “Austen’s realism signals the end of certain genres of romance … it simultaneously introduces its own mode of enchantment, one especially marked by self-consciousness both in its performance and its effects.”13 In attending to Austen’s uses of romance in Northanger Abbey, we will ultimately be asked, as Catherine is, to see the value in some measure of enclosure, limitation, temperance, and mediation. Catherine’s father chooses not the unreliability of either text or orality, both of which are in this culture proven at once dangerously seductive and, given the extent of their circulation, highly vulnerable to exploitation. Instead, he opts for an Aristotelian middle way – a golden mean.14

I. Catherine Morland’s Restriction Commencing with her father’s limitation of her access to funds, Catherine finds herself repeatedly subject to a series of restrictions, not merely financial, but also physical and psychological. At various stages of the novel we find her forced to endure ongoing embarrassment, even shaming, as well as various forms of confinement or expulsion. Removed, as the romance heroine often is, from the security of the family in order to take up a quest, she soon finds herself amid the social chaos of Bath, with only the vapid Mrs Allen for an attendant – a poor substitute for a Virgilian guide. Thus ill-equipped, Catherine faces social exclusion, is squeezed by the mobs of the Pump-rooms, is subject to the corrupting influence of the Evil Stepsister/Temptress Isabella, and is captured by the Braggadocio, John Thorpe. Later, during her visit to Northanger Abbey, her humiliations redouble, as, “always preferring those [things] which she was forbidden to take,”15 she is shamefully exposed by Prince Henry Tilney and then brutally exiled into the night by his father, the wicked King of Northanger, after which time she naturally falls ill. Only through the interventions, financial and romantic, of her Fairy Godmother, the Prince’s sister, Eleanor Tilney, is Catherine’s rehabilitation and ultimate transformation into the Parson’s Wife secured. An index to her perilous position on the marriage market, Catherine’s situation is thus one of perpetual vulnerability. For, until her marriage and eventual installment with Henry Tilney at Woodston, she has literally no

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place, depending largely on the good will of others for security, society, and advancement. To thus consider Austen’s use of romance as a resource in Northanger Abbey need not, however, turn us away from the immediate cultural context of the novel. Rather, as Goran Stanivukovic contends in the introduction to this collection, such a reading has the potential to direct us toward the ways in which the romance that “haunts” such a text “becomes the source of [its] modernity.”16 As Duncan points out, “by 1850 in Britain the novel was the ascendant form for the representation of a national cultural identity … such an ascendancy took place by means of the revival of romance.”17 It is in fact through the depiction of crucial moments of misrecognition such as that which we examined above, and thus its very reliance on forms of romance, that Northanger Abbey gestures toward broader political and economic issues in the culture that might yet be more fully accounted for.18 I use the term “account” advisedly here. Northanger Abbey has of course rather a meandering history of origin itself: Austen began writing the novel in 1797, but it was only finally published in a revised version late in 1817. Notably these dates nearly coincide with the Restriction Period in England, which lasted from 1797 until 1821. Introduced by Prime Minister William Pitt, the Restriction Act occasioned the suspension of cash payments, meaning that Bank of England notes were rendered inconvertible. Edward Copeland explains that Pitt was driven to such measures “by the enormous expense of the Continental war” and that the Restriction Act was intended “to prevent the withdrawal and hoarding of gold that occurred at the threat of invasion towards the close of 1796.”19 Mr Morland’s provision of guineas to Catherine as opposed to bank notes would have therefore acquired additional significance during that span of time. Linda Brigham, among others, has demonstrated how, in this period, the “volatility of paper currency” that the Restriction occasioned in turn “facilitated poor credit practices by the banks.”20 The result was a situation of remarkable economic instability, and one to which Austen herself was hardly immune: in 1816 her brother Henry Austen witnessed the failure of the banks in which he was a partner.21 According to critics of the Restriction, such as the outspoken William Cobbett, gold preserved the individual’s autonomy, offering protection

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from the often dangerous web of interconnections made possible by a financial world that was “awash with paper” and increasingly dependent upon the extension of credit.22 As Brigham observes, for opponents of the Restriction such as Cobbett, “the money issue also offered socially progressive reasons to insist on wages in gold; ordinary wage earners were most profoundly victimized by the bank failures and currency fluctuations enabled by inconvertible paper. Thus to insist on gold, the real thing, is part of making man ‘king over himself.’”23 In Northanger Abbey, Austen insists upon gold for Catherine, as she sets out to make a queen worthy of her king by the novel’s end. Indeed, gold acquires a renewed sacramental dimension in this era of pervasive textuality, and its veneration continues throughout the nineteenth century, reaching its apex in such quest-romances as Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines or Stevenson’s Treasure Island in the 1880s. The Restriction resulted in the assignation of greater amounts of value to surface images; it was a challenge, therefore, to conventional systems of faith in real property, in tangible gold. Such a dangerous climate calls for increasing interpretive ability that, to her detriment, Catherine does not initially possess. Through its depiction of her failures, Northanger Abbey illustrates the extent to which the cultural and economic realities of the Restriction amplify the importance of the individual’s capacity for unmediated judgment – unmediated by the bank, by paper inscriptions of value, or by other individuals – in the face of ongoing misrepresentations and fluctuations of worth. Figures such as Isabella and John Thorpe, for example, gain social credit on the basis of flimsy “credit practices” that allow them entry into the beau monde. They thereby become part of the “pseudo gentry,” a group composed of individuals who, as Copeland observes, “made use of consumer goods to assert their claims to social consequence.”24 Their behaviour is emblematic of a society increasingly confronted by the exploitation made possible by an increasing lack of certain knowledge regarding individual and institutional history, financial and otherwise. Catherine’s autonomy and ability to act independently on the basis of her own judgment is for much of the novel severely circumscribed by her connection to Mrs Allen’s thoughtless consumerism and the Thorpes’ world of excess. Not grounded in anything of any substance,

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these relationships leave her most vulnerable to the whims of the market in Bath, and, by extension, to the neglect, later on, of General Tilney. Thus, Catherine’s “fall” following Henry Tilney’s confrontation and exposure of her wild imaginings regarding the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death is a fall from the world of romance – from the golden world of wonder and enchantment – into the realist economy of text and paper. For what accompanies Catherine’s increasing suitability for marriage is not merely the containment of her desires and imagination, but rather her increasing knowledge of her limited monetary value and the way that those limitations may restrict her sphere of influence and circulation. Learning from Eleanor and Henry that their father would disapprove, on financial grounds, of any connection between Isabella Thorpe and the elder Tilney son, Frederick, Catherine soon “turned her feelings … with some alarm toward herself. She was as insignificant, and perhaps as portionless, as Isabella; and if the heir of the Tilney property had not grandeur and wealth enough in himself, at what point of interest were the demands of his younger brother to rest?”25 The tensions in Northanger Abbey – between circulation and enclosure, between disorientation and knowledge – are thus concentrated in the novel’s treatment of the financial realm. Yet such a financial reading remains, as I have suggested, inextricable from the novel’s engagement with romance, with enchantment and wonder. Writing of the rise of free trade in the long nineteenth century, from Walter Scott onward, Ayse Celikkol shows the intimate connection between crucial economic shifts and the literary deployment of forms of romance. She argues that “during the rise of free trade, literary works played a special role in scrutinizing the tension between circulation and enclosure.”26 In certain respects, Northanger Abbey can be seen to chart a kind of free trade operation, in which Catherine must circulate, a free agent in the marriage market, and suffer an intense period of “disorientation in space,”27 to use Celikkol’s terms, in order to achieve the ultimate enclosure – marriage. The Abbey, of course, symbolizes the enclosure that stands firm in response to the “heightened awareness of the permeability of national borders” that characterized this period.28 The potential consequences of such permeability necessitates the “voluntary spies”29 that Henry Tilney

