The Shapes of Romance in the Renaissance

Shaping—the enterprise of creating, forming, and fashioning—is one of the characteristic operations of the Renaissance as it is commonly discussed and theorized. The early modern period was deeply and provocatively engaged in refashioning human subjects and their relationships with the divine, the past, scientific knowledge, the natural world, and the ever-expanding horizons of the globe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the genre of romance came readily to authors’ hands as a long-established literary tool that could aid in this interrogation and shaping of the human in its physical, emotional, and social dimensions. Romance is fundamentally a genre of the human and the vernacular; the word is derived from the Old French romanz meaning a vernacular fiction. Although romance is heavily invested in the supernatural, the doings of men and, crucially, women, are its overriding concern: the societies they build and rupture, the alliances they make and break, and the wars that spill from both of these. Romance is drawn on the large scale as regards its plenitude of incident, but also on the small scale in terms of the precision with which human relations are dissected, the contours of the self explored, and the interactions between mind and body depicted.

In parallel with this intellectual and cultural reshaping of ideas about the human, English romance was itself being reshaped during the Renaissance by cultural transformations such as the rediscovery of ancient Greek fictions, the energetic mingling of vernacular traditions from across Europe, and the amplification of wondrous matter offered up by advances in scientific knowledge and the exploration of the new world. The generic reshaping of romance itself thus takes place alongside, and as a consequence of, the interrogation and reshaping of human subjects and societies.

This dual interest displayed by romance in shaping the human and reshaping itself is emblematized by the opening of Sidney’s New Arcadia (1590), a text that is well known for signaling its intention to reshape English prose romance into a form that amalgamated the medieval chivalric tradition with the newly translated erotic romances of ancient Greece.¹ The earlier manuscript version of the Arcadia (the Old Arcadia, written in the late 1570s) had deployed material from Greek romance such as young lovers, domestic upheaval, and theatrical virtuosity of speech, but in his revision Sidney mimics the structure as well as the content of ancient fiction. Specifically, he invokes the opening in medias res of Heliodorus’s fourth-century romance, the Aethiopica. The Aethiopica begins with a mystifying spectacle: at daybreak a band of brigands scan the shore where the Nile meets the sea; they see an abandoned boat, the carnage of a battle on the beach, and a beautiful woman embracing a wounded man. Sidney’s romance also opens at dawn, with a pair of shepherds lamenting the departure of the beloved shepherdess, Urania. Traditionally, much chivalric romance was structured by the life-story transitions of a knight from enfance to kingship and ultimately death; a beginning in medias res therefore deliberately disrupts the forward trajectory—the life-cycle shape—of this mode of romance plotting. For a romance to begin in medias res is therefore a conscious act of defamiliarization, a self-advertising stripping away of context and knowledge from the reader. Such an opening roots the relationship of narrator and reader in ambiguity and perplexity rather than trust or authority.

At the same time that it reshapes—alters the contours, the appearance—of early modern English romance by amalgamating medieval and ancient traditions and disrupting the telling of a knightly “history,” the opening to the New Arcadia also features a very specific “shape” in the now-lost early modern sense of a body (Oxford English Dictionary [OED], sense 4). The shape at issue is spotted in the water by the shepherds, interrupting their reverie:

[T]hey both perceived a thing which floated drawing nearer and nearer to the bank…. They doubted awhile what it should be, till it was cast up even hard before them, at which time they fully saw that it was a man; whereupon running for pity sake unto him, they found his hands … fast griping upon the edge of a square small coffer which lay all under his breast; else in himself no show of life, so as the board seemed to be but a bier to carry him aland to his sepulchre. So drew they up a young man of so goodly shape and well pleasing favour that one would think death had, in him, a lovely countenance, and that though he were naked, nakedness was to him an apparel.²

