Short Fiction in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Introduction

Modern scholars have disagreed sharply over whether Renaissance prose fiction can best be seen as taking tentative steps toward the eighteenth century novel or whether it marks the end of the medieval tradition. As with most academic debates, both approaches are useful and depend on the critic’s perspective. In fact, in some limited but important ways, the state of prose fiction between the first use of movable type in England (1485) and the last decades of the seventeenth century is comparable to that in modern times. It was an era of deep-rooted sociocultural change: A traditional mode of literature was slowly dying or being adapted to an apparently less discriminating audience; also, a bewildering variety of literary experiments, many of which were uncertain or outright failures, was accompanied by an uncertainty about the conventions and the value of prose fiction. To read the works of George Gascoigne, Thomas Deloney, or Aphra Behn is certainly to receive notions about the nature of prose fiction radically challenged. Yet a useful comparison of their strangeness to the modern reader can be made with the reader’s increasing familiarity with the postmodern experiments in fiction. There is also the awareness that although the world they describe is, largely, one that is now lost, they do nevertheless articulate important aspects of modern cultural heritage and so of modern self-understanding.

The period marked by the English revolution, the Restoration, and the Settlement of 1688 is one of the vital watersheds in history, and its effects can be sensed in the age’s prose fiction. By the late seventeenth century, many of the European literary fashions that England had belatedly adopted were taking root, and as socioeconomic balance shifted radically, so a new form of prose fiction developed. Historical changes of such magnitude, however, rarely occur overnight, and the whole era, in particular between 1570 and 1640 when the period’s social, intellectual, and cultural turmoil was at its most concentrated, provides anticipations and experiments of enormous interest. In any period of unusual turbulence, writers and texts tell the reader more than they know, and the role of the critic is more than that of deconstructing the obvious surface referentiality of texts, as the reader searches for evidence of deeper implicit, but eventually enormously important, changes in a society’s culture.

So far as “short” fiction is concerned, the Renaissance, unlike later periods, had no coherent theory of prose fiction in general, let alone for distinguishing between shorter and longer forms. The period inherited a huge variety of shorter forms from its past—jests, anecdotes, fables, exempla, romances, fabliaux, homilies, folktales, récits, novelle—but few writers seem to have given conscious attention to questions of length. Instead, they seem to have been anxious to justify the art of fiction-making itself—”poetry” was their usual term—alongside other human activities. Much Renaissance fiction is uneasily claimed to be “history” and contains elaborate justifications of the teller’s veracity. Although George Gascoigne and John Barth are worlds apart in sophistication of technique, both show a self-conscious uneasiness about their craft that points not merely to the uncertain quality of fiction but, beyond, to the nature of their societies. If one looks to France, Italy, or Spain, one finds evidence of a more self-conscious concern with shorter as opposed to longer forms of fiction and, indeed, in France between about 1560 and 1600 and again between 1660 and 1700, various short forms dominated fashions in prose fiction. In England, however, no such self-consciousness seems to have existed, and in order to get an adequate sense of what forms of short fiction did exist, it will be necessary to stretch and at some points to ignore the limits of the topic.

Notwithstanding uncertainty over the nature of prose fiction (and this is not simply an English phenomenon), an increasing amount was written and published as the new technology of moving type coincided with the expansion of the reading public. Among the earliest books printed by William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde were editions of medieval romances, and by 1600, approximately one-quarter of the books printed in England were prose fiction. The expansion of a literate, book-buying class was a complex business, and one of its most relevant aspects was the growing fear observable among the dominant and educated classes that the more the reading public grew, the more literary standards and—by association—social and political order, would be threatened. Authors who preferred the traditional role of court entertainer slowly adapted to the new commercial market, often with some reluctance, as new economic relationships developed between authors, entrepreneurs, and readers that would eventually radically transform the nature and status of the craft. Whereas Sir Philip Sidney’s primary audience was his sister, his family, and his friends, and John Lyly saw his fiction as a means of social advancement, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Deloney, and, by the mid-seventeenth century, most writers of fiction had abandoned the traditional role. While still archaically addressing their readers in continual parentheses as “gentles” and “fayre ladies,” in approved courtly manner, writers increasingly found themselves related commercially to their audiences and usually conceived their role as purveying and reinforcing what they saw as their audience’s normative values. Any emergent values or techniques observed, in hindsight, in Nashe, Deloney, or Behn are expressed indirectly in their works.

The major emergent literary form of the period was the drama of the public theater. Like prose fiction, the drama went through a period of uncertainty and experimentation and had to reconcile a long tradition of communal entertainment with new intellectual pretensions and the new demands of the marketplace. While the best of Elizabethan prose fiction is manifestly the expression of the same energies that produced the Elizabethan drama, it is striking that while in the theater an art form developed which expressed the energies of the period in a remarkable fusion of popular entertainment and philosophical and psychological profundity, fiction-writing remained a minor and peripheral form. One cannot simply say that the energies that later ages gave to the novel and short story were directed into the drama: The theater seems uniquely equipped to explore the bewildering variety of problems the age felt regarding contingency and change. The role-playing of the theater, its inherent relativism, its juxtapositions of opposing philosophies and moods, and its fierce demands on emotional involvement, all seem, in hindsight, to have captured the needs and confusions of the age better, perhaps, than the age itself knew.

The theater also had the advantage of developing subtle forms of independence of court values (although not of court patronage or censorship). By making the fascination of human actions its central interest, it opened the possibilities for audiences to contemplate themselves, their society, and their world. More than any other literary or art form, the drama articulated the age’s struggle to free itself from archaic and residual intellectual, social, and political forces and to release the emergent drives of a new world. Readers look back to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603), Doctor Faustus (pr. c. 1588, pb. 1604), The White Devil (pr. c. 1609-1612, pb. 1612), and The Tempest (pr.1611, pb. 1623) as embodiments of energies and insights that were to form and direct subsequent history. By contrast, the greatest work of prose fiction of the age, Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, revised 1593, revised 1598; originally entitled The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), looks back nostalgically to an earlier world of order and stasis. What seemed to Sidney’s contemporaries to be the shoring up of standards was eventually to be seen as retrogressive and nostalgic, and so far as prose fiction is concerned, the real growing points—for the eighteenth century novel and beyond—were peripheral and obscure parts of Renaissance culture.

Having identified somewhat the place of prose fiction in the sociocultural dynamic of the age, it is now appropriate to examine specifically the characteristics of short prose fiction. Notwithstanding the difficulty of defining “short” forms for the period, there is a variety of interesting works and points of potential growth for later ages. First to be dealt with will be those forms of fiction to which Renaissance authorities would have given greatest approval, those directly associated with the aesthetic demands of the court—adaptations of medieval romances, translations, and imitations of Continental modes (especially the novella, the conte, and the various picaresque forms). Second, the forms of prose fiction which, explicitly or not, modified or challenged the dominance of the court will be covered. These included the middle-class adaptation and eventual transformation of romance, fiction which bore the marked impact of Protestantism, and the various forms of short fiction that emerged from sociopolitical realities on the periphery of or outside the dominant culture. These forms—folk stories, anecdotes, jests, and tales of ordinary and seemingly trivial experience—however excluded by the hegemonic forms, nevertheless constitute a crucial part of the cultural life of England and point beyond to the life and literature of later periods.

During the sixteenth century, literature and the arts generally became increasingly subject to the control and values of the age’s dominant institution, the court. As the Tudor state took a more confident shape, it systematically—although on a European scale, belatedly—attempted to use the arts as an instrument in its policy of centralization and control. Epic and lyric poetry and the masque particularly felt its pressure, and the development of these modes show the power of the court over its subjects. The most important works of prose fiction in the European Renaissance—those by François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Ángel de Saavedra, and Sidney—all articulate directly or in reaction the new buoyancy and aggressiveness of the Renaissance court. Most writers of any kind were either courtiers or financially dependent on court patronage; until late in the sixteenth century, most conceived of themselves as court entertainers. As the court hegemony broke down over the succeeding century, writers were forced to find alternative social roles and audiences and to change their modes of writing to express the new social realities.

