Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading

Early Modern Prose Fiction

The study of early modern prose fiction offers invaluable insight into the culture of the period and is quickly becoming one of the most exciting areas of current literary research. Bringing together multiple strands of recent scholarship, Early Modern Prose Fiction formulates afresh the critical and historical context in which this crucial genre might be understood and offers both a survey of the field and incisive analysis of key authors and texts. Sharing the view that prose fiction had a significant impact on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England, the essays in this volume examine such issues as: •

• • • •

links between the emergence of the genre and a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure, accessible for the first time to those previously excluded from such activities, particularly women and the working classes the challenge this new culture represented to existing social structures, as a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class the relationship between prose fiction and the rise of a publishing and book-marketing industry, due to the increased popularity of reading the development of romance fiction and the emerging sense of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ that accompanied it changing critical views of prose fiction, and the beginnings of a tendency to consider it an inferior or trivial art form.

What emerges is a compelling perspective on a sometimes neglected genre: early modern prose fiction in reciprocal relation to class distinctions, and as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological, and historical strands of the age. Early Modern Prose Fiction is

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Early Modern Prose Fiction

a convincing case for the significance of the form and an important study for any scholar or student of early modern English culture. Naomi Conn Liebler is a Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University. She has published widely on Shakespeare and other early modern drama, and Modern American and European Drama, including Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy, 1995. Contributing authors include Sheila T. Cavanagh, Stephen GuyBray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic, and the volume includes an afterword by Arthur Kinney.

Early Modern Prose Fiction The cultural politics of reading Naomi Conn Liebler

First published 2007 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2007 Naomi Conn Liebler All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-00458-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0-415-35840-X (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-35841-8 (pbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-00458-2 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-35840-8 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-35841-5 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-00458-6 (ebk)

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: the cultural politics of reading

vii xi

1

NA OM I C ONN LIEBLER

2 Day labor: Thomas Nashe and the practice of prose in early modern England

18

STEV E M ENTZ

3 How to turn prose into literature: the case of Thomas Nashe

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STEPHEN G UY -BRAY

4 Fishwives’ tales: narrative agency, female subjectivity, and telling tales out of school

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C ONSTA NC E C. R ELIHA N

5 English renaissance romances as conduct books for young men

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GORA N V. STA NIV UK OV IC

6 Mildred, beloved of the devil, and the dangers of excessive consumption in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession MA RY ELLEN LA M B

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vi Contents 7 ‘‘What ish my nation?’’: Lady Mary Wroth’s interrogations of personal and national identity

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SHEILA T. CAVA NA G H

8 Bully St. George: Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and the creation of the bourgeois national hero

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NA OM I C ONN LIEBLER

9 Counterfeiting sovereignty, mocking mastery: trickster poetics and the critique of romance in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller

130

JOA N PONG LINTON

10 Afterword

148

A RTHUR F. K INNEY

Notes Bibliography Index

153 166 179

Contributors

Sheila T. Cavanagh is Masse-Martin/NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Duquesne 2001) and Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Indiana 1994) and numerous articles on Renaissance literature and pedagogy. She is also the Director of the Emory Women Writers Resource Project, which received a major grant from the NEH. Stephen Guy-Bray is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto 2002), Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (forthcoming from Toronto in 2006), and of articles and book chapters, chiefly on Renaissance poetry. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Against Reproduction, on theories of textual production in the Renaissance. Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History and Director of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His most recent books—Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (Wayne State 2000), Shakespeare by Stages (Blackwell 2003), Shakespeare’s Webs˙ (Routledge 2004), and Shakespeare and Cognition (Routledge 2006)—deal with the impact of cognitive theory on the way Elizabethans saw Shakespeare’s plays. In the spring of 2006 he was given the Paul Oskar Kristeller Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Renaissance Society of America, the highest honor given to a Renaissance scholar. Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She is author of Gender and Authorship in the Sidney

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Contributors

Circle (Wisconsin 1990) and Popular Culture in Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (forthcoming from Routledge 2006) as well as numerous essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She is currently working on a larger project on early modern women readers with and against contemporary discourses of consumption. For 2005–6 she is a Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. Naomi Conn Liebler is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (Routledge 1995), co-editor, with John Drakakis, of Tragedy (Longman 1998), and editor of The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama (Palgrave 2002). She has written numerous articles on Shakespeare and other early modern writers, including Richard Johnson. She is currently studying ‘‘Shakespeare’s Geezers,’’ representations and negotiations of old age in all of his dramatic and poetic genres. Joan Pong Linton is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. Her publications include The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge 1998), and essays on early modern prose fiction and on Anne Askew. Her current research focuses on trickster poetics in early modern English literature and drama. Steve Mentz is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He is the author of Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Ashgate 2006) and coeditor of Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Michigan 2004), and of numerous articles on early modern drama and prose. He is currently working on a study of shipwreck narratives from Hakluyt to Defoe. Constance C. Relihan is Hargis Professor of English Literature and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University. She is the author of Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourses (Kent State 1994), Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender, and Elizabethan Fiction (Kent State 2004), editor of Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent State 1996), and co-editor, with Goran V. Stanivukovic, of Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities (Palgrave 2003). She is currently at work on an edition of Westward for Smelts.

Contributors

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Goran V. Stanivukovic teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. He has published a critical edition of Emanuel Forde’s Ornatus and Artesia (Dovehouse 2003), and edited volumes, Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto 2001) and Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities, 1570–1640 (co-edited with Constance C. Relihan, Palgrave 2003). His edited volume, Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, will be published by Palgrave. He is working on a book on prose romances, fictions of masculinity, and Mediterranean travels.

Acknowledgments

The editor of a collection of essays enjoys both a certain privilege and a unique burden. The privilege rests in acknowledging specifically those who have helped bring this project to fruition; the burden (though happily borne) is that my debts are not only to those in the first category who are named below, but even more to the authors whose essays comprise this the book and to those whose contributions, unknown to me, those authors would acknowledge had they my privilege as editor. This volume is a collaborative work in the fullest sense: none of us works alone, and my gratitude extends to everyone implicated in the preceding sentence. I have learned much from the authors who graciously consented to write for this collection and (as always) from Arthur Kinney whose Afterword skillfully anchors the whole enterprise; their work, along with their patience, encouragement, and support throughout the long journey, is the heart of the project. I would not—and of course could not—have undertaken to steer this boat without them. More thanks belong to Routledge’s Liz Thompson, Polly Dodson, and Geraldine Martin for their faith in me and in this collection from the outset and for hands held and hands extended in support all the way through. I am grateful to Christy Desmet, Bernice Kliman, and Ramona Wray for their encouragement of the initial proposal and for recommending it so enthusiastically to the press. As always, the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library Reading Room have been indispensable in providing resources for my part in this process. To my eagle-eyed and diligent undergraduate student Arpin´e Jones for her help in reading the page proofs, and to Chuck Feldman for technical assistance—my two secret weapons in completing this project—my special thanks.

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Introduction: the cultural politics of reading Naomi Conn Liebler

The written word can dispense with trumpets; reverence for the written word as such may allow all trumpets to be spurned. Cognitive and moral egalitarianism is made feasible . . . . Semantic content acquires a life of its own. (Gellner 1988: 72)

Important work has been done in recent years, much of it by the contributors to this volume, to bring specific early modern prose works and their authors and readers to wider critical attention, and to formulate (or re-formulate) the critical and historical context in which those works should now be understood. It is time to bring together those separate strands of critical consideration. This collection of new essays addresses early modern prose fiction in terms of its reciprocal relation (1) to class distinctions among readers and authors and their attendant complications for critics of these materials, (2) to the development of the genre of romance fiction in particular (narratological, structural, and thematic), and (3) to the ways in which these growing shelf-lists of popular reading material permanently altered the social map of English readership as well as the book trade. As Goran Stanivukovic observes, the strikingly high number of printings and re-printings of prose fiction texts in the Renaissance suggests not only the popularity of the genre but also the relative speed with which such literary texts were produced and sold profitably. Narratives of women’s property, protocols of courtship, eroticism, devoted love, tempered masculinity, travel, and petty crime captured the cultural preoccupations of a nascent middle class interested in stabilizing marriage and the household, expanding property, and questing for profit. Prose fiction was a hybrid genre that absorbed not just cultural, ideological, and historical strands of the age, but

2 Naomi Conn Liebler also modes of writing of other literary kinds (travel, conduct literature, ethics, philosophy) and made them available to a wider reading audience of middling classes.1 Further, because of their marketability and portability among all classes of literate citizens, we reconsider the ways in which developing forms of romance fiction (chivalric and others) contributed to an emerging sense of ‘‘national identity’’ and nationalism. Like the start of any revolution, the history of ‘‘the coming of the book’’ remains the subject of a long-rehearsed and well-known debate (Febvre and Martin 1984: 9–13). Febvre rejected the term ‘‘revolution’’ in favor of the less sensational term ‘‘changes’’ (1984: 9) wrought by ‘‘the book’’ on a variety of social and political fronts. Nonetheless, when we consider the extent of changes in reciprocal social, economic, and political relations between and among English classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the impact of books on classes of citizens in early modern England who could, with reading, become irrepressible instead of repressed, ‘‘revolution’’ seems to be the apt term. That all of this occurred throughout Europe in a space of some 100–150 years—Febvre accepted 1450 as the starting point for the circulation of documents made with movable type (1984: 9)—qualifies the ‘‘changes’’ as revolutionary. As Stephen Orgel recently put it, ‘‘The print revolution . . . was in fact a reading revolution, a revolution not of technology but of dissemination and reception . . . . The innovation is in readers, not publishers: the agent of change is not the press but its audience’’ (2002: 282–3; see also Wright 1935: 81; Spufford 1982: 131). For Benedict Anderson, following on from the work of Febvre and Martin, in the 40-odd years between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than 20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600, the number manufactured had reached between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000. . . . In a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity. (1991: 33–4) By the sixteenth century, ‘‘books were readily available to anyone who could read’’ (Febvre and Martin 1984: 262), and print-capitalism ‘‘made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’’ (Anderson 1991: 36).

Introduction

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As anyone working today in literacy programs can affirm, access to the written—thence to the printed—word springs important personal and cultural alterations. Reading can empower and enfranchise the otherwise invisible or marginalized; it transmits meaning, in Ernest Gellner’s terms, ‘‘without speaker or listener,’’ and offers ‘‘content rather than context’’ (1988: 72). It ‘‘makes possible at once public and private identity’’; it is ‘‘the rite of entry into the social. . . [and] is traditionally held to be the qualification for citizenship’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 1, 26). What Walter Benjamin mourned in ‘‘the decline of storytelling’’ is specifically implicated in this development: ‘‘The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself’’ (1968: 86). By definition, so too has the reader of that novel, Benjamin continues, ‘‘more so than any other reader’’ (1968: 100), often to that reader’s—at least imaginative—liberation. The most obvious difference between listening to a storyteller and reading a book is that the latter activity protects by privacy whatever thought, response, fantasy, approval, or disapproval arises from the exposure. As a distinctly private activity, reading inspires reconsiderations of one’s boundaries: economic, social, physical, geographic, or political. Even while ‘‘the community of listeners disappears’’ (Benjamin 1968: 91), a community of readers emerges to redefine and reconfigure what is meant by ‘‘community.’’ In that redefinition, Benjamin’s isolated reader is ‘‘ready to make it completely his own . . . ’’ (1968: 100). Ownership is the key to understanding the social and political difference reading makes. We need to ask who was reading, and what were they reading? Studies such as those by Lori Humphrey Newcomb (2002) and the collection recently edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (2002)2 have done much to advance our understanding of specific tastes in reading, practices in annotating, and book collecting. But because many of the titles they discuss were primarily owned by elite readers, or were large and expensive tomes such as Bibles or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy —‘‘important’’ books owned by ‘‘important’’ people—they cannot tell us much about the reading practices of ordinary citizens whose books—the term ‘‘libraries’’ is hyperbolic and probably anachronistic for this population—were neither catalogued nor preserved. Although we lack sufficient empirical evidence (of the sort afforded by saved collections and catalogues) for access to the reading pleasures of grocers, craftsmen, housemaids, apprentices, middle-level

4 Naomi Conn Liebler merchants, and the like, it would be wrong to assume that we can know nothing of them. Prefaces and dedications indicate the readers to whom authors hoped to appeal. Printing, publishing, and vending rights for what today would be called ‘‘mass-market’’ books further contribute to that narrative of readership, especially in instances when relatively cheap books proved popular enough to have been reprinted or reissued in successive quarto editions over a relatively brief period of time. Much depends, of course, on what constitutes a ‘‘record’’ and what counts as ‘‘evidence.’’ To tweak Foucault’s now much-abused line—‘‘What matter who’s speaking?’’ (1977: 138)—we might well ask, without his irony: what matter who’s buying, who’s reading, who’s spreading the word and pumping up sales? Perhaps more importantly, we should also ask why. What did ordinary folks find appealing enough to warrant spending hard-earned pennies on works of prose fiction? What did those romances, adventure tales, pastorals, picaresque novels say to their readers? How did they embrace working-class purchasers3 and welcome them into the community of literate citizens who could, and did, read for pleasure, for enlightenment, or just—like today’s readers—to brighten the time passed between waking, working, and sleeping? The rise of reading is inextricable from developing ideas of permeable social and economic boundaries, of discrete concepts of subjectivity and the possibilities of enfranchisement. Addressing the question of Elizabethan ‘‘canonicity,’’ Laura Caroline Stevenson observes that Since literature offers a structure that enables men [sic] to reflect upon a variety of problems, works that attain popularity presumably do so because they offer many readers a way of sorting out their ideas on subjects of common interest . . . . Conversely, works that appeal to ‘‘fit audience, though few’’ attain little popularity because they do not offer insights to a wide audience . . . . (1984: 1) Reading—especially reading for pleasure—became the means by which people in a range of classes and communities discovered, fashioned, knew, and imagined not only ‘‘themselves’’ but also the relation of those selves to a nearly infinite world of other selves both real and invented. ‘‘A transformation from reading as exegesis to reading as sensibility’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 12) occurred for men and women, apprentices and squires, the full range of sundry folk who had increasing access to texts of their own choosing. Such access

Introduction

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grew exponentially with the book trade, which responded to growing demand with an equally expanding supply. When we remember that paper was the most expensive and least renewable resource in the manufacture of books and pamphlets (ink was cheap and movable type was recyclable), the explosive supply of printed matter is an astonishing index to the power of market forces. Reading for pleasure made books into commodities and readers into consumers. Peter Blayney once estimated conservatively that between 1591 and 1610 the printers of England manufactured an average of more than 300 surviving titles a year, plus numerous ballads, chapbooks, and other ephemera that have been lost . . . . If we assume an average edition size of 500 copies—which many textual critics would suggest is too low—the total annual production was about 175,000 printed objects. Including imported and second-hand books, the booksellers of England must therefore have been selling between 200,000 and a quarter of a million items a year—probably at least half of them in London itself. (1991) David Harris Sacks expands that estimate to ‘‘between perhaps a quarter of a million to a million individually printed items produced each year,’’ and adds that such numbers ‘‘imposed significant problems in the management of inventories as well as the distribution of finished products from year to year’’ (2002: 155), problems still recognizable for publishers and book sellers today.4 Estimates of London’s population for those years offer similar numbers—some 200,000 by 1600 and 375,000 by 1650 (Griffiths and Jenner 2000: 2; also Sacks 2002: 154)—which suggests that at least one printed item could have been sold to every person in the city.5 If we assume that not every adult citizen bought printed matter, adjusted distribution figures suggest multiple purchases by many of those adults who did.6 Those purchasers, of whom most if not all were also the readers of what they purchased, formed what today would be called ‘‘targeted markets, market sectors and market share . . . such language, for all its anachronistic qualities, quite properly describes both the conditions and perceptions of the early modern book trade’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 8). Those new markets reflected various tastes in reading matter and created new literary fashions, which in turn created markets for and increased production of such genres as romance, travel narrative, trickster and cony-catching tales, among others. One

6 Naomi Conn Liebler inevitable result of these variegated kinds of texts was a responsive alteration in what Sharpe and Zwicker, borrowing from literary theory, call ‘‘interpretive communities’’ or ‘‘reading communities’’ (2003: 8–9), which in turn inflected the number and the nature of discernible polities. New voices spoke to new listeners who ‘‘heard’’ with their eyes and made meaning from their independent receptions of printed words. The proliferation of available reading matter in London bookstalls both created and was fed by a new and widespread literacy, and thus was instrumental in altering the stratified social and political structures of the period both in England and on the continent. Like the history of the drama in this period, the development of a reading class among those previously excluded (women and working classes in particular) significantly challenged the preservation of class structures. But unlike the case of drama of the time, resistance to this inexorable growth of popular reading matter never resulted in a parliamentary act to close down bookshops; as Paul Salzman observes, ‘‘despite its strength as a literary form flexible enough to cater for a very wide range of readers, prose fiction sparked off very little critical debate or theorizing during the 150 years’’ from 1558 to 1700 in England (1985: 342; but cf. Quint 1993: 179–80 [on romance in particular], 321). Instead, a critical stratification occurred (and persisted well into the twentieth century) that relegated prose fiction and its readers to a diminished status that trivialized and denigrated both the matter and its purchasers. Simultaneously, that same matter and those same purchasers swelled both the shelf lists and the profits of the book trade and led, arguably, to changes in social and political modes: crossing normative boundaries of social organization, the availability of quarto- and octavo-formatted books produced a growth in literacy as well as a profound growth in the business of book production and book selling. Non-elite authors and readers grew in numbers, and as Newcomb (2002) and Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) have argued, efforts to contain (by the stratification noted above) the social impact of this new readership were neither as widespread nor as successful as we have been led to believe. Andrew Hadfield argues persuasively for locating contemporary political discourse as coded allegorical material within a wide range of prose fictions of the period (1998: 135). More intriguing than simply the fact of such covert political enterprises, however, are the reasons for it: ‘‘given the precarious career prospects for young men who did not inherit land or possess independent wealth, it is by no means self-evident that all wrote literary texts because they were bent on

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pursuing a literary career’’ (Hadfield 1998: 136). Some, such as Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge used fiction-writing as a platform to curry favor with one or another courtly faction; ‘‘it would be surprising if none of these . . . writers had chosen to consider political questions in their fictions, given their knowledge of and close involvement in contemporary politics’’ (1998: 137). More recently, and taking account of Hadfield’s work among many others, Philip Schwyzer observes the current critical understanding ‘‘that England, like all nations, was not there to be ‘discovered,’ but had rather to be invented or constructed—even ‘written’ ’’ (2004: 3). For Schwyzer, what is ‘‘written,’’ or ‘‘discovered,’’ or ‘‘constructed’’ is not ‘‘England’’ but Britain (2004: 3), despite this pointed observation: In the sixteenth century, there were many people of all ranks and stations willing to kill or die for their religion, for their traditional lord, for customary rights, or for pay—few if any were willing to make similar sacrifices for an imagined transhistorical community, be it nominated England, Wales, or Britain. Sentiments that could be termed ‘‘nationalist’’ seem to have been largely confined to a small, economically and politically dominant sector of society. (2004: 9)7 However we wish to understand the various investigations and/or critiques of ‘‘England’’ and its citizenry—and the essays in this collection will understand them from a variety of perspectives—our aggregate inquiry here aims to locate in early modern English prose fiction a social, political, and economic intersection where various sectors, classes, and estates gathered in the marketplace of ideas and entertainments. No less troublesome than the question of ‘‘nation’’ are those of social and economic class, which are not always the same thing. Readers of all stations, occupations, incomes, and expenditures increasingly during the period gained access to a great variety of printed matter. Lending libraries of course had not yet been invented, but lending, or at least sharing, purchasers are not difficult to imagine. Domestic servants could read the expensive bound books laid aside by their employers;8 apprentices similarly could read the pages brought home by their masters, and of course workers were known to spend fractions of their own wages on romances, chapbooks, posies of poesy, and the like. Ballads, broadsides, pamphlets, newsbooks, and other cheap matter were available at market and

8 Naomi Conn Liebler festival fairs and from itinerant peddlers across all the social and economic borders of English life. Information and entertainment were contagious, and uncontainable. The act of reading has political implications whenever it enfolds readers in a world larger than themselves, larger than the household or community or even the state in which they reside, work, live. Reading for pleasure is likewise political, for the reasons identified in attempts to discredit and sometimes to suppress fanciful imaginative forms such as romances. As Michael Schoenfeldt observes in a summation of Hobbes’ diatribe against reading in Leviathan —Hobbes compared the spread of historical and political reading to that of rabies—‘‘Books, then, stir in the body politic the same kinds of unhealthy passions they generate in the individual reader’’ (2003: 229). By ‘‘distracting’’ readers from more serious occupations like work or worship, they disturbed orderly systems of stratification and otherwise regulated behaviors. Leisure itself was seen as subversive, or at least potentially disruptive to the orderly household, shop, farm, and thus, by extension, polis. Even when the apprentice or the domestic servant remained seated, book rather than implement of service in hand, the adventures in which they participated imaginatively as they read the romance, the picaresque adventure, the cony or the trickster tale, suggested alternative, if unreal and unrealizable, lives. The fixed destiny of walking contentedly in one’s vocation was less unquestionable, more tenuous, especially given the social fluidity of positions of servitude: temporary service was ‘‘a matter of law and custom . . . . [All] unmarried men and women below gentle status and not in apprenticeship or domestic service were expected to lend their labor to service in husbandry . . . [and] most young people left their families to work in other households’’ (Newcomb 2002: 220–1). Fictions of adventurous lives arguably posited imaginary parallels to actual transgressions; at the other end of the scale of social practice, reading for self-improvement, through conduct books or discourses on fashion—what today would be called self-help books—provided models of kinder, gentler communities, for elites and also for those who perhaps had neither the opportunity nor the wish to alter their stations.9 Today, much attention is given in classrooms, in scholarly articles, and at academic conferences to ‘‘reader response’’ or ‘‘readercentered pedagogy,’’ and to the role and responsibility of readers (students, for example) in creating meaning and in participating in a dialogue with the texts they are reading. No such critical vocabulary existed for early modern readers, but the absence of a lexicon does

Introduction

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not mean the absence of praxis. Modern and postmodern critical intervention, in recognizing that the reader of text makes its meaning, perhaps unexpectedly has given us a way to project, to imagine, how early modern readers of the working classes—who left no diaries, marginalia, catalogues, or letters—might have received the stories, romances, picaresque and travel narratives. Addresses to the reader that preface early modern works of fiction can and should be taken as records of intent, and understood to have been the springboard to readerly negotiation of the matter that followed. ‘‘To the Reader’’ is a discourse of great importance wherever we find it. It is more than a selling point; it is in most cases the only record we have of the conversation between writers and purchasers of texts. Moreover, as Kevin Dunn suggests, the very fact of such a conversation indicates an important shift in the politics of reading, with particular attention to the reciprocal relations of reader and author. For Renaissance writers and their readers, he observes: The creation of a bourgeois public sphere brought with it important changes to the concept of authority, political but also literary. For the medieval writer, authority was a textual inheritance, a finite set of authorities who could be adduced and copied but rarely added to. The essential genre for the medieval writer was thus the gloss, the ligature between authority and writer. Whether the gloss was the writer’s in the margin of an authorized text or an authority cited to buttress the writer’s words, the scene of writing always appeared as an interplay between a preestablished ‘‘master text’’ and the writer’s liminal approach to that text. Authority . . . was hierarchically determined and inevitably borrowed; strategies of what might be called self-authorization were beside the point. (1994: 8) The address ‘‘to the reader’’ makes the text immediate, unmediated, and arguably unauthor ized in the sense that it is not endorsed—ligatured, to use Dunn’s word—by hierarchical authority. The reader so addressed becomes her or his own authority for reading, for making meaning, for completing the trajectory from author to recipient. ‘‘Self-authorization,’’ says Dunn, ‘‘has always been part of the prefatory project’’ (1994: 19). Dunn’s project focuses mainly on authors, but it implicates readers as well, for readers ‘‘invited’’ by prefaces into the discourse of the early modern romantic, pastoral, heroic, or picaresque novel,10 are thereby literally ‘‘authorized’’ at

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least imaginatively to participate in lives other than those they are living, in a vernacular discourse they can recognize as their own. For Dunn, the ‘‘center of the history,’’ the Renaissance ‘‘moment between the medieval and Enlightenment models of authority’’ constitutes ‘‘the space of the fullest exercise of self-authorizing rhetoric in the Western literary tradition before the Romantics. The story of this rhetoric is to a large extent the story of humanism,’’ which ‘‘had its roots in the Italian bourgeoisie and took its strength from the growing market for books that was created by the printing press’’ (1994: 9). Sometimes the texts figured subjects very much like their readers, ‘‘ordinary men and women . . . those classes in society which have risen in importance since the eclipse of the feudal aristocracy: the urban middle classes first of all, and later such more inclusive groups as workers and farmers, also salaried folk and various lesser groups attached to these major ones’’ (Schlauch 1963: 1). Other texts tended to naturalize ‘‘heroic’’ experience for readers who could fantasize through reading an already-fantastic world of knights and princesses, and also to recuperate—by presenting them as successful—strategies for survival and social or economic revenge, even if only imaginary. Thus tricksters and cony-catchers perform what servants, maids, and apprentices could not or did not dare; knightly champions travel exotically and reap rewards of dominion and fame. Although many early modern prose fiction readers were identified in prefaces and addresses as aristocratic, readers of all classes participated imaginatively in the journeys and escapades of the fictions they read, and as Brayman Hackel observes, because ‘‘the circulation of printed texts could not be fully contained . . . . [In] the very act of stratifying those readers, [preliminaries] pushed them towards a single reading posture of sympathy, pliability, and friendliness’’ (2005: 69). Brayman Hackel further notes that, despite ‘‘prescriptions’’ (and conversely, proscriptions) of intended markets by authors and publishers, offered by ‘‘sustained attempts at physical and, later, textual control of books,’’ the ‘‘great Variety’’ (in the capacious phrase of Heminges and Condell for the marketing of Shakespeare’s First Folio) of folk purchasing and presumably reading books was ‘‘perceived as at once vulnerable and menacing’’ (2005: 70). Thus the efforts, discernible in prefaces ‘‘to the reader,’’ by authors or publishers to direct book sales to particular populations (and to exclude others) could be thwarted or undermined by the power of the pence and by popular resistance to the specific ‘‘pitches’’ (as we might call them today) of those authors or publishers. It is intriguing to imagine a printer, himself a working craftsman, inserting his own ‘‘to the reader’’ into

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the final product, and evading any negative consequences by the increased sales of the book in question to readers unintended by its author. Ironically, at the same time that some elite authors resisted writingfor-sale because of its working-class implications, those who submitted to it for whatever reasons—failure to find sufficient aristocratic patronage would have been a compelling one—labored to sustain the illusion that if they must perforce endure the humiliation of hawking their wares like any common peddler or shopkeeper, they might at least be able to limit their market to the class of buyers who had declined to support them through patronage in the first place. We can almost hear their distress in addresses such as George Whetstone’s, in The Rocke of Regard (1576), ‘‘To all the young Gentlemen of England, to whose perusing the Booke shall happen’’ (presumably by accident; apparently even reading for pleasure constituted a d´eclass´e action tantamount to ‘‘slumming’’). Whetstone warns his delicate readers that they are about to engage with ‘‘a worke so worthlesse (in respect of the homely handling thereof) as will (I fere) neither content you in reading, nor any wayes commend my paines in writing.’’ With less apology but similar exclusivity, his Englysh Myrror (1586), dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, is directed ‘‘To the most Honorable the Nobilitie of this flourishing realme of Englande.’’ It must have been easier for authors with no such elitist pretensions to enjoy whatever market demographic their books could find. Anthony Munday, a draper’s son and ‘‘the first of the [Elizabethan] novelists who had no university training’’ (Stillinger xvi), neither forgot nor repudiated his working-class origins.11 His principal literary productions consisted largely in translations, and indeed his translation of the Amadis de Gaula was crucial to the burgeoning taste for romances in English read by overlapping classes.12 Munday’s single original contribution to Elizabethan prose fiction, Zelauto. The Fountain of Fame (1580) in three parts, carries three addresses to the reader. Part I openly capitalizes on the success of Lyly’s first Euphues or, The Anatomy of Wit (1578), and is addressed ‘‘To the well disposed Reader’’ without specifying any particular class of readers. Part II shows a more aggressive marketing, though still to those of any class inclined to purchase it: ‘‘The Author to the curteous Reader’’ writes: So who but readeth the beginning of a booke: can give no iudgement of the sequel ensuing . . . . The Printer (you will say) hath painted it full of Pictures, to make it be bought the better:

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Naomi Conn Liebler and I say the matter is more meritorious, and therefore you should buy it the sooner. So, if you will be ruled by the Printer and me: you shall at no tyme want any of the Bookes.

Part III, ‘‘The Amorous Life of Strabino’’ (one of Shakespeare’s sources for The Merchant of Venice) is likewise addressed ‘‘to the curteous reader,’’ but now the pitch is made specifically to ‘‘Gentlemen (and ryght courteous whatsoever),’’ and betrays a certain mendacity in its appeal: ‘‘Aristotle sayth, that he which receyueth a false peece of coyne, doth but sustayne a reasonable losse: but he that trusteth a fayned freend in steede of a true, may endammage him selfe to his vtter vndoing, few such freends God send me: and as much good money as shall please him.’’ The draper’s son who, after his father’s death in 1576, apprenticed himself to John Allde, the printer, stationer, and charter member of the Stationers’ Guild (Turner 1928: 5), never blushed to acknowledge the pursuit of money as his motive for writing. In Celeste Turner’s fortuitous phrase, he ‘‘made of the guildsman’s living a mantle for his age’’ (1928: 2). Nearly 100 years after Munday’s first publications, Francis Kirkman wrought himself a place that represents an intriguing middle ground between Whetstone and Munday. In a move increasingly familiar today, and propelled by ‘‘an itch to gain some Reputation by being in Print’’ (qtd. in Greene 2006: 19), he presented the largely fictional Unlucky Citizen as his ‘‘autobiography.’’ As Jody Greene has recently observed, Kirkman ‘‘literally ‘entitled’ ’’ himself to elite status, ‘‘in his own punning account, through the medium of a printed title. Moreover, in a move of radical appropriation, he uses the power of print to entitle himself ’’ (2006: 19).13 Although it is unclear how representative he was of other Restoration writers, Kirkman figures as a sort of telos in the trajectory of attitudes toward publication and booksales: as Greene admirably puts it, ‘‘Gentlemen may have shunned print . . . but print apparently had the capacity to make gentlemen—or at least something like gentlemen—of those who were no such thing. Barred by birth, education, and circumstance from the patriarchal prerogatives of the pen, Kirkman laid claim instead to new forms of literary authority promised by the press’’ (2006: 22). Whetstone the reluctant, Munday the transparent, and Kirkman the eager salesmen offer polarities of authorial relation to their respectively intended readerships. Whereas playwrights whose works were staged in public venues could share the success of plays enjoyed by a ‘‘great Variety,’’ elite authors of prose or poetic works squirmed to find their golden words enjoyed by unintended readers, who thereby

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insinuated themselves into a ‘‘community of readers’’ as varied and as uncomfortable as the ‘‘great Variety’’ of social and economic precincts of London itself. Like any other kind of community, the ‘‘community of readers’’ engendered by market forces was the site of competing anxieties and complicated tensions. Brayman Hackel lists a number of works advertised to readers of ‘‘all estates’’ (the poetic miscellany Paradise of Daintie Deuises, 1585; Three Ladies of London, 1581), ‘‘all degrees of men’’ (Hoby’s translation of The Courtyer, 1561), or in the case of the miscellany Forrest of Fancy (1579), to readers ‘‘young or olde/Ritche, poore, of high or low degree’’ (2005: 71–2). Even purchasers with only rudimentary skills to read the books they purchased ‘‘enter into the marketplace of print nonetheless, walking by bookstalls, glimpsing title pages, reading books, and forming opinions’’ (2005: 73). Those opinions made middle and lower-class readers into significant market forces and, arguably, into social and political forces as well, as the books they purchased, borrowed, or circulated became tools for their enfranchisement both economically and politically. Toward the end of Epic and Empire, David Quint hints at the shift from economic to political force: the fairy-tale stories of knights-errant and amorous shepherds codified aristocratic ideals of individual honor and gallantry and placed those ideals in an ahistorical setting, an escapist pastoral removed from a real political world in which those ideals and the nobility who upheld them were losing out to new historical forces: competition from below from a new mercantile bourgeoisie . . . [and] pressure from above exerted by the centralizing, absolutist state. The literary taste for romance evasion . . . represented a defection or alienation from the national projects of the crown on the part of an aristocracy that no longer felt itself to be a full partner with the monarch. (1993: 321–2) Elite dismay over the proliferation of books and their sales, combined with a growing disaffection within aristocratic circles over their diminishing influence, locates a cultural anxiety centered in increasingly fluid class distinctions.14 Cheap print and accessible prose narratives contributed to that anxiety by making the same material available to a ‘‘great Variety’’ of readers: the market for literacy became a bell that could not be un-rung.

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Markets of any kind tend to produce commodities of such variety that producers and vendors quickly find themselves organizing their goods into categories, and the labor to produce those various goods as an equally distinct enterprise. Not unlike today when writers identify themselves by genres of productivity, Elizabethan writers of prose fiction, from 1580 onwards, came to see their work as a distinct and new kind of literary labor. In ‘‘Day Labor: the Practice of Writing Prose Fiction in Early Modern England,’’ Steve Mentz opens this collection by exploring the ‘‘self-conscious’’ literary production of Greene, Nashe, Lodge, and Dekker as commodities for the book market; these authors, he argues, developed their own authorial personae as ‘‘brand names,’’ and positioned their books in competition with the public stage, coterie miscellanies, moral homilies, and other forms of circulated texts. Although several of these ‘‘authors’’ were what today would be termed ‘‘crossover artists,’’ writing for the stage as well as for the prose fiction market, Mentz argues that they saw their prose-fiction labors as distinct from, and superior to, their dramatic work and to the ‘‘mere players’’ who performed the texts of others on the stage. Taking Nashe as his principal exemplar of this new ‘‘commercial’’ artist, Mentz examines the work of this ‘‘proto-theorist’’ in tracing what he calls an emerging theory of prose narrative’s place in early modern literary culture. Nashe, he argues, more than any other Elizabethan writer, imagines the products of his pen as commodities to be sold, the writer’s craft as a respectable form of labor, and the writing of prose fiction as a newly professional cultural practice. With a focus narrowed specifically to Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, Stephen Guy-Bray follows, in ‘‘How to Turn Prose into Literature,’’ tracing Nashe’s appropriation of the Earl of Surrey’s prestige as a move to raise the status of his own tale and to establish prose as equal or even superior to poetry because the latter imitates continental fashions, whereas prose is natively English and solidly middle-class. Guy-Bray reads Nashe’s tale as a negotiation between elite and middle-class styles, and as a defense of both the middle-class citizen and the ‘‘humble’’ prose chronicle that tells English stories. The essays by Constance Relihan, Goran Stanivukovic, and Mary Ellen Lamb share an emphasis on matter aimed particularly at readers of the middle and working classes. Relihan’s ‘‘Fishwives’ tales: narrative agency, female subjectivity, and telling tales out of school’’ explores the implications of the narrative framework on the meaning of Westward for Smelts, an anonymous 1620 collection of six Boccaccian/Chaucerian tales but diverges from both of those traditions by presenting six English fishwives as the storytellers and setting its tales

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in England. The narrative voices are female and working class; the stories they tell are catty tales of adultery and deceit among English men and women, and each is followed by discussion of the actions of the stories’ characters that analyzes and ridicules bad behavior in an effort to identify appropriate standards of English conduct. The effect of this strategy, she argues, is to suggest a kind of confidence in English national identity through the creation of an idealized working-class, female state, a ‘‘floating female utopia of fishwives.’’ In ‘‘English Renaissance Romances as Conduct Books for Young Men’’, Stanivukovic identifies a different kind of ‘‘utopian’’ community to be fostered by behavioral models found in popular romances. Whereas Puritan clerics turned out dozens of volumes of instruction for managing the emotional and sexual lives of young women, they produced little in the way of guidance for young men. Castiglione’s Courtier, in Hoby’s translation, and Ascham’s Scholemaster addressed young nobles and humanist scholars, respectively, but they did little to effect changes in cultural conceptions of masculinity as these shifted from chivalric to romantic modes and required attention to such middle-class concerns as the establishment and governance of households. Romance writers such as Robert Parry, Emanuel Forde, Henry Robarts, and Richard Johnson revived nostalgia for the world of masculine prowess and chivalry within fictions that promoted for young men, caught between adolescence and adulthood, models of prudence, temperance, and romantic behavior leading to matrimony; romances thus became for these readers a sort of conduct books for the middle classes, teaching them how to manage their passions and ultimately to settle down to productive and moderate adult lives. Lamb’s essay, ‘‘Mildred, beloved of the Devil, and the dangers of excessive consumption in Riche His Farewell to the Militarie Profession’’, considers the caricature of the frivolous female reader of romance as a displacement of early modern anxieties over the increased circulation of goods onto women as consumers of books as well as of goods. Her essay offers a compelling contrast with Stanivukovic’s argument for romance reading as a moral guide for young men; women who read romances found in their ‘‘free-floating sexuality’’ a way of negotiating and managing both erotic and material appetites. Lamb’s essay considers some of the deeper cultural implications of these projections of the dual desire for sex and goods onto the early modern English woman within contemporary ideologies of both gender and class; these are set against the complicated multiple narratives of Barnabe Rich as author-subject and the female representations he imagines as both subjects and readers. For Lamb’s

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and Stanivukovic’s selected authors, the narratives offer similar sermonic lessons: uncontrolled appetites—for sex, goods, adventures, consumptions of all kinds—pose grave dangers for the commonwealth. For these authors as producers of books, however, as Lamb points out, controlling these appetites was not good for business: book sales depended upon, while seeming to decry, increased traffic in such unnecessary luxuries. The obvious contradiction between ‘‘lesson’’ and promoted practice crystallizes important aspects of the reader-consumer-citizen’s socially complicated situation in early modern England. Citizenship in another sense is the focus of the last three essays in this collection, which examine early modern prose fiction through lenses trained on distinct classes of readers. Sheila T. Cavanagh’s ‘‘ ‘What ish my nation?’: Lady Mary Wroth’s interrogations of personal and national identity’’ consider an aristocratic female perspective on issues of identity as they are affected and inflected by place, family ties, emotional entanglements, and political responsibilities. Cavanagh argues that Wroth’s prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s ‘‘Urania,’’ simultaneously establishes and undermines links between characters and their countries of origin, adoption, or sovereignty, constructing a romance where emerging strategies of narratology and nationalism continually shape each other. Set beside the essays that follow and precede it, Cavanagh’s contribution to this collection reminds us that the question of national identity informs early modern romance in ways that bind disparate classes of citizens; however differently inflected, the idea(s) of ‘‘nation’’ emerges as a fundamental concern of all classes of authors and readers of prose fiction, and forms a unifying link between elite and ordinary ‘‘sorts.’’ The ‘‘scene of reading’’ often invoked by scholars of early modern prose fiction (see, for example, Newcomb 2002) as a model of class distinction, with Cavanagh’s depiction of Wroth, expands to embrace readers of similar interests who were distinguished, in this context, only by their respective classes. Naomi Conn Liebler’s chapter, ‘‘Bully St. George: Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and the creation of the bourgeois national hero,’’ traces the appropriation of England’s patron saint and national hero for and by working-class citizens. Richard Johnson’s full oeuvre was almost entirely directed to a bourgeois readership of working Englishmen, primarily apprentices and shopkeepers, and was both significantly productive and indicative of the tastes of a middlebrow readership, some newly literate, who bought books in great numbers. This long prose romance (in two parts, 1596–7)

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reconfigures the legend-driven imaginations of the Beowulf poet, Malory, and Spenser into a distinctly un-allegorical narrative of St. George’s adventures in the newly discovered romance of the East. The Seven Champions abounds with stories of St. George’s multiple triumphs over what Johnson’s readership understood as the dual evils of fiery dragons and treacherous Muslims. While the narrative accommodates the other six national champions of Europe (each gets a full chapter), all unite under England’s patron. Johnson’s St. George is rarely the perfect model of chivalry; he is instead a hero instantly familiar to his middle-class readers, to whom Johnson appeals frequently in the course of the heroic tale. Johnson’s projection of a Christian English nation (and occasionally of a Christian European union of sorts) informs and is informed entirely by a non-elite, increasingly influential, and demographically substantial bourgeois London populace for whom ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘class’’ were inextricably conjoined. Finally, Joan Pong Linton’s essay, ‘‘Counterfeiting sovereignty, mocking mastery: trickster poetics and the critique of romance in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller,’’ brings the collection full circle, returning to the author whose work is the focus of the first two essays. It is not surprising that Nashe captures the attention of three contributors to this collection: arguably more than any of his equally important contemporaries, and certainly more than his less famous ones, Nashe defies definition, genre-classification, and narrative positioning; his dispossessed hero, Jack Wilton, remodels for an Elizabethan readership a tradition of trickster narratives, beginning with Caxton’s 1484 Life of Aesop, long familiar to English readers. Although rogue-like, Jack’s agency as trickster is defined through his difference from both the rogue and the citizen hero of the popular romances. It offers ‘‘a disposition, a way of living in the world and responding to others . . . [and] the possibility of thinking and living differently.’’ Thus Nashe emerges in this closing essay as the leading voice of a cultural interrogation, presenting ‘‘a rhetoric and ethics of irresponsibility’’ that emerges from and responds to real conditions of political existence and engages readers in ‘‘the critique of dominant discourses, inviting us to devise our own means to responsibility.’’ Linton’s elucidation of a ‘‘trickster poetics’’ appropriately caps our collective exploration of the liberating power of reading for the citizen classes of early modern England who discovered in a variety of rhetorical voices, speaking from a range of social positions and relative responsibilities, their own legible, and therefore imaginable, possibilities.

