Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520–1640 ed. by Donald Beecher

Abstract

sgVrEWs Donald Beecher, ed. Critical Approaches to English Prose Fic­ tion 1520-1640. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1998. 366. $16 paper. Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society, Volume 9. Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society, an ongoing series of modernized texts of Renaissance prose fiction in English, was inaugurated by Donald Beecher in 1992 with his own edi­ tion of Riche’s His Farewell to Military Profession. Many ed­ itors of texts in the series participated with others in a con­ ference organized by Beecher at Carleton University on 8-11 May 1997, from which fourteen of the sixteen original essays in Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520-1640 have been drawn. The collection does not systematically illustrate critical approaches, as its name implies, but it does weave a rich tapestry depicting fiction before the novel. Beecher’s interest in the nature of early modern writing and reading informs many selections. His introduction finds in Renaissance defences of fiction no middle ground between Horatian delight and instruction, the former encouraging writers to appeal to “the unbearable lightness of women,” the latter, to “the utilitarian sobriety of men.” His essay on A Margarite of America, a romance tragedy that Thomas Lodge probably com­ piled aboard ship by imitating remembered models, especially revenge plays, describes “split-field” story-telling and reading, which beneath “cathartic immediacy” recalls literary and m yth­ ical prototypes. In other essays on the writing process, Regina Schneider finds “the structural device of retrospective narra­ tive” the key to Sir Philip Sidney’s complex process of revis­ ing the Arcadia, and John Butler suggests that the authors of seventeenth-century fiction, while starting from types, were de­ veloping strategies to give depth to their characters, who some­ times “have pasts,” “forget their ideality” when overcome by emotion, or change over time. ESC 28,2002 ESC 28, 2002 Women are studied as writers, readers, and characters. Julie D. Campbell examines intertextually Sidney’s Arcadia, Lady Mary W roth’s Urania, Anna Weamys’s Continuation of the Ar­ cadia, and the salon rituals of the aristocratic literary circles for which they were written. For Joseph Khoury the gossips’ speeches in the misogynist fabliaux of The Bachelor’s Banquet paradoxically demonstrate the failings of men and illustrate suc­ cessful strategies by which women resist their domination. To Goran V. Stanivukovic, the eroticism of Emanuel Ford’s Ornatus and Artesia and other popular prose romances promotes a new humanist ethics of male self-mastery leading to compan­ ionate marriage. Issues of audience foreground the economic realities that produced prose fiction in this period. Arthur F. Kinney ex­ amines the commercial appeals of authors and printers to the literate middle class; Roger Pooley studies prefaces addressed to different groups of readers of prose fiction ranging across most classes and both genders; and Richard Baskin analyzes Thomas Deloney’s appeal to the rising middle-class and his dif­ ficulties with the authorities, eased in his prose fiction by humor that covers the fissures between his simultaneous attack on and reinforcement of the social hierarchy. In contrast to these unex­ ceptionable summaries of current critical thought is Carmine Di Biase’s speculative, and sometimes strained, argument that in Greenes Vision, a dream dialogue with Chaucer and Gower, the fashionably repentant Robert Greene renounces the euphuism of his romances for the plain style soon to be revealed in his cony-catching pamphlets. Denying accusations that he wrote the anonymous, bawdy Cobler of Caunterburie, a work remi­ niscent of The Canterbury Tales, Greene nevertheless speaks through Chaucer to classify his readers. Greene associates eu­ phuism with both the “gravest” readers, puritanical critics rep­ resented here by the moralizing euphuism of Gower, and the “youngest and wantonnest” readers, the newly literate middle class that bought his euphuistic romances. He rejects them for those “wisest” readers who see the difference between his eu­ phuism and the lively colloquialism of The Cobler. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller evokes three richly complex readings. Jennifer Turner sees Nashe as affirm­ ing his satirical art for the cheap print market not only by im­ 118 REVIEWS itating Pietro Aretino but also by characterizing Jack W ilton as a “spare page blown about Europe...