The
whole hangs together by the thinnest of plots, which is, indeed,
more a means to an end than an end in itself.
whole hangs together by the thinnest of plots, which is, indeed,
more a means to an end than an end in itself.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
Nor is the sense of proportion ever at fault.
You
are given the very essence of the tragedy, and so subtle is the design
that, at the first reading, it may escape you. The style is marked
by a strict economy of words and a constant preference of English
before Latin. From beginning to end, there is no trace of flam-
boyancy or repetition, and, while we applaud the wisdom of the
chroniclers who made this history of Richard their own, we cannot
but wonder that one and all failed to profit by so fine an example
of artistry and restraint.
Few books have had a stranger fate than George Cavendish's
Life and Death of Thomas Woolsey. Written when queen Mary
was on the throne, it achieved a secret and furtive success.
passed in manuscript from hand to hand. Shakespeare knew it
and used it. As I have said, both Stow and Speed leaned upon
its authority. First printed in 1641, it was then so defaced by
interpolations and excisions as to be scarce recognisable, and it
was not until 1657 that a perfect text was given to the world.
And then, for no visible reason, it was ascribed to William, not to
It was
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336
Chroniclers and Antiquaries
George, Cavendish. The uncertainty had no other excuse save
that William, the better known of the two, was the founder of
a great family. Speed gives the credit where it was due, to George
-and Speed's word was worth more than surmise. However, all
doubt was long since removed, and to George Cavendish, a simple
gentleman of the cardinal's household, belongs the glory of having
given to English literature the first specimen of artistic biography.
Steadfast in devotion, plain in character, Cavendish left all to
follow the fortunes of the cardinal. He was witness of his master's
pomp and splendour; he was witness of his ruin and his death.
He embellished his narrative with Wolsey's own eloquence; he re-
corded the speech of Cromwell, Northumberland and others; and
he imparts to his pages a sense of reality which only a partaker
of Wolsey's fortunes could impart. But he was not a Boswell,
attempting to produce a large effect by a multiplicity of details.
His book has a definite plan and purpose. Consciously or un-
consciously, Cavendish was an artist. His theme is the theme of
many a Greek tragedy, and he handles it with Greek austerity.
He sets out to show how Nemesis descends upon the haughty and
overbold, how the mighty are suddenly cast down from their seats,
how the hair-shirt lurks ever beneath the scarlet robes of the
cardinal. This is the confessed end and aim of his work. He is
not compiling a life and times. ' He discards as irrelevant many
events which seem important in the eye of history. The famous
words which he puts in the mouth of Wolsey dying might
serve as a text for the whole work: 'If I had served God as
diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me
over in my grey hairs. '
That his readers may feel the full pathos of Wolsey's fall, he
paints the magnificence of his life in glowing colours. Titles are
heaped upon titles. The boy bachelor grows to the man of affairs,
the ambassador, the king's almoner, the chancellor of England, the
archbishop of York, the cardinal. In lavish entertainment, in noble
pageantry, the cardinal surpassed the king. His banquets 'with
monks and mummers it was a heaven to behold. ' The officers of his
chapel and of his household were like the sands in number. He moved
always in a procession. 'He rode like a cardinal, very sumptuously,
on a mule trapped with crimson velvet upon velvet, his stirrups of
copper and gilt; and his spare mule following him with like
apparel. ' Is it any wonder that fortune ‘began to was something
wroth with his prosperous estate'? Almost at the outset, the note
of warning is struck. The sinister influence of Anne Boleyn begins
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
Cavendish's Life of Woolsey 337
to be felt from the moment that the cardinal comes between her and
the love of lord Percy. In other words, fortune 'procured Venus,
the insatiate goddess, to be her instrument. The king's displeasure
at the slow process of divorce is heightened by the whisperings of
Mistress Anne. And then, at Grafton, the blow falls. The cardinal
is ordered to give up the great seal and to retire to Esher. Hence-
forth, misfortunes are heaped upon him, as they were heaped upon
Job, and he bears them with an equal resignation. He is stripped
of wealth and state. His hopeless journey from town to town
brings him nearer only to death. The omens are bad. A cross
falls upon Bonner's head as he sits at meat. When the earl
of Northumberland, charged to arrest him of high treason, visits
him, 'Ye shall have such cheer,' says the cardinal, with the true
irony of Sophocles, as I am able to make you, with a right good
will. . . hoping hereafter to see you oftener, when I shall be more
able and better provided to receive you with better fare. ' So,
at last, he dies at Leicester, dishonoured and disgraced, stripped
of his splendour, abandoned by his train. And Cavendish, speak-
ing with the voice of the tragic chorus, exhorts his readers
to behold 'the wondrous mutability of vain honours, the brittle
assurance of abundance, the uncertainty of dignities, the flattery
of feigned friends, and the fickle trust to worldly princes. '
Talent and opportunity were given to the simple, unlettered
Cavendish, and he made the fullest use of them. Sir John Hayward
was a historian of another kind. He was not driven by accident
or experience to the practice of his craft. He adopted it as a
profession, and resembled the writers of a later age more nearly
than any of his contemporaries. Born in Suffolk, about 1560, he
was educated at the university of Cambridge, and devoted himself
with a single mind to the study of history. He was in no sense
a mere chronicler. He aimed far higher than the popular history,
digested into annals. His mind was always intent upon the ex-
ample of the ancients. He liked to trick out his narratives with
appropriate speeches after the manner of Livy. He delighted
in the moral generalisations which give an air of solemnity to
the art of history as it was practised by the Greeks and Romans.
His first work, in which are described the fall of Richard II and
the first years of Henry IV, and which was dedicated to the earl
of Essex, incurred the wrath of Elizabeth, and cost him some
years of imprisonment. The queen asked Bacon if he could find
any passages in the book which savoured of treason. 'For treason
surely I find none,' said Bacon, but for felony very many. ' And
22
6
E. L. III.
CH. XV.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
Chroniclers and Antiquaries
when the queen asked him 'Wherein ? ' he told her that 'the
author had committed very apparent theft; for he had taken
most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus, and translated them
into English, and put them in his text. ' This criticism is as
true as it is witty. Hayward aims at sententiousness with an
admirable success, and did his best to make himself the Tacitus
of England.
In the 'Epistle Dedicatorie' to his Lives of the Three
Normans, Kings of England, he declares that, though he had
written of the past, he ‘did principally bend and binde himself
to the times wherein he should live. ' His performance did not
agree with his bent. Concerning the times near which he lived he
has left but a fragment: The beginning of the Reigne of Queene
Elizabeth, of which beginning he had no more personal knowledge
than of the Life and Reigne of King Edward the Sixt, which,
in some respects, is his masterpiece. But, whatever was the
period of his choice, he treated it with the same knowledge and
impartiality. He made a proper use of unpublished material.
The journal of Edward VI gives an air of authenticity to his
biography of that king, and, in treating of William I, he went
back to sources of information which all the chroniclers had
overlooked. In brief, he was a scholar who took a critical view
of his task, who was more deeply interested in policies and their
result than in the gossip of history and who was always quick to
illustrate modern England by the examples of Greece and Rome.
His pages are packed with literary and historical allusions. He
was, moreover, always watchful of his style, intent ever upon
producing a definite effect, and, if he errs, as he does especially
in his Henry IV, on the side of elaboration, it is a fault of which
he is perfectly conscious, and which he does not disdain. Thus,
at last, with the author of Richard III and Sir John Hayward,
England reverted to the ancient models, and it is from them and
not from the chroniclers that our art of history must date its
beginnings.
>
1
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
ELIZABETHAN PROSE FICTION
AMONG the prose compositions of the Elizabethan era are
numerous works which, with many points of difference, have thi
in common, that they all aim at affording entertainment by means
of prose narrative. They are variously styled Phantasticall
treatises, Pleasant histories, Lives, Tales and Pamphlets, and the
methods and material they employ are of corresponding variety;
they are, moreover, obviously written in response to demands
from different classes, and yet their common motive, as well as
a common prose form, unmistakably suggest a single literary
species.
Previous examples of the type will rarely be found in our
literature, for medieval fiction had mostly assumed the form of
verse. The general adoption of prose at this date is, therefore, an
innovation, and, as such, it was due to more than one cause. It
was the outcome, in the first place, of natural development, the
result of that national awakening which led to the overthrow of
Latin as the language of the learned ; with its activities extended
!
in the one direction, the vernacular was not long in recommending
itself for use in another, and so it came about that pros joined
verse in the service of delight. Then, again, Malory, Caxton and
the translators of Boccaccio had shown that narrative might adopt
prose form without disadvantage; through the Bible and the liturgy
the use of vernacular prose was fast becoming familiar; while
further possibilities of prose were being revealed from its place in
the drama. And, lastly, with the departure of the minstrel and the
appearance of the printing press, there ceased, naturally enough,
that exclusive use of verse for narrative purposes, which, under
earlier conditions, alone had made long narrative possible.
Prose fiction, therefore, is one of the gifts of the Elizabethans
to our literature, and the gift is none the less valuable because
unconsciously made. It was no special creation, fashioned upon
22-2
## p. 340 (#362) ############################################
340
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
a definite model, but, rather, the result of a variety of efforts
which, indirectly, converged towards one literary type. Its
elements were of various origin, being borrowed, in part, from
medieval England, in part, from abroad, while much, also, was due
to the initiative of the age. The material with which it dealt,
varied in accordance with the immediate end in view. Its
'treatises' and its pamphlets embodied studies of manners and
character-sketches; it comprised tales of adventure as well as
romance; it dealt with contemporary life and events of the past,
with life at the court, and life in the city ; it was, by turns,
humorous and didactic, realistic and fanciful, in short, it repre-
sented the first rough drafts of the later novel. The history of
the novel had really begun, and, although the term was not, as
yet, generally applied, the word itself had already entered the
language.
The two main centres of influence around which Elizabethan
prose fiction revolved were the court and the people. The court
was easily the supreme element in national life, and one great aim
of contemporary letters became that of supplying the courtier's
needs, just as, in Rome, it was the orator, the typical figure of the
classical age, who had won similar attention. At the same time,
à strong and self-conscious middle class was emerging from the
ruins of feudalism, and the commons were becoming alive to the
interests of their class. Hence, now for the first time, they made
their way into literature, and the treatment of their affairs
became the secondary aim of this prose fiction.