The dominance of the court in the Tudor period meant that the works written or translated were heavily influenced by court taste. The majority of early works of prose fiction drew on traditional medieval chivalric material—stories of romantic love, Arthurian adventures, and the like. Even as early as 1500, their values were fast becoming archaic so far as actual social practices were concerned, but their increasingly escapist aura continued to appeal to readers for the next two centuries by means of an intriguing mixture of nostalgia and practicality. Their settings, characters, and actions are essentially escapist—enchanted islands, captured ladies, gallant knights, monsters, miracles, and coincidences—but they are invariably heavily moralistic.

Indeed, it is one of the strengths of the late Elizabethan flowering of prose fiction that even the most tedious and confused tale can suddenly break into an earnest moral argument between author and reader. Prompted by marginal notes and directly addressed by the author (who in the most unpredictable and seemingly postmodern manner can drop objectivity at any moment), the reader may be asked to enter an intense moral debate. Walter R. Davis has argued that central to Elizabethan romance is an attempt to test traditional moral and intellectual beliefs, embodied in the romance world of pure, idealized motives opposed to reminders of a harsher reality in which the reader uncomfortably lived. He points further to the higher interest in ideas in English romances than in their European counterparts; one witnesses the earnest adaptation to pragmatic ends of a set of values essentially idealistic, escapist, and archaic.

In most cases, however—the earliest signs of a countermovement are not found before the works of Deloney in the 1590’s—the reified values of the romances are the traditional chivalric ones, and any real possibility of debate, like that afforded by the drama—Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida (pr. c. 1601-1602, pb. 1609), or The White Devil, for example—is lost. Nevertheless, aristocratic readers of the typical romance tale in 1590 make a fascinating case history: Surrounded by the uneasiness of a world increasingly threatened by strange new sociocultural forces, they turned to prose fiction as they turned to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) or, a decade later, to the Jacobean court masque, for the reassurance of values and habits long archaic and unlike the reality outside their chambers. Perhaps a few miles away, however, in a dank public theater, a new play about a German necromancer was alluring or disturbing audiences from very different social groups with the thrill of blasphemy, ambition, and the possibility (reassuringly, to most of the audience, unsuccessful) of avoiding a just damnation.

When turning to the examples of short prose fiction from which the Renaissance reader had to choose (especially those few occasions when writers seemed more conscious of writing “short” forms), one discovers that the prose fiction of the English Renaissance was dominated by continental models. Most important for the period’s short fiction was the Italian novella, best exemplified by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, a form able to use a variety of serious, romantic, and satiric elements to transmit a sense of vivid, immediate life from teller to hearer. Various novelle by Boccaccio himself were translated or imitated and published in sixteenth century England, including, quite early, the anonymous, lively Frederyke of Jennen (1509), derived through various intermediaries from Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galeotto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620). Later in the period, many of the 214 novelle by Matteo Bandello, richly melodramatic stories of love and violence, were translated or imitated. In 1566, William Painter published Palace of Pleasure (revised 1575) taken from François de Belleforest’s French version of Bandello’s work. Subtitled “Pleasant Histories and excellent Novelles,” Painter’s work was described rather disapprovingly by the humanist educator, Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570) as “fond books, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London.” Painter includes more than one hundred short tales, including the contemporary story of the Duchess of Amalfi (later adapted by John Webster), all combining rich melodrama and dogged, simplistic moralization. Painter offers them as demonstrations that the world is “a stage and theatre” providing “diversitie of matter pleasant and plausible,” as well as being “for example and imitation good and commendable.” Titillating scandal exists side by side with moral lectures—a typical combination in the English collections of novelle.

A similar combination, even more diverse in its elements, can be found in Geoffrey Fenton’s adaptions of Belleforest and Bandello in his Certain Tragical Discourses (1567), thirteen short tales, mainly about the evils of lust, combining prurient details and long moralizing harangues on the inevitability of divine punishment. George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure (1576) also adapts twelve novelle, but their direct brevity is swamped, again, by coy moralizing and also—a new element which shows how the form was being adapted to genteel courtly taste—by a self-consciously elegant prose style, heavy-handed allegory, stylized debates, stolid abstractions, and sly asides to members of the courtly audience. Despite the sycophantic tone, however, Pettie’s work does show a strong sense of its audience, as does Barnaby Rich’s Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), eight stories adapted from various novelle and addressed to the “righte courteous Gentlewoman” of the court with the usual mixture of titillation and moral commonplaces. All these examples of framed novelle and others—Edmund Tilney’s A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage, Called The Flower of Friendship (1568) or George Whetstone’s An Heptameron of Civill Discourses (1582)—seem unaware that the novella’s power lies precisely in its brevity and directness; they aspire to longer, leisurely, more courtly forms of prose fiction. It was left to later dramatists, such as William Shakespeare and John Webster, to use the concentration of the novella in a different medium.

Similarly sophisticated in its handling of a short form—and providing an instinctive contrast with England—is the tradition in France. Until the reign of François I, France, like England, remained dominated by Italian or Spanish models. From the 1530’s, however, and as part of the sudden rebirth of secular and religious literature associated with the Pléiade and the court salons, there grew up an impressive tradition of prose fiction. Its longer forms were dominated by François Rabelais; its shorter forms (the conte, novella, or récit) were dominated by Marguerite de Navarre (in the L’Heptaméron, 1559; The Heptameron, 1597) and her circle, including Bonaventure Des Périers, Henri Estienne, and Belleforest. The vogue for short fiction, either as part of a collection told by a variety of dévisants, or storytellers, who frequently offered diverse interpretations of similar situations and so involved the readers in a moral debate, or else in separate unlinked examples, resulted in great advances in the art of short fiction. One can see a dramatic thematic widening, an unprecedented sophistication of style and technique, and an important contribution to the expressive powers of French prose. By the end of the century, short fiction in France was not merely highly popular but had become a major literary form in a way that English prose fiction did not until the eighteenth century. English writers adapted material from the French collections of stories but seemed to learn little about the sophisticated possibilities of the form.

The third major source—and, again, it provides a contrast with English fiction writers—is Spain. As in Italy and France, the Iberian Peninsula developed a varied tradition of fiction, seen at its greatest in Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615, The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha). Sentimental novels, pastoral romances, picaresque tales, and rogue fiction are all evidence of vigorous interest in shorter forms of fiction in Spain and Portugal. David Rowland translated the Lazarillo de Tormes (1553) in 1576, “strange and mery reports, very recreative and pleasant,” and James Mabbe in 1622 translated The Rogue: Or, The Life and Adventures of Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), thus bringing two notable examples of the picaresque into English. Margaret Tyler in The Mirror of Princely Deeds (1578), Anthony Munday in Palmerin of England (1581), and many other writers adapted the rambling, idealized adventure-romance. These chivalric works—which Cervantes attempts to “demolish” for their “ill-founded structure” and absurdities—were enormously popular in England, but as long works, they underline how the English taste turned inevitably to such leisured, essentially escapist, fiction.

One further foreign influence, although one hardly contemporary with Sidney, Lyly, and their fellows, should be mentioned. English writers were usually aware that their literary inheritance included a number of distinctive stories written in pre-Christian Greece. Usually referred to as “the Greek romances,” these included Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, Longus’s short tale Poimenika ta kata Daphin kai Chloen (third century; Daphnis and Chloë, 1587), and Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (second century c.e.; The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe, 1597), all of which were translated into English in the 1560-1590 period. All are elaborate in incident, intricate in plot, and held together by a graceful, sensual melancholy, and all stress the fickleness of human affairs. Greene’s prose romances and Shakespeare’s dramatic romances are among English works which show a careful study of their attractive atmosphere and incident-packed plots.