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Day labor: Thomas Nashe and the practice of prose in early modern England Steve Mentz

Does your worship think it is an easy thing to make a book? Don Quixote, Part II (1615) One constant during Thomas Nashe’s ten-year run in print, from his prefatory epistle to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) to Lenten Stuffe (1599), was his fascination with the labor involved in making books. Over the course of the 1590s his work comprised a not quite fully articulated summation of the changing conditions of authorship in the age of Elizabethan print. As early modern scholarship reconsiders the cultures of prose fiction and the book market, Nashe’s practice of prose clarifies the tenuous position of the newly professionalized author in early modern England. Nashe’s understanding of authorship divides the labor of making books between the extemporal flow of writing and the mechanical work of printing: writing with pen and ink allows Nashe’s persona to flow out from himself, and this liquidity gets hardened back into a fixed shape by the press. His sense of authorship derives from the tension between these aspects of literary labor. The liquefaction of the act of writing terrifies him, and his attraction to the stability of print can be read as an escape from writing itself.1 Print replaces and reforms the inherent disorder produced through writing.2 References to both kinds of labor appear in Nashe’s first printed work. The preface to Menaphon emphasizes Greene’s ‘‘extemporall veine in any humour [that] will excell our greatest Art-maisters deliberate thoughts’’ and also lauds the author’s final product, the ‘‘exquisite line’’ that was ‘‘his Masters day-labor’’ (Nashe 1958: 5: 312–13).3 Treating authorial labor as artisanal and extemporal as much as inspired or planned, Nashe asserts its worth as both liquid process and solid achievement.4 The claim that writing for the press was not ‘‘trifling’’ (in Sidney’s term) distinguishes Nashe from his

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coterie and aristocratic rivals. His bifurcated image of authorship fleshes out our understanding of the professional prose writer as distinct from coterie poets or playwrights (see Mentz 2000a: 163–9). Like other writers for the press, including Greene, Lyly, Lodge, and even Gabriel Harvey, Nashe imagined his works as commodities in the book market, saw the nascent publishing industry as a group of potential rivals or allies, developed his own authorial persona as a ‘‘brand name,’’ and positioned his books in competition with the public stage, coterie miscellanies, moral homilies, and other forms of circulated texts (see Mentz 2006). Nashe’s dual conceptions of literary labor reveal strains within the emerging professional culture of prose writing in English. This complex figuration of authorship did not come easily for the restless, improvident, aggressive student who had just come down from Cambridge when the epistle to Menaphon was published. During a career whose central principle has been called ‘‘constant innovation’’ (Schwyzer 1994: 585), Nashe remained ambivalent about himself and his writing.5 In exploring Nashe’s conception of authorship as ‘‘labor,’’ I will draw widely from his writings, but with special focus on what I take to be a decisive point in his career: the publication of Have With You to Saffron-Walden in 1596. I focus on Have With You because it is Nashe’s only book that did not represent a radically new direction; instead it returns to his printed flyting match with Gabriel Harvey after the two years of silence that followed the publication of Strange Newes (1594). By writing a second polemical book, Nashe solidifies his reputation as Harvey’s scourge.6 He pointedly rejects the mutual apologies that he and Harvey had (nearly) made in 1594–5, and he also refuses to extend recent experiments in picaresque fiction (The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594) and religious critique (Christs Teares ouer Jerusalem, 1593). He resumes, instead, the attacker’s pose, claiming that his natural function as author is to attack his rival.7 This conception of writing as combat exploits the intensely physical relationship Nashe sees between writing, printing, and human bodies. Books are prosthetic extensions of their authors, so that refusing to write against Harvey would mean refusing to appear physically in the public arena. Printed polemic draws together the informal extemporality Nashe admires in Greene’s fiction and the public solidity of print.8 Writing without print would degenerate into ‘‘the trade of Nouerint’’ (3:315) or scrivening, from which fate the press delivers Nashe. (Nashe habitually treated scriveners, whom he also calls ‘‘base Inck-dropper[s]’’ [1:240], as figures of contempt and representatives of an old-fashioned style of writing.)9 The Harvey controversy is useful because it facilitates both the flow of ink and the

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force of the press. Authorial labor requires not just the production of written words but their circulation as printed commodities. The distinction between Nashe’s ‘‘day labor’’ and other conceptions of authorship can be clarified by comparison with a more traditional metaphor for literary creation, the labor of childbirth.10 Among many prominent connections between childbirth and poetic creation is the first sonnet of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, which describes the poet as ‘‘great with child to speak, and helpless in my throws’’ (Sidney 1989: 153). Nashe clearly knew Sidney’s poem, since he wrote a preface to the first (unauthorized) quarto of the sonnet sequence in 1591.11 But Nashe rejects Sidney’s maternal image of labor. In Pierce Pennilesse (1592), Nashe explicitly connects the ‘‘day labor’’ of writing for the press with artisanal work: ‘‘For his hire, any handycraft man, be he Carpenter, Ioyner, or Painter, wil ploddingly do his day labor: but to adde credit and fame to his workmanship, or to winne a maistery to himselfe aboue all other, hee will make a further assay in his trade than euer hitherto he did’’ (1:179–80). Day labor in this formulation is the stuff of poetic creation—‘‘So in Armes, so in Artes’’ (1:180)—but literary excellence results from acts of self-promotion that seek credit, fame, or ‘‘maistery’’ for their authors. Later in a letter to the ‘‘Master or Goodman Reader’’ before Terrors of the Night (1594), Nashe expands the contrast between maternal and artisanal labor: Come, come, I know their dull tricks wel inough, you shal haue them lie in child bed one and thirtie weeks and eight daies of three bad lines and a halfe, & afterward spend a whole twelue month in spunging & sprucing them, honest thriftie Peter Littleton discharging their commons all the while: but such poore fellowes as I, that cannot put out money to be paid againe when we come from Constantinople, either must haue our work dispatcht by the weeks end, or els we may go beg . . . . And so I leaue them to stop mustard pots with my leaues if they will, or to their own will whatsoeuer. (1:343–4) Reiterating the claims of speed and extemporaneity that he linked to Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe suggests that poverty quickens his pen. The uncomfortably long poetic gestation and labor of which Sidney complains gets inverted, leaving instead a poor jobbing poet who must produce leaves ‘‘by the weeks end.’’ Nashe’s literary labors will not produce the poetry his preface to Astrophil and Stella calls ‘‘an artificial

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heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame’’ (3:329), in large part because his labors are so unlike Sidney’s. In addition to being motivated by financial need, Nashe’s idea of literary labor requires a rhetorical competition to demonstrate mastery. He recognizes his need for a fight in print in a sonnet at the end of Strange Newes (1592), which acknowledges how valuable Harvey’s writings have been in providing him with this contest: ‘‘Write hee againe, Ile write eternally./Who feedes reuenge hath found an endlesse Muse./My penne his speciall Baily shall becum/. . . Await the world the Tragedy of wrath;/What next I paint shall tread no comon path’’ (1:333–4).12 The task of the prose writer is revenge; his tools are pen and press, and his day labor contrasts with the inspired production of the aristocratic poet. As the market for printed books was becoming conscious of itself as a new locus of literary culture, Nashe’s exfoliation of two kinds of authorial labor defines emerging relationships between readers, books, and authors.13

The ‘‘extemporall veine’’ and writing Nashe’s need for money led him to conflate writing with prostitution. One of the most elaborate formulations of this argument appears in Have With You: As newfangled and idle, and prostituting my Pen like Curtizan, is the next Item that you taxe me with; well it may and it may not bee so, for neither will I deny it nor will I grant it; onely thus farre Ile goe with you, that twise or thrise in a month, when . . . . the bottom of my purse is turnd downeward, & my conduit of incke will no longer flowe for want of reparations, I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine; but otherwise there is no newfanglenes in mee but pouertie. (3:30–1) Elsewhere I have used this passage to link writerly prostitution with Nashe’s attitude toward popular fiction and the figure of Diamante in The Unfortunate Traveller (Mentz 2001: 346–7), and several other critics have emphasized Nashe’s obsession with the economics of the literary marketplace (see Halasz 1997; Hutson 1989, but also Brown 2004: 59–60). Looking more closely at the images of production in the passage, they reveal a troubling fluidity in which the ‘‘conduit of

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ink’’ stands for the author’s blood and physical power. In embracing the charge of literary prostitution—a charge already made in Have With You (3:26)14 —Nashe treats his sexualized body as the source of his prose. Prostitution amounts to eschewing substantial books (like Have With You itself) for job-verse. In doing so, Nashe would reject productive labor for amorous play. He describes this failure of productivity with an agricultural metaphor—‘‘I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow’’—but the mechanical plow also stands for a machine that prints books. Writing with ink becomes a metaphor for the ‘‘expense of spirit’’ in its sexual and spiritual senses. This contentless, expendable writing is as purely ephemeral, but Nashe blames its ephemerality on ‘‘pouertie,’’ and suggests that he stoops to it only ‘‘twise or thrise in a month.’’ Against such object-less labors he later positions the products of the press. If Nashe’s need to keep his ‘‘conduit of incke’’ flowing speaks to a fear of verbal poverty analogous to his economic hardships, the quarrel with Gabriel Harvey proves advantageous precisely because it requires books, not exhortations. As a product of the press rather than the social world, Harvey’s book attacking Greene (Foure Letters [1592]) (and later its sequel Pierces Supererogation [1593] attacking Nashe) struck Nashe as an invitation to return to the rich furrow of printed invective. Harvey’s books, moreover, were themselves implicated in the liquid-to-solid transfer through which the handwritten page becomes a printed book, but in the opposite direction. Referring to Pierces Supererogation, Nashe insists that Harvey’s book would sop up excess cooking liquid around London: I haue here tooke the paines to nit and louze ouer the Doctours Booke, and though manie cholericke Cookes about London in a mad rage have dismembred it, and thrust it piping hot into the ouen under the bottomes of dowsets, and impiously prickt the torne sheetes of it, for basting paper, on the outsides of Geese and roasting Beefe; yet haue I naturally cherist it and hugd it in my bosome. (3:14) Harvey’s solid book seems destined to return to the liquid environment from which the press liberates Nashe’s own ink-born writings. Nashe, however, puts things right by making a counter-book (Have With You) that remains solid. His labor cancels his rival’s. Even a face-to-face meeting with Harvey could not have been as satisfactory to Nashe as a combat between books. In a revealing

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passage, Nashe recalls that he and the Doctor had inadvertently lodged in the same inn near Cambridge about six months before Have With You was published. When ‘‘his Gabrielship’’ suggested a meeting and possible reconciliation under the sign of their mutually beloved university, Nashe refused, largely because it would obviate printing his book. It is the solidity of and labor invested in a printed book that conveys value for Nashe, more than actual human contact: ‘‘I had no fancie to [a meeting] . . . nor could it settle in my conscience to loose so much paines I had tooke in new arraying & furbushing him, or that a publique wrong in Print was to be so sleightly slubberd ouer in priuate’’ (3:92–3). Against the manuscript tradition in which the written word is a poor stand-in for personal interaction, Nashe (and the newly-educated class of readers to whom he appealed) values printed invective over private reconciliation.15 Hardening ink into printed pages transforms private ‘‘paines’’ into public commodities.16 While Nashe’s desire for fame through printed books links him with a well-known group of writers including Lyly, Greene, and Dekker, he was deeply aware of another current of literary culture, in which private manuscripts circulated among exclusive readerships. His major surviving work in this field is what Harvey calls his ‘‘unprinted packet of bawdye, and filthy Rymes’’ (Harvey 1884: 2:91), a narrative poem called ‘‘The Choise of Valentines’’ or ‘‘Nashe’s Dildo’’ (1592?). What is striking about this poem, and what makes it the signature image of Nashe’s fear of writing as opposed to printing, is its insistence that in the competition between the mechanical and the human the mechanical will necessarily win. The poem on one level celebrates Nashe’s taste in elite English poetry; it is a Chaucerian fabliau presented in Spenserian style (Hibbard 1962: 561–8; on Nashe’s Chaucer see also Mentz 2001: 354–5). It also includes veiled attacks on both Sidney and Gascoigne, whose Adventures of Master F.J. provides a parodic model of corrupted virtue from which Nashe departs (see Brown 2004: 73–5; Mentz 2004: 153–71). But from the point of view of Nashe’s interest in the labor of authorship, what seems most noteworthy is the poem’s chronicle of human sexual liquidity as a form of failure that can be trumped and exceeded by mechanical means. As a parody of the 1590s fashion for the epyllion inaugurated by Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) (see Brown 2004: 102–77; Maslen 2003: 59–100), ‘‘The Choise of Valentines’’ begins with Chaucerian familiarity (‘‘It was the merie month of Februarie/When yong-men in the iollie roguerie/Rose earelie . . .’’ [3:403–4]) but soon reaches a crisis of sexual and poetic authority. When confronted with his prostitute-mistress’s willing body, the narrator pleads, ‘‘What shall

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I doe to shewe my self a man?’’ (3:408). Echoing numerous sexualized references to being ‘‘a man in print’’ (see Wall 1993: 1–22), Nashe’s poem insists that masculinity must ‘‘shewe’’ itself by marking a feminine text. The penis becomes a surrogate pen but an unwilling one: ‘‘I kisse, I clap, I feele, I view at will,/Yett dead he lyes not thinking good or ill’’ (3:408). Roused at last by Frances’s labors, the narrator shifts to a heroic recreation of male sexual potency that ends (predictably enough) with a falling off: ‘‘But what so firme, that maie continue euer?’’ (3:410). True to Nashe’s fears about writing, the pen spends the last of its ink. The moment of liquefaction, described in pornographic detail, contrasts male ambition with female insatiability. While the liquid itself may be either productive (semen) or waste (urine), the dissolving of the narrator’s voice into liquidity marks a crisis of poetic voice. The narrator describes his climax in terms that move from the Chaucerian to the classical: ‘‘As Aprill-drops not half so pleasant be,/Nor Nilus ouerflowe, to Ægypt-plaines,/As this sweete-streames’’ (3:411). But rather than participate in such liquid excess, his lover remains stubbornly bounded by her body, as the very next line abandons Egypt: ‘‘With Oh, and Oh, she itching moues hir hippes,/And to and fro, full lightlie starts and skips’’ (3:411). The shift in registers reminds the reader that the poem has not succeeded in leaving the bodily for the metaphoric, and that the narrator has not yet fully shown himself a man. The juxtaposition of male satiety and female desire proceeds with an allusion to Sidney’s ‘‘What tongue may her perfections tell’’ blazon (Sidney 1985: 207–11), which appears during an idealized moment of sexual consummation in the Old Arcadia.17 In Nashe’s version, the emphasis is not on the lady’s beauty but her pleasure, and it is precisely in creating that pleasure that his narrator fails. ‘‘No tongue maie tell the solace that she feels’’ (3:411), the narrator claims hopefully, but soon after she has recourse to artificial solace. The central image of the poem (and the title in one of three surviving manuscripts) is the dildo to which Frances turns after her lover swoons. As mechanical substitute, it does what the hero has failed to do: ‘‘My little dilldo shall suplye their kinde:/A knaue, that moues as light as leaves by winde;/That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,/But stands as stiff, as he were made of steele’’ (3:412–3). Like Nashe’s hero Jack Wilton, the dildo is ‘‘my Mistris page’’ (3:413) in two senses: it serves the lady when others cannot, and it stands for the power of the printed page. Replacing and exceeding the hero, the dildo demonstrates the insufficiency of

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any human body that relies on merely human resources. The narrator’s misogynist railing against the dildo—‘‘Curse Eunuke dilldo, senceless, counterfet’’ (3:413)—replicates the futile railing of writing against print. While Nashe’s books contain many images of the printing press, including the summer banqueting house of The Unfortunate Traveller (see Yates 2003: 126–31; Mentz 2001: 347–50), Frances’s dildo typifies print’s most threatening quality, its ability to replace human effort. Nashe’s only surviving work of manuscript verse stages the triumph of mechanical print over liquid pen and ink at the expense of the poem’s narrator, who is named ‘‘Tomalin’’ in the poem (3:407). The only lasting difference between this liquefied failure and Tom Nashe himself is that the latter made books.

‘‘Day labor’’ and printing The distinction between writing and printing that typifies Nashe’s fascination with the labor of book-making also underlies his distinction between two literary products: the written poem and the printed book. In a passage from Pierce Penilesse that immediately precedes his first printed gibe at Gabriel Harvey and his brothers, Nashe suggests that differences between poems and books emerge from the difference between patronage and the book market. If he were to find a generous patron, Nashe claims, ‘‘I will doo him as much honour as any Poet of my beardlesse yeeres shall in England’’ (1:195). But if that patron should treat him poorly, or send him ‘‘away with a Flea in mine eare’’ (1:195), he will have his revenge. Unlike his printed revenge against the Harveys, however, revenge against a traitorous patron would take manuscript form: ‘‘let him looke that I will raile on him soundly: not for an houre or a day, whiles the iniury is fresh in my memory, but in some elaborate pollished Poem, which I will leaue to the world when I am dead, to be a liuing Image to all ages, of his beggerly parsimony and ignoble illiberalitie’’ (1:195). The poem, produced through and for a coterie manuscript culture, will live forever to mark the aristocrat’s failure to live up to that culture’s ideals. If this sort of production seems unlike Nashe’s surviving works (even such anthology lyrics as ‘‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss’’ and ‘‘Spring, the sweet spring’’), that may be because Nashe never fully entered the coterie world to which he ambivalently sought admission. When including this plea for patronage within Pierce Penilesse, Nashe was well aware that the printed book was a different kind of product,

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one in which he was more fully invested. Continuing his address to the imagined patron, he writes, let him not (whatsoeuer he be) measure the weight of my words by this booke, where I write Quicquid in buccam venerit, as fast as my hand can trot; but I haue tearmes (if I be vext) laid steepe in Aquafortis, & Gunpowder, that shall rattle through the Skyes, and make an Earthquake in a Pesants eares. (1:195) Writing ‘‘as fast as my hand can trot’’ returns to Greene’s ‘‘extemporall veine’’ and Nashe’s fears about overextension, but it is not clear whether Nashe’s more powerful ‘‘tearmes’’ would be products of the press or more limited coterie circulation. But in either case it is his perceived injury (being ‘‘vext’’) that creates the greater power that Nashe seeks. Emphasizing the force of his words through references to ‘‘aquafortis’’ and the modern technology of gunpowder, Nashe distinguishes a future book of invective from any possible manuscript poem. Once print has fixed the products of his hand, his book would assume the power of an ‘‘Earthquake in a Pesants eares.’’ These peasants are presumably not Nashe’s primary readers—Latin tags cluster on his pages—but he clearly wants a broad audience to bear witness to his powers. Nashe may never have entirely given up on patronage, but by 1592 he was much more committed to print. The great advantage of print for someone seeking ‘‘maistery’’ was that books were available for public judgment. The reading public, finally, was required to validate Nashe’s triumph over Harvey. Their dispute paradoxically emphasizes the extent to which each man was the other’s double: both were Cambridge graduates sounding off in print about Elizabethan literary culture. They were closer in background than either may have wanted to admit; each even lived for a time with a member of the Stationers’ Company (Harvey with John Wolfe, Nashe with John Danter) and thus had a ground-level view of London’s publishing world.18 Thus when Nashe describes Harvey’s books it is hard not to read anxiety at the Doctor’s apparent closeness to Nashe himself. While Nashe will be a ‘‘man in print,’’ a victorious revenger, he fears Harvey will label him, as Importuno says in Have With You, ‘‘a villaine in print . . . to be imprinted at London the reprobatest villaine that euer went on two legs, for such is Gabriell Scurueies (as in thy other booke thou termest him) his witless malicious testimony of thee, familiar to none but roguish morts and doxes, is an attainder that will sticke by thee for euer’’ (3:27). Importuno repeats

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Harvey’s slander to coax Nashe to reply at last, but it is noteworthy how close Harvey’s image of Nashe is to Nashe’s own self-image. To be ‘‘in print,’’ as man or villain, is to escape the expense of writing into a comparatively stable world in which patronage is no longer needed. The great benefit of print, Nashe claims, is its ability to last through time. Importuno sounds this note as he warns Nashe that if he does not answer Harvey, Nashe will eventually be known only through the Doctor’s slanders: Deceiue not thy selfe with the bad sale of his bookes, for though in no other mans handes, yet in his owne Deske they may bee found after his death, whereby, while Printing lasts, thy disgrace may last, & the Printer (whose Copie it is) may leaue thy infamie in Legacie to his heyres, and his heyres to their next heyres successiuely to the thirteenth and fourteenth generation, Cum Priuilegio, forbidding all other to Print those lewd lying Recordes of thy scandall and contumely, but the lineall offspring of their race in sempiternum. (3:27–8) Nashe’s claims for the longevity of printed books (even unread books) may surprise modern readers convinced by Adrian Johns’s argument that print did not become stable and trustworthy until the eighteenth century (Johns 1998). The threat Harvey’s books pose, however, gets matched by the power Nashe’s books have to refute his antagonist and extend Nashe’s name through generations. Aware of the printer’s interest in perpetuating his work, Nashe claims that print, not poetry, creates immortality. While he links himself to Ovid in the conclusion of ‘‘The Choise of Valentines’’ (1592?), Nashe rejects the poetic topos of immortality through verse (familiar from the end of the Metamorphoses and from Shakespeare’s sonnets) in favor of extension in time through print.19 Once convinced to re-enter the world of print, Nashe’s narrator (technically called ‘‘Piers Penniless Respondent,’’ but referred to as ‘‘Tom’’) gets carried away by a fantasy of potency. Like the lover of ‘‘Choise of Valentines,’’ he gives into rhetorical flights of fancy, but this time he has linked himself to his machine and cannot be displaced by it. Now that he has a task (revenge) and a medium (print), the author cannot be contained: For mee, I know I shall liue, and not die, till I haue digd the graues of all my enemies; and that the fire of my wit will not bee

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Deifying his wit even to the point of inserting a pun on his name into the Russian Orthodox mass, Nashe imagines his book as a rising and setting sun and links its arrival to the prodigies following the death of Caesar.20 His authorial power produces misery in his opponent’s dog and more importantly allows his wit to spread as ‘‘fire’’ rather than spill itself in ink. Here is Nashe’s self-creation through print at its most dramatic, in which the labors of book-making are requited by eternal and omnipotent readers. The press has done what the pen never could; it allows the author to extend himself prosthetically in space and time as widely as his ambitious wit could want. The remaining problem for this fantasized author is the problem of labor itself, the material traces of which cling to Nashe’s prose. He may dig Harvey’s grave or be worshipped like a sun-god by his readers, but he still remains limited by his materiality, by the tools he needs to dig or by the press itself. Nashe exports the physical problems associated with pressing onto his foil Harvey, whose products are too large to circulate practically. Writing about a handwritten letter of Harvey’s that was subsequently printed (thus combining the two modes of literary production), Nashe emphasizes that it cannot function in the world: ‘‘one Epistle thereof, to Iohn Wolfe, the Printer, I tooke and weighed in an Ironmongers scales, and it couterpoyseth a Cade of Herring and three Holland Cheeses. You may beleeue me if you will, I was faine to lift my chamber doore off the hindges, onely to let it in, it was so fulsome a fat Bonarobe’’ (3:36). Harvey’s letter exceeds what the market will bear; its ‘‘sixe and thirtie sheetes’’ (3:36) indicates a rhetorical excess and unwieldiness that dovetails with one line of criticism of Nashe’s own work. Nashe claims that Harvey uses print falsely to expand his own self-worth, while his own pages deflate Harvey’s egotism and properly aggrandize their author.

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The tension between Nashe’s desire to be ‘‘worshipt’’ and Harvey’s excessive production of pages suggests that simply being printed is not itself a sufficient guarantee of value. Nashe remains confident, however, that readers of Have With You will validate his victory over Harvey. Nashe further insists that Harvey’s books are inferior because they are vanity operations which Harvey paid Wolfe to print. ‘‘Even for the printing of this logger-head Legend of lyes,’’ Nashe writes, referring to Pierces Supererogation, which now I am wrapping up hot spices in, hee ran in debt with Wolfe, the Printer, 36. pound & a blue coate which he borrowed for his man, and yet Wolfe did not so much as brush it when hee lent it him, or press out the print where the badge had been. (3:71) Turning Harvey’s pages into waste paper and connecting them to the Catholic Golden Legend (‘‘Legend of lyes’’; see McKerrow 4:11) enables Nashe to disparage his rival’s work, but he emphasizes Harvey’s financial failure, his inability to earn his keep in the marketplace. Print marks Nashe as a successful author but leaves a mark on Harvey’s pawned coat. Nashe obsessively dwells on the 36 pounds as a concrete sign of Harvey’s authorial failure; he repeats the story at length later (3:96–8) and also catalogs the labors that Harvey did for Wolfe when lodging with him in London. He enumerates three examples of Harvey’s ‘‘pleasures [that] he did for Wolfe’’ (3:89): first, he writes an ‘‘eloquent post-script for the Plague Bills’’; second, he presses on the printer inferior works like ‘‘that Philistine Poem of Parthenophil and Parthenope’’ by Harvey’s friend Barnebe Barnes; and last Wolfe ‘‘set [Harvey] on the score for sack, centum pro cento, a hundred quarts in a seuennight, whiles he was thus saracenly sentencing it against me’’ (3:89–90). Harvey’s writing career gets linked to plague, inferior poetry, and paying the bar bill. While Nashe (and his sometime mentor Greene) famously claimed to draw inspiration from drinking—‘‘A pot of blew burning ale, with a fiery flaming toste, is as good as Pallas with the nine Muses,’’ Nashe writes in the preface to Menaphon (3:321–2)—Harvey’s large wine bill slanders the Doctor in terms not unlike Harvey’s attack on Greene’s final days. Nashe insists that his labors for Danter can be distinguished from Harvey’s for Wolfe in that Nashe created value, while Harvey consumed it. Nashe’s violent attack on Harvey reveals fundamental jealousy of Harvey’s institutional status. Like Greene, who boasted of his M.A.

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from ‘‘both Universities,’’ Nashe mixed claims for academic status with the street wisdom of St. Paul’s. Claiming that it was ‘‘well known’’ that ‘‘I might haue been Fellow [at St. Johns, Cambridge] if I had would’’ (3:127), Nashe claims equality with Doctor Harvey of Trinity Hall. But Nashe’s more dramatic claim is that the world of print is itself an extension of university culture: ‘‘for deriuing my maintenaunce from the Printing-house, so doo both Uniuersities, and whatsoeuer they be that come up by Learning, out of Printed Bookes gathering all they haue; and would not haue furre to put in their gownes, if it, or writing, were not’’ (3:127–8). Connecting writing for print with the pursuit of academic distinction allows Nashe to contextualize his obsession with the solidity of printed books within a traditional social institution. By assigning Harvey menial tasks in Wolfe’s print-shop and imagining himself occupied with properly Cambridgean ‘‘learning,’’ Nashe reverses the polarities of their dialogue. Print has become the new university.

Print as prosthetic: Nashe and early modern authorship Reading Nashe’s preference for printing over writing as a choice of solidity over liquidity and of public marketplace circulation over private manuscript culture serves first of all to flesh out standard readings of Nashe as a creature of print culture. In his decade-long construction of himself as professional author, Nashe unpacks a basic tension between writing and printing that clarifies this transitional phase in English authorship. Like his friends and sometime collaborators Jonson (The Isle of Dogs [1597]) and Greene (Menaphon [1589]), Nashe appears keenly aware of the ways print culture is positioning itself in relation to existing social institutions and the conventions of coterie and patronage culture. More than is often realized, however, Nashe’s example exposes the vexed and competitive interpenetration of writing and print. If the tendency (and, in a sense, the ultimate function) of print is to transform and finally erase the act of writing, Nashe’s fascination with the labors of writing, from the lowly scrivener to his own not-always-flowing pen, reminds us how incompletely print accomplished this erasure in its early incarnations.21 Nashe’s exposure of the ongoing tension and mutual interaction between writing and the press can qualify such influential statements as D.F. MacKenzie’s claim that multiple modes of textual transmission like print and manuscript ‘‘tend to work in complementary, not competitive ways’’ (MacKenzie 2002: 237–58). While MacKenzie is right to caution against the old displacement model in which print replaced

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manuscript culture once and for all—manuscript writing continues today, after the typewriter and word processor—Nashe’s example reminds us that even ‘‘complementary’’ relationships could, on the individual level, be very fraught. The growing self-awareness of print culture as separate from, and hostile to, older cultural institutions is part of its complex history. Nashe’s example may also have implications for the liveliest recent debate in early modern print culture studies, in which Adrian Johns’s (1998) claims for the socializing of print have assailed the ‘‘technologically determinist’’ claims about print culture staked out by Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979).22 Johns’s close reading of the practices of the Stationers’ Company suggests that Eisenstein’s notions of ‘‘standardization,’’ ‘‘preservation,’’ and ‘‘amplification’’ are radically under construction in sixteenth-century England (Eisenstein 1979: 43–159). The case of Thomas Nashe, however, cautions against too soon declaring victory for Johns’s position. Nashe, paradoxically enough, seems to be both an example of Johns’s model of socialization, in that he finds in the new technology and new culture images of what he wants to preserve about the old, and also an exponent of something closer to Eisenstein’s transformative thesis. Thus modern critics who join Johns in condemning Eisenstein’s determinism may need to reconsider the role of print as cultural fantasy as well as practical technology. For young authors like Nashe, the idea that the press could be an ‘‘agent of change’’ was a cultural fantasy with great personal appeal. The image of early modern authorship that Nashe’s bifurcated understanding of ‘‘labor’’ gives us is attractively hybrid, engaged on the one hand in encouraging a threatening liquid flow of ink (sympathetically bolstered by the flow of wine) and on the other in ‘‘pressing’’ that amorphous flow onto printed pages. The author as Nashe imagines him depends on the technology of the press not as an alternative to the pen but as a solution to the problems the pen raises. The press replaces the dildo as an extension of the male self rather than its replacement. What emerges is not unlike what Donna Haraway famously calls ‘‘cyborg identity,’’ in which the human body interpenetrates with artificial devices (Haraway 1991: 149–82). Nashe’s sense of labor as both a human and a mechanical project, which uses animal flows to fill printed pages, points toward the larger (and largely unwritten) history of how technologies like writing and printing interact with and mark the human body. Nashe’s fascination with remaking himself through the press reminds us that all new writing technologies create new human-mechanical hybrids, and that

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writing (like reading) involves the physical manipulation of specific objects. The changing readership of early modern English books found in writers like Nashe a portrait of ongoing changes in their literary culture. Nashe’s obsession with the labor involved in making books sets the terms for a new generation of English authors to learn how thoroughly mechanical and physical book making was.

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How to turn prose into literature: the case of Thomas Nashe Stephen Guy-Bray

Critics have tended to present The Unfortunate Traveller either as a satirical look at some of the kinds of writing that were popular in Nashe’s day or as a text concerned with the differences between the English and their continental neighbors (Latham 1948; Wheeler 1998). There has not been enough attention paid to the connection between these topics, to the fact that his patriotism is often expressed through his comments on literature (see also Turner 2001). Central to Nashe’s thinking is the idea that literature should be original, by which he means that a text should not be too indebted to even the greatest continental and classical authors. Over the course of The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe’s condemnations of the dependence on literary models that he appears to see as one of the major problems for the writers of his era become one of the text’s salient features. Less marked because less explicit (but, I would say, no less important) is his defence of prose as a medium for literature. In an era when prose narratives were very popular but not taken seriously, Nashe seeks to establish prose as equal or even superior to poetry. As I see it, his point is that poetry is associated with what he sees as an aristocratic desire to imitate continental fashions; prose, by contrast, is genuinely English and, as we would now say, middle-class. Before I turn to The Unfortunate Traveller I want to look at some of the attempts to establish the seriousness of English literature with which Nashe would have been familiar. In the Shepheardes Calender, Edmund Spenser seeks to establish himself as a poet within the standard model of a literary career that derives from Virgil. But his modifications to this model suggest that Spenser wished to alter the traditional literary context in which a young poet would seek to place himself. While the elaborate pastoral framework of the book is clearly intended to recall Virgil’s Eclogues, the range of themes and poetic forms is much greater and could be said to provide a practical demonstration of

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both the power and variety of English verse. Perhaps the most obvious example of Spenser’s desire to Anglicize the famous poetic model for his first book is his use of the name ‘‘Tityrus.’’ This name, which is the first word in the Eclogues (and which occurs in the last line of the Georgics), is often taken to be Virgil’s pastoral pseudonym: the tradition of referring to Virgil as Tityrus is almost as old as the poems themselves, but when Colin Clout (and the name is usually taken to be Spenser’s pastoral pseudonym) says in the June eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender that ‘‘The God of shepheards Tityrus is dead’’ (Spenser 1912: ‘‘Iune’’ 81) and proclaims that he is indebted to him for his ability to write poetry, the tireless commentator E.K. points out ‘‘That by Tityrus is meant Chaucer, hath bene already sufficiently sayde.’’ The substitution suggests that Spenser is simultaneously using Virgil and denying Virgil’s primacy. This point is underlined in ‘‘October’’ when E.K. says that ‘‘the Romish Tityrus’’ mentioned by Cuddie (Spenser 1912: 55) is ‘‘wel knowen to be Virgile.’’ The name Tityrus without any national adjective at all is, in fact, well known to be Virgil, and it is under this name that his poetic career is said to have begun. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the name Tityrus is typically used as a way to refer to the beginnings of great poetry. By presenting Chaucer as the originator both of Colin’s literary career and, I would argue, of great poetry in general, Spenser gives his English predecessor Virgil’s foundational place in literary history. The move is especially audacious since although the traditional account of English literary history begins with Chaucer, his reliance on classical and medieval continental literature is typically stressed. In Spenser’s rewriting of literary history, the fourteenth-century poet somehow predates the poet who died in 21 b.c.e. Furthermore, in a move that will be of great importance to The Unfortunate Traveller, Spenser’s identification of Virgil’s ethnic origin—and the use of ‘‘Romish’’ rather than the more dignified and classical ‘‘Roman’’ emphasizes the identification—associates the Latin poet with the political and religious enemies of contemporary England. The Unfortunate Traveller as a whole is indebted to Spenser’s desire to enroll himself in an English tradition which includes classical and continental models but is not subordinate to them. For Nashe, however, the crucial figure is not Chaucer but rather the Earl of Surrey. There are various reasons for this: for one thing, by focussing on Surrey, Nashe is able to set his story in the time of ‘‘the terror of the world and feauer quartane of the French, Henrie the eight (the only true subiect of Chronicles’’ (Nashe 1910: 209). While the two

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centuries between Nashe and Chaucer might not seem so very long to us, we should remember that in The Defence of Poetry Sidney contrasted Chaucer ‘‘in that misty time’’ with himself ‘‘in this clear age’’ (Sidney 1973: 112). Furthermore, although Chaucer was recognized as a poetic predecessor by the Elizabethans, he was not a figure of any particular glamour, while Surrey was an attractive figure both because of his own career and because of the great family of which he was the heir. As a man who was both a soldier and a poet, Surrey could be said to have united the active and contemplative lives and to work for his country’s glory in two ways: in his own person, that is, he provides a model for the interconnection of poetry and patriotism that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of The Unfortunate Traveller. Surrey’s aristocratic status was also of interest to Nashe, who was concerned to raise the status of his own text, a concern that can be seen in the plethora of English earls in the text. The first of these is the Earl of Southampton, to whom the work was originally dedicated. A dedication to an aristocrat is the norm in the literature of this period, but Southampton was an earl with connections to literature and to Surrey himself. Shakespeare dedicated both ‘‘Venus and Adonis,’’ which appeared the year before The Unfortunate Traveller, and ‘‘The Rape of Lucrece,’’ which came out in the same year as The Unfortunate Traveller, to him. As Charles Nicholl points out in his biography of Nashe, Southampton’s father was associated with Surrey’s son, the Duke of Norfolk executed by Elizabeth I; there was also a family connection to Surrey’s Geraldine, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald (Nicholl 1984: 159–70).1 In the dedication, Nashe says ‘‘A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets themselues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English’’ (1910: 201–2). The humility of the writer seeking an aristocratic patron is increased by the low status of prose narratives. Nashe’s enlisting of one earl as the patron of his text and another as one of its main characters are among his strategies for establishing that the writer of a prose narrative can be called a poet. As support, Nashe could cite Sidney, who had famously said in The Defence of Poetry that verse is ‘‘but an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified’’ (Sidney 1973: 81). Sidney himself is clearly an important influence on The Unfortunate Traveller, perhaps most obviously in the fact that Nashe gave his protagonist the name of the Countess of Pembroke’s famous country house. As well, as a writer who played a role in his country’s affairs,

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Sidney can be seen as a later version of Surrey. Nashe’s induction (‘‘to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court’’) begins with a lexical connection to Sidney and to another contemporary writer of literary theory. This is the reference to ‘‘nouus, noua, nouum, which is in English, newes of the maker’’ (1910: 207). The word ‘‘maker’’ in the sense of poet had been used a few years before The Unfortunate Traveller by Sidney in The Defence of Poetry —‘‘I know not, whether by lucke or wisedome, wee Englishmen haue mette with the Greekes, in calling [a poet] a maker’’—and by George Puttenham in the Arte of English Poesie when he says that towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign ‘‘there sprong vp a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat th’elder & Henry Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines’’ (OED s.v. ‘‘maker’’ 5). Both statements connect current practice with past practice: Sidney with the Greeks, the traditional originators of poetry, and Puttenham with the native heritage and the reign of Henry VIII that provides the setting for The Unfortunate Traveller. That Sidney, Puttenham, and Nashe all use the word ‘‘maker’’—by 1594 a rather archaic term for poet—may be a coincidence, but even in that case it should still lead us to consider the similarities among the three writers. All are concerned with literary heritage and with how English literature fits into that heritage; indeed, I would say that this concern is at the center of Nashe’s text. Surrey, cited by both Puttenham and Sidney (who said of Surrey’s poems that they had ‘‘many things tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind’’ [1973: 112]) in a way that suggests they saw him as a poetic originator, is the ideal figure for Nashe to use in his investigation of these concerns. What makes Nashe different from Sidney and Puttenham is that they consistently seek to tie English poetry to classical poetry and to continental poetry generally. For them, this connection is necessary if English literature is to be taken as the equal of more famous and better-established national literatures. Nashe, on the other hand, insists on the differences among literary traditions and on the superiority of the native model: for him, the reliance on models from other literary traditions—whether those traditions are distant in time or space or both—leads to literature that is inauthentic. Nashe’s attitude towards literary tradition is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in his use of classical authors. Like many works of the period, his text contains a great deal of Latin, both quotations from the standard authors and stock phrases. In a perceptive analysis of the question of literary authority in The Unfortunate Traveller, Mihoko Suzuki remarks that Nashe

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evinces his awareness of literary authority by his frequent quotations of Latin authors, such as Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. But the effectiveness of such authority is questioned by bastardization of these literary precedents, who are often quoted in an inappropriate context where the original meaning is subverted. (Suzuki 1983: 349) As this passage suggests, Nashe does not ignore foreign literature: rather he seeks to make it both new and English. We can see this in his first two Latin tags, both of which occur on the work’s first page. In the first of these, he refers to his creditors and then says ‘‘Coelum petimus stultitia, which of vs al is not a sinner’’ (1910: 209). The Latin—a line from Horace’s third ode—is one of the most famous passages from one of the most famous poems by one of the most famous Latin poets, which is to say that even people without much Latin would presumably recognize this quotation. Conventionally, when an English passage follows a Latin one it provides a translation, but this is not the case here, as the Latin means ‘‘we seek the heavens in our stupidity.’’2 Although it will become apparent that both phrases are applicable to The Unfortunate Traveller, their relationship to each other never becomes clear. The next Latin quotation, just a few lines down, is somewhat different. After speaking of his profitable trade in the English camp at ‘‘Turwin,’’ Nashe says ‘‘Paulo maiora canamus. Well, to the purpose’’ (1910: 209). Here again, the English is not a translation of the Latin (‘‘let us sing of slightly greater things’’), although there is clearly a greater connection between the phrases than was the case with the first quotation. As regards the second quotation, it could be said that the Latin phrase raises one of the most important questions we can ask: is The Unfortunate Traveller a text that deals with trivial matters or is it a serious text in which an English author makes an attempt to establish the greatness of both his own writing and of English literature more generally? In using the famous phrase from the beginning of the fourth eclogue in which Virgil first expresses his impatience with the pastoral framework and his desire to sing of Rome and its glory, Nashe would be taken by his classically-educated readers to be signaling his intention to write an epic, something that would celebrate England as the Aeneid celebrated Rome. In this case, the joke is that The Unfortunate Traveller never turns into an epic. The text continues to focus on trivial and sordid matters; the quotation from Virgil would then be a good example of what Suzuki meant by Nashe’s strategy of quoting from classical authors in inappropriate contexts

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and subverting the original meaning. But although The Unfortunate Traveller never becomes the kind of text that deals with gods and goddesses and heroes, it does tell of battles and it does resemble an epic insofar as it deals with the establishment of a nation (on the literary level, if not on the political level). Throughout his text, Nashe demonstrates a belief in English superiority that is fully the equal of Virgil’s belief in Roman superiority. Indeed, although Jack Wilton finds that Europe is generally unpleasant, Rome is clearly the worst place he visits; the text’s insistence on Rome as a place of horrors can be read as a deliberately anti-Virgilian gesture. These are only the first two of many Latin quotations throughout The Unfortunate Traveller, but in many ways they are representative of his strategy as a whole. If we see Nashe’s use of Latin as evidence of his desire to engage with literary history, however, the role of Latin in this opening section is different from the role of Latin later on in the text as the phrase from Horace that is Nashe’s first Latin quotation comes from the great propempticon in which Horace prays to Venus to guard Virgil on his voyage. This gesture of affection and respect from a poet to his older contemporary could provide a model for Nashe’s own use of Surrey and, more generally, for his use of literary tradition. But while there is no reason to doubt Horace’s sincerity, Nashe’s attitude towards his own predecessors is much harder to characterize (for an excellent discussion of Nashe’s use of Sidney, see Mentz 2000). In this context, it may be relevant that Horace’s poem about Virgil is not only famously moving but also famously unsuccessful, as Virgil died on the voyage to which Horace refers. Nashe may well have been drawn to the quotation partly for this reason; at the very least, the ode could be said to demonstrate that the idea of a poetic tradition and the desire to acknowledge the influence of earlier poets cannot be separated from the fact that those earlier poets have died (or will die), leaving the younger poets behind. We do not need to subscribe to ideas of the inherent hostility of poetic relationships to see that the gesture of indebtedness performed by Horace—and by Nashe in various ways throughout The Unfortunate Traveller —is thus also an assertion of the younger poet’s own power. In The Unfortunate Traveller itself, this kind of ambiguity in the relations between a writer and his predecessors is most clearly shown in Nashe’s changing depiction of Surrey over the course of the text. The best characterization of this is G.R. Hibbard’s from over 40 years ago: The way in which Surrey is handled and in which Nashe’s attitude

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towards him changes is clear evidence of the extent to which literary interests are uppermost in this part of the work. Introduced into it as the type of the good poet and liberal master, he becomes increasingly the target for satirical criticism, which begins as delicate parody, but gradually turns into full-blooded burlesque. (Hibbard 1962: 162–3) One possible reason for this change is suggested by Jonathan V. Crewe when he says that the relationship between Surrey and Wilton is ‘‘an informal essay in the complex dynamics of literary development’’ (Crewe 1982: 80). The shift in the portrayal of Surrey in The Unfortunate Traveller can best be accounted for by considering Nashe’s literary patriotism: the same desire to promote English literature that leads him to praise Surrey leads him to condemn English poetry that is too dependent on foreign models. In order for Wilton to develop as an English author, he must reject foreign influences, and by the end of the narrative Surrey has become foreign. When Wilton first meets up with Surrey at Middleborough, his attitude is entirely favorable: ‘‘O, it was a right noble Lord . . . a Prince in content because a Poet without peere’’ (1910: 242). Wilton’s praise of Surrey leads him to the more general statement that ‘‘if there bee anie sparkes of Adams Paradizd perfection yet emberd vp in the breastes of mortall men, certainelie God hath bestowed that his perfectest image on Poets’’ (1910: 242) and then back to praise of Surrey himself, whom he calls ‘‘My Heroicall Master’’ (1910: 242). The first indication that this laudatory rhetoric will not continue comes when Surrey gives the reasons for his voyage. He begins by speaking of his love for Geraldine and then says that he was prompted by ‘‘the fame of Italy, and an especiall affection I had vnto Poetrie, my second Mistris, for which Italy was so famous’’ (1910: 244). The two mistresses are brought together in his speech when he says that he had gone to Hampton Court to ask Geraldine’s permission for his voyage. She tells him that Italy is her native country and adds ‘‘I, pete Italiam, goe and seeke Italie with Aenas’’ (1910: 244). As this section of the text is crucial to our understanding of Nashe’s negotiations with literary heritage, I want to look at it in some detail. The obvious points to make are that Nashe’s history is inaccurate, as Surrey never went to Italy and there is no evidence that he was ever in love with Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald—although it is impossible to be sure that Nashe did not really believe either or both of these things. More significant to me is that Surrey’s speech to Wilton can

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be taken as a rewriting of his sonnet about Geraldine. Like many of Surrey’s poems, this sonnet is structured around proper names and references to places. Nashe’s version follows this pattern and exaggerates it: for example, while Surrey says that Geraldine was brought up ‘‘With a kinges child’’ (Surrey 1964: no.9), Nashe says ‘‘vppon Queene Katherine Dowager she waites’’ (1910: 243). The most important example of this strategy comes when Geraldine refers to Italy as ‘‘my natiue countrie’’ (1910: 244), while in Surrey Italy is only the place from which ‘‘my ladies worthi race’’ originally came. Nashe’s changes expand Surrey’s sonnet into a long prose speech and make Geraldine appear more foreign: like poetry, she is associated with Italy. Surrey’s conflation of the two things he loves and his association of them with Italy eventually lead him to appear ridiculous in The Unfortunate Traveller ; the situation is further complicated by Geraldine’s speech, in which she stresses her Italian origin, and, in particular, by her quotation from the Aeneid. In fact, the quotation is a misquotation of what Dido actually says—‘‘i, sequere Italiam uentis, pete regna per undas’’ (go, travel to Italy, seek [your] kingdom through the waves) (Virgil 1969: IV: 381)—but more important than the change in words is the change in context. While Dido tells Aeneas with bitter sarcasm to go to Italy, Geraldine tells Surrey with sincerity and affection to go to Italy. Furthermore, in the Aeneid it is absolutely crucial that Aeneas go to Italy because it is there that he will fulfill his destiny; indeed, without the fighting in Italy that occupies almost all of the eight books of the poem that follow the story of Dido, the Aeneid would hardly qualify as an epic, beginning as it does with Aeneas destitute, shipwrecked, homeless, and completely dependent upon a woman. In contrast, The Unfortunate Traveller begins in wartime, and Surrey’s rank and talents equip him to be an epic hero (as well, Surrey spent most of the last few years of his short life fighting for Henry VIII in France, an aspect of his life that Nashe almost completely suppresses). The relation between the Aeneid and The Unfortunate Traveller can be described as chiasmic: while Aeneas’ voyage to Italy turns him into an epic hero, Surrey’s voyage to Italy prevents him from being an epic hero. In other words, despite the very different contexts of the line in the Aeneid and Geraldine’s version of it in The Unfortunate Traveller, both she and Dido function as obstacles to the hero’s achievement of his epic destiny. The change in the depiction of Surrey does not become clear until the two travelers reach Florence, but on their journey they have two experiences that are important to the presentation of literary heritage. The first happens when the travelers arrive in Rotterdam

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and meet ‘‘with aged learnings chiefe ornament, that abundant and superingenious clarke, Erasmus, as also with merrie Sir Thomas Moore, our Countriman’’ (1910: 245). Nashe makes few comments about Erasmus and More, but their presence in the text has relevance to my topic. For one thing, the men demonstrate that ‘‘aged learning’’ is constantly being changed: that is, the scholarship of Erasmus and More shows that contemporary scholars revise and update and challenge the works of the classical authorities. For another, as More was English and as Erasmus was associated with England, Nashe is making a point about native versus foreign texts. Wilton adds that More was so outraged by the political injustice that ‘‘hee concluded with himselfe to lay downe a perfect plot of a common-wealth or gouernment, which he would intitle his Vtopia’’ (1910: 246). As a satirical prose text, More’s text is an obvious precedent for much of The Unfortunate Traveller (as might be expected, Nashe makes no mention of the inconvenient fact that Utopia was written in Latin). Perhaps we should see Utopia as a text that is in competition with Surrey’s poetry as one of the originators, if not of the native literary tradition, at least of Nashe’s own works. Erasmus is also cited as a satirical writer: he ‘‘seemed so much to mislike the indiscretion of Princes in preferring of parasites and fooles, that he decreed with himselfe to swim with the stream, and write a booke forthwith in commendation of follie’’ (1910: 245). Erasmus is important to The Unfortunate Traveller in another way as well. As Valerio Viviani has pointed out in this context, Erasmus was opposed to feeble imitations of Cicero, a position that would certainly have been congenial to Nashe (Viviani 1998: 117 et seq; he goes on to argue that Nashe was an Erasmian [1998: 122–3]). These kinds of imitation are his next target. After Surrey and Wilton leave Rotterdam, they go to Wittenberg where they hear a number of orations. The first is given by the university orator; Wilton tells us ‘‘that it was all by patch & by peecemeale stolne out of Tully’’ (1910: 246). This statement is followed by a long passage describing other orations and, eventually, scholarly debates. Wilton says that the speakers imagined the Duke tooke the greatest pleasure and contentment vnder heauen to heare them speake Latine, and as long as they talkt nothing but Tully he was bound to attend them. A most vaine thing it is in many vniuersities at this daie, that they count him excellent eloquent, who stealeth not whole phrases but whole pages out of Tully. (1910: 251)

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The problem with the orators is precisely the dependence on classical models that Nashe objects to in literary writing. For these men, having a sense of a literary tradition inhibits them and prevents them from being original. Nashe then says that if the orators look bad, the English look worse: ‘‘The leaden headed Germanes first began this, and wee Englishmen haue surfetted of their absurd imitation’’ (1910: 251). The English Ciceronians, then, are a copy of a copy. Erasmus is part of the problem as well as of the solution. As Neil Rhodes says in what may be the best discussion of Nashe’s style (in particular, of his use and celebration of copia): ‘‘there is another aspect of copia, which points to the dispiriting side of rhetoric: books such as Erasmus’s, or Fraunce’s or Peacham’s, may have been copious storehouses of eloquence, but they also encouraged copying, and the endless repetition of prefabricated linguistic units’’ (Rhodes 1988: 32). The ‘‘repetition of prefabricated linguistic units’’ forms a part of The Unfortunate Traveller when the conjuror Cornelius Agrippa appears in Wittenberg. At the request of the scholars, he produces Plautus, Ovid, and finally (at Erasmus’ request) Cicero himself. While the interest in the first two authors is in their appearance, Erasmus asks Cicero to perform the oration for Roscius of Amerio. Cicero performs brilliantly, delivering the oration with ‘‘such astonishing amazement, with such feruent exaltation of spirit, with such soule-stirring iestures, that all his auditours were readie to install his guiltie client for a God’’ (1910: 252). The oration works, in other words, but Nashe’s obvious belief in Roscius’ guilt should qualify our sense of Cicero as a model to be followed; as well, the fact that what is at issue here is, precisely, the repetition of a familiar text should indicate the danger of a sense of tradition. Nashe’s point would seem to be that Erasmus is not an innovator, as he is usually depicted, but rather someone who returns to the distant past. Like Erasmus, Surrey is often considered as an innovator, as one of the writers who presided over the beginning of the early modern period, and when Surrey and Wilton reach Italy it becomes clear that Nashe’s point about Surrey is substantially the same as his point about Erasmus. During the time that Wilton and Surrey are in Italy together Surrey writes three poems. The poems are not very good, although the first (1910: 254–5) is perhaps especially vile. Their low quality helps to set off the excellence of Nashe’s prose and allows Nashe to attack Petrarchanism. This aspect of The Unfortunate Traveller has been thoroughly studied (see D. Jones 1971), but what is not acknowledged is that as a criticism of Surrey, Nashe’s anti-Petrarchanism is unfair. The poems in Nashe’s text could never pass as Surrey’s work. What was

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becoming identifiable as a reading public in the late sixteenth century knew Surrey’s poems from Tottel’s immensely popular miscellany, in which Surrey, who was the first poet in the collection, was heavily represented. Surrey was indebted to Petrarch both for form and content and many of his poems consist to a greater or lesser extent of translations of sonnets from the Rime Sparse, but his poems are not marked by the sort of highly-charged rhetoric that we see as typically Petrarchan, nor does he make much use of the standard Petrarchan images. What Nashe is really attacking in this section of The Unfortunate Traveller is not so much Surrey himself but rather the late sixteenth-century sonneteers who were influenced by him. Whatever his feelings about Surrey’s poetry, Nashe must have been galled to know that poetry that was vastly inferior to his own writing was considered superior simply because it was poetry. By the time the travelers get to the house in Florence in which Geraldine was born, Surrey has already delivered two poems, but it is the third one that is most important, chiefly because of the way in which Wilton introduces it: O, but when hee came to the chamber where his Geraldines cleere Sunbeames first thrust themselues into this cloud of flesh, and acquainted mortalitie with the puritie of Angels, then did his mouth ouerflow with magnificats, his tong thrust the starres out of heauen, and eclipsed the Sun and Moone with comparisons; Geraldine was the soule of heauen, sole daughter and heir to primus motor. The alcumie of his eloquence, out of the incomprehensible drossie matter of cloudes and aire, distilled no more quintescence than would make his Geraldine compleat faire. In prayse of the chamber that was so illuminatiuely honored with her radiant conception, he penned this sonnet. (1910: 270) After the sonnet that follows, Wilton says that Surrey wrote ‘‘[m]any other poems and epigrams in that chamber’’ (1910: 270). The examples he gives are all in Latin: first a pun—‘‘Diamonds thought the[m]selues Dii mundi’’ (1910: 271) and then a series of quotations from Latin: ‘‘Dulce puella malum est. Quod fugit ipse sequor. Amor est mihi causa seque[n]di. O infoelix ego. Cur vidi? Cur perii? Non patienter amo. Tantu[m] patiatur amari’’ (A pretty girl is an evil. What flees I seek. Love is the cause of my following. O unhappy I. Why did I see? Why did I perish? I do not love patiently. At least allow me to be loved) (1910: 271).

