The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs From Geoffrey of Monmouth To The Death of Shakespeare (2008)

The English Romance in Time
The English Romance in Time is a study of English romance across the

Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It explores romance motifs—quests
and fairy mistresses, passionate heroines and rudderless boats and miss-
ing heirs—from the first emergence of the genre in French and Anglo-
Norman in the twelfth century down to the early seventeenth. This is a
continuous story, since the same romances that constituted the largest
and most sophisticated body of secular fiction in the Middle Ages went
on to enjoy a new and vibrant popularity at all social levels in black-letter
prints as the pulp fiction of the Tudor age. This embedded culture was
reworked for political and Reformation propaganda and for the ‘writing
of England’, as well as providing a generous reservoir of good stories and
dramatic plots. The different ways in which the same texts were read over
several centuries, or the same motifs shifted meaning as understanding
and usage altered, provide a revealing and sensitive measure of historical
and cultural change. The book accordingly looks at those processes of
change as well as at how the motifs themselves work, to offer a historical
semantics of the language of romance conventions. It also looks at how
politics and romance intersect—the point where romance comes true.
The historicizing of the study of literature is belatedly leading to a wider
recognition that the early modern world is built on medieval foundations.
This book explores both the foundations and the building. Similarly,
generic theory, which previously tended to operate on transhistorical
assumptions, is now acknowledging that genre interacts crucially with
cultural context—with changing audiences and ideologies and means
of dissemination. The generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare
were born was the last to be brought up on a wide range of medieval
romances in their original forms, and they could therefore exploit their
generic codings in new texts aimed at both elite and popular audiences.
Romance may since then have lost much of its cultural centrality, but the
universal appeal of these same stories has continued to fuel later works
from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.
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The English
Romance in Time
Transforming motifs from
Geoffrey of Monmouth
to the death of Shakespeare
HELEN COOPER
1
3
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Preface
This book is a study of romance motifs in England and their changing

uses from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare; or, to put
it another way, it is a study of the Tudor and early Stuart reception of
black-letter prints of Middle English romance. Just one later author was
reading these same romances and turning them into a work that itself
entered the canon of cultural literacy, and that is John Bunyan; so, for the
purposes of the book, he counts as an honorary Jacobean. The broad
argument of the book is that while the motifs of romance remain largely
the same, the usage and understanding of them changes over time, in the
same way that words themselves change meaning. This book traces a
comparable historical semantics of romance motifs. It therefore offers a
way to read, as evidence of a particular moment, stories of such longevity
or of such fantasy that they seem resistant to historical interpretation.
Romance emerges in the twelfth century in response to cultural
pressures, and had changed from an elite- to a mass-culture form by the
seventeenth century under new cultural pressures. The half millennium
in between constitutes the great age of romance, but not as a static phe-
nomenon. This book sets out to tell the story of those centuries, as a
process of change and reinvention that uses the materials of nostalgia,
fantasy, and social and religious ideals as vehicles of contemporary
concern.
My interest in romance and its development goes back many years, but
it is only recently that I have realized how closely many of the ways I have
approached it in the past coalesce to form a single story. Many of the
chapters therefore draw on the earlier articles cited in the notes. In most
instances these have been almost entirely reworked, but the core of
Chapter 3 will still be recognizable from my very first substantial article,
entitled, like the chapter itself, ‘Magic that doesn’t work’, first published
in Medievalia et Humanistica.
My concern has been to write a study that will be accessible to as many
people working in the Middle Ages and early modern periods as possible,
whatever their level of expertise. Some passages will therefore no doubt
be over-explicit about matters that will be entirely familiar to medieval-
ists, but not so well known to early modernists, and vice versa: for these,
viii Preface
I apologize, but not very much. For the shorter romances, I have nor-
mally cited the most easily accessible anthologies. I have worked largely
from modern editions so as to profit from their editorial material, though
Early English Books Online has transformed the accessibility of early
prints since I began the writing of this book, and I have supplemented the
holdings of the Bodleian and Cambridge University Libraries by elec-
tronic means with increasing frequency. Short-title Catalogue reference
numbers and further information about editions and the history of both
the manuscript and printed versions of all the Middle English romances
that crossed the 1500 divide are given in the appendix.
With the same aim of accessibility in mind, quotations from Middle
English are glossed or translated where they present difficulty, and quo-
tations from other languages are translated or given a close paraphrase.
All translations are my own unless otherwise stated, though published
translations of French and Anglo-Norman works that come under dis-
cussion are noted to enable the easier following-up of particular texts. In
quotations, thorn and yogh are given their modern equivalents, and i/j
and u/v are normalized in all cases except for the detail of bibliographical
titles. Capitalization, typography, and punctuation have been modern-
ized or made consistent unless there were some specific reason not to do
so.
The book could not have been written without the award of a two-year
Research Readership by the British Academy, and I owe them the great-
est thanks. The Master and Fellows of University College, and most par-
ticularly Jon Mee, gave me generous support in my application and
throughout the duration of the Readership. Many other friends have
offered help and encouragement along the way. Andrew King, Matthew
Woodcock, and Corinne Saunders not only took over my work to enable
me to do the writing but read and commented on the book in draft, and
Ruth Morse, most steadfast of readers, also read parts of it. It is all the bet-
ter for their comments, and would be still better if I had incorporated
more of them. I have profited in less visible ways from discussions over
the years with my research students in romance and adjacent areas,
Corinne, Andrew, and Matt foremost among them, but also Jane Bliss,
Joyce Boro, Alexandra Gillespie, Helen Moore, Nicola McDonald, and
Rachel Snell. The scholars and enthusiasts at the biennial conferences on
the non-canonical Middle English romances have also been an inspira-
tion. Many other people have answered queries or provided information,
including Elizabeth Archibald, Kate Belsey, Roger Dalrymple, Jennifer
Fellows, Linda Georgianna, Ralph Hanna, Susan Hurley, Elspeth
Preface ix
Kennedy, Paulina Kewes, Elizabeth Maslen, Alexander Murray,

Rhiannon Purdie, Nicholas Rawlins, and Simon Walker. Bill Byrne
provided me with quiet space. The staff of the Cambridge University
Library and the Bodleian Library have been unremittingly helpful.
My husband has, yet again, been unstinting in his support, and the
dedication reflects my debt to him.
List of Contents
Abbreviations xv
INTRODUCTION: ‘ENTER, PURSUED WITH A BEAR’ 1

Replication across cultures: the meme 3
Recognizing romance 7
Exploiting the familiar 15
Romance in England: a summary history 22
Coda: The rise and fall of the knight 41
1. QUEST AND PILGRIMAGE: ‘THE ADVENTURE THAT

GOD SHALL SEND ME’ 45
Society and the solitary knight 50
Mythic symmetries 57
Quests without maps 67
Questing westward 72
Landscapes of desire and fear 77
Seeking forgiveness 86
The penitential quest at the Reformation 90
The journey of the soul 98
2. PROVIDENCE AND THE SEA: ‘NO TACKLE, SAIL, NOR

MAST’ 106
Pollution, guilt, and the state 113
‘God is our pilot’ 119
From miracle to magic 128
xii List of Contents
3. MAGIC THAT DOESN’T WORK 137

Non-functioning magic 144
Non-replicating magic 152
Magic in the web? 159
Magic enacted 164
4. FAIRY MONARCHS, FAIRY MISTRESSES: ‘I AM OF ANE

OTHER COUNTREE’ 173
‘Some uncouth tidings tell you me’ 187
‘I love thee well by cause of the trouthe that is in thee’ 197
‘We had thought indeed the Lake had been ours’ 207
‘An elf-queen shall my lemman be’ 211
5. DESIRABLE DESIRE: ‘I AM WHOLLY GIVEN OVER UNTO

THEE’ 218
The politics of women’s desire 221
Erotic thought: the Middle Ages 229
Sanctifying sexuality 241
Erotic thought: Spenser and Sidney 251
‘Quick, and in mine arms’ 260
6. WOMEN ON TRIAL 269

The calumny romance in Tudor England 274
‘I am falsely and without cause accused’ 280
If women be a good thing, or no 292
‘Do after the good and leave the evil’ 300
The adultery question 307
Adultery in English romance 314
7. RESTORING THE RIGHTFUL HEIR: ‘IF THAT WHICH

IS LOST BE NOT FOUND’ 324
The foundling and the Fair Unknown 331
The descent of the crown 340
List of Contents xiii
Romance after Bosworth 344

Dangerous virginity 353
8. UNHAPPY ENDINGS: ‘THE MOST ACCURSED, UNHAPPY,

AND EVIL FORTUNED’ 361
Questing towards death 367
Exposure on the seas 375
Diabolic magic 377
Fairies and fates 381
Desire 387
Accusation 396
From family romance to family tragedy 398
Appendix: Medieval romance in English after 1500 409
Notes 431
Bibliography 499
Index 533
Abbreviations
ANTS Anglo-Norman Text Society

CFMA Classiques français du moyen age
CT Canterbury Tales
EETS Early English Text Society
E.S. Extra Series
O.S. Original Series
S.S. Supplementary Series
ELR English Literary Renaissance
FQ Faerie Queene
French and Hale Middle English Metrical Romances, ed. W. H. French and
C. B. Hale
MED Middle English Dictionary
PMLA Publications of the Modern Languages Association
Percy Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed.
John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall
Sands Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands
SATF Société des anciens textes français
SR Stationers’ Registers
STC A Short-title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland,
and Ireland 1475–1642
TLF Textes littéraires français
Citations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, general ed.
Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Citations from Malory are taken from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory,
ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edn., rev. by P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990); cross-references to the book and chapter num-
bering of Caxton’s edition are given in parentheses.
Citations from Shakespeare are taken from The Complete Works, general
eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986),
unless otherwise stated.
Introduction:
‘Enter, pursued with a bear’
Early in the 1590s, the Queen’s Men required a bearsuit. They were about
to stage a dramatized version of Valentine and Orson, a romance about an
empress falsely accused of adultery who gives birth to twins in a forest,
only to have one of them snatched away by a bear.1 The text does not
survive, but it would have been a big disappointment to the spectators if
the bear had not put in an appearance: they knew the story already, and
would have been waiting for it. Some of them would have read the source
of the play, in the form of one of the reprints of a translation made most
of a century earlier from a French prose version. That version was itself a
reworking of a fourteenth-century verse original, which had in turn been
compiled out of materials recycled from other romances, and which was
to work its way across the languages of Europe as far as Sweden. Those
playgoers who had not read the actual text still knew the story of its main
characters, the hairy wild man, Orson, and his chivalric brother,
Valentine. For centuries, they were as familiar as Cinderella is now, and
by similar means: through oral retellings, through illustrations, by simply
being around in the culture. They had figured in a street pageant for the
coronation of Edward VI in 1549;2 they were to get a mention—‘play the
Valentine with our wilder brothers, and bring them back with brotherly
care to civilisation and happiness’—by John Forster in his Life of Charles
Dickens, alongside Cinderella, with all the casualness that comes from the
safe assumption of shared knowledge.3 The omission of the bear on stage
would have been sorely felt.
It would not have been difficult to acquire the materials to make the
suit, if the company did not already have one in the property cupboard.
Bearbaiting pits often doubled as venues for early plays, and several of the
public theatres were clustered around the Beargarden on Bankside; a
bearskin, even if somewhat damaged, could have been acquired and recy-
cled for stage purposes as easily as the elements of earlier romances were
recycled to make the original story. It must have been a bulky item to
store, all the same, and once acquired, was crying out for good uses. More
2 The English Romance in Time
bears accordingly began to appear on the Elizabethan stage to occupy the

empty suit. An anonymous romance play entitled Mucedorus gets its
action off to a swinging start by having its heroine ‘Enter . . . pursued with
a bear’.4 Other bears figured in an opening dumbshow, or in spectral
form to terrify a murderer into suicide.5 Some twenty years later, when
Shakespeare wanted to call to his audience’s minds the resonances and
assumptions of romance, he combines a story of a queen falsely accused
of adultery with a bear that chases (and, offstage, eats) the guardian of her
baby at the moment when he abandons it in the wilds. The bearsuit, if it
was the same one, was coming towards the end of its days by that time:
motheaten, no doubt; the fur worn away, especially around the scars
from its first occupant’s life in the bearpit; and probably going mouldy
too. The Winter’s Tale was its last new appearance, as if to outface the
developing estimate of romances as ‘mouldy tales’.6 It is appropriate that
the stage direction for its bear should be not an entrance, but an exit.
‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ is notorious because to modern theatregoers
it seems so random and meaningless: it is not prepared for by the previ-
ous action of the play. The preparation for it lies rather in the coding and
resonances that the motif brought with it, still familiar to Jacobean spec-
tators, but long lost to modern readers or audiences. An understanding
of much of what is going on in Renaissance plays has disappeared
along with a comprehension of the codes of romance and a sense of their
resonance. The bear is the most famous example only because it is the
most extreme, and therefore the one of which we are the most aware. The
object of this book is to bring that extensive level of allusions, the context
of understanding, back to the surface: to restore to modern readers the
‘literary competence’, in Jonathan Culler’s phrase, that Renaissance and
medieval readers brought as a matter of course to their reading or watch-
ing of romances.7 Romance was itself the major genre of secular fiction
for the five hundred years covered by this book: a time span that makes
the novel appear the youngster that it is. Without such an understanding
of romance, it is impossible to make sense of that half millennium of lit-
erature in which men and women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
fashioned themselves, their culture, and their ideals. The bear will serve
as an emblem for the book: a motif that owes its birth and longevity to
the fact that it is an enthralling story element, but which was used to tell
a story about providence, the disruption and restoration of order and lin-
eal succession, innocence accused and vindicated; and which, once
invented, like the empty bearsuit waiting backstage, needed new mean-
ings, new justifications, to fill it out and give it continued life.
Introduction 3
replication across cultures: the meme
The abduction of a child by a bear or some other wild animal is an exam-

ple of a romance motif: a unit within literature that proves so useful, so
infectious, that it begins to take on a life of its own. There is a word for
such things now: a ‘meme’, an idea that behaves like a gene in its ability
to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt,
mutate, and therefore survive in different forms and cultures.8 These
motifs and conventions grew up with the genre of which they formed a
part and which they helped to define. They were first developed in the
twelfth century in romances written in French and the gradually diverg-
ing form of French spoken in England, Anglo-Norman; they moved
across the language barrier into English in the thirteenth to fifteenth cen-
turies, acquired a new and vibrant popularity when prints of medieval
romances became the pulp fiction of the Tudor age, and underwent
remarkable metamorphoses in the works of the great Elizabethan writ-
ers.9 Their quality as memes, with their generous capacity to latch onto
the mind and replicate, is wonderfully caught by one of the last authors
to use medieval texts in an unbroken line of transmission, John Bunyan,
in the later seventeenth century. He misspent his youth reading cheap
prints of romances, not least the perennial favourite Bevis of Hamtoun: a
work that owed much of its popularity to its density of the simplest and
most colourful of such motifs, dragons and giants and grim prisons and
healing balms. Such items came into their own when he realized how they
could be used in the service of God, in the work that became The Pilgrim’s
Progress. His mind ‘suddenly’ became crowded with
more than twenty things, which I set down;
This done, I twenty more had in my crown,
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do flie.
Their powers of exponential multiplication were matched by their insis-
tent memorability:
Art thou forgetful? wouldest thou remember
From New-years-day to the last of December?
Then read my fancies, they will stick like burs.10
And his Giant Despair and soporific Enchanted Ground did indeed stick
in readers’ minds, for almost as many centuries after he wrote as the
monsters of Bevis had lodged since its own composition.11 Modernist

and post-modern literature for adults is marked by a distrust of both
story and traditional story elements. Bunyan realized that a good story
composed of motifs that are already familiar is the most mind-engaging
form that there is, and that romances are the very best such stories. It is
no coincidence that the authors who kick-started the modern equivalent
of the romance, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, were two of the leading
medieval scholars of the mid-twentieth century.
This book is a study of the memes of romance. Its broad argument is
that whilst romance motifs remain superficially the same, sometimes
even down to verbal detail, the usage and understanding of them changes
over time, rather in the way that a word may change meaning: the book
traces an analogous historical semantics of the language of romance con-
ventions. It therefore sets itself a very different task from Vladimir
Propp’s classic formalist analysis of folktales, or, more recently, Susan
Wittig’s linguistics-based study of romances, both of which seek to ident-
ify motifs in tales or romances independent of either the broad culture or
the specific circumstances that produced them and in which they were
read;12 or from comparable synchronic surveys of variants on a single
motif, such as Margaret Schlauch’s study of accused queens.13 Other fine
studies of a single motif—the king in disguise on the Elizabethan stage,
the Renaissance boat of adventures—do not aim for chronological or his-
torical depth.14 ‘New readers make new texts’; every generation brings
different cultural expectations to works of the past and so finds new
meanings and new things to respond to.15 Even successive recopyings of
a single text record a process of shifting interpretations and significances,
and those shifts become more marked as traditional elements are re-used
in new stories and new contexts. Such differences are intensified as
stories and motifs move across authors, periods, readership groups, and
changing political and linguistic conditions.
The ‘far away and long ago’ that is almost a defining feature of the
genre, the freeing of romances from familiar place or chronology, makes
it especially easy for them to be appropriated for interpretations that fit
the immediate historical or cultural moment of subsequent new readers.
The half millennium during which romances were the dominant form of
secular literature was a period of massive change. When they first began
to be composed, England was a multilingual culture, and part of a com-
posite realm that extended over much of the territory of modern-day
France; by the time of Elizabeth, England was a fiercely nationalist entity,
proudly distinct in language, which regarded the English Channel as its
Introduction 5
providential bulwark against foreign encroachment. Manuscript culture,

with its primary appeal to a rich and leisured or educated élite and to the
upwardly mobile, gave way to print, with its potential for mass circula-
tion. Roman Catholic ideology, which emphasized the public outward
expressions of ideals and beliefs (from miracles and pilgrimages to vir-
ginity), was replaced by the Protestant stress on the inward and individ-
ual. It is no accident that the great age of romance was also the great age
of faith. The doctrine of salvation, in which the terrible events of the
Passion and Crucifixion were made the means by which fallen mankind
was restored and the bliss of Heaven once more became possible,
received its full theological formulation in the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies. Romance, with its typical pattern of an opening disruption of a
state of order, followed by a period of trial and suffering, even an
encounter with death, yet with a final symbolic resurrection and better
restoration, offers a secular equivalent to that divine order: a ‘secular
scripture’, in Northrop Frye’s phrase.16 Yet by the late sixteenth century,
that providential model of human and divine action existed in uneasy
truce, on one side with a sharp awareness that human affairs did not
always show evidence of either a benign or a just providence, and on the
other with the Calvinist theology of an unappeasable God who predes-
tined every human being to salvation or damnation. Both those were
hurdles that romance had to negotiate if it were to survive.
Despite those changes, the continuities between medieval and
Renaissance culture in England are exceptionally strong by comparison
with France and Italy, but they have been remarkably little studied. Until
a few decades ago, scholars of Renaissance literature concentrated almost
entirely on humanism and the rediscovery of the Classics; now, the
period has been renamed ‘early modern’, and the emphasis of research
has followed suit, to stress the forward-looking, the things that anticipate
the modern or the post-modern—an emphasis entrenched by the peri-
odization of both literature and history in universities. Both approaches
require ‘the medieval’ to be dismissed as a category in order for the neo-
Classical or proto-modern model to be constructed. Romance, and
medieval romance in particular, has accordingly been belittled, as being
neither classical epic nor modern novel; yet the history of the genre in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods constitutes ‘one of the strangest
success stories in English literature’,17 a story that is a romance in
itself. Humanism was a development added on to strong and deeply
embedded native cultural and literary traditions, and it was very often
that embedded culture that inspired the greatest literary achievements of
Renaissance England and set the model for future change and develop-
ment. Romance was one of the most strongly rooted of all those tradi-
tions. Any classical air about it was rarely more than a surface gloss, for a
humanist author to show off his fashionability.18 The abiding appeal of
romance resulted partly from its familiarity and its infinite adaptability;
partly also (despite the Catholic associations of the form) from its use-
fulness in the various nationalist agendas for the ‘writing of England’,
since many of the romances were native stories that asserted the value
and vitality of English originary legends and narrative traditions. The
appendix to this book shows both how extensive was the transmission of
medieval romance to the sixteenth century and beyond, and also how
selective it was: Alexander and Charlemagne barely make the transition
at all, whereas the stories of Arthur, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of
Southampton, and an abundance of other heroes who may not have been
English but whose romances had become thoroughly naturalized are
ubiquitous in the culture. Gawain, Arthur’s right-hand man since at least
the early twelfth century, remains the favourite knight of the Round
Table in the sixteenth; Lancelot, a late French import, comes a long way
back in the popularity stakes.
Elizabethan romance could not have possessed its cultural centrality
without those medieval roots. Medieval literature shares with earlier
writing from the Hebrew Bible to Beowulf the function of recording the
ideology of an entire community, the values by which it represents itself
to itself. Romance, as the dominant secular literary genre of the period,
was at the heart of such self-representation, a means by which cultural
values and ideals were recorded and maintained and promulgated. The
community of Tudor England similarly looked to romance as the site
where its values could be questioned and tested but ultimately re-
affirmed. That is why it was all but inevitable that Spenser’s great poem
on the state of England should take the form of romance. For all the stric-
tures of the preachers against secular fictions, romances in the Middle
Ages were widely regarded as educational. They offered models of
courage and faithfulness; they doubled as courtesy books, or as advice to
princes—a means of training the individual in the ethics and behaviour
required in order for society, one’s own immediate community or the
whole body politic, to function at its best. Often they contained discur-
sive passages of instruction: parents or guardians will expound the duties
of a good knight, as the Lady of the Lake does at great length to the young
Lancelot in the French prose Lancelot, and wise counsellors will describe
what constitutes good government, as happens to Arthur in the same text
Introduction 7
at even greater length.19 Spenser would not have been telling Sir Walter
Ralegh anything unexpected in his declaration in his letter prefacing The
Faerie Queene that his work offered a means of fashioning a gentleman or
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline; and it was equally
expected that this fashioning should be not in the cause of personal
fulfilment but in the service of the Church and state. Romance was at the
heart of the whole culture, or cultures, of the five centuries of its exist-
ence. So far as Elizabethan England was concerned, there were good
reasons why romance, like the culture it served, should be English.
Our well-entrenched habits of looking for the grounding of
Renaissance literature in the great classical authors (in particular Ovid
and Virgil), or in contemporary European works (Ariosto, or the Italian
novelle that were endlessly pillaged for the plots of plays), are therefore
misleading: not because they are wrong, but because they are not
enough. Alongside those works, which were accessible only by the intel-
lectual élite unless or until they were printed in English translations, was
a mass of stories available to everyone who could read English or hear it
read to them, and which indeed were likely to have circulated in oral
form as evening entertainment or, just as stories are retold now, as tales
for children. These were the stories that the Elizabethans grew up with:
which they did not need to learn, because they were so deep a part of
their culture. It is that very familiarity, the lack of need of any extensive
record or concern with preservation, that has made them largely disap-
pear from sight. Yet they remained not just a field of reference but a way
of thinking; and for the highly self-conscious writers of the Elizabethan
age, they were a way of thinking, not just about spinning new plots for
the endlessly voracious appetites of playgoers and readers, but about
what it meant to be created human in an age that had abandoned the
established schemes of Roman Catholic doctrine; about what England
and being English meant in an age of fierce nationalism; and about
the dynastic future of the country under a queen increasingly rep-
resented as a romance heroine but who had failed to fulfil the dynastic
requirement of producing an heir, not so much as one carried off at
birth by a bear.
recognizing romance
I have so far used the word ‘romance’ as if its meaning were obvious, and
that is not an oversight—not because its taxonomy can be drawn up with
the precision that separates biological genera, six-legged insects from

eight-legged spiders, but because a shared understanding between author
and reader is the crucial feature of generic definition: what Hans-Robert
Jauss called a ‘horizon of expectation’.20 Such an understanding—a com-
mon perception of a horizon—does, I believe, exist, now as in the Middle
Ages, so long as its narrow modern association with Mills and Boon is
broadened to include magic realism, a good many historical novels, and
much fantasy and science fiction. Those last two are not terms that can
easily be extended backwards: early romance insisted on its social rele-
vance, and it was always rooted in a recognizable this-worldly society,
even if voyages to exotic lands or the Otherworld were allowed. The
memes of romance are none the less largely the same ones as have been
made familiar through works such as the Narnia series and The Lord of
the Rings, and their many derivatives, including Harry Potter and Philip
Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (a serious treatment of adult love
being the main absentee; but Pullman does include bears who make their
own armoured bearsuits). The clash of good against evil, quests, protag-
onists of mysterious birth, monsters, the supernatural are more extensive
a part of culture now than they have been since the seventeenth century.
This has happened despite, rather than because of, the numerous theor-
etical attempts to draw up defining parameters for romance.21 There is
very little theoretical discussion of vernacular genres in the Middle Ages,
as scholastic theoreticians confined themselves to writing about classical
forms. The word romanz itself initially meant the vernacular languages
(especially French) as distinct from Latin: a meaning that effectively
removed the whole topic outside latinate scholarly discourse. What
discussion of romance there is comes in the form of comments from ver-
nacular authors within their own works, and those make it clear that
they, as both readers of earlier romances and writers of new ones, were
fully aware of the tradition in which they were writing.22 The romance
genre—any genre, indeed—is best thought of as a lineage or a family of
texts rather than as a series of incarnations or clones of a single Platonic
Idea. A family changes over time as its individual members change,23 but
equally, those individuals can be recognized through their ‘family resem-
blance’: a resemblance such as might lie in a certain shape of nose or
mouth, or colour of hair, or laughing in a particular way at a particular
kind of joke, or manner of twitching one’s eyebrows, even though no one
of those is essential for the resemblance to register, and even though indi-
vidual features (hair colour, eyebrow habits) may contradict the model.24
The principle of selective resemblance was recognized in the Middle
Introduction 9
Ages, as in a quatrain defining the set of qualities required to recognize

gentilesse, the virtues taken to define high social class:
In whom is trauthe, pettee, fredome, and hardynesse,
He is a man inheryte to gentylmene.
Off thisse virtues four who lakketh three,
He aught never gentylmane called to be25
[Any man who possesses integrity, compassion, generosity, and courage carries a
title to gentility. Whoever lacks three of these four virtues ought never to be called
a gentleman]
or, to put it another way, any two of the defining virtues would just about
be enough, regardless of which two were missing. Similarly with
romance, any of the features that might be taken as definitive for the
genre may be absent in any particular case without damaging that sense
of family resemblance, though the dissimilarity increases, ultimately
beyond the point of recognition, in proportion as the various elements
are missing—or, alternatively, as an atypical element is given promi-
nence. Even the characteristic most widely considered definitive for the
genre, the happy ending, can be absent without destroying the sense that
one is dealing with a romance.26 The Tristan remains a romance despite
the tragic deaths of the lovers, and so, more surprisingly, does the prose
Valentine and Orson, in the teeth of the unprecedented disaster near its
close when Valentine unintentionally kills his father. Intensify the
unhappy ending still further, however, as in the case of the terrible final
scene and the build-up to it that Shakespeare invented for King Lear, and
the work moves out of the romance orbit, for all its love-tests and virtu-
ous youngest daughter of three, elements familiar from its earlier
romance treatments and from happily ending folktales.
Drawing up a list of the common features that cumulatively indicate
family resemblance, generic identity, for romances presents few prob-
lems so long as one bears that caveat in mind: that no single one is essen-
tial for definition or recognition taken individually. Equally, related
genres will share some features even though other unshared elements sig-
nal generic difference. Various observers may come to varying conclu-
sions with regard to texts that keep the characteristics of different genres
in balance, but that is as inevitable as differences of opinion as to whether
someone more resembles a cousin on their mother’s side or their father’s
side. The outward form of romances—that they are predominantly
fictional narratives of some amplitude about particular individuals
(whether those individuals are named or not)—is one that they share
with many other genres, though spelling it out is necessary in order to

register the difference between romance and (non-fictional) history, or
romance and (the more concise) ballad, or romance and allegory (which
replaces the particular with the generalizing), though the borders
between romance and all three other genres are highly permeable. The
Faerie Queene manages to be both full-scale romance and full-scale
allegory. Other Elizabethan romances transgress even the boundary of
narrative, to take the form of drama, though the playwrights themselves,
Shakespeare included, never use ‘romance’ as a generic term to describe
their own writings.27 Romances are further characterized by exotic set-
tings, distant in time or place, or both; subject-matter concerning love or
chivalry, or both; and high-ranking characters—all qualities that separate
the dramatic romance from the earlier more quotidian emphases of clas-
sical comedy, and the narrative romance from the later more quotidian
emphases of the novel. Equally important elements in recognizability are
a series of features that serve to distinguish romance from the Old French
epic, the chanson de geste. These include the shaking loose of the narra-
tive from precise time and space; quests; magic and the supernatural; a
concern less with the communal good than with the individual hero’s
inward thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, and, frequently, those of the
heroine too; and a happy ending as normative, that ending often incor-
porating a return from an encounter with death—a symbolic resur-
rection. Typical of the treatment of all these elements in romance is a
concern with ideals, especially secular ideals, and with human per-
fectibility within a social context: characteristics that further distinguish
romances from another contiguous genre, the saint’s life, where the
ideals and the perfectibility function in almost complete separation from
the practicalities of life in this world.28 Even if perfection is not achieved,
even if the hero in some way fails or the ending is not happy, the ideals
themselves are not therefore treated with cynicism.
Those defining features might seem as if they would operate independ-
ently of the derivation of the term ‘romance’ mentioned earlier, as mean-
ing simply a work in the (French) vernacular as against Latin. The two do,
however, belong closely together. Latin was the academic and clerical lan-
guage, the language of ecclesiastical, theological, and philosophical dis-
course; a language and a series of discourses that were the prerogative of
that small percentage of the male population who possessed full Latin
literacy. The number of women readers of Latin was tiny, and women
writers in Latin need to be individually named rather than thought of as
any kind of group. The massive dominance of surviving medieval Latin
Introduction 11
over vernacular writings is in inverse proportion to those who could

understand them: a fact that implies a far greater dissemination for ver-
nacular texts than is suggested by the rates of their survival, unprotected
as they were by monastic or cathedral libraries. The vernaculars were
equally available to lay and clerical, women and men, and indeed
children. They were the languages of the secular world: of the family and
its perpetuation through marriage, reproduction, and the transfer of
power and property, and therefore also of practical politics up to the
highest levels of imperial rule; the languages of entertainment, not least
after sundown when most work became impossible, or in any context
where leisure-reading, or television, or a trip to the cinema might now be
appropriate. The shift from one meaning of romanz to the other, from
vernacular to story type, is particularly well illustrated around 1190 in the
Anglo-Norman Ipomedon of ‘Hue de Rotelande’, Hugh (or perhaps
Huw) of Rhuddlan, in North Wales. At the opening he welcomes his
readers or listeners with an assurance that he is translating from Latin (a
common claim, and by no means necessarily true), since no one will
understand the story unless he puts it ‘en romanz’; by the end, the phrase
‘en cest romanz’ carries a full generic significance:
Ipomedon a tuz amanz
Mande saluz en cest romanz
Par cest Hue de Rotelande.29
[Ipomedon sends greetings to all lovers in this romance through Hugh of
Rhuddlan.]
The audience Hue constructs here is a courtly one, since such a self-
conscious concern with loving was strongly associated with the secular
and the high-born.30 When writers in English make comparable remarks
about the need to translate from French into English, there is more
explicit marking of social class about the statements: the first translator
of the French prose Merlin, for instance, writing around 1300, notes that
English is the universal language across all classes, whereas French is
confined to the gentry:
Freynsche use this gentil man
Ac euerich Inglische Inglische can.31
[The gentry may speak French, but every English person knows English.]
A shift from Latin to French may extend the readership from those with
formal education to potentially everyone in France, but to a much more
restricted group in England; what is known of the ownership of French

romances in England throughout the Middle Ages indicates a strong bias
towards the aristocracy.32 The further shift into English made possible a
much wider dissemination for the stories, and ultimately the explosion of
readership when cheap prints became available.
The use of the vernacular separated romances from academic dis-
course. They did not require the strenuous exercise of the intellect; they
were immediately accessible by virtue of their exciting narratives as much
as by their choice of language, and were therefore ideally suited to being
heard rather than read on the page. Most often this would mean that one
person in a group (sometimes no doubt the only one with adequate read-
ing skills) would read them to the rest, as a form of communal entertain-
ment in an age before silent reading or cheap multiple copies. The
romances were composed in written form and largely disseminated
through manuscripts, but some degree of oral transmission, at least of the
shorter romances, is also likely.33 This does not mean that they were
designed for the unintelligent. It is easy to assume, in a culture of univer-
sal education, that those who cannot read or write are stupid; but stupid-
ity no more follows than it does for the managing director who dictates a
letter rather than writing it himself, or for the mathematician who has
never mastered the mechanical art of touch-typing. Romances, like nov-
els, can appeal to readers of every level of intelligence, although (unlike
the most intellectually demanding, and therefore élitist, novels) they
always do their audience the kindness of placing a primacy on telling
good stories. Their appeal is not however limited to that basic attraction
of narrative excitement. Chrétien de Troyes, one of the earliest and best
of the French writers of romance, insists that his romances are different
from the mere tales of those who tell stories for a living; in addition to
their subject-matter, their matière, they have an inner meaning, a sens.
The terminology was commonplace enough for Chaucer to use the
English equivalents, matter and sentence, without feeling any need to
explain them.34 This emphasis on meaning alongside story, the invitation
to readers to think beyond the story, allowed many romances to be
designed not just for reading but for discussion. There was a long fashion
for debating formal love-questions, demandes d’amour, which often took
a romance-type story as their point of departure, and free-standing
romances sometimes explicitly invite such debate. Chaucer’s Knight
invites his audience to consider which is the better off, the lover exiled
from the sight of his lady or the lover in prison who can see her; but the
question is directed less by the Knight to the fictional pilgrims than by
Introduction 13
Chaucer to his own real-life audience.35 It is likely that romances that do

not make such an explicit appeal for discussion were still used as mater-
ial for conversation and argument. It is indeed hard to imagine that the
author of a work such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would not have
sought, and elicited, such a response. Debate lay at the heart of much
medieval culture, across most of the civil institutions invented in the
Middle Ages: in the law courts, in the king’s council, in Parliament, in the
universities.36 Romances could provide a secular forum analogous to
academic debate. Their audiences expected to respond actively to them,
and the writers encouraged such a response.
It is this kind of engaged reception of romances—by audiences who
could and did think about what they were reading, and who could recog-
nize the resonances of the story across the whole genre—that helped to
make plot motifs become memes, with their ability to replicate and
adapt. The organisms through which genes replicate require a particular
ecological niche in which their life-form can operate; and the texts that
contain these gene-like ideas similarly have their particular generic niche
specified at the start, to establish the conditions in which their memes can
generate. Readers’ expectations are typically set in the opening lines, and
recognizability can be enforced by direct repetition from one text to
another. No fewer than three romances insist in the course of their first
stanza in almost identical words that there is a chivalric story to follow,
which
will telle you of a Knight
that was both hardye and wight
—that particular spelling of the lines being from the version of Sir
Eglamour recorded c.1648, though they go back to its original com-
position around 1350.37 Most romances similarly signal their generic
allegiance within the first verse, or even, like The Faerie Queene, the first
line:
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine . . .
And it could be done not only in narrative but in the new Renaissance
extension of romance into drama, and not only with reference to
chivalry but to the whole history of courtly storytelling and its alternative
popular contexts. Shakespeare’s Pericles, the most faithful to its romance
source of any play that he wrote (and indeed the most faithful to its
source of any outside his Plutarch-derived plays), opens with Gower as
Chorus promising ‘to sing a song that old was sung’, one that
hath been sung at festivals,

On ember-eves and holy-ales,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.38
The difference of the lines from those just quoted from the metrical
romances and Spenser is, however, instructive. By this date (c.1608), to
write a romance can be, not a natural act within a living tradition, but an
act of conscious medievalism, a revival of the past. The high courtly past
of the romance, the ‘lords and ladies’, recedes ever further into the dis-
tance, with folk-style oral retellings moving to the fore. Pericles insists on
that quality of telling a story not only by what it says but by how it says it:
the lines are spoken by the storyteller Gower himself, and the play enacts
his retelling. By the time the play was written, the primary context for the
continuing life of medieval romances was through the chapbooks and
ballads sold by peddlers and at fairs—and through playwrights hungry
for material for the popular theatres.39 It is not surprising therefore that
this most romance-like of Shakespeare’s plays was also one of his most
popular in its time.40 His works can be more or less divided into those
that make their generic affiliation clear from the start, and therefore
invoke a set of audience expectations, and those that keep the audience
uncertain, sometimes to the very end. For all the absence of the term
‘romance’ from Shakespeare, he was thoroughly familiar with the family
resemblances and expectations of the form, and it is his most traditional
romance that announces its genre most explicitly.
It is the generic awareness shared by author and audience, their com-
mon knowledge of how romances work and what they can do, that makes
possible the subtlety with which writers can handle the building-blocks
of the form, its motifs and conventions. ‘Conventional’ has become a
pejorative word; yet etymologically it derives from the idea of coming
together, agreement, a shared understanding. The criticism of modern
forms of fiction, more downmarket than medieval romances, that simi-
larly rely heavily on conventions or formulas—adventure stories, the
Mills and Boon type of romances—has developed a considerable respect
for the power of the formulaic, and in particular for the skill of individ-
ual writers in giving ‘new vitality to stereotypes’ to the point where a new
archetype, a new model for imitation, can be created and in turn gener-
ate its own posterity. Furthermore, whereas the quality of universality has
been widely regarded, ever since Aristotle, as what marks out great liter-
ature, what distinguishes the best within formulaic literature is the
Introduction 15
unique: the ability to give the sharpness of the individual to a variation on

a known and recognized theme.41
exploiting the familiar
This ability to vary the pattern, to make a conventional, shared motif new
and surprising, pervades early romance. The very familiarity of the pattern
of the motif, the meme, alerts the reader to certain kinds of shaping and
significance, and sets up expectations that the author can fulfil or frustrate.
The same motif will not always mean the same thing, or in the same ways:
on the contrary, what matters most is the variations on the ways it is used.
Familiarity with the model is used precisely to highlight difference. The
infinite adaptation of narrative material becomes a kind of shorthand for
meaning, since it draws on what an audience already knows but
reconfigures it in different ways. Conventions of this kind are the opposite
of clichés, which replicate the familiar without change and are therefore
inert. Conventions are what make literature work: they initiate active
participation from the audience in the creation of meaning, through reso-
nances with what is currently known and therefore living. Moreover, they
only become conventional if they are in some way true to experience.
One of the most familiar conventions, the beautiful heroine, will illus-
trate how the process works. It makes a good preliminary example
because the range of its uses stays largely stable over time, without the
complicating factors incurred by cultural change. Its truth to experience
comes from the principles of sexual selection: men find beautiful women
more attractive, for biological as well as aesthetic reasons. Literature and
art in all media have followed suit, throughout the centuries: perhaps the
first requirement for any woman appearing in a visual medium now
(film, television, advertisements) is a certain Helen of Troy quality, even
if it is irrelevant to the job in hand. Works that claim a greater realism by
insisting that their heroine is plain—Jane Eyre, for instance—will still
insist that she has beautiful eyes: there is a minimum of beauty below
which a heroine cannot fall. It is similarly the first requirement for
romance heroines, and generally, as for film stars, without qualification.
It can still, however, take many forms—perhaps more in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance than now, since the recognition of the requirement was
so overt; there was never any pretence that the beautiful was the norm.
The plain fact of beauty, however, is uninteresting; it is the many things
that can be done with it that give it power.
An insistence on the fact of beauty is none the less the first and basic
form of the convention. Herodis, for instance, the heroine of Sir Orfeo, is
introduced as ‘the fairest leuedi for the nones’,
Ful of love and godenisse,

Ac no man may telle hir fairnisse.42 [but
This is a bare statement of her qualifications for her role as the leading
lady: virtue and beauty—and interestingly (not least by contrast with
modern culture), in that order. Also interesting, however, is the fact that
the phrasing actually avoids description, by leaving almost everything to
the imagination: ‘no man may tell’ precisely puts her beyond what can be
said. Those romances (especially French ones) that spell out the heroine’s
beauty over dozens of lines run greater risks. One risk—which is indeed
sometimes incurred deliberately—is that the account invites an intrusive
or voyeuristic male gaze, of a kind blocked by the formulation for
Herodis.43 Another, hard to avoid in longer descriptions, is bathos: the
heroine’s nose will be neither too long nor too short, her chin the model
of perfection, and so on for some time. A further danger run by descrip-
tions of any length is a collapse into the inertia of cliché. This is not so
common as one might expect from the familiarity of the topos, since
beauty is so important: exceptional beauty is precisely what distinguishes
the heroine, so the audience is required to be alert to it. There are, how-
ever, a few romances where every lady who appears is of outstanding
beauty, and the effect, not least as regards the heroine herself, begins
to pall. The challenge for an author is to make the beauty of his lady
resonant: to bring in to his readers’ minds every other beautiful heroine,
and every response they have invoked, so as to make the effect of this par-
ticular instance of beauty stronger than if it were in actual fact unique.
Chaucer offers a remarkable example of such resonance in his descrip-
tion of Emily in the Knight’s Tale. Over the space of twenty lines, we are
told almost nothing factual about her looks except that she has yellow
hair; all the rest works by association, simile and suggestion.
It fil ones, in a morwe of May,

That Emelye, that fairer was to sene
Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene,
And fressher than the May with floures newe—
For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe,
I noot which was the fyner of hem two— [do not know
Er it were day, as was hir wone to do, [custom
Introduction 17
She was arisen and al redy dight, [dressed

For May wole have no slogardie anyght . . .
Hir yelow heer was broyded in a tresse
Bihynde hire bak, a yerde long, I gesse.
And in the gardyn, at the sonne upriste, [sunrise
She walketh up and doun, and as hire liste
She gadereth floures, party white and rede,
To make a subtil gerland for hire hede;
And as an aungel hevenysshly she soong.
CT, I.1034–42, 1049–55
The male gaze here is literal: this is what the knights see as they look
through their prison window, as mediated through the narrator’s own
focus. What they see, however, goes far beyond (or falls far short of) the
voyeuristic. Emily is mentioned alternately throughout the passage with
May, the month most deeply associated with love, not least in that great
allegory of the psychology of falling in love, the Romance of the Rose, the
action of which is similarly set in a garden. The rose and lily to which she
is compared are, respectively, the flowers of eroticism, for the passion she
inspires, and of purity, for the chastity she possesses—but chastity itself
is a condition that immediately invites male attention. She is not, how-
ever, accessible: not only are the two men who are looking at her locked
away in prison, but the imagery surrounding her puts her almost on a dif-
ferent plane from them. She and the sun rise together;44 she sings like an
angel. She is described, moreover, entirely in terms of the most spiritual
senses, sight and hearing. The knights’ instant love for her carries an
unmistakable sexual element, but it also suggests an infinity of desire for
the unattainable: she is their equivalent of the holy grail, to borrow an
image from a different area of romance. Her function in the narrative is
to be the undesiring object of male desire, and her introduction is
designed to show how fully she justifies such desire by making every
reader recognize that response.
Such a straight use of the description of beauty, to identify and define the
heroine, is much the most widespread, and it is generically central to the
family resemblance between romance heroines; but it is not the only way to
handle the convention. Closely related to it is its use for emphasis, to point
up a contrast, as for instance when the heroine is surrounded by the less
than beautiful. This is commonly the situation of dispossessed heiresses
who find themselves among country bumpkins: Spenser’s Pastorella, for
instance, or Shakespeare’s Perdita. The comparative plainness of the other
shepherdesses may only be implied, but it is implied by a stress on the

heroine’s own beauty. Polixenes, cast at this point of The Winter’s Tale as
Perdita’s enemy, moves within four lines from noting that she is ‘the pret-
tiest low-born lass’ to the suggestion that she is ‘too noble for this place’;45
and he is, of course, right.
A third use is for poignancy, most apparent when beauty is lost,
through hardship or age or grief. There is a particularly moving example
of the last of those in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, when the heroine
has heard that she is to be traded to the Greeks in exchange for a captured
knight, and so be separated from her lover. Chaucer accordingly
describes her not as looking positively ugly or unattractive but in terms
of the beauty and vibrancy she has lost:
Hire face, lik of Paradys the ymage,
Was al ychaunged in another kynde;
The pleye, the laughter, men was wont to fynde
In hire, and eek hire joyes everichone
Ben fled, and thus lith now Criseyde allone.
Troilus, IV.864–8
Again, the description is very unspecific: it works by association and
resonance (the joy of Paradise) more than by statement, appealing to the
readers’ imagination more than to their list-making faculties. Her aban-
donment, that she is left ‘allone’, even if in the syntax only by those
scarcely personified joys, stirs pity for her state both now in her desola-
tion and proleptically for the future in her isolation in the Greek camp.
Descriptions of beauty are usually positive, designed to enhance the
reader’s response to the lady’s attractiveness; but not always. The virtue
that the author of Sir Orfeo mentions before his heroine’s good looks is
the conventional, expected, accompaniment to beauty: inward virtue is
what outward beauty should represent. When that inner beauty is miss-
ing, the shock to one’s expectations is all the greater. Beauty can function
as a rather sinister kind of dramatic irony, to set up assumptions about
the matching of inward and outward form in the minds of other charac-
ters or indeed of the readers, and then to betray them. There is a whole
spectrum of beautiful villainesses in romances, from the diabolic
(Perceval’s lovely temptress on the Grail Quest is Lucifer himself in drag),
through wicked enchantresses (such as Duessa in the Faerie Queene), to
women who may or not be wicked or enchantresses (most famously, the
lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and finally to the women who
turn out not to be romance heroines after all but rather the cheap and
Introduction 19
sexually available female leads of a fabliau (such as May in the Merchant’s

Tale—‘fresshe May’, a parody of the beautiful Emily, but one who will go
to great lengths to ensure male access to her garden). An altogether
gentler kind of inappropriateness is found in Chaucer’s description of
the Prioress, with her unaffected (‘simple’) smile, soft red mouth, and
fashionable grey eyes. That she is attractive is not in question; the ques-
tion rather is whether she should be displaying it so generously to an
almost-all-male company, or whether attractiveness ought to be the most
striking attribute of a religious woman.
Beauty is generally thought of, now as in the Middle Ages, as an
attribute of women, but another variation on the description of attrac-
tiveness is to reverse the gender roles. Not only is the hero handsome:
very often, he will be seen as handsome through the eyes of a lady.
Criseyde looks out of her window at Troilus and implicitly acknowledges
his physical perfection, the glamour of the warrior—‘so fressh, so yong,
so weldy semed he’ (Troilus, II.636). More striking still is Ipomedon,
where Hue describes how first the disdainful heroine, and then a
sequence of other women, look at the hero, then what they see (his hand-
someness and fine body), then how they are attracted to him. Women are
not cast merely as sex objects in romances, and especially not in those
composed in England. They are frequently given their own thoughts and
responses, expressed in soliloquies of self-analysis as they awaken to love,
which endow them with the kind of subjective, interior, life that has often
been claimed to be exclusively both a male and a modern phenomenon.
If it is recognized as pre-modern, it is usually in terms of Petrarchism; but
a ‘Petrarchan’ process of gazing at the object of desire, of falling irreme-
diably in love, and responding in affective monologue, is first developed
for the heroines of the very earliest generation of romance as they first see
the men on whom they set their hearts, and it remains a forceful conven-
tion within Anglo-Norman and English romance through to Britomart
and Juliet.46
A further variation on the theme of beauty is comic parody. For par-
ody to work, its serious origins must be familiar; so it is interesting that
Chaucer parodies the blazon of male beauty in Sir Thopas, his mock-
romance in which the hero is the object of all-too-many female gazes (‘ful
many a mayde’ sighs for him when they would do better to be asleep).
Chaucer’s literary self-consciousness and his readiness to encompass
every possible variation on convention make him a master in this field:
they show again in his description of the hen Pertelote, the favourite of
Chauntecleer’s seven wives (or more properly his ‘paramours’: they have
not been through any wedding ceremony), which does its best to set up
the Nun’s Priest’s tale as a courtly romance. The language describing
Pertelote is Anglo-French, and therefore courtly: she is a ‘damoysele’,
courteous, ‘debonaire’, and ‘compaignable’. Also, rather like Emily, she
is ‘the faireste hewed’, though the colours turn out to be those of her
throat feathers. The warning implicit in that mention of her throat, that
she may not be everything the reader expects from a courtly heroine,
acquires full force only when Chauntecleer thanks God for her beauty
three hundred lines later, when her full henliness emerges.
For whan I se the beautee of youre face,
Ye been so scarlet reed aboute youre yen, [eyes
It maketh al my drede for to dyen.47 [allays all my fear
The shape of the formulation is indistinguishable from courtly romance
or lyric, but we are not allowed to forget that this all takes place, after all,
not in a court but in a chicken-run.
That example also serves to illustrate another way in which the topos
of female beauty can be exploited: by verbal variation, by substituting the
wrong phrase or detail in a description that would otherwise appear to be
set up seriously. Pertelote has red rings around her eyes; Alison, in the
Miller’s Tale, sings not like an angel but like a swallow (high-pitched and
unmusical); Sir Thopas’s complexion is as white not as a lily but as bread.
Sometimes items can be interchanged: Hoccleve rearranges all his lady’s
attributes to draw a portrait of a freak, just as Sir Philip Sidney later writes
a poem in which his mistress’s eyes, not teeth, are like pearl, and her skin,
not her hair, like gold. Donne similarly describes the ‘anagram of a good
face’ in which all the desirable similes are misapplied.48 All these exam-
ples are parodic and comic; but the idea can also be used with a serious
point, as it is most famously by Shakespeare in his sonnet on the less than
Petrarchan looks of his mistress, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the
sun’ (Sonnet 130), where he insists that a less than perfect reality is better
than ‘false compare’, inaccurate or impossible comparisons. If a woman’s
looks are to be a measure of her sexual attractiveness, there is far more
phwoor quality in a gypsy than in an alabaster statue.
One could map all the other conventions of the romance in similar
ways: they can be used straight, for emphasis, poignantly, and in all kinds
of variations, including absence. Some of these variations may finally
become so anarchic or disruptive as to break the bounds of the genre
altogether. Those disruptions need not be comic: some indeed are
intensely serious and powerful, especially the denial of the expected
Introduction 21
happy ending. Some can be pure fun, as in Sir Thopas, or, for a modern
example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film that is a useful
reminder of how many medieval romance conventions are still current:
how else would one recognize the ludicrousness of its being a young man,
not a damsel, who is in distress? Perceval, in Chrétien’s famous Conte du
Graal, fails on his quest by neglecting to ask a question; the Monty
Python knights have to answer one, whether the dangerously innocuous
‘What is your favourite colour?’ or the altogether more demanding, but
no less inappropriate, ‘What is the capital of Abyssinia?’ Some romances
work in a single mode, of taking all their conventions straight: those writ-
ten earliest, when the conventions were still being established, are most
likely to do so, since there was as yet no set of expectations on which the
authors could play variations. A few late ones, whether fourteenth- or
twentieth-century, take all their conventions as parody. Most, however,
will mix modes, operate enough conventions straight to lull their audi-
ences into a sense of familiarity, then shock them, for amusement or for
disaster, by withholding or perverting what is expected. Star Wars has its
quest, its princess, its Jedi knights, and its giant hairy monster, but he has
to have his hand held when the going gets tough. Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight uses social comedy to disguise a serious, and potentially
fatal, test of chivalric perfection, in which Gawain fails. As You Like It, a
play with an impeccable romance ancestry, laughs at all the ideals it ulti-
mately supports: love and desire; the preference for an ethically good
rather than a luxurious life; idealism itself. Chaucer’s Troilus is set up as
a love story—aristocratic, far away, and long ago, centrally concerned
with ideals despite, or because of, its warrior hero’s prostration by love—
but the failure of its ideals, and the painfulness of its ending, finally take
it over the boundaries of what most readers would regard as romance.
All those qualities and responses are made possible, and made power-
ful, by means of convention: by audience recognition. The familiarity of
the memes of romance, its standard episodes and motifs and phrasing,
make possible a much greater and more concise subtlety of response than
could be achieved by invention from scratch. The originality lies in an
author’s handling of his materials, his (on very rare occasions, her) abil-
ity to disrupt, to startle, to shock. The shock may come from upset expec-
tations, but it may also come from the recognition of something long
known but in circumstances that defamiliarize it, that make you recog-
nize it as if for the first time. Such defamiliarization can come even from
an unchanged text if it is read in new conditions: an out-of-time romance
can intersect with the historical moment of its reading or rereading in
new and unexpected ways. The colonels who overthrew democracy in

Greece banned a performance of Sophocles’ Electra in the 1960s for pre-
cisely those reasons: its story of principled resistance to tyrannical power
in the hope of its overthrow was not a message they wanted to have
declared, just as the group that planned to perform the play was well
aware that a text over two thousand years old contained an explosive con-
temporary message. Romances and their motifs had a similar capacity for
acquiring new meanings. That is why the fairy queen, bestower of favour
and riches, the ultimate mistress both sexually and in terms of power, can
become so potent a figure for Elizabeth I; or why Arthur can acquire a
second meaning alongside his identity as the greatest British hero, as the
embodiment of personal and political misrule that destroys his own
kingdom, and so step outside the bounds of romance altogether.49
Variations on conventions happen not only synchronically, within time,
as authors choose the particular angle on a motif that suits them, but
diachronically, across time, as cultural, historical, and political change
alter beliefs and expectations.
Romance writers developed a remarkable refinement and precision of
use of their language of motifs. The rest of this book is concerned with
how that language worked, in order to transmit to a new generation of
readers the literary competence that Chrétien or the Gawain-poet, or
Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or dozens of anonymous writers
could take for granted in their own audiences.
romance in england: a summary history
This book is concerned specifically with romance written or current

in England. The genre developed there in distinctive ways that make its
history unique in Europe. In the mid-twelfth century, when the expecta-
tions and conventions of romance were being established, England and
France largely formed a single cultural unit: they were linked both lin-
guistically (through the aristocratic language of Anglo-Norman, gradu-
ally beginning to separate itself from the western dialects of French) and
politically (through Henry II’s holding of both England and large areas of
modern-day France in a single Angevin empire). By the end of the twelfth
century, however, French romance was developing a trajectory distinct
from Anglo-Norman and its English-language descendants in the genre.
Many of the motifs still current in Elizabethan romance have their origins
in these earliest Angevin texts; the memes, and indeed a number of the
Introduction 23
texts themselves, showed remarkable adaptative powers and survival

mechanisms over many centuries.50 The opening date for this book, 1138,
is the likely year of composition of the work that set many of the stories
of romance on their way: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of
Britain. The early seventeenth century forms the logical stopping-point,
since the generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was
the last to be brought up on an extended range of medieval romances in
more or less their original forms, and which therefore had access to the
full range of their generic codings and intertextualities. A number of the
stories continued to be widely disseminated into the nineteenth century
through the medium of broadside ballads and chapbooks, but they
largely ceased to fertilize the active production of new imaginative litera-
ture. Their modern incarnations, from Victorian Arthuriana forward, are
more a matter of revival than survival. Romance itself remained import-
ant for a few more decades after Shakespeare’s death, but in forms that
had largely lost touch with the roots of the genre, not least its roots in
England. His own last plays are almost the final works to profit from the
power of those endlessly transforming traditions.
As a context for the rest of the book, and to demonstrate the conti-
nuity of the subject-matter of romance through the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, a short summary of the history of the genre in England may
be helpful, with a wider glance out at its interrelations with continental
romance of various kinds. Much of this will be familiar to readers with
particular specialities; but the periodization of literary studies means that
not everyone will be aware of (for instance) the dozen centuries that
separate Greek romance from Spanish romance, or the sheer longevity of
many of the English traditions. A preliminary history will also rescue the
stories of individual memes told in the rest of the book from being over-
whelmed by too much on-the-spot contextualization. It is necessary too
because the history of medieval romance is customarily written from a
French perspective, and that is misleading in some crucial respects when
it is applied to insular traditions.51 The two traditions none the less
remained interlinked; the examples taken from French romance later in
the book are largely from works known to have circulated in England,
and which therefore had the capacity for influencing the insular develop-
ment of the genre.
The larger story of romance begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth, and
never quite leaves him behind. The History of the Kings of Britain is not
itself a romance. It was written in Latin, not vernacular ‘romanz’; its
scope is that of epic history, covering almost two millennia. Geoffrey’s
endlessly inventive spawning of legends, however, provided the kind

of quasi-historical material that allowed for constant reinvention in
alternative, more overtly fictionalized forms down through the sixteenth
century and beyond. His account of the foundation of Britain by Brutus,
grandson of Aeneas, formed a powerful myth of origin that was rapidly
given romance treatment in French and Anglo-Norman, and which four
centuries later acquired a new force from the nationalist agendas of the
Elizabethans.52 Holinshed still repeats it as fact in his great History of
England; Londoners were proud to promote the legend of their city as
Troynovaunt, New Troy; and Elizabeth’s own reign, attended by none of
the disasters of Priam’s, could be given mythopoeic treatment by direct
contrast with its famous, but doomed, predecessor. Brutus accordingly
reappears in the chronicles of the history of Britain, ‘Briton moniments’,
in the Faerie Queene, along with another of Geoffrey’s protagonists des-
tined for future fame, King Leir.53 Leir’s story as given by Geoffrey, and
indeed in all versions except Shakespeare’s own, has a happy ending, with
his restoration to his throne. It was retold in this form not just in every
chronicle history, but in the influential French romance of Perceforest,
and presumably also in an Anglo-Norman romance of King Leir of
Leicester recorded in the thirteenth century, the text of which no longer
survives.54 Geoffrey’s most famous and successful invention, however,
was the rescuing of a shadowy Celtic hero named Arthur from the hin-
terlands of oral legend to the full light of a biography of conquest carried
to the very walls of Rome, so establishing a legendary imperial past for
Britain that reversed the direction of Brutus’s westward retreat. Some
seventeen years after Geoffrey, his translator Wace, writing his Brut in the
romanz language of Anglo-Norman, added to the story of Arthur an
account of the Round Table and its fellowship of knights; and in doing so
he created the narrative space for the infinite generation of further stor-
ies—further romances—from Geoffrey’s time-bound and linear model
of conquest and downfall.55 From these beginnings there eventually
emerged such works as Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, with all its
derivative Arthuriana in the modern world (including a fast-food restau-
rant in Tintagel called Excaliburgers), and the Faerie Queene itself.
The earliest works that are recognizable as romances—the first texts,
that is, to use consistently and purposefully the motifs that became the
accepted conventions of the new genre—were probably written, like the
Brut, in the 1150s, within a couple of decades of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History, and look back either to classical epic or to Geoffrey’s own addi-
tions to Trojan legend. Their difference from their epic antecedents lies
Introduction 25
partly in their choice of language—romanz, this time French, rather than

the Latin of their originals—and partly in their shift of emphasis, from
the founding of nations to the thoughts and feelings and aspirations of
their protagonists. The inwardness of many romances itself reflects a
larger cultural movement, from a shame culture, the belief that honour
and shame and the acts that incur them constitute virtue and vice, to a
guilt culture, the belief that virtue is finally a matter between yourself and
the judgement of God.56 Romance embraces both, sometimes without
contradiction, but sometimes in a tension that makes any satisfying end-
ing impossible. There is no such problem with works that are primarily
the products of a shame culture, epics and chansons de geste such as The
Battle of Maldon and The Song of Roland, where what impels heroism of
action is the knowledge that it will be spoken of. Honour remains cru-
cially important in romance, but it can strain other value systems beyond
breaking-point. Love, and especially illicit love, was problematic from the
earliest development of romance, in the Tristan legend. The hermits of
the thirteenth-century Quest of the Holy Grail define the problem out
of existence by classifying all desire for earthly glory as pride, the worst of
the seven deadly sins, and all sexual love as lust, but it was not a solution
that could satisfy a genre that founded itself on the principles important
to secular society but denied by the Church’s downgrading of the world
and all its values. The earliest generation of romances bypassed the issue
by locating their action outside Christian society altogether, in the
classical pagan world. The clash between the rival cultures came later,
as romance struggled to incorporate Christianity, and the Church
attempted to colonize or suppress the new genre.
These classicizing romances, known generically as romans antiques,
were therefore free to concentrate on the gap between inward and out-
ward behaviour rather than on the gap between ethical systems. They set
in tension the gender-inclusive intensity of private emotion and the male
public world of military ambition and engagement. There are three
major early romances of this kind: the Roman de Thèbes, which tells the
story of the ‘seven against Thebes’ best known from Statius; the Roman
de Troie, by Benoit de Saint-Maure, a retelling of the story of the siege of
Troy that first introduces the love affair of Troilus and Cressida into lit-
erature; and the Roman d’Eneas, a version of Virgil’s Aeneid in which
Lavinia, the woman whom Aeneas eventually marries, moves centre
stage. But however much their narratives may have been concerned with
private passion, the texts themselves had higher political concerns. All
three were associated with the Angevin court of Henry II and Eleanor of
Aquitaine, and are likely to have circulated on both sides of the Channel.
In conjunction with Wace’s Brut, the last two in particular may have been
intended, or regarded, as offering an ancestral history of Angevin sover-
eignty. The western European kingdoms, France as well as Britain, were
believed to have been founded by the progressive journeyings of Aeneas
and his descendants, fugitives from Troy, in the movement designated
the translatio imperii, the westward shift of imperial power that included
not only Aeneas’ founding of a new Trojan empire in Italy but ultimately
the establishment of the papacy at Rome. Once Aeneas was incorporated
into the ancestral history of Britain and the Angevins, then the rest of
Trojan history followed too.
The chivalric elements of romance figure in the romans antiques, but
they received their greatest boost from the entry of the Round Table into
literature in Wace. Geoffrey’s Arthur had been a great conqueror, but the
Round Table allowed for the creation of new stories of individual
knights, and therefore of the quest romance, of the knight who rides out
from court to seek adventure. The great figure here is Chrétien de Troyes,
who wrote between the 1160s and 1180s for a number of aristocratic
patrons, including Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of
Aquitaine. Chrétien is generally regarded, and with good reason, as the
greatest of the romance writers, and his works dominate the criticism of
French romance. They were at least partially known in England (Ywain
and Gawain is a translation of his Yvain; Percyvell of Galles takes his Conte
du Graal as its starting-point), but his influence was not paramount for
the development of English romance to the degree that it was for French.
By far his most influential work, Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ‘The Knight
of the Cart’, did for Lancelot and Guinevere what Geoffrey had done for
Arthur, that is, invent an enduring story from negligible antecedents,
and, in the eyes of many cultural historians, invent courtly love as well;57
but the story is rarely mentioned in English before Malory in the late
fifteenth century, and most definitions of courtly love are simply irrele-
vant to insular romance. Chrétien’s Arthur was, however, taken as part of
that great ancestral schema stretching back to Troy: three of the six sur-
viving manuscripts that contain his romances locate them in a chronolo-
gical sequence that includes a selection of the romans antiques and Wace’s
Brut.58
The direction of influence in romance is often taken as being west-
wards, like the translatio imperii and its intellectual equivalent the trans-
latio studii, in this case from France to Britain; but it was by no means all
a one-way movement, as the French adoption of Arthur from Geoffrey of
Introduction 27
Monmouth indicates. Geoffrey was probably living in Oxford when he

wrote his History, and his own origins lie further west still, in the borders
of Wales. He and Chrétien both show abundant signs of using Celtic
material, from the outer fringes of Britain and mainland Europe—
Ireland, Wales, and, for writers in French, Brittany. Legends about
Arthur had been circulating in the Celtic areas of Britain for some time
before Geoffrey developed them into a full biography; and some of the
tales in the Welsh Mabinogion show close links with Chrétien, not all nec-
essarily or entirely by derivation from him.
There is one variety of romance that is defined by the pride with which
it proclaims its Celtic origins: the Breton lai, as practised by Marie de
France and her imitators from the 1170s forwards. The Breton lais
are shorter than most full-scale romances; they generally emphasize emo-
tions more than actions; and they announce in their prologues their ori-
gins in the stories and songs circulating through Breton minstrels—so
making the works that comprise the genre immediately recognizable
while leaving the question of formal definition largely opaque. Despite
her cognomen, Marie has strong connections with England: she probably
lived and wrote there, and she knew its language and at least some of its
literary traditions.59 English developed its own tradition of Breton lais in
the fourteenth century, including one by Chaucer (the Franklin’s Tale),
whose claim of Breton antecedents for the work is distinctly cheeky; the
few English Breton lais that reached print, however, were assimilated
back into the broader genre of romance.
Celtic material was associated not only with particular varieties of
romance, or particular heroes, but with certain areas of subject-matter,
especially magic and the supernatural. The story of Tristan combines a
Celtic hero and setting (Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany) with a magic love-
potion as the engine of its plot. The earliest romanz version, whether con-
tinental French or Anglo-Norman, is lost, but it gave rise to a rush of
derivative texts from around 1170 onwards. Chrétien wrote a romance on
the subject, also now lost; but it was an Anglo-Norman poet named
Thomas who turned Tristan into one of the central figures of the whole
romance genre in almost every European language. His own text survives
only in fragments, but those can be supplemented by early translations
and adaptations into Old Norse, Middle High German (in the famous
version by Gottfried von Strassburg), Middle English, and various other
languages too.60 His skill is evident in the subtlety of his treatment of the
magic, in which what it means is much more important than its quality
as mere marvel, what it does. The story’s power came from its central
theme of a love so strong as to override all social and political taboos,

since it linked a man with the wife of his uncle and overlord in a love at
once adulterous and traitorous. Adultery no more became the norm of
later romance than did treason—almost all romances are narratives
either of courtship leading to marriage, or of the trials that part a loving
married couple;61 but it was Thomas’s handling of the Tristan story that
made the revolutionary move of presenting a fully sexual love indepen-
dent of marriage as both overwhelming and self-justifying. The influence
of that move made itself felt almost immediately, in Chrétien’s shaping of
the similarly traitorous love of Lancelot and Guinevere in Le Chevalier de
la Charrette. Even as penitential manuals were warning that all sexual
desire, even within marriage, was in some degree sinful, and the papacy
was concluding its fight to impose celibacy on all priests as a non-
negotiable standard of perfection (and as a prophylactic against inheri-
tance claims), the Tristan offered a model in which sexual love offers its
own challenging, and equally non-negotiable, standard of a secular
absolute, irresistible even when it opposes all moral and feudal norms.
The consequences of that move have affected attitudes down to the
present day. Thomas did not, of course, invent lifelong heterosexual
love single-handed, but he gave it a visibility and a language to describe it
that it had never had before. That language is still evident in the many
love-romances that reject the illicit elements in his formulation of love
(England was particularly resistant to those, despite Thomas’s Anglo-
Norman origins); but erotic rhetoric and the illicit exuberantly ran side
by side in many of the mainland European romances, not least those
bestselling blockbusters of the early sixteenth century, Orlando Furioso
and Amadis de Gaule.
Love is a feature of both the classical and the Breton material, but the first
vernacular European work to ground its whole plot and motivation solely
in love, Floire et Blancheflor, probably came from a different cultural source,
Arabic Spain: the same culture that may have inspired some elements in the
Provençal tradition of love-poetry.62 Its even-handed treatment of its
Christian and Saracen characters, even the Emir of Babylon (from whose
harem the young Floris has to recover his beloved Blancheflour), may be
grounded in such origins, in contrast to the near-universal casting of
Saracens as the opponents of Christendom elsewhere in romance. Floire
was first composed around 1160 in French; it spread rapidly across Europe,
with versions appearing in languages from Old Norse to Yiddish and
Spanish. As Floris and Blancheflour, it was one of the very first romances to
be composed in Middle English, in the mid-thirteenth century.63
Introduction 29
As the instance of Thomas of England demonstrates, it was Anglo-

Norman as much as French that set the pace for the twelfth-century
development of romance. Not all of this activity was focused on the
Angevin court; the genre could flourish wherever there were Anglo-
Norman-speaking gentry and patrons, including, for instance, the Welsh
Marches that were the adult home of Hue de Rotelande, Hugh of
Rhuddlan, the author of Ipomedon. The influence of insular material
showed itself not only in the dissemination of such works in France and
beyond, nor in the French use of British and Celtic legends, but in the
retelling of English legends (that is, legends about England after the
Anglo-Saxon invasions that gave the country its modern name, and
therefore after the end-point of Geoffrey’s History) in the new form of
romance, and the new languages of romanz. This ‘matter of England’—a
new subject-area to set beside the traditional ‘matters’ of Rome (Troy),
Britain (Arthur), and France (Charlemagne)64—was especially likely to
remain current in England in the sixteenth century, though its origins are
sometimes well disguised. Its earliest texts were most often composed in
Anglo-Norman, though some of those may have English-language
antecedents. The earliest extant version of the romance of Horn, for
instance, is Anglo-Norman, but since the story requires some punning
on the name ‘Horn’, which fails to work properly in any language other
than English, that Anglo-Norman form is likely to have been based on a
story already current in English. What that may have been like may be
indicated by the later Middle English King Horn, recorded around the
mid-thirteenth century. The story has a long history, with a second
Middle English redaction in the fourteenth century that itself gave rise to
a traditional ballad;65 the Anglo-Norman was freely rewritten in French
prose in the fourteenth century, losing its English connections in the
process, and that version was in turn translated into English (twice)
under the title of King Ponthus and the Fair Sidone, and went through sev-
eral printed editions under the Tudors.66 Another ‘matter of England’
legend, that of Havelok, first appears in Anglo-Norman in the continua-
tion to Geoffrey’s History written by Gaimar; in due course that too was
rewritten as an autonomous romance, both in Anglo-Norman and
Middle English.67 This story also makes a late reappearance, in William
Warner’s Albions England of 1586, from where it jumps into the work of
Lodge and Shakespeare. Warner himself turns it into a prefiguration of
the story of Elizabeth.68
English-language romances did not become common until the
fourteenth century. There was a flurry of them, all with French or
Anglo-Norman antecedents, composed around 1300, and the numbers

steadily increased over the next three hundred years. Many now survive
as part of larger manuscript anthologies, though that format may indi-
cate not so much that they were most often copied in collections as that
individual copies were much more likely to disintegrate or be thrown
away. Most of these anthologies date from the fifteenth century. The ear-
liest to survive, which in its present damaged form contains sixteen
romances along with pious and other works, dates from not long after
1330: the famous Auchinleck manuscript.69 The latest, yet more imperfect
since a number of its leaves were used for firelighting in the eighteenth
century but which still contains twelve romances in more or less their
original medieval form, is the Percy Folio manuscript, an assemblage of
verse narratives, ballads, and lyrics composed at various dates from the
early fourteenth century to the time of their collection in the 1640s.70
Although many of these romances have French antecedents, they take a
characteristically different angle on their material. They are generally
more compatible with orthodox Christian morality (adultery is out;
pre-marital sex is just that, pre-marital, and even that is rare); quite a
number are overtly pious, stressing the Job-like endurance of God-given
trials before restoration and a Providence-assisted happy ending. They
tend to indicate emotion more by action or statement than by soliloquy
or formal analysis. They avoid the more extreme flights of fantasy of
continental European romance. They tend, in fact, to show many of the
qualities often described as being associated with the rise of the bourgeois
novel: a parallel that may be connected with their choice of the English
language, and therefore with their downward social penetration from the
French-reading aristocracy to the gentry and to townsmen.
Once composed, romances showed a remarkable longevity. The great
majority of the English romances written before 1350 survive in multiple
copies, most of them made in the fifteenth century, and at least eight were
put into print by early Tudor publishers, notably Wynkyn de Worde and
Copeland. Those eight are Bevis of Hamtoun, Guy of Warwick, Richard
Cœur de Lyon, Of Arthour and of Merlin, Sir Isumbras, Sir Degaré, Sir
Eglamour, and Octavian. Translations made after 1350 of a number of
other earlier Anglo-Norman romances also reached print, among them
being Marie’s Lanval and Hue’s Ipomedon.71 Texts from this corpus still
figure prominently three hundred years after their composition in the
Percy Folio manuscript.72 Fifteenth-century romances provided
abundantly more printing copy. Most of the printed English romances
were written in tetrameter couplets; the other widespread early form,
Introduction 31
tail-rhyme, had passed its peak of popularity by the end of the fourteenth
century, though tail-rhyme romances continued to be composed for a
further hundred years. A few of the later romances used more elaborate
verse forms, such as the Chaucerian invention of rhyme royal. There were
just a few composed in alliterative verse, sometimes with rhyme added, in
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but these did not have
the wide geographical appeal of the metrical romances, and none reached
print.
Both the popularity and the longevity of metrical romance are exem-
plified by two ‘matter of England’ romances that were universally known
throughout the sixteenth century: Bevis of Hamtoun; and Guy of
Warwick. They were first composed in Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth
century, probably to celebrate, or to create, founding English heroes for
two of the great medieval aristocratic dynasties, those of the Albini fam-
ily of Arundel and of the earls of Warwick.73 They were first translated
into English around 1300, and in various versions enjoyed a wide popu-
larity, massively increased when they were put into print by Wynkyn de
Worde and a succession of later publishers. In contrast to the many
medieval romance texts that ceased to be printed after the earlier decades
of the Tudor age, these went through numerous new editions through-
out the sixteenth century, and in the case of Bevis into the eighteenth.74
Bevis’s dragon-fight is replicated in Redcrosse’s fight with his own
dragon in Book I of the Faerie Queene, with a detail that indicates that
Spenser’s readers were intended to recognize and to respond to its echoes
of the previous work;75 and the hero of Spenser’s Book II, Guyon, takes
his name, his association with the palmer, and his political resonance
from Guy of Warwick, whose hero is regularly named as Guyon whenever
the metre or rhyme requires it.76 The stories get a handful of mentions
each in the broad corpus of Shakespeare’s work, with a casualness that
again shows how universal a knowledge of the works could be assumed
at every social level of his characters and his audience.77 The most inter-
esting of these is the quotation that Edgar offers in his disguise as Poor
Tom, where the couplet on Bevis’s hardships in prison,
Rattes and myse and suche small dere [animals

Was his meate that seven yere
becomes Tom’s
Mice and rats and such small deer

Hath been Tom’s food for seven long year.78
Shakespeare seems to be right on the mark here in positing both a noble

Edgar who knows his Bevis, and an association of such knowledge with
the commonest of commoners. This universality, however, implied a
populism that led to increasing scorn from the educated, a scorn partly
justified in the case of Bevis by the desperation of the attempts to preserve
rhyme while making the antiquated Middle English comprehensible.79
Despite that, it still offered enough of a grip on the imagination for John
Bunyan to rework his youthful reading of it as the giants and monsters of
The Pilgrim’s Progress; and even after it had ceased to be printed in its
medieval shape, it continued a lively existence as a prose chapbook.
Guy of Warwick enjoyed a similar longevity in various forms. Much of
its power came from its being the prime story of the chivalric knight who
finds that chivalry is not enough. Guy renounces his hard-won wife,
Felice (the name is cognate with ‘felicity’; Renaissance classicizing habits
turned her into the commonplace Phillis), to seek a greater felicity,
becoming a palmer and eventually a hermit. The story was sufficiently
compelling to be disseminated not only in England but in continental
Europe too: literature composed in England was by no means just a
receiver of literary influence. The original Anglo-Norman text was
rewritten in French prose in the fifteenth century, and had an extensive
influence on the Spanish Tirant lo Blanc of Joanot Martorell and Martì
Joan de Galba. The English text of Guy made a final appearance in its
medieval shape in the Percy Folio manuscript, but from around 1600 the
story was disseminated in a variety of rewritten versions. It was drama-
tized at least twice for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, possibly as
many as four times, and one of these plays was put into print after the
Restoration.80 From the 1590s onwards, the story of Guy was a favourite
broadside ballad, though the legend moved upmarket as well as down.
John Lane, a friend of Milton’s father and keen nationalist where litera-
ture was concerned (he wrote a twelve-canto completion of the Squire’s
Tale), turned the Guy legend into a poem of even more epic proportions,
though it never found a publisher. Samuel Rowlands was much more
successful with his markedly Spenserian twelve-canto version of 1607.
With the shift of literary fashion towards prose, this was revised to
remove the line endings and most of the rhymes, leaving it as a kind of
historical novel with the skeleton of the iambic pentameters sticking
through the prose, and it was still being published in this form until the
late nineteenth century.81 This, or perhaps one of the many smaller and
cheaper chapbooks on Guy, would have been the source by which Samuel
Richardson and his readers knew of Guy’s greatest exploit, his defeat of
Introduction 33
Colbrand, the giant champion of the pagan Danes: an episode still famil-
iar enough in 1740 for the same name to be given to the villain of Pamela,
‘a giant of a man’ whose foot was ‘near as long’ as his heroine’s arm.82
Both Guy and Bevis were as familiar as the legends of Robin Hood or King
Arthur (or indeed of Valentine and Orson) until the start of the twenti-
eth century.
Prose romance reached England late. The first shift of the genre into
prose had taken place in France in the early years of the thirteenth cen-
tury, with the composition of the huge Lancelot-Grail, the ‘Vulgate cycle’
of Arthurian romances. Its authors are unknown, though it claims to
have been written by Walter Map, the clerical satirist and collector of
unconsidered trifles who lived in the reign of Henry II. The claim is not
sustainable, but it is interesting as demonstrating the dominance of
Anglo-Norman in early romance: if you wanted to advertise the glories of
your romance, you did so by claiming English authorship for it—or, to
be more precise, since Walter was even more Welsh than the Norman-
Welsh Geoffrey of Monmouth, British authorship, though it is not clear
whether early French readers would have registered the difference in his
case. For well over a century, the new form of prose remained limited
even in France to works that modelled themselves directly on the
Lancelot-Grail: the only slightly less huge prose redaction of the Tristan,
a free imitation of the Lancelot that intertwined the stories of the two
heroes; and the mammoth early fourteenth-century Perceforest, which
linked the prehistory of Arthur to Alexander the Great (and which was
one of the influences behind the founding of the Order of the Garter).83
It was not until the very end of the fourteenth century that prose became
the medium of choice for French romance. The innovations of the
Lancelot-Grail did not have an immediate effect on romance in England,
though the scanty records of book ownership indicate that copies of the
individual romances it comprised were widely disseminated in aristo-
cratic families in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.84 The first
English translation from Vulgate material, Of Arthour and of Merlin,
selects from the French Merlin primarily the quasi-historical material
already covered by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It also translates it into verse.
Verse remained the medium for romance in England until the full Merlin
was translated into prose in the mid-fifteenth century, and the equation
of the genre with verse was decisively broken only by Sir Thomas Malory
at the end of the 1460s. The most surprising thing about the Vulgate
material, however, is how separate it remained from English-language
romances of Arthur. Occasional writers, notably the Gawain-poet, show
signs of knowing it; but its decisive differences from Geoffrey’s account
of Arthur get only obscure mention in English before 1400, and very
little before Malory. These are, first, the pre-eminence of Lancelot, a
character who postdates Geoffrey’s History, and his affair with
Guinevere; and second, that Mordred was not simply Arthur’s nephew,
who rebelled against him while he was away on his career of conquest,
but that Mordred was also his incestuous son, whose treachery was made
possible by the king’s war against Lancelot over his queen.85 In the
English tradition, Gawain remains the top knight of the Round Table;
Lancelot is a peripheral French invention, and his affair with Guinevere,
if it registered at all, seems to have been dismissed as a French slander on
the great British hero.
The greatest influence of the French Arthurian prose romances on
later romance was in terms of structure more than of material. The ear-
lier verse romances had traced the adventures of a single hero (or at most
two protagonists, or a hero and heroine); the prose romances decisively
broke with that model. The Lancelot-Grail cycle, the Prose Tristan, and
the Perceforest substituted a structure in which a large number of stories
could be pursued in parallel. The model has come down to us in the form
of Dickens’s advancing a series of plot lines in a sequence of instalments
for serial publication, or, in a visual rather than textual medium, in tele-
vision soap operas. Interlacing enabled expansion, the potentially endless
extension of the pleasure of story. The Vulgate romances themselves
became especially popular in southern Europe (Dante’s Paolo and
Francesca famously start their affair through reading the Prose Lancelot
together), and further prose versions of them were produced in both Italy
and Spain.86 Their interlaced structure was inherited by Boiardo,
Ariosto, and Tasso, and in due course by Spenser for the Faerie Queene.
Sidney’s format in his revised Arcadia of flashback and digression is a
parallel development from the structural experimentation of the
Lancelot-Grail, mediated in his case more through Spanish romance than
Italian.
The second round of French fashion for prose romance, in the
fifteenth century, was at its height when Caxton set up his press at
Westminster. He had spent much of his career in Burgundy, where some
of the most famous of these romances had been composed, and, although
he avoided the traditional English metrical romances, he translated and
printed a number of these fashionable and wildly successful continental
works.87 His successors in the printing business added more, including
Valentine and Orson some time in the first decade of the sixteenth
Introduction 35
century. Their continuing fashionability is indicated by the translations

of Huon of Bordeaux and Arthur of Little Britain made in the reign of
Henry VIII by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, both of which remained
popular to the end of the century. The prose romances flourished along-
side the metrical in the first half of the sixteenth century, but largely out-
lasted them: a much higher proportion were still going through new
editions in the 1590s and later. Spenser made an unusual choice at this
date in following Chaucer and Ariosto in his selection of a long stanza
rather than prose for his near-epic romance: prose was to be the preferred
choice of future generations of serious readers. Verse narrative was
increasingly associated with the broadside ballad, or with tales for chil-
dren; a measure of its separation from narrative fiction is indicated by the
difficulty of imagining a rhyming novel.
The rise of prose helped to speed the demise of the metrical romances.
The fashionable fiction of the later decades of the sixteenth century con-
sisted of collections of novelle, largely Italian in origin; translations of the
huge Spanish prose romances, such as Amadis de Gaule and Primaleon
for chivalric romance and Montemayor’s Diana for the more self-
consciously humanist variety; and the occasional Greek romance, the
perfervid form of adventure and sexual fantasy that had flourished under
the Roman Empire, such as Heliodorus’s Ethiopica in Underdowne’s
translation, or Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe as reworked by Angel Day.
One other Greek romance, Apollonius of Tyre, had already been trans-
lated into English four times before becoming newly fashionable in the
Elizabethan era.88 This long history, and its rather more restrained sub-
ject-matter, had naturalized it as English: it is as an old native story, told
by Gower, that Shakespeare dramatized it in Pericles, and its earlier
English versions drop out of sight in the seventeenth century along with
many other of the native romances. What is known of the printing his-
tory of the metrical romances suggests that new editions were becoming
fitful from the time that Henry VIII imposed increasingly draconian state
control over publication as the Reformation took hold, and, after a
recrudescence in the 1550s under Mary, they became increasingly sparse
after Elizabeth came to the throne. It is hard to be sure just how sparse,
since almost the entire corpus of printed metrical romance has dis-
appeared: abundant contemporary references to the end of the century
indicate that the texts were still widely known, but the younger genera-
tion may have read them largely in increasingly tattered copies acquired
by parents or even grandparents. Although it is possible to trace a con-
tinuous printing history of a medieval metrical text into the seventeenth
century and beyond only for Bevis of Hamtoun, it is unlikely to have been
the only one to be reprinted across the 1600 divide. There is, for instance,
a record (but no copy) of a 1577 print of Eger and Grime, mentioned as
popular in the fifteenth century, but surviving only in the Percy Folio
manuscript and later prints from 1669 to 1711;89 and a comparable print-
ing history is likely for Roswall and Lillian, a romance whose form,
phraseology, and language show it to have been composed in the
fifteenth century, yet which survives only in a series of northern and
Scottish prints running from 1663 to 1786 (Sir Walter Scott noted that it
was still being sung on the streets of Edinburgh at the end of the eigh-
teenth century).90 Many other stories survived, but, like Guy of Warwick,
only in different incarnations. A few were rewritten in prose, at various
levels of respectability: Lodge wrote prose versions of both Gamelyn and
Robert the Devil; and the seventeenth-century prose Guy based on
Rowlands’s poem continued a healthy life well into the nineteenth
century. It was equalled in the popularity stakes by the prose Valentine
and Orson, which appeared in prints of every length from chapbooks of
single folded sheets to substantial quarto volumes, and inspired a
Victorian pantomime or two along the way.
What is abundantly clear is that the native romances retained a popu-
larity out of all proportion to the evidence of the printed record alone. It
is as misleading to see the absence of new editions as indicating a lack of
knowledge of them as it is to measure their popularity earlier in the cen-
tury by the number of copies surviving. The evidence lies both in later
survivals, and in the vituperation of moralists throughout the sixteenth
century about their continued universal popularity: you don’t waste your
breath, or your ink, condemning a decades-old corpse. The Percy Folio
manuscript is a rare witness to this continuing unofficial life: it attests to
a massive survival of native romance into the seventeenth century such as
has left almost no traces elsewhere in the written record. It preserves a
mixture of romances that had appeared in print, either copied direct or
quite possibly orally transmitted; romances not known to have been
printed, though entire editions may have been lost; and others in the
newly fashionable form of the broadside ballad. Further north, in the
country of the traditional ballad, other romances were passing into oral
form, apparently bypassing the medium of print: Horn, Sir Orfeo, the
romance section of Thomas of Erceldoune that tells of the protagonist’s
sojourn in elfland.
Further evidence from contemporary preachers, moralists, and cul-
tural commentators throughout the half millennium of the dominance
Introduction 37
of romance gives us not only lists of the most popular romances, but also
an indication of how the genre veered from disapproval to approval and
back again, as historical, and in particular religious, circumstances
changed. Secular fiction had been condemned by Christian writers ever
since Augustine deplored his greater readiness to weep over Dido’s suf-
ferings than over Christ’s.91 Comparable castigations in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance provide a useful index to fashions in romance.
Fourteenth-century moralists cited Guy of Warwick’s lion, killed defend-
ing its master, as a tear-jerker equivalent to Dido; they condemned Bevis,
Guy, Octavian, and Isumbras, despite the exemplary Christian penitence
shown by most of them; or they set out to replace with Biblical stories a
long list of romances including those of Alexander, Troy, Brutus, Arthur
and his knights, Charlemagne and Roland, and Tristan and Isolt—all of
which were still flourishing, in their original versions or later retellings,
in the sixteenth century.92 The start of the fifteenth century saw a sharp
reversal in approved reading-matter, however, as the new Wycliffite
translation of the Bible into English suddenly put Holy Scripture, and
with it heresy, within reach of those without clerical training. Romances,
with their promotion of traditional stable ideologies including the
defence of the Church, suddenly appeared a much more desirable area of
reading-matter than the English Scriptures, with their innovatory revo-
lutionary potential. Hoccleve accordingly urged knights, in the exem-
plary figure of the heretic Sir John Oldcastle, to stick with the chivalric
reading proper to their station:
Bewar, Oldcastel, and for Crystes sake
Clymbe no more in holy writ so hie.
Rede the storie of Lancelot de lake,
Or Vegece of the aart of Chivalrie,
The seege of Troie, or Thebes; thee applie
To thyng that may to th’ordre of knyght longe!93
By 1529, when Richard Hyrd was translating Vives’ Instruction of a
Christen Woman for Katherine of Aragon, the conventional moral line
had reasserted itself: condemning the usual reading of ‘idel men and
women’, he provides a list of popular English romances alongside the
titles already listed by Vives:
those ungratious bokes, suche as be in my countre in Spayne: Amadise,
Florisande, Tirante, Tristane, and Celestina the baude mother of naughtynes. In
Fraunce: Lancelot du Lake, Paris and Vienna, Ponthus and Sidonia, and
Melucyne. In Flaunders: Flory and White flowre, Leonell and Canamour, Curias
and Floret, Pyramus and Thisbe. In England: Parthenope, Genarides,

Hippomadon, Wyllyam and Miliour, Libius, and Arthur, Guye, Bevis, and many
other.94
Many of the texts cited here as popular on the continent already also
existed in English versions, or were translated later in the century: Amadis
de Gaule, Tristan (in Malory’s Morte Darthur, along with Lancelot),
Celestina, Paris and Vienne, King Ponthus, Melusine. Floris and
Blancheflour is less likely to have been known by this date, though the
existence of a distantly-related ballad may argue for a continuing oral
life.95 Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe was available in various ver-
nacular versions. And the English titles give a cross-section of the range
of romance-reading of the period: fourteenth-century metrical romances
now available in print, in Ipomydon, Libius Desconus, Guy and Bevis;
fifteenth-century verse redactions of earlier French romances, in
Partonope of Blois and Generides; a prose version of a romance already
translated once into Middle English verse (in this case, alliterative verse),
in William of Palerne (the William and Melior of the list);96 and Arthur,
by which Hyrd may have meant Malory, or possibly any and every
romance that contained Arthurian material.
The Reformation added a new danger to the reading of the traditional
romances, for they had been written, as Ascham noted, ‘when Papistrie,
as a standyng poole, covered and overflowed all England’.97 Hoccleve, by
this interpretation, was right: the texts promoted a Catholic ideology, but
that in turn had now become socially dangerous. The romances were
condemned for not conforming to the new theology, to the new require-
ments for pious and Protestant reading, or (in the eyes of cultural critics
such as Thomas Nashe, perhaps their worst failure) to the new humanist
standards of rhetorical excellence. It became fashionable to sneer at
them: they were condemned as having been written by those all-purpose
Reformation villains, monks (‘abbey-lubbers’, in Nashe’s contemptuous
phrase).98 But none of this stopped their being read, and, despite the
cessation of the printing of many of the texts, remaining thoroughly
familiar. There is some evidence that they may have held a particular
attraction for recusants—one known enthusiast with strongly Catholic
sympathies, Edward Banyster, went so far as to copy out five printed
romances to convert them back into manuscript form, complete with
illustrations—but such evidence needs to be read against their universal
appeal.99 It is perhaps not so surprising that Captain Cox’s library, as
recorded in 1575, should have included eight of the medieval metrical
Introduction 39
romances in addition to an abundance of prose romances, ballads, jest-

books, plays, and other works;100 it is more surprising to find people born
in that same decade still growing up to be familiar with a comparable
range of stories, as if a whole generation of parents kept a Captain-Cox-
style collection of old stories for their children to read. Schoolmasters had
to compete for their pupils’ interest against quartos of Bevis, Guy,
Valentine and Orson, The Four Sons of Aymon, King Arthur, and assorted
stories of monsters, all damned together as the product of lazy monks.101
The dangerous papistry of such works was, however, offset by a compen-
sating virtue: these were home-grown romances, any continental origins
long forgotten. In the great Elizabethan creation of a distinctively
national culture and literature, and even a national religion, the native
romances could play a central part that Virgil and Ariosto and
Heliodorus could not.
It was not humanism nor Protestantism that finally drove such works
out of high cultural visibility, but satire. A number of mass-market pot-
boilers of the 1590s, which piled on the native romance memes at a rate
of several per page, seem poised to invite very different reactions from
sophisticated and from less-educated readers—works such as Richard
Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom, which provides a full
romance set of adventures including lady-loves and children for seven
leading saints, and Tom a Lincoln, the life story of an illegitimate son of
King Arthur that incorporates an affair with a self-styled fairy queen; or
Christopher Middleton’s Chinon of England, in which Sir Lancelot pur-
sues and marries a lady with the impeccably Petrarchan name of
Laura.102 The enthusiasm for translations of the long and fantastic
Spanish romances, including Cervantes’s favourite Amadis de Gaule, put
English readers in a good position to appreciate Don Quixote when it was
first translated into English, by Thomas Shelton in 1612–20; and, at the
same time, Samuel Rowlands was composing his Melancholie Knight,
which did for the native tradition of romance what Don Quixote had
done for the Spanish. His knight is melancholy because he is poor, but he
is not in the least virtuous. He has read all the right stories, of Sir
Lancelot, Sir Triamour, Sir Bevis, Sir Guy, The Four Sons of Aymon, King
Arthur, ‘the Monster slayers, and the Gyant killers’; and he is himself
quite prepared to fight dragons, so long as they are tied up. To demon-
strate his learning in ‘worthy workes’, he tells a sample romance, of the
perennial favourite Sir Eglamour, its tetrameters now intensified into
nursery rhyme.
Sir Eglamour, that worthy knight,

He tooke his sword and went to fight.
And as he rode both hill and dale
Armed upon his shirt of male,
A Dragon came out of his den
Had slaine, God knowes how many men.
The dragon-fight of Bevis of Hamtoun had supplied Spenser with his
model for the Redcrosse Knight’s long-drawn-out combat against a
dragon at once apocalyptic and papal, and Chinon of England first tests
his chivalry against a fire-breathing monster; Rowlands, despite, or
because of, his fondness for traditional romance, deals with Eglamour’s
dragon-fight more briskly.
The Dragon had a plaguy hide,
And could the sharpest steele abide,
No sword will enter him with cuts
Which vext the Knight unto the guts;
But as in choller he did burne
He watch’d the Dragon a good turne,
And as a yawning he did fall,
He thrust his sword in, hilts and all.103
Unfortunately, he loses his sword in the process, but decides it is not
worth the trouble of recovering: a decision with which his melancholy
narrator fully concurs.
A knight without a sword has lost his chivalric function in life as in lit-
erature. A few decades later, Sir Hudibras made the happy discovery that
the questing knight needs only one spur, since if one side of his horse goes
faster the other is likely to keep up:104 the effort of winning your spurs
can be halved in economic terms without operational penalty. The halv-
ing of expense does, however, incur a total loss of cultural capital.
Romance had ceased to have a living meaning, its powering ideas ren-
dered obsolete by social change, market economics, and the scepticism
towards ideals and towards wonder attendant on the growth of experi-
mental science and literary realism. From being the reading-matter
of kings, the stories became the amusement of the semi-literate, the
provincial, and children: they were re-absorbed into the popular culture
from which the early romance writers had been so keen to distinguish
themselves.
Introduction 41
coda: the rise and fall of the knight
Throughout the first four centuries of romance, until the mid-sixteenth

century, romance is inseparable from ideas of chivalry, and from the pri-
mary exponent of chivalry, the knight. If the protagonist is not already a
knight when his story opens, it will be concerned with his education in
prowess, love, and just action that constitute his winning of his spurs. The
nature of those chivalric ideals was set out in the ceremonies of knight-
hood, and in the treatises on chivalry composed down into the seven-
teenth century. The historical record bears sad witness to how far the ideal
was from being normative; but that was, in a sense, the point. The chival-
ric virtues were not easy of attainment, and the aspiration towards achiev-
ing them in itself constituted an ethical quest. The adventures of the hero,
his striving towards something beyond him, show the chivalric virtues in
action, and show them as difficult—but all the more necessary to strive for
on account of that difficulty. The processes of history complicated matters
further, as the traditional ideals of knighthood became increasingly
anachronistic. By the time Spenser was writing the Faerie Queene, the
squaring of those ideal simplicities with the complexities of his own
political and economic world adds an extra layer of difficulty, beyond the
struggle for personal or personified achievement. He was writing, more-
over, in a society where knighthood was no longer synonymous with
physical and moral excellence, either in aspiration or in practice, and the
idea that it might be was beginning to seem quaintly old-fashioned.
In the tripartite division of society devised in the early Middle Ages
into those who fight, those who pray, and those who labour, it was the
knight who represented the fighting man: that was his function in the
Christian community. Aggression, however, is inherently anti-social, and
chivalry and the whole chivalric romance ethic were aimed at channelling
such aggression into socially useful roles: the support of the weak, the
support of the king, the support of God and the Church. As with speed
limits, the rules were not always observed, but they none the less
influenced behaviour. In the twelfth century, the desire to fight and to
acquire an income through fighting, felt especially by landless younger
sons, was catered for by tournaments; these offered an outlet for aggres-
sion and a way of exercising the physical prowess required of the fighting
man, as well as providing economic rewards for the successful.105 The
abundance of tournaments in early romance reflects social fact, and they
became embedded as part of the expectations of the genre even after the
violent mass melée had given way to the more decorous display of the
individual joust (the Arcadia and Pericles are unusual in the degree to
which they update their tournaments into the emblem-heavy aristocratic
showpieces of the Renaissance).106 Authors found mass tournaments
useful since they provided a locus where their protagonists, even if
engaged on a solitary quest, could meet and compete with other knights,
demonstrating the superiority appropriate to the story’s hero in the
process. Tournaments in practice offered substantial economic rewards
to the successful, and romances do not altogether overlook those; but
they represent fighting more as an ideal of prowess, and extend that from
the physical to the social and ethical. Bodily strength divorced from social
responsibility is always reprehended. Fighting in accordance with the
ideals of chivalry requires that a tournament must be fought without a
desire to injure, and real combat demands a cause for which the knight
will justly risk his life.
The origins of knighthood are obscure. The term found in historical
documents, miles, only gradually distinguishes itself from its basic mean-
ing of ‘soldier’, though the shift from a professional to a social usage
seems to have been under way by 1100. The knight’s distinctive method
of fighting, the horseback charge with a heavy lance supported under the
right arm, develops around the same time.107 It is also in this period
that the ceremonial of creating a knight first appears: ceremonies that
distinguish knighthood from warrior cavalry in their widespread require-
ment for a night’s vigil, and in their injunctions or vows to protect the
Church and the weak (especially women), to keep faith and uphold just-
ice. (Sir William Segar, writing a magisterial account of chivalry around
1600, substitutes the uncontentious loving of God for the defence of the
Church.)108 Symbolic meanings for the various items of the knight’s
armour and weaponry—that the two edges of the sword represent loyalty
and justice, the spurs diligence, or that the hauberk signifies his defence
of Holy Church—follow by the thirteenth century. One of the most com-
prehensive of these symbolic series appears in the course of a manual of
chivalry written by the great Spanish ecclesiastic Ramón Lull, in a book
eventually translated into both English and Scots; one of the most solidly
religious sets appeared, oddly enough, in the Prose Lancelot.109 The First
Crusade helped to integrate emerging ideas of knighthood with piety and
the defence of the Church. The cult of that most martial of Christian
saints, St George, was given a sharp boost in western Europe as a con-
sequence of his reported appearance to the crusaders at Antioch and
Jerusalem in 1098. Fighting was compatible with the highest religious
Introduction 43
devotion, whether in pitched battle against the enemies of God or in

single combat against a monster.
The emphasis on knighthood that characterizes the early quest
romances, notably those of Chrétien de Troyes, therefore celebrates a
comparatively recent phenomenon, though one to which the Arthurian
settings of his stories ascribe a long and authoritative pedigree. The
romans antiques and his own narratives between them write the ancestral
romance of chivalry itself. Later writers were equally anxious to locate the
origin of knighthood in the distant past: Segar places its roots first in the
Roman ‘order’of equites, cavalry, and then further back still in Aristotle’s
advice to Alexander to give chains and other badges to warriors of
‘notable merit’.110 He describes virtue as being the primary requirement
of a knight, but there is an assumption throughout his work, and increas-
ingly as he moves towards the present, that the knight will be a ‘person of
honour’ in the social rather than just the ethical sense (p. 60).
Knighthood was in practice expensive to maintain, and although some
medieval lords were prepared to endow less-wealthy men with lands
along with knighthood to enable them to fulfil their new role, wealth
remained, despite the high ideals, the leading qualification for dubbing
after social rank (none of the fair unknowns who seek knighthood in the
romances is other than nobly born, even if illegitimately so). Chivalric
prowess in practice came a very poor third, though Sir Philip Sidney
could still bitterly regret that he received his knighthood at court for
diplomatic reasons rather than on the field of battle, and his regret was
still fully comprehensible within Elizabethan culture—Gloriana’s cul-
ture. The images and traditions of knight-errantry preserved in chivalric
romances still, as Arthur Ferguson has noted, carried a mystique that
elicited ‘a special and deeply felt emotional response’, but a gentleman
who wished to serve the common weal would do so through public or
government service, not through the pursuit of private honour.111 And
the person who took such a route, who held such principles of behaviour,
now identified himself as a gentleman rather than a knight. Birth was still
of key importance, but the dubbing ceremony and its accompanying
vows received far less emphasis. The change is epitomized in the titles of
Olivier de La Marche’s fifteenth-century allegorical quest romance Le
Chevalier deliberé, translated into Spanish as El Caballero determinado,
but from Spanish into English in 1594 by Lewes Lewkenor as The Resolved
Gentleman. Segar himself brings his work up to date by giving advice on
ideal behaviour to ‘every Knight and Gentleman’ without distinction.112
When James I required everyone worth £40 a year or more to become a
knight, the chivalric ideal of knighthood received its deathblow.113 The

‘Fayry Champion’ of a parody romance of 1613 is thrilled to discover that
‘there were more wayes than one to attaine to a knightship . . . for in the
Fayry land they only have it by desert’.114 Spenser achieved the
magnificent feat of harnessing the idealism of romance knight-errantry
to practical public service, but his work was becoming outdated even
while it was being written. By the time Shakespeare died, to behave like a
knight was an anachronism, a reversion to romance rather than a living
ideal.
CHAPTER ONE
Quest and pilgrimage:

‘The adventure that God
shall send me’
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unex-

ercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and
sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where
that immortal garland is to be run for, not without
dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world, we bring impurity rather: that which
purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.1
Milton was moved to write that account of how the ‘true wayfaring
Christian’ strives after the good life through reading Book II of the Faerie
Queene, the book of Guyon, the hero who shares his name with Guy, or
Guyon, of Warwick.2 It is thus also an account of the practice of the good
life conceived, as Spenser conceived it, as romance quest. At one stage,
Milton was considering Arthur as the subject of the great epic poem he
wished to write, and this passage from the Areopagitica gives an insight
into what it might have been like, what appeal he might have found in
chivalric romance. The surface imagery of the quotation may be that of a
Classical athlete competing in a race, but chivalric quest forms its under-
lying metaphor, a substructure that seems almost instinctive rather than
learned. Milton’s ‘adversaries’ are not fellow competitors, but enemies. It
is knights errant, not athletes, who win through the exercise of virtue, and
who are purified by trial against their own or their adversaries’ impurity.
‘Unbreathed’, lacking physical fitness, is the negative form of the
romance term for the stamina of the combatant: Malory uses ‘well
breathed’ as a complimentary phrase for the physical prowess of his best
knights.3 By the time the second sentence ends, the ancient Olympic set-
ting has been forgotten, to be replaced by the postlapsarian world and its
unceasing testing of the individual in the combat of good against evil. The
passage belongs conceptually where it belongs in time: between the Faerie
Queene and the Pilgrim’s Progress, the latter work modelled on Bunyan’s
adolescent reading in Bevis of Hamtoun and the chapbook descendants of
romance. Bunyan’s narrative supplies the ‘wayfaring Christian’ with a
full chivalric biography, complete with encounters with giants and mon-
sters. What Milton glosses as a race—the dusty and sweaty journey from
inexperience to knowledge, even from the fallen world to a triumphant
ending in the immortality of heaven—is what allegory shapes as chivalric
pilgrimage, and the romance as quest.
The quest provides both the subject of a work and its shape, and to dis-
cuss quests is to discuss the point where form and content meet. It is
therefore much baggier than the other motifs of romance discussed in
this book, even though the underlying meme, the idea with its powerful
capacity for replication, is immediately recognizable, whether in the story
of the Grail, or Britomart, or The Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars. Not
every romance takes the form of a quest, but it is the model most centrally
associated with the genre. To most people, ‘medieval romance’ probably
conjures up first of all the image of a knight-errant riding on horseback
through a forest, perhaps with a dragon lurking in the background, and
perhaps, as in the legend of St George, a damsel in distress; that is what it
conjured up to Spenser, and things have probably not changed very
much since. (It is worth remembering, however, that Spenser’s St George
has to be rescued from distress rather more often than his damsel, and
she often helps in the rescue; English romance heroines are notably
feisty.) But the quest implies a great deal about the structuring actions of
its encompassing work beyond such static visual images. A quest
romance is essentially linear, following the line taken by the protagonist’s
journeyings. The ‘plot’ will consist largely of a series of adventures
encountered along the way: adventures that are usually in some way
related to the final object of the quest itself. A journey, however, allows
for the easy addition of further adventures, for extra stopovers or digres-
sions or diversions, and later redactors were fully alert to the possibilities
of adding extra episodes to a popular original. Chrétien de Troyes’
unfinished Grail romance, the Conte du Graal, invited potentially infinite
expansion in a series of continuations that did not see it as being in their
larger interests to bring the story to a close. In the longer romances, and
especially in interlaced romances that follow the adventures of more than
one protagonist, the deferral of ending becomes part of the point, as in a
soap opera: delay is in itself a promise of continuing pleasure.4 English
Quest and Pilgrimage 47
romance favoured conciseness much more than French or Italian or

