Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia

Popular prose fiction of the Elizabethan period has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Katharine Wilson's Fictions of Authorship aims to extend this emphasis by exploring the representations of authorship and textual transmission within Elizabethan popular fiction. As her introduction explains, "[t]he 'fictions of authorship' of my title refers to the way authors marked out ideas about writing within their novels, often through the creation of writers and readers within the text." She argues that the repetition of this theme is an indication of the "growing disenchantment with the romance" experienced by this new breed of popular writers, and of their "own uncertainty about the role of prose fiction" (4).

Wilson begins with the flurry of textual exchange that constitutes George Gascoigne's Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F. J., in which letters, poetry, and narratives continuously change hands. The chapter then proceeds to show how Gascoigne's own literary manoeuvres are appropriated by writers like Whetstone, Grange, and Gabriel Harvey, all of whom produce stories as "tribute[s] to the compulsive fascination of the story of F. J. and the games which could be played with it" (32). While the unstable nature of texts and textual exchange in Gascoigne's Master F. J. has been explored in detail previously by critics such as Constance Relihan and Susan Staub, it is Wilson's account of Harvey's unpublished narrative, "A noble mans sute to a cuntrie maide," which is bound to attract readers' attention with its delineation of the complicated literary ventriloquism through which the married "Milord" and Harvey's sister "Mercy" requisition Harvey's erudite persona to function as an involuntary "secretary" in their exchange of missives.

Chapter 2 introduces Lyly's archetypal Renaissance wit, Euphues. Wilson argues that Lyly's hero shares a significant trait with the protagonists of Gascoigne and his successors: all of them run the risk of being ridiculed as text-bound fools whose written work is either misinterpreted or misused — or, worse still, revealed to be hopelessly outdated in style. As before, Wilson pairs her text with a late-Elizabethan rejoinder: Robert Greene's Mamillia, which offers a neat reversal of the central premise of Euphues by presenting a female protagonist who comes to the rescue of the duplicitous hero, Pharicles. Wilson's knowledge of this body of texts is evident throughout the discussion, although one wonders if the study could have dispensed with some of the detailed plot summaries, particularly in the case of better-known texts such as Gascoigne's Master F. J. and Lyly's Euphues.

The synopses, however, prove to be useful tools in the two central chapters of the book, which focus on the innumerable amorous tales of Robert Greene. Wilson significantly points out that Greene continues to use his female protagonists as "surrogate authors" (84) within his stories, and that his pragmatic decision to recycle themes and plots throughout his career lead to the construction of "alternative canons and literary records in which the old names and stories remain as memories of a lost literary culture" (84). This process of creating an alternative cannon that is distanced and challenged almost as soon as it is proposed, is cogently illustrated in Greene's Menaphon, a pastoral romance laden with allusions to narrative predecessors ranging from the classical story of the Judgment of Paris to Sidney's Arcadia.

Chapter 5 focuses on Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, where the eponymous female protagonist also operates as a surrogate author, challenging established literary expectations about romances and romance heroines. However, Wilson suggests that Lodge's disillusionment with romance takes a far darker turn in his Margarite of America, in which the Margarita's passion for the tyrannical Arsadachus blinds her to the evil hidden behind her lover's easy appropriation of courtly wit. Romance is shown to have "turned into a distorting mirror" (162) in this narrative, with ultimately destructive implications for both Margarita and Arsadachus. This troubled mixture of "satire and nostalgia" (169), noticeable in most late-Elizabethan prose fiction, also becomes the focus of Wilson's epilogue, which takes a brief look at Thomas Nashe's unpredictable and striking reworking of romance tropes in The Unfortunate Traveller.

It could be argued that while Wilson repeatedly emphasizes the late-Elizabethan writers' disenchantment with romance, the actual nature of this complex tradition is not explored in much depth. The discussion also leaves some key questions tantalizingly unanswered. For instance, Wilson's examination of the recurrent use of eloquent female speakers and writers in texts ranging from Gascoigne's Master F. J. to Lodge's Rosalynde inevitably invites readers to wonder why the woman in love so often becomes the persona adopted by these young male writers in their fictions of authorship. Again, while Wilson traces the repeated appearance of yet another authorial figure, the secretary, we hear little else about the implications that the adoption of this persona might have for writers moving from the world of patronage to the so-called marketplace of print. However, despite its refusal to engage with these questions at length, Wilson's study offers readers a very useful review of a body of relatively unfamiliar narratives, and provides an engaging approach to the literary and authorial negotiations that shape this late Elizabethan genre.