A period of apprenticeship came first, in which the lines of
translation were closely followed, and then, with skill acquired in
the art of story-telling, a host of writers devoted themselves to the
newly found craft. A series of moral treatises, in narrative form,
were the first to appear. They aimed, for the most part, at courtly
education, and, up to about 1584, instruction, often in sugared
form, became the main concern of a body of writers, of whom Lyly
was chief. Then the business became one of a more cheerful kind:
Greene and Lodge wrote their romances for court entertainment,
while Sidney sought distraction in the quiet shades of Arcadia.
In the last decade of the century came the assertion of the
bourgeois element. As an embodiment of realistic tendencies, it
followed, naturally enough, upon the previous romancing; but
social considerations had, also, made it inevitable. Greene, Nashe
and Deloney laboured to present the dark and the fair side of the
life of the people: they wrote to reform as well as to amuse.
## p. 341 (#363) ############################################
Earlier Native Types 341
Throughout the whole period, England, as is well known, was
singularly sensitive to foreign influence : one foreign work or
another seems to have been continually inspiring Elizabethan pens.
Castiglione and Guevara, Montemayor and Mendoza, each in his
different way, exercised influence, which was certainly stimulative,
and was, to some extent, directive, But, while this is true, it is
equally true that, in most cases, the actual production springs
readily and naturally from English soil; southern influence,
undoubtedly, helped to warm the seed into life, but the seed itself
was of an earlier sowing.
First, with regard to the treatises : the enthusiasm inspired by
North’s translation (1557) of Guevara's El Reloa de Principes,
and Hoby's translation (1561) of Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, was as
great as it was undoubted, but it does not altogether account
for Lyly's great work. Courtesy books had been written in English
before those works appeared. The Babees' Boke (1475) 'a lytyl
reporte of how young people should behave,' and Hugh Rhodes's
Boke of Nurture (1450, published 1577), had previously aimed at
inculcating good manners; afterwards came Elyot's Governour
(1531), Ascham’s Scholemaster (published 1570) and Sir Humphrey
Gilbert's Queene Elizabethes Achademy (written after 1562), all of
which treated of instruction, not only in letters, but also in social
and practical life'. Such works as these, together with the numerous
Mirrours, aimed at pointing the way to higher social refinement,
and thus the movement which culminated in Lyly had already
begun in fifteenth century England, and had kept pace with the
national development, of which it is, indeed, the logical outcome.
Secondly, the romance is an obvious continuation of a literary
type familiar to medieval England. Sanazzaro and Montemayor
modified, but did not supply the form, while the French and
Spanish works of chivalry introduced by Paynel and Munday
(1580—90) merely catered for a taste which had then become
jaded. Medieval romances, it is true, had fallen by this time into
a decrepit old age. They were cherished by antiquaries, some-
times reprinted, less frequently reread; they figured mainly with
'blind harpers and. . . taverne minstrels. . . at Christmasse diners
and bride ales, in tavernes and ale-houses and such other places of
base resort? ' But their tradition lived on in the romantic works
1 Note, also, 4 lytle Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren (1554) by Whittinton, R. ,
The Myrrour of Good Maners, translated from the Latin by Alexander Barclay and
printed by Pynson, and R. Peterson's translation of G. della Casa's Galateo (1576).
Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, reprint of 1811, pp. 36, 69.
## p. 342 (#364) ############################################
342
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
of Greene, Sidney and Lodge, though in the form of their sur-
vival they owed something to foreign influence. The pastoral
colouring, for instance, is caught from the fashions of Italy and
Spain; but, for the rest, their differences from the earlier English
forms may be fairly put down to changed aspects of national life.
In a general awakening, something of the old wonder and awe
had, naturally, been lost; the world of chivalry and enchantment
had receded, leaving the heroes of romance in a setting less
heroic, just as, in active life, the knight had turned courtier and
castles had become palaces. Moreover, the medley of form which
these romances exhibit corresponds to that medley of past and
present which lingered in men’s minds at masque and pageant.
The Elizabethan romance is, in short, firmly rooted in Elizabethan
life. Modifying influences came from abroad; but the animating
tradition and guiding impulses were forces derived from the
national life.
And, again, the immediate origin of the realistic work which
followed must be sought for in English works of an earlier
date. It is not necessary to ascribe Nashe's Unfortunate
Traveller, any more than the other realistic works of 1590—1600,
entirely to the influence of Lazarillo de Tormes. In part, all
these works represented a reaction against those ‘feyned-no-where
acts' which had proved enchanting in the preceding decade.
But the ultimate causes were yet more deeply rooted, being social
changes, partly national, partly European. Agricultural depres-
,
sion, long years of militarism and the closing of the monasteries,
had done much to reinforce those bands of 'broken men' that
swarmed like plagues over England. Their existence began now
more than ever to force itself upon the notice of their country-
men, while, at the same time, the tendency of the renascence in the
direction of individualism urged attention to these human units,
and the sombre conditions under which they lived. And yet the
realistic literature of 1590—1600 was of no sudden growth.
Humble life had been portrayed in the lay of Havelok, its laments
had been voiced in the vision of Piers the Plowman and alongside
the romances of earlier England had existed coarser fabliaux
which related the tricks and intrigues of the lower reaches of
society. It was only a more specialised form of these tastes and
tendencies which sprang into being in the sixteenth century. To
the popular mind, collections of jests, as we have seen', had
become an acceptable form of literature, while, at the same time,
1 See ante, chap. v.
## p. 343 (#365) ############################################
The Influence of Translators 343
material was being collected for English rogue-studies'; and, while
the jest-collections had aimed at mere amusement, the rogue
pamphlets were prompted by ideas of reform. It is this material
which anticipates the realistic work of Greene, Nashe and Deloney.
The social influences which produced the earlier and cruder type
of work also produced the later.
The probationary period of translation enters but slightly into
the present narrative; and yet, as it marks the first stage in the
development of prose fiction, it must not be entirely forgotten.
Painter and Pettie, Whetstone and Riche are the translators
mainly concerned, and their efforts are characterised by an in-
teresting change from mere translation to bolder and more original
treatment. Painter, in his Palace of Pleasure (1566–7), supplies
versions of a hundred and one tales, some forty of which are
taken from Boccaccio and Bandello; Fenton, in his Tragicall
Discourses (1567), reproduces thirteen tales of Bandello; and both,
for the most part, are content with simple, faithful translation. In
the twelve stories, however, which constitute The Petite Pallace
of Pettie his Pleasure (1576), an advance on the mere process
of translation is plainly visible, and additions of an interesting
kind are occasionally made. Not only has Pettie's style certain
interesting features? , but his narratives are somewhat modi-
fied as compared with his originals. Into the tragical stories
of Tereus and Procne, Scylla and Minos, to mention only a couple,
the translator has skilfully worked an erotic element, while around
his classical figures he has thrown a contemporary colouring in
such a way as to suggest personalities of his day. In Whetstone's
Rock of Regard (1576), which consists, in part, of prose versions
of Italian novels, the method is, once more, one of mere repro-
duction, but it is worthy of note that one story, vaguely credited
to 'an unknowne [Italian] author,' is, in all probability, due to
Whetstone himself. And, again, of the eight stories which make up
Riche his Farewell to the Militarie Profession (1581), while three
are taken from the Italian, the remaining five are frankly. forged
onely for delight,' though the writer is careful to make his
forgeries reminiscent of Italian motives. In this way did mere
translation merge into adaptation, and then into the process of
actual invention? .
6
1 Cf. Awdeley's Fraternitye of vacabones and Harman's Caveat, ante, pp. 102 ff.
? See post, p. 348.
3 See Koeppel, Studien zur Geschichte der ital. Novelle in der engl. Litt. des XVI
Jahrh. (Strassburg, 1892).
## p. 344 (#366) ############################################
344
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
But these pioneers did more than render easy access to
Italian tales, though this was a service of no slight value; the
avenue thus afforded to new and strange realms revealed new
springs of human passion, and opened out on wide vistas of un-
familiar life. And, more than this, the secrets of successful
narrative, its material and its methods, were silently imparted,
while the feature of originality was being implicitly suggested.
They did much, too, in the way of popularising prose as a
medium of narrative. The merits of a simple prose had long been
recognised in France and Italy ; its more modest garb had been
seen to impose no restraint on the progress of the story, while
it was obviously free from that counter-attraction, inevitable in
verse, to the narrative itself. English writers had yet to learn the
charm of a plain and simple prose, devoid of tricks, but, in
employing prose in fiction, they had begun to learn.
This marked development in the methods of narrative soon
led to its employment in one of the main literary businesses of
the time, that of supplying moral treatises for courtly reading.
These works, which aimed at edifying by means of disqui-
sitions on subjects like love and friendship, form a sort of
intellectual counterpart to such works as Vincentio Saviolo his
Practise, which ‘intreated' of the use of rapier and dagger and
was 'most necessarie for all gentlemen that had in regard their
Honors. They were a revival, in some sort, of the medieval
discussions, though scarcely, on the whole, as trivial. Under an
attractive narrative form, they contrived to disseminate southern
culture after the fashion of Castiglione and Guevara.
The great outstanding figure in this line is that of John Lyly,
a native of Kent, and, in his day, a noted son of Oxford. His
career was one of strenuous effort, ill-requited because ill-directed.
His nice, fastidious temperament, which marked him off from the
roaring section of university wits, seems to have rendered him
ineffective in actual life. At Oxford, he missed recognition ; his
ambition to succeed to the Mastership of the Revels was quietly
ignored; while his closing years, passed in penury and neglect,
form a saddening sequel to the efforts of one, who, in his time, had
adorned the stage, had beautified the conversation of exquisites
of learned tendency' and had been the fruitful occasion of much
wit in others.
The work for which he is famous appeared in two instalments.
Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit was 'lying bound on the stacioners
stall’ by the Christmas of 1578; Euphues and his England, the
## p. 345 (#367) ############################################
Lyly's Euphues
345
second part, appeared in 1580. Together, they form an extensive
moral treatise, and, incidentally, our first English novel.