The body is that of Musidorus, a prince and one of the heroes of the romance. The shapeshifting involved in this encounter is part and parcel of the Heliodoran air of alienating irreality that Sidney is courting: first it is a “thing” that is seen, then a “man,” and only then a “young man” of “goodly shape.” Although tricks of visual misprision and mystifications of persons are the stock in trade of romance, this incident is striking in its staged awareness of the drama accruing from a human becoming such before the eyes of the beholders. As so often in the sharp and intermittently cruel New Arcadia, however, there is an ancient horror being evoked beneath the emerging beauty of this anti-birth (one is reminded of classical narratives of floating corpses such as Ovid’s tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, rewritten by Chaucer in the Book of the Duchess). The birthing of the “dead” Musidorus at the beginning of the New Arcadia constitutes a direct challenge to the enfance narratives of the neo-Arthurian romances that were the most popular fictions of the sixteenth century, of which the Spanish Amadís de Gaula, or de Gaule in French (also a source for the Arcadia) is the pattern and exemplar. These stories would typically start with the conception of the hero, his birth and singular beauty or grace, and his training in knighthood. In thus revising the traditions of vernacular fictional prose, this moment acts as a prelude to the multiple reshapings Sidney is undertaking in the New Arcadia: whether of his own manuscript version in the first instance; of the contours of English prose romance, as mentioned; or of the human body, human interiority, and human relations. These had always been the subject of romance, but at the interface of the medieval and early modern they were subject to new and urgent forms of re-examination.

Although the New Arcadia starts with the body of Musidorus, at the center of its plot in both versions is the equally ambiguous shape of Pyrocles, Musidorus’s friend and coadventurer. In order to gain access to the secluded princesses Pamela and Philoclea, Musidorus takes on the disguise of a shepherd and Pyrocles that of a woman. In the Old Arcadia Pyrocles-as-woman goes by the name of Cleophila, and in the New by that of Zelmane. As any late medieval or early modern reader of romance would have known, malleability—whether of source material or human bodies—is a trademark of the genre, and the changing of a human body to faerie form, or of a man into a woman, is emblematic of the liminal and precarious state of human existence. The malleability of human forms and selves is of obsessive concern to the Arcadia, which reworks the topos in many different ways by highlighting how vulnerable humans are to existing in, or falling victim to, liminal states of being: Basilius, the ruler who is yet no king thanks to his retreat from public life (and then his dangerous, potion-induced sleep, itself a state of liminal nonbeing); Gynecia, his wife, who loves the man-woman Cleophila; or Philoclea, her daughter, who also loves Pyrocles but believes him to be a woman. There is much comedy to exploit in cross-dressing as a particular form of shapeshifting of course, as Shakespeare demonstrates, but Sidney’s version is discomfiting in its insistence on bodily shiftiness and ambivalence as an inescapable and potentially tragic condition of life. Thomas Lodge’s cross-dressed heroine in Rosalynd (1590), discussed later on, is referred to in a pretended plainness as “he” when she adopts the male persona of Ganymede. Sidney, on the other hand, deploys the amorphous, disquieting, erotic, and beguiling pronoun “he-she” for Cleophila.

The malleability of the human, in mind as well as body, and romance’s deep interest in exploring that malleability while transforming its own generic “shapes,” is therefore the subject of this article. One further element of the Arcadia passage is indicative in this respect: the running of the shepherds toward the body, “for pity sake.” The capacity for pity (mercy, compassion, tenderness [OED, sense 1, a word not yet divorced from the related term “piety”]) is the defining characteristic of admirable human behaviors in romance. It encompasses not only the male arena of action but also the female, in the capacity of woman to show generous tenderness in both public and private matters. In the sense in which Sidney is using it, the broad meaning of “compassion” is intensified into that of “sorrow,” and it is here that the human shape of Musidorus is combined with the emotional shaping of human selfhood and relationships: as the human body takes shape before the shepherds’ eyes, so their reactions are shaped by the recognition of human affinity. Action and feeling are framed in the light of that recognition, and their “pity” takes shape. The shepherds in this moment are simultaneously actors in Sidney’s drama of discovery and responsive readers of it.

The study of emotions—or in the terminology of the time, “passions” or “affections”—has been gathering pace in early modern studies generally. It has many applications to romance, a genre that not only pays exhaustive attention to the contours of human emotionality but has traditionally been attacked for its capacity to stir the passions of the reader. Collaborative studies such as Reading the Early Modern Passions (2004) and Shakespearean Sensations (2013), alongside Katharine Craik’s Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (2007), have elucidated the diverse understanding and interpretation of the passions in this period.³ Compassion of the kind described above, for example, is illustrative of the belief that emotions were shared from body to body; the particular shared emotion of pity or compassion, as John Staines has pointed out, “was one model for public politics,”⁴ and thus it is eminently suited to the public-private discourses of late medieval and early modern romance. Most important, compassion is an emotion that extends across the boundaries of class, race, and gender. It therefore has the potential to be considered indicatively “human,” a term that is explored further below.