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I have quoted Wilton’s prose introduction to the sonnet rather than the poem itself because I think one of Nashe’s points in this passage is that prose can do everything poetry can. The poem is a parody of Petrarchan romantic discourse, but then so is the prose, and one of Nashe’s jokes here is that the introduction actually renders the poem superfluous. It is at this point that poetry and prose are brought into collision; there seems to me to be no doubt that in the context of The Unfortunate Traveller prose is shown to be superior. What is more, Surrey’s poetry is also superfluous in the sense that Geraldine is hundreds of miles away anyway; by contrast, although he seems to be unable to write poetry, Wilton demonstrates in the part of the narrative that takes place in Italy that he is able to seduce women even without poetic assistance. As well, Surrey’s poetry is foreign in the sense of not being English: the poem is foreign because it is so indebted to Petrarch and the Latin quotations that follow are of course literally foreign, as well as not being original. The scene is obviously intended to be humorous, as is the extraordinarily complex tournament that follows and that marks Surrey’s last appearance in The Unfortunate Traveller, but I think that the condemnation of Surrey’s poetry as inauthentic and unoriginal is seriously meant, at least insofar as to discredit a poet who was important to the nascent English canon helps Nashe to advance the claims of prose. After Surrey leaves, the narrative focus is less on literature and more on the violence and horror of Italian life, from which Wilton is lucky enough to escape. He ultimately leaves ‘‘the Sodom of Italy’’ (1910: 327) and rejoins the English in France, where Henry VIII ‘‘with great triumphs met and entertained the Emperour and the French king, and feasted many daies’’ (1910: 327–8). As Wilton himself says, the story has come full circle geographically, beginning and ending at the English camp in France. The difference, and it is an important one, is that now we see the English king as the equal—or even, since he is the host, the superior—of the two most powerful continental rulers. Thus, Wilton not only returns to Englishness, if not to England itself, but to an Englishness that is now more firmly established than it was at the beginning of the narrative. The Unfortunate Traveller ends with a promise from Wilton: ‘‘I will sweare vpon an English Chronicle neuer to bee out-landish Chronicler more’’ (1910: 328). My argument has been that the opposition between native and foreign chronicles in this sentence is the basic opposition of the text as a whole. More specifically, an ‘‘out-landish’’ chronicle is not only a story about foreign countries but also a story told in a foreign way: in a foreign language, in a style that too closely resembles the style of foreign

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authors, and, perhaps, in poetry, a form typically associated with the upper classes by the publishers of Nashe’s time. Wilton’s adventures demonstrate that he is a servant who is smarter than his master, and within the context of The Unfortunate Traveller this could lead readers to draw two inferences: the humble (and the relatively humble) may be more intelligent than the upper classes; and humble prose, chronicles that tell English stories, are better than Italianate poems.

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Fishwives’ tales: narrative agency, female subjectivity, and telling tales out of school Constance C. Relihan

I may as well admit it: I long to find more early modern prose fiction that was written by women. I long for more texts written by women, examples of prose fiction that may be used to help us reconstruct the lives, preoccupations, and narrative sensibilities of early modern English women, but I know that there just aren’t that many such early modern texts to be found (see, e.g., Newcomb 2002; Hackett 2000). Consequently, I have also developed an interest in examples of prose fiction which ventriloquize female voices: texts like Nicholas Breton’s The Miseries of Mavillia (1597) which is told through the voice of a first-person, female narrator, who helps articulate the role narrative can play in helping to explain early modern female subjectivity and experience. As she begins her work, the narrator mulls over the value of the tale she is about to tell: But why shall I tell this tale? who takes pleasure in a Tragedie? Why? myrth is in many places, and sorrow is no where welcome. Then let me holde my peace: alas I cannot. And why? I haue sworne to my selfe, the world shall see my miserie: but what am I the better? Oh yes, should I sit still and weepe? . . . . they say, that the eye sees not, the heart rues not. Oh thought is the torment of torments: and can I chuse but see my selfe? and by sight of my selfe, to bring in memorie the sorrowes that I neuer put out of my mind. What need I then to record, that I cannot but remember? I must keepe mine oath, how shall the world wonder at me? some mindes pittie me, and other bee warned by me, and all mindes erne when they thinke vpon mee, if I say nothing. Wherefore sweete friends, that faire Ladies, wish their welfare to you, and all the world besides, I will here vnfolde a Trunke full of such torments, as no minde can well beare, nor any heart but would burst with the carriage: the verie sight will affray the eye

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to looke on it, and the heart will pant with griefe to thinke on it. But since I now am gone, that to my liues ende haue borne it, and none I thinke now wil dare to meddle with it: nor if they were enforced, were able to abide it, I will heere set it downe to the pitifull viewe of all good people, whose wits will conceiue, and wills peruse, iudgements beleeue, and harts lament, the summe of such sorrow, as neuer was heard of. (1597: 10–11) The detailed, conversational voice that Breton creates for Mavillia encourages readers to use her character as a fictional representation of early modern female subjectivity in the absence of many actual female voices constructing fictional narratives. Mavillia is obligated to tell her tale so that ‘‘some mindes pittie me, and other bee warned by me, and all mindes erne when they thinke vpon mee’’ (1597: 11). She wants her tale, in short, to act as a mirror and a warning to others about what can happen to young women of her economic class. Breton and writers who similarly focus their narratives through a female narrator or voice provide evidence that allows readers to speculate about the conditions surrounding female experience in early modern England. Flawed though the perceptions generated by these texts may be, they nonetheless provide examples of characters and situations that seem structured to suggest realism. Examining the circumstances surrounding female storytelling, even fictional storytelling, may provide us with a more thorough understanding of the construction and representation of female subjectivity and its relationship to the production of fiction in early modern England. A second text, the text discussed below in more detail, is even more useful for those of us looking for ventriloquized female voices in early modern prose fiction, because it presents a series of female narrators. Westward for Smelts, most probably published first in 1620,1 is a collection of Boccaccian tales presented within the framework of a Chaucerian journey up the Thames. Its ostensible author is ‘‘Kind Kit of Kingston,’’ who also serves as the ferryman for the group of six fishwives from outside of London being transported to their homes after they have sold their wares to a fish-hungry city during Lent. The tales the women tell, which Kit describes as ‘‘wholesome though homely’’ (Halliwell 1848: 9), all emphasize various kinds of marital infidelity, jealousy, and thwarted sexual desire. Significantly, too, Smelts presents not just the tales the fishwives tell, but also their reactions to each other’s narratives, therefore providing readers with the opportunity to eavesdrop on the fishwives’ critical discourse, and

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linking Smelts a bit more closely to Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1558) than to Boccaccio’s collection of novelle (1349–51). Each tale is also preceded by a poetic description of its fishwife-narrator, a technique designed, it would seem, to evoke the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1400). The text begins when Kit proposes to sing his passengers a song to keep them awake on their trip; the women each promise to tell a tale in return. Marie-H´el`ene Davies, in one of the few critical discussions of the text, asserts that Kit is simply ‘‘happy’’ to be in the presence of the fishwives and that he ‘‘sings them some songs in order to encourage them’’ (1986: 177), but his choice of ‘‘encouraging’’ song seems telling. Kit’s song describes to his audience a young man’s love for a beautiful woman who is both immodestly forthcoming and yet aloof. The speaker, ambiguously termed a ‘‘serving man,’’ describes the woman in forty lines of traditional, if poetically inexpert, verse: She herselfe is witty, All her parts are pretty, Nature in her forme hath shewed her skill: Her bright beauty maz’d me, All her parts well pleas’d me: For of pleasant sights I had my fill. Then ’gan her hand for to uncover Her whitest neck, and [r]oundest pap: Then gan I farder to discover Most pleas[ant] sights, yet wayl’d my hap. (1848: 9) He then laments but justifies his paralytic inability to approach her: Had I made a tryall, Her most sad deniall, My obseruant heart oh[!] it would breake. (1848: 9) So he determines to try to content himself with the ‘‘private pleasures’’ he saw, ‘‘yet,’’ he says, ‘‘love I her for that she shewed’’ (9). Kit asks the fishwives for their response to his song: Hauing thus ended, I asked them how they liked my Song? They said little to it. At last, Well, quoth a venerable Matron (or rather

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a Matron of Uenery) that sate on a Cushion at the vpper end of the Boat, let vs now performe our promises to him in telling euery one her Tale. (1848: 9) There is no further mention of Kit’s song. Whereas H. Neville Davies diminishes the importance of Kit’s poem (1976: 35), it—and the lack of response to it—is key to understanding the tales that follow. His song, of a man’s overwhelming intimidation when confronted by a beautiful, virtuous, clever ‘‘goddess,’’ generates no more direct response than ‘‘Well’’ and an awkward silence because, as the women’s stories will subsequently demonstrate, they have no faith in the kind of world Kit’s poem describes: its speaker and the simultaneously brazen and distant woman presented in it do not form a part of the world they know or the community they wish to create. It is worth noting that before Kit sang his song of love the fishwives had urged him ‘‘not to cloy their eares with an old fidler’s song, as Riding to Rumford, or, All in a garden green.’’ (1848: 7). Kit interprets their comment to be a request for novelty: he will ‘‘give them a new one, which neither punke, fidler, or ballad-singer had ever polluted with their unsavorie breath’’ (1848: 7–8); however, it seems that their comment may imply a request for a song about a different kind of female experience. ‘‘All in a Garden Green,’’ for example, is a ballad about a woman who is essentially assaulted by a country man, and it suggests that her modesty and reluctance is all a sham—an imputation that the fishwives would likely reject. A portion of the poem, for instance, recounts a conversation between the ballad’s two main characters in which the woman exclaims (among other expressions of reluctance), ‘‘Lord, how yow hurt my hand;/for god’s sake let me goe’’ (Clark 1907: 221). The man then drags her off behind a tree: Then did he carrye her behynd a tree. What they did there is unknowne to me; But I h[e]ard her say, when she came awaye, making low curtsye, ‘‘Once againe, quoth she, ‘‘Kysse me ere yow goe.’’ (Clark 1907: 221–2)

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The ballad’s vindication of sexual assault is at odds with the fishwives’ sense of female sexuality and the appropriate representation of female agency. The ideology of this ballad, rather than its lack of novelty, is likely what the women find cloying. The wives’ reaction to the fourth tale makes this clear. That tale involves the seventh-century saint and king, Oswald of Northumbria, and his queen, here named Beblam, who, after the birth of a son decide to live celibate, holy lives. Bede’s seventh-century A History of the English Church and People had remarked upon the piety of Oswald, but without naming his wife or containing the tale recounted here; Holinshed’s Chronicles also describes in general terms the virtue and piety of King Oswald, but also without specific reference to either his wife or this tale.2 In the story as Kit tells it, a hermit doubts that it is possible for a man to be married and yet live a holy life, so King Oswald sends him to Beblam with instructions that she ‘‘should use him in all respects as shee would use himselfe’’ (1848: 48). As a result, the hermit receives only bread and water to eat instead of a feast, and he is thrown into a well twice because he believes that an invitation into the queen’s bed is an invitation to sexual activity. He concludes, of course, that Oswald and Beblam are as holy as they seem to be. The fishwives agree that Beblam is virtuous but that she ‘‘was not to be any president for them, seeing shee was a queene, and they were but fishwives’’ (1848: 51). One further argues that their husbands would never tolerate such chastity, ‘‘therefore for my part, I will never go about it’’ (1848: 51). The tale, in other words, amplifies the female role within the historical example and focuses on her behavior to provide the fishwives with the opportunity to discuss their economic and social circumstances. The women are highly sensitive to their economic and social position: they know that they are not queens and that the world that Beblam inhabited is not theirs, despite the stated intention of the woman who tells the tale to describe a woman ‘‘whose life may bee a mirrour for all women’’ (1848: 47). Instead, the world that these stories mirror to women is one of bleak confinement, physical threat, and loss of agency. Their stories occupy spaces in which women are attacked and where control is taken from them. And when women in these stories do seek independence, their attempts generally lead to attack or imprisonment as well. A quick catalogue of the other five tales in the collection will make this clear. In the first tale a woman tricks her husband into letting her leave the house at night to meet her lover. Eventually her trickery is discovered and she is tied ‘‘to a post hard by the dore’’ (1848: 14) until she persuades a female friend to take her place. The

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husband slashes the imposter’s nose with a knife but in the morning his wife is found to have no wound; ‘‘miraculously’’ affirming her innocence. Another story provides an analogue for the wager plot of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The third tale involves a woman whose husband routinely locks her into their home at night. She escapes to spend time with a female friend, her ‘‘pew fellow,’’ but is eventually caught by her husband, who accuses her of adultery. She then manages to lock him out of the house, accuse him of adultery, and obtain a divorce through the aid of her ‘‘pew fellow’’ and her mother. Another tale describes a woman who obtains a friar’s permission to take a lover because he assumes she desires him. When he realizes she does not, he disguises himself as her lover, enters her bedroom and tricks her into having sex with him. When she realizes what the friar has done, she has him castrated and threatens to reveal his crime if he tries to expose her. In the final tale a woman commands her suitor to remain silent for two years. He travels to Cornwall and eventually the Cornish duke offers a reward for anyone who can make him speak; prison for anyone who tries and fails. She follows and attempts to persuade him to talk: he refuses and she is imprisoned. Eventually the suitor speaks again and reveals the truth, and the woman is released but abandoned by the man. It’s a depressing list. In all these tales—except the last—female characters are attacked or imprisoned in their bedrooms or homes. In the final story the domestic prison is replaced by a literal prison into which the woman is thrown because of her treatment of her suitor. Her harsh behavior toward him is not motivated by whim, however: it is guided by the same rules which resulted in the imprisonment of the women in the other tales. She doubts his professed love for her and says: Sir, such little libertie hath our sexe, and men such corrupt judgements, that our mirth is counted immodesty, our civillest lookes lasciuious, our words loose, our attires wanton, and all our doings apish: to shunne these slanders, it behooveth us to bee carefull over ourselves, and not through our kindnesses to give inconstant and dissembling men occasion to speake ill. (1848: 59) It is her ongoing sense of imprisonment by her culture which prompts her harsh behavior. What makes the sense of female confinement more stunning and troubling in these tales, especially if we are trying to locate some notion of female voice or community within this text,

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is the entirely female narrative perspective of the tales and their geography: these stories are removed from the locations of their Continental sources when they are told by Kit’s English fishwives. The geography of the analogue for Cymbeline’s wager plot provides a useful example. Versions of the wager plot date back in European folklore at least to the thirteenth century (Bullough 1975: 12), but it is Boccaccio’s version in 2.9 of the Decameron that is generally recognized as providing one of the most important versions of the tale for Shakespeare’s play.3 This tale, like so many early modern novelle, places its European characters into a non-European cultural framework. The tale begins in a Parisian inn where Italian merchants gather: the duped Posthumus figure, Bernabo´ Lomellino, is Genoese and the villain, Ambrugiuolo, is from Piacenza. From this Parisian and Italian context the tale shifts out of Christendom: the maligned wife, Zinevra, disguises herself as a sailor who serves first a Catalonian gentleman and then becomes a trusted ‘‘lord and captain of the guard’’ of the Sultan in Alexandria. In that capacity she is sent to ‘‘Acre, which was under the Sultan’s subjection, [where] there yearly met a great assembly of merchants, as Christians, Moors, Jews, Saracens, and many other nations beside, as at a common mart or fair’’ (Barnet 1998: 195).4 There she spots the sash and purse Ambrugiuolo had stolen from her, and effects the requisite working out of the plot: her attacker’s confession, her husband’s repentance, and her restoration to him. The geographic context provides an interesting dimension to the plot and to Zinevra’s ability to be returned to her husband: it is only after she is removed from the European framework in which women’s capacity for ‘‘honesty’’ is so completely denied that Ambruguiolo is able to persuade the faithful and loving Bernabo´ to accept his challenge, that she gains power: of course disguising herself as male doesn’t hurt either. But as the male Sicurano da Finale, her ‘‘word was a law with the Sultan’’ (Barnet 1988: 197) and she is able to persuade the Sultan to adjudicate the dispute involving Ambruguiolo’s lies and thefts and Bernabo´ ’s supposed wrongful murder of his wife. Moreover, after her restoration to womanhood and to her husband, her power does not completely disappear: we are told that ‘‘a solemn feast was prepared wherein much honor was done to Bernabo, ´ being the husband of Zinevra’’ (Barnet 1988: 200). Dignity and worth flow to Bernabo´ because of his relationship to her. She retains pride of place and status despite her demotion from the Sultan’s lord to the Italian’s wife. The removal of the European characters from their Italian world is

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significant in this tale because it casts an aura of suspiciousness over the narrative’s conclusions. Their geographic separation from their home culture suggests that despite the virtues culturally assumed by Boccaccio’s readers to be present in the world of the Italians, the ability of that world to promote those values is seriously limited as well: it requires the oversight of the Sultan, whom contemporary cultural attitudes would malign as non-Christian, to effect justice and the restoration of Zinevra to her husband. This linking of the nonChristian and the just resolution of the tale is, however, undercut in a very typical way in the period’s prose fiction. Boccaccio writes, following the happy reunion of the spouses, about Ambruguiolo’s gruesome punishment: the very same day that he was impaled on a stake, anointed with honey, and fixed in the place appointed to his mean torment, he not only died but likewise was devoured to the bare bones by flies, wasps, and hornets, whereof the country notoriously aboundeth. (Barnet 1988: 200) The justice possible in the non-Christian world, in other words, becomes immediately tempered by the harshness and cruelty of the punishment meted out to Ambruguiolo (a punishment I believe I also once saw represented—not insignificantly—in a Dr. Fu Manchu movie) and by the tidbit of information about natural history which Boccaccio provides: before we become too comfortable with the Sultan’s world as a source of justice and restoration, its cultural and geographic separation from Christendom is emphasized. Boccaccio prevents comfortable identification with the non-Christian world and alienates his readers from it: its punishments aren’t like ‘‘ours,’’ and the natural composition of that world is different from ‘‘ours’’ as well (it’s not only non-Christian, but more full of bugs!). Shakespeare’s version of the tale in Cymbeline, it might be added, is significantly different in at least two dimensions, in relation to our inquiry into female subjectivity and the world of Westward for Smelts: first, its dramatic structure unmoors it from modes of narration, simultaneously amplifying and limiting the ability of the text to ventriloquize female speech; and second, it straddles the geographic boundaries between Englishness and Otherness. By shifting genres, Shakespeare limits overtly didactic possibilities, and structures any such moments as of limited authority since they must come from a character and not an omniscient narrator; of course, its genre has not prevented others, such as Leah Marcus, from commenting cogently

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and perceptively on the implications of the play for James I’s attempt to create a unified Britain (Marcus 1988: 116–48). The geographical shifting marks a middle ground and, as is widely acknowledged, a suggestion of the creation of a myth of national origin at Milford Haven becomes emblematic of the seat of the transfer of power from Rome to England. The play enacts that transition, that transfer of power, ultimately solidifying it in Cymbeline and his daughter. This assertion of power, however, must be accompanied by the defeat of Roman power and the restoration of the male line through the rediscovery of Cymbeline’s sons as well. Shakespeare’s version of the tale, then, ultimately contains female power in a way the Smelts version does not. In the Smelts version of the tale, however, the geographic framing of the tale undergoes extensive revision and contraction, setting the home of the central couple in ‘‘Waltam’’ during ‘‘the troublesome reigne of King Henry the sixt’’ (1848: 20). The wager between the husband and the unnamed villain is contracted at a London inn, and the place of the innocent woman’s ‘‘execution’’ is identified as ‘‘Enfield.’’ In his sorrow over his wife’s presumed infidelity, the husband undertakes to serve ‘‘King Henry, who a little before was inlarged by the Earle of Warwicke, and placed in the throne againe’’ (1848: 28). The wife, in her male disguise, serves as a page to ‘‘King Edward (being come out of France, and lying thereabouts [at York] with the small forces he had)’’ (1848: 31) until after the Battle of Barnet, when Henry’s forces are defeated, both her husband and her accuser are captured, and the wife recognizes the villain. The scene then shifts to London, where she has her accuser treated for his battle wounds and prompts King Edward to ‘‘doe her justice on a villain that had been the cause of all the misery she had suffered’’ (1848: 33). Place has clearly become more narrowly defined—both in geographic and historical terms. A final geographic reference finds its way into the fishwives’ discussion of the tale following its conclusion. The wife of Brainford says of the virtuous woman of the narrative that she was a garment out of fashion; she shewed well in that innocent time, when women had not the wit to know their owne libertie: but if she lived now, she would shew as vild as a paire of Yorkeshire sleeves in a goldsmithes shop. (1848: 36) ‘‘Yorkshire sleeves’’ provides another kind of English detail within the text, and a mysterious one at that. The OED cites this use of

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the phrase, ‘‘Yorkshire sleeves in a goldsmith’s shop,’’ to explain the meaning of the idiom (i.e., ‘‘something worthless’’[1989: def. 2]), but it provides no sense of what Yorkshire sleeves actually looked like. Boccaccio’s tale also provides a geographically based detail at the end of his narrative—in his case it is of the large number of ‘‘flies, wasps, and hornets’’ found in Acre that attack the story’s villain. The story is transferred entirely into the confines of England, centered around one of the most tumultuous times in England’s history, and the overarching authority for the wife’s power to effect her restoration to her husband is shifted from Boccaccio’s Muslim Sultan to the victorious Yorkist, Edward IV.5 In other words, even in its allusiveness, at a moment when the implications of the narrative are being developed for the reader, the text turns inward, to English geography and culture, rather than outward, for the anecdotes that will solidify the tale’s meaning in the reader’s mind. The transference of political power from Boccaccio’s Sultan to Edward IV solidifies this nationalist movement: the text sees no reason to travel outside England to authorize the woman’s reunion with her husband. The choice of Edward IV is significant too in that the narrative specifically invokes the Battle of Barnet, at which Edward IV, who held Henry VI prisoner, defeated the forces of the Earl of Warwick, who had worked to place Henry on the throne. Although the text repeatedly refers to this period of English history as ‘‘troublesome’’ and ‘‘dangerous,’’ it is nonetheless sufficiently stable and justice-loving to provide all the authority the woman needs to resolve her situation. Moreover, the geographic contraction of the tale in Smelts is paired with a heightened focus on female agency and the fairly unusual nature of the narrators themselves. Both Boccaccio’s and Kit’s versions of the tale are placed into the mouths of female narrators. While female narrators are common in Continental collections (Dec. 2.9 is told by Filomena), female narration is much less common among early modern English prose narratives. These narrators are significantly differentiated, however, by class and occupation. The working-class identity of the Fishwife of Stand-on-the-Greene and her membership among a group of female characters/narrators of similar status mark the distinctness of Smelts from the aristocratic group of male and female narrators of the Decameron. Fishwives occupy a particular space in the popular early modern imagination. While the term could refer to ‘‘any working woman who sold wares’’ (Brown 1999: 92), fishwives were generally thought to be ignorant, but possessing a love of ‘‘spectacle, clowning, and romance, and a large-lunged readiness to curse’’ (Brown 1999: 89). Of course, the bawdy use of ‘‘fish’’ for

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the vulva and ‘‘fishmonger’’ for pimp color our understanding of these narrators as well (Brown 1999: 103). Moreover, the use of the phrase ‘‘westward for smelts’’ in Westward Ho (1604) to allude to illicit sexual activity also qualifies our understanding of these women’s representational significance: they operate on the margins of the literary world, able to engage in vituperative Billingsgate speech without being compelled to participate in the poetic idealizations Kit wants to emphasize. Through their tales they are constructing a community that presents a romance world that is a revision of and at odds with the kind of idealized world and objectified vision of women that Kit’s initial poem creates. In other words, the geographic contraction exhibited in Smelts is paired with a differing class relation between the narrators and the stories they tell: the fishwives tell tales about members of their own class (or higher classes) and their own gender. The Decameron and its more direct successors feature both male and female narrators who are able to look down from their aristocratic perches on the characters they describe, characters whose class is either roughly parallel to theirs or beneath them. The narrators of Smelts are a smaller, more narrowly defined group, and they are a group defined by their gender and their economic place within English life. Moreover, female characters, actions, and relationships are emphasized more dramatically in Smelts than in other collections. In the first story in the collection, for example, the female friend who stands in for the wife and receives her nose-slashing punishment provides one instance of the text’s focus on what might be called female community building. The third tale of the collection provides an even more telling example. In this narrative a young woman is imprisoned in her home by a husband who fears she will cuckold him and who persuades most of her family and friends that she is a disrespectful and undutiful wife. When she manages to complain to a female friend, her ‘‘pew fellow,’’ in church, the woman responds: Why, said her pew-fellow, wherefore haue you hands, but to take the key when hee is asleepe, and to goe whither you will, onely you must be carefull to come in at the houre he useth to wake? Fie, I am ashamed, that you haue no more wit! Doe as I tell you, and since he barreth you of your libertie in the day, take it yourselfe in the night: for company take no care, come to me; and if wee cannot finde sport to passe away the time, wee will sleepe for company. (Halliwell 1848: 38–9)

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She begins to sneak out at night to be with her ‘‘pew-fellow.’’ Eventually the husband catches her and brings charges against her. The woman, however, is supported by her friend and (eventually) by her mother. She is ultimately able to divorce her abusive spouse. This presents a marked contrast with the narrative’s source, Decameron 7.4, which contains no female friend, substituting instead a male lover; which replaces her mother with ungendered kinfolk; and which ends with the reconciliation of the couple instead of their divorce. Female agency and community are foregrounded, in other words, by the tales themselves as well as by the identity of the narrators of Smelts as fishwives. The status of fishwives in early modern England emphasizes further the isolated nature of the community the text creates among them. As ‘‘foreigners’’ (Howard 2000: 151) coming into London to sell their fish, these fishwives from such towns as Brainford,6 Richmond, and Twitnam, were seen as a disruptive force in need of regulation. Through the 1580s laws required fishwives to ‘‘pass along the streets and lanes of the city’’(Inwood 2000: 125) selling their wares; fishwives continued to be the victims of harassing regulations through the early modern period (Gowing 2000: 142).7 This attempt to reduce competition between these women and the established London markets separates them from the formal guild-based market system, distancing them from identification with London and the nascent nationalism emerging from its culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The separation of fishsellers, both male and female, from identification with notions of nationhood may be further deduced from John Stow’s comments, in his Survey, that he has included a brief history of the fishmongers’ guild because they are ‘‘men ignorant of their antiquities’’ (Stow 1912: 193). The anchorless fishwives of Smelts create a political identity for themselves through a fantastic, utopian narrative structure and content which depends entirely upon native English places and concerns and which seems no longer to require European or Islamic involvement. Moreover, this floating female utopia of fishwives is concerned with the lives of women in England (only one of the tales is not set explicitly in England, though its characters have English names). As the fishwife of Stand-on-the-Greene’s tale suggests, the resolution of the problems the tales pose may also be found within England. This self-sufficiency of English experience, placed in the voices of working-class female characters, suggests a kind of national confidence in the state unseen in previous prose versions of the tale—a confidence made more telling because the author constructs that confidence as female. These women express a

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belief in English tales, English history, and English customs to create their culture. Of course, a certain amount of irony marks their beliefs: the closing comments to the tale do suggest that the late fifteenth century, for all its political turmoil, was an ‘‘innocent’’ time, that no woman could expect such a just outcome during the current moment in English history. Similarly, the isolation of these women in a boat on the Thames (and at one point they actively choose to continue floating past their destinations so that they might continue to tell their tales) hints that such a utopian vision is possible only in the watery, unanchored world of the Thames: ‘‘no man is an island’’ perhaps, but if women want justice—even within England—they had best create one for themselves. The significance of the title fish themselves is also crucial to our understanding of these women and their cultural position. ‘‘Smelt’’ referred to various small fishes eaten by a wide cross-section of the population, from the Commons to members of the Star Chamber (see, e.g., Scofield 1899: 83–95; Simon 1959: 17). As Venner’s Via recta ad vitam longam (1628) describes them: ‘‘The fragrant odor of smelt doth commend the wholesommenesse of them; they delight the Pallat, and yeeld to the body a very good and wholesom nourishment’’ (qtd. Simon 1959: 17). Still, perhaps we don’t want to be too literal about these smelts, recognizing that the word could also refer to a ‘‘simpleton.’’8 And, intriguingly, the fishwives of our text have sold their smelts during Lent, despite the fact that smelts were generally considered a fall food—Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Husbandry links them to Hallowmas (Tusser 1984: 24). In other words, the geographic contraction the novella tradition undergoes in this text is paired with a revision of the kind of community producing and produced by the text: the sensibility that pervades Westward for Smelts is not aristocratic like that of the narrators of the Decameron. The narrators of Smelts constitute a smaller, more narrowly defined community, and one defined by its gender and economic function within English life. They are not simply an assembly of ‘‘some happy fishermen’s wives,’’ as Marie-H´el`ene Davies describes them (1986: 177), or, as H. Neville Davies sees them, a homogeneous group in which there is ‘‘little differentiation between them except in point of view’’ (1976: 40). They exemplify an ideological position at odds with the dominant cultural constructions of social order, and the effect of the narrowing of the narratorial community to their small group is the creation of a female state populated by non-aristocrats which actively rejects the kind of idealized and objectified cultural representation Kit’s song proposes. Moreover, the narrative community

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they create is entirely dependent upon English geography and culture. This self-sufficiency of English experience, placed in the voices of fishwives, reveals confidence in female belief in the power of English tales, English history, and English customs to create their culture. Since it is reasonable to assume that this text was published in 1620, it is roughly contemporary with the Hic Mulier and Haec Vir pamphlets and shortly subsequent to the materials of the Swetnam controversy. Even though we have no evidence of the kind of seventeenth-century readers who were drawn to the work and so may only tantalizingly speculate about the nature of its readership, Westward for Smelts was produced at a time when textual misogyny was popular and when suspicions of women’s power and its transgressive possibilities was strong; it aligns itself with antimisogynist discourse.9 (Smelts even expresses support for ‘‘those women called Amazones, who out of a brave minde cut their husbandes throates, and so made themselves rulers of themselves’’ [1848: 46].) These women toy with making themselves ‘‘rulers of themselves,’’ something that seems no longer to require European or Islamic involvement (as it had in Boccaccio’s version of the Cymbeline tale), but which is still a kind of fantasy within the broader framework of national identity formation. The fantastic nature of this mythmaking is emphasized near the text’s conclusion when the Brainford fishwife says our mirth and journey ends about one time: for yonder is Kingstone, whose large and conscionable pots are praised throughout England; whose ale is of great strength and face [force], as our westerne watermens sicke braines can witnesse. Then since it is so neere, let us not bee factious, and contend for trifles; but let vs seeke to enjoy that which we came for, mirth: that best preserver of our lives: so land us with all speed, honest Waterman. They, hearing her speake but reason, agreed to be ruled by her, and therefore gave her the name of Captaine. With all haste and ease as I could possible, landed I my merry fare of fishwives, who went straight to the signe of the Beare, where they found such good liquor, that they stayed by it all night: where I left them, and so ended my journey, Westward for Smelts. (1848: 63) The creators of the female utopia may come ashore and continue to develop their sense of group identity, but only at the sign of the Bear, where they are able to float away under the influence of another kind of water, of another kind of mirth.

5

English Renaissance romances as conduct books for young men Goran V. Stanivukovic

The burgeoning middle class of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England attempted to prescribe and endorse moral values for managing the emotional and sexual life of young women through numerous matrimonial conduct books written mostly by Puritan clerics. One of the characteristics of the conduct books is that they promoted harmony, balance, and a relative emotional equilibrium between man and woman. In A Preparative for Marriage (1591), Henry Smith voiced the idea of matrimonial equilibrium and says: ‘‘The man [and] wife are partners, like two oares in a boate, therefore hee must diuide offices and affaires, and goods with her, causing her to be feared and reuerenced, and obeyed of her children and seruants like himselfe’’ (1591: 49). Yet conduct books also prescribed an opposite view, requesting subservience to the man, subservience that is the basis for peace in the small commonwealth of marriage. Thus according to another Puritan cleric, in such an apparently harmonious marriage, bodies of both men and women, and the desire that is supposed to bring them together, are subject to the strict control of god. ‘‘This is to bee remembered,’’ writes Robert Cleaver,

that Matrimonie or Wedlocke, must not onely be a coupling together, but also it must be such a coupling together, as commeth of god, and is not contrarie to his word and will. For there be some marriages made, whom God coupleth not together, but carnal lust, beautie, riches, goods, and landes, flatterie, and friendshippe: in such marriages God is not thought vpon, and therefore they sin the more against him. These and such like marriages be condemned in the Scripture: Genes. 6. 1, 2; Ezech. 10, 1 & C. Math. 24, 28, 38. (1598: G7r )

English Renaissance romances 61 At the same time when the Puritan clerics articulated their fantasies of orderly lives of men and women, another coterie of writers—authors of prose romances—offered their competitive versions of love, desire, courtship, and matrimony in the romance narratives of travel, heroic adventures, and courtship. If one reads prose romances against Cleaver’s condemnation of sexual liberties, premarital life in romances appears to be almost solely based on the unholy sinfulness of the flesh. Those romances are indeed based on the narratives of desire, wandering, combat, errors of lust, battle, and the acquiring of new lands. Among many reasons that romances were frowned upon in the Renaissance, their delight in the epicurean aspect of life and their zest for unbridled emotions was probably one of the reasons for cultural reprehension directed at them. There is an entry in the Register of the Stationers’ Company stating that on 13 February [1581] a certain John Charlewood Lycenced vnto him by master watkins a booke intituled the historie of PALMERIN of Englande, vppon Condicon that if there be anie thinge founde in the Booke when it is extante worthie of Reprehension that then all the Bookes shal be put to waste and Burnte . . . vjd. (Arber 1950: 74) The assumption underlying this entry licensing the publication of a romance is that the genre contains reprehensible content. But for whom would it be an affront to read romances? The stringent Protestant public morality over the social dangers of imaginative literature meant that romances were seen as texts corrupting contemporary readers. Judging by the moral standards underlying the production of conduct books and the sentiments surrounding one of the most popular of the sixteenth-century romances from the Palmerin cycle, most romances would have been subject not just to reprehension but to burning, yet the fact of their growing numbers on the print market suggests that they were quite popular and even surpassed in number the volume of printed drama in the 1590s, the heyday of public theaters in Renaissance London (Mish 1952: 197; see also Mish 1953). From this cultural distance and with sparse material evidence, it is difficult to judge what exactly might have been the impact of prose romances on their contemporary readers, what kind of shaping influence they had on the minds of gendered readers, and whether the cultural work they played depended on the

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social class that read them. But the resilience to a very hostile cultural attitude toward a largely imported literary genre clearly suggests that, despite the general cultural condemnation of romances, they were bought in abundance and read avidly, it seems especially by the young. Thus, Francis Meres suggests that Emanuel Ford’s romance, Ornatus and Artesia (?1595), should be censored because, together with twenty-two other prose romances on his list, it is ‘‘no less hurtful to youth than the works of MACHIAVELLI’’ (1903: 22). Romances surely were central to textual production at the turn of the century, and the persuasive narrative strategies of success in private and public affairs that they forged in their stories of romantic and national quests went alongside both the period’s expansion of the possibilities for the nascent middle class and social nostalgia for the age of chivalric victories. These two charges—desire for individual success and nostalgia for chivalry—played central roles in the formalization of, and gradual familiarization with, the adult world which the male youth of romances strive for in their attempts to marry a chosen mate, consolidate a household, and expand property. Romances provided those male youth with the persuasive rhetorical and narrative strategies to achieve those social goals. Since women’s lives were controlled both discursively by men who wrote the conduct books and socially within the household, what or whom did the unmarried young men turn to for models of conduct and protocols of behavior in matters of love (see Lucas 1988; Wolf 1912; Relihan 1994)? Although one could quibble with Caroline Lucas’s argument that romances primarily targeted women readers, one could agree with her assertion that some romances ‘‘focused on the hero rather than the heroine, on adventure rather than love.’’ For her this is sufficient evidence to treat such romances ‘‘in less detail’’ than those that focused on women as the principal readers of romances (Lucas 1988: 49). Less scholarly work has been done on masculinity and male sexuality in romances. I would therefore like to pick up from where Lucas stops, and explore romances not necessarily as fictions for women, but as narratives for and about men, especially young men. A study of the formalization of men’s lives constructed in romances may be seen as a contribution to critical work on the private lives of men, a topic that for a while has been neglected at the expense of the study of the public life of men. But as Elizabeth A. Foyster remarks, if we do not study the private lives of men, ‘‘how will we ever understand how and why patriarchy could endure?’’ (1999: 3). The end of Emanuel Ford’s romance Ornatus and Artesia articulates precisely the guarantee of a successful patriarchy granted to a young

English Renaissance romances 63 man after a turbulent series of events that solidified his bond with a future bride. Ornatus is about to leave Artesia to help fight the enemies of his father. He says: ‘‘My dear Artesia, . . . I beseech you, grant I may once again go to do my duty in aiding my father, which I will now do without danger for that I will make none privy to that I intend, nor attempt more than I am able to perform.’’ Artesia, seeing how fully he was bent to go, preferred his will before her own desire, knowing her duty not to contradict but to counsel him, and therefore said: ‘‘My dear Ornatus, my duty bindeth me to consent, but my love willeth me to deny; fear of your mishap maketh me unwilling, but will to fulfil your desire maketh me give an unwilling consent. Only let me request this, that you will take Phylastes in your company and leave me to the custody of my servants whose fidelity I am assured of, for having him with you, his aid and counsel may much avail to preserve your life, which if you lose as heavens forbid with the same shall mine expire, for it is impossible Artesia should breathe, Ornatus being breathless.’’ (?1595: 217) Artesia voices patriarchy’s claim to power: her love for, and submission to, the young master of the future household is here coupled with her oath of fidelity. Her oath of love and fidelity is the guarantee of patriarchy’s endurance, and Artesia’s articulation of them is the reward for Ornatus’s defeat of all obstacles on the arduous path that leads toward winning her. To the young male readers of romances this ending offers a fictional model of social success and prosperity. What I want to argue in this paper, then, is that prose romances construct narratives both of the formation of young men’s lives maturing to husbands and masters of the household, and of the recommended models for the rhetorical strategies and actions that lead to the formation of patriarchy. If most chivalric romances of the 1590s feature men as central characters and agents in the unrestrained narratives of heroic achievement, romantic trials, and the hardships of foreign travels, they are, in fact, speaking to men and are offering models for effective persuasion and agency useful to the young man in the process of maturity. A textual detail in the 1640 edition (in the Folger Shakespeare Library) of Emanuel Ford’s romance Montelyon suggests that prose romances

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might have been considered as works about maturation and that they were directed to young men. The author suggests that: it is commonly holden for truth, that all things of Antiquity are permanent, which never would have beene if they had not first begun in youth, youth being the first Foundation, the Foundation is then constant, then things though young of growth containe circumstancy, which being cherished grow to perfection. (1640: R2r ) The idea that youth is at the center of the social foundation suggests the importance of young men for the culture they inhabited. Life as a progress, romantic and territorial conquest, and as travel and an adventure is what the rising middle class considers some of the defining traits of their times and what romances promote as a narrative of success. A young man’s passage through life toward these cultural goals is therefore of a particular interest to that class and its civic ideals of social accomplishment. Romance narratives of social and class mobility, and the spirit of pioneering adventures that imbues those narratives, appealed to the youth of England living at the cultural crossroads of late feudalism and Tudor entrepreneurialism. Romances both translated and written in English originally served the purpose of offering models for the ambitious male youth in both private and public aspects of life (Wright 1933: 312–36). Romances may have influenced the ambitious and restless young in early modern England by offering intellectual and aesthetic reading pleasure and by prompting them to pursue lucrative occupations that might benefit the nascent middle class. Francis Kirkman’s chapbook romance, The Unlucky Citizen, for example, describes adventures of an ‘‘unlucky,’’ that is, young, citizen of London, who wanders through the Arcadia of England in quest of sex and profit (1673: 11). Direct references to several romances, such as Emanuel Ford’s Ornatus and Artesia, Montelyon, and the first part of Parismus, suggest the purpose they might have had in the young man’s imagination. The Unlucky Citizen, Kirkman’s principal narrator, tells the reader that when he ‘‘came to Knight Errantry, and reading Montelyon Knight of the Oracle, and Ornatus and Artesia, and the Famous Parismus: I was contentented [sic] beyond measure, and believing all I read to be true, wished myself Squire to one of these knights’’ (1673: 11). The identification with the recklessly adventurous youth of Ford’s romances is here presented as a desired model of life, and it is further expanded as a wishful role of being in the world. The Unlucky Citizen continues:

English Renaissance romances 65 All the time I had from School, as Thursdays in the Afternoon, and Saturdays, I spent in reading these Books [the Palmerin and Amadis romances]; so that I being wholly affected to them, and reading how that Amadis and other Knights not knowing their Parents, did in time prove to be sons of Kings and great Personages; I had such a fond and idle Opinion, that I might in time prove to be some great Person, or at leastwise be Squire to some Knight. (1673: 11–12) Whether we attribute these records and habits of reading romances to Kirkman’s fantasy of reading romances, or whether they suggest that romances were meant to instruct a young charge to fashion his life and ambition accordingly, this textual evidence is crucial to establish the reception of specific romances. But it is also central to our understanding of how textual meaning was produced among a very specific—male—reading audience of socially mixed classes. Kirkman gives voice to his invented narrator aware of the importance romances play in the shaping of the imaginative lives of young men, both common and aristocratic, as they seek independence or a higher position within their class. Kirkman’s text, thus, performs its social function by offering a textual model of young men’s ambitions. As Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer remind us, ‘‘Early modern writers were keenly aware of the social nature of their texts, whether that meant that they were given voice in the mouths of players, worshippers, preachers, or polemicists’’ (2002: 9). To this list I would also add writers of prose romances. Romances induce an appetite for travel and for doing good, and to combine both charges, the young errant wishes to become a ‘‘Chirurgion,’’ a surgeon, so that he ‘‘might travel, and thereby see all these several Countreys of Constantinople, Trebizond, and I know not what Places’’ (1673: 12). What underpins this motivation is the humanist idea that a young man acquires knowledge not just from books but from travel as well. Yet unlike the humanist courtly fiction of the Euphuistic kind, where travel complements the education acquired through reading and classroom instruction, romances offer a model of travel as pleasure and pastime. Being a doctor is also an activity that benefits direct pragmatic pursuit of a vocation, since to become a doctor is to look after the traveling Knight’s health and condition as he travels (‘‘I should be very necessary and useful dressing and healing their Wounds, therefore a Chirurgeon I was resolved to be’’ [1673: 12]). At the time when the nationalist fervor swept England at the end of the sixteenth century, it might make sense to suggest that