Spanish, but the combined influences from all those traditions make
themselves evident in the middle books of the Faerie Queene and in
Sidney’s digressive and dilating revisions of the Arcadia. None the less,
few romances are merely picaresque. The aim of the quest, its poetic as
well as geographical end, is integral: that is, it defines what the entire story
is about and ensures that the journey is something more than random,
even though it may start haphazardly, ‘by adventure’, and proceed with
adventures that appear equally adventitious. The achievement of the
quest, or even a failure to achieve it, will be not just another episode but
the informing principle of the whole romance. The start and finish of
most such works are therefore locked together, and the episodes that link
the two, although they may appear random, are likely to follow some pat-
tern of interconnection or symmetry unique to that particular quest.
The lucidity that the idea of the quest appears to possess is disturbed
on many occasions by the protagonist’s not quite knowing until the end
of the story what the object of his quest actually is. Further complexity
comes from the fact that texts that focus on the ending of their quest may
in fact be exercising a ‘duplicitous teleology’, Monica Fludernik’s term
for the gap between ‘the characters’ plotting on the level of the fictional
world and the narrative’s overall counter-plotting’.5 Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight is a clear example of such an opposition, where Gawain’s
quest for the Green Knight who will deliver the return blow turns out ret-
rospectively to have been more like the Green Knight’s pursuit of him;
the final encounter between the two, when Gawain believes his quest is
complete, is more a revelation of a climax already passed than the
moment of narrative crisis. The degree of duplicity here, the gap between
what Gawain intends and what the story delivers, makes the work excep-
tional among romances—indeed, among most literature written before
the eighteenth century—in that it changes almost completely between a
first and second reading. Usually, the very familiarity of romance con-
ventions ensures that the reader has a fair idea of what is to happen, even
if the author does not outline the plot in advance, and even if the hero has
different ideas. The reader will always know more than the protagonists
(that they will survive their adventures, marry their beloved, win back
their kingdom), but that knowledge is a shared assumption between
author and audience that bypasses the characters themselves. In the case
of Sir Gawain, the audience knows one thing more than Gawain, since he
expects to be killed, and every reader knows that he lives to fight another
day in all those other romances of which he is the hero; but in every other
respect, the reader shares Gawain’s ignorance rather than a common

horizon of expectation with the author.
The quest as motif is further complicated by the fact that it can provide
the structure or impulse behind many romances that do not contain any
physical journey. The works of Chaucer’s that might be considered his
greatest romances (in so far as they offer themselves for recognition as
such at all), the stories of compelling passion that make up Troilus and
the Knight’s Tale, avoid anything resembling a literal quest. Neither has a
romance source, being drawn directly from works of Boccaccio’s that
have rather different generic agendas; but both still contain a sense of
seeking, of strenuous mental and emotional aspiration, such as offers a
parallel to the journeyings of the knight-errant. The romance quest is
closely related to the discourse of desire, since the seeking, the aspiration
that constitutes the quest, requires a goal somewhere ahead of you:
potentially always somewhere ahead of you, like desire itself. There are
clear generic dangers in such material: that great literary critic Sigmund
Freud linked desire with the death-wish in ways foreshadowed by
Chaucer and in the Tristan romances, and part of the frisson of the genre
comes from the sense of risk in such illimitable desire.6 The duplicitous
teleology of Troilus and the Knight’s Tale lies in putting that risk into
practice, rewarding desire with death in a violent transgression of the
bounds of generic expectation. The ‘family resemblance’ of romance
requires rather that a quest must set limits to itself, even if those limits are
not quite what the knight-errant (or the reader) expects. Romances at the
centre of the genre assume that desire can and should be fulfilled, that
there will be a point where it comes to rest.
Those romances of Chaucer’s that send their protagonists off on an
actual physical journey with a definable end are less problematic. He
wrote two of those, and both are deeply embedded in native romance
material: the Wife of Bath’s Tale,7 and the tail-rhyme Sir Thopas. Sir
Thopas is accurate enough as parody to make what goes wrong, and
therefore what ought to go right, immediately visible. His travelling is
just that: covering ground. He spurs his horse until it is so bloody that
it needs wringing out, but the only result is to tire himself out
sufficiently to need a snooze on the grass. He does then dream of an elf-
queen and set off on another journey to find her, but less because of
desire than because no mere mortal woman is classy enough for him,
‘worthy to be my make’ (CT, VII.792). His quest proves exceptionally
brief since he discovers, on meeting a giant guarding the border of her
land, that he doesn’t have his armour with him; desire falls at the first
hurdle. Even now, journeying is deeply integrated with an idea of self-

development (that ‘travel broadens the mind’). Anyone who goes to
Paris and heads for a McDonald’s is, we feel, missing the point. But Sir
Thopas learns nothing, and neither do his readers. The tale is all matter
and no sentence, subject-matter without any informing meaning, quest
as mere narrative that has nothing to say and nowhere to go. The rapist
knight of the Wife’s tale, by contrast, who is sent off for a year and a day
to discover what women most desire, finds that his journey, although
successful, is the least important thing about his quest. Finding out the
answer is only a step along the way. He has to do all his mental travel-
ling, to distance himself from his former violent and misogynist self,
after he is back home at court—specifically, after he is in bed with his
loathly bride—before he finds what he did not even know he was look-
ing for: a virtue derived from Christ that is independent both of class
and gender. In addition, and not altogether incidentally, he finds that he
has in the process acquired a wife who is both beautiful and faithful, in
the shape—the altered shape—of the woman who has lectured him at
such great length on how he ought to think and act. He gets what he did
not know he wanted; she gets exactly what she most desires.
The quest of the Wife of Bath’s Tale is therefore not primarily a matter
of the knight’s year-and-a-day travelling nor his search for the answer to
a question. It is primarily about what happens inside him. Caroline
Walker Bynum has called attention to the shift in the understanding of
change in the mid-twelfth century, from alteration from one thing into
another to the development of a mode of being, as self-becoming: ‘The
“end” or goal of development . . . was to achieve the ideal version of that
type of self . . . to fulfil a given social role and become better versions of
virtuous selves. . . . The hero or heroine of secular literature grows into or
unfolds rather than replaces a self.’8 The equation between romance
quest, seeking, and that process of self-becoming drives both the narra-
tive, the subject-matter, of the romance (since ‘metamorphosis is about
process, mutatio, story’), and its sentence. Quest therefore opens out par-
ticularly easily into metaphor, into what is commonly thought of as a
quest for identity. The phrase is however confusing, since ‘identity’ has
no exact semantic equivalent in any medieval language and collapses sev-
eral different ideas into one. A quest for family or social identity, your
parentage or rank, is one of those. ‘Knowing yourself’ in a more ethical
sense is another, summed up since classical times in the Latin tag ‘Nosce
teipsum’. R. R. Bezzola memorably reformulated it for romance as ‘le
chevalier à la recherche de lui-même’.9
Such self-knowledge is most likely, in romance, to mean discovering

new capacities that enable you to reach that ‘ideal version’ of the self. In
the paradigmatic Book I of the Faerie Queene, that moment is allegorized
in the betrothal of the struggling and error-prone human form of holi-
ness, the Redcrosse Knight, to the ideal form of the virtue, Una or Truth.
Not every romance quest ends in such achievement, however. For
Gawain in his confrontation with the Green Knight, the search for self-
knowledge means the impossibility of ever reaching such an ideal, the
discovery of limitation or fallibility: a confrontation, in the event, with
himself. The discovery of limits can have a less dangerous meaning when
the knight is set in competition with his fellows rather than against adver-
saries. A search for identity can thus offer a range of possible placings for
the self in a genealogical or ethical or homosocial topography, being the
‘best knight’ in terms of lineage or virtue or competitive prowess. The
idea of change as development implies a movement within those
topographies: a journey in a symbolic landscape.
society and the solitary knight
The quest places the focus of a story squarely on the knight as an indi-
vidual. Just as the vows taken by the newly made knight impose duties
and responsibilities on himself alone, most romances—especially the
twelfth-century romances, and the insular romances in both Anglo-
Norman and Middle English that follow the patterns laid down then—
are concerned with the model of knighthood shown by a single
protagonist. Gawain alone steps forward in response to the Green
Knight’s challenge, and his adventures are his and no one else’s.
Chrétien’s Yvain and his English avatar Ywain may hurry to a magic
spring to take up an adventure on which another knight has failed, before
Arthur and his entire court can get there; but that it is his alone is shown
not just by his immediate success but by the whole pattern of love, mar-
riage, and further failure and recovery that follows. Later romances with
larger cast-lists still preserve the principle of the uniqueness of each indi-
vidual quest. The first two books of the Faerie Queene each focus on a
single knight, and the impossibility of the heroes’ being interchangeable
is what makes the allegory possible at all. ‘The Legend of Holiness’
cannot be the legend of anyone else, or of any other virtue; and once that
defining virtue is selected, then its particular embodiment follows with
what seems like inevitability.
These examples, however, demonstrate how impossible it is to sepa-

rate the knight’s actions from society at large, whether his own commun-
ity or the community of readers. Gawain acts as a representative of
Arthur’s court, however unique he may be within it; both he and Ywain
serve to define what the best chivalric and courtly standards should be.
Redcrosse’s uniqueness within the narrative is partly constructed out of
connections beyond it, in the world of history or legendary history. He
wears battered armour, of which he is evidently not the first bearer, and
which is further identified in the Letter to Ralegh as the whole armour of
God of St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. He carries a silver shield with a
red cross, a design first drawn with the blood of Joseph of Arimathea, leg-
endary founder of the first English church, at Glastonbury. This is also
the coat of arms of St George, and therefore in the Faerie Queene also that
carried by the figure identified with him;10 Holiness is the knight of the
Red Cross and all the associations that that carries with it, associations far
more extensive than those that define Gawain as the knight of the
pentangle. St George, the saint who hallowed Christian battle, had been
the patron saint of both the royal Order of the Garter and of England
since the fourteenth century; the chapel of St George’s, Windsor, claimed
to have his heart, and Henry VII a leg.11 Richard Johnson, in his bestseller
The Seven Champions of Christendom (c.1596), naturalizes him still fur-
ther by having him born in Coventry; later editions have him father Guy
of Warwick. Spenser rewrites his legend so far as to have him ‘sprong out
from English race’, but his main innovation is to make him the patron
saint of England’s unique religious settlement, the Anglican Church.12
The Redcrosse Knight may discover that his future destiny is to be that
saint, but he is young and untested, just as the Gawain of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight is young and untested. Each of them embarks on a quest
of dust and sweat, a process of learning better and emerging the stronger
for his failures along the way. Virtue, as Milton insists in the Areopagitica,
is acquired only with difficulty. It is not the same as innocence. Stephen
Hawes’s early Tudor chivalric allegory The Example of Vertue makes the
difference explicit: its hero, initially identified as Youth, is renamed as
Virtue only after he has progressed through a dangerous landscape and
overcome the three-headed dragon of the World, the Flesh, and the
Devil.13 Both Book I of the Faerie Queene, which may draw on Hawes,14
and Sir Gawain are grounded on a similar progression. The young,
untried Arthurian court of the opening of Sir Gawain, in its ‘first age’
with its boyish king15 and idealistic leading knight, gives way to the
sadder and wiser Gawain who returns to the court at the end. Gawain’s
journey measures the distance between them, geographical space stand-

ing for mental experience. The pentangle he bears as his coat of arms
when he sets out proclaims his naïve belief in the possibility of ideal
knighthood; he comes back wearing the girdle as well, symbol of his
acknowledged failure to live up to those ideals. Even so, when the other
members of the court immediately take it up as their own symbol to des-
ignate a new order of knighthood, they are not wrong—or perhaps, if one
wants to analyse their psychology beyond the text, they are more right
than they know. What Gawain has acquired is a tested virtue, acquired
with dust and sweat; without the spotlessness of innocence, and not look-
ing very virtuous to himself at all, but with a genuine humility that makes
his opening claims of worthlessness appear false, and with a knowledge of
what it takes to sustain the ideals of knighthood such as the emblematic
pentangle had never taught him. Redcrosse goes through numerous fail-
ures in the course of his own quest, but finally justifies his bearing of his
coat of arms. Gawain’s pentangle stands for an ideal that is finally beyond
achievement in a fallen world; but that does not mean that it need not be
striven for. An early reader of Gawain and the Green Knight added the
motto of the Order of the Garter at the end of the poem in the sole
surviving manuscript, as if to bring home the relevance of his quest to
those knights selected for outstanding chivalry. Whether or not the work
was composed for a Garter knight, its connection with the attempts to
revivify chivalry through such orders was well recognized in the late
fifteenth century, when its tail-rhyme redaction, The Grene Knight,
turned the story into a foundation legend for the Order of the Bath and
for its initiate knights’ badge of a white lace. The lace imposed a require-
ment for chivalric action, and helped to land Lord Herbert of Cherbury
in trouble in the seventeenth century.16
Despite the uniqueness of the hero within each romance, the kind of
learning process that both Gawain and Redcrosse undergo is designed to
be exemplary so far as the reader is concerned, to offer a model of how to
act and how not to act. Foremost among the principles of behaviour pre-
sented for imitation is the active readiness to engage with whatever
comes, or even to seek it out. According to the Letter to Ralegh, the ‘tall
clownishe younge man’ who comes to be known as the Redcrosse Knight
asks the Faerie Queen to be given a boon at her annual feast, in the form
of ‘the atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should
happen’, so enabling him to claim Una’s quest for himself.17 Knights
do not find themselves questing by accident. They may not know quite
what to expect, but they seize the initiative, choose to act rather than let
themselves be acted upon: they will ‘take the adventure that shall fall to
them’, or ‘the adventure that God will send them’. That willed acceptance
is one of the driving forces of romance. The questing knight is the one
who is prepared to accept the romance imperative, however foolish it
may look to everyone else; as Gawain asks in his rejection of his compan-
ions’ urgings that he should stay at court and not get himself beheaded:
Of destinés derf and dere [grievous; costly
What may mon do bot fonde? [but attempt (them)
564–5
The ‘mon’ in that question is, however, gender-specific, as romances
draw a marked distinction between men’s journeyings and women’s. The
outside world is masculine space, where few women venture willingly.
Viola, finding herself shipwrecked in a strange country, disguises herself
as a young man, but she still seeks shelter within a household, while her
twin brother puts up at an inn and walks around the city meeting people
at random. Apart from a few women warriors—Grisandol in the prose
Merlin, the eponymous Silence, Yde in Huon of Bordeaux, Ariosto’s
Bradamante and Spenser’s Britomart—women who find themselves in a
situation analogous to the hero’s quest in romance are most often victims
rather than agents, compelled to leave the safety of their own homes and
at other people’s mercy. The lone woman at large in romance is more
likely to be cast adrift in a rudderless boat than to choose to follow the call
of adventure: a situation that is considered in more detail in the next
chapter.
The readiness of the individual knight to step forward from his larger
community puts the quest romance in tension with its larger social pur-
poses. The problem is not resolved by representing knights as compan-
ions on a quest, since what happens to each of them is peculiar to himself.
In part, this is the result of the romance insistence on meaning as well as
event. The more a text is weighted towards meaning and the closer it
comes to allegory, the less possible it is for any quest to be shared. Since
Galahad is so obviously the knight destined to fulfil the Grail quest, the
obvious thing for all the other knights to do would be to follow him; but
that is precisely what the logic of the sentence forbids them from doing.
Each one must go off to his own kind of failure. Lancelot accompanies
Galahad for some time, but they are largely defined in opposition to each
other. Even the three knights who form the company of the Grail,
Galahad, Perceval, and Bors, finally separate to find different destinies.
The knights who travel together in the interlaced romances form a
pattern of constantly shifting companionships and alliances, each man

having his own quest to follow or object to pursue that gives his adven-
tures a different shape and meaning from those of his fellows. That stress
on the individual over the group is one of the motifs that most clearly
separates romance from epic or chanson de geste. Hector and Achilles are
scarcely imaginable without Troy and the Greek army behind them; The
Battle of Maldon names its heroes and its villains only belatedly, to record
the honour or shame they have won in the desperate Saxon resistance to
the invading Vikings. In the Song of Roland, Roland may be the hero and
Oliver run him a close second, but it is the great conflict between
Christian Europe led by Charlemagne and the Saracen advance through
Spain that matters. In the Orlando Furioso, by contrast, Charlemagne’s
defence of Paris against the Saracens largely happens in the background
while the protagonists travel the known and unknown world and beyond
in search of love and adventure, and even when the siege becomes the
scene of the action, individual deeds of prowess take centre stage.
In the long perspective of history, such a shift of emphasis from the
political or communal to the individual seems odd; but throughout the
great age of romance it was overwhelming. In the perspective of literary
history, the shift can appear as an inevitable middle point in the trans-
ition from the archaic to the modern, or the epic to the novel. Spenser,
however, was emphatically not writing a novel; he is centrally concerned
with the political and communal, and the insistent emphasis of romance
form on the individual is one of the basic problems he encounters in writ-
ing his epic of England. The conventions to which he commits himself,
and which are too dominant in sixteenth-century culture for him to
bypass at all easily, focus on the knight, not the society. This has the
advantage of shaping the poem to express an ethic of individual obliga-
tion—the ‘gentleman or noble person’ that Spenser envisages as his ideal
reader cannot sit back and believe that it is the responsibility of the state
or its institutions to change the world for good—but it does not help him
in shaping his own quest for a vision of what England might be. He uses
Arthur to embody a kind of manifest destiny for the country, but
Arthurian history was not on his side, and Arthur himself within the nar-
rative is another individual with his own unique road to follow.
The romance focus on the individual is given physical expression in
the quest itself. The questing knight rides out from the court, from his
own society, leaving behind everyone and everything that would give him
support and comfort. ‘Fer floten fro his frendez fremedly he rydez’, as
the Gawain-poet phrases it (714)—his hero is far separated from his
comrades, riding in potentially hostile territory. He has to rely on his own

strength, his own moral and physical courage, in isolation. Beowulf’s fol-
lowers stay around the mere, hoping for their leader’s return from his
combat with Grendel’s dam, after the Danes have given up and gone
home; Roland knows that Charlemagne would come to assist him and
will avenge him, and he dies thinking of him; but Gawain is on his own,
and Gloriana never sends a rescue party out after any of her knights. Even
so, it still matters very much that the knight does belong to some com-
munity. He may be alone, but he is not a loner. He will be the scion of a
noble family or the vassal of King Arthur, a member of the Order of the
Round Table or of Maidenhead. The knight without any such role is
immediately suspect: Malory’s Sir Tarquin or Sir Breunis sans Pité, or
Spenser’s many knights who appear from nowhere and exist without a
social context, tend to be thugs or wreckers. The principle is confirmed
even by an apparent exception such as the ‘fair unknown’, le beau
desconnu, the type that gives its name to the popular and long-enduring
romance of Lybeaus Desconus and its hero.18 The young Arthur himself,
from Geoffrey of Monmouth forwards, is just such a ‘fair unknown’,
brought up in ignorance of his parentage, and he is still in such a state in
the Faerie Queene, ‘both the lignage and the certain Sire | From which I
sprong’ being hidden from him (I. ix. 3). Such heroes are brought up out-
side the court and only find their place within it in the course of the
romance, but they have a claim to such belonging before they know it
themselves, and their recognition by, and integration into, the court
marks a key moment in their quest, even its culmination. Spenser’s
Prince Arthur, who has as yet no such community but who acts as an
independent support system for the knights of Maidenhead when they
get into difficulties, has as his implied ending within the poem both the
discovery of his place in the line of British kings and an acceptance into
the faerie court.
It follows from this emphasis on social placing that the questing knight
not only rides out from his community, but returns to it at the end. The
Lone Ranger may appear from over the horizon to sort out a problem in
town, and ride off over the horizon again when he has done so, but the
knight-errant does the precise opposite. He sets out from the court into
the unknown and returns, bringing with him whatever he has learned in
the process. Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh declares that the twelfth book of
his work will describe the annual feast of the Faerie Queen at which the
various knights were sent off on their quests, and gives the details for
Redcrosse; but presumably the description of that originating feast would
have been given in flashback alongside an account of a further feast at

which, like the knights in the Morte Darthur from which Spenser draws
his model, they would return to report on their degree of success. The
overarching story of Arthur’s quest for Gloriana must also have been set
to reach its climax in the twelfth book, not just by his discovery of his
identity and his incorporation into her court, but also by his marriage
and coronation. The Arthur of Spenser’s poem has not yet entered into
his kingdom, and when he does, within this text, it promises to be
Gloriana’s kingdom: a Britain at once historical, mythopoeic, and con-
temporary. Such an ending, together with the integration of the tried and
tested virtues into a sixteenth-century England, might have turned out to
be unwritable, and indeed that may be one reason why Spenser seems to
have broken off his composition of the work some years before he died;
but the whole weight of the romance tradition he invokes requires such
an ending.
The social object of questing is made particularly clear in those
romances where the hero assumes the kingship at the end. When the
ardent young Floris of Floris and Blancheflour discovers that he has
inherited the throne while he was on his quest to recover his sweetheart,
or Chrétien’s Erec is crowned as the final action after his various quests,
or a foundling progresses from having nothing (no family, no posses-
sions or obligations or role) to the greatest territorial power and the
highest of responsibilities, what is represented is more than just the
imposition of the happiest conceivable fairytale ending. Their quests
have been a preparation for the rule of others by their own disciplining
of themselves. They do not set out with that particular aim in mind, but
the shaping of the romance recognizes the connection of the two: the
good ruler is the one who has learned the good ordering of himself; and
the teleology of the narrative recognizes that even while the characters
have their minds on other things. There is of course a strong ideologi-
cal bias in this, quite apart from the assumption that monarchy is the
only right form of government (an assumption that it would be
anachronistic to expect to find questioned), but there is also a strong
regiminal element, of advice to rulers. These heroes serve as an exem-
plary model to those who hold power, by reminding them that such
power must be justified by the ethical as well as the genealogical superi-
ority of its holder. Kings who fall below that standard (as even tradi-
tional heroes such as Charlemagne are shown to do) are forcefully
criticized; when Arthur goes wrong in the prose Lancelot, he is set right
by a lengthy passage of wise advice that struck enough of a chord for it
to be made the centre of the late fifteenth-century Scots Lancelot of the

Laik. The exclusivity of the characters of romance, the concern of the
genre solely with the high-born, fuses easily with this active concern
with the nature of the good king and good rule. Floris may seem a bad
example for this, since his exploits are so consistently focused on the
recovery of his beloved, and show nothing of political or martial skills;
but his single-minded faithfulness and his readiness to lay down his life
for his love demonstrate an integrity that bodes well for his kingship.
The parallel may appear like a romance fantasy, but the equation
between sexual and political integrity, or marital faithfulness and good
rule, is not just a medieval or a romance phenomenon, as the recent his-
tory of press comment on politicians’ sexual scandals and on the omens
for the future of the British monarchy demonstrate.19 The very point of
romances’ educative function, in showing how one should ideally act,
assumes that most of the time most people do not do so.
mythic symmetries
This pattern of a return to one’s own society, whether that is the

Arthurian court, an inherited kingdom, or the family one had lost as an
infant, modifies the straight-line structure implied by the quest. The
quest romance may appear linear when it is read, but what seems like a
straight line ends by doubling back on itself, or completing a circle, back
where it began, in a symmetrical process that starts and ends in equilib-
rium, but which between those points progresses through various
ordeals, even to the point of apparent death. ‘Symmetry, in any narra-
tive,’ wrote Northrop Frye, ‘always means that historical context is being
subordinated to mythical demands of design and form.’20 The best-
known of such mythical patterns throughout the Middle Ages and
Renaissance was that of Christianity itself, in the doctrine of the
Atonement fully developed in the eleventh century: the design by which
humankind fell from bliss in the earthly Paradise to death, but was
restored to bliss in Heaven through the Passion and Crucifixion. Text
after text insisted on the symmetries at the heart of God’s purposes
underlying salvation history. ‘For since by man came death,’ wrote St
Paul, ‘by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all
dye, even so in Christ shal all be made alive.’21 Catholic doctrine
extended the parallels through exegetic prefiguration, which crucially
included Eve and Mary, the Tree of Knowledge and the Cross:
Reson wyll that ther be thre—

A man, a madyn, and a tre.
Man for man, tre for tre,
Madyn for madyn; thus shal it be.22
Only a handful of romances draw an explicit parallel between their own

symmetries of structure and God’s, and it is rare for there to be even any
identifiable sense of analogy; but authors writing within a culture whose
deepest beliefs were grounded on such a patterning had an alertness to
these mythic forms of narrative design that the modern emphasis on the
separation of myth from history has lost. Within romance, that alertness
was fostered by the frequency with which the central character passes
through some form of confrontation with death to resurrection.
The quest offered a narrative form that accommodated symmetry with
particular ease. The mirror symmetry of the outward-and-return journey
is one of the most striking expressions of such subordination of historical
conception to the mythic, but it is not the only way in which linear quest
is restructured in the direction of myth. Symmetry can take the form of
repetition, as in the stories of women cast adrift twice (a type of romance
discussed in the next chapter): the sense of passing through a symbolic
death to providential new life is especially clear in these works. Far from
being redundant, the repetition is incremental, a term associated with the
repeating of lines within a ballad; the increment lies precisely in bringing
that latent sense of myth into consciousness. Repetition also provides an
opportunity to re-interpret earlier episodes as they recur, in a process
that has something in common with the structuring of many pre-modern
academic works as text and commentary—not least glossed Bibles, in
which the commentary calls attention to prefiguration and its fulfilment.
In the romances that bring the knight back, the narrative may likewise go
back through the stages it has come through, in reverse order; but that
reversal is not just a revisiting of the same places, but a re-visioning of
analogous experiences. The outward journey tells a story; the return not
only completes the story but comments on that first half.
Other kinds of symmetry have less in common with the patterning of
Catholic doctrine, but still function to comment on each other. The two
halves of a romance may follow the same adventure pursued by two dif-
ferent knights, as happens in Eger and Grime, with a comparable effect of
the second half correcting or supplementing our understanding of the
first. Alternatively, or in addition, the heroes may effectively be doubles
of each other: each of the friends Amis and Amiloun, Palamon and
Arcite, and Mucedorus and Pyrocles pursues a course that offers a series
of interlocking variations on the other’s. In romances that intercut their
narratives with recounted stories from the past, or with visions and their
interpretations, those interpolations serve as analogous reflections of the
main events.
Such symmetrical structuring, and mirror symmetry in particular,
imposes a discipline on many romance authors that the linear quest alone
does not, and gives both unity and depth to their texts. Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight is an outstanding example of such structural and the-
matic coherence, but it is outstanding more by degree than conception.
On a first reading, it appears to describe a succession of events; only with
hindsight, or on a rereading, does its true structure of mirror symmetry
emerge. It opens by tracking British history from the time when ‘the siege
and the assault was ceased at Troy’, through the arrival of Brutus, to
Arthur; it closes in the same way, by pulling back from Arthur to Brutus
to the moment when ‘the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy’.
Within those long shots come the scenes at Arthur’s court, the first that
assigns Gawain his quest and the last when he returns from it. Integrated
within the first court scene and preceding the second come the blow and
the return blow; and inside those in this reflecting structure come
Gawain’s arming with his coat-of-arms of the pentangle and his journey
to what seems like the haven of Hautdesert, and his donning both his
coat-of-arms and the green girdle before he journeys to the supposed site
of his testing to death at the Green Chapel. At the centre of the structure
are the scenes in the bedroom, those episodes of apparent social comedy
that decide his fate (in effect, whether or not he is to die at the Green
Knight’s hands), and their counterpart in the lord’s hunting and killing
of his prey. Bertilak has ‘forfaren [destroyed] this fox that he folwed
longe’ (1895), as the poet announces after Gawain has finally committed
himself to breaking his trouthe, in the form of his agreement to hand over
his winnings. All the significant details of the poem acquire extra reso-
nance from their placing in this pattern. Between the opening description
of the court and his striking the first blow, Gawain declares that the only
good thing about him is that Arthur is his uncle and he has his blood in
his body; after receiving the return stroke and just before he returns to the
court, he makes the painful discovery that the old hag at Hautdesert is his
own aunt, Morgan le Fay, and therefore that he has as much of her blood
in him as he has of Arthur’s. He had set out from court showing to the
world the symbol of the pentangle, the endless knot, its five points
together adding up to a ‘syngne . . . in bytoknyng of trawthe’; he returns
displaying the girdle, as easily unknotted as knotted, as ‘the token of

untrawthe that I am tan [taken] inne’.23 The structure of the quest stands
in paradoxical relationship to its central symbol: the progression of plot
that at first seems linear turns out to be intricately knotted, its beginning
and its ending the same point, the same line; whilst the endless inter-
linking of the pentangle gives way to something no more intricate or con-
nected than a piece of string.
Gawain and the Green Knight is unusual in the perfection of its struc-
ture, but it is by no means unique in its method of knotting and unknot-
ting its plot in mirror-image stages. Dénouement, unknotting, was not
around as a literary term in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, but many
authors put into practice the principle implied by the word, not just as a
final plot resolution but as an extended reciprocation of the opening
complications of structure. The practice is especially well developed in
English romance, and shows most clearly in adaptations from French
that alter an original, more episodic, plot into a symmetrical one. The
deliberateness of such a scheme is evident from the extensive reworking
of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal in the Middle English Sir Percyvell of Galles,
which eliminates the Grail from the life of its hero in order to shape his
whole story into an outward-and-return symmetry of a kind impossible
in its unfinished and expansive original.24 The English author largely
follows Chrétien for his initial knotting of his plot, as far as his determ-
ination to find his mother; but instead of pursuing his source through the
appearance of the Grail at the Fisher King’s castle and an extended sec-
ond story line about Gawain, the poet revisits each of his plot episodes in
turn. Both Chrétien’s Perceval and Percyvell start out in the forest, where
their mother has taken them to preserve them from the dangers of the
chivalric life; Percyvell concludes his knightly adventures by returning to
find her, reclothing himself in goatskins such as he had worn as a boy to
reassure her as to who he is, and restoring her to health just as she had
borne and preserved him. Neither hero knows his name: Perceval intuits
his after he has failed to ask the question at the Grail castle, in a scene in
which he also discovers that his mother is dead; Percyvell is given his at
the centre of the romance, when he is knighted by Arthur. Gawain plays
an important role in both romances, but in Chrétien his adventures lead
away from Perceval’s; the English by contrast makes Percyvell into
another nephew of Arthur’s, so constructing a parallel between the older
cousin who instructs the younger in chivalry, and the younger who must
grow beyond that instruction. The return half of Sir Percyvell starts with
his remembering his mother—at Christmas, the point of the year when
time itself is about to complete one cycle and start again—and setting off
to find her. The romance ends in a family reunion, in which the mother
is integrated into the new household of Percyvell and his wife, her son
having made the full transition to autonomous adulthood. Essentially,
the story of this romance is one of ‘self-becoming’, in a quest that takes
its hero back to where he started so that he can recognize it for the first
time.
Sir Percyvell demands attention, not only because its radical alteration
of its source shows the deliberateness of its symmetrical structuring with
particular clarity, but because it also shows the very different priorities
obtaining between French and English quest romance in the Middle
Ages. It might not seem a good example to take, in that it is commonly
regarded as an example of the inferiority of Middle English romance; and
indeed Chaucer has it on his hit-list in Sir Thopas, not only naming Sir
Percyvell but lifting the rhyme of his name with ‘water of the well’.25 The
Percyvell-poet has, however, gone halfway to meet Chaucer, since
the story of an innocent abroad already has comedy built into it, and the
romance is pervaded by gentle amusement at the gaucheness of its hero.
Neither Chrétien’s Perceval nor Percyvell knows how to get the armour
off a dead knight, but only Percyvell thinks that all horses are mares. Its
author none the less resists turning it either into parody, like Sir Thopas
itself, or into satire, like A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court—
though he does have a Mark-Twain-like eye for the ludicrous in romance
(as when the Saracens’ heads, cut off by Percyvell, hop on the grass as
thick as hailstones, 1190–2). He may mock his hero’s inadequacies, but
never the impulses behind his aspirations or the underlying structure of
his story, even though the ideals that inform it are very different from
those of the Conte du Graal. The author will have nothing to do with the
increasing mysteriousness of the French Perceval’s quest, or with the
impracticality of the notion that success is dependent on asking the right
question at the crucial moment. If he knew, or knew of, the prose ver-
sions of the Grail, he likewise wanted nothing to do with the substitution
of pious fantasy for practical living, or of theological values for secular
ones. Chrétien’s Perceval quests for an undefined and undefinable end,
indefinitely postponed; the Perceval of the prose Quest of the Holy Grail,
whose qualification for success lies primarily in his virginity, ends in a
hermitage, withdrawing from the world. Percyvell by contrast embarks
on a succession of quests that lead to social integration, marriage, king-
ship, and a reaffirmation of the family. He makes the transition from
adolescence to manhood, the wild boy growing into prowess, love, and
responsibility for his actions, his recognition of his need to make up for
his own past errors.
Sir Percyvell opens with the story of his parents, and of the death of his
father at the hands of the Red Knight—the man who is the victim of the
wild boy’s first chivalric adventure. The Red Knight in the Conte du Graal
is a supplementary character with no prehistory, but the English author
integrates his main story with those events from the past in a way
that replays the downfall of the father in the success of the son. Such an
integration of the past with the present is another recurrent way of
expressing the mythic symmetries of romance. The relationship between
them is especially strong when the narrative present is interwoven with
the past through the retelling of earlier events in inset stories: stories that
parallel the main narrative but which also alter the readers’ and char-
acters’ understanding of the present. Aeneas’ recounting of the fall of
Troy in Book II of the Aeneid is the famous example of the narrative
device of flashback cited by the rhetoricians, but romances are sometimes
prepared to spend a substantial proportion of their length on earlier
events that define their present moment in ways that go beyond narrative
alone. The prose Quest of the Holy Grail pioneered this technique as a
meaning-rich second line of plot running in deep parallel with the dom-
inant quest, in its provision of a sequence of hermits and the occasional
virgin to provide lengthy expositions of the prehistory of the Grail or the
various items of Galahad’s armour (including the silver shield with the
red cross borne later by the Redcrosse Knight). The princes’ accounts of
their earlier adventures that constitute most of the additions to Sidney’s
revised Arcadia are ultimately descended from this model as much as
from Virgil, though the Quest’s Biblical connotations have been deci-
sively lost by this stage. The stories told by Pyrocles and Mucedorus
recount the journeyings that have brought them to their current place of
stasis in Basilius’ retreat, where their seeking the love of the princesses,
quest as aspiration, supersedes their earlier travels.
Sidney gives the Arcadia two heroes and two heroines, whose attrib-
utes complement each other and whose adventures interlock. A more
complex kind of symmetry of structure can emerge in the romances that
recount the quests of several knights in parallel—or more properly in
interlace, since those adventures will typically coincide, digress, con-
verge, overlap, and part company again. This is a way of telling sequen-
tially a number of stories that happen at the same time, but it is more than
just a device for doing that; when the author picks up the thread of a pre-
vious story, he does not return to it at quite the same point where he left
off, even if the narrative appears continuous when the ends are stuck
together. In Rosemond Tuve’s words, ‘We digress, or seem to, and then
come back, not to precisely what we left but to something we understand
differently because of what we have since seen.’26 Retold events from the
past make such a shift in understanding explicit; interlace works more
subtly, rather in the way of subplots in Renaissance plays, but without the
subordination of one element to another inscribed in the ‘sub-’ prefix.
The Quest of the Holy Grail in both its French prose form and Malory’s
redaction uses both techniques, of telling histories and of interlace. The
Faerie Queene makes a sparer (but still important) use of retellings of the
past, but it uses interlace in abundance, most obviously in the central
books. Our understanding of the quests of the various model lovers in
Book III is perpetually being reshaped by the intervening models of other
kinds of love or lust, and the reappearance of a character can just as eas-
ily follow the logic of someone else’s story as of their own. Spenser’s eth-
ical biography of Arthur works in a similar way. The story requires him
to be in his youth, but he never has the naïveté of Redcrosse; his estab-
lished virtue is the accumulation of all the experience acquired by the
other protagonists, and so is much greater than his interventions in the
narrative alone suggest. Arthur as ‘perfection’ of the virtues, as the Letter
to Ralegh puts it, therefore requires a large cast of supporting, and sup-
ported, knights.
Numerous characters are, however, not a prerequisite for interlace
structuring; two or three are all that is necessary. Una has her own adven-
tures when she has been separated from the Redcrosse Knight, and her
unswerving faithfulness serves to distinguish Truth from the imper-
fections, confusions, and failures of a struggling human Holiness. We
understand Una differently again by seeing Redcrosse’s interaction with
a third character, Duessa—her antitype, her false mirror image.
Allegorical romance, with its cast of characters selected and shaped for
meaning, shows particularly clearly how not just plots but significances
can be interlaced, but romances that set out primarily to tell stories do the
same. The fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo is a clear and very simple exam-
ple: after his wife is abducted by the fairies to something like a land of the
dead, Orfeo places his kingdom in the hands of his steward, and spends
many years in the wilderness before he finds a means to follow the fairy
hunt and win her back through his harping, calling in the fairy king’s
promise to let him choose his reward. He then returns to his kingdom in
disguise, and finds that his steward has remained faithful: a fidelity that
follows from and reflects both Orfeo’s own faithfulness to his wife, and
the fairy king’s in keeping his word. We have heard nothing about the
steward in the interim, but the models of faith in both the human hus-
band and the king of the Otherworld function to guarantee this further
example of patient integrity. The hunts and the bedroom scenes in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight are yet another example: the alternation
between the lady’s successive attempts at seduction and the lord’s
hunting, the changeovers occurring in mid-stanza, conveys almost sub-
liminally the sense that Gawain is likewise a quarry. The parallel sets of
scenes appear to have nothing to do with each other except to get the hus-
band out of the way, but their patterning triggers a shift in audience
response such as reflects what is happening in the larger plot even before
we know it.
Such a strong sense of the potential for symmetry in romance is found
in vernaculars other than English, but rarely so persistently or exten-
sively. The Middle English Havelok structures its narrative on parallelism
rather than a mirror symmetry, creating equivalent biographies for its
hero and heroine not found in the Anglo-Norman versions.27 The
Elizabethan romance drama of Clyomon and Clamydes, based on
episodes from the quite exceptionally long and complicated fourteenth-
century French Perceforest, similarly creates parallel biographies for its
two heroes, both kings’ sons, one of whom carries a silver shield and one
a golden.28 Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale offers both parallelism of characters
(not only between Palamon and Arcite, but between its human charac-
ters and its gods) and mirror-symmetry of plotting, the latter largely
absent from its source, but it uses those symmetries to provide a grim
irony in the different endings—violent death, marriage—met by its near-
identical heroes. This is the work of Chaucer’s that Shakespeare (with
Fletcher) adapted most closely for the stage, as The Two Noble Kinsmen,
and the tight ironies of its plotting seem likely to have been one of its
attractions.29 The dramatization of longer romances made it especially
important to solve the management of episodic structure, and it was
often done through such processes of parallelism and symmetry rather
than through the kind of organic unity privileged by nineteenth-century
critics. Attention to plot structure in such plays can often therefore be
more revealing than characterization or plausibility of action.
Pericles, which is guilty of all the charges of improbability brought by
contemporaries against romance drama (the many years covered by its
action; its settings widely scattered across the Mediterranean), is a case in
point. It shows very clearly the difficulty of staging travel; or rather, it
shows the insouciance with which early modern theatre, like the
medieval, staged the unstageable—sea-journeys are trivial to playwrights

and theatregoers accustomed to watching Lucifer’s fall from Heaven to
Hell.30 Pericles is concerned with its protagonist’s successive quests for a
bride, for asylum, for love, for his wife and daughter, though it is unusual
as a quest romance in that the journeys that lead him to the things that
matter most are not undertaken with the purpose of seeking them out.
His initial journey to Antioch is cast as chivalric quest—he describes
himself as taking the adventure like a champion in the lists; Antiochus
compares the test to fighting a dragon—but his intention of finding a
wife by whom he might propagate offspring is fulfilled only later, and
then at the instigation more of his future wife than himself.31 His journey
to Tharsus to recover his daughter brings him only to her tomb, and he
finds her somewhere else altogether; and his final journey to Ephesus is
undertaken at the bidding of Diana without his knowing that he will find
there what he most desires. This sprawl of place and time and the irrele-
vance of human intention is offset by the precision of its symmetries of
structure. The play heightens what is already found in the Apollonius and
Gower as a pattern of repetitions in which each recurrence recasts our
understanding of what has gone before. Its outermost form is that of the
exile-and-return romance, in which Pericles abandons and resumes his
kingship. The relationships of father and daughter, husband and wife, are
more central in every sense, from the incest with which the play opens,
through the ‘good’ wooing of Thaisa that concludes with the report of the
deaths of Antiochus and his daughter, to the reunion of the family at the
end, when marital and paternal and filial love are separated out and cel-
ebrated with an intensity greater than the condemnation of the abhorrent
affinities of the opening. This is not just plot progression, but a process of
commentary, or rather overwriting: aberration, deviance, is replaced by
what is good in both human and divine terms. The original romance
stressed the parallelism by having its Marina figure draw her unrecog-
nized father out of his grief by asking him riddles, just as he had been
faced with a riddle over interpreting the incest; the play uses music at
comparable points of the plot, culminating in the music of the spheres
(probably actually performed rather than left to audience imagination)
that Pericles hears after he realizes who she is. At the centre of the play
come both its first climax of joy, in his marriage to Thaisa, and its worst
moment, in her apparent death—a death from which the mythic struc-
ture of romance pulls her back, to affirm that it is the love, not the death,
that matters. The play offers perhaps the fullest experience of grief of any
of Shakespeare’s happily ending plays. The audience knows, however, as
Pericles does not, that his wife and child are alive, and therefore that at
the end of his journeyings he will find them; and even that dramatic irony
becomes a kind of structural parallelism within the play, as audience
expectations implicitly provide a running commentary on his own tragic
text, rewriting and correcting it for good.
The principle of controlling the structure of dramatic romance
through patterns of symmetry holds good even where adaptation is not
an issue. The Tempest acquires its tightness of action, not through its
near-conformity to the dramatic unities, but through the various sym-
metries with which its action is structured, and by means of which it
develops its ideas of legitimate and illegitimate power, of love, wonder,
and the nature of social living. It works both through the reciprocity of
the action of the first and second halves of the play, and through the effect
of interlace in the shifts between different groups of characters (not least
between the aristocratic usurpers and the rebels of the subplot, Caliban
and Stephano and Trinculo). It is designed with a mirror symmetry in
which each reciprocal action comments, as in Gawain, on its earlier
equivalent. Scenes of the separation of families, Prospero as magician,
falling in love, and rebellion are resolved in the second half, in scenes of
repentance, the masque that celebrates the young lovers’ potential fertil-
ity, Prospero’s decision for virtue over vengeance32 and his divesting
himself of his magic power, and the final scene of reconciliation and
recovery. At the centre of the structure, Ferdinand and Miranda pledge
themselves to each other, a pledge expressed in terms of a willing
servitude to and for each other, a mutual abrogation of power. The whole
play is enclosed within two offstage journeys. The first is the casting adrift
of Prospero that brings him to the island represented by the stage.33 The
second is not just the return voyage to Milan, but the Epilogue, in which
the actor playing Prospero pleads for favourable winds, the spectators’
breath that will release him from the island and from the stage. It is a way
of returning both actor and audience to the real everyday world that
encloses the acting of the play, a return on which they will take with them
something of that changed perception of the ordinary.
The travel, in this romance, happens outside the drama: in the casting
adrift of Prospero, the voyage to Tunis for the marriage of Claribel, the
homeward voyage before its irruption onto the stage in the shipwreck,
the return to Milan at the end, the Epilogue. The island setting, the stasis
of the action in terms of its location, refocuses those voyages as inward
quest, self-becoming. The Tempest is a romance of journeyings that all
happen offstage; the dramatized narrative gives us only the climax, the
central moment around which everything else falls into place. Those
symmetries also serve to construct the play as romance. The return to
Italy signals repentance, forgiveness, the return of the exile, and young
love and its promise of the uniting of the dynasties of Naples and Milan.
Less conventionally, the structural patterning finally rejects both magic
and colonialist appropriation, and refuses to claim any fantasy perfec-
tion. The island is left to the spirits who were its original inhabitants,
Sebastian and Antonio notoriously resist incorporation into the har-
mony of the new body politic, and Prospero does not take his powers as
enchanter back with him.34 Desire here becomes a desire for the familiar
world of home, and with that comes a renunciation of romance and its
marvels, just as the Epilogue renounces the illusory magical world of the
play.
A summary of the journeys that result in the action of The Tempest is
also a summary of its colonialist, psychological, and ethical concerns; and
finally of its religious concerns, too. No romance quest outside Sir Thopas
is there merely for the story. The word ‘quest’ itself means seeking, not
finding; and that placing of the emphasis, on the process rather than the
end, makes some degree of inner meaning almost inevitable. In the case
of the Epilogue to The Tempest, that inner meaning finally turns out-
wards, extending into the life of the actors and audience. The judgement
the audience give in their favourable breath, or in their withholding of it,
is a foreshadowing of their own journey towards the Last Judgement, and
the pardon that they themselves may or may not receive:
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Epilogue 19–20
The deferral of ending so characteristic of narrative romance, and so alien
to dramatic form, here opens out into the journey of life, the path of the
wayfaring Christian. The final voyage in this play is one that remains in
the future for every actor or spectator or reader, the moment when they
will cross from this world to God’s.
quests without maps
Since the root meaning of ‘quest’ is ‘search’, it follows that even if you
know what you are looking for, you do not know where to find it: a quest
is a journey to an unknown destination. Neither do you know the roads
by which you have to travel, or the landscapes through which they run.
Such unfamiliar topography takes to an extreme the practical difficulties
of travel in the Middle Ages. Those Englishmen whose professional func-
tions required them to travel—merchants, messengers, friars, the king
himself, and all levels of his household from the cooks to the highest
barons—were familiar with some of the main roads of England, and per-
haps a few of those of mainland Europe. Such people were far outnum-
bered, however, by those whose horizons were limited by the nearest
market town, or by the literal horizon seen from their own village. Maps
were rare, and generally not designed to be of practical use;35 before the
mapping of England in the sixteenth century it must have been imposs-
ible to have any accurate idea of the layout of the whole country, the
relative positions of hills and villages and rivers and monasteries that
lay more than a day’s journey from each other. A phrase such as ‘a day’s
journey’ is in fact tautologous, since ‘journey’ derives from journée, how
far can be covered in a day. Distance itself was hard to measure, and the
conversion of space into time provided a functional and accessible
approximation. The ease of the conversion is itself an indication of how
one-dimensional travel appeared, like time itself. The conversion worked
in the other direction too, to represent time as space. Dante famously
claimed to have had his vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven nel mezzo
del camin di nostra vita, mid-way along the pathway of his life, in the
thirty-fifth year of his allotted seventy. The pathway of life is also the
journey of life; life as quest.
One-dimensionality breaks down as a model in so far as it suggests that
you can’t get lost. The only straight highways in Europe were those built
by the Romans, and they were far outnumbered by branching roads and
crooked byways. Bunyan was exceptional in providing his wayfaring
Christian with a straight and narrow path that would take him exactly
where he wanted to go, to the fulfilment of his quest for Heaven; but that
path cuts through a landscape that provides an abundance of diversions
and wrong routes. Before cartography, and still for Bunyan’s Christian,
instructions for travellers took the form of itineraries, a sequence of
places through which you had to pass to get to where you wanted to go.
Topography was linear, familiar in so far as it formed the line of travel,
but whatever lay to the side remaining largely unknown.36 Without the
assistance of a single defined highway, journeying beyond an area per-
sonally known to you required a guide who had equivalent personal
knowledge of the new area, since there was no means of storing or taking
with you geographical information beyond the most basic instructions.
Even now, people trying to find a route or an address, a bed-and-break-

fast or an ironmonger, will ask a local passer-by for directions; knights-
errant take such a need as a matter of course—where can they find
lodging, or adventure, or the Green Knight? Once a destination is known,
a guide might well still be a necessity if anything more complicated is
involved than taking a right turn (the right turn, as Auerbach famously
pointed out);37 hence Gawain is given a guide to take him to the Green
Chapel even though it is only a short ride from Hautdesert. Guides are
not necessarily mere transmitters of information, however, and can lead
you astray in more than just the literal sense. Gawain’s can direct him to
his geographical destination, but his main function is to encourage him
to give it a miss, to divert him from his moral destination. The quests of
Malory’s knights proceed by a process of enquiry, many episodes being
triggered not by the dominant quest nor hazards randomly encountered
but by successive changes of direction impelled by local report or advice.
That, too, had its real-life counterpart. The problems of travel were com-
pounded if the object of a journey were on the move. A messenger or an
envoy sent to the leader of an army, or to a journeying king or prelate,
would have only an approximate idea of direction, not a known destina-
tion. It must have been a commonplace experience to pursue the king
from Westminster to Nottingham, and on to Chester, to Shrewsbury,
and eventually to catch up with him back at Westminster. You may find
the person you were looking for back where you started.
Travel by sea involved further hazards, since the open seas were
uncharted, and navigation instruments of limited reliability. The reliance
of ships on favourable winds meant that they were easily blown off course
and forced to come to land somewhere unintended or even unrecog-
nized. Travellers’ tales spoke of hazards beyond the normal terrors of
tidal rips and exposed coasts, such as the magnetic island, described by
Sir John Mandeville and others, that drew iron-nailed ships to itself.
Huon of Bordeaux lands on it despite the best efforts of his steersman,
and finds its harbour full of rotting vessels that have never been able to
get away, manned by the skeletons of sailors dead from starvation;
Spenser turns it into his Rock of Vile Reproach, a place filled with
‘carkasses exanimate’.38 Experienced seamen acquired a lifetime of
knowledge of different coasts and harbours, but even the best-travelled
could not know the entire coasts of western Europe or the
Mediterranean. The problems of topography were compounded by the
lack of modern means of communication. Travellers, or whole armies,
on ships that set out together but were separated by the weather had no
sure way of making contact with their fellows at sea or after they came to
land; they might well not know whether they should be searching north
or south to try to find them. If someone were abducted in a city or on the
road, anyone looking for them would have some idea of where to start;
but someone seized and taken away by sea, or abducted by enemy ships
or pirates or hostile merchantment, could be taken almost anywhere.
Seeking even a known object, a place or a companion, could therefore
involve difficulties that modern travellers would think of as insurmount-
able. Add in the frequently ill-defined nature of the aim of a quest (what
do women most desire? how can one win the most glory?), and the
‘errancy’, the wanderings, that characterize the questing knight become
inevitable.
That travel was experienced as linear, however wandering a line it
might follow, makes sense of a great deal of what at first appears strange
about the journeyings of a questing knight. The story, like an itinerary,
focuses on specific loci along the line of travel: the narrative settings are
those places where things happen (a spring, a hermitage, a ford, a castle),
and they are recognized by their characteristics, not by their spatial
co-ordinates. What lies out of sight—and if you are travelling through a
forest, you can’t see very far at all—is either irrelevant, or potentially
threatening. The philosophers of the twelfth-century school of Chartres
adopted the word silva, forest, as their term for chaos, matter that had not
yet been given created form; and it may not be coincidence that the quest
romance was developing its own characteristic landscape of forest at the
same time. The romance forest is the place that conceals brigands and
monsters, where the knight’s claims to chivalry are tested, his values and
his sense of self challenged.39
It rarely matters just where the forest is. A few are named (Broceliande,
Ardennes), but the point of any forest, named or not, is that you can get
lost in it. The starting-point of Dante’s journey through the three realms
beyond this world is in a selva oscura, a wood of darkness and indirection,
from which he needs the help of a guide to escape. Errare, to wander,
feeds into both the knight-errant, questing with no fixed goal, and
errancy, the moral equivalent of physically going astray. Step off the road,
and any woodland becomes a Wood of Error: it is not accidental that the
first landscape to be described in the Faerie Queene, after the undistin-
guished ‘plain’ of the opening line, is the ‘wandring wood . . . Errours
den’ (I. i. 13). Features of the landscape are more or less geographically
interchangeable if your experience is confined to what you can see of
them: a spring may be near Edinburgh or Toulouse, but the fact that it is
somewhere where you can drink matters more than its location, and the
idea that fairies haunt such places may matter more still. In quest
romances (romances of origins operate differently) real places are likely
to be named only if they have some symbolic function: a spring near
Jerusalem will have meanings that one near London will not. Romances,
furthermore, aim for the exotic, the distant. English audiences would be
too familiar with springs near London to find them interesting; those
occur in romances such as Amadis de Gaule, originally composed in
Spain and therefore able to regard England as an exotic country. The wet-
ness of England, its abundance of rivers and streams, was for a Spanish
audience a signifier of wealth.40 Locations close to home have to have
some weighty reason for being chosen. Imogen in Cymbeline sets out on
a journey to Milford Haven, a place whose specificity seems anomalous
(especially in view of its modern reputation as an oil refinery), but in the
sixteenth century it resonated with the landing there of that saviour of
war-torn England, Henry Tudor. The romances most likely to name
familiar places are those that serve a genealogical function, where the
point of the text is to provide a founding legend for a known baronial
seat; but the fixed location of a magnate’s home territory means that such
texts are less likely to take the form of quests. The spring of Melusine is
near the future city and castle of Lusignan, since the eponymous fairy will
be the founding mother of the Lusignan line, but it is her sons, not her-
self or her chosen husband, who set out from there to journey.
The characteristic setting for a quest romance is most simply described
as somewhere else. Even if it is given a location, it is in a form its real-world
inhabitants might not recognize: water apart, Amadis’s England is a
legendary land in which marvels can and do happen on a regular basis.
Malory is unusual in mapping the fantasy Britain of French Arthurian
romance onto the country he knows, identifying Camelot as Winchester
and Joyous Gard as Bamburgh in a programme of turning the more
implausible stories into a legendary history of the land that he and his
readers inhabit. What matters for Malory is that the traces of Britain’s
heroic past are ‘still there’, that the countryside preserves the evidence of
its originary moment.41 Caxton takes a similar approach, arguing for the
historicity of Arthur on the basis of the physical remains at Caerleon. Yet
even in Malory, once his knights have left those named locations, the
landscape loses its familiarity and its geographical precision. Quest
requires a landscape that follows the co-ordinates of adventure rather
than mappable space—which is why attempts to map the Faerie Queene
are doomed to failure.
The uniqueness of romance geography is apparent by contrast with

many of its contiguous genres. Epics and chansons de geste are likely to use
known settings, and so does that other genre of the happy ending, com-
edy—or at least, Roman comedy, the model best known in the
Renaissance. Terence and Plautus set their plays in familiar cities (most
often Athens), and the classicizing satirical comedy of the Renaissance
followed suit, as Jonson’s London plays testify. The distance of
Shakespeare’s comedies from that model, and their closeness to romance,
is evident in the exoticism of their settings, just as in their patterns of love,
loss, searching, and discovery. ‘This is Illyria, lady’; but no spectator in
their right mind is going to try to identify the modern equivalent of Illyria
on a map in the hope of illuminating the play. For all practical dramatic
purposes, Bohemia does have a seacoast. One result can be what
Northrop Frye has called ‘spatial anachronism’, where geographical and
thematic co-ordinates are at odds.42 The forest of Arden in As You Like It
is in some respects a Warwickshire version of the vast and mysterious
forest of the Ardennes, but it still contains a lioness, a serpent, and a
shepherd and shepherdess named Sylvius and Phoebe. The island of the
Tempest is reached in one direction from Naples and in the other from
Tunis, known places that locate it firmly in the middle of the
Mediterranean (Virgil’s or Aeneas’s Mediterranean); but Shakespeare
famously borrows some of its properties from the New World, from
accounts of the Bermudas and Montaigne’s essay on cannibals.43 The
westward voyages of exploration posed new challenges not just to the
explorers themselves but to the imaginative conception of the
unmapped; but that was a challenge that romance was well adapted to
take up.
questing westward
The great age of romance began and ended with westward questing. The
Roman d’Eneas told of Aeneas’ travels from Troy to Italy in his search for
a new home territory, of land to colonize, and the work’s emphasis on
Lavine over Dido gave priority to his founding of a dynasty over his
adventures on the way.44 It told of the translatio imperii, the westward
movement of the centre of power from Trojan Asia Minor across the
Mediterranean: a movement that his descendants were to take still fur-
ther, to the Atlantic edge of Europe. As the Gawain-poet put it,
Hit was Ennias the athel, and his highe kynde,

That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of al the wele in the west iles . . .
Tirius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes,
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes up homes,
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez
wyth wynne.
5–7, 11–15
[It was noble Aeneas and his princely descendants who afterwards subdued terri-
tories, and became lords of almost all the wealth of the western isles. . . . Tirius
went to Tuscany and founded dwellings, Langobard settled in Lombardy, and far
over the English Channel Brutus the Blessed established Britain in joy across its
wide hills.]
This process of colonizing and enfolding ‘almost all the wealth of the
western isles’ was recognized as appropriation but not usually as sup-
pression: as the vocabulary of beginning in this passage suggests, the
legends presented much of this colonization by Aeneas’ descendants as
being of empty lands, or at least of lands that were inhabited only by
creatures such as giants (as Britain was) or who knew little of the arts of
civilization, and so could be represented as properly overcome. The com-
parison with the rhetoric of later exploration is instructive, but the early
legends had the advantage of not having a knowledge of any contradic-
tory fact to contend with. Chrétien de Troyes is typical in describing this
westward movement as encompassing not only territorial expansion but
the ideals of chivalry and learning (the translatio studii, learning as car-
ried initially from the Greek- to the Latin-speaking world and then on
westwards):
Ce nos ont nostre livre apris

Qu’an Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui or est an France venue.45
[Our books have taught us that chivalry and learning acquired their first distinc-
tion in Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, as did the greatest learning; and
now they have come to France.]
The identification of the origins of the various realms of western Europe

in this process of westward questing remained a point of national pride
into the sixteenth century and beyond,46 and provided a context for
exploration still further westwards.
Europe, to its inhabitants and its writers, effectively constituted the
known world. In the Middle Ages, it was the East that most exercised the
imagination; whatever might lie to the west was largely so unknowable as
to be unimaginable—and in any case, since the world was known to be
round but the existence of the Americas unknown, imagining the West
was indistinguishable from imagining the East. Before the discovery of
the New World, romance writers therefore located their most exotic
romance landscapes eastwards, in Babylon or India. Even Eden had a
geographical location, being shown on medieval world maps at the
furthest point eastwards.47 As Sir John Mandeville noted, it was hard of
access. He did not reach it himself (‘Of paradys ne can I not speken prop-
urly for I was not there; it is fer beyonde, and that forthinketh me’),48 but
Alexander the Great, in some romance versions of his life, was supposed
to have reached its encircling walls.49 No lands to the west could offer
such tantalizing possibilities, but people’s imagination had already been
stirred by what might lie in that waste of sea beyond Europe. Maps down
to the eighteenth century filled the Atlantic not only with newly discov-
ered islands (such as the Azores), but with islands that had a mythical as
well as a real existence, and with others that were solely the product of
legend.50 The Canaries were identified with the Fortunate Isles, known to
the Greeks as the Islands of the Blest; Geoffrey of Monmouth gives them
the alternative name of the Island of Apples, Avalon, and makes them the
home of Morgen, the future Morgan le Fay, to which the dying Arthur is
taken.51 The most mythical islands included a number from Irish legend,
such as another isle of the Blest, Hy-Brasil.
Legend and fact fed on each other, and cannot always be separated.
The story of the voyage to the land promised to the saints undertaken by
the sixth-century Irish St Brendan probably records not only an actual
journey but one which may have succeeded in crossing the Atlantic.52
The legend was widely disseminated throughout medieval Europe in the
age of romance, in Latin and many vernaculars including Anglo-Norman
and Middle English; it not only influenced a number of romances (the
most recent, and one of the most faithful, being C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of
the Dawn Treader), but remained as an inspiration in the age of explora-
tion. The object of Brendan’s journey was not imperialist expansion, but
to see God’s wonders in the deep: exploration without appropriation,
quest as wonder.53 Brendan himself had stayed just a few days in his land
of promise before being commanded to set out on his return voyage, but
the prospect it offered of the fulfilment of desire fuelled further voyages
of exploration into the eighteenth century. There seems none the less to
have been no notable rush to incorporate the Americas into romance
geography, perhaps because the genre was so tradition-dependent. The
New World was rarely associated with the kind of wild and fearsome
landscapes believed to exist in the East: writers were more likely to use the
West as the setting for utopias rather than quest54—a land of promise,
like Brendan’s, rather than threat. Camoens’s imperialist epic of the
southern encompassing of Africa by the Portuguese, the Lusiads, did not
spawn offspring with an American setting. Ariosto and Tasso, however,
writing up-to-the-minute romances in the decades when the Americas
were being opened up,55 both put prophecies of its discovery into the
mouths of damsels guiding their heroes in magic boats in the further
reaches of the world, for all that their notional subjects were
Charlemagne and the First Crusade. Ariosto presents the American con-
quests as a continuation of the translatio imperii, though here it is the
expansion of Charles V’s empire, not the movement of his power base,
that is at issue. Charles himself took as his emblem a representation of the
Pillars of Hercules, entwined with labels reading ‘Plus Ultra’, ‘yet fur-
ther’—a badge that effectively represented the object of his rule as a west-
ward quest beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. His office as Holy Roman
Emperor enabled Ariosto to regard the voyages of exploration as a
process of glorious conquest by both state and the church, in accordance
with Christ’s prophecy in John 10:16, ‘There will be one sheepfold, and
one shepherd.’ In his English translation of 1591, John Harington, not
surprisingly, downgraded this prediction of world dominion into a dis-
missive marginal note.56 Tasso largely deletes conquest from the surface
of his account, but he does stress the more comfortable justifications for
the whole colonial enterprise, conversion of the heathen and the need to
introduce decent agricultural practices. When Edward Fairfax came to
translate this passage in 1600, he altered Tasso’s phrasing to associate
exploration more with the knight-errant’s quest or Brendan’s seeking out
of wonders than with political or cultural expansion. Columbus accord-
ingly becomes a ‘knight’ possessed of ‘the hardiment | Upon this won-
drous voyage first to wend’57—an altogether less contentious message for
English readers. Both Ariosto and Tasso also set scenes of magic and
enchantment, for which their semi-historical worlds of Carolingian or
Crusader Europe are inadequate, west of the Straits of Gibraltar. Ariosto
sends Ruggiero on a round-the-world trip by hippogriff, with a set of fan-

tastic adventures on the way in Alcina’s island, a seductive paradise that
might be in the West or the East Indies.58 Tasso’s journeying knights find
Armida’s ‘paradise’,59 modelled on Alcina’s island and the forerunner of
Acrasia’s bower, at the top of a mountain in the Fortunate Isles, with their
associations with Morgan le Fay.60
So far as the New World was concerned, the imitation of life by art
was less important than the imitation of art by life. Until it invented its
own pioneering mythologies, America did not carry the kind of sym-
bolic capital that could readily be integrated into the romance mode.
The most powerful influences were in the opposite direction, from
romance to exploration. The quest, and the possibilities of wealth and
power awaiting in a land of promise at the end of the quest, offered a
conceptual framework for the early voyages. The conquistadores took
their idea of marvellous journeys from printed texts of fifteenth-century
French, Spanish, and Italian romances, carried copies with them on
their travels, and on occasion gave romance names (such as California,
originally an island of Amazon women in Esplandian) to the places they
discovered; Ponce de Léon famously discovered Florida in the course of
a search for a fountain of eternal youth, and Cortes modelled his reports
on a prose romance of Charlemagne’s twelve peers.61 Romances were so
popular in the early days of the Spanish colonies that there were recur-
rent attempts to ban them. The Americas appeared at first as a land of
marvels, a romance landscape come true. Berners’ translation of Huon
of Bordeaux, with its particularly far-flung and exotic voyages (including
an island of apples of youth), may be a response to the intense interest
in such discoveries in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Segar
compared Cortes and Pisarro to Ulysses, Aeneas, the journeying knights
of Ariosto and Tasso, and King Arthur; the English explorers are latter-
day Sir John Mandevilles.62 Spenser justified his invention of Faerie
Land by an appeal to the new discoveries; Ralegh imagined Guiana as
potentially contiguous with the land of the Amazon women, and
Elizabeth as fulfilling her destiny by becoming the sovereign of such a
land.63 Even as the Old World was mapped with increasing precision,
unknown landscapes of the kind familiar from romance journeyings
opened up in the New. Exploration seemed to offer the prospect in the
real world of fulfilling the aspirations romances had channelled into the
quest: as the father of the Elizabethan captain Sir Richard Grenville
phrased it:
Who seeks the way to win renown,

Or flies with wings of high desire;
Who seeks to wear the laurel crown,
Or hath the mind that would aspire:
Tell him his native soil eschew,
Tell him go range and seek anew.64
As in Fairfax’s description of Columbus, the language of romance quest
and the language of exploration here become interchangeable. But the
exercise of such aspirations rarely resulted in the fulfilment of desire. As
Ralegh and many others found, the New World was all too often a topo-
graphy of despair and death, not least in the barren questing for El
Dorado, the land of infinite riches.65
The Tempest places itself somewhat equivocally within this nexus of
competing ideas. It calls attention to its intertextuality with Aeneas’ voy-
agings in the Aeneid by its insistence that Tunis is the same as Carthage,
by its naming of Dido, and by its close replaying of Aeneas’ meeting with
Venus in Ferdinand’s meeting with Miranda. The play’s magical island,
which is home to an enchanter, his beautiful daughter, a witch’s son, and
a spirit, is pure fantasy. Shakespeare’s New World source, Strachey’s as
yet unprinted Bermudas letter, must have been largely unrecognized by
its audience, but the play’s discourses of occupation and ‘plantation’
(2.1.149) are explicit—though it is important to remember that it is Ariel
who is native to the island, not Caliban, son of the tyrannizing incomer,
Sycorax. The internal contradictions in the idea of beneficent rule of the
innocent by the experienced are brought to the surface by Sebastian and
Antonio’s mocking comments on Gonzalo’s schemes of perfect govern-
ment. Gonzalo would like to ‘excel the golden age’, reinstate the time
when desire and fulfilment were one; but the Golden Age, in the parallel-
ing of classical myth and Biblical history, was a reminiscence of Eden, and
there can be no going back. Shakespeare will not subscribe to a myth of
an unfallen world, whether in a fantasy island in the Mediterranean or in
the Americas. Alexander the Great himself could not enter the Earthly
Paradise.
landscapes of desire and fear
As Milton recognized in the Areopagitica, the whole idea of quest

assumes the Fall. Quest distinguishes itself from travel partly by its
ethical dimension, its concern to distinguish between good and evil and
to strive for greater virtue at the necessary expense of innocence. The
landscapes of the quest therefore take the form of a series of locations
that carry some weight of meaning, and those meanings are most likely
to do with the particular form that the quest takes, the individual trials
that the knight must undergo and the state of mind he is in. The quest-
ing knight is drawn forward by his desire for some aim or object, adven-
ture or glory or a lady or the Grail; the obstacles he must overcome
are those that require courage and prowess beyond the ordinary, and
therefore that require the overcoming of fear. Bunyan’s Christian has
to follow just such a route, a ‘dangerous journey’ of forests, dark
mountains, lions, giants, and hobgoblins, an ‘inchanted ground’ that
threatens travellers across it with sleep, and a river with no bridge,
before he reaches the country for which he has fallen sick with desire.66
Many of the landscapes of romance offer themselves for understanding
in those terms. There is, however, a large potential for mismatch
between a psychological and an ethical landscape. Desire will not always
be for the good, nor fear mark the evil that has to be conquered.
Of all varieties of desire, sex is the most potent, and the most ethically
and psychologically ambivalent. Romance is the genre of love and the con-
tinuation of the family, but it exists in uneasy and often explicit relation-
ship with the misogyny deeply embedded in both medieval and
Renaissance culture.67 Furthermore, in the symbolic progression of the
quest with its male hero, the dangers of sexuality will inevitably take the
form of a female adversary, whether the point at issue is ultimately about
the danger of women, the danger of his own unbridled sexuality, or (as in
Gawain and the Green Knight) the danger of temptation at large. Any
sexually inviting woman in the prose Quest of the Holy Grail, with its the-
ology of virginity, is evil personified—evil feminized: such characters are
not women at all, but devils. Sexual desire, moreover, comes embedded in
a spurious ease, just as Gawain is tempted literally in his bed, in the com-
fort that lowers his defences after the hardship he has endured in the win-
ter landscape outdoors. The Grail quest’s Perceval, narrowly escaped from
a demonic horse that self-destructs in a ‘a rowghe watir whych rored’, finds
himself ‘in a wylde mounteyne whych was closed with the se nyghe all
about, that he myght se no londe aboute hym whych myghte releve hym,
but wylde bestes’.68 Rendered increasingly feeble by hunger and lack of
shelter, he is offered shade, food, and rest in a luxurious pavilion by a lady
who arrives in a ship, and only the sight of the crucifix set into the pommel
of his sword, which leads him to cross himself, saves him from destruction
by the devil in person. But even pavilioned luxury with half-naked women
is not necessarily evil: for Sir Launfal (or Lanval, or Lambewell, in his
Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and seventeenth-century incarnations),
it is the fulfilment of a desire he had not even known he might feel—
though it is also the beginning, rather than the end, of his quest.
Launfal is unusual, however. For the knight-errant, as Gawain finds at
Hautdesert, luxury (etymologically identical with luxuria, lust) is almost
always a temptation away from the dust and sweat of the way of hardship.
Fairfax makes the point explicit, fifty years before Milton, in his transla-
tion of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, when his knights encounter
Armida’s land of eternal spring with the satisfaction of all the appetites on
offer, ‘all daintie food’ and the promises made by a pair of naked virgins
bathing in a pool:
‘The fields of combat here are beds of downe,
Or heaped lillies under shadie brakes;
But come and see our queene with golden crowne,
That all her servants blest and happie makes,
She will admit you gently for her owne,
Numbred with those that of her joy partakes:
But first within this lake your dust and sweat
Wash off, and at that table sit and eat.’
XV.64
Desire here is for the life without dust and sweat, and despite—because
of—the echoes of Revelation in that passage, of the blessed as those who
are numbered in the joys of the Lamb and who hunger and thirst no
more, such desire must be resisted. The setting, a temperate paradise on
top of a high mountain, is a parody of the earthly Paradise itself, in which
the Fall may be re-enacted. Tasso’s original of the passage gave Spenser
precisely what he wanted for his descriptions of Phaedria’s island and
Acrasia’s bower (II. vi, xii): in the Faerie Queene, comfort and luxury
almost always signal danger. The most threatening landscapes of Book I
were landscapes of fear, such as the Cave of Despair:
Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie grave,

That still for carrion carcases doth crave;
I. ix. 33
but even in that book, the ‘wandring wood’ first leads Redcrosse and
Una astray towards the den of Error by means of its delightful trees and
birdsong. The temperate luxuriance of the Bower of Bliss is not quite a

new phenomenon, though the intensity of its wish-fulfilment (desire-
fulfilment) qualities is unprecedented in the poem. Acrasia herself lodges
at the point from which the ‘one harmonee’ of birdsong, vocal and
instrumental music, and the natural music of winds and waters all
emanate:
Such as attonce might not on living ground,

Save in this Paradise, be heard elswhere.
II. xii. 70
But this Paradise must not be taken as the fulfilment of desire; its bliss is
a state that must be destroyed. Those who seek it for its own sake lose
their masculinity ‘in lewd loves, and wastfull luxuree’ (80), ultimately
losing even their humanity and turning into beasts. That a landscape of
desire should be dangerous is nothing new in romance; that the desire
that draws the knight onwards towards the goal of his quest should be
inseparable from the destruction of everything that is desirable, is an
unfamiliar paradox that is hard to assimilate into the conceptual frame-
work of romance expectations. Tasso deals with a potentially similar
problem by having Armida’s paradise described in terms of danger
before it is seen (XIV.68–76), so that the reader sees through its beauties
when they are encountered; and he also has Armida herself call up devils
to destroy it after the hero has been rescued from it by his companions.
The bewilderment that readers commonly feel in Book II of the Faerie
Queene is due not solely to the fact that the cuing is misleading—har-
mony, for instance, here demands to be read as bad—but to a feeling that
the quest has no aim other than destruction, that the compulsion towards
its completion is also a compulsion towards annihilation.
That the goal of a quest should include destruction is not in itself either
puzzling or unfamiliar. There is a sense in which every knight who kills a
dragon has destruction as his aim, though it is usually a means to an end:
for the Redcrosse Knight, to freeing Una’s parents, and as a preliminary
to their marriage. Gawain believes that the end of his own quest will be
his death at the hands of the Green Knight, and the final landscape
through which he passes—icebound, misty, closed in by crags, to a Green
Chapel where the devil himself might worship (2187–8)—looks as if it is
leading him to the destruction he expects. The text’s most noted editor,
J. R. R. Tolkien, makes destruction the aim and object of the quest in
The Lord of the Rings: it is because the One Ring is the focus of such an
intensity of desire that it must be disposed of. Frodo, like every questing
knight, takes on the quest voluntarily, but also with a deep reluctance, a
resistance to desire that is his main qualification for success. He does not
want to be the ring-bearer. The final landscape that he has to cross before
he reaches Mount Doom (so allegorical a name as to require a less heavy-
handed alternative) is a waste of desolation that overgoes any medieval
Waste Land, a fusion of setting and quest that is both ethical, in its rep-
resentation of evil, and psychological, in its reflection of the draining
away of Frodo’s vital energies. Tolkien learned his memes from his wide
knowledge of medieval texts, and he learned too how to exploit them.
The bleakness of the ending might seem to be distinctively modern, but
despite the pull of romance towards concluding happiness, the Middle
Ages too can produce landscapes that lead inexorably towards disaster.
The quest can finish on a one-way road to death. The landscape that
Malory creates for the final act of Balin’s quest—a setting compacted
from a much looser-knit original—sets his hero on a path from which he
knows return is impossible:
And so he rode forth. And within thre dayes he cam by a crosse; and theron were
letters of gold wryten that said: ‘it is not for no knyght alone to ryde toward this
castel.’ Thenne sawe he an old hore gentylman comyng toward hym that sayd,
‘Balin le Saveage, thow passyst thy bandes to come this waye, thefore torne
ageyne and it will availle the,’ and he vanysshed awey anone.
And soo he herd an horne blow as it had ben the dethe of a best. ‘That blast,’
said Balin, ‘is blowen for me, for I am the pryse [quarry], and yet am I not dede
. . . Though my hors be wery my hert is not wery. I wold be fayne there my deth
shold be.’69
And he does indeed die, in a combat against his own brother in which
each kills the other.
Much of the power of that passage comes from what is left unex-
plained: why the cross carries the warning it does; who the old gentleman
is; how he knows Balin’s name; how he can vanish; who blows the horn
and for what purpose; why the road is so well-marked a route to death. It
is no more possible to give ethical or allegorical answers to such questions
than to give narrative ones. Unlike the grisliness and the corpses of
Spenser’s Cave of Despair, there is nothing here that is translatable to
another level of meaning, and nothing either that is inherently strange.
Roadside crosses and wayfarers were commonplace, the sounding of
horns nothing unusual. A horn-note could indeed be intended as assis-
tance for travellers, being sounded at nightfall in some wild or forested
districts to guide travellers to shelter. Balin’s landscape is the familiar
gone wrong: that liminal, unexplained, state that we know as the

uncanny, a state which, as Freud pointed out, exists in symbiosis with the
homely.70
There is one romance that exploits this quality of the uncanny to the
full: Eger and Grime, well known in the fifteenth century though surviv-
ing only in the Percy Folio manuscript and later seventeenth-century
prints.71 It tells the story of Eger’s despair of winning the love of an earl’s
disdainful daughter after he has been beaten in combat by a dangerous
knight named Graysteel. Eger is left for dead on the field of battle, and on
recovering consciousness finds that his right little finger has been cut off
and his glove replaced on his mutilated hand—this being Graysteel’s
trademark of victory. To recover his lady’s love, Eger’s sworn brother,
Grime, impersonates him in a return combat and defeats Graysteel,
cutting off his whole hand, in its glove, to prove his success. Structurally
the romance works through a symmetry of repetition, the second half
both re-enacting and commenting on the first. In the first part, Eger tells
Grime of his defeat; in the second Grime follows the same route and finds
the same adversary but fights to a different outcome. Graysteel lives in a
forbidden country, described by Grime as ‘the land of doubt’, of fear.72
The route there seems at first neither special nor distinctive: each knight
has to follow a river for two days and cross the wilderness of a forest for
a further day. What is strange is that the stages of the journey will last that
long no matter how fast each rides: something has gone wrong with the
interchangeability of time and space.73 The doublings and repetitions
confuse as much as they clarify, in ways reminiscent of nightmare.
Despite the imperfection of the surviving texts, the romance is one of the
most unnerving there is—much more so than those involving combats
against giants or dragons; and the missing finger (in Freudian terms, a
symbolic castration) catches the imagination far more than if an adver-
sary is cut to pieces. Nothing in the basic story is utterly marvellous (there
are a couple of magic objects as extra properties), but nothing is quite
right either, and the lack of explanation for the phenomena the heroes are
up against prevents any emotional response from being anchored by
rationality. Although everything more or less works out in the end (more
in the Percy Folio, less in the printed versions), it reaches that conclusion
by playing on audience anxiety much more than their propensity for
wish-fulfilment.
Fear and desire are the features of a psychological landscape most
easily recognized by modern readers, and Eger and Grime deploys them
in abundance. The sense of modernity perhaps stems partly from the
separation of such emotions from conventional morality. Psychology in

the Middle Ages and Renaissance was largely deployed in the service of
ethics, of virtue and its adversaries, and fear and desire most often figure
within ethical topographies. The conscience, the capacity to know good
from evil, was regarded not as a repressive Freudian censor but as the
most important of all mental faculties, since how you thought and acted,
your motives and your attitudes, were ultimately to be judged by God.
Within romance, however, the complement of seeking to live a life in
accordance with Christian ethics is not inner neurosis, but the outer
world of reputation. Christian morality is an expression of a guilt culture,
but romance also comprehensively embraces a belief in honour and
renown, the public judgement characteristic of a shame culture. The two
systems may coincide, but they need not, and romance, the genre poised
between the two, sometimes sets them at odds. Gawain and the Green
Knight recognizes the tension between the two, in Gawain’s proclama-
tion of his ideals to the world in the pentangle, and his refusal to claim
honour at the expense of conscience: he resists the guide’s temptation to
avoid the final encounter even though no one would know, and he will
not keep the shame of his failure secret. Malory’s world operates mostly
on shame culture principles, in his knight’s desire for ‘worship’,
worthship, the point where renown and the qualities that justify it com-
bine; but the hermits of the Grail quest classify all such desire as pride,
and all love as lust. Lancelot’s pursuit of the Grail accordingly shifts from
being a test of prowess to a test of humility, and his quest from a seeking
of worship to an externalized penance.
The shift from shame to guilt, renown to conscience, presents prob-
lems for a genre that is so dedicated to the telling of stories, the recording
of outward events. Storytelling is itself an agent of renown, Old French
renommée, the renaming of the hero to maintain the fame he has
acquired through action (and it is a fiction of all romances that they serve
to maintain, not invent, such glory). Church doctrine, however, increas-
ingly located virtue inwards, where it was not visible to anyone but God
and the self. The practice of confession was enjoined on the faithful at the
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, at just the same time as the new genre of
romance was being consolidated. Oral confession was necessary because
no one could know, unless the sinner told them, what sins he or she had
committed; and sins could as well consist of thoughts as actions. The
concern of romance with ideal Christian knighthood required some way
to encompass this inward sphere of action within its narrative of outward
event. Allegory was one solution, with its methodology of giving physical
form to psychological and religious experience, to all those things that

cannot be directly imitated since they are ‘hidden and inward’, as Tasso
put it in his explanation of the allegory of the Gerusalemme Liberata.74
The romance model was easily adaptable to such representations of the
inner life since evil was commonly represented as temptation by the
devil. The trial that the questing knight must undergo may set him
against a fully diabolic adversary; alternatively, the ‘wayfaring Christian’
may be cast as a questing knight to allegorize his combat with the devil.
The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet described chivalry as existing in
three forms: the heavenly chivalry exercised by the archangels in the
defeat of Lucifer; the spiritual struggle of human champions against
temptation; and the prowess performed on the field of battle.75 The motif
of the quest could therefore be taken over by religious writers as well as
in romances. The author of the Ancrene Wisse, close in date to the Lateran
Council, describes the life of the anchoress in just such terms, as a jour-
ney through a wilderness in which she is assailed by wild beasts whom she
must fight off, using the cross as both weapon and shield.76 Any concern
over the paradox that the anchoress is incapable of physical movement,
since she is symbolically immured within her anchor-hold, misses the
point: this testing of courage and prowess is spiritual, the quest entirely
within the mind and soul. For the enclosed religious, quest and pilgrim-
age alike could take place without any movement of the body. Not
coincidentally, there is one manuscript that contains both the Conte du
Graal and the Life of St Mary of Egypt: religious search as romance quest
juxtaposed with religious search as peregrinatio in stabilitate, pilgrimage
without movement.77
Fear is a state of mind, and some romance terrors are as much inward
as outward. They appear to have a physical existence, but disappear when
faced up to. Lancelot suffers a rare moment of fear—‘he dredde hym
sore’—at the Chapel Perilous, when he finds himself facing ‘thirty grete
knyghtes, more by a yerde than any man that ever he had sene’, all in
black armour, ‘and all they grenned and gnasted at sir Launcelot’; but
they scatter when he walks through them, and seem to have no power to
hurt him.78 Lancelot has a particular affinity with such episodes, though
his adversaries most often take the shape of lions. There is a move
towards such an interior sentence in Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette,
in which he has to cross a sword-bridge, the further end of which is
guarded by two lions; he crosses the bridge, but finds that they have van-
ished. As he is wearing a ring that guards against enchantment, he looks
at it, but the lions remain vanished: they are, in other words, genuinely
not there, rather than being invisible. The passage seems to have puzzled
its prose redactor, who has Lancelot fight the lions without being able to
hurt them, but when he looks at his ring they disappear. Another editor
or scribe, still more puzzled, eliminates them altogether.79 The invulner-
able lions of the prose are clearly a phantom produced by magic;
Chrétien’s beasts cannot be strictly zoological, since they do disappear,
but the impossibility of giving them a precise metaphysical status opens
the way to reading them as terrors of the imagination.
Such creatures might sound as if they would lend themselves well to
allegory, but they are in fact almost impossible to use, since allegory func-
tions by treating the conceptual as real: psychological lions take the form
of real ones within an allegorical narrative. The doubling of literal event
and retrospective interpretation in the prose Grail quest, both in French
and in Malory, enables a rare combination of the two. Faced with (yet
another) pair of lions guarding the entrance to Corbenic, the Grail castle,
Lancelot draws his sword to enable him to pass them, only to have it
struck out of his hand and a voice condemn him for trusting more to his
weapons than to God.
Than toke he hys swerde agayne and put hit up in hys sheethe, and made a crosse
in hys forehede, and cam to the lyons. And they made sembelaunte to do hym
harme. Natwithstondynge he passed by them withoute hurte.80
Bunyan manages to give a close equivalent in the lions that guard the
entrance to the Palace Beautiful. They are chained, but Christian cannot
see the chains, and so his walking past them becomes a test of his faith
that they will not be able to attack him.81 For Christian as for Lancelot,
facing the things of God can be as terrifying as facing the things of the
devil.
The Quest of the Holy Grail aimed to get the best of the physical and the
spiritual worlds at once, to occupy both the high devotional ground (a
taste for secular romances was already calling forth condemnations by
preachers) and the peaks of adventure. It may have been written by a
Cistercian, or so its frequent references to white monks suggest, but he
was clearly an author who, like Bunyan four and a half centuries later, was
thoroughly captivated by the genre he distrusted. That the Quest forms
part of the Lancelot–Grail cycle of Arthurian romance, and in due course
of Malory’s Morte Darthur, demonstrates its commitment to romance
methods: it may not follow all the generic norms, but it never falls out-
side the parameters of recognizability. The knights within the story, how-
ever, and the readers with them, can find such recognizability misleading.
When Lancelot does the correct chivalric thing and supports the weaker
party in a tournament, he is, for once in his life, defeated, since these
knights turn out to be the vices in combat with the virtues.82 What has
looked like chivalric quest turns out to operate by a different set of rules:
the topography has turned allegorical. The narrative proceeds—or is held
up—by frequent obscure dreams and their consequent expositions by
hermits, or, on occasion, by false expositions designed to draw the
knights astray. The hermits, as that image of ‘drawing astray’ suggests,
take on the function of the guide or the giver of directions, only now
those directions are to do with spiritual advance. Those knights who are
not chosen to achieve the Grail find at worst death, or at best nothing at
all; from time to time they meet up and complain about the lack of
adventures. Gawain is the key figure here. He was the first to swear that
he would seek the Grail, so instituting the whole quest; but he refuses to
take the spiritual steps that would bring him closer to it. After one such
episode of exposition, a hermit urges him to do penance for his sin:
‘Sir, what penaunce shall I do?’
‘Such as I woll gyff the,’ seyde the good man.
‘Nay,’ seyd sir Gawayne, ‘I may do no penaunce, for we knyghtes adventures
many tymes suffir grete woo and payne.’
‘Well,’ seyde the good man, and then he hylde hys pece.83
No medieval reader would have had difficulty in filling in that laconic

monosyllable. Gawain will not embark on the only form of quest that
matters here, the quest against the Adversary within him. He eventually
comes back to the court, with nothing achieved: his quest has led
nowhere. Yet Galahad, the chosen knight whose success is never in doubt,
is the least interesting of all the characters, and has nothing resembling an
interior life. Bors and Perceval both encounter devils in physical form,
and resist them. It is the knight whose conflict against evil takes place
within his own mind and who undertakes the most severe penance,
Lancelot, who comes to dominate the narrative interest. His success may
only be partial, but it is the hardest won, and his struggle towards that
engages the imagination far more than Galahad’s teflon perfection.
seeking forgiveness
Romances are keenly interested in perfectibility, but they are not about
perfection. A story about Galahad alone would be an impossibility
(‘Knight seeks Holy Grail. Succeeds. The end’). Milton continues his dis-
cussion of virtue in the Areopagitica by imagining untested goodness as
having an ‘excremental whiteness’, like a leprous growth. Achieved
virtue, by contrast, the kind that has faced its adversaries, will be dusty
and sweaty and not very white at all. Nor, in a fallen world, does one start
out in a state of innocence. ‘We bring impurity much rather’; what may
look like innocence is simply lack of experience, and experience means in
the first instance a replay of Original Sin. One of the most widespread
forms of romance is the romance of atonement: of failure, penance, and
a final forgiveness offered by the story in the restoration of order, har-
mony, and the unity of the family. Its most familiar exemplar now would
be The Winter’s Tale, with Leontes apparently causing the death of his
wife and loss of his heirs through ungrounded jealousy, yet after sixteen
years of repentance recovering both his wife and daughter. The structur-
ing of the play as atonement is especially marked by contrast with its
source, Greene’s Pandosto, which ends with the suicide of its Leontes
figure.
Such a structure, of initial equilibrium disrupted through sin but with
a return to a similar or better order at the end, closely reflects the out-
ward-and-return model of quest romance, and potentially its mirror
symmetry. Chrétien’s Yvain, familiar in Middle English as Ywain and
Gawain, was the first to make it the scaffolding of a whole romance,
though it does so in consistently secular terms. Yvain wins his wife by
questing for a particular adventure at a magic spring; she allows him leave
to maintain his chivalric reputation in the larger world for a year and a
day (that period of time that itself implies circularity), but he is to lose her
if he fails to return. He does indeed fail, since he allows his preoccupation
with chivalry to drive the time limit from his mind. The rest of the
romance sees him clawing his way back from madness and anonymity,
first to sanity, then to a different, more socially responsible, kind of
questing, and finally to winning both her forgiveness and the right to
carry his own name. His lady finally accepts back a hero who is decidedly
dusty and sweaty, but who has that experienced virtue, a knowledge of
good and evil and therefore also the self-knowledge of his own capacity
for both, that is more praiseworthy—more worthy of honour—than
mere innocence, or any youthful eagerness for adventure.
Yvain is not written with any coding for religious symbolism, but its
potential for development in that direction is evident. The inseparability
of romance from its nurturing context in Roman Catholic doctrines is
most evident in those texts that allow their sinning heroes the space to
make up for their failings and failures. The doctrine of humankind’s cre-
ation in innocence, the Fall with its introduction of death into the world,
and the potential for salvation through God’s grace, offers just such an
imposition of a happy ending on a process that looks catastrophic.
‘Imposition’ is indeed the wrong word, since the providential scheme
underlying salvation insists that that is the primary model, and that an
ending in disaster is the perversion, not the norm. The doctrine of the
Redemption gave humankind a second chance. It does not guarantee sal-
vation, but it offers the possibility of grace for ‘those who truly repent’, as
the Anglican Prayer Book still has it. The romances shifted such a pattern
into the secular world. The knights who have to atone for past failings
most often do so within an overtly Christian framework, but they do so
by their own efforts or by patient suffering, and are allowed that second
chance without the necessity of direct divine intervention (though mira-
cle is by no means ruled out). Tragedy is the genre in which consequences
far outweigh initial errors; romance is the genre in which such grim con-
sequences are not the final word, but can be followed by bliss within this
world. The romances of atonement offer a this-worldly equivalent to the
Church’s stress on the forgiveness of sin. Penance was one of the seven
sacraments, an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace.84
The high value set on repentance allowed for the transformation of guilt
and its associated shame into something more admirable. The achieve-
ment of the romances of atonement was to make repentance heroic.
Despite the happy endings of most such works, there is no pretence
that the process itself is easy. The bulk of every romance consists of pain,
trial, and endurance—that indeed is what gives the concluding happiness
its weight. The penitential quest is one of the hardest that there is, and the
hardship is emphasized by its romance qualities of excess. A work such as
Sir Isumbras—one of the most popular and most pious of the romances,
surviving in nine manuscripts and in fragments of five printed editions—
ensured that the model was thoroughly familiar from the early four-
teenth century to the late sixteenth.85 The work builds a quest structure
onto a Job-like model of testing, which incorporates an unusually high
proportion of miracle. Isumbras himself, blessed with a wife and three
sons, forgets his duty to God; a divine intermediary offers him the choice
between suffering in youth or in age, and he chooses youth. Immediately,
he loses all his property, and he and his family set off on pilgrimage, only
for his sons to be carried off by wild animals (a lion, a leopard, and a uni-
corn) and his wife by Saracens. He spends seven years as a smith, and
then, fighting in armour he has made himself, he defeats a Saracen army
in a three-day battle (reminiscent of Christ’s descent into Hell, and fore-

shadowing Redcrosse’s three-day battle against the dragon). He spends
seven further years as a palmer, until, near Bethlehem, an angel tells him
that his sins are forgiven. He is eventually reunited with his wife, who has
aided him initially without recognizing him; together they take on a fur-
ther army of Saracens, and are given help by three young men who arrive
riding on a lion, a leopard, and a unicorn, and who are, of course, their
sons.
The sense of replaying events, of everything happening twice, once for
loss and once for restoration, is very clear here. So is the sense of a felix
culpa, of an initial sin on the model of the Fall, that works out finally for
the better. In Sir Isumbras, it results not only in the restoration of the
family, but in the preservation of Christianity against the Muslim
advance: the function of knights is to fight, and the highest fighting is
against those regarded as the enemies of God. The processes of penance
may be recognizable in terms of chivalric romance, as with Yvain’s series
of restorative adventures, or they may involve putting chivalry into
abeyance, as with Isumbras’s years as a smith. One extreme form of
penance requires the sinner to act the part of a mute fool at court and to
eat only what he can seize from the dogs. Such exemplary expressions of
contrition are required of Robert the Devil, who was born under the
patronage of the devil, and Sir Gowther, who was fathered by one, and
who both display their origins to abundance in early careers of murder
and rape.86 The over-mighty monarch Robert of Sicily (as much a
homiletic exemplar as a romance hero, as the appearance of the story in
devotional manuscripts testifies) has to endure similar privations after he
is displaced as king by an angel, and has to live as a destitute fool beneath
the stairs of his own palace. That particular model of holy living was ulti-
mately drawn from a saint’s life, that of St Alexis, who left his wife on
their wedding night and returned as a beggar to his own home, being
recognized only at his death.87 All three secular heroes are allowed for-
giveness, and Robert the Devil (in most versions) and Sir Gowther marry
emperors’ daughters too; but other heroes follow the model of Alexis fur-
ther, to turn away from the aristocratic or chivalric life altogether. Guy of
Warwick lives his final years unrecognized as a hermit close to his own
castle. Valentine ends his days dumb and unrecognized as a holy man
within the imperial palace he had once ruled. Renaud of Montaubon,
hero of an Old French chanson de geste and its English prose descendant
The Four Sons of Aymon, abandons the chivalric life to become a labourer
on Cologne cathedral, and ultimately, after his martyrdom by fellow
labourers who do not appreciate his extraordinary capacity for heavy

work, a saint.
the penitential quest at the reformation
It might be expected that such fusions of romance with saint’s life would
be approved in the Middle Ages but condemned at the Reformation, but
their reception history is both more complex and more unexpected than
that. The medieval Church was not won over by such highly fictionalized
displays of piety. Even the most ascetic of them, Guy of Warwick, was
regularly condemned by preachers and moralists as a distraction from
true devotion.88 The lack of Romish approval finds a strange counterpart
in the continuing popularity of such stories across the Reformation. The
Four Sons of Aymon is frequently cited in sixteenth-century lists of
romances, whether as attractive reading-matter (in Captain Cox’s list of
books or The Complaynt of Scotland) or for humanist condemnation (by
Nashe, Francis Meres, and others), and a dramatized version was still
being acted in the seventeenth century.89 Robert the Devil was rewritten
by Thomas Lodge, who livens up his hero’s penitential career with an
episode of temptation by a promiscuous hamadryad in a wild forest, an
episode apparently based on Perceval’s temptation by the devil in the
guise of a beautiful lady in the course of the Grail quest.90
Lodge finished his days as a Roman Catholic, but the appeal of such sto-
ries cut across all theological divisions—as did their condemnation. The
replicability of romance memes, their capacity to stick in the mind like
burrs and multiply, took priority over both the theological resonances
attaching to them and recurrent moral disapproval. The one time when
preachers paused in their condemnation of romances was in the early
fifteenth century, when the threat of Lollardy, England’s one home-grown
heresy, was associated with the reading of vernacular religious works, and
romances suddenly seemed a preferable option—even those, or especially
those, with minimal devotional content.91 Strict Protestants in the fol-
lowing century reversed the order of priorities, to condemn frivolous
worldly reading and approve Holy Writ. Nothing made any difference to
the continuing popularity of the romances themselves, however, and it
was left to John Bunyan to combine the two forms, to offer ‘truth within
a fable’92 from the happy conjunction of the Bible and Bevis of Hamptoun.
Christian’s chivalric quest and his life of penance, undertaken as a search
for salvation, are one and the same. The stereoscopic focus, the merging
of two compelling images into one of greater power, ensured that

Pilgrim’s Progress remained as central within English-speaking culture for
the next three and a half centuries as Bevis had been for the previous four.
Bevis had demonstrated his piety in opposition to the Saracen enemies of
Christendom; Christian exemplifies a Calvinism strictly defined by its dif-
ference from other forms of Christianity. Even so, Bunyan does not shrink
from using motifs characteristic of Roman Catholicism, whether devo-
tional practices such as pilgrimage, or literary motifs such as the seductive
woman of the Grail Quest and Lodge’s Robert the Devil. Bunyan’s equiva-
lent is the witch who has charmed the Enchanted Ground, and who tells
Mr Standfast, ‘I am the Mistriss of the World, and men are made happy
by me.’93 The devil in various forms is the most fearsome adversary, but
wrong doctrine comes a close second. Bunyan’s characters are as rigor-
ously selected for success in their quest for salvation as are the knights of
the Grail. However exemplary he may be for the reader, Bunyan’s
Christian is not Everyman. His fellow travellers may on occasion precede
him to heaven, but many more never make it. In the last two sentences of
the work, the Anglican of the cast-list, named Ignorance, is ejected into
Hell through a trapdoor at the very gates of Heaven. The idea that the
quest is in some sense unique to the individual knight, the one who has
the courage and the will to take the adventure that God will send him,
translates here into predestination, into God’s own election of the man
who is to succeed on the quest. The doctrinal divisions that emerged
within Protestantism are by this time much more insidious dangers than
the advance of the Saracens that occupied earlier romance heroes, and
even Reformation fears of the recovery of Catholicism can be presented as
being as safely in the past as the classical gods:
I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt in old
time, by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, ashes, etc. lay
there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much
danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt since, that Pagan has
been dead many a day; and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is by rea-
son of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger
dayes, grown so crazy and stiff in his joynts, that he can now do little more than
sit in his caves mouth, grinning at Pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails,
because he cannot come at them. (p. 192)
As the crisis over James II was to indicate just a few years later, Pope was
in practice by no means as moribund as Bunyan claims; but his very
mockery serves to cut the giant down to size, to make him appear not
worth following.
Early Reformation England was not so particular about precise theo-

logical justification for its reading. Guy of Warwick, which has Romish
practices too deeply embedded in its narrative to remove, was also one of
the most popular. It combined the attractions of dragon- and giant-
killing with penance, sexual renunciation, pilgrimage, and withdrawal to
a hermitage, and finally rejected a conventional happy ending in this
world. Despite that—perhaps because of it, since it offered the familiar-
ity of both romance and traditional devotional narrative models such as
were increasingly disapproved elsewhere—it enjoyed a quite remarkable
popularity over many centuries, gradually disappearing from sight only a
century or so ago. Like so many penitential romances, it is structured as
a diptych, and makes the parallelism of the two parts unusually explicit.
In the first half, Guy quests across Europe in search of a reputation as the
‘best knight’, that being the price that the lady he loves, Felice, daughter
of the earl of Warwick, has demanded for her hand in marriage. Her
name may associate her with felicity, with bliss, but the bliss of earthly
love here is not enough. Within a few weeks of their marriage, he realizes,
looking up at the stars from that same tower at which he had earlier gazed
at his beloved,94 that all his prowess has been devoted to her service and
not to God’s, and he leaves her, pregnant with the son who is to continue
the line of Warwick earls. He takes a vow of celibacy, and sets out to
replay his earlier conquests, but now against God’s enemies rather than
chivalric opponents. He becomes a palmer, goes on pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, and eventually returns to England, where Athelstan is
inspired by a vision to select him as the English champion to fight the
giant Colbrand, champion of the pagan Danes. After overcoming him, he
returns unrecognized to Warwick; receives alms at his own castle gate
from the hands of his wife; and eventually dies as a hermit in a nearby
cave, having revealed himself to Felice moments earlier after an angel had
warned him of his impending death. The romance, in other words,
replays the chivalric quest of its first half as penitential pilgrimage in its
second half, overwriting secular adventures undertaken for honour and
one’s lady with spiritual seeking and with deeds of prowess performed
anonymously and for the sake of God.
With his conversion of quest into pilgrimage, his renunciation of sex
even within marriage, and his angelically-announced death as a hermit,
Guy is a hero who has no right to survive the Reformation, but the the-
ological upheavals did not dent his popularity. The medieval romance,
in a version of some 8,000 lines, was frequently reprinted until about
1570. His preservation may have been helped by the fact that he was
regarded as the ancestral hero of the house of Warwick; Robert Dudley,

earl of Leicester and younger brother of the Elizabethan earl of Warwick,
had an expensive genealogy made to show his descent from his famous
forebear.95 In 1584 Richard Lloyd recruited him to the ranks of the Nine
Worthies (in place of the usual Godfrey of Bulloigne, thus enabling the
British/English to outnumber the French two to one among the three
Christians of the set), but added a Protestant coda deploring the lack of
knowledge of the Bible shown by his hero in his opting to go on pil-
grimage to Jerusalem ‘to obtaine remission for his sinfull life’,
With punishing his bodie so, as then it was the wonted use,
Which of repentance plain doth sho a token, thogh through
great abuse,
For want of knowledge of the truth, of holie scriptures:
the more ruth.96
By 1600 Lloyd’s biography of Guy (without this moralizing coda) had
become a bestseller as a broadside ballad, and remained so for well over
a century. By 1607, Samuel Rowlands felt no need to be apologetic about
his hero’s Catholicism in his twelve-canto version, noting merely that his
withdrawal from the world was typical of the ‘devotion of that age’.97 His
one concession to changing theological principles, or changing popular
taste, was to fit into his final canto Guy’s greatest exploit, the combat with
Colbrand, as well as his retreat to a hermitage and sanctified death, so
that the culmination of the story is as much chivalric as pious. As the
decades and centuries passed, palmers and hermits were losing their edge
of political danger and becoming merely quaint.
The ecclesiastical incorrectness of the story makes it especially surpris-
ing to find as a favourite subject for the Renaissance stage, despite its
potential for irritating the puritan opposition. It was dramatized perhaps
as many as four times between 1580 and 1620. Only one text survives, enti-
tled The Tragical History of Guy Earle of Warwick, composed in strongly
Marlovian verse. It may date from c.1593, if an apparent allusion in it to
Shakespeare as the newly-published poet of Venus and Adonis is to be
trusted.98 The play is notable too for the way it seizes the initiative on
Guy’s piety, adding in some satirical remarks about the puritan resistance
to Archbishop Whitgift’s attempts to impose uniformity of clerical vest-
ments in the Church of England.99 It treats a hermit Guy meets as a
respected holy man, not an impostor, and never questions the virtue
attaching to Guy’s twenty-seven-year ‘long pilgrimage’. Just before his
death, Guy is given a long statement of his creed, which he speaks in a
tone of affective piety much more reminiscent of the Catholic wing of the
Church than of Calvinist rigour. God, he declares, made man as the only
element of Creation to contain ‘the breath of heaven’:
Yet he that late was fram’d of mire and filth,
Plac’d in a glorious state of innocence,
Was not content, but striv’d to be as good
As his great Maker, who could with one word,
Throw him down headlong to the deepest Hell;
Yet he in Mercy, Love, and meer good will,
Did grant him pardon for his foul offence;
And seeing him unable to perform
His blessed will, did send his own dear Son
To pay his ransome with his precious blood,
And to redeem that soul which sinful man,
Had forfeited to Satan, Death and Hell;
And for a death dam’d cursed and unpure,
He gave him life eternal to indure;
Which life eternal, grant sweet Christ to me,
That in Heavens joyes I may thy glory see.100
Guy’s life and death fuse romance structure with the whole of salvation
history, from his initial untestedness, through his reckless desire for glory,
to the new virtue derived from repentance that enables his entry to
Heaven. The designation of ‘tragical history’ for the play gives it a secular
emphasis at odds with the piety of its ending. It probably means no more
than that it ends with the death of the hero; but it calls attention to the dif-
ference of this story from the other romances of atonement that allow the
hero the restoration of his earthly happiness before his pious death. The
centre of heroism in Guy shifts from earthly chivalry undertaken for love
of one’s lady, through prowess performed for God, to the final journey that
takes Guy beyond this world: ‘for life and pilgrimage must end together’.
Guy’s penitence is modelled particularly closely on the life of St Alexis,
who embarked on his life of penance on his wedding night; Guy does,
however, wait before he leaves his wife until he has begotten the Warwick
heir, rather than before losing his virginity.101 That dynastic emphasis
puts the story at odds with the transcendent concerns of a saint’s life, and
so does the further nationalistic turn that the story acquired in the
account of Guy’s combat with Colbrand. On the strength of that, he
entered chronicle history as part of Athelstan’s resistance to the Danes.102
The combat typically figures as an exemplum of God’s support of the
English against pagan invaders, an altogether safer message for the story
to carry through the Reformation than his rejection of the world.
Rowlands hails Guy as ‘our famous Countryman’, and addresses a dedi-
catory epistle to ‘the noble English nation’. Sober Renaissance historians
were however becoming increasingly sceptical. Holinshed allots him a
single heavily qualified sentence,103 and John Selden refrains from any
comment at all in his notes to Drayton’s enthusiastic account of the com-
bat in Poly-Olbion. Drayton has it please ‘all-powerfull heaven’ that Guy
should arrive at Winchester to meet up with Athelstan’s vision-inspired
search for a champion for the English, and the penitential nature of his
pilgrimage is somewhat mitigated by the fact that his palmer’s staff is
actually a swordstick.104 The persistent popularity of the story in narra-
tive, ballad, and drama does however show the continuing acceptance of
ideas of sexual renunciation, pilgrimage, and the penitent’s outward
‘punishing his bodie’ long after they had been rejected by the established
Church, though by the late sixteenth century few people seem to have
thought of the legend as containing any reproducible model of the reli-
gious life.
The ubiquity of Guy of Warwick in its various forms makes Spenser’s
use of the legend in Book II of the Faerie Queene particularly interesting:
name your hero Guyon, the standard variant on Guy, and you are invit-
ing an intertextual reading not just from the educated but from every
possible reader. Guy’s Romish renunciation of the world is accordingly
rewritten as Protestant temperance. Guyon too has an ambivalent rela-
tionship with chivalry, though in his case not by choice: his horse, the
cheval of chivalry that gives the knight his literal high visibility,105 is
stolen from him by Braggadocchio, the braggart who is all show and no
substance. Guyon, as the knight of Temperance, is all substance and no
show—temperance, as C. S. Lewis noted, being a thoroughly pedestrian
virtue.106 Guy similarly abandoned the outward trappings of chivalry to
travel on foot as a palmer, though he abandoned his armour too, whereas
Guyon’s armour stands for the protection offered by the virtue itself, and
so cannot be set aside. Guyon’s palmer comes not as his alternative self
but as his accompanying attribute, the Reason associated with
Temperance by virtue of its opposition to passion. The prospect of future
marriage is not forbidden to Guyon—and given the emphasis of the
poem on proper heterosexual love within marriage, it scarcely could be—
but the only lady he serves is his feudal mistress. Arthur, according to
Geoffrey of Monmouth, bore the image of the Virgin on his shield, and
the Gawain of Gawain and the Green Knight carries her image on the
inside of his (648–50). Guyon looks as if he shares their piety, but his is
both less Catholic and more secular: the ‘faire image of that heavenly
Mayd’ on his shield (II. i. 28) is Gloriana. She is ‘my liefe, my liege, my
Soveraigne, my deare’ (II. ix. 4), an intermingling that casts Guyon as
suitor or lover as well as vassal. He assumes that Arthur’s highest ambi-
tion is to become one of her knights (II. ix. 6), and Arthur tactfully avoids
disabusing him. That last detail is a measure of how fully Spenser imag-
ines his narrative; but there is an allegorical agenda behind Guyon’s asso-
ciation with Gloriana just as there is behind his association with the
palmer. Of all the virtue knights, he is the one who serves her most
closely; or, to put it another way, temperance is the virtue most closely
integrated with her person. Gloriana may be heading towards marriage
with Arthur within the narrative, but, outside it, Elizabeth can share
Guyon’s distance from sexuality as the practice of a Protestant virtue.
The refiguring of Guy as Guyon bends the line of penitential romance
back towards a celebration of the political and the secular. Guyon is
unusual among Spenser’s male protagonists in that he does not need to
undergo penance for deeds misdone. He is tempted, but, unlike
Redcrosse or Arthegall (though like the ideal Elizabeth), he does not fall.
The closest Spenser comes to the romance of atonement is not in Book
II, where Guyon scarcely puts a foot wrong (and must not: for some of
the time, he has a fiend stalking behind him waiting for the slightest mis-
step, II. vii. 26–7), but in Book I, where Redcrosse has to pull himself back
from a series of failures in faith, hope, and chivalry before he is allowed a
distant glimpse of the New Jerusalem. Holiness has a particularly hard
time in this Protestant epic, since the temptations that traditionally beset
attempts at living a holy life are compounded by the pull of different the-
ologies. The richest and most resonant religious symbolism was Catholic,
but Spenser, like Bunyan, was happy to exploit such symbolism so long
as it was allegorical. The Reformation had rejected practices such as with-
drawal from the world, the mortification of the flesh, and pilgrimage, and
outside Elizabethan England iconic virginity too, though the queen was
treated as unique in such matters. Both Spenser’s characters and his read-
ers can therefore never be quite sure whether a traditional religious image
is going to turn out to be inward and spiritual or outward and papist.
Hermits may be either Catholic and therefore bad (Archimago, the arch-
hypocrite, first appears in that form), or with mystical insight and there-
fore good (as is Contemplation). Despair had long been recognized as
one of the major threats to the mental stability of those who would be
holy, and Spenser carries that through from a Catholic to a Protestant
context; but the seductive Duessa, who temporarily turns Redcrosse aside
from his quest, is now not just a Catholic allegory for the devil but
Catholicism itself. Dragons had symbolized the devil from the Bible for-
wards, and the beast that Redcrosse finally overcomes to rescue Una’s
parents is out of that stable; but the first monster he encounters, Error,
with its vomit of books and papers, is a creature of theological contro-
versy. After the batterings he receives from Error and various pagan
champions, his abandonment of his damsel, his imprisonment by the
giant Orgoglio, and his temptation to despair, he is more than ready for
the recuperation offered in the House of Holiness; but that recuperation
itself takes the Catholic form of ashes, sackcloth, fasting, and scourgings
(I. x. 26–7).
Redcrosse’s doctor throughout this process is Patience. Spenser pre-
sumably thought of the intense mortification of the flesh as a symbolic
rather than a literal requirement, but patience is required, though its
embodiment must come in the sinner himself. The penances endured by
Isumbras and Guy, Robert the Devil and Robert of Sicily, similarly
require a long and patient acceptance of suffering. Rosemond Tuve, in an
essay linking Redcrosse to the medieval devil-begotten penitents, makes
the further point that it is crucial that he is mortal, not fairy: only those
of human origin, or with at least one human parent, can achieve salva-
tion, and the patient endurance of suffering attendant on penitence only
has meaning within the framework of mortality.107 When Shakespeare
turned to similar models in his last plays, the form of patient penitence
was deeply familiar, though—whether because of stage censorship or a
deliberate humanism—he substitutes classical gods for explicit Christian
doctrine. Conspicuous outward forms of penance do not seem to have
interested him; but patience dominates the penitence of Leontes, and
Pericles’ long years of grief. Pericles’ sufferings are imposed by the evil of
others or by chance rather than in recompense for any offences against
the gods, but his restoration takes place under the aegis of Diana. The
Winter’s Tale is similarly pagan in its theophany, but its conclusion, when
Leontes’ years of penitence are rewarded by the resurrection of
Hermione, is conducted in insistently Christian language:
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.
5.3.102–3
Leontes and Hermione enjoy a redemption that is predicated as fully
human, fully secular, a happiness within this world. Pericles’ intensity of
joy enables him to hear the music of the spheres, that harmony normally
inaudible to mortals. Cymbeline similarly offers forgiveness and restora-
tion in the eyes of both the gods and human characters to Posthumus
after his grievous crimes against his wife. These are the endings that come
closest to a representation of that hardest of all states to make plausible,
bliss; and they come not after aspiration and achievement, but as atone-
ment after failure.
the journey of the soul
The reunited Sir Isumbras and his family live in such a state of happiness,
but not for ever after. In due course, we are told, they die, and find eter-
nal bliss in Heaven. The interchangeability of time and space may allow
for the representation of life as a journey, but, for all the resurrections
that romances contain, the journey of life is finally one-way. Life as quest
does not allow of return, and even King Arthur does not come back. The
closer quest comes to pilgrimage, the more likely it is to pass out of this
world altogether. The point of the journey undertaken by Bunyan’s
Christian is not to come back: the City of Destruction must be left behind
for ever if the Celestial City is to be achieved. Guy may come back to
Warwick twice, but only on the first occasion, when his reputation as best
knight in the world enables him to marry the earl’s daughter, does he
bring his new capacities to the service of his own society. The object of his
second return, as an unrecognized hermit, is to resist assimilation. He is
within reach of his wife and his castle, but he is in exile for as long as he
lives within the world, and the felicity he looks for is no longer Felice.
Guy of Warwick and The Pilgrim’s Progress both merge quest with pil-
grimage: Guy sequentially; Bunyan by fusing the two. Both kinds of jour-
ney suggest both geographical and mental travelling, but pilgrimage
distinguishes itself from quest in three significant ways. First, a pilgrim-
age is almost always made to a known destination—Canterbury, or
Compostela, or Jerusalem. Even the most spiritual of pilgrimages has its
goal, what Chaucer’s Parson describes as ‘Jerusalem celestial’. Second,
while quests are the prerogative of knights-errant, pilgrimages are open
to every wayfaring Christian. The Reformation may have condemned the
geographical pilgrimage, but the spiritual kind, as Bunyan demonstrates,
retained a remarkably comprehensive hold over the imagination. The
quest as pilgrimage is quest democratized. (The outward symbol of that
inclusiveness is that pilgrims travelled—or were supposed to travel—on
foot: the horse, which raises the knight literally and figuratively above the
common people, is replaced by humble ‘sandal shoon’.) Third, although
most pilgrims expected to return home, that was not the object. Every
pilgrimage was a potential allegory of that one-way journey to ‘Jerusalem
celestial’. A pilgrimage was a penitential act, and dying in the course of it
was often taken as equivalent to dying in a state of grace, a direct transi-
tion from the physical journey to its spiritual goal.
Crusading linked the two forms, quest and pilgrimage. A crusade was
a military expedition to exotic lands, and required all the prowess, sta-
mina, and chivalric equipment of the well-exercised knight. It was also a
journey for God; and the early crusades to recover the Holy Land were
chivalric journeys to the greatest of all the Christian shrines, where Christ
Himself had lived and died and risen. For the participants in the First
Crusade, fighting for God may have appeared a natural extension to
fighting for a feudal lord, but a journey to Jerusalem was far more than
just a journey over physical distance. As the mappae mundi showed,
Jerusalem was at the centre of a world represented in two dimensions,
and for immediate practical purposes its third dimension was most likely
to be thought of as spiritual. Sir John Mandeville’s travel book served
both as a semi-reliable guide to the Holy Land and its surroundings, and
as a guide to a spiritual journey. Succumb to the temptation of picking up
the gold scattered around in his Vale Perilous, and the devils will carry
you off through the entrance to Hell that debouches there.108 Direct
knowledge of the Holy Land, a country of real lions and real Saracens,
fuelled the marvels of romance more than it tamed them. Some crusaders
settled in the land beyond the sea, ‘Outremer’; many others returned
home, with tales that sounded every bit as exotic as romances and that no
doubt lost nothing in the telling. But returning from a crusade, as from a
pilgrimage, was not the point. ‘What man of spirit,’ Gerald of Wales
records one volunteer for the Third Crusade as saying, ‘can hesitate for a
moment to undertake this journey when, among the many hazards, none
could be more unfortunate, none could cause greater distress, than the
prospect of coming back alive?’109
Since allegory is concerned with inward matters, and therefore most
often with the soul rather than the body, allegorical quests are the most
likely to take one-way form. The shock of Balin’s statement as he rides
down the path marked for his destruction, ‘I wold be fayne there my deth
shold be’, comes from its contradiction of expectation within chivalric
romance. Christian’s near-identical statement by contrast falls naturally
within his spiritual questing: ‘I would fain be where I shall die no
more.’110 The similarity of expression does, however, conceal a radical

difference of desire: one for death; the other for the bliss of eternal life.
Galahad, the perfect Grail knight whose quest culminates in death, ini-
tially inherits Balin’s sword: it has inflicted the Dolorous Stroke that he
must heal, but it is also a symbol of the path that does not allow of any
return.111 It had always been difficult to find an object of desire that could
live up to the imaginative power exercised by the quest, and if not death
itself, then something beyond this world, such as the Grail came to sig-
nify, was the ultimate such object. Chrétien seems not yet to have worked
out what his Grail might stand for, and death for his hero is not appar-
ently among the options. What does seem clear is that his Perceval, like
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, is set for a return to happiness with
his beloved within this world after completing his own romance of atone-
ment, making up for his failure to ask the question at the castle of the
Fisher King. Robert de Boron and the redactors of the prose History and
Quest of the Holy Grail had other ideas. By turning the Grail into the ves-
sel of the Last Supper, they made it a figure for transubstantiation itself,
the moment when physical substance becomes spiritual: a moment made
visible in the Quest’s representations of the Mass.112 Appearing shortly
after the Fourth Lateran Council had spelled out the doctrine of transub-
stantiation, these texts are deeply imbricated in their particular historical
moment, in endorsing and disseminating the new dogmatic formulation;
Malory’s redaction 250 years later similarly acquires a new historical
specificity, in the wake of the Lollard attack on the same doctrine. The
claim made by the prose quest for the Grail is that it is a moment of con-
tact of time and eternity, an act of transcendence of the earthly. It would
be a betrayal of everything this Grail is about if Galahad were to return.
Instead, he leaves this world in an ecstasy of fulfilled desire, in the course
of a Mass conducted by the son of Joseph of Arimathea.
And so he cam to the sakerynge [consecration of the host], and anone made an
ende. He called sir Galahad unto hym and seyde, ‘Com forthe, the servaunte of
Jesu Cryste, and thou shalt se that thou hast much desired to se.’
And than he began to tremble ryght harde whan the dedly fleysh began to
beholde the sprituall thynges. Than he hylde up his hondis towarde hevyn and
seyde, ‘Lorde, I thanke The, for now I se that that hath be my desire many a day.
Now, my Blyssed Lorde, I wold nat lyve in this wrecched worlde no lenger, if it
myght please The, Lorde.’
He receives the Host and says farewell to his companions, ‘and so sud-
deynly departed hys soule to Jesu Cryste, and a grete multitude of angels
bare hit up to hevyn evyn in the syght of hys two felowis’.113
The Grail quest achieves the difficult feat of treating sentence as matter,
inward meaning as literal narrative. The claim it makes is that the adven-
tures of the quest are as much part of Arthurian history as the sword in
the stone, or Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere. Those who try to act as if
it were a chivalric quest, however, go badly wrong. Mention has already
been made of Lancelot’s support of the weaker party of knights who turn
out to represent the sins, and of his misapprehension in drawing his
sword on the lions who guard the castle of the Grail. The ‘right’ way is on
occasion signposted—or, to be precise, an inscription warns against the
left-hand way.114 The chosen knights frequently have to abandon their
horses to embark on rudderless boats, so handing over their will to
prowess to the will of God; and those boats and the cargo they carry may
themselves come with inscriptions that insist that they are something
more, or other, than material objects. ‘Thou man whych shalt entir into
thys shippe,’ reads one such inscription, ‘beware that thou be in stede-
faste beleve, for I am Faythe. And therefore beware how thou entirst but
if thou be stedfaste, for and thou fayle thereof I shall nat helpe the.’115 The
sword and scabbard the companions find on board bear similar threats.
Such things constitute not so much adventures or tests as proofs: they
confirm what the reader already knows, that Galahad and his compan-
ions are uniquely chosen for the roles they play. The ship Faith is itself an
earthly construction, designed by Solomon’s wife, and containing wood
from the tree planted by Eve and under which Abel was slain, but those
antecedents distinguish it from any other material vessel. Unlike other
ships, it does not take the knights anywhere, or provide the means of trav-
elling between two places. Its role is rather to be a means of access in itself
between the physical and spiritual worlds. Such access is more often pro-
vided by visions, which are interwoven with the more obviously chivalric
adventures and to an extent constitute those adventures. The Grail quest
is unique in the amount of time its chosen knights spend asleep, and
without that sleep representing a slothful abandonment of the quest.
‘And so he leyde hym downe and slepte’, we are told of Lancelot, ‘and
toke the aventure that God wolde sende hym’, sleep now being an adven-
ture in itself.116 Associated visions often take emblematic form: a woman
riding on a serpent, a lily ripe for corruption, voices speaking enigmatic
metaphors about barren fig-trees.
Allegory and dream are closely related, in that both offer non-material
narratives (Holiness is a personification, not a person; the figments of
your dreams do not have any physical existence outside the structures
of your brain), and both require interpretation. Texts that set out to
represent the journey of life or the soul therefore often take the form of
allegorical dream visions, with that journey itself represented as quest or
pilgrimage, or often as a combination of the two. Bunyan’s work is a
latecomer in a very long tradition of such works. Most of them are reli-
gious in orientation, but not all: one of the most famous, the thirteenth-
century French Romance of the Rose, is an allegory not of the whole of
life but of the lover’s quest for his lady, or rather, in Jean de Meun’s
continuation of the work, for his lady’s virginity. The poem ends with a
cheerfully blasphemous pilgrimage image, in which the lover enters her
shrine with his pilgrim’s staff, in a thoroughly secular satisfaction of
desire.117 Something of the same suggestion, in a non-allegorical narra-
tive, lurks behind the welcome to two of Tasso’s Christian knights as
‘fortunati peregrin’, happy pilgrims, as they approach Armida’s paradise
of lust.118
Most visionary quests take themselves rather more seriously, even
when their focus is this-worldly. There was quite a fashion for these in the
hundred and fifty years up to 1600. One that claims to derive its inspira-
tion from the unlikely mixture of the Grail quest and Jean de Meun is
René of Anjou’s Livre du Cuers d’amours espris, ‘the book of the love-
smitten Heart’, which tells of the quest of the dreamer’s heart, accompa-
nied by Desire, to free Sweet Mercy from Shame and Fear.119 The
narrative proceeds with a sequence of adventures of a kind familiar from
earlier chivalric texts (the spilling of water from a basin causing a storm,
as in Yvain; the Heart’s falling through a trapdoor into a prison, as
happens to Lancelot from the Chevalier de la Charrette to Malory)
intermingled with emblematic set-pieces, such as the Heart’s arming with
allegorical armour, or an account of tapestries showing various aspects of
passion. This method, of alternating active adventures, usually taking
place outdoors, with static emblems typically displayed on or inside
buildings, remains the norm for allegorical quests down to and including
Spenser—and indeed Bunyan, whose Interpreter’s House collects up just
such an emblematic series.
Neither author will have known René’s work, but there are other more
devotional allegories that operate on similar principles and which may
well have influenced Spenser. One of these is the first fully chivalric alle-
gory in English, Stephen Hawes’s Example of Vertue, which went through
at least three editions before 1530. This looks as if it is going to be a love-
quest, since its protagonist, Youth (the Youth who later earns the new
name of Virtue), is introduced walking in a ‘medow amerous’, and
undergoes his various perilous adventures, including overcoming a
three-headed dragon, in order to win the hand of the daughter of the God
of Love. This is explicitly not a worldly quest, however. In cutting off the
first two of the dragon’s three heads, representing the World and the
Flesh, the knight is conquering ‘flesshly desyre’ (1458). The third head,
representing the devil, contains no flesh or bone and so cannot be killed,
rather as some of Spenser’s antagonists cannot be overcome; the most the
knight can do is to drive him down to ‘his derke regyon | Of infernall
payne’ (1480–2). The lady herself is named Cleanness (purity), and Virtue
is eventually married to her by that master polemicist of the virtues of vir-
ginity over marriage, St Jerome.120 By the time their wedding feast
finishes, Virtue is 60 years old; and the kingdom his bride brings him, or
brings him to, is Heaven, which he proceeds to see in an inset vision after
a parallel tour of Hell. The narrative section of the poem ends by dis-
patching the pair to ‘Joye eternall’ (2040)—an ending to the quest from
which Virtue can no more return than he can recover his former incar-
nation as Youth. The strangest thing about the text is the difficulty of
discovering whether it is in favour of literal sexuality (the God of Love’s
half-naked state is described as representing the desire that ‘true love’
feels for the ‘very persone and eke body | That he so well and fervently
loveth’, 1324–7), or whether it is denouncing it. If Spenser did know the
work, as seems likely, he found his own Anglican solution to the Catholic
equation of the highest virtue with total celibacy. In Carol Kaske’s for-
mulation, ‘part of his delight in allegory sprang from the fact that eros
could be made to symbolize agape’,121 and as a Protestant he did not need
to make any literal rejection of the one before it could symbolize the
other.
Part of the attraction of allegorical texts of this kind lies in the illustra-
tions that accompany them. The most famous manuscript of René’s
work, illuminated under his own direction, contains many of the finest
visual representations of the questing knight in existence. The Example of
Vertue is illustrated by a series of woodcuts closely similar in content and
style to those used for early printed romances. They do not insist on their
inner meanings: the picture of Pride riding on an elephant might have
stepped across from a travel account of oriental wonders, and Youth’s
combat with the dragon is distinguishable from Bevis’s or Eglamour’s
only by the interlocking symbol of the Trinity on his shield, looking
rather like a triple equivalent of Gawain’s fivefold pentangle.122 Spenser’s
detailed visual imagination converts such emblematic figures into vivid
verbal icons. Anne Lake Prescott has argued for Spenser’s knowledge of a
further allegorical text, Stephen Bateman’s The Travayled Pilgrim (1569),
largely on the basis of its illustrations, which spell out their figurative
meanings—the arming of the knight with allegorical armour, the virtues
in the House of Reason, and so on—in captions accompanying the pic-
tures.123 Bateman’s title disguises the fact that not only is this a chivalric
allegory—his protagonist sets out as a knight in quest of adventure—but
also a translation of the Chevalier déliberé of Olivier de La Marche, the
same text as was translated again twenty-five years later by Lewes
Lewkenor as The Resolved Gentleman.124 Both English titles indicate their
authors’ sense that knighthood no longer carried conviction as a living
ideal, but where Lewkenor goes for a social equivalent, Bateman empha-
sizes the allegorical pilgrimage lying beneath the allegorical quest. For
this too is a one-way journey of life, in which the adversary that the hero
must face is the invincible Death.
The Faerie Queene would not have appeared unfamiliar to its six-
teenth-century readers. Not only its giants, and dragons, and fairy queen,
but its great emblematic set pieces, its exemplary protagonists, the alle-
gorical nature of the quests they undergo, and the landscapes they inhabit
were all part of the culture into which Spenser and his readers were born
and educated. None of his methods would have presented any of the
difficulties found in them by modern readers brought up on realist
fiction. This does not mean that every detail of his allegorical meanings
teased out by recent scholars would have been apparent to them, but his
methods would have been much more open, and therefore all such
meanings more easily accessible, not just because the topical and histor-
ical were matters of immediate import but because the structures of
thought were equally of immediate import. Even the two devices used by
many of the earlier allegorists but not by Spenser can be of help in read-
ing his work: dream, and the conflation of quest with pilgrimage. Dream
allows for the elimination of everything not directly significant.
Characters do not need to cover ground to get one from locus of adven-
ture to the next, since the significance itself makes the transition. Settings,
when they are mentioned at all, are psychological, not localized. In
dreams as in allegories, ‘then’ stands for ‘therefore’: cause and effect are
figured as chronological sequence. Interpretation, furthermore, is separ-
ate from action. Spenser does not generally supply any equivalent to the
hermits of the Grail quest who interpret visions and actions retrospec-
tively, but he does name retrospectively. New characters or places are
encountered, their qualities demonstrated in action and learned through
experience, but only then is the name attached to them, in a process
analogous to the waking from and rational analysis of dream.
Spenser does not obviously turn his quests into journeys to heaven, for
all his familiarity with Guy of Warwick and probably Hawes and
Bateman. The figuring of life as pilgrimage is none the less a powerful
subtext in Book I in particular, the book that gives its protagonist a
glimpse of ‘the new Hierusalem’ and sets him in apocalyptic opposition
to the Dragon. Its slaughter is not the end of Redcrosse’s chivalric career,
however. Archimago and Duessa make a final attempt to prevent the
union of Holiness and Truth; and when Una’s father invites him to enjoy
‘everlasting rest’ (I. xii. 17), he refuses. He has promised to go back, to aid
the Faerie Queene for six more years in her war against ‘that proud
Paynim king’. Spenser allows a joyous celebration of the betrothal of
Redcrosse and Una, but he postpones their marriage beyond the end of
the book, and the poem.125 Spenser’s concern with this world rules out
an ending in Heaven. His poem is about the continuing struggle of life in
the world, the struggle in which both his characters and his readers are
continuously engaged. It is only in the very last words of the Mutabilitie
Cantos that he allows himself to look beyond that, in his prayer for the
time when
all shall rest eternally
With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight.
VII. viii. 2
‘All’ are embarked on that one-way journey; but his poem is a narrative
of quest, not of pilgrimage. The roads may overlap, but Spenser’s con-
cern, even in his Legend of Holiness, is not with transcendence but with
the action of his virtues in the world of Elizabethan England.
CHAPTER TWO
Providence and the sea:

‘No tackle, sail, nor mast’
You have none now, that coming . . . [to] a barren

and desart shore of the sea, most commonly stormy
and unquiet; and finding at the brinke of it some lit-
tle cock-boat, without oares, saile, mast, or any kinde
of tackling, casts himselfe into it with undaunted
courage, yeelds himselfe to the implacable waves of
the deepe maine, that now tosse him as high as
heaven, and then cast him as low as hell.1
Don Quixote’s conviction that a boat carrying no equipment for steering

or propulsion was a guarantee of providential adventure was based on a
couple of millennia of literary experience. Romance was a comparative
latecomer in adopting the motif, though as Cervantes illustrates, it had
done so wholeheartedly. Over the centuries it had acquired a large and
often contradictory-seeming set of associations—with guilt and pollu-
tion, with sanctity, with political threat and its removal, with chivalric
election, with women—but the meme at the core of all these remained
exceptionally coherent, exceptionally faithful in its replication, not least
by comparison with the sprawling variations on the quest. The coherence
lies in the phrasing and cadences that describe the rudderless boat, and
which remain essentially the same across many centuries and languages:
a boat without oars, sail, mast, or any kind of tackling; with neither sail
nor oar; no rudder, oar, nor helmsman; neither sails nor oars, rudder nor
rigging; no tackle, sail, nor mast. The identifying phrases stand out from
texts in Latin and Old Norse, Anglo-Norman and Middle High German;
they are as recognizable in Sir Eglamour or the Quest of the Holy Grail as
they are in Greene’s Pandosto, or The Tempest, or Don Quixote itself. They
remain the same whether the vessels are tiny, just big enough to take a
baby, or full seagoing ships; whether the journey is readily undertaken as
Providence and the Sea 107
an act of chivalric adventure, as Don Quixote envisages, or against the

will of the boat’s occupant.
The phrases announce a story motif, a narrative building-block of
strong imaginative power. They also indicate that the story will have
some inherent meaning. Such a voyage is never accidental, however
unwilled or unintended it may be by the boat’s occupant. The range of
possible meanings is, however, huge by comparison with the brevity of
the identifying phrases, even though these boats are not allegorical. They
are real vessels, not ships of Fortune, or fools, or the state, or Love, or the
Church.2 Much more predictable than the meaning of such stories is
their outcome. The very danger of being adrift in a rudderless boat was
so extreme as to make death likely, and survival therefore almost the only
worthwhile narrative option: the only one that will carry suspense, no
matter how much the reader may predict it.
A journey in such a vessel was normally a terrifying business, as Don
Quixote’s description acknowledges. That is half the delight of his own
experience in ‘a little boat, without oares or any other kinde of tackling’
in which he embarks a few chapters later.3 His insouciance at under-
taking the adventure is helped by the fact that he is merely floating down
a river (though the boat comes to grief in a mill-race a few yards down-
stream, shortly after he has required Sancho Panza to carry out the ‘louse
test’ to discover whether they have yet crossed the equator, it being well
known that lice cannot survive equatorial heat). The kind of voyage he
envisages casts the boat as a barca aventurosa, in the phrasing of Italian
chivalric romance, a magic vessel dedicated to adventure.4 But much the
greatest number of voyagers in rudderless boats are victims rather than
agents, cast adrift at sea because their society wishes to dispose of them.
Both historically and in story, it was a way of getting rid of the transgres-
sive (certain types of criminals), the polluted (such as the children of
incest), or the dangerous (rival claimants to power). The knight-errant
rides out from his society, or on occasion is carried away by his magic
boat, and returns; most travellers in unsteerable vessels are ejected by
their community by a means that makes it as sure as possible that they
will not come back.
Heroic prowess, or indeed any kind of deliberate action, is largely
eliminated from such stories. The voyagers’ helplessness is reflected in a
shift away from the knight as protagonist. The central characters are
more likely to be women or children than grown men—a marked differ-
ence not only from most romances but from almost all other stories
about seafaring, where a homosocial grouping is all but universal. The
armour worn by the knight on horseback would be not only useless but
a positive disadvantage in an open boat, as Don Quixote discovers when
his own capsizes. Masculinity and its associated physical strength are
equally useless. Such voyagers, moreover, again in strong contrast to
knights-errant, rarely initiate their own exposure. A knight on the more
conventional kinds of quest volunteers to ride out from his own society
in order to take the adventure that God will send him. The person in the
unsteerable boat is outside society in altogether more drastic ways, and is
completely at the mercy of the seas and winds, or fortune, the gods, or
God. It is an adventure that you are unlikely to take on willingly, though
it cannot be other than what God will send you, since your own will can
have no effect whatsoever. This is one reason why the victims are so often
those who have least agency in a pre-modern, or in any, society. If it is a
man who is in the vessel, he is just as helpless as if he were a woman or a
child; he may even be asleep, and it makes little difference whether he is
or not. At the extreme of this lack of agency, the occupant of the boat is a
corpse.
The motif of the rudderless boat goes back beyond legend into myth,
though the stories often reflect the actual practice of casting adrift or
exposure on water. There is a vast geographical spread of such accounts
along seacoasts or major rivers, but there is a particular concentration of
them in the territory with the highest ratio of coastline to land: the British
Isles, and Ireland in particular. In early societies in which traditional
forms of law prevailed, malefactors and the unwanted—social outcasts—
were often not put to death by the deliberate act of a central authority,
but rather, quite literally, cast out from, and by, their community.
Execution would incur blood-guilt, and exile would leave them as a
potential threat; exposure at sea puts their fate in the hands of the gods,
or of God. The ‘adventure that God shall send you’ takes on a new order
of meaning in such circumstances. Some of the earliest of these legends
come from the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, often in
accounts of the birth of a hero in which the gods take a particular inter-
est.5 Many of these early victims are infants who must be disposed of
because they constitute a political threat—Perseus (son of Zeus) in the
Peloponnese, Romulus and Remus (supposed sons of Mars) for Rome,
and (at least in medieval interpretations) Moses in Egypt. Sometimes the
very point of the unsteered craft is to keep the child’s origin mysterious,
as with the legend of Scyld recorded at the opening of Beowulf. Although
the setting of the voyage is in the Baltic, Scyld’s arrival over the water is a
distinctively English tradition.6
Ireland generated accounts of rudderless boats in the greatest abun-

dance, and the historical practices that underlay them are particularly
well documented there. The language itself made a distinction between
voluntary voyaging for adventure, the imramh, most often conducted
with tiller and oars but sometimes without, and the compelled journey,
the longeas.7 The Irish Laws prescribed exposure at sea for certain classes
of wrongdoers, foremost among them being women and kin-slayers. The
victims were cast out to sea with an offshore wind in a curragh (a leather-
covered coracle) made from a single hide, and provided with food and
water for twenty-four hours. They were also given a single oar—which
would give limited steering power to an almost-round coracle, but min-
imal propulsion—and, if a passage of doubtful interpretation in the Laws
is to be believed, a sledgehammer for fighting off seamonsters.8 The pro-
vision of an oar and some food makes it clear that the object here is not
simply to cause the death of the malefactors, but to give them a fighting
chance of survival. If they come ashore, it will at least be somewhere else;
and it will be because God has willed it.
The Laws also make provision for children polluted by the circum-
stances of their birth. They were to be put into a leather box that was taken
out to sea and thrown into the water as far out as a white shield on the
shore was on the edge of visibility: far enough, in other words, for the box
not to be washed back ashore at the next high tide. The law was recorded
in the sixteenth century, but the practice is much older: the earliest known
instance is described five hundred years before that.9 The simpler practice
of floating an unwanted baby down a river or away on an offshore tide,
whether to be lost or committed to the ‘kindness of strangers’, was a form
of exposure used in many societies over many centuries. Where such prac-
tices could result in charges of infanticide, exposure had to be secret and
therefore unrecorded, so it is hard to get any idea of its frequency. The bal-
lad of Mary Hamilton, popularized by Joan Baez, tells a story originating in
the sixteenth century but which probably for long needed little historical
imagination from its audiences: the Scottish queen’s maid-in-waiting is
hanged after she admits to having put her new-born bastard son
in a little boat
And cast him out to sea;
And he may sink, or he may swim,
But he’ll never come back to me.
The practice continued until surprisingly recently, often motivated by
sheer poverty rather than illegitimacy. One baby too many from a poor
Welsh home was about to be floated down the Teifi into Cardigan Bay at
the start of the twentieth century, only for her mother to decide that she
was so beautiful she could not bear to part with her; the child grew up to
be the great-aunt Martha of one of my own students.
The motif flourished in a series of different literary niches before it
found particularly fertile ground in romance. Romance seems at first
glance to be an unlikely home for it. There is no immediate reason why
being adrift on the seas should be linked with chivalry, or love, or high
birth; it is a scenario that gives minimal opportunity for any kind of
active heroism or prowess; and the chances that such an event will have a
happy ending are remote. That very remoteness, however, makes a
romance shaping almost inevitable if the victim does survive. The happy
ending of romance is one achieved against the odds, and the odds in this
case are very high indeed. Survival for an infant marks him (or occasion-
ally her) as special, favoured by God or the gods: hence the association of
the motif with the birth of the hero, in early modern literature as in
archaic. Finding herself pregnant in a society that prescribes death for
unchaste women, the mother of the hero in that Renaissance favourite
Amadis de Gaule has her baby cast away in a little chest, which, ‘by the will
of the highest (who makes impossibilities easy)’, is found by a passing
ship. Ignorant of his birth, Amadis is known when he grows to manhood
as ‘the Gentleman of the Sea’. The primacy attaching to the motif is indi-
cated by the title page woodcut of the 1619 edition of Antony Munday’s
translation of the work, which shows the chest being fished out of the
water.10 Christian Providence is seen to intervene most directly in the
case of saints and penitents rather than heroes, but its workings are
stressed in romance when they operate to preserve the innocent or the
true ruler. Exposure at sea constitutes a iudicium Dei, a judgement made
not by men but by God; it is a marine equivalent of the testing of right in
chivalric combat. The history of the motif from the Middle Ages across
the Reformation sees a gradual shift from its lying on the border with
saint’s life to a greater concern with politics and the rightful heir.
Prospero is far from being a saint, but he and his daughter are saved by
‘providence divine’ (1.2.159) when they are set adrift on the high seas after
his depositon. The element of overt miracle is downplayed in the more
political texts, but God’s intervention in the working of the physical
world is evident in both kinds of story. As with the magic of the barca
adventurosa, this is one meme in which naturalism is not enough.
The outcome of such narratives correlates closely with the point of view
from which it is told. If, as occasionally happens, a casting adrift is focal-
ized through those left on shore, watching the unsteerable boat float away,
then it is a safe conclusion that the near-inevitable happens and the victim
is never heard of again. In 1509, a group of early Spanish explorers in cen-
tral America disposed of an unpopular governor, Diego de Nicuesa, by
just such a means: they put him in a rotten boat with no tackle and set him
adrift, jeering at him that he should report back his grievances to the king
in Castille.11 Tyrannical authority figures in fiction, notably fathers, are
sometimes given equally summary dispatch: in that compendium of every
available romance motif, Richard Johnson’s Tom a Lincoln, one such is
‘put into a boat alone, and so sent to the sea to seeke his fortune’.12 If the
narrative accompanies the victim, by contrast, then a happy ending is
guaranteed. A few stories in effect start with the happy ending, by taking
the point of view of the people on a different shore who find such a vessel
arriving. In this last case, the origin of the boat will be unknown, so ensur-
ing some degree of romance-like strangeness about the episode beyond
the sheer improbability of survival for the voyager. That very improbabil-
ity, however, indicates that the survivor will be in some sense extraordi-
nary. These shifts in focalization—from the perpetrators to the victim,
from the victim to those who find the boat on its arrival—also measure
how the geographical perception of such voyages is turned inside out. The
point of exposure at sea is to expel the victims, to dispose of them beyond
the margins of the society that wants to get rid of them. A narrative that
travels with them, or that recounts the discovery of the boat on a new
shore, turns the periphery into a new centre. The sea represents a thresh-
old to be crossed, a gateway to a new society. It is Prospero’s island, not
Milan or Naples, that occupies the stage in The Tempest.
Journeys in romance are usually intimately related to questing, to the
knight in pursuit of chivalric prowess: the very etymology of ‘chivalry’,
courtly French for horsemanship, would seem to preclude ship travel
except as a means of getting to or from an island, or travelling between
widely separated lands—a blank space between adventures, which the
knight will encounter only when he comes ashore. The landscape of his
journey is most often unknown, and he has no kind of map, topograph-
ical or moral, by which to find the object of his quest. He moves off
charted territory into those blank areas supposedly marked by cartogra-
phers only with ‘Here be dragons’, and dragons and other chivalric tests
will duly confront him in abundance. The occupant of a rudderless boat
moves off the map yet more decisively. The open seas constituted a land-
scape more desolate and uncharted than the most hostile and unknown
of forests or wastelands. The knight may not know where his horse
should go, but he can, most of the time, steer it; there is often a friendly
hermit not too far away to help out with lodging and sustenance, or at the
least there will be a tree for shelter and some minimal supply of drinking
water. Exposure in an open boat is a grimmer business altogether.13 The
‘no oar nor rudder’ often carries as a rider that there is no food or water
either, or only minimal provision. At least one historical victim, Edwin,
the half-brother of the tenth-century King Athelstan, seems to have
drowned himself in preference to waiting for death after he had been set
adrift ‘in an old rotten vessel without rower or mariner’, as Holinshed
phrased it.14 Such despair was widely recognized as a more immediate
danger than capsize or starvation. A character in Lady Mary Wroth’s
Urania is cast adrift by pirates ‘without oar, sail or hope’.15 Shakespeare,
whose reading on rudderless boats is likely to have included Holinshed’s
account of Edwin, has Prospero describe himself as being preserved in a
decrepit and rudderless vessel only by his baby’s angelic ‘fortitude from
heaven’, fortitude being the remedial virtue for despair.16
There were two possible ways of setting adrift: to push the victims out
to sea on a falling tide and with an offshore wind; or to cast them off from
a larger ship well away from shore. In a play misascribed to John Webster
entitled The Thracian Wonder, the father of the heroine condemns his
pregnant daughter and her lover to the two forms of exposure: they are
to be cast adrift on different tides and with contrary winds so that there
is no possibility of their vessels meeting:
She in a small boat, without man or oar,

Shall to the mercy of the waves be left;
He in a pinnace, without sail or pilot,
Shall be dragg’d forth some five leagues from the shore,
And there be drench’d in the vast ocean.17
Prospero, with the infant Miranda, suffers the second kind of fate, and
‘fate’ becomes even more compelling a term since the craft in which they
are put is unseaworthy.
They hurried us aboard a barque,

Bore us some leagues to sea, where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast—the very rats
Instinctively have quit it. There they hoist us,
To cry to th’ sea that roared to us, to sigh
To th’ winds. The Tempest, 1. 2. 144–50
The lines represent a defining moment for The Tempest. The ‘rotten car-
cass of a butt’ is not the only boat of the play—it is not even the first: the
whole play opens in mid-shipwreck with a crack of thunder. In that first
scene, the tackle, sail, and mast of an altogether finer ship than Prospero’s
worn-out craft are useless against the violence of the sea, and the
mariners are doing their best to get rid of them. At the end, the ship turns
out to be undamaged, and waiting offstage to take the various castaways
back to Naples, helped along by the ‘calm seas, auspicious gales’ that the
mage Prospero will ensure as his final act of enchantment. But it is the
rotting dinghy in which he was abandoned, ‘nor tackle, sail, nor mast’,
that alerted the original audiences to a set of resonances and traditions of
particular richness. They connect the exiled duke and his daughter to a
line that includes great saints and great sinners; infant heroes, and chil-
dren whose birth is deeply tainted; politically dangerous men, and falsely
accused women; both women and men with powers beyond the ordin-
ary; and the whole programme of colonial expansion.
pollution, guilt, and the state
The meme of the rudderless boat links meanings or conditions that at

first glance appear widely diverse: pollution, guilt, and the fate of nations
among them. There is an evident parallel between guilt, attaching to sin
or crime (including illicit sex), and pollution, the stigma attaching to
those who involuntarily transgress some taboo within their culture (such
as the offspring of such sins); but considerations of state would seem sep-
arate. The link lies in the threat inhering in procreation in patrilinear
societies, such as can turn blood relationship, small babies, or pregnant
women into a political danger. Victims of casting adrift who are regarded
as a threat to the state are sometimes the subject of a prophecy that they
will cause the death of the king; or they may simply have too much legiti-
macy. A linear claim, like ritual pollution, inheres in the potential heir: if
you have a right to the throne, or have a certain future predicted for you,
there is no more you can do to free yourself from that right or that
prophecy than you can free yourself from bastardy or incest. From the
ruler’s point of view, such figures are also potential traitors, threatening
deposition or assassination. Casting adrift is a way both of sidestepping
direct action against them, and of avoiding treason to come.
Exposure by water was the perfect way of disposing of a political
enemy beyond the reach of rescue or restoration but without incurring
blood-guilt in the process. This is likely to have been behind the muti-
neers’ choice of fate for Diego de Nicuesa, the man set in authority over
them by the king and, by implication, God. It was an especially attractive
option if the victim were someone such as a close relative or a baby,
whose assassination would transgress stronger taboos than would the
killing of a stranger. It was also attractive if the execution or murder of
the victim would be likely to result in an upsurge of popular support, a
rebellion against the ruler who ordered it. This seems to have been the
reason why Athelstan chose to cast his brother adrift after he was accused
of conspiring against him: Edwin was too dangerous to keep alive, but
putting his fate into the hands of God transferred the question of his
death or survival to powers other than the king’s. Prospero suggests that
he owes his own survival to similar motives after Antonio had deposed
him. When Miranda asks him why they were not both put to death, he
replies,
They durst not,
So dear the love my people bore me; nor set
A mark so bloody on the business.
Tempest 1. 2. 140–2
Alonso and Sebastian are thinking primarily in terms of pragmatic poli-
tics, but perhaps also of the judgement of God on them. That God might
have views on Prospero as well does not seem to occur to them: they
assume that casting adrift is equivalent to a bloodless assassination.
But, of course, in romance and comparable legends it does not work
out like that. Perseus was thrown into the sea as a baby along with his
mother Danaë, as a consequence of a prediction that he would kill his
grandfather, but that did not prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy.
Aeneas may have founded a state in Italy after a voyage from Troy in a
properly-equipped boat, but Rome itself owed its foundation to twin
babies who were exposed on the water in a little basket. Romulus and
Remus were marked for destruction twice over: they were the grandchil-
dren, and the only male descendants, of Numitor, who had been deposed
by his younger brother, Amulius; and the usurper had compelled their
mother to become a Vestal Virgin, with the intention of preventing the
birth of such descendants, or at least of attaching the stigma of pollution
to any children she bore. Amulius accordingly had the babies ‘committed
to the flowing river’ in an attempt to dispose of them. The little vessel in
which they floated was left stranded by the retreat of the flooded Tiber,
so allowing them to be found and suckled by a she-wolf. The twins grew
up to kill the usurper, restore their grandfather, and in due course to

build the new city of Rome.18 The point of this story lies in the fact that
they come back: what is supposed to be a one-way journey goes badly
wrong for the wicked great-uncle. For those victims who survive such an
ordeal, their return is likely to be as dangerous for those who set them
adrift in the first place as exposure was for the victim.
The founding of monarchies could rest on guilt rather than pollution,
with the rudderless vessel operating as a means to convey its passengers
between states of being as much as nation-states. Brut came to Britain, by
ordinary boat, after accidentally killing his father; he found a land inhab-
ited by giants, descendants of the first colonizers of the country, the forty-
nine daughters of a Greek king, who had cohabited after their arrival with
incubi. Those daughters had all been married on the same day and plot-
ted to kill their husbands on their wedding night, but the fiftieth sister
revealed the conspiracy. Their father, or in some versions her husband, is
reluctant to put them to death, on account of both their high birth and
their close kinship to him; so instead, as Holinshed puts it, he
commanded them to be thrust into a ship, without maister, mate or mariner, and
so to be turned into the maine ocean sea, and to take and abide such fortune as
should chance unto them.19
Anglo-Norman and Middle English accounts add further detail about the
condition of the ship: according to the Anonymous Metrical Chronicle, it
was ‘withouten seyl, withouten ore’, and without a rudder; in its Anglo-
Norman and Latin versions, it was without food, too.20 Nevertheless, the
sisters survive, drifting to the coast of the as yet unnamed Britain—the
unlikelihood of navigating the Straits of Gibraltar is never an issue in the
many stories that take these unsteerable boats from the Mediterranean to
the English Channel. At the suggestion of the eldest, Albina, the new
country is named Albion. There is no question here of any return to their
homeland; the land to which they come is effectively empty, awaiting col-
onization and (under Brut’s sovereignty) civilization. The disparity
between the normal expectations of the meme and the meaning given it
in the legend proved troublesome to some of the historians. The author
of the anonymous Chronicle, worried by the incongruity of the women’s
eventual fate in contrast with their guilt, suggested as an afterthought that
perhaps the youngest daughter’s accusation was in fact slanderous
(l. 305). Holinshed doubts the truth of the story, but partly on the
grounds that other sources that list the daughters of Danaus, as he names
their father, do not mention any called Albina.
The original inspiration behind the story of Albina is not known, but
it offers a parallel to accounts of the exposure of heroes, as if a great
nation, like a great man, needs some kind of mysterious origin from
which to emerge, some element of magic or miracle or providential care
that makes its founding a matter of something other than chance. The
narratives of the exiled sisters accompany them on their voyage, and are
recounted from the perspective of an English author—the perspective of
the land to which they come. The interest lies not in their original home-
land, but in Britain: the land on the edge of the known world that has
become the new centre, the society of the chroniclers and their listeners
or readers, and which down to the sixteenth century finds legitimation in
a legend of origin in the form of an unsteered boat arriving from over the
sea.
Most English stories of women in open boats have them cast adrift as
a consequence not of intended husband-murder but of real or supposed
sexual misdemeanours, along with the baby born as a result of those. As
in the case of Albina, the motif is strong enough to override all geo-
graphical plausibility, or indeed to recast geography altogether. The
Constance of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and its sources drifts from
Syria to Northumberland and back to Rome, her own city of origin.
Eglamour sleeps with his betrothed lady Cristabelle, daughter of the earl
of Artois, after success in the trials her father has set him, but he leaves to
take on an extra dragon before they are formally married; her father sets
her adrift along with the baby he charges with bastardy, in a boat with
‘nothere mast ne rothere’.21 When the boat comes briefly to land, some-
where in the Mediterranean, her son is carried off by a griffin to Israel,
and the rest of the story takes place around Egypt and the Holy Land.
Desonelle, the beloved of Torrent of Portingale (Portugal), undergoes a
similar, and similarly located, ordeal, with twins, though she does at least
start out from nearer the Mediterranean. Both romances, Eglamour in
particular, remained favourites in the sixteenth century. Against such a
background, it seems less surprising that the Bohemia of Greene’s
Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale should have a seacoast; for although
Perdita herself, accused of being the offspring of adultery, is brought
there by ordinary ship to be exposed on the land, her literary predeces-
sor, Greene’s Fawnia, is cast adrift in her own little vessel, ‘having neither
saile nor rudder to guid it’, and left ‘to the mercie of the seas, and the des-
tinies’.22 In all these cases, the destinies do, of course, live up to romance
expectations, and save the voyagers. The result is the preservation of the
true line of descent that male cruelty or suspicions have threatened to
destroy. Constance’s son Maurice inherits the empire of Rome from her
father, despite the slander told to her husband that the child was mon-
strous. Cristabelle and Desonelle, both heiresses, pass on their fathers’
lands to their recovered children. And Fawnia, like Perdita, returns from
over the sea as the lost heir.
The return of the victims in these stories amounts to a guarantee that
the true line of descent does indeed run through the children, whatever
the suspicions of the reigning monarch. Their recovery is a mark that the
succession is ensured by God Himself; that bastardy does not inhere in
the infants, that they are indeed true born. Other stories, occurring
throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, never question the legiti-
macy of the heir—that is indeed why they need to be disposed of—but
show God’s defence of the true line of succession against invaders or
usurpers. A late example comes from the Orlando Furioso, where
Ruggiero, founding father of the house of Este, and his twin Marfisa are
preserved after their uncles kill their father and expose their mother
at sea to die.23 The Tempest is almost unique among these stories in that
it is a father and daughter, not a mother and son, who are set adrift. The
change serves to emphasize that it is legitimacy, not illegitimacy, that is
at issue.24 Still more, the change calls attention to the distinctiveness
of Shakespeare’s own insistent interest in his last plays on fathers and
heiresses.
The successive reworkings of the story of Horn show how much
individual authors can vary the motif of casting adrift within what is
essentially the same narrative. The story forms part of the ‘matter of
England’, English originary romance; the earliest surviving text is Anglo-
Norman, though that is itself probably based on an English version.25
The king, Horn’s father, is killed by invading Saracens (a twelfth-century
updating of the pagan Vikings: the various proper names of the text are
Scandinavian or Germanic in origin). They consider murdering the boy,
but (as in the case of the Welsh baby Martha) they are moved to pity by
his beauty, and instead they cast him adrift with a group of companions.
In the oldest Middle English version, the youngsters are provided with
oars; but in Thomas’s Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn, they are towed
out to sea in a rotten boat with ‘no mast nor oar, rudder nor steersman’
and set adrift, with the intention that they will never be heard of again. In
the event, God acts as their steersman and brings them to shore, where
the boat breaks up in the surf but the children reach land safely.26 The
Anglo-Norman version was in due course recast in French prose with its
hero renamed, and that in turn was translated at least once, probably
twice, into Middle English, under the title King Ponthus. Printed early in
the sixteenth century and still of commercial interest in the 1580s, it was
one of a number of romances that preserved for the Renaissance the
motif of the casting adrift of a political rival.27 King Ponthus varies the
story to lessen the sense of miracle while still preserving the motif.
Ponthus’s father, like Horn’s, is killed by invading Saracens, and the child
and his companions are handed over to a knight named Patryke to be
disposed of. Patryke provides them with a ship, a month’s supply of
food, and a mariner, and sends them off with good hope of their safety.
When he reports back to the Saracen king, however, he tells a different
story:
Syr, seyde the knight, ye shall never see them; for I have set them in an olde
shyppe without ony maner of lyvynge of the worlde. And within have I made two
or three holes, and let draw the sail up to the top which bare them into the sea,
that never shall ye hear tidings of them.28
Patryke’s role foreshadows that of Gonzalo in The Tempest: Gonzalo does

carry out his orders faithfully, but he also provides the food and water
that preserve the dispossessed duke and his child, and the clothing and
the books that will provide them with all they need on the island. Both
Horn and Ponthus, like Prospero, do of course live to reassert their
rights, the early heroes to take vengeance on the usurpers, Prospero to
forgive them.
In telling the story of the setting adrift of his dispossessed hero, the
Anglo-Norman Thomas sought for an analogy of God’s providential care
for those exposed on the water in the account of the infant Moses in the
bulrushes: ‘Now may He preserve them who saved Moses, when he was
thrown as a child into the river in the ravine.’29 In this story too, the issue
is a threat to the ruler’s security, when Pharaoh is alarmed by the danger
posed by the Israelites’ fertility. His first intention is to have the male chil-
dren killed at birth, but when the midwives avoid co-operation, he comes
up with a different idea:
Pharaoh therefore charged all his people, saying: Whatsoever shall be born of the
male sex, ye shall cast into the river. (Exodus 1:22)
Thomas evidently took this to mean that the children were thrown into
the river in little vessels. Given the widespread reluctance, evidenced in
the story by the midwives, to murder babies outright lest it transgress
divine sanction, this may well be the right interpretation. Unusually for
such legends, though in ways not dissimilar to Patryke or Gonzalo, prov-
idential care in the case of the infant Moses is effected through human
ingenuity. His mother and sister lodge the waterproofed basket that car-
ries him in the reeds, to make it look as if his little craft, like Romulus and
Remus’, has grounded of its own accord, ready for Pharaoh’s daughter to
find the baby and foster him. The rest of that story, too, is a kind of his-
tory, only one that adds the purposes of God to an account of dominion,
as the adult Moses leads God’s people out of slavery to the Promised
Land.
‘god is our pilot’
Such human interventions to jog the likelihood of a happy ending remain

exceptional: the sheer helplessness of the victim exposed on the water
normally makes survival uniquely dependent on God. That these victims
are under His direct protection is emphasized by the recurrent analogy
drawn in text after text with Jonah.
Who kepte hire fro the drenchyng in the see?
Who kepte Jonas in the fisshes mawe
Til he was spouted up at Nynyvee?30
A whale may not appear much like a rudderless boat, but they do have a
lot in common, most particularly in the helplessness of the person inside
them to direct where they are going. Like the boats, too, the whale carries
Jonah to the right place—the place chosen by God. The story of Jonah,
moreover, follows the outline of the romances of atonement: his pen-
itence in the belly of the whale is accepted, and his deliverance follows.
The story was interpreted in the Middle Ages as a prefiguration of
Christ’s descent into Hell, and Jonah’s emergence as a figure for the
Harrowing, when Christ led out God’s faithful to eternal bliss in Heaven.
Besides being an analogy for God’s providential care for His chosen ones,
therefore, the story offers a larger analogy to the patterning of romance
on the model of the Fall and Redemption, a patterning made explicit in
some of the romances of casting adrift.
The same idea underlies a second analogy developed in the Middle
Ages, the story of Noah. There is no point in steering the ark when there
is no dry land left to which to journey, and God’s detailed instructions for
building it (Genesis 6:14–16) accordingly make no mention of mast, sails,
or rudder. That silence in the originary text becomes a positive absence
in the Middle English Cleanness, which spends four alliterative lines
describing its lack of mast and mast-step, bowline, cable and capstan,
anchor, rudder, helm, and sails.31 Orthodox exegesis interpreted the ark
as an allegory of the Church in which the faithful are preserved, but the
letter of the story suggested a different reading, in which the vessel serves
as a point of both generic and genealogical transition. All living things,
human and animal, contained in the ark are uniquely in the hands of
God; the story tells of their survival, their rebirth after threatened death.
Noah accordingly becomes the re-founder of the entire human dynasty.
The myth of Adam and Eve ends in disaster, God’s condemnation of
humankind; the myth of Noah ends with His promise never to destroy
the earth again. Every medieval and Renaissance genealogy incorporates
one of Noah’s sons into its line of descent. The Bible has often been
regarded as a compendium of genres, and the story of the ark is the ulti-
mate ancestral romance.
Such explicit theological links are reflected in the abundant appear-
ance of boats without sail or oar in devotional rather than secular liter-
ature, not least in saints’ legends. The sixth century, the Irish Age of
Saints, generated a large number of such stories, many of which have
their grounding in actual practices. Hard fact is, however, difficult to be
sure of, both because the stories were not recorded until some centuries
after the events they purport to describe, and because hagiography is not
noted for its historical accuracy. In the Irish stories that claim to be fac-
tual, survival in itself seems to have become a marker for sanctity, for
God’s especial favour to the victim. Such stories occasionally tell of the
preservation of children who grow up to be saints; some concern sinners
undergoing an especially harsh penance, and whose repentance, like that
of the sinful knights in the romances of atonement, is accepted by God.
Some record voyages undertaken voluntarily, where the travellers put
themselves into God’s hands as an act of willing faith.
Death for a saint cast adrift in an open boat would be a kind of
martyrdom, an ending that ensures bliss in the next world by way of
suffering in this: the classic form of hagiography. God’s providential
care, however, ensures survival in this life, a marker for romance;
and so such saints’ legends tend to lie on the border between the two gen-
res. Three such stories from across Europe—one about a woman, two
about babies—set their protagonists adrift in especially romance-like
ways.
The woman is Mary Magdalene, who, according to legend, served as
the apostle to the French. She is set adrift from the Holy Land with her
brother Lazarus and a number of companions, in
Ane olde schip withouten mast,

Withouten are, anker or any gude [oar; provision
That suld fend agayns the flode, [might preserve (them)
and with no food or water either.32 Although they come close to starva-
tion while they drift around the Mediterranean, Providence eventually
brings them ashore at Marseilles. Mary’s cult was widespread in the
Middle Ages, and she was the patron of many English churches; the
legends were therefore well placed to survive the Reformation, a process
no doubt helped by surviving copies of Caxton’s version of the same story
in his translation of the Golden Legend, an account complete with a ship
‘without any tackle or rudder’.33 Later parts of her legend include the
abandonment on an uninhabited island of the wife and child of one of
her converts, apparently dead in childbirth; they are in due course redis-
covered alive and well, through the intercession of the saint. The story
offers a Christian analogue of the apparent death in childbirth of the wife
of Apollonius of Tyre, and her surviving her committal to the sea in her
own vessel without sail or oars, a coffin: the story familiar from Pericles.
Of the future saints who are cast adrift as babies, one, St Kentigern, is
preserved in circumstances rather like the children of Cristabelle and
Desonelle. On being found to be pregnant under unexplained circum-
stances, his mother, an early British Christian, was first thrown from a
cliff, and, when that proved ineffectual, she was cast adrift in a leather
coracle ‘made after the manner of the Irish, without any oar’. Like the
Spanish mutineers in Central America, or the onlookers at the
Crucifixion, the perpetrators jeer at her as she embarks on her ordeal:
‘She trusts in Christ; let him deliver her if he can from the hand of death,
and the peril of the sea!’34 So far as the narrative focus is concerned, it is
the onlookers who are left behind; and Christ does indeed, of course, save
her.
The suspicion of illegitimacy about Kentigern becomes full incest in
the case of St Gregory. He is the protagonist of a story-type invented in
the Middle Ages, of double incest: stories in which the son of an incestu-
ous affair between a brother and sister comes back as an adult stranger
and unknowingly marries his mother. Between the two episodes, as the
event that prevents recognition, is a casting adrift: an attempt to dispose
of the child without adding the sin of murder to the sin of incest, and a
way of committing his fate to God. So the mother of the infant Gregory
‘bitaught him God and the salt see’, having him thrown into the water in
a little tun so that Christ could save him if it were not ‘agen his will’.35
That Christ does indeed intervene to save him makes his return and even-
tual marriage to his mother altogether more ironic than in the other cases
where castaways are preserved by divine Providence. Providence does
however continue to aid him in the penance he inflicts on himself after
his discovery of their relationship, keeping him alive for seventeen years
on a rock in the sea to which he chains himself, and restoring the key of
the fetters in the belly of a fish just as emissaries from Rome arrive to seek
out a man named Gregory chosen by God to be pope. Like a romance, the
work ends with a further reconciliation, when his mother and wife comes
to Rome to seek further penance for herself, and meets again with joy her
son and her husband.
The legends about children of incest mark them out either for great
sanctity or for great evil: they are marked for good or ill from the
moment of their conception. Bringing the Christian God into such stor-
ies is commonplace but theologically difficult, as the protagonists are
evidently polluted in the circumstances of their birth and, in the case of
double incest stories, sinners in their marriages, but without any inten-
tion to sin on their part. Gregory is attempting to do the right thing in
God’s eyes and redeem himself from the curse of his origin when he
marries: an attempt at a righteous life that goes horribly wrong, yet
which incurs its own extreme penance. Making a man with such a bio-
graphy into a saint is counter-intuitive, and indeed the point of these
stories seems to have lain in the idea that God can forgive even the most
extreme sins;36 incest incurs abhorrence even when it is unwitting.
God’s purposes become even more inscrutable, though the trajectory of
destiny more darkly logical, in the case of the wicked, traitors to the
king or to God. The Middle Ages produced two such counter-examples
to the providential saving of the innocent, in Judas and Mordred. Both
are cast adrift in an attempt to avoid prophecies of disaster, and both
are preserved to make their great betrayal; their stories are discussed
more extensively in the final chapter.
Casting adrift can itself be a test of guilt, or of hope following from
repentance. Most such narratives offer a close parallel to the penitential
romances, in which sinners are allowed to make up for past misdeeds.
Three Irish brothers who had been born, like Robert the Devil, after their
mother had prayed to the devil, undertake such an ordeal on the ocean as
penance after a similar career of church-wrecking.37 When St Patrick dis-
covered that a bandit named Maccuill had planned to kill him but
repented, he committed judgement on him to God, ordering his would-
be assassin to go unarmed into a one-hide coracle with no rudder or oar,
food or water; his feet were to be fettered, and the key thrown into the sea.
The man’s penitence was accepted by God: the boat was blown to the Isle
of Man, where Maccuill was rescued by the bishop, and in due course
succeeded him to the office.38 His elevation may be ecclesiastical rather
than secular, but the pattern it follows is very close to God’s preservation
of the penitent or righteous for reward within this world.
The workings of Providence are evident in the story of Maccuill, but to
the eye of faith, there was no need for God to be prompted into action as
a response to punishment. The most intrepid group of such seafarers
chose exposure in a rudderless boat of their own volition, precisely in
order to put themselves into the hands of God: to take the adventure that
God would send them in the most literal of ways, and, to anyone without
such faith, the most terrifying. They were again most often Irish, and
their adventures are frequently preserved in saints’ lives—or indeed as
saints’ lives, since such an expression of trust in Providence constitutes
faith of a heroic order. The idea seems to have come, at least in part, from
the analogous judicial practice. When sixty couples of the men of Ross
were cast adrift as a punishment, so that ‘God would pass His judgement
upon them’, two of the spectators, named Snedgus and MacRiagla,
decided that they should themselves go ‘with their own consent’—
unforced by any authority other than their own or God’s—not as a pun-
ishment but ‘into the outer ocean on a pilgrimage’. Initially, they use
oars; but after a while they ship them so as to entrust their journey
entirely to God.39 This most extreme form of pilgrimage is attested by
record as well as by story. There is a famous entry in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle for the year 891, which recounts how three Irishmen came
ashore in Cornwall in a coracle ‘without any oars’. They spent a few days
recovering, but insisted on putting to sea again, since their object was to
seek exile from men for the sake of God.40 The presence of Irish hermits
in Iceland, which was otherwise uninhabited when the early Norse set-
tlers arrived, further attests to the practice of pilgrimage on the open seas.
They may or may not have used oars for their journey, but it might not
have made much difference to their chances of striking land before they
died of exposure or thirst. Since they probably did not know of the exis-
tence of Iceland when they set out, and had no means of pinpointing its
whereabouts at all precisely if they did, they would have had a fairly equal
chance of reaching it whether they could propel or steer their boats or
not, given assistance from the prevailing winds blowing northwards
through the Atlantic. They did not, so far as we know, set out with any
intended destination in mind: they put entirely into the hands of God
where, or whether, they would reach land. If they were lucky, they would
touch Iceland; if they were even luckier, they would touch the face of
God. The primitive nature of the marine technology used by these pil-
grims of the sea would have made it harder for them to make the return
journey against the prevailing winds, and, in any case, return was not an
issue. It was not the point of these journeys that you should come back to
your own society. The object of a pilgrimage on land, a shrine or holy
place, ‘represents a “threshold”, a place and moment “in and out of
time” ’, and the pilgrim ‘hopes to have there direct experience of the
sacred, invisible, or supernatural order’.41 Pilgrimage at sea, its destina-
tion unknowable even as to whether it would be in this world or the next,
represents the crossing of a threshold out of human time to the sacred in
the most direct and challenging of ways.
The most famous of these Irish voyagers is none the less one who did
return: St Brendan. If he and his followers had acted like the other pil-
grims of the sea and set up hermitages or a monastic community in
their newly discovered land, there would be no legend. The fact that the
story exists at all predicts that they will return to tell their tale—that
they have returned, in order for their adventures to be recorded, rather
as Malory’s knights have their deeds chronicled back at court. The
legend indeed starts with the telling of a story by a kinsman of
Brendan’s named Barinthus about his own voyage to see the wonders of
God in the deep; and it is this that inspires Brendan to do likewise,
rather as Yvain’s initial adventure at the spring is inspired by the tale
told about it by one of his fellow knights. The eventual return of
Brendan and his companions is a further reason why the legend reads
almost as much like romance as hagiography. Other similarities lie in
the extensive and unlocalized space of their travels, and in the marvels
they encounter in the seven years they spend on their voyage. The
appeal of his legend to secular audiences is evident from the number of
vernaculars into which it was translated, including an early and influen-
tial Anglo-Norman version. It might be objected that his ship was well
equipped—tackle, sail, mast, and rudder, as with Tim Severin’s recon-
struction of both his boat and his voyage—but the difference between
his craft and those with no means of control is one that the legend is
keen to minimize. At key moments, Brendan instructs his fellow seamen
to commit themselves entirely to God:
‘God is our help, our pilot and helmsman who will steer us. Ship all the oars and
the rudder, likewise furl the sail, and let God do what He wills with his servants
and his boat.’42
A piously motivated voyage of exploration will be guided at least as well

without equipment as with it, as the absence of oar and rudder is refor-
mulated as the promise that Christ will be their pilot and helmsman.
The Atlantic across which Brendan and his companions journey is as
full of marvels as any knight-errant’s forest or Orient: their uncharted
waters would amply fulfil any promise of ‘Here be sea-monsters’. There
is, however, an interesting difference between the knight’s linear progress
and their own mode of advance, since in each of their seven years at sea
they spend the periods around Easter and Christmas in the same series of
places, mostly islands, though Easter morning is always spent on the back
of a helpful whale, named Jasconius. Those liturgical feasts serve as the
only temporal and spatial co-ordinates of their voyage. They are, in other
words—in modern words—going round and round in circles, though it
never seems to have occurred either to Brendan or to the compilers or
readers of the legend to interpret their travels in such a way. Their recur-
rent visits to the same places mark the cyclical time of the liturgical year,
time measured as space, the unmeasured wastes of the Atlantic mapped
like the calendar. Their continued journeyings are therefore translated
from representing geographical movement to spiritual progression, as if
the length of their ordeal served for inward purification. In due course
they do indeed reach the Land of Promise, or perhaps it was America.
They are not allowed to stay there, however: a divine-seeming young man
appears and bids them return, first loading their boat with fruit and pre-
cious stones (that too being picked up by later romance: Huon of
Bordeaux loads magic fruit and powerful gems onto his own self-guiding
ship, to which he is directed by an angel).43 He warns Brendan too to pre-
pare for the ending of his pilgrimage, his peregrinatio, not this time at sea
but on earth.
The mapping of a voyage in an unrigged boat onto the liturgical
calendar was not confined to hagiography. The same happens in the thir-
teenth-century Roman de la Manekine, whose author, Philippe de Rémi,
was a continental French writer with particular interests in England.44
Manekine is partly set in the British Isles, but it starts in Hungary, which,
like Shakespeare’s Bohemia, has a seacoast. After the death of his wife, the
king seeks to marry his own daughter, a girl named Joïe. To prevent the
marriage, she cuts off her hand. Her father condemns her to be burned,
but his seneschal takes pity on her—comparative pity—and instead casts
her adrift with no mast, oars, or rudder.45 After making a prayer that con-
tains an outline of Redemption history—the Harrowing of Hell, the
Resurrection, the Ascension—she eventually comes ashore at Berwick,
on the first Sunday in Lent. She refuses to reveal her name, but the
Scottish king nicknames her Manekine. He falls in love with her, and
marries her at Pentecost; by the following Easter, she is pregnant. While
he is away practising chivalry, she gives birth to a son; her mother-in-law
substitutes letters saying she has borne a monster in place of those
announcing its birth, and others demanding Manekine’s burning to
death in place of the king’s more temperate reply. Once again, she is
saved by being set adrift with her baby, in the same boat, without mast or
sail, rudder or oar, in which she had arrived. In due course she comes
ashore at Rome, and is given shelter there. For seven years, the king seeks
her, in a ship whose full complement of tackling is emphasized as much
as is its absence from his wife’s boat, and one Palm Sunday he too arrives
at Rome. He takes lodgings in the same house as his wife and son, and dis-
covers their existence through a ring with which the child is playing. In
that same Holy Week, the king of Hungary arrives in Rome to do penance
for his past sins, and he too is reunited and reconciled with Manekine.
Her happiness is completed by the miraculous rediscovery and restora-
tion of her hand, which has been preserved in the belly of a sturgeon, in
a glove-shaped place like a reliquary (so overgoing the miraculous return
of the key to Gregory’s fetters; the fish, somewhat ungratefully—though
perhaps not impiously, given the associations with Easter week—is
eaten). The family attends all the Easter services, and on the night of
Easter Sunday, when the penitential season of Lent is over, Manekine,
now with her name of Joïe restored to her, shares a bed with her husband
again. They return to Scotland the following Easter Day, to public cele-
brations. They have more children, all of whom in due course become
kings and queens; and Philippe ends by insisting that God can restore all
losses and injuries to those who remain faithful.46 The steady insistence
on the events of the Passion and their replaying in the liturgical calendar
makes explicit what in many romances remains latent: the parallel
between the shaping of romance and the felix culpa, the loss of happiness
that yet results in greater joy through direct divine intervention. The
same point is made by the choice of proper name for Manekine, Joïe, and
its restoration to her.
Le Roman de la Manekine is one of a number of closely related
romances that probably have folktale origins.47 The analogous stories
composed in England keep the malevolent mothers-in-law and the rud-
derless boats, but delete the amputation and the miraculous fish. In
Emaré, of c.1400, the boat in which the heroine is twice cast adrift is not
only without ‘anker or ore’, but without food or water, and she is almost
crazed by hunger and thirst as well as terror by the time she reaches
land.48 Although Emaré’s own piety is stressed, the emphasis of the
romance falls on marvel more than miracle. Throughout her successive
ordeals, she wears a dazzling robe made by a pagan emir’s daughter,
which has a pair of famous lovers embroidered in each corner. Although
her Christian goodness is made evident, the cloth serves to shift attention
from Providence to herself, in a quasi-magical projection of her
unchanging beauty and goodness. The other Manekine-type story moves
in the other direction, towards hagiography, since it stresses the role of its
heroine, Constance, daughter of the emperor of Rome, as a Christian
evangelist in each new destination to which she travels. The new empha-
sis (not to mention the deletion of the incest motif) may have been
thought especially appropriate for convent reading, as Nicholas Trevet,
in whose Anglo-Norman Chronicles the story first appears, was writing
for a daughter of Edward I who had become a nun at Amesbury. By pleas-
ing coincidence, he gives the story a sixth-century dating that would
make Constance’s second voyage exactly contemporary with St
Brendan’s.49 The story was picked up both by Gower in the Confessio
amantis and by Chaucer as The Man of Law’s Tale, each retelling treading
the border with saint’s life. Constance’s name is not in the first place alle-
gorical—her father is named Constantine, and Chaucer calls her
Custance, possibly to increase the sense of her as a person rather than a
personification—but the name none the less insists on her capacity for
the Christian virtue of faithful endurance. Her first casting adrift is a
consequence of her marriage to the sultan of Syria, who is prepared to
accept conversion to Christianity in order to win her hand. His mother,
however, slaughters him and the whole Christian party at the wedding
feast, Constance alone being saved from immediate death for exposure in
a ship (without sail or oar in Trevet, ‘al steerelees’ in Chaucer), so that, in
the jeers of the perpetrators, she can learn to sail home to Italy.50 After a
voyage of many years, she eventually arrives in Northumberland, pagan
since the flight of the Roman Christians, and in due course converts
many of its people and marries its king, Alla. After an accusation, like
Manekine’s and Emaré’s, of bearing a monstrous child, she and her son
are again cast adrift. Christ, however—or perhaps in this case the
Virgin—acts as her sail and rudder (CT, II. 833) and guides her boat to
Rome, where she is eventually reunited with both her father and her hus-
band. Her son in due course inherits the empire, and becomes a devoted
supporter of the Church: this is not only a story of miraculous preserva-
tion of a virtuous woman, but of the recovery of a lost heir.
The story has the capacity to be a full romance, but its ending remains
oddly muted, not least by comparison with La Manekine, or even the
legend of Gregory. This is readily explicable in Trevet’s version, since the
forward drive of chronicle towards the next ruler eliminates any possibil-
ity of pausing on a happy ending, but it is more surprising that the inde-
pendent treatments do not make more of the romance elements of the
story. There is no equivalent to the joyful sexuality of Manekine and her
husband; Chaucer’s version indeed goes out of its way to say that his
Custance did no more than put up with her husband’s attentions
(709–14). The emphasis at the ending falls less on the ‘joye and blisse’ of
family reunion (1119) than on its brevity, cut short as it is by Alla’s death.
It may have been that capacity to shift from hagiographic romance to the
mortality of history that attracted not only new readers but new writers
in the sixteenth century. It was made the subject of the first modernizing
of Chaucer, around 1520, by one Thomas Alsop, in a version called Fair
Custance—a version which, despite its pre-Reformation date, describes
the tale in its colophon as a ‘tragycall hystorie’.51 In 1600, the story was
dramatized by Thomas Dekker and others as Fair Constance of Rome,
now lost.52 Shakespeare never dramatized the story or echoed its text; but
the patient suffering of the women in his own late plays often resonates
with that of Constance, not least in their treading of the border with
tragedy and the recurrent presence of the sundering and restoring sea.
The pagan providence of his own romances none the less produces a
surge of intense happiness at the end such as the Christian story of
Constance never elicits.
from miracle to magic
Not every unsteered boat is potentially fatal. There is also a large group of
vessels, often full seagoing ships, that represent something more like the
ultimate in luxury travel than extreme privation in rotten skiffs. They
may therefore be fully equipped with sails and rudder, or the presence or
absence of tackle may not even be thought worth a mention. None the
less, they touch on the meme of the rudderless boat at so many points
that the two kinds of vessel cannot finally be separated from each other.
The recurrent feature of these ships is less consistently an absence of tack-
ling than an absence of crew: they sail with no one to operate them. None
the less, these, even more reliably than the boats without sail or oar, take
their passengers to the right place, to an adventure that awaits them. They
travel without helmsman or sailors, by magic and usually at great speed,

to wherever the voyager wishes to go, or, more often, to wherever the
boat or the person who has devised it wishes to take them. And most
often, that person is a woman.
It is evident why women should so often serve as the protagonists in
stories of casting adrift: God’s power is made most apparent by contrast
with the weakness of the victim. It is much less clear why women should
be recurrently associated with boats of the barca aventurosa variety, not
now as voyagers, but as their creators or controllers, in the role elsewhere
taken by Providence itself. From casting women as the most helpless of
romance characters, the ship with no apparent means of guidance can
also cast them as some of the most powerful, in the sense of command-
ing supernatural powers.
The origins of the association of such boats with powerful women are
obscure, though some of the earliest examples, like some of the earliest
hagiographic legends of casting adrift, are likely to have Celtic origins.
They are also often deeply enigmatic. Geoffrey of Monmouth first
invents, or records, the legend of the dying Arthur’s departure to the
‘Island of Apples’ in a boat under the aegis of the benevolent fairy
Morgen, in his Vita Merlini. This vessel has a helmsman, but Geoffrey
names him as Barinthus, Brendan’s precursor in his wanderings over the
ocean, ‘because of his knowledge of the seas and the stars of heaven’,53
and presumably also because his voyage likewise took place on the
threshold of the geographical and the supernatural. There is a different
kind of threshold to be crossed in those early versions of the Tristan story
that have the hero set adrift in an unsteered boat when he finds that the
wound he received from Marhalt’s sword cannot be cured; the voyage
takes him between plausible geographical settings, Cornwall and Ireland,
yet it also constitutes a transition from Mark to Isolt, social conformity
to transgressive passion. Its destination appears fortuitous, but there is
too strong a sense of both destiny and powerful women about the voyage
(Isolt’s mother is the only person capable of curing him) for chance to be
sufficient.54 The core narrative of Marie de France’s Guigemar is similarly
Celtic: it begins in Brittany, in the Léonnais, where the hero is wounded
while hunting a talking hind, but he is carried by an unmanned ship to a
city which is never named and has no place on a map. The hind tells him
that he can be cured only by a woman who is prepared to suffer as much
for love of him as ever woman suffered; finding the ship empty by the
shore, he enters it and falls asleep, and it transports him to the unknown
lady. They duly fall in love; but when they are discovered by her jealous
husband, the boat reappears to fetch him away, and then returns again to
take the lady after him. The source of its magic powers is never specified,
and the lady herself is as mystified by it as is Guigemar; yet some connec-
tion between boat and woman is clearly implied. Reading the lai is rather
like coming in on a conversation that is already half over, as if all the
explaining required by the narrative has happened somewhere else. The
very mysteriousness of the boat, however, makes it grip the imagination
in ways that explanation can only spoil.
The hazards of rationalization are illustrated in the near-contempo-
rary French Partonopeus de Blois, which was translated into English in the
fifteenth century. Its hero, lost in the forest while hunting, likewise
boards an unmanned ship that he finds by the seashore; the sails are
spread without any visible human aid, and it transports him to a city that
likewise appears uninhabited except for its young queen, Melior, with
whom he falls in love, but whom he is forbidden to see. It transpires that
she has devised this means of bringing him to her by rendering both the
crew of the ship and the inhabitants of the country invisible to him,
thanks to her education in magic.55 As explanations go, this is still on the
fantastic side of the rational; but it none the less reduces the intensity of
fear and wonder evoked by Partonope’s initial mysterious voyage. The
boats of both the lai and the romance do, however, function in compa-
rable ways as a test of love, a secular equivalent to the iudicium Dei.
Guigemar’s vessel takes him to the one woman who will love him enough
to make his cure possible, and restores her to him. Partonope destroys the
magic of Melior’s vessel by his failure in trust when he insists on looking
at her, and, like the knights of the romances of atonement, he has to
struggle back to her acceptance.
Despite these examples, the Anglo-Norman and English tradition of
romance treated the motif of the magic ship devised by a powerful
woman with rather more caution than did the French and its southerly
derivatives. Such vessels appear in a few translated or adapted texts,
including the Grail section of the Morte Darthur (on which more
below), but England created few new ones of its own. The main reason
for this seems to have been the greater insistence in English romance on
some degree of plausibility, both for its boats and its women.
Preservation in an open boat is unlikely but possible, especially in an age
of faith. The self-steering magic ship is pure fantasy, such as is typically
an element of French or Italian romance. The difference can be seen
even in different versions of the same story. In Malory, the corpse of
Elaine of Ascolat is laid, richly dressed, in a little boat covered with black
samite, which is steered by a single boatman down the Thames to

Arthur’s court. In the version told in the late thirteenth-century Italian
story-collection Il Novellino she is placed alone, with a crown on her
head as well as rich clothing, in a small ship adorned with scarlet samite
and precious stones, but with no sail, oars, or living help, to be
guided to Camelot by the sea itself.56 Malory’s Elaine is naturalistic and
psychologically plausible; the Italian Elaine, like most of these women
who are able to exercise control over unsteered boats, has powers that
make her both inimitable as a role model, and impossible to empathize
with.
If either the corpse or the living woman is a saint, however, then
Celtic and English traditions are more hospitable. Magic and miracle
can interlock, and there is not always an easy distinction to be made
between the two. Early saints’ legends bristle with accounts of saints,
both male and female, who are transported upstream or across the sea
by self-steering boats, or whose remains are taken by similar means to
their divinely appointed shrines (so explaining, lest the sceptical ask
questions, why their relics should be available for veneration in some
place other than where they died).57 English pragmatism or sophistica-
tion led away from such representations in its secular fiction, however,
whereas southern European fantasy found ways to accommodate them.
In its Italian composition, its setting in North Africa, and its all-male
cast, the episode in the Orlando Furioso when Astolfo provides himself
with an entire fleet of ships, complete with oars, sails, rigging, and
indeed sailors, would seem as far distant as possible from a Celtic
woman saint’s minimal means of sea-travel; but he obtains his ships by
miracle, by casting leaves on the sea to be transformed into galleons, in
a piece of providential magic identical except for the upgrading in scale
to the voyage from Ireland to Cornwall made by the virgin Hya, on a
leaf enlarged by a touch with her staff.58
The urbane Renaissance Ariosto can hardly have expected his audi-
ence to give any credit to his story, set as it is within a fiction that
includes travel to the moon by hippogriff, and indeed one wonders how
many of the pious would have given literal belief to the story of Hya; but
miraculous means of sea-transport in the prose versions of the Grail,
composed within the overtly fictional framework of romance, some-
times reappear in chronicle accounts, as if piety could cover all gaps in
plausibility even in historiography of the high Middle Ages. John of
Glastonbury, in his Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey, recounts the legend
of how the son of Joseph of Arimathea and his most pious followers
crossed the English Channel on his miraculously lengthened shirt, cor-

rectly citing the book ‘qui Sanctum Graal appellatur’, the French prose
History of the Holy Grail, as his source. This was not just a boat without
sail or rudder; it was a sea-crossing ‘without a ship and without oars’.59
Those of his followers who had less faith were allowed to make the
crossing by a more orthodox kind of boat, except that it had been made
by Solomon. In the sequel to the History, the Quest of the Holy Grail,
supernatural vessels do at least take the form of boats, but they are asso-
ciated with a sequence of women—or at least apparent women. The first
is the beautiful damsel who attempts to seduce Perceval and who turns
out to be Lucifer in female disguise; another is saintly in all respects
except canonization, Perceval’s virgin sister; the third is Solomon’s
wife, cast as a wicked woman in accordance with Solomon’s strictures
on the whole sex,60 yet who masterminds the building of a literal Ship
of Faith.
Despite their apparent differences both from each other and from
other stories of unmanned or rudderless boats, each of the ships of the
Grail quest has some function as a iudicium Dei, a means of making visi-
ble the judgement of God. Perceval has to undergo a testing that refash-
ions chivalric épreuve as the temptation of the saint, in his resistance to
the seductive fiend who visits the waste island where he is marooned, in
a ship that sails as fast as if ‘all the wynde of the worlde had dryven it’.61
By contrast, the companions of the Grail enter the ship that will carry
them further on their quest by divine invitation, Galahad being brought
by the woman who later identifies herself as Perceval’s sister; their pres-
ence on the ship confirms their status as elect. This ship is guided by God
alone, without any action or direction from its passengers. It is the
maiden, however, who acts as their guide and informant on the further
vessel to which it takes them, the one made by Solomon’s wife. This has
sailed unmanned since its construction in the Holy Land, its journeyings
taking in Ireland.62 It bears the warning inscription,
Thou man which shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste
beleve, for I am Faythe
—indeed, as the virgin informs them, if they have anything less than per-
fect faith, they will die on entering it.63 She confirms its dangers by telling
them how the Maimed King, despite being a man ‘ryght perfite of lyff’,
received his still unhealed wound from the sword he found after board-
ing the vessel, and which is intended for Galahad alone. The knights’
response is to go on board, precisely because if they are ‘a myssecreature
other an untrew knyght’, they will perish, just as Providence will execute
its judgement on the guilty on the open seas.
The last of the Quest’s series of boats seems at first sight the most com-
monplace. In contrast to the marvels of the ship devised by Solomon’s
wife, there is nothing inherently distinctive about it, except for that mark
of lack of distinction, that it is ‘withoute sayle other ore’.64 It functions in
the same way as the other unequipped boats that carry saints across seas
or rivers, or which transport their relics to new shrines: it constitutes less
a test of the virgin’s holiness than a demonstration of it. The virgin has no
doubt as to its powers—or hers, or God’s:
As sone as I am dede putte me in a boote at the next haven, and lat me go as aven-
tures woll lede me. And as sone as ye three com to the cité of Sarras, there to
enchyve the Holy Grayle, ye shall fynde me undir a towre aryved.65
They obey her instructions, and the wind carries the boat out of sight, and
into God’s hands. There is nothing random about her journey, and her
certainty of her destination marks her as retaining her qualities as guide
or pilot, not by means of helm or tiller, but by privileged spiritual know-
ledge.
The disappearance of the boat from the companions’ gaze does not
mark its disappearance from the narrative, however, even before it
reaches its promised destination. In due course, first Lancelot, then
Galahad, are directed to enter it. As with the knights on any quest, their
travelling together is only temporary, and the destinies of the boat’s pas-
sengers are very different. Galahad, like those Irish saints, is on a one-way
journey, which will take him ultimately to God. It looks as if Lancelot is
likewise travelling towards such singularity, a singularity figured by the
holy corpse that he accompanies; but finally his heart retains its centre in
the society, and the queen, to which he will return. The maiden herself
completes the journey she has prophesied, to Sarras, where the compan-
ions of the Grail bury her.
In the course of its journey, this boat takes Lancelot and Galahad
around ‘yles ferre from folke, where there repayred none but wylde
beestes, and ther they founde many straunge adventures and peryllous’.66
It thus doubles as a barca aventurosa, the kind of vessel recognized so
immediately by Don Quixote. Tasso, who coined the term in his Rinaldo,
makes a parallel connection with a chaste woman of exceptional powers,
though hers are magic rather than divine. She is a queen named Alba, and
it is she who devised for Rinaldo (in John Hoole’s eighteenth-century
translation)
A wondrous bark of magic texture fram’d,

And this the queen the BARK ADVENTUROUS nam’d;
For every warrior that in this confides,
The vessel swift to some adventure guides.
Without a pilot’s aid, by spelful force,
Through billowy seas she holds her certain course.67
Tasso elaborates on the motif in the Gerusalemme Liberata, for which he

supplies two such boats, one bad and one good. A less-innocent Rinaldo
is trapped by the enchantress Armida by means of the bad one: she leaves
a ‘little frigot’ by a river-bank, bearing an inscription that seems to
promise just such chivalric exploits, on the safe assumption that he will
immediately accept the adventure it offers.68 Its good counterpart carries
two of his Christian fellow knights to the Fortunate Islands on a mission
to rescue him from her clutches. This is piloted by another lady of more
than natural powers, ‘in looke a saint, and angell bright in shew’, who is
virtuous in substance as well as appearance. Her ‘little barke’, like those
of other enchantresses or indeed Perceval’s Lucifer, travels at remarkable
speed: it ‘scant toucht the troubled maine’, like a pre-modern hydrofoil.
Although she can steer it, she does so by magical knowledge, ‘withouten
needle, map or card’, not by the technological instruments of naviga-
tion.69 It is this female pilot who prophesies to her passenger knights
about the Renaissance voyages of discovery of the New World in ways
that make their own voyage a prototype for those, turning romance into
a figure for history.70
The motif of the ship sailing at the bidding of a powerful woman might
seem to be ideally formulated for the Elizabethan explorers to take up,
but it did not happen. It may not have been sufficiently embedded in
English tradition; it may have been associated too much with women
who did not make obvious subjects of panegyric—the later and more sin-
ister Morgan le Fay, for instance, is something of a specialist in such ves-
sels.71 Or it may have been due to a conviction that it is hard work, not
magic, that produces results. Such a belief is clearly at work when Spenser
turns his attention to the marine section of the Gerusalemme Liberata in
Book II of the Faerie Queene. Here, he cross-fertilizes the meme of the
boat controlled by a woman with that of the boat without sail or oar, and
imitates Tasso’s allegory as much as his narrative. Rinaldo, according to
Tasso’s own allegorical interpretation, represents the ireful capacity of
the soul in conflict with reason, which is represented by Godfrey;
Armida, in Fairfax’s phrasing, ‘is that temptation which laieth siege to the
power of our desires’.72 In just the same way, the passionate Cymochles
is attracted to the ‘little Gondelay’ carrying Phaedria (who is glossed in
the verse summary to II. vi as ‘immodest mirth’): a boat that travels over
the sluggish waves of the Idle Lake
Withouten oare or pilot it to guide,
Or winged canvas with the wind to flie.
II. vi. 5
She can steer it by turning a pin, but since the boat chooses its own way,
she does not usually bother. She takes Guyon too over the water to her
island when he is looking for a ferry over the lake, but he has to leave
behind his palmer, his own representative of reason. Once he has escaped
from Phaedria, Spenser describes him resuming the proper course of his
quest like ‘a pilot well expert in perilous wave’, who keeps his eye on ‘his
card and compas’ and his hand on the tiller (II. vii. 1). The metaphor
becomes literal in the final voyage Guyon makes with the palmer to
Acrasia’s country, where the palmer himself steers their ‘well rigged
boate’, and where, when danger threatens, the response is not to ship
their oars but to drive them all the harder. Their effort is all the more
noticeable by contrast with their further encounter with Phaedria, whose
‘boate withouten ore’ travels with none of the labour that their own
demands.73 Catholic miracle had demonstrated divine approval of the
saintly through the removal of effort, in a figuring of a prelapsarian or a
heavenly state without labour; a Protestant work ethic requires that the
virtuous must demonstrate their status as elect by strenuous exertion.74
‘A shippe without sayle other ore’ takes you out of your familiar com-
munity in more than one sense, and more decisively than any other kind
of quest. To survive such an ordeal you must be in effect elect: specially
favoured, perhaps by a lady, most often by God, whether you are an inno-
cent victim, or a penitent, or a saint, or a knight. The corollary of that is
that your own society is in some sense a failure: unsatisfying, unjust, or
of insufficient faith. The transition to the ship from the chivalric quest,
the quest on horseback, marks a transition to a new level of experience
altogether: one in which the journey constitutes the adventure in itself.
On a horseback quest, you journey from the centre of your society to the
periphery, and return to the centre to strengthen it. A rudderless boat
impels you to the periphery; the centre rejects you, or you turn your back
on it. What you find, however, is that what had seemed to be an edge is
in fact a new and truer centre. That turning of ethical geography inside
out may be another reason why Spenser finds the motif unusable. Book
II opens with a comparison between the still undiscovered world of

Faerieland and the newly discovered world of Peru, the Amazon, and
Virginia (II Proem 2). The object of exploration is to come back, to bring
back the spoils of discovery and colonization to the home country. The
object of his creation of Faerieland is to create a figure for Elizabeth’s
‘owne realmes’ (4). So far as Spenser is concerned, the very point of his
poem is that England is the centre to which all else relates.
CHAPTER THREE
Magic that doesn’t work
Romance promises a world of dragons and giants, magic weapons and

protective rings, flying horses and self-steering boats. Magic and the
supernatural rank high among the distinguishing features of the genre,
the most recognizable elements of family resemblance. The association of
romance with the marvellous was as high in the sixteenth century as in
the Middle Ages: hence the monsters and enchantments that Spenser
assembles in the Faerie Queene, or the brown-paper dragons and stage
giants that inhabited Elizabethan drama before Marlowe and Kyd
changed the fashions.1 It is none the less rare for any romance not to leave
a sense of disappointment about its marvels. ‘Marvel’, by derivation,
means what is to be wondered at—from the French merveiller, semanti-
cally overlapping both with the English wonder and with the Latin admi-
rare; but all too often romance marvels are neither very wonderful nor
very admirable. The dragon is always destined for the chop; a 14-foot
giant is bathetic when the gold standard for giants has been set at 16 feet;2
an oracle carries as much plot intrigue as a detective story where the clues
are explained in advance. Still worse, the best chances of creating a sense
of wonder or fear are frequently thrown away, as if the authors, having
once introduced the requisite supernatural elements, did not know what
to do with them. Far from being the most exciting features of a plot, they
have the potential for being among the most boring. Peele’s Old Wives
Tale—as its title indicates, a compendium of everyone’s favourite motifs
from popular romance and folktale—promises a were-bear, a man trans-
formed every night into ‘the White Bear of England’s wood’; but we only
get to see him in the daytime, in ordinary human form.3 The text as we
have it may have been cut, but there still seems to be the implication that
a reference to the bearsuit in the property cupboard carries as much, or
as little, excitement as putting it on stage. The more that enchantments
or fairies or magic potions are expected, the less enthralling they become.
Magic is above all a narrative issue: a way of telling a story; or a prob-
lem that gets in the way of telling a story well. The very replicability of
magic, the ease with which it can be incorporated into a story, threatens
to make it not just a set of memes but a set of clichés. This chapter is
exceptional in this book in that it is not about a meme, but about ways of
tackling a meme that got out of hand. There is no simple formula for such
a process, no equivalent to the rudderless boat, so it was never easily
replicable. Yet whether by selective imitation or by a recurrent process of
reinvention, one particular way of making magic central to romance
appears again and again in the work of the most skilled craftsmen of the
genre, and that, paradoxically, is by sidelining it, diverting its wonder
elsewhere.
There are all too many examples of why a solution was needed. The col-
lapse of wonder at the marvellous was evident enough to invite parody in
Sir Thopas: a giant should at least be a safe test of the hero’s strength, but
Sir Thopas’s giant has to be supplied with three heads shortly after his first
appearance in an attempt to keep up the interest. The supernatural, in the
form of the fairy realm, can on occasion be almost indistinguishable from
the human, hence Richard Johnson’s fairy queen in The History of Tom a
Lincoln who is indistinguishable from the human. The problem of frus-
tration is intensified in the case of magic objects and amulets, where the
reader’s expectations are often baffled in ways that can seem quite per-
verse. There is frequently—indeed, normally—a lack of excitement in the
treatment of such talismans, which is reinforced by the minimal part that
they play in the plot. Chaucer himself assembles a fine collection of magic
objects in the Squire’s Tale, and then stops short, as if, having once gath-
ered all these marvels together for display, he was not really interested in
developing a plot from them. It is quite common for the hero to be given
a magic ring—Richard Cœur de Lion gets two, one to protect him against
water, one against fire—which is never mentioned again.4 Of all the magic
objects in the Morte Darthur, one whose magic power is among the most
highly praised is the scabbard of Excalibur, which prevents its wearer from
losing blood; but Arthur himself never has the opportunity of using it, and
it is thrown away irrecoverably into a lake after it has had only one chance
to show its virtue, and then on another man’s behalf.5 Malory leads us to
expect that the scabbard will play an important part in the romance, but
it is lost forever, without so much as a samite-clad arm in the water to
receive it back. Even more baffling than such instances where our expec-
tations are frustrated in one way or another, is a large group of magic
objects, distinctive of many of the greatest romances, which are
introduced with all the emphasis appropriate to them, and then, when the
critical moment arrives, their magic fails to work.
Magic that Doesn’t Work 139
The particular oddity of this lies in the fact that the existence of magic,
like God’s intervention through miracle, can be demonstrated only by
the fact that it does work. A cloak that fails to turn its wearer invisible is
likely to be a fraud; and so are recipes for making the philosopher’s stone,
even though they may incorporate correct chemistry along the way. As
the case of alchemy indicates, there is a shifting borderline between magic
and science that complicates the issues, since science, like magic, demon-
strates its truth by working. It was widely believed that there were special
virtues inherent in particular stones, and sometimes there are: magnets
do attract iron, for reasons that looked like just such a marvellous power
until the underlying physical principles were explained. The possible
existence of a magnetic rock so powerful that it draws all ships to it and
lets none escape, of the kind that keeps Huon of Bordeaux trapped for
months and provides Spenser with his Rock of Vile Reproach, was a
marvellous extrapolation from an observable fact.6 And since magnets
also have an inherent power to point towards the north, it was not so far-
fetched to believe that (for instance) an amethyst would protect its
wearer from drunkenness. One might expect that experience would
rapidly falsify such a belief, but there is something of a catch-22 about
experience: if you get drunk, clearly what you are wearing is not a gen-
uine amethyst. Romances offer an array of plants that have implausible
powers of healing, but that some plants have medicinal properties was a
fact acknowledged in every manor garden and increasingly by modern
pharmacology. What is at issue in instances like these is less magic as
beyond the order of nature, than a kind of technological marvel operat-
ing just beyond the borders of replicable experience, rather as in modern
science fiction. The borderline between fact and magic may involve not a
category change but simply the crossing of a very narrow line of possibil-
ity. Jays and parrots can talk, sparrowhawks should not; chimpanzees can
acquire some principles of unvocalized language, a speaking hind comes
from the world of the supernatural. A rhinoceros is every bit as implau-
sible as a unicorn to the vast majority of early modern populations who
had never seen either; and the occasional washing up of a narwhal horn
on a beach, up to 9 feet of breathtaking spiralling ivory, provided strong
evidence for the existence of unicorns. ‘Real’ unicorns, by contrast, in the
shape of Sumatran rhinos, may have been ‘marvellous’ to the European,
but they were also a sad disappointment. ‘They are very ugly brutes to
look at,’ lamented Marco Polo, as he described their swine-like heads
drooping downward towards the mud-puddles in which they liked to
stand. ‘They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that
they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our

notions.’7
As that example indicates, new discoveries, whether geographical or
scientific, could unweave the rainbow, remove the marvel from the mar-
vellous. It had long been recognized that much of what incited wonder
was simply unexplained nature: in Gervase of Tilbury’s formulation, in
which he distinguishes miracle, the preternatural workings of God, from
the marvellous,
We call those things marvels [mirabilia] which are beyond our comprehension,
even though they are natural: in fact the inability to explain why a thing is so
constitutes a marvel.8
Yet there is no reduction in the literary category of the marvellous over

time. As more and more things were explained, the marvellous
expanded its frontiers to match, to the point of inventing new worlds
when the old one had yielded up its secrets (Ariosto includes space
travel, Spenser creates Fairy Land, modern writers invent fantasy worlds
that may be accessible from this, as are Narnia and far-flung galaxies, or
may be somewhere else altogether, as are the Shire and Mordor). And
explanation left magic, an intervention in the course of nature by non-
natural means, largely untouched. Magic occupied a distinctly shady
area between the natural and the supernatural, the miraculous and the
superstitious. Some of the best brains of the sixteenth century devoted
their efforts to understanding magic, in the belief that it, like the physi-
cal world, could be made subject to explanation, and therefore control.
The same mathematical skills and desire for knowledge that impelled
the advances in the understanding of the universe also served as an
incentive to put hermetic magic on an equally sound mathematical and
astronomical footing. Even the simpler magic or marvellous of the
romance variety often reflects far more of observation and experiment
than we commonly acknowledge. Dragons, giants, and monstrous
beasts may have had their origins, or at least received confirmation, in
the discovery of huge fossil bones, which evidently once belonged to
something not found in the everyday order of nature.9 Astrology starts
from a firmer experiential base. It is obvious, and correct, that the sun
and the moon govern the sequence of night and day, associated circa-
dian rhythms, the seasons, and the tides, and it was easy to extrapolate
from that to more distant heavenly bodies, and to regard as causes what
we would at best regard as correlations (such as the summer ascendancy
of the dog star causing the diseases associated with hot weather). The
continuing importance of the pagan gods in the medieval world springs

very largely from the fact that the planets carry their names: that the
goddess Venus influences love is a personification—a deification—of
the amorous influence of the planet Venus on humankind. So, in the
Knight’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the principles of love
(Venus) and war (Mars) find themselves at odds; their dispute is
resolved by Saturn, malevolent fortune, in the form of Arcite’s horse
rearing and mortally injuring him—malevolence personified as Saturn
in the tale, but no more than an accident with a strong Saturnian
colouring in the play.10 In both, Emily, who prays to Diana/Lucina for
perpetual virginity, overlooks the fact that the moon is also the presid-
ing power over change,11 and, since female fertility correlates with the
lunar unit of the month, over childbirth. Aurelius’ first idea for drown-
ing the rocks in the Franklin’s Tale is to pray to Apollo that he and his
sister, Lucina, should stay in exact opposition for two years: that is, that
the sun and moon should become in effect geostationary satellites, and
so hold the tide high. Not just astrology, therefore, but supernatural
machinery needs careful reading: there may be more of the ordinary
processes of nature in it than first meets the eye.
Such encompassing of marvel and the supernatural within the physi-
cal cosmos removes some of the sense of otherness, of some extraordi-
nary intervention in the familiar world, that magic needs if it is to stir a
proper sense of wonder. A further problem arises from the devaluing of
the preternatural by its very predictability in romance: what is expected
is not likely to be exciting. Even with three heads, Sir Thopas’s giant is
rather déjà vu, and his fairy mistress is little better. She is, first, simply
preferable to the other women on offer:
An elf-queene wol I love, ywis,
For in this world no womman is
Worthy to be my make
In towne;
VII.790–3
and he proceeds to look for her rather as a twitcher would pursue an
unusual species of bird:
Into his sadel he clamb anon,
And priketh over stile and stoon
An elf-queene for t’espye.
797–9
How do you keep the marvellous wonderful? Many of the most popu-
lar romances, such as Bevis of Hamptoun, use it to provide a bit of extra
thrill or to cover a need in the story that is hard to plot in any other way:
giants and dragons make more exciting opponents than ordinary
knights, and Bevis’s future wife, Josiane, preserves her virginity for him
through several years of marriage to a heathen king by means of a differ-
ent talisman or charm in almost every surviving text—its precise nature
does not matter so long as it serves the required end.12 One way to restore
the wonder to such episodes is to intensify the naturalism of the back-
ground: to portray a world that looks as if it operates by familiar criteria,
and then to disrupt it. That master storyteller J. R. R. Tolkien gets the
story of Farmer Giles of Ham under way with an account of how Farmer
Giles’s dog manages to escape from the kitchen one night to go for a walk:
He had a fancy for moonshine, and rabbits. He had no idea, of course, that a giant
was also out for a walk.13
And the Gawain-poet uses exactly the same technique, first drawing the
Christmas revels at Arthur’s court on the model of those found in four-
teenth-century Windsor or Westminster, without even a Round Table to
mark the difference, and then having the entry of the huge green man on
his green horse silence the revelry. The Green Knight keeps his spooki-
ness by never being explained—and tends to lose it at the end of the
poem when explanations are offered. Its Percy Folio retelling, the Grene
Knight, explains him at the start, and loses the spookiness accordingly.14
It is as if the supernatural is killed by the rational, but can only be saved
by the commonplace.
Even working magic has its problems, for the more one wonders at the
marvel, the less admirable is the hero who benefits from it. An invincible
sword might just as well be wielded by a coward as a hero, since it makes
bravery or physical prowess unnecessary. A protective ring is very nice for
the wearer, but its wearer could be anybody. The more special the magic
powers, the less special the characters appear who have them at their dis-
posal. Magic and heroism find it very hard to occupy the same text, or the
same portion of the text. Ariosto’s Ruggiero possesses a magic shield that
renders his opponents helpless, but he is careful to avoid what might be
thought the fraud of using it, and after he accidentally does so, he is so
anxious lest all his prowess be ascribed to magic that he throws it into a
well—thereby winning all the greater renown.15 Gawain is on occasion
endowed with strength that increases double or threefold up until noon;
but it figures most strongly in the romances in which the protagonist is
fighting against Gawain rather than those where he himself holds centre
stage. The highest heroism lies in the ability of a mere man to resist such
supernatural powers: Malory cites them when our sympathies lie entirely
with his opponent, Lancelot.16 The scabbard of Excalibur is a striking
instance of the same phenomenon. In the one episode in which it plays a
part, it has been stolen along with Excalibur itself by Morgan le Fay, for
her lover Accolon to use in his combat with Arthur. The king has to prove
his heroism, not while he is protected by the scabbard and fighting with
the sword that draws blood at every stroke, but when his opponent has
them; he has to fight against supernatural odds, and yet he wins.
The magic in this instance works, but not in the way that the plot had
seemed to promise. The episode elicits a reaction of wonder, not at the
magic of the weapons but at Arthur’s own prowess. This effect has been
named by Caroline Walker Bynum, in her study of wonder, as a
‘significance-reaction’.17 The magic is not important in itself, but for
what it reveals: human qualities at their highest can be appreciated to the
full only when they are measured against the supernatural, not when they
operate in conjunction with it. What we are invited to marvel at is not the
magic, but at courage and endurance unaided by magic. Wonder and
admiration are transferred from the supernatural to the human.
Romances therefore rarely make magic the driving factor in the plot,
or the decisive factor in the hero’s or heroine’s success. Magic and the
supernatural often appear oddly supplementary: decoration rather than
substance. Sir Launfal and Huon of Bordeaux, with their active fairy
involvement with the hero throughout the story, are the exceptions, not
the norm; they fall in that respect closer to fairytale, a genre that might be
thought closely analogous to the romance but which is much more likely
to make the supernatural of central importance. The life of the heroine of
a fairytale can be changed by a fairy godmother, or preserved by a goblin
who can spin straw into gold; the hero can find himself quite unexpect-
edly in possession of a magic flute or lamp. Even in fairytale, however,
magic often gives way to practical possibility and human determination
at the end. Once the magic has served to bring Cinderella to the notice of
the prince, he searches her out himself. Rumpelstiltskin gives away his
own secret and so enables the heroine to release herself from his schemes.
One of the slightly disconcerting things about the end of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream is that it fails to restore this emphasis on the human: the
fairy magic is needed to sort out the lovers into the right couples; love will
not do the work by itself. Such unconditional driving of a plot by magic
or the supernatural does, however, move towards the edge of the generic
spectrum of romance. The social concerns of the genre may be one rea-
son for this: magic of this kind is not going to be encountered in the real
world, nor can it in itself supply any model of behaviour unless it
becomes allegorical (hence its extensive use in the Faerie Queene). The
hero, the heroine, and their processes of self-becoming require more of a
human focus. The most striking way for an author to integrate the two,
to fulfil the audience’s pleasurable expectations of magic while keeping
the inner meaning of the story insistently on the central characters, is for
the magic not to work—or more accurately, when what works is not any
power or virtue within the magic object, but some power or virtue in its
bearer.
non-functioning magic
Such a use of magic emerged as the problem of the predictability of mar-

vel became evident. Magic was beginning simply to fail to work, both lit-
erally and in audience effect, without any compensating human
significance. A single example—fictitious in every detail but based on
actual romance situations—will show the range of ways in which these
failures manifest themselves. Let us suppose that the lady has presented
her knight with a magic flying horse, one like those of the Squire’s Tale,
Valentine and Orson, and Don Quixote, that is operated by a pin in its
ear.18 She has now been carried off, and is enclosed in a tower in Babylon
in dire peril; and if the knight does not arrive by nightfall she will be
burned alive, or married, or meet some equally dreadful fate. The hero
has at his disposal the horse, and also an airline ticket for a scheduled
flight from London Heathrow. (This is important: it is generally only in
fairytales, as distinct from romances, that the magic is forced on the
hero—that he rubs the lamp and the genie appears, whether he is wanted
or not. In romance the hero has the option of refusing the magic.) It
might now be expected that the author would next describe the hero’s
astonishing and extraordinary flight through the air on his magic horse;
but this happens surprisingly seldom, even if those romances are
included where the equivalent of the journey by flying horse is as routine
as the scheduled flight. It is much more likely that the hero will get onto
the horse—and nothing will happen. He has to flag down a taxi, rush to
the airport, and arrive both there and (after a further delay on the run-
way) at Babylon after everyone thinks he will be too late. That the author
may mention later that the horse was programmed only to fly to Camelot
does not enhance its reputation as magic in the reader’s eye.

Alternatively, the horse may indeed be programmed to fly to Babylon,
but on arrival the hero discovers that the lady has been moved to Peking;
so he has to take a scheduled plane flight in order to reach his desired des-
tination. Worse, there are occasions when the hero hears the dreadful
news, rushes desperately after the taxi, the plane, and so on, arrives safely,
and only remembers at that stage that he had the simple option of flying
by horse instead. Or the lady may have given it to the hero with stern
warnings about what will happen if he carries more than 20 kilos of bag-
gage on it. In the excitement of the moment, he slings his battle-steed
behind the saddle of his artificial horse, and loads on a couple of spare
suits of armour as well; the magic horse operates as promised, and all that
happens afterwards is that the lady tells him he should not have taken the
risk. There is also the possibility—perhaps the most frustrating of all—
that the poet will state the initial situation, and then, in the next sentence,
present his hero safely arrived in Babylon and carrying on with his adven-
tures, but with no mention at all as to which method of transport he used.
Ludicrous as these situations sound, they can all be paralleled many
times over from medieval romances. The horse that will not take off
because the programming is wrong is represented by Lancelot in the
Chevalier de la Charrette of Chrétien de Troyes, who finds himself
trapped by a portcullis; he accordingly gazes on the ring that will protect
him against enchantment. But the trap is quite natural; nothing whatever
happens, and Lancelot has to fight his way out by ordinary means.19 Was
the ring really magic? We have to take Chrétien’s word for it; but it is per-
haps not asking too much of an author that his magic should not only
exist but be seen to exist. The need for the plane flight in addition to the
horse is the situation of the lady Ydoine in the Anglo-Norman Amadas et
Ydoine, who is about to be married to an unwanted suitor; so she arranges
for three sorcières to enter the chamber of her bridegroom-to-be through
a tiny hole in the wall, and terrify him with terrible prophecies about
what will happen if he goes ahead with the marriage. The sorceresses do
their stuff, but what Ydoine has overlooked is that the man is hardis et
corageus, and decides to marry her anyway. She therefore has to invent an
entirely natural set of excuses to prevent his sleeping with her.20 The hero
who overlooks his flying horse is Huon of Bordeaux, who fights a mighty
combat to get past the porters defending the entrance to the castle of the
Emir of Babylon because he simply forgets that he has acquired a ring
from a giant that will take him past them without opposition.21 Instead,
he tells the porters that he is a Saracen, in direct contravention of his oath
to the fairy king Oberon that he would never lie; but the breaking of the
prohibition has none of the dire consequences that had been promised,
nor indeed any consequences at all. A comparable ignoring of the excess
baggage warning occurs in Chrétien’s Yvain, when a damsel smears the
hero all over with a magic ointment when she has been strictly instructed
only to put a little on his temples; she throws the box away, telling her
mistress she dropped it; the lady expresses bitter regret, and that is the
end of the matter.22 The audience’s expectations are aroused and then let
down, for no apparent reason. As for not knowing what happens,
whether the magic works or not, Yvain is given a ring by his lady that will
protect him against all evil, sickness, and imprisonment; at the end of a
year, when the ring is taken away from him, he is certainly still healthy
and free, but we are never told whether the ring had anything to do with
it.23 Once again, it may be magic, but it is not seen to be so. The frustra-
tion is the same as in the Old Wives Tale, where the actors seem to
promise that the bearsuit will be got out of the property cupboard, but it
never appears on stage; or as if an empty bearsuit did indeed appear, but
with neither a role in the plot nor any actor inside it to make it move.
Huon of Bordeaux might be accused of having a scattershot effect about
its magic, but the same is not true of Amadas et Ydoine, and Chrétien is
generally credited with actually possessing the high level of thought about
how he writes that he claims for himself. These examples would seem to
suggest a certain mindlessness at the level of both narrative and meaning,
matter and sentence. The texts read as if a gesturing towards magic were
sufficient to fulfil audience expectations, however badly those expecta-
tions might be let down at the level of plot: as if a token generic require-
ment mattered more than coherence of action. Their narrative
uselessness is matched by their lack of any obvious ethical or emotional
function. But one of these incidents does carry a significance that takes it
beyond bathos, and that is the last—Yvain’s protective ring. It certainly
seemed significant enough to the early fourteenth-century English
adapter of the romance for him to follow his source particularly faithfully
at this point in his own version, Ywain and Gawain. The lady gives it to
Yvain/Ywain after their marriage, when he requests leave of absence to
maintain his knightly reputation in the chivalric world. She grants this on
condition that he return in a year’s time, the penalty being that he will
lose her if he fails. He is horrified by the thought that he might be sick, or
wounded, or in prison, and so lose her against his will; and she gives him
the ring to protect him against all such eventualities. Her speech in
Middle English runs as follows (the italics are mine):
I sal lene to yow my ring, [shall lend

That es to me a ful dere thing:
In nane anger sal ye be, [no distress
Whils ye it have and thinkes on me.
I sal tel to yow onane [at once
The vertu that es in the stane: [stone
It es na preson yow sal halde,
Al if yowre fase be manyfalde; [even; foes; many
With sekenes sal ye noght be tane, [taken
Ne of yowre blode ye sal lese nane; [lose none
In batel tane sal ye noght be,
Whils ye it have and thinkes on me;
And ay, whils ye er trew of love,
Over al sal ye be obove.24 [victorious
Ywain will be protected by two things: the ring itself and his love for his
lady. The ring’s operation is guaranteed only as long as he holds her in his
mind—the twice-repeated ‘whils ye it have and thinkes on me’. The only
thing that will prevent Ywain’s return, in other words, is Ywain himself.
Every physical barrier has been removed in advance. In the event, he for-
gets; the ring is taken back, and the knight, faced with his own disloyalty,
his breaking of trouthe, goes mad—a literal acting out of his loss of any
claim to knighthood or integrity.25 He has to fight his way back to chival-
ric recognition, and to his wife, under his own strength. The magic of the
ring has served no plot function in itself, and we have never seen it in
action; but its very existence serves to highlight something in Ywain, to
tell us about the nature of his failure and the nature of knighthood. The
very lack of wonder attaching to the marvel here transfers to Ywain: not
only has he not done anything extraordinary, he has failed to live up to
any husband’s basic obligation of remembering his wife.
The idea behind all this seems to be that while ‘ordinary’ magic—
magic that works—may be of some use for the plot, it does not add any-
thing of genuine significance. It may be appropriate for ballad or
fairytale, but the process of turning tale into high-culture romance
requires something more. Magic that does not work, by definition, has
little to do with plot; but it can be used in a different way—psychologi-
cally rather than magically. It is, in fact, characteristic of the romances
that handle the conventions of the genre most thoughtfully that the
magic that fails to work should divert its expected quality of marvel to
showing what unaided humanity can do—or occasionally, as in Yvain’s
case, what it fails to do. The earliest generation of romance-writers still

seem to have been working their way towards a full understanding of this
use of magic: Chrétien does not always make the function of his ineffec-
tive magic so clear. He could indeed be charged with not having even this
incident of the ring fully worked out: since its magic depends on Yvain’s
remembering his lady, and since he in fact forgets her, does the magic still
operate, or is it rendered useless? Is he saved from sickness and impris-
onment by wearing it, even though he does not fulfil the condition of
thinking of her? The ring is never put to the test; but it is no more neces-
sary for it to work logically than magically. It fulfils the function required
of it—to demonstrate Yvain’s natural failing—and that is enough. A
demonstration that it did or did not have real magic powers would be no
more than a digression: in the economy of the narrative, the ring is nec-
essary, but not its magic. The wonder that you might expect to expend on
the magic is transferred to the emotional or ethical meaning it points to;
and the frustration of plot, in the talisman that never does anything, is
transmuted into a development of its inner significance, sens over
matière, Bynum’s ‘significance-reaction’, that could never be so clearly
achieved in any other way.
It follows from this that it is the authors who have the greatest concern
with the sentence, the inner meaning, of their stories, or with the emo-
tional life of their characters, who will use the motif most fully. Not sur-
prisingly, one of the earliest writers to exploit its potential to structure an
entire romance—or at least, a mini-romance such as comprises a Breton
lai—is Marie de France. The sheer scale of a full-sized romance demands
an emphasis on plot and event such as tends to call for a more functional
kind of magic, but Marie’s lais transfer the interest from the external event
to the internal, the emotional. Her lai of the two lovers, Les Deux Amants,
can be taken as a defining example of magic that fails to work magically
but that does work for the poem. Here, the heroine’s father has laid down
that no one shall marry his daughter unless he carries her in his arms up a
steep mountain: a task that is in human terms impossible. A number of
suitors try, and inevitably fail; but finally, a young nobleman falls in love
with her, and she with him. In order to enable him to pass the test, she
sends him to her aunt, who is skilled in herbs and medicines, to get a
potion that will give him the necessary strength: a potion, in other words,
that will give him superhuman powers. He obtains the potion, but, on the
day of the test, he is so overjoyed to see his lady that he forgets to drink it.
As he climbs with her she realizes that his strength is failing and urges him
to drink, but he refuses, twice. He completes the climb under his own
strength; but, when he reaches the top, he dies. Having tried unsuccess-
fully to revive him with the potion, she breaks the vessel and spills it. She
dies on her lover’s body, and they are buried in a single tomb.
A man needs more than human strength to surmount this barrier to
love: the drink is provided as the necessary supernatural means, but in fact
the superhuman power is to be found in his love itself. The supernatural
properties of the potion are transferred to his emotion—they become the
means by which the power of love is made manifest. The magic liquid
becomes the focus, the measure, and the means of definition of heroic
ideals and sublime emotions, and how those ideals and emotions can
break the limits of bodily capacity. As magic, it is useless; but magic is not
in fact what is at issue here. The drink is used to make a point, not about
the nature of the supernatural, but about the nature of love.
Marie’s Lais have a particular concern with sens as well as matière, as
befits an author writing in the courtly language of French in England. It
is more surprising to find a closely comparable use of magic in the very
earliest examples of Middle English romance, and it is a salutary
reminder, too, that the shift in language does not necessarily signal any
major shift in audience sophistication. In King Horn, the magic object is
a ring, and it is used, or has the potential for being used, in just the same
way as the potion in Les Deux Amants, as a means of defining the emo-
tional statement that shapes the story. Rimenhild, daughter of the king
who has taken in the exiled Horn, falls in love with him and offers herself
to him as his wife. He refuses to be acknowledged as her suitor until he
has proved himself in battle; and she gives him the ring to assist him.
Tak nu her this gold ring;

God him is the dubbing. [it is finely ornamented
Ther is upon the ringe
Igrave ‘Rymenhild the yonge’; [engraved
Ther nis non betere anonder sunne, [under
That eny man of telle cunne. [could tell of
For my luve thu hit were, [wear
And on thi finger thu him bere.
The stones beoth of such grace [are of such power
That thu ne shalt in none place
Of none duntes beon ofdrad, [be afraid of any blows
Ne on bataille beon amad [lose your nerve
Ef thu loke theran
And thenke upon thi lemman.26
As that last couplet shows, the condition of thinking of his lady to make
the magic work—the condition that Chrétien fails to follow up in
Yvain—becomes the focus of the story. In Horn’s progress upwards in
social and chivalric recognition, which culminates in his winning back
his kingdom and consummating his marriage with Rimenhild, whenever
he is in battle against heavy odds,
He lokede on the ringe,
And thoghte on Rymenhilde,
617–8; cf. 881–2
and each time he gains the victory. This could hardly be less convincing
as magic. If he remembers to look at the ring (and he makes a habit of
doing so before fighting), then of course he is thinking of her; and it is a
courtly commonplace that a knight who sets his thoughts on his lady in
battle fears no blows and emerges victorious.27 ‘Think on me’ or ‘think
on your lemman’ indeed becomes a meme in itself, with just such a
meaning.28 There needs no magic ring to tell us this; and, indeed, if it
were not for Rimenhild’s statement that it is the special ‘grace’ of the
stones that gives him courage, it would never to occur to us that magic
was involved at all. In effect, magic is not involved; the ring becomes sim-
ply a symbol of their love. King Horn is not a poem in which either the
poet or the characters spend time analysing what is going on, but the out-
ward statements and actions serve to demonstrate the inner invisible
grace that comes from love, not from gemstones of power.
That King Horn is not an isolated instance is shown by a comparable
use of magic in the romance that appears alongside it in its earliest man-
uscript, the thirteenth-century Floris and Blancheflour. Floris too is given
a ring, in his case by his mother, the queen, as he sets out to search for his
sweetheart Blancheflour:
Of hur finger she braide a ring: [took
‘Have now this ilke ring:
While it is thine, dought no thing [fear
Of fire brenning ne water in the see; [burning
Ne iren ne steele shal dere thee.’29 [harm
This is a talisman of invulnerability almost without conditions: ‘while it
is thine’ is the only qualification. Floris eventually finds Blancheflour in
the tower of the emir of Babylon; the catastrophe is precipitated when
the emir finds them in bed together, and they are taken out to be
burned.
Florys drough forth that ring

That his moder him gaf at her parting:
‘Have this ring, lemman min:
Thou shalt not die while it is thin.’
Blaunchefloure seide tho,
‘So ne shall it never go:
That this ring shall help me,
And the deed on thee see.’ [see you killed
Florys that ring hur raught [gave
And she it him again betaught; [gave back
Nouther ne will other deed seene:
They lete it falle hem bitwene.
A king com after; a ring he fonde
And brought it forth in his honde.30
All the onlookers except the one who matters, the emir himself, are filled
with pity. The king who picked up the ring also ‘wolde hem save to the
lif, | And told how for the ring they gon strif’(1000–1); and he manages to
persuade the emir to recall Floris for questioning, twice, so that finally the
whole story comes out and everything ends happily, with the emir
marrying Claris, Blancheflour’s companion, and Floris becoming king.
But is it the ring that saves them? Does it, by a special extension of its
magic powers, protect them both, even though neither of them is wear-
ing it? The repetition of ‘that ilke king that the ring fonde’ whenever he
intervenes to save them suggests that perhaps it does. But the question is
irrelevant to the central issue. What saves them is their total faithfulness
and courtesy towards each other, and the ring does nothing except epi-
tomize the absoluteness of their love.
It was a brilliant and powerful solution to the problem of magic. It is
not, however, one that can become a burr in the mind, that can be lifted
whole and transferred to other texts; and even in this story, as its numer-
ous translations and adaptations show, it was found intensely puzzling.
Working magic may have the memetic quality of replication, but magic
that doesn’t work, for all that it is found so widely, is more problematic.
In the genetic analogy for the memes of romance, magic that doesn’t
work behaves more like a recessive gene, or a recurrent mutation—
though it is one that is entirely under the control of the authors who acti-
vate it.
non-replicating magic
As a solution to the problem of making magic interesting, magic that

does not work magically appears in a wide variety of texts and authors
across widely varying historical or political contexts. Many of the most
striking examples occur in French, Anglo-Norman, and English, but
others occur in further romances across many different languages and
centuries. Despite this wide dissemination, it is neither universal nor ran-
dom. It never seems to have been part of the stock-in-trade of romance
conventions; it is produced by writers with the most conscious sense of
literary purpose beyond storytelling alone, and lost by those who are
most concerned just with telling the story. Its wide diffusion cannot
therefore be accounted for by the fact that it is part of the subject-matter
of a series of different stories. It is almost of the essence of non-function-
ing magic that it is not part of the plot, and so not part of the basic
outline of a story such as is likely to be preserved in oral tradition or in
repeated treatments of the same material. A translation or a close adap-
tation is likely to preserve it, but the creation of a new text from the same
story outline will not. The faithfully replicating memes of working magic
belong to the sphere of matter, non-functioning magic much more to
sentence. It is typical of courtly romance; it is almost unheard of in
popular romance or ballad or folktale. There, magic either works or else
it is forgotten, and in either case its interest generally stops there. The
differences in the treatment of magic therefore correlate less with region
or historical change than with social level.
In the great romances, the magic that fails to work magically goes in
tandem with their concern with ideals of behaviour and human per-
fectibility. Its appearance depends on the cultural capacities of particular
audiences, and on the narrative skills and priorities of individual authors.
The meaning inherent in the motif varies only slightly from one culture
to another—all the authors who use it seem to be primarily concerned
with the production of wonder at human capacities (or the negative of
that) rather than with anything more topical—but that comparative lack
of sensitivity to historical moment is offset by the social particularity of
its use. Whether it figures at all depends primarily on what Jacques le Goff
has described as the ‘humus sociale’, the fertilizing medium of social
placing that operates as the key determinant of literary production and
meaning.31 It is constantly re-invented by sophisticated authors writing
for the more élite, more thoughtful, or more leisured audiences, who are
accustomed to thinking of literature as carrying an inherent cultural

capital, as something more important than entertainment and more sub-
tle than direct preaching. Such magic has a high potential for becoming a
focus for discussion or debate: it appears most often in works designed
for reading in social contexts that would enable such debate, the parlour
or chamber rather than the hall or the inn, or by those with sufficient lit-
eracy and leisure for personal reading, for whom private thought can take
the place of discussion. The way the motif is used can therefore be infor-
mative in charting the relationship of various versions of the same story,
partly in terms of a stemma of redactions, but more importantly as
evidence in establishing the social level of a text. It becomes a marker for
the division between high and low culture: not because it is consistently
found in high culture, but because it is almost never found in low, and its
disappearance between one and the other can be traced with unusual pre-
cision. The main exception is in Shakespeare himself, writing for the
equally exceptional social inclusiveness of the audiences for Elizabethan
drama, from the queen to the apprentice. Even while he was creating new
examples of the motif, however, other existing instances were disappear-
ing at an ever-increasing rate as romances slithered down from an élite
manuscript culture into bulk prints and then into ballads and chapbooks.
What happens to magic can show right in front of our eyes a story’s
transition into high culture, or the popularizing of narrative for less-
sophisticated readers.
Marie de France was writing for a courtly audience, and Les Deux
Amants was not one of her lais that was given the accolade of rewriting:
perhaps the impossibility of making the magic actually drive the story
kept it reserved for a cultural élite. The way such magic disappears from
the less courtly or less-thoughtful treatments of a story is, however, abun-
dantly demonstrated by the dissemination history of a number of
romances, Horn being in the forefront of them. The process can be seen
in action across its various texts in Anglo-Norman and Middle and
regional English. Despite the existence of an Anglo-Norman version
from c.1170, the earliest surviving English redaction, the thirteenth-
century King Horn, probably represents the original most closely, and
further evidence for that precedence lies in the fact that it is in this ver-
sion that the ring functions most effectively as symbol and least effec-
tively as magic.32 The other versions of the romance show what happens
when a different poet treats the same story, or when it is popularized—
or even just when it is re-copied: one of the manuscripts of King Horn
cuts out the crucial couplet that Horn must ‘think on’ Rimenhild,
presumably because it did not register with the scribe as being impor-
tant.33 The Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn, for all its courtliness, loses
much of the symbolic power of the ring by making it more magic. Its
introduction into the poem is weakened by the fact that it is the third
occasion on which Rigmel/Rimenhild has offered Horn a ring: once he
refuses; the second time, after fighting a major battle, he accepts the same,
non-magic, ring as a love-token; and the third time, after a further battle,
Rigmel exchanges this for the magic ring. This second ring will protect
the wearer from death by fire, water, or battle34—the first two of these
being irrelevant, and the last seeming rather de trop when he has already
fought so much. Any risk that it might detract from his prowess is
avoided by the fact that he has established his chivalric credentials with-
out its assistance; but that in turn means that the ring receives very little
further mention. The one time it is recalled is in the course of Horn’s
combat against the pagan who killed his father; and then it is made clear
that it is desire for vengeance more than the love of Rigmel or possession
of the ring that spurs him to victory.35 The main function of the ring in
this text is to serve as a recognition token when he returns to Rigmel in
disguise, for which its magic powers are irrelevant. Just how irrelevant is
indicated by the prose version made in the fifteenth century, which was
itself twice translated into English and printed over several decades under
the title of The Noble History of King Ponthus (the new name for the Horn
character): here, there is just one ring, and it is not magic at all. Ponthus
has the same powers as a fighter as in King Horn, but without any assist-
ance apart from the fact of his love: ‘It was not I, that dide the aventures
of armes, bot it was ye; wherof I thonke your goode ladyshipp—for the
might and the hardenes that I have, I have itt of you, for of my selfe I
couthe not undretake itt.’36 The only use made of the ring is, again, as a
recognition token. The same recognition scene occurs in King Horn, but
there, where the ring has already acquired its quiet potency as a symbol
of love, the incident becomes much more charged; it is the power of love
signified by the ring as much as the object itself that reveals Horn to
Rimenhild.
There are two other English versions of the story, the romance of Horn
Childe from the early fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript, and
the ballad Hind Horn. In both these, the magic ring is essential to the plot,
in that the stone turns pale if the heroine’s love fades.37 Horn notices its
pallor while he is away from his beloved, and hurries back to prevent her
from being married to another suitor. This looks like a rationalization of
the King Horn kind of ring, in that the magic works magically; but the
change loses the point of the original. It even loses its own point, in so far
as Rimnild’s love for Horn is threatened rather than diminished. These
more popular versions have substituted a different folklore motif in what
seems to be an effort to make the magic work.38 The ring fulfils the func-
tion that might be taken by an email or a mobile phone in a modern ver-
sion, as a means of communication over distance, and the essential
quality of fin amor of the earlier version is lost to a piece of supernatural
mechanics. The redactor who produced Horn Childe (perhaps on the
basis of a version current in oral tradition rather than directly from either
the Anglo-Norman or the earlier English text), and the oral transmission
that preserved the ballads, lose the point of magic raised to the level of
symbol; only the King Horn poet invents it or recognizes it from whatever
the ultimate source of the story was. The difference between expressing a
sentence and reproducing subject-matter emerges very clearly from such
an array of different versions. Chrétien’s careful distinction between
himself and ‘cil qui de conter vivre vuelent’, professional storytellers who
spoil and corrupt their stories, acquires a new kind of particularity when
it is placed in a context of this kind.39
The array of versions and the variations in their treatment of the pro-
tective ring is even greater in the case of Floris and Blancheflour. The prin-
ciple that magic that fails to work is characteristic of individual courtly
treatments of a story still generally holds good, but the matter is unusu-
ally complicated because of the Europe-wide dissemination of the
romance and the still unsettled debate as to which versions derive from
which others. It was first composed in France, probably around 1160, but
it exists in two distinct versions, known (with misleading particularity
about readership) as the ‘roman aristocratique’ and the ‘roman popu-
laire’. Even the two-and-a-half surviving manuscripts of the ‘roman aris-
tocratique’ vary markedly in their treatment of the ring, as if individual
scribes were trying to rationalize the material they were copying.40
Besides its Middle English version, the romance also exists in Middle
High German (by Konrad Fleck), Low German, Dutch (by Diederik van
Assenede), Norse, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and a few other lan-
guages and dialects, each deriving ultimately from one or other of the
French redactions or their lost common source.41 One group of versions,
including the English, Fleck’s, and Diederik’s, derives from one particu-
lar variant of the ‘roman aristocratique’ and replicates both its ring and
its non-magical operation to save the lovers, as described above. The
northern versions have the ring work magically, but alter its powers to
endow invincibility: it ensures Floris’s victory when he offers to prove
their innocence by combat.42 The ‘version populaire’ contains no ring at

all, but it does give Floris a sword with a hilt containing relics that give
victory to the defender of a just cause; he accordingly—or at least, subse-
quently—saves his beloved from being burned in an episode placed ear-
lier in the romance, when she is the victim of a false accusation before she
is carried off to Babylon.43 A further group, consisting of the Italian
Cantare de Fiorio e Biancifiore, Boccaccio’s Filocolo, and the Spanish
romance, contains two rings. The first is given to Floris by Blancheflour,
and its property is to turn pale if she is in trouble—rather like the ring in
Horn Childe. It functions, correctly and magically, in the episode of false
accusation. The second ring has the same properties as the one in the
‘roman aristocratique’, but here it works: the lovers each try to give it to
the other, then they both hold it, and they are preserved in the midst of
the flames.44 In the Filocolo, they also call on the gods for help, and the
gods duly step in to save them, though Boccaccio notes that they need not
have bothered since the ring would have been sufficient.45 The goddess
most involved in their rescue is Venus: in theory, she could represent the
power of love rather than just a piece of Classical machinery, but in prac-
tice Boccaccio treats her as an actual goddess, perhaps as an expression of
his proto-humanist reading of Ovid and Virgil. She is shown acting
supernaturally, just as we are told that the ring acts magically: neither is
allowed to function through symbolic power alone. Plot marvels substi-
tute for the wonder of the ‘significance-reaction’ at a love stronger than
death.
The association between magic and wonder is almost a reflex response,
and if the narrative treatment of magic promises to be powerful in itself,
it takes quite strong action on the part of an individual author to divert
the wonder onto the human meaning of the story. On occasion, it is pos-
sible to see such a process in action, where a writer takes up a promising
motif of magic and disables it in front of our eyes. That the most notable
examples of such a process occur in the work of Gottfried von Strassburg
and Chaucer is an indication of the degree of literary self-awareness
involved in such a move.
The disabling is entirely literal in Gottfried’s Tristan, and its purpose
in displacing wonder from magic to emotion unusually clear. The
episode concerns the marvellous dog Petit-creiu.46 The lovers are under-
going one of their periods of separation, and they are desperately
unhappy. Tristan, who has withdrawn to Wales, defeats a giant in order
to win the animal, which has two remarkable properties: its fur is of every
conceivable colour; and from its collar hangs a bell whose sound banishes
all sadness—a magic bell, in fact. Tristan wants the dog not to solace him-
self but to send to Isolt, who has it carried around with her everywhere.
Up to this point, Gottfried is known to be following his source, the
Anglo-Norman Tristan of Thomas, since the Norse and Middle English
versions based on that both contain the incident.47 But in Gottfried’s
conclusion, Isolt breaks the bell off its chain, for she has no wish to be
happy while Tristan is suffering, and the dog’s constant presence
increases her grief by reminding her of her lover’s absence. The genre’s
insistence that the use of magic lies in the protagonist’s own choice here
takes the unusual form of having them actively refuse it, Tristan by giv-
ing the marvel away, Isolt by rendering it un-marvellous.48 The disabling
of the bell makes no difference at all to the plot. Once again, the magic
that does not work, the happiness-inducing bell that increases sorrow,
has nothing to do with the inherited story-line and everything to do with
the courtly development of inner meaning. The plot stands still while the
episode is acted out, but the pause in the action allows space for a won-
der that has nothing to do with the marvellousness of the magic.
Chaucer’s analogous episode is strictly an act of elimination of magic
from his source rather than its disabling within the narrative: the removal
of the rocks from the coast of Brittany in the Franklin’s Tale. The tale
claims at its opening to be a Breton lai, but it is not a story with Breton
antecedents: if the generic claim means anything, it is perhaps designed
to call its audience’s attention to a shift in focus from plot to emotion
such as is typical of Marie’s own work, and perhaps to a greater allowance
for magic than Chaucer usually makes. The story itself is a free variation
on a tale of Boccaccio’s, about how a suitor to a married lady fulfils her
impossible condition for loving him, that is, that he should create a blos-
soming garden in the middle of winter.49 Boccaccio’s lover hires an
enchanter to conjure up such a garden, and the lady and her companions
walk through it. Chaucer’s lady, Dorigen, declares that before she will
love the squire who is soliciting her, he must remove the coastal rocks
that threaten her husband’s homecoming. It is a euphemism for rejec-
tion, her synonym for ‘never’: ‘for wel I woot that it shal never betyde’
(CT, V. 1001). Despite being such a cause of anxiety to her both before
and after their disappearance, however, the rocks as physical objects are
remarkably unimportant in the story. They are significant because they
represent Dorigen’s fears for her husband, and therefore for her future
happiness; but even when the ‘subtil clerk’ who effects their disappear-
ance has completed his machinations, the status of the rocks remains
equivocal. ‘It semed that alle the rokkes were aweye’ (1296), and whether
an illusorily absent set of rocks might still wreck a ship is by now beside
the point, since the husband has arrived back safely some time before
with any dangers from the rocks unmentioned. It is of no consequence at
all whether they are really still there or not, and nobody in the tale appar-
ently goes to look: wonder at the marvel is entirely absent, even though
their disappearance for ‘a wyke or tweye’ (1295) makes it quite clear that
merely natural processes, such as high tides, are out of the question.50 By
the time Chaucer has moved into the consequences of the magic on the
characters, the rocks have sunk well below the threshold of conscious-
ness. The question at issue is not how or whether the magic has worked,
but how this will make everyone behave. The vanishing of the rocks con-
stitutes a trial, a kind of moral épreuve, through which each of the men in
the story must pass by releasing his claim in a promise made to him, a
promise itself being a pledging of troth. The husband must respect his
wife’s trouthe, her word given to the squire, above her marital oath made
to himself; the squire must release the lady from her unintended oath,
and so forgo the sexual pleasure he desires; the clerk must release the
squire from his monetary contract and forgo his payment. Each act of
renunciation encourages the others to follow suit, to enable the tale’s
happy ending.
As in the case of Horn and Floris, such a use of magic did not transmit
through retellings, and it is handled very differently in the early seven-
teenth-century dramatization of the same story by Nathan Field and
John Fletcher, The Triumph of Honour. There, the setting is transferred to
the Graeco-Roman world, and the rocks are never mentioned until the
play’s tough-minded Dorigen swears by them in her refusal of the propo-
sitions made to her by the general who has just invaded her country and
defeated her husband. Unexpected as the rocks are in the text, a theatri-
cal audience would have been prepared for something of the kind by their
actual presence as stage properties. Their disappearance is represented in
the stage directions by ‘Solemn musick. A mist ariseth, the rocks
remove.’51 However the ‘mist’ was contrived (presumably by a veil;
smoke would be hard to control with sufficient precision), the magic is
seen to work by the spectators; but any wonder attaching to it is not
reflected in the behaviour of the key men of the play, the general and
Dorigen’s conquered husband, which falls far short of the wonderful.
They dishonour themselves comprehensively: the husband by assuming
that his wife is unfaithful; the suitor by intending to go ahead with his
demand for sex with her. Both the casualness of the introduction of the
magic and the misbehaviour of the men (at least until the wife’s threat of
a Lucretia-like suicide brings them to their senses) mark a shift of the

story over the bounds of romance to something both more schematic and
more cynical.
magic in the web?
None of these examples of non-functioning magic seriously invites the

reader to doubt that the magic would work if it were given the opportu-
nity. Several of the authors are at pains to confirm that it would: Tristan
gets the idea of winning Petit-creiu for Isolt because it makes him feel
happy himself; the vegetation around Marie’s mountain grows extra
thickly where the potion is spilt; Floris and Blancheflour are indeed
saved; Horn does fight better for looking at the ring; and there is at least
the illusion that the rocks have disappeared, which is marvellous enough
in itself. The magic is not rationalized into anything merely human: it has
to keep its inherent wonder in order for the transfer to the hero or hero-
ine to be possible at all. But in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a
romance that rethinks every technique or convention of the genre, the
poet anticipates the reader in asking the question himself. He creates a
situation that looks identical, with an object that has magic properties
ascribed to it, but which does not work in the way the reader expects. In
fact, however, he reverses the terms, for the object in question, the green
lace that the lady gives to Gawain, is the only instance in romance where
readers are encouraged to assume that the magic does not work, even that
it is not magic at all, though the lingering question remains as to whether
it might have been magic after all. The lady assures Gawain that he will
not be killed while he is wearing the girdle, just as Floris’s mother assures
her son of the property of the ring she gives him, and neither hero is
killed; but there must be very few readers who take it that Gawain sur-
vives his covenanted beheading by the Green Knight on account of the
girdle. The Gawain-poet’s solution of the problem of how to make a tal-
isman that bestows invulnerability interesting is peculiarly drastic. Even
Gawain does not put very much faith in the girdle (he would not be so
scared if he thought he could not be harmed), and it turns out to have just
the opposite qualities from those he had been promised, so that it
becomes not the reason for his survival, but the reason for his injury.
That the hero has the option of refusing the talisman becomes the central
issue of the romance: presumably, if Gawain had maintained his trawthe,
his integrity, and had either refused to accept the lace or had handed it
over to the lord as he had promised to do with all his winnings, he would
not have been wounded at all. So much, at least, the Green Knight implies
in his exposition of the plot of which Gawain was the victim;52 but it is
only his word against the lady’s, and it is no more possible to prove that
Bertilak is speaking the truth than that it is the power of the stones in
Horn’s ring that gives him strength. The question is much more interest-
ing for being left open. Sir Gawain may not end with a question addressed
directly to the audience, but it would be an unusual audience that did not
want to debate what they had just heard.
That potential for discussion is emphasized again by the fact that the
Gawain-poet gives his talisman of invulnerability a meaning directly
opposite to the normal significance of the magic object. Far from inviting
a transference of the wonder from the marvel to the qualities of the hero,
the girdle quells any wonder at either. Gawain’s chosen badge, the pent-
angle that he presents to the world on his shield and surcoat, is a symbol
of trawthe, of interlinked virtues that together encapsulate knightly per-
fection. When he goes out to meet the Green Knight, he ties the girdle
over his surcoat: knotting the ends of the lace over the ‘endeles knot’.53
The girdle symbolizes not Gawain’s achievement but his failure, and his
failure on that very same issue of whether he could transcend the ordin-
ary. He is not, after all, superhuman, but human, and therefore fallible.
Is the girdle magic? That it is a gift from a lady who has some never-
defined connection with Morgan le Fay suggests associations with the
darker side of magic. It was, so Bertilak states, woven by his wife herself
(2359), and therefore also carries to modern readers suggestions of
women’s weaving of spells. That particular idiom, however, is not a
medieval one; metaphorical weaving might be concerned with plots and
deceits in fourteenth-century Middle English,54 but, despite the broad
cultural distrust of women, they were not at this date given the kind of
immediate association with dark enchantments that followed from the
later witch-hunting frenzy. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages was taken to be
an act, not a state, and it was an act that was at least as likely to be per-
formed by men as by women. Merlin is accused of being a witch in the
Morte Darthur, but not Morgan.55 She herself starts her career in
Geoffrey of Monmouth as a fairy (a career discussed in the next chapter);
in the texts that treat her less sympathetically, she is presented as a
woman who gets up to bad things rather than as someone inherently dia-
bolic. Skill in enchantment is in any case not necessarily bad. Some
women acquire their status as heroine through their possession of such
skills: it happens strikingly in Partonope of Blois, a thirteenth-century
French romance in origin but which became an early Tudor favourite.56

Its heroine, Melior, possesses powers of enchantment that Partonope ini-
tially believes to be supernatural, but which she eventually reveals (at the
moment when those powers are broken) to be the result of learning in the
seven liberal arts, plus a little ‘nigromancy’ on the side.57 It sounds highly
suspect, but it is not treated in the text as a matter for condemnation, and
Middle English ‘nigromancy’ is much less pejorative a term than the
modern ‘necromancy’: it is magic on the edge of acceptability, not magic
conducted through the agency of the dead. Although its derivation is
equivalent to ‘black magic’, the word is often used for supernatural pow-
ers derived from sources other than God rather than necessarily from the
devil. It can thus even appear among a list of attributes of the heroine, as
happens in a fifteenth-century account of Jason that takes a generally
kindly attitude to Medea: she
was passing eny other as wel of beute of persone, as of konnyng, norture, and
knowing of al the sciences, nigromancy, magyk, sorcery, and other enchaunte-
mentes, that nowe be forbode.58
The last phrase strikes a cautionary note, but it seems to allow at least that
pagan women had greater freedom in such matters: nigromancy is not
inherently evil, just forbidden to Christians. Melior is Christian, as she
stresses, and the term most often used in the narrative to describe her
ability is accordingly just ‘craft’: the same word as is used for any area of
expertise—shoemaking, or medicine. The nineteenth-century editor of
the text, summarizing the story in the margin, paraphrases it on its first
occurrence as ‘witchcraft’,59 but that is misleading: witches were associ-
ated with the devil, and although Partonope’s mother suspects that the
invisible woman with whom her son is having a passionate affair must be
a fiend, she is entirely wrong. Morgan likewise acquires her magic
through education. She learns it from Merlin in Sir Gawain, or in Malory
as a result of having been ‘put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned
so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye’: phraseology that
suggests a suspicion of learning in general as well as of magic, so need not
be as satirical as it sounds.60 So, although the hideousness of the old
woman in Sir Gawain does not foster confidence and we are told that she
is out to get Guinevere, it is still dangerous to assume too automatic a
connection between the girdle, evil magic, and Morgan: especially dan-
gerous since no such connections are offered in the text. All we know is
that the lady gives the lace to Gawain with a claim about its magic pow-
ers, which may well not be true anyway. Anything beyond that lies in the
suggestive hinterland of audience imagination, and modern imagina-

tions, thoroughly familiar with the later association of women and witch-
craft and with Morgan as an increasingly central character of the
Arthurian legends, may well respond differently from medieval readers.
Women, weaving, and spells do, however, come powerfully together in
a later and much more sinister use of the idea of ‘magic in the web’, and
one which raises the question of whether magic is actually present with
much more urgency. This occurs, like the phrase itself, in Shakespeare’s
Othello: a work that repeatedly invokes the motifs of romance such as
lend a contextual plausibility to Othello’s claims about the magic, even
though its ending breaks those generic associations so decisively. The
‘web’ itself, the woven fabric with its claim of manufacture by a woman
with supernatural associations, is, of course, the handkerchief that Iago
claims that Desdemona has given to Cassio, and which substitutes for the
‘ocular proof’ of her unfaithfulness that Othello demands. It first appears
not in words but as a stage property. Othello has already moved, in the
course of a single scene, from a cool dismissal of Iago’s hints as to
Desdemona’s unfaithfulness to blind belief: ‘She’s gone. I am abused.’61
He is already thinking of his cuckold’s horns, the ‘forkéd plague’, when
Desdemona enters and asks him if he is not well; when he claims a
headache, she offers to bind his forehead with her handkerchief, only to
have him knock it out of her hand in a stage direction regularly added
between the lines by editors but left by Shakespeare as an instruction to
the actors implied by the dialogue:
Your napkin is too little.