Academic interest has also turned increasingly to the interactions of romance with “real” human selves and societies, to consider the ways in which romance was shaped by, and shaped, its readers. Particular attention has been devoted to the historically informed mapping of readerships and reading practices for romance in the late medieval and early modern periods. This has extended our understanding of what the cultural drivers were for the writing, printing, and consumption of romance texts and has illuminated how the reading and writing of romance participated in shaping the early modern period’s conceptions of itself. The elderly yet still influential view once exemplified by Louis B. Wright, of early modern romance as a derelict form of poesy, embraced by a primarily “middle-class,” juvenile, or female readership (with class- and gender-prejudiced implications of limited or pleasure-based reading) has thankfully now been supplanted by nuanced attention to the specific reading communities of romance over time.⁵ In particular, adult men have been thoroughly rehabilitated as readers of romance; as Craik points out, Sidney believed that romances’ appeal to the passions “enkindled virtuous anger among soldiers even as they delighted them.” Alongside such defenses of soldierly or heroic romance reading, however, there remained a fear—amplified particularly in the 1630s—that the “pliable” emotions and bodies of young men made them dangerously vulnerable to the wanton narratives of romance and the erotic and imaginative transports into which the genre could lead them.⁶ Early modern romance, it is clear, depicts and participates in the shaping of many such “pliable” human bodies (or shapes), both fictional and actual.

The research that has deepened our understanding of the reading communities that consumed, and therefore shaped, romances has also illuminated the continuities of matter and practice that link the late medieval and the early modern. The means by which romance forms the common ground of a medieval/early modern cultural imaginary and yet is transformed in this continuity have been detailed in Helen Cooper’s The English Romance in Time (2004).⁷ Romance in this period is certainly shaped by both nostalgia and innovation: Michael Johnston and others have shown that the aspirational yet conservative values of provincial elites (the gentry) are reflected in fifteenth-century romance and promulgated through an actively sponsored system of collection and copying; romance is thus a “powerful vehicle for expressing and exploring their unique, and emergent, socioeconomic identity.”⁸ The use of romance as a means of exploring and promulgating emergent socioeconomic identities—particularly those of urban readers—is a marked feature of early modern popular romances, such as Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588).⁹ These texts of social aspiration speculate upon, and even seek to enact, the re-formations of the (typically servant) self and in doing so anticipate the direction of eighteenth-century novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740).

All these studies convey a sense of the importance of commercial and social imperatives in the composition and consumption of early modern romance. These contexts also help to explain romance’s articulation and examination of emergent kinds of selfhood, both individual and collective. The most commercially aware of all the authors of early modern romance was the prolific translator Anthony Munday, highly active in the 1580s and 1590s, whose close relationships with printers and booksellers and eye to the market seem proto-modern. Munday exploited to the full the commercial potential of serialization, and the prefatory material for his translations is devoted to the task of inspiring an appetite for more of the same in his literary consumers, shaping readerly expectations and promising social, moral, or rhetorical benefits to the reader.¹⁰ Notwithstanding his peculiar success in the enterprise, Munday was of course working within a century-long tradition of commercializing romance in print and shaping the vision of the self presented to the aspirant reader. In England this tradition was initiated by William Caxton, whose varied output and skill in appealing to both aristocratic and nonelite readers reshaped romance for the world of print culture.

The reshaping of vernacular prose romance in English begins with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, printed by Caxton at the birth of the Tudor age in 1485, although written some years earlier. The Morte Darthur crosses the boundary of medieval and Renaissance in terms of its production, readership, and recasting of the malleable Arthurian material for contemporaneous tastes. Furthermore, Caxton’s preface to the Morte Darthur engages with several of the ideas key to that boundary, as reflected in the intellectual, ethical, and political projects of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century humanism. He addresses questions of historicity and historical narrative, considers the social and moral utility of reading romance, and meditates on the malleability of literary interpretation.