Between about 1570 and 1610, then, occurred what can justly be seen as a most interesting flowering of prose fiction. A great variety of short and long fiction—much derived from Italian, Spanish, and French sources—was translated, adapted, or imitated. Medieval romances, English and continental alike, were revived in prose versions; the new writers of the Elizabethan younger generation—Gascoigne, Sidney, Greene, Thomas Lodge, Nashe, Deloney, and Emmanuel Forde—produced a variety of native examples. Although it is, once again, difficult to sort out distinctively “short” forms—and in some cases impossible if one wishes to get a rounded picture—one can nevertheless note some of the most important trends and illustrate them largely from short examples. Interestingly, one of the best pieces of prose fiction in English was written early in the period and is sufficiently contracted—about thirty-two thousand words long—to almost qualify as “short” fiction. It is the court poet-translator George Gascoigne’s The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. (revised as The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valasco), first published in 1573 and ostensibly set in some unnamed northern castle, and then republished in 1575, somewhat rewritten, retitled, and set in a typical Italianate court, accompanied by a denial that the early version had been, as had been alleged, a roman à clef. The work appeared as part of a miscellany of court entertainments by Gascoigne entitled A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie (1573) and included poems and translations, all “gathered partely . . . in the fyne outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarcke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention, out of our own fruitful Orchardes in Englande.” The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. itself is described as “a pleasant discourse of the adventures of master F. J. conteyning excellent letters, sonnets, Lays, Ballets, Rondlets, Verlays and verses.”

Alongside most other examples of prose fiction, short or long, between 1500 and 1700, The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. is an unusually coherent and skillful piece of fiction. Put in a European perspective, it appears as a typical product of a sophisticated court society, an antiromantic novella. It depicts the affair between a young man, saturated with the rhetoric of courtly love, learning something of his own naïveté and the archaic nature of his ideals, and a highly manipulative young married woman. Amour courtoise was, by the 1570’s, long dead in practice, except in the archaic rituals revived in the Elizabethan court; Gascoigne’s tale is an amusing scrutiny of its irrelevance to the actual experience of human love—as opposed to its value for social allegiance to the queen. Within a very limited sphere, Gascoigne is doing for the courtly tale, and the ethos behind it, what Cervantes was to do for longer chivalric romances.

During the late 1570’s and 1580’s, there was a concentrated attempt, largely initiated by Sir Philip Sidney and his circle, to bring about a renaissance of English letters. Sidney’s own Astrophil and Stella (1591, pirated edition printed by Thomas Newman; 1598, first authorized edition), Defence of Poesie (1595, also published as An Apologie for Poetry), and The Psalmes of David, Translated into Divers and Sundry Kindes of Verse (1823, with Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke) and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are all parts of this movement. In prose fiction Sidney also led the way with the age’s most important prose work, Arcadia. Sidney’s work epitomizes the dominance of the court over Elizabethan culture but, interestingly, it also betrays something of the intellectual and sociocultural strains that were to challenge the hegemony of the court over the next fifty years. Unlike most other prose fiction of the period, the Arcadia presents a complex and challenging model for aristocratic living, for action in and comprehension of the world. The debate Sidney takes the reader into may, finally, be settled by archaic and regressive ideas, but it is infinitely more complex and disturbing than any other work of prose fiction and far more interesting. Motivation and moral insight are rooted in cultural and intellectual values. Technically, too, Sidney’s work is far in advance of any other work of prose fiction, short or long, before the eighteenth century. While the Arcadia’s plot is appropriately elaborate (especially in the revised version), it is nevertheless unified by a coherent and subtle vision, all the more interesting because one senses that, like Spenser, Sidney increasingly felt the pressure to explore and question the values of his class and age. It is arguable, indeed, that the revised Arcadia, like The Faerie Queene, is an unfinishable work, its elaborate display and complexity an epitome of its author’s uneasiness before the questions his work raised for him and his society and one that he sensed would never be settled within his lifetime.

Sidney’s work was the most admired piece of prose fiction in English before Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741). It was imitated, completed, translated, summarized, and, in part, dramatized; it increasingly became regarded as a storehouse of lost moral wisdom. The Arcadia was a mine of plots and situations for dramatists and for later writers of prose fiction; only the collections by Pettie, Painter, and their like were used so much by the following century’s writers. The most popular tale within the complex fabric of Sidney’s work was that of Argalus and Parthenia, which was probably at least as familiar to English readers as the story of Romeo and Juliet and which inspired poems, plays, and a variety of cheap chapbook condensations or summaries of the Arcadia. Some versions, late in the seventeenth century, add characters, such as a villainous mother and a tricky maid, and vastly increase the melodramatic violence and suspense. None of the imitations, short or long, approach the intellectual richness or formal mastery of Sidney’s work. Indeed, so great was the power of Sidney, as an ideal even more than as a person, that the Arcadia might well be seen as hindering developments in prose fiction over the next century or so.

The other major writer of the 1570’s and 1580’s who, although not strictly a writer of “short” fiction, nevertheless deserves mention is John Lyly. His works Eupheus, The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580) provide excellent examples of the pressure of the court upon the role of fiction writing and the style and scope of his work. Whereas by his position as an aristocrat, Sidney had both the freedom and security to challenge or at least severely qualify court values, Lyly was an eagerly aspiring court follower, anxious for preferment and happy to write according to court taste. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit is court fiction par excellence, a courtly game designed primarily to provide stylish entertainment with a minimum of intellectual substance. Although occasionally ironical in intent, Lyly is concerned less with the substance of ideas than with their manipulation as part of a demonstration of wit and sophisticated cleverness. His audience is almost exclusively the ladies and gentlemen of the court, and his intention is to flatter, titillate, and reassure; what moral insights he offers are incidental to the use of stylistic devices as witty display. Yet beneath the glittering surface of Lyly’s prose there can be clearly sensed the unresisted pressure of the court: Contrary ideas are balanced to “prove” that moderation and judicious reasoning coincide with the commonplaces of the Elizabethan regime. Commonplace didacticism is presented, through the formal and mellifluous structure of the prose, as universal truth. In other words, Lyly is not simply offering his elegant style for admiration: He is asserting against the chaos of the world outside the mannered beauty of the court and the order of the courtly ideal. His style creates an emblem of harmony, a sense of formalized security, completely controlled so that the harsher realities of the outside world cannot invade. The constant use of superlatives—”the sweetest wine turneth to the sharpest vinegar”—has often been commented upon for its formal beauty, but it is more than decorative: It is a device designed to suggest that the whole possible range of experience has been considered and, through art, is being controlled and ruled. Lyly’s style is thus a flattering mirror of the court, and the readers of his books are invited to enter and take their places in that world. Almost as much space is given to such invitations, flattering the reader, as to dialogue: “Euphues had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, than open in a Schollar’s studie” is Lyly’s own gloss on his work.

Sidney and Lyly epitomize different aspects of the court aesthetic’s hold over prose fiction, although it was not just over prose fiction, nor was it simply an aesthetic. Hardly any prose fiction, short or long, during the 1580’s or early 1590’s escaped their influence. Euphuism gave writers such as Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Brian Melbancke, and William Warner an elegant mode of presenting characters and ideas as part of a tapestry of stylistic effects; Sidney gave his followers an emphasis on moral seriousness and, interacting with the influence of Greek romance and Spanish chivalric romances, an emphasis on the unpredictability and the infinite complexity of human events.