Let it alone. Come, I’ll go in with you.62
And he takes her off stage, neither of them thinking twice about the fallen
handkerchief, expressive as it is only of her care for him. Yet after Iago has
claimed it to be her love-token for another man, Othello gives it a full
history of its own:
That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give.
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it
‘Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye
Should hold her loathèd, and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me,

And bid me, when my fate would have me wived,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on’t.
Make it a darling, like your precious eye.
To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
desdemona. Is’t possible?
othello. ’Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.
A sybil that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses
In her prophetic fury sewed the work.
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful
Conserved of maidens’ hearts.
3.4.55–75
Is there indeed ‘magic in the web’? There is a whole range of possible ways
to read the exchange, and it is not easy to bring out any difference
between them on stage. One is that the handkerchief is indeed magic,
made in the way that Othello describes and containing all those proper-
ties. It would match with the exoticism of the Moor, a companion piece
to his stories of the anthropophagi and men whose heads did grow
beneath their shoulders. Another is that a humanist Shakespeare and the
upper echelons of his audience are much too sophisticated to believe
such magic themselves, but are happy to believe in an Othello who
believes in it: he is telling what he believes to be the truth even though
‘we’, like the audience that Chaucer’s Franklin addresses, know better
than to imagine any such thing could happen, and especially not in an
increasingly scientifically-minded Christian Europe. Another is that
Othello is making it up: telling a fable that contains an accurate moral, a
sentence that he means unequivocally, but where all the apparently
authenticating detail is fictional. The last few lines might be taken as sup-
porting that last view, in that he seems to be protesting on behalf of the
magic rather too much. But the effect of those last few lines is intensify-
ing for Desdemona: they decisively give the death to any hope she might
have of explaining her situation. This is no longer a matter of transfer
between enchantress and mother and son or of love between wife and
husband, but an issue locked into the sympathetic magic of the cosmos.
There have been plenty of other mothers who give talismans: the ring
given to Floris by his mother in some versions confers amiability as well
as invulnerability on its wearer; Isolde’s mother gives her the love-potion

to share with Mark. The suggestion of cosmic forces woven into the
handkerchief—the prophetic sybil, the hallowed worms—are not so far
either, at least to Othello’s non-expert auditors on or off the stage, from
the hermetic magic studied with intense seriousness by academics across
Europe, such as the royal astrologer Dr John Dee. The magic is endorsed
by both familiar story and by quasi-scientific belief.
But to ask ‘is the handkerchief magic?’ is as meaningless a question,
and as unanswerable, as asking whether the girdle in Sir Gawain is magic.
Its function is not to work magically, even though its loss brings about
precisely the effects that Othello describes. Whether or not the weaving
of the handkerchief incarnates Othello’s love for his wife, it symbolizes it
in the most literal of ways: its loss means the destruction of that love, and
‘perdition’ for both of them. The fact that he himself made her drop it in
the first place, or at least prevented her from picking it up (either or both
possibilities are implied by the dialogue coding the stage direction), is
remembered by neither of them.
magic enacted
There is something sinister about the magic of both the handkerchief and
the girdle, whether it is real or not. The magic they claim is not inherent
or natural, like the marvellous properties of a magnet, but deliberately
induced, so raising questions over its moral or theological status. The
transfer of wonder onto the human in magic that fails to work magically
has the advantage of bypassing such questions, whereas the active opera-
tion of magic tends to highlight them. Chaucer, or his Franklin, starts
off by suggesting that the esoteric manipulation of cosmic sympathies is
no more than ‘magyk natureel’; but by the time the ‘magicien’ has
embarked on the elaborate astrological calculations that will result in the
illusion of the rocks’ removal, medieval astrophysics has shifted over to
being ‘supersticious cursednesse’.63 Working magic was regarded with
deep suspicion, and that too is a problem that romance writers had to
negotiate.
One way of negotiating it, used increasingly in the sixteenth century,
was to allegorize it. Ariosto downgrades a magic ring that enables its
wearer to see through enchantment by noting that the ring of Reason
would be even better for such a purpose.64 If a ring of Reason were actu-
ally to figure within a narrative, it would be an allegorical ring, and if it
were itself presented as magic it would be in order to call attention to the

quasi-marvellous workings of its real-life equivalent. Allegory thus par-
ticularly favours magic even while the allegorizing process tends to
devalue the wonder attaching to the magical, since the point of it will lie
in something other than the fact that it is magic. Allegory gives primacy
to the inner meaning, the sens or sentence, in its selection of narrative
event: what is marvellous within the human is allegorized as magic, so the
wonder at the human that elsewhere drives the ‘significance-reaction’ is
here expressed by having the magic work. The Faerie Queene abounds
with shields and weapons of invincibility, as with giants and monsters,
but Spenser’s chosen medium sets a limit on how far he can exploit the
qualities of strangeness they might carry: set a story in Faerie Land, and a
fairyland moreover where everything carries a specific further meaning,
and such properties are both expected and explained. Britomart’s magic
lance, which represents the irresistible power of good love, must neces-
sarily unhorse every opponent in order to demonstrate that power. Even
so, Spenser works a number of variations on this model, some more
exciting than others. Arthur is equipped with magic arms made by
Merlin, but he keeps his invincible shield covered for much of the time,
so enabling him to show his prowess; it proves its continuing powers by
accidentally flattening a few friends on occasion.65 His sword, Morddure,
like Excalibur draws blood at every stroke, but it has the further property
of refusing to strike its true owner. Spenser, like Malory, has it stolen, for
use in a combat against him; but where Malory’s Arthur has to demon-
strate outstanding prowess to resist Excalibur’s onslaught, the only prob-
lem for Spenser’s Arthur is that he has to fight with just a lance against a
sword that will not strike him anyway. The next time we hear of
Morddure, it is failing to live up to its promise in a different way, since
although it wounds Maleger the injuries have no effect on him, and
Arthur is reduced to wrestling instead.66 It is possible to work out reasons
for such passages, but their lack of perspicuousness on the moral level
does not altogether redeem the sense of narrative bathos. More com-
pelling, and closer to the romance transference from the magical to the
human, is the fact that, despite the belief of his enemies to the contrary,
Redcrosse’s arms and armour are not magic at all. When things come to
the crunch, he has to rely on his own strength: the whole armour of God
will function as protection only so long as the individual who wears it has
the necessary faith. The cross on his shield can become unreadable in the
outflow of his blood; his armour will not glow in the dark, or not very
much; and, at particularly awkward moments, he isn’t even wearing it.67
The man struggling to embody holiness has to rely on ‘native vertue’, not
miraculous intervention.
If magic works magically in the Faerie Queene, it is most likely to be in
the possession of adversaries. One major difference between the late
sixteenth-century understanding of magic and the medieval lies in the
closeness of its association with the diabolic. It had always had such a
potential, but the same anxieties that fuelled the Renaissance witch-hunts
pushed such an interpretation to the fore to a degree that is not char-
acteristic of earlier centuries. Spenser’s good characters may carry magic
weapons made by others, which represent the power of virtue, but
practitioners of magic were regarded with immediate and intense suspi-
cion. The primary enemy in the early books of the Faerie Queene, not least
of the explicitly Christian hero Holiness, is the arch-magician Archimago.
He works with magic books and conjurations: his very first, and therefore
defining, action in the poem is to retreat to his study after darkness has
fallen to ‘seek out mighty charms’ to disturb Redcrosse’s and Una’s sleep.
Then choosing out few wordes most horrible,
(Let none them read) thereof did verses frame,
With which and other spelles like terrible,
He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame,
And cursed heaven, and spake reprochful shame
Of highest God, the Lord of life and light.
I. i. 37
Merlin within this poem is in some senses his allegorical opposite, the
man who uses his occult powers for good, and who seems to do so by
inborn knowledge rather than devilish art. The same ideas extend beyond
allegorical romance to its narrative counterpart, with magicians and
enchanters becoming the diabolic arch-rivals of heroes who are fighting
for Christ. Such a one-sided use of magic is clearly unfair to the
Christians, but, as in the case of the stolen magic swords, it increases
the sense of their courage and resourcefulness. It is almost part of the
definition of Guy’s Christian prowess in The Tragical History of Guy of
Warwick that he should number two enchanters among his antagonists.
Peele’s Old Wives Tale has a wicked enchanter as its villain, who can turn
himself into a dragon (not shown on stage) as well as other people into
bears, eliminate memory, and strike his opponents immobile.
Too natural an opposition to such magic can, however, be a drawback in
terms of narrative suspense. In an earlier romance, Oliver, one of
the heroes of the ‘matter of France’, finds himself facing a heathen oppo-
nent who has the advantage of a couple of bottles of magic

balm that cures all wounds hanging from his saddle; Oliver deals with
them by cutting them off and throwing them in the river.68 Saracen
princesses are, however, allowed to use magic to good effect, at least
before they are christened. That same heathen has a sister named
Floripas, who, having fallen in love with one of the peers and run off with
them after releasing them from her father’s prison, keeps them from star-
vation through a long siege by means of her magic girdle—a girdle that
unequivocally does what it is supposed to.69 In a Christian context, the
practice of magic almost always elicits anxiety, and increasingly so over
time. Merlin is the son of an incubus, and, although his devilishness has
been overridden by baptism, there is always a sense that his activities bor-
der on the realm of the forbidden. One of the most popular of the prose
romances through the sixteenth century, The Four Sons of Aymon,
enables the four sons to survive their horrendous adventures through the
help of a cousin, Maugis, who is skilled in magic, but he renounces it at
the end to become a hermit. Valentine and Orson contains both good and
bad enchanters—that is, enchanters who aid the Christians and the
Saracens, respectively—but they have been trained in the same school,
and the work finishes with a comprehensive and fierce condemnation of
the practice of magic by anyone for any purposes.70
One way to keep the pleasure of magic in a text while avoiding the sus-
picion attendant on its practice by ordinary mortals is to have it used by
fairies, the subject of the next chapter; they do not fall under the ban
attendant on being human, but they were themselves widely regarded
with suspicion as too close to devils.71 More problematic are characters
who have something of the fairy about them, but who are none the less
mortal: who practise magic through skill rather than through inherent
supernatural power. Such figures elicit anxieties of their own that the
texts often tackle explicitly, even to the point of making such anxiety cen-
tral to the plot. This is the driving force of the story in Partonope of Blois.
The hero is caught up in a succession of supernatural adventures, and his
fear that they may be diabolic impels much of the narrative. They begin
when, after pursuing a wild boar through the forest of Ardennes, he finds
himself lost on the seashore, with no way of escape but by means of a ship
riding at anchor there—a ship equipped with tackle and sails, and which
is guided to where it should go, but all without anyone visibly operating
it. It takes him to a country also devoid of visible inhabitants, and
which is lit as if with daylight even though it is night ‘uppon the see’.72
The ship, he thinks, could only be made by human hands through a
suspect ‘nygromansy’, if at all; and the brilliantly jewelled town and

castle to which he is taken makes him think
he was but in fayre, [fairyland
And weneth it were the develles werke.
887–8
The readers at this stage know no more than Partonope himself,73 and
although all the narrative motifs point to the first of these being the right
answer—fairy, not the devil—the two were not easily separable. He is
served by invisible attendants, brought water for washing, fed sumptu-
ously, and led to a magnificent bed. Once there and the lights removed,
he lies in a state of terror, not helped when he becomes aware of some-
one—as he believes, ‘sum evylle thynge’ (1190)—crossing the floor and
getting into bed beside him. The reader is allowed to know at this stage
that it is ‘a yonge mayde’
of grette degre, [high rank
That homely to hyr owne bedde come,
1195–6
that ‘homely’ being immediately reassuring—though not to Partonope,

who is accorded no such inside knowledge. They lie slightly apart, he
petrified, she ‘for shame’ (1213), until slight body contact leads to an
exchange of words, in the course of which she twice names the Virgin
Mary—so sufficiently reassuring Partonope that she is indeed human for
him to take sexual advantage of her. It sounds like a rape; but then it tran-
spires that it is she who is responsible for his being there at all. She is, she
tells him, empress of Byzantium, and she has chosen him to be her hus-
band. It was she who arranged for the boar to lead him astray, for the ship
to bring him to her, and for him to be led to her own bed. There is, how-
ever, a condition on the continuation of their love: although he may
enjoy every pleasure except human company by day, and although she
will come to him every night in bed, he is never to attempt to see her until
two and a half years have passed. If he observes that prohibition, at the
end of that time she will tell her lords and parliament whom she has cho-
sen, and they will be openly married. If, however, he sets eyes on her, an
act which will itself require ‘crafte of nygromancy’, he will die, and she
will be shamed for ever.
The story would not be worth telling if Partonope did not disobey.
After he has returned home, loaded with wealth, he is compelled by his
mother to make confession to the bishop of Paris and reveal what has
been happening. Convinced that he has been seduced by ‘ffendys of
ffayre’ (5656), they bully him into believing that the only way to ensure
his soul’s salvation is to betray his lady’s trust and break her prohibition.
His mother gives him a lantern, made by means of her own enchant-
ments, which cannot be extinguished, and so will reveal to him just who
he has been sleeping with. He shines it on his beloved, and so discovers at
that same moment that he has lost
the ffayreste shape creature
That ever was formed thorowe nature
5864–5
—‘fairy’ redefined as an entirely natural fairness. Only then does she
reveal to him that she is an ordinary mortal, her magic powers merely
learned skills; but those powers are none the less ended by his failure of
trust. He is exiled from her country, in the same ship but now with its
crew made visible and ordinary, and the journey that had taken a day and
a night when he first made it now requires fifteen days. Wonder and its
failure once again correlate with the failure of the hero himself—though
the lady herself never loses her quality of wondrousness, even when her
powers of enchantment cease. She is represented throughout as both
lovely and admirable; perhaps admiranda non imitanda, to be wondered
at rather than imitated, in the phrase used for the more extreme kind of
martyrs, but remaining the central focus of Partonope’s right desire.
None the less, the narrative gives powerful expression not only to fears
about enchantment but to fears about women, and especially learned
women. Such fears are taken as the premiss of the story; it could not exist
without them, and they serve as the grounding of its plot—a fact that
explains the consistency of the treatment of its magic throughout all its
versions. The point of the romance, however, is to show such anxieties to
be wrong, at the point where they appear most threatening. It is the ‘safe’
magic exercised by Partonope’s mother in conjunction with the bishop,
her attempt to undo magic that she believes to be diabolic, that causes
disaster. Her fears read like what we would call middle-class morality,
and although the class labelling is both anachronistic and inaccurate, the
hero has to follow a higher imperative such as is associated with the
courtly or chivalric; common sense, as in most romances, is emphatically
not enough, whether that takes the form of parental control or priestly
meddling. Common sense may say that powers of enchantment must be
diabolic, and female form a favourite disguise of the devil; romance can
take a different view of both. Yet Partonope ends without magic, as the
hero, like Ywain, has to demonstrate a continuing faithfulness even when
hope seems gone, and win back his beloved by human means alone.
Shakespeare’s uses of magic show a considered negotiation of all these
problems. Only the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are allowed to
use magic with the casualness of normal practice, and not to elicit criticism
for doing so74—they cannot indeed elicit criticism within the play, since
none of the human characters (with the equivocal exception of Bottom)
knows that they exist at all. Elsewhere, magic is almost always of the kind
that does not work magically. In As You Like It, we can safely assume that
Rosalind’s magician uncle, who she promises will give the lovers their
sweethearts for the final scene of mass weddings, is a fiction: in fact she
fixes everything herself, by entirely natural means. The fiction she chooses
none the less has a similar effect on the other characters to ‘magic that
doesn’t work’, in transferring the wonder attendant on the happy untan-
gling of the plot onto Rosalind herself. There is also a god present, in the
shape of Hymen; but there is no suggestion that Rosalind has the power to
invoke spirits, any more than when she ‘conjures’ the audience in the
Epilogue. Shakespeare gives not the slightest hint in the text as to Hymen’s
status, though a stage production is pushed towards making a decision as
to whether to present him as a god (so that the episode becomes a theo-
phany, like the visionary appearances of Jupiter and Diana in Cymbeline
and Pericles), or as a country yokel, or as one of the Duke’s servants dressed
up. But even on stage, a decision does not have to be made, or made appar-
ent. Even if the part were originally played by the singer who acted Amiens,
as would have been likely, the change of costume involved, and the habit
of doubling parts, would leave it open as to who or what the figure now
represented. As so often with the planetary gods, Hymen is more impor-
tant as the symbolic personification of a principle than as a divinity.
In The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, magic becomes a more con-
tested issue. Making the dead walk was one of the most terrible activities
of necromancers, and in The Winter’s Tale Paulina is anxious to deny any
such association:
If you can behold it,

I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend,
And take you by the hand. But then you’ll think—
Which I protest against—I am assisted
By wicked powers.
5. 3. 87–91
Those that think it is unlawful business

I am about, let them depart.
96–7
But the statue does move, the dead does come back to life, and Leontes
turns Paulina’s anxieties around: ‘If this be magic, let it be an art | Lawful
as eating’ (110–1). He is, of course, not wanting the same freedom that
fairies have to practise magic as a commonplace activity; what he wants
is for this magic not to be magic at all. This magic does not repeat the pri-
mal sin of devouring forbidden knowledge; it belongs to the everyday
processes of nurturing and sustaining life. Even while she is denying that
Hermione’s coming back to life is magic, Paulina hints that it is miracle,
dependent on the requirement that the spectators ‘awake their faith’; but
it is not miracle either, though the phrase is enough to trigger a recogni-
tion of the providential movement of the play without ever letting the
analogy turn into allegory. What is not disputed is that the coming to life
of the statue is a ‘marvel’ (100), eliciting wonder; and it is explicitly the
wonder of romance, ‘like an old tale’ (118). This is not magic that doesn’t
work, but magic that was never there in the first place; yet the scene pro-
vides perhaps the most powerful displacement of wonder onto the
human action in the whole corpus of romance.
It was almost, but not quite, Shakespeare’s last word on the subject. He
returned to magic again in The Tempest, more comprehensively than ever
before. The Dream confines its supernatural to the fairies; here, Prospero
is an enchanter skilled in the magic arts. We know how the play ends up,
so we are accustomed to taking on trust that Prospero is a ‘good’ charac-
ter; but it is far from evident that that was how the first audiences would
have reacted. He is introduced dressed in his ‘magic garment’, in the very
act of masterminding a shipwreck. He may have freed Ariel from the
punishment inflicted by a witch, but he keeps him as an unfree servant of
his own, and can summon more sprites at will in a way too close to
Archimago for comfort. Archimago uses the sprites he calls up ‘to aide his
friends, or fray his enimies’ (FQ, I. i. 38), and that is precisely the business
in which Prospero employs his. He even strikes his enemies immobile, in
a scene that replicates the actions of the first wicked enchanter in the
Tragical History of Guy.75 His feared ‘ending in despair’ of the Epilogue
has something of the damnation of Faust about it as well as the aban-
donment of hope of the man exposed in a rudderless boat—and, of
course, of the actor nervous about unpopularity. He ascribes his decision
for virtue over vengeance to following his ‘nobler reason’, as if, as with
Ariosto’s advocacy of the ring of Reason, virtuous rationality outdoes the

exercise of magic.76 His own renunciation of magic follows immediately.
It starts gently enough, with the invocation of the ‘elves of hills, brooks,
standing lakes and groves’ with their ‘printless’ and so by implication
harmless feet, but those members of the audience who knew Golding’s
translation of Ovid might already have been recognizing traces of Medea
behind the language, and the Renaissance Medea was by no means as
benevolent as the fifteenth-century one. The speech builds to a climax in
full-scale necromancy:
Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure.
5. 1. 48–51
His final act of magic is to draw together the courtly characters of the play
within a charmed circle to the accompaniment of ‘heavenly music’, and
then to release them from enchantment. His abjuration of magic recalls
that of Valentine and Maugis, but it is significantly different: they
renounce the devilish for the religious, Prospero renounces enchantment
for the ordinary. His giving up his marvellous powers is presented as cli-
mactic, as part of the play’s happy ending. The magic provides the most
spectacular action, but wonder is explicitly focused on the human: on
‘admired Miranda’ (her name itself meaning ‘to be wondered at’), and on
her own wonder at the ‘brave new world, that hath such people in it’.
Prospero’s deflationary response (‘’Tis new to thee’) does not altogether
override her excitement: the audience is invited not only to evaluate her
naïvety against her father’s cynicism but to look at the world as she does,
with fresh eyes, and see its potential for being wonderful. There is no
doubt at all that Prospero’s magic works—we spend the whole play
watching it do just that. There is no doubt at all that Shakespeare’s magic
works—we spend the whole play giving imaginative credence to the cre-
ation of a vision made out of a baseless fabric. But finally, as with magic
that doesn’t work magically, the most wonderful things turn out not to
be supernatural at all: the choice of virtue over vengeance; the sheer mar-
vel of ordinary human beings; and the illusion that lasts just a couple of
hours of a newly created alternative universe. Romance reconfigures the
supernatural as the superhuman; The Tempest reconfigures romance as
the familiar world.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fairy monarchs, fairy mistresses:

‘I am of ane other countree’
Magic may be at its most compelling in a romance when it does not

behave magically, but a being from another world—from the other world,
the world of fairy—who showed no supernatural qualities would be a sad
disappointment. It is the fairies’ difference from ordinary humanity, or
even heroic humanity—their freedom from the pains and limitations of
mortality; their ability to break the rules of nature and time and physical
space; their capacity to bestow unstinted wealth; their independence of
moral conventions; their sheer unpredictability—that gives them their
narrative interest. The ultimate fairy queen, both monarch and, poten-
tially, mistress, in whom all those properties are contained, is Spenser’s
Gloriana: the figure who gives her title to England’s national epic.
Just as the ultimate goal of Arthurian quest finally defines itself as the
Holy Grail, the object that can never be assimilated into the real world, so
the ultimate woman of romance is a fairy mistress, or fairy queen. Like
the Grail, she can be accessed—or rather, she can make herself accessi-
ble—within chivalric society, but she comes at her own will, not anyone
else’s. The Grail appears at the moment it chooses, and it is ‘achieved’
only by those few who are elect, not by all who seek it. Fairy queens, or
occasionally fairy kings, similarly choose their own moments of appear-
ance, and they bestow their favours on a similarly elect group. The fiction
of the later Grail romances is that the election is done by God; despite not
being able to claim the same ultimate status, fairies usually represent the
final supernatural arbiter within the works in which they appear.
Although they were sometimes given a place in the divinely created order
of beings, fairies sit very uneasily with a Christian context, and tend to be
made the subject of works whose ideologies are oblique to orthodox piety
(Spenser gets away with combining fairies and Anglicanism by making
his faery land allegorical). Above all, they are other in a fuller sense than
almost any of the ways in which the term is now used. Most ‘others’ are
alien because of unfamiliarity, or sexual or cultural difference, or social

or geographical distance: unfamiliarity and difference and distance that
ultimately offer the possibility of closer knowledge and understanding.
Fairies come from the Otherworld, and are unassimilable. It is never
going to be possible to bridge the gulf between the two worlds, even
though a being from one side may occasionally take up habitation on the
other. That sense of separation held good even when fairies were the
object of widespread belief; and now, in a world that claims to be ratio-
nal (that is, which has substituted a widespread belief in abduction by
aliens for abduction by fairies), they have retreated beyond the borders of
experience or of intellectual analysis to a world defined as fantasy. Even
in the pre- or early modern period, the fairies of romance did not require
belief, but they probably needed rather less suspension of disbelief. What
they do require is a recognition on the part of readers and audiences that
the real world cannot be reduced to the rational. Fairies occupy that dan-
gerous borderland that cannot be controlled by human will and is not
susceptible to the normal operations of prayer.
Only a handful of the fairies of romance have retained any measure of
fame into the modern world. One of these is Gloriana herself, who is
introduced (under the name Tanaquill) as early as the second stanza of
the Proem to the Faerie Queene, as being the ultimate, Grail-like, object
of the quest of ‘that most noble Briton Prince’.1 Another is the figure on
whom she is partly based, the ‘elf-queen’ of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas—the
tale which is the pilgrim-poet’s personal contribution to the Canterbury
storytelling, and a deadly parody of the less-sophisticated kind of con-
temporary romance. It should by rights have killed the whole motif stone
dead, but so far as memes are concerned all publicity is good publicity,
and the fairy queen went from strength to strength, reaching her epic
apogee in Spenser. And some four or five years after Gloriana had first
appeared on the market—a year or so before the second instalment of the
poem was published, and around three before Speght’s new edition of
Chaucer’s works—Shakespeare’s Titania and Oberon made their appear-
ance on the London stage: the only literary fairies who can still rely on
wide reader recognition beyond academia. They have among their
sources another Chaucerian fairy pair, the quarrelling fairy king and
queen of the Merchant’s Tale. And behind them all is a supporting group
of fairy aristocrats and monarchs—most often queens, occasionally
kings—who dispense threats or favours, wealth or death; who act as chal-
lengers or benefactors, as moral teachers or prophets, or, in the case of
female fairies, as mistresses or as founding mothers.
Fairy Monarchs, Fairy Mistresses 175
A further four such otherworld figures, who have largely dropped out
of sight since the sixteenth century, carried as wide reader recognition for
the Elizabethans as Titania does now. Three of them are female, one
male, and each has a function characteristic of fairy characters. Their lack
of familiarity in the modern world requires fuller descriptions for each of
them.
The first comes close to being the quintessential fairy mistress (much
more so than Gloriana, since she makes her sexual favours fully available
on her very first appearance in the narrative): the lady who bestows
herself and accompanying wealth on the knight successively named as
Lanval, Landeval/Launfal, and Lambewell, in his Anglo-Norman, two
Middle English, and Renaissance incarnations. She herself is anonymous
except in the Middle English Launfal, where she is called Dame
Tryamour. Only scraps of the printed editions survive, but the full
Renaissance text is preserved in the mid-seventeenth-century Percy Folio
manuscript.2
Second is the elf-queen who gives both the power of prophecy to
Thomas of Erceldoune, and also a long series of prophecies for him to
utter: hence one of his alternative names, True Thomas. His story accord-
ingly falls into two main parts, the first part constituting a romance that
describes his affair with her and his sojourn in her ‘other countree’; the
second recounting the prophecies. The textual histories of the two parts
developed in parallel, but with much interweaving, from the early
fourteenth century onwards,3 though the earliest full text to survive—
containing both parts, the story of the love-affair and the prophecies—
dates from the 1440s. It was copied several times over the next hundred
years, though its first known printed edition dates from 1652. By the early
sixteenth century this two-part version existed alongside a more
prophecy-heavy text, with an adapted and abbreviated romance intro-
duction,4 and one or both versions apparently influenced Spenser. The
romance section alone, without the prophecies, also at some point began
a parallel independent existence, passing into oral tradition as the ballad
known by its protagonist’s third name, Thomas Rymer.5
Third, and the least well known in England at the popular level, is
Melusine, the founding mother of the house of Lusignan. Her romance
was given both a prose and verse treatment in French, on each side of
1400, and both were translated into English, as Melusine and the Romance
of Partenay, though only the former is known to have been printed. The
few printed fragments surviving of her romance may none the less indi-
cate a process of reading to extinction rather than scarcity. She was
famous enough for Richard Hyrd to retain Vives’ condemnation of her

in the early years of the century, and she was listed alongside heroines
such as Dido, Lucrece, and Polixena in a poem printed in 1572.6
The name of the fourth figure has already been mentioned: Oberon,
the fairy king who typically acts as judge or arbiter, though his arbitration
may show more of arbitrariness than of justice. He requires a further list-
ing since he was thoroughly familiar as a character before A Midsummer
Night’s Dream was ever written, having made his first appearance some
centuries earlier in Huon of Bordeaux. Originating as an early thirteenth-
century French poem on the borderline between chanson de geste and
romance, and rewritten in prose in the fifteenth century, the work
decisively entered Tudor consciousness with Lord Berners’ translation of
its prose version. Oberon’s wide recognition factor in the late sixteenth
century came not only from reprints of the romance itself but from the
work’s being given its own dramatization.7 The text of the play is lost, but
some idea of it may be gained from the chunk of Huon material, Oberon
and his fairies included, that constitutes the second act of The Tragical
History of Guy of Warwick of the early 1590s. The Oberon of the original
romance, like Melusine, is the child of a fairy mother and a mortal father
(and, for all his longevity, eventually dies), but his later incarnations, in
writers such as Greene, Shakespeare, and Jonson, made him fully fairy.
If a fairy king is named in a text, the name chosen is almost always
Oberon: the medieval name. Fairy queens have no such generic name
until the very end of the sixteenth century, when ‘Mab’ begins to make its
appearance, but there was still a generous possibility for choice.
Shakespeare’s Titania allows a surface gloss of the classical supernatural:
the name is used for a number of figures by various Latin authors (ety-
mologically it means simply a descendant of the Titans), but the best
known of them, Ovid, applies it to both Circe and Diana,8 Diana being
the earthly form of the triple goddess Lucina–Diana–Hecate, and Hecate
in turn being identified with Proserpina. Both sets of association, Circe
and Diana, stress the potential danger of such a figure, as both have the
habit of turning mortals into beasts—a power that resonates with
Bottom’s ‘translation’, even though it is Puck who manufactures that.
The Proserpina connection also, however, takes Titania away from Ovid
back to her source in that other fairified goddess, the Proserpine of the
Merchant’s Tale.9 Her name notwithstanding, both Titania and Oberon
remain firmly in the native fairy tradition, with its pucks, its mischief-
making, and its household elves who creep out when all the mortals have
gone to bed.
Some slippage between the classical and native traditions was common
in the sixteenth century. As a knowledge of classical mythology spread
across in the Middle Ages from those learned in Latin to vernacular
speakers, there had been a tendency to equate the demi-gods with native
fairies, not least since both groups were connected with water and woods.
Before the word ‘nymph’ was borrowed into English, the Old English-
derived ‘elf’, or, from the early fourteenth century, the French-derived
‘fairy’ were the standard terms for such beings. The coupling of classical
and native terms becomes more self-conscious as familiarity with the
classics increases. Melusine uses ‘nymph’ as an occasional synonym for
‘fairy’; Spenser sometimes pairs the words.10 Golding translated Ovid’s
gods of the natural world as ‘elves of hilles, of brookes, of woods alone, |
Of standing lakes’, and Shakespeare followed him in The Tempest in
Prospero’s great speech renouncing magic. Prospero may invoke
Neptune as a metonym for the sea, but his ‘elves of hills, brooks, stand-
ing lakes, and groves’ have thoroughly fairy habits: they are ‘demi-
puppets’, not demi-gods, who
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites.11
No self-respecting nymph ever left the trace of a fairy ring. Even in such
an Ovidian context, Shakespeare is affirming native traditions of fairy,
just as he does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of
Windsor. In the latter, the retributive fairies who pinch Falstaff are fake,
and their victim seems to be the only person to believe in their exist-
ence—or, at least, the women who arrange it all would presumably not
have done so had they thought that ‘real’ fairies might be cavorting
around Herne’s Oak at midnight. It is one of the more wonderful effects
of the Dream that the audience so completely believes in their existence
for the purposes of the play, even to the point of swallowing Oberon’s ‘I
am invisible’ as a simple statement of fact (2.1.186). Although by this date
classicism might add a resonance or a kind of authority to fairies as demi-
gods, English romances kept the classical supernatural firmly secondary
until Spenser interwove classical machinery into his native epic. The ele-
ments he borrows are precisely those that will fit most easily into a fairy
land: Diana and her nymphs, not Apollo or Jupiter.12
The history of fairies in Britain takes somewhat different forms in folk-
lore and romance. Fairy beliefs at the popular level seem to have been
continuous from Celtic times forwards; the more literary kind of fairy
was conveyed into French literature by way of parallel Celtic traditions in
Brittany, and from there back across the Channel to England. Direct
transmission from Irish or Welsh to English is hard to trace, and seems
to have been unimportant by comparison with the Breton and French
route.13 The folklore history of fairies has been the subject of much schol-
arship and more speculation, but lies beyond the scope of this book. The
question here is what kind of generic niche was occupied by the fairy, and
the fairy lady in particular, after her arrival on the romance scene, and
how she adapted and changed for different purposes and over time—her
quality as meme within the corpus of romance. There is probably now a
tendency to equate the fairy queen and the fairy mistress, and the equa-
tion has a long history; it also gets strong endorsement from that trio of
couples, Sir Thopas and his prospective elf ‘lemman’, Arthur and his
visionary Gloriana, and one man who has no intention of ever seeking a
fairy mistress, Bottom, and the besotted Titania. If that were all there
were to such a figure, however, if she were no more than the ultimate sex-
ual fantasy, then she would have sunk to the level of cliché long before Sir
Thopas placed her there, and stayed at that level.
If there is a single defining quality of the fairy monarch, of either sex,
it is not sexuality but power: power that may well be exercised in the
cause of justice, but which is primarily characterized by its arbitrariness.
There was an Irish myth that equated the fairy hag who could turn beau-
tiful, the ‘loathly lady’ motif, with the territorial dominion of Ireland, in
what seems to be a relic of mythology of the goddess Ériu. That she
bestowed rule on the man who was prepared to kiss her, however it might
be allegorized in terms of the difficulty of obtaining the kingship and its
later sweetness, has an arbitrariness about it, a mismatch between ends
and means, that fits the fairy world in inverse proportion to its logic in
the real world.14 The mortal partner of a fairy may not have any notable
attribute other than an equivalent arbitrariness about his selection:
Thomas of Erceldoune (who seems to have been a real historical person
leaving normal traces in the records) has no claim to distinction until his
otherworld mistress has given him her store of prophecies. God, in
romances as in homilies and saints’ lives, can be relied on to act provi-
dentially, but such generic expectations of goodness, mercy, and due
reward are not a necessary predicate of fairies. The Oberon of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream does get the various lovers sorted out into
pairs, at the second attempt; but he might just as easily have chosen a less
happy ending for them. And just what he thinks he is doing with his wife
and Bottom, or with her ‘little Indian boy’, does not invite, or receive,
close scrutiny: for another quality of fairies is that they are inscrutable.
Fairies were an anomaly in the divine order of creation, and romances

are rarely interested in defining their precise metaphysical or theological
status except in terms of what they are not: it is frequently insisted that
they are not diabolic. Intellectual explanations for their existence in the
Middle Ages sometimes cast them as angels who had remained neutral in
the War in Heaven. They were therefore not damned, as the rebel angels
were, but they lost the right to remain in Heaven, and so descended to
middle-earth to lead a quasi-material existence in parallel with the phys-
ical existence of the human race.15 Such an explanation was, however, too
close to the diabolic to be altogether comfortable, as the recurrent anxi-
ety to stress that fairies are not in fact devils indicates. They themselves
are often at pains to make the distinction clear, sometimes by passing a
test of true faith such as partaking of the Eucharist, or simply by naming
God. One manuscript of Thomas of Erceldoune adds in such a reassur-
ance, having its elf-queen remain unfazed when Thomas invokes the
Trinity for protection against her.16 Just occasionally—it happens to the
mother of the future Richard Cœur de Lion, in his eponymous
romance—a woman who appears mortal will be proved otherwise by her
inability to pass such a test: forced to remain present through the sacring
of the Mass, she breaks free from the men holding her and flies out
through the roof, never to be seen again; but she is something of a rar-
ity.17 Sometimes figures who appear supernatural will insist outright,
even against the plain statement of the narrative, that they are actually
human.18 If they are not devils, neither are they ghosts: the Oberon of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, hardly the most theological of plays, firmly
differentiates fairies from such ‘damned spirits’ (3. 3. 382–9). The equa-
tion of fairies with nymphs and dryads was not entirely straightforward,
partly because the pagan gods were often given a Christian definition as
devils, partly because the natural history of the two groups (both habits
and habitat) did not offer a precise overlap. Having had his pageant of
water-nymphs washed out by a storm when Elizabeth visited East Anglia
in 1578, Thomas Churchyard hastily recycled them as fairies for her
departure, though he had to write a new speech apologizing for their
inappropriate costumes and appearance.19 Popular belief, and the
romances with it, most commonly took fairies to be outside theological
schemata, a third order alongside the angelic (fallen or not) and the
human. The place occupied by the fairies was, therefore, most often
defined simply as somewhere else: a fifth world to set beside Heaven, Hell,
Purgatory, and middle-earth. The lady of Thomas of Erceldoune leads him
to a place where the roads between those various worlds intersect: one
can pass direct to Paradise, or Hell, or Purgatory, or from Purgatory to

Heaven; or else finally to a marvellous castle on a hill, unparalleled ‘in
erthe’, in an ‘other countree’ that is never given a name but which is not
a part of any of those recognized worlds.20 The ballad version simplifies
the topography to three roads away from middle-earth, the paths of
righteousness (‘though after it there’s few enquires’) and of wickedness,
and the ‘bonny road’ to elfland.21 The lady of the romance instructs
Thomas:
‘Take thy leve of sone and mone,
And the lefe that spryngyth on tre;
This twelve monthes thou most with me gone,
Midylle erthe thou shalt not see.’22
She then leads him in at a hill, into pitch darkness, through water up to
his knees, and in constant earshot of the ‘swoghynge of the flode’ (174)—
a three-day journey intensified in one version of the ballad to the fear-
some
For forty days and forty nights
He wade thro red blood to the knee;
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.
Child, A.69–72
Elfland is not, it seems, equidistant from Hell and Heaven. The infernal
quality of the journey is endorsed in the romance by the fact that the
fiend regularly descends on the lady’s country to levy a tribute (289–90).
Thomas must be returned to middle-earth, after what seems to him like
three days but is in earthly terms three years, lest he be carried off to
Hell.
The Otherworld of the Thomas texts is ‘somewhere else’, and at a fur-
ther remove of distance from the somewhere else of most romance
quests. Unusually, it is accessed from a very specific place, from Huntley
Banks or Eildon Tree: real locations that serve to lock the prophecies that
conclude the romance version into the real world of time and place.23
Other romances that contain fairies associate them with a direction, often
the west, rather than a place. Folklore fairies tended to be denizens of the
night, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in the romances, they are more
widely associated with ‘undern’, when the sun is at its zenith in the south.
Sir Thopas heads off in diametrically the wrong direction, ‘north and est’,
in a fashion that indicates how commonplace the motifs must have been.
The midday heat can lead the mortal to invite further trouble by lying
down under a tree to rest. It is while Orfeo’s queen, Herodis, is taking her
midday rest in an orchard that she is abducted by the king of the fairies,
first in a dream, then in actuality.24 Trees and forests are dangerous loca-
tions; still more dangerous are liminal settings, alongside wood or water.
Sir Lambewell, the Renaissance equivalent of Sir Launfal, sets off
towards the west,
betweene the water and a faire fforrest,
and when he wakens from sleep he is greeted by maidens who come out
of the forest to summon him to their fairy mistress.25 The ‘fontayne of
fayerye’ where Melusine first appears to her mortal lover is set between a
meadow and a forest.26 It is ‘by a forest side’ that the knight of the Wife
of Bath’s Tale comes across twenty-four dancing maidens who disappear
when he approaches; Spenser, who imitates the passage when Calidore
encounters the disappearing dancers on Mount Acidale, has the knight
watch them from under ‘the covert of the wood’.27 Prince Arthur imitates
Sir Thopas in the run-up to his vision of his fairy queen by breaking off
from ‘raunging the forest wide’ to rest on the grass.
Fairies are most frequently to be met as a manifestation within this
world. The ‘Quene of Fairy land’, Aureola, who figured in an entertain-
ment at Elvetham in 1591, emerges from her normal abode ‘in places
under-ground’ to welcome Elizabeth, drawn to the real world by her
wish ‘to doe [her] duety’ to the more powerful monarch.28 It is less
usual for the human to gain access to the fairy world, though sometimes
the two overlap: the much-feared forest through which the young Huon
rides is ‘ful of the fayrey and straunge thynges, that such as passe that
way are lost’. It is the earthly haunt of Oberon, though his favour
towards Huon modifies his dangerousness: the forest becomes a place of
recovery for the hero and his men, as the fairy king summons up a feast
for the starving company and a magnificent palace in which to serve it,
with hangings of silk and beaten gold and jewelled ivory benches.29
Access by mortals to a fully other world is often through a cave or into
a hill: this is the route taken by Thomas of Erceldoune and Orfeo, and
by visitants to Celtic fairy worlds. Huon and his wife vary the pattern by
making their final journey (a one-way journey, with no return) to
Oberon’s fairy realm by air. The difference of these countries from the
familiar world is most immediately marked by the surpassing splendour
of their palaces, castles and towns. Thomas’s lady asks him, as they
come in sight of her home:
Seist thou yonder, that fayre castell,

That standyth hye upon that hyll?
Of townys and towris it berys the bell; [is ranked foremost
On erthe is lyke non other till.30 [no other can compare with it
Huon first sets eyes on the fairy capital city of Momure from a distant
hilltop, from where he can see its white marble walls and towers shining
like crystal, rather as the Redcrosse Knight sees the New Jerusalem from
the Hill of Contemplation. Spenser’s New Jerusalem is filled with angels
going up and down from ‘highest heaven’; Momure (in contrast to
Thomas’s elfland, with its easy access to Hell) is likewise accessible to the
angels, who descend in ‘a great multytude’ to take Oberon’s soul into
Paradise.31 The unearthliness of the Otherworld is sometimes made
explicit through direct comparison with Paradise. The crystal walls of the
castle that Orfeo finds, encompassing dwellings made ‘all of precious
stones’ that shine so brightly that there is never any darkness, recalls the
New Jerusalem and foreshadows its description in Pearl:
No man may telle no thenche in thought [think
The riche work that ther was wrought.
By all thing, him think that it is [it seems to be
The proude court of paradis.32
Spenser, by contrast, first compares his own fairy city, Cleopolis,
unfavourably with the heavenly Jerusalem, though he allows its primacy
among the less than heavenly: if it is not eschatologically ‘the fairest Citie
. . . that might be seene’ (I. x. 58), and its crystal tower is no more than
glass beside the ‘Angels towre’, it is at least
for earthly frame
The fairest peece, that eye beholden can.
I. x. 59
Just as the fairies occupy an equivocal position between humankind and
the angels, so Cleopolis is here marked out as something beyond the nor-
mal and yet still ‘earthly’: perhaps less a statement of the city’s meta-
physical status than an insistence on Spenser’s part that his Faerie Land is
not finally of a different order of being from England.
Surpassing beauty is also, and more famously, an attribute of fairies
themselves, and not just of their queens: Oberon is likewise the fairest
being Huon has ever seen.33 The lady who becomes mother to Richard
Cœur de Lion is the most beautiful in the world, ‘bryght as the sunne
thorwgh the glas’, and is encountered travelling in a ship made of gold

and ivory with sails of samite.34 The story of Launfal, in all its versions, is
structured so as to have a kind of beauty contest as its climax, in which
the hero’s rash boast of the supremacy of his mistress’s looks to
Guinevere’s is shown to be justified by a procession of maidens of ever-
increasing beauty, whom the onlookers believe, in turn, must be his mis-
tress, and which culminates in the appearance of
a damsell by her selfe alone.
on earth was fairer never none,—
upon a fresh ambling palfray,—
much fairer then the summers day.
Sir Lambewell, 507–10 (Percy)
The people rush to gaze on her as if she were divine:
and all still uppon her gazinge
as people that behold the sacring. [elevation of the Host
525–6
She carries, in other words, the quasi-divine quality of the Host of the
Mass—an interesting simile to find surviving the Reformation by a cen-
tury.35 Both Lambewell and Launfal speak of their mistress in terms nor-
mally reserved for the Blessed Virgin, as the one who ‘me out of baile shall
bring’, who can redeem the sinner from the sorrow attendant on sin.36
The processes of textual transmission elsewhere assimilate the other-
worldly with the heavenly. Thomas of Erceldoune, in both the romance
and the ballad, at first believes that the woman he sees is so beautiful that
she must be the Virgin; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts of the
prophecies actually turn her into the ‘Queene of heaven’.37 There is an
increasing tendency in panegyrics of Elizabeth to elide the earthly and
heavenly Virgin Queens, but Spenser largely resists the opportunities
offered by the mediating form of fairy to push such a substitution.38 He
describes his Gloriana as beyond the earthly:
So fair a creature yet saw never sunny day
I. ix. 13
but, just as he explicitly avoids turning Cleopolis into Paradise, so he
holds back from suggesting that his faerie queen might be an object of
worship. Gloriana is defined in opposition to everything that hints of
Catholicism. Even so, the Otherworld of faerie allows Spenser a place,
normally disallowed by Protestantism, in which the material world and

its inhabitants can take on something of a sacramental quality, of spiri-
tual sign.
If the fairy queen can be pushed upwards towards the divine, fairies
may also be rationalized, turned into mortal women whose supernatural
powers are acquired by more ordinary means. In the text that probably
represents the earliest form of the story of Lancelot, Ulrich von
Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet (which itself had an Anglo-Norman source), the
Lady of the Lake who nurtures its hero is a merfeine, a water-fairy, who
lives in a land of ten thousand maidens (and some mermen).39 In the
prose Lancelot she is redefined as a woman with skills in the magic arts:
Now, according to the story, the damsel who carried Lancelot off into the Lake
was a fairy. At that time, the word ‘fairy’ was used for all women who practised
magic, and at that time there were many more of them in Great Britain than in
other lands. According to the story in the Breton [British?] chronicles, they knew
the powers of words and stones and herbs, which allowed them to retain youth
and beauty and enjoy whatever wealth they wished.
This particular woman has learned her magic from Merlin, and the lake
in which she lives, in this text, is simply an illusion created by her to con-
ceal her estates from view.40 She is quasi-fairy, with supernatural powers
without being supernatural herself. It was not an altogether satisfying
strategy, and most other texts return her to being more fully other-
worldly, her habitation in the lake being evidence of that. Malory makes
an initial distinction between his supernatural Lady of the Lake, who can
walk on water (real, not illusory, water), and her damsel Nenive, who
adopts her title later, but who has to learn her magic from Merlin.41 The
push towards rationalizing supernatural women is the inverse of the
process of rationalizing magic that doesn’t work. That results in increas-
ing the supernatural element, making it work, over the course of
retellings. Here, the properties of the magic do not change—these
women really do have powers of enchantment—but the source of such
powers is demythologized. They may still be marvellous in the sense of
being an object of wonder, but they are not inherently supernatural.
Morgan le Fay is the best known and most discussed of such figures.
She first enters written literature in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of
Merlin, where she is the most beautiful and the most skilled in healing of
the nine sisters who rule over the ‘island of apples’, an island of eternal
spring that combines the qualities of Avalon and the Fortunate Islands,
to which the wounded Arthur is brought.42 Within twenty years of that
first appearance, by 1169, in a somewhat satirical section of Etienne of

Rouen’s political poem Draco Normannicus, she is described as Arthur’s
sister, and as a nympha perennis, a long-living fairy.43 A year or two later,
she makes her first vernacular appearance, again as Arthur’s sister skilled
in healing, in Chrétien’s Erec (l. 4220). Her first appearance in English is
in Layamon’s Brut, where she carries a different name, Argante, though
her function is the same as in the Life.44 The wounded Arthur declares
that he will go to Avalon, ‘to the fairest of all maidens, to the queen
Argante, most beautiful of fairies; and she shall make my wounds fully
whole’. A boat arrives bearing two unnamed women, who take the king
away; and ‘Britons still believe that he is alive, and lives in Avalon with the
loveliest of all fairies’:
Bruttes ileveth yete that he bon on live,
And wunnien in Avalun mid fairest alre alven.45
The literary offspring of these early Morgans are queens of magical
islands of eternal spring: some wicked or enchantresses or both (such as
Ariosto’s Alcina and her descendants in Tasso and Spenser), some benev-
olent. In these early manifestations, by contrast, Morgan is distinguished
by her separation from sexuality. That tradition too continued,
sufficiently for Bacon to note Elizabeth’s manipulation of the concept,
controlling her courtiers
much like those accounts we find in romances, of the Queen in the blessed islands
and her court and institutions, who allows of amorous admiration but prohibits
desire.46
One of the models proposed for Spenser’s Gloriana, the fairy queen
Proserpyne of Arthur of Little Britain, is of this kind, though in contrast
to Elizabeth her prohibition of desire applied only to herself: indeed she
masterminds (or mistress-minds) the love between her protégée,
Florence, and Arthur (son of the duke of Brittany, and unconnected with
the British hero). She tests this Arthur’s faithfulness by appearing to him
by moonlight, ‘betwene a fayre forest and a grene medow’, and making as
if to seduce him—a temptation he successfully resists.47
Although some late works that decisively broke with even the most
legendary kind of history (such as the wildly fantastic Mervine son of Oger,
of the 1590s) made Morgan fully fairy,48 her supernatural nature was
downplayed in the heyday of Arthurian romance. She was there refigured
as Arthur’s sister, and therefore as a mortal woman. In the prose Merlin,
she is given human parentage, as the daughter of Arthur’s mother Ygerne
by her first husband Gorlois, and ‘le Fay’ accordingly becomes a courtesy
title granted her on account of the exceptional learning that supplies her
skill in magic. The title is on occasion upgraded still further into ‘god-
dess’, picked up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:49 an upgrading that
also emphasizes its courtesy quality, since, although fairies might perhaps
exist, goddesses, in a Christian world, do not. The human Morgan’s use
of her learning is, notoriously, rarely for good: she is unusual among this
group of fairy-derived mortal women in that in her later and best-known
manifestations she is largely malevolent, and her malevolence increases
in proportion to her humanity. Only in her action in taking away the
wounded Arthur, which continues to associate her with Avalon, does she
consistently retain any alternative role. At the end of Malory’s narrative,
furthermore, despite the acknowledgement of his prophesied return,
Arthur does not reach any magic country for healing, but dies and is
buried at Glastonbury.50 His tomb, still containing his corpse, was sup-
posedly discovered there in 1191. There is no medieval narrative of
Morgan’s death; but, unlike Merlin or Arthur himself, she never figures
as one of the undead.
Most of the women who have the appearance of being rationalized
fairies are rather more attractive. The heroine of Marie de France’s
Guigemar has more supernatural associations than powers. Guigemar is
brought to her by a magic boat which he finds after encountering a talk-
ing hind while hunting, but she is not responsible for either the hind or
the ship, and their origins remain mysterious. She can, however, tie a
knot in his chemise that no woman but herself can untie. The author of
Partonope of Blois presents Melior for the first 6,000 lines of the
romance as a mysterious and unknowable figure with fairy powers,
including diverting him from hunting to a magic ship, but in its second
half she is simply human, with all the vulnerability of a young woman
betrayed by her lover. The two stories are found combined in Generides,
a fifteenth-century romance that was especially popular in print.51 Its
heroine, daughter of the king of Surre (Syria), inhabits a jewelled palace
in the forest, to which the hero is destined to find his way when he gets
lost while hunting. She declares her love for him, and when he has to
leave her, she weeps on his shirt, her tears staining it so that only she can
wash out the marks. For all their fairy resonances, all three heroines are
presented with the sympathy attached to any young woman in love,
whose difficulties in pursuing their love cannot be solved by any easy
exercise of supernatural powers. These authors get the best of both
worlds, this and the Other.
Such quasi-fairy figures offer another way of thinking about Gloriana.

She does not need to be rationalized, since allegory bypasses the question
of factual plausibility and provides a bridge between the human and the
supernatural. Queen Elizabeth herself, however, certainly had powers of
her own, even if they did not stem directly from her learning: powers to
grant or withdraw favour, ultimately powers of life or death. In many
ways, Elizabeth has more in common with a Melusine or a Melior or the
Lady of the Lake than with ordinary (mortal) romance heroines, and
figuring her as Gloriana embodies that distinction. Spenser also co-opts
a further quality of the supernatural in connecting this latest representa-
tive of the house of Tudor with the fairy world, and that is prophecy. This
helps to give specificity to his claim of divine endorsement behind his
faerie queen; divine endorsement is indeed partly what the poem is
about. It is channeled not only through Gloriana and the whole repre-
sentation of the Elizabethan church settlement as Truth, but through the
sense of Providence accompanying the culmination of British history in
the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors are presented as the fulfilment of polit-
ical prophecy; and, so far as humans are concerned, that is less a matter
of divine foreknowledge than of second sight—not least the second sight
associated with the inhabitants of the Otherworld, but applied within this
one.
‘some uncouth tidings tell you me’ 52
Prophecy of the present—writings that claim that the events of the

moment have been long foretold—requires a past from which the future
can be predicted. Renaissance prophecies therefore not only relied heav-
ily and explicitly on their medieval forebears, but could be expanded
indefinitely forwards to keep them up to date. Prophecy also requires
access to privileged knowledge. Such knowledge may come from God,
though God notoriously tends to class His plans for the future as divine
secrets, a forbidden area of enquiry. It may come from the devil, and
those who foretold the future were accused of diabolism almost as a mat-
ter of course. Fairy offered a third way, a medium that neither trans-
gressed God’s prohibitions nor invoked the powers of Hell, and it was
accordingly a useful channel for prophecy. Holinshed interprets the
‘three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of the
elder world,’ who accost Macbeth and Banquo to predict their royal des-
tinies, as ‘either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses
of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries’; and that he ascribes such an

interpretation to ‘common opinion’ suggests that the association of
fairies with prophecy was commonplace.53 The Fates and fairies indeed
share a common etymology in prophecy, in fata, things said, and ‘fairy’
could on occasion serve as a synonym for ‘prophecy’.54 The higher rank-
ing the fairy, the more authoritative the prediction; and since romances
were the natural generic home for such figures, there is a marked overlap
between romance and prophecy—an overlap on which Spenser capital-
ized. That fairies’ privileged knowledge was as good as any that might
come from God or the devil was stressed in various ways. Melusine, half-
fairy foundress of the house of Lusignan, repeatedly assures her chosen
lover that her foreknowledge is ‘of God’, not of the devil, and further
insists that she is not a heretic either.55 Thomas of Erceldoune supposedly
received his ability to prophesy twice over: once because on parting from
him his elf-queen gave him the gift of telling, or foretelling, the truth—
hence his byname of ‘True Thomas’; and again because she left him with
a substantial store of prophecies spoken by herself. The upgrading of her
in the early sixteenth century into the Virgin took the process a large step
further: if Mary herself foretells the future, then such revelation must be
agreeable to God, even if she has acquired the attribute by literary descent
from an elf-queen.
Romance made room in two ways for such supernatural figures with
their paranormal powers of knowledge. First, the readiness of the genre
to incorporate the magical and the fantastic gave them an easy home.
Second, the foundation legends that so often took romance shape are
themselves a form of prophecy of the future. Melusine can name
Raymondin, her future husband, on their first meeting; she knows of his
accidental killing of his uncle, although the action was unwitnessed; and
she gives him exact instructions as to how to bring about his future pros-
perity, including such details as that he must buy a deerhide from a man
he will meet by the road. She knows, too, later in the story, of his secret
action in breaking the taboo she has laid on him never to see her on a
Saturday, when she becomes a serpent from the waist down; and she pre-
dicts the terrible consequences for their descendants, in the present of the
romance’s writers and readers, that will follow from his action.56 In the
case of the parvenu Tudors, prophecy could serve as an insulation from
their shaky dynastic claim to the crown. The second sight of the seer
could reveal the rightness and necessity of their accession such as were
hidden from ordinary mortals. And James VI and I seems to have had the
additional advantage that his accession, and the union of the crowns of
England and Scotland, really had been prophesied in advance with the
help of Thomas of Erceldoune’s supernatural instructress.
The human characters of romance have to work through experience or
learning. Raymondin has to see his wife on the forbidden day before he
knows her secret; his uncle, who earlier predicts his own death and his
nephew’s prosperity, gets his knowledge from skill in reading the stars.
Those of supernatural origin know of hidden things directly, by a privi-
leged form of consciousness unlike ordinary forms of thought. It follows
that they are almost never portrayed from the inside: we are not shown
what kind of thought-process produces such knowledge. The workings of
Gloriana’s mind are never touched by Spenser’s narrative; even in Arthur’s
vision of her, she is apprehended through him, and her private thoughts
and motives lie beyond explanation or examination. Melusine’s mind is
shown only when she is operating with the emotions of a wife or mother—
of a woman—not when she speaks in prophetic or privileged mode, as a
fairy. Telepathic powers are given a kind of explanation in Huon, but only
to stress how inexplicable they are: Oberon was given such a gift by one of
the fairies who attended his birth, that he should know ‘all that ever any
man can knowe or thynke, good or yll’.57 The Fairy Queen Titania, who
represents Elizabeth ‘in tropicall and shadowed collours’ in Dekker’s ‘dra-
maticall poem’ The Whore of Babylon, has a similar power. Alongside her
public and political interactions, she has a form of knowledge that comes
to her ‘strangely’, and which gives her insight not shared by her courtiers
and advisers: for instance, the intuition, or second sight, to identify a
potential assassin when there is no apparent reason for suspicion.58
The language of prophecy similarly distinguishes itself from everyday
speech, by its form as much as by its predictive content. It includes not
just a heavy strain of the enigmatic—and the more the prophecy refers to
the future of the reader, to events that have not yet happened, the more
obscure the enigmatic coding is likely to be—but often also a kind of
moral apocalypticism, most familiar now through the Fool’s parodic pre-
diction of one of Merlin’s prophecies (‘this prophecy Merlin shall make;
for I live before his time’) in the Folio version of King Lear; a parody that
‘predicts’ a mixture of the standard abuses of the world as it is with a
vision of a world so perfect that it will never exist:
When priests are more in word than matter;

When brewers mar their malt with water;
When nobles are their tailors’ tutors,
No heretics burned, but wenches’ suitors,
Then shall the realm of Albion

Come to great confusion.
When every case in law is right,

No squire in debt nor no poor knight;
When slanders do not live in tongues,
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs . . .59
The Fool’s immediate model is a six-line prophecy variously ascribed to
Merlin and Chaucer, which similarly predicts confusion for Albion
‘whan faith fayleth in preestes sawes . . ..’60 The formal model for such
language is set by the earliest Thomas prophecies, recorded around 1340:
When men desire other men’s goods more than their own . . .
When men make stables of churches . . .
When pride spurs and peace is laid in prison . . .61
Similar prophecies were circulating orally and in manuscript at least
from the fifteenth century, and in print in the seventeenth. So it is not
surprising that Dekker’s Titania should use similar language to predict
what will never happen, as a way of rejecting the Catholic monarchs who
seek her hand:
When a court has no parasite,
When truth speakes false, and falshood right:
When Conscience goes in cloth of gold,
When offices are given, not sold . . .
And lawyers sweare to take no fees,
I. ii. 241–4, 248
only then will she be prepared to listen to suitors. The speech functions
within the action as a political statement, but it is presented as a way of
keeping at bay the monarchs’ ‘bewitching charms’; and it endorses the
sense that Titania is a figure who might, if she chose, use such language
not just as rhetorical elaboration of a ‘no’ but to mediate second sight.
Those who have no such supernatural powers or origins have to rely
on others to do their prophesying for them. The perennial favourite as
soothsayer was, as Lear’s Fool notes, not a fairy but a man with compar-
ably supernatural origins: Merlin, who owed his power to see hidden
things to the fact that he was the son of an incubus. Merlin enjoyed
Europe-wide currency, whereas Thomas of Erceldoune, and the fairy
queen for whose prophecies he served as the medium, seems not to have
been known outside Britain, and had their greatest fame in the North.
Geoffrey of Monmouth was responsible for this huge diffusion of Merlin,
both by inventing a biography for him in his History of the Kings of Britain
and his Life of Merlin, and through his composition (or perhaps media-
tion) of the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, which were incorporated into the
History and which also received widespread dissemination as an inde-
pendent text throughout the Middle Ages and in printed form into the
seventeenth century. The prose Merlin of the Lancelot-Grail cycle added
a concluding episode to his biography, with the story of his being buried
alive beneath a rock by a woman with whom he had become so besotted
that even his knowledge of the outcome could not prevent his revealing
to her the secrets she needed to immure him. He is acting as one of the
‘undead’ in the Orlando Furioso, when he reveals to Bradamante the
future of her dynasty. Britomart similarly has the line of her descendants
described to her by Merlin, though when he is still fully alive within this
world;62 the choice is particularly appropriate for Spenser’s prophecy of
the Tudors, since Henry VII had made the most of the Welsh prophecies
that might be taken to predict his accession, and Merlin continued to
carry authority, especially in his homeland of Wales, through the six-
teenth century and later. The ancient prophecies of a messianic Welsh
saviour, y mab darogan, the son of prophecy, were associated with him,
and optimistically applied to various historical figures: not just Henry
Tudor, but Owen Glendower before him, and Henry’s eldest son
Arthur.63 In Malory and his sources, Merlin regularly acts as prophet for
King Arthur (though, as in his own case, knowledge of the future does
not prevent it from happening). Tudor readers derived their knowledge
of Merlin variously from chronicles, from prophecies, from oral tradi-
tions, and from romance sources: in particular the Morte Darthur, and
the print of The Byrth and Prophecye of Marlyn, a metrical version of the
early part of the prose Merlin that largely overlaps with Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s account of him.64
Making a real prophecy about the future, especially if it encompassed
the death of the monarch, was an altogether more dangerous matter, and
one that called down sharp punishment. There were successive attempts
to prohibit the circulation of prophecies throughout the Tudor era,
enough to prevent their printing but apparently with no effect on less for-
mal means of dissemination.65 Ascribe your prophecies to someone
safely in the past, however—whether Merlin or Thomas of Erceldoune,
or, on occasion, both together—and it was easy to disclaim responsibil-
ity, even if the traditional text might look suspiciously updated. A
disclaimer of personal invention in the present added authority for what

still lay in the future. By the early sixteenth century, in The Prophisies of
Rymour, Beid and Marlyng, Merlin and Thomas Rymer’s elf-queen (now
transformed into the Virgin) were sharing a single prophetic text that did
project forwards in time. The work apparently dates from some time
between 1513 and c.1530, and rapidly achieved notoriety.66 An adapted
text was printed in 1603. It is a work that makes a heavy investment in the
Tudor dynasty. The man who speaks its predictions (variously citing as
his authorities, as its title indicates, ‘Arsalldoune’, Bede, and Merlin)
includes a prophecy of the Wars of the Roses, when ‘the sone ageinst the
father shalbe’ (111),67 and of the coming of Henry Tudor:
Then shall entre at Mylford haven
upon a horse of tree [i.e. by ship
A banyshed barone that is borne
of Brutes blode shalbe,
who will join battle at Bosworth Field (143–6, 149). The work ends with
an extended prophecy of a great English king who will reign for fifty-five
years, who will defeat the French, be welcomed into Rome by the pope
and cardinals, and then proceed to conquer Jerusalem and win the Holy
Cross. Alarmed by its potential for stirring political and religious oppo-
sition, Henry VIII’s council both forcefully attempted to halt its dissem-
ination and encouraged an alternative interpretation by which the Holy
Land would be metaphorically reconquered by the overthrow of the pope
and the putting of the Scriptures into English.68 The text continued to be
adapted and read into the next century, now with the wider dissemina-
tion of print, and notwithstanding the continuing presence of the Blessed
Virgin its function within a Reformation agenda remained assured. The
deep suspicion with which it continued to be regarded under the Tudors
had more to do with its open-endedness, and therefore its potential for
being extended in dangerous ways. One man was interrogated as late as
1586 for disseminating the Erceldoune prophecies.69 The various texts
available in scholarly reprints give little idea as to why they might still
have been so dangerous; but the version printed in 1652 fills in the gap,
and demonstrates why they could incur such suspicion. This is the origi-
nal romance version (very close, indeed, to its early fifteenth-century
text), with the standard prophecies appended; but it includes a coda
about the Tudors, accurate up until at least the 1550s, but then culminat-
ing with a prediction for the 1590s of Elizabeth’s death or removal,
followed by national breakdown on an apocalyptic scale.70
This kind of evidence for the oral dissemination of the Thomas

prophecies in the sixteenth century suggests that they were much more
widely known than the manuscript record alone would indicate; their use
after Elizabeth’s death, discussed below, indeed invites the speculation
that they were universally recognized, whether generically or as individ-
ual texts. The Prophisies of Rymour seems to have been the best known,
and it is particularly interesting for the closeness with which it meshes
with the opening of the Faerie Queene. Its narrator asks a man he meets
for news, and is shown a vision of a ‘crowned quene’ accompanied by
angels; like her literary ancestress, the elf-queen of Thomas of Erceldoune,
she rides on a dapple-grey steed, ‘of a ferly kynde’ (19–24). He looks
again, and sees ‘a goodly man as armyde knyght’ riding over a ‘bent’, a
plain, and who
bare a shylde of sylver shene.
A crosse of gowles therin did be. [gules, i.e. heraldic red
52–3
The knight is not identified until a few lines later, when the lady addresses
him as ‘Seint George’. Here, he is very much an English St George, who
is at odds with the Scottish St Andrew, and the lady’s function is to appeal
to their better nature (‘Remember that ye be sayntes in heven’, 65) and
keep them apart. His appearance, however, is strikingly similar to
Spenser’s ‘gentle knight’
pricking on the plaine,
Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
with both his shield and surcoat bearing a ‘bloudie Crosse’.71 As the
iconography makes plain long before he is named, this figure too is St
George. As the Prophisies records (69), St George commonly bore the
epithet ‘Our Lady’s knight’; in the Faerie Queene, Redcrosse has been
sent forth by a different lady, ‘the greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie
lond’ (I. i. 3), but she, in so far as she figures the head of the Church in
England, has need of her own saintly English knight to serve her.
The existence of the St George of the Prophisies of Rymour makes a
powerful difference to how the opening of the Faerie Queene might be
read. Did Spenser know the work, or equivalents to it? If he did, and if he
could assume a similar familiarity in some or all his readers, then his epic
announces itself forcefully from the start as political prophecy. It is
impossible to prove such knowledge—if one is to allegorize England in
the person of St George, there is bound to be an overlap of attributes, and
the similarities could be mere coincidence. But the existence of the

prophecy at the very least reconfigures the cultural context for the recep-
tion of the Faerie Queene. A Redcross Knight was already an established
figure within the febrile atmosphere that always surrounded political
prophecy; to open the epic of England with such a figure would have
announced more than it does to a modern readership unfamiliar with the
tradition. The culminating prediction of the Prophisies, about the great
English monarch who would enter Rome in triumph and win the Holy
Cross, had already been given the lie in its most literal detail by the pas-
sage of time; but the ideas of conquering Rome and building God’s king-
dom had a new dynamism after the Reformation. In retaliation for
Roman demands for tribute, King Arthur had supposedly reached the
very walls of Rome—according to John Harding and Malory, he had
been crowned as emperor.72 The Prince Arthur who seeks Gloriana still
has that in the future; and perhaps that future was one already current in
prophecy for the house of Tudor. Spenser seems to hint at a fusion of the
two conquests of Rome: Arthur’s in the future for the young prince of his
poem; and the other in the future for England, in a way that would fit
with his knowledge of these prophecies. The apocalypticism of
Redcrosse-St George’s overcoming of the dragon already had its match in
a prediction relating to an English monarch who would subdue the pope
and assume imperial power.73 Both provided powerful counter-models
to the prophecy of imminent disaster due to befall England in the 1590s.
Interpreting a prophecy to fit new facts, and a new set of hopes or anx-
ieties or fears, is a well-established and near-universal human character-
istic, and later rewritings will make sure the prophecy conforms a little
more closely to whatever eventuated. The earliest known print of any
form of the Prophisies of Rymour is the closely related ‘Prophicie of
Thomas Rymour’, apparently composed in the mid-sixteenth century; it
is one of the texts in the anthology of prophecies printed in 1603 as The
Whole Prophesie of Scotland, probably in London, though it carries an
altogether safer Edinburgh imprint on its title page.74 And this version
carries the story forwards, beyond the appearance of the Virgin and the
hostile saints George and Andrew and the prophecies that follow, to the
union of the crowns of England and Scotland. The culmination of the
text comes at the very end, when the narrator asks the thousand-dollar
question, and along with the answer is given the name that lends the
prophecy its authority:
When all these ferlies was away [marvels

Then sawe I non, but I and he.
Then to the birne couth I say, [man
‘Where dwels thou, or in what countrie?
Or who shal rule the Ile of Bretaine
From the North to the South sey?’
‘A French wife shal beare the Son,
Shall rule all Bretaine to the sey,
That of the Bruces blood shall come
As neere as the nint degree.’
I franed fast what was his name, [asked eagerly
Where that he came from what countrie?
‘In Erslingtoun, I dwelle at hame,
Thomas Rymour men calles me.’75
It is much easier to write prophecy retrospectively, once one knows what
one has to prophesy, but the prophet on this occasion had been writing a
little too early. The line of Brut of the Tudor prophecy (the ‘baron . . . of
Brutes blode’ quoted above) has been transformed into the line of the
Bruce, to turn it into a prediction of the Stuarts; but the change was orig-
inally intended to refer to a child one generation earlier than the man
who did eventually inherit both crowns, James VI, since he was of the
tenth degree, not the ninth, from Robert the Bruce.76 Inaccuracy was,
however, a trivial price to pay for the additional authority the prophecy
acquired from its having actually been current before the event. Both
John Colville, in his funeral oration on Elizabeth, and John Spottiswood,
archbishop of St Andrews, were happy to point out that James’s accession
fulfilled Thomas’s prophecies—strictly speaking, that is, the prophecies
given by the elf-queen for whom Thomas served as spokesman.
The prophecies of . . . Thomas the Rymer, may justly be admired, having foretold
so many ages before, the union of the kingdomes of England and Scotland, in the
ninth degree of the Bruces blood.77
The archbishop does not commit himself on the matter of elf-queens, but
the arrivals of both the Tudor and Stuart dynasties were authorized by
fairy prophecies. The union of the crowns was still in the future for
Spenser, but he could have found it already adumbrated by Thomas of
Erceldoune. The elf-queen of the romance had given Thomas his store of
prophecies; Elizabeth, in keeping with the inscrutability of the fairy, kept
the secrets of the future to herself, and unlocked them only by a single
gesture on her deathbed. Even if Spenser did know the prediction, he
most certainly could not incorporate it into his poem: his own living
Faerie Queene was much too dangerous for him to take such a step, as her
fierce prohibition of prophecy demonstrates.
It was a different matter after her death, when Dekker apparently
reworked the scene of the hostility of St George and St Andrew for the
intended original opening of the ‘Magnificent Entertainment’ designed
to welcome the new King James into the City of London in 1603.
Saint George, Saint Andrew, (the Patrons of both Kingdomes) having a long time
lookt upon each other, with countenances rather of meere strangers, then of such
neare Neighbours, upon the present aspect of his Majesties approach toward
London, were (in his sight) to issue from two severall places on horsebacke, and
in compleate Armour, their Brestes and Caparisons suited with the Armes of
England and Scotland, (as they are now quartered) to testifie their leagued
Combination, and newe sworne Brother-hood.78
The knights were to ‘ride hand in hand, till they met his Maiestie’, where-
upon the (female) Genius of the city was to make an appearance to
demand of them why they were in armour and conjure them to peace, a
peace appropriate for the time when the ‘proud buildings’ of New Troy
‘shew like Fairie-bowers’ (87). It is not essential that Dekker and the
watching Londoners should have known the prophetic text in order to
symbolize the amity of the kingdoms in the persons of their patron saints;
but the pageant acquires extra depth and resonance, and the exceptional
representation of Genius as a woman on horseback would be explained,
if it were written as a sequel to, and completion of, the Rymer prophecy
on ‘the union of the kingdomes’. The elf-queen who had been
transfigured into the Blessed Virgin now becomes a figure for civic pride;
Mary’s virginity is transmuted into an image of an un-invaded England:
’bout whose Virgin-waste,
Isis is like a Cristall girdle cast. [i.e., the Thames
104–5
The reconciled saints together with the fairy bowers and that reminis-
cence of Florimell’s girdle of chastity refigure London as the place where
Thomas’s elven prophecies and Spenser’s ideal Faerie Land merge and
are given material form in the historical world.
The accession of James and its immediate aftermath were as far for-
ward as the Thomas prophecies had gone. Their speciality had lain in the
troubled history of Anglo-Scottish relations, and the smoothness of
James’s succession not only appeared to complete that story but gave the
lie to the more apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of his

inheritance of the crown. So far as Dekker was concerned, his pageant
offers an end of history, or at least of prophesied history. It was a history,
however, that had by now dispensed with Gloriana.
‘i love thee well by cause of the trouthe

that is in thee’
Fairies possess not only the ability to see into the future but also the abil-
ity to see into the heart. That is what Dekker’s Titania does, when she can
identify a likely murderer. Despite the unpredictability that makes any
encounter dangerous (and there is still some touch of that in the rep-
resentations of Elizabeth as fairy queen), fays can act as arbiters of justice
when its human forms fail; and they may also act to encourage future
virtue in the protagonist as well as to acknowledge it in the present.
Supernatural intervention recognizes both the imperfection of human
attempts at justice and the mismatch between the exercise of justice and
power. When Malory’s Guinevere is accused of poisoning Sir Patrise and
attempting to poison Gawain, Lancelot can save her from judicial burn-
ing by combat, but it takes the quasi-fairy Damsel of the Lake to identify
the true culprit.79 Two of the most widely known fairy benefactors,
Melusine and Oberon, similarly come to the aid of their chosen heroes
after they have become criminals to mortal eyes, but when supernatural
insight can recognize their guiltlessness. Raymondin accidentally kills his
uncle, the earl of Poitiers, in attempting to defend him from a wild boar.
Melusine intervenes to prevent Raymondin’s part in the death from
being known, and gives him the advice that sets him on the path to wealth
and greatness. Huon of Bordeaux unwittingly kills Charlemagne’s son as
the result of a plot on the part of the emperor to ambush and kill him; and
despite clearing himself by both oath and combat he is sent off by
Charlemagne on a quest that should lead to his death. Oberon gives him
instructions and the magic help that will enable him to survive his adven-
tures. Their supernatural aid is not unconditional, however. Raymondin
has to love and trust his wife despite her prohibition from his ever setting
eyes on her on Saturdays; his trust briefly survives his breaking his deeply
sworn oath never to attempt to see her, but not for very long. Oberon
declares that he will assist Huon ‘by cause of the trouthe that is in thee’,80
but he also insists that Huon should maintain further standards of virtue
if his help is to continue, and Huon proves much worse at those. The
magic cup he is given will continue to refill itself only if he never lies; he
is never to be so rash as to try out the magic help-summoning horn with-
out due need. The consequences of disobeying Oberon are embodied in
one of his followers, who has been condemned to have the form of a sea-
beast for thirty years. Huon gets off more lightly: he infringes both
injunctions, though the narrative suspense as to what will happen next is
rather dispersed by Oberon’s forgiveness. More dire consequences follow
from his breaking the oath Oberon demands from him that he is to
remain chaste before his marriage. His forcing of his future bride on the
ship that is carrying them back to France results immediately in a ship-
wreck, her abduction by pirates, and he himself being bound, blind-
folded, tortured, and left to die—though again, Oberon opts to take pity
on him and send help.81 The adventures Huon undergoes and the trials
he encounters have almost as much to do with his repeated moral failures
to live up to Oberon’s commands as with the machinations of his ene-
mies, whether at home in France or abroad in various pagan kingdoms.
In the case of Huon, his trouthe is a given of the story, and tends to
be proved more by Oberon’s favouring of him than by any outstanding
demonstration of it on his part. There is a strong suggestion, however,
that Oberon’s education of him does work to make him into something
more like an ideal knight, worthy of the final choice of him to succeed
to the throne of the fairy kingdom; and such an assumption presumably
underlies Spenser’s choice of Huon as the being who has knighted his
own faery protagonist, Guyon (II. i. 6). Just how readily contemporary
readers recognized the role of fairies, and Oberon in particular, in
chivalric education is indicated by the perfunctoriness of Christopher
Middleton’s introduction of him as instructor in his Chinon of England,
of the 1590s. In the early stages of the romance, Chinon has no intention
of pursuing a life of prowess; after his conversion to such a mode of liv-
ing, his first adventure takes the form of a combat against a fire-breath-
ing monster, which turns out to be the fairy king acting in test mode.82
Otherworldly support may also be a narrative shorthand for virtue that
has to be taken somewhat on trust by the reader. Launfal, in his various
incarnations, is not seen exercising any remarkable virtues, though
every text makes clear that he deserves more than he gets: in Marie de
France’s original, he is distinguished for his valour, largesse, and
prowess, as well as for good looks; in Sir Launfal, it is his largesse alone
that is singled out for high praise; in Sir Lambewell, that virtue has
become a downright liability, as he progresses from spending ‘worthi-
lye’ to ‘outragiouslie’.83 It is when he is overlooked for reward and has
to leave the court to avoid the disgrace of evident poverty that a fairy
mistress steps in to supply him with the favours that Arthur has failed
to provide, and sexual favours too. There seems here to be something of
an excess of favour over desert: an excess made evident in the story
when Launfal breaks the prohibition on speaking of her and loses every-
thing she has given him, herself included. As in Huon, however (or as in
Yvain/Ywain, or any of the other romances of atonement), there is space
for penitence, forgiveness, and recovery, as she finally returns to justify
his boasting of her beauty. Just how much forgiveness she shows varies
from text to text, though all have a happy ending. In Sir Launfal, his
fairy squire restores his horse to him so that he can follow her to the
Otherworld. In Lanval and Sir Lambewell, he leaps up behind her onto
her own palfrey without asking her leave, the Percy Folio text adding a
defiant assertion of his faithfulness:
‘Madam, with reason and skill
now goe which way soe-ere you will,
for when you light downe, I shall stand,
and when you ryd, all at your hande,
and whether it be for waile or woe [weal, i.e., happiness
I will never depart you froe.’
611–16
He may have transgressed and lost her once, but she does not exercise her
magic powers to dismiss him after this insistence on his love and service.
He has now, in a way, achieved her love by right of his faithfulness in suf-
fering rather than through her grace alone.
Justice can bring punishment as well as reward, and fairy justice can be
extreme in both. The story of Launfal’s neglect and reward, disobedience
and recovery, encloses a further plot line, in which his rejection of
Guinevere’s advances results in a formal trial for shaming her, on the
grounds that he had propositioned her (a false charge, invented by the
queen as revenge) and slandered her (because he had claimed that his
mistress’s lowest handmaid was more beautiful than the queen; some-
thing he had done, but it falls as a charge when the fairy lady and her
maidens make their appearance to prove the statement true). The Middle
English version is meticulous in setting up the formalities of the trial,
with twelve knights being commissioned as the equivalent of a jury and
two more acting as bail for him. The delivery of justice at the end of the
romance, however, lies not only in their clearing of Launfal, but in the
fairy’s punishment of Guinevere:
Dame Tryamour to the Quene geth

And blew on here swich a breth
That never eft might she see.
1006–8
The Anglo-Norman and Percy versions instantiate the story’s generic
happy ending solely in terms of the hero: they have his guiltlessness
recognized at law, and allow his repentance as sufficient for reconcilia-
tion with his mistress. The Middle English adds to its restoration of moral
equilibrium the retribution delivered on the villainess, by a fay who has
both the second sight to know the truth, and the power to blind by her
breath.
Fairies are not, however, either reliable or predictable, and their capri-
ciousness can produce a kind of justice that does not follow normal mor-
tal rules. If the guilty Guinevere is blinded, that epitome of blind male
folly, January, in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, has his physical blindness
cured by the ‘kyng of Fayerye’, here identified with Pluto, in pursuit of his
quarrel with his wife, Proserpina. It is, once again, in the heat of the day,
and the fairy king and queen are following their usual habit of passing
their time beside a well under a tree in January’s pleasure-garden.84
January may be the injured party at the moment when he is given his
cure—his young wife May and her sprightly lover have just managed to
couple in the pear-tree over January’s head—but his persistence in moral
blindness marks the limits even of fairy power. May, caught in flagrante
delicto, is herself given the power of a quick-witted defence by the ‘queene
of Fayerye’ herself, and all women after her. Both husband and wife are
in effect rewarded rather than punished for their vice. Chaucer’s alter-
ations to his sources none the less represent an advance in tastefulness:
the closest analogues to his story cast the supernatural agents as Christ
and St Peter.85 Changing them to fairies taps into the arbitrariness that
potentially lurks within otherworldly arbitration: this is the exercise of
power without responsibility, carried out more for the fairy gods’ self-
interest in the progress of their own marital quarrel rather than to serve
as a corrective in the mortal world. Yet there is an appropriateness in the
outcome that is analogous to justice, in that it intensifies and makes evi-
dent what was already there by implication. The wilfulness of January’s
blindness is highlighted by his refusal to see what is there in front of his
eyes; May’s reneging on the trouthe of her marriage vows is pointed by
her outright lie (that she was just struggling with a man in a tree in order
to restore her husband’s sight), and her quick-wittedness confirms
her triumph over the man who had tried to exercise absolute control
over her.
Fairies can be arbiters not only in matters of virtue and ill-doing but in
matters of love. Shakespeare’s Oberon, whose quarrel with his wife has
the Merchant’s Tale in its hinterland, decides somewhat casually to sort
out the mortal lovers into appropriate pairs by a process of eye-altering.
That this is less justice than caprice is indicated by his other use for the
love-juice, to make his wife adore whatever hideous thing she first sees on
waking: it is designed as a way of making her give up her foster-child to
him, for purposes that seem unlikely to be moral by human standards.
He claims that his action is a kind of punishment, but it is much closer to
malice than justice: in all their various reasons for quarrelling, Oberon
tends to come out as the guiltier party—especially so since fairy wives are
not bound by the rules of subjection to their husbands imposed on the
daughters of Eve.86 There can, however, be more satisfying supernatural
interventions in matters of love. Nenive (the character in Malory who
starts as a damsel of his Lady of the Lake but then takes over her title)
takes action to correct the injustice suffered by Pelleas, the passionate
devotee of the scornful Ettard; Ettard’s mistreatment of him, and her
readiness to indulge in an affair with Gawain instead, are repaid when
Nenive makes her fall hopelessly in love with Pelleas at precisely the same
moment when she makes Pelleas fall out of love with her. He is rewarded,
not just by relief from past torment, but by the Lady of the Lake herself,
who can appreciate a deep capacity for love when she sees it. When Ettard
laments her state, Nenive calmly assures her that what she is suffering is
‘the righteous judgement of God’; when Pelleas thanks God, his bene-
factress declares simply, ‘Thank me.’ And the knight and his supernatural
rescuer proceed to love happily ever after.87
The most compelling instance of the supernatural arbitration of a
mortal lover’s faithfulness occurs towards the end of the Anglo-Norman
Amadas et Ydoine. Its imaginative power stems partly from the fact that
we are not told outright at any point just what the metaphysical status is
of the knight who tests Amadas’ trust in his lady: his conformity to the
conventions of fairy emerges only gradually, and even when he leaves the
text he carries with him as many qualities of the uncanny—the liminal,
the unexplained—as of the Otherworld. The romance, moreover, has not
made any use of fairies before this point: there is nothing to warn the
readers what to expect. The episode occurs after Ydoine has died (as the
narrative flatly states), and Amadas is watching over her tomb within a
walled cemetery. The lover had already undergone one test of how much
he loves his lady, when she had insisted to him, in a desperate attempt to
prevent him from killing himself after her own death, that she had had a
number of affairs before she fell in love with him and had murdered the
resulting offspring, so that it is imperative that he stay alive to pray for her
soul. She had at the same time insisted, none the less, that her love for
him was deep and faithful. This is what the scene in the graveyard now
calls into question. Just before midnight, Amadas sees a huge company of
noble people approaching. They bring with them a beautiful milk-white
palfrey with bells on its harness, which has no function in the narrative
unless perhaps as a sign of fairy.88 Then their leader, a knight in full
armour, leaps the wall on his charger and confronts Amadas, telling him
that he is mad and a fool for believing in Ydoine’s love: he himself, he
declares, was the man she really loved, and to prove it he shows Amadas
the ring that he, Amadas, had given her, on his own finger. Although the
young man’s confidence is briefly shaken, he gazes at her tomb, and just
as Percival recalls God in looking at his sword when he is tempted by the
devil, so Amadas recovers his faith in his lady from the sight of where her
body lies. He and the strange knight fight bitterly, the knight twice paus-
ing to give Amadas the opportunity to deny Ydoine’s love. At last Amadas
manages to inflict on him a mortal wound—or a wound that should be
mortal; but instead, unexpectedly, the knight congratulates Amadas on
his courage and loyalty. He assures him that Ydoine is not dead: all the
young lover must do is exchange the ring the knight had shown him,
which he had stolen from her finger, for an enchanted ring he had sub-
stituted for it, and which gives the appearance of death. He also tells
him—for this knight, like Dame Tryamour and Melusine, has privileged
knowledge of the truth—that all that Ydoine had told him about her past
was untrue. He further declares that he himself is of such a nature that
weapons cannot kill him. Before day breaks, he has to go to God, ‘a Diu’
(might he after all, indeed, be an angel rather than a fairy?); and he and
his company leave Amadas alone in the graveyard to open the tomb and
restore his sweetheart to life.89
It is an extraordinary episode. It is almost unique in having the lover
assert his faith in his beloved despite having (as he believes) genuine
knowledge of her unchastity, from her own mouth. It also sets a clear
limit on such male knowledge of a woman’s sexual history: some things
can be known only to those with second sight; or to those with love so
absolute and unconditional that their trust will override rational evid-
ence. In that respect it parallels the motif of magic that doesn’t work. The
magic here palpably does work—even the audience, as well as the
fictional characters, believe Ydoine to be dead; the knight is indeed, it

transpires, a supernatural being—but, as with non-functioning magic, it
is the surplus over and beyond the everyday but contained in human
emotion that matters; not the fairy enchantment, but Amadas’ depth of
love. Amadas’ combat against the supernatural being turns out to be a
combat against the temptation to replace his difficult faith in Ydoine with
the easy prejudices of entrenched antifeminism. This is, moreover, not a
diabolic challenge: the strange knight names God in the course of his first
exchange with the mourning lover, as well as on his departure. Amadas’
triple insistence before daybreak that he will not deny his love, twice when
the combat is suspended and implicitly in his victory, invites a contrast
with St Peter’s lesser loyalty, though the parallel is never spelled out.
There is no claim either that the test of Amadas is instigated by God; but
the knight’s departure to God implies that it carries divine approval, and
that the lover’s triumph is right by more than human standards.
The strange knight’s congratulations to Amadas on passing the test,
the discovery for both the lover and the audience that the challenger was,
after all, on his side, is echoed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The
Green Knight never claims to be an otherworldly being, but Gawain, and
the audience with him for much of the poem, have a strong suspicion that
he might be. Whether he is merely Sir Bertilak turned green is, moreover,
something that the poet avoids resolving: such an explanation has barely
been given before it is called into question again by the Green Knight’s
riding off ‘whither-so-ever he would’, and still green. A solidly human
figure might be expected to de-enchant at that point, to turn back into his
human form (as indeed happens in two of the later analogues),90 and
return to his castle. He carries with him enough associations of the non-
human—the unnatural colour of his skin and hair, his ability to survive
decapitation—for his function as moral arbiter to work in similar ways to
that of fully fairy figures. Like the knight of Amadas, he proves that he is
on the side of God, here by the regular performance of Mass in his castle.
And the test turns out to be one not of good against evil, but of how good
the good really is: a test of Gawain’s, as of Amadas’, trouthe.
The fairy knight and the Green Knight both initially appear to be set on
killing the heroes, and only the generic expectations of the romance limit
their danger. The challenger in Amadas is physically formidable, ‘grans et
fors’ (5653), and the magnificence of that opening image of his charger leap-
ing the cemetery wall casts him as a fearsome opponent. The Green Knight
is not only huge, and green, but inclined to terrifying whimsy: cut off my
head, and get your own cut off in a year’s time. There is obviously a catch
in it somewhere, hence the refusal of any knight except Gawain to accept

the challenge. It is only at the end that the moral force behind the terms of
the challenge, the testing of trouthe, is made manifest. Even the most capri-
cious and dangerous of fairies follow a code of conduct of a kind, in which
they respond to human goodness and are bound by certain codes of their
own—not least by the point on which Gawain is tested, faithfulness to their
given word. Such faithfulness from supernatural beings can, as in the case
of Launfal’s lady or Huon’s Oberon, mean trouble when they have
promised retribution for the hero if he breaks promises of his own. Gawain
likewise receives a small wound on the third descent of the axe for his fail-
ure to keep his word to exchange winnings with the lord. Even a fairy who
has become fully humanized in the course of a story’s transmission, as is
taken to be the case with Ywain’s Alundine (Laudine in Chrétien’s original),
retains this power of absolute fulfilment of her warnings—in her case, to
reject him if he fails to return to her within a year. The punishment has less
of the quality of personal pique about it than of taboo or the Celtic geis, an
imposed binding condition that operates at a level beyond ordinary human
pacts.91 She, like Dame Tryamour and Oberon, also has the power to relent
if the hero has sufficient inward trouthe to justify forgiveness, but there is
no suggestion that the hero can enforce such forgiveness. The fairy king of
Sir Orfeo fulfils his threat to carry off Herodis, but he also keeps his word to
Orfeo to give him whatever reward he wishes in return for his harping; his
only objection is that Herodis is too lovely to be given to the ragged and
filthy minstrel who has spent ten years in the forest. Despite this rather sur-
prising sense of what is socially or aesthetically proper, he is meticulous in
matching Orfeo’s faithfulness with his own trouthe—and, unlike in the
Greek myth, the reward is unconditional, and Orfeo does indeed lead his
wife back, hand in hand, to the world of the living.
Orfeo’s faithfulness comes close to setting a standard for the fairy king
to follow. There are other occasions, by contrast, when the protagonist
has deep moral flaws, and an encounter with a fairy is educative and
restorative. This is what happens in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. Unlike
in the analogues, the knight who has to find what women most desire
must do so in order to prevent his execution for rape. The hag who tells
him the answer is not, as in the other versions, a mortal woman under a
spell, but, it seems, a fairy.92 The tale is set in the times when
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,

Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
CT, III. 860–1
So one is invited to draw the obvious conclusion when the twenty-four

ladies whom the knight sees dancing disappear, leaving only one hideous
old woman. That she is indeed supernatural is implied again by the fact
that the power to turn beautiful lies with herself, not (as happens in the
analogues) in any undoing of someone else’s enchantment. She does so,
however, only after she has delivered the rapist knight a mighty lecture,
occupying a full quarter of the tale, about the nature of true virtue and its
derivation from God.
Chaucer does not require any belief on his readers’ part in fairies: the
moral advice holds good as serious Christian doctrine regardless of who
speaks it. The serious moral use of fairies, as giving supernatural endorse-
ment for ideological statement, generally required a less-sceptical attitude
towards them. Jean d’Arras, who wrote the French original of the prose
Melusine, spends a long introduction arguing the case for their existence.
When Melusine herself marks Raymondin with her favour, it amounts to
a supra-human endorsement of the probity of the male founder of the
house of Lusignan, intended to carry a weight beyond mere fantasy.
Similarly, when she gives her departing sons long lectures on good and
prudent living—like Polonius, holding up the sailing of their ship in
order to do so—her fairy origins are designed to endorse the conven-
tional wisdom of the advice, to make it appear not just conventional but
right by more absolute standards, deleting any possibility of social or his-
torical relativism. It is not just a mother’s or a woman’s advice, but that
of a fay who is ‘of God’, and whose instructions therefore carry more
weight than would their mortal father’s. She accordingly tells them to
support Holy Church; protect widows and orphans; keep company with
gentlemen; avoid borrowing beyond their means to repay; not to cede any
seigneurial privileges in subduing rebellion; to tax reasonably; and to
watch out for the small print of treaties. ‘Thus, as ye here, chastysed and
endoctryned Melusyne her two sones,’ and their careers prosper accord-
ingly.93 A similar desire to have more than human endorsement for
chivalric ideology lies behind the most extended instruction in chivalry in
the French Lancelot-Grail, which is delivered to the young Lancelot by the
quasi-supernatural Lady of the Lake. She instructs him in all the duties
owed by, and to, the knight: that he must defend Holy Church, as he is
defended by his shield and hauberk; that the double edge of his sword
signifies that he must be a soldier both of Christ and of the Christian
community, executing justice on thieves and murderers; and that he must
guide the common people as he guides his horse, and they, in turn, must
supply his needs, just as his horse bears him, ‘in legitimate subjection’.94
It is against such a background that the nature of fairy education in the

Faerie Queene needs to be set. Arthur has been trained ‘in gentle thewes
and martiall might’ by a ‘Faery knight’ named Timon (I. ix. 3; the name
comes from the Greek for ‘honour’), not, as one might expect, a mortal,
though Merlin has general oversight of his upbringing. Timon is of
sufficient importance to be mentioned as Arthur’s tutor in the ‘Letter to
Ralegh’, and there he is juxtaposed with another scheme of education: the
fashioning of ‘a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle dis-
cipline’. The whole context of authoritative instruction from beyond this
world gives the moral and political programme of the poem the fiction of
endorsement from outside the messy relativities of Spenser’s own time
and place. This may indeed be one reason why Spenser chose the ‘fairy’
form for the poem at all.
Arthur and the other virtue knights are characters within the fiction
who serve as surrogates for the reader in this process of education. The
scene on Mount Acidale operates within a similar context, but extends its
idea of authoritative fashioning beyond Calidore, the knight of Courtesy,
and the readers, to the poet himself, in the form of his alter ego, Colin
Clout. ‘Nymphes and Faeries’—the Classical and English forms of other-
worldly beings—sit by the banks of the river at the foot of the hill, and
dance on its flat summit. When Calidore approaches and hears the
‘merry sound | Of a shrill pipe’ and the thumping of feet, the description
strongly invokes fairies; their disappearance when he steps out, ‘vanish-
ing away’ just as the fairies in the Wife of Bath’s Tale had done, confirms
the identification, even though Spenser goes on to define them more for-
mally as graces in Venus’s service. That the three Graces at the centre of
the dance bestow ‘all the complements of curtesie’, and teach the skill of
civility,
how to each degree and kynde
We should our selves demeane, to low, to hie,
VI. x. 23
resonates with this long background in which ideological instruction is
confirmed by its stemming from beyond the world of the everyday. The
ultimate model of this teaching within the poem lies in the woman at the
very centre, Colin’s beloved; and importantly, she partakes both of the
fairy, in her vanishing, and of the human, in so far as she is a ‘Shepheards
lasse’ (VI. x. 16). Her attributes are a summary of the virtues of each of the
heroines of the books of the Faerie Queene—‘divine resemblance’ for
Truth, ‘excelling much the meane’ for a perfection of temperance,
supreme beauty, chastity, and courtesy—in a way that turns her into the
‘Idea or fore-conceit’, in Sidney’s phrase, of the whole work.95 Not by
anything she might say, but by what she is, the ‘lasse’ at the heart of the
dance instructs the poet in what his work can be. She is at once fairy,
authoritative model and inspiration, and the woman he loves. Oberon
had loved Huon for the trouthe that is in him. We never see inside the
lass’s mind, or see enough of Colin’s, to know whether such a motive still
holds true; but what matters here, is rather that she is the trouthe that is
in him.
‘we had thought indeed the lake had been ours’
The moment when things started to go disastrously wrong in the enter-

tainments that Leicester laid on for Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575
occurred while she was still making her way in through the various
defences of the castle in the course of her arrival. As she approached the
inner gate, she found
the Lady of the Lake (famous in king Arthurz book) with too Nymphes wayting
upon her, arrayed all in sylks attending her highnes comming: from the midst of
the Pool, whear, upon a moovable Iland, bright blazing with torches, she floting
too land, met her Majesty with a wel penned meter and matter after this sorte:
First of the auncientee of the Castle, whoo had been ownerz of the same, een till
this day, most allweyz in the handes of the Earls of Leyceter, hoow she had kept
this Lake syns king Arthurz dayz, and noow understanding of her highnes hither
cumming, thought it both offis and duety in humbl wyze too discoover her and
her estate: offring up the same, her Lake and poour thearin, with promis of repair
unto the Coourt. It pleazed her highnes too thank this lady and too ad withall, we
had thought indeed the Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow?96
The entertainment was intended as a compliment, as the handing over of

power and territory by a fairy to the queen. The queen would have none
of it: the power and the territory were hers, and Leicester was not to for-
get it.
Power was largely measured in the Middle Ages and the early modern
period in terms of territory. Fairy monarchs, and even ladies of the lake,
derive much of their power from the fact that they possess such domains;
but Elizabeth will not cede any of her own power. In casting her as the
Faerie Queene, Spenser is also giving her autonomy as a ruler, a notional
freedom from political constraint, and also from male constraint. Fairy
queens (like goddesses) are not under the control of fathers or husbands,
nor (unlike mortal queens) are they answerable to councillors and sub-
jects. They have absolute sovereignty, of a kind that goes far beyond the
human sort at issue in the Wife of Bath’s Tale: you have to be a fairy or a
goddess, not a mortal woman of however high a rank, to have complete
freedom. Gloriana is the absolute ruler of her kingdom, and she has the
disposition of her self entirely in her own control. There was no fairy
queen among the entertainments at Kenilworth, but Elizabeth made sure
that she acted an analogous part herself.
Material and territorial power were among the identifying features of
fairies, alongside their less tangible power of privileged knowledge and
their assumption of the role of moral arbiter, teacher, or judge. More
importantly, they can confer material possessions and the power that
goes with them. Malory’s Lady of the Lake is the patroness who gives
Excalibur to Arthur—the sword that comes from the lake, and that must
be returned into the water at his death.97 The sword itself serves as a
metonym for Arthur’s military strength: power as derived from battle,
and the territorial conquests that result. In the Draco Normannicus,
Etienne of Rouen suggests, not altogether seriously, that after Arthur’s
revival by Morgan she turned him into a fairy and gave him the
Antipodes as his kingdom—the other half of the world, if not exactly the
Otherworld—and that that realm serves as his power-base for any
prospective return to intervene in human affairs.98 Melusine does not
actually own the land that provides the power-base for the house of
Lusignan, but she instructs Raymondin how to obtain it (by cutting a
deer-hide into an unbroken thong and claiming the land that it encom-
passes, a legend traditionally attached to Dido). Oberon inhabits not only
the dangerous forest that Huon has to cross, but also his own fairy realm
accessible only by supernatural means and from which mortals do not
return. These territories may be ‘somewhere else’, but they can provide a
supernatural army whenever necessary to intervene in earthly crises. At
the close of the work Huon succeeds Oberon to the throne of the fairy
kingdom: a new role that is presented as an upwards career move, not
simply as a removal from this world. King Arthur, indeed, is Huon’s rival
for the throne, the implication being that ruling fairyland would be the
culmination of his imperial ambitions. War between the two is avoided
only when Oberon threatens to turn Arthur into a werewolf unless he
accepts Huon’s promotion, a threat that brings about immediate peace.99
Elizabeth may not have been able to turn Leicester into a werewolf,
but she too was dangerous to those who tried to play power politics at
her expense. At Kenilworth, what was at stake was not just marriage as
personal and erotic fulfilment, as Leicester suggests for his Zabeta in the
various masques and entertainments he laid on for her, but the realm
itself. Elizabeth as Gloriana, by contrast, chooses her own future hus-
band; if the Arthur of the Faerie Queene is to have imperial power, it will
be channelled through her. Oberon had cut off the earlier Arthur’s impe-
rial ambitions of ruling the fairy realm; Spenser’s Arthur, it is implied,
may yet make those dreams a reality.
The ability of romance fairies to confer material goods on those they
favour has an evident appeal to fantasy. The unlimited wealth enjoyed by
Launfal or Partonope until they infringe their lady’s injunctions makes a
direct appeal to the human desire to have something for nothing, and
what happened in romance had its counterpart in real-life frauds. It was
not uncommon in the sixteenth century for conmen to attempt to take
money from the gullible in return for an introduction to the fairy queen,
and even more common for Renaissance playwrights to write plays on
the subject. The standard fiction, as in the romances, was that the fairy
herself was already seeking out the gull with the desire of bestowing her
favours on him: the ultimate fantasy that was just sufficiently plausible to
the credulous to be played for real. It was the fabulous wealth to which
fairies supposedly had access that was the attraction here, not, as in the
romances, love or sexual favour. The fairy queen invented by the fraud-
sters of Jonson’s Alchemist has her particular favour explained on the
grounds that she is the gull’s aunt. The lack of sexual interest meant that
the fairy king could, on occasion, be substituted for the fairy queen, with
the possibility (as in Huon) of the inheritance of the fairy kingdom
thrown in as an added attraction.100
Within romance, the fairies’ conferring of prosperity is less common
as a motif than their exercising power over mortals, often at the humans’
expense rather than to their advantage. Sir Orfeo is one of the grimmer
examples, where the invisibility of the fairy king and his host means that
they can abduct Herodis despite all the chivalric force the mortal king
mounts against them. Fairyland in this text doubles as a land of the dead,
or of the living dead—the lack of precise definition for the state of the
corpses ‘liggeand within the wall’ of its king’s castle intensifies the alien-
ness of the whole strange experience. He is not, however, infernal, despite
his ancestry in Pluto. Dekker makes analogous reference in The Whore of
Babylon to ‘hurtfull Sprites’ who spread desolation over the good fairies’
country and fill its cities with the dead; but this is less a supernatural act
than the annexing of diabolic abilities to the Catholic ravaging of the
Netherlands.101
The arbitrariness of fairy power often takes the form of some kind of
taboo or injunction (the Celtic geis) that the mortal must not break.
There may or may not be a reason behind it, but the mortal must accept
it on its own terms. Melusine is structured on three such prohibitions,
each laid by a fairy woman on a mortal, and each serving to establish a
distance between the three supernatural women whose powers control
the story and the men who seek intimacy with them.102 The story starts
with Pressine’s forbidding of her mortal husband Elynas, king of
Scotland, from seeing her in childbed: after she has borne girl triplets,
he simply forgets, and enters her chamber. Reproaching him bitterly, his
wife disappears for ever into Avalon, ‘that was named the yle lost,
bycause that all had a man ben there many tymes, yet shuld not he
conne retourne thither hymself alone’.103 She brings up her daughters
there, constantly lamenting her loss: clearly, the taboo was an inherent
property in her nature, not a willed exercise of power. Melusine’s weekly
serpentine transformation is likewise not in her own power but the con-
sequence of her mother’s curse, imposed after she and her sisters shut
up their father in a mountain in Northumberland to punish him for his
act. Her injunction to her husband against seeing her is a way of hold-
ing off the worse effects of the curse. Yet there are also strong human
reasons why Melusine would not wish Raymondin to see her in her
deformed shape, and those seem to predominate when nothing initially
happens after he has transgressed her prohibition. It is only when he
reproaches her with her shape-changing some time later that she turns
fully into a serpent, a shape she must keep until the day of doom. The
third prohibition tells of a descendant of her third son, who has suc-
ceeded to the throne of Armenia. He decides to attempt the adventure
of the Sparrowhawk Castle: if any man can watch the hawk for three
days and nights without falling asleep, the beautiful lady who owns it
will grant the successful knight any worldly gifts he wishes—castles,
lands, wealth—excepting only her self. Those who fail lead the rest of
their lives in comparative happiness, but are never allowed to leave her
castle; anyone who asks for her body is condemned to misery. The
young king manages to stay awake, partly by admiring the pictures in
the hall that show the history of Elynas and Pressine. He fails to take
warning from them, however, and on completing the test he asks the
lady for her hand and body. She turns out to be Melusine’s sister, and
the young man’s request therefore infringes not only the supernatural
taboo on a request for sexual favours, but the human taboo on incest.
The consequences of his breaking the terms of the prohibition duly
work themselves out, with his own descent into decay and the eventual
loss of Lusignan sovereignty over Armenia.104
Supernatural assistance in acquiring wealth and territory, according to
such stories, brings fewer perils with it than sexual access, or attempts at
sexual access. The encounter between Elizabeth and Leicester’s Lady of
the Lake takes on a deeper subtext in the light of such a background. The
territorial dispute—who owns the lake—becomes a metonym for the
queen’s sexuality: threaten one, and the other will demonstrate its inde-
pendence. Elizabeth’s power to disappear may have nothing supernatural
about it, but disappear she certainly did, leaving Kenilworth several days
before she was due to depart.
Gloriana, like Elizabeth, is a queen regnant. Her realm is inalienable,
and her body is in her own disposition.
‘an elf-queen shall my lemman be’
One does not set out to find a fairy mistress: Sir Thopas’s decision that
nothing less will do for him shows, as usual, that he has got his memes
in a twist. The statement in the Proem to the Faerie Queene that Arthur
is seeking ‘fairest Tanaquill’ throughout the world is later modified by
the explanation that his quest is a response to her declaration of her love
for him in a dream: it is she who has initiated his search. That
the amorous fairy first seeks out her lover, not the other way around, is
the rule. The summons to Lanval by the fairy lady’s handmaids shows
how such things ought to be done: ‘Sir Lanval, my lady, who is most
noble and wise and lovely, has sent us for you, so come with us!’105 By
the seventeenth century, the invitation is less peremptory but more
explicit:
‘My lady thats bright as blossome or flower,
thee greets, Sir Lamwell, as her paramoure,
and prays you for to speake with her
and if it be your will, faire Sir.’106
Her pavilion is only yards away in the forest alongside which he is rest-
ing, and the lady declares her love for him the moment he enters:
‘Sire Lambewell,’ shee said, ‘my harts sweete,
for thy love my hart I leete.’ [lose
139–40
Sexual fulfilment follows as the culmination of that first meeting.