The
whole hangs together by the thinnest of plots, which is, indeed,
more a means to an end than an end in itself. Each incident and
situation is merely an opportunity for expounding some point of
philosophy. Euphues, a young man of Athens, arrives at Naples,
where he forms a friendship with young Philautus. He falls
in love with Lucilla, the betrothed of Philautus, and is duly
jilted by that fickle mistress. This is all the action of The
Anatomy of Wit: but the moralising element is something more
considerable. The ancient Eubulus discourses on the follies of
youth; Euphues, himself, on the subject of friendship. The com-
plications brought about by the action of Lucilla lead to much
bitter moralising upon fickleness in general, while Euphues, jilted,
discusses his soul and indites 'a Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers. '
Over and above all this, the work contains the hero's private
papers, his essays and letters; and opportunities are seized for
inveighing against dress, and for discoursing upon such diverse
subjects as marriage and travel, education and atheism. In
Euphues and his England, the scene changes from Italy to
England. The two friends, now reconciled, proceed to Canterbury,
where they are entertained by one Fidus, a pastoral figure of
considerable attractiveness ; Philautus soon becomes involved
in the toils of love, while Euphues plays the part of a philo-
sophical spectator. The former lays siege to the heart of one
whose affections are already bestowed, and so, with philosophy
for his comfort, he enters upon the wooing of another, with more
auspicious result. This brings the action to a close, and Euphues
leaves England, eulogising the country and the women it contains,
and returns forthwith to nurse his melancholy within his cell at
Silexedra.
The significance of the structure is best appreciated by re-
membering that the work is really a compilation, and is, in fact,
entered as such in the Stationers' register. Reminiscences of
Cicero occur, particularly of his De Amicitia and his De Natura
Deorum : but the body of the work is drawn from North's Diall
of Princes (1557), the English translation of Guevara's great
treatise. Euphues, in short, is little more than a re-ordering of
this material, and Lyly betrays his source when he introduces
certain details which, in his work, are obvious anachronisms, but
which, in the pages of Guevara, were in perfect keeping. Apart
from this, the adaptation has been consistently made, and the
works coincide in much of their detail. Dissertations on the
## p. 346 (#368) ############################################
346
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
same subjects-on love and ladies, on friendship and God, occur in
each. Both have letters appended to their close, which letters
treat of identical subjects ; Lyly's names of Lucilla, Livia and
Camilla are taken over from Guevara, while the 'Cooling Carde'
of Euphues finds its counterpart in that letter of Marcus Aurelius
against the frailty of women which is embodied in Guevara's
work? . It is only in a few instances that Lyly, while obtaining his
idea from the Spanish work, goes elsewhere for fuller details.
This is, however, the case in his remarks on education, in the
section Euphues and his Ephoebus (1, 264). Guevara, it is true,
embodies this material but Lyly's rendering is more nearly
suggestive of Plutarch's De Educatione Puerorum, though his
indebtedness is but indirect, the actual source being Erasmus's
Colloquia Familiaria (Puerpera).
The character of these sources indicates, clearly enough, Lyly's
didactic aim, in undertaking his Euphues. But, in projecting a
moral treatise, he stumbled on the novel, and, considered as such,
the work, though with many defects, has, also, abundant merit.
It foretells the day of the novel of manners, of the novel involv-
ing a detailed analysis of love. It moves away from the fanciful
idealism of the medieval romance and suggests an interest in con- .
temporary life. Love is no longer the medieval pastime of knights
and ladies ; its subtleties are analysed, its romance and glamour
are seen to lurk within contemporary walls and beneath velvet
doublets. The defects of Euphues, on the other hand, are those of
a writer unconscious of his art. There is a want of action, for the
story is, after all, of but secondary interest. A poverty of inven-
tion is apparent in the parallelism which exists between the action
of the two parts. Again, proportion is wanting; important events
are hurriedly treated; the characterisation is but slight; the
attempt at realism unconvincing. And yet the writer acquires
skill as he proceeds. In the second part, he shows a distinct
advance in artistic conception; there is more action, less moralis-
ing; characters multiply, characterisation improves and variety is
introduced by changes of scene? .
Not the least striking feature of the work, however, is the
peculiar style in which it is written. The style, known as
Euphuistic, won a following in its day, and has since become one
of the most familiar of literary phenomena. It is the least elusive
of styles, being deliberately compounded and, therefore, easily
1 See Landmann, Transactions of the New Shak. Soc. (1885), pp. 255 ff.
? See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 141 ff.
## p. 347 (#369) ############################################
Euphuism
347
6
analysed; but, while its grotesque exaggerations have met with
more than appreciation, justice has not always been done to its
real aims and effects. With all its flowers of fancy, it is nothing
more than the ‘painful'expression of a sober calculating scholar,
and is the outcome of a desire to write with clearness and precision,
with ornament and culture, at a time when Englishmen desired
'to heare finer speach then the language would allow. Lyly aimed
at precision and emphasis, in the first place, by carefully balancing
his words and phrases, by using rhetorical questions and by
repeating the same idea in different and striking forms. Allitera-
tion, puns and further word-play were other devices employed to
the same end. For ornament, in the second place, he looked
mainly to allusions and similes of various kinds. He alludes to
historical personages, found in Plutarch and Pliny, to mythological
figures taken from Ovid and Vergil. But his most daring orna-
mentation lies in his wholesale introduction of recondite knowledge;
he draws similes from folklore, medicine and magic, above all from
the Natural History of Pliny, and this mixture of quaint device
and naïve science resulted in a style which appealed irresistibly
to his contemporaries? . It should here be added, however, that
the acquaintance with Plutarch and Pliny, which the elements of
Lyly's style suggest, was not, necessarily, first hand. On the
contrary, it was, almost certainly, obtained through the writings
of Erasmus, which were in the hands of most sixteenth century
scholars and which had already penetrated into the schools. In
them, Erasmus had presented the fruit of his classical reading. His
Similia Colloquia, Apophthegmata and Adagia offered in a clear,
coherent form much that was best in antiquity and they repre-
sented a storehouse of learning which would save Lyly much
seeking in his quest for learned material. In some cases, where
Erasmus reproduces Pliny or Plutarch verbatim, Lyly's indebted-
ness to the great humanist might be doubted; but when Erasmus
takes over his classical material in a somewhat altered form, when
he expands or explains a thought, or falls into slight error or
confusion, the fact that these variations from the original are
faithfully reproduced in Lyly makes the latter's source undoubted.
And if this indebtedness be proved in the case of variations, a
further debt may be inferred even where identity of expression
appears in the classical writers, in Erasmus and Lyly? .
But this elaborated style, this 'curtizan-like painted affectation'
1 See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 141 ff.
2 See De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche Tooneelliteratuur der
aviº en xviie eeuwen (eerste deel), 1908.
## p. 348 (#370) ############################################
348
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
of Euphuism, did not originate with Lyly himself; he only
‘hatched the egges that his elder friendes laide. ' Its immediate
origin lay in a certain stylistic tendency then fashionable in
England. An almost identical craze had existed, a little earlier,
in Spain, namely, in Guevara's alto estilo, which, however, had
lacked the English device of alliteration. But the English fashion
did not come from Spain, though North’s Diall of Princes has
often been credited with having effected the introduction : while
this translation may have increased the vogue, it cannot have set
the fashion. In the first place, North had employed a French
version of Guevara's work for the purposes of translation, and
this was a medium likely to dissolve any peculiarities of style in
the original. And, secondly, many of the features of Euphuism,
its parallelism and repetitions, its rhetorical questions and classical
allusions, had already appeared in Lord Berners's Froissart (1524),
not only before North, but before Guevara had written! This
fashion, of which Berners is thus the first English representa-
tive, can, subsequently, be traced to some extent in Cheke and
Ascham; while, in Pettie's Petite Pallace, already mentioned, all
the structural, and most of the ornamental, characteristics of
Euphuism are present. It only remained for Lyly to expand the
recognised methods of simile-manufacture by adding to Pettie's
collection, based on fact and personal observation, others invented
by himself, and based on fancy.
The ultimate origin of the fashion lay yet further afield, and
is to be traced to that widespread movement for improving the
vernacular which left its mark on almost every European litera-
ture. The coincidence of its effects in the literary styles of
England and Spain must be ascribed to the prevalence of similar
national conditions in both those countries. In each case, it was
the outcome of a perverted classical enthusiasm, which led to the
imitation of late Latin stylists with their many extravagances.
It was due, also, in part, to the necessity for a courtly diction
which arose simultaneously in both countries, in consequence of
the growing interest which centred round the person and court
of the monarch. As a movement, it was by no means isolated ;
nor did its results assume merely one form. Arcadianism and
Gongorism, the conceits of seventeenth century France, and the
pedantic mannerisms of Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein in
Germany, are merely the outcome of the same influences, working
at different times on different soils.
Nor are the results of Euphuism on English prose style by any
1 See Wilson, J. D. , John Lyly, chap. L
## p. 349 (#371) ############################################
6
Lyly's Influence
349
means a negligible quantity, though its 'cunning courtship of
faire words,' its tedious redundancies and mass of ornaments,
led to its abandonment, generally speaking, about 1590. Sidney,
by that time, had lamented the fact that his contemporaries
enamelled 'with py'd flowers their thoughts of gold,' and Warner
perceived that in running on the letter we often runne from the
matter. ' But some good came of it all. An attempt had defi-
nitely been made to introduce design into prose; and balance and
harmony were the fitting contributions of an age of poetry to the
development of prose style. Prose diction, moreover, was en-
couraged to free itself from obsolescent words; and further
devices for obtaining lucidity, such as the use of short sentences
and paragraph divisions, were, henceforth, to be generally adopted
by English writers.
Apart from its prose style, the Euphues of Lyly exercised
considerable influence upon its author's contemporaries. On
Shakespeare, to mention only one, its effect is marked. Some of
the dramatist's characters, such as his pairs of friends, the senten-
tious old man Polonius and the melancholy philosopher Jacques,
recall Euphues in different ways. Verbal resemblances also exist:
Shakespeare's utterances on friendship, and his famous bee-
passage, place his indebtedness beyond all doubt, even supposing
his numerous similes drawn from actual or supposed natural
history to be but drafts made upon the common possessions of
the age
Lyly's success with Euphues was not slow in inspiring a number
of followers, and, up to about 1584, works of the moral treatise
kind were constantly appearing. But their authors, as a rule,
were painful imitators, who seemed incapable of original effort.
Some affected his style, others worked 'Euphues' into their title-
page, while the majority wrote, as Lyly had claimed to write, for
'the onely delight of the Courteous Gentlewoemen. ' Anthony
Munday's Zelauto (1580) is the first of this school ; it is a
delicate disputation. . . given for a friendly entertainment of
Euphues,' in which Zelauto's praise of England is in emulation
of that of Euphues. In Barnabe Riche's Don Simonides (1581)
Philautus reappears and English manners, once again, form part
of the topics discussed. Melbancke's Philotimus (1583) is made
up of philosophical discussions on the warre betwixt nature and
>
1 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1, sc. 3. 198; As You Like It, Act I, 80. 3. 69.
Henry V, Act I, sc. 2. 183.