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male youth—the future pillars of the early modern English society—would turn to romances for strategies that offered to them models of social and masculine agency (see Helgerson 1992). With their narratives of masculine prowess, trials and errors of romantic and militant conquest, and suggested formulas of good speaking and conduct, prose romances represented the most readily available form of conduct literature for adolescent men. Romances became an ‘‘expressive medium’’ (Hutson 1994: 88) for strategic re-imaginings of masculinity in the 1580s and 1590s when reading fiction of success in private and public realms supplants heroic combat as a model of masculine virtue. Although Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), in Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation, and Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation (1587) remained compendia for courtly behavior and polished conversation for noble youth, and Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster (1570) performed a similar role for the students of the English humanist schools, the rapidly changing world of early modern England initiated a change in the cultural fantasies about romantic masculinity. Neither Castiglione nor Ascham instructed young men of overlapping classes for such governing. They advised them how to improve their social and elocutionary skills, and how to better themselves through schooling and travel. Yet the nascent middle class of England, which prompted the rise of print culture in Renaissance London, also marked the burgeoning romances mostly written by and for men (judging by their dedications and male-oriented narratives). While the authors of conduct books mostly sermonized about chastity, matrimonial duties, procreation, and other aspects of young women’s conduct in marriage and within the household, writers such as Robert Parry, Emanuel Ford, Henry Robarts, and Richard Johnson revived in their romances, on the one hand, a nostalgia for the world of masculine prowess and chivalry (which was in tune with the nationalist fervor of the 1590s). On the other, they wrote fictions that offered young men who avidly read romances models of prudent behavior, tempered passions, and ways of maturing into marriage. For example, Richard Johnson’s chivalric romance, The Most Famous History of the Seauen Champions of Christendome (1596–7), was not only a frequently reprinted book on the market but ‘‘it was still being rewritten as an adventure story for boys in the twentieth century’’ (Cooper 2004: 389; also Liebler 2000: 72, 83). The epistle to the readers in the 1637 edition of the anonymous romance of French provenance, Valentin and Orson (written c. 1586), for example, makes clear its narrative mission to serve young men’s life pursuit. The printer, Thomas Purfoot, says

English Renaissance romances 67 that in this reprinted edition ‘‘the Princely mind [may] see his own model, the Knightly Tilter his martial achievements, and the amorous Lady her dulcet passages of love’’ and adds that his edition ‘‘gives also a working to the minds of the dull country swaynes, and as it were leads them to search out for Martiall atchievements, befitting many pastimes, & active pleasures’’ (1637: A2v ). Since most of the events in this romance are concerned with martial adventures announced to entertain the knights and less with amorous pursuits meant to please the ladies, one could assume that despite its announcement to please both genders, this romance, in fact, is more directed to young men seeking mates. Plots of romances imagine young men’s lives as a series of cultural and personal rites of passage, including the struggle between the generations. They construct the civic man in his relationship with the duties of a husband and master of household, and provide fictional scenarios for his duties as a hero and a lover. The period met them with reprehension, but from a cultural point of view romances were forward-oriented texts, and unlike The Courtier, which looked ‘‘to a dream of the past,’’ romances—civic versions of the civil courtly conversations—turned to the needs of the present and the ‘‘actuality of the future.’’1 One of the most common narrative topoi (Helen Cooper calls it a meme)2 of early modern prose romances that points to the future is of a young man’s leaving home. Either orphaned or sent out to the Continent to learn and harden, the young man of romances is less a prodigal youth of the Euphuistic courtly fiction3 and more a maturing adolescent exercising the virility of a young bachelor. Leaving home was culturally connected with freedom and an independence from the tutelage of a parent or governor. Thus in The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham writes that ‘‘a young jentleman was never free, to go where he would, and do what he liste him self, but under the kepe, and by the counsel, of some grave governour, until he was, either maryed, or cald to beare some office in the common wealth’’ (1570: D3r ). The men in romances, however, do not leave home in order to go to school, take up apprenticeship, or become lawyers, but to embark upon adventures that are going to transform them into respectable youth worthy of marriage and the management of a household.4 The average age of fifteen, that ‘‘marked the exodus from the paternal home’’ for boys in the early modern period, represents roughly the same age at which most youth of romances embark on their adventures and leave their parental or foster home behind (Wall 1978: 184). In that sense, the adventures of the male youth in romances represent imaginative investments in situations that counter the social reality of that youth,

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softening the blow of the reality of schooling or apprenticeship. The ‘‘mayden’’ knight in the subtitle of Henry Robarts’s romances, Pheander, the Mayden Knight (1595), is not an effeminized youth, but a young man of gentle countenance, an adolescent on the path to maturity. Thus on their way from being rash youth to responsible masters of a household, the young men of romances play the roles of ‘‘the apocalyptic horsemen of bourgeois respectability’’ (Schindler 1997: 279). If romances imagined young men’s maturity rites in heroic and romantic actions, in plots full of obstacles and temptations, they also did so in the narratives that concentrated on offering models for ethical life and instilling virtue, as a reward for the punishment of evil and for vice as the early modern humanists and their classical models suggested. Humanist romances of the second half of the sixteenth century fictionalize models of virtuous life by directing thoughts and inspiring usefulness and virtuous behavior of young men on their path toward adulthood.5 If conduct books gave advice to the youth through religious doctrine and prescriptions, romances instructed them by offering models of eloquence and actions, offering examples of a virtuous and ethical life. At the heart of their goal lay the particular idea of humanist training for boys, articulated by Erasmus in De civilitate morum puerilium as ‘‘giving instruction in the duties of life’’ (1985: 273). Romances promoted friendship with other men, consolidating romantic relationship with a woman through courtship that leads to marriage; they not only instructed in sexual life but also advocated sexual prowess; and they distinguished vice from virtue. Moderatus, the eponymous hero of Robert Parry’s 1595 romance, Moderatus, or the Black Knight, weighs ideas about friendship, and says to his friend, Priscius: I utterly detest and abhorre those flattering and fained friends, who, resembling the Amber stone, burne outwardly, and freeze inwardly: or the barke of the Myrtle tree in Armenia, which is as hote as fire in taste, and as colde as yce in operation. And rather, with the hearbe Amaranthus, which beginneth to flourish in the winter, when all other hearbes doe decay: so I in the winter of your extremities, purpose to shewe my selfe, not onely a friend, but a bright Sunne through the thickest and darkest cloud, being then assured that you doe love me, if you repose any trust and confidence in mine actions. (2002: 54–5)

English Renaissance romances 69 Throughout this romance, Moderatus, resembling the impetuous Redcrosse Knight of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, learns the duties of life through errors. The error that he grapples with, in the larger narrative from which this passage is taken, pits friendship against desire, Priscius against Venus, and compares the stabilizing force of friendship to the destructive potential of desire, responsible for the fall of Troy and decline of Athens. Likened to truth, symbolized in the Sun, friendship is imagined as a force that enlightens, unlike desire that brings over the thick darkness of hell. If friendship is the one cultural institution that defined normative relationships between men in early modern England, love is the charge that was seen as the basis of male-female relationships. Love is friendship’s counterpart in determining the entry into the symbolical order; the former is needed as the basis for the marriage and household, the other as the center of the public working of the state. As narratives that offered analogues to private situations in which young men would find themselves, romances offered opportunities to learn rhetorical strategies enabling successful courtship at the moment, as Thomas Lodge says, of ‘‘discovering . . . affections’’ (1997: 199). Hear Saladyne to Aliena in Lodge’s romance Rosalind (1590): Fair mistress, if I be blunt in discovering my affections and use little eloquence in leveling out of my loves, I appeal for pardon to your own principles that say shepherds use few ceremonies, for that they acquaint themselves with few subtleties. To frame myself, therefore, to your country fashion with much faith and little flattery, know, beautiful shepherdess, that whilst I lived in the court I knew not love’s cumber [trouble], but I held affection as a toy, not as a malady, using fancy as the Hyperboreans to their flowers which they wear in their bosom all day and cast them in the fire for fuel at night. I liked all because I loved none, and who was most fair, on her I fed mine eye, but as charily as the bee that as soon as she hath sucked honey from the rose flies straight to the next marigold. (1997: 199) The shepherd’s language follows the rhetorical protocols of courtship, involving humility and a shift from emotional naivety and superficiality to melancholy, associated with the lover figure. The example is a model of the psychological realism of the path one’s experience of love takes, from naivety to maturity, from the surface of looking to the depth of interiority. The figural rhetoric of this speech has its origin

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in the humanist grammar school instruction in the use of figures, tropes, and schemes in the structuring of an argument to achieve the desired effect, to sway one’s audience into believing the speaker. As an example of declamatory rhetoric, Saladyne’s speech fictionalizes the period’s practice of instruction through careful examination of a topic, thus offering the young male reader of a romance an elocutionary model for courtship. One could argue, however, that a young man who attended the grammar school would not have needed prose romances to offer such guidance in the affairs of love because rhetorical treatises would have offered exempla from the classics, or examples of their own invention, for such purposes. But the advantage of getting instructions in the matters of love from romances as opposed to solely through the rhetorical models offered in the books of rhetoric was that, through the narrative and characters’ actions, romances also linked rhetorical models to actions. Through models of behavior and rhetorical formulas of argumentation, romances extended the grammar school classroom practice into a protocol of life, by giving young men examples of how to put the theoretical knowledge into living practice. In doing so, romances also performed a crucial cultural role by offering affirmative examples of those aspects of intimate behavior and interior life—love, seduction, desire, pleasure—that conduct books pronounced sinful and were eager to edit out of human lives. If at the heart of the matrimonial conduct books lay the heavy weights of religion and libidinal restraint it professed, imagining private life as all too orderly and somber, the vortex of romance narratives is run by the contrasting charge of life in which pleasure is less controlled. Romances offered rhetorical strategies not just in how to assure the love of a maiden but in how to enjoy sexual pleasure as well. One of the most common perils of male-female relationships that the conduct book writers constantly warned against is that of sexual liberty, especially outside marriage. In the words of the Puritan cleric, Henry Smith, ‘‘Mariage was appointed for a remedie against fornication.’’ Smith adds that ‘‘God inflicted a sorer punishment vpon him which did commit vncleannes after marriage, then vpon him which was not married, because he sinned, although he had the remedie of sinne’’ (1593: B3v ). This cultural abhorrence of fornication, instilled by the religious doctrine of abstinence, has its fictional equivalent in romance narratives of deferred pleasure. Deferring pleasure until the end of romance when a young man finally finds his chosen mate and sexual gratification becomes a reward for the trials he has been subjected to, romance narratives promote sexual freedom before marriage. Here

English Renaissance romances 71 is an example from Ford’s Ornatus and Artesia (?1595). When a ‘‘fit opportunity’’ has arisen, Ornatus and Artesia surrender their bodies to each other: she [Artesia] yielded up her unspotted body and pure chastity to his possession, and the impression of his attempt dissolved her virgin zone, giving full interests of her heart, love and body to him, that pursued the possession of those riches with earnestness. Sometimes blushing, sometimes shrieking, and yet yielding, denying, and yet granting, willing and unwilling, yet at last she gave that [which] she could not recall, and let him possess her spotless virginity, which being passed, her heart panted with the motion and she felt her senses sad, a little repenting, yet not altogether sorry sighing for sadness, and yet not sad at all, whilst he bathed himself in that heaven of bliss, passing the rest of that night in such unspeakable pleasure as cannot be deciphered. (?1595: 158) Both the vocabulary and syntax of this paragraph rehearse the familiar scenario of defloration, from the give-and-take game of sexual surrender to the moans and pleasure that accompany that game. Among a number of possible strategies such an episode can play in the narrative of combat and courtship, one is that it provides (if not instructs) the young man with a scenario of lovemaking and its climax. Gratification and happiness, not reprehension and punishment, is the goal of this textual experience. The further effect of sexual gratification is inner satisfaction: Early the next morning he arose, taking his farewell with a sweet adieu, leaving Artesia sad for sorrow and lamenting his absence, but yet with earnest and hearty prayers invocating his happy success, bathing her heart in lukewarm tears, thinking she had been too prodigal of her favors to him, yet esteeming him worthy of a thousand times greater gift if she had it in her possession, with repentance rejoicing though deeming herself metamorphosed and other than she was wont to be. (?1595: 213) Rather than a source of repentance, sexual gratification and loss of virginity are a source of joy for a woman. For Ornatus, sexual intercourse restores martial prowess, as he arrives to his military camp full of new energy to fight the Armenians. Pre-marital sex and the

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loss of virginity are here offered not as horrific sins against religion and the culture of restraint, but as affirmative acts in the process of maturation. The episode features as a lesson in seduction aimed at a young charge drawn by the lure of the awakened sexual desire. Even though overt treatment of sex occurs in a number of English prose romances, sexual liberties are not as often the subject of English romances as they are of French, their formative models. Anthony Munday, the English translator of the immensely popular Amadis de Gaule cycles of French romances, ‘‘omits the more risqu´e elements in the French, and tones down the manner in which sexual relations are described’’ (2004: xxv). Munday, a city poet who kept his finger on the pulse of London life, tempers the sensuality of the original in ways that probably make it possible for the Amadis romances, attacked by a number of Protestant writers as unseemly foreign influences, to be published in England. But it is the French originals, not their English epigones, which continued to be attacked as immoral fictions. If anything, the English writers of romances, Emanuel Ford, for example, receive praises. In the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of the 1640 edition of Ford’s last romance, Montelyon, R.K. has added the poem in praise of Ford, which ends: ‘‘Thanke Foord, thus offring at free cost, / His Talent for our hearts delight’’ (1640: A2r ). Romances’ contribution to the growth of literature for pleasure reading could also be seen as playing an important role in the process of the formalization of social relationships and the secularism of the overt anti-Puritan literature. It might well be that the strong Puritan morality censored some of the pornographic and licentious content from entering into the imitation of the Palmerin and Amadis romances, but the fact that, where it did, as in the example of Ornatus and Artesia, it took the form of long passages that amplified the erotic content of the original, suggests that the culture might have seen some exemplary value in not editing out of publicly circulating literature examples of textualised sexual acts. It could be that the erotic insets in romances were used as a market ploy for audiences who bought romances because of such titillating narratives. But it could also be that in the narratives of sexual awakening and gratification romances resist not just the culture of temperance, even repression, animated by the strict moral codes of Puritan morality, but also the tenor of the conduct books that prescribed restraint as a necessary, even healthy, attitude toward felicity in and out of marriage. These textual strategies work toward offering models of the young man’s management of emotions. In that sense, then, romances played a role in the building of a community at whose heart is a humanist young man who has endured the trials

English Renaissance romances 73 of life not because he can use the sword but because of his ability to employ persuasive strategies in obtaining advantage over other men and over women. The private realm within which the young men in romances explored their emotions included male friendship and heteroerotic love. On the path of the complex experience of adolescent maturation, however, masculine love and heteroerotic friendship do not always exist as a harmonious unity, as two sides of the same coin of privacy and pleasure, but can create tensions, even competition. In some romances, like Ford’s Ornatus and Artesia, friendship, like the one between Ornatus and Priscius, co-exists with the heteroerotic love and courtship between Ornatus and Artesia. But in other romances, as in Parry’s Moderatus, male friendship and heteroerotic love are in tension. Moderatus and Priscius, two friends in Parry’s romance, learn both virtue and conjugal love once they have sworn brotherly love. [N]othing is to be expected in amities and friendship, more then equality: euen so could none more fitly be ioyned in amitie and friendshippe . . . then this couple, who so much resembled each other in proportion and condition, that scant could the one be known from the other . . . [T]hey were neuer found different in opinion or action: for one chamber was common vnto them both, as one bed serued them both, they both euer vsed one boord, they had but one purse indifferent betweene them: and last of all, their seuerall and distinct bodyes had but one mind: either of them with their affable and curteous demeanour, endeuoring to gaine the good will of the people: and both of them in verie short space did in the highest degree of good killing obtaine the same. (2002: 34) Equality is here imagined as reciprocity, and mutuality is linked with exchange, extending the familiar Elizabethan dictum that friends constitute two bodies in one, or that the friend is one’s ‘‘second selfe,’’ as Galastina, a character in Henry Robarts’s romance, A Defiance to Fortune (1590), says of his friend, Andrugio, upon his return to Saxony after his studies abroad. Yet this is how Galastina continues: I haue noted euer since thy coming to Sienna, amongst all thy myrth, how suddainly it hath bene ouershadowed with sighes and fantasticall speeches tending to loue, as thy passion describeth: If it be so my Andrugio, thou art entred into the most intricate

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Galastina voices one of romances’ profound worries: that love puts obstacles between male friends and that it separates friends; that it leaves one friend abandoned when the other is lured into the labyrinth of love. But what Galastina’s speech also brings out is the instability and fragility of the emotional, even amorous, basis of friendship in the imagined scenario of romance. Afraid of losing a friend to heteroerotic love and desire, Galastina continues: ‘‘I thinke of Loue, as Gnato the Greeke did, who was woont to say, that of all plagues wherewith mortall men are afflicted, loue was the greatest, for that they earnestlye desired that for their comfort, which they founde their mortall death’’ (Parry 1590: C3r ). The peril of losing a friend to the love of a woman empties the shaping self of its trust and stability. The effect of Galastina’s words paralyzes the listening Andrugio, who ‘‘could not well tell how to digest his speech’’ (Parry 1590: C3r ). Galastina’s language implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other: the selfhood is not a relation of sameness that is broken in this instance. There is a whiff of humiliated subject in Galastina’s forceful language in which the question of personal identity is tied to belonging to a friend, now seeking a woman. Heteroerotic love and male friendship, then, are here imagined as conflicting forces within the larger realm of love, and they are causes for exploring both fears and desires in the loving friend about to be abandoned. If the abandoned woman at large is subject to temptations of the outside world of romances, and is often, in Cooper’s words, ‘‘cast adrift in a rudderless boat’’ (2004: 53), the one friend of romances is tossed around in a frightful self emptied of its meaning initially enabled by the friend. If the narratives of romances shift between the stability and fragility of friendship, and vexations and pleasure of heterosexual love, what do those romances then offer as models of actions in the realm of affect to young men eager to master love and maintain friendship? The surrendering of self to other in the romance economy of friendship is, Parry says, ‘‘pertinent . . . to manly fortitude’’ (1590: D4r ). What fortitude means in Parry’s romance, however, has to do with the measuring of friendship against the other kind of amorous companionship: love for a woman. Priscius kept his love for Florida as a secret away from his friend, Moderatus, which Moderatus, upon

English Renaissance romances 75 discovering his friend’s secret, felt betrayed: ‘‘I could not chuse but be verie sorie, in that I perceived you to be unwilling to disclose the same [secret] unto me’’ (Parry 1590: D4r ). This narrative moment creates a further opportunity for the romance to delve into the interior lives of men. Swayed by Moderatus’ rhetoric of loyalty, Priscius ‘‘unlockt the closset of his thoughts, and discovered him selfe unto him [Moderatus]’’(D4r ). What Priscius’ inwardness reveals here is not repentance because of the secret, but a critique of the surrender of all bonds of decorum for the sake of the sanctity of friendship: he reminds ‘‘sweet’’ Moderatus that over-hearing was a fraudulent way ‘‘to compasse’’ his secrets (Parry 1590: D4r ), an act whose effect ‘‘had both impaired [his] substance, and preiudiced [his] person’’ (Parry 1590: D4r ). Priscius’ language lacks the acute vocabulary of psychological inwardness of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but it places trust at the center of subjectivity. But Priscius’ corrective reflection on Moderatus’s ‘‘friendly admonitions’’ (Parry 1590: D4v )—Priscius finds them ‘‘bitter and biting’’ (Parry 1590: D4v )—about the compromised fidelity and loyalty to a friend, in fact, brings out the precariousness of the friendship affect. But Priscius’ interior reflection on the affect split between romantic love and friendship more seriously and eloquently questions the friendship as the privileging identification. This, we could say, is the romance ploy, for the genre’s intent is to forge heteroerotic desire and promote marriage and procreation, from which friendship represents a detour. Parry devotes much of the rest of his romance to the thinking about the boundaries of friendship, about true from false (flattering and hence disloyal) friendship. For Moderatus, friendship has the capacity not just to calm his own ‘‘waywarde destinie’’ but it is also an ‘‘occasion of amitie betweene our [his and Priscius’] Parents’’ (Parry 1590: 86). Likeness and parity, and friendship as a pacifying force that reconciles families, in this economy of friendship are not bases for the contractual consent as they are in the narratives of chivalric friendship. On the one hand, they stabilize social relations between families within the same class; on the other hand, they give rise to a self-analysis of the ethics of emotions. Henry Robarts sees this power of friendship to shape interiority when he describes the effect of friendship’s love as entering ‘‘into the most intricate laborinth that can be’’ (1595: C3r ). If matrimonial conduct books focused exclusively on the discursive shaping and controlling of the lives of women in marriage, romances as texts offering models for male conduct in and out of marriage centered on the anatomies of male interior and exterior lives, offering

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their narratives as correctives of, or models for, virtuous masculine behavior. Under the pressure of marriage as the goal in romances, male friendship becomes a subject of scrutiny by women competing for a mate with male friends claiming other men as their companions. This is Guenela to Pheander, the eponymous hero of Henry Robarts’ romance, Pheander, the Mayden Knight (1595): Prince Dionicus, made choice of you, for his companion: then vnder benedicitie let me craue (all law of friendship exempted) did he not acquaint you with his determinations[,] for me thinkes it is scant credible, that such an vnity shall be amongst men, their loves being so perfect, but he should disclose each secret intent whatsouer. (1595: M1v ) Guenela’s ideas of the dialectic of selfhood and sameness, and of selfhood and otherness, cast doubt on the possibility of friendship, despite love attributed to it, echoing the cultural distinction between love for a woman and affection for a male friend. Guenela acknowledges the perfection underlying the love of friends, but the doubt that she casts on the love of friends gives her an advantage in courtship. In Sidney’s Old Arcadia, departure from the security of friendship for the insecurity of courtship is traumatic enough for ‘‘faithful Musedorus,’’ who separated from his friend Pyrocles, to say ‘‘I have no more freedom in mine own determinations. My thoughts are now all bent how to carry away my burdenous bliss [of falling in love with Philoclea]’’ (Sidney 1994: 152). Before courtship even starts, nostalgia for a disrupted friendship is already signaled early in the narrative, at the point when disguise, not even physical absence, becomes a barrier erected between friends. What in fact is curious about prose romances of the 1590s is that the mutual character of friends based upon ‘‘giving’’ and ‘‘receiving’’ (of favors, goodness, love) within the ethical sphere of unity is easily replaced by the primacy of women. Prose romances of the 1590s, then, offer young men powerful narratives of the celebration of humanist friendship as reciprocity of an exchange, occasionally capturing pressures put on friendship as the shift from heroic to romantic masculinity becomes central to the ideas of the household and an emphasis on men’s roles as masters of the household. Romances of the 1590s fictionalize young men’s departure from home, imagining obstacles on the path of those men’s quest for establishing themselves as independent masters of the household: husbands and fathers. These

English Renaissance romances 77 independent and individual pursuits, upon which heroes of romances embark alone, force separation, and hence redefinitions, of friendship, opening up the young man’s self to new introspections and to an individualized interiority of a singular self, not one dependent upon the presence of a friend. For all Galastina’s persuasion against love and in favour of friendship, and his warnings about the peril of desire in contrast to the tranquility of friendship, Andrugio still chooses heteroerotic love and jeopardizes friendship with Galastina. Like the two Antonios separated by marriage from their friends in Shakespeare’s plays The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, who remain unattached and melancholy at the ends of the two plays, Galastina’s fate in the narrative remains uncertain by his friend’s choice of heteroerotic love. Romance narratives that fictionalize tension between male friendship and heteroerotic love could be read as exemplary stories of actions that, while pointing to the path of socializing young men into adult society, replace masculine friendship with, first, masculine singularity, even loneliness and social isolation (while young men are choosing mates) and then with equality and fulfillment in marriage. In a way, then, the circle that connects matrimonial conduct books and romances closes at the same point: marriage and management of pleasure. The difference between the two genres, however, lies in their intent. While the prescriptive and often preaching tone of conduct books reflects masculinist and patriarchal anxiety over the potential liberty of women and men, especially libidinal freedom, and implies a strict control of sexuality, prose romances promote sexual freedom as part of the necessary phase in the process of the formalization of adolescent men, and manhood, within the normative culture. Romances teach (not preach) by example, by trial and error in young men’s actions, and they make attempts to gain honor the central point of their exemplary stories. As fictional conduct books for men, romances punish violence when it occurs between men, but by promoting the spirit of harmoniousness within marriage, they also offer a model of honorable conduct for young men turned husbands by taking away from them the right to maintain control in the household by using violence. In offering models of peaceful management of the household, romances implicitly intervene in the contemporary debate about the use of violence as a control mechanism within the household by promoting harmony and felicity as goals of matrimony. Dwelling on the narratives of heroic accomplishment and valor, romances offer young men models for cultivating manhood rooted in physical strength. The violence they fictionalize in stories of combat and conquest offered models of situations in which virtuous actions and defenses of ladies

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are offered to young men as forms of engagement with physical obstacles, and as opportunities in which their masculinity is tested within the socially sanctioned space of honorable actions. Sexual liberties extend this process of the formation of manhood in the complex and difficult rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood by bringing out in fiction what the culture attempts to repress. In all these senses, romances in fact solidify many of the moral norms of young men’s personal conduct demanded by the culture; they do not do so though prescription and stern control of their lives, but by more open, if fictionalized and idealized, exemplary narratives of civic life. Seen from this angle, as narratives of civic liberties, romances are perhaps the greatest reaction against both Protestant and Catholic attempts to control the body, restrain libido, and mold the lives of the young.

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Mildred, beloved of the devil, and the dangers of excessive consumption in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession Mary Ellen Lamb

To recent studies of sexualities addressed through early modern prose romance (Relihan and Stanivukovic 2003), this essay contributes a discussion of the erotic relationships imagined between the soldierauthor and variously classed women readers in Barnaby Rich’s Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581) as a way of thinking about consumption. Produced by the book trade, the forms of sexuality articulated in prose romances by Rich and other authors were always designed primarily to sell books. Exaggeratedly erotic representations of women readers, as Sasha Roberts has pointed out, had much more to do with commercial imperatives than reading practices (2003: 33). Since there is little hard evidence for significant recreational reading by women readers by the late sixteenth century, why then did the book industry vigorously step up its appeals to women readers?1 Recent critics have increasingly interpreted these promotions of books to women readers as also designed to attract men. Helen Hackett asserts that representations of reading as appropriate to women served primarily as an advertising ploy to market books as ‘‘racy, lightweight, and fun’’; males reading over their shoulders, figuratively speaking, were to experience ‘‘voyeuristic pleasures’’ in shared erotic reading (2000: 11). Lorna Hutson describes these fictions of women readers as vehicles by which male authors could display persuasive powers that had become, with humanism, more important than valor on the battlefield as a means for professional preferment (1994: 97). Building on Hutson’s emphasis on the transition ‘‘from the battlefield to the bedchamber,’’ Constance Relihan represents collections of prose romances as ‘‘defining, describing, and satisfying heterosexual desire’’ (2004: 29). In this essay I focus on Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581) to explore this distillation of a free-floating sexuality in prose romances as a means to come to terms with the anxieties and exhilarations aroused through the

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consumption of goods. From this approach, the sexuality fantasized for the woman reader served as a screen not only for male readerly pleasures, but also for widespread cultural anxieties over the uncontrolled consumption of goods by either gender. This essay considers some of the deeper cultural implications of the mingling of these desires for sex and goods within ideologies not only of gender but of class (see especially Newcomb 2002 and Relihan 1994 and 2004). An association between sexual desire and the urge to consume goods is everywhere visible in our own economy of late capitalism. As Madison Avenue figured out long ago, the yearning to buy a commodity resembles, on some level, a yearning for a superficial sexual encounter: the sudden joy in acquisition, followed by a sense of hollowness; the sense that this was not quite the right purchase/partner—that this need was not quite filled—and this sense of just missing that promised long-awaited completion at last only incites the pursuit of yet more and yet better. For scholars of consumption, this ‘‘consumer letdown and the longing that disappointment nourished’’ represents a predictable ‘‘exit’’ effect inducing the desire to buy yet more (Agnew 1993: 25). While this science of consumer desire was yet to be articulated, Barnaby Rich expresses this connection between superficial consumption and promiscuous sex in Riche His Farewell: ‘‘Those that bee accustomed to goe to Faires and Markettes, might sometymes fall into love with twentie in a daye’’ (1581: I2). Rich’s association may have drawn from an early modern sense that pleasures operate in similar ways, all of them tending, in the words of Montaigne, to ‘‘immoderation and indiscretion.’’2 This suspicion of pleasure is central to an early modern neo-Stoic technique of the self described by Michael Schoenfeldt: ‘‘Identity is achieved . . . through discipline, through the forceful imposition of rational order’’ on passions of all kinds, including the literal consumption of food and wine (2000: 242). And, one might add, buying unnecessary and trivial items. A long classical tradition, conveniently summarized by John Sekora, represents the appetite to consume nonessential items, or luxuries, as just such a passion and, like sexual desire, best controlled by reason. According to Cato, for example, to indulge the extravagant desires of Roman women is ‘‘to allow the passions to rule over reason, to abandon masculinity, and to relinquish proper subordination in society’’ (Sekora 1977: 37). Church fathers also developed this perspective, as Tertullian denounced luxury as the vice of ‘‘women,’’ and ‘‘the source of corruption and effeminacy’’ (40). From this perspective, the insistent urges for sexual consummation and for the

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consumption of goods appeared very much alike, as uncontrolled appetites to which those without the discipline of reason—women and ‘‘womanish’’ men—were most vulnerable.3 Even worse, such uncontrolled appetites were capable, if left unchecked by rational control, of corrupting virtuous women or transforming virile subjects into ‘‘womanish’’ men. From this classical or neo-Stoic approach to consumption, the unprecedented volume and variety of goods—silks, jewels, spices, wines—streaming into London potentially raised certain gender issues, as did the relatively sudden availability of more ordinary goods—hats, fish, laces, soaps, gold laces, French ruffs, combs, glass, sweet junkets, and books—available in shops burgeoning in England and especially in London.4 This transformation occurred within one or two generations. The sharp increase in goods available to the public, aristocratic and non-elite alike, raised Thomas Smith’s concern as early as 1549, when he wondered at the sudden increase in haberdasher shops (‘‘from the Tower to Westminster along, every street is full of them’’ 64 [Leinwand 1993: 177]). It continued for the next thirty years, for the rate of change in the growth of a consumer economy from 1550 to 1580, according to the economist historian Craig Muldrew, was not exceeded until near the end of the eighteenth century (1998: 20–1). In the early eighteenth century, Bernard de Mandeville would demonstrate that consumption of unnecessary luxuries was, in fact, necessary to national prosperity. In 1776, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations would link self-interest and public welfare. From the mid-eighteenth century until the present day, the valorization of respectable family life would legitimate significant forms of consumption as domestic comforts (Appleby 1993: 169). But in the early modern period, this problem of luxury that, as Margaret Ferguson has pointed out, lay ‘‘at the heart of the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production’’ (1996: 247), still posed a difficult contradiction. Early modern merchants—and authors of prose romances—were confronted with the necessity of creating consumer desire for their wares at a time when a long-standing association of luxury goods with personal and political corruption had become newly vitalized through the rapid expansion of unprecedented numbers of goods into thriving markets. Even beyond the ideological ambivalence towards consumption, early modern merchants could not yet avail themselves of the techniques and resources now commonplace to a modern advertising industry described by Dupr´e and Gagnier as spending ‘‘billions of dollars ‘educating’ people about what new wants they can learn to satisfy’’ (1999: 185). While scholars such as

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Jean Howard have explored the management of the dangers of unregulated femininity to control consumer desires within city comedy (2003: 164, 171), there remains work to be done on the incitement and the containment of those desires within the early modern book trade. Barnaby Rich’s Riche His Farewell, a collection of eight novellas, expresses these ideological contradictions confronting early modern merchants. Collections such as Rich’s became referred to as ‘‘ladies’ texts,’’ not only because they were addressed to ladies, but also because in the absence of an aesthetic category for light fiction, they became described as trifles or toys (Fleming 1993: 158). As authors such as Rich sought models by which to display light fiction or prose romances to potential buyers, they adapted ways of thinking about other nonessential items—the combs, spices, or gloves—with which they were classed as trifles. The ability to buy trifles was far from a trifling matter. The large-scale acquisition and display of such nonessential items was creating a crisis of representation, as the conversion of once-traditional signs of social status to fluid commodities available for purchase became especially visible, for example, in the widespread noncompliance with sumptuary laws (Agnew 1986: 97; Mukerji 1983: 9; Harte 1976). In this context, prose fiction served a function identified by Jean-Christophe Agnew for the theater: it provided a ‘‘laboratory of representational possibilities for a society perplexed by the consequences of its own liquidity’’ (1986: 54). The new social contract that theater created with its audience served as a ‘‘proxy form’’ enabling early moderns to think through the new social relations operating within a market economy (11). Similarly, the tales Rich collected for his Farewell serve as thought-pieces through which to situate himself and his readers in this evolving system of commodity exchange, as he both flattered and insulted women readers, sometimes simultaneously, in terms already available in contemporary discourses of consumption. Rich does not use this laboratory of possibilities only for experimentation. The tales of Riche His Farewell also repeatedly express his settled conviction of the dangers posed by this rapidly evolving consumer society in both the personal and political domains. Excessive consumption was not appropriate for virile men, and it was not good for the nation. This concern for England had been voiced decades earlier in Thomas Smith’s caution against throwing away England’s ‘‘inestimable treasure’’ (a phrase usually applied to female chastity) on ‘‘trifles’’ such as glass windows, toothpicks, pins ‘‘and a thousand like things that might either be clean spared or else made within the realm sufficient for us’’ (1969: 63–4). In his Allarme

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to England (1578), Rich uses gendered terms in a similar concern for the damage merchants were inflicting on England by ‘‘conveying awaye theyr commodities, and by returning of incommodities, vayne trifles . . . onely to maynteyne women and children in pryde, pompe, and vayne glorie’’ (C4). Both the Allarme and Riche His Farewell provide a focus for this general anxiety on a specific issue: excessive consumption poses a present danger to the realm by diverting needed funds away from soldiers. Rich’s appeal that current expenditures on frivolous and effeminizing luxuries be redirected to the upkeep of soldiers was not based only on gender ideology. Since Rich was himself a military man, his protest against the tightfisted treatment of soldiers was admittedly self-interested; but his military experience in France, the Low Countries, and Ireland also provided him with a grounded perspective not so easily dismissed. Well known for her frugality, Queen Elizabeth was not generous to her military troops. Rich had encountered the consequences of England’s parsimonious treatment of soldiers in his personal experience. Early in his professional career, he served in France under a Captain Darcy, who was compelled to improvise or ‘‘shift’’ from his personal connections when promised resources for arming his men did not appear. In Ireland, Rich’s worst fears came true shortly after the publication of Riche His Farewell, when late in 1581, Queen Elizabeth ordered almost 4,000 English troops to be discharged without any means for returning home. While Rich himself escaped to England, many discharged soldiers died of hunger in Ireland. Finally, on a more personal note, Rich was arrested for an arguably patriotic debt in 1570 by an investor who had advanced him a twenty pound bond to outfit an ill-fated privateering vessel designed for boarding ships belonging to England’s enemies. The ship sank before it could turn a profit. In a convoluted series of events, this debt would continue to haunt Rich until 1601 (Cranfill and Bruce 1953: 16, 19–20, 23, 32). Thus, it would seem that Rich’s economic concerns were quite serious, and that he used light prose fiction to reach exactly that audience demonstrably culpable of frivolous expenditures. To whom better to address his warnings about consumption than to readers, imagined as gentlewomen, whose purchases of prose romances bore witness to their own foolish investments in trifles? Gentlewomen were not his only or perhaps even his most important audience. As Jane Collins has ably noted, Rich’s prefatory letters present a ‘‘fantasy of aristocratic promiscuity’’ to titillate non-aristocratic readers, and at the same time to flatter them with a sense of ‘‘moral superiority’’

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(2003: 187, 189). In his hostility to a status system based on wealth and title, Rich reveals his common ground with those non-elite readers who, like him, define their own values in opposition to those imagined for aristocratic women, including the gentlewoman reader hailed in Rich’s prefatory letter and addresses. As described below, this disidentification with the values of courtiership, recast as sycophancy, participates in an emerging ideology generating considerable dignity for the middling sort, including soldiers. Rich’s epistle to soldiers makes visible another social group represented as hyper-masculine readers. Despite, or more precisely through, his effeminizing abasement of himself before his gentlewoman reader, Rich repeatedly calls attention, in fact, to his masculine traits befitting a soldier. More than a transparent deprecation of the eroticized woman reader, then, the misogyny directed at gentlewomen in the prefatory letters of Riche His Farewell registers Rich’s vehement protest against the economic changes taking place around him. Rich presents his collection as a trivial item of consumption for the entertainment of gentlewomen as early as the claim on his titlepage that he gathered these narratives ‘‘for the onely delight of the courteous Gentlewomen, bothe of Englande and Irelande, for whose onely pleasure thei were collected together’’ (titlepage). As Juliet Fleming has pointed out, Rich inverts the prodigal repentance expressed by other male writers of prose romance (1993: 172). Instead of regretting time and talents wasted on trivial writing, Rich claims, tongue-in-cheek, that it was his career as a soldier that represents his prodigal phase. He has now come to his senses. Instead of enduring the ‘‘paine, travaill, tormoil, disquiet, colde, hunger, thirste, penurie, badde lodging, worse fare, unquiet slepe’’ in the service of his country, he now plans to enjoy the ‘‘pleasure, sporte, joye, solace, mirthe, peace, quiet reste, daintie fare, with a thousande other delites’’ in his service to women. Imagining a free sexuality for his woman reader/mistress, he hopes in time for a kiss—or a ‘‘taste at his Mistres lippes’’—for his ‘‘better recompense’’ (1581: a2v–a3). As his crude, almost doglike, phrase for a kiss suggests, Rich’s professed desire to serve as a courtier-servant to gentlewomen is only a pose functioning to divert attention to the underlying absurdity of his situation. Rich makes it glaringly apparent that his soldier-like masculinity interferes with his ability to dance, to sing, or to play instruments; it is only his ‘‘zeale’’ to please women that serves as his credential to take up this decadent form of service (a4). Rather than expressing anxiety over his supposed effeminization, Rich’s pose represents an attack, as Fleming notes, on a ‘‘society that he considered to be dangerously

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effeminized’’ (1993: 166). Expressed in terms of luxury items (‘‘a silken Canapie’’ and ‘‘daintie fare’’), this effeminization forms part of a larger critique of excessive consumption projected onto women consumers. Rather than some personal insecurity, Rich’s self-mockery at the clumsiness of his attempt at courtiership represents an attempt to work against this decadent consumer economy from the inside. In case any reader missed his double-message to ‘‘gentlewomen readers,’’ his epistle ‘‘To the noble Souldiours bothe of Englande and Irelande’’ protests directly about the ‘‘pinchying for a penie, that should be spent in our Countries defense,’’ and the ‘‘small recompence to Souldiours,’’ even as money is spent instead on ‘‘vanities and idle devises’’ (B3v). It is the entertainer, not the soldier, who achieves financial success; and he recommends that other soldiers also attend to their own economic welfare, for ‘‘to Pipe, to Feddle, to Syng, to Daunce, to lye, to forge, to flatter, to cary tales’’ provides ‘‘the onely meane that is best for a man to bring himself in credite’’ (B2v). In this they should follow his own example, for in writing these ‘‘lovyng Histories’’ he does but ‘‘followe the course of the worlde’’ by pleasing gentlewomen. His concluding prayer that ‘‘God sende all Souldiours that hath honestly served their Countrey, better consideration then of long tyme thei have had’’ (C1v) reveals Rich’s advice to his brothersin-arms to lay aside their arms as a rhetorical strategy designed to focus attention to the underlying dangers, personal and political, posed by a consumer economy. As his letter’s description of an encounter with a ‘‘womanish’’ man on London’s Strand suggests, these dangers are not limited to women. The attire worn by this degraded (or tempting?) apparition models the effeminization attending lapses by males into excessive consumption: ‘‘a Frenche Ruffe, a Frenche Cloake, a Frenche Hose, and in his hande a greate fanne of Feathers, bearyng them up (verie womanly) against the side of his face,’’ all, he supposes, to ‘‘please Gentlewomen’’ (B1v–B2 [Relihan 1994: 87; Lucas 1989: 99]). While the soldierly Rich represents his similar desire to please gentlewomen by writing these romances, he bears no fan against his face. As this letter indicates, Rich is exploiting this allegedly light entertainment to express a serious concern with masculinity. Providing financial support for soldiers even in peacetime is a matter not only of gender ideology. Men who bear fans against their faces would not, it is thought, vigorously defend England against her foreign enemies. As Constance Relihan observes for Allarme to England (1578), Rich’s demand that money squandered on luxury items be spent instead on supporting soldiers sets up an important context for Riche His Farewell (1994: 156n.21). Dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton, praised as ‘‘the

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onely meane to her Majestie, for the amending of [soldiers’] pay’’ (*2v), the Allarme includes a letter by Barnabe Googe denouncing his country’s unnatural lack of generosity to its soldiers, as exemplified by the veterans of Agincourt, ‘‘pitifully constrained . . . in their olde and honourable age for very want and necessitie to begge’’ (*4v). Rich’s verse epistle ‘‘The Author to the Reader’’ warns England to learn from the example of Antwerp, a once flourishing city that could have defended itself against the Spanish if they had only spent half the money they wasted on beer to train soldiers (*3v). The threat to England is clear, as Rich declaims: ‘‘O England would thou didst regard, what plagues in time do hap / to such as so without respect are luld in pleasures lap’’ (*4v). Rich especially criticizes expenditures to the rising professional classes, such as the lawyer for doing a neighbor ‘‘a shrewed turne’’ (B3v) as well as the merchant for providing trifles to women and children (C4). Some of these trifles are also worn by courtiers, whom Rich mocks for their ruffes, the ‘‘great bundle of feathers,’’ the outsized hats (H1). Rich makes a series of sensible suggestions: appoint older captains for their skill rather than younger captains who have little experience of warfare. When soldiers are impressed from prison, one can only expect a lack of respect and little discipline. Above all, it is necessary to pay soldiers. If there is any point of optimism, it is that Spanish soldiers may themselves rebel for lack of pay (see also Webb 1943). As the title implies, Allarme expresses the author’s patriotic intent to rouse England to defend herself, in this case by investing in soldiers instead of luxury items. A more specific and self-interested motive, not incompatible with patriotism, also appears in Rich’s use of the term ‘‘credit’’ in both the Allarme and Riche His Farewell. Craig Muldrew’s explanation of the particular importance of credit to early moderns provides a useful context for Rich’s remarks. By the late sixteenth century, there were not enough gold and silver coins to cover transactions, so early moderns would incur debts to each other and then ‘‘reckon’’ or cancel them out, to cover only the remainder with coins. Trust in the others’ solvency, or their ability to reciprocate when required, was essential for the smallest of everyday transactions. Before banks and factual credit checks, a good word from others, often one’s neighbors, became crucial to establishing this trust. In what he has called ‘‘a culture of credit,’’ the ability to attract credit was essential, according to Muldrew, for financial survival (1998: 153). Households were bound together in networks of economic dependency, and a failed debt could often create a ripple effect wreaking havoc on an entire chain of creditors. This domino

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effect caused significant anxiety, for solid householders could go bankrupt through no fault of their own (150). It would seem likely that soldiers would not have fared well under this system. Serving abroad, soldiers were already outsiders to most neighborhoods, and the custom of impressing soldiers from prisons did not increase their reputation as a good credit risk. As Rich repeatedly notes, soldiers were badly paid; and Rich himself had been arrested for debt. Thus Rich’s defense of the worthiness of soldiers, including himself, had financial implications. To understand Rich’s use of the term ‘‘credit’’ and its crucial role in his writing projects, it is necessary to describe its two meanings of ‘‘honesty and solvency’’ circulating by the late sixteenth century (Amussen 1988: 152). Credit, or a reputation for honesty, was required to bring in credit, or faith by lenders in one’s financial solvency. In the following parallelism with the words ‘‘estimation’’ and ‘‘necessary maintenance,’’ Rich’s use of ‘‘credit’’ catches both meanings in his prefatory address in Allarme ‘‘To the valiant Captaynes and renowmed Souldiors of Englande, Barnabe Riche wisheth for their better encouragement, encrease of credit, estimation and necessary maintenance, according to their due deserts’’ (*4). Rich’s subsequent quotations demonstrating respect for soldiers in Biblical and classical times were to raise soldiers’ credit in the more general sense; but increased respect would also presumably enhance their ability to attract financial credit as well. Another use of the term ‘‘credit’’ refers more explicitly to economic matters. When Rich predicts that he will be scorned for writing a tract of war instead of ‘‘some pleasant discourse, some strange novell, some amorous historie’’ that ‘‘might have purchaced me credit,’’ the economic meaning is clarified by his addition, ‘‘the Printer may have gayned by selling of my booke’’ (A1v). And write some ‘‘strange novell, some amorous historie’’ he did, in the narratives gathered in Riche His Farewell. Written for ‘‘credit,’’ Rich’s work becomes inseparable from the many other market transactions of London. These transactions do not bring him satisfaction. Rich’s use of the word ‘‘credit’’ in his letter to soldiers in Riche His Farewell expresses his bitterness at an unjust social system. Since there is no respect for the military profession, he advises soldiers to learn, like the womanish man carrying feathers, to please gentlewomen; for ‘‘this is the only meane that is best for a man to bring himselfe in credit’’ (B2v). Whether in the sense of social esteem or necessary funds, credit is gained only, paradoxically, by catering to acts of irresponsible consumption that will lead, according to Rich, to the ruin of the realm.

