ROBERT Greene transformed the face of English prose fiction with the sheer volume, diversity, and inventiveness of his publications. Before he started to write, no English writer had dedicated his entire career to prose fiction, or written so many varieties of it, or demonstrated to the same extent its unparalleled flexibility as a medium, its capacity to function as a vehicle for such an astonishing range of contrasting styles, plots, narrative forms, and points of view. By the time of his death it was possible to imagine oneself as a writer of prose fiction first and foremost; in anachronistic terms, as a professional novelist. And the full implications of this one-man transformation of the English literary scene have only recently begun to be explored with the attention they deserve.1
This is partly due to the vagaries of fashion. Greene’s style in his romances, long dismissed as grotesquely artificial, is now enjoyed for the qualities that once condemned it: playful experimentation with rhetorical and narrative structure; bold musicality; and the flamboyant display of its own craftsmanship.2 But his low reputation was also due to a successful smear campaign by his enemies—a campaign to which he was oddly willing to contribute through his presentation of himself, in his later work, as a talented, but feckless hack.3 And his image was further tarnished by the contempt he expressed for Shakespeare in a notorious pamphlet written on his deathbed. Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought With a Million of Repentance (1592) represents its author as an unscrupulous trickster who repeatedly falls foul of other people’s tricks. His pleasure in fooling others takes him from plotting to con his brother out of his inheritance—which ends with his own betrayal by a fellow plotter—to writing for the theatre—which ends with the players abandoning him for a more fashionable writer from among their own ranks (Shakespeare, naturally). It seems appropriate, then, that the terms Greene used to slander Shakespeare—above all the claim that he was ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ (sig. F1v), plagiarizing the work of university graduates to make himself look good—have been used to flog the slanderer.4 Greene has been accused of stealing stories, passages, and phrases from a range of other writers, including himself, since he sometimes repeated parts of his own texts verbatim. In fact, the Groatsworth itself may be an act of plagiarism, assembled after Greene’s death by Henry Chettle as a means of cashing in on the drama of the famous author’s final moments.5 But whatever proportion of the text is by Greene, it is a highly complex work, as Steve Mentz has shown, which slips easily between literary modes—from romance to erotic fabliau to lyric to autobiography to animal fable to confessional missive (it closes with a letter of apology written to his wife)—making the pamphlet a miniature model of his literary career.6 The Groatsworth, in fact, should encourage us not to dismiss, but to look more closely at the strange but fascinating writer whose name it bears.
Greene started out as a nobody.7 It is not clear, in fact, exactly who he was or what he did in life apart from writing. He came from Norwich, he tells us in his title pages, where his father may have been a saddler or an innkeeper—we don’t know which. We don’t know what school he attended, though it was probably the Norwich grammar school. We know he graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge, like his friend Thomas Nashe (he was later awarded an MA by Oxford too). He may have married a woman named Dorothy, spent her money, and sent her back with a child to her wealthy Lincolnshire family. He may have had a son called Fortunatus with a London hooker. He may have been disinherited by his own father, undergone a deathbed repentance, and written to Dorothy, asking her to pay off his debts. But nearly all these details come either from his quasi-autobiographical fictions, such as the Groatsworth, or the pen of his enemy Gabriel Harvey, who made a habit of engaging in literary squabbles with celebrity authors (Lyly and Nashe were among his other targets). Greene’s biography as we know it is a commercial fabrication, inseparable from the busy marketplace of print which he dominated in his lifetime—and which continued to draw sustenance from his name after his death, in a series of publications (The Repentance of Robert Greene [1592], Greene’s News Both from Heaven and Hell [1593], and Greene in Conceit [1598]) that flaunt it on their title pages.8 The fictitiousness of his life (and afterlife) is itself a testament to the impact he had on prose fiction, demonstrating as it does the extent to which he made it possible to imagine a nobody as a fitting subject for what has come to be called ‘novelistic discourse’.9
Greene’s career as a writer of prose has been roughly divided by Walter Davis into four distinct phases.10 From 1580 to 1584, he wrote imitations of John Lyly’s celebrated Euphues books; from 1585 to 1588, framed collections of short stories; from 1588 to 1589, pastoral romances inspired by ancient Greek romance; and from 1590 to 1592, quasi-autobiographical narratives and stories about London con artists, the celebrated ‘cony-catching pamphlets’. Useful though it is as a starting point, this fourfold division is clearly too simplistic. Greene began writing romances based on ancient Greek models as early as 1584; he continued to produce longer romances while writing his framed story collections, autobiographies, and cony-catching pamphlets; and he also wrote books of quite different kinds, such as translations from Italian, French, and Spanish, and the immensely successful satire A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). Moreover, there are consistent preoccupations that fuse the different strands of Greene’s writing and these can be occluded by any inflexible taxonomy of his works. Above all, Greene resembles his contemporary Marlowe in his obsession with those aspects of human experience that resist categorization or