3 See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 169–175.
## p. 350 (#372) ############################################
350
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
3
fortune,' and, in Warner's Pan his Syrinx (1584), woman is under
debate, and, as in Euphues, a cooling carde' is drawn up
against the sex. The most notable exponent of this fashionable
type of work is, however, Robert Greene. His character, the date
of his appearance and the attendant circumstances, all made it
inevitable that he should follow the fashion, and work it for what
it was worth. In his Mamillia (1580) he relates how a fickle
Pharicles undeservedly wins Mamillia's hand, a circumstance which
leads on, naturally enough, to questions of love and youthful folly.
Upon these topics Greene, therefore, discourses, and duly recom-
mends what he has to say, by means of zoological similes and
classical precedents. These details of ornamentation he repeats
in succeeding works, in his Myrrour of Modestie (1584), based
upon the story of Susanna and the elders, and in Morando (1587),
a series of dissertations upon the subject of love. In 1587, two
companion works, characterised by the same style, appeared from
his pen. The first, Penelope's Web, consists of a discussion in which
the faithful Penelope, strangely enough, embodies the ideas of the
Italian Platonists in her conception of love, and then goes on to
portray the perfect wife. In Euphues his Censure to Philautus, on
the other hand, the perfect warrior is sketched, Euphues supplying
the picture for the benefit of his friend. But, in spite of this
and other sequels to Lyly's original story, the enthusiasm aroused
by Euphues and the love-pamphlets he engendered had already
begun to subside. Greene was already working in another field;
and Lodge's still more belated pamphlet Euphues Shadow, the
battaile of the sences, 'wherein youthful folly is set down' (1592),
is nothing more than a hardy survival'. It was a work born out
of season ; and, though its author was pleased to describe his
Rosalynde as 'Euphues golden legacie found after his death in
his cell at Silexedra,' such a description was little more than the
whim of one 'who had his oare in every paper boat'—the work
itself belonged to another genre.
Before the vigour of this edifying output had begun to abate,
the literary current was already setting in the direction of the
court romance. The study of codes of etiquette and morality, was,
after all, an unsatisfying diversion, and, to those who looked back
regretfully to the more substantial chivalry of an earlier day, the
romance still made a definite appeal. The earlier romance, how-
ever, had fallen into disrepute by this time; and the Elizabethan
type was drawn up on lines somewhat different, and more in
1 Cf. also J. Dickenson's Arisbas, Euphues amidst his slumbers (1594).
>
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
Sidney's Arcadia
351
keeping with the fashion of the age. With the retention of
characters of a princely kind and the frequent addition of a
pastoral setting, a fresh situation was devised, that of the nobly
born in a simple life; and this, in its turn, brought about a change
of motive, so that the general theme became that of the separa-
tion and reunion of royal kindred. Therefore, while the earlier
chivalrous and supernatural elements are, for the most part,
absent from the romances of Sidney, Greene and Lodge, in their
Arcadias and Bohemias true nobility shines all the more clearly
through the wrappings of humble pastoral circumstance. And
this was a theme of which Shakespeare made good use in his
romantic plays.
Of all the workers in the field of romance, Sir Philip Sidney
stands out as best qualified by nature and circumstance to
deal with the theme. Amid the shades of Penshurst, the golden
past had entered his soul, and its gentle influence was shed over
his remaining days. He travelled abroad and made friends with
Languet; at home, his sympathies were divided between art and
action. He began life as a courtier in 1575, but his idealistic
temperament proved to be but ill-adapted for an atmosphere of
intrigue. Bickerings with the earl of Oxford and a rebuff from
Elizabeth drove him, in 1579, into rustic retreat at Wilton, whence
he emerged to take up diplomatic work abroad, and to fall before
Zutphen in 1586.
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was begun in 1580,
during Sidney's retreat at Wilton, and was posthumously pub-
lished in 1590. It was primarily intended as merely an expression
of some of the 'many fancies' that lurked in his young head'; it
was 'a trifle, and that triflingly handled'; and as the author sent
his sheets by instalments to his sister, the countess, it was on the
understanding that they should proceed no further. The prime
motive of the work was to indulge his fancy with ideal scenes and
sentiments, such as he had sought for in vain in the debased
chivalry of the court; and fancy leads him on to pastoral scenes,
to the calm of a golden age, as it had led others before him in
similar periods of unsettlement.
Earlier pastoral works existed in Sanazzaro's Arcadia (1504)
and Montemayor's Diana (1552); and to each of these Sidney
is somewhat indebted, while, for occasional incident, he goes
to Heliodorus and others 1. From Sanazzaro he obtains his
Notably Achilles Tatius's Clitophon and Leucippe and Chariton's Chereas and
Callirrhoe; see Brunhuber, Sir P. Sidney's Arcadia und ihre Nachläufer.
1
## p. 352 (#374) ############################################
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Elizabethan Prose Fiction
title, and, possibly, the trick of infusing something of a personal
element into his work. Although the work of the Elizabethan
is never autobiographical to the extent of the Italian's, yet,
amidst his fancies, there stray some serious and personal thoughts
on religion, philosophy and love, while the pastoral Philisides
shadows forth the friend of Languet. Sidney's debt to Monte-
mayor is, however, less uncertain, as is shown by the striking
parallel which exists between the opening passages of their
respective works. In Diana, Sidney found a precedent for his
mixed pastoral, for his happy blend of eclogue and romance;
by Sanazzaro, on the other hand, the chivalrous element had
been left untouched. Montemayor's conception of romance, more-
over, embodied nothing of the magical, and Sidney follows him in
discarding this piece of medieval machinery. And, once again, the
love-plot in Montemayor's hands having become more than ever
complicated, Sidney, by the employment of bewildering disguises,
and a multiplicity of incident, succeeds in effecting the same
artistic confusion? .
The main interest of Sidney's plot centres in love-intrigue.
Two shipwrecked princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, after pre-
liminary adventure, fall in love with Pamēla and Philoclea,
daughters of the king of Arcadia, who has taken up his abode
in the depths of a forest. Exigencies of courtship compel the
princes to assume rustic disguises; and Pyrocles, appearing as a
shepherdess Zelmane, soon becomes involved in awkward entangle-
ments. The king falls in love with the pretended shepherdess,
while his queen is attracted by the man whom she recognises
through his disguise. From this compromising position, Pyrocles
is only rescued by the privileged skill of the novelist; explana-
tions and pardons follow, and the sequel is of a felicitous kind.
But the story, as thus outlined, fails to give any idea of the plot's
endless involutions, of its untiring series of alarums and excursions.
Subordinate romances are woven into the main structure; there
are tournaments and fêtes, long-drawn love-scenes and unceasing
adventure with both man and beast. And the movement is further
retarded by numerous experiments in metre, due to Sidney the
Areopagite. There are some choice insertions, like the ditty
beginning ‘My true-love hath my heart,' but, by the side of these,
there are limping hexameters and elegiacs, experiments in terza
rima and ottava rima and occasional exhibitions of the sdrucciolo
or trisyllabic rimes.
1 See Greg, W. W. , Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906).
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
Its Characteristics
353
As a romance, the work enshrines Sidney's noble ideals of
medieval chivalry. The Grecian heroes embody true knightly
qualities : they are simple and gentle, daring in action and
devoted in love. And the pastoral element gives an ideal setting
to this chivalrous action. Arcadia is a land where morning ‘strows
a
roses and violets on the heavenly floor,' a land of flowering
meadows and quiet pastures, where shepherd boys pipe as though
they should never be old' But, while the romance is thus prodigal
of beauty, it is not without many faults, both of form and style.
Its characters, in the first place, are of a shadowy kind; a
strong suggestion of sheer unreality is inevitable. As regards its
structure, there is an obvious lack of order and restraint, and this
is a feature which, while characteristic of the age, is, perhaps,
exaggerated in the case of the romance with its traditions of
amplitude. In drama and poetry, there existed compelling forces
of law and order, to which the intensity of the one and the grace
of the other were due. But the laws of the prose romance were
yet to be evolved, and in the Arcadia will be found no very logical
development, nor skilful handling of the threads of the narrative.
Its discursive character has already been noted, and one result of
this exhausting method lies in the fact that the work concludes
without decent disposal of all the characters. Nor must humour
be looked for in either situation or phrase. Though a few rustics
like Dametas and Mopsa are introduced by way of an antimasque,
the humorous result apparently desired is not obtained. Sidney's
temperament was melancholy as well as idealistic; his vision did
not include either the ludicrous or the grotesque. The work, how-
ever, has the qualities of an eclectic performance, reflecting the
rich confusion of the renascence mind. Fancy ranges in the
romance from Greece to England, and within its purview the
three ages seem to meet. The landscape, in the first place, has
the bright colouring of renascence paintings—something, too,
of the quieter tones of an English country-side; its temples
and its churches, its palaces and pavilions, suggest a medley
collected from Greece, Italy and England. Then, again, the
ancient and medieval worlds appear to meet the modern. While
the pastoral colouring revives the ancient notion of a golden age,
and the chivalrous element is a faint afterglow of medieval days,
a modern touch is perceived in the confessed unreality of the
nature of the romance. Romance, hitherto, had been speciously
linked with the real and actual: now, frankly removed to fanciful
realms, it is made to imply an escape from reality-the sense in
which it is accepted by the modern mind.
23
E. L. III.
CH. XVI,
## p. 354 (#376) ############################################
354
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
The style of the Arcadia represents a successful attempt at
a picturesque prose, for the result is picturesque if somewhat
extravagant. Other contemporaries were engaged upon the same
quest, but, while Sidney avoids their several extravagances, he
indulges in others of his own making. He avoids, for instance, the
devices of Euphuism, the more obvious absurdities of bombastic,
pedantic phrase, as well as those tricks of alliteration' and other
'far-fetched helps' which 'do bewray a want of inward touch. '
His excesses, on the other hand, are those of a poet who forgets
that he is now committed to prose. He enters upon a pedestrian
task, unprepared to forego poetical flight; and, freed from the
restraints which verse imposes, he strains even the limits of a
more willing prose. With coherence of structure he is not greatly
concerned. His sentences, long and rambling, are yet incapable
of expressing his wealth of thought, and are, therefore, expanded
by frequent parentheses. When he aims at emphasis, he occasion-
ally employs Lyly's trick of antithesis, or, perhaps, the epigram-
matic effect of the oxymoron? : but his favourite artifice is that of
a jingle of words’, which lacks effect as it lacks dignity.