In its comments on romance, the Morte preface participates in a long-standing rhetorical conflict that circulated around romance. On one side stands the charge that romance is idle and fabulous, the product of mere “fancy,” lacking truthfulness and dangerous in its promulgation of the unreal. On the other stands the view that the fabulous also has its function, and that despite it (however aesthetically indefensible), romance can claim a “sage and serious” dimension, as Milton later said of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Although often regarded as a debate on literary and aesthetic matters—essentially a version of the distrust of fiction expressed in Plato’s Republic—this argument is not only about fiction, or even the genre or mode that is termed romance, but also about the increasing realization that every reader is volatile and independent, that modes of reading and interpretation are multiple, and that it is impossible to legislate secular reading since it became, with printing, a widespread and predominantly private experience. As a result, “attacks” on romance in this period fret about how romance shapes the reading self, and in particular how the fabulous matter of romance can variously encourage delusion (or, worse, tyranny); disable the active, virile life into one of (feminine) lassitude; and remove the reader from civic engagement into private empathies with fictional characters. All of this suggests that the debate on fabulous fiction burgeoned during the long sixteenth century not only because romance was popular reading matter but because this was a period of intensely self-conscious variety and heterodoxy—whether of belief, interpretation, or literary form.

Of course variety and heterodoxy had always been associated with secular reading, and ultimately Caxton in his Morte preface takes refuge in the repetition of a familiar Chaucerian catch-all on this issue, with a semi-quotation from St Paul:

And for to passe the tyme thys book shal be pleasaunte to rede in, but for to gyve fayth and byleve that al is trewe that is conteyned herin, ye be at your lyberté. But al is wryton for our doctryne, and for to beware that we falle not to vyce ne synne, but t’exersyse and folowe vertu … ¹¹

Far from being a formulaic relic of an earlier time, incompatible with the appeal to the emergent world of Tudor utility that underpins much of the preface, the “al is wryton” moment is very much of a piece with Caxton’s argument about readers throughout: essentially, that they are diverse in opinion and ultimately beyond the reach of both author and printer in the formation of their judgments. Thus, on the subject of the historicity of Arthurian legend, Caxton can metaphorically shrug his shoulders with the observation that “for to gyve fayth and byleve that al is trewe that is conteyned herin, ye be at your lyberté.”

The “lyberté” of readers to do as they like when it comes to romance is exactly the problem, in this and other ages: they can believe, or not believe, as they wish, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. The capacity of modern romance readers to reshape themselves along fictional lines, and thus to reshape their lived world, is precisely the subject of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605). Cervantes’s novel undoubtedly parodies the empathetic extremes to which romance reading can lead, yet although it is indeed cruel in the humiliations that are meted out to Don Alonso—as Nabokov was shocked to realize when he had to lecture on the novel—it is at the same time humanely tolerant of the Don’s right, even in his madness, to rename himself as Don Quixote and to take the consequences. “Liberty,” meaning freedom from servitude to sin, was first introduced into English in the late fourteenth-century Wycliffite Bible, and Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate were all using “liberty” in the sense of “being able to act or function without hindrance or restraint” (OED, sense 2a) in the same period. Caxton’s use of the term here is therefore an extension of the burgeoning late-medieval language of theological, political, and personal liberty into the realm of literary judgment. And it is in the context of romance that this reshaping of the critical lexicon is taking place.

Another term that, like “lyberté,” points to the new shape romance and its reading were beginning to assume at the beginning of the Tudor period, is “humanyté.” “Humanyté” appears twice in the Morte preface, the first time in a triumvirate of virtuous matter: the reader will find here “noble and renomed actes of humanyté, gentylnesse, and chyvalryes,” claims Caxton (p. xv). On its second occurrence, “humanyté” is easy to overlook thanks to the familiarity of the concepts that surround it. This book, Caxton writes, “treateth of the noble actes, feates of armes of chyvalrye, prowess, hardynesse, humanyté, love, curtoyse, and veray gentylnesse, wyth many wonderful hystoryes and adventures” (p. xv). Chivalry, prowess, courtesy, gentillese: all of these are the familiar language of romance inherited from the twelfth-century poetry of Chrétien de Troyes and naturalized in Chaucer, the Gawain poet, and the metrical romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But humanity? This, again, is a word that OED traces back to the Wycliffite Bible and to which it gives the definition “the quality of being humane.” “Human” and “humane,” it should be noted, are extremely difficult terms to separate throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, and both are present in “humanyté.”