Gloriana’s appearance to Arthur as he sleeps while ‘raunging the forest’ is
made with the same directness, and without intermediaries:
Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd
Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay . . .
Most goodly glee and lovely blandishment

She to me made, and bad me love her deare,
For dearely sure her love was to me bent,
As when just time expired should appeare.
FQ, I. ix. 13–14
Spenser holds back from declaring precisely what happens in the
encounter—Arthur’s assertion, ‘Was never hart so ravisht with delight’,
is coupled with the further statement that she spent ‘all that night’ speak-
ing words such as living man had never heard before. This sounds more
like the loathly lady’s pillow-talk in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, or the topos
of inexpressibility associated with a vision of Heaven, than the sensuality
implied by ‘blandishment’ and ‘delight’. Spenser holds back, too, from
giving any metaphysical status to the visit. Arthur is asleep, but it is more
than a dream: when he wakes, he finds beside him the ‘pressed gras,
where she had lyen’ (15)—phrasing that again suggests a sexual
encounter. But the point does not lie in any law-court style evaluation of
evidence as to what did or did not take place between them. What has
happened is that a woman with the absolute autonomy of the ‘Queene of
Faeries’ (14), and her freedom to dispose of her favour and her love wher-
ever she chooses, has chosen Arthur; and that the encounter sets him off
on the quest that would, somewhere beyond the end of the poem as we
have it, and some time outside history, lead to their continuing union.
Launfal achieves such lasting consummation only after leaving this world
for another; Arthur is searching Faerie Land rather than Britain. The ‘just
time expired’ of the quotation keeps the ambiguity of temporal possibil-
ity, as in the fulfilment of a prophecy—a prophecy along the lines of an
English monarch’s being welcomed in to Rome and winning the Holy
Cross, for instance. But history was running out on Elizabeth, and the
phrase carries strongly apocalyptic resonances too. As after Redcrosse’s
overcoming of the dragon, when the final unbroken union of Holiness
and Truth must be delayed until after his duty to his ‘Faerie Queene’ has
been fulfilled, history has to be completed and time expire before there
can be eternal stability.107
As with all romance conventions, the variations on the fairy mistress

can be as striking as the dominant themes, and even the requirement that
the fairy should choose her own lover is not universal. A fairy woman
could presumably resist rape by a mortal man (she has all those super-
natural powers on call), and a mortal’s taking the sexual initiative often
turns out to be illusory. Graelent, in the Breton lai that bears his name,
finds a fairy maiden bathing in a pool, and takes her clothes; he is pre-
pared to return her shift to her, but when she refuses him her sexual
favours, he proceeds to make love to her anyway. At that point, however,
she informs him that she had come to the fountain for his sake, and that
she knew in advance ‘ceste aventure’, all that would happen.108 She exer-
cises her power over him only when, like Lanval, he later breaks her taboo
on speaking of her. Thomas of Erceldoune is perhaps the most forward
of mortal lovers, and risks the most. After establishing that the super-
natural lady he has encountered is not the Virgin Mary, he proceeds to
proposition her, but it is a dangerous move. She warns him that he will
wreck all her beauty, and indeed after making love to her (seven times),
Thomas stode upe in that stede,
And he by-helde that lady gaye;
Hir hare it hange all over hir hede,
Hir eghne semede owte, that are were graye. [eyes; before
And alle the riche clothynge was awaye,
That he by-fore sawe in that stede;
Hir a schanke blake, hir other graye, [one leg
And all hir body lyke the lede.109
The transformation convinces him that she is, like Percival’s beautiful
temptress, a devil in drag, and therefore that he is damned, but she does
not allow him to escape: she carries him off with her, as he desperately
prays for deliverance. Only on reaching her homeland, beyond this
world, does she recover her beauty.
It is an episode that invites a symbolic or moral reading, but it is not at
all clear what it should be. ‘Don’t make the first advances to fairies’ seems
too simplistic, though that might have been enough for those in the audi-
ence who did believe in their existence—and the widespread credence
given to Thomas’s prophecies implies belief in the source of his prophecy
as well. The mysteriousness of the elf-queen’s turning ugly is itself much
of the point: we do not even learn whether changing her looks lies in her
own power, or, like Melusine’s serpent form, in enchantment or a curse;
or whether it is an inherent consequence for her of pollution by sexual
activity or by congress with a mortal. Despite his initial fear, Thomas is

rewarded, not damned, for what may be defined as a sin of lecherousness,
or as sexual bullying (she does consent, so it is not a rape, but it is scarcely
a freely willed choice on her part), or for consorting with a fairy. It is not
even clear if it is sin that is at issue at all: fairies lie outside normal moral-
ity, especially where sex is concerned. The episode inverts the pattern of
the Wife of Bath’s Tale, where the hideous old woman with her fairy asso-
ciations chooses to turn beautiful. That too is only a first step: she gives
her husband the choice as to whether she should be ugly and faithful, or
beautiful with all its associated risks. Only when he returns the choice to
her to make does she assure him she will be both beautiful and faithful.
Again, there is no explanation as to whether he has himself unconsciously
performed some kind of magic action to enable such an outcome (as hap-
pens in the analogues, where it is a matter of breaking an enchantment
imposed on a human woman), or whether—as seems to be implied—she
makes the decision for herself, as a generous response to his generosity.
Symbolic and moral readings are much easier to provide for the Tale than
for Thomas—almost too easy, indeed. The hag’s transformation can be
read as a shift from a misogynist to a pro-feminist paradigm, in parallel
with the knight’s progression from his initial rape of a young woman to
granting his wife freedom of choice: the hatred and objectification of
women expressed in the rape, and his reluctant marriage to his repellent
rescuer, indicate his estimate of women as despicable; his conversion to
an understanding of gender-inclusive virtue, and of the right of women
to autonomy equal with his own, enables him to recognize their human
loveliness. A parallel reading could be given from a female point of view,
as the recuperation of the raped woman’s self-hatred and sense of cor-
ruption to the beloved woman’s sense of self-worth. By these readings,
the magic of the transformation simply gives physical form to the enact-
ment of moral change: the magic does work (unlike in all those non-
functioning talismans discussed earlier), but it is enabled to work by the
moral and emotional state of the mortal at the centre of the story. But
plenty of other more sceptical interpretations of the tale are possible,
including seeing it as the Wife of Bath’s own fantasies about recovering
her youth and beauty, or as Chaucer’s satire of female fantasies of sover-
eignty. Thomas seems to have more to do with male fantasies than with
female ones; but there too the woman’s ugliness is associated with the
man’s use of her as sexual object, and beauty with her recovery of power.
Such a variety of readings is possible for the Wife of Bath’s Tale partly
because the eldritch woman is never explicitly defined as a fairy, so her
powers are never linked solely to the supernatural. Her conversion of her
husband is done through moral harangue, not enchantment, even if her
own metamorphosis helps matters along. A fully certificated elf-queen,
by contrast, with her freedom from theological or patriarchal control, is
scarcely a topic on which to build morals about normal human relations,
and especially not sexual relations.110 There are almost always dangers
attached to a fairy’s sexual favours—some kind of ordeal or prohibition
or geis—but they do not stem from any male owner of her sexuality. They
are, therefore, very different from the ordeals imposed by fathers or hus-
bands to keep daughters or wives safe from predatory or adventurous
men.111 The conditions set by fairy mistresses are theirs alone, and are
more often concerned with the continuation of their love than the initial
winning of it. The punishment for infringement most often appears as an
instant and automatic consequence of the lover’s disobedience. That
punishment, furthermore, generally bears no logical relationship to the
terms of the initial condition. It is not evident, for instance, why her
husband’s seeing Pressine in childbed must result in his losing her (it
seems even to be against her own will), whereas it is very obvious why
inadequacy in fighting a dragon will have immediate adverse effects. The
prohibitions therefore have something of the illogic, the quality of pure
trial divorced from rationality, of the forbidden fruit of Genesis. The
stories are not allegorical, but the taboo is backed by devastating super-
natural consequences.
That the danger involved in the relationship should have no evident
physical mechanism within the narrative comes close to defining a
woman as supernatural: supernatural at least in origin, even if the exist-
ing version of the story redefines her metaphysical status towards the
mortal. Partonope of Blois, with its heroine on the cusp between super-
natural and mortal, is a leading example. The abduction of the hero to an
enchanted country at its queen’s behest, their ensuing affair, the riches
she gives him, and the prohibition on his seeing her until due time has
expired all cast her in the role of an elf-queen. Yet, after Partonope has
broken the prohibition and her powers together, the focus of the
romance shifts largely to her. Its second part is primarily concerned with
her anxiety over whom she will be compelled to take as her husband. The
inscrutability that is one of the distinguishing features of the fairy is lost,
and we see generously inside her mind and her feelings. In its first half,
the story makes the most of the mysteriousness, suspense, and danger
associated with fairy; in its second, it swaps over to the conventions of the
heroine embarking on love, with all the interiority and sensitivity to her
inward feelings that characterize the treatment of so many romance

heroines—an interiority that is the subject of the next chapter.
Despite Richard Hyrd’s testimony to the popularity of Partonope in
England around 1530, it is hard to trace any continuing reading of it into
Elizabeth’s reign. The distinction it makes between the heroine as fairy
and the heroine as mortal is however one that continued to be under-
stood. It is there in the difference of treatment between Gloriana, who
can be described by those who have seen her in vision or in actuality, but
whose mind remains completely hidden; and the mortal Britomart, who
is given the closest and subtlest psychological exploration in the whole
Faerie Queene. It is there too in the contrast between Helena and Hermia,
with their hopes and fears and confusions, and the enchanted Titania’s
calm imperiousness as she adopts Bottom as her Most Favoured Being.
Just what her relationship with him involves—or indeed her relationship
with Oberon or with Theseus—is never fully revealed. The fairy woman
retains to herself a reserve of unknowability. So far as Elizabeth I herself
was concerned, such a role gave her distinct political advantages, even
while—or because—it cast those around her as unable to access her mind
or her motives.
There is one further reference to Elizabeth that belongs in this context,

though it is one designed to separate her off from every other fairy mis-
tress, Gloriana included. This is Oberon’s reference in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream to the ‘fair vestal thronèd by the west’ whom Cupid’s
arrow passes by. There could, as critics have noted, be many other fair
vestals; but there is only one who holds a throne in the west, and any
Elizabethan audience would have taken such a phrase as a reference to the
queen.112 The lines, moreover, serve no dramatic function; their only
conceivable purpose is as political panegyric. They define the ‘imperial
votaress’ by her difference from both other mortals and other fairies.
Oberon’s description of her follows soon after the account of the confu-
sion of the seasons consequent upon his marital quarrel between the fairy
monarchs, and, more immediately, from Titania’s account of the brim-
ming fertility and the death in childbirth of the mother of the little Indian
boy, a ‘votaress’ of her own order (2. 1. 123–35). This is the world of time
and change, which the panegyrics of the 1590s increasingly represented
Elizabeth as transcending: far from seasonal alteration, she brought an
eternal spring, always the same, semper eadem.113 There seems to be an
apotropaic element in such encomia, an attempt to keep at bay the pos-
sibility of the queen’s death and the risks of civil breakdown attendant on
an uncertain succession. The scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets

the unchanging world of the untouched virgin alongside the world of
mortality, where women’s reproductive powers and death accompany
each other. The description of the ‘fair vestal’ sets Elizabeth outside the
play and its concerns with desire and jealousy, whether fairy or
human.114 The flower touched by Cupid’s arrow produces a love-juice
that affects mortals and fairies equally: it is under its influence that we see
Titania acting not as disaffected fairy wife but actively as fairy mistress. It
does not touch the cold virgin. Shakespeare’s Titania falls victim to magic
against her will; Dekker’s Titania, a decade or so later, resists her suitors’
charms under her own powers. The ‘imperial votaress’ exists outside the
discourses of desire altogether.
CHAPTER FIVE
Desirable desire: ‘I am wholly

given over unto thee’
The medieval romances ‘created a series of female characters who were

both passionate and pure, who gave their hearts spontaneously into the
keeping of the men they loved and remained true to the bargain in the
face of tremendous odds. The women’s steadfastness is in direct relation
to their aggressiveness . . .’ That is not the way we are accustomed to
thinking about medieval women; and indeed Germaine Greer wrote the
passage, not about early romance but about Shakespeare.1 The phenom-
enon she ascribes to his originality was in actuality already endemic as a
meme. At issue is not just the matter of claiming originality for
Shakespeare where he is drawing directly on the embedded culture of his
medieval antecedents, but the risk of missing the powerful resonances
that the meme of the ‘passionate and pure’ woman brings with her—the
woman who focuses all her newly awakened sexual desire on the man she
chooses to be her husband. Such a heroine is generically central for the
romance: that is, while there may be plenty of female characters who do
not conform to such a model—who are the variations on the central
theme of the actively desiring and faithful woman—the Shakespearean
variety of heroine defines a work as romance almost as decisively as does
a happy ending, and does so from the very inception of romance in the
mid-twelfth century. The presence of such a woman at the centre indeed
promises the happy ending, and it is only in a handful of works that delib-
erately set out to confound such an expectation, to disrupt generic
norms, that the two do not go together. Furthermore, as the romances
make clear, the happiness is not just a personal matter. The strong and
loving heroine is typically an heiress, even the founder of a family or a
dynasty: a fact that was already familiar to Elizabethans reading about
Britomart, or watching Rosalind or Miranda.
Love, even more than questing or chivalry, is the concept most closely
associated now with romance. The Mills and Boon phenomenon, with its
Desirable Desire 219
billions of sales, indeed reduces romance to a matter of female love,

which until very recently excluded overt sex. Its writers and readers, over-
whelmingly, are women; by prescription, the stories have a woman as the
central character, and follow her actions and (in particular) her feelings.
Such a focus on women’s emotional inward life is generally regarded as a
field of action developed in the novel, with writers of the stature of Jane
Austen and George Eliot as its giants. That the Mills and Boon books are
known as romances none the less contains an important element of his-
torical truth. They deserve the title, not just because of their compulsory
happy endings, nor even because their aim of being accessible to women
readers is in keeping with the romances’ original emphasis on the ver-
nacular; but because, historically, the concern with women’s actions and
inward lives first emerges in their direct line of ancestry in the medieval
romances. That concern is closely linked with their entry into love, a love
that never denies its sexual component. ‘In the space of a few centuries,’
wrote Foucault, ‘a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of
what we are, to sex . . . Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are,
it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key.’2 As with so many
statements about the modern world, the Middle Ages is an important
forerunner, in this case specifically in romance; and most particularly,
since the adventures available to women focus so largely on their transi-
tion from maidenhood to marriage, in the heroines of romance. For a
young woman of the pre-modern or early modern world, this is what any
bildungsroman that makes any claim to reflect the real world must focus
on. Her growth into sexuality, and the leaving of her father’s house for
her husband’s, were the female equivalent of the hero’s leaving home to
make his own mark in the world. The men have a much greater range of
possibilities for action, which the stories take up in abundance. Love-
romances therefore typically cover a far greater range of time, characters,
and experience than do their modern analogues; they incorporate many
conventions that would now belong to other genres, not least the adven-
ture novel or science fiction; and they have all the resources to hand that
only poetry can provide, to offer a mimetic evocation rather than a mere
statement of what it feels like to be in love. Their conventions offer a huge
capacity for encompassing many of the characteristics of literature most
valued in the modern world, not least in their representation of women.
It is in the early romances that a sense of women as ‘subjects’ in the full
modern sense of the term, as unique individuals with a self-conscious
awareness of their own place in the scheme of things, first begins to
develop. This self-awareness is linked to the awakening of their sexuality;
and women’s sexuality is centrally regarded as positive, to the point

where it is one of the key factors that enables the restoration of social and
providential order. Such an emphasis functions as a strong generic
marker—this is what romance is about. Female sexuality, moreover, is at
its most powerful in working towards such an end when it is directed not
by the man who has the social and familial responsibility for its control
(normally the father), but by the woman herself. Thaisa, the feisty and
desiring young woman who selects Pericles as her husband, is an exam-
ple that runs across the whole historical range of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance.3 Spontaneous and active female desire, rightly directed,
becomes a driving force in the larger providential scheme, the secular
scripture, that most strikingly differentiates the romance from contigu-
ous genres such as epic or history. Only one genre shows a comparable
emphasis, and that is the life of the female saint, where the active desire is
redirected towards Christ.
That last paragraph runs counter to almost every critical and theoreti-
cal presupposition of the last century or more. Germaine Greer’s remark
quoted at the head of this chapter follows from a claim that Shakespeare
‘rejected the stereotype of the passive, sexless, unresponsive female and
its inevitable concomitant, the misogynist conviction that all women
were whores at heart’, and such an assumption about the stereotypical
image of woman is made by almost every critic of the Middle Ages and
early modern period. As is inevitable with such a vast topic as women’s
sexuality, however—affecting half the human race directly, and the other
half by association—things are not simple. This chapter is accordingly
concerned not only with the meme of the desiring woman but with the
political, social, and theological contexts that encouraged her existence.
The romance texts provide overwhelming evidence for a belief in the
desirability of active female desire and for the exploration of women’s
subjectivity. These attitudes to women are most characteristic of insular
writings, in both Anglo-Norman and English. The mistaken assumptions
about the stereotypical woman tend to be the result of approaching insu-
lar writings through French and Latin, which prioritize different models:
the more courtly, and the overtly misogynist. English romance-writers
were aware of those rival discourses, and their responses to them form
the subject of the next chapter; but their own ideas of women’s love and
sexuality were very different.
The ideological centre of romance—the point where family resem-
blance is at its strongest—insists finally not on such surrounding com-
plications but on an idealized simplicity, in which the emphasis given to
female desire raises it to rank equally with male, in a powerful image of

good love as reciprocal and mutual. The idea is perhaps best expressed in
a verse of William Blake’s, written in a very different historical context,
but, like the romances, recording a positive rejoicing in mutual sexuality,
independent of ideological constructions of women as dangerous and in
need of control:
What is it men in women do require?
—The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
—The lineaments of Gratified Desire.4
Blake may have been unique even in his own time, but it goes against all
human experience to imagine that that particular belief was unique to
him, or that it cannot be transhistorical. Love between a woman and a
man at its fullest includes ‘gratified desire’, the body as well as the heart;
or, given the unprecedented modern emphasis on sex, perhaps one
should say the heart as well as the body. The most widely used medieval
term for such love was simply that—love; though to insist on the distinc-
tion of love from lust, physical attraction that does not involve the heart,
Middle French sometimes used phrases such as fin amor, ‘refined love’,
adopted by Chaucer to indicate the highest human love as ‘fyn lovynge’.5
The fineness of fin amor precisely indicates the surplus involved in such
love: the emotions as well as the body, and, with the emotions, the poten-
tial for the infinite linguistic and rhetorical exploration of that surplus
that is the special domain of love-poetry. There is, however, a crucial dif-
ference between love-lyric, which overwhelmingly presents the man’s
point of view—his pining for the lady he desires, his unfulfilment pro-
viding the space for the poetry; and love-narrative, which, in England in
particular, frequently portrays a woman’s desire that takes fulfilment as
its only end. The aim of love, in these romances, is mutual; its genesis lies
in the woman.
the politics of women’s desire
What differentiates the romances most strongly from Blake’s formula-

tion is that they build into the model of desire a strongly political ele-
ment, though one very different from the modern feminist connection of
the personal with the political. In the pre-modern world, or more
specifically the pre-contraception world, sexual activity and childbirth
were inseparable; and procreation was the means by which dynasties and
great families maintained their existence. Female sexuality was therefore
a matter of direct high economic and political concern: hence the anxiety
over male control in a system of patrilineal inheritance, and the high pre-
mium on female chastity in the form of virginity before marriage and
faithfulness within it. The woman’s desire as well as her virtue was, how-
ever, crucially important. The most widespread belief about conception
was that both partners produced seed at orgasm, and so mutual pleasure,
or ideally simultaneous orgasm (the most gratifying gratification of
desire), was most likely to result in offspring. Romances frequently men-
tion that the lovers conceive a child on their wedding night. This happens
in texts as various in origin as the Apollonius story, in almost all versions
including Pericles, and Guy of Warwick, where it marks Felice’s transfor-
mation from the disdainful object of desire to the desiring wife. The cou-
ples’ mutual fulfilment of their sexual longing is itself a guarantee of
dynastic continuity.6 The romances therefore do not offer any revolu-
tionary attack on conventional sexual morals or a patriarchal system of
dynastic inheritance, but they do repeatedly show women exerting their
freedom within the system, insisting on the precedence of their own
desires over any schemes of their fathers’, and constructing their new
families in accordance with their own fixed and faithful love of both heart
and body. The endorsement offered by the genre to the heroine’s asser-
tion of personal choice gives it a major claim to being the most com-
pelling element of generic identity in love-romances, the point where
‘family resemblance’ is at its strongest, and to which other patterns of
love and marriage are secondary.
The active and desiring heroine none the less receives varying degrees
of recognition both over time and in different social contexts and lan-
guage areas. Her sudden emergence as the central figure in the twelfth
century reflects two elements of social change: first, the insistence by
Pope Alexander III that what made a valid marriage was neither parental
decision nor a public ceremony, but the consent of the spouses; and sec-
ond, a shift in patterns of inheritance, especially in England and France,
by which the property of a man who died with no sons necessarily passed
to his daughter. Such an heiress, moreover, could inherit not only prop-
erty but the political power that went with it—a power that was then
exercised by her husband.7 The combination of these factors made for
some explosive writing, in which women were invested with rights of
both erotic and political patronage such as they had never had before.
The lady in many of the early romances, including some of the most
famous and influential, is accordingly an heiress, with very clear ideas as

to whom she is prepared to marry. Her heritable land is embodied in her:
she becomes almost a metonymy for the immovable territory, ‘immeu-
ble’, that she can bring to her husband, but a metonymy with a will, and
a body, of its own.8 In France, whether because the shock of the new
faded away, or because new dowry customs reduced the importance of
the heiress, the motif of the actively desiring woman lost much of its
dominance in the thirteenth century,9 though it never entirely disap-
peared. The English tradition was markedly more hospitable. Perhaps
fostered by the disruption of lineage and the desire of the Norman new-
comers to establish origins for themselves in the wake of the Conquest,
Anglo-Norman romance of the twelfth century gave the idea an even
higher profile, and carried it through into the next century too;10 and
English-language romance makes the actively desiring heiress its central
model throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Marriage
to an heiress remained one of the most significant means in England by
which a man could transform his social and financial prospects, in the
fifteenth century as much as in the twelfth.11 English social customs,
deriving from Germanic and Norse models, also seem to have been bet-
ter adapted for allowing such a convention to continue, in that they
appear to have allowed women somewhat more freedom of movement
than in France or Italy—even if not in practice the degree of freedom the
romance heroines seize for themselves. Erasmus’s delighted surprise that
the expected greeting between a man and a woman was a kiss on the lips
is a measure of the different expectations on the two sides of the English
Channel by the end of the Middle Ages.12
An heiress’s choosing of her own husband, without or against parental
authority, was scarcely an approved model in actuality, though it did on
occasion happen.13 Romances generally attempt to square her desire with
larger social and parental approval by having her engineer the consent of
her father, her other senior male relatives, or her council; sometimes their
opposition is overcome by the discovery that the unknown young man is
an heir in his own right, but when he is not, or not known to be, the hero-
ine has to put in rather more work. Ydoine, the capable heroine of the
widely-known Anglo-Norman Amadas et Ydoine, is initially reluctant to
return the love of Amadas, who is merely the son of her father’s seneschal,
but, once she has committed herself to him, she has to show constant
resourcefulness in converting her father’s plans to fit with her own. The
initial marriage he arranges for her, thanks to some strenuous efforts on
her part, remains unconsummated; once she has managed to free herself
from that, she takes a belt-and-braces approach to the issue by persuad-

ing her father to allow her her own choice of husband, but then gra-
ciously gives up her newly-won right once she has made sure that he and
his advisers will select Amadas for her anyway.14 It is rare for the younger
generation never to receive some kind of blessing from the older, or for a
father to remain implacable—or if he does, as is the case with Desonelle’s
father in Torrent of Portyngale, he is asking for trouble: the punishment
he had inflicted on her, of being cast adrift in an open boat, is in turn
inflicted on him, and the Providence that had preserved the faithful
daughter does not save the guilty father.15
The romances recognize a further important social and psychological
fact in presenting their heroines as active participants in forging their
own destinies. Women of any historical period can be just as resourceful
at putting their wishes into action as their menfolk—if not more so,
since, unlike the men, they rarely have in their own hands either political
or physical power as a fallback. Women in both romances and real life
may appear to be restricted to their roles as maiden, wife, mother, widow,
and very occasionally nun; but with men from the upper levels of society
often away in attendance on the king in peace or war, and with merchants
often away on business, women’s roles easily extended to estates man-
ager, business manager, even to battle leader—the latter being exem-
plified not just by Edward III’s queen Philippa leading an English army
against Scottish incursions while her husband was fighting in France, but
by the gentry wife Margaret Paston attempting to defend a family prop-
erty at Gresham against armed assault by a rival claimant.16 Meek and
passive wives had distinct drawbacks. The role played by the long-lost
wife of Sir Isumbras alongside her husband and sons in defeating an army
of 30,000 Saracens has more to do with fantasy miracle, but it must still
reflect some capacity for identification or admiration in the readers; and
perhaps it brought with it too some memory of events such as the defence
of Tortosa against the Moors by women armed with hatchets, an event
commemorated by the count of Barcelona by the founding of a female
equestrian religious order, the Order of the Hatchet.17 Of more immedi-
ate practical use might be a partner along the lines of Ydoine: she keeps
the whole story on course towards its happy ending while her lover can
do no more than languish in agony for years at a time, or even, after he
hears about her marriage to someone else, require incarceration with his
parents after losing his mind. It is Ydoine who keeps at bay the husband
given her by her father, restores Amadas’ sanity, finds a way when she
herself is about to die to prevent his committing suicide, and finally (after
her magic recovery) sets up her marriage to the man she loves. Amadas is
given an active role in only one late episode, his enthralling encounter
with the fairy knight who tests his belief in her faithfulness to him despite
all the evidence to the contrary. Tristan and Isolde may be more famous,
but Amadas and Ydoine were celebrated in England as exemplary lovers
alongside or even ahead of them.18
Romances in part feed their audiences’ appetite for fantasy; but that
statement invites the question, whose fantasy? Marriage can still be a
means of social and economic advancement, as it is in the traditional
Mills and Boon novels. In a linear system of inheritance, it is crucial. For
the readers of Mills and Boon, the fantasies are obviously and intention-
ally women’s, with the promise of marriage to a rich and handsome man,
physically and financially desirable. The configuration of early romance
is in some respects the exact opposite, in reversing the gender roles both
for characters and for readers. In the typical Mills and Boon plot, the
heroine’s family is dead or otherwise removed from sight, and the hero is
successful, rich, and domineering.19 The typical medieval romance of
love portrays a hero whose family is dead or invisible, and who becomes
the object of desire of an heiress who can bestow on him both wealth and
rank. The man’s own exceptional attractiveness may be delineated
through the lady’s falling for him despite her being, like the tough mod-
ern hero, capricious, or domineering, or reluctant to engage in a rela-
tionship: hence names for her bespeaking pride, such as the Fere, La
Fière, in Ipomadon, or the Orgueilleuse d’Amour, ‘the proude lady in
love’, in Blanchardyn and Eglantine.20 The gender reversals highlight how
far the early narratives serve the wishful thinking of male readers, with
their recurrent promise of marriage to a beautiful woman who is desir-
able both physically and in terms of wealth and status (at the extreme of
fantasy, a fairy queen). The new customs of primogeniture not only pro-
vided a supply of wealthy heiresses in families without male heirs, but a
large number of younger sons with no landed inheritance. For such
young men, as for those belonging to any class except the very highest,
marriage provided the best way to rise in life. The romance model of the
strenuous processes involved in winning the lady gave a reassuring
colouring to the need for such men to have the competence to manage
well the power they acquired through their wives.
The point of view from which the stories are told, however, does not
show so simple a pattern of gender reversal. The Mills and Boon stories
always identify with the woman, in a stereotyped development from the
novels’ explorations of female psychology; early romances most often
focalize predominantly through the man, but they also spend consider-
able time exploring the minds of their women. The potential of these
romances to serve male fantasies is therefore constrained by their readi-
ness to project the narrative through their heroines. Readers will
inevitably show an empathetic attachment to a character whose point of
view is represented with any degree of credibility; and finally, ‘the ontol-
ogy of the text . . . is embodied in the reader’,21 not the author. The
romances’ readiness to enter the minds of their heroines makes it all but
inevitable that women readers or listeners should empathize with them,
even project some degree of their own wishful thinking onto the stories,
and not only through the regular provision of strong and handsome
lovers. As Chaucer knew, the answer to the question ‘What do women
want?’ is ‘sovereignty’—not necessarily or primarily in the sense of rule
or dominance (though the heiress heroines have some degree of that
too), but, as the Wife of Bath’s exemplary tale proceeds to demonstrate,
the freedom to make their own choices affecting their own lives.22 The
romances are fully conscious of the male power to which their young
women owe a duty of obedience, and of the likelihood of their desire to
resist it. Such resistant readings are often actively encouraged by the
authors: the degree of narrative sympathy accorded to these indepen-
dent-minded heroines can hardly be accidental, whether in Anglo-
French or medieval or Renaissance English. Silence, the young woman
brought up as a boy in the Roman de Silence of Heldris of ‘Cornuälle’
(which may well indicate Cornwall, where Silence finds refuge), makes a
deliberate choice to follow nurture rather than nature and continue to
live as a man for just such reasons of personal independence, with Reason
backing up her decision: she sees no reason to place herself low when she
is on top, ‘quant sui deseure’, especially since continuing to play the role
of a man will also enable her to inherit, within a legal system that has for-
bidden inheritance through women.23 The revelation of her true sex
incurs respect and love, not horror.
The active heroine who chooses her own husband regardless of her
father’s intentions is represented in romance as admirable. Romances are
usually thought of as serving the ideology of the élite, but in this respect
they begin to look almost oppositional—sufficiently indeed to cause
occasional anxiety in their authors, who sometimes try to find ways
around presenting such independent-minded heroines as role models.
One way to avoid the problem was to substitute a figure so exotic as to
place her beyond imitation: a passionate fairy, for instance, or a Saracen
princess. Saracen women, in blithe authorial ignorance or carelessness of
Islamic mores, are allowed to take an especially aggressive approach

towards identifying and winning their man. The Sultan’s daughter,
Floripas, for instance, in the Sowdone of Babylone, engineers the release of
her father’s Christian prisoners by pushing her uncooperative governess
out of the window into the sea, and then beating out the gaoler’s brains
with his bunch of keys (the object of her passion, Guy of Burgundy, is
decidedly less enthusiastic, and has to be persuaded by his fellow paladins
to accept her love). The social transgression inherent in a young woman’s
active emotional and sexual choice is much more evident, and potentially
troublesome, if she is a Christian, and even more so if she is a Christian
heiress, capable of bestowing wealth and rank on her chosen knight.
Again, few men would be reluctant to identify with such a hero; but there
would seem to be abundant social risks in presenting such role models for
women. Famously, in Gayle Rubin’s description, women in patriarchal
societies function as commodities traded between men.24 That may be an
over-simplification in all kinds of ways, but the Middle Ages were aware
of the issue—‘we usen here no wommen for to selle’, says Chaucer’s
Hector when the Trojans are asked to trade Criseyde for the captured
Antenor, just before they do indeed agree to ‘sell’ her.25 The heiress is not
only a commodity but a major capital asset, and, through her capacity to
bear children, a guarantee of a return on investment for the future. One
would not normally expect one’s capital assets to have a mind of their
own, to choose their possessor, or to determine their own investment in
their future; and even less that such a capital asset should be represented
as the most desirable kind of all. In the romances, however, that is exactly
what happens, on numerous occasions. The heiress who insists on her
freedom to love where she will, and who sets out to win the man she has
chosen, is not only endorsed but celebrated.
The pattern is set as early as the Roman d’Eneas, a text both widely known
and radically influential: as one of the very earliest works to be definable as
a romance (a fact emphasized by its vernacularization of the Latin Virgil),
its practices rapidly became the conventions that made the new genre rec-
ognizable. Part of that alteration of genre lies in its change of heroine: not
the transgressive Dido, who kills herself after her lover abandons her, but
Lavine. Marriage to her gives Eneas territorial dominion within Italy, in the
first step of the westward translatio imperii, and their descendants found the
dynasties of western Europe. The shift of female protagonist helped to
establish romance’s generic wariness about illicit love (Eneas’ as much as
Dido’s: it is he, as Chaucer emphasized, who is the unfaithful one),26 but it
also helped to establish a pattern by which heiresses converted their latent
political power into a direct exercise of sexual patronage. In contrast to her

prototype in Virgil, Lavine takes the lead in initiating the love between her-
self and the man she has chosen (and, although her father favours the
match, her own choice is the one that gets the narrative attention). Lavine
is not, of course, Christian; but there is no sense, as there is with the Saracen
princesses, that she belongs to a society that operates by customs alien to the
readers’ own. The text counterbalances the intensity of Dido’s passion by a
still more aggressive passion in the ultimately legitimate Lavine, as if the
originary legend for a dynasty required a forceful input from its founding
mother as well as its founding father.
The phenomenon of the dominant founding mother is most evident in
the legend of Melusine, who has the excuse of being half fairy, but many
ancestral romances make their heroines particularly strong characters.
Spenser is following widespread romance norms when he makes
Britomart look into Merlin’s mirror, fall in love with the man she sees
there before he even knows of her existence, and set out to find him. She
is just one of many maidens who are neither pagans nor fairies and yet
make the running in choosing their mate, and marriage is not always the
only thing on their minds. Rimenhild, King Aylmar’s heiress daughter in
King Horn, loves the dispossessed Horn passionately despite never hav-
ing exchanged a word with him; she sends her father’s steward to sum-
mon him to her ‘bower’, the female space within the castle or household,
but he, for the revealing reason that Horn is altogether too attractive for
him to trust her, sends a different man.27 In the event, when she gets hold
of Horn, she expresses her desire for him in terms of an offer of mar-
riage—an offer which he initially rejects, on the grounds that the dispar-
ity in rank between them is too great. Both lovers then undergo parallel
processes of testing and trial: she by resisting rival suitors; he by demon-
strating his merit through a succession of combats that finally win him
back his own kingdom. The ‘lusty lady Lillian’ in Roswall and Lillian, a
fifteenth-century text now known only through seventeenth- and eigh-
teenth-century prints, chooses the exiled Roswall (apparently poor and
of low birth, and going under the name of Dissawar) to be her chamber-
lain the moment he arrives at her father’s court, and then makes her feel-
ings for him very clear—as lover first, and as husband second:
‘Dissawar, my little flower,

I wish thou were my paramour.
God, sen I had thee to be king,
That I might wed you with a ring.’28
Roswall’s response is considerably more enthusiastic than Horn’s:

‘I vow, lady, [till] I die,
To love you again most heartilie.’
Within his heart he was right glad
And he did think mair than he said.
383–6
It is especially likely that the women will do the wooing if they are
higher ranking than the men (or appear to be so: both Horn and Roswall
are in fact heirs in their own right). This might appear like a forerunner
of later royal protocol—Queen Victoria proposed to Prince Albert, on
the grounds that no one but a monarch could initiate such a match—but
being a reigning queen means that one’s father is already dead; and
neither Rimenhild nor Lillian is in that position. Their fathers are living
kings, with a crucial interest in the descent of their blood line. Lovers
accordingly have to take extreme action if the father opposes the match.
When the Melior of William of Palerne, daughter of the emperor of
Rome, falls for the foundling William but finds herself promised in mar-
riage to a Greek prince by her father, the lovers elope in white bearskins,
a choice of disguise that fails to camouflage them every bit as much as one
would expect: the bears in this case are not the pursuers but the pursued.
Here, however, as in a high proportion of such romances, her father is
finally won round to approving the match, not least when the foundling
turns out to be a long-lost prince. Patrilineal interests finally mesh with
male fantasies of marrying a beautiful and desiring heiress, and with
female fantasies of unconstrained sexual choice. The order of priorities is
none the less transgressive. The fullest happy endings for romances, both
medieval and Renaissance, privilege young love over patriarchal direc-
tion, and focus on the woman’s desire as much as, or more than, the
man’s.
erotic thought: the middle ages
The heroine’s falling in love follows a regular pattern. She sets eyes on the
man she is to love and is smitten with desire for him, typically by the
arrow of the God of Love piercing through her eye to her heart. She is
overwhelmed by the strangeness and paradoxical nature of the feelings
that ensue, and engages in a long monologue with herself, usually as she
lies in her bed, while she tries to come to terms with what has happened
to her. She then devises means to let the man know of her desire. It is a
clustering of memes that is thoroughly familiar, but which is now uni-
versally thought of as being the courtly or Petrarchan model that gives
agency to the man, not to the woman. Petrarchism is the form in which
the language of emotion of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance is
now most familiar, and that notoriously presents a male gaze at a woman,
or at an idea of a woman. Its metaphors—of burning and freezing, soar-
ing in flight and immobility, being sea-tossed or shipwrecked—suggest
an inward self-analysis such as opens up the modern understanding of
subjectivity: the feelings are too invisible to anyone else to be spoken of
other than in the first person. So the God of Love takes his revenge on the
disdainful Troilus by having the sight of Criseyde strike him to the heart’s
root, in a physiological expansion of the metaphor of Cupid’s arrow.29 As
soon as Troilus finds himself alone, Chaucer gives him a soliloquy
analysing the strange and unfamiliar emotions of being in love, in the
form of the first translation of a Petrarch sonnet into English. He is ‘al
sterelees withinne a boot . . . amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two’; he is
dying ‘for hete of cold, for cold of hete’.30 Petrarch, and Troilus after him,
is however using a language that had to a large extent been developed for
young women first awakening to love. There is none the less a key generic
difference between such language when it is ascribed to women, within
romance narratives, or to men, in sonnets or comparable self-contained
lyric forms. The lyric encourages stasis, an analysis of emotion that relies
on the woman’s unresponsiveness.31 That ‘sterelees’ vessel, with its asso-
ciations of female passivity derived from the typical occupants of rud-
derless boats, is not going to get the lover anywhere, and it is in Petrarch’s
interests as poet that it should not. Narrative by contrast requires action,
and the women of the early romances take their soliloquies as a prelimi-
nary to getting their man, to converting their expressions of emotion into
practical action.
In these early romances, the woman shows none of the passivity so
often cited as a misogynist element in male-focused discourses of love;
she is the agent, exercising her own freedom to love where she will and to
further that love by whatever means she can—except that that freedom is
represented as compulsion or necessity, symbolized by the overwhelming
power of the God of Love. That sense of loss of agency is inseparable from
romance love, for both male and female protagonists; though with
almost equal frequency, they declare a willed commitment to loving,
even if they put up some resistance first. Love at first sight, irresistible,
absolute, and lifelong, is the typical way of falling in love throughout all
romantic literature: not because it is conventional, but because the con-

vention itself reflects real experience—it is still a great deal more com-
mon in actuality than a cynical modern age likes to believe—and because
being so totally overwhelmed carries with it that same heroic quality of
excess as killing dragons does for the heroes. The metaphor of the God of
Love, however, casts the protagonist in a role more like the dragon’s: both
are conquered victims, even if the lover remains alive after his encounter
with the undefeatable god. The invincibility of love puts the lovers
beyond the possibility of resistance, just as the magic of the potion does
in Tristan. Falling in love also carries with it a whole set of inexpressible
feelings, which romance and lyric set about devising a language to
express. Although such language is generally assumed to be male-
focused, representing male desire for the woman, in many romances the
most ardent language of desire is put into the mouth or the mind of the
lady, in speeches of private self-analysis. From the twelfth century,
romances show a concern with the interiority of their heroines, in a way
that takes them beyond representations of women as ‘other’, or as mere
male reflection, to treat them seriously as subjects in their own right. The
very fact of their desire for someone outside the bower shakes these
young heroines out of their unthinking acceptance of their place within
the family or household to a new sense of individuality and autonomy.
The process appears fully developed as early as the Roman d’Eneas,
foundational for the genre of romance as for the legendary history of
western Europe. It is Lavine, not Eneas, who first falls in love, and who
compels his response. As she gazes out of her tower window at the
Trojans beneath the town walls:
Amors l’a de son dart ferue;
ainz qu’el se fust d’iluec meüe,
i a changié cent foiz colors:
or est cheoite es laz d’amors,
voille ou non, amer l’estuet.32
[Love struck her with his arrow; before she moved away from there, she changed
colour a hundred times. Now she has fallen into love’s snare, whether she wishes
or not, she has to love.]
She proceeds to make the allegory of the dart of love literal, by having an
arrow shot to Eneas’ feet with a message declaring her love wrapped
around the shaft; only then does Eneas, gazing at the tower to see where
it has come from, set eyes on her and find himself similarly smitten.
When she had asked her mother shortly beforehand what love is and how
she should recognize it, her mother had insisted that only experience can
inform her: this is not public knowledge that can be shared, but a recog-
nition that comes from inward feeling (7902–14). Her response to seeing
Eneas, like Troilus’ to seeing Criseyde, is a soliloquy, in which she uses all
the language that Petrarch and Chaucer were to appropriate later: she is
at once wounded and healthy; she feels both chilled and feverish; she can-
not tell if love is good or evil, bitter or sweet, though she is sure that Love
personified or deified is a tyrant; and she feels the truth of her mother’s
statement that only experience could reveal to her what love is like. Her
monologue runs for almost 400 lines (8083–444): a length sufficient in
itself to compel reader empathy with her voice and her emotions. The
influence of the Eneas shows itself in almost all later romance, even after
the text itself had disappeared from view.
Lavine’s soliloquy constitutes the most extended analysis of love pro-
duced in Europe since Ovid. Those works of his that contain monologues
spoken by passionate women, both the Metamorphoses and the Heroides,
might be proposed as authorizing forerunners for Lavine; but the model
offered in the Eneas is radically different. Women’s passion in the
Metamorphoses tends to be transgressive: Myrrha’s sexual hunger for her
father, for instance. The women of the Heroides describe, not their love,
but its betrayal, by lovers who have abandoned them. Neither work pre-
sents anything comparable to Lavine’s passion as the grounding for a
dynasty, and therefore of its celebration. Furthermore, the longest
stretches of poetry that Ovid puts into women’s mouths, the complaints
of the Heroides, necessarily tell stories, even if in the form of their first-
person memories; there is therefore less space for the extensive explora-
tion of their inner feelings than in the romances, where the narrative
context provided by the rest of the work allows the love-soliloquies to
have more of the quality of lyric. Clerical and humanist reading of Ovid’s
work fed into writings on love, especially men’s love, for the next 500
years after the Eneas; but this first romance starts a new tradition that is
already affirming its independence from Ovidian roots.
Where Lavine led, other heroines were quick to follow. The early ver-
sions of the Tristan story were probably composed very shortly after the
Eneas; and in all the extant versions that cover the protagonists’ falling in
love, Isolde is given the first and longest soliloquy, in which she attempts
to analyse her feelings after drinking the potion. The earliest to survive
complete (c.1170–90), Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant, goes long and gen-
erously inside her mind, in a soliloquy of some 200 lines.33 The Carlisle
fragment of Thomas’s text preserves a similar long soliloquy, in which
she puns generously on l’amer, loving, la mer, the sea, and l’amère, bit-
terness: she is deliberately covering her love with an excuse of seasickness
and playing on the paradoxical sweetness and bitterness of loving, in a
way that has a long history down through the Petrarchan imagery of love
as the sea.34 The passage caught the imagination of contemporaries
sufficiently for Gottfried von Strassburg to retain it in his own Tristan
despite the degree of awkwardness incurred through the change of lan-
guage. Rather than give his Isolt the sole attention, however, he offers a
linguistic and rhythmic imitation of mutuality in a long passage that
intertwines the words ‘maget’, ‘man’, ‘minne’: the maiden, the man, and
love. He opens with the responses to the potion of the lovers, ‘diu maget
unde der man, Isot unde Tristan’, then focuses on Tristan’s finding in his
heart nothing but ‘Isolt, and Love’:
son was ie niht dar inne
wan Isot unde Minne,
then on her own reciprocal inability to think of anything but ‘Love, and
Tristan’:
son was ie diz noch daz dar an
wan Minne unde Tristan.35
The early versions of Tristan served as foundational texts, alongside the
Eneas, for the expressions of female desire in later works. The romances
of Chrétien de Troyes are at first sight more focalized through their
heroes, but in his anti-Tristan story of Cligés he follows a similar pattern.
The heroine of the first generation, Soredamors, falls in love and reacts in
self-interrogating soliloquy before the hero’s own feelings are described
(450–532). The lovers of the next generation, Fénice and Cligés, fall in
love simultaneously and mutually, but it is still her feelings that are given
the fullest analysis—here, because her father has arranged a marriage for
her with another man, and she is going to have to acknowledge her
predicament, her pleasing sickness and distressful desire, to her wise
nurse in order for her to find a way out (2941–3124), just as the distressed
Britomart does four centuries later. Britomart and Gloriana also have an
interesting joint precursor in the Iblis of the originally Anglo-Norman
Lanzelet, who dreams of the hero and decides that he is the man she will
marry the night before she first lays eyes on him.36
English-language romance, with its greater emphasis on outward action,
was selective in how readily it adopted such displays of fine feeling. It was
especially reluctant where the love could not be celebrated or approved.
Thomas’s Anglo-Norman Tristan loses all its analyses of love, whether nar-
ratorial or soliloquy, in its summary Middle English version, Sir Tristrem.
But the motif remains frequent enough to show that it was well recognized,
both available to poets and accessible to readers, and most particularly
when the woman is the first to fall in love and the end and aim of that love
is marriage. There is no Middle English version of the Eneas itself, but it was
a text known in the Angevin court of Henry II, and its treatment of love was
rapidly transmitted into the English romance tradition through the media-
tion of French and Anglo-Norman authors who knew it and whose
influence can be directly traced in England. The centrality of its representa-
tion of desiring women was passed directly forwards into early printed
romances, along with their Petrarch-like language of desire. William of
Palerne is a particularly generous instance of such transmission. Tudor
readers knew it in a prose version made from a mid-fourteenth century
alliterative poem that was itself based on a French original written shortly
after 1200;37 its wide dissemination in printed form is evidenced by Hyrd’s
sixteenth-century castigation of its popularity, though excessive reading
has destroyed all the material evidence of its printing except for a single
fragment.38 That, however, is enough to show how closely it followed its
original, and there is no doubt that Tudor readers, like their medieval pre-
decessors, were treated to the long and touching soliloquy given to the
emperor’s daughter Melior when she falls for the foundling brought home
by her father. Her love, like Lavine’s, starts from looking, and she alternately
blames and absolves of blame her eyes and her heart: the raw materials of
love poetry down to Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Mine eyes and heart are at a
mortal war’ and beyond. She concludes, as the Iblis of Lanzelet and others
had done before her, with a willed commitment to love:
Theigh I winne with mi werk the worse evermore,
so gret liking and love I have that lud to bihold,
that I have lever that love than lac al mi harmes.
Nou certes, sethe it is so, to seie the trewthe,
thann have y had gret wrong myn hert so to blame
for eni werk that he wrought, sethe I wol it hold;
ne wold I it were non other, al the world to have.39
[Even if my actions were to cause me grief for ever after, I have such great pleas-
ure and love in looking at that man that I had rather have that love than be with-
out all my troubles. Now truly, since it is indeed so, then I have been very wrong
to blame my heart for anything it has done, since I want to keep it that way; I
would not want it to be otherwise, not for all the world.]
Although the soliloquy does not form part of the surviving printed frag-
ment, the title that Hyrd gives the work, ‘Wyllyam and Milior’, is a recog-
nition of the leading role she plays alongside the hero—and indeed
indicates that she was regarded as more important than the bewitching
and bewitched character whose name is often joined with William’s in
the alternative modern title, ‘William and the Werewolf’.
Hue of Rhuddlan, who knew the Eneas well, wrote such soliloquies gen-
erously into his Anglo-Norman Ipomedon, and they are reflected in all
three Middle English versions, including the ‘Hippomadon’ castigated by
Hyrd alongside William of Palerne. Hyrd presumably knew the printed
couplet version, which is considerably abbreviated from the original;
Hue’s soliloquies appear at their greatest length in English in the fuller
fourteenth-century tail-rhyme redaction. These love-monologues are
particularly interesting since no fewer than three women successively fall
in love with the unchivalric-seeming Ipomadon: the Fere (Hue’s La
Fière), the proud, stand-offish lady whom he will eventually marry; her
high-ranking handmaid and confidante, Imayne; and the married queen
into whose service he enters on condition that he can be called her sweet-
heart, ‘dru la reine’, and kiss her every evening. These women regularly
articulate their desire as pillow soliloquies, and the very proliferation of
such loving and recurrently wakeful women here and in other romances
may be behind Chaucer’s parody in Sir Thopas, in which ‘many a maiden’
lies sighing for the hero when they ought to be sleeping. The line is com-
monly taken as being funny because of a gender inversion (this is what
knights do for their ladies); the texts suggest rather that it is funny because
it is accurate. The whole plot of Ipomadon is largely driven by the desiring
women, most particularly the Fere, a ruler in her own right, who resists
making a sexual choice and taking a husband. In many respects the
romance is as much her story as Ipomadon’s, as she is impelled into reluc-
tant love for the apparently useless squire who comes anonymously to her
court, and has to suffer the emotional revenge of a desire that appears
unrequited. Hue gives his own version a distinctly ironic tone, especially
where the women are concerned, and he occasionally drops overtly
antifeminist remarks into his narration;40 but the story itself takes its
characters rather more seriously, and by the time it has crossed the lan-
guage barrier into English both the irony and the antifeminism have gone,
to leave a romance that concentrates the experiences of love strongly and
directly on the women. Their sexual response to Ipomadon is presented as
both natural (even proper, so long as they do not act on it outside mar-
riage), and as a code by which the reader recognizes his status as hero, just
as the man’s response to a beautiful woman in the Petrarchan tradition

marks her out as the heroine. In an interesting inversion of the theory of
the male gaze developed in relation to film and applied by modern schol-
arship to the Petrarchan lover’s gaze, these women, the Fere and Imayne
in particular, make Ipomadon the object of their own gaze, and a very
attractive object he is too.41 As Lavine and Melior and an abundance of
other young women demonstrate, they are far from being alone in the
intensity of their reaction to an active process of looking at the hero. The
strength of the Fere’s response embarrasses her into accusing someone
else of her own guilt, as she delivers an unprovoked rebuke to her cousin,
Jason, for looking too lovingly on Imayne. When it is Imayne’s turn to fall
for Ipomedon, he is disguised as a fool, in rusty and ill-fitting armour, and
she has been playing a role as the damsel scornful of the unknown young
man who has been foisted on her in her quest for chivalric help, like
Malory’s Lynette in his ‘Tale of Gareth’ (who is indeed likely to be her
direct literary descendant). Also like Lynette, she remains stubbornly
unimpressed by the combats he undertakes on their journey; and it is only
when he disarms and sits beside the fire at a small country inn where they
have taken lodging that she looks at him properly for the first time and
responds to the sheer physical appeal of his body. After they have gone to
their separate beds in the inn’s single chamber, she engages in an agonized
debate with herself before creeping across to his bed to declare her love
and offer him the freedom of her body, with marriage to follow. He
responds by seizing her hand and making as if to bite it, in order to con-
vince her of the genuineness of his disguise. He (like Sir Thopas, and in
contrast to those romance heroes who have a greater eagerness than their
ladies for sex before marriage) is ‘chaast and no lechour’, and will not
respond to any of the women who ‘moorne for hym paramour’, except,
eventually, his own beloved, the Fere. The queen never gives outward
expression to her own desire for him, and it is revealed in the text in her
unspoken thoughts: in her too, the women are given a more extensive
internal life than the men of the story. The author of the tail-rhyme redac-
tion shows his awareness of the inversion of gender roles in all of this
when he gives her a version of a proverb most commonly associated with
a man’s failure to make the most of the availability of a woman: ‘he that
will not when he may, shall have not when he would’.42
The intensity of the women’s gazing in all these works raises the possi-
bility, not of the woman as the agent of the look, but of these episodes as
male narcissism—as the author’s appropriating the woman’s gaze merely
for the purposes of male self-admiration, as is suggested by the succession
of beautiful and high-ranking ladies falling for Ipomedon’s handsome

body.43 It would be foolhardy to deny that there is never any element of
that in the mix (and for Hue in particular it seems to be an element in his
alertness as to what will give his romance maximum appeal to a mixed
audience), but the attention paid to the thought-processes of the various
women, in which they analyse their own disturbance of emotion almost
independently of the object of their attraction, finally keeps the balance
tilted towards the female subject. Their soliloquies, however, raise an
analogous issue: their occurrence in male-authored works raises the
question of how far they should be read as male ventriloquism, as men
fashioning women according to their own notions of how they would like
them to think and speak, and so finally still denying women any subject-
hood.44 In the texts themselves, there is something of a spectrum from
those monologues that invite such a reading to those where it defies cred-
ibility: around half of the eight thousand lines of Amadas et Ydoine, for
instance, are focalized through the heroine, with abundant access into
her thoughts. Even if the author were creating his own idea of a woman
(as any author does, whether male or female), it is impossible for readers
not to empathize with Ydoine as an autonomous character. The impres-
sionist response to most of the soliloquies of female desire, however
short, is that they should be taken seriously, and there is no obvious rea-
son why medieval readers’ responses should have been different—not
least women readers’. ‘This yonge man whome I never saw before,’ thinks
Huon’s daughter Clariette when she first sets eyes on the young Florence,
‘maketh me to thynke that I never thought before, so that it maketh my
blode and all my mymbres to tremble.’45 The very refusal of specificity—
what she ‘never thought before’—both serves as authenticating detail for
her brief and forceful response to desire, and invites imaginative comple-
tion from the audience.
There is furthermore a useful control on what a female language of
desire actually looks like, from women writers both secular and religious.
The Lais of Marie de France frequently focalize through their women
protagonists, and the longest of them, Eliduc, allows the space for a series
of spoken and unspoken expressions of desire from the maiden
Guilliadun for the lover, the dru, she selects for herself. She has heard him
well spoken of, but it is her first gazing at him that stirs her desire:
Icele l’ad mult esgardé,

Sun vis, sun cors e sun semblant;
Dit en lui n’at mesavenant,
Forment le prise en sun curage.

Amurs i lance sun message,
Que la somunt de lui amer.46
[She looked at him closely, his face, his body and his whole appearance; she said
to herself that there was nothing unbecoming about him, and prized him highly
in her heart. Love directed his message there, which summoned her to love him.]
Marie is unusual as a woman writer of romance, but there were many
female mystics who recorded their own feelings of longing for Christ, and
whose writings offer a check on reading the male-authored texts as solely
masculine in orientation. These women commonly express their desire in
more fervent and often more sexually explicit language than the romance
heroines use, an explicitness allowed by the transfigured nature of their
desire. The thirteenth-century Flemish mystic Hadewijch speaks of how
she beheld the Beloved, Christ, in a vision after the Eucharist, and how he
took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his
in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.47
The lineaments of gratified desire are precisely what is at issue there: not
in the way a secular age would choose to understand Blake’s formulation,
but carrying immense psychological, spiritual, and physical power with-
in medieval Christian culture. English mystical works, like English
romances, tend to be more reticent in their use of erotic language than
continental ones, but Margery Kempe, perhaps influenced by works from
that continental tradition, is prepared to take a similar approach. She
looks at handsome young men eagerly in the hope of seeing Christ’s form
in them; she has Christ urge her, ‘Whan thu art in thi bed, take me to the
as for thi weddyd husbond’—a formulation reinforced by the fact that
she has already gone through a wedding ceremony with the Father.48 The
mystics are important for an understanding of romance because they so
often formulate an autobiographical language of female desire. This does
not mean that the secular soliloquies necessarily imitate or parody mys-
tical texts: the chronological sequence suggests that influence runs the
other way—that the mystics identified with the language of desire of the
romance heroines. Both secular and religious texts respond to the same
paradox, that the sense of intimate connection with someone outside
your own self jolts you into a full awareness of your own unique subjec-
tivity, of heart and mind and body.
Such a connection reaches its ideal when it is mutual: when the gaze
and the embrace is returned, desire gratified. The romances have ways of
expressing this too, but in action more than in soliloquy—soliloquium,
‘speaking alone’, would be mere distraction once love is fulfilled. The

look of longing can become a mark of mutuality in love, as when
Chrétien’s Erec and Enide gaze wordlessly at each other’s naked bodies at
their first entry into the joy of their wedding night, and the syntax runs
together into a single action the pleasure shared by the two lovers.49
Mutuality is often given mimetic expression by the use of the syntactic
pattern by which each lover occupies both the subject and the object
position of a reflexive verb, found for instance at its simplest in Malory’s
description of the coming together of Gareth and his lady Lyonesse,
‘eythir made grete joy of other’.50 French romance sometimes expands
this pattern generously: it extends over most of a hundred lines in the
scenes of the marriage and wedding night in the thirteenth-century Jehan
et Blonde, where the lovers exchange rings with each other, gaze on each
other, embrace each other; or, when one lover is chosen as the subject of
a sentence, the other immediately follows, so that both are given an equal
share in the language as in the joy.51 Blonde is the daughter of the earl of
Oxford: English lovers are just as capable of such an abundance of mutual
joy as French, though English authors are more reticent. Malory writes
his most compelling account of such reciprocal intensity at the moment
when two of his lovers first set eyes on each other, though once again the
woman is the instigator. Fair Alys, ‘La Beall Pylgryme’, lodges herself
alongside the piece of ground that Sir Alysaunder is defending against all
comers, and it is she who first both reacts to the sight of her future hus-
band and declares her love. When she sees him joust, she at once ‘lepe
oute of hir pavylyon and toke sir Alisaundir by the brydyll’, and asks to
see his face—‘Of thy knyghthode, shew me thy vysayge.’
And than he put of his helme, and whan she sawe his vysage she seyde, ‘A, swete
Fadir Jesu! The I muste love, and never othir.’
‘Than shewe me youre vysage,’ seyde he.
And anone she unwympeled her, and whan he sawe her he seyde, ‘A, Lorde
Jesu! Here have I founde my love and my lady!’52
Each request and action and response reciprocates the other’s; and the
lovers’ invoking of Jesus is a way of sacramentalizing that act of immedi-
ate and lifelong commitment, made at sight and mutually.
Desire is not always mutual, however, and some of Malory’s most
compelling portrayals of women are of those who love without hope of
response, in particular the two Elaines who love Lancelot. Elaine of
Corbin is predestined to bear Galahad, and, despite the accompanying
paraphernalia of prophecy and miracle surrounding the Grail knight’s
life, and in contradiction of the theology of perfect virginity obtaining on

the Grail quest itself, Malory makes her love fully sexual. Even after the
excuse of conceiving the Grail knight is passed, Elaine continues to trick
Lancelot into her bed whenever the opportunity offers—‘for wyte you
well, oute of mesure she loved hym’.53 While Guinevere exists, however,
there is nothing she can do to elicit a corresponding love from Lancelot,
and she makes a bitter complaint to the queen against her deprivation.54
Elaine of Ascolat, in the longest speech given to a woman in the whole of
the Morte, utters a passionate defence of earthly love, and specifically her
love for Lancelot. She too has lost her heart to him with no hope of reci-
procation, and (unlike the other Elaine) with no assistance from either
prophecy or magic. Her brother is equally devoted to him—‘she doth as
I do, for sythen I saw first my lorde Sir Launcelot I cowde never departe
from hym, nother nought I woll, and I may folow hym’55—but he can
put his love into effect within the accepted practices of male bonding and
knightly fellowship. The only possibilities that Elaine will contemplate,
since she rejects Lancelot’s clumsy offer of a massive dowry and annuity
if she marries someone else, are that he should be her husband or her
paramour. He, of course, refuses both; in which case, as she tells him, ‘I
muste dye for youre love,’ and she does so. On her deathbed, she defies
her confessor who commands her to stop thinking about Lancelot.
Than she seyde, ‘Why sholde I leve such thoughtes? Am I nat an erthely woman?
And all the whyle the brethe ys in my body I may complayne me, for my belyve
ys that I do none offence, though I love an erthely man, unto God, for He
fourmed me thereto, and all maner of good love comyth of God. And othir than
good love loved I never sir Launcelot du Lake . . . And sitthyn hit ys the suffer-
aunce of God that I shall dye for so noble a knyght, I beseche The, Hyghe Fadir of
Hevyn, have mercy uppon me and my soule. ’56
When it comes to writing the polemics in favour of virginity in the Grail

section of the work, Malory is content to transcribe directly from his
French source; here, as when Elaine of Corbin cries out against
Guinevere’s thwarting of her love for Lancelot, Malory breaks free and
writes for himself. Elaine of Ascolat is a ‘clene maydyn for hym and for all
othir’, but she does not link that to any inherent desirability in virginity.
It is hard to separate Malory’s God from hers: a God who is on the side of
the sexual desire inherent in ‘good love’.
sanctifying sexuality
Elaine’s claim that God is in favour of love between men and women is
unusual only in its setting at the moment of her death. It was not only
in romance that sexuality was regarded as a ground of delight and
approval. There is abundant evidence in early modern culture that
shows how familiar such a way of thinking was: romance grounds its
discourse of desire in a broader social, intellectual, and even theological
context. Such approval, especially of female sexuality, was by no means
universal, as any broad reading in medieval texts indicates and as mod-
ern scholarship has abundantly documented; it always coexisted with
the political, legal, and theological subordination of women, and with
the fear of aberrant sexuality inherent both in a secular patrilinear sys-
tem and in ecclesiastical celibacy. Yet despite all that, the desirability of
desire, male and female, was widely acknowledged as a part of God’s
design for the universe. Although the narratives of romance give it the
specificity of individual experience, their discourse of desire is also the
discourse of Nature as vicaria Dei, ‘the vicar of the almighty Lord’:57 a
discourse strongly promoted in the late twelfth century, at the same
time as the rise of romance, by writers such as Alain de Lille, and often
appealed to, explicitly or through imagery, in the romances themselves.
Around the same period, marriage was made a sacrament of the
Church: an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace, com-
parable with the other sacraments of baptism and ordination and the
Eucharist itself. The increasing interest in individuals’ inward lives evid-
ent in romance, and especially in its treatment of love, had its religious
counterpart in an increase in mysticism, and as devotional women such
as Hadewijch and Margery Kempe indicate, the discourse of desire
could be turned to spiritual as well as earthly ends. The sublime eroti-
cism of the Song of Songs was officially allegorized into the love of Christ
for his Church (some modern Bibles still give that as a running head to
the book), and mystical writers drew abundantly on that too; the
Church has never been able to find higher imagery to express the love
of God than the imagery of earthly desire.
Sexual desires were acknowledged to be universal; that was why they
were so dangerous. Temperance, as Spenser knew, is a life lived in fight-
ing off temptation. They also had their being within the scope of God’s
purposes, as the means by which the created world maintained its exis-
tence. The sexual act is often insistently associated with the language of
nature, so bypassing the penitential discourses that associate it with sin.

So Chaucer describes the embrace of Troilus and Criseyde,
As about a tree, with many a twiste,

Bytrent and writh the swote wodebynde, [entwines; twists
Gan ech of hem in armes other wynde.
Troilus III. 1230–2
The impossibility of assigning separate gender roles to the lovers, any

more than to the woodbine and the tree, echoes the romances’ reciprocal
language of consummation; yet the image is a particularly useful one for
Chaucer in that it bypasses any questions about the status of the lovers’
relationship.58 Marriage is an institution unique to humans, so there is
potentially a faultline between the regenerative activities of the created
world and those of the highest element in that creation, humankind.
Even so, Chaucer spells out the cosmic and divine extensions of natural
love in the proem that introduces Book III, the book of the lovers’ con-
summation, where he describes how God’s eternal principle of love is
channelled through the astrological influence (the ‘vapour’) of Venus,
which runs through all the temporal cycles, the ‘tymes’, of the seasons,
and through all living creatures:
Man, brid, best, fissh, herbe, and grene tree

Thee fele in tymes with vapour eterne.
God loveth, and to love wol nought werne; [refuse
And in this world no lyves creature [living
Withouten love is worth, or may endure.
III. 10–14
There, regeneration, procreation, and divine and human love are all set
on the same spectrum.
More extended theoretical discussions in the pre-modern world often
took the form of allegory: where we would write a monograph or a text-
book, medieval and Renaissance thinkers would offer the same kind of
generalizing theory through extended metaphor, or through the symbol-
ism of the dream poem. Chaucer and Spenser both offer such extended
allegorical studies of the place of sex in the natural order alongside, or
within, their romance narratives. Spenser’s is the Garden of Adonis,
placed in Book III of the Faerie Queene so as to provide the theoretical
model that the central books on love illustrate in operation. The Garden
models itself in part on Chaucer’s invocation to Venus quoted above: it
is the place where the outward forms are provided for the ‘reasonable
souls’ of humankind, and also for beasts, birds, and fish (III. vi. 35).
Venus is the deity who presides over all procreation and regeneration;
and at the heart of the garden, as has often been noted, is a landscape
designed to model the woman’s own generative body (43–4). Venus’
activities can scarcely be taken as a social model for humans, but it is still
interesting that it is she, and not Adonis, who ‘reape[s] sweet pleasure’
here from her lover (46). The woman’s desire, as so often in the romance
background, is also coupled with mutual pleasure, independent of any
social or religious constraints:
Franckly each paramour his leman knowes,

Each bird his mate, nor any does envie
Their goodly meriment, and gay felicitie.
III. vi. 41
The parallel implied there between human and avian love picks up from
Chaucer’s analogous allegory in which he studies the operation of natural
desire, the Parliament of Fowls. The association of birds and humans is
not without reason: the mating patterns of birds—basically monoga-
mous, but with the occasional bit on the side, and with some extreme
cases of parental irresponsibility such as cuckoos—offer the closest par-
allel to human habits within the natural world. It is therefore striking that
the action of the Parliament concerns the free choice in mating given to a
formel (female) eagle: a choice that in this poem she exercises by request-
ing a year’s delay. The poem makes no attempt to present as natural—or
to present at all—female choice as being controlled by a dominant male.
This is not necessarily quite the whole story, since outside the dream
world there may be a set of allusions to the marriage negotiations for
Richard II, in which the lady in question would certainly not have had
such uncontrolled freedom of choice;59 but if such a topical reference for
the poem is correct, it makes the naturalization of the female’s refusal all
the more interesting. It may be a way to cover political embarrassment,
but it also insists that the God-given order of Nature may make such
embarrassment inevitable. Within the world of nature that encompasses
the world of politics, female choice is the scenario that holds good. The
eagle at the centre of the debate is free to make her own selection of a
mate, or indeed to withhold it.
The emphasis on Nature in numerous romances and in major indi-
vidual works both Latin and vernacular offers an important reminder
that the clerical promotion of virginity was always a specialized discourse

aimed at initiates, those ordained or under vows. Procreation is natural,
normal, and normative: a statement so obvious as not generally to need
spelling out, any more than pop lyrics comment on the biological prin-
ciples of sexual selection. The resulting medieval silence on the normal-
ity of heterosexual activity tends to be filled by other, competing,
discourses, not least by the penitential stress on the sinfulness of carnal
desire (God’s purposes having been corrupted by the devil from the
Garden of Eden forwards), and by antifeminist diatribes. The discourses
of nature do not, however, simply bypass morality. The tenets of natural
philosophy—or natural theology—show the same anxiety as the prin-
ciples of patriarchal family organization to establish limits: a God-given
procreative Nature abhors ‘unnatural’ sexual practices as much as a
patrilineal society abhors adultery or illegitimacy. Sexuality in every cul-
ture engenders anxiety about the distinction between the right and wrong
uses of desire, even though different cultures draw the boundaries in dif-
ferent places: Shakespeare lived in a society that prescribed the death
penalty for homosexuality, but which found no problems in a Juliet who
had not quite turned 14. Sex as normative tends to be made explicit only
when it seems to be threatened, for instance by Alain de Lille in his
Complaint of Nature, written to combat what he saw as a rise in (non-
procreative) homosexual activity. Cleanness, one of the works that shares
a manuscript with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and is likely to be by
the same author, takes the further step of condemning the evils of Sodom
and Gomorrah primarily through a eulogy of heterosexual sex, put into
the mouth of God. He Himself, He claims, invented the pleasures of the
fulfilment of desire for humankind:
I compast hem a kynde crafte and kende hit hem derne,

And amed hit in Myn ordenaunce oddely dere,
And dyght drwry therinne, doole alther-swettest,
And the play of paramorez I portrayed Myselven,
And made therto a maner myriest of other:
When two true togeder had tyghed hemselven,
Bytwene a male and his make such merthe schulde come,
Welnyghe pure paradys moght preve no better.60
[I created a natural skill for them and taught it to them secretly, set it as singularly
precious in My scheme for the world, causing love, the sweetest of all pleasures,
to be part of it. I Myself drew up the play of sexual love [‘paramours’], and made
it the most enjoyable practice of all: that when two faithful people had bound
themselves together, there should be such joy between a man and his beloved that
even paradise itself could scarcely improve on it.]
There is no evidence that anyone ever thought that such a claim was blas-
phemous or wrong; desire was a natural, kynde, part of being human. It
is unusual to find a religious writer insisting so frankly and enthusiasti-
cally on that fact; but it is a belief that the romances made their own. The
poet can therefore have God draw on secular language: ‘paramorez’ is
itself a term borrowed from romance, from loving par amour—a tautol-
ogy that enacts the attraction of both body and heart. Its primary usage is
for any passionate love that goes beyond the mutual goodwill indicated
by the clerical terminology of maritalis affectio, marital affection. It there-
fore commonly occurs in extramarital contexts, but it is also often used,
as here, to describe a passion that is joyfully guilt-free.
As Cleanness recognizes, that sex could be intensely enjoyable was not
in doubt: hence the perceived need to regulate it, especially in the pre-
contraception world. ‘Two true’ must bind themselves together before
the unconstrained play of paramours can re-create unfallen bliss, ‘pure
paradys’. Despite their twentieth-century reputation for promoting
adultery (discussed in the next chapter), most romances, English ones in
particular, reserve the lovers’ sexual bliss for marriage, and any contra-
vention of that reservation is likely to bring speedy retribution. The
young lovers are usually scrupulous about not sleeping with each other
before they are married, a standard most rigorously urged by the women
and sometimes endorsed by authority figures who have the power of
magic to back them. Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux and Prospero in The
Tempest both threaten disaster if the lovers pre-empt their weddings, and
in Huon it does indeed happen: when Huon ignores Esclarmonde’s
protests and effectively rapes her, she is carried off by a shipful of pagans
and he is tied up and left to die of exposure (he does of course escape to
marry her, many episodes later). Very occasionally, lovers intending
marriage will enjoy each other before their wedding, but even that is rare.
Malory’s Gareth and Lyonesse try to do so, but are repeatedly thwarted
by the intervention of a phantom knight created by Lyonesse’s disap-
proving younger sister.61 Even without such supernatural threats, pre-
marital sex can lead to serious trouble. The resulting babies are often lost
for an entire generation, and the same length of time may intervene
before the lovers recover each other. Disaster likewise engulfs the lovers
of Sidney’s Old Arcadia at the moment when Musidorus is on the point
of raping Pamela and Pyrocles makes love to Philoclea.62 But marriage
remains the aim and the norm, even in such cases as the rape of a maiden
by a fairy knight in Sir Degaré, and even if the wedding has to wait until
the child of the liaison has grown up.63
In a secular society in which the family was the basic unit of organi-
zation, there was good reason to celebrate sexuality, so long as it
expressed itself within marriage; and that celebration received massive
ecclesiastical support. The insistence on consent between the spouses
for making a marriage valid was a major part of this; and the upgrading
of marriage into a sacrament was in keeping with that emphasis on con-
sensual bonding. Rather less has been heard in recent years about that
sacramentalizing of sexuality than about the connection between desire
and sin—and that connection was also forcefully made by Roman
Catholicism, not least in the Middle Ages; St Augustine had concluded
that any sexual activity, even within marriage, was inseparable from sin,
since rational and divinely authorized motives of procreation could
never entirely dominate over irrational desire. Even so, medieval
Catholicism never made such a belief into dogma, whereas its endorse-
ment of marriage was a matter not only of theological doctrine but of
daily practice. For every celibate Catholic cleric who composed misogy-
nist texts, there must have been at least a thousand—probably several
thousand—who performed the marriage service, a single text replicated
in oral form over and over again and therefore leaving no explicit record
of its frequency, and which gives a very different idea of the theology of
sex. The service as a whole still fell well short of an unmitigated cele-
bration of sexuality—as the traditional Anglican version still insists, sex
within marriage is justified by the begetting of children and the avoid-
ance of the worse sin of fornication—yet the anxiety of much of its
phrasing does not altogether conceal the fact that it is a form of fertility
rite, and one that binds the physical with the divine. It invokes a
broader cultural context that insists on sexual desire not just as a neces-
sary means of continuing a lineage, nor even as the greatest secular hap-
piness, but as instigated by God. The marriage service was the face that
the Church turned towards the secular and sexual world, and it incor-
porated imagery from that greatest of erotic poems, the Song of Songs. It
turned its allegorical meanings back to the literal and the human, as
offering a model of how a husband should love his wife, in a way that
sacramentalizes the body itself. The Song of Songs was one of the major
sources for the expression of spiritual love, authorizing a language of
mystical union in metaphors of the sexual; but it also authorized the
expression of sexual union in metaphors of the mystical. Moreover, it
has two speakers, a woman and her beloved, and both express their
desire for the other frankly and unashamedly.
The dual meaning of the Song of Songs serves to introduce a larger cul-
tural endorsement of women’s active choice from an altogether unex-
pected quarter, namely religious treatises on the value of virginity—the
lives of virgin martyrs, handbooks for women recluses, and the writings
of women mystics. Here, as in the romances, the basic narrative of the
perfect life requires that the woman should reject her father’s plans for
her marriage, or the approaches of various unwanted suitors, to insist on
a marriage to the lover who surpasses all other lovers in both beauty and
rank, Christ Himself.64 There is no particular virtue in being put in a con-
vent in accordance with family convenience,65 nor is the negative wish to
avoid the sinfulness of the world enough. The woman must herself make
an active choice for Christ, and show the strength of her choice through
adversity as great as, or greater than, the romance heroines show in
remaining faithful to their own lovers. Bevis of Hamtoun’s beloved
Josian—a pagan princess who, true to form for Anglo-Norman heroines
and their descendants, is the first of the couple to fall in love, and who
actively woos him—has to keep a succession of husbands at bay by vari-
ous means, including stringing up her second unwanted spouse from the
rail of the bed-hangings on their wedding night.66 The women marked
for sainthood may take less drastic action to dispose of rival suitors, but
that is only because Christ Himself will intervene to inflict equally
unpleasant fates on them by direct miraculous intervention.
The minimum requirement for an active demonstration of the force of
the woman’s own will for Christ was to override the opposition of her
parents: in effect, to elope.67 The great thirteenth-century Catalan
thinker and missionary Ramón Lull, whose works were widely dissemi-
nated across Europe for the next couple of centuries (his great handbook
on chivalry was translated and printed by Caxton), wrote a quasi-
romance named Blanquerna precisely to give the religious life the same
appeal as secular narrative, and its deliberate closeness to romance pat-
terning is instructive: many of the conventional memes reappear, but
they are given new meanings so as to direct the readers towards finding
fulfilment in God rather than within the secular world. The work is a bil-
dungsroman of both its hero, Blanquerna himself, and its heroine,
Natana. She has been chosen as his wife by their parents, but he insists on
renouncing the world and becoming a hermit (by the end of the work, he
has been elected pope: the ecclesiastical equivalent of the romance hero’s
becoming emperor). She expresses her passionate love for him, and offers
to follow him into the wilderness; but he converts her to loving Christ
instead, whereupon she escapes from her home to a convent, and, when
her furious kinsfolk threaten to attack the convent and force her out, she
persuades them to peace.68 Real life did, on occasion, come surprisingly
close to romance. The twelfth-century Christina of Markyate, who made
a private vow of virginity as a child, had to resist intensive moral and
physical pressure both from her parents and from a number of church-
men to force her into marriage, the approved social model for young
women; she was compelled to adopt a number of extreme techniques of
avoidance, culminating in an escape in male clothing, in order to enforce
her own will for Christ. Saints can safely rely on God’s intervening to pre-
vent rape; real-life women, like secular romance heroines, have to take
measures for themselves, as when Christina locked the randy bishop of
Durham inside her bedroom while she got away.69 The love of Christ, in
other words, properly trumps both the love of man, and the obedience
owed to one’s parents. Romance develops a similar line of argument in
the secular world: love of one’s chosen spouse overrides filial duty, and
presents it as right that it should do so.
Love for both kinds of heroines incorporates desire. Although physical
sexual activity is ruled out for women under vows, it is still taken for
granted that they have sexual desires: what is required is that they should
be redirected towards Christ, Who is (as such writings repeatedly stress)
the most handsome, the richest, and most powerful of all possible hus-
bands, and also (as a surprising number of them stress) the most sexually
fulfilling.70 Sexuality, in the Catholic Middle Ages as in the Protestant
Renaissance, was taken as a given. What mattered was what you did with
it. Promiscuity was condemned in both men and women (even if with
considerably more vigour for the latter). What a woman with a religious
vocation has to do is very explicitly to sublimate her sexuality, to choose
Christ as her sexual partner rather than a man. A post-Freudian age reads
this as a form of sexual repression, but it is quite clear from the texts
themselves that the writers regarded it as the highest form of fulfilment:
how could one have a better lover than Christ? ‘Lover’, moreover, on the
model of the Song of Songs, was taken in a more literal, embodied, sense
than our modern, supposedly liberated, sensibilities are happy with. Hali
Meithhad, ‘holy maidenhood’, an early thirteenth-century treatise
encouraging young women to reject earthly marriage in favour of the
vocation of an anchoress, describes the final union of the woman with her
beloved Christ after death in terms of unashamed sexual consummation:
‘blessed is His spouse, whose virginity is unspotted when He sheds His
seed into her’.71 This is a spiritual love that represents itself as fully
embodied, such as now demands some effort of imagination in compre-
hending its cultural power. The effort is particularly great because such a
synthesis was not only dismantled but condemned by the Reformation,
with its rejection of a physically incarnational theology in favour of a the-
ology of the text;72 and the modern world has largely inherited, often
subconsciously, that intense distrust of the expression of spirit in terms
of the body, regarding the result as confusion rather than fusion. In the
Middle Ages, despite the division between the theological primacy given
to virginity and the secular primacy given to procreation, spiritual long-
ing existed in close symbiosis with the desirability of female desire
expressed in the romances.73
The authors of the religious treatises for women wrote so that their
readers might pattern their lives on the models they presented: not, in the
case of saints’ lives, necessarily literally, but at least with the same
absolute commitment to God. Admiranda non imitanda, the recognition
that some examples of pious heroism should be wondered at rather than
imitated, was a useful saving principle, and applied no doubt to Josian’s
short way with her husband too. The fact that pious authors sometimes
looked to romance for their imagined scenarios is an indication of how
the secular genre was acknowledged to influence women’s desires and
self-images: the famous allegory in the Ancrene Wisse of the soul as a lady
besieged by her foes within her castle, and rescued by her wooer Christ,
takes as its premiss that the anchoresses for whom it is written (that is,
women living a life of enclosure under vows but without belonging to a
religious community of nuns) will identify with such a lady.74 There is a
further close correlation between many of the lives of virgin saints and
the romances, not just in that the young women in both have to repel
rival suitors, but that those suitors are often represented as heathen
tyrants: romance heroines as various as the Fere of Ipomadon and
Percyvell of Galles’ beloved need defence against pagan kings who aim to
compel their submission by force. Whereas the romance tyrants, like the
foe of the Ancrene Wisse, rarely get closer to the ladies than to besiege
their castles, those in saints’ lives typically try to impose their will by a
direct attack on the bodies of the nubile young maidens they desire, strip-
ping them naked and torturing them. The graphic description devoted to
this has frequently been attacked by modern critics as authorized
pornography,75 but the equation is problematic. Quite apart from the
very different cultural meanings for both nakedness (with its strong
symbolic association with innocence, emphasized in pictures of virgin
martyrdoms by the brightness of the saint’s body compared with the

other figures and the background) and for the infliction of pain (with its
associations with the Passion), the element of potential pornographic
fantasizing through such images is strictly controlled by both hagiogra-
phers and artists. Rival suitors and torturers are alike on their way to
damnation; and they are always presented as in some sense ‘other’. The
pictures make that particularly clear by the ugliness of the men sur-
rounding the heroine, just as the men who attack the lady in romance are
often represented as in some way monstrous. The pressure from romance
actively discourages identification with a heathen villain or would-be
rapist, or with the intense voyeurism of their gaze.
The Catholic cult of virginity might seem to entail a break-point at the
Reformation in the link between such discourses and romance, but any
disruption of memetic replication takes place only over a long time-scale.
Elizabethan England was only a generation, or the width of the Channel,
away from a fully Catholic culture, and those ways of thinking, its
imagery, and its books did not disappear with the Act of Settlement.
Many of these images and patterns of narrative accordingly continue in
the new religious context. Spenser makes explicit both the innocence of
nakedness and the beastliness of voyeuristic lust in his analogous stories
of Serena, stripped for the ‘sordid eyes’ of the satyrs whose desire to rav-
ish her is thwarted initially only by the decision to sacrifice her instead;
and of Una, the ‘heavenly virgin’ who is rescued from Sansloy’s
attempted rape by another troupe of satyrs, but they are impelled by the
revelation of her unveiled beauty, not, like her attacker, to the feeding of
their ‘fiery lustfull eye’, but to the adoration of Truth.76 The secular sur-
face of Spenser’s narrative never conceals his models in hagiographic
legend: the resonances of such episodes with the lives of virgin saints
would still have have been familiar to his readers. On occasion he states
as much, as when he describes Florimell’s resistance to Proteus’ attempts
to seduce her away from her true love (first offering her kingdoms, then
assailing her in hideous form with ‘sharpe threates’) as making her
worthy of a ‘crowne of heavenly praise with saints above’ (III. viii. 40–2).
Martyrdom, moreover, continued to hold a fascination even on the
Reformation stage. The scenes in Pericles of Marina in the brothel, secu-
lar as they are, bring with them connotations from the legend of St Agnes,
who was condemned to such a fate by the pagan whose advances she had
refused, but with even direr consequences for her would-be clients; her
story was among those retained as historical in Foxe’s Ecclesiasticall
Historie, and so had continuing currency in the great Protestant marty-
rology.77 In 1620, Massinger and Dekker took the further step of drama-
tizing the death of St Dorothy, as The Virgin Martyr. Here, her persecu-
tors are clownish villains, presented not as types of evil but rather as the
butt of satire, comic figures in the classical sense as defined by Sidney:
characters represented ‘in the most ridiculous and scornefull sort that
may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such
a one’.78 Dorothy also proclaims the sublimated sexuality characteristic
of Catholic spirituality focused on the virgin martyr: she has chosen a
lover who surpasses any other, and He in turn ‘languisheth to death’ for
her.79
One of the great defining moments of the Reformation was when the
ex-monk Martin Luther married a former nun. It marked a redefinition
of the perfect life, from rejection of the world and the flesh to the uncon-
tested sacramentalizing of the secular: earthly marriage was no longer
second best, but the institution in which the highest Christian life could
be practised. Spenser famously redefines the Chastity represented by
Britomart, the title knight of Book III, from virginity to faithful love. The
move is evidently to some extent a product of the Reformation, an active
rejection on Spenser’s part of Roman Catholic doctrines of perfect
celibacy in favour of an ideal of marriage. Yet the Protestant shift in ideo-
logy reinforced the whole romance ideal that cast married love as the
model of chaste faithfulness; medieval writers of romance were to an
extent writing against the dominant cultural model of their age, whereas
Spenser can write in accord with his. Faithful love with marriage as its
aim makes a statement in favour of England’s own reformed theological
(and therefore political) ideals. Romance therefore has the potential to lie
at the heart of a Protestant national literature, just as marriage lies at the
heart of the genre. If outside the Faerie Queene it does not often do so,
that is perhaps the consequence of a larger cultural shift, from an
assumption that literature exists to express an age or a nation’s ideology
to an assumption that it speaks with an individual voice at odds with the
institutional requirements of Church and state.
erotic thought: spenser and sidney
That that spectrum of good love did indeed embrace both human and
divine is the underlying principle of the Faerie Queene, and in particular
of Books III and IV. Here, Spenser presents an array of love in all its
variations: divine and cosmic and human, good and bad, natural and
unnatural; promiscuity and virginity, the right attraction between virtues

and the dangerous attraction between vices, the seduction of the virtuous
away from their true natures. The dividing point comes not between
physical and spiritual love, but between love inspired by God and lust
that sets the soul on a wrong path. Where medieval presentations of sim-
ilar ideas had to work against a multiplicity of competing discourses,
Spenser had on his side not only the Reformation theology of God-given
sexuality, but also the Neoplatonic theories of how the soul might rise to
God by using earthly love and beauty as stepping-stones towards higher
things. What might appear simple when expressed in the abstract, how-
ever, becomes much more ethically complex in practice, and the acting
out of such principles in fictional examples brings those complexities to
the fore. None of Spenser’s characters has an easy or assured road to the
fulfilment of love, and Sidney’s numerous love-smitten characters in the
Arcadia exemplify anxiety at least as much as they exemplify love.
Spenser starts from the position that earthly love is the highest human
good, and has divine approval; the Arcadia reads like an extended debate
as to whether that is true. Sidney goes well beyond most romance writers,
English or continental, in the subtlety of his exploration of the links
between sexuality and ethics. In both versions of the Arcadia, but most
markedly in the revision, he shows that even the men and women who
fashion themselves according to the cultural norms of virtue have their
self-images broken and re-formed by desire; the potential for good and
evil inherent in sexuality does not divide out easily between heroes and
villains. Providing a thread through such complexities, however, in both
the Arcadia and the Faerie Queene, runs the continuing meme of the ‘pas-
sionate and pure’ young woman, who sets her choice on a man on whom
she gazes.
Spenser offers, as the lead protagonist in the large cast of his books of
Love and Friendship, not a knight but a woman acting the role of a
knight: a maiden seeking the man she loves. The choice follows almost
inevitably from the long-standing English portrayal of the feisty heroine,
the agent of her own choices in life and love, as the generically central
figure of love-romance, not least stories of the founding of dynasties.
Although her immediate predecessor is Ariosto’s Bradamante, another
maiden knight who in turn has the Grisandol of the prose Merlin in her
background, Spenser is concerned to make Britomart’s British derivation
clear by what she says as well as by what she is called. Her very first speech
offers a declaration of belief in love as free choice, for both partners: an
idea that takes further the Church’s insistence on the consent of both
bride and bridegroom for a valid marriage. As the culmination of this pri-
mary speech, the affirmation carries a particular weight.
Ne may love be compeld by maisterie;
For soone as maisterie comes, sweet love anone
Taketh his nimble wings, and soon away is gone.
III. i. 25
The passage is itself a quotation from the Franklin’s Tale, where Chaucer
has his Franklin make the same point, in a story that insists on the impor-
tance of mutual respect within marriage:
Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye.
Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon
Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon!80
The quotation is so precise as to indicate that it was meant to be recog-
nized, and so to bring its original context with it. It is an ideal of behav-
iour within a relationship as well as of choice of partner. Chaucer’s
emphasis falls on the former: his lines are in context a warning about the
effect on a loving wife of a bullying husband. Spenser shifts the emphasis
to the second meaning, though without leaving the first behind. Chastity,
faithful married love, is for Spenser effectively defined as the free and
unconstrained direction of a woman’s will towards the man of her
choice, or, by extension, of a man’s towards a woman, both in the selec-
tion of a partner and in the maintenance of that love. He roots that
definition in the native tradition of romance, in the father of English
poetry.
As a maiden warrior, Britomart offers the most extensive exploration
of how the contrasting possibilities of action for men and women in love
can be brought together in a single figure. In keeping with his practice
throughout the poem, Spenser introduces her first in action, so that the
effect of what she represents is made clear before she is given a name, or
indeed a gender. That opening action is a typically male one, the unhors-
ing of Guyon, the knight of temperance. Far from virtue being opposed
to evil here, what Spenser is demonstrating in the overthrow is a hier-
archy of virtue: good love, allegorically speaking, is stronger than dispas-
sionate temperance, and can rightly overcome it. That she does so with a
magic lance makes the same point as the arrows of the God of Love: love
carries its own supra-human power that is stronger than will or reason.
That, for St Augustine, had been what was wrong with it; in Britomart,
Spenser insists on its rightness. Only after her credentials have been
established in these terms is she introduced to the readers (the characters

continue to think of her as a fellow knight for some time longer):
Even the famous Britomart it was,

Whom straunge adventure did from Britaine fet,
To seeke her lover (love farre sought alas,)
Whose image she had seene in Venus looking glas.
III. i. 8
Britomart is not a fairy queen, with her traditional freedom from normal
moral constraints; she is not a fay of any kind. She is a young woman who
has seen ‘her lover’—the man who is to be her husband, but, more par-
ticularly, the man with whom she has fallen in love and to whom she has
dedicated her sexuality—in a mirror. The ‘looking glas’ is at once an alle-
gorization of loving at first sight, since a mirror offers nothing except
sight; and of the growth into self-awareness consequent on falling on
love, which Spenser develops in a long exploration of her emotions.
Rather than a formal soliloquy, he offers a long and sympathetic account
of her inarticulate feelings of bewilderment and distress that brings us
into intimate contact with her inward state of mind, in a way unique in
the whole poem.
And if that any drop of slombring rest

Did chaunce to still into her wearie spright,
When feeble nature felt her selfe opprest,
Streight way with dreames, and with fantasticke sight
Of dreadfull things the same was put to flight,
That oft out of her bed she did astart,
As one with vew of ghastly feends affright:
Tho gan she to renew her former smart,
And thinke of that faire visage, written in her hart.
III. ii. 29
For Britomart as for Lavine, or the Fere, or indeed any Petrarchan male
lover, the experience of desire is not pleasant, and Spenser does not hes-
itate to foreground its sexual element. Her ‘fraile fleshly mould’ is burned
by ‘no usuall fire, no usuall rage’ (III. ii. 37, 39), even though the object of
her desire does not so much as know of her existence. To pursue her
desire, she steals away from her father’s house, to which she is the heir
(22), in the guise of a knight-errant. She would appear to be breaking just
about every patriarchal taboo on women’s actions that there was; but she
carries Spenser’s full approval, and all the other women of these books
are implicitly or explicitly judged by comparison with her. The approval
is not just a matter of the private ethics that govern personal relation-
ships. The mirror that made her fall in love is not only Venus’s, as the
overpowering deity of love; it is also, as we learn later, made by Merlin,
the figure who intervenes in history to fulfil the destiny that will culmi-
nate in the Tudors. He does it in traditional legend by engineering the
conception of Arthur. In Spenser’s addition, he sets Britomart on her
quest for Arthegall so that they can become the founders of the Tudor
line.
For once, Britomart’s ‘lover’ is introduced first of all by name, not by
action: Arthegall, ‘equal to Arthur’. It is Britomart herself who names
him (III. ii. 9), as if he were a part of her own subjectivity rather than an
independent character. Arthegall is equivalent to Arthur, moreover, not
just in that he takes the place that might be expected to be Arthur’s as the
ancestor of the Tudors, but through the parallelism—or rather the mir-
ror imagery, reversal as well as reflection, appropriate to ‘Venus looking
glass’—of the ways in which Britomart falls in love with him and Arthur
falls in love with Gloriana. Gloriana visits Arthur in a vision, somewhere
between dream and reality (the pressed grass with its signification of her
body), and he spends the rest of the poem seeking for her. His desire for
her is grounded in her declaration of desire for him. Britomart sees an
image of her own lover without any consciousness on his part, and
embarks on her quest on her own initiative: she puts her own desire into
action. Both Arthur and Arthegall are therefore the objects of female
desire; but Britomart is closest to Arthur in the active role she takes in
seeking that desire’s fulfilment. Lesser loves in the poem have the man
wooing the woman, but these two are the great love-interests that domi-
nate the work. Britomart’s desire allows for a future that will lead down
to the sixteenth century; Gloriana’s allows for a continuation beyond
Spenser’s own time, in an expression of hope in a romance happy ending
that combines the fulfilment of procreative desire with the continuation
of the state. There is a strong sense in which the whole of the Faerie
Queene is structured on those two love-quests, with the implication that
the consummation of both will also complete the work itself. Both are
grounded in female desire.
Britomart is not so much a personification as an exemplary person,
and what she exemplifies is active female desire. As such, she serves as the
dominant theme of the core narrative to which all the other characters
play variations. The method of the central books of the poem is to
present not so much the ‘continued metaphors’ described in the opening

Letter to Ralegh, but a ‘romance of types’, where the central characters
represent not ideas or principles, but people who illustrate general
human attitudes or tendencies with regard to love.81 Heterosexual
human relationships here are not, as they were in the opening two books,
primarily a means by which Spenser expresses larger moral and political
allegories: they are the major subject in their own right. The exemplary
quality of the characters does not limit them to being stereotypes; as with
so much of the best literature that operates with stereotypical figures,
they are constantly striving towards a condition of uniqueness, just as the
more highly individualized characters of other great works strive towards
a condition of universality.82 Britomart herself is the most striking exam-
ple of this breaking the ‘type’ mould to become at the same time a unique
individual. The Tudors do not emerge from a genealogical allegory, but
from a desiring woman.
It does not follow that Spenser endorses women’s desire as necessarily
good. As with all matters of sexuality, what matters is how it is exercised,
and the central books of the Faerie Queene function as an exploration of
that. The first woman Britomart encounters, shortly after her unhorsing
of Guyon marks chaste love as a superior good to temperance alone, is
Malecasta, the ‘ill-chaste’: a desiring woman whose desire has turned into
lust, the random sexual appetite for any man available. She, like
Britomart, acts as her own mistress, outside male authority; but she does
not control her own sexual appetites for good, and uses them to break
faithful heterosexual bonds when she can. The last major woman
opposed by Britomart in the poem as we have it is the Amazon Radigund,
a warrior woman who uses both her sovereignty and her beauty for dom-
inance alone, to enforce her power over men. Spenser describes such
female dominance as ‘a licentious libertie’ contrary to the bonds imposed
on women by Nature, but the issue of women’s sovereignty is one that he
negotiates with some anxiety. After her defeat of Radigund, Britomart
reigns ‘as princess’ in order to exercise the true justice of restoring
women to men’s subjection; but the next stage of Arthegall’s own quest
brings him to Mercilla, a figure for Elizabeth, and therefore one of those
women whose sovereignty ‘the heavens’ have rendered lawful.83 Earlier,
Spenser describes the ‘streight lawes’ that curb women’s liberty as being
imposed by men out of fear that women will excel them, whether in the
exercise of arms or in ‘artes and pollicy’: a passage in justification of
Britomart, but which is designed to move into a panegyric to his own
queen.84
Spenser’s embodiment in Britomart of his definition of chastity as

faithful desire for one man none the less prevents her from becoming a
figure for the queen on either the personal or the political level. In the
‘mirrors more than one’ that the poem offers to Elizabeth, Gloriana
reflects her rule, Belphoebe her ‘rare chastitee’ in the strict sense of vir-
ginity (III Proem 5). Both are variations on Britomart’s central good sex-
uality, and they are joined by a number of other women in these central
books who offer further positive variations on women’s desire.
Belphoebe and her twin sister, Amoret, are begotten by the sun on a fairy,
in something close to an immaculate conception.85 They are more
mythological than human: unlike the other women of the Faerie Queene,
their life choices are made for them. Belphoebe may be fierce in defence
of her virginity, but her form of life is laid down for her independently of
any exercise of her own will. She has been raised by Diana in ‘perfect
Maydenhed’, Amoret by Venus in ‘goodly womanhed’ (III. vi. 28). The
adjectives might seem to reflect the Catholic hierarchy of dedicated vir-
ginity as superior to marriageability, but, as their twinship indicates, the
distinction is not one of subordination. Belphoebe’s virginity can be ‘per-
fect’ in so far as it is complete in itself, requiring nothing beyond itself;
Amoret is destined—somewhere beyond the poem as Spenser left it—to
find her fulfilment in a husband. It would take the ex-Catholic John
Donne to insist that on her wedding night a maiden ‘puts on perfection,
and a woman’s name’, that perfection lies in what is added to virginity.86
Spenser’s narrative none the less implies something of the kind.
Belphoebe’s readiness to accept adoration without returning anything is
criticized in the episode of Timias, based on Elizabeth’s harsh treatment
of Ralegh after his marriage. Amoret is a maiden who is sought by her
lover rather than seeking him herself; her imprisonment by Busyrane
may be a comment on the complexities of unequal desire, or the difficul-
ties of right desire (it is one of the episodes that have resisted all attempts
at definitive interpretation), and her need for rescue by Britomart indi-
cates that the actively desiring heroine possesses something that she does
not. Of all the women associated with the virtues in the central books of
the work, only one, Florimell, completes her story and achieves her
desire. She appears at first as if she exemplified the infinitely desirable but
undesiring woman, as one man after another pursues her, from Arthur to
casual rapists; but she too, like Britomart, is in fact in quest of the man
she loves.
Spenser allows Britomart to cross-dress to give an emblematic repre-
sentation of the active virtue of romance love. The women warriors who
had preceded her in English (Grisandol of the prose Merlin, Ide of Huon)
were martial virgins rather than questing lovers, but there were other
models of women who had adopted a less military male disguise to find
or assist the men they loved, and who helped to prepare the way for
Britomart, and indeed for Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines.
Clyomon and Clamydes, one of the few surviving English romance plays
of the 1570s, provides such a heroine, and enlarges her role from that pro-
vided for her in its source, the recent print of the fourteenth-century
French Perceforest.87 The heiress to the Kingdom of the Strange Marshes
finds Clyomon lying exhausted and seasick on the shore, nurses him
back to health, falls in love with him and soliloquizes about it; when she
is kidnapped by a rival suitor, she devises her escape so that she can seek
him out in male disguise; and she arranges the scene of her revelation to
him. She is the main agent in the fulfilling of their love, and the most
ardent expressions of love are all hers. On this evidence, Elizabethan dra-
matic romance took such a woman as its generic centre, and Spenser did
not need to look to any general English acquaintance with Ariosto to set
the expectations of his readers.
That very establishment of a horizon, however, enables its resetting.
The gender confusions in Sidney’s Arcadia are much more disturbing,
not least because they do not have any such traditional value behind them
and do not acquire any inherent value of their own. The implications of
gender differences are to an extent the raw material of the work, and
especially in the love-tangle focused on Pyrocles—the man who disguises
himself as a woman in order to get near his beloved lady (a scenario mod-
elled on Spanish, not English, romance), but who is himself desired as a
woman by her father, as a man by her mother, and as a woman whom she
would like to be a man by the deeply confused Philoclea. In the revised
version, for the purposes of his disguise as an Amazon, Pyrocles takes the
name Zelmane, that of a woman who herself loved him and followed him
in the guise of a page, but who never declared her love until she was on
the point of death. She had continued to be restrained by her feminine
self-effacement and modesty; he continues to behave with all the self-
confidence of a man. His cross-dressing never amounts to an assumption
of social gender. His aim is to place himself in a position where he can
declare himself and his love; the complication is that the means he uses
to do so, disguise as a woman, cuts down on his options, despite some
heroic bear-slaughtering. The story is driven by the various characters’
attempts to stalk or escape each other: Pyrocles perpetually trying to get
time alone with Philoclea; Basilius trying to do the same with him; and
Gynecia determined to prevent either of them from succeeding. The

principal desiring maiden in this part of the plot is Philoclea; but,
although Sidney goes long and generously inside her mind, she is the least
pro-active of all of these characters. The figure who occupies the role
occupied in earlier romance by the pursuing heroine is here a woman in
appearance only, Pyrocles–Zelmane.
Both the comedy of situation and Pyrocles’ centrality are counterbal-
anced by the sympathy and detail with which Sidney presents the feelings
of his desiring women. Basilius is not treated kindly at all (he is presented
as something close to the conventional senex amans of the Merchant’s
Tale and other such fabliaux, the old man who makes a buffoon of him-
self through love), and Pyrocles himself has to go through the indignity
of scornful mockery from Musidorus for both his subservience to love
and his choice of such an ignoble disguise as that of a woman (revenged,
of course, when Musidorus himself settles for playing the shepherd).
Gynecia, however, is not a figure of comedy (‘wit’ in the following quo-
tation of course means ‘intellect’): she is
a woman of great wit, and in truth of more princely virtues than her husband; of
most unspotted chastity, but of so working a mind and so vehement spirits as a
man may say it were happy she took a good course, for otherwise it would have
been terrible.88
The potentially destructive nature of her passion is evident both to Pyrocles
and to herself, as she torments herself with the recognition that she is ‘a
plague to myself and a shame to womankind’, and, more wretchedly yet,
that she has no comfort except to place herself beyond shame.89 Philoclea
has none of her knowingness. Her own falling in love is presented as her
first awaking to experience beyond herself—she is ‘like a young fawn who,
coming in the wind of the hunters, doth not know whether it be a thing or
no to be eschewed’.90 By the time she discovers, it is too late to resist. Sidney
charts the growth of her desire, at first in his own authorial voice so that he
can maintain the reticence of distance. She wishes that she and Zelmane
might be sisters, or that one of them should be a man,
that there might succeed a blessed marriage betwixt them. But when that wish
had once displayed his ensign in her mind, then followed whole squadrons of
longings that so it might be . . . Then dreams by night began to bring more unto
her than she durst wish by day, whereout waking did make her know herself the
better by the image of those fancies. (pp. 239–40)
Only once the sexual nature of her longings has been established does he
give her her own voice, in verses and a soliloquy. Despite her belief that
her desire for a woman must be both sin and shame, she finishes with a
passionately willed acceptance of her love (p. 244): ‘O my Zelmane, gov-
ern and direct me, for I am wholly given over unto thee.’
The Arcadia mounts an extended exploration of the complexity of
human categories and roles across many fronts. Peasants and aristocrats
are confused, not so much by Musidorus’ adoption of a shepherd dis-
guise as by the exemplary love shown by the ideal shepherds Strephon
and Klaius—noblemen in disguise in the first version, but real shepherds
in the revision. Gender definitions and roles are generously explored in
the varying mix of masculine and feminine elements in many of the char-
acters, in Gynecia and Pamela as much as in the cross-dressed Pyrocles.
The relationship between desire and virtue is similarly complicated, by
the ‘princely virtue’ of the would-be adulteress Gynecia, and the appar-
ent perversion of the virgin Philoclea’s love for an Amazon. The story,
being a romance, ends by restoring social and ideological boundaries:
Philoclea’s love is not unnatural; neither Gynecia nor Basilius commits
the evil of adultery; the irrational desire of the young lovers—a desire that
in the first version drives Musidorus to the point of raping Pamela, and
Pyrocles to overcome Philoclea’s reluctance to yield to him—is finally
contained within marriage. It is what the lovers have all been seeking, but
too many of the dangers and disruptions along the way have had their
origins within themselves for the happy ending of the plot to convey a
secure sense of assured order.
‘quick, and in mine arms’
Shakespeare’s handling of romantic love and women’s desire requires

discussion to itself, not so much because he is working from different
models or with different ideas as because of the wide range of plays in
which his ‘passionate and pure’ heroines are active. Many of the com-
edies he wrote before 1608 or so are drawn from classical models or
Italian novelle, but, although those may provide him with plots (his ‘mat-
ter’, in medieval terminology), both the sentence, the sens or inner shap-
ing that he gives to them, and his treatment of his material, are
dominantly inflected by romance. ‘Comedy’, the dramatic term newly
used in Elizabethan England for plays with happy endings, is Greek by
etymology and Latin by familiar usage, and Renaissance theorists accord-
ingly define the genre in classical terms: comedy requires low-life charac-
ters and low style, and has the aim of reforming the audience through
satiric laughter. Shakespeare largely confines such elements to minor

characters and subplots, and patterns almost all his comedies instead on
romance. The two forms have in common a happy ending, but not a great
deal else. In his romance redefinition of the genre, centre stage is taken by
high-born characters, who most often speak in the high style of blank
verse, and whose falling in what eventually turns out to be right love is
treated as normative. Some element of family reunion and rediscovery is
a widespread plot element of Roman comedy; but Shakespeare gives it an
emphasis much more characteristic of the whole romance tradition.
Similarly, his presentation of love in his heroines develops directly from
that tradition’s interest in both the outward actions and inward thoughts
of the actively desiring woman, and it is her desire that keeps the plot on
course towards its happy resolution.
By the time he was writing his late plays, his ‘romances’, he was calling
overtly and directly on the full romance models of dispossession and
restoration, transgression and atonement, and of an active and desiring
female sexuality that has to be accepted and celebrated by the male char-
acters of the play in order for the final happiness to be possible. These late
plays none the less push very close to another generic boundary for the
love-romance, that of tragedy. The closeness of the two was not a new
discovery (witness the stories of Tristan and Lancelot), but Shakespeare
on occasion pushed the genre over the edge: in Romeo and Juliet; in
Othello. In those plays, he breaks the links between the heroine’s ‘pas-
sionate and pure’ sexuality and the happy ending, between virtue and
reward, to contemplate the bleakness of a world in which providential
ordering is not in evidence. The last plays write supernatural guidance
towards a final joyful closure back into the romance script.
The pattern for much of Shakespeare’s comic romance is set in what
may have been his very first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona.91 Its
dual debt to both classical and medieval traditions is inscribed in the
names of the two gentlemen themselves: Proteus, named after the
changeable Greek sea-god; and Valentine, named for the favourite
romance hero as well as the patron saint of lovers. The association with
romance is confirmed in the second scene, when the first of Julia’s suit-
ors to be named is ‘the fair Sir Eglamour’. The name would have
received instant audience recognition, as the eponymous hero of a
romance that maintained an inexplicable popularity from the four-
teenth into the seventeenth century. Later in the play, this character (or
another of the same name) enters the action, as a man who has sworn
chastity in memory of his dead ‘true love’, and who is willing to assist
the distressed Silvia in her escape from an unwanted marriage (4. 3).
The disjunction between the roles assigned to him in the two scenes
suggests that the resonances of the name were of more immediate con-
cern to Shakespeare than full narrative consistency: the emotional world
the play invokes is that of the native romances. So it is not surprising to
find that the first soliloquy given to any of the lovers in the play is
Julia’s, in which she recognizes in her own actions the folly of love (1. 2.
50–65). Julia indeed has the bulk of the soliloquies in the play; when
Proteus and Valentine speak alone on stage, they are much less likely to
analyse how they feel than to comment on the action—Proteus on his
betrayal of both his lady and his friend; Valentine on his alteration of
state to that thoroughly medieval character, a forest outlaw on the
model of Gamelyn (on whom more below) or Robin Hood. Neither of
the women apparently initiates courtship, but both actively pursue their
own choice of suitor: Julia by following Proteus in male disguise; Silvia,
daughter and heiress to the duke of Milan, by first agreeing to elope
with Valentine, and then, when that fails, by escaping to the forest from
the unwanted marriage her father wishes to impose on her. The
women’s consistent faithfulness, to their lovers and to each other, like-
wise follows the model of the loyalty and uprightness of the earlier hero-
ines of English romance. Valentine’s attempt to hand Silvia over to his
rival, by contrast, is an aberration by any conventions, and almost as
gross a violation of her own freedom of choice as Proteus’ attempt to
rape her. ‘All that is mine in Silvia I give thee’, he declares, as if she were
indeed a commodity, to be disposed of at his pleasure just as her father
had tried to dispose of her to another suitor. That it is Julia who inter-
venes to claim her own right in Proteus contradicts the men’s assump-
tion that they are the owners of the women. As is emblematized by the
rings they have exchanged, the contracts are mutual. The men—both
the duke himself and the lovers—finally agree to the disposition of love
and marriage chosen by the women.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona contains patterns of structure and
event that are replicated many times over in Shakespeare’s later works,
but the plays and narrative poems that immediately followed it offer a
broad array of variations on, and disruptions to, its generically central
theme of love as ultimately controlled by women’s faithfulness, rather as
the various subordinate stories within the central books of the Faerie
Queene offer variations on, and counter-models to, its Knight of
Chastity. Even the barest summaries suffice to demonstrate this array;
what should be emphasized is how much their presentation of women’s
love takes as its unspoken norm the desire of the romances. The Taming
of the Shrew makes marriage overtly a matter of economics, and the
point of the play is to show the hero riding roughshod over the woman’s
wishes, even if its fiction is that that is really what she wants; and the
‘fiction’ is emphasized—this is the one play of Shakespeare’s that does
not pretend to be ‘really’ happening, but never to be anything other
than a play. Titus Andronicus almost defines itself as tragedy by its resis-
tance to any romance models of loving women: it presents two female
protagonists, one, the young Roman Lavinia, raped and dismembered;
the other, the older Goth Tamora, sexually voracious and vengeful. The
story of the original Lavinia was known to the Elizabethans from the
Aeneid, not any derivative from the Roman d’Eneas, but Shakespeare’s
choice of name for the heroine is no less significant for being based on
the more passive model of Rome’s founding mother: the glory of Rome
dies in her abuse as it had been founded on her predecessor’s marriage.
The Rape of Lucrece tells a similar story, in which the denial of a
woman’s sexual choice has political consequences as great as the Eneas
poet’s allowing of such choice. Venus and Adonis calls attention to the
imbalance inherent in gender relationships, in which female desire, no
matter how great, cannot compel the male; this goddess of love, in con-
tradiction of the whole of western literature, does not carry all before
her. Less concerned with its women’s thoughts and feelings, and offer-
ing a measure of the difference between classical and romance comic
patterns, is The Comedy of Errors, the play of Shakespeare’s most closely
modelled on Roman comedy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows
Helena and Hermia ultimately getting their own choice of partner, in
the teeth of parental opposition, male capriciousness, and mis-targeted
magic, but within the more questioning framework offered by Theseus’
defeat of Hippolyta and Oberon’s crushing of Titania’s own volitions.
And one comedy, Loves Labours Lost, sorts out a full four couples into
desiring pairs but then refuses to end ‘like an old play’, or indeed like an
old romance, by not giving Jack his Jill.
Romeo and Juliet looks initially as if it will most completely fulfil the
romance model, of mutual love overriding all obstacles, and its faithful-
ness to such expectations for the first three acts (there is even, as in Two
Gentlemen, a Friar Laurence) makes the disaster of the last two all the
more shocking: this is a tragedy by virtue of being a romance with an
unhappy ending. The mutuality of the lovers’ attraction is given brilliant
performative expression in the sonnet they share at their first meeting: a
sonnet that is a rhetorical enactment of shared minds and shared desires,
and in which the touching hands (‘palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss’)
and the kiss itself become part of the reciprocating syntax of the action.92
It is Juliet who speaks the most expansive of all Shakespeare’s soliloquies
celebrating a woman’s desirable desire, the thirty lines in which she urges
the sun’s horses to gallop apace so that her bridegroom may ‘leap to
these arms, untalked of and unseen’ to fulfil their ‘amorous rites’.93
(Thomas Bowdler, in his Family Shakespeare first published in 1807, cut
it down to fifteen lines.) But Romeo and Juliet refuses the implied
providential modelling of romance, replacing it with the sheer contin-
gency of disaster.
Two of the great comedies of the late 1590s owe a debt to medieval
sources more pervasive than the Eglamour and Robin Hood models of
Two Gentlemen, and it is no accident that they also present two of
Shakespeare’s strongest heroines, both of them heiresses: Portia, of The
Merchant of Venice; and Rosalind, of As You Like It. Portia’s dead father
extends his power over her disposition in marriage from beyond the
grave, through the requirement that her suitors must win her by choos-
ing the right casket: a story given wide dissemination through its appear-
ance in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of stories originally assembled
in England in the fourteenth century and still a hot favourite in the
Renaissance.94 There, however, it is the prospective wife, not husband,
who has to select the right casket, in order to win the emperor’s son. The
test, as the moralization appended to the story in the Gesta makes clear
and as remains true in the play, is whether the suitors can distinguish
between outward and inward value. Portia has already announced her
own preference among her suitors, but she takes more of the active role
of her prototype in the Gesta than might appear. Like those earlier
romance heroines who pretend to submit meekly to their male relatives
and advisers while actually engineering their decisions for them, she
is not above nudging things along the way she wants them to go.95
Bassanio might have made the right choice anyway, but it is the lady of
the house who makes quite sure that he does so, and who then proceeds
to engineer the trial to save the life of the friend who has made his woo-
ing possible.
The immediate source for As You Like It was Thomas Lodge’s pastoral
romance Rosalynde; and Lodge’s source was the Middle English Gamelyn,
a story halfway between a Robin Hood ballad and a romance of dispos-
session and restoration. It had never reached print, but was preserved as
an alternative Cook’s tale copied into some manuscripts of the Canterbury
Tales. Gamelyn itself, however, contains no love interest—no Rosalynde
figure; and it has been assumed that Lodge made up that half of his story.
In fact, it seems that that, too, has a medieval antecedent. The story of the
young woman, dispossessed by her uncle, who flees to the countryside
and there finds the suitor she had first met at the court, had figured in
William Warner’s bestseller Albions England, first published in 1586 and
reprinted in a succession of later editions; and Warner had taken it from
the history of England most widely disseminated in the Middle Ages and
printed by Caxton, the prose Brut.96 The origins of the story lie even ear-
lier, in a legend most familiar now under the title of its independent
romance version, Havelok. Both there and in the Brut, the heroine’s
usurping uncle forcibly marries her to the hero when he is working as a
scullion, and she only later discovers his true identity as heir to the throne
of Denmark and falls in love with him. Warner turns the story back into
an independent mini-romance within his larger narrative. His heroine
escapes from the court to the country in the guise of a milkmaid rather
than be compelled to marry the kitchen knave, and she falls in love with
him while he is similarly incognito in disguise as a shepherd: the story, in
fact, doubles as a dispossession romance and a pastoral romance, and it is
as such that Lodge adopts it. The rewriting also turns her from being the
victim of a forced marriage to one of those feisty heroines who follow their
own desires in marrying. Warner, like Lodge and Shakespeare, has both
lovers fall in love spontaneously, and allows each of them to discover the
other’s true identity before they marry; but it is Shakespeare who has his
heroine dominate the wooing after both lovers have fallen in love at first
sight. In addition, he designs the play to offer an array of different types of
love—not so much in this instance varieties of heroines, as varieties of lit-
erary love: the sub-Petrarchan art-pastoral sighings of Silvius and Phoebe,
Audrey’s yokel inarticulacy, Touchstone’s appeal to the bird world to jus-
tify his own lust—‘As pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling’ (3. 3.
74). The love that is presented as normative is that of Rosalind and
Orlando, and the focus is on hers more than his. We encounter his stereo-
typed expressions of love not directly from him but through her own
quicksilver reactions to the poems he has pinned to the trees. Her love is
active, wooing, and both emotional and sexual: her early declaration that
she sighs for her ‘child’s father’, for the man she already imagines as her
procreating husband, was censored for much of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries into a sigh for her ‘father’s child’, herself.97 At the end
of the play, she engineers a happy ending not only for herself and Orlando,
but for all the other pairs of the play too. Her dominance is the major fac-
tor in ensuring the play’s happiness: it is arguably the sunniest of all
Shakespeare’s comedies. By contrast, the loving and active heroine of All’s

Well that Ends Well finds a much more muted happiness, so much so as to
require discussion later as an ‘unhappy ending’.
The last plays present some of the most frankly desiring heroines in the
whole Shakespeare canon, but the desirability of their desire often has to
contend with intensely misogynist images of female sensuality (the sub-
ject of the next chapter). Miranda is both the most naïve and also the least
contested of these figures: beyond Caliban’s attempt to rape her, she has
no knowledge of any wider social misogyny, and within the play she
never has to learn it. She accordingly has no hesitation in offering herself
to the man she has chosen as her husband: ‘I am your wife, if you will
marry me’, she tells Ferdinand (Tempest, 3. 1. 83), and her father is
sufficiently anxious over their mutual enthusiasm, despite their having
done of their own volition what he had planned to bring about himself,
to threaten them with perpetual wedded misery if they pre-empt the
proper ‘sanctimonious ceremonies’.98 Perdita takes the frankness still
further: after Juliet, she is Shakespeare’s most openly desiring heroine,
with her publicly spoken wish to have her lover strewn with flowers in an
unashamed evocation of sexual ecstasy:
like a bank, for love to lie and play on,
Not like a corpse—or if, not to be buried,
But quick and in mine arms.99
In some respects the lines confirm the recognition of women’s desire that
has dominated the first three acts of the play, but their tone and phrasing
and meaning are at the far extreme from the distorted imaginings within
Leontes’ mind that have driven his wife to apparent death. The Winter’s
Tale, like Cymbeline, is deeply concerned with recuperating women’s sex-
uality as positive, and finally with celebrating it—a celebration required
if the play is to register as a romance at all, with the harmony required for
its closure. There is no general claim, however, in Shakespeare’s
romances or in those of his medieval predecessors, that all sexuality is
good. The story of Apollonius of Tyre, in all its versions from its fifth-
century origins down to Pericles, shapes itself around a series of powerful
exempla of right and wrong sexuality. The first couple to be introduced
are the incestuous Antiochus and his daughter, a pair whose transgres-
sion of the natural is grotesquely magnified by the death visited on all
those suitors who fail to guess the riddle they set—and indeed of any who
do guess it, as Pericles’ experience shows. Wrong sexuality, this time in
the public domain rather than concealed within the family, is flaunted
again in the episode in which Tarsia-Marina is sold to a brothel; though

unlike her avatar, St Agnes, she preserves herself without any assistance
from miracle or intervention from God. Yet interwoven with these
episodes of the evils of wrongly used sexuality are others that insist on its
inherent goodness. The other fathers of the play, Thaisa’s father
Simonides and Pericles himself, harbour nothing possessive, or jealous,
or incestuous towards their daughters. Simonides wants nothing better
than his daughter’s sexual happiness with another man, and is delighted
when she makes her own choice. Good love—good sexual desire—
throughout the play is focused on Thaisa, the woman whom Pericles
marries; or, to put it more accurately, the woman who marries him.
Thaisa herself is as forward and decisive in her choice of husband as
any romance heroine. Her response to her very first sight of Pericles is to
write a letter to her father, declaring that
she’ll wed the stranger knight,
Or never more to view nor day nor light,
(9. 14–15)
even while Pericles himself has barely seemed to register her existence.
Simonides’ response is equally decisive, and approving of her downright
way of doing things:
I like that well. Nay, how absolute she’s in’t,
Not minding whether I dislike or no!
(16–17)
and, after a pretence at anger with the young lovers interrupted by asides
of delight, he chases them off stage with the couplet,
It pleaseth me so well that I will see you wed,
That with what haste you can, get you to bed.
(112–13)
Their brief bliss is ended by Thaisa’s apparent death in childbirth, a death
which the audience, unlike Pericles, speedily learns not to be real. When
they eventually meet up again, Pericles is unrecognizable after years of
suffering, and she is a priestess of Diana. In a passage unique to
Shakespeare, her response to the story he tells of his life is not to check his
identity by means of a mole or a token (though recognition by a ring
comes later), but by her sexual desire for him: if he arouses her ‘sense’, he
is indeed the husband she has lost:
O, let me look upon him!