The same excess characterises his use of ornament, for which
he depends, not upon erudite display, but, rather, upon a free use
of clever conceits in which sentiment is ascribed to inanimate
objects.
are given the very essence of the tragedy, and so subtle is the design
that, at the first reading, it may escape you. The style is marked
by a strict economy of words and a constant preference of English
before Latin. From beginning to end, there is no trace of flam-
boyancy or repetition, and, while we applaud the wisdom of the
chroniclers who made this history of Richard their own, we cannot
but wonder that one and all failed to profit by so fine an example
of artistry and restraint.
Few books have had a stranger fate than George Cavendish's
Life and Death of Thomas Woolsey. Written when queen Mary
was on the throne, it achieved a secret and furtive success.
passed in manuscript from hand to hand. Shakespeare knew it
and used it. As I have said, both Stow and Speed leaned upon
its authority. First printed in 1641, it was then so defaced by
interpolations and excisions as to be scarce recognisable, and it
was not until 1657 that a perfect text was given to the world.
And then, for no visible reason, it was ascribed to William, not to
It was
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336
Chroniclers and Antiquaries
George, Cavendish. The uncertainty had no other excuse save
that William, the better known of the two, was the founder of
a great family. Speed gives the credit where it was due, to George
-and Speed's word was worth more than surmise. However, all
doubt was long since removed, and to George Cavendish, a simple
gentleman of the cardinal's household, belongs the glory of having
given to English literature the first specimen of artistic biography.
Steadfast in devotion, plain in character, Cavendish left all to
follow the fortunes of the cardinal. He was witness of his master's
pomp and splendour; he was witness of his ruin and his death.
He embellished his narrative with Wolsey's own eloquence; he re-
corded the speech of Cromwell, Northumberland and others; and
he imparts to his pages a sense of reality which only a partaker
of Wolsey's fortunes could impart. But he was not a Boswell,
attempting to produce a large effect by a multiplicity of details.
His book has a definite plan and purpose. Consciously or un-
consciously, Cavendish was an artist. His theme is the theme of
many a Greek tragedy, and he handles it with Greek austerity.
He sets out to show how Nemesis descends upon the haughty and
overbold, how the mighty are suddenly cast down from their seats,
how the hair-shirt lurks ever beneath the scarlet robes of the
cardinal. This is the confessed end and aim of his work. He is
not compiling a life and times. ' He discards as irrelevant many
events which seem important in the eye of history. The famous
words which he puts in the mouth of Wolsey dying might
serve as a text for the whole work: 'If I had served God as
diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me
over in my grey hairs. '
That his readers may feel the full pathos of Wolsey's fall, he
paints the magnificence of his life in glowing colours. Titles are
heaped upon titles. The boy bachelor grows to the man of affairs,
the ambassador, the king's almoner, the chancellor of England, the
archbishop of York, the cardinal. In lavish entertainment, in noble
pageantry, the cardinal surpassed the king. His banquets 'with
monks and mummers it was a heaven to behold. ' The officers of his
chapel and of his household were like the sands in number. He moved
always in a procession. 'He rode like a cardinal, very sumptuously,
on a mule trapped with crimson velvet upon velvet, his stirrups of
copper and gilt; and his spare mule following him with like
apparel. ' Is it any wonder that fortune ‘began to was something
wroth with his prosperous estate'? Almost at the outset, the note
of warning is struck. The sinister influence of Anne Boleyn begins
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
Cavendish's Life of Woolsey 337
to be felt from the moment that the cardinal comes between her and
the love of lord Percy. In other words, fortune 'procured Venus,
the insatiate goddess, to be her instrument. The king's displeasure
at the slow process of divorce is heightened by the whisperings of
Mistress Anne. And then, at Grafton, the blow falls. The cardinal
is ordered to give up the great seal and to retire to Esher. Hence-
forth, misfortunes are heaped upon him, as they were heaped upon
Job, and he bears them with an equal resignation. He is stripped
of wealth and state. His hopeless journey from town to town
brings him nearer only to death. The omens are bad. A cross
falls upon Bonner's head as he sits at meat. When the earl
of Northumberland, charged to arrest him of high treason, visits
him, 'Ye shall have such cheer,' says the cardinal, with the true
irony of Sophocles, as I am able to make you, with a right good
will. . . hoping hereafter to see you oftener, when I shall be more
able and better provided to receive you with better fare. ' So,
at last, he dies at Leicester, dishonoured and disgraced, stripped
of his splendour, abandoned by his train. And Cavendish, speak-
ing with the voice of the tragic chorus, exhorts his readers
to behold 'the wondrous mutability of vain honours, the brittle
assurance of abundance, the uncertainty of dignities, the flattery
of feigned friends, and the fickle trust to worldly princes. '
Talent and opportunity were given to the simple, unlettered
Cavendish, and he made the fullest use of them. Sir John Hayward
was a historian of another kind. He was not driven by accident
or experience to the practice of his craft. He adopted it as a
profession, and resembled the writers of a later age more nearly
than any of his contemporaries. Born in Suffolk, about 1560, he
was educated at the university of Cambridge, and devoted himself
with a single mind to the study of history. He was in no sense
a mere chronicler. He aimed far higher than the popular history,
digested into annals. His mind was always intent upon the ex-
ample of the ancients. He liked to trick out his narratives with
appropriate speeches after the manner of Livy. He delighted
in the moral generalisations which give an air of solemnity to
the art of history as it was practised by the Greeks and Romans.
His first work, in which are described the fall of Richard II and
the first years of Henry IV, and which was dedicated to the earl
of Essex, incurred the wrath of Elizabeth, and cost him some
years of imprisonment. The queen asked Bacon if he could find
any passages in the book which savoured of treason. 'For treason
surely I find none,' said Bacon, but for felony very many. ' And
22
6
E. L. III.
CH. XV.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
Chroniclers and Antiquaries
when the queen asked him 'Wherein ? ' he told her that 'the
author had committed very apparent theft; for he had taken
most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus, and translated them
into English, and put them in his text. ' This criticism is as
true as it is witty. Hayward aims at sententiousness with an
admirable success, and did his best to make himself the Tacitus
of England.
In the 'Epistle Dedicatorie' to his Lives of the Three
Normans, Kings of England, he declares that, though he had
written of the past, he ‘did principally bend and binde himself
to the times wherein he should live. ' His performance did not
agree with his bent. Concerning the times near which he lived he
has left but a fragment: The beginning of the Reigne of Queene
Elizabeth, of which beginning he had no more personal knowledge
than of the Life and Reigne of King Edward the Sixt, which,
in some respects, is his masterpiece. But, whatever was the
period of his choice, he treated it with the same knowledge and
impartiality. He made a proper use of unpublished material.
The journal of Edward VI gives an air of authenticity to his
biography of that king, and, in treating of William I, he went
back to sources of information which all the chroniclers had
overlooked. In brief, he was a scholar who took a critical view
of his task, who was more deeply interested in policies and their
result than in the gossip of history and who was always quick to
illustrate modern England by the examples of Greece and Rome.
His pages are packed with literary and historical allusions. He
was, moreover, always watchful of his style, intent ever upon
producing a definite effect, and, if he errs, as he does especially
in his Henry IV, on the side of elaboration, it is a fault of which
he is perfectly conscious, and which he does not disdain. Thus,
at last, with the author of Richard III and Sir John Hayward,
England reverted to the ancient models, and it is from them and
not from the chroniclers that our art of history must date its
beginnings.
>
1
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
ELIZABETHAN PROSE FICTION
AMONG the prose compositions of the Elizabethan era are
numerous works which, with many points of difference, have thi
in common, that they all aim at affording entertainment by means
of prose narrative. They are variously styled Phantasticall
treatises, Pleasant histories, Lives, Tales and Pamphlets, and the
methods and material they employ are of corresponding variety;
they are, moreover, obviously written in response to demands
from different classes, and yet their common motive, as well as
a common prose form, unmistakably suggest a single literary
species.
Previous examples of the type will rarely be found in our
literature, for medieval fiction had mostly assumed the form of
verse. The general adoption of prose at this date is, therefore, an
innovation, and, as such, it was due to more than one cause. It
was the outcome, in the first place, of natural development, the
result of that national awakening which led to the overthrow of
Latin as the language of the learned ; with its activities extended
!
in the one direction, the vernacular was not long in recommending
itself for use in another, and so it came about that pros joined
verse in the service of delight. Then, again, Malory, Caxton and
the translators of Boccaccio had shown that narrative might adopt
prose form without disadvantage; through the Bible and the liturgy
the use of vernacular prose was fast becoming familiar; while
further possibilities of prose were being revealed from its place in
the drama. And, lastly, with the departure of the minstrel and the
appearance of the printing press, there ceased, naturally enough,
that exclusive use of verse for narrative purposes, which, under
earlier conditions, alone had made long narrative possible.
Prose fiction, therefore, is one of the gifts of the Elizabethans
to our literature, and the gift is none the less valuable because
unconsciously made. It was no special creation, fashioned upon
22-2
## p. 340 (#362) ############################################
340
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
a definite model, but, rather, the result of a variety of efforts
which, indirectly, converged towards one literary type. Its
elements were of various origin, being borrowed, in part, from
medieval England, in part, from abroad, while much, also, was due
to the initiative of the age. The material with which it dealt,
varied in accordance with the immediate end in view. Its
'treatises' and its pamphlets embodied studies of manners and
character-sketches; it comprised tales of adventure as well as
romance; it dealt with contemporary life and events of the past,
with life at the court, and life in the city ; it was, by turns,
humorous and didactic, realistic and fanciful, in short, it repre-
sented the first rough drafts of the later novel. The history of
the novel had really begun, and, although the term was not, as
yet, generally applied, the word itself had already entered the
language.
The two main centres of influence around which Elizabethan
prose fiction revolved were the court and the people. The court
was easily the supreme element in national life, and one great aim
of contemporary letters became that of supplying the courtier's
needs, just as, in Rome, it was the orator, the typical figure of the
classical age, who had won similar attention. At the same time,
à strong and self-conscious middle class was emerging from the
ruins of feudalism, and the commons were becoming alive to the
interests of their class. Hence, now for the first time, they made
their way into literature, and the treatment of their affairs
became the secondary aim of this prose fiction.
A period of apprenticeship came first, in which the lines of
translation were closely followed, and then, with skill acquired in
the art of story-telling, a host of writers devoted themselves to the
newly found craft. A series of moral treatises, in narrative form,
were the first to appear. They aimed, for the most part, at courtly
education, and, up to about 1584, instruction, often in sugared
form, became the main concern of a body of writers, of whom Lyly
was chief. Then the business became one of a more cheerful kind:
Greene and Lodge wrote their romances for court entertainment,
while Sidney sought distraction in the quiet shades of Arcadia.