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Rather than swerving from the goal, at once patriotic and selfinterested, of rousing the alarm in England, Rich uses fiction to dramatize the concerns raised in the Allarme and in his prefatory letters. This agenda appears immediately in the vocation of the protagonist of the first tale, ‘‘Sappho, Duke of Mantona,’’ who is, like Rich, a soldier to the core (see Lucas 1989: 103; Hackett 2000: 87). Once celebrated for his victories against the Turks, Sappho also loses court preferment in peacetime to ‘‘Dauncers, Pipers, Fidlers, Minstreles, Singers, Parisites, Flatterers, Jesters, Rimers, Talebearers’’ and such who please women with ‘‘new fangled, straunge fashions’’ (C4v). Rich calls attention to his own experience of this injustice, already described in his prefatory letters, by digressing ‘‘from a reasonable tale to a railyng rage’’ that temporarily interferes with his intent ‘‘to penne certaine pleasaunt discourses, for the onely pleasure of Gentilwomen’’ (C4v). In his request that they remain patient with his supposed weakness, he portrays his gentlewomen readers as self-centered participants in this indolent court culture. When invented lies by the parasitical courtiers cause the banishment of Sappho and his family from the court, the narrator’s apology for disturbing their ‘‘gentill hartes’’ by mentioning such unpleasant events again represents the selfish egotism of Gentlewomen readers. His promise to keep this ‘‘pitifull plight’’ experienced by ‘‘the most noble Captaines of the world’’ to himself in fact foregrounds the tale’s real-world relevance. As he promises in future to comply with gentlewomen’s superficial desires (‘‘I rather desire to drawe you into delightes, then to droune you in dumpes’’ [D1v]), his visible effort levels a critique of the genre of prose fiction as shallow entertainment, and of gentlewomen as idle and frivolous narcissists. The remainder of Sappho’s narrative continues to represent the woes of soldiers in this world gone so wrong. Importantly, Sappho loses his credit. Reduced to rented lodgings, he cannot afford payments, and so he resolves to travel with his small son to find a way of making a living. His landlord refuses him any more ‘‘credit’’ unless he leaves behind his wife and daughter for ‘‘security.’’ Losing his son in a forest, Sappho wanders like a vagabond, as did numbers of discharged soldiers in Elizabeth’s day, until he enters service to a local lord and eventually becomes a lowly church bellringer. The fortunate conclusion of this soldier’s narrative presents a political moral for contemporary readers. Many years later, Sappho’s emperor finds himself in dire need of soldiers to fight against the invading Turks. Repenting his choice to prefer ‘‘simple sots that were more fitter to waite in gentlewomans chambers’’ (G1), he sends messengers

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throughout his kingdom to find Sappho, whom he restores to power as general of his troops. Sappho is reunited with his wife and daughter, who have supported themselves as seamstresses, as well as his son. Adopted by a wealthy lord, his son has unknowingly followed his father’s path by choosing to become a valiant soldier; and the support for his profession offered by the son’s wife provides a model for women married to soldiers (G1). This tale uses its appeal to readers of love stories to convey a major point: soldiers deserve to be well treated even in peacetime (and credit should be extended) both for their own worthiness and also to insure the availability of their services in time of war. Of the eight narratives, six represent soldiers as exemplary figures of liberality, valor, or self-control. Like Allarme, Riche His Farewell is designed, in part, to raise respect for soldiers. This objective is all the more evident when its references to soldiers are not strictly necessary to the plot. The tale of ‘‘Apolonius and Silla,’’ for example, dignifies military experience only as an indicator of Apolonius’s heroic stature. An underlying agenda appears in the special praise of his liberality towards soldiers as an ultimate virtue. The young duke used his own funds to gather together a large band of men to fight the Turks; and within a year, ‘‘all the world was filled with the fame of this noble Duke,’’ not only for his bravery in battle, but also for his ‘‘wisdome and liberalitie, used towardes his Souldiors’’ (I2v). In ‘‘Nicander and Lucilla,’’ the wealthy suitor who offers Lucilla’s mother money in exchange for her daughter’s virginity finally abstains from sex with this beautiful (and naked) girl out of compassion, even providing her a dowry of 2,000 pounds to marry the suitor of her choice. His self-control provides the narrator a slight pretext for praising soldiers, such as Alexander and Scipio, who also abstained from sexual relations with women although, as he admits, these foreign women were not as tempting as Lucilla. In the tale of ‘‘Fineo and Fiamma,’’ Fineo gains his freedom from Moorish pirates by his great valor in a sea battle; and it is for this valor that the king of Tunis takes him into service ‘‘near his own person’’ (P1). In the tale ‘‘Of Amaranthus born a Leper,’’ a storm blows the ship carrying a king’s diseased infant to land occupied by Turks where, raised by a fisherman, the youth chooses to become an ‘‘ordinary souldier.’’ Showing bravery and wise discretion, he grows into ‘‘suche credite with the greate Turke hym self,’’ that he becomes a trusted counsellor (X4v). In this role, he devises a scheme by which the Turks capture the Christian city ruled, unbeknownst to him, by his own father. Within the tale’s happy ending, with the city restored to the Christian king’s rule and the son reunited with his father, lurks

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an implicit threat. Unlike the English as described in the prefatory letters, the Turks respect and reward their soldiers, giving them credit and power that in turn advances the Turkish empire as a serious threat to the Christian world. It would behoove England, the argument runs, to do likewise. Moving from the far-flung locales of romance to the urban milieu of city comedy, the tale ‘‘Of twoo brethren and their wives’’ re-enacts the relationship between the soldier-author Rich and his gentlewoman readers with a difference. Like the gentlewoman of the prefatory letter who would offer her servant a ‘‘taste’’ at her lips, a wealthy wife Mistress Doritie also engages in adulterous relationships with her admirers. Like the ‘‘zeale’’ represented by Rich as his primary credential for service to gentlewomen readers, it is ‘‘vehemencie of the Love he bare unto her’’ that moves Mistress Doritie to invite him to her chamber. But rather than a grovelling subservience, this soldier gains some sway over Mistress Doritie through his sexual prowess, manifestly superior to similar performances by the doctor and lawyer who were also rivals for her love. After a session in her chamber, ‘‘the Souldiour had pleased Mistres Doritie so wel, that both Maister Doctor, and Maister Lawyer, were put quite out of conceipt’’ (R1v). This soldier enters into a cooperative relationship of mutual respect with Mistress Doritie. When her rejected lovers write her insulting letters, Mistress Doritie and her soldier enact a punishment, worthy of fabliaux, that concludes with his prolonged cudgeling of the doctor (‘‘sparing neither hedde, shoulders, armes, backe, nor breast’’ [S4v]) and the lawyer (‘‘so long as he was able to fetch any breath’’ [T1]) in what must have constituted a thoroughly satisfactory reversal of their relative social authority. Justifying this thrashing for their contempt towards women, the soldier threatens such another if ever he hears ‘‘that any of you hereafter this do use any misdemeanure towardes any woman either by word or writyng’’ (T1). Rather than the emasculated suitor dependent on women’s power as was posed, however transparently, in Rich’s prefatory letters, the soldier emerges as an empowered defender of women.5 And in this process, so does the author. In response to the lovers’ letters, the soldier’s long and impassioned defense of women, beginning ‘‘Ah moste vile and blasphemous beast’’ (R3v), prompts the author’s selfidentification as a soldier-author also deserving women’s gratitude for defending women: ‘‘But I pray gentlewomen how like you by this Souldiour, doe you not thinke him worthie a Sargeantes fee for his aunswere: in my opinion, you ought to love Souldiours the better for his sake’’ (R4v).

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The apparent sexual innuendo of this address undercuts the author’s assumed role as a defender of women. What, exactly, is ‘‘a Sargeantes fee’’: the cost of this book with this tale defending the honor of women, or a ‘‘taste’’ of the collective lips of his gentlewomen readers? Does his coy appeal subvert the sincerity of the soldier’s argument by exposing the author’s self-interested motive to defend women so that they might show their love by buying his book? This same radical ambivalence, ironically, characterizes the lover’s letters, which portray Mistress Doritie in the same terms implicit in Rich’s prefatory epistle. Venting his anger against women in general as ‘‘counterfect in their courtesie,’’ feeding fools with ‘‘fopperies,’’ requiring one to wear her glove and another her garter, the lawyer concludes with a lawyer-like loophole: if she had treated him better, then he would (and perhaps still might?) praise her as different from her ‘‘kinde’’ (R2v–R3). The doctor employs an even more clever tactic of deniability. Portraying Mistress Doritie herself as ‘‘wanton, proude, and incontinent,’’ so wholly given to ‘‘lewdeness, luste, and lecherie’’ that he does ‘‘but waste the time in setting of you forth’’ (R2), he then turns his letter to praise by repunctuating it (S1). In the volatility of their meanings (Hackett 2000: 93; Fleming 1993: 174), these letters mirror the rhetorical strategy of Rich’s own prefatory letter to gentlewomen readers, in which the author expresses his evident contempt as surface praise. The happy conclusion of this episode, however, suggests a way out of this negative dynamic. After living ‘‘in greate credite’’ with Mistress Doritie, the soldier goes off to war. Grieving over her loss, she now also understands the risks she incurs by taking on affairs, when two of her three lovers proved to be disloyal. Fearing ‘‘to fall into any further infamie,’’ she ‘‘contented her self to live orderly, and faithfully with her housband, al the rest of her life and her housebande who never understoode any of these actions, loved her dearely to his diyng daie’’ (T1–T1v). Rather than prostrating himself before a gentlewoman reader he despises, this soldier-author perhaps also assumes some authority over women readers for whom he feels some affection, as he presents their ‘‘infamie’’ for their better reformation. Affluent but not titled, Mistress Doritie’s middling sort status appears to play a role in this more positive relationship leading, in fact, to her moral betterment. As Relihan asserts, Mistress Doritie’s more positive representation suggests a special appeal to the reader of the middling sort (1994: 95). The formative presence of the non-elite woman reader accounts, in part, for Caroline Lucas’s observation of the discrepancy between Rich’s predominant woman character (‘‘the

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spirited, resourceful, and courageous heroine’’) and the ‘‘qualities of foolishness and weakness’’ attributed to the woman reader implied in the narrator’s addresses (1989: 101). However wealthy some of them might be, the heroines of Rich’s tales affirm their disdain for aristocratic lineage and fortune in their willingness to sacrifice all for the love ideally binding together spouses in a companionate marriage. Numerous and sometimes obtrusive comments in the text vehemently applaud this preference for a male suitor’s innate qualities. The daughter of a rich lord loves Sappho’s son, assumed at that point to be base-born, for his virtues; for she is not like those women ‘‘whiche care more to have their housbandes purses well lined with money, whereby thei may bee maintained in their bravery’’ (F1v). ‘‘O liberalitie never heard of before! . . . O true Love most pure and unfained,’’ Apolonius exclaims on his discovery of Silla’s sacrifice of the ‘‘delicacies and banquettes of the Courte’’ for his service. Already impoverished, Lucilla still refuses a rich dowry from Don Hercules to keep herself pure for her desired husband. When one Gonsales prefers a courtesan to his virtuous wife Agatha, the narrator instructs readers to learn from her example ‘‘how little it is to [women’s] commoditie or quiet, to matche them selves to suche, that be rather riche then wise: and how muche it were better for them to bee married to men, then to their goodes’’ (T3). Even a pagan Turk judged the excellent qualities of Amaranthus sufficient to outweigh his supposed base birth so as to welcome his marriage to his daughter. In the tale ‘‘Of Phylotus and Emilia,’’ Emilia considers in detail the estimation and credit she would receive as wife to the aged but wealthy Philotus, and how she would be ‘‘well furnished with sondrie sutes of apparell . . . accordyng as the tyme and the fasshion did require’’ (Aa-4v), before eloping instead with the young Flanius. As Hackett observes, Rich’s approval of women who marry for love rather than money or rank finally serves the interests of ‘‘deserving and ambitious young men,’’ including presumably Rich himself, as much as the interests of women (2000: 88). Yet Rich also finds common cause with non-elite readers, who are affirmed in their conservative morality, according to Jane Collins, through the negative example of the gentlewomen readers caricatured in the prefatory epistles (2003: 194). Like soldiers, non-aristocratic women see through the surface show of gentility to the moral decadence it signifies. This gender ideal expressing true love, as opposed to shallow flirtation, through a relative disdain for worldly goods was widely circulated in the early modern marriage manuals. According to Ann Rosalind Jones, these manuals reveal how the elegant self-display required of an aristocratic

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woman to uphold her husband’s status became, in the eyes of the middling sort, a sign of vanity and even sexual dishonesty. Gervase Markham’s English Huswife (1615), for example, portrays the ‘‘virtuous bourgeois wife’’ as adopting ‘‘an anti-style, a class-reinforcing rejection of higher ranks’ exotic fashions that reverses the inner/outer split by now presumed to underlie aristocratic immorality and surface show’’ (Jones 1987: 62). Instead of her splendid garments or even her beauty, the non-elite wife was, according to these manuals, to find her value as a domestic worker skilled in practical virtues (54). She is to show her industry by performing housework, and ably supervising her household (58). This ideal only gained strength among the middling sort through the first decades of the seventeenth century. In 1631, Thomas Powell asserts that reading romances may, in fact, interfere with the industrious labor valued in non-elite women: while ‘‘greater personages’’ may glory in ‘‘their arts in arreigning of mens affections,’’ for our women, ‘‘let them learne Cookery and Laundrye. And instead of reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, let them learn the grounds of good huswifery’’ (1876: 2.173). In the first narrative of Riche His Farewell, Sappho’s wife Messilina and daughter Phylene conform to this industrious model by working in cloth ‘‘with weavyng and knittyne of laces, and otherwise with their needles’’ (E1). Achieving work of superior calibre, Messilina became so good a ‘‘woorkewoman’’ that a duchess sent for her and her daughter to work in her employ, and the son of the duchess became so enamored of the ‘‘beautie and good grace of this yong Seamester Phylene’’ that he desired to marry her (G4). As often happens, the text has it both ways, and Phylene is of course discovered to be a duke’s daughter, after all. This classed gender model has it both ways, as well, for the practice of this virtuous industry even by a duke’s wife and daughter affirms these values of the middling sort as appropriate for all ranks. Their ability to use their domestic skills to free themselves from debt (and from the unwanted sexual advances of their host as well) also provides assurance to the middling sort that if their finances should take a turn for the worse, then their initiative and hard work can reverse their fortunes. As Relihan claims, the sudden downward turn in the fortunes of Sappho and his family also may address an ‘‘uncertainty in the lives of Rich’s readers’’ (1994: 98). While Relihan emphasizes the difficulties faced by the merchant and gentry classes, I would extend her insight to include householders of the middling sort bound together in networks of credit described earlier. In this highly volatile system of economic interdependency, a loss of reputation—perhaps through

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gossip or a lie like the one causing Sappho’s banishment from the emperor’s court—could in fact cause a serious decline in the credit necessary to solvency. Relihan argues that the financial difficulties experienced primarily by female characters enable male readers to consider their own social instability without having to fully confront it (1994: 98). To her perception I would add another possibility: their economic distress also functioned to disassociate these virtuous women, poor but content, from dissolute gentlewomen consumers. Even the wealthy female protagonists, such as the wife of Sappho’s son, or the Turk’s daughter who married Amaranthus, or Emilia who spurned the rich Phylotus, showed their disregard for goods through their choice of relatively poor or evidently base-born men as husbands. This discernment on their part demonstrates an abundant interiority based, finally, on their transcendence of luxury goods. This supposed transcendence appears to be, paradoxically, a product of the explosion of movable wealth in the late medieval and early modern periods. Martha Howell has convincingly related the rise of the companionate marriage to the history of property. As the immovable land and properties that had once played such a determining role in the choice of marriage partners gradually gave ground to movable wealth, a new seal was required to secure a marriage. That seal, according to Howell, was the language of romantic love; and it took greatest hold precisely on those of an urban middling sort who were most dependent on commercial goods (2003: 30). Gentlewomen readers might take lovers among their servant-authors; but in marrying only for love, the loyal women of the middling sort were to secure companionate and monogamous marriages as an essential aspect of their social identity. This seal of love did not mediate the anxieties, however, inherent in the use of movable goods, as opposed to land, as the basis of a couple’s financial security. In addition to the inherent hazards described for a credit system by Craig Muldrew (1998: 150), the significant fluctuation of the value of movable property at that time created greater risks than those experienced by the middle class today. As Howell eloquently observes, ‘‘not only newly independent, liberated, these couples were also isolated, exposed, as though adrift in treacherous seas in their own boats—sometimes leaky boats’’ (2003: 50). Irresponsible spending, or even an unfounded reputation for spending, could sink small leaky boats of the middling sort much faster than a large, aristocratic galleon. The last narrative, entitled ‘‘Conclusion,’’ attributes to a physician’s daughter the same consumptive desires he had previously ascribed to gentlewomen readers.

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Just as in his prefatory letter, Rich implicates his own writing as a trivial consumable luxury. He denigrates his collection as a trivial ‘‘fashion’’ suited for the times: My self seeyng trifles of no accoumpt, to be now best in season, and suche vanities more desired, then matters of better purpose, and the greatest parte of our writers, still busied with the like. So I have put forth this booke, because I would followe the fashion. (Dd3) Immediately following this self-deprecating account of his authorship, he defines ‘‘fashion’’ through an odd anecdote of a ‘‘maister Deville’’ Balthaser, who holds considerable authority in hell, who disguises himself as a handsome gentleman to marry Mildred, a physician’s daughter of eighteen years of age. In response to his offer to grant any wish, on the condition that she make no more demands afterwards, Mildred consults her mother to request a ‘‘sute of apparell of a gallaunt fashion, but even then newlie come up’’ (Dd4). Melancholy only a month later over clothing no longer in fashion, she wheedles another outfit from her indulgent devil-husband. When a month after that, she provides yet another inventory of her needs for new clothing, her devil-husband abandons her for Scotland, where he afflicts the king with ‘‘straunge and unacquainted passions’’ (Ee1). After a time, Mildred’s physician father travels to Scotland, where he offers to cure the king. Ordering the drums to roll and the trumpets to blare, he misleads Balthaser into thinking that Mildred is approaching. The devil flees to hell in fright of again encountering Mildred and her fashions, and the king is healed. This narrative avoids a number of expected endings. Balthaser does not dramatically reveal himself to his wife as a devil, and he does not cart her soul down to hell. It is Balthaser, not Mildred, who regrets the marriage. Instead, Rich’s anecdote forcefully makes the following point: not even the unlimited resources of a master devil can satisfy the demands of a young bride for stylish clothing. Its humor lies in the implicit parallel between this devil’s futile struggles to control his wife’s consumptive desires and similar marital struggles by early modern husbands especially, it is implied, among the urban professional class to which this physician’s daughter belonged. With this tale, as Relihan observes, ‘‘all positions in the text are rejected’’ (1994: 75). Mildred’s excessive love for fashionable clothing reflects a wider social problem addressed by repeated directives in conduct books and sermons suggesting that the industrious domestic ideal set

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out in conduct manuals was, like many such ideals, often more a wish than an actuality.6 As an elaboration of the narrator’s own motive for only following the fashion, Mildred’s uncontrollable consumption closes any respectable reading position for the non-elite reader, now indistinguishable from the gentlewoman reader, through a shared principle inherent in a consumer economy and operating across all social groups. One may perhaps still whiff a pungent form of brimstone in the operations of this ‘‘principle of nonsatiation’’ inciting desires comparable to Mildred’s still at the hollow center of late capitalism, described by Susan Feiner in this way: ‘‘no matter what is consumed, or how much of it can be taken in, there is always a tomorrow in which more is better’’ (1999: 201). As in Allarme and the other tales of Riche His Farewell, uncontrolled consumption is capable of damaging entire countries, in this case Scotland. What was meant by the devil’s affliction of the king with ‘‘straunge and unacquainted passions’’? Rich apparently hit a nerve, for the year after the third edition in 1594, the servant of the English ambassador to Scotland writes that ‘‘the King is not well pleased’’ at ‘‘the conclusion of a booke in England called Rich his farewell.’’ It would, in fact, ‘‘please the King some thinck that some order were taken therewith.’’ The message concludes, ‘‘The King saies litle but thinkes more’’ (quoted in Cranfill 1949: 67). Were these the evidently sexual passions displayed by the young king, then thirteen years old, for his cousin, Esm´e Stuart, in 1579, two years before the first publication of Riche His Farewell (1581)? Created Earl of Lennox in 1580, the dashing Esm´e brought into James’s court the manners—and the conspicuous consumption—of the French court from which he had arrived the year before (Lynch 2000: 80). For military reasons, Rich may have shared the concerns of Protestant militants protesting the dangerous power wielded by this Catholic Frenchman over the young James (Lyall 2000: 59). Or were the ‘‘straunge and unacquainted passions’’ related instead to the expenditures of Queen Anna shortly before the king’s displeasure with Rich in 1595? In 1594, the Scottish convention of estates refused to levy a tax to pay for her expenses of some 50,000 pounds to repair and furnish Dumferline Abbey for her confinement with her first child (Meikle 2000: 129, 134). The fictional dissolution of Mildred’s relationship with her devilhusband and, by implication, Rich’s relationship with his women readers, expresses pressures of new patterns of consumption shaping the commercial inception of early modern prose fiction. The specific consequence represented in Rich’s anecdote—that a woman’s desire to over-consume will destroy her marriage—implies its resolution: that

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a husband should exert his masculine authority over his wife’s actions. By diverting resources from luxuries to national defense, this sensible resolution was also patriotic. Such austere control of female desire, or desire gendered as female, was not, however, conducive to sales. It was in the interests of early modern merchants, whether tailors or authors, to provoke rather than to control unnecessary expenditures. For Rich’s Farewell, provocation won out, and this collection of novellas became a best-seller, going through four editions in twenty-five years. The incitement of desires within the early modern book trade—as well as other trades—caused deep cultural contradictions beyond even the resources of hell—or at least of Mildred’s devil—to resolve.

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‘‘What ish my nation?’’: Lady Mary Wroth’s interrogations of personal and national identity Sheila T. Cavanagh

Lady Mary Sidney Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania (1621; c. 1626) is a sprawling, multi-faceted text that defies confinement within standard generic parameters. Sharing elements from the epic and romance traditions and interweaving poetry and prose sections, the Urania features a convoluted prose style that correlates with its author’s experimentation with a variety of stylistic and intellectual issues. The first extended prose piece published by a woman in English, the Urania explores a range of conflicting demands facing its characters, most of whom hold positions of power or authority. Its relatively idiosyncratic prose style, therefore, parallels its examination of numerous issues, ranging from personal and official identity formation; tensions between amorous desires and political responsibilities; intersections and diversions between geographical and ethnic affiliations; and other concerns regarding the roles and wishes of the narrative’s complex cast of characters. At the same time, it participates in early modern examinations of what came to be called nationalism, although Wroth’s text reflects what Philip Schwyzer calls ‘‘not the nation per se so much as the nation in potentia’’ (2004: 9). The Urania explores concepts of national identity, but frequently puts concerns of particular countries beneath more personal demands. This focus also places the Urania within a genre of writing discussed by Andrew Hadfield: much early modern travel writing and colonial writing was written, in whole or in part, in order to participate in current pressing debates about the nature of society, the limitations of the existing constitution, the means of representing the populace at large, the relative distribution of power within the body politic, fear of foreign influences undermining English/British independence, the need to combat the success of other rival

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nations, religious toleration and persecution, and the protection of individual liberty. (1998: 12) While the narrative nominally does not take place in England, it reflects Wroth’s personal involvement in the politics of the day both at home and abroad. It also contributes to the discussions about nationhood raised by Hadfield and others. In brief, the Urania relates the adventures of an eclectic group of cousins, whose many friends, acquaintances and offspring enter the story as well. Comprised primarily of the royal families of Romania, Morea, and Naples, the text follows these characters through decades of personal and political triumphs and crises. Readers need to attend to the narrative closely in order to keep pace with the many changes of character and scene, but those who do so are rewarded with compelling testimony regarding early modern attitudes towards personal, political, geographical, religious, and dynastic claims upon some of the aristocracy of this period. At the same time, they are exposed to the literary experimentation and achievements of a member of one of England’s dominant writing families. Since Wroth’s 600,000-word text has only been readily available to scholars and other readers for a few years, it might be prudent to review some of the main characters, along with their primary roles within the text. Urania, eventually queen of Albania, was raised by foster parents in a pastoral setting, ignorant of her royal status until reunited with her family in young adulthood. Sister to Amphilanthus, who becomes Emperor, and confidant to Pamphilia, member of the Morean royal family and the main female figure in the text, Urania plays a prominent role in both parts of the narrative. Her husband, siblings, cousins, and children stand at the center of most of the Urania’s stories, giving some semblance of shape to this effusive prose work. Amphilanthus and Pamphilia share a thwarted and often confusing passion for each other, although the Emperor eventually marries the Princess of Slavonia and Pamphilia weds the King of Tartaria. The vagaries of their relationship also fuel much of the storyline throughout the two volumes of the text. Since the narrative draws from English and continental romance and epic traditions, it also includes an assortment of supernatural beings, both benevolent and otherwise. As this brief overview suggests, the genealogical tables and other editorial materials provided in the Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies editions of the Urania (1995; 1999) are welcome guides for those considering this voluminous romance. Having read the manuscript Urania before the

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formal edition was completed, this writer is particularly appreciative of the work of those who made this scholarly apparatus possible.1 Many of the characters spend considerable time in movement, which helps draw attention to the conflicting demands under scrutiny here. Each of the main figures, moreover, operates under different geographical and political constraints than their spouses, siblings, and cousins. As a result, none of them is ever able to concentrate attention easily, nor can any reliably share the burden of multiple obligations with those closest to them in blood or affection. If any of them were real people, their lives would defy ready description. As fictive beings, however, they provide insight into the ways that personal and official roles were being conceived by a highly educated member of a prominent English family during a time of considerable social and political change. However incredible their lives and powers of communication appear to be in this era before telecommunication, therefore, Wroth’s portrayal of their struggles to create and sustain their personal and political identities grants this narrative a richness and a place in literary history that expands the importance of its position as the first prose narrative published by a female author. The desires and demands continually pulling these characters into different directions attract attention in part because they illustrate the interstices and contradictions between these figures’ powerful positions as heads of state and the tensions created by their geographic diffusion and their characteristic emotional upheaval. Possibly reflecting Wroth’s gendered perspective on her fictive world, the Urania is notable for its recognition that both male and female characters have to balance their responsibilities to their personal dynasties and to the individual countries over which they rule. Although Amphilanthus, as emperor, presumably possesses the power to bring cohesion to the political disarray that is so frequent in this environment, his own emotional state generally interferes with his effectiveness in this regard. Most of the central characters, therefore, are continually having to decide whether their familial, romantic, or political obligations should predominate at any given moment. This close interplay between the personal and the political manifests itself variously for the different characters. As I note elsewhere, for instance (Cavanagh 2001: 22), Pamphilia’s birthname remains uncertain throughout the narrative. She gains sovereignty over the country Pamphilia when she inherits the throne from her uncle, but the text never clarifies whether she always carried the country’s name as her own: ‘‘The King of Pamphilia (brother to the King, who was

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newly come thither to visit him, but principally his Neece, who by his gift was to enjoy that kingdome after his decease, and therefore bore that name likewise given by him)’’ (1995: 100). Both she and the country are known as ‘‘Pamphilia,’’ a convergence that is never mentioned within the text. It also remains unclear whether or not Pamphilia considers herself a Pamphilian, although most indicators within the narrative suggest that she views herself as the country’s ruler, not as one of its people: Goe I must with mine Uncle, to be seene to the Pamphilians, and acknowledged their Princesse . . . . He long since chose me [to succeed him], and to that end gave mee that name: but he growing old, or rather weake, and they desirous to know me, gain’d of him to make this voyage for me. (1995: 145) Like her siblings and cousins, she appears to hold benevolent feelings about the land and people she governs—‘‘wher she lived beloved’’ (1999: 60)—and she does her best to avert the many crises that assail them, but there is little evidence to suggest that she is as closely tied to this country as her name might imply. After she marries Rodomandro, King of Tartaria, she displays similarly fond, yet impersonal regard for that country and its people: ‘‘Asia, which is my husbands country and mine’’ (1999: 378). Although the information offered about her governing suggests that she takes her responsibilities seriously, therefore (at least when she’s there), Pamphilia’s emotional ties remain most tightly connected with her cousins, particularly her erstwhile lover, Amphilanthus, rather than with the country she rules. Melasinda, Queen of Hungary, in contrast, devotes herself entirely to her country, even when it means abandoning her beloved Ollorandus in order to marry the tyrant Rodolindus. Melasinda is so intent upon personally guarding Hungary’s safety that she initially contacts Ollorandus in a dream since she will not leave her country and repeatedly refuses to abandon Hungary even when staying endangers her physical or emotional well being. She marries Rodolindus, for instance, since this is the only way she can retain her ties to Hungary: ‘‘This was bitter to her; but this she must doe, or be left alone, people-lesse, and kingdome-lesse’’ (1995: 79). Although Melasinda is soon widowed, enabling her to marry the long-suffering Ollorandus, it remains clear that she is committed first to the requirements of her country, then to her own needs. Unlike many of the other monarchs

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depicted in the narrative, including the emperor, Melasinda always remains focused upon her domain and the people who depend upon her. The differences between Melasinda and Pamphilia highlight some of the varying responses to concepts of nationality and nationhood that are developing during this period. In Richard Helgerson’s terms, for instance, from his influential study on nationhood, two major questions in this regard are ‘‘Who counts as a member of the nation? Who gets represented?’’ (1992: 10). These questions are complicated in the Urania by the fact that even the countries’ rulers cannot unequivocally be attached to those places. Pamphilia and her cousins remain far more devoted to their relatives and lovers than they do to any specific geopolitical region. Unlike Melasinda, who remains rooted in Hungary, the other characters travel continually, thereby ensuring that their ties to each other do not suffer, regardless of what may happen in their respective countries. Over the course of the entire narrative, the characters visit innumerable locations, both in Europe and in more supernatural venues. They generally travel together or encounter each other along the way; in fact, great consternation results when characters such as Amphilanthus or Pamphilia’s brother Parselius disappear without explanation for long periods. The first book of the manuscript continuation ends, for instance, with the sorrowful dispersal of many princes, who mourn the inexplicable absence of Amphilanthus: ‘‘The rest of the Princes all agreed of their owne courses, every one of them sadly complaining of the Emperours strange leaving them’’ (1999: 190). Despite the vast distances that theoretically separate these figures’ sovereign countries, therefore, they tend to congregate together for regular and lengthy interludes. However bereft their subjects may feel, therefore, these close friends and relatives remain in the comfort of each other’s company except when they actively reject it due to depression or other emotional impediments. One thread that consistently binds the countries and their rulers together is religion. Although differences between Protestants and Catholics do not appear particularly relevant to the Urania, tensions and battles between those who are Christians and those who are not recur regularly. As Schwyzer remarks about this era, ‘‘there were many people of all ranks and stations willing to kill or die for their religion’’ (2004: 9). Wars abound in this text, with an abundance of them being framed in religious rather than political terms, such as when Pamphilia is under siege in the manuscript:

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They [Amphilanthus and other leaders] fell to taulke of other businesses, expecially for an embassador to bee chosen to goe into Percia to the youn[g] Lady with promise of assistance, and to make Parselius generall of the Morean forces, which were then speedily to march thither ward; the Acayans being already on theer way, and the Massedonians gon. The Emperour took this as a warning in a faire maner to provide likewise, being the greatest Christian King and Emperour, nott to bee the last who showld adventure for Pamphilia. (1999: 261) Christian countries, moreover, tend to be construed as allies immediately, just as conversion to Christianity often suffices to end hostilities, as the christening of the penitent wife of Lamurandus reflects: The Emperour, seeing her goodness and truthe, bid her rise from her knees, telling her that her repentance, if she had binn more faulty, and her convers [ion] soe willingly had merited more than the graunt of her requests, which he gave her, and her life . . . . Then the Emperour, with all the rest of that Royall assembly, Christened her. (1999: 190) Despite the significant upheavals in England during Wroth’s lifetime over the Reformation and its aftermath, therefore, she chooses to submerge these disputes in favor of representing efforts geared toward the globalization of Christianity. Even when battles are fought with those outside the human realm, moreover, Christianity often predominates over other dividers between characters, as illustrated by the decision of the giant Drudeldoro’s Christian servants to abandon their master when he threatens the pilgrim Parselius: ‘‘this wowld bee an abominable staine to all Christians, if poore Pilgrims for keeping their Voews showld bee soe curstly intreated’’ (1999: 345). As this lengthy narrative unfolds, therefore, the national identities of its characters tend to remain secondary to their religious affiliations. This religious focus is particularly noteworthy in the case of Pamphilia’s wooer, then husband, Rodomandro, King of Tartaria. Tartaria, during this era, stretched across most of Asia, and thus presumably encompassed a vast array of ethnic differences amongst its population. Most contemporary literature in English concerned with Tartaria condemns the country for its paganism and barbarism (Cavanagh 2001:

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37–51). The many negative characteristics associated with Tartaria, combined with the unexpected darkness of Rodomandro’s skin, make the Tartarian (as he is most commonly called) an intriguing choice as husband for Pamphilia, the main character in the Urania, who appears to be modeled upon its author. Not surprisingly, in this context, textual descriptions of Rodomandro emphasize his Christianity and his affect, which is said to contrast with what might be expected: ‘‘When as lately his very looks were dangerous, butt non need fear him . . . . For hee [Rodomandro] was an exquisitt man in all things, and a Christian’’ (1999: 46). At the same time, however, Tartarians exhibit more ethnic distinctiveness than citizens of the other countries represented in the narrative. Apparently, their position as Asians, rather than Europeans, warrants particular attention in the text, since they are portrayed as possessing the kinds of qualities peculiar to their region that one might expect to see associated with the many other groups of people represented. Tartarian dress and customs, however, attract a type of notice that is rare within the Urania: ‘‘Their aparall after the Tartarian fashion was all alike’’ (1999: 46). References to Tartarian dress, dances, and a special beverage that ‘‘revives the spiritts, and makes men and woemen younge again, and have their old abilities about them’’ (1999: 396) highlight the presumed exoticism linked to Tartaria and Asia. Since language variations strikingly are never mentioned in connection with the Urania’s diverse assortment of people, the special notice taken of these unusual Tartarian garments and customs goes further toward distinguishing Asia from even the Eastern European countries depicted, such as Pamphilia, which is located in modern Turkey. Although there is never again anything ‘‘foreign’’ portrayed about Rodomandro except for his skin color, the courtship masque introducing him to the assembled company and to the manuscript’s audience cements his representation as an exotic ‘‘other’’ who has been welcomed into the gathering largely because of his religion and his worthy demeanor.2 Although Rodomandro’s portrayal is far from unproblematic through the rest of the narrative, his ethnic difference from the other central characters is never presented as an impediment against his marriage to Pamphilia. Just as the other main figures often appear indistinguishable from what readers might anticipate regarding characters based at the English court, Rodomandro generally operates within these royal circles without the differentiation of ethnicity—although his wife inexplicably appears to marry him under unexplained duress (1999: 274) and he is later chided for unspecified faults (1999: 329). Nevertheless, the exotic display of the Tartarians seems primarily to offer a diversion

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in the text and to the characters, not to signal an insurmountable difference between the country’s monarch and his Western colleagues. The text’s otherwise consistent submergence of linguistic and other cultural differences draws attention to those characteristics considered salient in the text, as well as it reflects Wroth’s desire for what Helgerson calls (using Spenser’s terms), ‘‘a kingdom of our own language’’ (1992: 1). Wroth’s narrative depicts a group of monarchs who often do not seem to share the ethnicity of those under their sovereignty, although there is no indication that this is a source of concern for anyone involved in these relationships. Instead, the characters described in the text do not appear to be overly interested in anything that distinguishes between persons apart from religion or military hostility. Moreover, external martial activities seem to be the primary motive that keeps monarchs in their countries at all. Most of these rulers generally stay within their own boundaries only when they are under siege or face impending or ongoing military actions, such as the fires that sweep across Asia through much of the Urania’s manuscript continuation. Protecting these countries from invaders, therefore, demands these monarchs’ presence, while ongoing governance and quotidian administrative needs rarely interfere with more personal commitments. Normal constraints of time, space, and communication do not appear to hinder these rulers from fulfilling their political obligations. If there were no hostile military events to contend with, therefore, it is likely that most of them would spend even less time within the boundaries of the countries under their domain. The combination of extensive travel and significant stasis caused by enchantments and other supernatural interventions further indicates the typical dominance of religious or broad political identities over national identifications. Amphilanthus, for instance, regularly receives new positions, which carry increasingly important responsibilities. He begins the narrative as prince, then proceeds through a series of new roles that culminate in his election as emperor (the fictive equivalent of Holy Roman Emperor). This succession of promotions is generally attributed to his exceptional valor and skill as a leader: ‘‘At Franckford he was crown’d with the greatest applause and content that ever Emperor was, and with the best reason, for he was the most worthy, and famous that ever reign’d over them’’ (1995: 463). Nevertheless, the text continually undermines this characterization through its accounts of Amphilanthus’ absences from battlefield and court, such as when ‘‘he presently [took] his way whether destiny lead him, rather then desire to any settled course’’ (1999: 190). The emperor’s

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wanderings are reflected through Wroth’s meandering prose style, which often leaves readers as uncertain about the direction of the narrative as Amphilanthus’ subjects are about the location of their leader: Many days hee passed thus, till one after noone, the time extreame hott, and hee faint with fasting and sorrow, hee came in to a most delightful sollitarines, having in his distracted thoughts strayed, and yet nott out of his way when hee had noe settled way to take, and distracted: non can say other ore better of him, for love in dispaire is a parfect lunasie. (1999: 136) Although he is accorded innumerable accolades from a variety of sources, Amphilanthus consistently lets his own despair, libido, and other personal priorities keep him distant from his considerable political responsibilities. Since Wroth regularly has her characters, particularly Urania, chide errant monarchs, including Amphilanthus and Pamphilia, for their lack of attention to state matters, there is no reason to presume that the contradiction between Amphilanthus’ behaviors and his purported obligations is not represented deliberately in order to underscore that disparity. On the one hand, therefore, Amphilanthus is being presented as an admirable leader, with unsurpassed professional abilities, while this representation is concurrently being undermined by his suicide attempts, his abundant sexual activity, his periods under enchantment, and his bouts of depression, all of which separate him from his subjects and his fulfillment of official duties. This apparently deliberate diminution of Amphilanthus’ oft-stated exalted position serves a number of purposes. With regard to the concept of growing nationalism in the period, it erodes the notion that a singular ruler, serving both as figurehead and practical leader, can preserve and expand a country’s boundaries and culture despite competing personal demands. Although the language associated with Amphilanthus often suggests that he is without compare as a monarch—‘‘light of the Westerne worlde’’ (1999: 199)—the plethora of information that concurrently contradicts that characterization reminds readers that strong alliances among numbers of rulers and soldiers are more successful in preserving religious and political integrity than reliance on a particular person is likely to be. The rhetoric of admiration surrounding Pamphilia, Amphilanthus, and others, therefore, is continually balanced by evidence that puts such

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accolades in question. Implicitly, therefore, the readers of this text are receiving cautionary tales about the conflicting responsibilities of dynastic rulers. Wroth’s own familial position within the aristocracy gave her considerable experience with the life at these levels that presumably contributes substantially to the picture she paints within her narrative. Although characters such as Amphilanthus find that their romantic entanglements contribute most prominently to their dereliction of political duty, many of the other monarchs ignore the needs of their countries because their children are enchanted at unknown locations for most of the Urania’s manuscript continuation. Wars flourish in their absences, with crises erupting without pause; nevertheless, these parents—and many others—devote themselves to the search for their offspring despite the considerable burden it presents to their countries. As readers of the manuscript Urania quickly realize, the narrative’s many stories of lost and enchanted children cannot easily be reconciled with each other. In fact, these episodes often give confusing or otherwise inaccurate information that suggests they would have been revised and consolidated if Wroth had ever prepared the manuscript for publication. While the first part of the narrative offers numerous confusing passages, it does not contain the number of competing storylines one finds in the manuscript. In the current context, these numerous contradictions are not particularly relevant, however. Instead, the episodes’ significance here lies in their illustration of the priorities the narrative’s central figures establish when their families are absent—even though the children are never shown to be in danger. The enchantments that keep them from their parents, like many of the enchantments within the Urania, are generally benign. In fact, they seem largely designed to keep hormonal young people in safe custody until they are ready to assume their future martial, political, and marital roles in society. The parents and others who travel extensively in search of the children, therefore, seek primarily to see their offspring, not to save them or protect them from harm of any kind, since the children are said to be safe ‘‘under the care of the sage Melissea’’ (1999: 145), who is trustworthy throughout the text. The circumstances facing the countries abandoned by these royal parents are not so peaceful, however. Instead, military action continually threatens these regions, requiring unexpected leadership from a group of illegitimate sons, particularly Adromarko and Faire Designe, who have not been included in the missions to rescue their legitimate cousins, siblings, and associates. While this reliance

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upon sons born outside of wedlock may reflect Wroth’s allegiance to her own illegitimate offspring, it also reinforces the implication that traditional structures of power may not suffice during difficult political times. While the narrative continues to shower praise upon the central characters even as they neglect their duties, therefore, it also introduces an expanded understanding of where valor and leadership may emanate from. In conjunction with the narrative’s advancement of the goal of a unified, Christian world (Cavanagh 2001: 29–31), this expansion of traditional sources for leadership indicates that a new world order is being conceptualized that seems less bound to conventional understandings of sovereignty and ethnic identification than readers might expect from a text of this kind during this era. However involved Wroth’s family may be in traditional structures in society, therefore, the beliefs that may accompany her own unconventional behavior appear to manifest themselves in her lengthy text through its examination of alternative structures of sovereignty, marriage, and familial succession.3 These alternatives demonstrate both familiar and evolving senses of identity formation.4 Many of the missing children, for instance, bear identifying birthmarks, which help them reunite with their parents and locate their prospective spouses, as Floristello explains when he displays his birthmark: And she [his future wife], I am tolde, hath a delicat, curious flower within a starr. And therefore I have my name given mee from this marck, which my wife must carry, which is Floristello. (1999: 97) These birthmarks are not infallible signs, however, since the text occasionally appears to err in its uses of these signifiers.5 In much romance literature, such birthmarks are reliable and are used in texts without apparent hesitation. Their ambiguous status in the Urania, therefore, suggests that here these markers serve simultaneously to situate and to undermine fixed identity. Particularly in cases such as the ‘‘Knight of the Faire Designe,’’ who may be Amphilanthus’ illegitimate son and who appears poised to assume guardianship of the united Christian globe (1999: 418), such birthmarks often do more to emphasize the ambiguity of identification than they do to provide the certainty they traditionally promised in literature. While some of the errors associated with birthmarks may result from authorial hurriedness or inattention, the questions they raise accord with many

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other issues considered repeatedly in the Urania, particularly those associated with major concerns, such as life and death. This ambiguity surrounding personal identity—appearing first at the very beginning of the text when Urania discovers her true parentage—parallels the uncertainty generally accompanying the main characters’ national identities. There are no apparent differences between the range of European locations playing prominent roles in the text. The monarchs of countries such as Romania, Morea, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Pamphilia, therefore, rule over people who are largely indistinguishable from each other. There is nothing in the text to suggest that any of these populations differ from any of the others in any recognizable fashion. As noted previously, the Tartarians are the only ethnic group represented as having distinctive clothing and customs. Apart from the labels of being ‘‘Pamphilians,’’ ‘‘Hungarians,’’ ‘‘Albanians,’’ etc., therefore, the Europeans represented in the text carry no particular identifying features. Each of the monarchs rules over a group of Christian subjects, but there is nothing to suggest that anyone would notice if one of them accidentally began ruling over the inhabitants of one of their cousins’ countries. ‘‘European Christian’’ is a much more stable identifier in this narrative than any other common marker of geographical affiliation. Once Rodomandro is presented as a staunch Christian, moreover, disparities between Europe and Asia also begin to blur. Although the various barbarians in the narrative retain characteristics of ‘‘otherness,’’ therefore, the figures who predominate in the text resemble each other in every imaginable way. The vision of unity being presented, therefore, is predicated upon a homogeneity of appearance, manner, and religious belief. Those who do not conform to this model invariably become identified as religious and political opponents who must be overcome. This preference for conformity in these regards suggests that a concept of national identity is still in the early stages of formation throughout this narrative. Geographical specificity is rampant in the text, however, and as Josephine Roberts has shown, Wroth regularly uses names of geographical locations, such as Pamphilia, that can be found on contemporary maps (1995: xliv). Despite the pervasive romantic influences on the work, which presumably could have led to a landscape without such strong parallels in the physical world of her day, Wroth depicts an environment with recognizable geographical correlations to the Europe and Asia of her era. Thus, instead of relying upon mythic realms, Wroth draws from her broad knowledge in order to fashion a world whose boundaries were often under siege during

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her lifetime. The many textual resonances of the Thirty Years War, moreover, suggest that the Urania’s Europe suffers from many of the same tumultuous situations as those that plagued the region during this seventeenth-century conflict. Wroth thus carefully created a world that would be recognizable to her audience, even if she stopped short of including the linguistic and cultural differences that characterized these countries’ actual historical counterparts. This combination of homogeneity and specificity contributes to the understanding of personal and political identification that the text appears to promote. Just as divisions between Protestants and Catholics evaporate in the Urania (Cavanagh 2001: 31), so do other kinds of variations that might impede religious unity between persons of different countries, such as language differences or conflicting cultural norms. In the Urania, boundaries between people and countries are both fluid and fixed, just as distinctions between the material and spirit worlds are often blurred.6 The innumerable wars that keep these monarchs continually on the battlefield or in planning sessions with their advisors make it clear that geographical boundaries have weighty significance in this world and that strong military allies are essential in order to maintain sovereignty. At the same time, the ease and frequency with which the central characters jump on and off ships and effortlessly travel inordinate distances suggests that geographical specificity remains malleable in this text, concerning characters only when there is a particular narrative necessity at play. Otherwise, time and space stay largely irrelevant in the lives of those portrayed. This fluidity indicates that national identity is largely a matter of convenience in this narrative. As Helgerson notes, ‘‘A kingdom whose boundaries are determined by the language of its inhabitants is no longer a kingdom in the purely dynastic sense, but neither, so long as it goes on identifying itself with the person of a hereditary monarch, is it quite a nation’’ (1992: 2). This unstable identification parallels the uncertainty about national association and individual identity that is found throughout the Urania. Although Amphilanthus changes his primary affiliation from Naples to Italy to the Empire in accordance with his increasing fame and position, his moves in this regard—and his frequent shifts of personal name7 —characterize the kinds of maneuvers that occur with other characters’ identities also, most prominently with Pamphilia, who morphs from Western queen to ‘‘Eastern Star’’ (1999: 417). The fact that the monarchs of so many seemingly disparate countries emanate from the same small group of siblings and cousins reflects the reality that personal lineage is more

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important than country of origin for most of the figures at the center of this narrative. Whom one is related to, married to, or in love with trumps other considerations at every juncture. Rodomandro’s relatively effortless entry into the Morean royal family after Amphilanthus has effectively rejected his claim on Pamphilia by his marriage to the Princess of Slavonia reflects this situation. Rodomandro’s differences largely fade and his suit is met with approval because religious compatibility remains more important than cultural similarity. As Helgerson remarks, the indefinite priority of various allegiances mark this era: ‘‘Was the nation—itself a problematic though widely used term—to be identified with the king, with the people (or some subdivision of the people), or with the cultural system as figured in language, law, religion, history, economy, and social order? Which of these or what combination of them was to define and control the state?’’ (1992: 8). The Urania contends with these competing interests continually. As part of this examination, Wroth’s prose style consistently supports and extends a malleable sense of national identity, even as it may frustrate modern readers who find it difficult to navigate. Wroth experiments continually with her rhetoric and syntactical structures, creating sentences that travel as circuitously as her characters do. In this passage, for instance, readers have not been reminded for pages who ‘‘he’’ might refer to: Nobly, and courteously was hee received at the Court, much was hee perplexed with passion, much pittied by all, and as much hee was troubled, that hee was barred from exercising himselfe in those sports, which by reason of his promise to Celina hee could not doe, not being able to weare armes while he was in Brittany, if not for defence, yet at the Ring he ranne, and did it so finely, as the King and all admir’d him; here hee stayed the conclusion of the tryumpths, then remembering his friends, and oath, he took his leaving, taking towards that place where he arrived, just as the Florentine did, but when he saw Leurenius in a Court Suit of Willow colour Sattin embroidered with Gold, his Armour trust up, and carried on a Horse after him, ‘‘What Metamorphosis is he?’’ cry’d he. (1995: 653) Placing an entire visit to London within one sentence, as this passage does, is typical for Wroth’s prose. Readers are often left to puzzle out to whom unclear pronouns refer or where characters are situated during a particular narrative segment. Since the manuscript continuation

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of the Urania was never prepared for publication, it often seems especially prone to narrative perambulations that impede readers wishing a straightforward path through the text. The Urania is not a text likely to appeal to aficionados of short and direct phrasing. As Mary Ellen Lamb argues: In a genre characterized by the interlacing of long and complicated episodes, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania stands out for its proliferation of plots. More than other romances, Wroth’s Urania disperses a multitude of characters over wide expanses of land and sea. Some of them reappear, and their narratives tangle and untangle in knotted cords. Some are lost from the text forever. (2001: 107) This brand of textual meandering can frustrate any reader determined to follow it all. At the same time, however, Wroth’s narrative circumlocutions enhance the kind of deliberate ambiguity surrounding personal and national identities that are discussed above. As the reader struggles to follow the narrative, it quickly becomes evident that markers of identity are reliably resistant to containment. While some figures, like Rodomandro, are generally labeled in accordance with the country they rule, many others evade consistent, stable identification. Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, for example, change labels repeatedly as the narrative unfolds. In another instance, Rodomandro is said to have two sisters, but one is eventually revealed to be a spirit and may be impersonating either Rodomandro’s daughter or his sister: ‘‘I ame daughter of the King of Tartaria; my mother was a Persian’’ (1999: 9). Similarly, characters occasionally share the same name and it is impossible to tell definitively whether or not they are meant to signify the same person.8 As noted, one cannot be certain that Pamphilia has always carried this name and Urania, among others, grew up without knowledge of her birth family or country of origin, just as the Knight of the Faire Designe rises to prominence in the text without any explicit information about his parental or national provenance. Since he is operating in a system where traditional requirements of parentage do not apply, however, his uncertain origin does not impede him significantly either professionally or personally. Thus, even though many characters are known primarily by their titles or other links to their lineage or country, Faire Designe is one of several young knights representing a new hierarchical order that honors merit more than the chance elements of personal history.

