Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood ed. by Margaret Tyler and Joyce Boro (review)

Margaret Tyler’s 1578 romance has long been recognized as pioneering in its early and strong defense of female authorship; she famously argues that women should be able to write stories if they may read them: “it is all one for a woman to pen a story as for a man to address his story to a woman” (50). Accordingly, her prefatory materials, “To the Right Honourable, the Lord Thomas Howard” and “M. T., to the Reader,” have been frequently anthologized as exemplary of a work by a “first feminist.” While Tyler’s preface is truly a bright spot for scholars seeking Judith Shakespeare, her translation of a chivalric romance has received little critical attention despite its sixteenth-century popularity (it went through three printings in twenty years and was frequently referred to and alluded to in contemporary literature). Joyce Boro’s new edition of Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood offers a delightful opportunity for the non-specialist to read Tyler’s work as well as an excellently-researched edition for scholars. In particular, Boro highlights Tyler’s alterations to her Spanish source, the first book of Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros (1555) by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra, and writes an introduction that constitutes one of the most thoughtful critical works on Tyler to date.

Facilitating access to the Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood is a worthy goal, since the story models chivalric romance’s enchantments, magical events, lost children, seemingly hopeless lovers, and deeds of valor. Those conventions of romance were copied and parodied throughout England’s native literature, and the Mirror is an influential source. The story begins with an outrageous marriage that sets a tone of moral ambiguity that haunts the plot’s many twists and turns. Emperor Trebatio, ostensibly the hero, falls in love with the Princess Briana after hearing of her beauty. He murders her fiancé (Prince Edward of England), impersonates the dead fiancé, marries the princess, rapes her, and then disappears into a sorceress’ lair for twenty years. The princess must then disguise her pregnancy and childbirth (since she wasn’t supposed to consummate the marriage until after the wars), and then devise a way to bring up her twin sons without revealing that she is their mother. She does so with the help of a trusty servant, but is inevitably separated from her sons, one at age three and the other on the cusp of adulthood. The narrative then follows the adventures and love affairs of each family member while driving the plot toward their family reunion, which is partially complete at the end of Tyler’s work; the rest of the reunions are deferred until Books Two and Three, necessitating the sequels and continuations typical of romance. (Ortúñez and other contemporaries penned sequels that were translated into English by others after Tyler’s death; Boro includes an excellent history of the Mirror’s afterlife in her edition.)

Boro’s introduction presents the historical, literary, and religious context of Tyler’s publication, noting in particular the fraught cultural relationship between women readers and the romance genre. She addresses the longstanding questions about Tyler’s likely Catholicism by weighing biographical evidence as well as textual clues, particularly and most effectively Tyler’s deflation of the “marvelous.” In addition, Boro tracks Tyler’s construction of narrative authority throughout her presentation of the plot, noting her additions to the text as well as her tendency to condense Ortúñez’s wordier moments, which are usually gory battle scenes and descriptions of knights’ armor. Most importantly, Boro’s rigorous reading of Tyler and Ortúñez in tandem reveals Tyler’s interventions in the source text. By expanding the themes of friendship and jealousy, correcting references to English culture and geography, and rewriting the possibilities of an unmarried queen, Tyler “makes her text appear more like a native English romance” (19...