What elements of the Morte Darthur might Caxton have had in mind for this category? Perhaps the easiest way of approaching it is to exclude matter related to the other terms surrounding “humanyté.” By implication, then, it is not a specifically chivalric, courtly, or amorous property, and so straight away we find ourselves in challenging territory for a discussion of Malory and of romance more broadly. It is, however, territory into which a few hardy souls have previously ventured, typically with reference to the sorrows of what Caxton’s preface calls “thys shorte and transytorye lyf.” Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, places the romance in the de casibus tradition of medieval tragedy as a warning to the great of “this unstable life.” His preface to the 1498 edition is decidedly macabre in its evocation of Arthur and Guinevere, “buried in obscure foss or pit” and Lancelot, “feeble and faint,” “groveling on the cold mould”; humanity here is fleeting in its greatness and constrained by its fleshliness.¹² It is “dolourous,” as Caxton describes the “death and departing” of the final books in his colophon, and in the dolorousness of life kings are notably aligned with commoners. For Douglas Gray, five hundred years later, dolor is very much the property of the human as it is presented in the Morte Darthur: he observes that the romance’s ending is apocalyptic and epic but “above all it is a tragedy of humanity, rooted in an awareness of human reality and suffering.”¹³ Dolor, pity, compassion; it is in these conditions that the “humanity” of Malory’s romance is rooted.

At the same time that it raises the question of what it is to be human(e), the occurrence of “humanyté” in Caxton’s preface intrigues by leaning toward the predominantly sixteenth-century sense of “humanity” as secular and ancient learning. Caxton, indeed, had already supplied one of the earliest uses of the word in this sense with the pairing “dyuynyte and humanyte” in his translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1483). Throughout the twentieth century, it was axiomatic that Caxton was no humanist and even that he existed in splendid isolation from such a phenomenon. N. F. Blake’s biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is remarkable in its determination on this point, which is repeatedly asserted in the final paragraph: “He was not a learned man…. He did not seek learned works in Latin or English…. He was not affected by the new humanism…. He was a man of the late medieval period, not of the Renaissance. His introduction of the printing press to England kept the old culture alive; it was not used in the service of the new learning.” Not only is the boundary between “medieval” and “Renaissance” now being gradually dismantled, however, but also “humanism” is increasingly understood as a social practice as well as a scholarly enterprise.¹⁴ Daniel Wakelin’s view of Caxton’s humanism, for example, stands in marked contrast to that of Blake. Restating the continuities between the kind of classicism practiced by Chaucer and that of the humanists, he points out that Caxton printed Boece in 1478 and “pretends to links with humanism” by ending with Latin verses and returning to a Latin manuscript; like its sixteenth-century successor, this kind of humanism makes new use of old knowledge and exhibits “a self-consciousness of the novelty.”¹⁵

Even if Caxton is being gradually admitted into the ranks of the broadly defined humanist, what is the relationship between this kind of “humanyté” and that of Malory? Just as axiomatic as the Caxton-no-humanist view has been the assertion of an insuperable divide between new learning and (old) romance. That divide, however, is surely vulnerable to the same pressures that have been applied to “medieval” and “Renaissance”; indeed, it could be said to be one of the assumptions that has helped to maintain that false division. The Morte Darthur sits right at the heart of this problem, thanks to its inclusion in Roger Ascham’s much-cited comments on the literary past in The Scholemaster (printed in 1570 but written earlier):

In our forefathers[’] tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest aduoulteries by sutlest shiftes….¹⁶

Almost exactly the same phrase was used in Toxophilus, a defense of archery, in 1545:

In our fathers tyme nothing was red, but bookes of fayned cheualrie, wherin a man by redinge, shuld be led to none other end, but onely to manslaughter and baudrye.¹⁷

When these passages are viewed together, the comments on the Morte Darthur appear not so much an act of literary criticism as the attempt of a man whose formative years were spent in the white heat of controversy in the 1530s to put as much distance between the current age and the Catholic past as he could. Hence we have Ascham’s untenable negation of the past as a time of “nothing” and the misrepresentation of its reading under the totalizing “manslaughter and baudrye.” Just as Ascham erases the books of the past for the purposes of Protestant polemic, so he removes all trace of Malory’s interest in “humanyté,” the compassionate and piteous (although the human condition in Malory does also, of course, encompass much that is far from humane).¹⁸ Despite its frequent citation in literary studies, Ascham’s reference to Malory has little to do with the text as it was actually consumed by Caxton’s clientele or their sixteenth-century successors. By contrast, it has everything to do with the midcentury politics of intellectual and theological succession and self-differentiation. The castigating of content and style as old or barbarous is a common humanist device, well-used by Ascham’s time, that is employed to promote the identity and supremacy of the new; as Wakelin observes, “humanist civilization is reliant upon the definition of barbarism” (p. 196).