control: with anger, greed, desire, and other emotions; with ageing and other changes that happen over time; with sudden, unexpected events or coincidences that defy all our usual assumptions about cause and effect. He delights in telling stories that reverse the scenarios favoured by the pedagogues of the English educational system, where the old are always wise and youngsters disobedient, where men are intelligent, strong, and responsible and women fickle, foolish, and weak, where rulers are to be respected and their subjects docile. Perhaps his most striking characteristic, in fact, can be summed up in the statement that with Greene’s work you can seldom guess what will happen next. This would hardly be true if it could be tidily compartmentalized. In imparting this unpredictable quality to his narratives, Greene built on the achievements of English prose fiction writers of the 1560s and 1570s; and to appreciate his contribution to literary history one has to start with these.11
The 1560s saw a major influx of French and Italian short stories into England, in the shape of the hugely influential collections of William Painter and Geoffrey Fenton. Greene clearly read Painter’s two-part Palace of Pleasure (1566–7) very carefully—like many of his contemporaries, including Shakespeare—and transferred its organized eclecticism to his own story collections, such as Perimedes the Blacksmith (c.1588) or Penelope’s Web (1587). Fenton’s Certain Tragical Discourses (1567) helped bring about the ‘feminizing’ of English prose fiction in the 1570s, which Greene enthusiastically embraced.12 Dedicated to Mary Sidney, Philip’s mother, the Tragical Discourses are a selection of often melodramatic stories derived from the Italian author Matteo Bandello, in which women play a central role. Fenton’s insistence that his stories constitute a form of history, articulated in the detailed defence of the historian’s craft in his dedication, helped to give English prose fiction its status as a kind of alternative to the chronicles sponsored by governments: a form that acknowledged, as chronicles did not, the crucial parts played by women and desire in the changing fortunes of nations. Greene’s two interventions in the quasi-historical matter of Troy—Penelope’s Web and Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587)—and his cheeky historical romance Ciceronis Amor (1589), which describes the love-life of Rome’s most celebrated orator, continue Fenton’s project of identifying women and desire as the unacknowledged dual motors of European history.
Painter’s and Fenton’s achievements were built on by the two most influential English writers of the 1570s, George Gascoigne and John Lyly. Gascoigne’s only prose fiction, The Adventures of Master F.J., formed part of his miscellany A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573), revised as The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire in 1575; while Lyly’s two Euphues books (1578 and 1580) gave their name to an ornately patterned prose style, euphuism, which remained fashionable for at least a decade after their publication. Both Gascoigne and Lyly took devious, witty, feckless young men as their protagonists. In each case these men come as strangers from distant regions to the household of a respected member of society—a Northern English knight in the first version of the Adventures of Master F.J., the Governor of Naples in the first Euphues book—and disrupt it by prosecuting an adulterous or quasi-adulterous affair: Master F.J. seduces the knight’s wife, Euphues the Governor’s daughter, who is betrothed to another man. Both narratives emphasize the complex, stylistically sophisticated repartee between illicit lovers, whose enjoyment of word-play, elegant syntax, and chop-logic masquerading as reason—the verbal counterpart of passionate sex or a skilful card-game—quickly leads them into moral confusion. In each case the women prove more adept at such word-games than the men and are therefore blamed, directly or by implication, for the male protagonist’s descent into depravity. Master F.J. ends his adventures as a misogynist, Euphues as a philosopher warning other young men against entangling themselves with women as he did. At the same time, both books adopt an amusingly sardonic view of the kind of counsel dispensed by the reformed Euphues. The recipient of such advice himself, he paid no attention to it when young and there seems little likelihood that his young male readers will be any more influenced than he was by moral instruction—though they will relish, no doubt, the artistry of his phrasing, which is so much more attractive when deployed as a weapon in repartee than when trotting out truisms.
Both books, in fact, present themselves as a form of alternative education for their young male readers—much as Fenton’s presented itself as an alternative to chronicle history. Euphues before his reformation is a highly talented young man whose training in the art of rhetoric fails to keep him safe in the predatory environment of modern Italy, as represented by the untrained, but mentally acute young woman Lucilla, who first charms and then discards him. Master F.J. too finds his verbal skills, which he devotes to the cut-and-thrust of witty dialogue, more than matched by the native eloquence of his mistress Elinor. Formal humanist education in itself, these narratives insist, leaves its recipients poorly equipped to cope with the quotidian power-games of early modern society. The philosophy of the humanist pedagogues, conveyed to the young in glib sayings, not reasoned treatises, can be exploited by any man or woman witty and unprincipled enough to apply them for private purposes. And the skills involved in deploying these and other verbal tricks persuasively are by no means confined to the educated classes. Male and female con artists, streetwise tricksters, and adolescent truants of all classes are equally capable of picking them up and using them, to the dismay of pedagogues and parents who think to give their children an advantage by providing them with a top-class education.