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identifies as ubiquitous and that drive his father, General Tilney, to “por[e] over the affairs of the nation for hours”30 in his newspapers and pamphlets.31 To remind us of Henry’s sentiments, I quote from his famous, if not infamous, accusatory tirade, which erupts upon his discovery of Catherine’s investigation of his mother’s room – and her implication that General Tilney may have had a hand in his wife’s death: Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?32 The importance of national and familial history reaches its climax here, as Catherine has refused to grant credit to the public images of Mrs Tilney that she has been hitherto presented with, be it the “elegant monument to [her] memory, which immediately fronted the family pew”33 or her portrait, which “for some time … had no place” and now hangs in Eleanor’s bed-chamber.34 Dissatisfied with these empty images, Catherine proceeds with her “blackest suspicions,”35 assuming that there is yet a repressed history of violence that she can unearth. Henry Tilney’s rhetoric regarding the security of the realm has been the subject of much critical scrutiny; his claims are disingenuous to say the least. The mob violence of the Gordon Riots of 1780 rears its head in an early conversation between Eleanor, Henry, and Catherine; and the French Revolution and years of war with France perpetually surround Austen’s life and works, both here and elsewhere.36 The Abbey, with General Tilney at its head, likewise points toward a turbulent history of oppressive public and private regimes at home, not merely abroad. In

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striving so vigorously to protect his own family history, Henry schools Catherine about the judicious treatment of information about the past, whether a record of financial accounts or personal conduct. In his schema, memory, it seems, can only operate in productive service of the collective. Humilated and ashamed, Catherine learns in severe terms of the degree to which the Tilney history family must remain concealed – untouched, untarnished, and unalloyed: “The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened.”37

II. Collective/Corrective Memories In Northanger Abbey’s well-known manifesto on behalf of the novel as a form, the narrator boldly asserts the powers and integrity of her craft, despite its widespread cultural disparagement: Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literature corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried … And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England … are eulogized by a thousand pens, – there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.38 Histories are constructed by men and lauded by society, despite the fact, as the narrator continues, that works such as the Spectator are “so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer contain any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.”39 As Henry Tilney’s accosting of Catherine makes plain, Northanger Abbey considers how, in response to the ongoing male jostling for the control of history, women in particular must make judicious use of memory and must recognize, perhaps, when they must turn from the past – as a means of survival.

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From the outset, Northanger Abbey dramatizes the limits placed on Catherine’s ability to negotiate the terms of her own history’s unfolding. In depicting her containment throughout the novel, Austen identifies the attempt to control the representation of history as fundamental to the operation of power, financial and otherwise. Rather like the deceased Mrs Tilney about whose past she wonders and conjectures, Catherine finds her own history under assault. Yet not only is her public identity subject to the whim of others’ constructions and misrepresentations, but, as we shall see, her private memory is also highly vulnerable to external control. The extent of Catherine’s mistreatment by General Tilney, who expels her from the Abbey without “money enough for the expenses of her journey”40 (a situation only remedied secretly by Eleanor) once he discovers the truth of her financial circumstances (or lack thereof), shows the precariousness of her situation; her market value is subject to massive fluctuations beyond her control, even beyond her knowledge. Removed from her parents’ prudent guardianship while at Bath, Catherine’s representational value, which is subject to others’ distortions, largely eclipses the truth of her inherent value. Putting into circulation a false history of her family and financial circumstances, John Thorpe identifies her “as the almost acknowledged future heiress of Fullerton”41 and touts this story before General Tilney, as a means of self-aggrandizement, “his vanity induc[ing] him to represent the family as yet more wealthy than his vanity and avarice had made him believe them.”42 Thus Thorpe initially influences General Tilney in Catherine’s favour, and, for a time, shapes her financial and romantic destiny. Yet in his proprietary treatment of Catherine, Thorpe goes so far as to assume control not merely of Catherine’s financial history, but also the very terms of her memory’s functioning. On the day prior to her intended outing with Eleanor Tilney, the embattled Catherine tries in vain to resist the Thorpes’ insistence that she instead accompany them: “Do not urge me, Isabella. I am engaged to Miss Tilney. I cannot go.” This availed nothing. The same arguments assailed her again; she must go, she should go, and they would not hear of a refusal. “It would be so easy to tell Miss Tilney that you had just

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been reminded of a prior engagement, and must only beg to put off the walk till Tuesday.” “No, it would not be easy. I could not do it. There has been no prior engagement.” … they were again joined by Thorpe, who coming to them with a gayer look, said, “Well, I have settled the matter, and now we may all go to-morrow with a safe conscience. I have been to Miss Tilney, and made your excuses.” “You have not!” cried Catherine. “I have, upon my soul. Left her this moment. Told her you had sent me to say, that having just recollected a prior engagement of going to Clifton with us to-morrow, you could not have the pleasure of walking with her till Tuesday.”43 Repeatedly intervening in her affairs, Thorpe assumes control of Catherine’s public history as well as the functioning of her memory. Yet the intimate psychological trespass and destructive intrusion of the latter assault proves all the more extreme in its capacity for violation. A parallel can in fact be drawn to Henry Tilney’s behaviour – and well before his fierce reprimand of Catherine at Northanger. Throughout the novel, Catherine’s relationship to memory and record-keeping of all kinds is an ambivalent one. We witness this during her first meeting with Tilney in the Pump-room, when she admits, to his surprise, that she does not keep a journal, leaving herself thereby vulnerable to his dictation of what she ought to write – a rather heavy-handed metaphorical representation of the way men’s authorship determines women’s plots. In his signature witty parlance, Tilney claims to know “exactly”44 what she will write in her journal; he knows, therefore, precisely how Catherine will remember the evening – by dwelling mostly on its sartorial minutae: “Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings … but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.”

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“Indeed I shall say no such thing.” “Shall I tell you what you ought to say?” “If you please.”45 However subordinate in the hierarchy of historical record-keeping, a journal is nonetheless a document of the past, an articulation of recollected experience. Without a journal, Catherine has no history, at least none over which she has control. Tilney, for his part, rightly proves that he will always have a hand in it. His relationship to Catherine’s memory, both here and throughout the novel, is indeed more nuanced than Thorpe’s, but is perhaps all the more insidious for its sophistication and presumption of intimacy. Tilney’s attempts to control not merely Catherine’s speech, but the interior workings of her mind and powers of recollection, suggest an intimate, private exchange; Thorpe violates all bounds of propriety – by visiting Eleanor himself and parlaying his fraudulent tale of Catherine’s “recollection” publicly. Whereas Henry Tilney will be proven expert at the subtle “whitewashing” of history, John Thorpe, in a total disregard for historical accuracy, tells such blatant lies about the past that he cannot finally succeed in Austen’s economy. Yet it might be said that, after all, Henry Tilney is only teasing. But Tilney’s teasing goes rather too far as he fabricates the gothic tale of the “memoirs of the wretched Matilda”46 as the pair approach the Abbey in his curricle. Together with her reading of gothic novels in Bath, Tilney’s fabrications contribute greatly to Catherine’s skewed interpretation of all she sees at Northanger Abbey and, in turn, her recreation, à la Thorpe, of a nonexistent past. There, just as Tilney presumes in his description of the kind of past she will record in her journal, Catherine’s interests prove to be like those of a typical girl of her age, as she mentally maps a stock fictional history – here one of gothic violence and excess – onto the domestic space of the Abbey and its familial relationships. The Abbey’s hold on Catherine’s imagination illustrates Austen’s attentiveness to the way that, as Cohen observes, “[t]he fantastically decorated Gothic edifice is not only the core around which the Gothic novel is constructed, it is the cornerstone of an art of artificial memory.”47 Catherine’s humiliating encounter with Henry on the threshold of his mother’s rooms, what I would term her “fall into realism,” her fall into