If he be none of mine, my sanctity
Will to my sense bend no licentious ear
But curb it, spite of seeing.
(22. 48–51)
Her sexual instinct, in other words, will be sufficient for her to identify
the man she loves; and they embrace, twice, in perhaps the most extended
staging of loving physical contact required in the whole Shakespeare
canon.100 That the play is generally so exceptionally faithful to its source
texts marks Thaisa’s unprecedented means of recognizing her husband as
being of key importance. The moment is none the less deeply faithful to
the romance genre in which it is rooted. The Winter’s Tale makes the
recognition of the accused wife’s virtue the condition that enables its final
closure in restored order; Pericles makes female desire itself the agent of
and authority for its ending in joy. To call it a ‘happy ending’ is here not
enough: Shakespeare manages to achieve that hardest of all literary
effects, an ending in bliss. How far that steps beyond ordinary human
experience is measured by Pericles’ belief, as a prelude to the vision in
which Diana instructs him to visit her temple, that he can hear the music
of the spheres, the music normally inaudible to humankind (as
Shakespeare had noted in an earlier play) while ‘this muddy vesture of
decay | Doth close us in’.101 It is as if Thaisa’s faithful sexuality reverses
the Fall itself.
Pericles is the play of Shakespeare’s that has the least likelihood of any
kind of topical reference. The story had changed remarkably little over
the millennium of its existence. Shakespeare’s own dramatization of the
old tale—his dramatization, indeed, of the telling of an old tale, since the
storyteller himself, in the shape of Gower, acts as its presenter—is rather
a recuperation of romance itself. And with romance comes his most gen-
erous recuperation of female sexuality: of active female sexual choice as
the well-directed and faithful will for good, and women’s desire as desir-
able both to their earthly lovers and to the divine order.
CHAPTER SIX
Women on trial
Any glance at medieval and Renaissance writing about women outside

the field of romance is enough to indicate that its warm endorsement of
its heroines’ sexuality had to contend with very different views. A long
history of clerical misogynist writings on one side, and vernacular fabli-
aux on the other, portrayed women as creatures of insatiable sexual
appetite, though the Latin writings interpret as a threat what the fabliaux
regard as a promise. Romances could not seal themselves off from such
attitudes. They were so deeply engrained in the culture as to be
inescapable, and the misogyny inherent in them is clearly audible as
background noise even in a genre that resists such beliefs. The romance
emphasis on women’s sexuality invites antifeminist accusations from
contemporaneous thinkers who regarded virginity as the only good, or
from recent theorists not content with anything short of modern social
conditions and convictions as to the equality of women. Furthermore, it
has been argued that the ‘fundamental definition’ of misogyny is any
essentialist definition of woman,1 and the generic quality of the heroine
puts her within that category.
That definition, however, itself essentializes a phenomenon that is far
more complex and nuanced than is often allowed for, and ignores the
contestations of it made from within the culture itself.2 Many romance
writers clearly regarded themselves as entering into the wider debate on
the whole issue of women’s goodness or wickedness, and they cast them-
selves in the role of the defence. Their heroines’ transgression of
approved social practices in the pursuit of their own desires laid them
open to losing the sympathy of anyone in their audiences (especially, but
not only, the men among them), who might perceive such actions as
proof of women’s tendency to rebellion. Scarcely any writer of romance
takes universal approval of these heroines for granted. Instead, the trans-
gressions recurrently become the nexus for competing discourses and
images of women, as the authors incorporate voices that offer resistance
to or approval of their narrative models. The rival arguments function as
a way of recognizing scepticism or anxiety on the part of male readers,

sometimes in order just to relieve it, but often to mount an active refuta-
tion. The opposing positions are sometimes set out as formal intellectual
debates; alternatively, the debate may be conducted implicitly, through
examples and counter-examples built into the narrative. If a work is to
remain within the parameters of romance, its final meaning, its sentence,
must be one of approval: the text constitutes a kind of trial, in which the
‘sentence’ in the forensic sense exonerates the heroine. In some cases,
debate indeed crystallizes into a trial, either in a lawcourt or on a field of
battle—trial by combat.
In the set of memes at the core of these romances—the pattern most
widely replicated, and to which other variations in plot are subordinate—
the focus of debate shifts to an individual woman, most often a wife, who
is charged with unchastity. She finds herself the exemplary model of the
same debate, as to whether her sexuality follows a pattern of faithfulness
or promiscuity. Her accuser is most often a man whose advances she has
rejected, who aims to displace his own guilt onto her. Secular attempts at
justice, especially if they are conducted by her jealous husband, may find
her guilty; but providence or some earthly equivalent intervenes to prove
her innocence, and to reveal the charges against her as deliberate
calumny. The final outcome of the trial vindicates her claim of goodness,
and identifies her accuser as the one who is guilty. Such a woman may not
escape the further ‘essentialist’ charge, but the balance of the romances
falls another way: the accusation against her carries weight because it is
given credibility by culturally instilled misogynist beliefs, but her vindi-
cation amounts to a challenge to those beliefs. The fear and hatred of
female sexuality implied by these stories is invariably presented as being
irrational, sometimes even diabolical; and they are written to resist com-
plicity with such beliefs, not to invite it. The motif of the falsely accused
wife—the wife who is believed to be the protagonist in a story of adultery,
but whose faithfulness demands a rewriting of the script—denies that the
background noise of antifeminism has real content.
The general tenor of recent feminist criticism would offer a different
interpretation of these stories, in which the heroine’s innocence would be
taken as an instance of the polarization of women into madonnas and
whores, one woman’s innocence confirming rather than questioning the
whole structure of misogyny. The great majority of such romances, how-
ever, endow their ‘madonnas’ with a vibrant sexuality; and although their
probity may have a heroic quality about it that puts it beyond the
commonplace, it is not suggested that it is exceptional in itself. Even these
Women on Trial 271
stories, however, can make space for villainous as well as virtuous

women, most particularly when the source of the calumny is not a
rejected suitor but a mother-in-law, the woman who has been displaced
by the arrival of the new wife. These characters are unequivocally evil, like
the wicked stepmothers of fairytale,3 and come to nasty ends. The issue
that makes the mother-in-law a plausible danger is less one of jealousy of
the younger woman’s sexual hold over her son than resentment at her
own loss of power and status: these women are always widows, so their
sons’ marriages mean marginalization, a fall from their position as the
woman at the top of the court hierarchy, to a status largely dependent on
sufferance. The young wife may thus be the target of either male desire or
female envy. Both are dangerous, but it is the first, the accusation by a
man, that immediately persuades her husband of her guilt. No husband,
in these narratives, stops loving his wife because she is hated by his
mother, but a word from a male subordinate carries a weight that
women’s accusations never do.
Antifeminism is an age-old phenomenon—Aristotle, ‘the Philo-
sopher’ to the Middle Ages, gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to
much wider fears of women—but the Roman Catholic emphasis on vir-
ginity as perfection provided particularly fertile ground for its growth,
especially after the first millennium, when the Church began to require
celibacy of all its priests. This movement helped to keep in circulation the
writings of some of the Fathers of the early Church who had not only pro-
moted the avoidance of all sexual activity but done so with a virulence
against women that now looks pathological. These views never became a
part of Catholic dogma, but they were none the less taken as authorizing
later antifeminist discourses, written with varying degrees of seriousness
but always insisting on the potential of women for replicating Eve’s
temptation of Adam and so separating Man (in the gender-specific sense)
from God.4 In the Middle Ages, the more extreme assertions of misogy-
nist discourse were largely confined to a few texts that were particularly
popular among clerics, not least apparently among witty young students;
Chaucer may well have been representing fact by portraying his expert on
misogynist writings, the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband Jankin, as a former
student of Oxford. Despite the recent attention given to such writings,
they were never the only, or even the dominant, representation of
women’s sexuality, as the chapter above has argued. Even Latin works,
moreover, often took the form of debate, for or against women—and
although such debates operate by overt mass generalization, those gener-
alizations pull in opposing directions.5 Similar debates attained still
wider currency once they shifted into the vernacular and were dissemi-
nated through print, and they remained uninflected by the Reformation
approval of married clergy. A reading of the titles licensed by the
Stationers’ Company in the second half of the sixteenth century shows
that debates on women constituted a substantial proportion of the read-
ing-matter of the period.6 The vibrancy of the continuing life of the motif
of the falsely accused woman in turn testifies to the equal vibrancy of the
antifeminism that gave such narratives their point. The disproving of the
accusation, and with it the belief in women’s fickleness that gives it sur-
face plausibility, also enacts a resistance to that antifeminism.
A fascination with sexuality in general and women’s sexuality in
particular is shared by romance, fabliau, and the clerical discourses of
misogyny, though their portrayals differ radically. The timing of the
emergence of romance, in the century after Gregory VII began the
process of enforcing universal clerical celibacy, suggests that one element
in its rise may have been a secular backlash against the anti-sexual atti-
tudes that accompanied that imposition. Romance attitudes by contrast
embody and promote the vested interests of the great secular majority of
the population, though the genre confines its portrayal to the élite group
who have both major dynastic interests and also the leisure to devote
themselves to the development of sentiment.7 Its authors do not invite
any sexual revolution—they accept that the public world is a male one,
even while recognizing that individual women may do rather better in it
than men; they never question the system of patrilinear descent that
made a wife’s chastity a matter of crucial political and economic import;
and in a world without access to the technologies of contraception, there
could be no pretence that sexual liberation was desirable for women, even
if the whole ethical force of the culture had not been against it. There is
none the less a widely expressed resistance across all these works to any
sexual double standard, even though women are the target of much of the
prescription, and even though the definitions of the sexual standard in
question are as discrepant as they could be. The clerical texts promote
virginity for both sexes. Most romances, and English ones in particular,
demand faithfulness from their male as well as female protagonists. The
fabliaux portray (and often champion) generous unlicensed sexual activ-
ity for both men and women, and the figure most likely to receive unsym-
pathetic treatment is the inadequate husband. Wives, and more rarely
maidens, are here treated very much as sexual objects; and the only group
to emerge favourably with any degree of consistency is the young clerks
who are often cast in the role of roving lovers, and through whom the
Women on Trial 273
stories are often focalized. Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale and John and
Aleyn of the Reeve’s Tale would be the most familiar English examples of
such clerical protagonists. Although many fabliaux, like Chaucer’s own,
were written by secular authors who worked in other genres too, clerical
and fabliau discourses of women share much common ground, and the
romances recognize and combat both.
Adultery is a hidden sin, and popular estimates of its frequency vary
with changing cultural norms independently of whatever the facts may
be. A reading of medieval fabliaux suggests a world of young women per-
manently on heat, and the propagandists for celibacy seem to have shared
that fantasy. The Victorians, with their downplaying of women’s sexual
desire and the concomitant elevation of them as exemplars of purity,
regarded the chaste heroine as the acme of Christian civilization. Young
women of the technological twenty-first century assume that their pre-
modernist forebears enjoyed the same attitudes to sexual liberation as
they do themselves. All those, of course, are generalizations about recent
as well as past eras, such as can be made only by ignoring rival attitudes
in each age in turn. The fabliau view of the Middle Ages, for instance, is
contradicted not only by the universal and unequivocal teaching on sex-
ual morals from both ecclesiastical and secular sources, and by the
romances themselves, but also by works such as Christine de Pizan’s Book
of the City of Ladies (itself printed in English translation in 1521), with its
appeal to the everyday experience of women’s faithfulness to set against
the male chorus clamouring the opposite.8 For the first time, however,
advances in biochemical techniques of analysis now permit a factual
picture of medieval and early modern rates of adultery to be drawn inde-
pendently of such claims and counter-claims. Surnames, which were
coming into use in England some seven hundred years ago, record a
traceable line of paternity, or notional paternity. Mitochondrial DNA,
inherited from the mother, records a traceable and factual line of mater-
nal ancestry. Correlating one against the other therefore indicates the
legitimacy rates of children born within marriage over that long period of
time. A sample case study has been undertaken for a single English sur-
name, with an estimated factor built in to allow for special circumstances
such as parents’ adoption of children or children’s adoption of a step-
father’s surname; but with that allowance, the analysis shows a remark-
able 99 per cent legitimacy rate over those seven centuries.9 It is only in
the last of those centuries that contraception could have concealed the
correlation between adultery and illegitimacy. Even allowing for gen-
erosity in the estimate for non-genetic acquisition of a surname, and even
if the study is not taken as typical, such a degree of wifely faithfulness

could not be achieved solely by oppression or male control; its result
must still be read as an indication of how deeply women identified their
personal integrity, their own trouthe, with their sexual integrity. Such
identification can no less (or no more) be ascribed to cultural propa-
ganda than can sexual liberation: both can become the self-fulfilling
internalization of a contemporary paradigm of behaviour, and faithful-
ness has both length of endurance and multicultural breadth on its side.
It is dangerous to read too much into a single case-study, even one that
covers seven hundred years, and comparable research has not yet been
undertaken for other European cultures. Yet it does offer striking
confirmation that English romances endorse an ideal of wifely living and
loving—purity quite possibly accompanied by passion—that was already
in everyday practice.
the calumny romance in tudor england
Stories of falsely accused women occur throughout Europe and beyond,

but they found particularly fertile ground in England, and it is possible
that the particular romance form of the motif originated there.10 This
pattern of recurrence invites an explanation, just as the frequency of
stories of rudderless boats correlates with an extensive coastline. Social
practices and beliefs cannot be mapped with anything resembling the
same precision; but one interesting correlation is with the rarity of
romances of adultery in Britain. Outside Malory, the woman charged
with adultery in English romance is overwhelmingly likely to be inno-
cent. The genre is consistently associated either with courtship leading to
marriage or (as in these romances of accusation) with the faithfulness of
a wife within marriage: subject-matter that accords a positive voice to
women’s sexuality, and which insists on its compatibility with accepted
ethics and social institutions.11 The degree of social freedom allowed to
women in Britain presupposes a broad male acceptance of their probity,
and the justification of the accused woman offered by romance endorses
such acceptance and gives it imaginative authority. A further, positive,
correlation within English romance lies with the dominance in courtship
narratives of active and passionate heroines. It is very easy, in a culture in
which suspicion of female sexuality is so deeply engrained, to take their
choosing of their own husband and their pursuit of him as evidence for
the prosecution, for their readiness to desire other men too. The stories
Women on Trial 275
of calumny acknowledge the fear of such a connection, but ultimately

deny it any substance.
Given the high value set in most cultures on women’s chastity, it is
inevitable that analogous stories from elsewhere should feed into the
English tradition. One that was increasingly used to support the princi-
ple of the accused woman’s innocence was the Biblical story of Susanna,
which constitutes an apocryphal chapter (13 in the Vulgate numbering)
of the Book of Daniel. Accused of adultery with a young man by the
Elders whose advances she rebuffed, she is cleared only by the sagacity of
Daniel, who is prepared to trust her integrity above male accusations.
The story was given separate narrative treatment in Middle English and
with increasing frequency in post-Reformation England, where her story
was an acceptable Biblical substitute for saints’ lives. Robert Greene
thought it sufficiently saleable to write it in two versions: one about
Susanna herself; the other substituting a lady named Isabel. It was dra-
matized around 1569 in Thomas Garter’s Commody of the moste vertuous
and Godlye Susanna.12 All the versions culminate in a trial scene, in which
the Susanna figure is found guilty solely on the word of her male accusers,
and a providential (male) intervention is needed in order to save her. The
play is acutely aware of the ease with which even the most upright of
women can be calumniated, and of the evil of so doing: the Devil himself
sends Ill Report, the Vice figure of the play, to betray her. It is, in other
words, the work of the devil to destroy women’s goodness through
slander.
The meme of the falsely accused woman retained its popularity
throughout the era of romance and into the novel, turning up in the most
unlikely places (What Katy Did at School, for instance). A number of vari-
ants on the central model of the rejected suitor as accuser appear in the
later Middle Ages and Renaissance. One that seems to be continental in
origin, and reaches England only in the sixteenth century, is the hus-
band’s bet on his wife’s chastity, most familiar now from Cymbeline. It
was given its widest currency by one of the stories in the Decameron, and
reached Shakespeare either directly from that or from its free adaptation
Frederyke of Jennen, first printed in England in 1518.13 That Shakespeare
keeps the Italian context for the bet despite the British setting of his play
suggests that the motif retained an alien feel to it, or at the least that he
wanted to keep it alien. Another variant is not to have any external
accuser at all: for the husband to generate all the suspicion himself. This
too is most familiar now from Shakespeare, from Leontes in The Winter’s
Tale, but it was already familiar in the late Elizabethan era. The source for
the play, Greene’s Pandosto of 1588, takes the same form; and he used it
again, this time with an urban setting, four years later in Greene’s Vision.
There, it constitutes the plot of a tale told by a dreamed persona of John
Gower, as if such stories already carried something of the medieval about
them—or at least, as if Greene wanted them to appear that way.
If narratives of calumniated women appeared at all old-fashioned
around 1590, however, they reasserted themselves energetically over the
next twenty years, and not least on the stage. Their most thoughtful prac-
titioner, and the author to use them most extensively, is that promoter of
the ‘pure and passionate’ heroine, Shakespeare. The motif evidently
fascinated him; it may not be coincidence that he called one of his daugh-
ters Susanna. He bases five of his plays on it, plays that run the full generic
gamut from comedy to tragedy but that focus centrally on romance: The
Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline,
and The Winter’s Tale. The one consistent element in all these is the
forcefulness with which the misguided men are condemned: it is they,
and not the women, who are in the wrong. In this particular form of the
antifeminist debate, Shakespeare is the chief spokesman for the defence.
He made further use of the motif in a sixth play: his Fletcher collabor-
ation All is True, better known now as Henry VIII. As both titles indi-
cate—this is recent history, and unlike the rest of these stories, it really
happened—Tudor England had particular reason to be interested in such
stories, for a reason that makes Greene’s relegation of them to the
medieval look like playing safe. Henry VIII had divorced one wife,
Katherine of Aragon, after a trial that accused her not of unchastity but
of not being a wife at all. He tried and executed two more, Anne Boleyn
and Katherine Howard, after charging them with adultery: accusations of
which both were found guilty. An accused queen who is not restored, like
Katherine of Aragon herself, cannot look to a happy ending in this world;
only God’s justice can provide the reward her innocence deserves.
Shakespeare accordingly incorporates a vision of such a heavenly afterlife
into his own play, in which Katherine dreams shortly before her death of
being crowned with heavenly garlands—a dream performed on stage
rather than just recounted, so coded as true. He predicates the justice of
such a reward, not only on what he has shown us of Katherine within the
play, but on his modelling of her story on that of the falsely accused
queen. He was not the first writer to have claimed such divine vindication
for her after the failure of earthly justice: he was preceded by William
Forrest, chaplain to Katherine’s daughter Mary Tudor. Forrest’s model
was not the romances of calumny but an alternative widely known story
Women on Trial 277
of a wife’s undeserved suffering and rejection by a near-psychopathic

husband, the story of Griselda as contained in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. The
Tale itself has a happy ending, in so far as the husband takes back the wife
he has pretended to divorce; but for Katherine, and therefore for Forrest
and for Shakespeare, history refused to follow the model of fiction.
Forrest, writing a text that was probably never intended for publication,
casts Henry as a deeply imperfect husband, to a degree much more
difficult for Shakespeare in writing for the Globe. The text of All is True
indeed testifies abundantly to the difficulty of presenting both a good
calumniated queen and a husband who is not a fool or a knave. Too
warm a defence of Katherine of Aragon, moreover, would not only
amount to an attack on the monarchal exercise of justice, but would
bring Henry’s second marriage, and therefore Elizabeth’s legitimacy, into
question.14 Equally, too warm a defence of Anne Boleyn would call into
question the operation of regal justice as it was to be exercised in her own
condemnation. Yet Anne, the woman who replaces Katherine in her hus-
band’s bed and on the throne, must also be portrayed as good, and that
presents even greater difficulty in a play sympathetic to the divorced wife.
Anne is frequently spoken of by other characters as a woman prepared to
sacrifice her morals to her ambitions, but her stage appearances are at
odds with that, as if the play set out to enact the difference between
defamation and inward truth. It stops with the birth of Elizabeth, there-
fore before Anne’s own downfall; but the shadow of that hangs over the
whole play, and it may too have inflected the reception of all the
romances in which a queen and her baby are condemned by a powerful
husband.
Elizabeth’s accession tacitly confirmed her mother’s status as the vic-
tim of calumny. Her claim to the throne was grounded on her mother’s
marital fidelity, at the very least up to the time of her birth; but, given the
habit of reading loose sexual morals as an inherent tendency in a woman
rather than as an individual act, what happened after that weighed in evi-
ence for her earlier life too. That Anne was indeed innocent of adultery at
any point has not been seriously doubted by most modern scholars, and
her guilt was far from universally believed at the time; but any sense that
she might not be guilty could no more affect the verdict against her than,
in the Winter’s Tale, every other character’s belief in Hermione’s inno-
cence can affect her condemnation. Archbishop Cranmer, who heard
Anne’s last confession, declared in distress to a confidant on the day she
died that ‘she who has been the Queen of England on earth will today
become a Queen in heaven’.15 Henry did not act as judge in person, as
Leontes does, but it is a distinction without a difference given his total

control over the exercise of the law. He never seems to have doubted his
own paternity of Elizabeth, but he did have his marriage to Anne declared
null shortly before her execution, with the consequence that their daugh-
ter was declared a bastard, though she was later re-incorporated into the
succession to the throne. The declaration that the marriage was invalid
was not taken to affect the charges of adultery, nor the punishment to
which Anne was liable. She was beheaded, at her request by a French
swordsman so as to ensure the minimum of suffering; but the grimmer
form of execution by burning at the stake was allowed by law, and was a
real possibility. The frequent threat to burn an adulterous queen in
romance may sound like a fantasy element; it was not.
Henry’s matrimonial disasters are a salutary reminder that motifs
familiar as fiction may take historical form too, and that what seems like
fantasy, even escapist fantasy, can be dangerous or fatal when it turns into
reality. All is True apart, Shakespeare no more overtly refers to the events
of the 1520s and 1530s in his plays of falsely accused women than do the
authors of such stories before that date; but those stories must have read
very differently after those events than they had done before. It may not
be coincidence that the most popular story of a calumniated queen writ-
ten later in the century, Greene’s Pandosto, has her die before she can be
rehabilitated. Shakespeare rewrote the death to accord with the romance
model when he adapted the work in the Winter’s Tale, but Greene’s vari-
ant on the conventional motif made his story powerful enough to remain
in print, in various abbreviated forms, for almost as long as the parallel
story of a vindicated queen in Valentine and Orson.16 Yet, despite the
happiness of the last act of the Winter’s Tale, the similarities between the
treatment of Hermione and the treatment of Katherine in All is True
show Shakespeare’s full consciousness of how closely historical events
could match the romance stories of accused queens.
Pandosto may have been Shakespeare’s direct source for the Winter’s
Tale, but there were other, older romances of calumny available to him as
there had been to Greene. The fourteenth-century Earl of Toulouse was
still being copied around 1500, and an analogous story appears in the
Percy Folio Sir Aldingar and a traditional ballad;17 Sir Tryamour, also
fourteenth-century, was reprinted at least until the 1560s, and was still
popular enough in the mid-seventeenth century to be recorded in the
Percy Folio; and Valentine and Orson remained a bestseller for a couple of
centuries after that. One curious feature of these works, including
Shakespeare’s, is their avoidance of naming the woman in the title.18 They
Women on Trial 279
may be called after the husband who imagines himself wronged

(Pandosto, the non-romance Othello), or the accuser (Sir Aldingar); the
lost children (Tryamour, Valentine), or the wife’s defender (The Earl of
Toulouse), or a child who acts as her defender (the alliterative Chevalere
Assigne, ‘chevalier à cygne’, and the related prose Knight of the Swan); or
even her father (Cymbeline). The one exception is so illogical as to confirm
the principle: ‘Frederyke of Jennen’ is the assumed name taken on by the
Innogen figure of the story when she is in male disguise, the equivalent of
Shakespeare’s Fidele. The consistency of the avoidance of the woman’s
own name may be a way of endorsing her honour, on the principle that a
woman becomes public property even by being spoken about; or it may
point to the significance carried by these stories beyond the woman alone,
to questions of the succession, or to the husband’s growth through repen-
tance—several of these narratives share features with the romances of
atonement. Whatever man is named in the title, all the stories treat the
male belief in such accusations as an aberration. It may be normal in the
sense that a predisposition to such credulity is commonplace, but it is very
far from normative in the sense of what ought to be.
The allegorical method adopted by Spenser in the Faerie Queene is par-
ticularly well fashioned to bring out the difference between those two, the
commonplace and the normative. His narrative operates by presenting
the good (such as Una), the evil (such as Duessa), and the evil disguised
as good (‘Fidessa’); the false accusation promotes a fourth state, the good
perceived as evil (Una calumniated, by means of her promiscuous simu-
lacrum shown to Redcrosse). When Spenser treats of such false percep-
tions, he sometimes writes in terms that emphasize the closeness of such
falsehood to the stereotypical faithlessness of women themselves; but that
closeness often seems to be deliberate strategy rather than an uncon-
scious carrying over of preconceptions. The opening stanza of Canto iv
of Book I is an example of where the most interesting reading emerges
from taking the similarity as intentional, as being designed to wrong-foot
the reader into an automatic antifeminist response that is then reproved.
The reader—specifically the male reader predicated by Spenser in the
Letter to Ralegh—is thus led to enact the process of blame and retraction
that is itself the narrative subject. The stanza begins:
Young knight, what ever that dost armes professe,

And through long labours huntest after fame,
Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse,
In choice, and change of thy deare loved Dame.
It sounds like the conventional warning against women’s unfaithfulness;

but the context is the tricking of Redcrosse into believing that he has seen
Una in the arms of another man, and ‘change’ here refers not to female
changeability, but to male. The passage continues:
Least thou of her beleeve too lightly blame,
And rash misweening doe thy hart remove:
For unto knight there is no greater shame,
Than lightnesse or inconstancie in love.
Men’s faithlessness, the passage suggests, is to be condemned as much
as women’s; and the first reason adduced by the poem for such incon-
stancy—by implication men’s first excuse—is that they can cast the
woman herself as blameworthy.
A woman’s honour is fragile, ‘frail’ in Elizabethan English, because it is
too easily subject to defamation, to ‘blame’; but defamation lies in the
speech of others, and there was little difficulty in destroying a woman by
such means. Hamlet’s notorious exclamation, ‘Frailty, thy name is
woman!’, is followed by his insistence that even ice-cold chastity will not
escape calumny.19 The naming of women as frail was all too easy to pass
off, or to receive, as the real thing. Romance, with the generic primacy it
accords to women and to sexuality, and with its weighting towards the
happy ending, needs to assert its own countering reality. Trial and debate
were the central means by which it did so.
‘i am falsely and without cause accused’ 20
A man’s belief in his lady’s unfaithfulness may seem to belong to a differ-

ent narrative and psychological category from the motif of the woman’s
spontaneous and single-minded love, but many of the narratives of false
accusation make clear how closely the two are related. A woman’s desire
for her fiancé or husband does not have the corollary that she will lust for
other men too, but he himself may take it as evidence of guilt. A late exam-
ple (c.1608) that makes the point clearly is John Fletcher’s Philaster, who is
asked by the heiress to the kingdom, in defiance of her father, if he will
marry her. His first response, despite the fact that he claims to love her
himself, is not joy, but a threat of trouble to come:
How this passion should proceed from you
So violently, would amaze a man
That would be jealous.21
Women on Trial 281
And Philaster is indeed jealous, though in this case the target of his jeal-
ousy is not only a boy whom his fiancée loves for his sake, but a boy who
is in fact a woman in disguise. Feminine virtue is fragile not because of
any inherent frailty in women, but because it can be so easily destroyed
by the premisses of antifeminism itself. The romances accordingly ensure
that their audiences are on the side of the woman before the accusation is
made: her innocence and faithfulness are explicit in the narrative from
the start.22 Her downright dismissal of the approaches made by a would-
be seducer in many of these stories is designed to provide further explicit
evidence of her integrity that the husband, lacking a narrator’s omni-
science or a playwright’s privileged access to private space, does not have.
Yet an antifeminist culture creates the conditions in which a wife’s desire
for her husband can easily lead to a plausible accusation of adultery, even
if that accusation is made in revenge or as a pre-emptive defence by the
man whose advances she has rejected. Belief in her guilt, even within the
story, is however in almost every case confined to her husband. The
woman herself is surrounded by men and women who trust her probity
but who lack the political power to support her, especially in those
romances in which her husband is the king or emperor. He, by contrast,
is all too ready to believe the lone male voices of accusation, taking their
calumny as proof of loyal homosociality and confirmation of the truth of
that background noise that insists on the depravity of women.
Othello gives the most extensive expression to the connection between
the heroine’s desire for her husband and his suspicion that she has
betrayed him, and gives it tragic consequences. We are informed by
Othello himself that Desdemona took the initiative in encouraging his
courtship of her, and it is she who asks the Senate that they be allowed to
consummate their marriage: both are Shakespeare’s additions to his
source, and serve to turn her into the kind of heroine familiar to English
audiences, not least from his own plays.23 Yet her insistence on following
her own desires in defiance of her father is taken as prima facie evidence
for a similar defiance of her husband, and her blithe indifference to the
ethnic difference between herself and the man she loves is reformulated
by Iago into evidence of unnatural sexual tastes:24
Not to affect many proposèd matches

Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends.
Foh, one may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural!
Sir Aldingar takes such an attitude to its extreme by having the wicked
Aldingar put a leper in the queen’s bed: the sexual perversion expressed
in her apparent choice of partner itself becomes evidence against her. Yet
Sir Aldingar, and the great majority of analogous stories, have the plot-
ting and the lies revealed in time and their heroines justified. Othello does
end with its heroine vindicated, but only when it is too late.
One thing about which Othello leaves us in no doubt is Desdemona’s
innocence. The villains, in the narratives and the plays of accusation, are
the calumniators; the husbands (even Leontes, who doubles the part of
husband and accuser) are treated as misled rather than wicked, and most
get off comparatively lightly in the final bestowal of rewards and punish-
ments. Only those who cause the actual (rather than apparent) deaths of
their wives suffer punishments much worse than remorse: hence the sui-
cides of Othello himself, and of Greene’s Pandosto. Just one, the emperor
of The Earl of Toulouse, is presented from the start as an unworthy hus-
band. His empress, the beautiful and wise Dame Beulybon (‘belle et
bonne’), advises him rightly on several occasions when he makes both
ethically and strategically wrong decisions, and his reluctance to forgive
her for that25 lays him open to believing the charge of adultery brought
against her by two knights whose advances she has rejected, and who lay
in her bed a young man they have murdered. (The evidence of a dead
male corpse is taken throughout this literature as trumping the denials of
the woman in the bed beside it: it never seems to occur to Lucrece, in
Shakespeare’s or any other version, that Tarquin’s identical threat might
not be taken as a proof of guilt.) The eponymous hero of the Earl, who
has loved her from a distance, disguises himself as a monk in order to
hear her confession and so confirm his belief in her innocence. Her worst
sin, she tells him—and as he knows—is that she once gave the earl a ring.
He duly undertakes a trial by combat to save her from the stake, and,
although her husband is delighted with his victory, the real happy ending
comes later, with his death, which enables the empress to marry the earl
and for him to be elected emperor.
The alternative to a sentence of death for an accused wife is exile, for
herself and her child: a scenario that makes for a bipartite romance, the
first part about the calumny, the second about the chivalric adventures of
the son (the Winter’s Tale offers a variant on this, with its queen con-
cealed rather than banished, and a daughter growing into love rather
than adventures). Sir Tryamour and Valentine and Orson both follow this
pattern, though whereas Sir Tryamour ends as soon as the family is
reunited, the prose versions of Valentine extend the careers of the
Women on Trial 283
children forward to encompass the whole of their lives too. Its earlier
metrical form had followed the more typical scheme of calumny and
restoration,26 expectations familiar enough for the long prose redaction
to be later cut back to fit them: the Percy Folio The Emperor and the Child
comprises a summary retelling in couplets that manages to get the intro-
duction of the characters, the failed attempt at seduction, and the
seducer’s false accusation into its first twenty lines.27 The prose Valentine
makes the most of its expansiveness not only to continue the story
beyond the reunion of the family but to spell out the implications of all
these events. Its heroine is empress of Greece and the sister of King Pepin
of France; her calumniator is an archbishop who also acts as the
emperor’s principal adviser. Her rejection of his advances is unequivocal,
on grounds in which earthly and heavenly considerations make unan-
swerable claims:
Never please it God that the bloud of Fraunce from the which I am extraught, nor
the maiestie of the puissant Emperoure, be shamed nor dishonoured by me in
any maner. O false and cursed man, beholde what thou woulde do, that will dis-
poyle and unclothe me of myne honour, and put my body in vytuperable shame
for ever, and my soule in the waye of dampnacion eternall.28
Just as bodily clothing is the outward sign of status, so honour is the

clothing of the soul, and to be stripped of it, ‘dispoyled’, is a fall in the
sight of both men and God. She threatens to tell the emperor, however,
only if the archbishop renews his suit: a threat that gives him the oppor-
tunity to cut off danger from himself by accusing her both of adultery
and of plotting her husband’s death. The emperor accords the story
instant belief, for ‘he had his trust in hym more than in any man of the
worlde’ (p. 18). He assaults his wife, who is pregnant, and threatens to
have her burned. Only his barons’ urging of the risk of political recrim-
inations from King Pepin makes him change his mind, to exile her
instead. In the event, however, male trust is just as strong between the
emperor and the king as it is between emperor and archbishop. Even
though Pepin is told the story of her banishment by the faithful squire
who has accompanied her into exile, he still takes her husband’s part
rather than his sister’s, endorsed as it is by the long tradition of con-
demning all women in Eve:
Of as muche holde I the Emperoure more folysher, because he made not my sys-
ter dye, for by the God almighty, if I had her here at this present time, I should
never reste til that I hadde made her dye an evil death . . . . Ha veray God almighty
(sayd he) howe often is man deceived by woman. (p. 35)
The empress’s innocence is finally accepted only when the archbishop is

defeated in full judicial combat by a merchant who had come upon him
attempting to rape her as she journeyed into exile, and who later accuses
him before the emperor.29 The archbishop is defeated, and condemned
to be boiled in oil; but by that time the empress’s whereabouts are
unknown, and her children lost—one, Valentine, to be brought up in
ignorance of his lineage by King Pepin; the other, Orson, reared by a bear.
These stories of empresses and queens are almost by definition dynas-
tic. The rediscovery and restoration of the calumniated wife are generi-
cally inseparable from the rediscovery of the lost heirs. The monarch’s
folly in believing his wife unfaithful potentially deprives his realm of its
future stability, and the story necessarily continues until the children as
well as the wife have been recovered. If the descent of the crown is not an
issue, there is no need, within the narrative economy of the story, for the
accused wife to be pregnant. Leontes’ purposes require the exposure of
Perdita as a corollary of his accusation of her mother; the purposes of the
narrative require the baby to exist because of the death of Mamillius,
which leaves her as the only heir. In Cymbeline, by contrast, Innogen is
not pregnant, since, although she appears to be heiress to the crown of
Britain, the rediscovery of her long-lost brothers diverts the line of
descent back to them. In the related events of Henry VIII, the inconveni-
ent existence of an heiress in the shape of Katherine’s daughter Mary is
passed over in almost complete silence, in order to allow space for the
celebration of her new half-sister Elizabeth. Stories that are concerned
with a prospective bride rather than a wife likewise bypass the question of
succession, since there are no children in existence, and the man has the
possibility of marrying someone else instead—though the generic shap-
ing of these stories still calls for his reconciliation with the defamed
woman. This is what happens to Una and Redcrosse, after Archimago has
fooled him into thinking he has seen her in the arms of another man.
Spenser’s allegory does not require a failed seduction attempt on Una
herself on Archimago’s part; his desire here is to injure Una rather than
seduce her, and to injure Redcrosse through her. The issue is accordingly
not one of offspring, but of ‘honour’, in the sense of the need for outward
appearance and reputation to match the truth of what lies inside; and in
Una’s case, importantly, it is Truth that she personifies. Calumny always
threatens to write a woman out of social existence; it threatens to erase
Una altogether.
Una is an heiress—the heiress to humankind, though that has a theo-
logical rather than a social or political meaning, and it is not an issue in
Women on Trial 285
the calumny episode. Spenser does not claim that all the daughters of Eve
are recuperated by her integrity. In her standing as prospective bride
rather than wife, Una has more in common with the protagonists of sto-
ries of false accusation set lower down the social scale, including those
who follow her later in the Faerie Queene. The account of Phedon and
Claribell (in II. iv) is the most detailed of these. The story is the same as
that of Much Ado About Nothing, of the fiancée whose maidservant,
dressed in her mistress’s clothes, is shown to her betrothed in a compro-
mising position with another man. Unlike Hero, however, who is finally
married to Claudio after her reported death and return, Claribell is killed
by her outraged lover, who then murders her calumniator too, and
attempts to murder the maid.30 Guyon’s warning to him against ‘intem-
peraunce’ (II. iv. 36) is, in the circumstances, excessively mild. The stories
of Una and Claribell show how easily the generic shaping of the motif of
the falsely accused woman can fall either towards romance, or towards
tragedy—the shaping of Much Ado, or of Othello. Greene’s Pandosto has
a tragic trajectory, with the death of the wife and the suicide of her hus-
band after he has lived to lust incestuously for his own unrecognized
daughter. The permeability of the boundary between the two genres does
not necessarily require large shifts of plot. It often depends on a sub-
ordinate narrative detail that is entirely outside the woman’s control: the
detection of the calumny, and its timing. It is subordinate, not because it
is not important to the plot, but because these romances never read like
detective stories. The precise means whereby her innocence is discovered
does not much matter, just as the initial evidence is usually very thin.
Rationality is overridden by passion in such accusations, as the inclusion
of the story of Phedon in the Book of Temperance asserts, and it takes
something more than protests by either the lady or her supporters to cor-
rect the image of women in the mind of the man who thinks himself
deceived. He is much more likely to be affected by an evident interven-
tion of Providence: the oracle of the Winter’s Tale, disbelief of which on
Leontes’ part is immediately followed by the death of his son; the hound
that runs into the court in Sir Tryamour to tear the throat out of the man
who had accused the queen and killed its master for his support of her;31
or the seeming 4-year-old child, perhaps an angel, who defeats the wicked
Sir Aldingar in combat.32
Shakespeare found the calumniated woman one of the most fertile
memes in the whole of romance, but he plays numerous variations on the
elements peripheral to that central figure. Only in Cymbeline does he
have the calumny originate with an unsuccessful seducer, and that is
Iachimo, who has reasons for attempting the seduction (the bet with the
husband) quite independent of any desire for Innogen herself. Other
calumnies are motivated by a desire to damage the husband more than
the bride or wife: Don John wants to injure the man who was instru-
mental in his own defeat; Iago hates Othello for reasons that go beyond
his casual and unsustained mention of the possibility of his general’s
having slept with his own wife. Their plots require rather less material
evidence than a corpse in the lady’s bed: in these plays, the husband or
fiancé can be persuaded of her fall from virtue with frightening ease.
Claudio has the excuse of scarcely knowing Hero, but Othello runs ahead
of Iago (he has to be reminded about the proof supposedly offered by the
handkerchief), Posthumus is convinced of Innogen’s guilt well before
Iachimo reaches his punch line about the mole on her breast, and Leontes
generates his own accusation without the need for any external persua-
sion at all. The range of variations Shakespeare plays on the false accusa-
tion, in terms both of generic shaping and of his analysis of the power
dynamics that sustain the charge and the psychology of the reactions to
it, is unmatched by any other writer. The one element he carries over
directly and without question is the woman’s innocence. The husbands’
suspicions are consistently presented, as in the medieval romances, as
irrational aberration. The antifeminist voices occasionally heard in
authorial comments in the earlier romances are here put in the mouths
of characters who are unequivocally wrong.
Shakespeare’s most light-hearted treatment of the motif is also his first,
and it largely falls outside the ‘romance’ category for very different
reasons from the tragic shaping of Othello. His only comedy to have an
unequivocal English location, The Merry Wives of Windsor (of 1597) is too
local and contemporary, too middle-class, and too funny to bring
romance to mind; yet both its main plot, of the overturning of Ford’s
conviction of his wife’s unfaithfulness, and the subplot, which concerns
the junior heroine’s engineering her marriage to the man she loves in
defiance of the rival choices made by her mother and her father, are
drawn from romance models with appropriately strong English associa-
tions. It is one of Shakespeare’s plays that has no known single source; its
major plot line, of the clever wife fooling her husband, was widespread in
Italian novelle, but very few such stories show the wife as faithful. The
assumption of women’s integrity is so rare in that tradition as to mark
Shakespeare’s treatment as deriving from elsewhere, and the obvious
‘elsewhere’ would be English romance, in keeping with the play’s English
setting. The treatment of the plot, by contrast, conforms not to romance
Women on Trial 287
models but rather to classical conventions of comedy, in its social level,

its corrective ridicule of folly, and its stereotypical characters of citizens,
bawd, parasite, and braggart soldier.33
The combination of classical comedy with a romance-style plot of false
accusation was not completely new: Nicholas Udall had used it for the first
formal comedy in English, Ralph Roister Doister, written probably in 1552
for performance before the young Edward VI by the boys of the Windsor
choir school. There, the defaming of the heroine threatens to have more
serious consequences for her than one ever imagines for her Windsor suc-
cessors. The play’s eponymous braggart-parasite, a figure not unlike
Falstaff, attempts to force marriage on a rich young widow while her
betrothed is away on business. Her probity is written into her very name,
Christian Custance: a name that links her with another accused good
woman from English tradition, the Custance (Chaucer’s own form for
Constance) of the Man of Law’s Tale. Her fiancé hears rumours of what is
going on, and refuses to believe her own account of her innocence when
he returns. Like her namesake in Chaucer, she turns to God to help her:
Thou didst help Susanna, wrongfully accused,
And no less dost thou see, Lord, how I am now abused.34
Her reputation and marriage are saved, not by God, but by a man who is
a friend of both of them, and whose assurances of her faithfulness her
betrothed is happy to accept. There is never any suggestion that her
future husband might be at fault in giving more credit to a male friend
than to the woman he supposedly loves, or indeed in weighing the fatu-
ous courtship of Roister Doister more heavily than her own integrity. In
that particular respect, the Merry Wives is distinctively different: the jeal-
ous Master Ford is made the object of ridicule, the trusting Master Page
is presented as admirable. In keeping with his practice in his later treat-
ments of analogous plots, Shakespeare consistently censures the folly—
increasingly, the criminal folly—of the men who cannot recognize female
integrity when they see it. There is no positive evidence that he knew
Roister Doister, and the familiar traditions behind the meme of false accu-
sation mean that he would not have needed to. The common assump-
tions made by the plays concerning the good sense of women and the
various kinds of folly of the men suggest that both élite and more popu-
lar audiences were receptive to such representations—that they formed
part of an accepted horizon of expectation.
It was the other and nastier expectations about women that made these
plots possible. The action of the Merry Wives shows both the easy social
freedom enjoyed by its eponymous wives, and also the dependence of

that freedom on the assumption that married women will use it respon-
sibly. The wives are outraged by Falstaff’s belief that they might be
susceptible to his advances, quite apart from the fact that he has proposi-
tioned them with identical letters. The play turns its criticism on Falstaff,
for believing that the wives’ openness, their ‘familar style’, amounts to a
‘leer of invitation’ (1. 3. 40–1); on Master Ford, for his willingness—
indeed, his determination—to believe that his wife will respond to those
seduction attempts; and on the various unsuccessful suitors to Anne
Page, for their self-deception as to their own desirability. The audience is
never in the slightest doubt that Mistress Ford is well able to look after
herself, but her husband’s rhetoric of jealousy is none the less disturbing,
not least in the way it shifts so easily from the singular to the plural, the
grounding of one woman’s perceived guilt in the guilt of the entire sex:
Who says this is improvident jealousy? My wife hath sent to him, the hour is
fixed, the match is made. Would any man have thought this? See the hell of hav-
ing a false woman! . . . Then she plots, then she ruminates, then she devises; and
what they think in their hearts they may effect, they will break their hearts but
they may effect. God be praised for my jealousy! 2. 2. 278–81, 294–8
That last phrase keeps the speech safely on the side of comedy, but the
plays that deal with jealousy more seriously show the same shift from
individual accusation to its broad misogynist context in much more dan-
gerous ways. It takes only a few lines for Othello to move from his first
conditional questioning of Desdemona’s possible unfaithfulness to a
condemnation of the uncontrollable appetites of ‘these delicate creatures’
(3. 3. 272–81), or Leontes from a conviction of his wife’s adultery with
Polixenes to a claim that there is
no barricado for a belly; know’t;
It will let in and out the enemy
With bag and baggage: many thousand on’s
Have the disease, and feel’t not.
Winter’s Tale 1. 2. 205–8
And Posthumus is still more explicit in his extension of his new-found

hatred of his wife and his conviction of her unchastity to the viciousness
of all women:
Women on Trial 289
There’s no motion
That tends to vice in man but I affirm
It is the woman’s part.
Cymbeline 2. 5. 20–2
The movement of these speeches is from the individual to the general,
whilst the subtext runs the other way: from a pre-existent image of
Woman as the source of all evil to a casting of even the most familiar and
beloved of women in that image. The hatred of the whole sex leads easily
enough into a hatred of all sexual activity, expressed in the ugliness of the
sexual imaginings associated with these fantasies of betrayal:
O all the devils!
This yellow Iachimo in an hour—was’t not?—
Or less—at first? Perchance he spoke not, but
Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one,
Cried ‘O!’ and mounted.
Cymbeline, 2. 5. 13–17
This is language differentiated in every detail from the rhetoric of mutual
love of the romances that celebrate sexuality, and where that celebration
is confirmed and endorsed by its syntactic mimesis.35 Yet these plays
make clear, before we hear any of the husbands’ speeches, that their
rhetoric of jealousy is fantasy: language has become separated from sub-
stance, from the actuality of the chaste and faithful wife. The calumnies
get their power not from any authority in an external accuser but from a
programme of beliefs already instilled in the husband. The ease with
which ‘she’ converts into ‘they’, the loving wife into the whole promiscu-
ous tribe of women, shows the replication of a meme at its most danger-
ous. It does not matter that the casting of women as sexually insatiable is
untrue: the notion is endemic, and replicates with all the speed and
vigour of HIV.
The intensity of such a rhetoric of jealousy is a measure of the irra-
tionality of these beliefs, and that irrationality makes it impossible for the
women to refute the accusations against them. When Claudio accuses
Hero of unchastity in Much Ado, he takes her blushes as evidence of
hypocrisy, the ‘show of truth’ with which ‘cunning sin’ can cover itself, or
alternatively as ‘guiltiness, not modesty’ (3. 5. 35–6, 42). Asked whom she
has talked with, and required to answer ‘if you are a maid’, her denial—
‘I talked with no man at that hour, my lord’—leads her straight into the
trap Claudio has set for her:
Why, then you are no maiden.

3.5.89
The immediate reaction of her father is to accept the truth of the charge
made by the men—‘Would the two princes lie? and Claudio lie?’—and
he, as the man still responsible for her in her unwedded state, is given the
strongest rhetoric of repudiation in the play, of her ‘foul tainted flesh’
(4. 1. 44). He is brought to a more moderate response by another man, the
Friar; only Benedick is convinced by a woman’s own conviction,
Beatrice’s. In the plays in which the supposedly injured husband has
more power, the accused wife has no hope of redress. As in the romances
of calumniated empresses—and therefore including the lost 1590s
dramatizations of Valentine and Orson—the husband acts as both pro-
secutor and judge, and any legal trial the woman undergoes is an outward
formality to confirm a guilty verdict decided long before. Shakespeare
has Hermione sum up the hollowness of such a process at her own trial
in the Winter’s Tale:
Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say ‘Not guilty’. Mine integrity
Being counted falsehood shall, as I express it,
Be so received.
3. 2. 21–7
Her appeal to her own past faithfulness and obedience is indeed dis-
missed as another instance of the ‘impudence’ that made her unchaste in
the first place. Katherine of Aragon’s speech in defence of her wifehood
at her own trial in All is True—a speech based on historical record—sim-
ilarly asserts her integrity even while acknowledging that she has no
power to affect a verdict already reached. When the nominal judges invite
her to address the court, she crosses the stage to her husband and speaks
to him; but he remains silent.36 Her removal is necessary in order to make
way for the birth of Elizabeth, but the play does not allow that to over-
write the injustice of the proceedings against her.
Cymbeline takes one extraordinary further step, beyond any other of
these plays, in having Posthumus forgive his wife and accept her sexual-
ity even while he still believes she is guilty. Like Phedon and Othello, he
has killed her, or rather believes that he has had her killed; but he recog-
Women on Trial 291
nizes that the act was not one of justice, and that justice can only be
satisfied through his own death—a worthless life for her own ‘dear
life’37—before he knows that his original verdict was wrong.
Gods, if you
Should have ta’en vengeance on my faults, I never
Had lived to put on this; so had you saved
The noble Innogen to repent, and struck
Me, wretch, more worth your vengeance.
5. 1. 7–11
It looks unprecedented; but it, too, has one notable romance antecedent,
in Amadas et Ydoine—a work that also provides the only precedent for
the false insistence to the audience in the Winter’s Tale that the heroine is
indeed dead. Other characters often suffer such a misapprehension, but
everywhere else, as in Cymbeline, it is known by the audience to be wrong.
Shakespeare did not have access to Amadas; but that two such excep-
tional variations on familiar conventions should be found in a single
early Anglo-Norman romance and his own romances shows how
similarly two authors of intense generic alertness, writing three or four
centuries apart, could widen out the horizons of their material. Ydoine is,
uniquely, her own calumniator: she slanders herself on her deathbed in
order to persuade the suicidal Amadas to stay alive to pray for her soul,
stained as she declares it to be with the sin of an earlier affair. She main-
tains none the less that her only true love is for him, and it is Amadas’
belief in this that is tested by the strange supernatural knight whom he
encounters at her grave. The knight not only claims that he was the man
she loved, but to prove it shows him on his own finger the ring that
Amadas had given her:38 an ocular proof far stronger than the handker-
chief that convinces Othello. Amadas initially responds with a pre-
dictable (and in the circumstances, one feels, more justifiable than usual)
outburst against the fickleness of all women. Yet despite having been per-
suaded by her own words of her previous bloodstained sexual history, his
belief in the truth of her love for him reasserts itself, and he fights the
combat of his life in defence of that. The plot details make Posthumus’
bet on his wife’s chastity in Cymbeline and his decision to have her mur-
dered look positively plausible by comparison; but the inner sentence of
both stories is closely similar. That a woman’s active sexuality, even
affairs with other men, does not necessarily deny her love or destroy her
integrity; that acceptance of that is itself the greatest test of a man’s love;
that the passing of that test is in turn rewarded with the discovery that his
beloved is chaste after all; and that all those together can fittingly call her
back from the dead—in all those claims, one of the most thoughtful early
romances, by an anonymous Anglo-Norman poet, and one of the last
romances to be written within the same tradition, by the greatest English
writer of all time, touch hands. They make what seems a surprisingly
modern claim, that misogynist views of women as sexual beings may be
a worse evil than aberrant female sexuality; but they also insist that
women are indeed true in loving.
if women be a good thing, or no
Amadas and Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale are all deeply concerned
with recuperating women’s sexuality as positive, and finally with cele-
brating it, in order to achieve the harmony of romance closure. There is
no general romance claim, however, in Shakespeare or in his medieval
predecessors, that all women, or all sexuality, are good. Posthumus and
the whole tribe of jealous husbands condemn their wives in the name of
all women, and both the narrative and the dramatic romances ground
themselves on the fact that they are mistaken; but the opposite position—
that all women can be justified in the name of one good one—is never
argued. Romances frequently offer the same process of generalization as
the rhetoric of jealousy, from the singular to the plural, one woman to the
sex at large; but, unlike the rhetoric of jealousy, they do not insist that
their generalizations about women’s goodness are universal truths.
Women’s probity may be represented as normative, but it is regularly set
in opposition to other images of women, or examples of women, who
come much closer to justifying misogynist ideas. This might sound no
different from the customary spectrum of characters in any fiction into
the good and the not so good, the attractive and the unpleasant; the dif-
ference lies in the habit of generalization that these women bring with
them—that both the good and the wicked are treated as arguments about
the whole sex, in a manner closely reminiscent of the madonna/whore
dichotomy. Not the least significant point about such arguments, how-
ever, is the ease with which women can be turned, not just into general-
izations, but into male debating positions. Even in romances, such
debates can become explicit; but their frequent combination of argument
with exemplar makes the process rather subtler than that might sound,
since the illusion of autonomy possessed by any fictional characters gives
the women at least an outward form of opportunity to represent their
Women on Trial 293
own point of view. The declarations in favour of women’s integrity as the

norm moreover qualify the antifeminism inherent in the debate.
The process is exemplified by the two stories contained within Greene’s
Vision. The vision in question contains a storytelling contest between
Chaucer and Gower, their stories being designed to exemplify their rival
views as to the value and function of literature, for entertainment or
morality; but the narrative vehicles Greene chooses to conduct the argu-
ment are tales of jealous husbands. Gower tells a calumny romance (if its
social level allows such a generic label), about how a ‘gentleman of good
parentage’ casts out his wife on unprompted false suspicion, and how his
discovery of her continuing (and implausible) devotion to him reconciles
them. Chaucer tells a fabliau reminiscent of the Miller’s Tale, with a set-
ting in and around Cambridge University, about a feisty (though never
unfaithful) wife, her artisan husband, and a student. No less a personage
than Solomon awards Gower the victory, in a defeat of pleasure by
homiletics. The moral that receives all the emphasis in Gower’s story has
to do with the supreme importance of virtue in women; the husband’s
folly and cruelty towards his wife receive little stress. That the debate over
the nature of literature fuses with a debate on the nature of women is
made further explicit by the inclusion of twenty frankly antifeminist
maxims, ‘sentences’, spoken by Chaucer, as for instance number eigh-
teen:
Women, be they chast, be they curteous, be they constant, be they rich,
renowmed, honest, wise: yet have they sufficient vanities to countervaile their
vertues.39
What is being argued out here is a parallel between the seductions of

women and the seductions of literature.40 Chaucer, the proponent of
pleasure, takes the more cynical view of women, in keeping with his
fabliau story, and denies any greater value to literature. ‘Moral’ Gower’s
more romance-like model argues that literature, like women, can have
ethical value. It would be attractive to be able to assert that Greene is
arguing that the recuperation of women, romance, and literature, and of
romance through women and of literature through romance, go together
and reinforce each other—that the virtuous but suspected woman offers
a counter-model to all those theorists who declared that ‘poetry’, fiction,
was no better than lies; but it has to be acknowledged that Greene’s
defence of fiction is half-hearted, just as the existence of the good wife
does not turn the Vision into a pro-feminist work. The text is none
the less interesting in that it offers such testimony as to the paradigmatic
quality of the debate over women’s virtue, the way it can subsume or
serve as a vehicle for debates of other kinds. It is also interesting, for the
larger scope of this book, that in that great literary decade of the 1590s,
Greene should have chosen for his defence of literature a form that
belongs to the newly-emerging discourse of medievalism, the conscious
revival of the past, and chosen competing generic representations of
women’s sexuality to fill it.
Romances did not need to look outside their own boundaries, how-
ever, to find counter-models to their good women, and the ones they
contain are much more dangerous than the lively wives of fabliau. One
such figure who has her own niche as a meme in romance is the wicked
mother-in-law, who figures as an alternative to the unsuccessful seducer
as the accuser in some romances of calumny. She can herself be regarded
as a misogynist fantasy, but she is one who is as dangerous to women as
to men: her target is by definition her daughter-in-law and the bond
between her and her husband. Although her wickedness is presented as
exceptional, the extremity of her treatment—which is much less natural-
istic than that of male would-be seducers—is coloured for later readers
by a knowledge of the ease with which such a categorization of old
women who had outlived their social usefulness could in the seventeenth
century accommodate charges of witchcraft. In these stories, however,
although she may be presented as devil-inspired, her malignancy oper-
ates through natural means. Her danger lies rather in her place in the
heart of the household and family. The testing of her son inherent in her
accusation challenges him to commit himself to belief in his wife, not in
the face of homosocial assumptions of male probity, but by breaking his
bonds to his mother. The husband is generally cast in a better light in
these stories, in that he is at least reluctant to believe the accusations. The
charges in any case commonly take a different form, not directly of
unchastity, but of having given birth to a monster.41 The mother thus
avoids using the antifeminist clichés that might strike at herself too, but
she opens the channel for an almost equally deep fear, to do with birth as
much as adultery, though the two are closely connected: a monstrous
child can be taken as a sign of an ‘unnatural’ conception. The wicked
mother-in-law of the Knight of the Swan romances42 abducts the queen’s
septuplets at birth and substitutes seven puppies, and then accuses the
queen of bestiality with a dog. In La Manekine and Chaucer’s Man of
Law’s Tale, the claim of a monstrous birth is known only to the mother-
in-law and the absent husband, as she substitutes her own letters to him
for those telling him of the birth of an heir. When he refuses to respond
Women on Trial 295
in the way she would like, she again substitutes forged messages, order-
ing the wife to be cast adrift with her child. The calumny in these cases is
bound to be revealed as soon as the king returns home, and he punishes
his mother accordingly. The revelation of the wife’s innocence in the
Knight of the Swan is more difficult, since she herself has no idea that her
true babies were stolen, and when faced with the evidence of the puppies
can only plead her own knowledge of her sexual purity. The plot accord-
ingly needs an intervention from Providence to resolve matters—a
miraculous intervention in the secular world, though miracle and magic
are not far apart in a story in which six of the infants turn into swans. The
remaining child, who has been brought up by a hermit in the forest for
the twelve years since his birth, does not know what a ‘mother’ is, let
alone a sword or a horse; yet, when an angel summons him to defend his
mother in combat, he overcomes the mother-in-law’s experienced cham-
pion, and all the bells of the cathedral close ring out spontaneously to cel-
ebrate his miraculous skill.43 The defeat of the mother-in-law, like the
defeat of a male accuser, carries an endorsement by the story and by God
of the rightness of the wife’s sexuality.
That a mother-in-law should be jealous of her son’s bride, and in par-
ticular resent the usurpation of her power and status at court, gives a
degree of psychological plausibility to such stories, but the romances are
not greatly concerned with social motives. These older women are cate-
gorized simply as evil; they are not exactly ‘whores’, in the modern phras-
ing of the polarization of women, since their own sexuality is not an issue,
but they are in the grip of the devil just as the young wives are preserved
by God. The devilishness is explicit in the Man of Law’s Tale, which con-
tains two wicked mothers-in-law, the first a Saracen, the second (the
calumniator of the story) a pagan. The latter is twice condemned for the
specifically male vice of tyranny, and, in the rhetorical search for adjec-
tives bad enough to describe her evil, ‘mannysh’ is first chosen, to be
rejected in favour of ‘feendlych’:44 her sex is not part of the accusation
against her except in so far as she does not act as a woman—a formula-
tion that assumes goodness to be a normal attribute of being female, just
as ‘womanly’ is a virtue word (it can indeed connote resistance to sexual
temptation).45 The sultaness is described as being less a woman than the
devil who tempted Eve—a woman only in appearance, a ‘feyned wom-
man’, but in fact a ‘serpent under femynyntee’, recalling the recurrent
representation of the serpent of the Fall with a woman’s head.46 This
might sound like an expulsion of her from the category of women alto-
gether; but Chaucer continues by connecting her to Eve, on whom the
whole medieval debate on women was founded. She was chosen as his
instrument by Satan because
thou . . .
Wel knowest to wommen the olde way!
Thou madest Eva brynge us in servage . . .
Thyn instrument so—weylawey the while!—
Makestow of wommen, whan thou wolt bigile.
CT, II. 366–71
Women, in the standard charge reproduced in these lines, are the gate-
way to the devil. The standard refutation is given in the Tale, too: Eve is
counterbalanced by the Virgin, ‘glorie of wommanhede’ (II. 851), just as
the evil of the pagan women is offset by the near-sanctity of Custance.
The conflict between God and the devil is thus channelled through the
debate about women. God, of course, decisively wins, but it is a story as
much about the dangers of women as their virtue. Such a degree of polar-
ization is unusual in Chaucer’s work, but its causes here are generic, in
the tale’s closeness to the clerical discourses of hagiography. This is not
only a romance but a romance on the border where it crosses into saint’s
life, where ethical and devotional exemplarity trump any romance push
towards the individual. In contrast to most calumniated women, the var-
ious Constance figures are presented primarily as Christian women
rather than wives; the Man of Law’s Tale (in marked contrast to its more
secular analogue, La Manekine) dismisses sex as merely an impediment
to ‘hoolynesse’ (713). There is no reference to any particular love
Custance holds towards her husband before their marriage, and though
their reunion, and her realization that he played no part in having her
cast adrift, brings the highest earthly bliss ‘bitwix hem two’ (1075), her
rediscovery of her father and the restoration of the imperial line receives
just as much emphasis, when she is slotted back into her place as the
dynastic link between her father and her son. The story may be one of
romance, but its fashioning consistently pulls it in the direction of
hagiography and its accompanying ecclesiastical simplicities.
There was no need for a hagiographical bias for the devil to be invoked.
Even when an older woman plays a subordinate role to a male villain in
a calumny narrative, her activities may be described as devil-inspired as
his are not. It happens almost as a reflex in Frederyke of Jennen. Here, after
the character equivalent to Iachimo realizes he is going to lose the wager
on the wife’s chastity, he goes for help to an old woman because, as we are
twice told, ‘an olde woman can do that the devell hym selfe can not do’.47
Women on Trial 297
She is the one who thinks up the trick of concealing him in a chest—
though it is the man who receives a gruesome punishment at the end of
the tale.
The Fall was the archetypal event that was commonly taken to mark
women as tainted by the devil, but romances, including some that are less
overtly committed to reaching a verdict on women’s goodness, may
invoke it with greater subtlety to refigure its sentence into something
much more sympathetic to women. Heldris of ‘Cornwall’ first mentions
Adam and Eve in Silence when the eponymous heroine’s father describes
them as the model of sacramental marriage. Later, a personified Nature
and Nurture debate as to which of them is responsible for Adam’s sin;
Nature wins when she points out that God made Adam and Eve perfect,
so it must have been the devil’s nurturing of Adam that deceived him by
means of the apple, ‘par la pome le deçut’—Eve is left out of this part of
the argument altogether.48 Partonope of Blois goes further, when, after
he has betrayed his wife’s trust, he blames Adam outright for the Fall, but
notes that he at least was able to keep ‘hys love, hys wyffe’, whereas he has
lost his own—and lost her, moreover, because he was persuaded by his
mother and an archbishop that she might be a devil in disguise. That the
narrator was fully aware of what he was doing in this intervention in the
gender debate is proved by his noting that ‘olde clerkes’ are fond of gen-
eralizing from a single bad woman to condemn the entire sex. The Wife
of Bath was far from being the only character in the Middle Ages to be
aware of the sexist bias of her culture, and of the clerical dominance in
maintaining it.49
It was not just antifeminist discourses that were an immediate spur to
debate; argument could be triggered by almost any representation of
women. The passionate heroine’s independence in choosing her own
sexual partner can invite an antifeminist response, however firmly that
choice may have marriage as its final aim, and romances often raise it as
an issue at points where it is most likely to be raised in the minds of lis-
teners or readers. Chrétien’s Cligés, which tells with apparent full
approval (explicitly in contrast with Isolde) the story of a young woman’s
managing to preserve her body for the man she loves even after she has
been compelled to marry an emperor, closes with the statement that her
skill at circumventing her official husband resulted in the strict control
under which later empresses have to live. Ydoine’s resourcefulness in
manipulating the men around her invites recurrent denigrations of
women’s deceitfulness, and equally recurrent palinodes exempting the
heroine herself from the general condemnation. Hue of Rhuddlan drops
a series of distasteful remarks, often of a voyeuristic kind, into his

Ipomedon, so that the desire shown by both his male and his female char-
acters carries something of a fabliau tinge; and he ends by offering his ser-
vices to any of the local ladies who care to drop around. There is none the
less a curious disjunction between such statements and the treatment of
the stories and characters, where the narrative tenor is strongly approv-
ing,50 and it is the approval, not any irony towards it, that is carried
through into the Middle English versions. Such comments read more like
asides: a turning away from the story to make a joke to the audience, and
especially to the men in the audience, perhaps to keep them on side in
scenarios that risk their identifying not with the hero but with the fooled
husband or the defied father. The comments recognize the anxiety, refor-
mulate it as a topic not to be taken seriously, and deflate it in the process.
At the same time, they recognize that the issue is not one that can be
closed: that the debate will continue.
The Reformation made little impact on that continuing debate, or
even on its terms: the same examples are repeated; the same authorities
cited; the same polarization taken for granted. Almost the only change is
that the denigration of women is more likely to be ascribed to ‘some men’
rather than to clerics in particular. This is how Sidney phrases it, when
Kalander claims early in the New Arcadia that the princesses’ excellence
in ‘all the gifts allotted to reasonable creatures’ (a formula that itself
insists on women’s equal claim with men to rationality) is sufficient to
counter the antifeminist arguments—though the metaphor he chooses
to formulate the claim somewhat spoils the effect:
We may think they were born to show that nature is no stepmother to that sex,
how much soever some men, sharp-witted only in evil speaking, have sought to
disgrace them.51
The conflict between what those evil-speaking men say and what the
princes come to believe is a theme not only for debate but for combat.
The series of challengers to Amphialus in Book III of the New Arcadia
includes one man who offers as ‘the cause of his quarrel’ that women are
the oversight of nature, the disgrace of reasonableness, the obstinate cowards, the
slave-born tyrants, the shops of vanities, the gilded weather cocks; in whom con-
science is but peevishness, chastity waywardness, and gratefulness a miracle.52
He is, of course, defeated; but the ideas on trial were not so easily over-
come. The syntactic pattern of the passage, with its piling up of insults,
shows Sidney’s familiarity, not just with a tradition of antifeminist
Women on Trial 299
vituperation going back over a thousand years, but with the same author-
ities who had underpinned it throughout that time. This definition of
women is a paraphrase of the views of the first- or second-century Greek
philosopher Secundus, popularized through a twelfth-century Latin ver-
sion and widely current in the vernaculars of Europe. To quote from a
text of 1530, woman is
the confusyon of man, a beaste insaciable, a continuall busynesse, a batell never
endid, mannis manciple, and to a continent man destruccyon.
The same text ascribes a further battery of definitions to St Jerome: ‘The

gate of the fende, the waye of wyckednesse, the strooke of the serpente, a
noyable kynde is the woman.’53 Sidney is still happy to present the most
virtuous and the most wicked characters in the Arcadia, the princesses
and Cecropia, as polarized extremes of women, but the work as a whole
sets the conventional terms of the debate at odds with the experience of
the narrative, testing theory against practice. The dual representations of
women are disputed between the heroes in the early stages of the work,
in a passage written for the first version and retained in the second. The
issue here is not so much whether essentialized woman is madonna or
whore, but whether her effect on the male subject is bad or good:
As the love of heaven makes one heavenly, the love of virtue, virtuous, so doth the
love of the world make one become worldly; and this effeminate love of a woman
doth so womanize a man that, if he yield to it, it will not only make him an
Amazon [a direct dig at Pyrocles’ newly-acquired disguise, and a threat to which
Spenser has his macho hero Arthegall submit], but a launder, a distaff-spinner or
whatsoever other vile occupation their idle heads can imagine and their weak
hands perform.54
Pyrocles responds by bringing the debate away from abstraction: ‘If we

love virtue, in whom shall we love it but in a virtuous creature?’55 Sidney
is not content, all the same, just to oppose lovers against women-haters;
the princes’ debate is shown to be inadequate, not only because their con-
clusions are simplistic, but because women live and think and feel in their
own right. They are not merely the objects of male love, or (as Gynecia
shows) summarily divisible into the good and the evil. Sidney may have
been encouraged in his exploration of such attitudes by the fact that he
was writing the work for his sister, but the romance form that he chose
was already pushing him in that direction.
‘do after the good and leave the evil’ 56
The debate over women in romances matters because of the belief that
fiction was persuasive: that it instructed its readers, not only by direct
statement, but by the representations of the characters and actions that
composed it. The contention exemplified by Chaucer’s fabliau and
Gower’s romance in Greene’s Vision, as to whether the function of litera-
ture was primarily entertaining or didactic, had customarily been
resolved from classical times forward by the argument that its delight was
merely a means to a didactic end. In medieval encyclopedic texts, poetry
and fiction often appear as a branch of ethics. Any fictional, or indeed
historical, characters are therefore likely to be portrayed as models to be
imitated or shunned, and the tendency to generalize from women char-
acters made them especially potent as such models. That is why the pas-
sionate heroines of romance are potentially so dangerous. Yet they are
often set in opposition to other women whose ethical undesirability is
much more obvious, and who by virtue of their existence underline the
approval given to the independent-minded heroines. Many romances
offer an array of types of women for endorsement or rejection, some-
times in extreme moral terms, but sometimes with a subtlety at odds with
such absolutes.
The story of Apollonius of Tyre, in all its versions from its fifth-century
origins down to Pericles, is the paradigmatic model of how the categories
of female sexuality can be played off against each other. The story shapes
itself around a series of powerful exempla of right and wrong sexuality
focused on a series of women, but the ‘wrong’ sexuality here takes the
form of excessive obedience to a father, and in turn highlights the right-
ness of the true heroine’s independence in choosing her own sexual
partner. The first couple to be introduced are the incestuous Antiochus
and his daughter,57 a pair whose transgression of the natural is
grotesquely magnified by the death visited on all those suitors who fail to
guess the riddle they set—and indeed of any who do guess it, as
Apollonius’–Pericles’ experience shows. Wrong sexuality, this time in the
public domain rather than concealed within the family, is flaunted again
in the late episode of the selling of women’s flesh in the brothel. The con-
trast with Apollonius’ wife-to-be helps to mark as unequivocally good the
eagerness of the maiden who chooses her own husband and is prepared
to defy her father to do so. The extremity of the bad examples also allows
for a comparably extreme example at the good end of the spectrum, the
Women on Trial 301
fierce virginity of Tarsia-Marina as she resists the men who come to buy
her, with its reminiscence of the legends of the virgin martyrs.58 She finds
herself as the chaste and virginal cynosure of all the lustful men of the
city, and she preserves herself without any paternal protection, or assist-
ance from miracle, or intervention from God.
Some romance heroines might seem to present especially undesirable
role models, whether to young women or to their parents. The cross-
dressed maidens who lead their lives as knights appear to be at the fur-
thest extreme from the womanly obedience required of young women;
the calumny romances would seem to be problematic in a different
way, since they show virtue to be no defence against suspicion and ill
treatment. The two issues come together in the Grisandol of the prose
Merlin and her direct descendant Silence, both of whom are the victims
of a gender-reversed calumny when a promiscuous empress or queen
tries to seduce the supposed young man and accuses him/her of rape
when her advances are rejected.59 The empress of the Merlin, further-
more, is revealed as keeping a troupe of gigolots disguised as waiting-
women; the queen of Silence has a lover dressed as a nun. Quite apart
from their being condemned to death, these guilty women are presented
as decisively unattractive in a way that insists on the loveliness of chastity,
however strangely its proponents may be acting by the standards of nor-
mal social behaviour. Merlin himself, in both texts, reveals the truth
about the various cross-dressings, but confesses even himself to have
been deceived, since he could only be captured by a woman’s wiles—in
these stories, those of the maiden whose true sex he failed initially to
recognize. Yet neither he nor anyone else condemns these particular
wiles, and each heroine finishes up marrying the sovereign after the exe-
cution of the guilty wife. Despite his support for women at earlier points
in the work, Heldris ends rather more equivocally, by insisting that good
women are more worthy of praise than bad women are of blame since
they have to go against their own nature to act well. He asks for approval
specifically from the women in his audience for the praise he has given
Silence, but although his whole narrative has been designed to insist that
a woman can excel not only in her own sphere but in men’s too, and
therefore that the female deprivation of inheritance rights that set the
story going must be reversed at the end, it avoids any revolutionary con-
clusions and withdraws into a model of containment.
Silence never made it into English; Merlin was widely known in France,
but this section was not translated into English until the mid-fifteenth cen-
tury, and Malory either avoided it or did not know it. English audiences
were consistently more wary than continental ones of the actual practice of
adultery (as distinct from a false charge of adultery) within serious secular
literary forms, no matter how faithful, or how casual, the affair might be.
If it appears at all, such love is most likely to make its appearance, not as a
subject in itself, but as part of the whole array of different kinds of love
offered, whether by intention or by virtue of sheer comprehensiveness, in
the more capacious romances. All such works distinguish between good
and bad kinds of sexuality, and therefore offer models of women to be
followed or shunned, but the boundary is never simply aligned with mar-
riage. The dividing line is most likely to be drawn between faithful sexual
love, and casual affairs that involve no commitment of the heart; but dif-
ferent writers draw the ethical limits in surprisingly different ways, and
there may even be no sharp division at all. The medieval term for such a
comprehensive array was distinctio, a term that means the division of a
complex whole or idea into its constituent parts; but that is not a binary
division, and many romance writers recognize such a complexity both in
love and in the women who embody or typify the various forms it can
take.60
The Morte Darthur offers such an array of sexuality, though the com-
prehensiveness seems to be a consequence of the work’s scope rather than
being intentional on Malory’s part. He presents a hierarchy of value in
the various love-stories in the work, and the legalities of marriage have
very little to do with it. What matters is that love should be true, singu-
lar, and faithful. There is no adverse judgement offered when Dame
Lyonesse celebrates her new and immediate love for Gareth by promising
to come to his bed in the hall; her younger sister’s success in spoiling
things is reported neutrally, though with the balance of sympathy falling
towards the eager young lovers.61 Lancelot likewise seems to be a good
deal more shocked than Malory is by Elaine of Ascolat’s suggestion that
she should become his paramour, and Malory invents for her her mov-
ing speech in defence of earthly love. Like Spenser and the great majority
of romance authors, Malory reserves his strongest disapproval for lust,
physical desire without love, whether it takes the form of Gawain’s sleep-
ing with Pelleas’s beloved Ettard while Pelleas waits in increasing anxiety
at the gates, or Morgan le Fay’s casual promiscuity.62 Enforced sex is an
evil, whether the perpetrator is a male rapist or a female seducer. Celibacy
is presented as an overriding value only within the bounds of the Grail
narrative, and even there much the most interesting character is Lancelot,
the man who cannot quite renege on his love for the queen. Malory never
commits himself to the position taken by his French Grail source, that all
Women on Trial 303
sex is damnable, even though he adopts all the female characters who
turn out to be (male) devils in disguise. The very absoluteness of the
demands of the Grail quest paradoxically helps Malory’s sympathy
towards love. The knights are required to leave behind their ladies of
whatever marital status, and it is only the totally celibate (or the almost-
totally-celibate: Bors, as we keep being reminded, has slept with a woman
just once) who are going to succeed. To have a wife is just as much a dis-
qualification on the quest as is a mistress, or indeed somebody else’s wife.
And so the fact that Lancelot’s love is for the queen, not only married to
another man but the wife of the king, would logically be no worse so far
as the Grail is concerned than his liaison with Elaine of Corbin that
resulted in the birth of Galahad himself. Malory accordingly never repre-
sents the fall of the Round Table as being due to Lancelot’s affair with the
queen; the people he consistently blames are Mordred and Agravain, the
treacherous knights who speak open shame about the lovers even though
they know that it will bring about the downfall of the kingdom. There is
no virtue in speaking the truth when the motive behind it is malice and
the results so catastrophic. ‘Vertuouse love’, in Malory’s definition, is
long-lasting love set on a single person, and Guinevere is its exemplar—
‘for whome I make here a lytyll mencion, that while she lyved she was a
trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende’.63
Malory carries over much of this array of kinds of love from the
Lancelot-Grail, but its particular inflection, and especially his refusal to
separate godliness from devoted sexual attraction, is his own. Another
derivative of the French prose romances, the Orlando Furioso, likewise
presents a wide variety of kinds of love, but, as with Malory, the French
and Italian writers of romance do not seem to have deliberately set out to
present a full normative array of love: a comparable effect is more a con-
tingent result of their multiplication of love-narratives. Sir Philip Sidney,
by contrast, seems to have moved across from the contingent to the
intentional in the course of his revision of the Arcadia. In the revised ver-
sion, many of the digressions are precisely designed to show different
kinds of sexual attraction in operation in a wider assortment of charac-
ters than would be allowed by his main narrative alone. The exemplary
nature of these added love-stories is demonstrated by the inset narrative
of the cynical seducer Pamphilus, found by Pyrocles tied up with garters
and being pricked with bodkins by nine deceived gentlewomen led by the
abandoned Dido: an episode that would seem more at home in the
‘romance of types’ sections of the Faerie Queene.64 Where Spenser
illustrates different kinds of love along a spectrum from spirituality and
faithfulness to the instant gratification of lust, however, Sidney questions

much more consistently how far, or whether, or when, love can be con-
sidered as a good at all. The Protestant theology of marriage does not
seem to help him in the slightest, and when his princes appeal to
Neoplatonic theory, they get it wrong: their immediate response to falling
in love is to move downwards, Musidorus by abandoning his nobility of
rank, Pyrocles his superiority of sex; and when Musidorus sings an
eclogue that should be about rising upwards towards the Ideal, the poem
in fact descends from an image of contemplation beyond nature to the
beautiful body that encloses the ‘dear soul’ of a particular woman.65
Some of these differences may be due to the political thrust of the work
(if Blair Worden is right, it is an allegory of the key issues of late 1570s pol-
itics),66 in contrast to Spenser’s concern with what an ideal England
might look like. Some may also be due to the two authors’ different per-
sonal experiences of love: Spenser with his passionately happy marriage;
Sidney with whatever complications followed from his entanglement
with the married Lady Rich. The fullness of romance structure taken by
the two works, however, gives both authors space to explore love to a
degree that takes them beyond topical concerns, whether political or per-
sonal. Both make the exploration of the ethics of sexuality central to their
romances.
The middle books of the Faerie Queene contain the most extensive
deliberate portrayal of different kinds of love within English romance,
but Spenser is not the first writer to design a work with such an intention.
Chaucer was an important forerunner. The Canterbury tales between
them portray a spectrum of desire from St Cecilia’s adoration of Christ
above her husband, through Palamon and Arcite’s rarefied passion for a
lady whom they regard as being on the borderline with a goddess, to the
Wife of Bath’s cheerful voraciousness for serial monogamy, and to
the unadorned lust of the characters in the fabliaux, the ‘churls’ tales’.
The array follows in part from the encyclopedic generic scope of the
Tales, which brings a variety of approaches to women and to sexuality in
its wake, but the deliberateness of its display of varieties of love is indi-
cated by The Parliament of Fowls (a text to which Spenser makes explicit
reference).67 The work is in some ways the allegorical epitome of the
Tales, and it makes such a variety its principal subject. The Parliament is
a dream poem about the different mating habits of various birds, who
function as an avian equivalent of humans. A dream poem is itself a gen-
eralizing form, offering a simplified schema that avoids the messy com-
plicating detail of the real world; the choice of birds as characters in the
Women on Trial 305
Parliament offers the further advantage of avoiding ethical questions

altogether, since their actions are by definition natural, and Chaucer
accordingly assembles them under the aegis of Nature, the ‘vicaire of the
almyghty Lord’ (379). There is thus no judgemental attitude taken as to
whether the birds follow their natures as profligate cuckoo or as aristo-
cratic eagle, a spectrum originating with Aristotle that encompasses both
ornithological accuracy and social hierarchy. The assembly of birds rep-
resents a distinctio of kinds of loving; but there is a larger dichotomy that
Chaucer makes in the poem. Nature and the birds occupy only the sec-
ond half of the dream. The first half is devoted to a different kind of
desire, emblematized in the claustrophobic temple of Priapus occupied
by Venus; it consists of sexuality almost entirely divorced from procre-
ation. On its walls are painted the stories of lovers—most of them classi-
cal (Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido, Cleopatra, Troilus), but including
Tristram and Isolde—whose love has been unhappy and in some way
illicit, and has resulted in death. The contrast between the two loves rep-
resented in the temple and on Nature’s hill is summarized in the double
inscription over the gate to the park where the dream is set: one inscrip-
tion warning of barrenness, ‘ther nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere’, and
death; the other promising an everlasting May of health and grace
(127–40).
The poem thus offers a dichotomy between two kinds of love: fatal pas-
sion, and pairing as procreation, as embodied respectively by humans
and birds. Yet the distinction is not as absolute as it might appear, and
not just because the justification for the birds’ presence in the poem is
that they offer the closest analogy in the animal world to human patterns
of sexual behaviour. One of the figures painted in the temple is ‘the
moder of Romulus’; she is the only one to be defined as procreative, but
her presence prevents any definition of the human lovers as representing
sterile passion alone. Equally, the birds are not immune from death: the
turtle dove is defined in terms of its faithfulness even beyond the death of
its mate. The choice of lovers for the temple, including Troilus and
Tristram, suggests a distinction in terms of ‘courtly’ as against ‘natural’
love; but the aristocratic birds likewise suffer, offer long service, and
speak eloquently of their own desire, yet all under the aegis of Nature.
Since the three eagles all seek the same female, two of them will necessar-
ily be disappointed—potentially, therefore, becoming further trophies
for the temple. Not least because of its refusal to follow easy categoriza-
tions, the work is illuminating in many ways for thinking about love
in the romances. It decisively splits down the middle the modern
monolithic construction of ‘courtly love’. The intensity of desire por-

trayed in the temple leads only to death, and so is not natural—it takes
place outside the dominion of Nature. Unfulfilled desire and the eagles’
courtly formulation of requests for fulfilment, by contrast, are repre-
sented as appropriate for those of highest rank, and therefore as natural
as the turtle-dove’s (ornithologically accurate) lifelong mating, or the
goose’s altogether more casual attitude as to how one finds a mate.
The middle books of the Faerie Queene, with their multiplicity of rep-
resentations of love and desire, present a similar array, interwoven rather
than sequential, and so with the contrasts and differences made part of
the narrative structure. Spenser’s method is often to present chaste
women alongside promiscuous ones, often pairing them as narrative
antonyms (as the virgin Una is contrasted with the unchaste Duessa,
Britomart with Malecasta), and the Faerie Queene can itself be read as an
extended debate on the nature of women. Books III and IV are designed
to portray
in diverse minds,
How diversely love doth his pageants play,
And shewes his powre in variable kinds.
III. v. 1
These ‘variable kinds’ are the variations on the central, good image of
Britomart’s own desire, and their function as variations is unusually
explicit. Spenser makes a radical distinction between the two kinds of
desire. One is the ‘Love’, capitalized, that catches its spark from the ‘sacred
fire . . . y kindled first above’, and represents a choice for virtue; the other
is ‘filthy lust’ such as is associated with an abdication from the fully
human, being chosen by ‘brutish minds’ (III. ii. 1). It may look like that
division of women into madonnas and whores, but there is no double
standard: the criticisms in particular are consistently applied equally to
men and women. There is an opportunistic Paridell for every adulterous
Hellenore, a randy Squire of Dames for every promiscuous Malecasta, and
the actions of the men are reprehended equally with the women’s.
Furthermore, since the human characters (as distinct from personified
abstractions or figures of supernatural or mythological origin) are types
rather than ideas—fictional people, not embodied concepts—their forms
of life are represented as active choices, not as an allegorical given. The
human women—Britomart, Malecasta, the dominating Radegund, the
disdainful Briana—are shown as self-fashioning, choosing the ethical and
sexual model they wish to follow. Women’s independence, their freedom
Women on Trial 307
of choice, is therefore built into the structure of the work, for bad or, most
strongly, for good; and any attempts at male control, such as the jealous
Malbecco’s of Hellenore, are destined to fail, not for antifeminist reasons
to do with untamable female sensuality, but because the women, like the
men, are made the agents of their own ethical choices. ‘Do after the good’,
Caxton wrote in his address to his readers that prefaces his edition of the
Morte Darthur, ‘and leave the evil.’ Spenser likewise writes so that his
readers can imitate his characters, not only in their actions but in taking
responsibility for their own forms of living and loving.
the adultery question
The meme of the falsely accused woman has the wife’s innocence built
into it: she is falsely accused. Two of the most famous romances, by con-
trast, those of Isolde and Guinevere, are stories in which an adulterous
wife is justly accused, and others (Marie de France’s Guigemar, the
Provençal Flamenca) show a mistreated wife escaping from a tyrannical
husband into the arms of a lover. These romances demand sympathy for
their lovers; yet no reader of the episodes of the adulterous queens in
Merlin or Silence would have been likely to object to their executions; and
Marie herself condemned a wife’s unfaithfulness in Bisclavret. If these
responses appear contradictory, it is perhaps due to our own habits of
reading the Middle Ages too simplistically. Adultery, like love, comes in
an infinity of forms; yet it was so universally reprehended, by the Church,
the law, and the whole political system, as well as being the most feared
element in the charges against women’s licentiousness, that the high
profile given to such love in some romances demands analysis. No single
explanation can cover the entire phenomenon, involving as it does cul-
tural, historical, and generic variants: not only is French romance much
more ready to accommodate adultery than is English (and Italian more
so again), but the same phenomenon is illustrated even more generously
in the later genre of the novel—fictional adultery, or its avoidance, can be
a national rather than just a medieval or generic phenomenon.
Adultery was never a norm in romance in any language. It stretches the
genre to its limits, or indeed breaks them. In contrast to the active desire
of the maiden for the man she chooses for her husband, it makes a happy
ending almost impossible, as the stories of Tristan and Lancelot bear wit-
ness. It requires attention in this chapter, not only because it is the most
difficult area in which to analyse the representation of women, but
because the habits of criticism set early in the twentieth century made it
central to romance, and numerous attempts to deny that centrality have
had little impact outside the circle of scholars most immediately
involved. The particular problem arises from C. S. Lewis’s notorious dic-
tum that adultery was a sine qua non of courtly love, and therefore of
medieval literary love: a dictum that is probably the most misleading
remark ever made about medieval literature.68 Unfortunately, it has itself
become one of the most successful memes in the modern view of the
Middle Ages, a kind of urban myth with an extraordinary power of repli-
cation quite regardless of its untruth. The problem lies not only in the
equation of courtly love and adultery but in the very concept of ‘courtly
love’. The term itself is rarely found in any medieval language, and never
in Middle English. Gaston Paris coined ‘amour courtois’ in the late nine-
teenth century specifically to describe the relationship of Lancelot and
Guinevere in Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette, his one romance of
adultery, and his term too has acquired a popular currency (a memetic
replicability) out of all proportion to its actual usefulness.69 The nearest
equivalent phrases in common usage in medieval French are either sim-
ply amors, love, or fin amor, ‘refined love’, anglicized by Chaucer as ‘fyn
loving’, where the ‘fin’ denotes the surplus of emotion over physical
desire alone. Neither has any inherent connotation of adultery; Chaucer
uses the English term for married love, and other writers use it for char-
ity, godly love.70 Although the link between adultery and courtly love has
been extensively challenged, the concept itself is still often invoked in
relation to the romances’ representations of women, in particular to
claims that the lady is denied any subjectivity—a claim that, as the previ-
ous chapter has demonstrated, is simply wrong so far as writing in
England is concerned. The debate over courtly love has therefore recently
been subsumed within the scholarship on misogyny, but in relation to
different issues from the concerns with women’s right and wrong uses of
sexuality that exercised medieval authors and commentators.
Lewis derived his odd belief about the centrality of adultery from the
declaration ascribed to Marie de Champagne by Andreas Capellanus,
André the chaplain, in his handbook on love, De amore, that it was
impossible to love one’s spouse. The work did not have the seminal sta-
tus or dissemination that Lewis assumes, and this declaration further-
more comes at quite a late stage of the work, with none of the primacy he
assigns it: most of the text up to that point, supposedly written as instruc-
tion in seduction for a young man named Walter, never mentions the
marital status of the various women whose love Andreas’ assorted male
Women on Trial 309
characters are forever seeking, and seeking with an invariable lack of suc-
cess. The ladies’ refutations of the men’s arguments indeed give them all
an air of cool good sense that goes beyond the dialectic requirements of
the form. The book’s conclusion in a sharply misogynistic palinode aligns
it with clerical antifeminism much more than with any secular discourses
of love: a context confirmed by the fact that it is written in the male lin-
guistic preserve of Latin. The nature of Andreas’ work has been called
into question from all angles since Lewis wrote: as P. G. Walsh puts it,
‘Controversy surrounds its title, date, author, social setting, literary
frame, purpose and importance.’71 It may have no historical connection
with the court of Champagne, but rather be a mildly salacious historical
novel for scholastically-trained clerics.72 Marie de Champagne is, how-
ever, also named by Chrétien as having commissioned his Chevalier de la
Charrette, the foundational romance of adulterous love inspired without
the help or excuse of magic draughts. Chrétien describes the countess as
prescribing both matière and sentence for his story, but it was certainly
typical neither of her reading-matter, which tended towards the pious,
nor of his own works, the rest of which all promote love within mar-
riage.73 His Cligés is, indeed, written explicitly as an anti-Tristan story, in
which the greatest ill lies in dissociating love from marriage. Despite
going through a wedding ceremony with a man she does not love, the
heroine Fénice insists that ‘he who has the heart, has the body’—‘Qui a le
cuer, cil a le cors’74—and, like Ydoine and Josiane, she manages to avoid
ever sleeping with her husband. She at least believes that love both of the
heart and body was properly shared with the one man she aims, ulti-
mately, to marry, and it would be perverse to imagine that Chrétien or
anyone else expected her love to cease at that moment.
The conclusion Andreas gives to the countess of Champagne, in which
she divides love from marriage, is in any case necessitated by the particu-
lar terms of the argument, and only by them. The sexual predator
involved in raising the question effectively eliminates the possibility of
love between married couples by defining love at the crucial moment of
his seduction routine as ‘an uncontrolled desire to obtain the sensual
gratification of a stealthy and secret embrace’—furtivi et latentis
amplexus.75 The definition is intended to rebut his latest lady’s refusal of
him on the grounds that she is married to a worthy husband of whom she
is very fond, and he is trying to find ways around her rejection. It is this
fictional pair who take to Marie de Champagne for judgement the ques-
tion of whether it is possible for there to be love between a married cou-
ple, and she rules against it, not on the grounds that marital embraces
need not be stealthy, but because in marriage the wife has no sexual
choice. The tenets of medieval marriage held that husband and wife were
under an obligation to each other to have sex: as Andreas’ countess puts
it, ‘Married partners are forced to comply with each other’s desires as an
obligation, and under no circumstances to refuse their persons to each
other.’76 She is in effect expounding a paradox; the modern equivalent
might be, can a husband and wife enjoy free love together? The answer in
all three cases is essentially one of definition: each pair of terms—mar-
riage and stealthy desire; marriage and free sexual choice; marriage and
free love—is inherently contradictory. A few pages later, Ermengarde of
Narbonne refuses to answer another question related to the love between
lovers and spouses because the terms are too ambiguous to give a logi-
cally coherent answer.77 The emphasis of the declaration against married
love is not on living or feeling but on casuistic argument, a secular
and emotional equivalent of the Latin and philosophical debates in the
Schools where the whole text perhaps originated, and says little or noth-
ing about actual practice either in real life or in literature.
The fate of Andreas’ De amore in England confirms that the declara-
tion for which the work is now best known was not regarded as either
central or normative, and confirms, too, the preference shown by English
romance for love that is ultimately circumscribed by orthodox morality.
Chaucer’s Franklin dismisses the notion that the ‘law of love’ might sep-
arate off the roles of ‘lady’ and ‘wyf’,78 and there is no reason to think that
Chaucer did not agree. It is not likely, however, that Andreas’ argument
underlies the dismissal, as there is no evidence for any knowledge of the
Latin text in Britain in the Middle Ages. The work did eventually make its
way across the Channel, but in an adaptation into French in which the
advice on love to the young Walter is put into the mouth of the wise
abbess Heloïse—and wisdom seems to be the point at issue in this ver-
sion. The text confines itself to the first half of the first book of Andreas’
original, so it stops short before the question arises of whether one can or
cannot love one’s spouse; the vicious antifeminism of the final book also
therefore disappears. The differences are moreover far from just a matter
of length. The relentless male point of view of Andreas’ text is recurrently
made gender-inclusive, not just by the change of instructor, but from the
very first page by the redefinition of love as a mutual emotion shared by
both lovers: it concerns ‘les cuers des deux gens amans’, and that both
lovers are equally involved is stressed throughout.79 The fictional recip-
ient of the text is still a man, but the emphasis of the work has been
altered to turn it into a young man’s guide to winning his lady’s heart
Women on Trial 311
(rather than, as in Andreas, her body), through a training in fine emo-

tion. That intention is confirmed by the nature of the single surviving
manuscript, a beautiful production made for the young prince Arthur,
heir to Henry VII, some time before his marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
It contains, in addition to this treatise, a series of demandes d’amour more
sympathetic to women than those contained in Andreas’ series of conun-
drums, and a further treatise of advice to princes.80 If ever Elizabeth I had
picked it out from among the books in the Royal Library, she would have
found nothing in it to offend her.
Despite its distance from English ethical and generic norms, the full
Latin version of Andreas’ treatise and Marie’s ruling within it are illum-
inating on one matter, and that is the importance of free sexual choice for
the woman. The sophistical or legalistic point on which her decision
turns is the issue of compulsion: that the husband who has his wife’s body
does not necessarily also have her heart, yet she has no right to refuse her-
self to him. The normal solution, both inside and outside romance, was
not to deny the possibility of loving one’s husband, but to insist that the
ideal marriage was one where the wife did love her spouse—hence the
ecclesiastical emphasis on consent, which may not compel the heart, but
at least insists on the personal choice of partner for both men and
women. Such choice, however, in practice took different forms for the
two sexes. For men, with their greater social and personal freedom, it
could precisely mean active personal choice, even if that choice was made
in line with parental interests and for reasons of economics and status
rather than love. For women, ‘consent’ was likely to mean no more than
the right of refusal of a husband chosen for her. Although the Church set
its face against enforced marriages, it was in practice extremely difficult
for a daughter to resist parental compulsion, which was in any case fur-
ther reinforced by the Church on the grounds of obedience. No romance
heroine ever considers the possibility of simply refusing a bridegroom at
the altar as a way round a parental choice of husband; and Friar Laurence
in Romeo and Juliet similarly never thinks that a downright refusal of
Paris on Juliet’s part would cut any ice. At the higher aristocratic levels
that concern Marie de Champagne and her court, and which are the main
setting of the romances, women would be especially unlikely to be given
much freedom in the choice of husband.81 Romances notwithstanding,
they were largely the passive objects of arranged marriages, and the
arrangement was made by the man responsible for them, normally the
father. The romances of adultery typically therefore involve a married
woman and a single man. She makes her own active sexual choice
independently of the husband who has chosen her and the father who
has endorsed that choice, in an extreme form of resistance to male
commodification of women; the man she loves likewise exercises his free
sexual choice, for her. The romance authors were fully alert to such
processes. In Flamenca, the heroine’s father demands his daughter’s obe-
dience to his choice of husband, and she replies by consenting to his wish:
she never, within the text, consents as such to her marriage partner, a
distinction that prepares the way for her affair when her husband turns
brutal on her.82 Arthur consults Guinevere’s father before he marries her,
but not her. The marriage of Isolde to Mark is a matter of diplomatic
negotiation conducted by men, and one, furthermore, that disrupts a
love relationship that already exists—the husband, not the lover, is the
third in this particular triangle. Romances show their heroines resisting
the passive role laid down for them, choosing their own sexual partners
regardless of their fathers’ plans for them, or, in the rare extreme case,
notwithstanding the existence of a husband.
Happy marriage in the real world was taken to depend not so much on
passionate love, nor on the love-at-first-sight commitment of romance,
as on mutual respect between the spouses: on marital affection and
friendship,83 qualities that could be achieved by active good will without
the need for intervention by any god of love. That a woman has a worthy
husband is often given as a forceful argument against extramarital affairs.
The married lady accosted by the sex-hungry man in the De amore cites
it as her reason for refusing him (hence the need for the sophistical
Andreas to find a way around the objection); Gawain tries to keep
Bertilak’s over-familiar wife at bay by telling her that she has chosen
(‘waled’, 1276) a much better man than he is; and the respect, or the lack
of it, that can be accorded the husband makes the crucial difference in the
lais of Marie de France between those where extramarital love is treated
sympathetically and those where it is not. In Guigemar and Yonec, extra-
marital love is represented as supernaturally-bestowed compensation for
good women imprisoned by jealous husbands. The unfaithful wives in
Equitan and Bisclavret by contrast are unequivocally condemned,
together with their lovers, even though in the latter the husband has the
habit of turning into a werewolf. In each, to drive the point home, the
wife’s readiness to betray her husband opens the way to trying to get rid
of him altogether: in Equitan by scalding him to death in a bath (which
her lover, the king, accidentally climbs into); in Bisclavret by removing
the clothes that enable him to turn back into human form. Generides, one
of the romances to enjoy considerable popularity in print, opens with an
Women on Trial 313
announcement of the queen’s adultery, and she and her paramour

remain major characters throughout the narrative; they finish up
defeated, but they are allowed to beseech, and be granted, forgiveness
before they die. The early announcement of the affair clears the way for
the wronged husband to be led by a hart to meet his own beloved, and the
child born to them, Generides, in due course recovers his father’s throne
from the usurping wife and paramour.
It is notable how rarely ‘romances’ of adultery provide happy endings
for the lovers. If such stories are recognizable as romances because of
their focus on love, they are marginal to the genre in so far as the nature
of that love prevents their achieving a final order and equilibrium within
this world. The affair between Lancelot and Guinevere causes Arthur’s
downfall, whether that downfall is represented as the punishment for
sexual transgression (as in the Lancelot-Grail) or as political treachery
motivated by hatred of Lancelot, in which the affair is no more than an
excuse (as in the Morte Darthur). The love at the basis of the Tristan
romances cannot find any resolution for the lovers other than death, and
Tristan’s marriage to Isolde of the White Hands adds a second tragedy
within the first: it is one of the very few stories where the hero marries
someone other than the woman he loves, with disastrous results for his
bride. If a wife with both a husband and a lover is in a near-impossible
position, the rare wife whose husband is in love with someone else is
worse off still. In Marie’s Eliduc, the young Guilliadun falls for Eliduc
without knowing that he is married, and he does not have the courage to
tell her; when she discovers, after they have eloped, she faints so deeply as
to appear dead. They are enabled to live ever after in ‘parfit’ amur’ (1150)
only by the wife’s discovering the inanimate Guilliadun, finding a way to
bring her back to life, and then withdrawing to a convent: a happy end-
ing, in fact, achieved only through her unstinting generosity, unrewarded
in this world, and the next is never explicitly mentioned. The few
romances that do manage happy endings for extramarital lovers (Marie
de France’s Guigemar; the anonymous Provençal Flamenca, which calls
itself a ‘novas’ rather than a romance)84 are those in which the husband
suffers from such paranoid jealousy that he imprisons his innocent wife,
and an escape into the arms of a lover offers the only hope of a happy
ending for her, or indeed any tolerable existence at all. Even so, a brutal
husband is not enough to ensure the poetic justice of happiness for the
wife. Marie’s Yonec tells of how an imprisoned wife finds happiness with
a supernatural lover who gets access to her chamber in the form of a
hawk, but the husband succeeds in killing him.
In these early decades in the history of romance, the possible permu-

tations of combining the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of more
than one spouse were enlarged by the fact that the formalities of marriage
had not so long before been more flexible than they became after the
Church imposed its own control, and there were advantages for
romance-writers in making the most of such flexibility. When Eliduc’s
first wife declares that it is neither good nor becoming, ‘bien ne avenant’,
for a man to have two wives, and the law furthermore does not allow it
(1128–9), her becoming a nun is presented as sufficient to free her hus-
band to marry Guilliadun. There is no divorce before the new wedding,
nor is the Church in any way consulted. Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s
Lanzelet, and presumably therefore his Anglo-Norman original,85
secretly leaves his beloved wife Iblis (the maiden who fell in love with him
in a dream the night before she first laid eyes on him) in order to under-
take an adventure that involves overcoming a hundred knights, with the
reward of the hand of the queen of Pluris; he overcomes the knights, and
marries her. She will not allow him to leave, and he has to be rescued by
means of a trick mounted by four knights (including Gawain and
Tristan) before he can return to Iblis, after which we hear no more of his
new wife. Guinevere, in this romance, remains faithful to her husband,
and passes a magic test of fidelity to prove it; Lanzelet’s status as hero
seems to derive both from his participation in a passionately happy
marriage and from his readiness to accept sexual adventures, and even a
second wife, as they offer themselves. If these episodes do indeed derive
from Anglo-Norman, they would constitute an unusual instance in
England of a double sexual standard; but neither Lanzelet, nor the
author, nor, so far as we know, the readers, found the combination of
blissful love and sexual opportunism especially troubling.
adultery in english romance
In every medieval European language, literary adultery is in the first

instance the hallmark of fabliau rather than romance. Lanzelet’s love-
adventures with every woman other than Iblis, whether bigamous or
merely promiscuous, are treated with a mild salaciousness that is less
than fully serious. The wonder one expects romance to evoke as a
response to the supernatural or the suprahuman coexists here with
amazement at what he and the various women get up to. Just as the
discourses of clerical antifeminism are allowed a voice in romance, so are
Women on Trial 315
the discourses of fabliau: not necessarily to be debated or put down, but

perhaps as a means of allowing for inappropriate or cynical responses
from any sections of the audience who might be disinclined to docile
acceptance of sentiment or human idealism such as romance usually
demands. The romance concern to present faithful heterosexual love as
the highest human good elides easily with the cheerful conviction of the
fabliaux that sex is the main goal of all humanity, and not least the female
half.
The potential closeness of romance and fabliau is exemplified by the
incorporation into a number of romances, including the Lanzelet, of nar-
ratives that show the near-universal imperfection of women, by way of
mantles that shrink or cups that spill in the hands of disobedient or
unfaithful wives. When such tales are free-standing, they are more likely
to be chastity tests, and are often indistinguishable from fabliau. Their
affinity with clerical antifeminism is indicated by the claim in one of the
earliest such texts, the Anglo-Norman Lai du Corn, that the author got
the story from an abbot.86 That is by no means necessarily true, but it
must have carried a degree of plausibility, even if it shifts the emphasis
from antifeminism to anticlericalism. Romance treatments of compar-
able stories often raise the standard of wifely faithfulness impossibly high:
the most extreme is that a wife should never have had a single thought
that she would not be happy for her husband to know. In the Lanzelet,
where Iblis is the only one such a magic mantle fits, the other ladies of the
court err at least in thought, or are inclined to grumble against their hus-
bands.87 This is magic that does work, though whether it serves to mark
the supra-human, the exceptional, as a possibility or as an impossibility
in a thoroughly fallible world is left to the reader to decide. The location
of the episode immediately before Lanzelet’s entanglement with the
queen of Pluris invites a contrast to be made between the hero and the
heroine, whether in favour of Iblis’s greater perfection, or as marking
different ethical or fantasy expectations of male and female protagonists.
The precise statistics attaching to such stories vary: at best they offer a
hundred-to-four ratio of imperfect to good women; at worst they imply a
figure closer to Solomon’s claim, much cited in the Middle Ages, that
there is scarcely one good woman in a thousand.88 The tales therefore
require a large number of women to be found together in one place, and
so a court made a good setting, especially Arthur’s: an Arthurian context
fits with the magic element of the tales, and the presentation of the cup or
mantle may constitute the marvel that the king requires before he will eat
at major feasts. One would expect a court setting to have been attractive
to a non-courtly audience, as it calls into question the women’s claim to

be ‘ladies’ rather than ‘wenches’, in the class-and-sexuality-specific dis-
tinction familiar from the fourteenth century forwards;89 but although
that may have encouraged the spread of such stories beyond the élite, it
evidently did not hinder their acceptability within courtly romance. The
longest-enduring of such stories was that of the mantle won by Caradoc’s,
or Craddock’s, chaste wife. Widely known throughout Europe, the tale is
first mentioned in England in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalachronica (late
1350s), as fact—he claims that the mantle is preserved at Glastonbury,
refashioned into a cope. Caxton also cites its preservation as evidence for
Arthur’s historicity in his preface to the Morte Darthur, though he locates
it at Dover Castle. The only full English version of the story survives from
a more popular level, in the ballad-style The Boy and the Mantle preserved
in the Percy Folio manuscript.90 The mantle’s antics—shrinking or shred-
ding itself—reflect how seriously the ladies have ‘done amiss’ (l. 30), down
to the slightest infringement of a strict moral code: even Craddock’s sweet
wife has to reproach it when it begins to ‘crinkle and crowt’ above her toes,
for a misdemeanour most people in England would not have regarded as
such:
Shee said, ‘Bowe downe, mantle,
and shame me not for nought.
‘Once I did amisse,
I tell you certainlye,
When I kist Craddockes mouth
under a greene tree,
When I kist Craddockes mouth
before he marryed me.’
115–22
When such stories appear contextualized within a larger romance, they
are subjected to a more sober critique. When Malory recounts the
episode of Morgan le Fay’s gift of a magic drinking-horn intended to
show up Guinevere’s guilt, he shifts its emphasis away from the mass
female errancy it reveals towards the hatred on Morgan’s part that drives
her desire to damage Arthur. In the event, the horn is diverted to Mark’s
court, where Isode and a hundred ladies all fail to drink cleanly, only four
succeeding. Mark’s response, to order a mass burning of the errant
women, is immediately overridden by his barons, who despite their own
disgrace simply want nothing to do with any product of sorcery. ‘For that
horne dud never good, but caused stryff and bate’, comments Malory,
Women on Trial 317
with typical greater concern for political stability than for matrimonial
relationships. The larger drift of his whole narrative none the less leads
him to add that Morgan was always ‘an enemy to all trew lovers’, in an
acknowledgement rare for English romance other than his own that
‘true’ love might exist outside marriage.91
It is surprising, given his normal method of balancing out exempla of
the loving and the lustful, to find Spenser incorporating an analogous
full-scale chastity test into the Faerie Queene. The episode is one that
eliminates the magic element, to demonstrate simply women’s easy sex-
uality. This is the story put into the mouth of the Squire of Dames, who
tells of a ratio of 12,000 seducible women to three who resist him, and one
of those is a prostitute whose charges are too high. That is the only
moment that elicits laughter from its auditor (hearty laughter, at that),
who otherwise shows minimal reaction, though Spenser comments later
that the story defames the Squire more than it does women.92 The
Squire’s story is insulated from the larger tenor of the Faerie Queene by
the fact that it is recessed within the main narrative: these women exist as
fictions within a fiction, not as characters present to our eyes. The Squire
first appears moreover in the grip of the giantess Argante, the embodi-
ment of a ‘sensuall desyre’ ‘gainst natures law’ so intense as to be
unslakeable even by incest and bestiality. The fact that she is female might
suggest the commonplace of women’s sexual insatiability; but the Squire
is a victim not of women’s voraciousness but of his own. He is the work’s
principal example of men’s insatiable sensuality (even if, in turn, he finds
women excessively compliant), and it is that that Argante represents. She,
moreover, can be defeated only by a maiden knight-errant on the
Grisandol or Britomart model, Palladine, named after the virgin goddess
of wisdom.93 The episode is the only one of all the diverse pageants of
love and lust in the Faerie Queene to suggest that female promiscuity is a
norm, and the rest of the work never endorses that. Elsewhere, Spenser
goes so far as to offer a statistic for virtue that inverts Solomon’s, one bad
woman ‘’mongst thousands good’ (III. i. 49). Even the Squire’s story,
moreover, stops short of any explicit mention of adultery. The many
examples of loose morals in the work rarely extend to that. The primary
instance is that of Hellenore with Paridell. As their names indicate, their
escapade is designed to recall the archetypal adultery of Helen and Paris,
but there is nothing either epic or romantic about it in Spenser’s treat-
ment: it is a shoddy affair, which is designed to satirize the jealous hus-
band Malbecco as much as the principals in the case, even though
Hellenore partakes of the sexual insatiability of antifeminist discourse
(she ends by taking herself off to the satyrs for satisfaction, a way of life
that receives surprisingly little explicit condemnation in the poem, how-
ever much the allegory may define it as beastly).
The broader inhospitality of English romance towards adultery is indi-
cated by the fact that Spenser derives the stories of both the Squire and
Malbecco from Ariosto; magic mantles apart, there is nothing directly
comparable in any native source. Badly treated ladies who escape from
imprisonment by jealous husbands into the arms of a lover scarcely get a
mention in Anglo-Norman romance after Marie de France, and are effec-
tively non-existent in Middle English. There is just one tale that follows
such a pattern, the story known as Inclusa, ‘the imprisoned woman’, in
The Seven Sages of Rome, a work of ultimately Oriental origin that
reached England through various continental redactions and which
remained popular through numerous printed editions.94 Here, the lovers
surpass the expectations for most such romances, both of them falling in
love by dreaming of each other before they ever meet, in a doubling of the
effect of the Lanzelet’s Iblis or Spenser’s Arthur; and they manage to trick
the husband into giving his own wife in marriage to her lover, in another
instance of bigamy that originated before Church control was strength-
ened. Just as the story of the magic mantle is altered by its context, how-
ever, this tale is taken decisively away from romance by its larger setting.
The plot of the Seven Sages tells how a wicked stepmother and the
eponymous sages tell rival stories on seven successive days, the step-
mother’s designed to persuade the king to execute his own son, those of
the boy’s teachers designed to make him distrust her—and Inclusa is one
of the latter. The one story of an unhappy lady’s escape to love in Middle
English owes its existence to the fact that it is an exemplary story against
women.
The greater wariness towards adultery in English-language romance
than in its French counterpart is illustrated by the story of the Chatelain
de Coucy, the French version of which ends with the jealous husband
feeding his unknowing wife with her lover’s heart. It was rewritten in
English around 1500, keeping the tragic ending but with the affair
removed. The lovers insist on loving
wyth herte and minde,
Nat in vyce but in chastyte,
and it is only the husband’s irrational jealousy that assumes that their
relationship is sexual.95 Husbands are not exempt from the requirement
of faithfulness, in English in particular: the king’s extramarital love in
Women on Trial 319
Generides follows the revelation to him of his wife’s adultery and treason,
as if her actions freed him from his own commitment to a marriage vow
already broken, and he and his new beloved remain passionately faithful
to each other despite a long separation. The only Middle English
romance before the fifteenth century to present, or to carry over from
Anglo-French, a sympathetic story of an adulterous love—or rather, a
love that becomes adulterous through the marriage of the heroine—is Sir
Tristrem, the adaptation of Thomas’s Tristan; and that survives in only
one manuscript, suggesting no great interest in the story, and did not
inspire imitations. The French prose Tristan and Lancelot were known
and read in England, at least by some aristocrats, but their stories do not
decisively enter English until Malory, and he includes nothing on the
growth of love between Lancelot and Guinevere. The one British text to
recount that early part of the story, the northern or Scottish Lancelot of
the Laik, was not written until the very end of the fifteenth century.
Furthermore, although the single manuscript of the text is incomplete,
the small number of missing leaves strongly suggests that it would have
taken the lovers no further than their first kiss.
The ‘adultery’ version of Arthurian romance was not unknown in
anglophone Britain before Malory (there is the barest mention of it in an
addition to an early fourteenth-century chronicle, and it is taken for
granted in the stanzaic Morte Arthur of c.1400),96 but the general silence
seems to suggest that the whole story was regarded, in so far as it was
thought of at all, as a French slander on the historical British Arthur as
drawn by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In Geoffrey, Lancelot does not even
exist. The early Anglo-Norman romance of Lancelot that underlies
Ulrich’s Lanzelet was perhaps written to counter Chrétien’s adulterous
version of Guinevere; its hero’s amorous interests extend to four enthu-
siastic women but exclude her, and her probity is made explicit.97 In the
fifteenth century, John Harding’s rhyme-royal Chronicle, which is unique
in incorporating the story of the Grail into the historical version of
Arthur derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, not only omits the affair,
but has Lancelot married to Elaine the mother of Galahad ‘in very clene
spousage’.98 Harding has political as well as ethical reasons for the
change, since he wrote his chronicle to encourage the king of England to
pursue English claims to Scotland, which partly derived from Arthur’s
overlordship of the whole of the British Isles; and so he has a strong
vested interest in representing Arthurian history as morally admirable.
He therefore draws the story of Lancelot within the normative patterns of
romance love as found in England: love as a matter of courtship leading
to marriage. English Renaissance romance is even less hospitable towards

adultery. Roger Ascham’s famous condemnation of the Arthurian stories
as ‘bold bawdry’ is typical of an absolute line drawn by Protestant views
of marriage, one which does not allow for any gap between theological
and secular discourses, let alone Malory’s belief in God’s sympathy for
faithful lovers.
The degree of that sympathy is therefore surprising. Malory down-
grades the story of Lancelot and Guinevere for much of his narrative; he
borrows a tiny fraction of the French prose Lancelot, and the greater part
of that fraction, which forms his ‘Tale of Sir Lancelot’, has almost noth-
ing to do with the queen. He is also fully aware of the ills consequent on
their love. To have an affair with the king’s wife was high treason, and, in
case anyone might have been in any doubt, it had been categorized as
such in English law in the Statute of Treasons of 1352—the point being
that such a sexual relationship potentially interferes with the succession.
Both Guinevere and Isolde, conveniently—of necessity, so far as the
stories are concerned—are childless.99 Yet the faithfulness and strength
of Lancelot’s love for Guinevere override the legal categories of both
adultery and treason. Lancelot maintains a rigorous and paradoxical loy-
alty to Arthur, always supporting him, always working to his highest
good, and desperately reluctant to fight against him. In contrast to the
Geoffrey-derived versions that make her a willing accomplice in
Mordred’s abduction of her, Malory’s Guinevere similarly never acts
publicly against the king.
Perhaps the best way of comprehending Malory’s presentation of the
love between Lancelot and Guinevere is to set aside the category of ‘adul-
tery’ altogether: not because it is not an issue (very obviously, it is) but
because it pre-empts too much. It puts an end to thought, just at the
point where thinking ought to start. In his ‘Tale of Sir Lancelot’, when an
unnamed damsel mentions almost for the first time in the work that there
are rumours of such an affair, Lancelot responds forcefully:
And as for to sey to take my pleasaunce with paramours, that woll I refuse: in
prencipall for drede of God, for knyghtes that bene adventurers sholde nat be
advoutres nothir lecherous . . . And so who that usyth paramours shall be
unhappy, and all thynge unhappy that is aboute them.100
The speech, like so many of those that comment on the affair, is Malory’s
own invention. It looks at first glance like a denial that any such affair
exists—possibly because it has not yet started (though we are never
shown its beginnings, and rumours are already rife in the Arthurian
Women on Trial 321
world); the obvious alternative would be for Lancelot to be making the

kind of denial familiar in the mouths of politicians, one that never quite
meets the point at issue. A medieval equivalent would be the oath sworn
by Isolde that no man ever lay between her thighs except her husband and
the man under whom she fell while he carried her ashore from a boat—
that man being, of course, Tristan in disguise. Lancelot answers the
charge of loving the queen with a denial that he is promiscuous, and what
he says is strictly true: he is not lecherous, he does not take his pleasure
with paramours (in the sense of casual mistresses; as a noun, the phrase
par amour had lost its intensifying sense by this date), and knights-errant
ought not to be adulterers. The speech is certainly intended by Lancelot
to stop the damsel’s loose talk, but the tenor of what he is saying may
none the less be as heartfelt as it sounds. A knight-errant, a knight adven-
turous, should not use his wanderings as a means of getting promiscuous
sexual pleasure, and Lancelot consistently resists such opportunities. The
words may well be intended by Malory to make the reader think harder
about the distinction between the casual sleeping with other men’s wives
implied by ‘advoutres nothir lecherous’ and his single-minded love for
Guinevere. Even the damsel acknowledges that ‘ye shall never love none
other but hir’. Lancelot’s reply is designed to mark the ethical boundary
that falls not between active sexuality and celibacy, nor between love for
your own wife and love for someone else’s, but between promiscuity and
faithfulness. His prediction of ‘unhappiness’ for sexual adventurers
therefore does not come over as ironic, or as applicable to himself, for all
our foreknowledge of what will happen.
The stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and of Tristan and Isolde are the
most famous love-stories of the Middle Ages because of the strength of
love represented in them; and for that to be shown, it has to be demon-
strated by some kind of opposition. The course of true love, as
Shakespeare’s Lysander notes, never did run smooth, and especially not
in fiction, for if it did there would be no story at all. There must be some
obstacle, and being married to someone else—especially to the king—is
one of the most awkward. Just as a knight proves his surpassing strength
by fighting giants or dragons or an entire army of Saracens, not the boy
next door, so love proves its invincibility by being set against every social,
political, and religious taboo, and not by being reducible to convenient
marriage. Adultery is the most extreme condition for showing the power
of love; and it is a consequence of love, not (pace Lewis) the condition
that makes love possible. The idea that love is irresistible is doubled in
the Tristan story by having the lovers come together as a result of their
accidental drinking of the magic love-potion: having drunk it, they are
helpless against it. The drink also has the advantage of removing moral
blame from them. It is not saying much for love, however, if it needs to
be inspired by magic, and lovers in lyrics and romances soon start insist-
ing that a love inspired solely by the loved one is altogether superior to a
potion-inspired passion.101 The affair between Lancelot and Guinevere is
calqued on that of Tristan and Isolde, but their love is spontaneous, and
its power makes the question of guilt problematic just as the potion does.
Malory’s damsel who notes Lancelot’s faithfulness to Guinevere also sug-
gests that maybe the queen’s hold over him is due to ‘enchauntement’.
That is a charge that could be brought against Elaine of Corbin, at least
so far as her getting Lancelot into her bed goes, but the significance of his
love for Guinevere is that it comes entirely of himself.
Finally and tragically, there is no way out; an affair between a married
queen and a vassal cuts off all possibilities of a happy ending. But it does
not necessitate an ending in Hell, not even for the first writer to portray
most of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere in that inhospitable English
tradition—indeed, especially not for him. Malory does not make the
morality easy for himself or his readers: in one of his largest structural
interventions in his sources, he reorganizes episodes from the Lancelot-
Grail so that the three accusations of Guinevere that threaten her with
execution at the stake mark a progression from guiltlessness (she is inno-
cent of the charge of murdering Sir Patrice), to innocence on a technical-
ity (she has not slept with any of the wounded knights lodged in her
chamber, and the charge does not extend to sleeping with Lancelot), to
guilt (Lancelot has indeed been taken with her in the night, ‘whether they
were abed other at other maner of disportis’), and he has no option but
to defend her. Whether he ‘ded ryght othir wronge’, the only possible
right thing to do is to save her from burning.102
And Malory’s God is on the side of the lovers. In an episode original to
him, placed immediately after the section in which the lovers explicitly
sleep together for the first and only time in the work, God gives Lancelot
his own personal miracle, in the healing of Sir Urry. The ‘good end’ that
Malory allows to Guinevere takes the form in this world of a retreat to a
nunnery in penitence for causing the death of her ‘most noble lord’, but
it is still an end awarded to her because of her love rather than because of
her repentance.103 Lancelot himself, who similarly abandons the world,
does so primarily because she has done the same—‘Sythen ye have taken
you to perfeccion, I must nedys take me to perfection, of ryght.’104 He
keeps faith with her, and never repents of loving her; and he dies in the
Women on Trial 323
odour of sanctity. The demand for absolute chastity in the story of the
Grail may have required Malory to have Lancelot unceremoniously
dumped outside the chamber door when he tries to approach the Grail,
but he still allows the Archbishop of Canterbury a vision of a crowd of
angels heaving him up into Heaven, ‘and the yates of heven opened
ayenst hym’.105 Bunyan’s Faithful had to exhibit a very different kind of
faithfulness unto death, and undergo a very different quest, before he
achieved such an ending.
Persuasive as it is, it is not a conclusion that could be taken forward.
Spenser, in his own Arthuriad, allows the occasional glimpse of other
Arthurian knights (an adolescent Tristram, for instance); but there is no
possible room for Lancelot, and less still for Guinevere. In this version of
his biography, Arthur will marry not a Guinevere who made her sexual
choice elsewhere, but the Gloriana who made her own choice of him.
Spenser may have been helped in writing Guinevere out of history by the
confusion of traditions about her; Holinshed, in one particularly desper-
ate moment, goes so far as to suggest that Arthur might have married
three successive women of the same name.106 Yet the change also means
that Spenser is writing himself into a dead end. It was Guinevere’s
unfaithfulness—with Mordred in Geoffrey, with Lancelot in the romance
tradition—that opened the space for Arthur’s downfall. Write Guinevere
out of history, and there is no final battle; and so the whole course of
British history is changed, down through the coming of the Anglo-
Saxons and the Normans and so ultimately the Tudors. In his account of
British history in the House of Alma, Spenser brings the story up as far as
Uther Pendragon—the present moment of the poem. The rest is told
later, in Merlin’s prophecy. In the gap between the two histories,
Guinevere and Gloriana engage in unwritten rivalry. Guinevere was the
woman rightly accused of adultery. Elizabeth, Gloriana’s human form,
was the child of a queen executed on the same charge. Yet to substitute
the virgin queen, the fairy queen, for the guilty queen of British history,
meant a rewriting of history that would threaten to erase her very exist-
ence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Restoring the rightful heir:

‘If that which is lost
be not found’
The quest to discover one’s inborn chivalry and true parentage; the child
adrift on the open seas; the elf-queen’s prophecies; the frank willingness
of Melusine or Gloriana, Lavine or Britomart, to offer themselves to the
man of their choice, whether an adventurer outcast from his patrimony
or one who does not know what that might be, and so become the found-
ing mother of a dynasty; the child falsely declared a bastard and lost to its
true father—all these memes of romance come together in the concern of
the genre with true inheritance, the rightful passing on of land and power
underwritten by Providence. Only one of the motifs discussed so far in
this book does not directly concern itself with this issue. When it comes
to identifying the true heir, magic works. No one but the rightful succes-
sor to the throne of Britain, the unknown son of Uther Pendragon, can
pull the sword from the stone. A disputed succession calls for some sign
by which the rightful king can be known, whether by magic, miracle, or
some recognizable natural or material proof. Its precise metaphysical sta-
tus matters less than its signification: it must be a sign visibly and demon-
strably beyond everyday experience, such as raises the man who bears the
mark of it beyond the common run of humanity.
The insistent concern of romance with identifying the rightful king is
a reflection of the fact that rightfulness does not necessarily show itself in
unequivocal ways, even without the complications of the heir being
brought up as a foundling of unknown parentage. A ‘lost’ heir required
some mark of identity, some equivalent to a DNA test to prove paternity.
Havelok has a light shine from his mouth when he sleeps, and also a
‘kynemerk’, a birthmark showing both his kinship and ‘kunrik’, royalty,
in the form of a gold cross on his right shoulder.1 The shoulder was the
location of badges of allegiance: men who had taken a vow to go on
Restoring the Rightful Heir 325
crusade bore a cross on the shoulder of their cloak, and the angels of
Richard II’s Wilton Diptych wear white hart badges in the same position.
Havelok’s king-mark is inscribed directly on his body by God, as wit-
nessed by the angel who explains its meaning to his bride. Valentine like-
wise bears ‘a crosse upon my shoulder, the whiche is also yelowe as the
fyne golde’, that suggests to him that he must be greater than he knows.2
Romance, however, can make sure that such markers are reliable, as his-
tory cannot. Henry III was faced with a pretender bearing ‘the mark of
royalty upon his shoulder’, who tried to assassinate him; Perkin Warbeck
backed up his claim to be Richard duke of York, the younger son of
Edward IV, with three congenital marks on his body.3
The appearance of a man claiming to be a lost heir was, in practice,
much less common than a succession of questionable legality, or a suc-
cession disputed by a known claimant. Those raised the same problems of
identifying the rightful successor, and similarly required some demon-
stration of divine arbitration. Where the ultimate power in the state was
concerned, the principles and laws of primogeniture could easily conflict
with political, national, or personal issues and interests. The Hundred
Years War was not in immediate origin a dynastic war, but it was increas-
ingly justified in terms of the claim of successive English kings to be the
rightful inheritors of the crown of France, a claim not surprisingly denied
by the French. The laws of primogeniture might be thought to pre-empt
disputes over succession, but they did not prevent, and in many cases
fuelled, the sequence of problematic accessions to the English throne from
the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Bolingbroke’s deposition of his
cousin, Richard II, left both his son and grandson with claims that were
repeatedly contested, culminating in full civil war. The Yorkists denied the
validity of the homage sworn to Henry VI by asserting Edward IV’s super-
ior line of descent from his great-great-great-great-grandfather.4 Richard
III’s usurpation diverted the crown from son to uncle, a less drastic step
in terms of the linear succession than Bolingbroke’s; but Henry Tudor’s
victory at Bosworth entailed the biggest disruption to the succession of the
crown since the Norman Conquest. It was not without reason that he set
about systematically eliminating every possible rival claimant. Henry VIII
altered the whole history of Britain through his desperation to beget a
male heir, and even after he had finally settled on naming his three legiti-
mate (or re-legitimated) children as lineal successors, Protestant politics
forced the promotion of Lady Jane Grey as a rival to Mary, and Catholic
politics urged the claim of Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s own virginity gradually hardened from being an issue of
political and diplomatic concern over potential husbands to the irrevoc-

able fact of childlessness. ‘The king shall live without an heir’:5 it was the
most dangerous of all political scenarios, and the closing decades of
Elizabeth’s reign made it a matter of increasing anxiety.
The methods of identifying the true heir offered by romance do not
immediately connect with practical politics. James VI of Scotland could
not draw an immovable sword from a stone or reveal a miraculous birth-
mark, and it would have cut little ice if he had. The insistence of romance
that there was such a thing as a true heir, however—that one person, and
one person only, carried the right to the crown, and with it the approval
of God—bore an ideological charge that might be at odds with realpoli-
tik but which was very widely subscribed to, and which carried immense
judicial, ethical, and theological weight. Dark Age heroes such as Scyld
Scefing, whose drifting ashore as a baby is mentioned in Beowulf, owe
part of their capacity as leader or ruler to the fact of their mysterious
birth; medieval heroes may often similarly be foundlings, but they owe
their potential sovereignty to the fact that they have a parentage that can
be discovered. The shift happens at about the same time as the origins of
romance, in the same period that primogeniture becomes the legal norm
for inheritance:6 for that norm is intended to make the same point, that
there will always be one claimant whose title can be proved rightful ahead
of all rivals. Romance follows to its logical and semi-miraculous conclu-
sion the legal principle that ‘Only God can make an heir’, first formulated
in the late eleventh century but carried through into English law.7 The
various systems that operated in central Europe, including the election of
the Holy Roman Emperor, translated into romance rather more awk-
wardly, but the clarity of the laws of kingship developed in England and
France constituted an open invitation to concordant narratives.
Romance is the myth of the ideology of primogeniture.
‘A myth’, wrote Northrop Frye, ‘is designed not to describe a specific
situation but to contain it, in a way that does not restrict its significance
to that one situation.’8 Every change of ruler invited authorization or
challenge from the myth of the rightful heir. Chronicles concern them-
selves with the evidence of reason and knowledge, the knowable past.
Romances are concerned with the unfolding lives of the characters within
their narratives, who have to discover the true line of descent by more
providential or intuitive means. Romances, and especially genealogical
romances, are also concerned with the future beyond their narratives, the
present of writer and readers; and so they offer predictions of that present
coded as just such providential shaping. They therefore function to
authorize the present, to insist on its rightness. The density of dynastic

concern in the sixteenth century—the renewed interest in London as
Troynovaunt; works such as William Warner’s Albions England, which
represents all of legend and history since the pagan gods as a teleological
progression towards Elizabeth; the abundance of ‘prophecy’ of post-
Arthurian history down to the house of Tudor incorporated by Spenser
into the Faerie Queene—may be in part a response to the doubtful legit-
imacy of the ruling house, the need to find a justification for it in the deep
past since it was so difficult to do so from more recent times. It is not
without reason that Spenser gives a fairy genealogy for his Henry VII
figure; a real one would have been much too embarrassing.9 Elizabeth I,
notoriously, refused to name any heir. Whether or not the story is true of
the dying queen, her power of speech gone, raising her hand to her head
in a gesture of coronation when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked her
if James should succeed her, it was a story that would have had to be
invented. The weight given to the prophecy ascribed to Thomas of
Erceldoune of the Scottish ascent of the English throne becomes more
comprehensible in this context.10 Such prophecies appeared to ground
the queen’s gesture far back in time, in the processes of destiny or
Providence rather than in any whim of a dying woman. They provide a
guarantee beyond rational human decision, a supernatural mark of
identification, that could select James VI from among any other possible
claimants to the crown.
The concern of romance with the rightful heir is closely bound up with
the justification of the present by the past, often a legendary past about
the founding of a dynasty; but it links up too with a broader principle, of
the deep psychological need for children to know who their parents are,
and of parents to find missing children.11 The close connection of that
principle in the Middle Ages with inheritance is the corollary of the
culture-specific systems of land tenure, but the urge to know one’s ori-
gins, or a parent’s hope to rediscover a lost child, runs deeper than that.
The identification of a child by means of a birthmark or of goods left with
it is the stuff of romance, but not of romance alone. Perdita is identified
by her mother’s cloak and jewel with which she was exposed, Pastorella
by the birthmark of ‘a litle purple rose’ on her breast (FQ, VI. xii. 18). The
origins of the elder son of Cymbeline are confirmed by the mantle his
mother had embroidered, his younger brother’s by a ‘mark of wonder’, a
star-shaped mole on his neck (5. 6. 366–7); both sons require such
identification since in the legendary genealogies the younger succeeded
the elder as king. Outside fiction altogether, the museum of the Thomas
Coram Foundling Hospital in London, founded in 1741, preserves a col-

lection of identifying mementoes left by the desperate mothers who
handed over their babies, many of them no more than scraps of cheap
ribbon, but all such items were immediately separated from the children
by the institution’s authorities. From there, there was no going back. A
child is especially likely to lose its identity if it is illegitimate, though
romance, with its insistent concern with noble blood lines, is prepared to
allow such children within its remit even if it is gentilesse or prowess
rather than territorial inheritance that is at issue. Gawain’s bastard son,
Gingelain, has nothing to inherit but the prowess of his father, which is
innate to him, but he still becomes the hero of one of the longest-lasting
of the romances, Lybeaus Desconus. The meme descends by linear inher-
itance from the romance to the novel: the love-child Oliver Twist, left
orphaned in the workhouse with a locket and ring, is innately good
despite all his horrific childhood experiences, and is finally recognized by
the friends and relatives of his parents even though the mementoes have
got lost along the way. Since he, and related heroes such as the foundling
Tom Jones, are illegitimate, inheritance is not a direct issue, though it can
be added in as a bonus in the hero’s happy ending. Poetic justice is served
in Tom Jones by Tom’s displacing his legitimate, but villainous, half-
brother as the chosen heir to his Allworthy uncle’s estate, and his gentil-
ity of blood and character is recognized in his marriage to the daughter
of the neighbouring squire.
Romances, whether in medieval or novel form, are often notably for-
giving to the mothers of these illegitimate children—though the novel
makes forgiveness simpler by removing them from the narrative through
death at an early stage. That the mothers of both Oliver and Tom are
more important than their fathers in the network of relationships reflects
the facts of abandonment, but it also seems to bond the children more
closely with the family than male promiscuity would do; and almost all
such stories insist that the mother was expecting marriage to her lover.
Early romances, where inheritance is at issue, sometimes end with the
son presiding over the final marriage of his long-separated parents, so
endorsing the woman’s role as a link in the chain of patrilineal descent.
The romances where an unknown son comes close to marrying his
mother, such as Sir Degaré, may well have as much to do with anxieties
over property transfer as with anxieties over incest. Degaré’s heiress
mother abandons him, with a pair of gloves that will fit no woman but
herself, after she is raped by a fairy knight; when as a young man he wins
her hand in marriage, they discover their relationship to each other in the
nick of time by means of the gloves, and he in turn is recognized by his

father by means of another such recognition token, a sword without a
point. The son is able to preside over the long-delayed marriage of his
parents, in an action that both reunites the separated family and legiti-
mates his place in the line of inheritance. In Marie de France’s Milun, an
analogous story though without the threat of incest, the rediscovered son
takes on the role of his mother’s dead father to give her away in marriage
to his own father, to mark how control of the family line and territory lies
in his disposal.
Degaré is brought up by a hermit, a figure who falls safely within the
standard character set for romance. Other foundlings may be brought up
as, and by, a peasant (as is William of Palerne, after his abduction by a
werewolf) or even a butcher (as is Octavian’s son Florent, who had ini-
tially been carried off by an ape), but the point of their romances is that
their high birth will be revealed. In the novel, this will be by superiority
of character generously helped out by coincidence and the pressure for
poetic justice and a happy ending; in romance, those are commonly
backed up by the overt intervention of Providence, a divine order that
endorses social hierarchy and the inherent superiority of noble blood.
The young Helyas, the future Knight of the Swan, has his royal parentage
revealed by an angel to the hermit who has raised him, together with a
prophecy that ‘of his lignage should descende Godfrey of Boulion, that
for to agment the holy faith of God shal conquere the holy lande of
Jherusalem’.12
Providence is especially active when the lost child is the heir to a duchy
or a kingdom. The political element in the motif might none the less seem
to exclude it from the realm of memes, those self-replicating burrs within
the mind, to place it rather as a reflection of legal principle and political
events. It was not common practice, however, to lose an heir. That is a dis-
tinctively romance twist, a surplus added to the normal customs of succes-
sion, and a surplus that insists, with its stress on the recovery of the true
claimant, on an ideal pattern of succession. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the motif is sometimes replicated in the language in which it is
described, often as a kind of punning inherent in the name of the missing
heir—or even, at a pinch, just his number. The Augustinian friar John
Capgrave celebrated the restoration of the dispossessed Yorkist line in such
terms in the dedication of his Abbreviacion of Chronicles to Edward IV:
He that entered be intrusion was Herry the Fourte. He that entered by Goddis
provision is Edward the Fourt. The similitude of the reparacioun is ful lich the
werk of the transgression, as the Cherch singith in a preface: ‘Because Adam tres-
pased etyng the frute of a tre, therfor was Crist nayled on a tre.’13
That particular argument could never have carried much political
weight, but the likening of the Lancastrian usurpation to the felix culpa,
the fault redeemed by the advent of the man who offers reparation for
transgression, witnesses to the urgency of finding a divine endorsement
for such disruptions to the succession. It also reads like an attempt to
extend to Edward not just the endorsement of Redemption history but
the kind of legitimacy of title conferred on other lost heirs by the writing
of their loss into their names. Perdita—‘the lost one’, gendered femin-
ine—is so called on the instruction of the seeming ghost of Hermione,
because she is ‘lost for ever’; but her name also promises the fulfilment of
Apollo’s prophecy, of the finding of ‘that which is lost’.14 Perdita’s kin-
dred dispossessed are more likely to have the names that mark their loss
(and by generic extension, their rediscovery) rooted in the romance
language of French rather than humanist Latin. Two of the fourteenth-
century English Breton lais make the loss and recovery of the line of
descent central to their plots, and give their protagonists names to match.
Emaré, a version of the Constance story, states at the end that its Breton
version (now unknown) was entitled ‘Playn d’Egarye’, Egaré’s lament—
Egaré, ‘the lost one’, being the name that Emaré, heiress to an emperor,
calls herself by after she has been cast away in an open boat from her own
country, and she keeps the name when she is cast adrift a second time
with her newborn son. Her true name is restored to her only when she is
herself restored, first to her husband, then to her father, and with that
restoration comes the safe descent of both kingdom and empire to her
son. Her change of name, and its use as a title for the Breton original,
highlights that central concern of the romance with the finding of the lost
one. The same concern is evident in Sir Degaré, though there the name is
baptismal: the baby’s name is given him by the hermit beside whose
hermitage he is abandoned. The later versions of the story, as exemplified
by the Percy Folio text, obscure the similarity to egaré by calling him
‘Degree’, but they keep the same explanation of the name:
Degree, to understand i-wis,
A thing that almost lost itt is;
As a thing that was almost lost agoe,
Therefore he called his name soe.15
The true etymology may in fact be from the Anglo-Norman deswarre,
‘destitute’, and the Middle English text suggests a meaning closer to that:
Degarre nowt elles ne is

But thing that not never what hit is,
Other thing that is neggh forlorn also.16
He is not only lost to his parents (and he will need to find them before
they are reconciled and married), but lost to himself, and nearly lost alto-
gether, ‘nigh forlorn’. The deswarre form in turn suggests a link with the
Dissawar of Roswall and Lillian. This is the name that the young prince,
cast out from his home court to live unknown and in poverty, assumes as
his alternative, self-alienated identity, ‘thing that not never what hit is’.
He is also dis-aware rather than unaware of his actual identity: he knows
who he is, but events have forced a disjunction between that knowledge
and its practice. He recovers his own name at the moment when he is
restored to his parents and to his rightful place in the succession, the
moment when what had been lost is found again.
The centrality of losing and finding to the motif of the missing heir
appears not only in names but in statements. Perdita is the bearer of both
effects, her name being given to her, so far as the narrative is concerned,
quite distinctly from the prophecy that inscribes her name within it. The
formulaic nature of that prophecy is indicated by the fact that it is the one
element of Apollo’s declaration that Shakespeare takes over word for
word from Greene: ‘The King shal live without an heire: if that which is
lost be not founde.’17 Something of the same idea, that loss and recovery
confirm the identity of the true heir, seems to underlie the episode in
Edward III (?1592–3) when the Prince of Wales is reported killed in battle
before he turns up on stage alive and triumphant a few lines later. The
episode would seem singularly redundant, except that it gives his father
the chance to declare,
As things long lost when they are found again,
So doth my son rejoice his father’s heart.18
The phrasing might seem to invoke the parable of the Prodigal Son, but
there is nothing remotely prodigal about the Black Prince. Rather, he
gains charisma and credibility as the true heir by such an association with
loss, as the filius perditus who is rediscovered.
the foundling and the fair unknown
A foundling in romance is always a ‘fair unknown’: a child whose parent-

age may well have been told to the reader, but is not known either to the
child himself (he is typically male) or to those who raise him. As his mys-
terious birth indicates, he is destined to be a hero; he will frequently turn
out to be a channel through whom a dynasty runs, whether baronial or
royal. A fair unknown will, however, not necessarily be a foundling,
though the children of both categories demonstrate their high lineage by
beauty, courtesy, and exceptional prowess. The fair unknown who has
not been abandoned may be brought up by his mother in ignorance of his
father, as Perceval is, or not knowing that the queen at whose court he
lives is his mother, like Generides. He may be fostered, as Arthur is by Sir
Ector, without his parentage being revealed either to himself or his
guardian; or adopted, as Lancelot is by the Lady of the Lake, who knows
his parentage but for long chooses not to tell him. He may opt to hide his
origins after dispossession, as the young Horn does in his exile after his
father has been killed. In the later years of romance when characters are
allowed to imitate their own generic memes, he may pretend anonymity
in order to win a chivalric reputation independently of his blood line, as
Malory’s Gareth does.
The fair unknown, le bel inconnu or le beau desconnu, is most often a
young man who undertakes a series of adventures in quest of his family
identity. The character who gives his name to the type—the eponymous
Bel Inconnu—makes his first recorded appearance in France in a late
twelfth-century romance by Renaut de Beaujeu. He crossed into English,
as Libeaus Desconus, in the fourteenth century, and remained a favourite
long enough to be condemned by the humanists and to put in a late
appearance in the Percy Folio manuscript.19 The Libeaus figure is
unknown even to himself, though his parentage shows through in his
chivalric prowess: he is, it transpires, the bastard son of Gawain. His
parentage is demonstrated not only by natural means but by super-
natural ones too, equivalent to the material signs by which lost heirs are
recognized. In Libeaus’ case, he is kissed by a serpent with a woman’s
face, and the kiss immediately transforms the beast into the lady for
whose deliverance he has been questing. She had been condemned to ser-
pent form by enchantment until she could kiss Gawain or one of his kin.
Libeaus duly marries her and so becomes lord of both her and her territ-
ories, his innate nobility confirmed by action, by recognition, and by the
touchstone of magic.
Although he gives his name to the type, Gawain’s son was not the first
fair unknown. It was the Perceval of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal that set
the fashion for such a figure, and who ensured its power of memetic repli-
cation. Perceval, and Le Bel Inconnu in imitation of him, are brought up
outside the court and find their place within it only in the course of their
romances, though both have a birthright to such belonging before they
know it themselves. Chrétien’s romance rapidly outgrew its initial fram-
ing as a Bildungsroman of a young man’s maturing into personal and
chivalric consciousness, and its later continuations turned it still further
away from such a model; its Middle English descendant, Sir Percyvell of
Galles, by contrast, follows the bel inconnu model much more closely. It
loses all the additional material of Chrétien’s romance, including the
Grail, in order to concentrate on this theme alone, and it is constructed
solely in terms of the unknown young man’s processes of self-discovery.
Importantly, therefore, it brings Percyvell back to his home at the end: his
mother does not die, as she does in the French, but remains alive in the
forest, mad with anxiety over her son, ready for him to find her and
restore her to health and to himself. Sir Percyvell, in other words, con-
forms more closely than its sources to the pattern of the family romance,
where rediscovery and reconciliation of parents and children constitute
the recovered equilibrium of the happy ending. It is this cluster of expec-
tations that comes to dominate such romances in England, though they
often incorporate the descent of the crown as an issue, as it is not in
Lybeaus or Percyvell. This concern remains constant from two of the ear-
liest romances in English, King Horn and Havelok, down to Shakespeare’s
own romances in the early seventeenth century.
One of the memes of the fair unknown romances is that the hero is
ignorant not only of his family identity but of his name, even if there is
no particular reason why he should not know it. The Perceval of
Chrétien’s Conte du Graal has been raised by his mother, anonymous
both to himself and the reader; she calls him only ‘fair son’, and it is not
until a crucial moment in his ethical development, when he has to face
the fact of his major chivalric and intuitive failure, that he names himself,
by intuition but rightly. Sir Percyvell names its hero to the reader in the
first stanza, though he knows himself only as ‘myn awnn modirs childe’.
Arthur, however, guesses that he is his lost nephew when he first sees him,
even though the wild young man is not at this stage interested; and the
king makes his name and parentage public when he knights him.20 The
English Libeaus, like the French Perceval, knows himself only as ‘beufise’,
beau fils (Percy, 26), and he never thinks to ask his mother for more. The
discovery of his family identity matters far more than any discovery of his
proper name, which one might expect to be the marker of his personal
identity. He continues to be known as Libeaus, the name under which
Arthur knights him before he knows any other, and half the English
manuscripts including Percy name him (as Gingelein) only to the audi-
ence at the start of the romance, never to himself at the end.
Namelessness often appears to set a challenge for the hero’s associates far
more than it troubles himself. Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet does ask
his name from the Lady of the Lake who has raised him, but she post-
pones telling him until he has completed his first adventures; to everyone
else, he is known as ‘the proud warrior from the lake, and nothing else;
for some reason he is nameless’.21 The meme of anonymity remained an
expected part of such romances well into the sixteenth century. Amadis
de Gaule, who had been cast adrift in a chest as a baby and rescued by
fishermen, is for long known only as ‘the Gentleman of the Sea’.
Women are rarely lost so comprehensively, and especially not in the
Middle Ages. Their loss is more usually threatened than actual, and it is
political loss that is at issue, not disappearance. The most typical situation
in medieval romance is for the heiress to be faced with an undesired mar-
riage to a deeply unsuitable husband, thereby threatening the transfer of
her land to an alien, tyrannical, or even Saracen, lord—a loss to good or
godly rule rather than to patrilinear succession. She is, therefore, still in
possession of her land, or at least expecting its reversion. She is embed-
ded in the territory she has the capacity to bestow, and she and her citadel
together are typically under siege; the assault is made equally on her lands
and herself. The knight who rescues her acquires land and lady as a
single package, and her desire for him encodes his rightful entry into her
patrimony.
The conventions for the heiress who has actually been dispossessed
differ both from those for such threatened women, and from those for
the male of species. She tends, for a start, to be less unknown than most
of her male counterparts. She rarely or never becomes nameless. When
such a woman is deprived of her inheritance, as happens to Goldeburh in
Havelok, she does not usually disappear from knowledge in the way that
happens to dispossessed heirs, such as Havelok himself: her identity con-
tinues to be known, whereas it is a condition of the plot that his is not.
The different treatment stems partly from the premiss that a woman’s
place is within the protection of a household, not in the outside world of
adventure: Goldeburh herself is kept under her usurping guardian’s eye
until he fulfils his vow to marry her to the highest and strongest man in
the kingdom, which he chooses to interpret literally (as he believes;
Providence has other ideas) rather than politically. Although dispos-
sessed, she still has her being within the land whose rightful possession
she embodies in her own person. An alternative way of depriving an
heiress of her true inheritance is, therefore, for the villain of the story to
charge her with bastardy, to enforce the loss of her dynastic identity
rather than her person. Leontes inflicts both on Perdita; the Knight of the
Swan acquires his territorial power through defending the heiress to the
duchy of Bulloigne from just such a charge, and then marrying her.
Robert Copland dedicated his 1512 adaptation of The Knight of the Swan
to Edward duke of Buckingham, since he ‘lynially is dyscended’ from the
couple; and the duke was far from alone in England in claiming this par-
ticular legendary ancestry. The Beauchamp earls of Warwick owned a
cup reputedly made of the gold from the neck-chains of the siblings who
had been turned into swans.22
The later sixteenth century sees a greater readiness for such stories to
allow heiresses to go missing altogether, and so to assume more of the
characteristics of the ‘fair unknown’. Medieval examples of girl
foundlings do exist—Marie de France’s Le Fresne and its Middle English
adaptation Lai le Freine are an obvious instance. The English version
survives in a single manuscript and was never printed, its interest per-
haps being depressed since inheritance is not here an issue. Girl
foundlings never become a meme of Middle English romance, and it is
not until the 1580s that they begin to form a tradition. Spenser goes so
far as to adapt the story of Sir Eglamour to change its male foundling
into a girl. The mothers of the babies share both a name and the open-
ing stages of their biographies. Sir Eglamour’s heiress-beloved,
Cristabell, is cast adrift with her new-born son after her father has for-
bidden their marriage, only for the child to be carried off by a griffin
and raised as a foundling. Spenser’s heiress Cristabell likewise gives
birth to a child after her father has forbidden her to marry the man she
loves; but this time it is a daughter, who is left in the fields for a shep-
herd to find and take home. For all her consequent raising as a shep-
herdess, Pastorella’s beauty and grace win the heart of Sir Calidore; she
is eventually united with her parents (now married, but childless), and
becomes the heir to both their lines of inheritance.23 She is one of the
models behind Perdita, who likewise enjoys a pastoral upbringing and
the love of a gentleman (a prince, indeed), though her inheritance is
even greater than Pastorella’s. Perdita’s textual ancestry is also more
varied, as it includes a foundling from outside the dominant English
tradition, the Chloe of Longus’ late Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe:
a work translated from French into English by Angel Day in 1587, and
which influenced Shakespeare’s immediate source, Greene’s Pandosto.
In keeping with his own cultural circumstances, however, Longus has
little interest in any capacity of his heroine for inheritance, and pays far
more attention to her sexual education.
A girl is generally of interest to patrilinear romance only if she has no
brothers. Innogen earns her place as the heroine of Cymbeline since she is
the heir presumptive after the abduction of her brothers in infancy, and
her story becomes one of solely personal interest when they reappear.
The Winter’s Tale is unique in the Shakespeare canon—though much
more typical of earlier romances, including the familiar Valentine and
Orson—in that Hermione’s condemnation results in the loss of the king’s
heirs, his son dying through ‘mere conceit and fear’, imaginative dread,
of what his father is doing to his mother, and his daughter exposed as a
result of his own deliberate act. That loss of Perdita becomes crucial to
the play primarily because of her brother’s death. He is unusual in
romance, as in tragicomedy, for being irremediably dead—there is no
symbolic return for him in the plot, as there is for Hermione—but the
theatre may have offered a way around that, too. It is possible, perhaps
likely, that the same boy actor played both siblings: that Mamillius does,
in the most literal sense, return in the person of his sister.
Nobody knows the identity of Perdita, or of either Daphnis or Chloe,
until the old shepherds who found them produce the tokens that accom-
panied them on their exposure as babies. Libeaus’ and Perceval’s moth-
ers know who their children are, but they are not telling; and neither for
many years does the Belarius of Cymbeline, who abducted the infants
Guiderius and Arviragus and brought them up in the wilderness. For all
the youngsters, nature wins out over nurture—Perdita through the
innate courtesy that makes her seem ‘too noble for this place’ (4. 4. 159),
the men by their readiness to engage in combat and their skill and
courage in doing so. Malory’s Tor, raised as the son of a cowherd, is taller
and stronger than any of his twelve brothers, refuses to engage in labour,
and drags his supposed father to the court to ask Arthur to knight him;
but it still requires the supernatural insight of Merlin to declare his true
parentage, as the bastard son of King Pellinore. His mother confirms that
the child is not her (future) husband’s son as soon as she is called on to
do so:
And there she tolde the kynge and Merlion, that whan she was a mayde and wente
to mylke hir kyne, ‘there mette with me a sterne knyght, and half be force he had
my maydynhode. And at that tyme he begate my sonne Torre.’24
She is however dependent on Merlin’s knowledge to identify the knight

in question, and Pellinore did not know that he had a son at all. At the
other extreme from these, a ‘fair unknown’ may himself know who he is,
but choose to keep everyone else in the dark. It is a role that can be
adopted as a form of disguise, not by altering but by concealing one’s
identity. Malory’s Gareth conceals his origins as Gawain’s brother to
spend a year in the royal kitchen, before calling in Arthur’s promise to
grant him a boon in the form of the quest to rescue the Lady Lyonesse.
His mother, far from having tried to prevent him from embarking on a
career of chivalry, as Perceval’s does, is outraged to find that he has not
been given proper recognition. He is finally identified to the world
through the inscription of his name in gold on the helmet she had
equipped him with before he left home, rather as a mother might sew
nametapes onto her son’s sports gear. By this time, in fact, the fair
unknown is so familiar a meme that Gareth himself can be allowed a con-
scious knowledge of it.
Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight combines many of the qualities of Perceval
and Libeaus, Tor and Gareth. According to the summary of the events
preceding the action of the poem in the Letter to Ralegh, he appears at
court as ‘a tall clownishe younge man’, like all those four, and claims the
boon of an adventure. That adventure, like Libeaus’, takes the form of a
lady accompanied by a dwarf, who requests help in raising a siege.25 Like
Libeaus and Perceval, Redcrosse discovers his own true parentage only
much later. He too was a foundling, discovered by a ploughman lying in
a furrow, and called ‘George’ from the earth (geo-) that to all intents and
purposes might have generated him. In allegorical terms, it did so: he is,
it transpires, a mortal, not a fairy, and therefore of the race created out of
dust and which shall return to dust—a figure for mankind in whom lies
the capacity to resist the dragon-devil. He is exceptional among
foundlings in that his immediate parentage is never revealed, though
Spenser has Contemplation tell him that he is sprung ‘from ancient race
| Of Saxon kings’ (I. x. 65). St George is, in other words, true English by
descent as well as by the exercise of saintly patronage. The suggestion that
one’s origins can be discovered by contemplation is a strange one, and
perhaps should not be pushed too far; but it has the effect of turning the
process of self-identification inwards, and so away from the processes of
physical adventure and the personal interest of a quest for family that
mark most of the fair unknowns. St George’s family is the English branch
of humankind.
How much the change alters the ideological balance of the foundling
story is more open to question. Redcrosse’s discovery in a furrow by a
ploughman might appear to open out the capacity for nobility of nature
to all men regardless of social rank (Piers Plowman, something of a best-

seller in its mid-sixteenth-century editions, was known to Spenser), but
the immediate specification of his royal ancestry nips any such notion in
the bud. Spenser in any case sets himself a particular problem since he
allegorizes nobility of character as nobility of lineage, so leaving no way
open to consider the possible separation of the two. The relationship
between gentility of blood and gentility of action had long been debated
(Chaucer, following Boethius and Dante, repeatedly comes down on the
side of virtue over descent), but it comes close to being part of the generic
definition of romance—its recognizability—that it should insist that the
two are interlinked. In the formulation offered by Stephen Hawes in his
Comfort of Lovers (c.1511), even if ‘one of the gentyll blode’ should be
brought up among ‘yomanry’:
Though he knewe not his parentes verament
Yet nature would werke so by entendyment
That he sholde folowe the condycyons doubtles
Of his true blode by outwarde gentylnes.26
This is far from meaning that nobility of blood necessarily results in good
action. Romances contain an abundance of characters who are both
noble and vicious, but they show them little sympathy or mercy:
usurpers, even from the royal line, and unknightly knights regularly
come to unpleasant ends. Noblesse oblige, and those who fail to follow its
obligations are severely punished. Still more powerful as a dominant
maxim, however, is that nobility will out. It is part of the political fantasy
of romance that high social rank is both justified and discoverable
through innate nobility even when that rank is occluded. One difference
between romance and its contiguous genres is the greater readiness of
other genres to allow the genuinely poor or low-born child to rise in the
world through outstanding prowess or virtue and through marriage to a
prince or princess.27 The scullion Havelok must be a prince; the Squire of
Low Degree must be a squire, not a scullion. Romance discovers the child
to be at the very least of gentle blood, and usually noble or royal. The one
exception that is allowed is in the case of a feral child whose true parent-
age cannot be discovered. There are plenty of instances in romance of
children known to be noble who are carried off by beasts and indeed
raised by them (examples known into the sixteenth century include
Orson, the twin sons of Octavian, and all three sons of Sir Isumbras;
Richard Johnson adds the three sons of St George), but the very myster-
iousness of the origin of children recovered from animals promises
heroism. As Sir Calidore puts it when he is trying to persuade the child-

less Matilda to take over the bawling baby he has just rescued from a bear:
It hath oftentimes bene seene,
That of the like, whose linage was unknowne,
More brave and noble knights have raysed beene,
As their victorious deedes have often showen,
Being with fame through many nations blowen
Then those, which have bene dandled in the lap.
VI. iv. 36
The fact that its new father is named Sir Bruin gives the child an obvious,
quasi-prophetic, appropriateness for the adoption: a further use for the
bearsuit, which if it cannot reproduce on its own account, can none the
less acquire offspring. Such children form a meme to themselves in
romances, and might appear to be well within the realm of fantasy; but at
least one English baronial family, the Stanleys, was quite happy to incor-
porate such a legend into their own genealogy, and to locate it within
knowable historical time. The childless Lord Lathom and his wife sup-
posedly adopted a baby boy recovered from an eagle’s nest, and made
him their heir;28 that foundling’s daughter married Sir John Stanley, who
has been suggested as the patron for the Gawain-poet, and their descen-
dants, as earls of Derby, became the subject of a number of poems in the
Percy Folio manuscript.29
If mysteriousness of origins could stand in for known nobility of
blood, ideas about high birth, inner virtue, and social mobility came to
be differently inflected as the centuries passed. A conception of inherent
nobility could cut both ways as prosperous lower gentry or even mer-
chant families increasingly married upwards: such social elevation could
be seen as undermining the link between blood and virtue, or as endors-
ing the rise on the grounds that it brought with it a justifying assumption
of virtue, of gentilesse of character rather than descent. If a steward’s son
such as Guy of Warwick could marry an earl’s daughter, or the Squire of
Low Degree marry the heiress of the kingdom of Hungary, and their ele-
vation be justified by the pre-eminence of their chivalry, then the way was
open for other forms of public action to be taken to fill the requirements
of high rank. That it was in practice usually wealth rather than virtue that
underlay such transactions was a fact that did not need exploring, though
it profited from mystifying. It was not until James VI and I turned prop-
erty or income from being a qualifying condition for knighthood into a
factor that rendered it compulsory regardless of either rank or gentility of
character, that the ‘gentleman’ decisively replaced the knight as the social
ideal.
There is one social rank, however, that insists on a direct and provable
blood line; and that is royalty, in the person of the true heir to the king-
dom. In romance, that legitimacy is shown by sovereign qualities of good
rule and self-rule, by divine endorsement in the working out of the plot,
and often by supernatural signs too.
the descent of the crown
The romances that tell the story of lost heirs and their recovery of their
kingdoms are the clearest example of the objective of romance to pro-
mote the well-being of the realm, the common wele. They might seem to
have little to say to an established sovereign, but their insistence on pre-
senting models of good rulers, and their tendency to equate tyranny with
a false claim to the crown, both promote the idea that the rightful king is
also the good king. Prowess in battle, faithfulness in marriage (a consis-
tent element of English romance, for men as much as for women), due
reward of his followers, firm rule in accordance with the law, and
keeping his word, all mark a kingship that carries the approval of God
and the goodwill of the people. Failure in any of those can result in trou-
ble, a suspicion that all is not well. Inability to defend the land can result
in its loss; tyranny that overrides law invites rebellion; a bastard son can
threaten the safe descent of the crown. The fiction of romance may be
that the rightful king will be a man who enacts all those virtues, but its
covert message is that a king who hopes to keep his crown would be wise
to do the same. The fiction that a rightful monarch must also rule well
was preserved in the repeated claim by rebellious barons that they aimed
to remove the advisers who had supposedly misled him rather than him-
self. Romance proffers a more polarized good and evil, a simplified ethi-
cal issue in place of a complex political or legal problem. Tyrants are
therefore likely to be usurpers rather than rightful inheritors; a disputed
succession will have a single identifiable right outcome, a right ‘issue’—a
word, as Helen Hackett has pointed out, that embraces both ‘outcome’
and ‘offspring’.30 The dispossessed heir of romance embodies that right
issue in both its senses, and proves its rightfulness by the wisdom and
capability of his rule, his readiness to uphold and rule by the law.
There is a series of memes for the disappearance and return of such
figures. They may be lost through their father’s false suspicion and exile
of their mother, like Valentine and Orson, or through the machinations

of a mother-in-law, like Constance and her son. They may be displaced
by a usurper, either a wicked relative or an invader. They may recover
their loss through active prowess, whether directly aimed at retrieving the
crown or not, or through the intervention of Providence or a divinely-
guided fate or fortune without their taking much of an active role. One
story outline, which itself takes on the quality of a replicable meme rather
than just a repeated plot, is recurrently found in Anglo-Norman romance
and remains distinct to England, and that is the return of the heir from
over the sea to claim his throne: the story of Horn and his descendant
Ponthus; of Henry Bolingbroke and Henry Tudor; and eventually of
Charles II.31
The rightfulness can lodge in the man who becomes king through mar-
riage to the heiress as well as in a male heir apparent, and especially if he
himself is also the victim of wrongful dispossession. John Capgrave, the
friar who tries to inscribe the accession of Edward IV into salvation his-
tory, gives an epitome for such a story—in effect, a miniature archetype
for this kind of romance—in the course of his world chronicle. Benighted
while hunting, the Emperor Conrad takes shelter with a hermit who is in
fact an earl that he had banished. That same night the countess, who had
accompanied her husband into exile, bears a child, and a voice
announces to the emperor that this child will succeed him. He, scorning
‘that so pore a a child schul regne aftir him’, orders his servants to kill it
and bring him the heart. Taking pity on the baby, they bring him instead
the heart of a hare, abandoning the child in the forest to be found and
raised as their own by a childless duke and his wife.
Whan the child was growe the emperour dyned with this duke, the child stood
before him, and he gan remembre the face of that child whech he comaunded to
be slayn, desired him of the duk, led him forth, sent him to the emperesse with
swech a lettir, ‘That day that ye receyve this child, ordeyn for him that he be ded’.
So happed the child for to slepe in a prestes hous be the weye, and the prest red
the lettir, of pité he raced the clause and chaungid it into this sentens, ‘That day
ye receyve this child, in moost goodly hast wedde him to oure doutir’. Whan the
emperour cam hom and sey that Goddis ordinauns wold not be broke, took it
more at ese, specialy whan he knewe what man was his fader.32
Providence has to work especially hard on this one, employing directly
miraculous interventions (the voice of prophecy), apparent chances (the
emperor’s arriving at the hermitage), and a series of co-operative indi-
viduals (the royal servants, the duke, the priest). The restoration of the
earl and the reunion of the foundling with his true family are left implicit
in the emperor’s relief at discovering the young man’s identity, by means

that the story does not trouble to make explicit. What matters is God’s
fixing of the succession to the empire, and the need for mere mortals,
even an emperor, to submit to the divine will in the matter.
Such an explicit sense of almost magical rightness, or of the supernat-
ural or Providence acting independently of purposeful human agency, is
none the less unusual—or at least in the case of men, who are expected to
show their fitness for rule by their own capacity for action. Providence is
most likely to make a direct intervention on behalf of either a child or a dis-
possessed woman, whose age or gender debars them from most such
action, and the behaviour of the men falls into place around that provi-
dential shaping. Perdita’s recovery accordingly happens independently of
any deliberate action on her part or her father’s; it is desired, and the
prophecy leaves open the possibility that it may happen, but it is not some-
thing that can be pursued through human means. The bear in this play
does not rescue the baby, as it does in Valentine, but by killing Antigonus
at the same moment that his ship is lost it ensures that her whereabouts are
unknown, and that she cannot be recovered by the exercise of human will.
The beast’s attack is the last act of irrational violence in the play. After this
point, young love, patience, and penitence hold centre stage, and finally
restore at least some of what Leontes has destroyed; but they do so, in
terms of the characters’ own intentions within the larger plot, by accident.
So far as a lost male heir is concerned, by contrast, and given the stress
universal in the genre on the hero’s abilities as well as his lineage, it is a
very small step from God’s identification of him to his own replacing of
himself on the throne and proving his fitness to rule in the process. Full-
scale romances accordingly often sideline any overt intervention of the
divine even while implying that the pattern taken by the story is provi-
dentially guided. Arthur is defined as the rightful king while he is still a
boy by the miracle of the sword in the stone, but he has to set about win-
ning and consolidating his kingship by force of arms. Romances such as
King Horn and its descendants down through the Renaissance open with
the exile or dispossession of the hero as a child and his miraculous sur-
vival, and end with his winning back his kingship, his rightful place in
society, through the exercise of his own capacities. What happens
between those two events typically takes the form of a journey or quest,
with all the demands that questing places on the courage, integrity,
and prowess of the hero. It need not be specifically a quest for the throne
that is his by right, but it is designed to show the audience that right,
capability, and divine endorsement go together.
In Havelok, whose antecedents in legendary chronicle go back to the

generation after Geoffrey of Monmouth, the heiress Goldeburh carries
almost as much of the weight of the narrative as does Havelok himself,
though she cannot take any part in the exercise of prowess that enables
her husband to win back both her throne and his own. In her half of the
story, the earl who displaces her sets out not to bypass a prophecy but to
foil the consequences of a vow made to her dying father, that he will
marry her to the strongest man in the kingdom. He chooses a husband
who will at once fulfil the letter of his vow while, he believes, negating her
political danger: the tough young Havelok, employed as a scullion in
Lincoln. What neither of them knows is that Havelok is in fact the sub-
ject of an analogous narrative, being the rightful heir to Denmark; his
guardian too seizes the throne, and believes (like Capgrave’s emperor)
that he has had Havelok murdered. The intended murderer, however,
realizes who the child is when he sees the light that comes from his mouth
as he sleeps and the gold cross on his shoulder, and he escapes with him
to England. The same signs in due course also identify Havelok to
Goldeburh and to his Danish supporters. It is however his strength in
fighting, not the miraculous cross, that enables him to fulfil his prophetic
dream of clasping Denmark in his arms and England in his hand, the
hand by which Goldeburh has taken him in marriage. The future of their
various territories is assured by their having fifteen children, all of whom
become kings or queens. The development of the legend may have been
influenced by the desire of the eastern areas of England with which the
narrative is concerned to justify their earlier embracing of Danish rule.33
Here, the king of Denmark does indeed acquire overlordship of the area,
but he rules in right of his English wife; and the markings on his body give
divine sanction to his position.
Some of the most interesting things about this romance happened to it
long after its composition. The story appeared as a regular part of the
prose Brut, where the names of the protagonists are given as Curan and
Argentille.34 In that form, it was printed by Caxton as part of his
Chronicles of England; and it was borrowed from there by William
Warner for his encyclopaedic history of Britain from the pagan gods to
the Tudors, Albions England. The story of Curan appears in the first edi-
tion, of 1586, and again in all the later redactions that gradually extended
the story forwards, ultimately to the accession of James I. Warner’s ver-
sion has already been mentioned as the likely source for the love-interest
side of Lodge’s Rosalynde, and so ultimately for As You Like It.35 By
the time of the play, the political force of the story is becoming much
attenuated: in the play, we never even discover what territory Rosalind’s

father is duke of. Warner’s own story enjoyed a lively afterlife independ-
ent of its original context, in verse retellings and eventually in popular
ballads; a partly word-for-word version was reprinted as an ‘old ballad’ in
1725, under the title of ‘A Song of the Strange Lives of Two Young Princes
in England’, by which time any suggestion of historicity was thoroughly
drained out of it.36 The versions of the story down to Warner, by con-
trast, all stress the political power invested in the dispossessed daughter.
He himself carries this through to the point where he makes her a golden-
haired beauty who could take the prize from the three goddesses in a
new Judgement of Paris: a convention that defines her as an avatar of
Elizabeth herself. That, however, was not a point that could be reached
historically until much later in his verse chronicle, after the Tudor
usurpation had been negotiated; had been turned into the romance myth
of the recovery of the lost scion of the royal house.
romance after bosworth
Every one of the English kings from Edward II to Henry VII suffered
either deposition or a disputed crown, or both. Almost all had their claim
to the throne contested by someone who insisted that the incumbent sov-
ereign was a usurper, and that he himself was the true heir dispossessed
of his right. Several of those monarchs in turn declared that they them-
selves were just such true heirs, reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. The
romance archetype of the dispossessed heir could thus be invoked either
by whoever occupied the throne, or whoever wanted to displace him. It
could be especially powerful if it appeared that the rightful sovereign
might be returning from apparent death, on the model close to the
generic heart of romance. There were persistent rumours that Edward II
had not in fact been murdered at Berkeley Castle, rumours substantial
enough for his brother to rebel in his cause; there is even some evidence
that they may have been true.37 There was a similar widespread belief that
Richard II remained alive and had taken refuge in Scotland,38 a belief that
encouraged Henry V’s ceremonial reburial of his corpse: bury a king
twice, and perhaps he will stay dead. The mercy initially shown to the
deposed Henry VI, who was briefly restored to his throne, showed the
still greater dangers in leaving a former monarch alive; after his murder,
the widespread belief in his power to work miracles, which did at least
assume his death, must have come almost as a relief. Henry VII lived in
fear of the remaining members of the Yorkist line, real or pretended, who
might, or did, claim a prior right to the throne. Much the most danger-
ous of them, to whom the government assigned the identity Perkin
Warbeck, claimed to be Richard duke of York, son of Edward IV and the
younger of the ‘princes in the Tower’, who had, so he said, been spared
by a repentant murderer at the time when his brother was killed; and in
his case, as in Edward II’s, it is impossible to be entirely certain that the
story was not true.39 The extinction of the separate Yorkist line did not
mark the end of rumour. Mary Tudor found herself facing a pseudo-
prophecy connected with Thomas of Erceldoune, to the effect that
Edward VI had not died, but was alive and in prison and preparing to
return:
Then shal rise the joyful sice,
For sice was lost, and sice was found,
And sice was buried in the ground,
And sice shal rise and wear the crown
—a ‘sice’ being a throw of six at dice. The same rumour was current well
into Elizabeth’s reign, though by her later years the same prophecy seems
to have been taken as a prediction of the coming of James VI.40
Even without the problem of a return from death, the monarchy was
recurrently contested. Every one of the fifteenth-century kings had to
contend with open or planned rebellion from the descendants of Edward
III—the Mortimers and the related Yorkists opposing the Lancastrian
dynasty; the Lancastrians opposing the Yorkists; the Yorkists torn by self-
division when Richard III deposed the uncrowned Edward V; the last
Lancastrian scion defeating Richard in battle but still having to fight off a
series of Yorkist pretenders. The victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth did
not at the time seem like the successful break with the troubled past that
the Tudor myth insisted it was. It was itself the most traumatic scission in
the lineal descent of the crown since 1066, when Harold was killed at
Hastings (or, as rumours then too insisted, survived to live on as a her-
mit). Henry Tudor was, like both the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, a
descendant of Edward III, who had by this time been dead for over a cen-
tury; but in his case he came through the line of the Beauforts, the bas-
tard children of John of Gaunt by his long-standing mistress. They had
been granted legitimacy when he finally married her, but when the legit-
imation was renewed by Parliament under their half-brother Henry IV,
they were specifically excluded from any claim to the succession.
Moreover, if Henry Tudor’s claim had been a dynastic one, it would have
been self-cancelling, since his lineal claim came through his mother, the
redoubtable Lady Margaret Beaufort, and she, being very much alive, had
the prior claim to the throne, though she never pursued it for herself. He
took the crown by virtue of conquest—famously, Sir William Stanley
found the coronet Richard III had been wearing, under a rosebush, and
crowned him with it on the field of battle—but conquest was no guaran-
tee of right, however much one might claim (as Henry of course did) that
the victory had been granted by God. He presented it indeed as a verum
Dei iudicium, a quasi-judicial ordeal that showed the true judgement of
God by direct supernatural intervention.41 He strengthened his hold on
the throne by marrying the prime Yorkist heiress, Edward IV’s daughter
Elizabeth; but he deliberately waited several months before doing so, to
put it beyond doubt that he meant to claim the throne in his own right
and not hers. When Parliament confirmed him as king, instead of out-
lining his claims to the title, they settled for acknowledging that he was.42
It was, however, not enough to be king: it was necessary to be seen as
the rightful king, too. Henry’s very name argued against him. The royal
name Plantagenet had come to be applied to the entire line of kings since
Henry II; but this new Henry was not a Plantagenet, he was a Tudor. John
Fisher, in his memorial sermon for Henry’s mother, recounted how St
Edmund himself had bidden her to marry Edmund Tudor, thereby lend-
ing divine approval to his paternity;43 but the fact remained that it was an
outlandish surname, lacking the respectability of either English or Anglo-
Norman, and further lacking in dignity when pronounced in the Welsh
fashion as Tidder. His initial advance across England was not helped by
the absence of a resonant royal name:
They called him Henry Tydder, in scorn truely,
And said, in England he shou’d wear no crown.44
The Welsh were commonly regarded as a wild people on the margins of
civilization (and not just by the English: in France too, Perceval de
Galles, Perceval of Wales, was marked as being reared beyond the reach
of courtliness by his cognomen), who had been properly subjugated by
the cultured English. To the Welsh, Henry could be regarded as the mab
darogan, the son of prophecy; and Merlin, that prophet among the
undead, was given wide credence in Wales and beyond. That was never
going to carry much weight with the English, however, and especially
since the messianic child was not a part of Merlin’s or any other prophe-
cies in general circulation in England. It was true that the Welsh were
also recognized as being the last of the British, and that Henry could
therefore claim to be a descendant not only of Brut, but of Cadwallader,

last of the British kings; Spenser has Merlin incorporate the point in his
account of the descent of the crown, noting that ‘a sparke of fire’ from
Anglesey, the ancestral home of the Tudors, will ultimately burst into
flame:
So shall the Briton bloud their crowne againe reclame.
FQ, III. iii. 48
He does not mention that the Yorkists, through a Mortimer marriage to
a daughter of Llewellyn the Great a couple of centuries earlier, could, and
did, claim exactly the same blood line. In neither case did the connection
make any practical difference to a claim to the English crown. It rein-
forced an ancestral genealogy, the confirmation of the present by the
past; but it could not in itself create any such confirmation.
It was with some reason therefore that Henry set about trying to make
the fact of his kingship seem both right and necessary, and in conformity
with deep cultural ideals: the ideals embodied in romances, and dynastic
romances in particular. This was always secondary to more practical
measures (notably the elimination of every remaining Plantagenet), but
the propaganda gradually worked towards a consolidation of the new
regime, until by the time of Elizabeth the whole Tudor myth was well
entrenched. The best-known aspect of this campaign exploited his Welsh
ancestry for its connection with King Arthur.45 It was not possible to
argue in detail for descent from him (though it was sometimes men-
tioned in vague terms), since Arthur had notoriously died with no legit-
imate son. It was indeed risky to press the lineal argument too far, since
the line of descent from Uther Pendragon passed after Arthur to his
eldest daughter, who had married King Lot of Lothian—a fact that was
not lost on the Scots, who made it a live issue in fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century historiography so as to turn on its head the English
claim to the throne of Scotland.46 The alternative legend that Arthur
himself might return—that he was, in the formulation given at the end of
the Morte Darthur, rex quondam rexque futurus—could be exploited to
some degree but was again not anything that provided a plausible foun-
dation for a rightful title. Henry’s naming of his eldest son as Arthur may
have had more to do with naturalizing the Welshness of the Tudors than
with making any claim to be a returning king, though court poets were
happy to note the conjunction.47 Henry VIII instigated the painting
of the Round Table at Winchester, perhaps to make a point about his
own imperial ancestry to the emperor Charles V.48 Elizabethan courtly
literature made rather more of Arthur’s connection with the Tudor line,
though in more metaphorical fashion—on which more below.
What Henry lacked in lineage could be made up for by association, and
especially by arguments concerning divine approval. It was reported that
‘Henry the saint’, Henry VI, had prophesied that ‘the Earl of Richmond
must be King of England’, and Shakespeare incorporates the scene into
Henry VI Part 3.49 Stephen Hawes concluded his allegorical quest romance
The Example of Vertue with a eulogy of the king that upgrades his coming
from the reappearance of the red rose ‘kepte ryght longe in close’ to some-
thing almost messianic, ‘to be our bote | After our bale sente by grete
grace’; and his mother’s joy at his victory over his enemies is extended from
the romance analogy of the mother united with her long-lost son,
A ioyfull metynge than bytwene
The moder and the sone so dere,
to something more reminiscent of the joys of the Blessed Virgin.50 The
poem seems to have been completed in 1509, at the time of Henry’s death:
it includes a hasty coda on the next Henry’s accession. Even a generation
on from Bosworth, the Tudor usurpation was clearly still felt to be in
need of divine sanction.
The romance model of the dispossessed heir made a quieter appear-
ance on the Tudor scene, in the form of the commissioning by Lady
Margaret Beaufort in 1489 of Caxton’s translation of the French prose
romance Blanchardyn and Eglantine. Any political point it might be
making is so understated that it cannot have served much propaganda
purpose in the country at large, despite its dissemination in printed form;
but it was the only secular work that the pious Lady Margaret ever com-
missioned, and the choice seems likely to have been driven by political
analogy rather than just a desire for entertainment.51 It tells the story of
how Blanchardin, son of the king of Frise, leaves home to pursue a life of
chivalry, falling in love with Eglantine in the course of it. During his
absence, the kingdom is overrun by Saracens, and the king himself cap-
tured. Blanchardin eventually drives them out, is recognized as the true
heir, succeeds his father, and marries his beloved. The events are all
romance commonplaces, but they also have the potential to be mapped
onto the events of Henry’s own life: his strategic retreat from England to
Brittany is dignified by association with Blanchardin’s leaving home for
the exercise of prowess; the Yorkist tenure of the throne parallels the
abeyance of rightful rule in Frise; the imprisonment of Henry VI matches
that of Blanchardin’s father; and Henry’s own battling for, and winning
of, the crown offer an analogy for the hero’s restoration to the true line of
succession. These parallels gain a sharper specificity, however, from the
one significant change that Caxton makes to his source. In the French,
the heroine is known consistently by her byname, la pucelle orgueilleuse
d’amours, the maiden proud in love. Caxton names her emphatically as
early as his dedication to Lady Margaret, as Eglantine.52 And the eglan-
tine, French englantier, was not just a flower of general appropriateness
for a heroine: the similarity of the word to ‘England’ or ‘Angleterre’ led
on occasion to the equation of the eglantine with the country, and not
least with the English rose.53 Blanchardin’s winning of Eglantine can thus
become a reflection of Henry’s marriage to the English princess, the ‘lily-
white rose’ in the ‘glorious garden’ of England, Elizabeth of York.54 The
romance itself symbolizes Eglantine as just such a flower, as the hero
walks in a garden and sets his eyes on a rose
that of flagraunt odoure and of beaulte passed all the other; wherfore upon her he
dyde arrest his eyen, and said in this maner, ‘Ha, noble rose, preelect and chosen
byfore all other flouris that ben about the, how be it that they be right fayre, thou
puttest into my remembraunce thurgh the fayrnes that I see in the, the right
perfyt and excellent beaulte of myn owne goode lady.’55
The fact that the romance was not composed for the occasion, but pre-
existed the events it could be taken to parallel, increases its political value:
the biography of the romance hero who recovers his throne and marries
the princess brings with it all the confirming ideologies of royal self-
representation without their even having to be invented for the occasion.
The ability of a text to acquire a topical weight unforeseen by its orig-
inal author is demonstrated even more strikingly in the case of Oliver of
Castille, a French prose romance translated into English by Henry
Watson in 1518, and printed by Wynkyn de Worde, who had been the
printer to Lady Margaret until her death in 1509. Its co-hero, who, like the
first Tudor prince of Wales, is named Arthur, has a right to the crown of
England through his marriage to the heiress to the throne. At the end
of the narrative, however, when the king dies, his cousin, the duke of
Gloucester, seizes the crown.
Wherfore [Arthur] sente in to Englande for to knowe and it were by the consente
of the noblemen of the countree, and for to knowe yf that he sholde not be
receyved for kynge as reason wolde. It was answered to hym naye.56 Wherfore he
assembled a grete company of folke, and with grete puyssaunce came and
descended in Englande, and dyde so much by force of armes, after dyvers grete
bataylles, that he that sayd hym kynge was taken and put in pryson, where as he
never yssued oute after. After he made hym to be crowned kynge as reason wolde,
and the Englysshemen receyved hym for theyr lord.57
A reader in 1518 could not but have made the equation with a more recent
usurping duke of Gloucester, for all that he had been a part of the story
since it was first composed in France in the mid-fifteenth century; and
with that equation comes the strong implication that the more recent
usurpation too had happened without the consent of the nobles, who
welcomed the new king in accordingly. Even more overtly than
Blanchardyn, the episode suggests that Henry’s taking of the throne was
a restoration of the rightful line, not a violent disruption of it. In one
significant other way, however—a way that perhaps underlay the post-
ponement of the translation until after Henry’s death—it offered a much
more undesirable analogy, for Arthur claims the throne in right of his
wife. By 1518, that was no longer a live issue, since Henry VIII was safely
on the throne, inheriting in his own person the claims of both his father
and his mother. Henry VII would not have wanted any romance model
that suggested he reigned by any right but his own.
It was, therefore, outside court circles that a rather different romance
account of the Tudor takeover took place—one that dealt directly with
the historical personages involved, even if it gave a fictional spin to what
happened, and which made Henry much less of a central figure. The
protagonist this time is not the dispossessed Tudor prince but the dis-
possessed Yorkist princess. The text in question is Lady Bessy: a ballad-
style romance preserved both among the papers of the Elizabethan
antiquary John Stow and in the Percy Folio manuscript, but which on
internal evidence is likely to go back at least to the early sixteenth cen-
tury.58 It is one of the poems in the Percy Folio written to celebrate the
Stanley family (descendants of the foundling in the eagle’s nest), and to
promote, or invent, the part they played in national history. The poem
recounts the events of 1484–5 as engineered by Elizabeth of York herself,
who is far from being the passive object of dynastic marriage. She dis-
covers that she is herself the subject of a prophecy that she will become
queen (the fact that she is literate is mentioned with some awe—a
measure of the poem’s distance from the highly cultured royal court):
Shee tooke a booke in her hande,
And did read of prophecye,
How shee shold be Queene of England,
But many a guiltelesse man first must dye.
Percy, iii. 327 (165–8)
She accordingly determines to marry Henry Tudor, and enlists a reluc-

tant Lord Stanley’s help in sending an envoy from herself to him in exile,
along with three mule-loads of treasure to assist him in an invasion—‘to
bring her love over the sea’, in the time-honoured fashion for a returning
English heir.59 In comprehensive contradiction of historical fact, she is
present to watch the aftermath of the battle of Bosworth, scornfully
mocks the corpse of her uncle Richard, and promptly marries Henry:
Great solace it was to see,
I tell you, masters, without lett,
When the red rose of mickle price
And our Bessye were mett.
A Bishopp them marryed with a ringe,
They two bloods of hye renowne.
Bessye sayd, ‘Now may wee sing,
Wee tow bloods are made all one.’
Percy, iii .363 (1063–70)
And the Stanley brothers crown them jointly on the spot. This is history
rewritten as romance, with Elizabeth of York in the role of both the dis-
possessed heiress and the desiring woman; Henry Tudor is merely her
knight in shining armour. Lady Margaret Beaufort had promoted the
Tudor claim on the romance model of the prince denied his right of suc-
cession; a provincial ballad-maker reworked the same events to turn
them into a Yorkist romance of a dispossessed princess.
Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth, when he eventually got round to it, was
not the end of the story. The self-styled Richard duke of York, Perkin
Warbeck, appeared to have the perfect biography for a fair unknown:
escaping from the assassination planned for him by the tyrant usurper
through the miraculous softening of the heart of the murderer, wander-
ing as an unrecognized exile, finally being recognized by his own inher-
ent nobility and by certain tokens on his body. He was supported over
several years by his putative aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, and treated as
what he claimed to be by various of the crowned heads of Europe. James
IV of Scotland gave him a close relative of his, Lady Katherine Gordon, in
marriage. Romance, however, celebrates those whom God or fortune or
history favours, and Warbeck was not one of those, whatever his real
identity: he was hanged in 1499, a long eight years after he had appeared
on the political scene. The depth of the threat he offered to the Tudor
dynasty may be measured by the fact that it was not until after the Stuarts
were safely on the throne, and the question of what had happened to the
Plantagenets had receded into the distant past, that the episode became a
subject of discussion, and indeed controversy, among historians and
antiquarians.60 It was a story well worth dramatizing, as John Ford real-
ized, though not as either romance or comedy; his play was printed in
1634 under the title of The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck: A Strange
Truth—a title that tacitly acknowledges the resistance of history to happy
endings, and paradoxically calls attention to the impossibility of being
quite sure what the ‘truth’ was. Warbeck’s claims are strenuously denied
by Ford’s Henry VII, but its hero never admits to being anything but what
he claims to be. His consistent nobility and the steadfast love for him of
Lady Katherine—both historically attested—offer an endorsement to his
claim that neither history nor the play disentangles.61
As the regime established itself, the myth it had created to disguise the
fact of usurpation began to look increasingly plausible. By the time the
house of Tudor had been in power for a century, the propaganda sur-
rounding Henry’s granddaughter could take as fact that God must indeed
have endorsed the entry of the dynasty, must have given that verum iudi-
cium at Bosworth. With the challenges to Henry VII and the troubles
attending on the succession to Henry VIII safely in the past, the Tudors
could be represented as the providential happy ending for the realm after
the curse of the deposition of Richard II had worked itself out. That, too,
could appear as a felix culpa, an event of apparent disaster that God could
yet turn to a greater good. ‘England hath long been mad, and scarred
herself’, but that dark night of the nation can now be turned to sunny
prosperity through the descendants of the red and white roses. This is
how Shakespeare has Henry represent it at the end of Richard III:
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together,
And let their heirs—God, if his will be so –
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days.
. . . Peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say ‘Amen’.
5. 8. 29–34, 40–1
By the end of the speech, Henry’s voice is indistinguishable from that of
a chorus, or of the playwright. It offers a pseudo-prediction, an endorse-
ment by the past of the present of dramatist and audience; and in this
present, Elizabeth I and peace are effectively synonymous. It sounds like
the end of history, and an end not in apocalypse but in blessing. But
Elizabeth was ageing, with no heir named, and the fear that the queen and
peace would die together was becoming increasingly insistent.
dangerous virginity
The potent mix of the ardently desiring virgin, dynastic succession, and
the ending of romance in the harmony of rightful monarch and state
became explosive in late Elizabethan England. What was needed was for
Elizabeth to become what Donald Maddox has called a ‘mega-mother’,
like Melusine: the foundress of a great dynasty whose children would
bear the mark of their originator.62 The continental courtly model of
wooing, in which the man pined for a distant and unresponsive lady—
the model found in many of the troubadour poets and given massive cur-
rency by Petrarch—might have evident advantages as an image for the
relationship of an unmarried queen and her courtiers, but the very fact
that it had been found so useful for the lyric and the sonnet is an indica-
tion of its weaknesses in a political context. It is static; it has no opportu-
nity for expanding into narrative; and its existence depends on the
infinite deferral of fulfilment. The succession to the English throne
demanded a story that moved forward, that promised a future in the
form of offspring, and which guaranteed that future before the queen
reached the limit of her mortality. There is an evident impossibility in
writing a foundational romance for a virgin queen. It is an easy matter for
Spenser to write of her ‘great auncestry’ (FQ, II, Proem 4), even to cast
her as a fairy and potential foundress; it is much harder for him to
realize that potential, to carry that ancestry forwards to a great posterity.
The story of England threatens to turn into the story of a missing heir, not
shaped as a romance but bringing all the horrors of a disputed succession.
The heir to Elizabeth is not lost and awaiting recovery, but not there
at all.
The experiences of the young princess had offered closer analogues for
being reshaped as a romance, and specifically a romance of dispossession,
for she herself had come close to losing both her birthright and her life.
Her dynastic identity was threatened when she was declared a bastard by
her father; she was imprisoned by her sister, in imminent danger of exe-
cution. The parallels between Anne Boleyn’s history and that of queens
and empresses falsely accused of adultery have been outlined in the
previous chapter. Elizabeth would scarcely have known her mother, and
never went out of her way to recall her memory, but on her deathbed she
still wore on her finger a locket-ring that contained portraits of both
Anne Boleyn and herself.63 Although Elizabeth never became a
foundling, never left the land she came so energetically to embody, the
troubles of her early life could be made conformable without too much
stretching to the romance of loss and recovery. William Warner’s move
to mirror her in the person of Argentille, his Goldeburh figure in Albions
England, demonstrates how the parallels could work, as he reshapes his
heroine’s story to recall Elizabeth’s dangerous life before her accession.
She disguises herself as a milkmaid to avoid her usurping uncle’s plots to
render her politically safe: a state of life, according to Foxe’s Ecclesiasticall
Historie and recycled in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know not Me, You
Know Nobody, that the princess Elizabeth had sighed for while she was in
exile from the court at Woodstock.64 Even while Argentille is in disguise,
she is described as worthy to defeat the goddesses in the Judgement of
Paris—a confirmation of Argentille-Princess Elizabeth’s inherent ability
to rule even when her royal identity is still unknown, and an especially
fashionable compliment to Elizabeth at the time Warner was writing
(George Peele had made the same equation a couple of years earlier in his
Arraignment of Paris, a play written for presentation before the queen).
Warner’s declared intention to shape English history as a necessary pro-
gression towards the House of Tudor, and Elizabeth in particular, turns
his Argentille into not just a figure modelled on the queen, but a kind of
historical prototype or figure for her, rather as Old Testament characters
and episodes prefigure their fulfilment in the New. Such a reading of his-
tory enables him to make connections without committing himself to the
precision of allegory, though his handling of his heroine’s choice of hus-
band is none the less interesting. His Argentille is committed by history
to marrying, though on her own terms. By the time Warner was writing,
any possibility of matrimony for the queen was past. He accordingly
rewrites his heroine’s marriage as the first great step on the way to
uniting the various little kingdoms into what was at this time first named
England. Elizabeth had once kept over-pressing enquiries about her
marital intentions at bay by claiming that she was married to her
people; Argentille’s marriage becomes an act of unification for England
itself.65
If it was possible to cast the young princess retrospectively as the
recovered heiress, the very fact that Elizabeth was not married, and by the
1580s was clearly not going to be married, made for difficulties in finding
parallels in romance heroines for her present state, whether on the
courtly or Petrarchan model, or as the actively desiring heroine, or as the

founding mother. She could be celebrated as Diana, goddess of chastity,
but a lady of romance who is inviolably chaste is something of a contra-
diction in terms. She could be incorporated into the tradition of the Nine
Women Worthies—a more fluid group than the male set, sometimes
consisting solely of Amazons, sometimes including great Old Testament
women such as Deborah—but there was not much that could be done
with such a topos other than list them. The problem was compounded for
the courtiers and poets seeking an English role to cast her in by the rather
small number of ladies familiar from the native romance tradition who
were the objects rather than the initiators of wooing (she being the object
of their own adoration), but even when such heroines announced their
reluctance to admit suitors (like Felice, or Eglantine, or Chaucer’s Emily),
their major function in their romances was to have their desire for inde-
pendence or virginity overridden. One solution eventually adopted at
Elizabeth’s court was to find an English princess who was yet adored in
the full continental fashion, in the form of the Oriana of Amadis de Gaule.
Oriana was the daughter and heiress to a king of England by the name of
Lisuarte: an evident impossibility in historical terms, and therefore
avoiding all the awkward implications of history. It is true that Amadis
does eventually win her (and is indeed granted her sexual favours), but
the sheer length of the romance made the deferral of desire before that
point was reached seem pretty infinite.
Another solution was to associate her, not with the heroines of
romance, but with the greatest of British heroes: the returned Arthur.
The comparison was helped by the belief, inscribed by Foxe into his
Ecclesiasticall Historie, that Arthur had helped to defend the true Church
against the pagan Saxons, just as Elizabeth defended the true Church of
England against papist superstition. Sir George Buck insisted that ‘hir
coming was foretold by the tale of the return of K. Artur as some and not
absurdly interpret it’.66 Other writers, most particularly Spenser, inter-
wove her history with Arthur’s in more complex ways. He claims in the
Proem to Book II that
Thy name, O soveraine Queen, thy realme and race,
From this renowned Prince derived are,
but that is not true in the simple sense of descent: one of Spenser’s pur-
poses in writing, indeed, seems to be to make up for the lack of literal
children of both Arthur and Elizabeth by rewriting history into a mar-
riage between them—a marriage that would presumably bear another
kind of symbolic fruit. In addition to the fairy genealogy he invents for

the Tudors’ precursors, he has Merlin predict an alternative genealogy,
equally fictional but human, in which Britomart, the royal warrior
heiress who inscribes Britain in her name, and Arthegall, ‘Arthur’s equal’
and his half-brother, will found a dynasty in the wake of Arthur’s own
death that will restore the suppressed line of Brut and ultimately culmi-
nate in Elizabeth.67 Arthegall himself, in this new-created legend, is like
the Redcrosse Knight a changeling in reverse, not a fairy child left in the
place of a mortal baby, but a human child stolen by a fairy and raised as
such. He too will in due course need to learn his true ancestry and ‘take
the crowne, that was his fathers right’ from Constantius, the man who
according to the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition had succeeded Arthur.
By a small but skilful intervention in the legendary chronicle genealogy,
Spenser thus inserts Arthegall and Britomart into the line of descent of
the British, and so ultimately the Tudor, crown.
Merlin ends his prophecy at the point where ‘a royall virgin’ reigns
over a realm at peace, who will extend her ‘white rod’ over ‘the Belgicke
shore’ to strike at Spain (III. iii. 49), in a predicted European conquest to
parallel Arthur’s own. Spenser can go no further, but he, like Merlin,
knows that there will be a future, even if Merlin is not telling:
But yet the end is not. There Merlin stayed.
III. iii. 50
Spenser cannot recount the events of Arthur’s reign as history, because in
the time-frame of the poem it has not yet happened; nor can he give it as
prophecy, because in this new account of the British hero, it is not going
to happen. He will not marry a woman who will betray him either to a
vassal or a usurper, Lancelot or Mordred, and so help cause the collapse
of the kingdom in civil war. Replace Guinevere as Arthur’s wife with a
woman who will remain faithful, and his fall will be written out of his-
tory; but delete that fall, and the very course of history that ultimately
produces Elizabeth will not happen. The prophecies, both inside and out-
side the poem, will not ‘come out’.
Marry Arthur to Gloriana, however—a desiring Gloriana, at that—
and a lineal succession becomes possible; or at least in theory. Gloriana’s
seeking out of Arthur provides a way for Spenser to reconcile Elizabeth’s
own virginity with the strong impulse of romance to locate its happy end-
ing in the active sexual choice of the heiress heroine, the woman who can
bestow rule and a kingdom together with her own person. The Fairy
Queen’s love for the British prince promises a way through the blank wall
of the future, a means to shift the progress of history onwards towards

romance. Spenser combines this with a recognition of the fact of the
queen’s inviolable virginity by offering her Belphoebe as an alternative
‘mirrour’ (III, Proem 5). Belphoebe, child of an immaculate conception,
repels all suitors; Gloriana initiates her own chosen lover’s quest. The two
roles offered here for Elizabeth in relation to love both lie in the determi-
nation of the woman, and none of her various avatars in the poem is a
woman who merely responds to a man’s wooing. Belphoebe’s perfect vir-
ginity is, however, a political dead end. Gloriana’s desire by contrast
allows for a future for Spenser’s own sixteenth-century England, just as
Britomart allows for a future that will lead down to the sixteenth century.
That Elizabeth herself is part of the fictional posterity of Britomart and
Arthegall is one way to draw as optimistic and laudatory the line of
descent created in the poem, but its future beyond her has to remain
uncertain. What will happen next may be as inscrutable as the mind of
this or any other fairy queen, but it is the only way that Spenser has to
save the romance happy ending that combines the fulfilment of procre-
ative desire with the continuation of the state. So far as the real world of
the poet and his readers was concerned, it was too late; and it is impossi-
ble to guess, from the unfinished state of the poem, what solution he was
going to offer. There is nothing in the Letter to Ralegh that gives any kind
of clue; the suggestion there, indeed, is that the last book will look back-
wards rather than forwards, to the start of all the quests. One wonders if
Spenser were waiting for Elizabeth’s death so that he could find out what
did happen to the succession, who the missing heir would turn out to
be, and shape his poem to fit. He was, after all, twenty years younger than
she was.
The Faerie Queene offers abundant testimony, all the more eloquent
for being unstated, to the impossibility of imagining just how that next
heir might be identified, and still more covertly to the dangers of speak-
ing any such imaginings. The fracas over the commissioning of a revival
of Richard II by the Earl of Essex’s followers on the eve of his rebellion was
to demonstrate the dangers of representing even a historically attested
disputed succession. Plays designed for presentation before Elizabeth
concentrated on the virtues of the present moment, without looking to
the future. Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, by opting to cast her as quasi- or
super-goddess, implies an illusory timelessness. The Misfortunes of
Arthur, by Thomas Hughes and other gentlemen of Gray’s Inn who acted
it before her in 1587, uses Arthur not as a medium for eulogizing her, but
as a contrast: far from being a romance, this is a revenge play, in which
Uther’s sexual misdemeanours in tricking his way into Igerne’s bed and
Arthur’s in begetting Mordred on his own sister are visited in terrible
form on the realm in the shape of civil war. A coda eulogizes the queen
by reading her virgin state as a metonymy for peace, the inviolability of
her body as an emblem for the inviolate land.68
If Elizabeth’s virginity was an inevitable topic of allusion within court
plays, it was one that Shakespeare tended to steer clear of in her own life-
time. Only one of his plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, makes a direct
allusion to it (in its description of the ‘fair vestal’), and that is not known
to have been presented to her. The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was
probably written with some kind of court performance in mind (it
includes a panegyric to Windsor Castle and the Knights of the Garter),69
has its pseudo-fairy queen (Mistress Quickly in disguise) lead her fairies
in an attack on ‘unchaste desire’ in the person of Falstaff, and in its main
plot has its Windsor wife successfully rebut her husband’s suspicions of
her unfaithfulness; but both are so thoroughly integrated into the action
as to make any allusiveness superfluous. If Elizabeth did indeed see it, it
must have been a relief to her to watch a play that took women’s faith-
fulness as a premiss, and treated the fairy queen as a joke.70 Loves Labours
Lost, written some three years earlier and which claims performance
before the queen on its quarto title page, is equally indirect in its allu-
siveness. This may none the less be the one play in which Shakespeare
responds to the problem that caused Spenser so much anxiety, the
queen’s refusal to fit the role of desiring and fertile romance heroine. He
does not take the escape route of celebrating her virginity—a topos that
by the mid-1590s both queen and playwright may have been feeling had
been done to death. The highest ranking of the four ladies who are wooed
by the men of Navarre is the heiress to the throne of France; after the
announcement of the death of her father in the final scene, her new posi-
tion as queen regnant gives her the right to choose her own husband free
of constraint, but she does not do so. Instead, she postpones her decision
for a year, beyond the end of the play: an ending found in Shakespeare’s
reading only in Chaucer’s taxonomy of natural desire in the Parliament
of Fowls, where the formel eagle likewise postpones her own mating
beyond the end of the poem.71 The play closes with the songs of the
cuckoo and the owl, the birds of spring and winter. They do, in a way,
adumbrate the cycle of the seasons; but their order, with winter follow-
ing spring, does not insist on an inevitable fertility. The heroine pre-
sented before Elizabeth is a queen who will not settle for marriage and
posterity before the end of the action. The future of the dynasty inherent
in the princess’s accession to the throne remains a blank, a question both

unanswered and barely asked.
Dynastic continuity in its romance form does not become a major pub-
lic theme, acted on the public stage, until Shakespeare’s last plays, when
the posterity of the English crown itself seemed assured and the anxiety
attendant on an uncertain succession had been removed. All but one of
his last six plays present the safe negotiation of a succession crisis involv-
ing an heiress. Even in Pericles, which does not emphasize the question of
succession, the rediscovery and marriage of Marina tacitly ensure the
future of the royal line, and Miranda likewise represents the true line of
inheritance of the usurped duchy of Milan. Perdita is heiress to Sicily, and
her recovery not only ensures the future of the kingdom but completes the
working out of the oracle that had declared her mother guiltless of adul-
tery, that same charge that had destroyed Elizabeth’s mother. None of the
late plays is a political allegory of Elizabethan or Jacobean politics, but it
may not be coincidence that Cymbeline, with its restoration of a male line
consequent on the discovery of the king’s missing sons, seems to have
been the one that was written with James I most strongly in mind.72 The
Winter’s Tale and The Tempest negotiate their political crises not only by
the recovery of the missing heiress but by her marriage to the heir of a
potentially hostile line, so that she both absorbs the rival dynasty and is
absorbed in it: a faint but telling analogy of the relationship of female-
ruled England and male-ruled Scotland across the Stuart accession. These
two plays also offer strong central images of positive female sexuality, the
desirable desire that promises to make the heroine the founding mother
of a future line—that promises a happy issue, in both senses of the word.73
Almost the last of Shakespeare’s plays, All is True/Henry VIII closes
with its focus on Elizabeth herself and her own successors. The custom-
ary promise of abundant children from the heroine’s marriage is dis-
placed in the case of the newborn heiress onto the future fruitfulness of
her country, and onto her own multiplication in good deeds, the procre-
ation that traditionally befitted the virgin.74
All princely graces
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her.
5. 4. 25–8
Henry Tudor’s prophecy of peace under his heirs at the end of Richard III
is now repeated:
In her days every man shall eat in safety

Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.
5. 4. 33–5
Divine endorsement is evident in her Church Settlement, by which ‘God
shall be truly known’. She will be a Gloriana at the head of a new fellow-
ship of men noble of soul, for whom mere lineal honour is secondary:
Those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
5. 4. 36–8
And the fertility will continue under her successor, here represented not
as her progeny but as her resurrection, a phoenix arising from her
maiden ashes.75 In this ‘oracle of comfort’ (5. 4. 66), dynastic continuity
and the happy ending for the state are achieved by more splendid mytho-
logical means than active sexual choice or the normal processes of pro-
creation ever managed.
It was a magnificent piece of royal propaganda; a pity that the theatre
burned to the ground during a performance. At around the same time,
Sir Walter Ralegh, writing his History of the World during his long impris-
onment in the Tower while he awaited execution, presented a rather
more disillusioned version of the Tudor myth. The dominant factor of
the Tudor dynasty, for him, was the childlessness of the heirs of Henry
VIII: a childlessness that he read as divine retribution for Henry’s wars
against James V, when he had used ‘his sharpest weapons to cut off, and
cut down those branches, which sprang from the same root that
himself did’.76 The Stuarts still inherited the throne of England by divine
dispensation, but of a rather different kind from that envisaged by the
prophetic Cranmer: by retribution rather than by grace.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unhappy endings:
‘The most accursed, unhappy,
and evil fortuned’
A chapter on unhappy endings in a book on romance might appear to be

a contradiction in terms, a denial of its own generic premisses. ‘Unhappy’
is an especially strong word in Middle English, carrying a meaning close
to ‘accursed’, or fated to misery. Unhappy endings make as strong a state-
ment about the malevolence inherent in the scheme of things as happy
endings make about providential ordering. They are therefore different
from mere death. In the age of faith in which romance developed, the
same qualities that define the chief characters as hero and heroine also
promise their entry to Heaven, and a number of stories end with a happy-
ever-after in the next world rather than this. The simultaneous natural
deaths of Bevis, his wife Josiane, and his horse Arundel are presented as
the culminating marvel of their story, not as a breach of generic decorum.
An unhappy ending challenges faith more radically.
The happy ending is perhaps the feature of romance most held against
it. It smacks too much of fantasy, wish-fulfilment, and escapism. There is
a widespread modern assumption both that romance and realism are
antonyms, and that realism is nasty (as in clichés such as ‘harsh realism’);
romance must therefore be both unrealistic, and unrealistically pleasant.
In so far as ‘realism’ in the twenty-first century has an informal literary
and generic meaning, it emphasizes the gruesome, the unpleasant, and
the doomed. The bulk of most romances, however, is devoted to the
undergoing of hardship, and a surprising number—numerically a
minority, but including some of the most famous—finally opt for bleak
fate over benevolent Providence. Those that do have happy endings
rarely take them for granted. The difference between romance and real-
ism lies more in the treatment of time and place, social class and motif,
the location of point of view or experiential centre, than in outcome. It
needs only a small alteration of structure to frustrate the happy ending.

In its typical form, romance follows the cycle of experience from equilib-
rium through disaster to a recovered and better order, or the cycle of life
from growth through death to rebirth. The upward movement is power-
ful enough to pull even a myth such as that of Orpheus and Eurydice with
it, to allow Sir Orfeo to bring his wife back from the land of the dead.
Refigure that cycle as the wheel of Fortune, and romance starts with the
downward movement, but follows the wheel upward again. But while a
literary structure can stop the wheel at any moment—with the protago-
nist at the bottom for tragedy, at the top for romance—time and event
will move things on. Happiness is not inherently less realistic or more
illusory than misery, but both are subject to time, and romance acknow-
ledges that. It is especially likely to do so if its subject-matter is close to
history, or if an author chooses to follow the progress of the cycle through
to death or repeated misfortune.1 The resurrections of romance, the
returns from an encounter with what should by all human logic be fatal,
are presented as exceptional, even as miracle; and that in itself acts as a
covert reminder that the miracle may not happen—as with the families
separated in the concentration camps of the Second World War and
reunited decades later. Romance concentrates on the survivors, but as
they live out its narratives they do not know what will happen to them,
and audience expectations and hopes can be destroyed along with the
hero.
Romance emerges from secular epics or legendary histories that do not
offer any expectation of happiness at their conclusion. The origins of the
three great ‘matters’ of romance, of Rome (including Troy), France, and
Britain, all predate the emergence of the genre, and all include a strong
element of disaster. The stories of Hector and Roland and Arthur are car-
ried forward into the age of romance from a period when narrative bore
no expectations of concluding bliss. Legendary history, like factual his-
tory, always moves on beyond its moments of recovery and stasis; the
building of Troy is followed by its fall, the founding of the Round Table
by Mordred’s insurrection and the last battle. Germanic epic or French
chanson de geste may offer more of a single completed narrative than his-
tory, but the completion is likely to lie in the death of the hero. Romance
assimilated such stories rather than rejecting them, altered their empha-
sis more than their content. Tasso, working out a theory of epic for a
sixteenth-century culture bred on romance, called on poets to reject
stories ‘that are sad, such as the death of the paladins and the rout at
Roncesvalles. No Greek or Latin ever wrote a heroic poem to celebrate
Unhappy Endings 363
the defeat of the Athenians or Spartans.’2 For him, the Charlemagne

romances that transmitted the story of Roland–Orlando to his own age
were opposed to classical epic, not because of their lack of Aristotelean
unified structure or their frequent incredibility, but because of their
readiness to admit disaster.
Once the generic norms for romance were established, they invited
exploitation and resistance, and writers from the high Middle Ages for-
wards (Chaucer, Malory, Shakespeare) responded by producing works
designed to question their own generic assumptions in ways that are
more disturbing than the early legends. It had been a remarkable generic
achievement of romance to justify the happy ending by the trials and
hardships its protagonists underwent in the course of the action: Orfeo’s
final bliss is built on the foundation of his ten hard years in the wilder-
ness after he refuses to carry on normal living without the woman he
loves. It was, however, an achievement that demanded questioning, and
the very suffering that lay at the heart of such romances invited a follow-
ing through into full-scale tragedy. The result is a shaking loose of the
genre from its customary grounding in a providential and poetic justice.
God does not necessarily support the good, and an arbitrary or
maleficent fate can appear to have at least as much control over what
happens.
All those possibilities that had characterized the raw material of the
earliest romances, of history and tragedy and destiny, recur forcefully in
the shift of romance into prose in the fifteenth century, and English prose
romance incorporates an exceptionally high proportion of such stories.3
The change of medium brought with it a change in expectations, towards
those raised by the prose of factual chronicle, and so invited the inclusion
of disasters of the kind associated with both the legendary and the real
past and the present. Coupled with the strong self-consciousness of a
genre now passing into its fourth century, the resistance of history or real
life to obvious or immediate providential outcomes helped to alter the
norms of romance, to open it up to new and less reassuring areas of
human experience. Even a writer who seems to have chosen romance
because it promised a happy ending endorsed by God, Edmund Spenser,
could find the history he was living through too resistant.
‘History is what hurts’, wrote Fredric Jameson. ‘It is what refuses desire
and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which
its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention.’4
Romance had grounded itself on the opposite: the pursuit and fulfilment
of desire, the questing knight’s refusal to accept limits, the rewarding of
good intention. It also typically offered the inverse of such tragic

ironies—a ‘romance irony’ in which, for instance, Goldeburh’s enforced
marriage to the strongest man in the kingdom turns out to be the short
step to the restoration of both herself and her husband to their crowns.
But if history pressured the genre from outside, writers became increas-
ingly ready to apply the same pressure from within. Every one of the
memes described in the previous chapters of this book can result in some
‘grisly and ironic reversal’ of its overt intention. The ‘echo chamber of
motifs’ that in George Steiner’s formulation constitutes the essence of
literature does not always resonate harmoniously,5 and the discords are
all the more troubling for the music they recall even while denying it.
The extent and depth of the process is demonstrated by the prose ver-
sion of Valentine and Orson, translated into English shortly after 1500
from a French original written some twenty years earlier. There is no
doubt about Valentine’s credentials as a romance. Although it touches
history at a few points (its theatre of battle, for instance, is largely the
Mediterranean; its villains the Turks, whose advance by the later fifteenth
century presented an urgent and continuing threat to Christian Europe),
it is essentially unashamed fantasy. Its fourteenth-century metrical orig-
inal told of a falsely accused empress, foundling children, a combat with
a giant, loving women, and a happy ending in the reuniting of the family
and in marriage for the sons. But just as Sir Orfeo inverts the trajectory of
the original myth, so the prose Valentine inverts the trajectory of the
romance into its opposite. It starts off like the early story, and indeed
intensifies the fantasy elements: it adds a Green Knight, a dwarf
enchanter, a dragon, and a flying horse operated by a pin in its head.
More significantly, it extends the story beyond the original ending so that
what was once the stable moment of achieved bliss becomes a brief high
point before a plunge down to disaster. It had long been a practice to use
the events of the second half of the structure of romance to comment on
the first half; here, the commentary implicit in those events serves to
undermine or destroy every one of the elements that had made the
moment of bliss possible.6
The destructive processes are hinted at even within the first part of the
story. King Pepin, who finds and raises Valentine, is furnished not only
with a legitimate heir, but with two bastards who plot against their
father’s foundling. Valentine’s initial urge to find his mother gradually
turns into an obsessive questing that is never satisfied, even when he has
found the immediate objects of his desire, first his mother, then his
father, the emperor of Greece. ‘Desire’, indeed, becomes an insistent
Unhappy Endings 365
repetition in the text, and rarely for good. His determined initial search
for identity is superseded by an eagerness to assume new roles and dis-
guises that ultimately take over from their ostensible purposes. The love
interests of the story likewise go badly wrong, not because the women fall
short of the standards expected of the desiring heroine, but because the
brothers do not show any equivalent trust and faithfulness. Fezon falls in
love with Orson, the brother raised by a bear, even when he is still in the
shape of a wild man without speech, but that is not enough to persuade
him that her love is genuine. He goes on to test her faithfulness, since, he
claims,
women were of suche a nature that for a lytell thynge they chaunged theyr
thoughtes and promyses, and broke theym falsly.7
Fezon fully lives up to her passionate assertions of fidelity and stability,

but Orson, having married her, goes on to fail the very standards that she
has set. In the final section of the work, he seduces the maiden Galazye on
the poor excuse that ‘he knewe not whether Fezon was dead or not’
(p. 300). Only after Galazye has become pregnant does he inform her that
he cannot marry her because he is married already. She retreats into a
convent, and the plot impasse is resolved by Fezon’s conveniently dying
of grief when she hears of her husband’s unfaithfulness. Valentine’s own
record in faithfulness is little better. He initially promises marriage to
Pepin’s daughter so long as his birth proves him worthy of her:
For by the fayth of my body if God will that I be of a place come that is any thyng
worth or of valoure of extraction for to have you. I shall never have to spouse nor
wyfe other than you. (p. 85)
In fact, he appears never to think of her again, falling in love with another
lady, Clerimond, spending most of the romance pursuing her, and even-
tually marrying her. Other major characters are given unexpectedly vio-
lent ends. The faithful magician Pacolet is stabbed to death by an enemy
king he has tricked. Worst of all, the climax to the prose version lies not
in the reunion of parents and sons, which happens with no special high-
lighting halfway through, but in Valentine’s killing of his father.
The killing of the emperor is in fact a chivalric act that goes wrong:
both he and Valentine are disguised as Saracens in the crucial battle.
Orson, who had been fighting alongside the emperor, realizes from hear-
ing Valentine’s battle-cry
that it was his brother that hade slayne his father, so he threw downe his shelde
and hys spere, and lyfte up hys helme. After he cryed in weping, brother
Valentyne evill prowesse have you doone, for to daye you haue slayne the father
that engendred you. (p. 308)
From this moment on, there is no question of this story’s being just an
unusually capacious romance: it has turned into its own dark opposite.
Nearer the start of the work, the plots of King Pepin’s bastards had been
frustrated; at the end, they too kill their father, and his queen—by
poison, a form of murder that was regarded in the Middle Ages with
particular abhorrence as being close to witchcraft. Valentine suggests that
perhaps his action was in retribution for his readiness to adopt Pacolet’s
magic textbook, but the narrative does not pick up the idea, and the
deeper causes for the incident are left in the hands of malign Fortune
rather than divine justice. Valentine’s lament when he has discovered
what he has done is one of the most powerful moments in the whole
work:
I am above all the other the moost cursed, unhappy, and evil fortuned. Alas death
where arte thou that thou comest not and take me for I am not worthy that the
earthe susteyne me, nor that none of the elementes lende me nourisshinge whan
that I haue commytted suche a dede before god detestable, and to the men
abhomynable . . . it is not reason that I live ani more upon the earth, nor that I be
put in the nombre of knightes. (pp. 308–9)
His ensuing penance may be acceptable to God, but it does not alter the
fact that the trajectory of this romance not only leads to a series of parri-
cides but also locates their causes outside divine control. In the versions
current after the Reformation, Protestant theology required the penance
to be de-emphasized, so sidelining both Valentine’s atonement and God
still further.
Elsewhere, much of the force of the rediscovery of parents by children
is to enable a smooth succession in the passing on of the throne from
father to rightful heir, and that is what happens in the early version. In the
prose, that process of right inheritance is impossibly compromised.
Valentine does, indeed, take on the rule of the empire, but he soon aban-
dons it to Orson and embarks on a life of penance as a hermit in the
wilderness. Only a few pages after he has married Clerimond, and with
no child conceived, he breaks in half their wedding ring, ostensibly to
serve as a recognition token, but she never knowingly sees him alive
again. Part of the penance prescribed for him by the pope is that he is not
to speak for seven years: just as the wild Orson, at the start of the story,
had been unable to speak, so Valentine must now commit himself to
dumbness as punishment for sin. The story had opened with the empire
Unhappy Endings 367
threatened with being left without heirs when the emperor casts off his
wife; the birth of twin sons, even in the forest, would seem to promise,
within the world of romance, a double insurance against a problematic
succession. Yet Orson too abdicates as emperor to become a hermit in the
woods, so retreating to the wilds into which he was first born. Both the
empire and the realm of France are thus left in jeopardy at the end of the
story, in the hands of regents while the infant heirs of both Pepin and
Orson are incapable of government—perhaps the most unstable of all
political conditions. The closing sentences of the narrative assure us that
the children, like Valentine and Orson themselves, make it safely to ‘the
blysse that never shall have ende’ (p. 327), but that in itself insists how far
the emphasis of the work has moved from any ideas of a providential
ordering within this world. Valentine moves more towards the patterns of
hagiography, where God’s will is made manifest only in a rejection of sec-
ular values and ideals, and anything resembling bliss is excluded from the
worlds of time and space, or of chivalry and love; but it is not hagiogra-
phy, and although the value of the secular is denied, nothing substantial
is offered to replace it. At the moment when romance is shifting from the
medieval to the early modern, desire overreaches, love is undermined by
the protagonists’ endemic cynicism about women, magic is condemned,
and the reunion of father and child gives way to parricide.
Valentine is far from unique in its readiness to challenge the expecta-
tions of a happy ending, though the comprehensiveness of its attack on
its own motifs is exceptional. The rest of this chapter revisits the memes
discussed in this book to illustrate how they can be used not to endorse
the providential structures underlying the happy ending but to call them
into question.
questing towards death
The first free-standing adventure in Malory’s Morte Darthur—the first,

that is, to take anyone other than Arthur himself as protagonist—is the
account of Balin and Balan, the brothers who kill each other. Both the posi-
tion of the tale and the way Malory handles its content make it para-
digmatic for the whole work as it is not in the French, where it is positioned
well inside the Vulgate cycle. Its landscape, of a one-way road to death, has
been described earlier: the inscribed cross, the old man who exists only to
call out a warning before vanishing, the horn sounding the death of the
quarry.8 Balin is left in no doubt where his quest is taking him.
‘Me repentyth’, said Balyn, ‘that ever I cam within this countrey; but I maye not
torne now ageyne for shame, and what aventure shalle falle to me, be it lyf or
dethe, I wille take the adventure that shalle come to me.’9
No knight is ever certain of returning from his quest; every one is under-
taken on the premiss that the knight will take the adventure that will fall
to him, be it life or death. Others who have taken on the same quest ear-
lier may have failed and indeed died, but by convention they are the lesser
characters, whose lives fall outside the focus of the immediate narrative.
The knight-errant at the focus of the story may not know what the out-
come will be, but the audience or reader has a saving knowledge of the
expectations of romance. As Balin witnesses, however, that privileged
generic knowledge may be wrong. This time, his premonitions are right,
and the repeated expression of them forces the readers’ expectations
away from their own desire for the hero’s success to a realization of
impending doom as inexorable as Balin’s own. The fact that the combat-
ants are brothers ensures that neither of them has a congenital advantage
in prowess, so neither can win; and the fact that they do not recognize
each other ensures that they will fight to the death. Balan suspects for a
moment that his opponent may indeed be his brother, as if fate may yet
look kindly on them; but he has just exchanged his shield for one
supposedly better, so that an ironic reversal of Balin’s intention, a tragic
irony, prevents their reconciliation. They fight with ‘grete blood shed-
ynge’, until
Atte last Balan, the yonger broder, withdrewe hym a lytel and leid hym doune.
Thenne said Balyn le Saveage,
‘What knyghte arte thow? For or now I found never no knyght that matched
me.’
‘My name is,’ said he, ‘Balan, broder unto the good knyght Balin.’
‘Allas!’ sayd Balyn, ‘that ever I shold see this day,’ and therwith he felle back-
ward in a swoune.
Thenne Balan yede on al four feet and handes, and put of the helme of his
broder, and myght not knowe hym by the vysage, it was so ful hewen and bledde;
but whan he awoke he sayd,
‘O, Balan, my broder! Thow hast slayne me and I the, wherfore alle the wyde
world shalle speke of us bothe.’ (i. 89–90) (II. 18)
Malory is a master at writing scenes of disaster, and the episode is one of

the most compelling in the whole Morte Darthur. Its power lies in more
than just the writing, however. The ‘Book of Balyne le Saveage’ functions
in the work as a kind of book of prophecies: a large proportion of what is
Unhappy Endings 369
to happen later is explicitly predicted in the course of the tale. Some of

those prophecies are of high chivalric acts, such as the combat between
Lancelot and Tristram; but another predicts that Lancelot will use Balin’s
‘unhappy’ sword to ‘sle the man in the worlde that he lovith beste’, Sir
Gawain.10 And, over and beyond those specific predictions, there is an
increasing sense that the whole work will similarly be modelled on the dis-
aster of this tale: that the history of Arthur and his knights will take the
same road towards an inevitable end where brother will slay brother, and
where great slaughter rather than great achievement will brand their fame.
Not every quest that goes wrong does so quite so spectacularly, but the
structure of the knight-errant romance gave plenty of scope for frustrat-
ing expectation.11 Some failing on the part of the hero was an expected
part of that structure, but at an early point. The quest gives him the time
and space to make up for failure, or to atone for wrongdoing. But not all
quests function in that way, and wrongdoing can mark the hero not only
to the end of his adventures but proleptically for the rest of his life.
Lancelot never achieves the Grail, for all his refusal to abandon the quest
even when he has been told that his sin will prevent him from success.
Malory, in contrast to his French source, treats his failure with more
admiration than the Grail knights’ success, but the Lancelot-Grail itself is
uncompromising in its insistence that his adultery is responsible for the
downfall of the Round Table. Other works challenge the expectations of
the characters within the work and its readers more subtly, by not
fulfilling them rather than by denying them. Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight is perhaps the prime example from the whole field of European
romance. Gawain, like Balin, takes on the adventure that falls to him—
falls not by chance, but by his active acceptance—whether for life or
death, and he and his fellow knights strongly suspect that this one is going
to be fatal. He finds neither the death that he fears nor the success that
either an English Gawain romance or his own achievement would seem
to promise. Like the archetypal romance hero, he goes to encounter
death, and comes back alive; but in his own eyes at least he has failed. The
sash that he wears as a ‘token of untrawthe’ may be taken as a badge of
honour and of fellowship by his fellow knights, but he himself declares
that he will wear it as a reminder of his weakness for the rest of his life,
For mon may hyden his harme bot unhap ne may hit. (2512)
‘Unhap’ is in the first instance a verb, ‘unfasten’; but it strongly invokes
the noun, ‘misfortune’.12
Sir Gawain tells of one of the first adventures to befall Arthur’s court,
undertaken by its most upright representative; he fails, and the court with
him. The poem is written on the assumption of the audience’s familiar-
ity with the conventions and the personalities of Arthurian romance (the
king’s requirement for a marvel before eating at a great feast, or Morgan
le Fay), and that extends to the longer story, when ‘unhap’ does indeed
befall the Round Table, and more disastrously.
Such failure risks compromising the highest secular and aristocratic
ideologies of the Middle Ages. Writers of romance very rarely, however,
allow such stories to suggest that those values are mere delusions. A work
such as Sir Gawain does not question the worth of the ethical system by
which its hero tries to live, but, in common with other romances from the
high Middle Ages forwards, it does question whether such ideals are
achievable in a fallen world. Earlier or simpler romances allow their
heroes to aim for perfection even after they have sinned, and indeed to
achieve it: Guy of Warwick dies in the odour of sanctity. So does
Lancelot, whether despite or because of his refusal ever to renounce his
love for Guinevere. Sir Gawain maintains the genre’s concern with per-
fectibility, but denies that it is possible. It is still deeply concerned with
issues of sexuality and faith, courtesy, courage, the love of life, and
trouthe—all the more so, indeed, in that Gawain is a failure in his own
eyes, and challenges his readers as to whether he is in theirs. Spenser’s
choice of genre makes the same assertion, of the centrality of ethics and
the need to aim for perfection, and the same qualification, that perfection
is not achievable within this world; but in the Faerie Queene, the attempt
to combine the romance drive towards perfectibility with an openness to
the processes of history in a society that is very far from perfect repeat-
edly opens up deeper fissures in the romance structure.
The blankness of the dynastic future would have made concluding the
work difficult, if not impossible. For an Elizabethan writing in the 1590s,
genealogical romance can produce the Tudors, but no guarantee of a safe
or peaceful transition to any future true heir. The work offers to rewrite
the past, to create an Arthur who will have a different biography from the
one that eventuated in civil war and the collapse of the kingdom, but the
past cannot be rewritten. The first generation of romances had made
themselves recognizable as a distinct genre by differentiating themselves
from epic and history, and there are deep problems in recombining
them. The whole project of the romance-epic of the Faerie Queene is
justified by its engagement with history, with the unfolding present of the
world in which, and for which, it is written. Transposed to an allegorical
Faerie Land, its Britain would seem to have the potential to realize the
Unhappy Endings 371
golden world that the brazen world of history denies. Yet the brazen or
fallen world persistently denies any final possibility of achievement. The
ending to every book has something problematic about it; the quests
become increasingly unsatisfactory. Moments of closing equilibrium are
never more than temporary, if they are achieved at all. The prospects for
the whole work, were Spenser ever to have finished it, achieved his quest,
look increasingly threatening. The Redcrosse Knight succeeds in killing
the dragon, but his old enemies Duessa and Archimago promptly reap-
pear. Instead of settling down with his bride Una, he is recalled to the
world of questing against continuing evil: Holiness and Truth will not
achieve lasting union this side of the Apocalypse, even in Elizabeth’s
Anglican England. Guyon cannot transform the mind as well as the body
of every man whom Acrasia has turned into a beast, and the book ends
with a frank acknowledgement of his failure to do any more for the man
who prefers to forget ‘the excellence | Of his creation’ and keep his ‘hog-
gish mind’ (II. xii. 87). The happy ending originally given to Book III in
its 1590 edition, with the reunion of Scudamour and Amoret—the happy
ending, therefore, that the first readers of the poem found as its conclu-
sion—was cancelled for the 1596 version, where the narrative continues
through another three books without ever bringing them back together.
Book IV does indeed end with two weddings, but neither of those relates
to either of the major love-quests of the centre of the poem, Scudamour’s
or Britomart’s, and those, like Arthur’s for Gloriana, remain incomplete.
Book V, the book of Justice, chooses Ireland as its exemplar, and
although there is no doubt that the country offers itself as a strenuous
test-case for political justice, neither Elizabethan policy nor the longer
processes of history have been able to resolve its trials and hardships into
a peaceful conclusion. Book VI, with its topic of courtesy and its closing
pastoral interlude, looks an altogether gentler prospect, but it offers some
of the most shocking events of the whole poem. Calidore does achieve his
quest, in that he manages to bind the Blatant Beast of slander for the
space of five stanzas; but its containment is an impossibility within
Spenser’s own world, where it now ranges at liberty, causing ‘more mis-
chiefe and more scathe’ (VI. xii. 39) than ever it did before. Pastorella has
half the conventional romance biography in that she discovers her true
parents, but she, like so many of the other women of the work, remains
separated from her love. What shocks most deeply in this last book is the
destruction of the shepherd world, the nearest thing in the whole work to
a good, or at least an innocent, society. Elsewhere in the work, good may
have a hard time in resisting evil, but it keeps up that resistance, or is at
least capable of rescue. The pastoral world is one to which wickedness,

ambition, and monsters are unknown. The one inhabitant who has had
contact with the corrupt society of the court has turned his back on it for
the perfect contentment of the countryside. But this is not Eden, and
innocence has no defence against the general massacre inflicted by the
brigands. Its virtues are, in Milton’s phrase, ‘fugitive and cloistered’, and
in a fallen world that is not enough.
The pressures of time and change make themselves increasingly felt
within the completed parts of the work, and Spenser admits as much in
the Mutability Cantos, published a decade after his death. These acknow-
ledge the impossibility of ever reaching a conclusion, a happy ending,
within a universe governed by mutability. The word itself had entered the
written record of English in Chaucer’s work, first in the discussions of for-
tune in his translation of Boethius, then in Troilus and Criseyde, where
again it is a marker for the instability of Fortune, the world of chance on
the very edge of, if not beyond, the direct guidance of Providence.13
Spenser’s close attention to Chaucer must have added a further impulsion
for him to give consideration to the same processes of change within his
own work. In Chaucer’s two major individual narrative poems, Troilus
and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale, he sets the processes of rise and down-
fall associated with the wheel of Fortune in direct conflict with subject-
matter that would seem to promise romance. For all that Troilus is one of
the greatest love-narratives in the English language, with a legendary hero
of high chivalry and prowess, it announces in its very first stanza that it
will reverse the structure of romance, taking its protagonist ‘fro wo to
wele, and after out of joie’. The Knight’s Tale is premissed on the fact that
the rise of one man on the wheel of Fortune necessitates the fall of
another. It poses radical questions about the metaphysical operations that
control human life, that frustrate intention and anything resembling just
reward. Chaucer makes his two protagonists, the cousins Arcite and
Palamon, effectively indistinguishable—much more so than in his source.
There is no reason in terms of poetic justice why one should end the nar-
rative dead, and the other with his desired bliss in the form of marriage to
the lady of his adoration. The tale becomes part of a larger debate across
the whole of the Canterbury Tales about the validity of happy or sad end-
ings. The Knight interrupts the Monk’s tragedies, with their threatened
interminability of catastrophe, with a plea for a more balanced presenta-
tion of the human condition, one that allows for the ‘joye and greet solas’
of good fortune as well as the ‘greet disese’ of its opposite.14 It is a small
but significant theorization of the model of his own tale, and one that
Unhappy Endings 373
indicates that Chaucer was not adapting Boccaccio’s Teseida just because
it was there, but because it could play a part in that debate between
romance and tragedy, or between a world governed by Providence and a
world governed by Fortune or the stars. His rewriting, as Barbara Nolan
has noted, excludes ‘any hint of Christian transcendence’.15 It is open to
question whether the Knight’s Tale is a romance at all—‘romance’ is in
any case a word Chaucer uses only rarely, and the tale is described within
the text as a ‘noble storie’ (CT, I. 3111)—but it has all the qualifying attrib-
utes of exoticism, love and chivalry, aristocratic characters and ideals, to
set its audience’s expectations, just as much as any work central to the
genre. The death of Arcite would cease to carry its full force, indeed, with-
out those audience expectations. As with Troilus, it is resistance to the very
generic model it invokes that gives the narrative its power.
The resistance in the Knight’s Tale focuses on the metaphysics of
suffering. In this world, as the two young knights lament, whatever
‘governance’ there may be seems to torment rather than protect the
innocent (I. 1313–14), and in this story those miseries do not lead to any
later happiness for one of the lovers. The tale is set in a pagan world, so
the standard answers of faith—that God’s purposes must be believed to
be for good, however much that good may not be apparent—are not
available to the characters themselves. Theseus is allowed some degree of
Boethian revelation at the end, but the only comfort he can offer is that
it may be best to die young and famous; there is no evidence that either
the dying lover or the one who is to marry Emily would agree. Theseus’
determination that one must make a virtue of necessity has something in
common with the romance imperative of taking the adventure that will
fall to you, but ‘necessity’ forecloses on the freedom of action that the
knight-errant must exercise. Equally, the capriciousness of the gods—the
planetary gods, therefore with a continuing influence even within a
Christian world—is presented as the immediate cause for the lack of
providential ordering, or of poetic or any other kind of justice. There is
no sense here that aspiration, metaphorical questing, will ever move
towards pilgrimage, a journey towards God, and given that the characters
are pagans, they have no possibility of doing so. When the old Egeus
offers an image of pilgrimage, it is one without hope:
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,