English prose fiction of the 1570s, then, may be seen not just as an alternative form of schooling, but as a form of anti-schooling, exposing the flaws in the cherished assumptions of Elizabethan educators. Real life, it implies, operates according to quite different principles than the simplistic formulae promulgated by schoolmasters and tutors; and this can have worrying implications for members of the ruling classes who endeavour to guide their actions by what they have been taught. As often as not, public figures in these books are powerless to regulate either their own lives or those of their inferiors. The social, economic, and philosophical structures of early modern Europe may look stable and well organized, but they are always shifting in response to new pressures, always on the verge of metamorphosis or collapse. The presence in Lyly’s and Gascoigne’s texts of competing European cultures reinforces this impression. Master F.J. and Elinor introduce French and Italian dances, games, and customs into Northern England, while Euphues is an Athenian in Lucilla’s Italian hometown, quickly finding himself Italianated—rendered more devious and subtle than he was already—by her influence. England could easily become a second France and anywhere in Europe could end up as Italy. In addition, the key terms that dominate the two narratives invoke not stability, but improvisation in response to unexpected circumstances. Master F.J.’s ‘adventures’ are games of chance played for the highest stakes, while the subtitle of the first Euphues book—The Anatomy of Wit—parades its author’s obsession with native, undisciplined intelligence, capable of responding with lightning speed to sudden encounters; his obsession, in fact, with the quickness or ‘quick capacity’ celebrated by Gascoigne. This is the literary context inherited by Greene and it was in direct response to the challenges these texts threw down that he constructed his scandalous career as a proto-novelist.
In the first of his romances, Mamillia (c.1580), 13 Greene followed Fenton, Gascoigne, and Lyly in making a passionate and eloquent woman the centre of attention; and although like them he finds her interesting solely in terms of her relationship with men, he differs from his predecessors in refusing to condemn her for her eloquence and passion. Instead, as Derek Alwes has pointed out, he makes her an idealized mother-substitute for her fickle husband, nurturing him and forgiving his infidelities time and again until she has converted him by sheer force of faithfulness into what his culture would have him.14 There were precedents for such exemplary women in the works of Gascoigne and Lyly: Elinor, F.J.’s mistress, has a well-behaved and intelligent sister called Frances and the second Euphues book, Euphues and his England (1580), substitutes a clever and courteous Englishwoman, Camilla, for the headstrong Neapolitan Lucilla. But neither of these women could be described as maternal and forgiveness is not their central role; and Greene returns to the forgiving maternal woman so often in his work that she acquires the force of a philosophical idea. By frequently casting women as the imperilled champions of a sexual, social, and religious value system which is always being demolished by men, Greene lays emphasis on the fragility of the humanist pedagogic framework, which needs to be defended or restored by the extemporary verbal acrobatics traditionally gendered as female. Constancy for Greene is a necessarily active quality, surviving through constant negotiation with the traitors and humbugs that seek to undermine it. His constant women are always in verbal or physical motion, pursuing, converting, and avenging themselves on the men who assault or betray them. And in doing so they effectively give men a free hand to behave as badly as they like. Thomas Nashe famously called Greene ‘the Homer of Women’ and implied that he praised them in his romances to make himself ‘more amiable with [his] friends of the Feminine sexe’.15 But as Alwes has demonstrated, despite all the prefaces Greene addresses to women, his implied readers in the narrative proper are invariably men and it is men who stand to gain most from subscribing to his ascription of constancy and cultural guardianship to their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.16
The Adventures of Master F.J. took games of chance or ‘adventure’ as its theme and Euphues was organized around its author’s delight in scintillating wit. Greene shares Gascoigne’s and Lyly’s concern with arranging their work thematically and like them, chooses themes that stress the precarious shiftiness of the world into which his young men and women stray when they leave the parental home (or indeed beforehand, since parents in Greene’s work are often untrustworthy), and the ungovernable nature of the mind. He was helped in developing these themes by his passion for the ancient Greek romances that were becoming known in England as he wrote: Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, and Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, all of which stress the role played by a perverse and unpredictable fortune in the lives of mortals, effecting astonishing coincidences, miraculous resurrections, and unhoped for reconciliations on the capacious stage of the Mediterranean.17 Fortune figures largely in Greene’s work throughout his life, from the ‘injurious fortune’ that robs Mamillia of her husband Pharicles in his first romance to the card-games that rob the cony-catchers’ victims of their purses in his final pamphlets. But for Greene, fortune is to a great extent an internal phenomenon—as Katharine Wilson has shown—whose processes are worked out through the kaleidoscopic changes of the mind and the language it uses.18 Mamillia would never have lost Pharicles if he had not been unfaithful, or regained him if she had not been eloquent, active, and courageous. The cony-catchers rig all the games of chance by which they fleece their clients. Greene’s romances, then, fuse the English writers’ fascination with the most ungovernable aspects of human psychology with the generous geographical scale and twisted plotting of the Greeks; and ungovernable minds and devious plotting remained his topic when he turned his attention to the smaller stage of the London underworld at the close of his career.