The matter of Malory’s romance is not itself humanist, but the Morte Darthur was printed and read in close proximity to works that were. As the sixteenth century progressed, the potentialities of romance as a tool within the social practice of humanism became ever clearer, particularly on the Continent. French translators such as Jacques Amyot and Nicholas de Herberay overhauled the ancient and medieval inheritance of prose romance, forging a vernacular poetics of elegance and eloquence to rival that of Cicero and foregrounding those themes of romance such as resistance to flattery and tyranny that accorded with the humanist ideals of manhood and government. Romance thus became integrated into the humanist educative program. The Spanish sentimental romance Cárcel de Amor by Diego de San Pedro, translated by Lord Berners (earliest surviving edition ca. 1548), offered material on the favorite humanist themes of rhetoric, tyranny, and good counsel, and the examples of sentimental romances that were printed as polyglot, parallel-text editions participated, as Joyce Boro has demonstrated, in “the twinned didactic traditions of linguistic and moral pedagogy.”¹⁹ One sixteenth-century romance reader, William Blount, 7th Lord Mountjoy, annotated his copy of Sidney’s Arcadia with notes from sources including Ovid and Tacitus as glosses on Sidney’s political themes such as rebellion, the ethics of kingliness, and good government.²⁰ It was not only the political matter of romance that attracted such attentions; annotators of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) elucidated its biblical allegories with enthusiasm, rifled through it for antiquarian material, and jotted down details of its plots and characters with evident enjoyment of its multiplicity of meaning.²¹ All of these examples generate a sense of romance writing and reading in this period as actively engaged in the meditation on and construction of a culturally and specifically new sense of humanity and its potentialities.

Ascham’s contrast between an implicitly modern civility and the barbarism he projects onto the Middle Ages produces an easy rhetorical opposition. It also articulates the anthropocentrism that is common to romance and to humanism, notwithstanding the allegiance of both to conventional Christian piety and its practice. Robert W. Hanning long ago linked the rise of romance in the twelfth century to a burgeoning interest in the individual, and in the Morte Darthur the same impulse may well lie behind Malory’s oft-noted curtailing of magic and supernatural display in favor of human incident.²² Helen Cooper brings together the simultaneously pious and earthly dimensions of this when she characterizes fifteenth-century English romances as exemplary in their view of humanity and yet forcibly directed toward its contemporary dilemmas in offering readers “a stabilizing model to hold as an ideal even while their own society egregiously diverged from the romance pattern.”²³ The (dis)-integrations of self and society are long-standing themes in romance criticism; Jill Mann, for example, emphasizes the challenges facing “wholeness” of self and society in Malory’s Sankgreal, and human “felyship” is regularly identified as the vulnerable thread that holds together both the society and the narrative of the Morte Darthur until its fatal unraveling.²⁴ As discussed below, Elizabethan romance is no less keen to bring under the spotlight similarly vulnerable aspects of “humanyté,” such as the unstable interfaces separating male and female or parents and children. If the inhabitants of late medieval romance are surrounded by “dolour,” their sixteenth-century successors are troubled by the prevailing human condition of “disquiet,” signifying the psychological and social commotion or lack of ease that emerges from the instabilities of human existence. To construe this emergently modern phenomenon of “disquiet,” English writers of romance looked increasingly to the genres and models of continental fiction as well as to the medieval inheritance.

The reshaping of English religious, intellectual, and literary culture across the boundary of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is nowadays characterized by notions of continuity and re-formation rather than disjunction.²⁵ This is particularly true of romance. Given its inherent diversities of form and encyclopedic capaciousness of matter, romance in the sixteenth-century was able to incorporate a revivified classicism in the form of Greek romance at the same time that it retained the cultural prominence within English literature of the Arthurian and other legends. Sidney reprises Heliodorus; Spenser remodels Arthur as the particularization of the ethical virtue of magnificence in the letter to Raleigh annexed to the Faerie Queene; and Shakespeare reanimates the medieval story of Apollonius of Tyre in Pericles (written ca. 1608).²⁶ An enthusiastic recognition of the malleability of classical and medieval culture and an energetic engagement with its reshaping is everywhere apparent in sixteenth-century romance, whose writers share with humanists a self-conscious interest in the past and a love of novelty.