In the last decade of the century came the assertion of the
bourgeois element. As an embodiment of realistic tendencies, it
followed, naturally enough, upon the previous romancing; but
social considerations had, also, made it inevitable. Greene, Nashe
and Deloney laboured to present the dark and the fair side of the
life of the people: they wrote to reform as well as to amuse.
## p. 341 (#363) ############################################
Earlier Native Types 341
Throughout the whole period, England, as is well known, was
singularly sensitive to foreign influence : one foreign work or
another seems to have been continually inspiring Elizabethan pens.
Castiglione and Guevara, Montemayor and Mendoza, each in his
different way, exercised influence, which was certainly stimulative,
and was, to some extent, directive, But, while this is true, it is
equally true that, in most cases, the actual production springs
readily and naturally from English soil; southern influence,
undoubtedly, helped to warm the seed into life, but the seed itself
was of an earlier sowing.
First, with regard to the treatises : the enthusiasm inspired by
North’s translation (1557) of Guevara's El Reloa de Principes,
and Hoby's translation (1561) of Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, was as
great as it was undoubted, but it does not altogether account
for Lyly's great work. Courtesy books had been written in English
before those works appeared. The Babees' Boke (1475) 'a lytyl
reporte of how young people should behave,' and Hugh Rhodes's
Boke of Nurture (1450, published 1577), had previously aimed at
inculcating good manners; afterwards came Elyot's Governour
(1531), Ascham’s Scholemaster (published 1570) and Sir Humphrey
Gilbert's Queene Elizabethes Achademy (written after 1562), all of
which treated of instruction, not only in letters, but also in social
and practical life'. Such works as these, together with the numerous
Mirrours, aimed at pointing the way to higher social refinement,
and thus the movement which culminated in Lyly had already
begun in fifteenth century England, and had kept pace with the
national development, of which it is, indeed, the logical outcome.
Secondly, the romance is an obvious continuation of a literary
type familiar to medieval England. Sanazzaro and Montemayor
modified, but did not supply the form, while the French and
Spanish works of chivalry introduced by Paynel and Munday
(1580—90) merely catered for a taste which had then become
jaded. Medieval romances, it is true, had fallen by this time into
a decrepit old age. They were cherished by antiquaries, some-
times reprinted, less frequently reread; they figured mainly with
'blind harpers and. . . taverne minstrels. . . at Christmasse diners
and bride ales, in tavernes and ale-houses and such other places of
base resort? ' But their tradition lived on in the romantic works
1 Note, also, 4 lytle Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren (1554) by Whittinton, R. ,
The Myrrour of Good Maners, translated from the Latin by Alexander Barclay and
printed by Pynson, and R. Peterson's translation of G. della Casa's Galateo (1576).
Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, reprint of 1811, pp. 36, 69.
## p. 342 (#364) ############################################
342
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
of Greene, Sidney and Lodge, though in the form of their sur-
vival they owed something to foreign influence. The pastoral
colouring, for instance, is caught from the fashions of Italy and
Spain; but, for the rest, their differences from the earlier English
forms may be fairly put down to changed aspects of national life.
In a general awakening, something of the old wonder and awe
had, naturally, been lost; the world of chivalry and enchantment
had receded, leaving the heroes of romance in a setting less
heroic, just as, in active life, the knight had turned courtier and
castles had become palaces. Moreover, the medley of form which
these romances exhibit corresponds to that medley of past and
present which lingered in men’s minds at masque and pageant.
The Elizabethan romance is, in short, firmly rooted in Elizabethan
life. Modifying influences came from abroad; but the animating
tradition and guiding impulses were forces derived from the
national life.
And, again, the immediate origin of the realistic work which
followed must be sought for in English works of an earlier
date. It is not necessary to ascribe Nashe's Unfortunate
Traveller, any more than the other realistic works of 1590—1600,
entirely to the influence of Lazarillo de Tormes. In part, all
these works represented a reaction against those ‘feyned-no-where
acts' which had proved enchanting in the preceding decade.
But the ultimate causes were yet more deeply rooted, being social
changes, partly national, partly European. Agricultural depres-
,
sion, long years of militarism and the closing of the monasteries,
had done much to reinforce those bands of 'broken men' that
swarmed like plagues over England. Their existence began now
more than ever to force itself upon the notice of their country-
men, while, at the same time, the tendency of the renascence in the
direction of individualism urged attention to these human units,
and the sombre conditions under which they lived. And yet the
realistic literature of 1590—1600 was of no sudden growth.
Humble life had been portrayed in the lay of Havelok, its laments
had been voiced in the vision of Piers the Plowman and alongside
the romances of earlier England had existed coarser fabliaux
which related the tricks and intrigues of the lower reaches of
society. It was only a more specialised form of these tastes and
tendencies which sprang into being in the sixteenth century. To
the popular mind, collections of jests, as we have seen', had
become an acceptable form of literature, while, at the same time,
1 See ante, chap. v.
## p. 343 (#365) ############################################
The Influence of Translators 343
material was being collected for English rogue-studies'; and, while
the jest-collections had aimed at mere amusement, the rogue
pamphlets were prompted by ideas of reform. It is this material
which anticipates the realistic work of Greene, Nashe and Deloney.
The social influences which produced the earlier and cruder type
of work also produced the later.
The probationary period of translation enters but slightly into
the present narrative; and yet, as it marks the first stage in the
development of prose fiction, it must not be entirely forgotten.
Painter and Pettie, Whetstone and Riche are the translators
mainly concerned, and their efforts are characterised by an in-
teresting change from mere translation to bolder and more original
treatment. Painter, in his Palace of Pleasure (1566–7), supplies
versions of a hundred and one tales, some forty of which are
taken from Boccaccio and Bandello; Fenton, in his Tragicall
Discourses (1567), reproduces thirteen tales of Bandello; and both,
for the most part, are content with simple, faithful translation. In
the twelve stories, however, which constitute The Petite Pallace
of Pettie his Pleasure (1576), an advance on the mere process
of translation is plainly visible, and additions of an interesting
kind are occasionally made. Not only has Pettie's style certain
interesting features? , but his narratives are somewhat modi-
fied as compared with his originals. Into the tragical stories
of Tereus and Procne, Scylla and Minos, to mention only a couple,
the translator has skilfully worked an erotic element, while around
his classical figures he has thrown a contemporary colouring in
such a way as to suggest personalities of his day. In Whetstone's
Rock of Regard (1576), which consists, in part, of prose versions
of Italian novels, the method is, once more, one of mere repro-
duction, but it is worthy of note that one story, vaguely credited
to 'an unknowne [Italian] author,' is, in all probability, due to
Whetstone himself. And, again, of the eight stories which make up
Riche his Farewell to the Militarie Profession (1581), while three
are taken from the Italian, the remaining five are frankly. forged
onely for delight,' though the writer is careful to make his
forgeries reminiscent of Italian motives. In this way did mere
translation merge into adaptation, and then into the process of
actual invention? .
6
1 Cf. Awdeley's Fraternitye of vacabones and Harman's Caveat, ante, pp. 102 ff.
? See post, p. 348.
3 See Koeppel, Studien zur Geschichte der ital. Novelle in der engl. Litt. des XVI
Jahrh. (Strassburg, 1892).
## p. 344 (#366) ############################################
344
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
But these pioneers did more than render easy access to
Italian tales, though this was a service of no slight value; the
avenue thus afforded to new and strange realms revealed new
springs of human passion, and opened out on wide vistas of un-
familiar life. And, more than this, the secrets of successful
narrative, its material and its methods, were silently imparted,
while the feature of originality was being implicitly suggested.
They did much, too, in the way of popularising prose as a
medium of narrative. The merits of a simple prose had long been
recognised in France and Italy ; its more modest garb had been
seen to impose no restraint on the progress of the story, while
it was obviously free from that counter-attraction, inevitable in
verse, to the narrative itself. English writers had yet to learn the
charm of a plain and simple prose, devoid of tricks, but, in
employing prose in fiction, they had begun to learn.
This marked development in the methods of narrative soon
led to its employment in one of the main literary businesses of
the time, that of supplying moral treatises for courtly reading.
These works, which aimed at edifying by means of disqui-
sitions on subjects like love and friendship, form a sort of
intellectual counterpart to such works as Vincentio Saviolo his
Practise, which ‘intreated' of the use of rapier and dagger and
was 'most necessarie for all gentlemen that had in regard their
Honors. They were a revival, in some sort, of the medieval
discussions, though scarcely, on the whole, as trivial. Under an
attractive narrative form, they contrived to disseminate southern
culture after the fashion of Castiglione and Guevara.
The great outstanding figure in this line is that of John Lyly,
a native of Kent, and, in his day, a noted son of Oxford. His
career was one of strenuous effort, ill-requited because ill-directed.
His nice, fastidious temperament, which marked him off from the
roaring section of university wits, seems to have rendered him
ineffective in actual life. At Oxford, he missed recognition ; his
ambition to succeed to the Mastership of the Revels was quietly
ignored; while his closing years, passed in penury and neglect,
form a saddening sequel to the efforts of one, who, in his time, had
adorned the stage, had beautified the conversation of exquisites
of learned tendency' and had been the fruitful occasion of much
wit in others.
The work for which he is famous appeared in two instalments.
Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit was 'lying bound on the stacioners
stall’ by the Christmas of 1578; Euphues and his England, the
## p. 345 (#367) ############################################
Lyly's Euphues
345
second part, appeared in 1580. Together, they form an extensive
moral treatise, and, incidentally, our first English novel.
The
whole hangs together by the thinnest of plots, which is, indeed,
more a means to an end than an end in itself. Each incident and
situation is merely an opportunity for expounding some point of
philosophy. Euphues, a young man of Athens, arrives at Naples,
where he forms a friendship with young Philautus. He falls
in love with Lucilla, the betrothed of Philautus, and is duly
jilted by that fickle mistress. This is all the action of The
Anatomy of Wit: but the moralising element is something more
considerable. The ancient Eubulus discourses on the follies of
youth; Euphues, himself, on the subject of friendship. The com-
plications brought about by the action of Lucilla lead to much
bitter moralising upon fickleness in general, while Euphues, jilted,
discusses his soul and indites 'a Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers. '
Over and above all this, the work contains the hero's private
papers, his essays and letters; and opportunities are seized for
inveighing against dress, and for discoursing upon such diverse
subjects as marriage and travel, education and atheism. In
Euphues and his England, the scene changes from Italy to
England. The two friends, now reconciled, proceed to Canterbury,
where they are entertained by one Fidus, a pastoral figure of
considerable attractiveness ; Philautus soon becomes involved
in the toils of love, while Euphues plays the part of a philo-
sophical spectator. The former lays siege to the heart of one
whose affections are already bestowed, and so, with philosophy
for his comfort, he enters upon the wooing of another, with more
auspicious result. This brings the action to a close, and Euphues
leaves England, eulogising the country and the women it contains,
and returns forthwith to nurse his melancholy within his cell at
Silexedra.