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While Wroth’s prose style is undeniably infuriating at times to readers who desire a more direct narrative (a benighted hope when one approaches a 600,000 word text), its continual challenge to traditional syntax furthers its disruption of other conventional expectations and repeatedly requires its readers to reconsider the assumptions they are bringing to the text. In the realms of personal and national identity, which are under scrutiny here, this rhetorical model resists efforts at passive, unthoughtful identification. Instead, it urges readers (and auditors of the unpublished manuscript) toward an active mode of continual reassessment of characters. Just as the family of the errant knight Parselius has trouble recognizing him when he arrives at their home dressed as a pilgrim (1999: 396), readers are prompted to look beneath the surface at all the characters and events they encounter. The prose, the characters, and the story are continually in motion in the Urania —even when the main figures are trapped in enchantments—and the reader is well advised to remain alert to alterations of identity, both large and small, while recognizing that no one can follow the text completely. In fact, it seems plausible that readers are not expected to keep straight all of the characters, stories and episodes presented in the Urania, particularly since its original audiences lacked the indices and other textual devices that help guide modern readers. It seems far more likely that readers and auditors are being actively discouraged from expecting the kind of specificity other modes of narration might offer. For the reader, as for many of the characters, the journey is definitely more significant than the destination. Moreover, since the Urania’s abrupt mid-sentence ending—‘‘Amphilanthus was[s] extreamly’’ (1999: 418)—defies closure, readers would be hard-pressed to justify expectations of definitive personal or national identifications earlier in the text. Gender and religion of the characters are generally beyond doubt in the narrative; other identifiers remain ambiguous and fluid. As Lamb notes, this indeterminacy characterizes Pamphilia’s story, as well as those of her cousins and companions: ‘‘unable to reach resolution, the narrative of the constant heroine proliferates to destabilize meaning’’ (2001: 117). Ultimately, this destabilization of meaning becomes one of the most stable messages presented through the Urania. In short, therefore, characters in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania would have no easy answers to the famous Shakespearean question alluded to in my title. Although aware of the pulls of geography and genealogy, Wroth resists linking her characters to specific countries too tightly. As she experiments with a diffuse prose style, she simultaneously explores the possibilities of a globalized, Christian world wherein the

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variations between persons of different countries lose much, if not all, of their significance. Birth, marriage, and other personal life events continually challenge identifications between persons and countries, just as the intrepid travel undergone by most of those at the center of the narrative undermines the potential for significant new ties to be established. Instead of country of origin or residence, therefore, religion, love, and genealogy serve as prime determinants of identity. Countries are important, but predominantly when they are under siege from non-Christian forces. An early look at the globalization we often discuss in the twenty-first century, the Urania promotes unity among distinct peoples, as it submerges differences apart from religion.

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Bully St. George: Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and the creation of the bourgeois national hero Naomi Conn Liebler

Few scholars writing about early modern prose fiction have much to say about Richard Johnson. This is perhaps in part because until 2003,1 when Jennifer Fellows’ old-spelling edition appeared, access to his most important work, The Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (Part 1: 1596; Part 2: 1597), was difficult (although this would not necessarily explain the neglect of Johnson’s other work). When noticed at all by modern critics, he is—at best—damned with faint praise.2 But The Seven Champions has much to interest and still amuse us if we look past its purple prose. With England’s patron saint and national icon as the central figure in a narrative pitched to a working-class and bourgeois readership, it immediately raises questions about its author’s choice of focus. St. George, though fictionalized, stands for a national spirit and as a metonymy for the English nation. The complicated domestication of a national icon, this St. George—identified from birth with the dragon he conquers at the start of his career—displays from time to time a brutality nearly indistinguishable from that of his foes; in this regard he is consistent with the romance tradition where heroes perform both well and ill. Whereas Spenser’s model was directed to an elite readership, Johnson’s work calls attention to itself as a working-man’s Faerie Queene, minus the allegory and the poetry: a non-elite paean to nation and nationalism for readers who, like its author, are often overlooked as movers and shapers of the idea of an English polity. Johnson’s full oeuvre was almost entirely directed to a bourgeois readership of working Englishmen, primarily apprentices and shopkeepers. Thus it was significantly both productive and indicative of the tastes of a middlebrow readership, some newly literate, who bought books in numbers great enough to be a significant economic factor in the competition of the printers’ and publishers’ marketplace. The

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Seven Champions in particular addresses the new and fascinating romance of the East: most of St. George’s exploits take place in Egypt and Persia, and the book abounds with stories of the hero’s triumph over the dual evils (as conceived by early modern England) of fiery dragons and treacherous Muslims.3 Thus it combines, retrospectively, the legend-driven imaginations of the Beowulf poet, Malory, and Spenser with important contemporaneous interests as economic and political English enterprises recognized the opportunities—and hazards—of travel and possible dominion in the Muslim world. These concerns were visibly manifested not only in Shakespeare’s Othello and Marlowe’s two Tamburlaines but also, as recent studies by Kenneth Parker (1999), Nabil Matar (2000), and Dan Vitkus (2002), inter alia, have shown us, in ‘‘Turk’’ plays by less well-known authors and in captivity narratives of Eastern travelers. Capitalizing on this new interest in the exotic, Johnson appends it to a drum-thumping promotion of Christian England as the best—and divinely nominated—nation among nations, and of ordinary Londoners as its paragon citizens. A former apprentice in an unspecified trade, Johnson offers an intriguing model of his nation’s identification with its patron saint. The Seven Champions is part of the large body of material—in dramatic as well as in prose form—that informed and was informed by an increasingly influential and demographically substantial London bourgeois population. Because we know nearly nothing about his origins or his education,4 attribution to Johnson of anything like a sociopolitical ‘‘project’’ is a risky venture. But this is exactly what I want to confront in this chapter. A few years ago, I began an essay on Johnson by suggesting that he, a ‘‘sometime apprentice and later producer of a baker’s dozen of very popular works of prose and verse, would today be dismissed as a hack. That he was noticed at all in his day and since then, however, suggests that his work has an important place in the record of how and why reading became not only a popular leisure-time activity of a late Elizabethan and Jacobean citizenry but also both a marker and maker of an emerging English bourgeois self-consciousness’’ (Liebler 2000: 71). The first of these statements is the one I wish now to reconsider; the second is the springboard to that reassessment. If we had sufficient information about Johnson to trace certain origin, certain education, certain patronage, certain material and social successes, would we recognize him as a careful stylist, a deliberate contributor to both a national consciousness and a burgeoning book market, an ‘‘educator,’’ perhaps, of those apprentice and bourgeois classes to whom several of his works are addressed? His project was

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no less inspiring than Spenser’s in Faerie Queene, his popularity among Elizabethan and Jacobean readers emphatically no less than that of Greene, Nashe, Deloney, and others better known today. What if he were to be read as a serious artisan rather than dismissed as a hack? What if recorded biography (or its absence) were not destiny; if political consciousness and agenda need not depend upon formal education, despite assertions to the contrary of political scientists such as Anthony Smith (1991; 1998)? If we could in fact discern genuine political and social premises in Johnson’s work, would that observation admit him, however belatedly, to the ‘‘Parnassus’’ from which he felt excluded throughout his career?5 In recent years, political scientists and sociologists have found it necessary to distinguish the terms ‘‘nationalism’’ and ‘‘patriotism,’’ and to locate the former as an exclusively modern, not an early modern, phenomenon. Most, says Anthony Smith, posit the French Revolution as a starting point, since ‘‘a high level of political participation by the masses’’ is a prerequisite for nationalism, and so are both a concept and an actualization of ‘‘self-government’’ (Smith 1998: 17, 21). Eric Hobsbawm observes that although studies of concepts such as ‘‘nations’’ and ‘‘nationalism’’ seem to have taken on a new momentum since the late 1960s, the question ‘‘What is a (or the) nation’’ inspires no consistently applicable answer (1990: 4–5). Perhaps it is more interesting as a question than any conceivable answer would turn out to be, situated as it is, says Hobsbawm, at the point of intersection of politics, technology and social transformation. Nations exist not only as a function of a particular kind of territorial state . . . but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. (1990: 10) Hobsbawm urges ‘‘the view from below’’ in addressing the ‘‘national question’’—that is, ‘‘the nation as seen not by governments and spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda,’’ a view, he argues, that is ‘‘exceedingly difficult to discover’’ (1990: 11). For Hobsbawm there are real and important distinctions between authorized views (like those expressed in select media such as newspapers) and ‘‘public opinion,’’ and between

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‘‘official ideologies of states and movements’’ and ‘‘even the most loyal citizens or supporters’’ (1990: 11). And there’s the rub: the views of ordinary citizens do matter in some large arena, at least to themselves, and are important because they constitute the large arena, but they are seldom recorded or preserved for posterity. These debates suggest that we need to tread very carefully in the taxonomical mire. As Richard Helgerson (1992) has shown, the evidence of early modern texts, fictional and otherwise, makes it clear that a spirit of nationalism—if not its vocabulary—was already in place in England at least by the 1590s. (William Sherman [1997] supplies the term ‘‘commonwealth discourse’’ for the missing vocabulary.) We can therefore perhaps proceed on an assumption (and it cannot be more than that) that such a spirit was then available and cultivable among non-elite readers. If so, how would an interested outsider today gain access to those views? The link between a printed work and its readers’ collective if not individual identifications can arguably be known through evidence of the work’s popularity. The detailed record of The Seven Champions’ publication starkly contrasts with the little we know about its author. First issued in 1596–7 in two separate quarto volumes (Part 1: STC 14677; Part 2: STC 14678), The Seven Champions achieved in its early years a publication record matching that of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (to cite just one very popular example): fifteen printings in eighty years, five of them during the period 1596–1639 (cf. North’s editions 1579–1631). Subsequent quarto printings combine both parts in a single two-part edition. Eleven more editions appeared between 1639 and 1696;6 increasingly abridged and bowdlerized versions continued to appear through 1932.7 Moreover, ownership of its publication rights were kept within the same family for thirty years: Cuthbert Burbie printed and sold the first two-volume quarto; his widow Elizabeth kept the book under her own imprint for Q2 (1608), although she sold off most of her late husband’s other holdings, and then, when she re-married and left the publishing business, assigned it to her son-in-law Thomas Snodham who printed Q3 in 1616. Before he died in the autumn of 1625, he named his wife Elizabeth (the Burbies’ daughter) sole executrix of his estate; before she died several months later, she signed her title-holdings over to William Stansby, Snodham’s former apprentice, who printed and sold Part 1 of Q4 (1626). Thus, for its first thirty years, the rights to print and sell The Seven Champions were carefully kept within the family of their first holders. Such careful guardianship

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was hardly a usual practice among Elizabethan/Jacobean printers and publishers unless the book in question continued to sell profitably. The fact that Johnson’s focus in this work is England’s patron saint and national icon (the other six national champions get comparatively short shrift) suggests that something like a sense of ‘‘nationalism’’ is at the heart of the text’s appeal. Smith traces the roots of an English national consciousness to the twelfth century with the publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and despite the fact, he says, that an ‘‘English nation’’ had not yet quite come into existence, ‘‘nationalism [or at least] some of the processes that help to form nations had become discernible . . . unity was slow to appear in other respects’’; this would depend upon ‘‘a common educational system [that] would indeed have to wait for several centuries, but an e´lite educational system was established by the later sixteenth century’’ (1991: 56; emphasis added). His implication here is obvious: a sense of ‘‘nation’’ depends on an educational system (by which he means, evidently, university-level education) in place by the 1590s that, as ‘‘elite,’’ excluded ‘‘ordinary’’ citizens. He is quite firm on this point: ‘‘While the nation clearly did not include the artisans and peasantry, by the sixteenth century, [eventually it would admit] the upper middle classes. . . . The nation emerges through state action . . . built around a relatively homogeneous, albeit upperstratum, ethnic core’’ (1991: 56–7; emphasis added).8 That ‘‘upperstratum core’’ Smith identifies as the ‘‘intellectuals and intelligentsia,’’ who are the only strata with an abiding interest in the very idea of the nation, and alone possess the ability to bring other classes onto the platform of communal solidarity . . . . This is not to deny the importance of other elites or strata like bureaucrats, clergy and officers . . . . But, whereas such ‘‘leading classes’’ may vary, . . . the pivotal role of professionals and intellectuals must remain constant . . . . (Smith 1991: 57) Smith’s claim expresses an elitism that ignores—as elitism often does—voices presumed to have been unrecorded and therefore either negligible or nonexistent; it ignores earlier arguments such as Gellner’s (1983) and Hobsbawm’s (1983), and has been further challenged effectively by more recent historical studies (e.g., Sacks 2002: 153). If arguments like Smith’s were correct, we would have

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to ask to whom, then, and of whom Johnson was writing in 1596 and 1597. Johnson’s Champions are the national heroes of Western Europe united under a common banner of Christianity. For Johnson, Christendom is geographically western European, racially Caucasian, and socially middle-class and aristocratic, and is evidently non-sectarian.9 There is a unity implicit among them, and occasionally a cultural conflation: George of England, Patrick of Ireland, David of Wales, Andrew of Scotland, Denis of France, Anthony of Italy, and James of Spain: Johnson’s ‘‘Magnificent Seven’’ are a multinational but entirely European Christian lot who spend some of their narrative time in separate exploits but also come together at various times to celebrate their collective and individual triumphs over monsters and infidels. As Heinrich Plett has observed, in substituting Coventry origins for the ecclesiastical tradition that the saint was born in Cappadocia, Johnson combined ‘‘the political myth of the English national hero and the religious myth of the champion of the Christian faith. In this equation of warrior and missionary he created an ideological unit which promoted the growing imperialism and colonialism to no small degree’’ (1990: 240). It is impossible to say whether this was Johnson’s intention or only a happy political bonus in recreating St. George’s fame, or whether he meant only to tell (and sell) the lively story of a national hero. Plett’s argument is appealing and difficult to refute, however: Thus an occidental dream comes fictionally true: the Christian hero as ruler of the world . . . . When an author of the English Renaissance dreams this dream for his national saint, he thereby also expresses a national wish: the establishment of a worldwide colonial empire under English supremacy. The propagation of Christianity can be the final end, but it may also be only a pretext. (1990: 242) Johnson clearly perceived himself as the voice of the middling classes (apprentices, freemen, merchants, ordinary citizens): he misses no opportunity to remind his readers that, as he notes in the Nine Worthies of London —his earliest known publication, a paean to craftsmen who became Lords Mayor, and dedicated to ‘‘the Gentlemen Readers, as well Prentices as others . . . who though their states were but mean, yet doth their worthy prowess match superiors’’ (1592: B2)—‘‘from the beginning of the world, and in all places of the world, Citizens have flourished and beene famous’’ (1592: F4–F4v).10 The Pleasant

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Walkes of Moore-fields (1607), a ‘‘dialogue’’ between ‘‘a country gentleman’’ and ‘‘a London citizen’’ extolling the development of this section of the city for recreational purposes (and also as a place where merchants’ maids could hang the laundry to dry), is dedicated to the knights and aldermen of the city. Look on me London. I am an honest Englishman ripping up the Bowels of Mischiefe, lurking in thy sub-urbs and Precincts (1613) is addressed to ‘‘the yong men of London, as well Gentlemen as others,’’11 cautioning them against gambling, pawning, usury, unrestrained shopping, and dining out, and is dedicated to Sir Thomas Middleton, the Lord Mayor. The Pleasant Conceites of Old Hobson the Merry Londoner (1607), partly adapted from Thomas Heywood’s 1605 play, 2 If you Know not Me you Know Nobody, celebrates William Hobson, haberdasher, who died in 1581 (Proudfoot 2004: 295). In The Seven Champions, Johnson is at pains to observe that ‘‘the City of London’’ (cited twelve times in the 1597 Part 2) received St. George, the other six Champions, and George’s three sons—Guy, Alexander, and David—with the greatest pomp, the kindest welcome, the most generous hospitality, all evidently important markers of ‘‘the nation’’ for Johnson. His St. George may have been a Coventry native, but he was London’s adopted son. In nearly every one of his thirteen known works, Johnson announces his civic pride, his identification with the city and the nation, and his enthusiasm for its ordinary citizens as the heart of London, England. Johnson’s project in The Seven Champions is a complex one in regard to representation. In order to give his English hero the kinds of ‘‘roots’’ he needs for credibility among non-elite classes, George cannot be assigned a distant origin, as he is in hagiographies.12 Following Spenser’s lead with Redcrosse, Johnson introduces his hero at the start of The Seven Champions as a distinctly home-grown hero. His mother is the nameless daughter of a nameless ‘‘King of England’’; his father is Albert, Lord High Steward of England, and his nation is identified as the domesticated product of both time and history: After the angrie Greekes had ruinated the cheifest Cittie in Phrigia, and turnd King Priams glorious buildinges to a waste and desolate wildernes, Duke Aeneas exempted from his natiue habitation, with manie of his distressed countrimen (like Pilgrims) wandered the world to finde some happie region, where they might erect the Image of their late subuerted Troy . . . . Brute (being the fourth decent from Aeneas) first made conquest of this land of Brittanie, then inhabited with Monsters, Gyants, and a kinde of wilde people without gouernement, but by pollicie hee

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Naomi Conn Liebler ouercame them, and established good and ciuell lawes. Here hee laide the first foundation of newe Troy, & named it Troynouant, but since by processe of tyme, called London: then began the Ile of Britaine to flourish, not onlie with sumptuous buildinges, but with valiant and couragious knights, whose aduenterous and bolde attempts in Chiualrie, fame shall discribe what obliuion buried in obscuritie: . . . For the famous Cittie of Couentrie was the place wherein the first Christian Champion of England was borne, & the first that euer fought for forraine aduentures, whose name to this day al Europe highly hath in regard, and for his bold and magnanimous deedes at Armes gaue him this title, (the valiant Knight Saint George of England) whose golden garter is not onelie worne by Nobles, but by Kinges: and in memorie of his victories, all England fights euermore under his Banner. (1596: B–Bv)

Only after Troynovant becomes London does ‘‘the Ile of Brittaine’’ begin to ‘‘flourish’’ as the home of civility, courage, and chivalry, led by ‘‘the first Christian Champion of England.’’ But Johnson’s image of the hero is problematized at the outset by a notable dualism: late in her pregnancy, his mother dreams that her baby is a dragon. In distress, she confides to her husband:

(My Honourable Lord) you knowe I am by birth the King of Englands daughter, and for these one and twenty yeares haue beene your true and lawfull wife, yet neuer was in any hope of child till now, or that by me your name should suruiue: . . . For these thirtie nightes past, my silent slumbers haue beene greatly hindered by a greiuous dreame, for night by night no sooner could sweete sleepe take possession of my sences, but me thought I was conceaued with a dreadfull Dragon, which shoulde bee the cause of his Parentes deaths: euen as heauenly Hecuba the beautious Queene of Troy, when Paris was in her wombe, dreamed to bee conceaued with a firebrand, which indeede was truly verified; for Paris hauing rauished the Parragon of Greece, and brought Helena into Troy, in reuenge thereof the Grecians turned the Towers of Illium into a blaze of fire. Therefore, most deare and welbeloued Lord, preuent the like daunger, that I be not the mother of a viperous Sonne. (1596: B2)

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Like most dreams in romances, hers comes true. Lord Albert ventures into the forest to confer with Kalyb, the Wise Lady of the Wood, who confirms the prophecy (and later kidnaps the baby). Meanwhile his Lady beeing ouercharged with extreame paine and bitter anguish of her laboursome wombe, was forced either to the spoyle of her Infant, or decay of her owne life: But regarding more the benefit of her countrie, than her own safetie, and for the preseruation of her childe, shee most willingly committed her tender wombe to be opened, that her Infant might be taken forth aliue. Thus with the consent of many learned Chirurgions, this most Noble & Magnanimous Ladie was cast into a dead sleepe, her wombe cut up with sharpe razers, and the Infant taken from the bed of his creation: Upon his brest nature had picturde the liuely forme of a Dragon, vpon his right hand a bloody Crosse, and on his left leg a golden garter, they named him George. (1596: B2v–B3) From birth, then, St. George is simultaneously affiliated with Spenser’s Red Crosse and Christendom in general, with the Order of the Garter of which he would later be patron, and (although this birthmark is never again mentioned in either part of the romance), with the dragons he will eventually destroy (and the one that will, in Johnson’s 1616 Q3 additions, destroy him).13 Hero and monster are conflated in one. Johnson’s St. George is in many respects no saint. He is as often petulant, self-absorbed, frightened, and cruel as he is courageous and steadfast. He is, in other words, quite ordinary. Typically, when imprisoned (which happens repeatedly throughout the saga; incarceration and separation from his beloved Sabra, the Egyptian princess he converts to Christianity and then marries, is a frequent motif in The Seven Champions), he wails in a most unchristian despair and wallows in self-pity, as in this example from Chapter III: his cheifest comfort was, to number the Persians he had slaine in the conflict, one while pondering in his restlesse thoughts the ingratitude of Ptolomie the Egyptian King, another while remembring his loue, his vowe and deepe affection that he bare to the Egyptians daughter, and how vnkindely shee tooke his departure, caruing her picture with the nayles of his fingers vpon

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Naomi Conn Liebler the walles of the dungeon: to which sencelesse substance hee many times would thus complaine: O cruell destinies! why is this greiuous punishment allotted to my penance? Haue I conspired against the maiestie of heauen, that they haue throwne this vengeance on my head? shall I neuer recouer my former libertie, that I may be reuenged vpon the causers of my imprisonment? frowne angry heauens, vpon these bloudy minded Pagans, those daring miscreants, and professed enemies of Christ, and may the plagues of Pharao light vpon their countryes, & the misery of Oedipus vpon their princes: yet they may bee eye witnesses of their daughters rauishments, and beholde their Citties flaming like the burning battlements of Troy. Thus lamented hee the losse of his libertie, accursing his birth-day, and houre of his creation, wishing that it neuer might be numbred in the yeere, but counted ominous to all insuing ages. (1596: D3v)

Passages like this one abound in both parts of the two-volume text; they combine the picaresque, the heroic, and the overcharged romantic. The ideals that George embodies are those to which any ordinary citizen might aspire; his episodes of melodramatic despair, as in the passage quoted above, or the bloody-mindedness he evinces in moments of victory are excesses familiar from romances characteristically directed to aristocratic readers, now appropriated, for better or worse, for a middle-class stratum: what’s sauce for the elite goose can be served up as well to the bourgeois palate.14 Johnson’s heroes in The Seven Champions are all, of course, chivalrous knights. As Stephanie Jed points out, ‘‘Chivalry requires the construction of an enemy, an infidel ‘Other’ who will play ‘them’ to a Christian ‘us’ ’’ (1997: 49). Jed’s referents are primarily continental sixteenth-century chivalric narratives, but several of her observations are appropriate to studies of English texts as well: The literary code of chivalry was founded in the military exploits of Charlemagne’s paladins and in the affective relations of service, generosity, piety, and courtesy which obtained in his court to rationalize Christian violence against the Infidel . . . . Texts about war, from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso to ephemeral chapbooks hawked on the street, represented their contents in terms of chivalric hopes and heroes . . . . [In] every case, we can see a ‘chivalric politics’ at work in the organization of emotion with

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respect to war and in the social relations among military servants, writers, printers, and collectors that enabled such politics to come into being. (1997: 56–7) In Jed’s research, the voice of an anonymous soldier, ‘‘an unnamed military man in the service of the Este family’’ (58), claims remarkable attention in an incunable collection of chapbooks relating to the political and military exploits of the Estes from 1506 to 1515, helpfully annotated in marginalia commentary upon various matters: dynastic chivalric ideology, mundane activities, daily body counts, prophecies and prognostications, reports of new munitions technology mingled with that of a lord who got hit in the head by a rock, whose removal to safety delayed the conclusion of a particular battle (1997: 59–61). The affective relations of our military commentator to his readers . . . provide the social context necessary to understand the emotional and political appeal chivalric ideals may have had for soldiers and subjects of the Ferrarese court. For behind the scenes of such chivalric texts as the Orlando furioso was a daily activity of writing about war that organized public sentiment around the [chivalric] figure . . . always courageous and virtuous in battle . . . . And by the zeal with which he carried out his service, he organized, in his readers, an affective foundation for support of Ferrara’s military politics . . . . In this context, chivalry’s success in filling the imaginations of soldiers and subjects was not so much a fact as a construct . . . . It was these daily activities of making sense within an affective network that may have lured the captain or soldier to become ‘addicted’ to chivalry in the first place . . . . (1997: 61) Jed’s anonymous military commentator might today be called an embedded journalist with the specific agenda of inspiring ordinary men to emulate extraordinary acts usually associated with both real and fictional aristocrats. The credibility of his first-hand reportage might even have outweighed, for some readers, the appeal of fantastic fictional exploits. His ordinary soldier’s voice is one not otherwise much recorded anywhere outside of imaginative texts such as Shakespeare’s Henry V. Had he been English and his subject his nation’s patron saint instead of the patron of a ducal estate, his readers could have been Johnson’s readers. Jed’s reporter gives further evidence that readers (and writers) of chivalric texts encompassed all classes

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from elite to ordinary, and that those readers might have read those texts with different kinds of responses. Some, presumably, would have enjoyed accounts of brutality such as this description, in Seven Champions Part 1, Chapter XIV of an attack upon the family of ‘‘an English Marchant and his wife’’ in Tripoli by a company of ‘‘bloodie minded Negars’’ who had just moments earlier sworn fealty to St. George and conversion to Christianity in gratitude for George’s victory over the Moroccan Prince Almidor, George’s arch-enemy in earlier chapters. As soon as George leaves to continue his crusade against the Egyptian King Ptolomie (his beloved Sabra’s father), the ‘‘barberous Moores’’ begin to exact their own revenge ‘‘against all Christians that remained within the limmets of that Heathen Nation’’ (1596: S4). The bloodie minded Negars violating both oath and promise before plighted to saint George: by violence set vppon the Marchants house, where first they made a massacre of his seruants, and before his face cast their dead bodies to hunger-starued Dogges: then comming to the Marchant, they bound him fast with hempen cords to the strongest post in his house, and after tooke his children, being seuen of the goodliest boyes, that euer nature framed, and likewise tied round about him: Then one of the Moores being crueller than the rest, proffered to deflower the Marchants wife before his face: but she in chastetie like Cama, chusing rather an honorable death then an infamous life, spit in the Negars face, and most bitterly reuiled him, yeelding neither to his force, nor his bloudie threats: but snatching a knife fro his girdle, vowed to sheath it in her bosome, before shee would lose that precious gemme of honour, that once being gone, cannot be recouered for all the worlds treasure. (1596: S4) The merchant likewise declines to trade his wife’s virtue for the lives of his sons, and the violence escalates until the merchant, his wife, and all seven sons are dead; their corpses are brought to a mountaintop to be left for ‘‘hungrie Rauens’’ and ‘‘rauenous beasts,’’ but the sun ‘‘consumed their bodies like the morninges dew, and by the wonderfull workmanship of heauen, in the same place sprung a bower of Roses, to signifie the vnspotted honour of the Marchant and his virtuous wife’’ (1596: S4v). The passage typically indulges in bloody imagery and in a final emphasis upon the contrast between treacherous infidels and virtuous Christians, but it is noteworthy for its focus upon the English merchant class within an otherwise exotic

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narrative, and for the author’s evident awareness of and concern for English merchants who had set up businesses in Muslim territories. Not all of Johnson’s Englishmen are presented as epitomes of virtue. In the next Chapter (XV), the earl of George’s own native Coventry lusts after Sabra who has been deposited there for safety. He embarks upon a long and fruitless seduction, and finally threatens rape, in response to which she plays Scheherazade with story, song, and poetry, lulls him to sleep, and kills him in her bed. We should note that English lawlessness here is reserved to an aristocrat; despite an historical counter-narrative of peasant revolt and Shrovetide apprentice ‘‘unrest’’ (Hutton 1994: 188–9; Cressy 1989: 18, 173, 175), some in London and its suburbs during Johnson’s lifetime,15 our author carefully occludes any imputation that his bourgeois readers are capable of such bad behavior. The Earl of Coventry’s moral turpitude contrasts starkly with the sustained virtue of the English merchant and his family in the preceding chapter. Johnson holds consistently to the high moral affect he writes for members of his apprentice/merchant class throughout his other work, e.g., Look on me, London (1613) and The Pleasant Walkes of Moore-fields (1607): ordinary citizens are the bed-rock—indeed the definition—of English civilization. The King of England (apparently not the same King of England who was George’s grandfather), who just happened at this time to keep his court in Coventry, sentences Sabra to a year in prison, after which time, if no champion arrives to defend her in a ritual joust, she will be set to burn at the stake. Needless to say, at the last minute George arrives disguised, slays the king’s knight in the combat, rescues his wife, and departs with her for Persia where, eventually, she gives birth to the triplet sons whose saga constitutes much of The Seven Champions of Christendom, Part 2. Before he closes out Part 1, however, Johnson reunites all seven champions; together, with George as their acknowledged leader, they cut a last swath of blood and gore through Persia, whose Soldan commits suicide rather than live in subjection to Christian knights. This final victory gives the Christian champions a triple crown of triumphs—‘‘the Conquest of three imperiall Diadems, that is to say, of Egypt, Persia, and Moroco’’ (1596: Ee2v)—and dominion over the known Muslim world, the apotheosis of Johnson’s perception of a Christian English empire. Johnson’s final words in Part 1 return his readers home, literally, with a reminder of the city honored at the start of the narrative: After this S. George earnestly requested the other sixe Champions, that they would honour him with their presence home to his

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Naomi Conn Liebler Countrie of England, and there receiue the comfort of ioyfull ease, after the bloudy encounters of so many dangerous battels. This motion of S. George not onely obtained their consents, but added a forwardnesse to their willing minds: So incontinently they set forward towards England, vpon whose Chalkie cliffes they in a short time ariued, and after this tooke their iournie towards the Cittie of London, where their entertainments were so honourably performed, as I want the eloquence of Cicero, and the Rethoricke of Caliope to describe it. Thus, gentle Reader, hast thou heard the first part of the honourable liues, and princely atcheiuements of these worthie Champions, which if with a kind curtesie thou accept of, my wearie Muse shall take in hand the second part: wherein is described the fortunes of Saint Georges children: the loues of many gallant Ladyes: the Combats and Turnaments of noble Knights: the Tragedies of mighty Potentates: and finally, the honourable deaths of these renowned Champions. Thus fare you well, from my house at London. (1608: Ee3v)16

Johnson’s closure here takes his readers ‘‘back’’ to London both imaginatively—as George invites the other six champions home not to Coventry but to Johnson’s and his readers’ own city—and, with no break in narrative progression, to their ‘‘real’’ world as Johnson speaks in his own voice. The closure is notable: we are told immediately that the sequel is imminent, though because the unique extant Q1 copy is incomplete, we cannot be certain whether this advertisement was part of the first printing or added in the 1608 Q2 once the success of Q1 was already evident. Part 2 (1597) opens in London where the champions ‘‘manie a day sojourned, a place . . . beautefied with sumptuous buildings’’ (Av), and where George’s three sons ‘‘arriued all three at one time in the famous Cittie of London, where their entertainments were most princely, and welcomes so honourable, that I want arte to describe and memorie to expresse’’ (1597: A2). There, says Johnson, ‘‘I omit what sumptuous Pageants and delightfull Showes the Cittizens prouided, and how the streetes of London were beautified with tapestrie, the solemne bels that rung them ioyfull welcomes, and the siluer strained instruments that gaue them pleasant entertainment’’ (1597: A2). Johnson’s disingenuous confession of ‘‘memory lapse’’ performs an interesting and for him unusual narrative strategy in that it pretends

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an eye-witness account and implies a verisimilitude that aims to make credible some of the more bizarre and fanciful parts of his narrative about dragons, giants, and other wonders. It also underscores for his readers an implicit ‘‘historicity’’ in both parts of the romance. But perhaps most important of all, it invites his London readers to remember pageantry and ceremony that they had witnessed on various festival occasions, Lord Mayor installations, royal progresses, and so on, thereby making the champions’ and junior champions’ welcomes events in which they themselves had, or could have, participated. Further, the references to Cicero and Calliope (among countless references to classical writers and classical lore throughout the romance) indicate that, despite our necessary ignorance of Johnson’s personal history, this ‘‘poore apprentice’’ was obviously familiar with at least the literary curriculum of the secondary school system—or with a wide range of other popular Elizabethan reading—if not that of a university, and that he fully expected his readers to have a similar familiarity. This expectation weighs heavily against Ernest Baker’s charge that Johnson was ‘‘a writer for the illiterate’’ (1929: 197; quoted in Fellows 2003: xxviii). On the contrary, it implies certain assumptions about the ‘‘cultural capital,’’ to borrow John Guillory’s (1993) famous formulation, of the ordinary citizens who were Johnson’s readers, and of a cultural apparatus at least equal to that of an aristocracy (not all of whom attended university either, it must be said); ‘‘despite the truth of aristocratic taunts that the populace consumed vast amounts of trivialities provided by ballad writers and journalistic pamphleteers, the bourgeoisie was developing a definite criterion of judgment . . . . What Spenser accomplished in the romantic tradition for courtly readers, Richard Johnson did for the plain citizen’’ (Wright 1935: 100; see also Liebler 2000: 78–9). As Shakespeare put it in Coriolanus, around the same time as The Seven Champions Q2 (1608), ‘‘What is the city but the people? True,/The people are the city’’ (3.1.198–99).17 The success of The Seven Champions in Johnson’s own lifetime—at least through the 1616 Q3 where he added seven new chapters at the end covering the deaths of the seven champions and concluding with George’s designation as ‘‘Patron of the Land’’—indicates that his homage to the citizen class and to their participation in the glorification of England was received, if not with critical acclaim, then at least with the acclaim of the marketplace. As St. George became a metonymy for national pride, spirit, and definition, Johnson’s version stood for Everyman’s Patron Saint, the heroic property of workingand middle-class consumers who returned the honors accorded them by keeping his work in print.

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Counterfeiting sovereignty, mocking mastery: trickster poetics and the critique of romance in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller Joan Pong Linton

Recent studies have brought new interest to the cony-catching pamphlet by treating the genre as ‘‘narrative . . . that mediates between fact and fiction’’ (Kinney 2004: 378). Among others, Craig Dionne argues that, with a market economy and a new urban culture developing in London, ‘‘the cony-catching pamphlet can be read as a handbook for the urban pedestrian, a rhetorical primer into the ways of social miming’’ (Dionne 2004: 52). And Steve Mentz finds in the pamphlets of Robert Greene a ‘‘deep romance coding’’ of wandering and recovery through which these texts provide ‘‘tactical instruction manuals for urban life’’ (Mentz 2004b: 350). Seen in this light, cony-catching pamphlets have their ideological counterpart in the emerging city romances celebrating the citizen who rises from humble beginnings to wealth and power through his domestic and self government. In connecting these emerging genres, I have in mind Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, a text that has eluded generic classification. Scholars have already noted the ‘‘initial posture of coney-catcher’’ in Nashe’s protagonist, Jack Wilton (Hutson 1989: 219; cf. Jones 1983: 61) and a ‘‘meta-critical’’ romance dimension in his relationship with Diamante (Mentz 2001: 341). In building on these insights, I hope to show how differently disposed to the world Jack ultimately is from both the cony-catcher and the citizen, and how this difference marks him a trickster whose transgressions constitute a form of cultural critique. My inquiry begins with Michel Foucault’s thesis of the long historical shift beginning in the mid-sixteenth century that propelled European societies from sovereignty to governmentality, that is, from the sovereign’s monopoly of land and power over his subjects towards forms of rational government, with the management and security of populations as their goal. As Foucault indicates, during the initial phase of this shift, sovereignty was aligned with the

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emerging discourses, practices, and institutions of governmental rationality (Foucault 1991: 101). In Tudor England, this process began with a notion of princely sovereignty that fell short of absolutism, as the ‘‘internal order’’ of the state ‘‘depended on a de facto concordat or understanding between the monarch and the political nation’’ which ‘‘had been increasingly identified with parliament’’ (Loades 1997: 6).1 Furthermore, with the household being the basic unit of Elizabethan society and economy, the alignment between sovereignty and governmental rationality was reflected in the popular analogy between family and state (Amussen 1988: 34–66). The analogy naturalizes sovereign power and reinforces the domestic hierarchy as part of governmental reason. It also effaces the selectiveness of governmental reason—its responsiveness to householders and property owners whose prosperity gave them a measure of social power and respectability. This was especially the case, given the period’s increasing private land ownership within a social system where the propertied and titled participated in local politics and parliament. In this connection, what cony-catching pamphlets and citizen romances have in common is their investment in the period’s emerging discourses on government, including domestic government, through their commitment to the cultural assumption that aligns property with propriety, their appeal to readers’ social fears and aspirations, and their cultivation of a responsible disposition to emerging forms of government. These genres of domestic and social mastery found a popular readership, ‘‘with the increase in the habit of more and more merchants, shopkeepers and professional men of calling themselves ‘Master’ ’’ (Joseph 1971: 42). By contrast, Nashe presents an irresponsible disposition through Jack’s counterfeiting of sovereignty on the one hand and his agonistic engagement with governmental discourses on the other. In doing so, Nashe articulates a trickster agency that challenges the conventional expectations and cultural assumptions shared by both emergent genres. Lorna Hutson has identified resources for Nashe’s tricksterism in carnival, festive pastime, and the ‘‘free-wheeling irony’’ and ‘‘ ‘picaresque’ qualities’’ attributed to the Lucianic and Menippean traditions (Hutson 1989: 102–4, 141). I would add that Nashe’s Jack finds a fellow traveler in the figure of Aesop, whose fictional life and fables were well known among literate and illiterate alike throughout medieval and early modern times. In England the popularization of The Life of Aesop owed much to Caxton’s 1484 translation, which was reprinted well into the seventeenth century (Hale 1972: 122). A reading of Caxton’s Life, then, will mark the parameters for analyzing

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trickster agency in The Unfortunate Traveller. My aim is not to trace lines of literary influence, but to approach trickster agency as the emergence in narrative of a disposition, a way of living in the world and responding to others that is at once grounded in social experience and open to chance and the possibility of thinking and living differently. In this sense, trickster agency is not a fixed essence in any person or character; rather, it is a rhetoric and ethics of irresponsibility that is deeply responsive to the conditions of political existence. Such agency, recapitulated at the level of narrative, yields a trickster poetics, or poetic rhetoric, that engages readers and listeners in the critique of dominant discourses, inviting us to devise our own means to responsibility.

I In England, where ‘‘the tradition of political fabling was well established by the end of the fourteenth century,’’ the Aesop in the Life speaks the voice of the enslaved. As Annabel Patterson further shows, the ‘‘darker message of the Aesopian canon’’—the declared ‘‘Moral’’ of ‘‘unequal power relations’’—‘‘is also thematized in the figure of [Aesop]’’ (Patterson 1991: 2, 15).2 As a slave to Exantus, householder and renowned philosopher of Samos, Aesop’s tricksterly antics are largely directed at Exantus’ wife, the unnamed woman who rules the master and rejects Aesop on sight. When Exantus, banqueting with his friends, sends Aesop home with a platter of meat for ‘‘her that loveth me best’’ (Caxton 1967: 39), Aesop gives it to the dog instead of the wife. When she then takes refuge with her kinsmen and refuses to return to her husband, Aesop’s solution is to give out that Exantus has decided to look for a new wife. Ostensibly teaching his master a lesson in domestic mastery, Aesop in effect further undermines Exantus’ household harmony. And in her sleep the mistress becomes literally the butt of his joke when Aesop paints eyes on her buttocks and exposes them to the view of guests (Caxton 1967: 50).3 Such misogyny suggests perhaps the displaced resentment of a slave who is so often promised—and denied—his freedom by his master. His domestic pranks thus gesture toward the larger socio-political dimension of his trickster agency. Aesop begins his tricksterly career rather unpromisingly, as a mute laborer. Being falsely accused of eating some figs specially reserved for his master, Aesop demonstrates his innocence by drinking a large amount of water and then vomiting, revealing the contents of his stomach. The same device of induced vomiting convicts his accuser

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as the real culprit. This inaugural act reveals his indomitable wit, an agency that is further enlarged by the gift of speech with which the goddess of hospitality rewards him for giving food and drink to a stranger. The gift is both an instrument for justice and a personal burden: when Aesop speaks out against the beating of a fellow laborer, he is sold into slavery. The quality that most fundamentally defines Aesop is already apparent from these events: his care for the dispossessed other which defies the possessive mentality that comes with property and mastery. In Caxton’s translation of the Life, Aesop is most frequently described as subtle and counterfeit. The word ‘‘counterfeit’’ here carries the now obsolete sense of being ugly and deformed, although Aesop plays on the other, then also current, senses of imitation and false representation. When the slave merchant worries that he is ‘‘ouer lothely/and countrefayted,’’ Aesop replies that he can help keep children in line, ‘‘for they shalle drede and fere me lyke a fals visage’’ (Caxton 1967: 31). In this ironic play on the double sense of counterfeiting, Aesop’s deformed and ugly body becomes the ground for a self-authorizing wit that exposes hidden truth and undoes false assumptions. This self-authorizing is reaffirmed in his first exchange with Exantus: And [Exantus] asked what arte thow / And Esope ansuerd / I am of flesshe and bone / And Exantus sayd / I demaunde the not that / but where were thow engendrid And borne / And Esope sayd / in the wombe of my moder / And Exantus sayd / yet I aske the not that neyther/But I aske of the / In what place thow were borne / And Esope sayd / My moder neuer told / ne assured me / whether she was delyuerd of me in her chamber or in the halle / (Caxton 1967: 34) By grounding his identity in his and his mother’s bodies, Aesop queries both the assumption that links identity to place of birth and Exantus’ unquestioned acceptance of it. The absence of a father as a link to birthplace and birthright may account for Aesop’s own dispossession within a propertied economy. When Exantus’ followers agree, however, that Aesop ‘‘had ansuerd by dyuyne sapience’’ and that ‘‘this felawe surmounteth our maystre’’ (Caxton 1967: 34), we realize that the episode is also a critique of complacent learning. As philosopher Exantus has become too comfortable with his own

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position of mastery to question the social order, an order made possible by slavery. While at Samos, Aesop uses his wit not only to win contests and find a treasure for his master but also to answer questions confronting the city that Exantus does not fully grasp. Through all his services his goal is freedom, and he wins it by popular acclamation when he correctly augurs the coming of the tyrant Croesus and offers to serve him in exchange for the liberty of Samos. The trade ushers in the final phase of his life in which Aesop wins international esteem through his political services to tyrants. In Aesop, then, the trickster establishes a special relationship to the tyrant, much as the fool is licensed by his lord or king. Aesop’s subtlety—his ability to think the outside (to dominant discourses)—renders him exemplary and always an exception. For this reason, the freedom and mobility that he gains also positions him outside the civic and domestic life he desires. As a freed man, Aesop is betrayed by his adopted son who not only beds his wife but falsely accuses him of treason. As one whose augury rivals the oracles of Delphos, he is finally executed by its envious citizens on trumped-up charges of theft and ‘‘sacrilege’’ (Caxton 1967: 68). Addressing his murderers, Aesop compares himself to a daughter raped by her father, protesting their violence as the ultimate act of patriarchal mastery (cf. Patterson 1991: 31). We can now resituate Aesop’s misogyny as the final scale to fall from the eyes of a seer who throughout his life has befriended the stranger—who remains an other to property and mastery in a world where liberty must still negotiate with tyranny on those grounds. Published in the first year of Richard III, Caxton’s Life spoke to a society confronted with the consequences of the ‘‘family feuds’’ that produced the Wars of the Roses (Patterson 1991: 15). The Tudor period saw the creation of a complex state bureaucracy, and the production of humanist discourses on domesticity and government. Elizabeth I undertook a ‘‘strenuous programme of social and economic reform,’’ including education reform aimed at producing obedient subjects who understood productivity and providence as individual responsibilities that benefit the commonwealth (Hutson 1989: 36, 15–36). In these developments sovereign and governmental authority are aligned despite their divergent logics—and it is this space between discourses that Nashe’s text inhabits, constructing a social other in the voice of an ‘‘I.’’ As a product of humanist education who remains ambivalent toward all forms of authority, Nashe announces in The Unfortunate Traveller a ‘‘cleene different veine,’’ the performance through his protagonist of a self-authorizing wit (Nashe 1958: 2:201).

