THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

to the throne by providing a troop of fifty mounted men clad in white coats and red caps for the royal campaign
against Scotland, and he later proudly demonstrates to King Henry that he himself is a prince of ants intent on
warding off the assaults of idle, gilded butterflies (doubtless a barbed reference to the gentlemen of the court). Having
feasted his monarch and impressed him with a pageant performed by local children, Jack emphatically declines the
offer of a knighthood by proclaiming that ‘honour and worship may be compared to the lake of Lethe, which makes
men forget themselves that taste thereof’. This forgetfulness seems to be the vice that separates the careers of the
worthy Jack and the proud Cardinal Wolsey who accompanies the King; both are poor boys who have made good, but
Jack alone emerges as the possessor of the qualities which make for true social worth. Deloney’s clothiers,
shoemakers, and merchants can in some ways be seen as the forerunners of the self-confident tradesmen and
industrialists of Defoe, Holcroft, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Shaw; more significantly perhaps, none of them are pictured
as social-revolutionaries or as a threat to the stratified class-system of Tudor England.
The fiction of Robert Greene (1558-92) was clearly calculated to appeal to a broad audience. Having begun his
career with variations on the style, theme, and shape of Lyly’s Euphues (such as Mamillia of 1583 and Euphues his
Censure to Philautus of 1587), Greene experimented with romances which intermix Sidneian pastoral with Greek
romance and proved to be a prolific writer of pamphlets concerned with low life and urban criminality (such as A
Notable Discovery of Coosnage of 1592 and the three animated studies of ‘cony-catching’ of the same year). It was,
however, with his pastoral romances, Pandosto. The Triumph of Time (1588) and Menaphon (1589), that he most
influenced the developing art of story-telling in prose. Both stories successfully forge together elements of adventure,
intrigue, disaster, disguise, malevolent fortune, and relatively happy resolution; both contrast the courtly and the
bucolic and both make significant play with cross-class marriage. The popular appeal of Greene’s abrupt changes of
fortune, shifts of mood, and contrasts of tragic and comic elements in Pandosto proved sufficiently attractive to
Shakespeare for him to take the plot as the basis of The Winter’s Tale (c. 1611). Where Shakespeare allows all to
resolve itself happily, Greene kills off his first heroine (Bellaria) at the time of her trial and abruptly ‘closes up’ his
comedy ‘with a tragical stratagem’ - the suicide of King Pandosto. For Greene, a story describing the irrational
behaviour of an enraged king, the trial of a queen, and the pronouncement of her daughter’s bastardy may well have
contained too
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many painful echoes of recent English history for every element in the plot to be blessedly transformed as destiny is
fulfilled.
Shakespeare also used the finest of Thomas Lodge’s stories, Rosalynde, Euphues golden legacie, as a quarry for
his As You Like It. Lodge (1558-1625) pursued a various career as a sailor, physician, translator, critic, and
playwright (he collaborated with Greene on the play A Looking Glasse for London and England in 1594), but it is as
the author of the subtle, delicately observant, pastoral romance Rosalynde (1590) that he is best remembered (and not
purely for the novel’s Shakespearian ramifications). Lodge’s other fiction, especially his forays into the historical
(Robert Second Duke of Normandie of 1591) and the exotic (A Margarite of America of 1596), is untidy and restless;
Rosalynde is by contrast both shapely and equable. As his full title implies, Lodge nods towards the example of Lyly
and sprinkles the soliloquies, or ‘meditations’, of his characters with choice moral observation in the manner of the
supposed author, Euphues. More effectively, Lodge also uses these meditations to explore his characters’ feelings and
motives and to externalize their inner debates. He varies his texture by including a series of songs, sonnets, and
eclogues by means of which characters display both their passions and their technical skills. Rosalynde and her cousin
Alinda, her admirer Rosader, and his once oppressive brother Saladyne retreat to an Arden which is already the
refuge of the deposed King Gerismond. Arden is an untroubled Arcadia, peopled by poetic shepherds and unvexed by
winter, rough weather, and man’s ingratitude; its lawns are ‘diapred with Floras riches’ and its trees open to form an
Amphitheatre ‘interseamed with Limons and Citrons’. It is a garden in which the disguised Rosalynde comes to
recognize ‘that Peasaunts have theyr passions, as well as Princes, that Swaynes as they have their labours, so they
have theyr amours, and Love lurkes assoone about a Sheepcoate as a Pallaice’. Lodge’s forest lacks the innate
contradictions and contradistinctions of Shakespeare’s. Instead, it comes to represent an idealized refuge from the
jealousies, the enmities, and the cruelties of the outside world. After a necessary period of withdrawal and
realignment, it ultimately forms the base from which King Gerismond and his new knights, Rosader and Saladyne,
launch their successful military campaign to restore the lost rights of the kingdom.
The intermixture of love and politics, chivalry and philosophy in Lodge’s Rosalynde complements the more
intricate investigation of those themes in Sidney’s Arcadia. The powerful influence of Sidney’s work can, however, be
most directly felt in the moulding of the multiple interconnected narratives which make up Lady Mary Wroth’s The
Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621). Both the title and the opening line of Urania nod respectfully to its
distinguished predecessor, and its decorative title-page was specifically designed to remind readers of a genteel
derivation which was as much aristocratic as it was literary. The Urania is almost certainly the first work of fiction