A series of romances published in 1584 proclaim his preoccupation with themes relating to intractability on their title pages: Morando: The Tritameron of Love; Arbasto: The Anatomy of Fortune; and Gwydonius: The Card of Fancy. The protean forms of irresistible desire, the fluctuations of good and bad luck, and that tricky term fancy, which combines the senses of erotic attraction and of fantasy—a wilful turning away from what is deemed serious, stable, or ‘true’—these are Greene’s recurrent themes in all the literary forms he made his own. The first of these books, Morando, invites its reader to join a houseful of Italian nobles as they debate a series of questioni d’amore (questions of love) in imitation of Boccaccio’s Filocolo and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. But the second and third are more characteristic of Greene’s mature romances, in that they expand the topographical and temporal scale of Gascoigne’s and Lyly’s fictions, inserting romantic attachments between men and women into the context of wars between nations, the twists and turns of whose progress imply the passage of considerable time as each tale unfolds. Time and its effects, indeed, are another abiding preoccupation of Greene’s, enshrined in the title of his most popular romance, written in c.1585: Pandosto: The Triumph of Time.19 This stress on time helps to underline the difference between romance and chronicle history. The term ‘history’ implies the orderly progress of an official narrative, a record committed to paper at the behest of human authorities. ‘Time’ stresses instead the operation of ungovernable forces that both ‘plant and o’erwhelm custom’ (to quote the play based on Pandosto, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale), 20 sweeping aside authority and institutions in favour of biological imperatives or sudden shifts of circumstance, very often brought about by random changes in the moods of individuals or populations. It is hardly surprising, then, to find that monarchs discover themselves subject to the most extreme fluctuations of fortune in Greene’s romance. Love, fortune, fancy, and time—none of these can be constrained within the social or geographical boundaries set by government, and the solitary supreme governor—the monarch—is likely to discover this unwelcome fact more swiftly than anyone else. The deposed King of Denmark, Arbasto, alternately weeping and laughing in a hermit’s cell before narrating his adventures, sums up the unstable universe of Greene’s romances.
But despite the ambitious topography and time-scheme of Arbasto, Gwydonius, and Pandosto, all three are very short—a feature that helps bring out their thematic unity. Brevity was forced on Greene by the market; an Elizabethan author was only paid for a manuscript once, after which the rights to it passed to the printer, so that he found it more profitable to write several short pieces than a single long one, such as Sidney’s Arcadia.21 It was also in the author’s interest to keep his readers entertained, so that they would keep demanding his work at the local bookstall. Variety as well as brevity was of the essence. Despite their similar themes, Arbasto and Gwydonius have different outcomes (tragic and comic respectively), while Pandosto ends as a tragicomedy, with both marriage and suicide. The three books experiment, too, with stylistic innovations. Arbasto is written in the first person—almost uniquely in Elizabethan fiction—while Gwydonius and Pandosto report dialogue in the manner of a play, dispensing with ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ in favour of speech prefixes, or relying on the reader to distinguish between unnamed speakers in successive paragraphs. Greene could be said, in fact, to have brought prose fiction closer to drama than ever before, forging romances, story collections, and pamphlets into a kind of paper playhouse, while making his greatest plays (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay [c.1589] and The Scottish History of James the Fourth [c. 1590]) from the stuff of romance. Like a play in production, his prose fiction takes many risks, and its riskiness is both what made it popular and what damned it in the minds of its critics.
Gwydonius offers a fine example of the risks Greene was willing to take.22 The opening section closely resembles Lyly’s first Euphues book in plot, pace, and style; but as the narrative unfolds it persistently disrupts the expectations this resemblance might have raised in its first readers. Lyly’s Euphues books inhabit a world where the older generation is exemplary in its conduct. Gwydonius opens instead with the portrait of a despot, Duke Clerophontes, who uses ‘such mercilesse crueltie to his forraine enimies, and such modelesse rigour to his native Citizens, that it was doubtfull whether he was more feared of his foes for his crueltie, or hated of his friends for his tyrannie’ (sig. B1r). Clerophontes rules part of Sicily, an island synonymous with tyranny in the Renaissance (a reputation it owes to the tyrant Dionysius, who featured in the most celebrated English play of the 1560s, Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pythias).23 So it comes as no surprise that the Duke’s son, too, is ‘blemished with detestable qualyties’ (sig. B1v). Where Euphues was an uncharacteristic product of the city of Athens, famous for brilliant statesmen and philosophers, Gwydonius is the spitting image of his despotic father, which lends an ironic flavour to the reams of good advice Clerophontes gives him. Pronounced by a man who is feared by his friends as much as his enemies, the Duke’s injunctions to ‘Be a friend to all, and a foe to none’, to ‘trust not without triall, nor commit any secret to a friendlye stranger’, and to ‘Lend not … a listning eare to the Alarums of love’ (sig. B4v) strike the reader as deeply hypocritical—especially since Clerophontes considers killing his awkward son before deciding to advise him. No surprise, then, that when Gwydonius sets off on his travels, like Euphues before him, he promptly forgets his father’s counsel—with predictable consequences: he is arrested in the first country he comes to for financial double-dealing. But he emerges from prison repentant and proceeds to seek employment at the court of an exemplary monarch, the Duke of Alexandria. Clearly, he is no Euphues or F.J., both of whom underwent protracted periods of cheerful prodigality before their downfalls. He has ceased to misbehave within the first few pages of his narrative; and from this point on, Greene’s early readers would have had no notion what might happen to him.