The significance of the structure is best appreciated by re-
membering that the work is really a compilation, and is, in fact,
entered as such in the Stationers' register. Reminiscences of
Cicero occur, particularly of his De Amicitia and his De Natura
Deorum : but the body of the work is drawn from North's Diall
of Princes (1557), the English translation of Guevara's great
treatise. Euphues, in short, is little more than a re-ordering of
this material, and Lyly betrays his source when he introduces
certain details which, in his work, are obvious anachronisms, but
which, in the pages of Guevara, were in perfect keeping. Apart
from this, the adaptation has been consistently made, and the
works coincide in much of their detail. Dissertations on the
## p. 346 (#368) ############################################
346
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
same subjects-on love and ladies, on friendship and God, occur in
each. Both have letters appended to their close, which letters
treat of identical subjects ; Lyly's names of Lucilla, Livia and
Camilla are taken over from Guevara, while the 'Cooling Carde'
of Euphues finds its counterpart in that letter of Marcus Aurelius
against the frailty of women which is embodied in Guevara's
work? . It is only in a few instances that Lyly, while obtaining his
idea from the Spanish work, goes elsewhere for fuller details.
This is, however, the case in his remarks on education, in the
section Euphues and his Ephoebus (1, 264). Guevara, it is true,
embodies this material but Lyly's rendering is more nearly
suggestive of Plutarch's De Educatione Puerorum, though his
indebtedness is but indirect, the actual source being Erasmus's
Colloquia Familiaria (Puerpera).
The character of these sources indicates, clearly enough, Lyly's
didactic aim, in undertaking his Euphues. But, in projecting a
moral treatise, he stumbled on the novel, and, considered as such,
the work, though with many defects, has, also, abundant merit.
It foretells the day of the novel of manners, of the novel involv-
ing a detailed analysis of love. It moves away from the fanciful
idealism of the medieval romance and suggests an interest in con- .
temporary life. Love is no longer the medieval pastime of knights
and ladies ; its subtleties are analysed, its romance and glamour
are seen to lurk within contemporary walls and beneath velvet
doublets. The defects of Euphues, on the other hand, are those of
a writer unconscious of his art. There is a want of action, for the
story is, after all, of but secondary interest. A poverty of inven-
tion is apparent in the parallelism which exists between the action
of the two parts. Again, proportion is wanting; important events
are hurriedly treated; the characterisation is but slight; the
attempt at realism unconvincing. And yet the writer acquires
skill as he proceeds. In the second part, he shows a distinct
advance in artistic conception; there is more action, less moralis-
ing; characters multiply, characterisation improves and variety is
introduced by changes of scene? .
Not the least striking feature of the work, however, is the
peculiar style in which it is written. The style, known as
Euphuistic, won a following in its day, and has since become one
of the most familiar of literary phenomena. It is the least elusive
of styles, being deliberately compounded and, therefore, easily
1 See Landmann, Transactions of the New Shak. Soc. (1885), pp. 255 ff.
? See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 141 ff.
## p. 347 (#369) ############################################
Euphuism
347
6
analysed; but, while its grotesque exaggerations have met with
more than appreciation, justice has not always been done to its
real aims and effects. With all its flowers of fancy, it is nothing
more than the ‘painful'expression of a sober calculating scholar,
and is the outcome of a desire to write with clearness and precision,
with ornament and culture, at a time when Englishmen desired
'to heare finer speach then the language would allow. Lyly aimed
at precision and emphasis, in the first place, by carefully balancing
his words and phrases, by using rhetorical questions and by
repeating the same idea in different and striking forms. Allitera-
tion, puns and further word-play were other devices employed to
the same end. For ornament, in the second place, he looked
mainly to allusions and similes of various kinds. He alludes to
historical personages, found in Plutarch and Pliny, to mythological
figures taken from Ovid and Vergil. But his most daring orna-
mentation lies in his wholesale introduction of recondite knowledge;
he draws similes from folklore, medicine and magic, above all from
the Natural History of Pliny, and this mixture of quaint device
and naïve science resulted in a style which appealed irresistibly
to his contemporaries? . It should here be added, however, that
the acquaintance with Plutarch and Pliny, which the elements of
Lyly's style suggest, was not, necessarily, first hand. On the
contrary, it was, almost certainly, obtained through the writings
of Erasmus, which were in the hands of most sixteenth century
scholars and which had already penetrated into the schools. In
them, Erasmus had presented the fruit of his classical reading. His
Similia Colloquia, Apophthegmata and Adagia offered in a clear,
coherent form much that was best in antiquity and they repre-
sented a storehouse of learning which would save Lyly much
seeking in his quest for learned material. In some cases, where
Erasmus reproduces Pliny or Plutarch verbatim, Lyly's indebted-
ness to the great humanist might be doubted; but when Erasmus
takes over his classical material in a somewhat altered form, when
he expands or explains a thought, or falls into slight error or
confusion, the fact that these variations from the original are
faithfully reproduced in Lyly makes the latter's source undoubted.
And if this indebtedness be proved in the case of variations, a
further debt may be inferred even where identity of expression
appears in the classical writers, in Erasmus and Lyly? .
But this elaborated style, this 'curtizan-like painted affectation'
1 See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 141 ff.
2 See De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche Tooneelliteratuur der
aviº en xviie eeuwen (eerste deel), 1908.
## p. 348 (#370) ############################################
348
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
of Euphuism, did not originate with Lyly himself; he only
‘hatched the egges that his elder friendes laide. ' Its immediate
origin lay in a certain stylistic tendency then fashionable in
England. An almost identical craze had existed, a little earlier,
in Spain, namely, in Guevara's alto estilo, which, however, had
lacked the English device of alliteration. But the English fashion
did not come from Spain, though North’s Diall of Princes has
often been credited with having effected the introduction : while
this translation may have increased the vogue, it cannot have set
the fashion. In the first place, North had employed a French
version of Guevara's work for the purposes of translation, and
this was a medium likely to dissolve any peculiarities of style in
the original. And, secondly, many of the features of Euphuism,
its parallelism and repetitions, its rhetorical questions and classical
allusions, had already appeared in Lord Berners's Froissart (1524),
not only before North, but before Guevara had written! This
fashion, of which Berners is thus the first English representa-
tive, can, subsequently, be traced to some extent in Cheke and
Ascham; while, in Pettie's Petite Pallace, already mentioned, all
the structural, and most of the ornamental, characteristics of
Euphuism are present. It only remained for Lyly to expand the
recognised methods of simile-manufacture by adding to Pettie's
collection, based on fact and personal observation, others invented
by himself, and based on fancy.
The ultimate origin of the fashion lay yet further afield, and
is to be traced to that widespread movement for improving the
vernacular which left its mark on almost every European litera-
ture. The coincidence of its effects in the literary styles of
England and Spain must be ascribed to the prevalence of similar
national conditions in both those countries. In each case, it was
the outcome of a perverted classical enthusiasm, which led to the
imitation of late Latin stylists with their many extravagances.
It was due, also, in part, to the necessity for a courtly diction
which arose simultaneously in both countries, in consequence of
the growing interest which centred round the person and court
of the monarch. As a movement, it was by no means isolated ;
nor did its results assume merely one form. Arcadianism and
Gongorism, the conceits of seventeenth century France, and the
pedantic mannerisms of Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein in
Germany, are merely the outcome of the same influences, working
at different times on different soils.
Nor are the results of Euphuism on English prose style by any
1 See Wilson, J. D. , John Lyly, chap. L
## p. 349 (#371) ############################################
6
Lyly's Influence
349
means a negligible quantity, though its 'cunning courtship of
faire words,' its tedious redundancies and mass of ornaments,
led to its abandonment, generally speaking, about 1590. Sidney,
by that time, had lamented the fact that his contemporaries
enamelled 'with py'd flowers their thoughts of gold,' and Warner
perceived that in running on the letter we often runne from the
matter. ' But some good came of it all. An attempt had defi-
nitely been made to introduce design into prose; and balance and
harmony were the fitting contributions of an age of poetry to the
development of prose style. Prose diction, moreover, was en-
couraged to free itself from obsolescent words; and further
devices for obtaining lucidity, such as the use of short sentences
and paragraph divisions, were, henceforth, to be generally adopted
by English writers.
Apart from its prose style, the Euphues of Lyly exercised
considerable influence upon its author's contemporaries. On
Shakespeare, to mention only one, its effect is marked. Some of
the dramatist's characters, such as his pairs of friends, the senten-
tious old man Polonius and the melancholy philosopher Jacques,
recall Euphues in different ways. Verbal resemblances also exist:
Shakespeare's utterances on friendship, and his famous bee-
passage, place his indebtedness beyond all doubt, even supposing
his numerous similes drawn from actual or supposed natural
history to be but drafts made upon the common possessions of
the age
Lyly's success with Euphues was not slow in inspiring a number
of followers, and, up to about 1584, works of the moral treatise
kind were constantly appearing. But their authors, as a rule,
were painful imitators, who seemed incapable of original effort.
Some affected his style, others worked 'Euphues' into their title-
page, while the majority wrote, as Lyly had claimed to write, for
'the onely delight of the Courteous Gentlewoemen. ' Anthony
Munday's Zelauto (1580) is the first of this school ; it is a
delicate disputation. . . given for a friendly entertainment of
Euphues,' in which Zelauto's praise of England is in emulation
of that of Euphues. In Barnabe Riche's Don Simonides (1581)
Philautus reappears and English manners, once again, form part
of the topics discussed. Melbancke's Philotimus (1583) is made
up of philosophical discussions on the warre betwixt nature and
>
1 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1, sc. 3. 198; As You Like It, Act I, 80. 3. 69.
Henry V, Act I, sc. 2. 183.