It is with Lodge and Greene that one can see the romance tradition being adapted to shorter fictional forms. Although Stephen Gosson’s The Ephemerides of Phialo (1579), Anthony Munday’s Zelauto (1580), and Brian Melbancke’s Philotimus (1583) are all medium-length adaptations of Lyly’s mode, with exemplary dialogues and debates and a self-conscious elegance of style, Greene and Lodge provide readers with the best evidence for the popularity and the adaptability of the court-dominated forms. Lodge is the more influenced by Sidney. In Rosalynde: Or, Euphues Golden Legacy (1590), for example, the major source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. 1599-1600, pb. 1623), the typical (although not exclusively) Arcadian motif of the contrast between court and country is used to test the ideals of conduct and style on which the court prided itself. A Margarite of America (1595) is similarly Sidneyan in its mellifluous pastoral atmosphere and delicate moral touches. Between 1579 and 1592, Greene (who was probably the best-selling short-fiction writer of the whole period, with some seventy editions of his romances published before 1640), published about thirty pieces of fiction and, in fact, derived much of his income from what he termed his “trifling Pamphlets . . . and vaine fantasies.” He continually adjusted his work to prevailing fashion, writing Euphuistic fiction (Mamillia: A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England, 1583, 1593), love-tales, low-life and criminal stories, moral exempla—The Mirror of Modesty (1584) shows that “the graie heades of dooting adulterers shall not go with peace into the grave”—and adventure stories. Of his shorter works, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588) is an especially interesting use of the Greek romance tradition. Used by Shakespeare for the main source of the plot of The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611, pb. 1623), it is a tale of lost love, unpredictable fortune, and unexpected joy and sorrow, all designed to stress the illogicality and unpredictability of fortune, but unlike Shakespeare’s play, revealing, in Walter R. Davis’s words, an “almost cynical or Calvinistic assumption of the inconsequentiality of human purposes.” Another example of Greene’s adaptability in a brief form is A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), a calculated criticism of the waste and self-deception of pretentious gentility, written from the conservative viewpoint of a cautious bourgeois. The ethos of this and of his lively “conny-catching” rogue-fiction pamphlets, which display something of the vigorous anarchy of the low-life and the criminal subculture of London, show the gradual adaptation of the romance to a wider audience and, eventually, to anticourt sentiments. As Davis comments, Greene “began his career as the staunchest of the young Euphuists, but by the end of it he had neglected everything Lyly stood for.” As such, he epitomizes the revolution that was coming over much of the literature of the age by the time of his death in 1592.

Before looking in some detail at the distinctive features of the short fiction of the 1590’s, it is perhaps important to sense something of an overview of the courtly fiction that dominated the 1570’s, 1580’s, and early 1590’s, and which in increasingly adapted forms continued to be overwhelmingly popular through the seventeenth century. As can be seen from looking at its two dominant writers, Sidney and Lyly, courtly fiction is essentially conservative in intellectual outlook: Originating in the values of the court, it harks nostalgically back to a world of order, harmony, and mystery. Essentially escapist in its values, it therefore tends to avoid or else to romanticize the pressures and contradictions of material life. Its characters are abstractions and types. Its settings are exotic and romantic, its plots episodic, coincidental, melodramatic, and unsurprising in their continual unexpectedness. Its style, if rarely as explicitly as in Lyly, tends to reinforce the ethos of nostalgia. It is rhetorically heightened, static and emblematic, and self-conscious in its use of rhetoric and ornament to convey the experience of participation in a ritual of comfort and wish fulfillment. In its origins, courtly fiction grew from a tradition of oral entertainment, its tellers subservient (although aspiring) members of the court whose values it espoused. Its narrative techniques go back to those courtly origins. They still show marks of the storyteller, the court entertainer, conscious always of the audience and of the roles he or she must therefore play. Although there is no clear break with the writers of the 1590’s, readers do start to become aware of new forces threatening and disconcerting the dominance of the court. Even Lyly betrays something of an unease before a crucial transition that had, in fact, been under way since the invention of printing: the creation of a larger, more impersonal, and more diverse audience created by the printing press. This was a literate although not necessarily a learned audience eager for entertainment and the reinforcement of its own very different and rapidly changing values and experiences.

In many areas of literature, the 1590’s saw disturbing formal and thematic developments—in satire, in a pared-down rhetoric in both poetry and prose, in the public theater, in the influx of new ideas, and in the virtual invention of new literary forms. So far as prose fiction is concerned, the developments have often been described as the surfacing of a new strain of realism, anticipating, clumsily, developments in the eighteenth century novel. The confusions and the achievements of the 1590’s deserve better than that. They are both important crystallization of the enthusiasms and anxieties of their time and indicative of wider and more long-term cultural changes. Erich Auerbach’s observation that “courtly culture was decidedly unfavorable to the development of a literary art which should apprehend reality in its full breadth and depth” has real point here. It is seen, very clearly, in the ways in which the public theater of Shakespeare’s time responded to and in part created the tastes and self-consciousness of a new audience, and how its new modes of perceiving reality were in part dependent on its growing independence and rejection of the values of the court—paradoxically even while it was ostensibly responsible to and dependent on the court. Only spasmodically does one see such possibilities develop in prose fiction.

The 1590’s show some of the few signs. The later works of Greene, written just before his death in 1592, show him turning to the raw energies of contemporary London life for the material of fiction, and the possibilities of a new, disturbing realism can be seen in another transitional writer, Thomas Nashe. Like Greene, Nashe adapted his considerable talents to both traditional courtly tastes and to a new, wider, less discriminating audience. He attacked the “idle pens,” “fantasticall dreams,” and “worne out impressions of the feyned no where acts” of the chivalric romances and saw his The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594) as written in a “cleane different vaine.” Using an impressive range of satire, parody, burlesque, and realistic observation, Nashe’s work is a picaresque biography of one Jack Wilton, an adventurer who observes warfare, travel, and various aspects of contemporary life. Nashe’s plot is unsophisticatedly episodic, and the straightforwardness of his hero, a roguish outsider able to inhabit a variety of recognizable milieus, affords him an unusual degree of realistic observation. The Unfortunate Traveller is a typical 1590’s work, akin to experiments in poetry and drama, mixing the characteristics of a variety of traditional literary modes, held together by the restless persona of its author, and betraying signs of emergent cultural experiences straining at the restrictions of older artistic forms.

Some of Nashe’s other works, including Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599) and Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), are on the boundary (not easy to draw in the 1590’s) between fiction and disputation. In these two works, he fictionalizes his enemy, Gabriel Harvey, pouring scorn on his learning and affectations and complaining that true learning and wit go unrewarded. In his complaint, one senses less the iconoclast than the aspiring court entertainer, harking back to older, more traditional ways, idealized in Nashe’s Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592) by the Sidneys. He bewails that a gentleman like himself should have to make himself “a gazing stock and a publique spectacle to all the world for nothing.” Like many of his generation—restless, ambitious Inns of Court or university men—Nashe is self-indulgent, insecure, and, despite his astringent style, still seeing his fiction as a means to preferment in a world where advancement seems increasingly denied. While he has the true performer’s delight in rhetoric and a vivid sense of his audience—”Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can doo to make you merry,” he cries in The Unfortunate Traveller—his qualities of realistic observation and pointed commentary remain incidental to his residual conception of the role of fiction, and they point forward to later developments despite his own intentions.

Nashe, Greene, and Lodge all show signs of a vital transition in the nature and function of prose fiction. Even in the Arcadia, in so many pivotal ways the age’s most significant work, there are signs of the incipient breakdown, even at its apparent height, of the cultural hegemony of the court. Any culture contains, as has been shown, residual elements of an earlier phase of society—frequently embodied in the dominant and therefore more conservative tastes of society—and emergent cultural values and experiences, which often appear unknown to authors and which the modern reader identifies as culturally significant. The confusion and experimentation of the 1590’s is not unique to prose-fiction writers, but in their searches for social and literary identity one can certainly sense something of the age’s most important cultural shifts.