The next stage of the narrative is just as unpredictable. In a mirror image of the opening, Duke Orlanio of Alexandria warns his daughter Castania to resist desire; but since Orlanio is as wise as Clerophontes was tyrannical—and since Castania derives her name from the Latin word for chaste (casta)—Greene’s first readers no doubt assumed she would take heed of his warnings. Sure enough, she begins as a model of self-restraint. When young Valericus attempts to seduce her she rebuffs him in a series of speeches that get steadily blunter the more he persists. But the situation changes. Gwydonius too falls in love with her and she spurns him as she spurned Valericus. Where Valericus’s persistence annoyed her, however, she is perversely delighted by Gwydonius’s obstinacy. When he refuses to take no for an answer she is impressed by his commitment; and when he chooses to leave Egypt to spare her his unwelcome attentions, she can restrain herself no longer. She sends him a letter that has no equivalent in Lyly or Gascoigne: a declaration of love wholly free from irony or devious mind-games. ‘What though the Duke my father be incensed against me, for making (in his minde) so carelesse a choice?’ she writes ecstatically,
What care I for his friendship, so I have thy favour[?] Let him fret, let my friends frowne, let livinges be lost, hap what hap wil, no misling showers of mischance, no boysterous blasts of adversitie, no terrible tempestes of disaster fortune, shall make my constant minde in any respect to move: no torments, no travaile, no care, no calamitie, no penurie, no povertie, no onelie the losse of life shall diminishe my love[:] in liew whereof remain thou but constant, and in pledge of my protested good will, have here my heart and hand, to be thine in duste and ashes. (sigs. M2v–M3r)
It is hard to convey the full impact of this extraordinary passage. After Castania’s fiercely rational resistance to her suitors, this bold articulation of desire comes as something of a shock even to the modern reader, who has been willing her to confess her love for many pages. But to its early readers it was surely far more shocking. The Euphues books lay great stress on the achievement of a moral and philosophical balance in life, an equilibrium that has its counterpart in the balanced clauses of Lyly’s prose.24 Emotion must be tempered with reason, Lyly contends, youthful self-interest with respect for the precepts of your elders, devotion to an individual with devotion to your monarch and country, or respect for the foreign state where you are a guest. The lack of such a balance leads to the humiliation of the prodigal hero in the first Euphues book and the achievement of it is what marks out the heroine Camilla in the second as exemplary. But in Greene’s passage all balance is lost. Castania’s commitment to her lover is absolute and her clauses reflect this in their failure to sustain the elegant dualisms, the succession of neatly paired clauses linked in sound and sense, for which Euphuism was famous. Instead, they build up, in a crescendo constructed from small alliterative units, to a statement of radical imbalance, of complete singleness of purpose; and to a final phrase in which alliteration, assonance, and caution are thrown to the winds: ‘have here my heart and hand, to be thine in duste and ashes’.
Castania then signs off her letter with a casual blasphemy (‘Thine, though the Gods say no’, sig. M3r) that might have left Elizabethan readers reeling. Her dismissal of her father’s opinion, swiftly followed by a hubristic dismissal of the gods themselves, would in any earlier romance have served as prologue to disaster; and her total reliance on the former libertine Gwydonius (‘remain thou but constant’) seems to show where disaster will come from. So when Gwydonius’s father Clerophontes declares war on Alexandria, the lovers’ fate seems sealed. Gwydonius has told neither Castania nor her father that he is Clerophontes’s son; to do so now would be fatal; he is therefore trapped in an impossible situation, branded liar and traitor by a twist of fate. The stage is set for a tragic dénouement, which seems all the more likely given the tragic ending of Greene’s previous romance, Arbasto.
It is the jealous Valericus—Castania’s would-be lover—who sets the final act in motion. He makes the double discovery that Castania loves Gwydonius and that Clerophontes is Gwydonius’s father; and he gleefully leaks these discoveries to Orlanio, delighted at the chance to humiliate the woman who rejected him. Orlanio responds less like an Egyptian statesman than a Sicilian tyrant, clapping Gwydonius in jail and locking up his daughter, though not before informing her—as every father should—of the reason for her punishment. ‘Hath the force of love,’ he rants, ‘nay rather the furie of lust (vild wretch) so blinded thy understanding, that to accomplish it thou passest not to pervert both humane and divine lawes?’ (sig. Q2r). Some of Greene’s first readers, no doubt, would have sympathized with the Duke’s position; everyone knew, after all, that ‘lascivious affection’ (sig. Q2r) must be resisted, laws honoured, gods and dukes obeyed. At the same time, they may have found the venom of his language unsettling. And when Orlanio concludes his speech by condemning his daughter to death for a crime she did not commit—a sentence from which she is only saved by the intervention of her brother—it is clear that he is fast becoming a second Clerophontes. The moral high ground has in fact been lost by this stage in the narrative. The older generation have shown themselves as irascible and impulsive as the young; the counsellors have discarded their own good counsel; and the just ruler seems as capable of breaking the law as his unjust neighbour. All moral direction has gone, and with it any lingering convictions as to where the tale is going.
