Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and a note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The readership of Renaissance romance
- 2 Renaissance romance and modern romance
- 3 Novellas of the 1560s and 1570s
- 4 Spanish and Portuguese romances
- 5 Fictions addressed to women by Lyly, Rich and Greene
- 6 The ‘Arcadia’: readership and authorship
- 7 The ‘Arcadia’: heroines
- 8 ‘The Faerie Queene’
- 9 Shakespeare's romance sources
- 10 Lady Mary Wroth's ‘Urania’
- Epilogue: The later seventeenth century
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and a note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The readership of Renaissance romance
- 2 Renaissance romance and modern romance
- 3 Novellas of the 1560s and 1570s
- 4 Spanish and Portuguese romances
- 5 Fictions addressed to women by Lyly, Rich and Greene
- 6 The ‘Arcadia’: readership and authorship
- 7 The ‘Arcadia’: heroines
- 8 ‘The Faerie Queene’
- 9 Shakespeare's romance sources
- 10 Lady Mary Wroth's ‘Urania’
- Epilogue: The later seventeenth century
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The importance of a new class of readers, composed of women from the middle ranks of society, deserves attention, because the influence of feminine opinion, an influence which has grown continually more powerful in English and American literature, began to be felt in the sixteenth century … Since women in general have never subscribed to realism, romance in strange opera lands and love stories with happy endings found favour with the Elizabethans even as with feminine readers today.
So wrote Louis B. Wright in 1935, in his eminent study of Elizabethan popular reading which laid the groundwork for much subsequent scholarship. How true, though, is the story he tells, of a rising Elizabethan female readership craving romance?
In the first place, many others concur that the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw a ‘fiction explosion’. Much of that fiction is little known today, although in recent years it has begun to receive more critical attention. It can require some acclimatisation from the modern reader, since it operates not by the familiar principles of the novel, but in the fantastical, non-naturalistic mode designated by the term ‘romance’. It tends to be concerned, for instance, with the adventures of elaborately named knights and ladies in exotic lands and/or in periods of distant mythologised history. Robert Greene's Pandosto, the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, is a typical example; it tells the story of the King of Bohemia, his daughter Fawnia and her lover Dorastus, Prince of Sicilia, set in some unspecified past age when perplexed rulers were inclined to consult the Oracle at Delphos.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000