Escaping Italy: From Novella to Romance in Gascoigne and Lyly

Studies of English Renaissance prose fiction have for some time languished between a critical narrative that has fallen out of favor—reading these works as "prehistories of the novel"—and the lack of attention given to idiosyncratic texts that are not part of an established tradition. With the exception of Sidney's Arcadia, and more recently Nashe's Unfortunate Traveler, Elizabethan fiction has not been well served by existing critical models, despite perennial interest in Shakespearean sources like Lodge's Rosalynde and Greene's Pandosto. The wide range of popular fictions from Gascoigne and Lyly to Greene and Dekker have remained on the margins of recent literary scholarship. Ongoing shifts in critical practice, however, may enable scholars to read these works more profitably.¹ The resurgence of genre criticism, as it develops historical specificity beyond the theories of Frye and Jameson, provides a valuable critical framework.² The recombination of generic forms underlies the fiction-making process in four popular Elizabethan fictions, Gascoigne's two versions of The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573 and 1575) and Lyly's two volumes of Euphues (1578 and 1580). These texts portray, with explicit intertextual connections that have gone unremarked, the shift in English fiction from the Italianate novella to Elizabethan romance. Prose romance would become a major literary institution in the late Elizabethan years, and to a significant extent it emerged as a reaction against the attractive but untrustworthy novella.³

The most prominent English fictions of the 1560s and early 1570swere translations of novelle: William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure (1565), Geoffrey Fenton's Certaine Tragicall discourses (1567), and George Pettie's A petite palace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576).⁴ Developed by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, the novella was one of early modern Italy's most prominent literary exports.⁵ Writing in the wake of these volumes, especially Painter's massive success, Gascoigne and Lyly cut their fictions to fit the Italian model.⁶ What critics have termed the "ethical ambiguity"⁷ of the novella created a problem: English writers wanted to use Italian models without becoming corrupt and Italianate themselves. This problem was partly cultural and religious—anything Italian was suspect in Protestant England—but it had generic implications. English fiction needed to demonstrate its freedom from the literary works Roger Ascham called "inchantements of Circe."⁸ Ascham argued that the novella was an important front in the war against Italian cultural influence, because "Mo Papists be made by your mery bookes of Italie than by your earnest bookes of Louain."⁹ He also repeated the oft-cited proverb, "Inglese Italianato é un diabolo incarnato."¹⁰ These "mery bookes"were problematic for Elizabethan writers because they were both popular and culturally forbidden.¹¹

While the novella's amoral urbanity posed a problem, Italian humanist and academic culture were much admired in the English Renaissance.¹² Italy carried diverse meanings for English writers; it was a source of humanist learning as well as the homeland of religious error, social immorality, and ethical laxity.¹³ By the late Elizabethan period, however, the cultural pendulumhad shifted against Italy.¹⁴ Anti-Italian polemics were published by humanists like Ascham, anti-theatricalists like Stephen Gosson, and pamphlet writers like Anthony Munday and John Wolfe.¹⁵ For fiction writers who wanted to equal the successes of the 1570s, Italy and the novella were devils, despite their attractions.

Generic forms like the novella and romance were hazily defined and often interpenetrated in early modern England.¹⁶ To explain the shift fromnovella to romance around 1580, it is important to recall that early modern writers treated generic forms less as independent structures than as tools for solving artistic and cultural problems.¹⁷ The Renaissance trope of contaminatio or generic mixing was an established way to modify generic norms.¹⁸ As Claudio Guillén has observed, new genres emerge because they solve problems for authors: "A genre endures . . . insofar as it continues to be a problem-solving model, a standard invitation to the matching of matter and form."¹⁹ Furthermore, when one genre creates a cultural...