Fashioning Authority

The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse

Constance C. Relihan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612770888
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously-among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates, and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably produced changes in modes of literary production. Furthermore, access to the bookstall to a new class of readers altered the structures and subjects writers employed. Within this tumultuous context, the writers of fictional prose narrative negotiated-for themselves and their audience a precarious definition of their identity within the Elizabethan literary world. In Fashioning Authority Constance C. Relihan examines the influence of Elizabethan prose fiction on early modern literary culture, emphasizing the role of the nonaristocratic reader in the reception of literature, the importance of the marketplace in the production and reception of prose texts, and the growth of prose as the dominant mode of narrative presentation. Combining cultural analysis with a concern for narrative structure, Relihan explores six strategies by which the writers and readers of Elizabethan fiction struggled to achieve artistic authority: incorporating poetry into prose texts; using translated material; separating authorial from narrative voice; introducing a sense of place; depicting females; and representing non-European cultures. Relihan argues that Elizabethan fiction's unique position on the borders of literate and literary English culture, that is, its position as what M. M. Bakhtin calls "novelistic discourse, " allows it to constitute a rich field for examining the ideological rifts of the period. Taking her primary examples from Barnabe Riche's Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), but also considering texts by a variety of authors (such as Sidney, Deloney, Lyly, Gascoigne, Lodge, Breton, Greene, Harmon, Nashe, and Painter), Relihan demonstrates that regardless of their specific structural and thematic differences, the various modes of Elizabethan fiction all share a common origin in the upheavals of English culture during the later half of the 16th century. By examining novelistic discourse as a category, Fashioning Authority strengthens our understanding of the nature and history of English fiction even as it broadens our sense of Elizabethan culture. The result is an exploration of how Elizabethan novelistic discourse established the cultural place of its newly literate readers and its generically marginal authors, creating literary comfort in narrative prose for those who failed to find it in verse.

1

Prose, Poetry, and Popular Authority

THE DIFFICULTY for the writer of Elizabethan novelistic discourse, as Renaissance poetic theory demonstrates, is the lack of literary, fictional models in prose. As William Nelson observes:

Poets and dramatists had a great classical body of fiction for precedent; those who wrote stories in prose did not. The notable examples of classical prose are historical, philosophic, rhetorical, or didactic; ancient prose fiction familiar to Renaissance writers is represented by only a scattering of very various works, none of them of the stature of the Aeneid and most subject to the accusation of frivolity.¹

While the medieval period provided English storytellers with some native prose models, most notably Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, that supplemented the dearth classical culture provided, fiction writers of the Elizabethan period still operated from a disadvantage: their genre was generally viewed as non-literary; they were not artists, but writers for the marketplace.

One response to the absence of literary authority created by the arguments of courtesy literature and Renaissance literary theory was to embed within artistically marginalized prose the irrefutable art form, verse. Drawing from Continental sources, such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504)² and The Diana of Montemayor (1559), writers as diverse in style as Sidney, Deloney, and Nashe found reasons to include poetic texts—either as found objects or as means of plot advancement—into their prose. This strategy finds its most developed presentation in Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J., but it is also employed in two of Riche’s novellas (“Sappho Duke of Mantona” and “Nicander and Lucilla”), Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1594), and Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596), to name just a few of the works that attempt to achieve authority in this fashion. What is important about this list is that it illustrates the ways in which what was originally a romance convention spreads from its expected location in works such as Sidney’s Arcadia to novella collections and “bourgeois” fiction as well.

These varieties of fiction provided the often non-aristocratic audience of Elizabethan novelistic discourse a means of imagining themselves in a new way through the inclusion of poetry within prose. Poetry within the texts allowed them to experience at least transitory connections to a recognizable literary form; moreover, it enabled the non-aristocratic audience to see itself engaged in an artistic process. As poetry transformed temporarily the pamphlets into traditional literary art, the readers became momentarily aristocratic during the process of reading. Once questions about the authority of novelistic discourse had been deferred, it was possible for the pamphleteers to define themselves and their readers thematically. Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596) provides a clear example of how poetry can function within fictional prose to establish a sense of the pamphlets as works of literary art and of their readers as members of an educated group able to recognize and interpret literature.³

Margarite, which may be broadly termed a romance, narrates the adventures of an evil prince and the unfortunate princess who loves him. Interspersed throughout the prose text are several poems that either describe characters’ emotions or are presented as found objects (such as the poem—carved into a bedframe—that describes murals in a castle bed chamber). Toward the work’s conclusion, however, the narrator presents his readers with a series of love poems that the evil prince, Arsadachus, wrote and recited to his wife, Diana (while Margarite patiently awaits his return to her). The narrator, who has previously been relatively unintrusive, reports that these poems are included because they “gaue certaine signes in him of an excellent witte” (202). Regardless of the narrator’s intention that these poems should demonstrate the breadth of Arsadachus’s character, the introductions the text provides to the poems quickly change to stress the artistic and learned nature of the poetry:

