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The Narrative Stance in ‘The Adventures of Master F.J.’: Gascoigne as Critic of His Own Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Too much discussion of George Gascoigne's ‘Adventures of Master F.J.’ has bogged down in the question of whether the story is fiction or autobiography. While it is impossible now to be sure to what degree the young Master F.J. is an autobiographical portrait of the younger Gascoigne, it is not only possible but inevitable to find Gascoigne the writer in the figure of G.T.
‘The Adventures’ as it first appears in the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres of 1573 is an older man's account of the misadventures of a younger man in love. The raconteur, one G.T., reports what happened to his young friend, Master F.J. Following much negative reaction, the story is transformed in the revised Posies of 1575 into ‘The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valesco, translated out of the Italian riding tales of Bartello.’ This pseudo-translation becomes an anonymous omniscient narrator's account of the misadventures of a young man in love. The loss of G.T. as narrator entails with it the loss of a multitude of subtleties of attitude and tone.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1976
References
1 Although it is usually argued that F.J. is Gascoigne himself, the opposing argument is represented by Robert P. Adams in ‘Gascoigne's “Master F.J.” as Original Fiction,’ PMLA, 63 (1958), 315-326.
2 This loss has been noted previously. See, for example, Bradner, Leicester, ‘Point of View in George Gascoigne's Fiction,’ Studies in Short Fiction, 3 (1965), 21–22.Google Scholar
3 Gascoigne, George, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. Prouty, C. T. (Columbia, Mo.: Univ. of Missouri, 1942), pp. 50–51.Google Scholar All page numbers following subsequent references to the 1573 Flowres refer to this edition.
4 What presents itself retrospectively as a story with interpolated verses is in fact a collection of poems which predate the narrative prose links between them. See Prouty, C. T., George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), pp. 194–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 While the date of composition is unknown, the absence of the ‘Notes’ in the 1573 edition and their inclusion in the 1575 edition suggests that they were written during the same period when Gascoigne was rearranging his Flowres into Posies.
6 ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction,’ in The Complete Poems of George Gascoigne, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (Roxburghe Library, 1869), I, 508. All page numbers following subsequent references to ‘Notes’ or the 1575 Posies will refer to this edition. Abbreviations are expanded and modern typographical conventions followed.
7 Gascoigne's rearrangement of poems into these three classifications reveals a great deal about his own critical and ethical standards. Prouty gives up too soon on deriving the criteria for categorizing when he writes in the introduction to his edition, ‘If the curious reader cares to examine those poems which Gascoigne chose to place among Flowres and to compare them with those which were evidently considered Weedes, he will, I fear, find that there is no even remotely consistent principle at work’ (p. 39). On the contrary, a serious consideration of the division yields a fairly regular and demonstrable pattern of classification.
8 Discussing Gascoigne's use of posies, Prouty says of ‘Si fortunatus infoelix,’ ‘in my opinion, this posy is a general one used by Gascoigne to describe himself as a younger courtier first adventuring into courtly intrigue and affairs of love’ (p. 35).
9 A similar defense of the poems of the young is offered when G.T. writes to H.W. acknowledging that ‘good letters’ ‘do no lesse bloome and appeare in pleasaunt ditties or compendious Sonets, devised by green youthful capacities, than they do fruitefully grayheared writers’ (p. 50). Here G.T.'s appreciation suggests Gascoigne's high regard for his own ‘green youthful capacity.’