Raymond Williams, commenting on the Arcadia, points to the irony that the work, which gave its name to a central facet of the English pastoral tradition, should have been written on a real country estate whose wealth had been created by upsetting traditional bonds between people and their land and then ruthlessly exploiting the enclosures thus acquired. Sidney certainly seems unaware of the irony, and the reader may notice, perhaps a little uncomfortably, that he seems supremely indifferent to the pressures of the real-life values or problems of tenants, peasants, or any class below the level of his admirable, if erring, heroes and heroines. What, as was seen with Greene and Nashe, the 1590’s bring is a gradual transformation of the forms and function of traditional fiction by an audience and an incipient structure of values, beliefs, and habits that would eventually transform not only prose fiction but also the sociocultural fabric of England. It is therefore fascinating to see the court romance invaded and subverted increasingly in the years following the 1590’s. What are usually termed “bourgeois romances” can be seen as early as the 1580’s. At first they are simply adaptations of the traditional fantastic adventures, except that their heroes are not aristocratic but middle-class knights errant. In works such as Lodge’s The Life and Death of William Long Beard (1593), Henry Roberts’s Pheander the Mayden Knight (1595), and Richard Johnson’s The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincolne (1607), the quests of the heroes are to protect values that express the world not of Arcadia but of Southwark or Eastcheap.

The bourgeois romances are cautious and decorous to the point of incongruity, however, calling into question their courtly antecedents by implication only and explicitly intent on appealing still to the values of “the gentleman reader,” although the term is taking on a meaning far broader than Baldassare Castiglione, Sidney, or even Nashe would have approved. The most successful writers of this form of fiction are Emanuel Forde and Thomas Deloney, whose works, like Gascoigne or Greene’s, are somewhat awkwardly located between “long” and “short.” Forde’s enormously popular The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia (1595?) and The Famous and Pleasant History of Parismus (1598-1599) are works of moderate length which add to an explicitly although romanticized bourgeois setting an interest in the motivation of humble people exploited by overbearing aristocrats. Deloney was almost as popular a writer and even more interesting in his mixture of realism and traditional romance. In 1596 he was accused of “bringing in” the queen to one of his works, “to speak with her people in dialogue in very fond and undecent sort,” which would never have done for Sidney (or Spenser). His heroes typically rise from being lowly apprentices or servants to becoming wealthy clothiers or members of Parliament. His settings are still idealized but are recognizably related to England rather than Arcadia and are peopled with a variety of merchants, shoemakers, citizens, and goodwives, whose natural loyalties are more patriotic, Deloney constantly asserts, than those of the aristocracy. In Thomas of Reading: Or, The Six Worthy Yeomen of the West (c. 1600), after an especially jovial interview with the king, Hodgekins the clothiers’ spokesman “affirmed on his faith that he had rather speak to the king’s majesty than to many justices of peace.” With such a revolution in the content of his work, Deloney is, however, disappointingly traditional, even archaic, in the structure and mode of his fiction. His work is still chivalric romance, adapted for a new class anxious to see its newfound respectability and power idealized in the way its superiors continued, more uneasily, to idealize theirs.

One can, however, find fiction (and significantly, specifically short fiction) that escapes the dominance of the residual court modes if one looks even further from Whitehall than Hodgekins and his like afford. The recovery of popular, especially lower-class, literature in the period is beset with extraordinary difficulties. Much, if not most, has been lost simply because it was not or could not be written down and printed; much that has survived in print has been laundered for a more genteel audience. However, from various written sources, often very indirect ones—commonplace books, letters, and the like, as well as some printed sources—one can piece together a vivid tradition of folk and popular art that never escaped the force of the dominant sociocultural pressures, but which nevertheless constituted a rich tradition in its own right and which surfaced, increasingly, in the seventeenth century in the Commonwealth and in works such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Part I (1678). Difficult as it may be to pin down a visible tradition of folk stories actually published in the period, one can nevertheless from indirect sources (letters, brief mentions in plays, and other works) see how the stories of traditional folk heroes, such as Robin Hood, served as outlets for the frustrations and ambitions of the underprivileged and unlettered.

Indeed, perhaps the most pervasive form of short fiction, written or oral, in the period is the short, homely anecdote or tale. Hundreds of examples are found, often tucked away in other literary forms (for example, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, pr. c. 1597-1598, pb. 1958) or assembled in the enormously popular collections of jest-books. Jest-books were accumulations of varying length of tales and jokes, most centered on a clinching or witty riposte designed to provoke laughter or admiration (or a free drink); the tales used a variety of typical characters—faithless wives, rapacious clergy, corrupt lawyers—that simultaneously drew on traditional wisdom and sharp observation. A typical example is the anonymous The Sack Full of Newes (1558), a collection of twenty-two miscellaneous jests, some with dialogue, some with brief, pithy morals, but all meant for entertainment. Some of the jests are developed into short capsule biographies and become picaresque tales of a rogue or practical joker whose exploits demand the reader’s sympathy. Examples include George Peele’s Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607), Dobson’s Dire Bobbes (1607), and The Life of Long Meg of Westminister (published 1620, probably written thirty or more years earlier). The atmosphere is usually colloquial and vulgar, and the basic narrative structure is episodic, with a rapid focus on a succession of individual incidents.

Anecdotes, jest-books, and jest-biographies all bring the reader much closer to the world that court romances were deliberately written to exclude and control. They constitute an undercurrent of short fiction that, while surfacing as much indirectly in other forms of literature as in their own right, nevertheless constitute a genuine alternative to the dominant cultural forms. The sources of energy in key works of the age—again, Bunyan provides an important example—coincide with and reinforce the tradition the reader must next consider. That tradition, Protestantism, on the surface seems antithetical to the dominant characteristics of prose (or any) fiction, and it is usually ignored in histories of the prose fiction of the period. This neglect is unfortunate, since in many ways Protestantism constituted the most important forward-looking movement of the whole age.

Except for occasional references, one group of Renaissance writings neglected as examples of prose fiction are the popular theological tracts. Many, admittedly, are among the most memorably unreadable works ever written—with exceptions such as John Foxe’s The Book of Martyrs (1563), which is a masterwork of propaganda, of religious devotion, and, it might be suggested, of fiction. At its greatest moments—in the account of the deaths of Latimer and Ridley, for example—Foxe sets the reader down as an eyewitness (even ear- and nostril-witnesses) to events purportedly historical, revealing the details of which only the victims themselves could have been aware. Facts are redoubled, hearsay becomes fact, rumor is given tongue, and Foxe’s rhetoric above all else directs his readers to participate in the revulsion against the persecutions of Bloody Mary.

In short, Foxe, self-consciously or otherwise, takes over the rhetorical duplicity and inherent depravity that pious Protestants mistrusted in literature, art, and above all prose fiction. During the 1570’s, indeed, as the new movement in prose fiction gathered impetus, Protestant moralists shifted their traditional attacks on medieval verse romances to the new prose examples. Ascham, no extremist, regretted that the Bible was banished from the court and “Morte Arthure received into the Princes Chamber.” Philip Stubbes, Gosson, and Perkins described the prose romances as “idle tales,” “dreams merely to amuse the idle,” “bookes of love, all idle discourses and histories,” “nothing else but enticements and baites unto manifold sinnes.” In the 1630’s, the sophisticated Nicholas Ferrar spoke for a century of Protestant condemnation when he stated that romances and tales could not be allowed “to passe for good examples of vertue among Christians.” Protestant theologians such as William Prynne in the 1630’s or John Milton a decade later saw prose fiction as “profane discourses,” or “baits for sin and corruption.”

Behind such condemnations lies a suspicion of the autonomy of the human imagination, expressed in Saint Augustine’s oft-cited definition of a tale or fable as “a lie, made for delectation sake.” Yet, although Protestants attacked their society’s increasing tolerance of books “whose impure Filth and vain Fabulosity, the light of God hath abolished utterly,” as one Puritan pamphleteer put it, there is nevertheless a sense of the gradual fusion of fiction writer and theologian in a tradition of popular theological pamphlets heavily influenced by Foxe. As C. S. Lewis noted, while most of the attacks on prose fiction were by Protestants, so were most of the defenses. Sidney’s Arcadia was praised by such stern moralists as his friend Fulke Greville for its moral seriousness, and it has been made apparent how consistently English readers and writers alike were most comfortable when their fiction was reassuringly moralized. In Europe, the Council of Trent was attempting to create a religious literature to replace the secular forms that dominated genteel and popular taste, and its influence can be seen in both the devotional lyric and in a fashion for explicitly Christian romances. The movement is especially associated with Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of Bellay, whose Dorothée and Palombe are examples of the genre. Each is a Christianized pastoral romance designed to teach, respectively, the purity of marriage and the duties of parents. The typical romance features that have been observed are all present—dreamlike atmosphere, idealized characters, complicated plots—all held together by an explicitly theological drive.