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Like Aesop, Jack is without paternity, his tricksterly existence beginning in Henry VIII’s military camp in Turwin. In a society where the titled and propertied have liberty while servants, apprentices, laborers, and vagrants are not free to travel,4 Jack’s travels, which combine vagrancy with something of the aristocratic grand tour, is an assertion of freedom (Joseph 1971: 48, 59). Not surprisingly this geographical mobility also exposes him to captivity and enslavement. Again, like Aesop, Jack inhabits a series of inside-outside positions (Jones 1983: 75), his freedom to transgress boundaries enabling him to remain utterly irresponsible to both sovereign power and governmental reason while playing the social games they configure of property and propriety. It also renders him powerless and dispossessed, a figure that troubles the culture’s narratives of masculine domestic mastery.

II As a trickster Jack most resembles a cony-catcher in his geographical mobility, his linguistic facility, and his ability to counterfeit respectability. But whereas cony-catchers are constructed in counterfeit relation to the respectable citizen, Jack defines his trickster agency in counterfeit relation to the king.5 This relationship is at once parasitic and parodic: ‘‘There did I . . . raigne sole king of the cans and black iacks, prince of the pigmeis, countie palatine of cleane straw and prouant and, to conclude, Lord high regent of rashers of the coles and red herring cobs’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:209). Even as the king expresses his arbitrary will through war, so Jack will have his way with his victims: ‘‘The prince could but command men spend their bloud in his seruice. I could make them spend al the mony they had for my pleasure’’ (210). Thus Jack’s claim of intelligence from the king’s council brings an aristocratic cider-merchant to turn loose his stores to common soldiers, and sends a former accomplice in knavery into the enemy camp. His fleecing of the Switzer captain—‘‘I came unto him in the form of a half-crown wench’’—plays on prostitution as part of the business of war (223). And his prank on ‘‘coistrel clerks’’ for sheer dislike of their profession is a pure exercise of arbitrary will: ‘‘I was ordained Gods scourge from aboue for their daintie finicalitie’’ (223, 224). From his self-conscious recounting of his trickeries, it is clear that Jack is always playing to an audience. Hence his show of grief to the cider-merchant over the king’s supposed displeasure, recounted as an elaborate joke:

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Joan Pong Linton . . . myself that am but a poor, childish wellwiller of yours, . . . have wept all my urine upward. The wheel under our city bridge carries not so much water over the city as my brain hath welled forth gushing streams of sorrow. I have wept so immoderately and lavishly that I thought verily my palate had been turned to Pissing Conduit in London. My eyes have been drunk, outrageously drunk, with giving but ordinary intercourse through their sea-circled islands to my distilling dreariment . . . . (Nashe 1958: 2: 213)

As Susan Purdie has shown, joking involves a discursive exchange in which the teller forms ‘‘an excluding relationship with their object’’ (the butt of the joke) and a collusive ‘‘discursive relationship with the audience.’’ Within this collusion, ‘‘the utterance is itself socially transgressive’’ and as audience we ‘‘reproduce the transgression, in our own minds, as momentarily ‘permitted’ ’’ (Purdie 1993: 5, 13). In this case, the joke is not only socially transgressive: Jack’s transgression is figured as a violation of anatomical order, the reversed flow of body fluids belying the sincerity of his grief, and the performed word compels the audience to imagine the reversal through their own bodily awareness. Indeed, all bodies are subject to a generalized verbal violence at the hands of a joking narrator whose poetic license mirrors the monarch’s monopoly on violence. One may recall the image of the old woman afflicted with sweating sickness wiping away all three layers of her chin, or the episode in which the Earl of Surrey, having distinguished himself in a tournament at his beloved Geraldine’s birthplace of Tuscany, is abruptly called home by the king, ‘‘whereby his fame was quite cut off by the shin’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:268). The fact remains that Jack’s body is not exempt from the verbal violence. Presented as a retelling, such violence entails a temporal dissociation between Jack as character who acts and ‘‘suffers’’ in the moment and his role as narrator who inflicts his edgy humor on character(s) and audience alike. The body’s vulnerability to violence renders the narrator’s performance more than just the routine of a standup comic, especially when Jack suffers real punishment for his exposed knavery: ‘‘then was I pitifully whipped for my holiday lie’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:216). Holiday, one might add, for Jack, but work-a-day for the camp. As the denominator of a shared humanity, the body vulnerable to real

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violence becomes the ground for a trickster agency that appeals to the audience’s survival instinct. The rigors of the law indicate that in counterfeiting sovereignty there are limits to Jack’s trickster agency, the first being economic: But pouerty in the end partes friends; though I was prince of their purses, & exacted of my vnthrifte subjects as much liquid alleageance as any keisar in the world could doe, yet where it is not to bee had the king must loose his right. (Nashe 1958: 2:210–11) Another limit lies in the difference between the trickster’s power of performance and the sovereign’s power of life and death over his subjects. In the cider caper, Jack’s verbal trickery is equated only in the negative with the king’s death sentence: ‘‘no definitiue sentence of death shall march out of my well meaning lips’’ (Nashe 1958: 2: 214–15). Finally, there is a more fundamental, structural difference: while the trickster can play the rules of the social game to his advantage, it is the king who owns the game. While the exposed trickster tastes the full brunt of the law, the beneficiary of his transgressions is the king himself, who has putative monopoly over land as well as violence. The merchant, for one, is so convinced of Henry’s displeasure that he gives up his lucrative business and returns his land to the king. Within the unequal power relations structuring the complementary roles of king and trickster, then, the trickster functions as the dirt in the social system the purging of which guarantees business as usual in the body politic. The figuring of Jack’s mouth as London’s pissing conduit, an instance of the narrative’s pervasive visual grotesque (of which more later), here divulges the social subtext to Jack’s trickery. This power dynamics also explains why the violent inscription of sovereign power on Jack’s body should leave no impression. His irresponsibility to the law is in fact a critical response to sovereignty as a state of political existence. Thus his retelling of the cider caper leads to general gloating over his trickeries: This was one of my famous atchieuements, insomuch as I neuer light vpon the like famous Foole: but I haue done a thousand better iests, if they had been bookt in order as they were begotten. It is a pittie posteritie should be depriued of such precious Records; & yet there is no remedie: and yet there is too, for

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Joan Pong Linton when all failes, welfare a good memorie. Gentle Readers (looke you be gentle now since I haue cald you so), as freely as my knauerie was mine owne, it shall be yours to vse it in the way of honestie. (Nashe 1958: 2:217)

In owning up to his knavery Jack in effect takes ownership of his trickster agency. His admonition to readers, coming as an afterthought, parodies a formula in the cony-catching pamphlets by which the narrator rejects a prodigal past in roguery which he now reveals in repentance. The parody marks a faultline between Nashe’s sovereign power dynamics, which places the trickster beyond moral recuperation, and the pamphlets’ moralizing, governmental perspective, in which the cony-catcher is capable of reform, often without having been detected in the first place. Indeed, the narrator as a reformed cony-catcher figures the ‘‘continuity between cony-catcher and citizen,’’ a source of anxiety for householders and property owners (Mentz 2004b: 250). Among pamphleteers, Greene is especially skillful at cultivating this kind of ambivalence, although, as Mentz has shown, the romance coding in Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets also suggests that law-abiding citizens who learn enough about conycatching can outwit the cony-catcher at his game (Mentz 2004b: 248). Readers of these pamphlets would find similar models in the citizen heroes of Deloney’s romances, who defend the honor of their household maids from predatory foreigners and noblemen by outgaming them. Both genres appeal to a sense of justice that translates into moral victory for those who would defend their property and domestic mastery. If moralization thus serves to maximize entertainment value in these stories, it is still the strategy where the cony-catcher remains unregenerate. In The Black Book’s Messenger (1592), Greene presents a first-person fictionalized gallows confession of the purported real-life rogue, Ned Browne. Though unrepentant, Ned has clearly internalized the moral codes: ‘‘Thus, gentlemen, did I neither fear God nor his laws, nor regarded honesty, manhood, or conscience’’ (Greene 1990: 197). This gallows speech is further framed by a preface in which Greene promises to deliver a ‘‘Cony-catcher’s repentance’’ in his forthcoming Black Book (Greene 1990: 193), and at the end by the voice of an omniscient narrator telling readers that, as a sign of divine judgment, after his execution ‘‘in the nighttime there came

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a company of Wolves, and tore him out of his grave, and ate him up’’ (Greene 1990: 205). The insistent marking through moralization of the boundaries between lawful citizen and lawless criminal brings into focus a sense of self in which sovereignty and governmentality are merged. Conceived as territory, this ‘‘sovereign self,’’ as Laura Brace calls it, ‘‘is defined by its fear of invasion’’: ‘‘the idea of a territory relies on the notion of separation, of individuals who can only relate to each other through conflict and competition. This vision concentrates on fixing boundaries, on preserving sovereignty through exclusion’’ (Brace 1998: 2). By this definition, the householders and property owners of the popular romances are positive evocations of the sovereign self, while cony-catchers in the pamphlets are negative evocations, given their perceived threat to property and the social order (Woodbridge 2001: 16), as are roguish servants who transgress upon the authority of their masters (van Elk 2004: 132). Both genres hail the rise of new masters as possessive sovereign selves through an easy appeal to national and class pride. Thus Greene addresses his Notable Discovery of Cozenage ‘‘To the Young Gentlemen, Merchants, Apprentices, Farmers, and plain Countrymen,’’ twice proclaiming ‘‘Nascimur pro patria’’ (Greene in Kinney 1990: 163, 175, 182). And in Deloney’s Jack of Newberry, domestic mastery not only underwrites the hero’s rise as clothier6 but empowers him, rejecting knighthood, to represent fellow clothiers in negotiating with the crown for fair conditions of trade. In contrast, Jack in his self-conscious counterfeiting of sovereignty is paradoxically dispossessed, and through him Nashe advances a counter-discourse to the genres’ discourses of mastery. While not one to pass up opportunistic gain, Jack has neither property nor title to defend, nor the ambition to acquire them. Although Jack switches places with his master during their travels, the switch is allowed, and reversed, at the latter’s will. Jack’s disposition thus separates him from the sovereign selves he encounters on both sides of the law; it also explains why he becomes increasingly the powerless witness and even victim of their actions. In a world where crime is defined with respect to sovereignty of power and possession, the violence of revenge and punishment becomes inevitable. Jack, however, speaks from his condition of dispossession, not to idealize the poor and powerless, but to pose questions of justice and dispose the audience to thinking differently about them—differently, that is, from both sovereign and governmental perspectives.

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III Jack’s passivity brings out the trickster that has all along been at play at the narrative level. My analysis here draws from Gerald Vizenor’s idea of trickster as a ‘‘comic holotrope,’’ which he defines as a ‘‘consonance of narrative voices in discourse’’ resulting from the interplay among four points of view—those of the author, narrator, characters, and audience. Such interplay constitutes the holotrope as a ‘‘communal sign’’ in which the voices ‘‘cannot be separated or understood in isolation’’ (Vizenor 1993: 188). This holistic emphasis builds on Roy Wagner’s understanding of culture as a ‘‘holography of meaning,’’ as ‘‘analogy based on (and subversive to) other analogies, not in a tension of rigid oppositions or categories, but a mobile range of transformations worked up a conventional core’’ (Wagner 1986: 7). Within the holotrope’s cultural grounding, voices can be said to ‘‘trope’’ or play on other, conventional voices. Adapting also Bakhtin’s dialogism and poststructuralist theories of the sign to the communal dynamics of Native American storytelling, Vizenor offers the holotrope as a means of comic liberation from the tragic ends dominant discourses impose on a people historically dispossessed of their land, culture, and language. Whereas dominant discourses are cause-effect monologues that isolate, contain, and predetermine individuals, rendering them powerless, the holotrope’s interplay of narrative voices dialogizes these monologues: it ‘‘uncovers the ironies and distinctions between narrative voices,’’ in the process making possible larger social connections in which to locate individual experience (Vizenor 1993: 192). The comic holotrope fits well Nashe’s trickster poetics which operates on the complex, shifting interplay of diverse narrative voices and positions, filtered through Jack’s parody and retelling. In this relation, the temporal and positional differences earlier noted between Jack’s roles as narrator and character here function crucially in mediating between narrative and audience. As narrator Jack creates the communal dynamics for storytelling through his addresses to listeners and readers.7 His performative antics demand our active participation, in particular, his use of the visual grotesque which forces the audience to ‘‘ ‘see’ differently’’ by disorienting (troping) conventional, rational modes of understanding the world (Stephanson 1983: 28). Such effect is built into, and magnified by, the holotropic interplay of voices. As witness Jack becomes a ‘‘figure of the audience’’ through which we reflect on our own participation in the narrative (Ferguson 1981: 170). Thus instances of Jack’s captivity often point to ideological prisons and the challenge of thinking beyond their confines.

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And in moments of narrative self-consciousness, often occasioned by Jack’s limited understanding or his unreliable narration, we sense the agency of an implied author engaging us in a game of narrative expectations. The result is a poetic rhetoric that both achieves its effect in the performative present and seeks to live beyond its own transience through its open-ended engagement with the audience. A paradigmatic instance of such interplay occurs at the beginning of Jack’s second journey. Embarking as a prospective mercenary, he witnesses a horrific battle between two sovereign powers and recounts the mayhem and the vindictive cruelty of the victors. Continuing his adventures, Jack compares himself to ‘‘a Crowe that still followes aloofe where there is carrion’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:232). This stunning communal sign implicates not only Jack as character and narrator but also the author and the audience as feeders on carrion, exploiting violence in their own ways for its entertainment value. Simultaneously disarming and coercive, Jack’s acknowledged irresponsibility draws readers and listeners into a moment of self-critical reflection about their own appetites and expectations. This self-critical moment frames the entire narrative of his second journey, in which such exploitation is a pervasive social condition interweaving sovereign power with governmental reason. An example is the episode of the Anabaptist uprising in Munster, with the dissidents establishing a messianic kingdom under John of Leiden. Amidst the shifting voices and perspectives Jack adopts in his recounting, his double-edged satire reveals social disparities beneath religious differences when he describes the dissidents as men ‘‘such as thought they knew as much of Gods minde as richer men’’ (233). Ventriloquizing the state’s position, he calls Leiden a ‘‘vsurper’’ and founders of the dissident faith, ‘‘too-too infant Fathers,’’ parodic counterfeits on both sides of the state-household analogy (238, 237). He punctures their petty ‘‘desires of reuenge’’ in praying for ‘‘speedie punishment’’ for those who disagree with them (239–40). Their puny vindictiveness is no match for the brutality of the state’s violent suppression of the dissidents, however, which moves Jack to ‘‘compassion.’’ Comparing the massacre to bear-baiting, and the imperial army ‘‘that were their executioners’’ to ‘‘a father that weeps when he beats his child’’ (240), Jack exposes both the state’s paternalistic moralizing of its vengeance (the state-household analogy again), and the public’s capacity for accepting it as a spectator sport. Regardless of how such troping is received, in Wagner’s terms Jack’s analogies play on conventional cultural signs, ensuring that contemporary audiences would be in the position to respond.

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Indeed, Jack positions the audience as skeptical participants by calling attention to his own limitations as narrator, as when he speaks wiser than he knows or when he ‘‘tells us things he could not know’’ (Jones 1983: 76–7). In his account of Zadoch’s execution, he makes clear that ‘‘a leafe or two before’’ he was ‘‘lockt vp’’ as Juliana’s sex slave (314). We must conclude therefore that the account is largely his fantasy motivated by his hatred for Zadoch, who sold Jack’s body for dissection at the ‘‘yearely Anatomie’’ and got his satisfaction from daily whipping Jack’s courtesan Diamante (304). For all that, Jack’s fantasy turns out to be telling social description. Details of Zadoch’s torture—‘‘to his priuie members they tied streaming fire-workes’’; ‘‘his nailes they half raised vp, and then under-propt them with sharpe prickes, like a Tailer’s shop window halfe open on a holy daie’’; to burn him from feet up ‘‘they had a small oyle fire, such as men blow light bubbles of glasse with’’—locate the art of exquisite pain and sexualized violence within an economy of consumption. The comic horror of ‘‘holy daie’’ indicates the governmental logic that licenses the appetites of hard-working citizens through the state’s retributive power over the criminal. Jack’s limited perspective becomes clear, however, when he breaks into his own narration to cheer for ‘‘the end of the whipping Jew, contriued’’ by Juliana, the Pope’s mistress, in her revenge on Zadoch (316). The narrative transgression both releases us from Jack’s fantasy and elicits our response to it. Aside from the anti-Semitism and xenophobia critics have noted, the fantasy reveals a society where law and commerce conspire to feed a public’s desire for violent entertainment. Such a society operates on what Nietzsche calls a ‘‘slave economy . . . grounded on the law of equal returns,’’ in which ‘‘justice demands that all debts be paid in kind’’ (Schrift 2001: 116). Although Nietzsche is addressing the capitalist economy of his time, he traces this concept of justice to primitive contractual relationships, in the Germanic term ‘‘Schuld, which fuses debt with guilt’’: ‘‘like guilt, obligation, and punishment, Nietzsche . . . locates the origin of justice in the relationship between creditor and debtor’’ (Schrift 2001: 115). In the public spectacle of torture and execution, this concept renders crime into a debt to be paid through punishment, although as Deleuze and Guattari point out there is hardly any basis for equivalence between the two. Rather, it is the eye that extracts from the criminal’s pain a surplus value in pleasure. Through the public execution, then, the state ‘‘makes desire the property of the sovereign, even though he be the death instinct itself’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 191, 199). In the slave economy of Jack’s world, where money facilitates fulfillment

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of desires through consumption, the king becomes a symbolic figure: his coinage in circulation mediates the sovereign’s arbitrary will indifferently to those who have money, real or counterfeit. This generalized sovereignty is also an ideological servitude in which individuals participate, including Jack, who cheers for the instigator of both Zadoch’s torture and his own sexual bondage. Such sovereign servitude extends beyond violence to sex in the consumption of flesh, providing context for the hilarious episode in which Jack and his master find lodging in Venice with the courtesan Tabitha and her pander Petro de Campo Frego, who turn out to be handlers of counterfeit coin. ‘‘For [their] money’’ Jack and Surrey are ‘‘vsed . . . like Emperours,’’ scammed by ‘‘a craftie queane,’’ finally finding themselves implicated in coining and, through Petro’s ‘‘fine cunnycatching corrupt translation,’’ confessing to it (Nashe 1958: 2:255, 256, 259)!

IV Although, along with Petro, Tabitha is ultimately executed for her crime, her counterfeit domesticity—‘‘her pillows bare out as smooth as a groning wiues belly’’ (255)—provides an entry for literary travelers into the underside of romance. By this I mean the seamy side of sexual exchanges, including rape and sexual slavery, against which the romance defines its relation to domestic government, a discursive elaboration that is both presented and challenged in Jack’s narrative. In this connection, the Surrey character serves to focalize the narrative’s comic self-consciousness about conventions of romance, courtly and domestic. As the Petrarchan lover ‘‘metamorphozed’’ by the ‘‘little God called Loue,’’ Surrey becomes the target of relentless parody (Nashe 1958: 2:243). This parody turns into a new game with the arrival of Diamante, one that heralds her comic liberation from domestic mastery. If Surrey’s inspiration is Petrarch, Jack’s is Aretino,8 whom he extols as the model of satiric and poetic authority, and who intervenes twice to deliver master and servant from unjust imprisonment, then their love interest, Diamante, from a jealous husband. Sent to prison by a jealous husband on groundless rumor of her infidelity, Diamante’s initial description presents a riddle of contraries: With a licorous, rouling eie fixt piercing on the earth, and sometimes scornfully darted on the tone side, she figured forth a high discontented distaine; much like a prince puffing and

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As Mentz observes, ‘‘Diamante imports Chaucer’s view of female sexuality into Nashe’s romance. She embodies Nashe’s stylistic doubletalk’’ (Mentz 2001: 355). I would stress how this double-talk, in presenting Diamante as both sexual and chaste, transgresses the gender binary underwriting conventional femininity. Indeed, Diamante’s princely anger figures forth a sovereign self defending her maligned chastity as inviolate territory, although Surrey may have mistaken it for a manifestation of the love god on her face. In this sense Jack’s observation is most telling that his master is ‘‘more in loue with his own curious forming fancie than her face’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:262). Unsurprisingly, while Surrey woos Diamante with words, Jack wins her with deeds. What surprises expectation is that Diamante should turn out to be the assertive partner in the union: ‘‘I was in prison, and she my silly Iaylor’’ (263). Diamante’s role as active partner anticipates the emergence of her trickster agency during their Roman sojourn. Even as she becomes the heroine who liberates Jack from captivity, he has become the used up sex slave, in his own imagining the turd that Juliana flushes down her toilet9 —in Vizenor’s terms the ‘‘comic shit’’ that liberates the audience from the romance ideal of domestic mastery (Vizenor 1993: 196). For all that, their story may well have ended in fulfillment of conventional expectations. Freed from prison and her old husband conveniently dead, the then rich and pregnant Diamante ‘‘inuested [Jack] with the state of a monarch’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:266). The two later marry, in belated conformity with domestic closure in the popular citizen romances. Yet they do not settle down to property and propriety, the child never materializes, Jack never claims domestic mastery, nor is he jealous happening upon her ‘‘kissing very louingly with a prentise’’ (304). By the end of his narrative Diamante is no longer with him. Even so, as Constance Relihan points out, the two constitute the narrative’s one relatively stable heterosexual relationship of love and mutual aid. For her, this union provides the crucial evidence that ‘‘Nashe’s text rejects the culture’s hegemonic discourse on gender’’ (Relihan 1996: 147, 142). It is even more remarkable that this love should begin out of wedlock and, from Jack’s affectionate memory of Diamante, endure beyond it. Their non-possessive relationship defies the romance trajectory to domestic property and propriety.

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An agonistic disposition likewise operates in the episode of Heraclide, who is raped by Esdras in her own home. The episode inhabits the analogy between household and state, between domestic and political economy. Heraclide’s rape recalls Henry’s invasion of Turwin and the rape of Jane Trosse (cf. Yates 2003: 131). While Henry’s invasion is associated with the quartan fever, Esdras and his accomplice Bartol invade ‘‘rich men’s houses in the night where the plague had most reigned’’ (Nashe 1958: 2:287). And Heraclide is figured as a besieged city, a perverse Petrarchism that refigures her as the sovereign territory of one man (the husband) subjected to the arbitrary will of another (the rapist). Barbara Baines has argued that the episode presents a pornographic account of the rape, citing Joshua Cohen’s definition of pornography as ‘‘ ‘graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women’ and ‘key to making sexual submission into a system.’ ’’ Furthermore, ‘‘Jack/Nashe’s stance as the moralist consistently serves to mask or neutralize the pornographic element, a strategy Lynda Boose identifies as this emerging genre’s ‘split mentality,’ designed to alleviate the reader’s guilt’’ (Baines 2003: 120–26, 15, 131). While the portrayal of Esdras certainly warrants the first claim, the equation of a moralist Jack with Nashe overlooks the ways the narrative comments on the production of rape. Indeed, attention to the interplay of disparate voices and narrative positions yields an allegory for reading as production of rape within the romance’s domestic economy. In the first place, Jack breaks off his account just as Esdras overpowers Heraclide, telling the audience to ‘‘coniecture the rest,’’ regretting having undertaken ‘‘this tragicall tale’’ (292). His words, however disingenuous, reframe the rape narrative as a collective production, one shaped by the cultural reception of the story of Lucrece, to which Jack earlier refers in saying that even a prostitute like Tabitha ‘‘could set as ciuill a face on [domesticity] as chastities first martyr Lucrecia’’ (255). In recounting Heraclide’s complaint after the rape, Jack takes issue with her claiming moral responsibility for it. His inept references to Oedipus and Cephalus, men who become inadvertent domestic murderers, precede and frame her equally ridiculous selfcomparison to Clytemnestra, who plots her husband’s death with a lover. Yet the tragic telos of her violated chastity preempts her innocence, reversing cause and effect, displacing her knowledge of having been ‘‘tyrannously polluted’’ with theological error that her fall is predestinate (293).10 When she sees, in the mirror, her sin written on her forehead, Jack counters that ‘‘none lookt vpon her but her own reflected image’’ (293). Finally, the narrative presents an

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alternative to suicide in the person of Diamante, who is raped at the same time by Bartol, and lives. As both captive witness and narrator Jack also plays into this alternative disposition. Unlike Diamante who escapes ideological captivity, Jack is literally trapped in the domestic space of the rape narrative, and powerless to undo the tragic events he narrates. Tragedy turns into farce, however, when Heraclide’s suicide wakens her husband from his counterfeit death,11 and the result is a powerful holotropic exposition of the romance’s ideological orientation: So (throughlie stabd) fell she downe, and knockt her head against her husbands bodie: wherewith he, not hauing been aired his ful foure and twentie howres, start as out of a dreame: whiles I, through a crannie of my vpper chamber vnseeled, had beheld all this sad spectacle. (Nashe 1958: 2:295) It is remarkable that the husband’s waking should prompt Jack’s disclosure of his access to the scene of rape. The disclosure marks a moment of self-conscious voyeurism in the narrative that implicates the audience. In the presence of the wakened husband, Jack catches himself looking, and we, too, being positioned alongside him as voyeurs. At the same time, the disclosure verifies Jack’s story against the ignorance of a husband who in his plague-ridden coma not only failed to defend Heraclide but cushioned her rape with his body. Such ‘‘unconscious’’ complicity suggests that rape is a necessary threat against which the romance articulates its governmental logic of domestic mastery. The farce is complete when the husband, oblivious to Heraclide’s sacrificial suicide, misreads the signs of the crime and fingers the wrong man for it. In convicting Jack, the law vindicates the husband’s domestic mastery, but only after he has made a thorough mockery of it. I will now make a good end by speaking of gallows speeches. Wrongly convicted of Heraclide’s rape, Jack composes a ballad entitled Wiltons wantonness. The ballad is never sung because, at his hanging, Jack decides instead to protest his innocence, and his account happens to produce a witness who happens to have heard Esdras bragging about the crime. A second dying confession comes from the unrepentant Cutwolfe which Jack chances to hear in his transient travels, in which Cutwolfe happens to disclose a third confession by Esdras, who repents his rape of Heraclide. Cutwolfe then relates his killing of Esdras to avenge his brother’s murder, ending with his praise of revenge as

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‘‘the highest performance of valure’’ and ‘‘whatsoeuer we call law or iustice’’ (Nashe 1958: 2: 326). Coming towards the end of the narrative, this equation of revenge with justice both sums up Jack’s encounters in his unfortunate travels and mocks the moralization in the cony-catching pamphlets. If in the consonance of two unredeemed voices refracted through Jack’s retelling Heraclide’s and his innocence is discovered, this is trickster poetics with a vengeance. Nashe thus tropes tragedy through ‘‘comic chance’’ (Vizenor 1993: 188), doing justice by way of crime, beyond the romance’s still intact bounds of domesticity. Returning to the unmastered spaces of storytelling (at court, below stairs), Jack the King of Pages entertains fellow pages of the games of chance, a fellowship that extends, through the pages of dispersed print, to readers in whose chance encounters trickster may reemerge, holotropically, in all its counterfeit sovereignty.

10 Afterword Arthur F. Kinney

Early modern prose fiction in England can dazzle us with its boldness, its inventiveness, its sheer virtuosity. Robert Greene makes this clear in the preface to Menaphon in 1589: if Gentlemen you find my style either magis humile in some place, or more sublime in another, if you find dark Aenigmas or strange conceipts as if Sphinx on the one side, and Roscius on the other were playing the wagges; thinke the metaphors are well ment, and that I did it for your pleasures, whereunto I ever aymed my thoughts: and desire you to take a little paines to prie into my imagination. (1964: 6: 7–8) He luxuriates in the possibilities of language; he can move from the plain and straightforward style of the humble into the mysteries of the obscure and the sublime. His work can be riddling, like the Sphinx, or full of tricks and jokes like the escapades of Roscius. His romance is the widest possible container, a portmanteau that stimulates pleasures but also thoughts, and all of his ranging techniques and effects are subject to, held together by, the powers of his imagination which, pried into, will be understood and shared by his readers with only a little effort on their parts. He works deliberately through an aggregate of metaphors, of images, that constitute an imagination that can be shared, pried open by the devoted readers who use pleasurable language to arrive at Greene’s own thoughts. Reader and author meet, co-create, when the reader intervenes in the writer’s imagination with his own. Greene’s forceful, untroubled optimism belies an intoxication with the vernacular that characterizes his age. David Margolies has caught this sense of the excitement of the writers of early modern prose

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fiction, and its rich potential capacity to discover, reveal, to make by making up. With a judicious turn of phrase, an incantation, a trick of words, the disparate elements of reality can be made to cohere. With words the author can re-shape the world to his liking or stamp it with his own image. Language has not yet been reduced to dried symbols of reality; it contains the reality and words seem real things. ‘‘I have terms,’’ said Thomas Nashe, ‘‘. . . laid in steep in Aquafortis, and Gunpowder, that shall rattle through the Skies, and make an Earthquake in a Peasants ears.’’ (1985: 1–2)1 It is the inclusiveness of prose fiction that energizes Nashe and that promotes his racy, improvisational style, as three of the writers in this collection demonstrate, but it was also shared by Greene and other writers of fiction. Naomi Conn Liebler points to the secret of early modern fiction’s power—its hybridity. No other writing of the Tudor period could be so versatile. Where Greene likes to experiment with fiction to unlock a lexicon of words (extended by Nashe’s frequent neologisms) and a new horde of metaphors, fiction for other writers like Emanuel Forde or Richard Johnson, Lady Mary Wroth or Barnaby Rich see its lax boundaries capable of combining forms of writing that the imagination had only compartmentalized before: legend, fabliau, romance, adventure, joke; all acts of the imagination that can be put into narrative form are the very stuff of prose fiction. It is this hybridity that gives rise to the unexpected and to the range of writing that the essays in this volume return to again and again. What prose fiction does that lyric or epic poetry cannot quite manage and that drama (with its varying, jostling perspectives) never confronts, is employ such inclusiveness to present works before an audience of varying demands and tastes, an audience that remains (even after publication) essentially unknown. Early prose fiction writers knew this, too. Austen Saker writes in his 1580 edition of Narbonus, he must write well that shall please all minds: but he that planteth trees in a Forest, knoweth not how many shall taste the Fruit, and he that soweth in his garden diverse Seeds, knoweth not who shall eat of his Sallets. He that planteth a Vine, knoweth not who shall taste his Wine: and he that putteth any thing in Print, must think

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Arthur F. Kinney that all will peruse it: If then amongst many blossoms, some prove blasts, no marvel if amongst many Readers, some prove Riders. (1580: I: A3; qtd. Margolies 1985: 24)

The encyclopedic concerns of Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller or Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania demonstrate the ability (and need) for fiction to maintain its hybridity, advance its inclusiveness. Even where a strong function of a work appears to make it seem almost singular—such as female agency in Kind Kit of Kingston’s Westward for Smelts or Forde’s romances as instructive manuals for young men—the various tones and shifts of focus examined here show the restless energy of fiction as a form not bounded by rules of scansion or characterology. Inheriting classical traditions that featured both pastoral and urban settings and medieval traditions that practiced in medias res and interlacement, early modern fiction writers could move easily in space and in time; fictions could be chronological, but they could also be woven of many threads simultaneously, such as Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession, or, as a kind of summa, the Urania. But fiction also provided an opportunity to pursue, more simply, an unfolding and flowering of a chief idea in all its intricacy, as in the case of Richard Johnson’s development of St. George. Even the same material could be recycled. Margolies notes that What was superficially the same narrative material could be organized from different perspectives. Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, serves as a model for Emanuel Forde’s Ornatus and Artesia (and provides matter also for his later Parismus and Parismenos). Forde borrows situations, events and characters from Sidney; but whereas Sidney employs the material to validate hierarchy, Forde indicates the injustice that common people suffer at the hands of the gentlemen. Sidney judges the actions of his heroes ultimately in terms of the conduct of the state; Forde presents chivalric action from the point of view of those beneath gentle rank as well, such as the shepherd imposed upon by the knight. (1985: 4) The powers of the imagination, however, could not duplicate within the growing body of early modern fiction, but only, in the end, transform. What the example of Sidney and Forde shows here—or in the present collection Wroth and Kind Kit—is the unavoidable revelation

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of authorial ideology. While lyric poetry contracts into a persona and drama splinters a situation into a rainbow of responses, early modern fiction cannot sidestep political, social, or religious beliefs. However exotic Greene’s landscapes, however foreign the escapades of Nashe’s Jack Wilton, the very organization of the narrative—or, in the case of Nashe, its (only) apparent disorganization—never quite manages to hide an author’s beliefs or values. The essential discursiveness of fiction will not allow it. The prying into the authorial imagination that Greene acknowledges is, therefore, fundamentally possible and unavoidable. That too is a constant feature of the fictions that are examined here. But to say that such authorial concerns narrow or limit the fiction is to mistake the power of fiction, the force of its variant metaphors that Greene was so quick to point out. The most realistic fiction—the narrative of the fishwives, the adventures of Jack Wilton—remain, when we pry into the author’s imagination, untrue, even unreal. The character of the fishwives is a highly selective one; and Jack Wilton from the start is identified as a commoner—Jack—and quite possibly an aristocrat—Wilton, the house the Sidney family made so famous. The strange amalgamation of the ideological and the imaginative, what might narrow down and what widen out, is what made early modern fiction so marketable. And as these essays repeatedly contend, the power of the market was never far from the minds of writers of fiction. Their imaginative works were always, at some acknowledged level, commodities, wares, products to be displayed and sold. Such a fact is inescapable, not merely in the works themselves, and in the prefaces that comment on the importance or entertainment of a work or its appeal to readers, but the very place where, as objects, they were seen. The bookstalls encircled Paul’s Churchyard, within the precincts and outside them. A person would have to walk by them or between them to get to the other markets held in the aisles of Paul’s on weekdays when they hawked their wares or posted title-pages; a potential customer had to make his way around them on the way to church on Sunday, even though they were shuttered for services. This outer band of stalls thus surrounded the sale of other commodities, and the exchange of gossip at the center of London’s society. Fiction writers used their forms of imagination to lift their customers from such routine activity; but they asked readers to pry into their imaginations from just such activity, and from the knowledge they would return to it. Yet even this phenomenon, like, it would seem, everything else, was open to the writer whose work remained in conversation with the reader. John Harington addresses his reader directly at the

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outset of A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596): Now (gentle reader) you have taken such pain, and perhaps some pleasure, in reading our Metamorphosis of Ajax; and you supposed by this time to have done with me: but now with your favour I have not done with you . . . . First you thought me fantastical . . . . I would but ask you this question, and even truly between God and your conscience, do but answer it. If I had entitled the book, A Sermon showing a sovereigne salve for the sores of the soul. Or a wholesome haven of health to harbour the heart in. Or A marvellous medicine for the maladies of the mind, would you ever have asked after such a book? (1596: H7–H7v; qtd. Margolies 1985: 43) The Metamorphosis of Ajax is a treatise, not a work of imaginative fiction, but Harington shares with the writers of fiction examined in this book the same acute awareness of audience, the same desire to supply pleasurable thoughts, that Greene identifies in the prefatory matter for Menaphon. What is lacking in Harington’s work, or the sermon or selfhelp books that might be alternatives, is the metaphorical imagination that Greene wants pried open. That imagination—strange, dark, sublime, painful—is, unlike Harington’s, hybridic, inclusive, and ideological, as well as marketable. Given its potential range, seen in the various achievements examined here, fiction’s peculiar job is to take the reader to places unexamined by his quotidian existence—and that it does so suggests why, from the Tudor age, fiction has come to dominate the imaginative works of today.

Notes

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Stanivukovic, personal communication, for which many thanks. 2. The introduction to the Andersen-Sauer collection offers a helpful overview of ‘‘current trends in the history of reading’’ (2002: 1–20). 3. Laura Stevenson’s study of the ‘‘most popular’’ Elizabethan texts (which includes printed drama, religious books, fiction, poetry, handbooks of instruction, medical and scientific pamphlets, and collections of essays and aphorisms) notes ‘‘eighty that were concerned with merchants, clothiers, craftsmen, and the economic and moral content of their lives. These works together made up 27 percent of the canon of popular literature’’ (1984: 14–15). 4. Sacks adds importantly that the market for these inventories was heavily concentrated in London itself, where the levels of literacy for women as well as men were high and went relatively deep into the social order. But there were good numbers of readers in most towns and among the middling sort as well as the gentry and nobility resident in rural England; the market for printed material . . . was widespread throughout the country. (Sacks 2002: 155) 5. ‘‘Items printed’’ offers a more useful estimate than the number of editions printed because, as Stevenson points out, ‘‘little is known about the exact size of Elizabethan editions, so a book that went through a number of editions may have sold fewer copies than available publishing statistics indicate’’ (1984: 12). 6. Census figures (parish rolls, poll tax figures, and similar statistics) count household servants over the age of sixteen, lodgers, apprentices, and other non-property-owning populations in these figures (Boulton 2000: 206); not all of them would have been readers, of course, let alone purchasers, of books and other print items. My ‘‘average’’ merely suggests that enough material was sold to account for a purchase by every single adult citizen; adjusted for those who bought none, the average implies multiple purchases by many (see also Cressy 1980).

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7. I review the vexing question of differences between ‘‘nationalism’’ and ‘‘patriotism,’’ and whether either of these terms can reasonably be used in regard to early modern English populations, in the chapter on Richard Johnson below in this collection. Schwyzer’s argument is more closely aligned with that of Anthony D. Smith (1998), who rejects the possibility of ‘‘nationalism’’ before the American and French Revolutions, than with those of Ernest Gellner (1983), Eric Hobsbawm (1990), and Benedict Anderson (1991) who, variously, leave open the possibility of something like a nationalist sentiment even if differently termed. Schwyzer nonetheless uses expressions such as ‘‘Tudor nationalism’’ and ‘‘British nationalism,’’ as he says, ‘‘as a kind of shorthand (for ‘emergent-national-consciousnessseeking-to-propagate-itself-more-widely’)’’ (2004: 9). 8. Lori Humphrey Newcomb offers a compelling discussion of the relation of servant readers to Greene’s exemplary Dorastus and Fawnia (Pandosto) as well as other romances, and the implications of transsocial reading practice for disrupted social hierarchies (2002: 209–23). 9. For a fascinating discussion of the relation between ideology and fictional forms, see Lennard Davis’s concluding chapter, ‘‘Ideology and the Novel,’’ in Factual Fictions (1983: 212–23). My argument here focuses not on forms but on a posited but credible ‘‘lived experience’’ of reading those fictional forms and then reflecting upon the content of that reading. In this sense, the experience of reading—as much as Davis’s subject, the novel as written—participates in ideology as Louis Althusser defines it in For Marx: the ‘‘‘lived’ relation between men and their world, or a reflected form of this unconscious relation’’ (1977: 252; qtd in Davis 1983: 214). 10. I tread carefully around the word ‘‘novel,’’ whose ‘‘origin’’ many scholars still steadfastly locate in the eighteenth century, and beg the indulgence of those who do so. For the learned and complicated debate, see Walter R. Davis (1969), Lennard J. Davis (1983), Arthur F. Kinney (1986), Michael McKeon (1987), Geoffrey Day (1987), J. Paul Hunter (1990), Robert Mayer (1997), Margaret Anne Doody (1997), Helen Cooper (2004), and of course Northrop Frye who arguably started this discussion by observing that The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to get along without the novel, and until he reaches his great deliverance in Defoe, his perspective is intolerably cramped . . . . Clearly this novel-centered view of prose fiction is a Ptolemaic perspective which is now too complicated to be any longer workable, and some more relative Copernican view must take its place. (1957: 303–4) Or, as Lennard Davis ventures, ‘‘Genres are troublesome creatures and need much more than birth certificates to clear up questions about missing progenitors and problematic origins’’ (1983: 26); his own litmus test for distinguishing novels from romances, however, submits to some lapidary notions of genre-to-class association (1983: 40), which will be actively challenged by the essays in the present collection.

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11. Munday’s first published work, now lost, was The defense of povertie against the Desire of worldlie riches, Dialogue wise collected by Anthonie Munday (1577). 12. My thanks to Goran Stanivukovic for this observation. 13. Greene notes that The Unlucky Citizen owes much of its narrative to a collection of rogue tales Kirkman had previously co-authored with Richard Head (2006: 18); we have to wonder, given the similarities between their titles and Kirkman’s profession as a bookseller who would likely have known the earlier text, how much The Unlucky Citizen owed as well to Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller. 14. Richard Helgerson adduces the development of hybrid terms such as ‘‘gentle merchants’’ (Deloney) and ‘‘mercantile gentleman’’ (implied but not stated by Hakluyt) as evidence of the complex taxonomies resulting from this increasing fluidity (1992: 178), and quotes William Harrison’s remarks that merchants ‘‘often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of the one into the other’’ (1992: 171). Notes to Chapter 2 1. My speculations about the tension between writing and printing have been influenced by a Spring 2005 Folger Shakespeare Library Seminar led by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, and by reading several prepublication chapters from Chartier 2005. 2. Taking cues from Crewe 1982 and Nielson 1994, it is tempting to read Nashe’s preference for print as opposed to writing in theoretical terms, relying either on Derrida’s distinction between speech and writing or on Luce Irigaray’s ‘‘fluid dynamics’’ (1985) in which masculine fears of femininity express themselves in the preference for solids over liquids. The stability Nashe attributes to print, however, is not a normative or classical position like Derrida’s speech or Irigaray’s masculinity, but is itself under construction in a complex way. Over all, despite many temptations, I find that reading Nashe as a postmodernist avant la lettre flattens out his local historical resonances too much. See Mentz 2001: 339–47. 3. All further quotations from Nashe given in the text from this edition with volume and page number. 4. For the claim that ‘‘Nashe exploits artisanal metaphors to define his vocation and thereby acquires a means of asserting control over his investment when it is conceived as labor,’’ see Halasz 1997: 99. My interest in the twin processes of writing and printing explores the tension within Nashe’s idea of labor that Halasz minimizes. On early modern playwrights as artisanal laborers, see Turner 2002: 85–127. 5. As will become clear, I believe that Nashe’s return to invective in Have With You marks a significant departure in that it is the only one of his books that does not fit Schwyzer’s thesis about constant innovation. Schwyzer’s claim that the ‘‘two works against Gabriel Harvey are worlds apart in style and structure’’ (585) is true enough, but does not explain Nashe’s decision to write a second book of invective in 1596. 6. Nashe acknowledges this silence in Have With You: ‘‘till the Impression of this Book, I hauing got nothing by Printing these three years’’ (3:128).

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes In a sense, however, Have With You is at least Nashe’s third printed polemic, since he is usually assumed to have written An Almond for a Parrot (1590) as part of the Martin Marprelate controversy. On the role of the Marprelate crisis in forming Nashe’s mature style, see Hibbard 1962: 19–48, and Nashe 1958: 5:34–65. For background to the Harvey-Nashe controversy, which Robert Greene touched off just before his death with A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), see McKerrow’s extensive notes (Nashe 5:65–110) and Hibbard 1962: 180–232. My sense that Nashe wants his books to be solid has some affinities with what I might call the neo-aesthetic reading of Nashe’s project, in which his self-referential playfulness and stylistic invention produce something like ‘‘pure literature,’’ in C.S. Lewis’s phrase. See, among others, Lewis 1954: 410–16; Barbour 1993: 64–126; and Brown 2004: 53–101. Barbour’s term for the solidity that Nashe craves, ‘‘stuffe,’’ marks the turn from Lewis’s purely aesthetic claims to more material ones, and Brown’s recent assertion that Nashe’s ‘‘marginality’’ makes him paradoxically central to the 1590s signals an increasing desire to place his work in dialogue with other elements of late Elizabethan culture. This passage may refer to Thomas Kyd’s scrivener father, if Kyd is the author of one of the famous ‘‘whole [ur-]Hamlets’’ to which Nashe refers. See McKerrow’s note (Nashe 4:449–52). The OED lists Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595) as the first usage of the term ‘‘labor’’ in this way (6a), but this meaning was widespread in the 1590s and seems likely to color Nashe’s use of the term. In a controversial preface which was omitted from later editions of the sonnet sequence, Nashe attempts to hitch his rising literary star to Sidney and also distinguishes his urban, material prose from coterie poetry (see Mentz 2000a: 163–9). McKerrow (Nashe 4:196) rejects the suggestion of Nashe’s nineteenthcentury editor, Alexander Grosart, that the sonnet should read ‘‘print’’ instead of ‘‘paint.’’ This crux emphasizes the distinction Nashe maintains between writing in ink (‘‘painting’’) and being printed by the press. On the new conditions of literary culture made possible by print, see Halasz 1997: ‘‘Print permanently altered the discursive field . . . by enabling the market place to develop as a means of producing, disseminating, and mediating discourse independent of the sites and practices associated with and sanctioned by university, Crown, and Church’’ (4). On the relation between this charge and Nashe’s answer, see Hibbard 1962: 54–5. Hibbard’s suggestion that the Villanellas and Quipassas refer to Nashe acting as a ‘‘ghost-writer’’ (55) for his social superiors seems reasonable enough, and fits Brown’s emphasis on his continuing efforts within patronage circles. Nashe acknowledges that he had previously wanted to end his feud with Harvey, and had written to that effect in the preface to Christs Teares, which repents all his former writings (2:12–13). Have With You effusively recants this brief repentance, which itself might owe something to the multiple printed accounts of Robert Greene’s deathbed repentance in 1592.