3 See Bond, Works of Lyly, vol. 1, pp. 169–175.
## p. 350 (#372) ############################################
350
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
3
fortune,' and, in Warner's Pan his Syrinx (1584), woman is under
debate, and, as in Euphues, a cooling carde' is drawn up
against the sex. The most notable exponent of this fashionable
type of work is, however, Robert Greene. His character, the date
of his appearance and the attendant circumstances, all made it
inevitable that he should follow the fashion, and work it for what
it was worth. In his Mamillia (1580) he relates how a fickle
Pharicles undeservedly wins Mamillia's hand, a circumstance which
leads on, naturally enough, to questions of love and youthful folly.
Upon these topics Greene, therefore, discourses, and duly recom-
mends what he has to say, by means of zoological similes and
classical precedents. These details of ornamentation he repeats
in succeeding works, in his Myrrour of Modestie (1584), based
upon the story of Susanna and the elders, and in Morando (1587),
a series of dissertations upon the subject of love. In 1587, two
companion works, characterised by the same style, appeared from
his pen. The first, Penelope's Web, consists of a discussion in which
the faithful Penelope, strangely enough, embodies the ideas of the
Italian Platonists in her conception of love, and then goes on to
portray the perfect wife. In Euphues his Censure to Philautus, on
the other hand, the perfect warrior is sketched, Euphues supplying
the picture for the benefit of his friend. But, in spite of this
and other sequels to Lyly's original story, the enthusiasm aroused
by Euphues and the love-pamphlets he engendered had already
begun to subside. Greene was already working in another field;
and Lodge's still more belated pamphlet Euphues Shadow, the
battaile of the sences, 'wherein youthful folly is set down' (1592),
is nothing more than a hardy survival'. It was a work born out
of season ; and, though its author was pleased to describe his
Rosalynde as 'Euphues golden legacie found after his death in
his cell at Silexedra,' such a description was little more than the
whim of one 'who had his oare in every paper boat'—the work
itself belonged to another genre.
Before the vigour of this edifying output had begun to abate,
the literary current was already setting in the direction of the
court romance. The study of codes of etiquette and morality, was,
after all, an unsatisfying diversion, and, to those who looked back
regretfully to the more substantial chivalry of an earlier day, the
romance still made a definite appeal. The earlier romance, how-
ever, had fallen into disrepute by this time; and the Elizabethan
type was drawn up on lines somewhat different, and more in
1 Cf. also J. Dickenson's Arisbas, Euphues amidst his slumbers (1594).
>
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
Sidney's Arcadia
351
keeping with the fashion of the age. With the retention of
characters of a princely kind and the frequent addition of a
pastoral setting, a fresh situation was devised, that of the nobly
born in a simple life; and this, in its turn, brought about a change
of motive, so that the general theme became that of the separa-
tion and reunion of royal kindred. Therefore, while the earlier
chivalrous and supernatural elements are, for the most part,
absent from the romances of Sidney, Greene and Lodge, in their
Arcadias and Bohemias true nobility shines all the more clearly
through the wrappings of humble pastoral circumstance. And
this was a theme of which Shakespeare made good use in his
romantic plays.
Of all the workers in the field of romance, Sir Philip Sidney
stands out as best qualified by nature and circumstance to
deal with the theme. Amid the shades of Penshurst, the golden
past had entered his soul, and its gentle influence was shed over
his remaining days. He travelled abroad and made friends with
Languet; at home, his sympathies were divided between art and
action. He began life as a courtier in 1575, but his idealistic
temperament proved to be but ill-adapted for an atmosphere of
intrigue. Bickerings with the earl of Oxford and a rebuff from
Elizabeth drove him, in 1579, into rustic retreat at Wilton, whence
he emerged to take up diplomatic work abroad, and to fall before
Zutphen in 1586.
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was begun in 1580,
during Sidney's retreat at Wilton, and was posthumously pub-
lished in 1590. It was primarily intended as merely an expression
of some of the 'many fancies' that lurked in his young head'; it
was 'a trifle, and that triflingly handled'; and as the author sent
his sheets by instalments to his sister, the countess, it was on the
understanding that they should proceed no further. The prime
motive of the work was to indulge his fancy with ideal scenes and
sentiments, such as he had sought for in vain in the debased
chivalry of the court; and fancy leads him on to pastoral scenes,
to the calm of a golden age, as it had led others before him in
similar periods of unsettlement.
Earlier pastoral works existed in Sanazzaro's Arcadia (1504)
and Montemayor's Diana (1552); and to each of these Sidney
is somewhat indebted, while, for occasional incident, he goes
to Heliodorus and others 1. From Sanazzaro he obtains his
Notably Achilles Tatius's Clitophon and Leucippe and Chariton's Chereas and
Callirrhoe; see Brunhuber, Sir P. Sidney's Arcadia und ihre Nachläufer.
1
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352
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
title, and, possibly, the trick of infusing something of a personal
element into his work. Although the work of the Elizabethan
is never autobiographical to the extent of the Italian's, yet,
amidst his fancies, there stray some serious and personal thoughts
on religion, philosophy and love, while the pastoral Philisides
shadows forth the friend of Languet. Sidney's debt to Monte-
mayor is, however, less uncertain, as is shown by the striking
parallel which exists between the opening passages of their
respective works. In Diana, Sidney found a precedent for his
mixed pastoral, for his happy blend of eclogue and romance;
by Sanazzaro, on the other hand, the chivalrous element had
been left untouched. Montemayor's conception of romance, more-
over, embodied nothing of the magical, and Sidney follows him in
discarding this piece of medieval machinery. And, once again, the
love-plot in Montemayor's hands having become more than ever
complicated, Sidney, by the employment of bewildering disguises,
and a multiplicity of incident, succeeds in effecting the same
artistic confusion? .
The main interest of Sidney's plot centres in love-intrigue.
Two shipwrecked princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, after pre-
liminary adventure, fall in love with Pamēla and Philoclea,
daughters of the king of Arcadia, who has taken up his abode
in the depths of a forest. Exigencies of courtship compel the
princes to assume rustic disguises; and Pyrocles, appearing as a
shepherdess Zelmane, soon becomes involved in awkward entangle-
ments. The king falls in love with the pretended shepherdess,
while his queen is attracted by the man whom she recognises
through his disguise. From this compromising position, Pyrocles
is only rescued by the privileged skill of the novelist; explana-
tions and pardons follow, and the sequel is of a felicitous kind.
But the story, as thus outlined, fails to give any idea of the plot's
endless involutions, of its untiring series of alarums and excursions.
Subordinate romances are woven into the main structure; there
are tournaments and fêtes, long-drawn love-scenes and unceasing
adventure with both man and beast. And the movement is further
retarded by numerous experiments in metre, due to Sidney the
Areopagite. There are some choice insertions, like the ditty
beginning ‘My true-love hath my heart,' but, by the side of these,
there are limping hexameters and elegiacs, experiments in terza
rima and ottava rima and occasional exhibitions of the sdrucciolo
or trisyllabic rimes.
1 See Greg, W. W. , Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906).
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
Its Characteristics
353
As a romance, the work enshrines Sidney's noble ideals of
medieval chivalry. The Grecian heroes embody true knightly
qualities : they are simple and gentle, daring in action and
devoted in love. And the pastoral element gives an ideal setting
to this chivalrous action. Arcadia is a land where morning ‘strows
a
roses and violets on the heavenly floor,' a land of flowering
meadows and quiet pastures, where shepherd boys pipe as though
they should never be old' But, while the romance is thus prodigal
of beauty, it is not without many faults, both of form and style.
Its characters, in the first place, are of a shadowy kind; a
strong suggestion of sheer unreality is inevitable. As regards its
structure, there is an obvious lack of order and restraint, and this
is a feature which, while characteristic of the age, is, perhaps,
exaggerated in the case of the romance with its traditions of
amplitude. In drama and poetry, there existed compelling forces
of law and order, to which the intensity of the one and the grace
of the other were due. But the laws of the prose romance were
yet to be evolved, and in the Arcadia will be found no very logical
development, nor skilful handling of the threads of the narrative.
Its discursive character has already been noted, and one result of
this exhausting method lies in the fact that the work concludes
without decent disposal of all the characters. Nor must humour
be looked for in either situation or phrase. Though a few rustics
like Dametas and Mopsa are introduced by way of an antimasque,
the humorous result apparently desired is not obtained. Sidney's
temperament was melancholy as well as idealistic; his vision did
not include either the ludicrous or the grotesque. The work, how-
ever, has the qualities of an eclectic performance, reflecting the
rich confusion of the renascence mind. Fancy ranges in the
romance from Greece to England, and within its purview the
three ages seem to meet. The landscape, in the first place, has
the bright colouring of renascence paintings—something, too,
of the quieter tones of an English country-side; its temples
and its churches, its palaces and pavilions, suggest a medley
collected from Greece, Italy and England. Then, again, the
ancient and medieval worlds appear to meet the modern. While
the pastoral colouring revives the ancient notion of a golden age,
and the chivalrous element is a faint afterglow of medieval days,
a modern touch is perceived in the confessed unreality of the
nature of the romance. Romance, hitherto, had been speciously
linked with the real and actual: now, frankly removed to fanciful
realms, it is made to imply an escape from reality-the sense in
which it is accepted by the modern mind.
23
E. L. III.
CH. XVI,
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354
Elizabethan Prose Fiction
The style of the Arcadia represents a successful attempt at
a picturesque prose, for the result is picturesque if somewhat
extravagant. Other contemporaries were engaged upon the same
quest, but, while Sidney avoids their several extravagances, he
indulges in others of his own making. He avoids, for instance, the
devices of Euphuism, the more obvious absurdities of bombastic,
pedantic phrase, as well as those tricks of alliteration' and other
'far-fetched helps' which 'do bewray a want of inward touch. '
His excesses, on the other hand, are those of a poet who forgets
that he is now committed to prose. He enters upon a pedestrian
task, unprepared to forego poetical flight; and, freed from the
restraints which verse imposes, he strains even the limits of a
more willing prose. With coherence of structure he is not greatly
concerned. His sentences, long and rambling, are yet incapable
of expressing his wealth of thought, and are, therefore, expanded
by frequent parentheses. When he aims at emphasis, he occasion-
ally employs Lyly's trick of antithesis, or, perhaps, the epigram-
matic effect of the oxymoron? : but his favourite artifice is that of
a jingle of words’, which lacks effect as it lacks dignity.
The same excess characterises his use of ornament, for which
he depends, not upon erudite display, but, rather, upon a free use
of clever conceits in which sentiment is ascribed to inanimate
objects.