Even more interesting are works that, while explicitly rejecting any fictional status, nevertheless show the marked influence of fictional techniques. Thomas Beard’s The Theatre of Gods Judgements (1596, and many subsequent editions) is a case in point. Beard’s aim is to survey the whole course of human history to demonstrate the inevitability of God’s revenging judgments over a world which is “nothing else but an ocean full of hideous monsters or a thicke forest full of theeves and robbers.” Apart from its highly colorful interpretation of God’s nature, Beard’s work is distinctive for its reliance on an endless succession of anecdotes, tales, and gossip—in short, on a variety of short fictions. Beard’s style has the dash and crudity of Greene’s conny-catching pamphlets and the vividness of Nashe or Bandello. Of the eighty-seven chapters in his first edition, eighteen are concerned with lust, whoredom, and uncleanness; twelve with the crimes of great men; and eleven with murder. Even within chapters dealing with offenses against less spectacular commandments—such as blasphemy, false witness, idolatry, and perjury—his examples are chosen for their lurid powers of persuasion. Many of his examples are taken from Foxe and significantly elaborated by techniques drawn from the sources in popular culture that provided the strength of the best Elizabethan fiction. Another unusual hybrid is John Reynolds’s The Triumphs of Gods Revenge, Against the Crying, and Execrable Sinne of Murther (1621), in which quite explicitly the enemy is not merely sin but fiction. Reynolds attacks the popularity of the amorous romance which, he says, panders to humankind’s bare appetites by their “Perfuming, Powdering, Croping, Paynting, Amarous kisses, Sweet Smyles, Suggered speeches, Wanton embracings, and lascivious dalliance.”

When one thinks of the importance of prose fiction in succeeding centuries, one might well look back to Beard and Reynolds (or to Bunyan’s self-chastisement for reading lewd romances) as misguided opinions bypassed by history. Paradoxically, however, it was the Puritan dynamic, with its emphasis on self-understanding and the conscience of the individual before God, that came through into the eighteenth century to provide the intense moral concerns of Daniel Defoe, Richardson, and others. Protestant books of devotion and moral treatises turned inevitably to fictional portraits to exemplify worthy behavior. The classical genre of the character-book was revived and infused with a distinctive moralistic cast and again stressed not idealized characters in unrealistic settings but the temptations and contingencies of the world and the correct inner attitudes to cultivate. In short, the intense moral seriousness of the Protestant dynamic started, through the seventeenth century, to constitute a genuine countercultural movement that radically transformed the whole tone of English (and, by the 1620’s, North American) life. Part of that transformation is the effect not only on forms of popular literature but also on the creation of a sensibility which would look to fiction with a new concentration on realistic motivation, recognizable settings, verisimilitude of characterization, and intense and complex moral dilemmas. Protestant polemics against fiction may have, in the period, distorted or helped prevent the maturing of an audience for prose fiction, but ultimately they provided crucial elements to make it possible.

Of the native works, the most popular were reprints of Sidney, Forde, Johnson, Munday, and Deloney. Overall, the English fiction of the whole century presents a depressing picture. Continental fiction, by way of contrast, continued to dominate, especially the long French heroic romances such as Honoré d’Urfe’s L’Astrée (1607-1628, 1925; 5 volumes; Astrea, 1657-1658), which was imitated in England in the 1640’s and 1650’s, and the Spanish picaresque, such as the old La Celestina, first published anonymously in 1499 as the Comedia de Calixto y Melibea. It reappeared several years later in a series of expanded versions entitled Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, in which there is textual evidence that the author of at least the major part of the work was Fernando de Rojas. It was subsequently retitled La Celestina, after the main character.

Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1613; Exemplary Novels, 1846), one of the landmarks in the development of the European short story, was partially translated into English by James Mabbe in 1640 but was not widely influential in England. The tentative beginnings of a new realism foreshadowed in Greene and Nashe come to fruition in these experimental tales, which turn their focus squarely on the life of secular characters in contemporary social settings. Cervantes himself explicitly recognizes in the preface that he is breaking new generic ground in Spanish literature: “I am the first who has written novels in the Spanish language, though many have hitherto appeared among us, all of them translated from foreign authors. But these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen from anyone. . . . “ He does, however, retain distinct ties to the earlier courtly romance and didactic moral treatise: His protagonists are typically of noble birth, and the tales are explicitly presented as “exemplary” because, as he remarks in his preface, “there is not one of them from which you may not draw some useful example.” These elements of the escapist aristocratic romance are combined in many of the tales with a dedication to verisimilitude and realism and are frequently grafted onto plots and social milieus drawn from the picaresque tradition.

Furthermore, the putative exemplarity of the stories often seems highly problematical upon close examination. While the first story in the collection, “The Gypsy Maid,” does end with the harmonious union of a virtuous young couple of noble birth, even here the setting for most of the action is picaresque: the outcast (and officially outlawed) society of gypsies. Later tales in the collection yield morals that are ambiguous at best. In “The Jealous Extremaduran,” even the narrator expresses his bafflement at the failure of the heroine to dispel her husband’s conviction that she has behaved dishonorably. The final two stories of the set, “The Deceitful Marriage” and “The Colloquy of the Dogs,” seem to defy any simple attempt at moralistic interpretation. The former depicts the reciprocal treacheries and betrayals of a couple who marry under false pretenses with the intention of stealing from one another. The husband, having contracted a venereal disease from his wife (who has since abandoned him), overheard a dialogue between two dogs while recuperating in the hospital, which he then relates as an embedded narrative within the story of the marriage. The dogs deliver a thorough (and hilarious) denunciation of virtually every aspect of contemporary Spanish society, ending with the (unfulfilled) promise of a sequel. As this example of embedded narrative and nonhuman point of view suggests, the tales are highly innovative at the level of narrative technique. Cervantes eschews both the autobiographical first-person narration of the picaresque novel and the omniscient third-person narration of the romance for a limited third-person mode heavily reliant upon characters’ speeches and, especially, dialogues, reflecting his long-standing interest in writing for the theater and opening up the texts to a multiplicity of dramatized voices.

A durable critical tradition has divided the twelve tales into two subgroups. The first comprises a series of relatively conservative and conventional idealistic romances (“The Two Damsels,” “The Force of Blood,” “The Lady Cornelia,” “The Generous Lover,” and “The Spanish-English Lady”). A second group consists of more realistic and experimental tales, which break from conventional patterns and foreshadow the future of narrative fiction in the genre of the novel (“Rinconete and Cortadillo,” “The Glass Scholar,” “The Jealous Extremaduran,” “The Deceitful Marriage,” and “The Colloquy of the Dogs”). The remaining two, “The Gypsy Maid” and “The Illustrious Scullery-Maid,” have proven less easy to assign to either group and are often considered transitional or mixed in form. This interplay between idealism and realism (or, as it came to be characterized by modern critics, between the romantic and the novelistic) in Cervantes’s work, noted as early as 1633 by Charles Sorel in his L’Anti-Roman: Ou, L’Histoire du Berger Lysis (1633-1634; The Anti-Romance: Or, The History of the Shepherd Lysis, 1654), begins to be codified in Mabbe’s 1640 English version. Mabbe offers a clear index of contemporary English taste in literature by translating only six of the tales: all five from the list of melodramatic romances, plus “The Jealous Extremaduran.” By way of historical contrast, Rodríguez Marín, in 1914, similarly translates only six of the tales for his influential Clásicos Castellanos edition. In accordance with much different early twentieth century critical tenets, he takes four of them from the list of novelistic tales, the two from the “mixed” list, and none from the list of romances. Either of these implicit schemes of evaluation consigns at least half of the tales to the status of artistic embarrassments, whether it be as crude examples of debased popular and folkloric forms or as failed attempts by Cervantes to mine the historically outworn genre of the Byzantine romance.