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the realm of representation, at once exposes and responds to the dangers of that artificiality. This response takes the form of an acute recognition of the import of historical control. Following her exposure and humiliation, Catherine almost magically sharpens her skills of retrospective analysis: “She did not,” we are told, “learn either to forget or defend the past,”48 but she did perhaps learn to leave well enough alone: “she learned to hope that it would never transpire farther … She remembered with what feelings she had prepared for knowledge of Northanger. She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled long before her quitting Bath.”49 And, importantly, she learns to reject those parts of the past that no longer serve her. Presented with a letter from Isabella that merely testifies to its author’s narcissism, Catherine at last roundly rejects this “strain of shallow artifice,” its “inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood [having] struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her.”50 Transformed into a realist heroine with the ability to scrutinize the past judiciously, Catherine can, crucially, turn squarely from it. She thus emerges from her shame, troubled only by “an occasional memento” of past folly, helped along by the fact that, naturally, Henry “never allud[ed] in the slightest way to what had passed.”51

III. Petitioning Beggars and Historical Whitewashing Henry’s Tilney’s recourse to silence, regarding both Catherine’s trespass and the spectre of an unsettling familial history that her suspicions raise, implicates him in a widespread cultural tendency toward the whitewashing not merely of familial strife, but of a very recent national history of violence and unrest. In striving to quiet Catherine’s mind, he effectively suggests that her assumptions border on the treasonous – this insofar as her speculations challenge the patriarchal control of the historical record, in both public and private affairs. In many ways, then, he and John Thorpe function in similar ways. Yet Thorpe’s outrageous fictions encourage Catherine to speak for herself and, finally, to reject all that he and his poisonous sister, Isabella, represent. In contrast, Henry insists on a singular narrative that, as Claudia Johnson observes, “enforces credence and silences dissent.”52

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The novel’s emphasis on the connection between the construction of history and textual analysis points us to two crucial texts that bookend the novel structurally: Thomas Moss’s poem “The Beggar’s Petition” (1769), a tale of economic exclusion, and the “manuscript” (or laundry list, as it turns out) accidentally left behind by Eleanor Tilney’s romantic interest. However mundane, the latter, by contrast, tells a tale of economic inclusion – an index to ownership, property, and social hierarchy. Taken together, both texts return us to the realm of romance. It is in reference to the “Beggar’s Petition,” a well-known ballad often used in recitation lessons, that we first learn of Catherine’s limited powers of recollection, for “[h]er mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat”53 this single poem, and even her younger sister, Sally, could recite it more successfully. While this seems a playful enough satire on the typical heroine’s education, the narrator is careful to underscore ways in which women’s very lives are shaped by the texts they are taught to memorize and memorialize. For as Catherine grew, she “read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.”54 Of course the life of a typical young woman will normally be far from eventful; it is thus little wonder that the golden world of Northanger, with its enchantment and mystery, is so alluring for Catherine. Yet Northanger Abbey ultimately proves hardly possessed of gold of the integral kind, but is instead a world of illusion. Once more, a wondrous world of possibility merely covers over the quotidian, textual, financial realm. Turning to Catherine in her chamber at Northanger, we find her before the high, old-fashioned black cabinet, which, though in a situation conspicuous enough, had never caught her notice before … though there could be nothing really in it, there was something whimsical, it was certainly a very remarkable coincidence! It was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was Japan, black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind; and as she held her candle, the yellow had very much the effect of gold.55

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Three times (three of course that magical number of romance) Catherine must try the key before she can open the cabinet (whose various empty drawers render it as much an empty cash register as a repository of exquisite secrets). Therein she finds “a roll of paper,” “the precious manuscript.”56 In this manuscript matters of fortune and fact will miraculously converge; such a convergence informs the very language of Austen’s free indirect discourse here, as Catherine ponders over “[t]he manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning’s prediction,” and marvels, “how was it to be accounted for?”57 To Catherine’s great disappointment, the manuscript has far more to do with matters of accountancy than she would have imagined. While she hopes it will grant her access to a gothic past, it proves no memoir of a long-dead heroine, but, instead, a record of very recent, very dry domestic history: “for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size and much less than she had supposed to it to be at first … An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand.”58 There are but four further such bills, along with a receipt for hair powder and soap, and a farrier’s bill. Such records of plain, objective fact serve as a humiliating counter to Catherine’s wild imaginings and desire to uncover a vivid history long concealed. For there are, then, no dirty secrets here, apart from that daily grime of which a male consumer has had to rid himself, its costs documented in but “coarse and modern characters.” Such description echoes, we ought to recall, the narrator’s earlier description of the kind of writing one finds in such publications as the Spectator. Both kinds of texts, this implicit equation suggests, are but mere inventories of the pedestrian, the quotidian. The laundry list and inventories of consumer goods particularly should remind Catherine of the everyday domestic realities that were actually to be found in the Abbey, where, to her great disappointment, “[t]he furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste.”59 That the manuscripts are but records of laundering or “whitewashing,” we might say, signals how such texts provocatively concentrate the multiple concerns of Austen’s financial romance. For, as the oed tells us, the verb “to whitewash” means not only “to make a fabric lighter or

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whiter; to bleach,” or “to cover or coat a wall or building with whitewash,” but also, in the sense that we now may more readily assume, the act of rewriting or tempering a history, as in “to conceal the faults or errors of; to free from blame.” Yet there is an additional meaning of the term that, although now rare, notably emerged in the late eighteenth century and underscores the crucial role these washing-bills play in the romantic and financial resolution of Catherine’s plot: in 1761 “to whitewash” was first noted as meaning “to clear (a person) from liability for his or her debts, especially by judicial declaration of bankruptcy; to write off (a debt, etc.).” An 1819 issue of Sporting Magazine, for instance, reports on “[t]wo baronets’ sons pleading to be white-washed, but remanded for frauds toward their creditors.” Ironically for readers, in retrospect we come to realize the importance of such texts and their place in remedying any liabilities in Catherine’s financial history and securing her profitable romantic and financial future. As it turns out, this “laundry list” contains far more than merely the residue of dull domestic dealings; it both bears a trace of Eleanor’s romantic history and anticipates the novel’s romantic conclusion – and therefore has far more to do with Catherine’s fate than she realizes. As Mary Poovey argues with regard to Austen’s fiction, “by making the money plot first disrupt, then be absorbed by the domestic plot, Austen translates a monetary debt into mutual love.”60 So it is here. The “man of fortune and consequence”61 who rather magically transforms Eleanor into his Viscountess at the novel’s conclusion is not a fictitious Byronic hero, but a “real” man possessed of his share of dirty laundry. This man, the narrator reveals, “was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing-bills, resulting from a long visit at Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures.”62 Here I concur with Susan Zlotnik’s recent reading of Northanger Abbey, which aptly foregrounds this moment of textual discovery as distilling the text’s central focus on the connection between romantic and economic plots.63 As well as a record of domestic accounts, the list reminds us of what greatly informs the basis of marriage: matters financial, domestic, and, often, pedestrian. Our narrator knows what our heroine does not: that the seemingly slightest of texts (rather like Austen’s own domestic fiction, her self-proclaimed “little bit … of ivory

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on which [she] work[s] with so fine a brush”64), and indeed, those bound up with both domestic matters and matters of the heart, may have far more historical import than literally meets the eye. In this manner the novel argues for the way in which apparently trivial, marginal texts of the past in fact form a significant part of the historical record. The laundry list’s significance tells us that history is only superficially a tale of men’s financial transactions. Simultaneously it is much more. Austen’s trivial texts underscore the prominence of the financial record, yet also illustrate that those domestic concerns largely occluded from dominant narratives of history are in fact absolutely fundamental to its realization. We recall that only Eleanor remembers that Catherine may have insufficient funds to see her through her journey; this crucial moment of female financial guardianship recurs in the novel’s conclusion when Eleanor’s prosperous marriage sufficiently assuages her father’s temper for him to submit, however grudgingly, to the union between Henry and Catherine. Indeed, the violent intrusion of the economic in Northanger Abbey’s world of romance and enchantment is countered by the very intrusion that finally concludes it: Henry’s visit to Catherine at Fullerton. Recalling the frequent compression characteristic of Austen’s endings, such as that of Sense and Sensibility, the dashing hero’s arrival unannounced at the heroine’s humbler abode dramatizes the levelling process that the novel’s marital conclusion will in part bring about. Giving the last word, thus, to romance, the power of the landed Viscount trumps the evil actions of the General. Of course, in a final irony, this apparent triumph of conservatism enables the violation of conventional classbased relations – the “filial disobedience”65 that the young couple’s union represents. Like them, readers of Austen – and the realist novel to come – are certainly all the richer for the romance.

notes I wish to gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, whose funding supported the research for this essay. I am also indebted to April London for her enduring insights and Nadine Menghin for her thoughtful and timely research assistance.