The third [poem] though short for the method, is verie sweete, and is written in imitation of Dolce the Italian, beginning thus: Io veggio, etc. (204)

The fourth being written vpon a more wanton subiect, is farre more poeticall, and hath in it his decoram [sic] as well as the rest. (204)

Another melancholy of his for the strangenesse thereof deserueth to be registred, and the rather, in that it is in immitation of that excellent Poet of Italie, Lodouice Pascale, in his sonnet beginning; Tutte le telle hauean de’l ciel l’impere. (206)

The cumulative effects of such comments, and the similar comments that introduce the remainder of the ten poems, turn the reader into a courtly, educated individual able to read the poetry in terms of its Italian source material, its literary technique, and the appropriateness of its subject matter. Like the prose comments that punctuate the eclogues of Sidney’s Arcadia or G. T.’s evaluative remarks on F.J.’s poetry in Gascoigne’s work, Lodge’s prose introductions to the poems of Margarite temporarily transform his romance into high literary art, altering his position as an author (claiming not only the authority presented by poetry, but also that indicated by thorough knowledge of Italian poetry), and transforming his readers into university wits able to assess the poetry’s artistic merits. Lodge’s strategies here may also be understood as introducing into Lodge’s text an element of intertextuality common to notions of mannerist play, but even if seen in the context of literary mannerism, the effect in Lodge’s text is still the same: readers are temporarily placed into the community of aristocratic readers able to understand the relationship of Margarite’s poetry to its Italian models.⁴

Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury may also demonstrate the ways in which poetry is inserted into prose fictions in order to authorize their writers and their readers. Deloney’s text, more well-known than Lodge’s, describes the rise of John Winchcomb, known as Jack of Newbury, from the servant of a clothier to a member of Parliament. During the course of Jack’s progress, several poems are presented to Deloney’s readers, ranging from Jack’s twelve-line farewell to his drinking companions (6-7), to the songs sung by Jack’s weavers and servant women (40-47), to Will Summer’s brief summary of his treatment by Jack’s maids (52), to a poetic catalog of the signs of Jack’s wealth (26-28). My purpose is not to discuss the poems individually, but rather to observe that they link Jack’s rise to power with traditional literary genres—most notably the ballad—that contain whatever subversive content Deloney’s narrative may suggest. Significant, too, in Deloney’s text is that these embedded verse texts occur early in the work: Will Summer’s ditty, located in the fourth of eleven chapters, is the last that appears. After the suppression of a traditional representative of misrule, the jester Summers, Deloney’s text is able to assert its authority solely through prose. During the scene in which Jack attempts to organize his fellow clothiers, an embedded text is again used, but here it is a letter in prose—the new mode of the novelistic writers. Poetry contains potentially subversive elements in Deloney’s text until Jack’s power as a member of the merchant class emerges, until, in other words, the text moves beyond a need for traditional artistic forms.⁵

I

Lodge’s A Margarite of America and Deloney’s Jack of Newbury provide two brief examples of the possible effects of poetry’s uses within novelistic discourse in early modern England. The best way to begin a more thorough analysis of the subject is by reference to Virginia Woolf’s discussion of the uses of poetry and prose within Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. In the course of Woolf’s description of Arcadia as a novel (her term for it), she explains that Sidney’s text entices its readers at first because of its language and alterity to our life but that it ultimately remains unsatisfying because it lacks cohesion. She describes Sidney’s romance as a text that readers find off-putting because it is a web of stories without a center. (One wishes, at this point, that she had access to the more unified Old Arcadia.) Poetry, in Woolf’s view, functions to make clear “the boundaries in which Sidney was working”; prose in the romance

is made for slow, noble, and generalised emotions; for the description of wide landscapes; for the conveyance of long, equable discourses uninterrupted for pages together by any other speaker. . . . when Sidney wished to sum up, to strike hard, to register a single and definite impression, he turns to verse. Verse in the Arcadia performs something of the function of dialogue in the modern novel.

Woolf contrasts “the realism and vigor of the verse” with the “drowsy languor” of Arcadia’s prose.⁶

While we might quibble with terming such poetry as “Ye Goatherd Gods” realistic, Woolf’s conclusion addresses two key issues: it acknowledges a fundamental difference between the function of prose and verse in Arcadia, and it recognizes the shift that occurs in the reading process when the text moves from prose to poetry. This shift—the conscious awareness that the expectations of the text are not being met—is fundamental to the operation of much Elizabethan novelistic discourse that employs poetry. For Sidney, as for Lodge, Deloney, Gascoigne, and Barnabe Riche, poetry calls into question the nature and limits of the prose text, requiring its readers to actively (if subconsciously) reassess the generic nature of the work.

In Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), for instance, the poetry foregrounds itself by claiming to be the true kernel of the narrative. Since the text consists of F.J.’s poems and G. T.’s explanations and analyses of them, the reader is continually asked to define “fiction” in terms of poetry: novelistic discourse in Master F.J. is that which is based on and explains monologic poetry. This system of expectations asks the reader to overlook the fact that late in Master F.J. G. T. provides the reader with information F.J. could not have known and, thus, could not have transmitted to G. T. For instance, G. T. reports conversations at dinners at which F. J. was not present, and he also describes private conversations between Dame Elinor and her secretary (and between Frances and Pergo) about which F.J. could not have known.⁷ G. T. gradually makes fewer references to material that came from F.J.; but while he does assert more authority as the narrative progresses, he still maintains his distance from it.

The result of these narrative maneuvers is that the reader of Gascoigne’s text is asked to give G. T. authority to focus on the nature of narrative interpretation and to give G. T. authority to tell his story because it is grounded in legitimizing poetry.⁸ The text’s authority is further grounded in the factual illusion Gascoigne’s prefatory material creates. Gascoigne details the layers of the text created by the means of its transmission: F.J. wrote the poems,

G. T. commented on them, H.W. edited F.J.’s and G. T.’s work, and A.B. printed the entire manuscript. The strategy of alleged factuality lends credence to the text just as the poetic foundation gives it an artistic base.

The artistic foundation of novelistic discourse in poetry is also seen—although perhaps less clearly—in A Mirror for Magistrates and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. These works, representatives of the complaint genre, claim no alliance with prose texts, yet their affinity to novelistic discourse seems clear. The ratio of verse to prose is certainly greater than in Master F.J., and each poem operates as a more clearly independent unit. Although the moralizing purpose of the Mirror makes it a more obviously edifying text than Master F.J., the prose links between the Mirror’s individual complaints unify the individual poems and create a structure which, in its emphasis on the composition process and on reflection on the complaints’ moral content, seems somewhat analogous to the novelistic structure of Gascoigne’s work. The group of poets who discuss, during the interludes, the quality of poetry and its moral significance act as G. T. does in Master F.J.: they shift the focus of the work from its content to the artistic process itself, pushing at the limits of poetry’s ability to contain narrative in the modern world and aligning it with Bakhtin’s sense of novelistic discourse as that which organizes extraliterary forces and multiple voices into an artistic form that may—or may not— be expressed in prose.⁹

The Rape of Lucrece (1594), on a smaller scale, similarly functions to problematize the nature of poetry’s ability during the period to convey a narrative unaided by prose. The presence of the argument, which explains the events that precede and follow those contained in the poetic narrative, suggest that poetry, in this case, can function (to use Kittay and Godzich’s term) to “monumentalize” Lucrece’s rape, but not to explain its political causes and effects.¹⁰ What we see, even in the traditionally established complaint, is an inversion of the relations between prose and poetry in novelistic discourse. In these examples of complaints, prose is needed to concretize and interpret the more abstract and literary verse; in Master F.J., conversely, verse grounds and authorizes the text’s prose. Because of shifting cultural conditions, neither work is able to authorize itself through the use of only one genre.

The traditional distinction between the complaint and prose genres may create resistance to this conclusion, and yet such resistance returns us to consideration of the fundamental difference between prose and poetry. The distinction suggested in the previous chapter is based on artistic status and economic constraints: true gentlemen creating “art” would be more likely to adopt the sonnet sequence, to be circulated in manuscript, than the prose of Deloney or Riche, which was intended for the bookstall. While some scholars accept an economically determined distinction, this separation between prose and verse is not universally accepted. Discussing early modern genres as a whole, Earl Miner erases the split between the two forms of writing: “western medieval matter well illustrates that prose and verse are alternatives to each other rather than matters classifiable as genres. There are romances in verse and romances in prose.”¹¹ While significant exceptions did exist, such as Malory’s prose and Thomas Churchyard’s ballads, which of the two kinds of fictive discourse would have been more easily classified as art in early modern England and w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Elizabethan Contexts and Generic Anxiety
• 1. Prose, Poetry, and Popular Authority
• 2. Borrowed Authority Appropriating “Italian Histories”
• 3. Constructing Voice, Subverting Narrative
• 4. Gender, Empowerment, and the Construction of Character
• 5. Authorizing Landscapes The Power of Place
• 6. Constructing the Alien, Authorizing the Self
• Conclusion Novelistic Discourse and the Problem of Realism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index