The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia (review)

The popularity of The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia by the little-known Emanuel Ford is a testament to the changeability of what Borachio in Much Ado about Nothing calls 'that deformed thief,' fashion. Written about 1595 and published first in an edition with no date but assumed to be 1599, it went through at least eight editions in the seventeenth century, not counting abridgments, and more subsequently. It is a distinctly sub-Arcadian romance, based on a story from Amadis de Gaul, with reminiscences of Greene's Pandosto, Daphnis and Chloe, Barnabe Riche's 'Apolonius and Silla' from Riche his Farewell to Military Profession, and many more. It is, as Goran Stanivukovic puts it in his introduction to this modernized text, 'a collage of literary influences,' and was perhaps so much liked because it was completely unoriginal and without any surprises for the reader familiar with romance. The geography of this history ranges predictably over the eastern Mediterranean, in the exotic regions of which the young and beautiful lovers Ornatus and Artesia, noble offspring of warring fathers, meet, fall in love, are separated, encounter violence, pirates, wild boars, and treacherous princes, and after much testing of their love are restored to one another and live happily ever after. As Ford says in his dedicatory epistle, 'Here shall you see lust tyrannizing, avarice guilty of murder, and dignity seeking his content with usurpation, yet all subverted by virtue.'

Stanivukovic in his introduction wisely bases most of his case for the interest of Ornatus and Artesia on its typicality and its representative qualities, rather than trying to claim any individuality for it. Thus the narrative illustrates the early modern fascination with the cultural geography of the Middle East shared by Tamburlaine and Othello, though Ford makes little of the opportunities offered for clashes of manners and mores that his Moorish pirates could have afforded. In fact, the pirate chief who captures Artesia is conspicuously polite and courteous, although he does have to reprehend the 'rude behavior' of his 'ruder' followers, and it seems rather unfair that in the combat with Ornatus, who comes to rescue his love, the pirate is struck with a board so that 'the brains fell about the place and he died.' This episode demonstrates an aspect of the romance that distinguishes it from many others of its type: the greater plainness of the style. The characters are given the usual quantity of inner cogitations, self-questionings, and so forth, but there is, as Stanivukovic says, argument rather than ornamentation. This means that the romance is somewhat low in the sorts of elaborate descriptive passages that provide much of the readerly pleasure in Arcadia, and it also lacks sustained erotic encounters, to which the two-page account of the lovers' consummation is the only exception. Stanivukovic calls this 'delicately negotiated' in its handling of Artesia's conflicting impulses, but a less sympathetic reader might find something cruder in the description of her 'sometimes blushing, sometimes shrieking, and yet yielding, denying, and yet granting, willing and unwilling' as she 'gave that she could not recall.'

The introduction is exhaustively full, and helpfully locates Ford's text in relation to such issues of current debate in early modern studies of narrative as the contemporary book market, the nature of the readership of romance, the significance of gender disguise, and issues of property, lineage, and government. It constitutes an excellent survey of current scholarship in these areas, and would be of great value to a student reader, and also to anyone coming new to Elizabethan fiction. Though readers familiar with this genre in the original might find this text somewhat fussily punctuated, the presentation of the book itself is very reader-friendly, and some may even find the Alma-Tadema painting chosen for the cover appealing.