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1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, edited by James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. Further references are to this edition. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 Marilyn Gaull, “The Romance Plot,” in Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, edited by Marilyn Gaull (New York: Longman, 2005), 201. 5 Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1996); Ian Haywood, “Paper Promises: Restriction, Caricature, and the Ghost of Gold,” in Romanticism, Forgery and the Credit Crunch, https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/forgery/HTML/praxis. 2011.haywood.html (accessed 15 November 2015); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy. Mediating Value in Eighteenth Century and Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, edited by James Kinsley (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2003), 163. 7 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, edited by Fred Caplan (New York: Norton, 2000), 83. 8 Emily Jane Cohen, “Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory,” elh 62 (1995): 883. 9 Nicholas Dames, Amensiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23. 10 Ibid. 11 The oed dates the use of the term “till” in reference to “a drawer, money-box, or similar receptacle under and behind the counter of a shop or bank, in which cash for daily transactions is temporarily kept” to 1698. 12 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3. 13 Sonia Hofkosh, “The Illusionist: Northanger Abbey and Austen’s Uses of Enchantment,” in A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2012), 102. 14 See Sarah Emsley for a discussion of way in which “[i]n her novels, Jane Austen begins with the Aristotelian idea of the mean, and her virtuous characters work to find the mean in a world of extremes and temptations and vices.” Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 40.

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15 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 5. 16 Goran Stanivukovic, “Introduction,” this volume. 17 Duncan, Modern Romance, 2. Notably, Jane Austen is largely absent from Duncan’s discussion, receiving only mention in passing in a catalogue of eighteenthcentury female authors. 18 Many have commented on the political inflection of Northanger Abbey. Robert Hopkins, for instance, sees it as the “most political of Jane Austen’s novels”: Robert Hopkins, “General Tilney and Affairs of State: The Political Gothic of Northanger Abbey,” Philological Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1978): 214. Claudia Johnson concurs, suggesting that of all of Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey is “most densely packed with topical details of a political character – enclosure, riots, hothouses, pamphlets, and even anti-treason laws”: Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, il: Chicago University Press, 1988), 41. Sheryl Craig most recently examines Austen’s novels in their legal and political contexts: Sheryl Craig, Jane Austen and the State of the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 19 Edward Copeland, “Money,” in Jane Austen in Context, edited by Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 318. 20 Linda Brigham, “Prometheus Unbound and the Postmodern Political Dilemma,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 260. 21 Craig, Jane Austen and the State of the Nation, 144. Jan Fergus also addresses the details of the financial strain faced by Austen and her siblings during this period: Jan Fergus, “The Professional Woman Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–17. For further discussion of the enduring effects of the Restriction Period in nineteenth-century culture, see also Poovey’s discussion of the Restriction and Pride and Prejudice in Genres of the Credit Economy, 357–72. See also Sara Malton, Forgery and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 22 Mary Poovey, “Introduction,” in The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Mary Poovey (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 23 Linda Brigham, “Prometheus Unbound,” 259. 24 Copeland, “Money,” 319.

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25 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 153. 26 Ayse Celikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 27 Celikkol, Romances of Free Trade, 5. 28 Ibid. 29 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 145. 30 Ibid., 138. 31 Nikki Hessell usefully addresses Austen and the encroaching “glare of nineteenth-century print culture” in “News and Newspapers: Readers of the Daily Press in Jane Austen’s Novels,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 31 (2009): 254. 32 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 145 (emphasis added). 33 Ibid., 139. 34 Ibid., 132. 35 Ibid., 137. 36 Poovey usefully identifies the narrative strategy deployed here a “gestural aesthetic”: “it gestures toward extratextual events but so carefully manages these allusions that the reader is invited back into the text instead of encouraged to go outside of its pages” (Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 363). 37 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 146. 38 Ibid., 23. 39 Ibid., 24. 40 Ibid., 169. 41 Ibid., 182. 42 Ibid., 181. 43 Ibid., 70, 72 (emphasis added). 44 Ibid., 15. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 116 (emphasis added). 47 Cohen, “Museums of the Mind,” 886. 48 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 146. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 160. 51 Ibid., 147. 52 Johnson, Jane Austen, 38. 53 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 5.

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Ibid., 7. Ibid., 122–3. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 124–5 (emphasis added). Ibid., 125–6. Ibid., 117–18. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 365. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 185. Ibid., 186. Susan Zlotnick, “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in Northanger Abbey,” Studies in the Novel 41, no. 3 (2009): 277–92. Laura Baudot likewise observes that through the washingbills, “Austen hints at the material facts that are fundamental to marriage and reading”: Laura Baudot, “‘Nothing Really in It’: Gothic Interiors and the Externals of the Courtship Plot in Northanger Abbey,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24, no. 2 (2012): 235–352, at 325. 64 Jane Austen, “Letter to Edward Austen, December 1816,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1995), 337. 65 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 187.

Afterword Patricia Parker

It is an honour and a pleasure to write the afterword to this extraordinary collection of essays on romance across different time periods, genres, and cultures. When I was writing what became Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode in the late 1970s, there had already been important published work on romance as a genre as well as in different periods – including Erich Auerbach’s “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (in 1953); Gillian Beer’s The Romance and Carol Gesner’s Shakespeare and the Greek Romance (in 1970); Eugène Vinaver’s The Rise of Romance (in 1971); Fredric Jameson’s “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” in New Literary History (in 1975–76); and Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (in 1976), following two decades of writing that made reference to romance, including his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism.1 But I felt that there could be an approach to romance as a “strategy” that might in different ways enable movement from narrative to other kinds of romance both within and beyond recognizable genres, including what a section of the Milton chapter of Inescapable Romance ultimately called “The Romance of Language”; that could move from the “threshold” state of “pendency” in Book 4 of Paradise Lost to the poetics of the threshold so fascinating to Keats and to the practice of poets as apparently diverse as Valéry, Mallarmé, and Wallace Stevens (from whose “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” my title “Inescapable Romance” was taken). And what resulted was a book that moved from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the poetry of Keats to those three poets; but

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also to the striking echoes of romance données (including “error” or wandering) in twentieth-century theories of linguistic errancy and narrative structure, and descriptions of the pre-apocalyptic, or threshold, nature of language itself; the affinities – as well as the differences – between Ariosto’s repeated use of “differire” for his multiple deferred endings and Jacques Derrida’s neologism “la différance”; and the importance of “dilation” (from the same Latin root) not only for Spenser and other romance writers but in relation to what Roland Barthes called modern narrative’s “espace dilatoire.”2 And in this sense, the writing of that book was for me both an experiment and an education in the truly metamorphic or shape-changing nature of “romance,” as well as a lesson in its notorious resistance to any conclusive definition. Since Inescapable Romance in 1979, there has been an explosion of work that has demonstrated (especially from the 1990s onward) the resiliency of romance and its transformations across genres, periods, geographies, and non-literary domains: from works as diverse in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century as Ian Duncan’s Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (1992); Colin Burrow’s Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (1993); Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996); Joan Pong Linton’s The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (1998); Helen Hackett’s Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (2000); Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (2002); Geraldine Heng’s Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003); Barbara Fuchs’s Romance (2004); Helen Cooper’s The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (2004); to the studies in Corinne Saunders’s collection A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary (2004); Steve Mentz’s Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (2006); Jeff Dolven’s Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (2007); Benedict S. Robinson’s Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (2007); Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne’s collection Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (2009); Victor Skretkowicz’s European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and