Under the (probably unconscious) influence of evolutionary thinking, modern critics long viewed Cervantes’s career under the latter of these two models. His overall artistic trajectory was considered to be itself exemplified by the Exemplary Novels, which were thought to demonstrate his development from a backward-looking writer of artificial romances early in his career to a forward-looking precursor of the modern novelist in his more realistic mature works. Over time the wide factual disparity between this oversimplified characterization of his oeuvre and the chronological history of his publications worked to question and eventually overturn the pseudoevolutionary view that every genre must succeed and render extinct its predecessors. The discovery and study of the early versions in the Porras manuscript (usually dated 1604 or 1606) of the picaresque “Rinconete and Cortadillo” and the bawdy “The Jealous Extremaduran” established that Cervantes became interested in the “modern” realistic tales relatively early in his foreshortened career. Conversely, bibliographic study of his last two major works—Part 2 of Don Quixote de la Mancha, typically read as the deathblow to traditional romance writing, and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617; The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern History, 1619), a textbook example of traditional romance writing—establishes that he must have been working on both of them at the same time.

More recent studies of the themes and techniques of Cervantes’s writings have led to the recognition that he found much of value in a wide range of styles and genres and freely mixed elements of all of them together, forging artistic links between the spiritual and secular worlds. The alternation of genres in the Exemplary Novels, as well as in other works throughout his career, is more plausibly the result of a conscious artistic juxtaposition of the codes of pastoral romance and the demands of verisimilitude rather than evidence of a pivotal change in his own attitudes toward literature. Cervantes’s hybridization of colorful depictions of low-life gypsies and picaresque scoundrels with sentimental aristocratic love stories has come to look less like artistic miscalculation and more like the habitual succession of comic and elevated scenes in the plays of his exact contemporary Shakespeare. Critics are now disposed to rank the romantic and realistic stories as of comparable merit and interest, opening up the opportunity for a more balanced appreciation of the novelle than has perhaps been available since Cervantes wrote them. Consideration has also begun of the integrity of the work as a whole, circling back to a hint at a larger unity that Cervantes had offered in his preface: “Were I not afraid of being too prolix, I might show you what savory and unsavory fruit might be extracted from them, collectively and severally.” Critical assessment of the literary achievement of the collection has become increasingly positive, and current estimates of the Exemplary Novels have placed it at the point that it cannot be fairly compared with any other body of short fiction of its period.

In subsequent English fiction, one can, nevertheless, certainly pick out both interesting trends and a variety of fictional forms. The best short fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, was written in this period of transition, between about 1570 and 1620, when it looked as if the tradition established by Sidney, Gascoigne, Lyly, Lodge, Greene, and Nashe, and then modified by Deloney and Forde, might produce a flowering in fiction akin to that in France, Italy, or Spain. This did not happen, however. R. A. Day has described the period between the death of Elizabeth I and the early eighteenth century as a “wasteland” so far as fiction is concerned. It is a pardonable exaggeration. Continental fiction continued to dominate, especially the Spanish picaresque, such as the old La Celestina (1499), which was first translated into English in 1631, and the long French heroic romance, such as Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrea.

Nevertheless, one can certainly pick out both interesting trends and a variety of fictional forms. Of the shorter kinds of fiction—tales of sentiment and love, collections of novelle in the manner of Boccaccio (who was first translated in 1620), didactic and exemplary fiction, jest-books, cautionary tales—all continued to be published. By and large, however, C. C. Mish’s summary is an apt one: The course of short fiction during the years 1600-1660 was a “downward decline; the bright promise went down in sterile entertainment and preciousness.” While (as Mish and others have shown) it is possible to put together an anthology of entertaining pieces from the period, most of the work is derivative, nostalgic, uncertain in style, and vitiated by inconsistency of technique and uncertainty of aim. The best continues to be translation from the French, Italian, or classical sources, which continued to dominate European taste in fiction; or short, popular tales and anecdotes in the jest-book or jest-biography tradition, such as Hugh Peters’s The Tales and Jests of Hugh Peters (1660) and Nathaniel Crouch’s English Jests Refined (1687); or picaresque fiction, such as the anonymous Murther upon Murther (1684), Sir John (c. 1700), and Bateman’s Tragedy (c. 1700). It is in the later seventeenth century, in fact, that the folklore and folktales, of which there was only spasmodic evidence a century before, start to surface in published works. Stories of Robin Hood, Fortunatus and his Magic Purse, and the like were clearly the main fictional diet of the lower classes and had been for centuries. Only gradually were they becoming part of the mainstream of English culture. Other fiction remained firmly in the tradition of improbable, elaborate romance, often with exotic settings expressing the public’s interest in newly discovered or fashionable parts of the world, such as the United States, Turkey, or Surinam.

Major historical transitions do not occur overnight, and although in post-Restoration England there is little to change the picture of what short fiction was written there, nevertheless from the 1680’s on there are signs of a new impetus in prose fiction that would lead to the re-creation of the genre as central to English culture during the following two hundred years. One sign is the indirect but crucial impact of the Protestant emphasis on soberly meeting and contemplating oneself as an individual and learning what it was, in this world, that might make for one’s salvation. Indicative of this new importance of self-analysis was the gradual rise of epistolary fiction, stories in the form of letters, which was eventually to lead to Richardson’s Pamela. In the seventeenth century, epistolary fiction was typically focused on the personal lives of wellborn or respectable women, and, while hardly (to modern taste) penetrating beneath the genteel surfaces, in retrospect these attempts represent an enormous breakthrough toward psychological realism. Telling a story in letters, as in the anonymous French work Lettres portugaises (1669; Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, 1678), allows the reader to focus on and partly inhabit the self-consciousness of the narrator. Gradually, prose-fiction writers were discovering what the dramatists had almost a century before—the need to let the reader participate in the making of the work’s meanings. Another important change was the growing insistence, already anticipated by Nashe or Deloney, on a degree of external verisimilitude in fiction. Details of setting became more functional, characters were introduced as part of the ongoing plot, motivation was more carefully linked by logic and circumstance, and speeches became more colloquial.

Particularly in France there was a rapid growth in the variety and sophistication of short fiction. The long romance, le roman de longue haleine, gradually became less important in France and a variety of shorter, more realistic forms, became more dominant. The crucial difference between the earlier tales of Bandello, Cynthius, or Marguerite de Navarre and those of Madame de La Fayette, such as La Princesse de Montpensier (published 1662 as Segrais; The Princess of Montpensier, 1666) or La Princesse de Clèves (1678, published anonymously; The Princess of Clèves, 1679), and others is precisely the movement toward some degree of vraisemblance in setting and, especially, in psychology. In England the development was slower, but a growing verisimilitude of setting at least appears in some of the tales of roguery, such as John Davies’s Scarron’s Novels (1665), translated and adapted from the diverse short pieces in Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique (1651-1657, 3 vols.; English translation, 1651, 1657; also as The Comical Romance, 1665).

In the various kinds of fiction written after the Restoration, too, a new solution slowly developed for a problem that had clearly worried Elizabethan prose fictionists—the role of the narrator within the work. In collections such as Boccaccio, Cynthius, or Painter’s, there is usually a close relationship maintained between the narrator and the author in the introductory or “frame” material that links the individual tales together. At other times, as in Gascoigne or Sidney, the narrator will directly address his reader, at times be seemingly omnipotent, and at other times be disarmingly frank about his ignorance of his characters’ motives, actions, or origins. In short, there is a shifting and often arbitrary relationship between the different narrative voices of the work; there is a characteristic opaqueness which continued into the eighteenth century in Laurence Sterne and which, interestingly, has reappeared in such twenty century fictionists as John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, and Ronald Sukenick.