The ending serves only to compound the early reader’s confusion. Gwydonius escapes from prison—again with the help of Castania’s brother—and learns that his father has invaded Alexandria. But he also learns that the war has reached an impasse, which the invaders seek to resolve by challenging their enemies to single combat, control of both the dukedoms being the prize. Clerophontes (who is ‘huge of stature’, sig. R3v) offers himself as the Sicilian invaders’ champion, but the Alexandrians have no champion of equal strength. After a short internal struggle, Gwydonius makes up his mind to accept the challenge on behalf of Alexandria, fighting against his father to defend his lover, betraying his country to display his faith to his future wife. And he expresses this decision in the book’s most disturbing passage. ‘Is not (fond foole) necessitie above nature?’ he soliloquizes. ‘Is not the lawe of love above King or Keysar, Father or Friends, God or the Divell? Yes. And so I meane to take it: for either I will valiantly win the conquest and my Castania, or lose the victorie, and so by death ende my miseries’ (sigs. S3v–T1r). There is no attempt here at reasoned argument; this is the language of raw passion, aggravated by treason, prospective parricide, and blasphemy—the latter not even mitigated, this time round, by being directed at the pagan gods. The duel ends in triumph for Gwydonius, an outcome that ensures a reconciliation of the warring nations when he weds Castania. But the moment when he reveals his identity leaves the onlookers baffled; Sicilians and Alexandrians alike stand ‘astonished at this strange Tragedie, doubting [ … ] whether they dreampt of such a rare device, or saw it in effect’ (sig. T1v). And this self-conscious pointing up of the ‘rare device’ Greene has effected—a plot with all the hallmarks of tragedy, capped with a happy conclusion—indicates his awareness that he has done something new and controversial, a special effect on paper to match the special effects that were dazzling spectators on the London stage. No Elizabethan reader could have predicted such an outcome for the tale Greene had been telling, peopled as it is with rebellious youngsters, erring parents, treason, jealousy, injustice, unprovoked aggression between nations, and the rhetoric of unreason. Neither of the most celebrated literary prodigals of the previous decade—F.J. or Euphues—was permitted to get his girl as Greene’s does; and neither of them went so far in their resistance to authority. The ending of Gwydonius is designed to be bewildering; as bewildering as the more familiar ending of Pandosto, in which a ‘comical event’, the marriage of Dorastus and Fawnia, is undermined by a ‘tragical stratagem’ (pp. 224–5), as Fawnia’s father, King Pandosto, is seized with remorse for his acts of jealousy, murder, and incest and kills himself in a fit of depression.25 With these two romances, Greene effectively tore up the script for the kind of moral instruction a writer of fiction was expected to offer his public.
The instability of Gwydonius can be summed up in the changing connotations of the term ‘fancy’ in the romance. The subtitle—The Card of Fancy—suggests it is a verbal chart or map of the affections, although a ‘card’ could also be a compass or a component in a card-game.26 Fancy in Greene’s work can only be mapped, its course traced like that of a storm-tossed vessel; it can be won with luck, like a game of cards, but it cannot be shaped, directed, or expunged. At the beginning of the romance it is unequivocally a force to be resisted. Gwydonius, in his prodigal phase, ‘follow[s] wilfullye the furie of his owne frantike fancie’ (sig. B2r), though he is warned against it by his father, while Orlanio would have his daughter shun ‘the stiffeling stormes of unbridled fancie’ (sig. C4v). For the greater part of the book she obeys his instructions, conscious of fancy’s alliterative affinity with frenzy, folly, and fickleness. Valericus’s ‘fading fancie’ (sig. E4r)—another negative alliteration—seems to prove her right, since it speedily converts itself to ‘extreame hate’ (sig. F2v). But fancy that endures is a different matter. Gwydonius’s refusal to be put off his ‘fixed fancie’ (sig. H4v) by denials soon infects Castania with the same condition (‘O lawlesse Love,’ she chides herself in a panic, ‘O fancie, fraught full of phrensie and furie’, sig. I3r), then convinces her that his feelings are lasting (he shows ‘no signes of fleeting fancie, but of firme affection’, sig. M1v). Yet, the lovers’ now mutual attachment continues to bear the same name. When Gwydonius is considering whether he should fight his father he describes his love of Castania as ‘fancie’ (sig. S1r) and Castania concurs, acknowledging the ‘force of fancie’ while in prison for Gwydonius’s sake (sig. Q4r). Laden as it has been with negative connotations in the first half of the romance, the term’s continued use in the second half is unsettling. Indeed, the frequency with which it is repeated makes one suspect Greene is trying to unsettle us; so too does his use of ‘fancy’, rather than ‘love’, which has more positive connotations in the romance tradition. What then was Greene’s intention in rendering the key term of his book so radically unstable?