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English Literary Politics (2010); and Helen Cooper’s “Introduction” and other studies in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England, edited by Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney (2010). And continuing work in the current decade provides ongoing evidence of the heuristic importance of “romance” across genres, time periods, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural/geopolitical spaces (including cartography, religion, empire, travel, and trade) – including Nandini Das’s Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570– 1620 (2011); Tiffany Werth’s The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (2011); Ayse Celikkol’s Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (2011); Cyrus Mulready’s Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after Shakespeare (2013); Michael Murrin’s Trade and Romance (2014) – following his earlier work in History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic and The Allegorical Epic; Jon Whitman’s collective volume Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (2015); the collection edited by Nandini Das and Nick Davis entitled Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (2016); and Goran Stanivukovic’s Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 (2016), which encompasses all of these as well as the interrelated issues of queer masculinity and eroticism.3 Helen Cooper has recently once again reminded us that romance is “a capacious term,” with “an unnerving tendency to metamorphose from text to text, or period to period,” as well as a term that often escapes precise (or single) definition.4 And its reputation as what Goran Stanivukovic describes in Knights in Arms as “one of the most resilient and absorptive of literary forms”5 is – like its metamorphosing across time and texts – amply on display in this splendid new volume. Starting from its learned and wide-ranging introduction – and its treatment of romance as “a portable form, moving the subject matter into the main genres and transferring structural devices between texts” – the volume richly fulfills the introduction’s promise that this book “addresses romance from an angle that … has not been addressed thus far,” focusing “not on tracing the unchangeable historical life of a static form, but on illuminating how the specific strategy [each of the essays]

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discuss[es] is more generally available as a resource of romance writing beyond the specific texts each chapter addresses,” and on exploring “the attraction of the romance as a resource that extends beyond ideological, aesthetic, and historical bounderies.”6 Its individual studies are remarkable for their extraordinary historical (as well as generic and disciplinary) range, from Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and Greek romances to twentieth-century literature and theory, and twenty-first-century analysis and exploration of what the introduction aptly describes not only as an “ever-changing form” but also “an international genre par excellence,” woven from multiple and diverse “discourses coming from outside a single national culture,” in a way that “makes any national label attached to ‘romance’ secondary to the origin and, often, orientation of romance in cross-national discourses, narratives, and stories.”7 At its opening in part 1 – following on her highly influential work on the “memes” of romance in The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (2004) – Helen Cooper’s “The Knight and the Hermit” brilliantly demonstrates, once again, that “Romance is a durable form” – in this case in relation to “its ability to outlast its Catholic roots through its continued popularity after the Reformation” by tracing the relation between religious and secular, and the “hermit” figure in particular, from medieval romance to late Elizabethan writing. Truly a historical tour de force, Cooper’s opening essay moves with ease between the “French prose Arthurian romances, known collectively as the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail,” the “vast French prose romance” of the Perceforest, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and a range of other early examples; post-Reformation English translations of Olivier de la Marche’s fifteenth-century Burgundian Chevalier delibéré; the anxiety caused by hermits for Protestant writers clearly demonstrated in the popular Guy of Warwick – in contrast to the early-seventeenth-century play The Birth of Merlin; the “old religious man” who converts Oliver at the end of Shakespeare’s As You Like It; and the figure of the hermit at Elizabeth’s Accession Day tournament in 1590 and the Ditchley entertainment of 1592; Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Sir John Harington’s 1591 English translation; and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Ralph Knevet’s seventeenth-century Supplement of the Faery Queene.

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John H. Cameron and Goran Stanivukovic’s “Straggling Plots; Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene” then extends Cooper’s discussion by exploring the simultaneously rhetorical and narrative strategy of digression, the unexpected importance of the apparently only “circumstantial” or “incidental,” and the ways in which such aspects of romance writing at the same time “open space for debate” – thereby providing an entirely new perspective on humanism, rhetoric, temporality, and narrative sequence as well as romance. And rounding out part 1, Colin Lahive’s “Milton and the Resource of Romance” crucially engages with rhetoric in a different form, important in relation to Milton’s (only) apparent rejection of romance in Book IX of Paradise Lost – “the recusatio [as] a dissimulating rhetorical device used to engage the reader by challenging the artifice of generic convention and expectation while at the same time relying upon the very artifice that it attempts to undermine” and “encourag[ing] the reader to think about the very topic that the poet repudiates as an unsuitable subject for celebration.” Lahive provides an important reminder that Milton’s rejection of “Wars,” of “fabled knights / In battles feigned,” and of the “tinsel trappings” of romance (IX: 28–36) is “especially ironic considering that Milton has already made an entirely fabricated war between angelic forces the subject of a whole book of Paradise Lost, while also making strategic use of romance to provide a framework for his theopolitical vision” and that “Milton engaged with the motifs, narrative strategies, language, and ideology of romance throughout his career,” from “Il Penseroso” through Eikonoklastes to Paradise Regained. And in ways that connect romance with the biblical (a relation central in a period when Milton, like Spenser and others, readily combined what we might call “isomorphic” forms, including romance wandering and the Exodus topos of wandering in the wilderness), Lahive’s essay importantly reminds us that “Romance, after all, is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, and shares many of its foundation myths, so that it should come as no surprise that Milton thought about romance in biblical and theological terms, especially in his late poems.” Part 2 – on “Magic and Wonder” – once again underscores this book’s dedication to both historical and generic range and cross-cultural influences. David Rollo’s “Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of ‘a Devyls Son’” begins from “[t]he problems raised by Merlin’s demonic

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origins and his implication in the Arthurian past [that] were first exposed in response to the text in which the soothsayer gained literary notoriety, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae” (in latetwelfth-century English historian William of Newburgh’s “transparently political” denunciation of the Historia regum), and moves to other ways in which responses to the magician Merlin (central to Malory’s romance in Le Morte D’Arthur) enable the calibration of anxieties that are at once political, historical, and cultural. John Carey’s “Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures” – in its detailed examination of the influence of early Irish and Celtic or Gaelic sources on English romance (including the “Otherworld” in particular) – is itself an eye-opening introduction into an other world beyond the usual Hellenic and Continental models cited by historians of the romance form, and hence a truly invaluable corrective to what have been striking gaps in that more familiar and customary history. Nandini Das’s “Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder” begins with medieval chivalric romances, Chaucer’s parodic “Sir Thopas,” and Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1484) – the unfinished romance continued in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso – and moves to the world of Renaissance art (including the engravings of Albrecht Dürer) before returning to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But at the same time – in ways that continually demonstrate its extraordinary historical as well as theoretical range – she raises the question of “why the ordinary and the everyday keep accompanying and framing the symbolic, the allegorical, and the wondrous in romance.” And she considers the work of the philosopher Stanley Rosen (in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy) and of Henri Lefebvre in Everyday Life and the Modern World in relation to premodern romances, including Huon of Bordeaux, and the “tricky balance between wonder and the everyday” that was “renegotiated, challenged, and transformed in radically different ways” in the late sixteenth century (in Anthony Munday’s Zelauto, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller) – before turning back to “wonder” again in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Sidney’s New Arcadia. In part 3 (“Reformation and Mediation”), Joseph Falaky Nagy’s “The ‘Romance’ of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories” once again

