THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

uilt around expressions of conflicting attitudes and codes. King Basilius’s impulse to withdraw himself and his
family into an Arcadian retreat ostensibly represents a vain attempt to escape the fulfilment of a curse. It also suggests
an espousal of passivity and inaction which is to be negated by the active series of intrigues indulged in by the two
princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who intrude themselves into Basilius’s pastoral refuge. Sidney seeks to draw out
contrasted themes of honour and deception, calmness of mind and discordant passion, cultivated courtesy and rough
wooing, gentility and seduction, ordered ceremonial and violence. The first version of his story culminates in a trial
for murder and in the meting out of a savage justice (though the situation is happily resolved by the reawakening of
the supposedly poisoned king). In the revised text, where Sidney attempted to expunge the offences of seduction and
attempted rape, the insertion of new
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characters and of fresh adventures for existing ones serves to add to the multiple oppositions of behaviour and
emotion. His narrative shape is as much clogged with moral reflection and circuitous demonstration as his longer
sentences are loaded with simile, metaphor, and conceit. The second ‘Book or Act’ of the Old Arcadia opens, for
example, with a description of the feverish disruption brought about by the ‘poison’ of love: ‘In these pastoral
pastimes a great number of days were sent to follow their flying predecessors, while the cup of poison, which was
deeply tasted of all this noble company, had left no sinew of theirs without mortally searching into it; yet never
manifesting his venomous work till once that, having drawn out the evening to his longest line, no sooner had the
night given place to the breaking out of the morning’s light and the sun bestowed his beams upon the tops of the
mountains but that the woeful Gynecia (to whom rest was no ease) had left her loathed lodging and gotten herself into
the solitary places those deserts were full of, going up and down with such unquiet motions as the grieved and
hopeless mind is wont to bring forth.’ The Arcadia resembles nothing so much as an elaborate Renaissance pleasuregarden,
endlessly and symbolically varied with floral knots and mazes, lodges and bowers, topiary and trellis, the
familiar and the rare. It serves as a vital key to the dense interweaving of novelty and tradition in English culture in
the late sixteenth century, but the very intensity and scale of its artifice have tended to dispirit those modern readers
predisposed to prefer the kinship of the wilder touches of nature to the arts of formal cultivation.
Sidney’s Arcadia exhibits the sophistication to which much courtly Elizabethan prose fiction aspired. A very
different display of narrative sophistication is, however, evident in George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.
J., first published in Gascoigne’s anthology of his own poetry, prose, and drama, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, in
1573. Gascoigne (c. 1534-77) later relegated an emasculated revision of the story to the ‘Weedes’ section of his later
collection The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575) where he was at pains to insist in his Preface that his fiction was
purely imaginary and that ‘there is no living creature touched or to be noted therby’. This Preface may well have been
intended to add a new ironic dimension to an already complex narration and to place a fresh emphasis on a
fictionality which had failed to impress some literal-minded readers. In the original version of Master F. J. Gascoigne
comments generally on the amatory affectations of his time and he debunks the posturings of courtly love, but the very
structure of his story indicates that he was also a careful craftsman. F J.’s amorous adventures are recounted by two
intermediary narrators, G.T. and his friend H.W. The often comic presentation of a triangle of lovers, subtly framed
by H.W. and G.T., effectively counters G.T.’s self deprecating protestation that he has merely presented his readers
with a ‘thriftless history’.
A triangular relationship, though a far less interesting one, also figures in John Lyly’s Euphues: The Triumph of
Wyt (1578). The thin plot of Euphues is more a vehicle for Lyly’s elaborately poised style than an experiment in
narrative
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playfulness or an examination of manners and motives. Lyly (?1554-1606) was essentially more interested in the art
of speaking than in the art of telling. His book and its sequel Euphues and his England (published in 1580 when the
much admired Euphues was already in its fourth edition) provided a witty, courtly, rhetorical, and learned
divertissement fit ‘for all gentlemen to read, and most necessary to remember’. Lyly presents his readers with
character types (Euphues - ‘well endowed with natural gifts’ or ‘witty’; Eubulus - ‘good counsellor’; Philautus -
‘selfish man’) and moves his narrative forward, like a debate, by means of shapely oppositional discourses. If both
books purport to preach the virtues of experience married to wit, they do so by exposing readers to moral and
intellectual choice. Lyly’s once celebrated sentences, principally shaped by balanced antitheses, insist on a reader’s
grasp of the effect of contrasted perceptions and of extremes. When, for example, Eubulus attempts to explain the
dangers which threaten an inexperienced and ‘high climbing’ intelligence, he offers Euphues a string of examples:
‘The fine crystal is sooner crazed than the hard marble, the greenest beech burneth faster than the driest oak, the
fairest silk is soonest soiled, and the sweetest wine turneth to the sharpest vinegar. The pestilence doth most rifest