Similarly malleable was the vernacular culture of continental Europe, reshaped for an ever-burgeoning and diverse body of readers by translators. The act of translation is nowadays theorized in terms that are highly resonant for the late medieval and early modern periods, as a “cultural political practice, constructing or critiquing ideology-stamped identities for foreign cultures, affirming or transgressing discursive values and institutional limits in the receiving culture.”²⁷ Metaphors of manual labor and material remaking—dismantling, rearranging, reclothing, reconstructing—thus spring unforced to the lips of modern translators, as easily as they did for their early modern counterparts. Ariosto’s Italian romance epic Orlando Furioso was translated into Scots by John Stewart of Baldynneis in the 1580s and into English by Sir John Harington (1591). Spanish prose romance was particularly popular, being translated both from the original and via French intermediaries. In addition to Lord Berners’s translations of sentimental romance, Bartholomew Young changed the landscape of pastoral fiction in English with his translation of Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana in 1598, and Anthony Munday created and then sustained a wide readership for Spanish chivalric romances over nearly forty years between 1580 and 1620 with his translations of the Palmerin and Amadis cycles.

The re-formative capacities of romance were self-consciously advertised as part of the genre’s identity during the vogue for pastoral romance in the 1580s and 1590s. The title page of Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance Rosalynd (1590), for example, draws witty attention to the character of romance as volatile and malleable even before the reader has begun this story about the multiple instabilities of state, self, and society:

Rosalynde.

Euphues golden le-

gacie: found after his death

in his Cell at Si-

lexedra.

Bequeathed to Philautus sonnes

noursed vp with their

father in Eng-

land.

Fetcht from the Canaries.

By T.L. Gent.

The conceit is that this is a story written by the protagonist of John Lyly’s influential fictions, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580). A second element is added to this spurious myth of self-origin with the idea that the text has been “fetcht” from the Canary Islands. The claim to be a rediscovered manuscript is a common topos of romance self-articulation, but here that fiction is immediately and nonchalantly exposed as untrue in the dedication to Lord Hunsdon, which states that Lodge wrote the romance on a sea voyage to beguile the time.

The restlessness of a sea journey provides a fitting narrative of origins for Rosalynd. Lodge’s romance is in fact a reworking of the fourteenth-century metrical romance Gamelyn, an outlaw tale that also has both an actual and a fictional genesis. Gamelyn survives only in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, where it is spuriously used to fill the gap left by the missing “Cook’s Tale”; Lodge probably encountered it thus in manuscript. The creation of fictive identities and flirtation with the spurious are thus literary activities embedded in the origins of Rosalynd as a printed artifact, and they set the tone for much of what follows in the story itself. At the heart of the romance lie the themes of legitimacy and identity and how they can be disguised or adapted. Much also turns on the consequent difficulty of discerning or establishing true identity and true feeling; the expression of these dilemmas drives the plot and the poetic effusions with which it is punctuated.

Rosalynd is founded on three acts of displacement: Sir John of Bordeaux’s favoring his youngest son, Rosader, in his will; the banishment of Gerismond, lawful king of France, into the Forest of Arden by the usurper Torismond; and the subsequent banishment of Rosalynd by Torismond, who fears that “her perfection might be the beginning of his prejudice” by drawing the love of the lords of France toward her.²⁸ Pity is again found to be key to romance’s analysis of human behavior when faced with such displacement and the consequent psychological “disquiet” (p. 42) experienced by its victims. Here pity, as the indicative element of what it means to be human(e), inspires collective human action in a reaction to dolor, the indicative condition of human life as already discussed. As in the opening scene of the New Arcadia, pity is triggered by the sight of a suffering human body. Torismond, for example, justifies the banishment of Rosalynd to himself with the excuse that “her face is so full of favour that it pleads pity in the eye of every man” (p. 44). This idea that the human shape, or body, is rhetorically enabled, that it can “plead” pity in others, is widespread in romance and is part of the genre’s fascination with the ways in which selves are shaped through eloquence, whether verbal or bodily. The eloquent bodies of romance are highly efficacious, being depicted time and again as the means by which dolor and disquiet can be ameliorated by pity.

