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105 Chapter 4 “A Booke Layd By, New Lookt On” The Romance of Reading in Urania and Don Quixote The End of Romance? Early modern romance is a Janus-­ faced genre. It looks nostalgically backward, to the medieval past and the tales that accrete around English and Continental chivalric heroes: Arthur, Amadis, Guy, Bevis, Roland. At the same time, it pushes the leading edge in generic experimentation, engendering radically new forms, hybrid species such as tragicomic drama, and developing the mode that would ultimately dominate fiction making, the long prose narrative, which became the novel. Evidence that early seventeenth-­ century English readers themselves regarded romance as participating in such a duality of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, is present in the language of early modern critics of the mode, from Ascham to Sir Thomas Overbury, who dismiss romance’s fustian old-­ fashionedness, denouncing its ties to a pre-­ Reformed age, even as they inveigh against romance’s popularity as a faddish affectation, the latest example of cultural degeneration in a fallen era. Conversely, in the preface to his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington acknowledges that objections had been made to romance as a degraded poetic form, a kind of cut-­ rate epic that ignores classical models in favor of latter-­ day casualness : “Another fault [imputed to Ariosto] is, that he speaketh so much in his own person by digression, which they say also is against the rules of Poetrie, because neither Homer nor Virgill did it.” (Allying himself with the recent past against the ancients, Harington boldly adds, “Me thinks it is a sufficient defence to say, Ariosto doth it.”)1 Given the continued reprinting and popularity 106 The Immaterial Book of older romances, native and translated, even as new romances were written and published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the question remains of whether classifications of “old” romances, such as the medieval tales of Guy of Warwick, and “new” romances, such as Sidney’s Arcadia or the fictions of Greene and Nashe, were actually significant to consumers. Certainly in the London book market, the “old” was still current. In his 1615 poem “The Mastive, or Young-­ Whelpe of the Olde-­ Dogge,” Henry Parrot envisions a “Countrey-­ Farmer” standing before a bookseller’s stall: “Shewe mee King Arthur, Bevis, or Sir Guy, / Those are the bookes he onely loves to buye.”2 Despite such evidence of romance’s equivocal temporal identity in the early modern period, modern critics of the prose of the later Renaissance have often seen romance, in that historical moment, as rooted in the past, as a traditional, nostalgic form from which a new narrative discourse, the novel, is poised to spring. It has been a commonplace for some time, for instance, to say that Cervantes’s Don Quixote is “the first modern novel,” specifically because of its parodic reaction against romance.3 Recent critics have rejected the “first modern novel” label, however, seeing Quixote not as a radical departure from the romance tradition but as a deeply engaged response from within.4 Rather than envisioning Don Quixote as an innovation or even a synthesis, then, it is more appropriate to imagine a continuum extending from medieval and early modern chivalric romance through Cervantes’s text and beyond. One of the lenses through which this continuum is most visible is the romance motif of the book. In a symptom of its highly self-­ conscious, self-­ referential generic identity, romance—­ as we have seen in previous chapters of the present work—­ often includes portrayals of readers, even romance readers, as a way of questioning the nature of literary representation and of readerly interpretation. Romance is even suggested to exist in an endless cycle in which textuality engenders textuality: early in Chaucer’s dream vision The Book of the Duchess, for example, the narrator calls for “a book / A romaunce . . . to rede and drive the night away” (ll. 47–­ 49); falling asleep over the book then seems to inspire the dream narrative of Chaucer’s romance itself. In this chapter, I will explore these moments of vertiginous perspective—­ in which the text presses against the limits of representation by attempting to represent everything, even itself, the reader, and the idea of reading—­ in Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote and in Mary Wroth’s Urania. Both these narratives, in presenting readers who find themselves in the texts they read, invite us, as readers, to consider the permeable boundary between book and...

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