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extends the boundaries of romance scholarship – in which “[i]t has long been noted that medieval Celtic literatures anticipate many of the characteristics of romance as analyzed by medievalists over a period of more than a hundred and fifty years” – by “expand[ing] the range of early Irish texts we can legitimately examine as comparanda to medieval European romance” and posing “for further consideration elements that are not only firmly embedded in the narrative dynamics of early Irish storytelling” but also “a staple of the genre of romance as it flourishes in medieval western Europe.” Shifting to a very different time period, Marcus Waithe’s essay on “Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones” not only extends this section’s temporal range to include these nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers (along with T.S. Eliot) but addresses the relation of the work of Sigmund Freud to romance (including as suggested in Gillian Beer’s 1970 book The Romance), while simultaneously stressing that Freud’s influence can be “to downplay the pre-existing work of the romance in addressing the relationship between desire and the real, and the endurance of this awareness among modern writers.” He argues that romance “retained its own way of communicating conflicts that Freudian theory more readily assigns to the structures of Classical myth,” including in his analysis both Freud on the unheimlich (and Oedipus), and the ways in which “[t]he romance tradition … makes available a distinct version of the uncanny that deserves separate attention.” In the concluding parts 4 (“Transmission and Circulation”) and 5 (“Aesthetics and the Politics of Form”), this book’s extraordinary historical range is even more strikingly highlighted in moving from Heliodorus and the Greek romance to Jane Austen, while at the same time providing entirely new perspectives on a range of generic, political, gender, and textual issues. Helen Moore’s “Dramatizing Heliodorus” provides remarkable new insights into the influence of Heliodorus’s fourth-century romance the Aethiopica on Renaissance writing, not only exposing its traces in the New Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, whose writings make clear his familiarity with other Greek romances; but also describing the Aethiopica as “a teasingly absent presence” in theatre history and tracts abusing the stage, as well as in other plays and works. And she then moves to more detailed discussion of “the two extant

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Heliodoran plays from the seventeenth century – John Gough’s The Strange Discovery (1640) and the anonymous Caroline manuscript The White Ethiopian – providing “specific evidence concerning the strong affinity between Greek romance and early modern tragicomedy” and (with reference to Jonson’s Masque of Queenes) examining the ways in which “the spectacular foreignness of the Aethiopica is domesticated by assimilation into the existing traditions of masque and tragicomedy” in England. Steve Mentz, in “Pericles and Polygenres,” begins from a “somewhat gnomic opening” (“Genre problems are hierarchy problems. Genre solutions are hybridity solutions”), in a far-ranging study that draws on “the decentralized network theories of Bruno Latour, the genre theory of Jacques Derrida and Edouard Glissant, and recent literary critical work by Caroline Levine.” And his paradigm-shifting concept of a “polygenetic system that turns observed variety from problem to structural principle,” where “hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks” (which he describes as “[a]n unsystemic structure that risks incoherence at every turn” and a “polygeneric system [that] takes romance, not epic or tragedy, as its normative form”), provides an invaluable argument from which to approach what he calls “one of Shakespeare’s most structurally wayward and evidentially co-written plays, Pericles.” Stuart Sillars, in “Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance,” crucially extends the boundaries of critical conceptualization in yet another way, by going beyond simply literary studies in examining the woodcuts that serve as visual illustrations in Anthony Munday’s Zelauto (a text that has attracted little critical attention beyond its status as a source for The Merchant of Venice) – not only in relation to its overall design but also to the ways in which it becomes “almost a metafictional contemplation on the romance genre,” moving “beyond the common conception of the romance as a frivolous form of entertainment” while simultaneously reminding us of “the sheer complexity of the Tudor printed book.” In this remarkable book’s final section, women writers and their relation to romance are brought prominently to the fore, first in Catherine Bates’s “Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Ar-

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cadia,” which moves from an opening discussion of critical work on romance endings to a detailed analysis of the differences between the Old Arcadia and the unfinished New Arcadia, in relation not only to romance (and its “dilations”) and resistance to idealizing readings of Pamela’s “purse” but also to the ways the unfinished New Arcadia comes closer to a tragedy like King Lear, before Mary Herbert’s “retrospectively sewing a providential outcome” onto its end “ensured that the Arcadia would remain and continue to be read as a romance, but at the price of its tragic vision of a world that is not to be borne.” Hero Chalmers also crosses generic lines by foregrounding the tragic as well as the romance in her essay “‘Romancy-Ladies’: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women” – which not only treats in detail each of these two later-seventeenth-century women writers but starts with the statement that “the chief study of our Sex is Romances” in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664) and the critical recognition that “the notion of a predominantly female readership for romance is a construct designed to help negotiate anxieties about the form’s potentially deleterious moral and social impact on readers of either sex.” And finally, Sara Malton’s “‘The Visions of Romance Were Over’: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,” in examining what she calls “Austen’s financial romance,” persuasively argues that “attention to the novel’s engagement with forms of romance enables readers to better see the way in which [important] moments [in it] are informed by what Ian Duncan has termed the “transformative dynamics of romance” (in his Modern Romance and Transformation of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens) and what Sonia Hofkosh more recently has described as “Austen’s Uses of Enchantment.”8 And Malton’s conclusion – that “readers of Austen – and the realist novel to come – are certainly all the richer for the romance” is an exemplary contribution to the ongoing debate over the relation between romance and the history of the novel. That debate continues, despite what Michael McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1988), famously called “antiromance,” or the movement away from the fantasy and magic of the earlier “romance” form. But as Goran Stanivukovic has recently argued in his book Knights in Arms (2016), “Although verisimilitude still remains compromised in the anti-romances that McKeon describes, romance

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now reveals a deeper level of complexity and ambition within itself: its stories are no longer grounded in the extravagancies of fantasy alone, but fictions inspired by the immediate historical and social movements that always touch romance” and “romance lubricated historical currents by staging scenarios of the historical future.”9 And – as Margaret Anne Doody argues in The True Story of the Novel (1996), whose very title is a reminder of the romance antecedents of the very notion of what Ariosto slyly called his “vera istoria” and modelled on Lucian’s ironically titled “True History” – the separation of romance and the novel was itself a historical construct that constricted “The Rise of the Novel” to English eighteenth-century innovations (and national-imperial interests), arbitrarily excluding the ongoing impact of transhistorical and transcultural influences going back as far as Heliodorus and beyond.10 It is, at every turn of the page, the amazing adaptability of romance across time periods, cultures, texts, and genres – from Helen Cooper’s opening reminder that “Romance is a durable form” in an essay that has principally to do with the premodern period, to the ending on Jane Austen and the novel’s continuing debt to this heritage – that is the signal contribution of this splendid volume of essays. Inescapable romance, indeed!

notes 1 See respectively Eric Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, [1953] 2003); Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970); Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington, ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1971); Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7 (1975–76): 135–63; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957) and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1976). 2 See the “Epilogue” to Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jacques Derrida, “La Diffé-

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rance,” Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 62, no. 3 (1968): 73–101, reprinted in his Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), 1–29; Roland Barthes, S/Z: Essai (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), 81ff and 25–6; and his Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). 3 See, respectively, Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, uk: Clarendon Press, 1993); Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lori Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004); Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004); Corinne Saunders, ed., A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004); Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2006); Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, eds., Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2009); Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2010); Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney, eds., Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010); Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2011); Tiffany Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore, md: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Ayse Celikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cyrus Mulready, Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after

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5 6 7 8

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Patricia Parker Shakespeare (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Murrin, Trade and Romance (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2014), in addition to his influential History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jon Whitman, ed., Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Nandini Das and Nick Davis, eds., Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (London: Routledge, 2016); Goran Stanivukovic, Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565– 1655 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). See Helen Cooper, “Introduction,” in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England, edited by Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), xiii, xi. Stanivukovic, Knights in Arms, 36. See the introduction to this book. See the introduction. Sonia Hofkosh, “The Illusionist: Northanger Abbey and Austen’s Uses of Enchantment,” in A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2012), 102. See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, md: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Stanivukovic, Knights in Arms, 36. See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

Contributors

catherine bates is a research professor of English at the University of Warwick. Her books include The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Freud (London: Open Gate, 1999); Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Masculinity and the Hunt (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2013); and On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2017). She has edited The Cambridge Companion to Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and written numerous essays on Renaissance literature. john h. cameron teaches English literature at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax). His monograph on early modern tragedy, co-written with Goran Stanivukovic, will soon be published with Edinburgh University Press. john carey is a professor of Early and Medieval Irish at University College Cork. His publications include Ireland and the Grail (Aberystwyth, uk: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007); King of Mysteries: Early English Religious Writings (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998, 2000); A Single Ray of the Sun: Religious Speculation in Early Ireland (Aberystwyth, uk: Celtic Studies Publications, 1999, 2011); and In Tenga Bithnua: The EverNew Tongue (Turnhout, uk: Brepols, 2009).

