Lyly, Greene, Sidney, and Barnaby Rich's "Brusanus"

Abstract

ANYONE WHO is interested in such things already knows how Barnaby Rich put together the twenty-six works that he proudly claimed to have written. As he admitted in the first of them, I have done as the Jay, who decked her selfe with the fethers of other Byrds, to the ende, she might seeme to be the more glorious. I Various scholars have so amply documented Rich's feather plucking that it may seem unnecessary to show that the method of composition which served him in his Farewell to Militarie Profession or The Honestie of This Age was also put to use in The Adventures of Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria.2 However, the few remarks that have been made about the sources of Brusanus indicate that a study of them may be of unusual interest. According to Professor Walter Davis, [Brusanus] starts out by following The Anatomy of Wit in its use of the prodigal son motif as the basis of the plot. Somewhere in the middle of Book I, however, its hero turns virtuous . . . , and the book shifts, first to a plot revolving around love and friendship (with many direct debts to Pyrocles and Musidorus in Arcadia, but very few to Lyly) in Book II, then to standard chivalric romance (with no relation to Lyly at all) in Book III.3 It is intriguing to find the two titans of Elizabethan fiction here in tandem. How, we wonder, were their rival influences reconciled? Was it simply, as Davis suggests, a book for Lyly, a book for Sidney, and a third for chivalric romance? Does the influence of either Lyly or Sidney clearly dominate? And where does Brusanus stand with respect to those waves of fashion that swept first Lyly and then Sidney to a crest of popularity? To answer this we must know when Brusanus was writtena question about which there is little agreement. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 23, 1592. The title page is also dated 1592, but carries the additional information that the story was Written... seaven or eight yeares sithence, that is, in 1584 or 1585, five or six years before any of the Arcadia was printed.4 Was Brusanus then the earliest