Gradually, however, especially after the Restoration, one can sense in fiction, first in France and then in England, the rise of fictional illusionism. The question of the author’s access to the states of mind of his characters, especially if they were portrayed as historically real, which by the time of Jane Austen or William Makepeace Thackeray or Henry James was seen as jejune, was for Madame de Scudéry or Aphra Behn a most awkward one. The diverse solutions—the claims of having seen letters, read diaries, spoken to the persons involved—seem naïve to later eyes, but the questions being asked gradually produced the belief in the illusionism of fiction, the omnipotence of the narrator, and the self-contained autonomy of the world of the novel or tale. Without such developments, the so-called realistic novel of later centuries would not have been possible.

Of all the shorter fiction written in England after the Restoration, the most significant, and still readable, is that by the female dramatist-novelist Aphra Behn, who wrote a dozen or so pieces of short fiction. Most are interesting mixtures of traditional romance with a few rather genteel hints of the new realism. Her stories are melodramatic, generalized, and elevated, but nevertheless—as in The Nun: Or, The Perjur’d Beauty (1697) and The History of the Nun: Or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (pr. 1689), or the longer and posthumously published in 1688 The Fair Jilt: Or, The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda and Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave—reach unusual levels of intensity. The History of the Nun compresses into twenty-one pages the complicated love affairs of five men and women, including one, the beautiful and unpredictable Ardelia, who falls in love with three men, causing the death of all three, the sister of one, and her own. Superficial, exploitative, and psychologically improbable, the work nevertheless has some energy and concentration that make it more approachable than the longer works of the period, such as the earl of Orrery’s labored Parthenissa (1654-1669), which drags its reader lugubriously through six volumes nostalgically looking back to the world of Sidney’s Arcadia.

In 1692, near enough to the end of this study’s period to constitute a landmark, an indication at least of slowly changing tastes and of the deeper sociocultural currents beneath, William Congreve published his Incognita: Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d. Written when Congreve was twenty-two, the work—a charming, well-plotted, amusing Scarronian tale, a not altogether unsympathetic attack on the romance tradition—contains a preface which was to set out many of the issues for prose fiction in the next decades. He comments on the incredibility of the romance tradition: Romances, he argues, are “generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s, Heroins . . . where loftly Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate and surprise the Reader into a giddy Delight.” Novels, by contrast, “are of a more familiar nature; come near us . . . with . . . Events but not such as a wholly unusual or unprecedented.” Congreve’s terminology was not new—Jean Regnault de Segrais in 1656 had distinguished the novelle from the roman by its greater vraisemblance—but in England, Congreve’s explicit statement marks an important turning point in the development of fiction, as he bids farewell to the archaic world of romance and looks to the already emergent modes of short and long fiction that were to dominate the next century.

Looking back over this survey of short prose fiction between the impact of printing in the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, one can see that the changes in literary taste are inevitably the expressions of complex but definable structures of idea and feeling in the life of the whole society. In England the period was one of political and social energies for radical change, concentrated, thwarted, and then overwhelmed by forces closely tied to the new dominance of entrepreneurial capitalism. At the beginning of this period, the sociocultural power was slowly slipping from the older feudal aristocracy to classes more in harmony with the new forces of secularism, industrialism, and dominance over the world, nature, and one another. The cultural development of England between 1500 and 1700 is too complex to summarize thus, but one can see how the fiction of the period responds to and articulates such pressures—the slow replacement of an increasingly archaic mode of romance narrative, the slow growth of a confident new illusionism (“realism” is far too question-begging a term), an uncertainty not merely about the mode of fiction but about the very place of fiction in such a society, the spasmodic surfacing of repressed cultural modes of living in folktale, jest, or other popular forms—through the otherwise dominant cultural forms. Such changes can be discussed in literary terms, but they are not simply literary changes.

In particular, this is the case with the so-called growth of realism. The triumph of realistic prose narrative in the eighteenth century is the triumph of a way of seeing the world, which provides an illusion that chosen events are linked causally, that details can be selected from human events and be perceived as inevitable, given, and irreducible. Realism, however, like the social system that it expresses, stresses the product and its consumption by the reader, not the production. Just as capitalist society represses the mode of production of any article and stresses the product’s marketable value, so realism (produced, in fact, by a certain use of language) stresses only the final illusion of reality and the harmonious final effect on the reader-consumer. The writer’s concern throughout this period with the place of the narrator in his or her text reflects more than a technical problem; in the eighteenth century, both Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne mercilessly satirize the notions that language is simply instrumental and reading is simply consumption. They look back, angrily or whimsically, to the earlier period when the writer-narrator was on more arbitrary but nevertheless intimate terms with his reader, and the writer did not feel obliged to believe that language was identical with the real world. The gradual triumph of the illusion of realism is undoubtedly the single most important development in this period—which, as we have seen, does contain (despite many modern scholars’ opinions) a goodly variety of amusing, interesting fiction—but its triumph is not simply a passing fashion. Realism, with all its apparent naturalness, is the exact, and in many ways limited and limiting, articulation of the dynamic of a new age. In England (in America, a very different pattern was starting to emerge triumphantly) readers had to wait another two hundred years for an equivalent literary change—and for the complex cultural changes intertwining with and expressed by it.

Bibliography

Atkinson, William C. “Cervantes, El Pinciano, and the Novelas ejemplares.” In Critical Essays on Cervantes, edited by Ruth El Saffar. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Atkinson’s essay, originally published in Hispanic Review in 1948, reads Cervantes’s collection as a series of literary experiments in the aesthetics of the new genre of short fiction, heavily influenced by the Italian literary theorist El Pinciano’s Philosophía antigua poética.

Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. “Novelas ejemplares: Reality, Realism, Literary Tradition.” In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, edited by John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982. Locates the Exemplary Novels in relation to the main currents of the Spanish literary tradition and argues that Cervantes was consciously setting out to invent a new literary genre with the collection.

Clamurro, William H. Beneath the Fiction: The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes’s “Novelas ejemplares.” New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Argues that each of the novellas in the collection illustrates the inherent tension between the ideal values of the ostensibly dominant social mores and the more complicated realities of a rich and diverse cultural community. Cervantes’s ostensibly conservative affirmations of the social order simultaneously dramatize the range of conflicting and often disorderly behavior that goes on within it.

El Saffar, Ruth. Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s “Novelas ejemplares.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Argues that the novellas, when read in the order of their composition, reveal a trajectory in Cervantes’s production from early realistic stories to later idealistic stories. The full meaning of the overall pattern of the published collection can best be evaluated against this chronological ordering, which implicitly contradicts much modern discussion about the development of Cervantes’s aesthetic principles.

Forcione, Alban K. Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Locates four of the Exemplary Novels—”The Jealous Extremaduran,” “The Gypsy Maid,” “The Glass Scholar,” and “The Force of Blood”—within the mainstream of the Christian Humanist tradition of Western European thought. Forcione argues specifically for the influence of Desiderius Erasmus on Cervantes’s tales.

Ricapito, Joseph V. Cervantes’s “Novelas ejemplares: Between History and Creativity. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996. Explores the manifold connections between the novellas and their historical contexts. Includes detailed analyses of social, religious, economic, and political backgrounds as they relate to individual stories.

Riley, E. C. “Cervantes: A Question of Genre.” In Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honour of P. E. Russell, eddited by F. W. Holcroft, et al. Oxford, England: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981. A concise and balanced overview of the long history of critical discussion about the “novelistic” and “romance” elements in Cervantes’s works, including the Exemplary Novels.