Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England

Abstract

No ONE BOTHERS to turn the pages of Elizabethan novellae unless they are examining the source of a Shakespeare play or attempting the by now rather discredited task of tracing the history of the novel. But the project of excavating the origins of the English novel from the mire of Elizabethan prose fiction has so obviously been a failure that this in itself raises a question mark over the dusty narratives that qualify as firsts in a certain sort of prose fiction in English. Why do we find the stories in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (155657) and Geoffrey Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567) so supremely uninteresting when the influence they exercised on other writers-of stories as well as of drama-was so pervasive? Histories of prose fiction, probing them with modern expectations of narrative coherence, are baffled precisely because these fictions feel even stranger and more remote than forms of storytelling-saints' lives, romances, pilgrimages-that we think of as more archaic. We find them, in a very real sense, unreadable: the principle according to which material has been selected and organized, whether within individual or across a collection of tales, simply eludes us. What is the common denominator for Painter's selection of episodes from Livy's first decade, of novellae from the second day of Boccaccio's Decameron, of certain of Francois Belleforest's translations of Matteo Bandello, of apothegms from Plutarch? And if lack of coherence in a collection makes it hard for us to come to any conclusion about what the translator thought he was offering under the name of or Nouelles,' the lack of any kind of coherent purpose within individual stories such as Fenton's Tragicall Discourses presents even more of a reading problem. Fenton's histories confront us with exasperating redundancy and radical discontinuity. Competing interpretations of the same set of narrative circumstances are offered to the reader without one being privileged or authorized over another. The resulting effect of incoherence, however, cannot be dismissed as a lack of artistry, for it is clear that the selection and translation of these stories was undertaken as a new and self-conscious venture, to be recognized as distinct from and superior to native forms of chivalric romance. As it presently stands, however, our theoretical apparatus for distinguishing in any meaningful way between chivalric romance and the plottedness