Greene’s point, it seems, is that time determines meaning.27 A term used one day will have a different meaning the next, depending on who uses it and under what conditions. This is confirmed by the imprisoned lovers’ reliance on time to resolve their crises. Gwydonius expresses his certainty that ‘the Gods … will in tract of time ridde us from blame’ (sig. Q3v), while Castania contends that ‘in time we shall have such happie successe, as the loyaltie of our love, and the cleerenesse of our conscience [ … ] doo deserve’ (sigs. Q4v–R1r). It is the length of time he remains loyal that confirms Gwydonius’s constancy, and time that ensures that his betrayal of father and country acquires legitimacy—if he had lost the single combat he would have been a traitor, but once it is won he can claim that ‘the destinies by my meanes have decreed’ that the Dukes and their countries should be reconciled (sig. T1r). So too the word fancy changes its meaning according to the moment when it is uttered; there is no single enduring interpretation of a given term and no human agency has any more power to fix a word’s meaning than to ensure the outcome of a fight between two evenly-matched contestants. The consistent failures of the legal system in Greene’s romances—from Orlanio’s summary condemnation of Castania to the King’s spontaneous dismissal of the evidence at the trial in Pandosto—confirms the impossibility of containing language, even in the interests of legislation. And if language cannot be contained even in the law courts, what hope is there of holding its most powerful users, hereditary monarchs, to account? What hope is there of justice, outside the bounds of a well-executed romance?
Gwydonius’s reference to the ‘destinies’ implies that some supernatural agency may be at work in Greene’s universe, ensuring that justice is done in the fullness of time. But the pagan setting of the young man’s adventures—the same ‘ancient’ Mediterranean context Greene uses for Pandosto, Menaphon (1589), and his story-collections Penelope’s Web, Euphues His Censure, and Perimedes the Blacksmith—undermines the characters’ conviction that a benevolent destiny, fate, or providence guides their actions. Atrocities are committed—the effective murder of Bellaria in Pandosto, the pointless massacres of armies and populations in Arbasto, Gwydonius, and Menaphon—which can hardly be compensated for by an eventual royal marriage. And if the gods may be conveniently questioned in this ancient setting, so too may the mortals they have put in power. The murderous irascibility of Duke Clerophontes is shared by the Kings of Bohemia and Sicily in Pandosto, by King Democles in Menaphon, and by the King of Denmark in Arbasto—which, despite its Northern setting, is clearly set in the pre-Christian world, since it opens with the first-person narrator offering a sacrifice to Astarte in the Phoenician city of Sidon.28 Time, in fact, is consistently deployed in these romances as an instrument for undermining the power of monarchy—both by implying that all rulers will finally be judged as they deserve once the passing years have robbed them of their crowns and also by demonstrating the extent to which they share their subjects’ inability to manipulate history, despite all their efforts to control the narratives of which they form part.
The romance that most insistently stresses this monarchic helplessness is Pandosto: The Triumph of Time. Here the term ‘time’ is repeated as often, and deployed to as many contradictory purposes, as ‘fancy’ in Gwydonius. It is the ‘computation of time’ (p. 192) that convinces the jealous monarch Pandosto that his wife is pregnant by Egistus—just as it is the ‘time of the year’ (p. 224) when she was found that eventually helps him identify his long-lost daughter. Pandosto’s cupbearer, Franion, disobeys his orders to kill Egistus, certain that his master will forgive his disobedience ‘when time should pacify his anger’ (p. 189). The opening of the story casts Franion’s certainty in doubt by defining jealousy as the only passion impossible to cure ‘by tract of time’ (p. 184). But such proverbial encapsulations of universal laws have a way of collapsing, in Greene’s world, in the face of experience. Despite Pandosto’s efforts to pervert the course of justice, his wife is proved innocent, then dies from the stress she has been under; and at this point, time becomes punishment, as Pandosto embarks on an extended programme of contrition, visiting her tomb ‘once a day’ to mourn her death (p. 199). Later we learn ‘how fortune is plumed with time’s feathers and how she can minister strange causes to breed strange effects’ (p. 178), as Pandosto’s lost daughter Fawnia finds her way back to him, preparing the way for the tragicomic ending. The reference to ‘strange causes’ and ‘strange effects’ recalls Gwydonius’s ‘straunge Tragedie’ and ‘rare device’, with their acknowledgement of Greene’s gleeful violation of generic expectations. Both romances render themselves strange by demonstrating how far the tragic and the comic are subject to time. If Pandosto had ended with Bellaria’s death, its tragic status would have been indisputable. If the romance had come to a close with Fawnia’s marriage, its ending would have been comic. But by repeatedly carrying through his narrative to the next abrupt change of circumstances, Greene demonstrates the arbitrary nature of generic divisions, and with them the arbitrariness of divisions based on social status, personal reputation, morals, and national identity (nearly all his romances end with a marriage that renegotiates boundaries between nations or city states). Where language itself is arbitrary, as the changing connotations of ‘time’ and ‘fancy’ suggest, no human institution can be sure of retaining its identity for long.