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helen co oper is professor emerita of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She has particular interest in cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods. Her books include Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (Ipswich, uk: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978); Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1989); The English Romance in Time (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004); Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010); and an edition of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press 1998). hero chalmers is a fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. She is the author of Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2004), and co-editor, with Julie Sanders and Sophie Tomlinson, of Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2006). Her current research projects concern writings by members of the Cavendish family. nandini das is a professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool. Her publications include Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2007); Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2011); and Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, co-edited with Nick Davis (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2016); as well as essays on Sidney, Shakespeare, and cultural memory. Her investigation of the traces and impact of early modern cross-cultural encounters in Britain, and British and European engagement with the wider world, has developed at the same time through a number of essays on Renaissance travel, and through her work on Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and associated projects. colin lahive is a National University of Ireland post-doctoral research fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. His main interests lie in the work of John Milton, early

Contributors

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modern literary and intellectual history, and the literature and political culture of early modern Ireland. He is preparing a monograph on Milton’s engagement with romance, as well as journal articles on Caroline court culture and the narrative poetry of Thomas May. sara malton received her PhD in English from the University of Toronto in 2004, and went on to a sshrc postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She joined the Department of English at Saint Mary’s University in 2005, where she is currently an associate professor. Her work has appeared in such journals as Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, the European Romantic Review, and English Studies in Canada; and her book Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2009. She is currently completing a monograph on the subject of the sailor, national performance, and nineteenth-century cultural memory. steve mentz is a professor of English at St Johns University in New York City. He is the author of three monographs: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); At the Bottom of the Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009); and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2006). He has also edited or co-edited four collections of essays and published many articles and chapters on Shakespeare, environmental criticism, romance fiction, and the blue humanities. He blogs at The Bookfish (http://www.steve mentz.com). helen moore is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has published on early modern fiction, drama, and reception, and is the co-editor of Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2011).

354

Contributors

joseph falaky nag y is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of two books on medieval Irish literature as well as many articles on Celtic storytelling tradition, and the founder-editor of the Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook. patricia parker is Margery Bailey Professor in English and Dramatic Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Her books and co-edited collections include Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979); Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (Slingsby, uk: Methuen, 1987); Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, with David Quint (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, with Geoffrey Hartman (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 1991); Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, with Margo Hendricks (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 1994); and the forthcoming Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. david rollo is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. He previously taught French, including ten years at Dartmouth College. His books are Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, French Forum, 1998); Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages (Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press, 2011). He is currently working on translations of Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae (complete), Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus (in progress), and Albert the Great’s Quaestio de luxuria. stuart sillars is emeritus professor of English in the University of Bergen. His main research interest is in the relation between literature and visual art, especially with regard to Shakespeare. Most recent among

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his books are Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Shakespeare and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). goran stanivukovic is a professor of English at Saint Mary’s University. He is the author of, most recently, Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), and the editor of Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Re-mapping of the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave, 2007); Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, with C. Relihan (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave, 2003); Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); and the romance Ornatus and Artesia by Emanuel Ford (London: Dovehouse, 2003). marcus waithe is a university senior lecturer and fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Suffolk, uk: Boydell and Brewer, 2006). Recent works includes essays on John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Empson, and Geoffrey Hill. He is currently finishing a second monograph, and a co-edited volume (with Claire White, for Palgrave), on the subject of literature as labour, as well as a collection of essays entitled Thinking through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (with Michael Hurley, for Oxford University Press).

Index

Amoryus and Cleopes, 45 anagnôrisis, 210 anti-romance, 347 Apuleius: Golden Ass, 227 Ariosto, Ludovico, 6–7, 62, 67, 74, 340; Orlando Furioso, 52, 67, 75–6, 269, 339, 342, 344 Aristotle, 174, 244; Metaphysics, 174; Poetics, 210 Auerbach, Erich, 24, 339 Austen, Jane, 30, 322, 327, 329, 334, 345; Mansfield Park, 319; Northanger Abbey, 317–19, 321–3, 326–7, 333–4 Barclay, John, 93 Barthes, Roland, 340 Bateman (Batman), Stephen, 28, 47, 49, 57n21, 257–8, 261–2, 263, 264, 272 Beaumont, Francis, 252 Bede, Venerable: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 115 Beer, Gillian, 23, 199, 339, 345 Bentley, Gerald Eades, 224 Birth of Merlin, 49–50, 342

Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 20, 47 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 159, 344 Brantlinger, Patrick, 318 broadside ballad, 49 Brome, Richard: The English Moor, 225 Bromwich, Rachel, 156n49, 158n80 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 320; Villette, 223 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress, 262 Burrow, Colin, 69, 72, 340 Callimachus, 90 Campbell, Lori, 33n27 Cartigny, Jean de, 76 Castiglione, Baldassare: Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), 268 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Cave, Terence, 210–11 Cavendish, Margaret, 17, 299–301; Sociable Letters, 299, 347 Celikkol, Ayse, 324, 341 Certeau, Michel de, 23

358

Charles I, 92–3 Charles II, 308, 311 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 140; Canterbury Tales, 140, 160 chivalry, 17 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 74, 80–1 Cohen, Emily Jane, 320 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 244, 276 Copeland, Edward, 322 Cromwell, William, 89

Index

Erasmus, Desiderius, 74, 162 eremitism, 40–2, 46, 49 First World War, 25, 201–8, 211–14 Fletcher, John, 252 Foucault, Michel, 239 Fowler, Alastair, 5, 31n4 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 199, 208–9, 345; heimlich and unheimlich, 209 Frye, Northrop, 94, 339 Fuchs, Barbara, 7–9, 340

Dames, Nicholas, 320 Davis, David, 257, 261–2 Davis, Nick, 341 Derrida, Jacques, 239, 241–3, 340 Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield, 320; Hard Times, 319–20 Dickson, Lynne, 292 Dobell, Bertram, 281 Dolven, Jeff, 82, 180n30, 340 Doody, Margaret Ann, 340, 348 Dowden, Edward, 17–18 Dowland, John, 51 Dudley, Edward, 68 Duncan, Ian, 320, 322, 340, 347 Dürer, Albrecht, 24, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 172, 177, 263, 344

Gesner, Carol, 339 Glissant, Éduoard, 239, 242–3, 252 Gossett, Suzanne, 240 Gosson, Stephen: Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 222 Gothic: fiction, 13; Gothicism, 209, 223; novel, 200 Gough, John: The Strange Discovery, 26, 224–9, 230–1, 232–5, 346 Gower, John, 27, 239 Greene, Robert, 12, 172, 252 Greene, Roland, 288 Greville, Fulke, 29, 281, 287–8 Guy of Warwick, 20, 48–9, 55, 57n23, 263, 342

economics, 30, 317–24, 327, 331–4 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 61, 200, 345; The Waste Land, 200 Elizabeth I, 51–2, 257–8, 259, 261, 264–5, 293; Accession Day tournaments, 51 emblem books, 262 entrelacement, 67–8 epic, 303–4

Hackett, Helen, 13, 299, 340 Hadfield, Andrew, 69 Hanson, Ingrid, 205 Harbage, Alfred, 225 Haywood, Ian, 318 Heliodorus, 17, 25–6, 221, 224–9, 342, 345; Aethiopica, 221–9, 231, 233–5, 342, 345 Heng, Geraldine, 340

Index

Henslowe, Philip, 46 Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 29, 281–2, 286, 288, 294, 347 Herbert, Percy: Princess Cloria, 93, 100–1 Herman, Peter, 311–12 hermits, 16, 40–55 Hobbes, Thomas, 100–1; Elements of Law, 100; Leviathan, 100 Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 208–9 Hofkosh, Sonia, 320–1, 347 Horace, 90 Hoskyns, John, 71 Houghton, Hugh, 35n38 Humphrey Newcomb, Lori, 12, 19, 340 Hutchinson, Lucy, 17, 301, 303, 305– 6, 313 iconography, 258, 261, 273, 276 Ireland, 62, 141, 189–91 Jacobus, Mary, 223 Jameson, Fredric, 339 Jentsch, Ernst, 208 Johnson, Claudia, 330 Jones, David: In Parenthesis, 3, 14, 17, 25, 201–9, 211, 214 Jones, Inigo, 234 Jonson, Ben, 17, 20, 26, 233, 252, 346 Keats, John, 81, 339 King, Andrew, 86–7n54 Klein, Lisa, 293 Knevet, Ralph, 54–5, 342