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16. For many recent critics, Lenten Stuffe’s paean to the red herring represents Nashe’s most complete celebration of the commodity, and of market writing in general. See Turner 2001: 529–61; Brown 2004: 85. 17. While the Old Arcadia circulated only in manuscript during Nashe’s lifetime, this poem was well known in manuscript collections and in print miscellanies like England’s Parnassus (1600). 18. Halasz emphasizes the differences between these two stationers: Danter, Nashe’s landlord, was ‘‘for the most part, a job printer,’’ while Wolfe ‘‘was a capitalist in the trade.’’ She notes that both Danter and Wolfe were apprenticed to John Day, a founder of the Company, but finally suggests that Nashe’s and Harvey’s views of the Company must have been quite different (Halasz 1997: 97–8). 19. Nashe calls ‘‘Ouids wanton Muse’’ the ‘‘fountaine whence my streames did flowe’’ (3:415) in the sonnet that ends ‘‘The Choise of Valentines.’’ Nashe’s primary non-English models for authorship are Ovid and Aretino, and the latter, especially, clarifies his ambition to transform liquid writing into something more solid. As early as Pierce Pennilesse (1592) (and as late as Lenten Stuffe [1598]), Nashe hails Aretino as his model: ‘‘We want an Aretine here among us, that might strip these golden asses out of their gaie trappings, and after he had ridden them to death with railing, leaue them on the dunghill for carrion’’ (1:242). The reference in Lenten Stuffe closes the ‘‘To the Readers epistle’’ in rousing fashion: ‘‘of all stiles I most affect & striue to imitate Aretines . . . giue me the pure wine of it self, & that begets good bloud, and heates the brain thorowly: I had as lieue haue no sunne, as haue it shine faintly, no fire, as a smothering fire of small coales, no cloathes, rather than weare linsey-woolsey’’ (3:152). Aretino models Nashe’s violent style and provides an example of a writer who used polemic to shape his literary flow. 20. McKerrow (Nashe 4:322) suggests that Nashe got the Russian phrase from Hakluyt. 21. Yates compares Nashe’s fascination with print with Bruno Latour’s ‘‘immutable mobile’’ (Yates 2003: 106). 22. I have suggested (Mentz 2000b) that the accusation of technological determinism relies on a somewhat unfair interpretation of Eisenstein’s massive work. Johns’s broad critique, however, has been persuasive and influential.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Nicholl is wrong in saying that Lady Elizabeth was the Countess of Southampton’s grandmother, however: she was Lord Montagu’s stepmother. 2. All translations are my own.

Notes to Chapter 4 1. There was speculation in the eighteenth century that an edition of Smelts was published in 1603, but as J.M. Nosworthy’s introduction to the Arden

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Notes

edition of Cymbeline summarizes, although some early editors of Shakespeare’s works mention the 1603 edition, ‘‘there is no reliable evidence to show that Westward for Smelts was printed before 1620’’ (1955: xx). Although the queen remains unnamed in Bede’s account, he does explain that the relics of Oswald are kept in the city of Bebba, named ‘‘after a former queen’’ (1955: 150). In the anonymous Frederyke of Jennen (1560?), the tale is set in France, the merchants come from France, Spain, Florence, and Jennen. It is the King of Cairo who provides the political protection for the disguised wife (see Bullough 1975: 12). There are also analogues in the novelle collections of Geoffrey Fenton (1567) and George Pettie (1576). Quotations from this tale are taken from the 1620 translation, included in the Signet Classic edition of Cymbeline. The year 1620 seems to have been an important one in England for this story. It might be worth exploring the issue of tribute in Cymbeline as well in relation to the version of the tale as presented in Smelts: Edward IV exacted tribute from Louis XI of France; the paying of tribute to Rome is, of course, a significant element in Shakespeare’s play. Howard also notes that Brainford ‘‘is the conventional place beyond the immediate London suburbs where gallants and city wives go to outwit jealous husbands’’ in many texts during the period (2000: 161). Henry Machyn reports in his diary in March 1561, for instance, seeing a woman ride about Cheapside and London for bringing young fry of diverse kind of fish unlawfull, with a garland upon her head hanging with strings of the small fish, and on the horse afore and behind her, led by one of the beadles of Bridewell. (Gowing 2000: 142)

8. The OED cites Westward Ho as a source for this meaning. 9. Additionally, Cymbeline was first published in the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, only three years after the probable publication of Smelts. There may have been more reading of Cymbeline in the context of Smelts than a traditional understanding of sources would acknowledge. Notes to Chapter 5 1. I borrow these two phrases from Lievsay 1961: 44. 2. Cooper describes the memes of romances as motifs that remain ‘‘superficially the same, sometimes even down to verbal detail’’ in romances over time and that readers recognize as staple structural elements of romances (2004: 4). 3. Arguing that courtly fiction modeled on Lyly’s Euphues is about young men, Richard Helgerson identifies the prodigal youth as the central protagonist and the motor of plot and narrative in much of the mid-sixteenth century didactic and romantic fictions (1976: 3). 4. R. Wall suggests that in the sixteenth century, boys would leave home between the ages of six and seven, and in the seventeenth century, they would do so between the ages of ten and fifteen. The cut-off points for the

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age of leaving home may vary, but as Wall points out, ‘‘a general impression that children did leave home early in preindustrial times has become very widely accepted’’ (1978: 183). 5. A relationship between the humanist poetics of usefulness and virtue, and early humanist novels, is discussed in Kinney 1986: 35ff. Notes to Chapter 6 1. Pearson 1996: 83; Hackett notes evidence pointing to a strong market later, by the mid-seventeenth century (2000: 7–9). See also Wheale (1999: 56) and Hull (1982: 1). 2. ‘‘On some verses of Virgil,’’ Essays, discussed by Relihan and Stanivukovic (2003: 1); see also Newman 1989 and 1991, Ferguson 1996, Howard 2003, Orlin 2000: 96 for projections of desires for goods onto women consumers. 3. The cultural implications of this traditional gendering of excessive desires for luxury goods as female have been ably developed by Newman 1989 and 1991; Ferguson 1996: 235–59; Howard 2003. Foucault traces the classical technique of the self by which the masculinity of the disciplined subject depended upon the mastery of the (male) reason over the (female) passions within the self as well as within society (1986: 84–5). 4. These ordinary goods are listed as available in shops in Isabella Whitney’s ‘‘Will for London’’ (1573). Contemporaries such as Thomas Platter (Peck 2000: 277) and John Stow (Newman 1989: 504) also listed material goods saturating the early modern market. A few sources on early modern consumption include essays in Turner, ed. 2002 and in Orlin, ed. 2000, Jardine 1996, Braudel 1992: 183–333, Mukerji 1983, Appleby 1993, Thirsk 1978. For applications of these sources to literature, see for example essays in Woodbridge 2003. 5. Hackett 2000: 92 interprets the soldier’s defense as undercut by his feeling of success in attaining Doritie’s favors. 6. William Gouge, for example, criticizes wives specifically of a professional class for dressing above their husbands’ stations: their ‘‘silken gownes, Beaver hats, and other like attire’’ are ‘‘not agreeable to their place and state,’’ for the wives of ‘‘Ministers, grave Counsellors, sage Magistrates, no nor conscionable Professours’’ (1622: 280–1). Notes to Chapter 7 1. Josephine Roberts died in a car accident before the second volume of the Urania was completed. Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller accepted the daunting task of completing the edition, with the assistance of Micheline White. 2. Kim Hall presents a more vexed reading of Rodomandro’s ethnicity (1995: 206–10). 3. Roberts details Wroth’s often scandalous personal life, which included the birth of two illegitimate children (1995: lxxi–lxxv). 4. Katherine Maus (1995), among others, discusses concepts of identity during this period. 5. See the Urania 1999: xxx–xxxi for an account of the mistakes contained in the story of Floristello’s birthmark.

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6. Characters move effortlessly, for example, from the material world to and from places of enchantment. 7. He is known, for example, as the ‘‘Lost Man’’ (1995: 376–7) and ‘‘Just in Hope’’ (1995: 498). 8. There are characters known as the ‘‘Princess of Elis’’ in both parts of the narrative, for example, but there is no clear correspondence between the two stories. Notes to Chapter 8 1. Paul Salzman (1985: 353) cites an edition by ‘‘R. Kennedy’’ (not further identified, nor is the issuing press), issued in ‘‘Portland, Oregon’’ in 1967. I have been unable to find any record of this edition in the catalogues of the Library of Congress, the Folger, or the Huntington Library. 2. Salzman is one of very few who notice Johnson favorably, counting him along with Henry Robarts and Emanuel Ford among the ‘‘three most important writers of . . . chivalric romances,’’ and distinguishing him as an author whose work was ‘‘aimed at the very poorest readers’’ (1985: 99, 110). Walter Davis (1969) devotes a few pages to Johnson, including some paragraphs on The Seven Champions; David Margolies identifies him as ‘‘a writer for artisans’’ whose ‘‘point of view is clearly that of trade’’ (1985: 15, 18) and as ‘‘the most enduringly successful of the commercial writers of the century’’ (1985: 35). Laura Stevenson O’Connell identifies Johnson, with Heywood and Deloney, as one of the ‘‘three . . . most popular second-rate Elizabethan authors’’ (1980: 267). Helen Cooper reads him as a parodist who ‘‘made his money, like tabloid writers, by never underestimating the tastes of his readers,’’ who ‘‘converted high cultural capital into cheap but attractive commodity,’’ and in whose hands the prose romance ‘‘could be used not just to comment on but to dismantle itself’’ (2004: 389); The Seven Champions fares slightly better with her than does Johnson’s other major romance, Tom a Lincoln (Part 1, 1599; Part 2, 1607), which she calls misogynistic and pornographic (2004: 391). Margaret Schlauch relegates The Seven Champions and The Nine Worthies to a single footnote in her preface, and Tom a Lincoln to one sentence within her study (1963: viiin, 171). J. J. Jusserand (1890), Geoffrey Day (1987), J. Paul Hunter (1990), and Barbara Fuchs (2004) ignore him completely. 3. Johnson can only imagine this world; repeated references to Muslim ‘‘deities’’ as ‘‘Mahomet, Apollo, and Termagaunt’’ betray his complete ignorance of any real information about Islam, which he could have gotten from a variety of travel narratives. His reading may have been wide for a former apprentice, but he was content to invent whatever served his fiction. 4. In the 1891 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Seccombe cited a baptismal record for Johnson on 24 May 1573 in London, but as Richard Proudfoot points out in his revision for the new edition of the DNB, ‘‘the name is too common to make the identification at all safe’’ (2004: 295). We know nothing of his family or his higher education. Wood does not mention him for Oxford; of the twelve ‘‘Richard Johnsons’’ listed in Alumni Cantabridgienses, only one could possibly be our

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author, and of him the entry says only ‘‘Matric. pens. from Trinity, 1598; B.A. 1601–2’’; ‘‘pensioners’’ were Cambridge undergraduate students (called ‘‘commoners’’ at Oxford) who could afford to pay their own fees and boarding expenses and who were not considered academically promising enough to be given university scholarships. This is not likely to be our author. I cannot trace him to any family of means or station, despite Johnson’s own occasional claims. In the dedication of Tom a Lincolne (Part 1: 1599; Part 2: 1607) to Simon Wortedge of ‘‘Okenberrie’’ [Auconbury] in Huntingdonshire, he signs himself ‘‘Your worships devoted, and poore country-man’’ and refers to the ‘‘great friendship’’ shown by Wortedge’s father to his own parents. I could find no mention of the name Wortedge (or any reasonable cognate) in Huntingdonshire records for the period. (For further discussion, and no firm conclusions, see Liebler 2000: 83n7; Proudfoot 2004: 295.) 5. In the dedication to A Remembrance of Honors Due to the Life and Death of Robert Earle of Salisbury (1612; STC 14691), Johnson says of himself: ‘‘I confess ignorance, and with all giue them thus to understand, I neuer tasted one drop of Parnassus fountaine, but yet care added to industrious trauells is able to performe matters of importance.’’ This may be a conventional diffidence, or it may be a necessary apologia by a man self-taught rather than university educated. In his first published work, The Nine Worthies of London (1592), Johnson refers to himself as an apprentice, but he does not indicate to what master or in what craft, or indeed whether the term ‘‘apprentice’’ is meant to be taken in its ordinary and literal sense or as a synonym for ‘‘novice writer.’’ Johnson identified himself as ‘‘a poore Freeman of this Cittie’’ in the dedication of Anglorum Lacrimae (1603) to Robert Lee, Lord Mayor of London, and again in 1613 in the dedication to Lord Mayor Thomas Middleton of Looke on Me, London. I am an honest Englishman, ripping up the Bowels of Mischiefe, lurking in thy sub-urbs and Precincts. He emerged a prolific writer, with thirteen works either certainly by or reasonably attributed to him, and one who knew how to appeal to popular taste. The Nine Worthies of London was printed twice in the same year; The Seven Champions of Christendom followed in 1596–7; in 1599 The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln, Part 1 (initialed R.J. and attributed to Johnson) was entered in the Stationers’ Register to W. White (24 December); Part 2 was entered on 20 October, 1607; a sixth printing appeared in 1631 and a seventh in 1635. 6. Two other texts directly related to Johnson’s romance and its evident success appear within the first eighty years of its existence. One is a set of engravings of each champion printed by R. Daniell, printed in 1623 under the title The Seven Champions of Christendome; although this set was once thought to be part of a lost Johnson edition, the Rev. STC editors now believe these illustrations were made and printed independently of Johnson’s work (STC 4955.5). In 1638 a play by John Kirke, The Seven Champions of Christendome, appeared. Its title page indicates that it had been ‘‘Acted at the Cocke-pit, and at the Red Bull in St. Johns Streete, with a generall liking and never printed till this yeare 1638.’’ Its modern editor, Giles Dawson, identifies its principal source as Johnson’s work.

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7. The last, until the Fellows 2003 edition, is a reprint of a 1926 issue (Wing 12837.a.8), radically truncated to a moral tale for young boys; see Liebler 2000: 72, 83n4; Cooper 2004: 389. 8. Elie Kedourie usefully distinguishes nationalism from patriotism and xenophobia with which it is often confused. Patriotism, affection for one’s country, or one’s group, loyalty to its institutions, and zeal for its defence, is a sentiment known among all kinds of men; so is xenophobia . . . . Neither sentiment depends on a particular anthropology and neither asserts a particular doctrine of the state or of the individual’s relation to it. Nationalism does both . . . . (1993: 68)

9.

10.

11.

12.

But Kedourie posits this type of nationalism as a distinctly modern (i.e., nineteenth-century) phenomenon from which in any case he excludes British and American citizens on the grounds of heterogeneity (1993: 68–9; see also Connor 1994; Nairn 1994). On this view, perhaps all of Johnson’s Champions would be called patriotic, but each is so to his own nation of origin without any apparent animus toward those of the other six. In other works, however—The Pleasant Walkes of Moore-fields (1607), The Nine Worthies of London (1592), or The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln (1599), for instance—Johnson is emphatic about the individual and collective virtues he considers ‘‘English’’ and thus worthy of inculcation. They are exemplified in all these works by the behaviors of craftsmen, apprentices, and other ordinary citizens who become extraordinary by deeds, not birth. This ‘‘unity’’ is of course ahistorical; Johnson lacks the perspective of modern historians and political theorists, and is not thinking of what John Hutchinson calls the consequence of ‘‘the Wars of Religion and the Counter-Reformation, . . . . an interstate system based on a complex web of alliances and balances of power’’ (Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 7). Wright thought such claims must have been intended to inspire apprentices to virtuous deeds (1935: 330), but Johnson says, in the same passage, that his motive was to elicit respect for the ‘‘noble Citizens’’ on the parts of aristocratic snobs whose ‘‘malicious mindes . . . . enuye at the deserts of noble Citizens, by proofe of these mens worthienesse to repent their contempt, and amend their capricious dispositions.’’ Proudfoot notes that Look on me London ‘‘drew heavily’’ on George Whetstone’s A Mirrour for Magistrates of Cities and a Touchstone of the Time (1584), which was dedicated to the ‘‘yong Gentlemen, of the Innes of Court’’ and emphasizes Johnson’s extension of his text to ‘‘all . . . . , as well Gentlemen as others’’ (2004: 296). An account of George’s various historical, legendary, and mythical representations would be too long and complicated for the scope of this chapter. His antiquity is the problem here, owing to his canonization by Catholic England as a martyr/saint from Cappadocia and his decanonization by Anglican fiat. Stuart writers, and particularly Lancashire

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Catholics, had a special interest in reviving the debate over George’s existence and heroic record. The debate continued well into the eighteenth century when three consecutive English kings bore the name of the patron (and the fourth carried it into the nineteenth century). During this George-dominated era, the Lancashire Catholic John Milner undertook to set the record straight in the face of Gibbon’s unflattering portrait in his Decline and Fall. Milner’s research, as well as his argument, is passionate and as thorough as such research could have been at the time. His own vested interest as an Englishman and a Catholic fuels the project; he wants his saint restored to both the ecclesiastical and the historical canon. Part of his argument rests on what counts as a ‘‘record,’’ and on his agenda, Johnson’s text appears to speak with a plausibility equal to that of Spenser, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and others: If there are any persons now who consider as doubtful the existence of St. George, or who are inclined to rank him amongst fabulous and non-existing characters, by reason of the fables invented concerning him so many hundred years after his name and merits had been known and celebrated all through Christendom, such persons must evidently consider his existence as still more doubtful, since the last fabrication concerning St. George of our English legendary writers in the last century, namely, the author of the Seven Champion [sic], the ballad writer in Dr. Percy, and the allegorical Spenser, who have ingeniously accommodated to the prejudices of Englishmen the history of their Patron, by making him the son of Lord Albret [sic, for Albert] of Coventry: and have conjured up as formidable a dragon on Dunsmore-heath, for the last display of our Champion’s valour, as that is represented to have been which Voragine placed in the monster-breeding deserts of Lybria [Libya?]. (Milner 1792: 25–6) Milner may have been embarrassed by Johnson’s text and its popularity, but he does not repudiate it. 13. Schwyzer emphasizes the particular link between the Welsh red dragon and Henry Tudor: ‘‘Both at Bosworth and subsequently at St. Paul’s, the new king presented the standard of the red dragon, with clear reference to the Merlinic prophecy that this dragon, symbolizing the Britons, would eventually succeed in driving out the white dragon of the Saxons’’ (2004: 21). Evidently by the reign of Henry’s granddaughter, English writers—Spenser and Johnson among them—had accepted the red dragon without question as a fully English icon. 14. I am grateful to Mary Ellen Lamb for suggesting this class-crossing connection. 15. For a particularly gruesome account of the pathology of apprentice violence, see Twitchell 1989: 48–89. His focus is on eighteenth-century ‘‘imaging of violence’’ in France and in England, but his commentary persuades toward a much longer historicity: ‘‘While the aristocratic

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Notes males took to the field to choreograph the rituals of chivalry, the proletariat boys took to the field to enact their violent routines not against well-protected humans but against domestic animals’’ (1989: 54). He further argues that the advance of print culture both memorialized and sublimated real violence through its reproduction in narrative and illustration: Shocks would still be visible, but instead of theatrics on the factory floor, they would be illustrated on paper . . . . Printed pictures and printed text transferred the voyeuristic thrills from real to artificial texts. This process of transporting violent images into print . . . marked the beginning of the modern world. (1989: 65)

16. The unique extant copy of Q1 Part 1 (owned by the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA) is incomplete, lacking the last chapter (XIX) and all but the first page of the penultimate chapter (XVIII). For quotations from these chapters I rely upon the 1608 Q2, from the copy owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The final sentence ends with ‘‘the two and twentie day of Nouember/1608/FINIS/R. I.’’ 17. Citation to Shakespeare follows the Riverside edition by G.B. Evans, et al. (1974). On the possible further relation between The Seven Champions and Shakespeare’s play, see Liebler 1995: 161, 242–3n21, 22.

Notes to Chapter 9 1. Loades further notes that while English writers made arguments for the prince’s ‘‘sovereignty,’’ these arguments fall short of Jean Bodin’s divine right monarchy, although ‘‘we find by the 1590s what might loosely be described as ‘divine right’ arguments appearing for the first time in England’’ (Loades 1997: 3). 2. While Patterson rightly underscores the poignancy of the moral of ‘‘unequal power relations’’ for Caxton’s readers ‘‘especially . . . when right wins the argument but might wins the day’’ (Patterson 1991: 15), it is important also to attend to fables in which the weak win through the use of wit. 3. This is to repay the mistress for refusing to watch over the food Aesop has prepared for the guests, claiming that she has eyes on her buttocks and can keep watch in her sleep. The prank’s underlying aggression can best be read in context with episodes omitted by Caxton that present Aesop in sexual alliance with the mistress. Herself a disposed other, she here flaunts her domestic privilege over the slave. 4. This restriction of movement was part of the Legislation of 1572 Against Retainers and Vagabonds (Joseph 1971: 59). 5. Julian Yates likewise sees Jack’s parodic relation to Henry within the text’s elaborations of liquid economies and the mechanics of flow (Yates 2003: 117).

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6. As I have argued elsewhere, the rise of master clothiers entailed the displacement of women weavers from ownership in the trade, a displacement the text both registers as economic rape and trivializes in the sweet nightingale voices of Jack’s maids engaged in the low-skilled, low-paying work of spinning (Linton 1998: 68). 7. For a substantive discussion of Nashe’s manipulation of oral and written strategies, see Relihan 1996: 143–6. 8. By 1593 Nashe himself had come to be identified as the English Aretine, an association that conjured Italianate ‘‘effeminacy and national weakness’’ (Moulton 2000: 162). 9. Yates 2003: 135. Yates devotes a chapter to Harrington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax and the cultural metaphorics of the flush toilet. 10. Mentz juxtaposes Heraclide’s theological error to Esdras’ similar mistake in ‘‘assuming that his run of luck reveals ‘a charter above scripture’ that will save him from retribution,’’ discussing both in terms of the contradictions in the romance’s Providential plot (Mentz 2001: 352). 11. Ferguson sees Jack as a double of Heraclide’s husband, both being unable to defend their mate from rape (1981: 180). I explore their differences within this similarity. On the farcical turn of the plot, see also Mentz 2001: 353, Stephanson 1983: 31. Notes to Chapter 10 1. Margolies is quoting from The Works of Thomas Nashe (1966) (ed.) R.B. McKerrow with corrections and supplementary notes by F.P. Wilson, Oxford: Clarendon. I: 195.

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Index

adolescence, 15, 78 adventure tales, 4 Aesop, 17, 131–5, 164, 167, 170 Agnew, J.-C., 80, 82, 166 Allarme to England. See Rich, B. Allde, E., 12 Althusser, L., 154 Amadis de Gaula, 11, 65, 72, 166 Amussen, S., 87, 131, 166 Anne of Denmark (Queen), 96 Anatomy of Melancholy. See Burton, R. Andersen, J., 3, 65, 153, 166, 174 Anderson, B., 2, 154, 166 Anglorum Lacrimae. See Johnson, R. Appleby, J., 81, 159, 166 apprentices, 3–4, 7–8 10, 16, 115–16, 118, 120, 127, 129, 135, 139, 153, 160–2, 164 Arber, E., 61, 166, 173 Aretino, 143, 157 Ariosto, L., 124–5 Arte of English Poesie. See Puttenham, G. artisans, 119, 160 Ascham, R. The Scholemaster , 15, 66–7, 166 Astrophil and Stella. See Sidney, P. Baines, B., 145, 166 Bakhtin, M., 140, 171 Baldwin, W., 7 ballads, 5, 7 Barbour, R., 156, 166 Barnet, S., 52–5, 166 Bede, 50, 158, 166

Benjamin, W., 3, 167 Beowulf , 17, 116 Bible, 2 Black Book’s Messenger, The. See Greene, R. Blayney, P., 5, 167 Boccaccio, 48, 52–3, 55, 59 Decameron 52, 55–8 Bodin, J., 164 book production 6; selling, 6 booksellers, 5 Boose, L., 145 Boulton, J., 153, 167 bourgeois, 9, 16, 17, 68, 93, 115–16, 121, 123–5, 127, 129, 174 Brace, L., 139, 167 Braudel, F., 159, 167 Brayman Hackel, H., 6, 10, 13, 167 Breton, N., 46–7, 167 The Miseries of Mavillia 46–7, 167 broadsides, 7 Brown, G., 21, 23, 156–7, 167 Brown, P., 55–6, 167 Bullough, G., 52, 158, 167 Burbie, C., 118, 171 Burton, R., 3 captivity narratives, 116 Castiglione, B., 15, 66, 167 Catholic, 29, 78, 96, 163, 173 Cato, 80 Cavanagh, S.T., 98–114, 167 Caxton. W., 17, 131–4, 164, 167 census, 153 chapbooks, 5, 7, 124–5 Charlemagne, 124

180

Index

Chartier, R., 155, 167 Chaucer, G., 23–4, 34–5, 48, 144, 176 chivalric, 2, 15, 62–3, 66, 75, 124–5, 150, 160 chivalry, 15, 17, 62, 66, 122, 124–5, 164 citizen, 5, 14, 16, 17, 64, 120–1, 124, 129–31, 135, 138–9, 144, 154, 162 Clark, A., 49, 167 class, 1, 6, 7, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 23, 47, 55–6, 60, 62, 64–6, 75, 80, 93–5, 126,-7, 129, 139, 155, 159, 164, 178 Cleaver, R., 60–61, 167 clothiers, 139, 153, 165 Clytemnestra, 145 Cohen, J., 145 Collins, J., 83, 92, 167 commodity, 2, 80, 82, 157, 160, 177 conduct books, 2, 8, 15, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 77–8, 95–6 171 Connor, W., 162, 168 cony-catching, 5, 8, 10, 130–1, 135, 138–9, 147, 173 Cooper, H., 66, 67, 74, 154, 158, 160, 162, 168 Coriolanus. See Shakespeare, W. coterie, 14, 19, 25–6, 30, 61, 156 Countess of Pembroke, 35, 176 Courtier, 15, 66–7, 167 courtship, 1, 61, 68–71, 73, 76, 104 Coventry, 120–1, 127–8, 163 craftsmen, 3, 120, 153, 162 Cranfill T. and Bruce, D., 83 Cressy, D., 127, 154, 168 Crewe, J., 39, 155, 168 crime, 1, 51, 139, 142–3, 146, 147 Cymbeline. See Shakespeare, W. Danter, J., 26, 29, 157 Davies, H. N., 49, 58 Davies, M.-H., 48, 58, 168 Davis, L, 154–5, 168 Davis, W., 154, 160, 168 Dawson, G., 162 Day, G., 14, 18, 20, 25, 154, 157, 160, 168 Decameron. See Boccaccio Defence of Poetry. See Sidney, Philip

Dekker, T., 14, 23 Westward Ho 56, 158, 171 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 142 Deloney, T., 117, 138–9, 155, 160, 176 Jack of Newberry 139 Derrida, J., 155 Dionne, C., 130, 168, 172–3, 177 Doody, M. A., 154, 168 Dorastus and Fawnia (Pandosto). See Greene, R. dragons, 17, 115–16 122, 123, 129, 163 Dunn, K., 9, 10, 168 Dupr´e, J. and Gagnier, R., 81 Eclogues. See Virgil Edward IV, 158 effeminization, 84–5 Eisenstein, E., 31, 157, 168 elite, 3, 6, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 23, 81, 84, 91–3, 96, 115, 118–9, 121, 124, 126 Elizabeth I, 11, 35, 83, 134 England, 2, 5, 6–7, 11, 14–18, 25, 31, 34, 37, 41, 44, 47, 54–5, 57- 60, 64–6, 69, 72, 81–3, 85–6, 88, 90, 96, 99, 103, 115–6, 118–22, 127–9, 131–2, 148, 153, 158, 163–4, 166–78 Englishness, 44, 53 Erasmus, 41–2, 68, 168, 178 eroticism, 1 Este, 125 Europe, 17, 52, 57, 59, 104, 109, 120, 130 Faerie Queene, The. See Spenser, G. farmers, 10, 139 Febvre, L., 2, 169 Fellows, J., 115, 129, 162, 169 female desire, 24, 97 female subjectivity, 14, 46–7, 53 Fenton, G., 7, 158, 169 Ferguson, M., 81, 140, 159, 165, 169 Ferrara, 125 fishwives, 14–15, 47–50, 52, 54–9, 151, 167 Fitzgerald, Lady E., 35, 39 Fleming, J., 82, 84, 91, 169

Index Florence, 40, 43, 158 Folger Shakespeare Library, 63, 164 Ford, E., 15, 62–4, 66, 71–3, 149–50, 160, 169 Montelyon 63–4, 72, 169; Ornatus and Artesia 62–4, 71–2, 169; Parismus and Parismenos 150 Foucault, M., 4, 130–1, 159, 169 Foyster, E. A., 62, 169 France, 40, 44, 54, 83, 120, 158, 164 Frye, N., 154, 169 Fuchs, B., 160, 169 Gascoigne, G. The Adventures of Master F.J., 23, 173 Gellner, E., 1, 3, 119, 154, 169 gentlemen, 11, 12, 120–1, 139, 148, 162 gentlewomen, 94 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 119, 163 Georgics. See Virgil Googe, B., 86 Gossett, S., 159, 178 Gouge, W., 159, 169 Gowing, L., 57, 158, 169 Greene, J., 12 Greene, R., 12, 14, 18–20, 22–3, 26, 29–30, 117, 130, 138–9, 148–9, 151–2, 154–7, 170–1, 176 The Black Book’s Messenger 138, 170; Dorastus and Fawnia (Pandosto) 154; Menaphon 18–20, 29–30, 148; A Notable Discovery of Cozenage 139, 170; Quip for an Upstart Courtier 156 Griffiths, P. and Jenner, M.S.R., 5 Guazzo, S., 66, 170, 172 Guillory, J., 129, 170 Guy-Bray, S., 14, 33–45 haberdasher, 81, 121 Hackett, H., 46, 79, 88, 91–2, 159, 170 Hadfield, A., 6–7, 98–9, 170 Hakluyt, J., 155, 157 Halasz, A., 21, 155–7, 170 Hall, K., 159, 170 Halliwell, J. O., 47, 56, 170 Hallowmas, 58 Haraway, D., 31, 170

181

Harington, J., 151–2 Harrison, W., 155 Harte, N. B., 82, 170 Harvey, G., 19, 21–3, 25–30, 156–7, 170 Have With You to Saffron-Walden. See Nashe, T. Head, R., 155 Helgerson, R., 66, 102, 105, 110–11, 118, 155, 158, 170 Henry V. See Shakespeare, W. Henry VIII, 36, 40, 44, 135 heroic, 9, 10, 17, 24, 61, 63, 66, 68, 76–7, 89, 124, 129, 163 heteroerotic. See love. Heywood, T. 2 If you Know not Me you Know Nobody, 121 Hibbard, G. R., 23, 38–9, 156, 170 Hic Mulier. See Swetnam Hobsbawm, E., 117, 119, 154, 170 Hoby, T., 13, 15, 66, 167 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 50 Horace, 37–8 householders, 87, 93, 131, 138–9 housemaids, 3 Howard, J. E., 57, 82, 158–9, 171, 176–7 Howell, M., 94, 171 Hull. S., 159, 171 Hunter, J. P., 154, 160, 171 Hutchinson, J., 162, 168, 171, 174 Hutson, L., 21, 66, 79, 130–1, 134, 171 Hutton, R., 127, 171 hybridity, 149–50 Inwood, S., 57, 171 Ireland, 83, 120 Irigaray, L., 155, 171 Islam, 160 Italy, 39–40, 42, 44, 109–10, 120, 171, 173 Jack of Newberry. See Deloney, T. Jardine, L., 159, 171 Jed, S., 124–5, 171 Jennen, 158 Johns, A., 27, 31, 157, 168, 171, 173, 176

182

Index

Johnson. R. A Remembrance of Honors Due to the Life and Death of Robert Earle of Salisbury 161; Anglorum Lacrimae 161; Look on Me London 121, 162; Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln 160, 162; Pleasant Walkes of Moore-Fields, 121, 127; Nine Worthies of London 120, 161–2, 171; Seven Champions of Christendom, 16–17, 115, 127, 129, 160–1, 163, 169, 175 Jones, A.R., 92–3, 130, 135, 142, 171 Jonson, B., 30, 167, 174 Joseph, B. L., 131, 135, 165, 172 Jusserand, J.J., 160, 172 Kedourie, E., 162, 172 Kind Kit of Kingston. See Westward for Smelts Kinney, A., 130, 139, 148, 150, 152, 154, 159, 170, 172 Kirkman, F., 12, 64–5, 155, 170, 172 The Unlucky Citizen 12, 64, 155, 172 knighthood, 139 Kyd, T., 156 Lamb, M. E., 14–16, 79–97, 112–13, 164, 172 Latham, A. M. C., 33, 166, 172 Leinwand, T., 81, 172 Lent, 47, 58 Lenten Stuffe. See Nashe, T. Lewis, C.S., 156, 172 Liebler, N.C., 1–17, 66, 115–29, 149, 161–2, 164, 169, 170–2 Lievsay, J.L., 158, 172 Linton, J.P., 17, 130–47, 165, 172 literacy, 3, 6, 13, 117, 153 Loades, D., 131, 164, 172 Lodge, T., 7, 14, 19, 23, 69, 172–3 Rosalind 69 London, 5, 6, 13, 17, 22, 26, 29, 47, 54, 57, 61, 64, 66, 72, 81, 85, 87, 111, 116, 121–2, 127–30, 136–7, 151, 153, 158, 160, 166–78 Londoners, 116 Look on me London. See Johnson, R. Lord Mayor (of London), 121, 129, 161

love, 1, 39, 43, 48–9, 51, 55, 61–3, 67- 71, 73–7, 80, 89–92, 94–5, 106, 111, 114, 143–4 heteroerotic love 73–5, 77 Lucas, C., 62, 85, 88, 91, 172 Lucrece, 145 Lyall, R., 96, 172 Lyly, J., 7, 11, 19, 23, 158, 173 Euphues 11, 158 Lynch, M., 96, 169, 172–3

Machiavelli, N., 62 Machyn, H., 158 MacKenzie, D. F., 30, 173 McKeon, M., 154, 173 McKerrow, R. B., 29, 156, 157, 174 maids, 10, 121, 138, 165 Malory, 17, 116 Marcus, L., 53–4, 173 Margolies, D., 148, 150, 152, 160, 165, 173 Marguerite de Navarre, 48 market, 4, 5, 7, 10–11, 13–14, 18, 19, 21, 25, 28, 57, 61, 66, 72, 79, 82, 87, 116, 130, 151, 153, 156–7, 159 marketplace, 7, 13, 21, 29–30, 115, 129 Markham, G., 93 Marlowe, C., 116 marriage, 1, 60, 66–70, 72, 75–7, 92, 94–6, 104, 108, 111, 114, 171 Martin, H.-J., 2, 169, 175 Marprelate controversy, 156 masculinity, 1, 15, 24, 62, 66, 76, 78, 80, 84–5, 155, 159 Matar, N., 116, 173 Maus, K. E., 160, 173 Mayer, R., 154, 173 Meikle, M., 96 Mentz, S., 14, 18–32, 38, 130, 138, 144, 155–7, 165, 168, 172–3, 177 merchants, 4, 52, 81–3, 86, 93 ,97, 120–1, 126–7, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 153, 155, 158, 177 Merchant of Venice, The. See Shakespeare, W. Meres, F., 62, 173 Metamorphosis of Ajax. See Harington, J.

Index middle class, 14, 15, 17, 33, 64, 120, 124, 129 Middleton, T. (Lord Mayor), 121, 161 Milner, J., 163, 173 Miseries of Mavillia. See Breton, N. Mish, C., 61, 174 Moderatus, or the Black Knight. See Parry, R. Montaigne, M., 80 Montelyon. See Ford, E. More, T., 41, 166 Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln. See Johnson, R. Moulton, I. F., 165 Mueller, J., 159, 171, 178 Mukerji, C., 82, 159, 174 Muldrew, C., 81, 86, 94, 174 multinational, 120 Munday, A., 11–12, 72, 155, 166 Zelauto 11, 177 Muslims, 17, 116

Nairn, T., 162, 174 Narbonus. See Saker, A. Nashe, T., 7, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 117, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Christs Teares ouer Jerusalem 19; Have With You to Saffron-Walden 19, 21–3, 26, 29, 155–7; Lenten Stuffe 18, 157, 177; Pierce Pennilesse 20, 25, 157; Strange Newes 19, 21; Unfortunate Traveler 14, 17, 19, 21, 25, 33–7, 130–4, 150, 155, 169, 171–5, 177–8 nation, 7, 16–17, 38, 82, 98, 102, 110–11, 115–17, 119, 121, 125, 131, 162, 168 national, 2, 13, 15–17, 34, 36, 54, 57, 59, 62, 81, 97–8, 103, 105, 109–13, 115–17, 119–21, 123, 125, 127, 129, 139, 154, 165

183

nationalism, 2, 16, 57, 98, 106, 115, 117–19, 154, 162 Newcomb, L.H., 3, 6, 8, 16, 46, 80, 154, 174 Newman, K., 159, 174 newsbooks, 7 Nicholl, C., 35, 157, 174 Nielson, J., 155, 174 Nietzsche, F., 142, 176 Nine Worthies of London. See Johnson, R. Nosworthy, J. M., 158 Notable Discovery of Cozenage. See Greene, R. Oedipus, 124, 145, 168 Old Arcadia. See Sidney, P. Order of the Garter, 123, 173 Orgel, S., 2, 174 Orlando furioso. See Ariosto, L. Orlin, L., 159, 174 Ornatus and Artesia. See Ford, E. Othello. See Shakespeare, W. Ovid, 27, 37, 42, 157 Palmerin, 61, 65, 72 pamphlets, 5, 7, 59, 130–1, 138–9, 147, 153 Parismus and Parismenos. See Ford, E. Parry, R., 15, 66, 68, 73–5, 174 pastoral, 9, 13, 33–4, 37, 99, 150 patriotism, 33, 35, 39, 86, 117, 154, 162 patronage, 11, 25–7, 30, 116, 156 Patterson, A., 132, 134, 164, 175 Pearson, J., 159, 175 peasantry, 119 Peck, L. L., 159, 175 peddlers, 7 Petrarch, 43–4, 143, 172 Petrarchism, 145 Pettie, G., 158, 167, 175 Pheander, the Mayden Knight. See Robarts, H. picaresque, 4, 8–9, 19, 124, 131 Pierce Pennilesse. See Nashe, T. Platter, T., 159 Pleasant Walkes of Moore-Fields. See Johnson, R.

184

Index

Plett, H., 120, 175 Plutarch, 118 pornography, 145 Powell, T., 93, 175 prefaces, 4, 9, 10, 151 prentices. See apprentices printers, 5, 12, 27–9, 87, 115, 119, 125 printing, 4, 27, 30, 156, 168–9 property, 1, 62, 94, 129, 131, 133–5, 138–9, 142, 144, 153 Protestant, 61, 72, 78, 96, 168 Proudfoot, G. R., 121, 160–2, 175 publishers, 2, 5, 10, 45, 115, 119 publishing, 4, 19, 26, 118, 153 Purdie, S., 136, 175 Purfoot, T., 66, 166 Puttenham, G., 36 Quint, D., 6, 13, 175 readers, 1–17, 20–1, 23, 26–9, 37, 45, 47, 53, 59, 61–3, 66, 79, 82–6, 88–94, 96, 99, 104, 106–8, 111–13, 115, 117–18, 120, 124–9, 131–2, 138, 140–1, 147–8, 150–1, 153–4, 158, 160, 164, 166, 172, 174 reading, 1–11, 13, 15–17, 26, 31–2, 43, 64–6, 72, 79, 93, 96, 116, 129, 131, 145, 152–6, 158–9, 160, 175 Red Crosse. See Spenser, G. Relihan, C., 14, 46–59, 62, 79–80, 85, 91, 93–5, 144, 159, 165, 175 Rhodes, N., 42, 175 Rich, B., 15, 79, 80, 82–9, 90–3, 95–7, 149–50, 167–8, 175, 178 Allarme to England 85, 175; Riche His Farewel to Militarie Profession 15, 79, 82–5, 87, 96, 150, 175 Robarts, H., 68 A Defiance to Fortune 73; Pheander, the Mayden Knight 68, 76, 175 Roberts, J., 109, 159 Roberts. S., 79, 175, 178 romance, 1–2, 4–6, 8, 11, 13, 15–17, 55–6, 60–79, 81–5, 90, 93, 98–9, 108, 112, 115–16, 123–4, 129–31, 138–9, 143–50, 154–5, 158, 160–1, 165, 173

romantic, 9, 15, 44, 62–4, 66, 68, 76, 94, 100, 107, 109, 124, 129, 158 Rosalind. See Lodge, T., Sacks, D. H., 5, 119, 153, 175 St. George, 16–17, 115–16, 120–3, 126, 129, 150, 163 St. Paul’s Churchyard, 151, 167 Saker, A., 149 Salzman, P., 6, 160, 176 Sauer, E., 3, 65, 153, 166, 174 Schindler, N., 68, 176 Schlauch, M., 10, 160, 176 Schoenfeldt, M., 8, 80, 176 Scholemaster. See Ascham, R. Schrift, A. D., 142, 176 Schwyzer, P., 7, 19, 98, 102, 154, 156, 163, 176 Scofield, C. L., 58, 176 Scotland, 95–6, 120 Sekora, J., 80, 176 servants, 7–8, 10, 45, 63, 84, 90, 94, 103, 125, 135, 139, 143, 153–4 service, 8, 84, 88, 89, 90, 92, 124–5 Seven Champions of Christendom. See Johnson, R. sexuality, 15, 50, 62, 77, 79–80, 84, 144 Shakespeare, 10, 12, 27, 35, 51–4, 63, 72, 75, 77, 116, 125, 129, 155, 158, 164, 166–9, 172–5, 177–8 Coriolanus 129; Cymbeline 51–4, 59, 158, 166, 174; Henry V 125; Merchant of Venice 12, 77; Othello 116; Rape of Lucrece 35; Twelfth Night 77; Venus and Adonis 35 Sharpe, K., 3- 6, 176 Shepheardes Calender. See Spenser, G. Sherman, W., 118, 176 shopkeepers, 16, 115, 131 Sidney, P, 18, 20–1, 23–4, 35–6, 38, 76, 93, 150–1, 156, 173, 176 Astrophil and Stella 20; Defence of Poetry 35–6; Old Arcadia 24, 76, 157, 176 Simon, A.L., 58, 169, 177 Smith, A. Wealth of Nations, 81 Smith, A.D., 70, 81–2, 117, 119, 154, 162, 166, 168–9, 171, 174, 176–7

Index Smith, H., 60, 70, 177 Snodham, T., 118 Spain, 120, 158 Spenser, G., 7, 17, 33–4, 69, 105, 115–17, 121, 123, 129, 156, 163, 176–7 Faerie Queene 69, 115, 117, 176; Shepheardes Calender 33–4 Spufford, M., 2, 177 Stallybrass, P., 155, 169, 172 Stanivukovic, G., 1, 14–16, 60–79, 153, 155, 159, 169, 175 Stansby, W., 118 Stationers’ Company, 26, 31, 61 Stationers’ Guild, 12 Stephanson, R., 140, 165, 177 Stevenson, L. C., 4, 153, 160, 177 Stillinger, J., 11, 177 storytellers, 14 Stow, J., 57, 159, 177 Strange Newes. See Nashe, T. Surrey, Earl of, 14, 34–6, 38–44, 136, 143–4, 176–7 Suzuki, M., 36–7, 177 Swetnam, J. Hic Mulier, 59 Tamburlaine. See Marlowe, C. Tertullian, 80 Thirsk, J., 159 Tom a Lincolne. See Johnson, R. travel, 1–2, 5, 8, 10, 40, 55, 61, 64–6, 88, 98, 102, 105, 107, 110–11, 114, 116, 135, 160 trickster 8, 10, 17, 130–2, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 144, 147. See also cony-catching Turks, 88–90, 173 Turner, H.S., 12, 33, 155, 157, 159, 169, 175, 177 Tusser,T., 58, 177 Twelfth Night. See Shakespeare, W. Twitchell, J.B., 164, 177 Urania, The Countesse of Montgomery’s. See Wroth, M. Unfortunate Traveller, The. See Nashe, T.

185

Unlucky Citizen. See Kirkman, F. upper middle classes, 119 Valentin and Orson, 66 van Elk, M., 139, 177 Venner, 58 Virgil, 33–4, 37–8, 40, 159, 175, 177 Aeneid 37, 40 ; Eclogues 33; Georgics 34 Vitkus, D., 116, 178 Viviani, V., 41, 178 Vizenor, G., 140, 144, 147, 178 Wagner, R., 140–1, 178 Wales, 7, 120, 176 Wall, W., 24, 67, 159, 178 Wealth of Nations. See Smith, A. Webb, H., 86, 178 Westward for Smelts, 14, 47–8, 53–9, 150, 158, 170 Westward Ho. See Dekker, T. Wheale, N., 159, 178 Wheeler, L.S., 33, 178 Whetstone, G., 11–12, 162, 178 Whitney, I., 159, 178 Wolf, S.L., 62, 178 Wolfe, J., 26, 28–30, 157 Woodbridge, L., 139, 159, 178 working classes, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 55, 57, 115 Wright, L.B., 2, 64, 129, 162, 178 writers, 7–8, 12, 14–15, 19, 23, 32–3, 36, 42, 47, 61, 65–6, 70, 72, 84, 95, 125, 129, 148–52, 160, 163–4, 174 Wroth, Lady M., 16, 98–101, 103, 105–12, 149–50, 159, 167, 172, 178 The Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania 16, 98–100, 102, 104–15, 150, 159–60, 167, 172, 178 Wyatt, T., 36 Yates, J., 25, 145, 157, 165, 178 Yorkshire sleeves, 54–5 Zelauto. See Munday, A. Zwicker, S.N., 3–6, 176

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