It is hardly surprising, then, if Greene should have made his own crisis of identity as an author the subject of his later fictions. His use of a succession of different mottoes on the title pages of his books suggests he was always intensely aware of the image of himself he presented to his readers—and aware too that it was constantly changing.29 The range of his dedicatees, too, from unknown friends to the highest nobles in the land (Gwydonius is dedicated to the Earl of Oxford), demonstrates his willingness to redefine his social position from one book to the next.30 Then, in about 1590, he started to include his name in the titles of his books, a sign both of his growing commercial success and of his growing interest in weaving his own story into his fictions. And this practice marked a major new stage in his lifetime quest for innovation.
The bulk of his publications with ‘Greene’ in their titles contain quasi-Chaucerian recantations of his earlier romances. Chaucerian pilgrims feature often, seeking redemption through travel in some unspecified, explicitly non-Catholic way; and in one of them, Greene’s Vision, Greene even meets the ghost of Chaucer himself, who praises his work.31 Chaucer renounced his non-religious writings at the end of his life, but Greene’s renunciation is far more protracted, lasting from 1590 till his death in 1592. Greene’s Vision suggests that he gave careful thought to this timing, since he deferred its publication from the year of its writing—1590—till that of his death. Partly no doubt, this deferral occurred because he was not yet ready to turn his talents to theology, as he promises he will in the pamphlet. Perhaps, though, he also deferred because of some deep ambivalence about the need for recantation, making his claims to contrition as double-sided as his representation of himself in the Groatsworth as the trickster tricked.
Greene’s rejections of romance are nearly all romances, from his lyrical retelling of the story of the Prodigal Son, Greene’s Mourning Garment (1590), to the story-collection in which he traces the forms of human stupidity, including his own, Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1591). Gwydonius and Pandosto show why he felt the need to stage a repudiation of his earlier work, with their scandalous breach of Elizabethan conventions regarding the didactic function of fiction. But they also show how hard it would be for Greene to stage some final repentance, since moods, convictions, affections, even the definition of right and wrong are always changing with the passing time. Perhaps the only way to promise reformation, for Greene, was to acknowledge its contingent nature by deferring the moment of that promise’s fulfilment till an unspecified moment beyond the limits of the text in which the promise is made.
The supreme statement of the principle of deferral in Greene’s writing is the two-part, quasi-autobiographical romance Greene’s Never too Late (1590). Its title anticipates the risk Greene ran two years later, in the year of his terminal illness: if it is never too late to repent, there is a danger that contrition will be repeatedly put off until the hour of doom, when Greene is represented in the various versions of his deathbed scene scrawling letters to his abandoned wife in which he begs her to pay off his debts—procrastinating payment, in fact, until after the breath has left his body. It might even be said that Greene’s Never too Late predicts a future scenario for its author very much like this one. At the end of Part One, its protagonist, Francesco, declares his intention to reform himself and go back to his wife, whom he has abandoned just as Greene is said to have abandoned his; and Francesco echoes the narrative’s title as he makes this decision: ‘remember this … Nunquam sera est ad bonos mores via’ [it’s never too late to take the path of righteousness] (p. 61).32 But it is not until three-quarters of the way through Part Two that the prodigal husband finally summons up the will to go home to his spouse. And the repentance pamphlets of 1592, which point up the link between Francesco’s life and Greene’s, imply that even this eventual return was either a fictional or an impermanent one. The Groatsworth finds the author back in London, dying in debt to his landlady and as far as ever from his wife. The operation of time in his works precludes the kind of neat Prodigal Son narrative, where a rebellious young man falls on hard times and returns chastened to the path of good conduct, which was the staple of so much Elizabethan fiction and drama.33 Greene’s world is dominated by fortune, not providence; in it, men’s minds are subject to fancy and folly, rather than reason; and as a result, no orderly pattern of cause and effect can be guaranteed, no ending certain until the very last page of a romance has been written, the very last heartbeat of a man’s life stilled.
This is what makes Greene’s work so lively and so dramatic. In his celebrated cony-catching pamphlets, the author’s bad behaviour in London—the reason for his need for repentance—supplies him with the raw material for a witty exposition of the seamier side of London life; while the very act of exposition puts him in danger of retaliation from the men and women whose crimes he exposes, so that each new cony-catching pamphlet becomes an instalment in a game of cat-and-mouse played out (Greene would have us believe) between the London mafia and the intrepid pamphleteer. Printed paper becomes a performance, implicitly stirring up frantic action in the underworld each time it leaves the press and whipping its audience into frenzied anticipation of the next instalment as each pamphlet ends. We are beginning to learn once again how to appreciate Greene’s various performances in his prose. And in doing so, we are learning to read with renewed excitement a forgotten, but vital chapter in the story of the novel.
Alwes, Derek. Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004).
Barbour, Reid. Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993).
Clark, Sandra. The Elizabethan Pamphleteers (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983).
Crupi, Charles. Robert Greene (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986).
Davis, Walter R. Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).
Kinney, Arthur F. Humanist Poetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
Margolies, David. Novel and Society in Elizabethan England (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985).
Melnikoff, Kirk, and Edward Gieskes, eds. Writing Robert Greene (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006).
Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Wilson, Katharine. Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).