359

Lamb, Mary Ellen, 340 Latour, Bruno, 239, 241–2, 346; and Actor-Network Theory, 239 Leavis, Queenie, 276 Lee, Henry, 51–2 Lefebvre, Henri, 167–8, 177, 344 Levine, Caroline, 239–40, 242–3, 252 Lewkenor, Lewis, 57n21 Licence, Tom, 55–6n3 linguistic errancy, 340 Lodge, Thomas, 14, 21, 23, 170–2, 252; Rosalynde, 170–1, 344 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus): De rerum natura, 301 Lull, Ramón, 45–6, 48 Lyly, John, 23, 172, 252, 274 Mabinogi, 143–4, 153–4n15 MacNeice, Louis, 61 magic, 22, 24, 113–35, 159–60, 162, 166–9; druidic, 187–8 Mainelli, Peter V., 68 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 339 Malory, Thomas, 17, 22, 41, 43–4, 55n1, 66, 120–2, 159, 161, 183, 204– 5, 207, 342; Le Morte D’Arthur, 113–15, 121–35; Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney, 159, 161 Martorell, Joanot, 48 McKeon, Michael, 347 Middle Ages, the, 12, 25, 119, 143, 186, 293 Middle English, 4, 16, 55n1 Milton, John, 7, 17, 22, 88–107, 343; An Apology for Smectymnuus, 96– 9; Areopagitica, 99–100, 308; De

360

Doctrina Christiana, 100; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 308; Eikonoklastes, 92; The History of Britain, 95; “Il Penseroso,” 92, 97; “Lycidas,” 94; Mansus, 94–5; A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 97; Paradise Lost, 89–91, 93, 100–6, 303, 343; Paradise Regained, 89, 93, 105–7, 343; Reason of Church-Government, 97 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 17, 115–18, 143, 145, 344 Montemayor, Jorge de, 9 Morland, Samuel, 88–91 Morris, William, 14, 200–14 Morte D’Arthur, Le. See under Malory Moss, Thomas: “The Beggar’s Petition,” 331 Mulready, Cyrus, 12, 341 Munday, Anthony, 23, 170, 172; Zelauto, 28, 170, 257–76, 344, 346 Murrin, Michael, 341 Nashe, Thomas, 21, 23, 171–2, 252; The Unfortunate Traveller, 172, 344 neuroscience, 8 Nicholl, Charles, 82–3n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 164 Nuttall, A.D., 224 Old Catalan, 20, 45 Ordene de chevalerie, 39 Orpheus, 22, 140–1, 150n1

Index

Otherworld, 140–52, 153n8, 153n11, 154n31 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 221, 228–9 Owen, Wilfred, 212 paradiegesis, 63–5 parecbasis, 65–6 Peacham, Henry, 63–5, 71 Poe, Edgar Allan, 209 Pollard, Tanya, 223, 225 polygenre, 238–40, 250 Pong Linton, Joan, 340 Poovey, Mary, 318, 333, 337n36 Protestantism, 46–50, 80, 261, 288–9 Prynne, William: Histrio-Mastix, 222 Pulter, Hester, 17, 301, 307–10, 312– 13; The Unfortunate Florinda, 301, 307–13 Puttenham, George, 65–6, 69, 71, 73–4 Quint, David, 64 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 73–4, 81, 85n36 Raleigh, Walter, 7 Reformation, 20, 60; and postReformation, 47–8 Renaissance, 21–2, 61, 71, 73, 170, 211, 221, 244, 253, 262–3, 293, 310, 344 Restoration, 92 rhetoric, 60, 63, 65–6, 73, 80, 91, 246 Robinson, Benedict, 340

Index

Roman Catholicism, 39–40, 52–5, 261 romance, 3–5, 7–8, 15–16, 18–19, 23– 5, 29–30, 45, 47, 66–7, 69–73, 75, 77, 81, 91–4, 96–9, 104–7, 160, 162, 170–1, 174, 177, 183, 206, 208–9, 213, 223–4, 227–8, 230, 233, 244, 252–3, 257, 261, 275, 281, 286, 299– 300, 303–8, 310, 312–13, 322, 324, 344, 346–7; Arthurian, 40, 67; Celtic, 23–4; chivalric, 16, 159, 172, 249–50; Christian, 77; Continental, 185; critical approaches to, 7–8; cultural circulation of, 16; definition, 6–7; as durable form, 39; and drama, 12, 17–18, 224, 227, 232, 245, 252, 312; and the everyday, 24, 161–2, 167–9; Gaelic, 17; Greek, 221–2, 224–6, 230, 342, 345–6; Imperial, 200; as a literary mode, 8, 303; medievalism of, 16; metrical, 17; Middle English, 30; Old Irish, 17; pastoral, 286; Reformation, 20; Renaissance, 240, 252–3; as resource, 9–10, 16, 19, 27, 31, 80; rhyme royal, 45; satanic, 103; Scientific, 200; and tragicomedy, 224–6, 235; Tudor, 275 Romanticism, 208–9, 211, 223 Rosen, Stanley, 344 Rowlands, Samuel, 49 Saunders, Corinne, 136n2, 340 Scanlon, Paul A., 257 Scott, Walter, 324 Shakespeare, William, 6, 18–19, 50,

361

221–4, 238, 240, 244–5, 248–9; and George Wilkins, 26, 239–40, 249; As You Like It, 50; The Comedy of Errors, 250; Cymbeline, 18, 222–3, 225; Hamlet, 49; King Lear, 294, 347; A Lover’s Complaint, 303; The Merchant of Venice, 257, 346; Pericles, 17–18, 26–7, 238–40, 242–53; The Rape of Lucrece, 311; The Tempest, 18, 250; Twelfth Night, 221; Venus and Adonis, 263; The Winter’s Tale, 18 Sidney, Philip, 281–2, 289, 345; Apology for Poetry, 282; New Arcadia, 175–7, 221–3, 240, 245, 249, 252, 269, 273, 281–2, 284–94, 344– 5, 347; Old Arcadia, 11, 17, 23, 28– 9, 281–8, 347 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 3, 14, 23, 159, 166–7, 168, 183, 209, 344 Sir Orfeo, 140–1, 150–1 Skretkowicz, Victor, 221–2, 340–1 Sloane, Thomas O., 86n44 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 7, 11, 17, 21, 23, 52–4, 60– 82, 173–4, 204, 240, 339–40, 342, 344; Shepherd’s Calendar, 275 Stevens, Wallace, 7, 339 Stillinger, Jack, 257 Tasso, Torquato, 6–7, 62, 67, 74, 76; Gerusalemme Liberata, 75 Tatius, Achilles: Leucippe and Klitophon, 221 Tennyson, Alfred: “Gareth and Lynette,” 204

362

Thurloe, John, 89 Troyes, Chrétien de, 120, 146–8, 160, 183 Twine, Lawrence: The Patterne of Paineful Adventures, 27, 248 uncanny, the, 25, 208–14 Valéry, Paul, 339 Vickers, Brian, 71 Victorian medievalism, 208 Vinaver, Eugène, 339 Virgil: The Aeneid, 67, 75, 90, 221 Wales, 140–4 Wayne, Valerie, 340 Werth, Tiffany, 341

Index

White Aethiopian, The, 224–7, 229, 231–5 Whitman, Jon, 341 Whitney, Geoffrey: Choice of Emblems, 262 Wilcher, Robert, 301–2, 305–7 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, 73 Wofford, Susanne L., 66, 69 Wolff, Samuel Lee, 221–2 wonder, 16, 22, 24, 30, 160–1, 173–5, 225 woodcuts, 28, 261, 264, 269, 272–4, 276 Wroth, Mary: Urania, 299 Zlotnik, Susan, 333