The familial, political, and amorous experiences of Rosalynd are all “restless,” as Lodge describes the perplexities of Saladyne, Rosader’s jealous older brother (p. 32), and they are in need of constant shaping and rhetorical management by the romance’s protagonists. Rosalynd is thus intimately concerned with the poetical act of giving form to feeling, the “discovering affection” (revealing of emotion; p. 40) that can be achieved through bodies, looks, and verbal eloquence. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Elizabethan fiction and drama, Rosalynd and Rosader strive continually to achieve a perfect alignment of body and words to frame and shape their feelings. Within romance, certain poetic shapes, or genres, habitually aid lovers in this task of untangling the life of the mind; eclogues and sonnets, for example, are the favored inset poems of early modern romance because they deploy powerful topoi of exposure and evasion in discovering and debating love. Indeed, so allied is love as a sentiment with the rhetorical shaping of its expression that “passion” in this period is also a term of para-generic literary designation, meaning “a literary composition or passage marked by deep or strong emotion; a passionate speech or outburst” (OED, sense 6d). “Passion” is therefore used in Rosalynd as a rhetorical descriptor alongside other formalized and shaping designations for the articulation of emotion, such as “meditation,” “complaint,” and “discourse.”

Somewhat perversely, considering the emphasis placed in Rosalynd on the “discovering” of love and self in language, it is the occlusion of the self in the form of bodily disguise or remaking that ultimately releases all the romance’s protagonists into a world of resolution rather than restlessness. Rosader’s self-shaping as an outlaw provides the means by which he is restored to his lawful inheritance and his orthodox body. In comparable fashion, Rosalynd’s cross-dressing as Ganymede paradoxically facilitates the outward discovering of her inward affections. In the boy’s disguise, she attains a level of emotional authenticity in her dealings with Rosader that would be impossible in her authentic physical form. But by no means all the discovered bodies in romance lead to such resolutions of restlessness. In the despairing third book of Sidney’s New Arcadia, a strikingly inauthentic and occluded, yet truth-telling, body shape is that of Parthenia, who articulates her mutuality with her dead husband Argalus by cross-dressing as the Knight of the Tomb. Her armor is “all painted over with such a cunning of shadow that it represented a gaping sepulchre” (p. 395), and black worms are depicted crawling up and down her body. Not only is Parthenia’s female form reshaped, but even her living humanity is emptied out in this chilling act of sorrowful self-erasure, one in which all forms of verbal communication are renounced until her dying words (she “showed no will to hear or speak”; p. 396).

Unusually, Parthenia is a woman who commands the rhetoric of her own body even in death. As she dies, she refuses to be touched by the pitying hands of her killer, Amphialus, thus undermining the narrator’s attempt to render her mutilated and bleeding body a site of beauty, compassion, and “heavenly” demeanor to the (predominantly masculine) eyes that behold her (pp. 397–398). The narrator strains to read Parthenia’s body as a tragic combining of the commiseration and admiration that for Sidney translate Aristotelean pity and fear, but her body is resistant to the tragic doctrine that pity can redeem suffering. Parthenia’s dead body, so different from those of the amorous princesses in the Old Arcadia, expresses the transition from comedy to tragedy that underpins Sidney’s rewritten romance, and it underlines how integral human body shapes are in Renaissance romance to the construing of its own changing generic identity. In particular, Parthenia’s refusal of male pity and her embracing of death claim serious ground for romance by challenging the orthodoxy that violence perpetrated on the female body can serve the ethically useful end of stirring pity and fear. Parthenia’s reshaped female body—simultaneously living and dead, male and female, animate and empty—thus introduces a new set of significations for the tragic body in romance.

The incidents considered here all manipulate the human form or shape by occlusion, alteration, or revelation, and they are situated in texts that participate actively in the generic reshaping of romance in the Renaissance. The perplexing “shape” of Musidorus as it emerges from the sea and the shifty shapelessness of the he-she Cleophila are indicative of the disruptive principles embodied in Sidney’s princes and the beguiling yet dangerous reshapings they bring to Arcadia and its ruling family. The reshaping of Rosader and Rosalynd as outlaw and boy, on the other hand, resolves the “disquiet” and “discontent” of two fractured families and serves one of the most distinctive features of fiction in this period by remolding dolor into delight. Finally, and in complete contrast, Parthenia’s broken body reshapes the sensibilities and norms of both romance and tragedy by resisting and refusing the expression of pity, the otherwise indicative emotion of what the captive princess Philoclea terms “the common course of humanity” (p. 420).