And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.
Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore.
I. 2847–9
That is not the end of the tale, and Theseus’ assertion of a ‘feyre cheyne
of love’ that binds the universe (i. 2988) and Palamon and Emily’s mar-
riage and ensuing ‘blisse’ are still to come; but the shaping of the tale is
such as to make its conclusion in happiness singularly arbitrary. There is
no metaphysical principle, no access to any belief system, to offer any
secure reassurance. And when Shakespeare, in collaboration with John
Fletcher, turned his attention to the tale, it was that absence of providen-
tial ordering that he seized on.16
The practice of referring to Shakespeare’s last plays as romances is well
established; even Henry VIII can be assimilated under the same heading,
given its strong providential shaping and the focusing of that Providence
through the birth of an heiress. His final play is however much more
equivocal. The Two Noble Kinsmen, like its source, offers itself for recog-
nition as a romance: a story of two young knights of high prowess who fall
in love with the same woman. Throughout the play, however, the authors
home in on the elements Chaucer had made problematic, and intensify
them. Love is presented not as an ideal but as an obsession. Same-sex
friendship is called into question, except when its object (Emilia’s child-
hood friend) is dead. The play’s strong women speak of exercising their
strength outside the action in terms of a martial acquaintance with
slaughtered babies, and within it they are consistently cast as victims
rather than agents. The lovers, for all their declarations of adoration,
reveal themselves as callous sexual predators.17 The play, like the Tale,
starts with the disruption of Theseus’ wedding procession by three
mourning queens whose husbands are unburied and unavenged, but the
scene as dramatized contains a marked predictive quality for the play as a
whole. It opens with a song to Hymen, in which the birds of ill omen are
enjoined to be absent; but whatever is symbolized by the ‘boding crow’
immediately appears in the shape of the queens dressed in black, and
death remains a threatening presence throughout the play. Shakespeare
enlarges the bare mention in the Tale of how the young knights are found
and condemned to prison; and he uses this new scene, at the end of Act I,
to bring forward Egeus’ lines on life as a thoroughfare of woe, and to give
them to Theseus. Now, however, the image has shifted significantly, from
one that can resonate with ideas of spiritual pilgrimage, for its Christian
audience if not for the characters, to something altogether bleaker:
This world’s a city full of straying streets,

And death’s the market-place where each one meets.
1. 5. 15–16
Unhappy Endings 375
Chaucer’s Arcite laments that a man trying to find happiness in life is like
a drunkard unable to find his way home; Shakespeare’s Theseus suggests
that there is no home to be found, that life is a nightmare city where the
streets themselves turn errancy into error. In this darker Jacobean world,
any possibility of pilgrimage, of spiritual striving, of quest, is replaced by
a barren mercantilism where death is the only commodity on offer, the
only end-point with nothing beyond. Ancient Athens and contemporary
London fuse into a single city of mortality.
This, it should be remembered, is Shakespeare’s very last play. After
the wonder of the romances, their reunions and near-miraculous resur-
rections and recoveries, their prophesied workings out of all things for
good, he ends his career in the bleakness of a medieval romance that goes
wrong.
exposure on the seas
In the conventional accounts of the child exposed on the seas, he or she

is preserved by God for some great future: for sanctity or empire.
Greatness, however, need not take the form of goodness. By an altogether
more ironic process of Providence, or by a more malignant fate, the child
who is preserved may be the ultimate traitor. The Middle Ages offered
two such figures: Judas Iscariot, and Mordred.
Judas is not a figure one associates with the heroes of either romance
or tragedy, but the biography recorded for him in the Golden Legend
incorporates many of the same memes. It is a compelling story, and was
still circulating in the eighteenth century in a popular print.18 After his
mother dreams that she will bear a son so evil that he will cause the down-
fall of his people, she and her husband determine to dispose of the child.
They are reluctant to kill him, so, in the earliest Middle English version,
hii beseye tham that hii made . a barel atte laste

Ther inne hii dude this luther chyld . and amydde the se hyt caste.19
[They finally decided to prepare a barrel, and they put this evil child in it and cast
it into the sea.]
The barrel containing the baby is found by a childless queen as she ‘pleide
bi the stronde’ (31) and she raises him as hers, but after she bears a son of
her own she taunts him with being a foundling. Judas kills his foster-
brother, flees to Jerusalem, and unwittingly kills his father in a quarrel and
marries his mother. So far, the story is close to that of Oedipus; but Judas
still has the key part of his history to come. When he and his mother/wife
discover the truth about themselves, she suggests he should go to Jesus to
receive forgiveness for his sins, and his following of Christ leads to his
great betrayal. There is of course ultimately a providential pattern behind
all this—the providential pattern, since the betrayal enables the Passion
and Redemption of mankind. Like the Fall, the betrayal has something of
the quality of a felix culpa, a sin that brings about a far greater good.
Judas’s suicide, however, excludes him from participating in that good, or
from sharing in the redemption offered to sinners who do not despair of
God’s mercy. Even in the theological interpretations of the Biblical story,
there is a black irony in this, intensified in the legend. He is unquestion-
ably a sinner, but not all his sins, especially the incest, are committed
deliberately or with any intention of the will. The sense left by the full
legend is that fate has it in for him rather than that the purposes of God
are made manifest in him. He appears as sacer, that Latin word that cov-
ers the man set apart by the gods for worse as well as for the better. Judas
is tainted from before his birth: in Middle English terms, unhappy.
It may have been with the legend of Judas in mind that Malory revised
the account of Mordred’s infancy that he found in the Merlin. Mordred
in this tradition is himself a child of unwitting incest between Arthur and
his half-sister, and his conception sparks prophetic omens of the doom
that will follow. Arthur dreams that griffins and serpents will burn and
slay all the people of his land, and Merlin expounds both what he has
done and what the consequences will be:
Ye have done a thynge late that God ys displesed with you, for ye have lyene by
youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the
knyghtes of youre realme. (Malory, i. 44 (I.20) )
Like Judas’s parents after his mother’s dream, Arthur attempts to frus-
trate fate, and with an equal lack of success. In the French, he orders all
the children born in May to be sent to him, but the ship carrying
Mordred is wrecked, and he is the sole survivor. Arthur considers killing
the babies he has gathered up, but instead he follows a visionary instruc-
tion to set them adrift in a pilotless boat so that Christ may save or
destroy them. In the event, they all come ashore safely, and are raised by
Arthur’s own care. Malory makes the episode much more deadly. There
is no separate voyage and shipwreck for Mordred; instead, Malory com-
bines the two journeys into one, in the course of which all the babies
except Mordred suffer the fate that should, by the logic of the story and
Unhappy Endings 377
of legal or romance convention, belong only to the child of polluted

birth. After the children have been collected,
all were putte in a shyppe to the se; and som were foure wekis olde and som lesse.
And so by fortune the shyppe drove unto a castelle, and was all to-ryven and
destroyed the moste party, save that Mordred was cast up. (Malory, i. 55 (I. 27))
In this new version, Arthur is cast in the far from heroic role of Herod,
but the real point of the changes focuses on Mordred rather than the
king. In this new massacre of the innocents, it is as if Judas, not Christ,
were the only one to survive.
For Mordred, as for Judas, this is only the beginning of the story, but
Mordred’s story does not have any redemptive final coda. Judas’s career
leads to his murder of his unknown father and incest with his mother, the
Crucifixion, the downfall of the Jews, and his own death and damnation,
but God’s larger plans for salvation history still operate. Mordred, with a
full knowledge of what he is doing, goes on to attempt (or to achieve,
depending on the version) an incestuous relationship with his father’s
wife, to kill his father, and to destroy the realm; but this is, in Malory’s
somewhat obscure phrase, the ‘morte Arthure saunz gwerdon’, the death
of Arthur with no recovery, no payback, no compensatory result in
good.20 Mordred is the traitor within the house, as Christ is betrayed by
one of his own followers. The survivor from the boat becomes, in
Arthur’s words in the final battle, ‘the traytoure that all thys woo hath
wrought’. Lucan warns the king against fighting him, ‘for he ys unhappy’:
that word again that indicates almost an infectious state of disaster, or an
open passage through which ‘thys wycked day of Desteny’ has entrance.
Arthur refuses to hold back, and Mordred’s final action is to inflict a
mortal wound on ‘his fadir, kynge Arthur’: the one time in the whole
Morte Darthur when that collocation is used. The baby protected by God
throughout exposure on the seas should come back to reunite his family
and ensure the succession. Mordred’s survival instead fulfils a different
prophecy, given in full in the Merlin: that ‘the fader sholde sle the sone,
and the sone sle the fader, and the londe of the grete breteigne abide with-
outen heir and lordles’.21
diabolic magic
‘Magic that doesn’t work’ is the most telling kind of romance magic, a
means of turning wonder and admiration onto the characters. Magic that
does work is as likely to be diabolical as helpful, and increasingly so as

romance moved into the sixteenth century. The Faerie Queene may allow
Britomart a magic lance and Arthur a magic sword and shield, but they
none the less have to fight largely by their own natural courage, faithful-
ness, and prowess against enemies equipped with powers of shape-
shifting or vanishing, conjuration, invulnerability to wounds, and
witchcraft, or against hellish monsters with poisoned teeth. Magic and
the supernatural increasingly inspire fear and horror rather than wonder.
Magic, like fairies, has too much of an association with the devil to be
comfortable.
It might be expected that the passage of time from what are custom-
arily known as the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment would show a pro-
gressive downgrading and dismissal of magic, but this is far from being
straightforwardly the case. It is true that the category of the marvellous,
defined as natural phenomena that lie beyond rational explanation,
shrank over the centuries as experiment and exploration explained or
disproved them. The miraculous too took a severe battering at the
Reformation, with the denial of the capacity of saints or their relics to
intervene in the normal processes of the created world, and a resistance
to any belief that even God would intervene other than through natural
processes. The supernatural, however—the realm of phenomena beyond
the reach of scientific analysis, and not directly under the control of
God—in many ways increased its hold, partly through claims for the
divine potential of hermetic and Neoplatonic magic, but partly through
an increasing conviction that the only remaining source of the supernat-
ural, when the miraculous and the fairy were eliminated through the
exercise of reason, was the devil.22 Roman Catholicism offered a way to
resist such diabolical interventions, through exorcism or pious charms,
even the sign of the cross. Rational Protestantism rejected all such
defences as superstition, and in doing so, as Keith Thomas has argued,
made magic much more threatening than it had been in the Middle
Ages.23 Although witchcraft was condemned and witches (male or
female) occasionally punished, they were not perceived as a major social
threat in the Middle Ages, in life or in literature. Even Morgan le Fay is
more of a nuisance than a diabolic Other, and she is much less dangerous
than the entirely non-supernaturally-powered Mordred. The stepmother
of William of Palerne, who uses her ‘coninge of wicchecraft’ to turn her
stepson into a werewolf, is forgiven and accepted back into the life of the
court as soon as she re- transforms him.24 The first English statute against
witchcraft was passed only in 1542, and the great age of witch-hunting,
Unhappy Endings 379
with witches cast as agents of the devil, was contemporary with the
increasing impetus of the scientific revolution, in the seventeenth cen-
tury.25
The anxieties that made magic appear so ominous were none the less
already stirring before the recognized Catholic means of keeping it at bay
were removed, and they are reflected in its treatment in a number of
romance texts from the fifteenth century forwards. The text that inspired
the witch-hunts of continental Europe, the Malleus Maleficarum, is a
Catholic work that narrowly predates the Reformation. Its publication in
1486 altered the whole balance of how magic and enchantment and their
practitioners were regarded, redefining all such practices as sorcery.
Magic in earlier romance rarely invites rejection: it frequently appears as
neutral, even as a good thing. Wonder-working rings that help the hero
are a simple bonus. They operate on the edge of marvel, those unex-
plained powers of nature; if a lodestone can turn towards the north, why
should another stone not have comparable virtues of a different kind?
The emphasis falls on the power of the talisman, not on the means that
brought it into being. There was an idea around in the Middle Ages that
it might be possible to entrap a devil in a ring to give it magical powers,
but it seems to have been floated as an intellectual possibility rather than
as a theological proscription.26 A hero may, like Partonope of Blois, fear
that the self-propelling boat on which he finds himself is the work of the
devil, but he is wrong. Later romances do not always take such a com-
forting view.
Two of the most widely known of the early printed prose romances,
Valentine and Orson and The Four Sons of Aymon (which, like Valentine,
was both abundantly reprinted and dramatized in the sixteenth century),
show the transition in progress from the acceptance of magic to its demo-
nization, as the helpful magic that has sustained the heroes in their many
adventures is finally rejected. Maugis, the magician cousin of the Four
Sons, becomes a hermit, and there is a strong sense that Christianity is
foreclosing on magic. Valentine and Orson, specifically in its fifteenth-
century prose recasting discussed above, makes the process still more
explicit; it may not be coincidental that the composition of the French
version was almost exactly contemporary with the Malleus Maleficarum,
though direct influence is unlikely.27 The earlier episodes of the text
employ the more benevolent kinds of magic, such as a speaking bronze
head that gives helpful instructions to the heroes, and the marvellous
mechanical horse. The horse’s creator, the dwarf Pacolet, is introduced as
if he were a benevolent agent of good, the practitioner of magic that helps
the heroes when natural means fail. Over the course of the work, how-
ever, he is transformed into something much more suspect. Valentine’s
Saracen enemies themselves acquire the assistance of an enchanter,
named Adramayne, who has long been known to Pacolet, and they are
presented not as contrasting but as equivalent. Both have been trained in
the same techniques, perhaps even the same school, of ‘nygromancy’,28
and both are masters of the art. Pacolet is initially happy to host
Adramayne, and they compete with each other in producing entertain-
ments for the company. When their enmity becomes apparent,
Adramayne at first succeeds in outwitting Pacolet, but the dwarf speedily
gets his revenge. He disguises himself (with a little magic help) as a
woman, gets access to Adramayne’s tent, and after casting him into an
enchanted sleep he beheads him. He likewise puts the rest of the Saracen
army to sleep, and invites in the Christians to slaughter the lot. His
actions thus benefit the Christians, but they are not godly: there is no dis-
tinction made between his own arts and those of his pagan counterpart,
and the fact that the narrative regularly refers to Adramayne as ‘fals’ does
not disguise that. As the work progresses, Pacolet’s methods become
increasingly suspect. He plays the same trick of putting an army to sleep
ready for slaughter in contradiction of an oath of Valentine’s, in an action
acknowledged as treasonable; he raises the devil to discover whether a
castle can be taken.29 Finally he becomes too clever for his own good, and
is stabbed to death by a king he has tricked into Valentine’s hands.
Valentine takes his magic tables, ‘in whyche was wryten all the secretes of
hys arte’, from his bosom, ‘the whyche’, the narrative adds, ‘dyd him
good servyse afterwarde’ (p. 282). But that is not how the plot itself goes.
After his accidental killing of his father in battle, his own explanation for
the deed is to blame his readiness to trust magic:
Never please it God that I plaie more with suche arte, for it is dampnable. And he
that tought it me dyed unhappely at the laste, and I beleve that for this sinne I
have slain my father. (p. 311)
A romance that starts out with all the wide-eyed acceptance of enchant-
ment as a legitimate element of its own generic form turns to attack and
reject it as diabolic.
Although Valentine recognizes some of the same anxieties that went
into the creation of the Malleus Maleficarum, there is one important
exception. The romance does not manifest the terror of women as chan-
nels of diabolic communication evident in its notorious contemporary.
Its heroines, indeed, generally show considerably more probity than the
Unhappy Endings 381
men, and magic and enchantment are presented as male skills. None the
less, its sixteenth-century readers came to it from a cultural background
in which fears of sorcery and witchcraft were steadily increasing. For all
its elements of fostering bears, foundlings recovered, and innocence vin-
dicated, Valentine marks the end of an age of innocent wonder.
Such an extreme reaction against magic provides a useful context for
considering the Elizabethan literary magicians, not least Spenser’s
Archimago, discussed earlier, and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Faustus’s urge
to damnation marks the play for tragedy, but the suspicion of magic even
in so hospitable a genre as romance underlines the danger of what he is
doing. The diabolic nature of his magic is never in question, since it is
acted out on stage; but in one crucial sense that too is magic that does not
work. As Mephistopheles calmly informs him, it is not his conjuration
that has summoned him from Hell, but the fact of his abjuration of God.
The frisson one expects to follow from the summoning up of the devil
turns into the grimmer fascination of seeing someone choose their own
damnation, just as wonder shifts from the magical to the human. The
tricks Faustus plays with his newly acquired powers have often been
regarded as disappointing, but although their frequent quality of practi-
cal joke has some precedents in Merlin and Pacolet, their diabolic opera-
tion makes them far more dangerous. His flight through the air in a
dragon-drawn chariot (unstageable, even by elastic Elizabethan stan-
dards of imaginative audience participation) is not cognate with
Alexander’s cunning invention of a griffin-drawn flying-machine, but an
overt transgression of the limits of knowledge allowed to humankind by
God, and retribution follows accordingly. The late medieval Valentine
rejects magic only after irremediable disaster has struck, but he spends
the last years of his life in penitence, and dies in the odour of sanctity. The
Renaissance Dr Faustus does neither, despite his last-second offer to burn
his books.
fairies and fates
Fairies, even more than magic, smacked of the devil. However careful
authors might be to distinguish the fairies of their own texts from the
altogether more suspect sort still widely believed to be at loose in the
world, the very qualities that marked them as supernatural also marked
them as dangerous, whether those qualities were strict judgement, capri-
ciousness, their ability to alter the laws of the physical world, or the power
of prophecy. Thomas of Erceldoune is returned to middle-earth by his

elf-queen just before the devil comes to carry him off as part of the trib-
ute due to him from her country. Few of the supernatural beings of
medieval romance are as benevolent as the fairy godmothers of fairytales,
and even godmothers are prepared to turn vicious towards the enemies
of their protegées. Otherworld generosity, in the romances, is usually
performed in the interests of the giver, and lasts only as long as those
interests are protected. Morality in the human sense is rarely an issue. If
Oberon insists that Huon should stay chaste before marriage, it comes
over more as a taboo from an area outside reason than as an ethical or
Christian prohibition. Often, the same figures who offer rewards initiate
disaster. This may, as in Sir Launfal, amount to a trial of faithfulness that
he is allowed to pass, but fairies do not bring any assurance of a provi-
dential outcome. Equally, their powers of prophecy are amoral. Bliss and
catastrophe are foretold without distinction, whether they might take the
form of due reward or due punishment or of something outside justice
altogether.
Having a fairy mother as your foundress can therefore cut both ways.
Richard Cœur de Lion preserves the legend that the wife of Henry II was a
fairy of the devilish variety, whose true nature was unmasked when she
was forced to attend Mass. The legend offers a retrospective explanation
for the towering and unconventional personality of Eleanor of Aquitaine
(though she is given a different name and biography in the text); for
Richard’s exceptional savagery, of a kind to be wondered at rather than
imitated (his byname supposedly derives from his tearing the heart out of
a lion that attacked him; the romance describes his fondness for eating
roast Saracen); and perhaps also for the inadequacies of her youngest son,
the future King John, whom she dropped as she made her final dis-
appearance through the church roof.30 Although the whole English royal
dynasty descended from herself and Henry (the Plantagenet name was
derived from his badge), the legend of the demon wife does not seem to
have been called on to explain what happened to their later descen-
dants—not even when it was printed under the Tudors by Lady Margaret
Beaufort’s own printer, Wynkyn de Worde. The story of Melusine, by
contrast, seems to have been recorded to do just that. Ancestral romance
can not only incorporate the illustrious and semi-magical origins of a
family but also account for the disasters that may afflict it over the course
of history, so shifting their cause from personal responsibility to a godless
predestination. The house of Lusignan suffered a series of disasters in the
later fourteenth century, with the loss of Poitou to the English in the
Unhappy Endings 383
Hundred Years War, and the Lusignan king of Armenia’s loss of his
crown in 1375.31 The writing of the legend of Melusine in France in the
1390s thus takes cognizance both of the illustrious origins that could be
claimed for the line, and of its less than illustrious present.
The story of Melusine’s fairy taboos and prohibitions, the dangers
accompanying sexual access to the women, has already been told. An
alternative way to tell the same story is to concentrate on how the disas-
ters that befall the Lusignan line are grounded in a series of double pre-
dictions of the future, prophecies or promises of either wish-fulfilment or
disaster, that are to be governed by the actions of the male protagonists.32
Wealth and honour await the king of Albany if he does not see his fairy
wife Pressine in childbed. Instead, his unthinking entry into her room
compels her to leave him, lamenting bitterly; and in due course her
daughters take revenge on him by shutting him inside a mountain. This
in turn leads Pressine to tell them that their action has prevented their
release from the world of the fairies, and to give them each a ‘gift’, or a
curse, Melusine’s being that she should turn every Saturday into a serpent
from the waist down. Her deliverance will depend on whether or not her
husband will keep his word not to look at her then.33 Melusine accord-
ingly offers Raymondin two alternative prophecies on their wedding
night: a future of unalloyed happiness if he keeps his word; or, if not, that
‘bothe you and your heyres shall fall litil and litil in decaye and fro your
estate’ (p. 57). Even while he keeps his oath, having a fairy for a wife has
drawbacks: each of her ten sons bears a ‘mother-mark’,34 not an enhan-
cing king-mark but a congenital deformity. The eldest, for instance, has a
large, squat face, one red and one blue eye, and ears ‘as grete as the hand-
lyng of a fan’.35 For the older sons, who turn out well, this figures as a sign
of their exceptionalness without its counting against them. They become
leaders of the Christian resistance against the Turks and win kingdoms
and dukedoms, but the younger sons have rather different fates. One is so
saintly that he opts to become a monk, but that so infuriates his brother
Geoffrey ‘with the great tooth’ that he burns the monastery, and his
brother and his fellow monks with it. In the case of the youngest, three-
eyed, son, the aptly named Horrible, his moral deformities are so extreme
(by the age of 4, he has killed two wet-nurses) that his parents arrange to
have him murdered. Things are, in other words, going wrong with the
family even before Raymondin breaks his oath. That diverts the course of
the future from its predicted good to its predicted trouble. He is devas-
tated by what he has done, and speaks a long lament regretting the loss of
‘my joye, al my comfort and myn hoop . . . my swete and entierly beloved
lady’.36 She herself has to abandon husband and family and the castle of
Lusignan she had founded, to wander in the shape of a flying serpent until
the Day of Judgement. For her, this is an outcome far worse than death.
The greatest blessing she desired, it transpires, would have been ordinary
mortality. Without the breaking of the taboo, she
hadd lyved the cours natural as another woman; and shuld have be buryed, aftir
my lyf naturel expired, within the chirche of Our Lady of Lusynen, where myn
obsequye and afterward my annyversary shuld have be honourably and devoutely
don. (p. 316)
In contrast to Launfal, whose grief at the loss of his own fairy mistress
after he has broken her taboo ultimately leads to his return to her favour
and perpetual life with her in fairyland, Raymondin has no way to
recover either his own loss or hers. He becomes a hermit, ‘for to pray god
that it playse hym to give allegeaunce [=alleviation] to my lady my wyf’
(p. 335), but his prayers are unavailing against her fairy mother’s curse.
Melusine’s last appearance is in her serpent form, at the moment of his
death, when she utters a cry so dolorous that it threatens to make the
fortress of Lusignan fall.
The loss of Armenia is presented as the long-term effect of Pressine’s
curse on another of her daughters, who is banished there to a castle where
she is to preside over the adventure of the sparrow-hawk. A knight who
can watch it for three days and nights without sleeping can have any gift
he chooses, except only herself. Anyone who persists in asking for her as
his reward ‘shalbe infortunate unto the ninth lynee, and shul be putt
from their prosperitees’ (p. 16). In due course, a descendant of Melusine’s
third son, himself king of Armenia, does just that. Furious, she tells him
that she is Melusine’s sister, his request therefore incestuous, and that as
a consequence of his forbidden desire he himself will, like Raymondin,
suffer ‘decay’, and his heirs ‘grete myschief’ and exile to the ninth gener-
ation.
And wete it wel that his heyres after his decesse were not fortunat, but unhappe
in al their actes. (pp. 367–8)
Divine retribution, including the visiting of the sins of the fathers on the
children, was a well-recognized explanation for the unhappiness of life.
Melusine insists that there can be other principles of retribution at work
with which God has nothing to do.
By the time the romances of Melusine reached Middle English, around
1500, the precision of their historical and prophetic messages must have
Unhappy Endings 385
been inaudible to most of their readers. Historical prophecy is much

more telling when it relates to one’s own nation and time. It is an inher-
ently apocalyptic mode of discourse, and so encouraged by disaster (as in
the claims made on the internet that the events of 9/11 had been predicted
by Nostradamus), though there can be prophecies for good too, as the
prophecies of the Stuart rule of Britain demonstrate. The difference
between hopeful and ominous prophecies is in any case not always clear,
prophecy being closely related to irony, appearing to say one thing while
actually meaning another. It specializes indeed in those ‘grisly and ironic
reversals’ of Jameson’s formulation. The ‘goddesses of destinie, or else
some nymphs or feiries’ who prophesy Macbeth’s kingship to him in
Holinshed’s Chronicle predict the fulfilment of his desires for the
crown,37 and Shakespeare makes that fulfilment the basis of his tragedy.
For his Macbeth, the further prophecy of the descent of the Stuart line
through Banquo’s son Fleance adds to his miseries, however much it may
have pleased James I. The processes of both history and Providence
promise that the future monarchical line will spring from the boy who
escapes death when his father is killed. In the longer term beyond the
confines of the drama, Macbeth promises romance, but that is not the
focus of the play.
The most prophetic of the fairies of medieval romance, the lady of
Thomas of Erceldoune, finally reached print in 1652, in the anthology
Sundry Strange Prophecies of Merlin, Bede, and Others. The text is very
close to the earliest form to be recorded, in the Thornton manuscript of
c.1440. Its prophecies, however, are given a coda that takes them on
beyond the standard ending, and they are very grim indeed. This part of
the text may well originally have been a free-standing one, but the 1652
print runs it on from its Thomas in the same double-column verse for-
mat with no new heading, in a way that suggests not only that its read-
ers would take the two texts as one but that the compiler of the
anthology may have found them in that form. It can be dated, as can
many prophecies, by the point where accurate but lightly coded ‘pre-
diction’ of what is already known gives way to fabrication, though in
this instance that is made more complicated by the fact that it seems to
have been overwritten, extended, and re-interpreted as the years went
by. Its correct, retrospective ‘prophecies’ cover the Reformation and the
dissolution of the monasteries, the short reign of ‘I’ in 1553 (the text
helpfully adds dates), followed by ‘the marvellous M’ (Lady Jane Grey
and Mary); and it gives a warning about the power of ‘aliens’, the
Spanish,
Until E do reign again,

In whose time many shal turn from the faith
—‘the faith’ being Roman Catholicism. This looks at first glance like a
prophecy about Elizabeth, and was apparently so taken by the redactor or
editor of this composite text; but the ‘reign again’ is more specific, and
identifies it as one of the rumours about the return of Edward VI.38 The
rest of the text is entirely fabrication, and of a particularly frightening
kind. The year 1597 will bring in
great dearth and murder,

Neighbour against neighbour shal fight,
The brother with the brother in armour dight.
The father against the son you shal see.
1598 promises ‘terrible’ war, and a power struggle between (or perhaps
invasion by) three kings. The next year, ‘many shal die with sorrow and
pain’. In 1600
Ladies shal waile that ever they were born . . .

Fortune shal turn up al that earst was down,
And then the layity shal wear the crown;
Then to study take thy tombe,
It draws neer the day of doom.
(p. 28)
The text, in fact, prophesies the death or removal of the queen, itself a
treasonous act, and follows that with civil war and all the horrors of apoc-
alypse. With texts such as this at large in the country, one sees why the
government found prophecy to be so dangerous a mode.
By 1652, when it was published, the critical years were safely in the past,
and the ban on the printing of prophecies had been lifted. Prophecy had
indeed become one of the dominant modes of political discourse in the
Civil War era, and not just by the godly; as the whole collection of texts
in Sundry Strange Prophecies indicates, Merlin and Thomas and others
were riding high on the revival. The year was a particularly active one for
prophecy, encouraged by an eclipse of the sun and the millenarian events
that seemed to be happening all around.39 Part of the attraction of the
text must have lain in its chiming in with a widespread popular sense that
the world was coming to a crisis or to an end. The elf-queen has a role to
play not only in the 1440s but in Thomas Cromwell’s antipapal propa-
Unhappy Endings 387
ganda most of a century later, and under Oliver Cromwell a century after
that. The prophecies she utters, however, are increasingly doom-laden.
desire
At their simplest, love stories that turn out wrong do so because circum-
stance or fate is not on the side of the lovers. A strong and loving heroine
does not always act as a predictor of a happy outcome, whether for the
whole romance or just for herself. Tristan and Isolde share their separa-
tion from each other and a tragic death just as they share their desire.
Very few of Malory’s desiring women find happiness. Elaine of Corbin is
not, as the French tries to make her, a symbol of the Virgin, contented in
her conception of Galahad, but a woman who aches with desire for a man
who loves someone else. His Elaine of Astolat dies from unrequited love
with a passionate defence of her desire in the sight of God. Stories of this
kind, however, rarely spring a surprise at the end. The impossibility of a
happy ending is built into the narrative from early on, and the romance
elements gain extra poignancy from the reader’s sense that all cannot be
well, that the hopes and desires of the lovers will finally be frustrated.
Such an exploitation of convention may run counter to the generic norm,
but it does not altogether undermine the basic principles of romance
love. The women’s desire is still approved, even though the situations in
which they exercise it make a final fulfilment impossible. Like the
knights-errant who knowingly ride towards death, these women accept
the challenge of loving and all its consequences, and do so without hesi-
tation or repentance.
More disturbing are those romances that offer unhappy endings to
their stories by locating themselves with varying degrees of explicitness
within the discourses of misogyny. The ‘desirable desire’ of romance was
always an attitude chipped out of such attitudes, and defined itself in resis-
tance to them. That resistance in turn invites counter-opposition from the
antifeminist ideology it rejects. Antifeminism was so well established by
the time of the rise of romance that writers could jump either way,
whether in the twelfth century or the seventeenth. The less than good can
be recuperated: Medea, who in most treatments of her legend is one of the
most anxiety-inducing of women—determined to obtain the man she
wants, skilled in magic and necromancy, and ultimately the murderess
of her own children—is given the full heroine treatment in several
texts, including Raoul le Fèvre’s fifteenth-century version and Caxton’s
translation, where she is rewarded for her love for the perfidious Jason by
marriage and a happy ending.40 The good can be rendered suspect:
Lavinia, little more than a cipher in Virgil, but whose desire for Eneas in
the early French Roman d’Eneas helped to set up the expectations for
romance heroines, is recast as nothing more than a metonymy for blood-
shed in the Faerie Queene, her marriage to Aeneas being described as
Wedlock contract in bloud, and eke in blood
Accomplished.
III. ix. 42
Desirable desire threatened to be an unstable category, that could be con-
structed temporarily but that needed constant renewal.
As has been noted, it is not uncommon for a writer to incorporate
some degree of antifeminism within a romance, if only to acknowledge
audience anxiety and so to help neutralize it. Chrétien’s Cligés both cele-
brates its Fenice, and notes that her deception of her husband in favour
of the man she loves resulted in the close sequestration of later empresses.
Hue’s Ipomedon alternates its sympathetic focalization through its hero-
ine with sly or titillating comments inviting voyeurism or sniggers—
comments, interestingly, that are cut from the Middle English versions.
Ulrich von Zatzikhoven endorses the desire of Iblis for the knight she
dreams of, the as yet unknown Lancelot, but treats the queen Lancelot
marries as a femme fatale who should be abandoned as soon as possible.
These romances none the less follow the logic of their central heroines
through to a happy ending. Altogether more disturbing are those narra-
tives that upgrade the suspicion of women’s sexuality to the point where
the expectations of romance are broken down. If the authorial stance
supports this suspicion, such stories are likely to move outside the ambit
of romance altogether, into diatribe or fabliau, and so invoke a different
set of expectations. Others keep their authorial focus centred in romance
and its ideals of womanliness, but allow the male protagonist to give his
own suspicions of women such loose rein as to incur disaster. The hero-
ine’s desire is set in opposition to a determinedly mistrustful man, who
refuses to respond to the probity of her love even though it is endorsed
by the narrative, and who persists in his refusal in despite of all generic
pressure. These last categories, where the happy ending is foiled because
the principles that make love-romance operative are themselves
betrayed, become increasingly common from the later fifteenth century
forward. Orson’s behaviour is a striking example, when he seduces the
trusting Galazye on the excuse that his loving and faithful wife might be
Unhappy Endings 389
dead, and refuses to marry her when she is pregnant on the grounds that
she might still be alive after all. His behaviour is so transgressive that later
English versions of the story toned it down (but not, interestingly, the
post-medieval French versions). Earlier texts that told similar stories
were more ready to break free altogether from romance; later ones insist
much more that they are indeed romances, and therefore that the ideal-
izing expectations of the genre should be revised downwards to belittle or
condemn women, or at least to give up hope of any reward for their
desires. A series of works written either side of 1600 will illustrate this
shift: Richard Johnson’s parody romance Tom a Lincoln, its first part
printed c.1599 and its second c.1607,41 and Shakespeare’s All’s Well that
Ends Well, of c.1603.
Richard Johnson made his money, like tabloid writers, by never under-
estimating the tastes of his readers. His most famous work, The Seven
Champions of Christendom, was one of the works that became a staple of
the chapbook market, like Valentine itself, and was still being rewritten as
an adventure story for boys in the twentieth century. He also produced col-
lections of broadside-type ballads that converted high cultural capital into
cheap but attractive commodity: his Garland of Golden Roses, for instance,
includes simple retellings of both the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Clerk’s Tale,
for those for whom Chaucer’s Works and language were too expensive and
too difficult. The Pleasant Historie of Tom a Lincolne, the Red Rose Knight,
for his Valour and Chivalrie, surnamed The Boast of England seems designed
to appeal both to the worst tastes of sophisticated readers for its unrelent-
ing over-the-top treatment of every romance motif and meme that ever
existed, and to the less sophisticated for the density of its hair-raising
adventures. Tom is the bastard son of King Arthur and the fair Angelica,
daughter of the earl of London. He is abandoned to be raised by shepherds;
proves his valour through the inherent prowess he shows on various voy-
ages; and is desired (successfully) by both the queen of a country ‘called by
the name of the Fayerie-Land’ inhabited solely by women,42 who commits
suicide when he abandons her, and the daughter of Prester John, with
whom he elopes. So much occupies the first part of the work. Its sequel,
like the last part of Valentine, sets itself to blight all the motifs that had con-
stituted its first part. That Johnson chooses to write like this at all shows
how familiar the ‘unhappy’ treatment of romance was, and how fully con-
scious even populist writers were of the way a bipartite structure could be
used not just to comment on but to dismantle itself.
The Second Part of the Famous Historie of Tom a Lincolne opens with
King Arthur’s dying confession of how he had seduced Angelica and that
the Red Rose Knight is, in fact, their son. The consequences of the revela-
tion are dire. His widowed (unnamed) queen determines to be revenged
on Angelica; Angelica is reclassified as a strumpet, and is devastated by her
loss of honour; the Red Rose Knight is devastated at discovering himself
to have been ‘begot in wantonnesse, and borne a bastard’;43 and Prester
John’s daughter, Anglitora, to whom he is now married, is so disgusted
that she sails off for home with their son, named the Black Knight, and a
blackamoor slave. The rest of the work is devoted to dealing with each of
these initiatory plot elements. The queen sends Angelica seven different
means of being put to death, from which she chooses poisoned robes; the
report of her patience in dying so troubles the queen’s conscience that she
has all the messengers executed, and then hangs herself from her bedpost
with ‘a girdle of pure Arabian silke’ (p. 666). Anglitora’s ship arrives at the
castle of a lord with whom she immediately starts an affair, made easier by
the fact that her son gets lost while hunting and spends seven years in the
forest, his hair growing long and shaggy and his nails becoming so talon-
like that they enable him to climb trees. The slave, upset by his mistress’s
adultery, sets off to find the Red Rose Knight, but is shipwrecked, and
saved by the Knight himself, who is the only survivor on another ship that
has been seven years at sea and whose other occupants have all eaten each
other. They make their way to the castle of his wife and her paramour,
where she, recognizing him despite his palmer’s attire, chokes him by
stuffing the jewels she had once given him down his throat, and disposes
of the corpse in a dunghill. She also has the slave buried up to the waist in
the earth, where he eats the flesh of his own arms before being found by
the Black Knight, who has been led back to the castle by the ghost of his
father demanding revenge. He kills his mother, regrets his actions and
laments over her, and is comforted only by the arrival of his half-brother,
son of the Red Rose Knight and his fairy queen, with whom, after more
hectic adventures, he returns to England, and, with the encouragement of
an ageing Sir Lancelot, builds Lincoln cathedral.
For all its rip-roaring adventures, the second part of Tom a Lincoln was
right to drop the ‘Pleasant’ from its title: it is hard to overstate its unpleas-
antness. The distastefulness focuses relentlessly on its attitude to its
women. They are all lustful, vengeful, and sadistic, and are sadistically
punished for it. The first part is gentler, with Angelica’s yielding to the
king and the desire of both the fairy queen and Anglitora being treated
with superficial sympathy; the last two are both allowed pillow solilo-
quies, in the best tradition of desiring heroines. The whole work, how-
ever, is deliberately designed to titillate its male readers, and perhaps less
Unhappy Endings 391
intentionally to play to male hatred of women; it could scarcely provide

its female readers with any self-image other than loathing. The fairy
queen and all her country of ladies are desperate for men (they had
slaughtered all the original male inhabitants), and Tom’s accompanying
hundred knights are snapped up by a hundred of her own followers. The
myth of women’s sexual insatiability is given a strong showing, most par-
ticularly in the misdemeanours of the previously loving Anglitora in the
sequel. All the evil in the work is carried out by women: the murderous
widowed queen, the adulterous and bloodthirsty wife. The men’s trans-
gressions are never held against them; the women’s virtues are never
credited to them. The only good woman in the whole double work is the
heroine of a story-within-the-story told in the first part. This concerns a
young maiden, ‘daughter to a country gentleman’, who falls in love with
a thoroughly intertextual Valentine, son of the emperor of Greece. She
too pines for him in soliloquy, but his mother scorns the lowness of her
rank and attempts to have her poisoned. She is saved because the physi-
cian who has been ordered to dispense the poison substitutes a sleeping-
draught; and, in this story, love is triumphant (she joins Diana’s nymphs,
he becomes a shepherd, etc.), and when they return to court even the
queen is brought to approve of their marriage. But it is only a story, and
therefore, by implication, a mere fantasy compared with the unrelenting
wickedness of the ‘real’ women of the main plots. For all the work’s qual-
ities as spoof, there is no suggestion that the antifeminism is other than
genuine: that is, it does not show any trace of satirizing misogyny itself.
This is the real thing. Johnson deploys it precisely to destroy the ideology
of romance, in a way that shows both how deeply that is dependent on
the strong and faithful heroine and how thoroughly he disbelieves in such
a creature. Replace her with her opposite, the woman whose passions for
sex and revenge are alike uncontrolled, and the other elements of
romance—the chivalry and the exoticism and the magic—lose all their
meaning. Tom a Lincoln is not so much romance as pornography.
All’s Well that Ends Well, written between the two parts of Johnson’s
History, dismantles romance in much subtler ways. It is unusual in that it
fulfils almost every surface requirement of the genre, including the con-
version of a failing hero and a closing marriage, without fulfilling its sub-
stance. Its title could be applied to almost every romance ever written in
which a happy ending follows from hardship and trial, including
Shakespeare’s own, but it would fit Cymbeline or the Winter’s Tale, or
indeed A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, much better than
this play. The story contains the loving and faithful heroine who pursues
her chosen man until she gets him, an announcement of death overcome
in apparent resurrection, an insistence on the priority of virtue over
birth, recognition tokens, and a quasi-prophecy that appears impossible
of fulfilment but which finally brings together husband, wife, and child.
It is possible to produce Shakespeare’s play as the romance that all these
elements suggest, but neither directors nor critics have usually been per-
suaded. The ready acceptance given to it as a ‘problem play’ demonstrates
how widely the insubstantiality of its outward form is recognized. Its out-
line is closely faithful to its source story, from Boccaccio’s Decameron by
way of William Painter’s novella collection, but that provides a happy
ending unshadowed by doubt.44 The play’s recasting of its short and
uncomplicated fairytale-type original is consistently designed to heighten
the elements that resonate with English romance tradition, to reproduce
its memes, and to set expectations that it finally refuses to endorse. For its
original audience, coming to it with a familiarity with that tradition, the
disparity between what they are led to expect and what they are given
must have struck still more sharply than it does modern audiences.
Shakespeare adapts the story towards romance even while he rejects its
generic trajectory.
The one respect in which the grounding of the plot is unusual for
English, though it shares it with Tom a Lincoln’s inset story, is that the
woman is of lower rank than the man (it is one respect in which its Italian
original shows through). The reverse is much the more commonplace
situation, where men such as Guy, or Amadas, or the Squire of Low
Degree win aristocratic wives through the strength of their love and the
exercise of prowess. In all those cases, their inherent gentilesse, nobility of
character, is sufficient to justify their winning the ladies they love.
Disparity of rank is what Bertram most holds against Helena, but the play
goes to some lengths to deny the validity of the objection, and not only
by the king’s offer to her of lands and titles. The heart of the argument,
and one insisted on over and over again from the first scene forwards, is
the supremacy of inherited and innate virtue over inherited title—the
same argument that holds good for the non-aristocratic lovers of high-
born ladies. Helena inherits from her father not only the medical skills
that enable her to heal the king, but her ‘honesty’ (that is, the quality that
gives substance to honour), to which she adds virtues of her own: ‘she
derives her honesty and achieves her goodness’ (1. 1. 42–3). Bertram
inherits his father’s looks and his land, but the injunction that he should
also inherit his goodness remains no more than a pious hope (1. 1. 58–61).
The question of the nature of true nobility is raised again and again in the
Unhappy Endings 393
play, the king’s speech on the subject reiterating all the familiar argu-
ments with the added trenchancy given by the immediate situation:
That is honour’s scorn
Which challenges itself as honour’s born
And is not like the sire; honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers.
2. 3. 134–8
The argument is given emblematic form in the exchange of Bertram’s
ring for Diana’s chastity, both of them a jewel, an honour, ‘bequeathèd
down from many ancestors’ (4. 2. 45, 48). This may turn chastity into a
commodity, but it also commodifies honour, and it is the woman’s virtue
that comes out of the exchange untainted. Helena, taking Diana’s place,
gives him another ring that the king had given her, a gift he had accom-
panied by a promise that he would always help her at need (5. 3. 85–7).
Recognized by the king in the last scene, this ring acts like a naturally-
functioning talisman; but it cannot make her husband love her.
Helena expresses her desire in the classic way for heroines from Lavine
forward, in soliloquy. She phrases it in the way most familiar in the six-
teenth century as an expression of male desire, in terms of the eyes and
heart, but medieval heroines had been doing the same thing for centuries:
the Melior of William of Palerne, for instance, in its verse and presumably
also its printed prose version, soliloquizes about how
I have him portreide and paynted in mi hert withinne,
That he sittus in mi sight, me thinkes, evermore.45
Helena imagines how she might
see him every hour, to sit and draw
His archèd brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table.
1. 1. 92–4
Like so many earlier romance heroines, she determines to act to get the
man she wants—and given the familiarity of English romance tradition,
it is likely to be such heroines that the audience would think of when she
makes her decision:
Who ever strove
To show her merit that did miss her love?
1. 1. 222–3
But the opposition to her lies solely in her husband, not in adverse cir-
cumstances or parental opposition. As in a number of other romances
where the princess loves a man of lower rank, the older generation
favours the marriage (examples include the Simonides figure in all the
versions of Apollonius including Pericles, and the king in The Squire of
Low Degree). The countess of Roussillon calls on her own experience to
insist on the naturalness of the young woman’s desire, and she is not a
figure whose words we are invited to doubt:
This thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born;
It is the show and seal of nature’s truth,
Where love’s strong passion is impressed in youth.
1. 3. 125–9
Helena’s powers of healing recall those of other wise or skilled heroines,
from Guigemar’s lady forward. She is protected from any suspicion of
witchcraft by the fact that her cure for the king is based on a recipe
bequeathed to her by her father, and she describes it as ‘the help of
heaven’ more than ‘the act of men’ (2. 1. 152). Both her initial decision
to seek to win Bertram through the king, wagering her life against her
failure, and her refusal to give up the quest after he abandons her, bring
her within the remit of the king’s generalized words as he sends his sol-
diers off to war, as if she were a lady-errant, a Britomart seeking her
love:
When
The bravest questant shrinks, find what you seek,
That fame may cry you loud.
2. 1. 15–17
Helena does not need to show physical courage on the field of battle, but
she pursues her quest with an almost theological hope in the possibility
of a happy ending even after Bertram has set his impossible conditions.
The time will bring on summer,
When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp . . .
Time revives us.
All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown.
4. 4. 31–3, 34–5
Unhappy Endings 395
Mutability, she believes, will be change for good, the upward movement
of the wheel. By the time the title maxim is repeated in the closing lines
of the play, it has been refashioned into a thicket of subjunctives and con-
ditionals.
A hard-to-win mistress, like Guy’s Felice, will come to recognize the
innate nobility of her suitor and finally give him unstinting love and faith-
fulness. Bertram does not. The play makes clear that his refusal goes
against all principles of reason and natural desire—every other young
man within the king’s disposal is eager to marry Helena—and of self-
advancement too, though he hopes to get away with fooling the king into
thinking that Helena has left him. The assumption of modern culture that
he should not be pressured into an unwelcome marriage is allowed for in
the play, though it is constrained by political realism. The king declares to
her that she has ‘the power to choose’, but the young men whose mar-
riages are ‘in [his] bestowing’ have no power to refuse (2. 3. 54–7). The
statement goes against all principles of mutual consent as requisite for
marriage, and Helena’s own initial response to Bertram’s rejection of her
is to accept it. The logic of the story, however, the expectations it so insis-
tently creates, are not on his side. A beautiful, virtuous, and desiring
young woman who carries the potential for wealth and titles can be
rejected only by a man incapable of recognizing the desirability of that
virtue and that desire: incapable, in fact, of romance in the full generic
sense. He also creates his own double ‘prophecy’, in setting the condition
for her return that he believes is impossible but which she determines to
fulfil. She does indeed get the ring from which he swears he will never be
parted, and become pregnant with his child. In the source novella, Giletta
carries on her affair with her husband until she is sure she is pregnant.
Helena makes love with Bertram once only, as if her conviction of her own
desire were enough to assure her of the first-night conception that marks
desiring heroines. The lack of deep reciprocity inherent in the bed-trick—
the disguise of love as casual sex—is however carried through into
Bertram’s reluctance to acknowledge the consequences of his own
demands, when she returns pregnant with the child he has fathered. 46 He
does ask ‘pardon’ (5. 3. 310), but given that he never otherwise speaks to
either Diana or Helena in this scene, only to the king, then he seems to be
asking for remission of punishment rather than reconciliation. He does
promise good behaviour, when there is absolutely no alternative left, but
since he is a habitual liar, both to his women and to his king, his qualified
declaration of love at the end does not carry conviction. The king’s
response is to protest too much, both in his own person—
All yet seems well; and if it end so meet,

The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet
5. 3. 334–5
—and as Epilogue:
All is well ended if this suit be won.
Ep. 2
This is not a disaster romance; Helena does not end up dead, the heir to
Roussillon is born or about to be born, and Bertram has got a better wife
than ever he deserved. But where Shakespeare had shown himself, and
was to show himself again, one of the writers most able to create a sense
of bliss at the end of romance, here he opts for scepticism and a veneer of
poetic and providential justice so thin as to invite the eye to see straight
through it.
accusation
All’s Well may have been written next in time to Shakespeare’s other work
that most disrupts the expectations of love-romance, and does so even
more violently. Othello uses a plot that he had already developed into two
comedies, and that was to drive two of his romances: the woman falsely
accused. It had always been a meme that shadowed tragedy particularly
closely, and there is less strain imposed on the plausibility of the story by
letting such a plot fall over the edge into disaster than by pulling it back
within the parameters of romance. In the Garden of Eden, the devil had
seduced Eve into eating the apple: an act widely associated with the loss
of sexual innocence. Polixenes suggests just such a connection in the
Winter’s Tale, as an immediate prelude to Leontes’ conviction that his
wife is adulterous.47 No matter how much love and integrity women may
display, men will still believe that they have listened to the serpent. And
in the postlapsarian world in which women are made subject to their hus-
bands, it is men who hold the power: both the political power of judge-
ment, and the physical power to commit murder.
Othello was presented to audiences already familiar with the idea that
innocence might not be sufficient protection against unwarranted jeal-
ousy. Bellaria, the equivalent figure to Hermione in Greene’s Pandosto,
dies as a consequence of her husband’s accusation of her, and there is
neither a rehabilitation of her in her lifetime nor a resurrection. The story
Unhappy Endings 397
was immensely popular, becoming one of England’s long-time bestsellers

under the title Dorastus and Fawnia, and preserving with it the awareness
that wifely guiltlessness is not always vindicated.48 Bellaria is not, how-
ever, a major figure in the way that Hermione or Desdemona is, and
romance had always allowed that minor characters are disposable. The
fact that Hermione and Desdemona are leading figures within their plays
should qualify them for survival: a pattern that Shakespeare makes true
for Hermione as he had done for Hero in Much Ado, but not for
Desdemona.
The accused woman who dies was not altogether without precedent in
pre-Elizabethan romance, quite apart from historical figures such as
Anne Boleyn. The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell is one of
the latest of the metrical romances, written probably around 1500; the
sole surviving printed copy dates from the mid-1550s, and it was still a
title with economic potential in the 1570s. The romance is based on a
French original, but where the French makes the eponymous wife a part-
ner in an adulterous relationship, the English insists that the love between
the lady and the Knight of Courtesy is chaste, innocent, ‘as children that
together are kynde’.49 Determined to get him killed, her jealous husband
despatches him on crusade to Rhodes, the focus of Christian resistance to
the Turkish advance in the later fifteenth century. He survives a fight with
a dragon, but is mortally wounded in a combat against impossible odds
against the Saracen besiegers of the city. His last act is to ask his page to
return to Faguell with his heart, and give it to his lady. The page, however,
presents it to the lord. He, believing his suspicions confirmed, orders the
heart to be well spiced and cooked, and stands over his wife while she
unsuspectingly eats it. On his telling her what she has done, she refuses all
further earthly food: since her body has become the grave to her lover,
she too must die. She confesses and takes the sacrament, and insists to her
husband that she is his ‘true wedded fere’. He does at last believe her, but
it is too late for a happy ending in this world, though the poem ends with
a strong implication that the Lord to whom she prays for mercy on her
soul will indeed grant her ‘the joye of Paradyse’ (502). The end of the
story may be deeply gruesome, but it does maintain the values of
romance: in their very different circumstances, both lovers die thinking
of the other and remaining true to that love.
Desdemona is guiltless not just of adultery, but even of loving anyone
but her husband. With her determination to marry the man on whom
she has set her heart and her unashamed desire for the consummation of
her marriage, Shakespeare models her, like Helena, on the heroines of
English romance and of his own romantic comedies more than on his
Italian source.50 By all rights she should be the female lead in just such
another comedy. Instead, the play relegates the processes of her and
Othello’s courtship to retrospective summary, so that what might else-
where be the triumphant conclusion becomes the starting-point of the
action. From here, the only way for the wheel to turn is downwards, and
Shakespeare stops it at the bottom. The same actions and responses that
are presented at the start as proof of her love become the evidence against
her: her rebellion against her father’s authority; her readiness to desire a
Moor. Even the ‘magic’ handkerchief acts against her: she rightly
describes herself as ‘most unhappy in the loss of it’,51 and ‘unhappy’ car-
ries much of that additional force that it bore in Middle English. The play
was originally known as The Moor of Venice, a formulation indistin-
guishable as to genre from The Merchant of Venice, with its rescue of its
eponymous protagonist from death, and its couples, including the young
woman who has escaped from her father’s house to marry the man she
loves, set for happy marriage. It may well be that the original audience of
Othello expected the story to follow its romance structure through to the
end: to have Iago’s plot revealed in time, the handkerchief confirm itself
as a metonymy for love and faithfulness, even for Desdemona’s momen-
tary revival after her suffocation to be a genuine return to life. Poetic just-
ice demands no less, and romance often allows more, making space for
penitence and forgiveness; but not here. Othello imagines the ending for
Desdemona that the Knight of Courtesy promises, of the salvation of his
guiltless wife’s soul; but the corollary of that is that
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it.
5. 2. 281–2
He may suggest that Iago is a devil incarnate, but he also sees no alterna-
tive for himself but damnation.52
from family romance to family tragedy
Discovering his parentage does not help a foundling if his name is

Oedipus. The recovery of a lost child may appear to be quintessential
romance, but it also forms the plot of the play chosen by Aristotle as the
quintessential tragedy. The reunion of mother and long-lost son is
tainted by the discovery of his killing of his father and his incestuous
Unhappy Endings 399
relationship with her, and their own children are polluted by their birth.
The myths of the Christian tradition offer almost as little comfort as the
Greek. The first act of the first couple is to lose Paradise; the first act of
their children is for one brother to kill another.
Mordred and Valentine and Balin bear witness to the readiness of
romance to incorporate all such motifs, and to incorporate them for their
tragic potential, not for disaster avoided. There are romances where the
same plot elements can be pulled back from the brink. Even incest is
redeemable in the legend of Gregorius, the child of brother–sister incest
who was exposed on the water and returns not only to marry his mother
but to repent and become both pope and saint.53 Father and son can
recognize each other in the nick of time, as Degaré and his fairy father do.
Brothers can do the same: Ipomedon recognizes his long-lost brother in
mid-combat. The intensity of the relationships within a family, and the
intensity of the accompanying emotions, can produce the most powerful
effects of bliss at the end of a romance, of overwhelming rightness and
completeness—the emotion symbolized at the end of Pericles by his hear-
ing of the music of the spheres. But, as Lorenzo points out at the end of
the Merchant of Venice, we are not in fact capable of hearing it while we
are enclosed in ‘this muddy vesture of decay’.54 The same intensities pro-
duce the particular pain of tragedy: not just its suffering, but the sense
that this is not how things ought to be.
The two works that may be the earliest of the Middle English prose
romances are also family tragedies. The Siege of Thebes and The Siege of
Troy, composed some time after 1422 and copied in sequence in the
same manuscript, are brief retellings of Lydgate’s substantial poems on
the same subjects, his Siege of Thebes and Troy Book.55 Their categoriza-
tion as romance, despite the ‘unhappy’ nature of their narratives, stems
from their treatment of their material, not least their promotion of the
secular values of chivalry and, in the Troy, love (Jason and Medea, Paris
and Helen, and Achilles and Polyxena all receive concentrated attention;
Medea, heir to her father, falls for Jason in the best fashion of medieval
desiring heroines, and is treated with consistent sympathy). Their aris-
tocratic characters, their settings distant in space and time, and their
readiness to incorporate magic (such as the detailed account of the five
charms given by Medea to enable Jason to overcome the beasts that bar
his way to the Golden Fleece) are all typical generic markers for
romance. Thebes does open with the birth prophecy of Edippes’ ‘infor-
tunat destony’, but the following events stress romance patterns when-
ever they can. The servant ordered to take the baby into the forest and
kill it refuses to do so since it is ‘so faire and wel shapen’. The foundling
is discovered and raised by a king, as a romance foundling should be. In
an attempt to keep the morality of the story orthodox, the author insists
that the child was ‘ful of wicked and cursed condicions’, and makes his
killing of his father an act of fury; but he then goes on to kill ‘an horri-
ble beest a monstre, called a Spinx’, in the best tradition of knights-
errant. His marriage to his mother is recognized as being unwitting and
therefore ‘innocent’, and his reaction to discovering what he has done is
not tearing out his eyes but weeping them out. The arrangement
between his sons to alternate ruling his kingdom results in the younger
setting out as a knight-errant, and undergoing some Malory-style
adventures. The siege of Thebes is an affair of high chivalry, conducted
by ‘ful grete renowned’ warriors who fill the whole country ‘with bright
baners and harneys, that hit was mervelouse to se’.56 But the pollution
of the brothers’ birth must work itself out, and their killing of each
other is presented as inevitable:
Hit preved well there of theym two, that weren so horribly goten ayenst al nature
and ordenaunce, for as clerkes seyn, blode to touche blode, bringeth forthe cor-
rupt frute. (p. 269)
When the relationships within a family become too close, parricide and
fratricide will follow. Troy does not have to concern itself with incest, but
it opens with an uncle’s attempt to kill his nephew (the story of Jason),
and its key word becomes ‘treason’: treason within the family and the
palace, between knights when chivalry fails, and finally within Priam’s
chivalric affinity as Antenor and Eneas arrange for the betrayal of the city.
The text closes, not with a prediction of the great future awaiting Eneas’
descendants, but with another warning of disaster:
And alwey the ende of every tresoun and falsenes to sorwe and myschef at the last.
(p. 285)
The romance elements of the great legendary-historical stories are given

generous treatment, but the trajectories of their narratives lead else-
where.
The same tension between romance treatment and inevitable catastro-
phe is at its most powerful in the Morte Darthur. Malory’s ending is so
overwhelming, and so familiar, that it is easy to overlook how golden
Arthur’s world had seemed to other writers in the fifteenth century. Even
John Lydgate, not known for his idealism, delivers some high panegyrics
on him, as being
Unhappy Endings 401
Hedspryng of honour, of largesse cheef cisterne,

Merour of manod, of noblesse the lanterne,
who sets up the Round Table as the best means of upholding the ‘comoun
proffit’ of the realm, and whose knights show every Christian virtue.57
His time was everything that Lydgate’s own present is not, when men and
women loved only for ‘trouthe and honeste’.58 Lydgate follows Geoffrey
of Monmouth and the historical tradition in having Arthur die at the
height of his conquests, in battle against his rebel nephew, and that is the
version of his story most commonly found in Middle English, where the
processes of historical movement alone cause his downfall.59 The
Lancelot-Grail adds Mordred’s incestuous birth and Merlin’s prophecies
of disaster to come, and it is that version that Malory chooses to follow.
Despite his reworking of the casting adrift of the infant Mordred to turn
him more into a Judas figure, the threat of impending disaster disappears
from sight for most of the work, while the quests and adventures of the
greatest fellowship of knights occupy the foreground. Combat through-
out most of the work is presented as admirable, a test of prowess, named
knight against named knight, in a process of conferring honour through
renaming—renommée, ‘renown’. Opponents who are hostile to King
Arthur are defeated and either killed or brought within the fellowship.
From the middle of the Tristram, however, an altogether more disturb-
ing element enters the narrative, in which fellows of the Round Table
actively hate each other and carry that hatred through into murder. The
treacherous death of the ‘good knight’ Lamorak, struck from behind by
Mordred while fighting alone against Gawain and three of his brothers,
marks the symbolic moment when the fellowship begins to break from
within.60 Malory avoids describing the murder directly, recording it only
through the horrified reactions of various other knights (Gareth among
them) as they themselves hear about it.
The brothers’ action can, however, still be placed morally, as an act
against chivalry, a betrayal of knightliness. Their placing on the chivalric
roll of honour becomes one not of fame but of infamy. Much harder to
assimilate within any kind of romance pattern is the tragic irony of
Lancelot’s killing of Gareth in the course of his rescue of Guinevere from
the threat of the stake. Although Gareth does not have the seniority to
refuse Arthur’s order to escort her (unlike Gawain, he is ‘yonge and full
unable to say you nay’), he shows his unwillingness by not bearing arms.
He is, therefore, not only defenceless against Lancelot’s attack but with-
out the easy recognizability conferred by his shield.
And as they were unarmed, [Lancelot] smote them and wyst nat whom that he
smote, and so unhappely they were slayne. (Malory, iii. 1183 (XX. 9))
Malory has made Gareth one of the co-heroes of his work, creating for
him a biography that demonstrates why, as Gawain recalls in bewilder-
ment, ‘he loved sir Launcelot of all men erthly’.61 The French Mort Artu
presents the disasters of the last book as the consequence of Lancelot’s
adultery, but Malory never condemns his love for Guinevere, and so holds
back from justifying what happens in terms of divine punishment.62 From
the death of Gareth forwards, the Morte Darthur moves beyond moral or
providential explanation. If there is any principle at work, it is the wheel
of Arthur’s final dream, that whirls upside down and tips him from his
throne into ‘an hydeous depe blak watir’ full of serpents (iii. 1233 (XXI. 3)).
God may allow the soul of the dead Gawain to appear to him in a coda to
the same dream to warn him against fighting the next day, but no meta-
physical explanation is offered for the adder that comes out of a ‘lytyll
hethe-buysshe’ as the armies face each other and so causes the onset of the
battle on ‘this unhappy day’ (iii. 1235 (XXI. 4)). We are not told what side
the knight belongs to who draws his sword to kill it, and it does not mat-
ter. The conventional combat of named knights, with its implicit promise
of victory for the most righteous, now becomes a universal carnage:
And thus they fought all the longe day, and never stynted tylle the noble knyghtes
were layde to the colde erthe. And ever they fought stylle tyll it was nere nyght,
and by than was there an hondred thousand leyde dede uppon the downe.
(iii. 1236 (XXI. 4))
The knights of the Round Table and their desire for ‘worship’ are alike
obliterated in the anonymity of slaughter.63 This may be the Day of Destiny,
in Malory’s phrase, but it is not a divinely-controlled Day of Judgement.
What Malory is portraying, with full consciousness, in these last sec-
tions of his work, is civil war: the kind of war defined not by deeds of high
chivalry but by the severance of what should be the closest of bonds,
father with son, and brother with brother. Completing his work towards
the end of the Wars of the Roses, he draws a direct comparison between
the events of his own age and of Arthur’s:
Lo ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a myschyff here was? For he that was the
moste kynge and nobelyst knyght of the worlde, and most loved the felyshyp of
noble knyghtes, and by hym they all were upholdyn, and yet myght nat thes
Englyshemen holde them contente with hym. Lo thus was the olde custom and
usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that
custom. (iii. 1229 (XXI. 2))
Unhappy Endings 403
Shakespeare epitomizes the horrors of civil war in the emblematic scene

in Henry VI Part 3 where a father kills his son and a son his father. The
familiarity of the emblem is demonstrated from a ballad on the Wars of
the Roses still current in the eighteenth century:
Fathers unkind their Children kill’d,
And Sons their Fathers slew;
Yea, Kindred fought against their Kind,
And not each other knew.64
Civil war, whether of Mordred against Arthur or Lancastrians against
Yorkists, encapsulates family tragedy, the breaking of the bonds that
should be most sacred.
‘The moste party of all Inglonde hylde wyth sir Mordred’, Malory
announces, and Mordred is at once a rebel, a son who tries to depose his
own father and marry his wife, a regicide, and a parricide. When Arthur
returns to oppose the rebellion, Mordred is there to try to prevent ‘hys
owne fadir to londe uppon the londe that he was kynge over’. And when
Arthur insists on encountering him as the last act of ‘thys wycked day of
Desteny’, the horror of Mordred’s inflicting a fatal wound on the man
who is both his king and his father is intensified by the gruesome way in
which he does it.
And whan sir Mordred saw kynge Arthur he ran untyll hym with hys swerde
drawyn in hys honde, and there kyng Arthur smote sir Mordred undir the shylde,
with a foyne of hys speare, thorowoute the body more than a fadom. And whan
sir Mordred felte that he had hys dethys wounde he threste hymselff with the
myght that he had upp to the burre of kyng Arthurs speare, and ryght so he smote
hys fadir, kynge Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon
the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet and the tay of the brayne.
(iii. 1237 (XXI. 4))
Arthur may set out for Avalon in the barge, but Bedivere finds a ‘tumbe
newe gravyn’ at Glastonbury the next day, and it is the king’s corpse that
Lancelot finds when he inters the dead Guinevere beside him. And on the
battlefield itself, pillagers—presumably more of those unnamed
Englishmen who held with Mordred—come to kill off the wounded and
strip the corpses of their riches. There may be one more moment of won-
der, in the arm that emerges from the lake to catch Excalibur and draw it
under the water, but the removal of the sword from the world marks the
end of the age of marvels.
Spenser may have tried to restore the marvellous by setting the young
Arthur at large in Faery Land, but a return to more historical Arthurian
material picked up the demythologized nation that Malory had set in place
at the end of his work. The Misfortunes of Arthur, written by Thomas
Hughes and acted before the queen by the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn in 1587,
turns Arthurian romance into a full-scale Senecan revenge tragedy, plus
dumbshows. The whole action is watched over by the ghost of Gorlois, the
duke of Tintagel whose likeness Uther took on in order to sleep with his
wife and beget Arthur. The play is premissed on the temporal outline of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s biography of Arthur (he has spent nine years
abroad in pursuit of his imperial ambitions, and the play begins with his
return home after hearing of Mordred’s attempted usurpation), but it
incorporates the incestuous begetting of Mordred from the romance tradi-
tion. As ‘The Argument to the Tragedy’ makes clear, indeed, every crime,
and especially every sexual crime, is made worse than in its original. Uther
makes love to Igerna before killing Gorlois, so making their love technically
adulterous and Arthur a bastard outside the official possibility of legitima-
tion. Mordred’s mother is not just Arthur’s half-sister but his twin sister,
whom he seduces knowingly rather than unwittingly.65 Guenevara is not
only having a willing affair with Mordred, as Geoffrey of Monmouth
half implies (‘O mischiefe, O lewd life, O filthy dayes’, as another Arthurian
promoter put it),66 but considers murdering her husband on his return.
The Chorus represents the ensuing war as a replay of Theban tragedy:
In Thebes the rotte and murreine would not cease
Till Laius broode had paide for breach of lawes:
In Brytain warres and discord will not stent
Till Uther’s line and offspring quite be spent.67
The final battle is described in the classic terms for civil war: of brother
killing brother, and father and son killing each other:
The brethren broach their blood; the sire his sonnes,
The sonne again would prove by too much wrath,
That he, whom thus he slew, was not his sire.
IV. ii. 170–2
And Conan, the play’s approximate equivalent to Bedivere, draws the
contemporary moral:
When perhaps our childrens children read
Our woefull warres displaid with skilfull pen,
They’l thinke they heere some sounds of future facts,
And not the ruines olde of pompe long past.
IV. iii. 29–32
Unhappy Endings 405
To an audience in 1587, the lines are both a warning against present rebel-
lion (it was the year in which the danger of Mary Queen of Scots was
finally removed), and a reminder of the Wars of the Roses, brought to an
end by the advent of the Tudor dynasty. In this play, it is made explicit
that Uther’s line dies out with Arthur and Mordred: Gorlois’s curse ends
with them. It closes by looking forward to a distant future, the present of
the performance, when a Virgin shall come from Heaven, clean of all the
sexual impurity that has caused such havoc in the play, and restore peace
to Britain.
It is the inevitable way in the late sixteenth century of pulling a
romance rabbit out of a very black hat. What is interesting is how the hat
itself has changed colour, and shape. Hughes and his collaborators set out
to erase every association of Arthur with romance. There are no marvels,
no acts of prowess, no love, no faithfulness: just a heaping up of sin upon
sin and blood upon blood, to the accompaniment of platitudinous
choruses about the advantages of a quiet life and low station. Given the
continuing widespread belief in Arthur’s essential historicity and in his
status as Britain’s own Worthy, the demythologizing of the narrative, its
revised status as a warning about failed kingship, retribution, and civil
war, is extraordinary. The potential for most of such an interpretation
had been there since Geoffrey himself (though he casts Mordred merely
as Arthur’s nephew); it took the disillusioned eyes of student lawyers of
the Elizabethan age to realize it in textual form.
There is one last legendary romance that was recast as a tragedy a few
years later, but which gave a less obvious invitation to such treatment: the
story of King Lear. In Geoffrey’s version, Leir is the ninth-generation
descendant of Brut and eponymous founder of the city of Leicester. The
basis of the story is already in place in the History of the Kings of Britain:
the love-test and the ensuing division of the kingdom; the marriage of the
plain-speaking Cordelia to the king of Gaul; the other daughters’ mis-
treatment of their father; Cordelia’s invasion of Britain to restore him to
his throne. In this ‘historical’ account, the restoration is successful, and
Cordelia in due course succeeds him. It is a mixture of foundation
romance (for the city) and a variant on the restoration of the true king,
though for this early date there is no need for primogeniture to trump
ethical right to the succession. Only in the sequel does any element of
tragedy enter the story, when the widowed Cordelia is deposed by her
nephews and commits suicide in prison. The story appears to have been
turned into an independent romance by the late thirteenth century, when
it is named in a list of Anglo-Norman lais, and it was familiar in romance
contexts in the fourteenth.68 It was widely known in the Elizabethan age,

being retold by Holinshed, Spenser, William Warner, and others, and
dramatized in the 1590s as The True Chronicle History of King Leir. All
consistently follow the romance outline of Leir’s own story, and the early
play intensifies that. Its events are safely governed by a Christian
Providence; prayers and invocations to God regularly punctuate the
action, and are divinely answered. Its king of Gallia comes to Britain in
disguise, and falls in love at first sight with the destitute Cordella before
he knows who she is; she reciprocates his love while she believes him to
be a palmer. Leir dreams that his elder daughters stab him, and that
Cordella brings him back to life by pouring balsam into his wounds. The
daughters do, indeed, attempt to have him assassinated, but the mur-
derer, forcefully helped by thunder and lightning and other effects sent
directly by God, decides to spare him. Cordella and her husband go on an
outing to the seaside, disguised as country folk, and there meet up unrec-
ognized with her father, who has crossed to France. The play ends with
the defeat of the sisters, and Leir’s expression of thanks to all those who
have remained loyal to him.
The ways in which Shakespeare converts this romance material into
tragedy are too well known to need detailed analysis. For the first audi-
ence, familiar with the story, and presented with what the quarto text
calls the ‘True Chronicle History’ of King Lear rather than the ‘Tragedy’
it became in the Folio, their belief in the possibility of a happy ending may
well have lasted until the final few minutes of the play. The known story
of Lear promises an ending like that Shakespeare was to give Pericles and
Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, where father and daughter rediscover
each other in a powerful invocation of harmony and a promise of a bet-
ter future. The subplot that he adds, in which a bastard brother plots
against his legitimate sibling, is one that he had tried out in Much Ado
About Nothing, with the villain being unmasked before the damage he
had caused was irreparable. He had indeed already written one entire
play with plot materials closely similar to those of Lear, in the romance-
based As You Like It. There, the configurations of family foreshadow
those of the tragedy, with the three sons of Sir Roland de Boys, of whom
the youngest is the most virtuous, standing in for the three daughters,
and Duke Frederick’s deposition of his brother approximating to
Edmund’s disinheriting of Edgar. The dispossessed are exiled from the
court to the countryside, but it is a timeless (or at least clock-free) Forest
of Arden, a Warwickshire version of the great Forest of Ardennes that
occupies the landscape of adventure romance. The landscape into which
Unhappy Endings 407
the dispossessed of Lear are driven is nature at its harshest, stormbound

and devoid of shelter. Rosalind and Celia take along their court fool to be
a comfort to them in their banishment (1. 3. 130); he is a figure who prop-
erly belongs in comedy, but in Lear the Fool’s faithfulness to the king
becomes indistinguishable from the agony of conscience, of knowledge
of foolish action that cannot be recalled or undone. The comedy ends
with the reconciliation of brother with brother, the reunion of father and
daughter, the restoration of the true ruler, and four marriages under the
aegis of Hymen (and whether Hymen is presented as a ‘real’ theophany,
like Jupiter in Cymbeline, or a pageant arranged by Rosalind, does not
greatly matter). The tragedy ends with the breaking of marriages, brother
killing brother and sister sister, the father dying on his beloved daughter’s
corpse, the extinction of the royal line, and no evidence that the gods so
much as exist.
Shakespeare’s Lear is almost as great a contrast to the earlier Leir as it
is to As You Like It. Disguise becomes more a matter of stripping down,
of becoming ‘unaccommodated man’ in a testing out of the minimum
requirement for humanity, rather than playful holidaying. There are no
scenes of falling in love or intimacy between Cordelia and the man she
marries. The storm is not an act of divine protectiveness but a macrocos-
mic representation of psychic agony. The restoration of the king to his
throne and Cordelia’s succession never happen. The wheel of Fortune
that casts the king down and lifts him back up is now a ‘wheel of fire’, a
machine of torture, and its downward movement is not offset by any final
rise. Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar may believe in beneficent gods, but
Shakespeare’s version abandons the Christian framework of Leir, and the
new plotting holds back from endorsing any such belief. The recovery of
the mad Lear may be like a resurrection, but it is not one that he wants:
‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave.’ And his dying belief, if that
is what it is, that Cordelia still lives, is delusion.69
Romance did not give way to tragedy without a fight. At just about the
same time as Shakespeare was turning the story of Lear from romance to
tragedy, an anonymous author was turning Valentine and Orson from
tragedy back to romance. The Emperor and the Child, preserved in the
Percy Folio, reverts to the medium of the earliest form of the story, verse,
and its original shape, in which the calumny of the empress and the loss
of the babies are corrected and restored in a closing family reunion:
And soe att lenght, in spight of ffortunes happ.

They lived in joy, and feared no after clappe.70
As a concluding couplet, it is strikingly close to the one inflicted on King

Lear by Nahum Tate, in 1681. The absence of any poetic justice or divine
endorsement of the good in Shakespeare’s play threatened to make it
intolerable; Samuel Johnson was famously appalled by it.71 Tate’s adap-
tation, which put back into the story everything that Shakespeare had
taken out, and more besides, held the stage for almost two hundred years.
Tate’s reversion to an outline closer to Geoffrey, in which Cordelia wins
the battle, was by this date made not for reasons of legendary-historical
accuracy but for generic propriety. His Lear opts not to take back his
throne but to become a hermit, along with Kent; and since the King of
France is eliminated from the cast list, Cordelia is free to marry Edgar.
The play ends with a triumphant affirmation of everything Shakespeare
had shaped his play to avoid, as Edgar assures his bride,
Whatever storms of fortune are decreed,
That Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.72
But this is no longer an age of faith, and the claim is altogether too easy:
a piece of stage machinery, not an affirmation of hope against the odds.
It was the difficulty of bringing truth and virtue to success that had given
romance much of its force. It was not a characteristic evident in the
everyday world. God might reward such things in Heaven, but if they
were to be realized on earth, they needed both providential support and
the exercise of heroism, exceptional courage and faithful love. Over the
centuries, human perfectibility, then divine Providence, then the ideals
themselves were falling out of belief.
Appendix: Medieval Romance in
English after 1500
This appendix lists all those works originating between 1138 and 1400, or trans-
mitting material of similar date, that were current in English or Scottish dialects
of English after 1500, as evidenced by prints, further manuscripts, adaptations,
and allusions. Full details of modern editions and criticism cited here by name
can be found in the Bibliography.
Fuller accounts of the Middle English romances, including plot summaries, are
given in J. Burke Severs, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1350 I:
Romances (New Haven, 1967). Plot summaries of all longer fictional prose nar-
ratives in English to 1558 are given in Appendix 2 of Beware the Cat by William
Baldwin: The First English Novel, ed. William Ringler, jr, and Michael Flachmann
(San Marino, 1988).
The information is organized as follows:
Heading Italicized headings indicate romance titles, roman type indicates
subject area (e.g., stories of the Trojan founding of Britain appear
under ‘Brut’; the various redactions of the story of Horn appear
under ‘Horn’). The title given is that by which the romance is
most commonly known, except that ‘Sir’ is omitted.
Edition Major modern individual editions are indicated by ‘ed.’ plus the
editor’s name; anthologies containing the work are indicated by
the name of the editor only. For full details, see the Bibliography.
Titles are given in cases of possible confusion.
Origin/source ‘Source’ indicates a translation or close adaptation of a known
text; ‘origin’ indicates a looser relationship to an original, or a
more general field. Known ownership of source texts in England
is noted, in particular the manuscript presented to Margaret of
Anjou on her marriage to Henry VI, London, British Library
Royal MS 15 E VI.
Date/MS Summary information about the likely date of composition of the
Middle English text and the number and (where of interest) date
range of its surviving medieval manuscripts. Information from
Severs, Manual, Vol. 1: Romances, and Guddat-Figge, Catalogue.
Inclusion in the earliest surviving anthology of Middle English
romances, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, Advocates
Library MS 19.2.1), of c.1340, is noted.
16th–17th c currency. Summary information about the number and dates of sur-
viving late manuscripts and printed editions of the original texts or close adap-
tations down to c.1660, largely drawn from the Short-Title Catalogue (STC)
and, where it contains material of significantly different date from the surviv-
ing copies, the Stationers’ Registers (SR); place of publication is London unless
otherwise stated. It should be remembered that numerous entire editions have
been lost, and the prints noted here do not give anywhere near a complete
account of what was available; many of the known editions survive only as
fragments of a single copy. Individual late manuscripts are noted as follows:
Banyster: manuscripts copied in 1564 by Edward Banyster (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Douce 261 and London, British Library, Egerton MS 3132A) (see
Seymour, ‘MSS Douce’)
Percy Folio: the last great manuscript anthology to include romances, the Percy
Folio manuscript (London, British Library MS Add. 27879; edited by Hales and
Furnivall), compiled c.1648.
Adaptations, dramatizations, etc. Indicates survival of medieval material in forms
substantially different from the original texts, such as plays, broadside and tra-
ditional ballads, and other rewritings. Information about dramatizations is
taken from Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, 3rd edn., rev. by Sylvia
Stoler Wagonheim, unless otherwise noted.
Allusions. Selected references indicating the popularity of named romances after

1500. The degree of selection necessarily varies with the density of allusion,
subject areas such as Arthur, Brutus, and Guy of Warwick being impossible
even to adumbrate.
Abbreviations:
Complaynt list of current romances in Complaynt of Scotland, c.1550, ed.
Stewart, p. 50 [anonymous, but possibly by Robert Wedderburn].
Cox list of books (possibly fictional) in Robert Langham: A Letter, ed. Kuin,
p. 53, and Appendix G [the author may be William Patten rather than
Robert Laneham or Langham: see O’Kill, ‘Printed Works’].
Crosse list of works for censure in Henry Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth
(1603), ed. Grosart, pp. 102–3.
Dering list of works for censure in Edward Dering, A Brief and Necessary
Instruction . . . (1572).
Hyrd list of English romances added to Vives’ continental list by Richard
Hyrd Instrvction of a Christen woman (written c.1530, printed 1541):
see pp. 37‒8 above.
Kirkman works recommended by Francis Kirkman, ‘To the Reader’, in The
Famous and Delectable History of Don Bellianis (1673)
Meres Francis Meres’ list of works for censure in Palladis Tamia (1598), in
Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. by G. Gregory Smith, ii.308
Appendix: Medieval Romance in English after 1500 411
Nashe list of works for censure in Anatomie of Absurditie (1589), Works, ed.
McKerrow i.11
Rowlands list of reading of the eponymous ‘Melancholie Knight’, 1615.
Albina and her sisters

Origin? early 14th c Anglo-Norman Des Granz Geans
Date/MS history no independent Middle English version, but incorpo-
rated into chronicles from 14th c
16th–17th c currency chronicles, including 1543 print of Harding, Holinshed
Alexander
numerous versions in Middle English and Scots: see Severs, Manual, nos. 64–70
French prose included in BL Royal 15 E VI
Kyng Alisaunder
Edition ed. by Smithers
Origin Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie
Date/MSS history early 14th c; four MSS including Auchinleck
16th–17th c currency print c.1525, STC 321
Alexander Buik (Scottish)
Edition ed. R. L. G. Ritchie, Scottish Text Society 12, 17, 21, 25
Sources French Fuerre de Gadres and Voeux du Paon (13th–early
14th c)
Date/MS history 1438; no MS extant
16th–17th c currency print Edinburgh c.1580 (STC 321.5)
Apollonius of Tyre
Edition in Archibald, Apollonius (also generous bibliography of
versions)
Origin probably Greek by way of 5th–6th c Latin; other Latin
texts include Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon and
later versions of the Gesta Romanorum (rare in manu-
script)
Date/MSS history one MS of Old English version, one of late 14th c version
Gower, Confessio amantis (c.1390) (from Godfrey)
16th–17th c currency Kynge Apollyn of Thyre (STC 708.5, 1510) (from French
Gesta)
Gesta Romanorum (Latin; continental printings from
c.1475); prints from c.1502–57 (STC 21286.3–21287; not in
later editions)
Gower, Confessio amantis, 3 edns. 1483–1554
Lawrence Twine, The Pattern of Painfull Adventures, SR
July 1576 (ii. 301); surviving edns. 1594, 1607 (STC
709–10) (from Latin Gesta)
George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles

(STC 25638.5, 1608)
Dramatization Shakespeare [?and others], Pericles, ?1608
Arthur (legendary history)

Origin Geoffrey of Monmouth (Latin, 1138)
Middle English versions Layamon’s Brut, early 13th c
abundant in chronicles, including Harding (mid-15th c
verse)
Arthur, late 14th c verse interpolation in Latin chronicle,
one MS
Alliterative Morte Arthure (ed. Benson, Hamel), c.1400,
one MS
Malory, Tale of Emperor Lucius in Morte Darthur (from
alliterative Morte)
16th–17th c currency Latin abridgement of Geoffrey 1585 (STC 20109)
chronicles including Harding (printed 1543), Holinshed
(three edns., 1577–85)
Leland, Assertio, 1544 (trans. Robinson 1582)
Adaptations Lloyd, Nine Worthies, 1584; extended as ballad in Percy
Folio
tragedy of Arthur in 1610 edition of Mirror for
Magistrates
Dramatization Hathway’s Arthur, King of England, 1598 (lost; content
unknown)
Uther Pendragon, 1597 (lost)
Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587 (Vulgate-influenced)
Allusions numerous, including opening lines of ballad in
Complaynt
Robert Chester, Love’s Martyr, 1601
Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, 1609
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 1612/1620
see also, Merlin
Arthur (romance developments)

Editions Stanzaic Morte Arthur ed. Benson, Death of King Arthur
Malory, Le Morte Darthur: (manuscript-based), ed. by
Vinaver; (Caxton-based) ed. Spisak; Cowen
Sources French Lancelot-Grail
English ownership of various parts through 14th–15th c
Date/MS history Stanzaic Morte Arthur, c.1400; one late 15th c MS
Malory, completed 1469–70; one MS; printed by Caxton
1485
16th–17th c currency 6 edns. of Malory 1485–1634 (STC 801–6)

Allusions numerous, including Cox, Kirkman; condemnations by
Ascham, Dering, Nashe, Meres, Baxter (1578), Florio
(1603), Crosse, Rowlands; extensively in Spenser,
Faerie Queene; Jonson, Prince Henries Barriers;
Milton, Par. Reg. II. 359–61
Adaptations/dramatizations 1539 court masque of Arthur and his knights
(John Heywood; lost)
Leicester’s Kenilworth entertainments, 1575
Gosson suggests dramatizations pre-1582
Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587 (also historical)
Hathway’s Arthur, King of England, 1598 (lost; possibly
legendary history)
see also, Grail, Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram
Arthur of Little Britain

Edition ed. E. V. Utterson
Source early 14th c French prose Artus de Bretagne
Date/MS history no Middle English versions, no MSS known
16th–17thc currency trans. by Lord Berners before 1533; three? prints
c.1560–1581 (STC 807–8)
Allusions Complaynt; Underdowne’s 1570 preface to Aethiopian
Historie; Nashe
Kirkman notes as rare, 1673
Bevis of Hamtoun
Editions ed. E. Kölbing, EETS E.S. 46, 48, 65; Herzman et al.
Source 13th c Anglo-Norman Boeve de Hamton
Date/MSS history c.1300; 7 MSS (of two versions) including Auchinleck, to
late 15th c
16th–17thc currency numerous prints from c.1500 to 1711 (STC 1987–96;
Wing H2160; and see Fellows, ‘Bevis redivivus’)
Adaptations chapbook versions from late 17th c
parts reworked by Spenser, Bunyan
Allusions numerous, inc. Complaynt, Cox, Peele, Shakespeare,
Jonson, Rowlands, Kirkman
condemnations by Hyrd, Dering, Nashe, Meres, Crosse,
Arthur Dent (Plaine Mans Path-way, 1601)
Blanchardyn and Eglantine

Edition ed. L. Kellner, EETS E.S. 58
Source 15th c French prose redaction of 13th c romance
Date/MS history no Middle English version prior to Caxton’s trans-
lation, printed 1490 (STC 3124)
16th–17th c currency adapted by Thomas Pope Goodwine, prints 1595, 1597

(STC 3125–6)
Allusions Meres
Brutus
Origin Geoffrey of Monmouth
Date/MSS history 1138; numerous later chronicle versions
16th–17th c currency chronicles including Holinshed; Spenser, Faerie Queene
‘Defence of Brutus’ 1593 (SR ii. 627)
Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, 1609
Dramatization Day and Chettle, Conquest of Brute I & II (1598; lost)
Allusions extensive and various; London as Troynovaunt
The Carle off Carlile, see under Gawain
Charlemagne
Origin mid-13th c French metrical Fierebras
included in BL Royal 15 E VI
Middle English versions The Sowdone of Babylone (c.1400, one MS); two
other redactions both entitled Sir Firumbras (late 14thc,
one MS each)
Printed version Book 2 of Caxton’s translation Charles the Grete, 1485,
from Bagnyon’s French prose Fierebras, 1478 (STC 5013)
(ed. by Herrtage)
Adaptations The Twelve Peers of France (lost; ‘old’ in August 1586, SR
ii. 453)
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and its Renaissance derivatives (Harington’s trans-
lation, 1591; play, 1591) are distantly related to this material; the MS play
Charlemagne (c.1604) is independent of both traditions.
see also, Four Sons of Aymon; Huon of Burdeux; Rauf Coilyear
Chaucer: the romances of the Canterbury Tales

Editions Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson; numerous
Date/MS history c.1380–1400; numerous MSS
16th–17th c currency five edns., 1477–1526 (STC 5082–6); Works, six edns.
1532–1602 (STC 5068–81), 1687
Allusions numerous: see Spurgeon
Franklin’s Tale
Origin Italian (Boccaccio, probably Decameron)
Dramatization Francis Beaumont and Nathan Field, The Triumph of
Honour, 1612
Allusion quoted Faerie Queene III. i. 25
Knight’s Tale
Source Italian, Boccaccio’s Teseida
Dramatizations Richard Edwards, 1566
anonymous, 1594
Shakespeare and Fletcher, Two Noble Kinsmen
Allusions Wyatt, Satire 1; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Jonson,
Bartholomew Fair
Man of Law’s Tale (Constance)
Origin Anglo-Norman, Trevet’s Chroniques
Modernization Thomas Alsop, Fair Custance, STC 538.5 (c.1525)
Dramatization Dekker and others, Fair Constance of Rome (1600)
Sir Thopas
Origin original, based on Middle English romance
Imitations Dunbar; Drayton
Allusions Wyatt, Satire 1; Spenser, Faerie Queene, View; Drayton,
Eglogues
Squire’s Tale
Origin no known source, but reworking of French romance
motifs
Adaptations/completions Spenser, Faerie Queene; John Lane (1615, rev.
1630; unpublished)
Allusions inc. Milton, Il Penseroso
Wife of Bath’s Tale
Origin probably English folktale
Dramatization Fletcher, Women Pleas’d (1620)
Adaptations Richard Johnson, ballad 1612
Allusions numerous to the Wife and the Prologue, less common
to her Tale (see Cooper, ‘Shape-shifting’)
Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

Editions ed. B. A. Windeatt; Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson;
numerous
Origin/source 12th c French of Benoit de St-Maur, by way of 13th c
Latin of Guido delle Colonne, to Boccaccio’s Il
Filostrato (Italian, 14th c)
Date/MSS history c.1385; sixteen MSS
Other medieval versions included in Lydgate’s Troy Book
16th–17thc currency edns. 1483, 1517, 1526 (STC 5094–6); Works, six edns.
1532–1602 (STC 5068–81), 1687
Lydgate’s Troy Book printed 1513, 1555 (STC 5579–80)
Translation Kinaston’s Latin translation of Books 1–2, 1635 (STC
5097–97.3)
Dramatizations ?Cornish, 1516; Grimald, 1540s (both lost)

(with other sources: see Troy) Shakespeare, Troilus and
Cressida
Adaptations ballads 1566, 1581 (SR i.300, ii.394)
Allusions numerous, including Turberville 1569; Gascoigne 1575;
Sidney 1581
see Spurgeon
Constance, see Gower; Chaucer, Man of Law’s Tale
Degaré
Editions ed. by Schleich (repr. Jacobs, Later Versions); French
and Hale; Laskaya and Salisbury
Origin no known source, but traditional materials
Date/MS history early 14th c, 4 MSS to c.1500 including Auchinleck
16th–17th c currency four editions from c.1512 to c.1565 (entitled Sir Degore)
(STC 6470–6472.5)
Banyster
Percy Folio
The Earl of Toulouse

Editions Fellows; French and Hale
Origin no known literary source
Date/MS history 4 MSS to c.1500
Later currency no known prints, but analogue in Percy Folio Sir
Aldingar and later traditional ballads (Child no. 59, ii.
33–48)
Eger and Grime

Editions ed. Caldwell (parallel texts); French and Hale (Percy)
Origin no known source
Date/MS history 15th c allusions, but no extant medieval MSS
16–17 c currency record of 1577 edn. (no copies extant)
Percy Folio
extant prints from 1669, 1687, 1711
Allusions from 15th c; Complaynt
Eglamour of Artois
Editions ed. F. E. Richardson, EETS O.S. 256; Hudson
Origin no single source known; traditional material
Date/MS history mid-14th c; five MSS to early 16th c
acted at St Albans 1444 (‘Eglemour and Degrebelle’,
lost)
16th–17th c currency six edns. from c.1500 to c.1565 (STC 7541–7544.5); licence
transferred 1581–2 (SR ii. 405)
Banyster
Percy Folio
Allusions Cox; Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen
Adaptations Rowlands (parody)
influence on Percy Folio ballad Sir Lionel and later oral
versions (Child no. 18, i. 208–15)
Four Sons of Aymon

Edition ed. O. Richardson, EETS E.S. 44–5
Source French prose redaction of c.1400 (printed c.1480) of late
12th c chanson de geste, Renaut de Montauban
Date/MS history no English versions before Caxton’s translation, printed
c.1489
16–17 c currency licence transferred 12 March 1581–2, 22 Feb 1598–9 (SR ii.
408, iii. 137, 139)
Dramatization acted 1603, 1624 (lost)
Allusions Complaynt; North, Diall of Princes (1557); Cox, Dering,
Nashe, Meres, Rowlands
Kirkman notes as rare, 1673
Gamelyn
Editions French and Hale; Sands
Origin no known source; related to English folktales and Robin
Hood ballads
Date/MSS history later 14th c; survives as spurious ‘Cook’s Tale’ in 25 MSS
of Canterbury Tales
16th–17th c currency mid–17th c MS (Ashmole)
not printed until 1721
Adaptation Thomas Lodge, Euphues Golden Legacy (Rosalynde),
source of As You Like It
Gawain
Golagros and Gawain
Edition Hahn
Origin loose adaptation from First Continuation of 12th c
Perceval
Date/MSS history late 15th c; no known MSS
16th–17th c currency one print, Edinburgh 1508 (STC 11984)
Allusion Complaynt
The Grene Knight

Editions Hahn; Speed
Origin free tail-rhyme retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight
Date/MS history 15th c; no surviving MSS; possible reference by John
Paston, 1470
16th–17th c currency no extant prints; Percy Folio
A Jeast of Sir Gawayne
Edition Hahn
Origin loose adaptation from First Continuation of 12th c Perceval
Date/MS history late 15th c; no medieval MS
16th–17th c currency prints from c.1528 to c.1540 (STC 11691a.3–.7); SR 1557–8
(i. 79)
Banyster
Allusion ? Cox (‘Sir Gawain’)
Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle
Edition Hahn
Origin no source known, but includes beheading motif as in
Gawain and the Green Knight
Date/MS history c.1400, one MS
16th–17th c currency adaptation,The Carle off Carlile, probably early 16th c;
no prints extant; Percy Folio (also ed. by Hahn)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Grene Knight
The Turke and Gowin
Edition Hahn
Origin no source known, but includes beheading motif as in
Gawain and the Green Knight
Date/MSS history c.1500; no extant MS
16th–17th c currency no prints extant; Percy Folio
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
Editions Hahn; Shepherd
Origin folktale; some influence from Wife of Bath’s Tale
Date/MSS history mid–15th c; one MS, c.1500
16th–17th c adaptation Marriage [Wedding] of Sir Gawain, Percy Folio
(also Hahn, Shepherd)
Generides
Editions ed. Furnivall (couplet); ed. Wright, EETS o.s. 55, 70
(stanzaic)
Origin possibly French, but no known source
Date/MS history couplet version ?late 14th c, one MS; rhyme royal version
?early 15th c, one MS

16th–17thc currency three prints of rhyme royal version, c.1500–08 (STC
11721–21.7)
licence transferred 1568–9 (SR i. 389)
Allusions Hyrd
Gower, Confessio amantis

Edition ed. G. C. Macaulay
Origin multiple; see also Apollonius
Date/MS history 1390s; numerous 15th c manuscripts
16th–17th c currency 3 edns. 1483–1554; licence transferred 1582–3, 1594 (SR ii.
405, 651)
Dramatization/allusion Pericles
Grail
16th–17th c currency incorporated into Harding’s 15th c Chronicle, printed
1543 (STC 12766.7–12767)
see, Joseph of Arimathea; Malory. Henry Lovelich’s translation of the History of
the Holy Grail was not known later.
Guy of Warwick
Editions early versions, ed. Zupitza, EETS E.S. 42, 49, 59 (repr.
1966); 15th c version, ed. Zupitza EETS ES 25–6 (repr. 1987)
Source Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewik
Other medieval French prose (not trans. into Middle English) included
versions in BL Royal 15 E VI
Date/MS history five MSS of various versions from c.1300 (earliest in
Auchinleck)
16th–17th c currency prints 1500–c.1565 (STC 12540–2); ed. Schleich
Percy Folio (including adaptations)
Dramatizations ?1593 (extant as The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick,
printed 1661); 1618 (anon.); 1620 (Day and Dekker) (see
p. 93 above)
Adaptations Richard Lloyd, Nine Worthies 1584
ballad, SR 1592 (ii. 601)
Drayton, legend in Poly-Olbion
verse by John Lane (1621 , MS only)
verse by Samuel Rowlands (1609; numerous prints to
c.1680 (STC 21378–80, Wing R2084–6; prose redaction
printed to 19th c))
further broadside and chapbook versions
Allusions numerous, including Hyrd, Dering, Meres, Rowlands
Spenser, Faerie Queene (Guyon); Shakespeare; Jonson
For bibliography, see Richmond
Havelok
Editions ed. by G. V. Smithers; French and Hale, Herzman et al.,
Sands, Shepherd, Speed
Origin English legend, but first surviving text Anglo-Norman
Date/MS history late 13th c; two 14th c MSS
Other medieval versions chronicles, especially prose Brut
16th–17th c currency prints of prose Brut from 1480 (Chronicles of England,
STC 9991–4)
as legend of origin for Grimsby (Camden)
Adaptations William Warner, Albions England (edns. from 1586 to
1612), from chronicles
Helyas, see Knight of the Swan
Horn
Editions King Horn, ed. Hall; Fellows, French and Hale, Herzman
et al., Sands
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, ed. Mills
Origin probably English, but first surviving text Anglo-
Norman
Date/MSS history King Horn, early 13th c, 3 MSS all c.1300
Horn Child, early 14th c, Auchinleck only
16th–17th c currency no prints
Adaptations ballad Hind Horn (Child 17)
see also King Ponthus
Huon of Burdeux
Edition ed. S. L. Lee, EETS E.S. 43, 50
Origin 15th c French prose redaction of late 12th c chanson de
geste
MS history no Middle English version
16th–17th c currency translated by Lord Berners, c.1515
editions from c.1515–1601 (STC 13998.5–99) (see Boro)
inventory of 3rd earl of Essex, 1646 (Davis p. 30)
Dramatization before 1593 (lost)
Allusions Spenser, FQ, II. i. 6; Cox, Nashe, Meres, Florio (1603)
Ipomadon (tail-rhyme)/Ipomydon (couplets)/Ipomedon (prose)

Editions ed. Eugen Kölbing (all versions)
ed. Rhiannon Purdie (tail-rhyme), EETS O.S. 316
ed. Ikegami (couplet, including print)
Source Anglo-Norman of Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan), c.1190
Date/MS history three Middle English translations (14th c tail-rhyme; 15th
c couplet; mid-15th c prose); one MS of each, all 15th c
16–17 c currency two prints extant, 1522, 1527 (couplet version, STC
5732.5, 5733)
Allusions Hyrd, Complaynt
Isumbras
Editions ed. by Schleich; Hudson; Mills
Origin no single known source
Date/MS history early 14th c; eight MSS to c.1500
16–17 c currency five edns. from c.1530 to c.1565 (STC 14280.5–14282;
Severs, Manual)
Banyster
SR 15 Jan. 1581–2, ii. 405
Allusions Cox; Cobler of Caunterbury (1590); Drayton, Eglogues
(1593)
John de Reeve
Edition Percy
Origin folktale motif of ‘king in disguise’
Date/MS history c.1400 (1377–1461); no medieval MS extant
16th–17th c currency Percy
Allusions from c.1500; Complaynt
Analogues King Edward and the Shepherd (late 14th c; one 15th c
MS, no post-1500 circulation; in French and Hale)
Rauf Coilyear (see below)
for plays, see Barton, ‘The King Disguised’
for ballads, see Child 273 (v. 67–87)
Joseph of Arimathea
Editions alliterative poem and prints ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS O.S.
44
Origin Estoire del Saint Graal (opening section of French
prose Lancelot-Grail, early 13 c); English ownership
14th–15th c
Medieval versions mid–14th c alliterative version, one MS
various chronicles, in particular John Capgrave’s
mid–15th c Nova legenda Angliae
16th–17th c currency Capgrave printed 1516 (STC 4601)
prints of two prose and one verse versions of the legend,
all deriving from Capgrave: Lyfe of Joseph of Arimathy,
c.1511 (STC 14806); De Sancto Joseph, 1516 (in STC 4602);
The Lyfe of Joseph of Arimathia (verse), c.1520 (STC
14807)
chapbook version current to late 18th c
King Ponthus and the Faire Sidone

Edition ed. by F. J. Mather, jr, PMLA 12 (1897)
Source French prose rewriting (c.1390) of Anglo-Norman Horn
(one MS probably copied in England)
also included in BL Royal 15 E VI
Date/MSS history mid-15th c; two MSS
16th–17th c currency (?different translation) printed c.1509–11 (STC 20107,
20107.5, 20108); also 1548 (Scanlon); licensed 15 Jan.
1581–2 (SR ii. 405)
The Knight of Courtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell

Editions ed. E. McCausland; Hazlitt
Origin 13th c French Chronique du Châtelain de Couci;
romance by Jakemes
Date/MSS history ?15th c; no known MSS
16th–17th c currency one print extant, ?1556 (STC 24223)
Allusions Cox
The Knight of the Swan

Editions Cheualere Assigne, ed. H.H. Gibbs, EETS E.S. 6; French
and Hale, Speed
Origins redaction of story from French Godefroy of Bouillon
cycle
Date/MS history late 14 c; one late 15 c MS
16th–17th c currency extended prose version, Helyas, Knight of the Swan,
three prints 1512–c. 1560 (STC 7571–2) (from French
prose; in Thoms)
Lancelot
Origin French Prose Lancelot (English ownership in 14th and
15th c)
Middle English versions see Arthur: romance developments
late 15th c northern Lancelot of the Laik
Middle English allusions Auchinleck Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle,
c.1331
Chaucer, Nun’s Priest’s Tale
16th–17th c currency see Arthur: romance developments
Adaptations Thomas Deloney, Sir Lancelot of Dulake, 1603 [Lancelot
and Tarquin]: numerous prints as broadside ballad;
Percy Folio
legend of combat at Knock Castle, near Manchester, to
18th c.
Allusions Complaynt (text in question not identified)

Florio (1603); Rowlands; Milton, Par. Reg. II. 361
character in Middleton’s Chinon of England, Johnson’s
Tom a Lincoln
Launfal/Landeval/Lam(be)well
Editions Launfal ed. Bliss; Fellows; French and Hale; Laskaya and
Salisbury; Sands; Shepherd
Landeval, in Bliss’s edn.; ed. by Kittredge (‘Sir Launfal’);
Shepherd
Origin late 12th c [Anglo-]French (Marie de France)
Date/MS history Landeval, early 14th c, one late 15th c MS; Launfal, later
14 c, one 15 c MS
16th–17thc currency Sir Lamwell, 1548–60 (STC 15187–87.5); licence trans-
ferred 1557–8 (SR i. 79)
Percy Folio (Sir Lambewell)
allusions Cox
Lybeaus Desconus
Edition ed. by Maldwyn Mills, EETS O.S. 261
Origin possible Anglo-Norman original; only continental ver-
sion now known
late 12th c French, Le bel Inconnu by Renaut de Beaujeu
Date/MSS history late 14th c; 5 MSS
16th–17th c currency no prints surviving; Percy Folio
Allusions Hyrd, Crosse
Malory, see Arthur
Melusine
Edition ed. by A. K. Donald, EETS E.S. 68
Origin late 14th c prose of Jean d’Arras
Date/MSS history c.1500, one MS
16–17th c currency printed c.1510 (STC 14648)
one early 16 c MS of translation of metrical version by
Coudrette (ed. Skeat, Romauns of Partenay)
Allusions Hyrd (Vives’ list); William Holme (1537/72: see p. 176)
Merlin: birth
Edition Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson,
EETS 268, 279
Origin Vulgate cycle Merlin (English ownership in 15th c)
Date/MSS history before 1300; four MSS from Auchinleck to late 15th c
16th–17th c currency The byrth and prophecye of Marlyn 1510, 1529 (STC
17841–41.3)
Percy Folio
Dramatization The Birth of Merlin (dramatization, ?1608) (ed. Tucker
Brooke, Shakespeare Apocrypha)
Allusions Rowlands
[Neither Lovelich’s early 15th c metrical Merlin (ed. Kock), nor the mid–15th c
prose translation (ed. Wheatley) was current after 1500.]
Octavian
Editions Octovian, ed by F. McSparran, EETS O.S. 289; Hudson;
Mills
Origin/source probably 12th c French
Date/MS history mid–14th c; southern version, two 15th c MSS; northern
version, one late 15th c MS
16th–17th c currency print c.1505 (STC 18779)
Oliver of Castile
Edition ed. by G. Orgelfinger
Origin mid-15thc French prose incorporating traditional
motifs
Date/MS history no Middle English versions
16th–17thc currency trans. by Henry Watson printed 1518 (STC 18808);
licence transferred 1581–2 (SR ii. 408)
Allusions Cox, Dering, Meres
Orfeo
Editions ed. by A. J. Bliss; French and Hale; Laskaya and
Salisbury; Sands; Shepherd; Speed
Origin possibly French, but no source extant
Date/MS history early 14th c; three MSS, Auchinleck to c.1500
16th–17th c currency King Orphius (Scottish, c.1586; ed. Stewart)
Ballad King Orfeo (Child i. 317–29)
Allusion ? Complaynt (‘Opheus kyng of Portingal’)
Paris and Vienne

Edition ed. E.M. Leach, EETS O.S. 234
Source 15th c French prose
Date/MS history no English version prior to Caxton’s translation (1485)
16th–17th c currency three or four edns. 1485–1505 (STC 19206–8)
licence transferred 8 Aug. 1586 (SR ii. 453)
Adaptation by Matthew Mainwaring 1628, 1632 (STC 17201–2)
licence assigned May 1638 (SR iv. 394)
Dramatization acted by boys of Westminster School 1572
Partonope of Blois
Edition ed. A. Trampe Bödtker, EETS E.S. 109
Origin 12th c French
Date/MS history 15th c; five MSS of couplet version, one of abbreviated
quatrain version
16th–17th c currency likely to have been printed but no edns. extant
allusions Hyrd
Perceforest
Origin mid-14th c French; no Middle English version
16th–17th c currency numerous French printed edns.
Dramatization Clyomon and Clamydes (1570s; printed 1599, STC 5450a;
ed. Littleton)
Rauf Coilyear
Editions ed. S. J. Herrtage, EETS E.S. 39; ed. E. Walsh; Speed
Origin folktale (‘king in disguise’)
Date/MS history late 14th–15th c; no extant MSS, though listed in Asloan
MS (1515)
16th–17th c currency printed St Andrews, 1572 (STC 5487)
Allusions from 1500; Complaynt
Analogues see John the Reeve, above
for plays, see Barton, ‘The King Disguised’
for ballads, see Child 273 (v. 67–87)
Richard Cœur de Lyon

Edition ed. Karl Brünner, Der mittelenglische Versroman über
Richard Löwenherz (Vienna, 1913)
Origin chronicle-type material, though treatment probably
original
Date/MS history c.1300; nine MSS (two fragmentary), Auchinleck to late
15th c
16th–17th c currency two prints extant, 1509, 1528 (STC 21007–8)
licence transferred 1568–9 (SR i. 389)
Robert the Devil

Edition Hazlitt prints both early 16th c versions
Origin 12th c French Robert le diable
Date/MS history no extant Middle English MS
Medieval adaptations Sir Gowther, c.1400 (two MSS) (edition with
important study of Robert by K. Breul (Oppeln, 1886);
also Mills)
16th–17th c currency prose version printed 1500, 1517 (STC 21070–1)

metrical version, 1510 (STC 201071.5); also Banyster
(Egerton)
Adaptation Thomas Lodge, Robert Second Duke of Normandy (1591)
Allusions Complaynt
Robert of Sicily
Edition French and Hale; Foster
Origin unknown, but widespread folktale type
Date/MS history 10 MSS, c.1375–c.1500
Medieval dramatization 1447–53 (lost)
16th–17th c dramatizations 1529; Latin, 1623 (both lost)
Roswall and Lillian

Edition ed. O. Lengert, Englische Studien 16, 17
Origin no known source, but influenced by Ipomedon
Date/MS history probably 15th c; no surviving MSS
16th–17th c currency prints from 1663 to 1775
Adaptations ballad ‘Lord of Lorn’ (SR 6 Oct 1580, and ref. that year
by Guilpin) inc ‘Disaware’, version included in Percy
Folio (i. 180–98)
Seven Sages of Rome [Seven Wise Masters]

Editions ed. K. Campbell; ed. K. Brunner, EETS O.S. 191
Origin Oriental, by way of 12th c Latin and early 13th c French
Date/MS history nine MSS of various texts, from Auchinleck to early
16th c Scots and English
16th–17th c currency printed as The Seven Wise Masters, editions from 1493
to 1576 (STC 21298–21299.3)
adaptation of early print 1653, numerous editions to
early 18th c
Scots version by John Rolland 1568, six extant editions
1578–1635 (STC 21254–57.7)
other versions (short texts deriving from early print)
18th–19th c
[see Campbell’s edition]
Dramatization Chettle and others, 1600 (lost)
Allusions Cox
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see The Grene Knight under Gawain, above
Squire of Low Degree [Undo your Door]

Editions French and Hale; Sands
Date/MSS history not traceable before printing, but may be 15th c

16th–17th c currency two prints extant, c.1520, 1560 (STC 23111–12)
Percy Folio
Allusions Cox; Nashe; Spenser; Shakespeare (Henry V, 5.1)
Thomas of Erceldoune
[The following information relates to the narrative versions; prophecies
ascribed to Thomas without any narrative frame are not covered, though they
had an even more extensive dissemination and afterlife.]
Editions ed. James A. H. Murray, EETS O.S. 68; ed. Ingeborg
Nixon
Origin traditional material but original
Date/MSS history ? 14th c; three surviving 15th c MSS
16th–17th c currency one 16th c MS (c.1525; ed. Murray)
printed 1652 (ed. Nixon)
Adaptations Prophisies of Rymour, two MSS from c.1529 (Virgin for
elf-queen)
prints of redaction of Prophisies, 1603, 1615
current as chapbook to early 19th c
ballad, Thomas Rymer
Torrent of Portyngale
Edition ed. E. Adam, EETS E.S. 51
Date/MS history c.1400; one late 15th c MS
16th–17th c currency c.1505–10 (STC 24133, 24133.5)
Allusion ? Complaynt (‘Opheus kyng of Portingal’)
Tryamour
Editions Fellows; Hudson
Origin no known source, but traditional material
Date/MSS history late 14th c; two MSS (one missing)
16th–17th c currency five prints c.1503–65 (STC 24301.5–24303.3)
Percy Folio
Allusions Cox; Rowlands
secondary hero in Middleton’s Chinon of England
Tristram
[The 12th c Anglo-Norman Tristan of Thomas of Britain is represented in Middle
English by a late 13th c version surviving only in Auchinleck; there are numerous
allusions to the story in Middle English, but the transmission to the Renaissance
comes by way of the Prose Tristan, an amalgam of the 12th c versions with the
model of the Prose Lancelot.]
Editions see Malory

Source 13th c French Prose Tristan (15th c English ownership)
Date/MS history see Malory
Dramatization Tristram of Lyons, 1598 (lost)
Allusions Nashe; Spenser; character in Middleton’s Chinon of
England
Troy
Origin ultimately Homer, by way of Dictys (4th c) and Dares
(6th c; metrical version by Joseph of Exeter, 12 c)
12th c French Roman de Troie of Benoit de St Maur; 13th
c Latin prose redaction by Guido delle Colonne
Date/MS history various Middle English redactions from c.1300, none
directly transmitted after 1500 (see Severs, Manual, nos.
72–6)
Lydgate, Troy Book (1420)
The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, trans. Caxton
(c.1475) from Raoul le Fevre’s French prose version of
Guido
16th–17th c currency Lydgate’s Troy Book printed 1513, 1555 (STC 5579–80);
modernization 1614 (STC 5581)
English version of Dares by Thomas Paynell (via
French), 1553 (STC 6274.5)
3 edns. of Caxton’s Recuyell, 1475–1553 (STC
24571.3–24572)
rev. as The auncient historie of the destruction of Troy by
William Fiston, ?SR June 1591 (ii. 586), edns. 1596 to 1738
(STC 15379–82)
Dramatizations Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida (?1603) (from Recuyell
and Chaucer)
Thomas Heywood, Life and Death of Hector, The Iron
Age (from Lydgate)
Turke and Gowin, see under Gawain
Valentine and Orson

Edition ed. Dickson, EETS O.S. 204
Origin/source 15th c French prose redaction of lost ?14th c French orig-
inal
Date/MSS history no Middle English version
16th–17th c currency three prints extant, c.1510–c.1565 (STC 24571.3–24572)
licence transferred Aug. 1586 (SR ii. 453)
abbreviated version 1637 and numerous later reprints
Dramatizations pageant for coronation of Edward VI, 1549
plays 1595, 1598 (Hathway and Munday) (both lost)
Adaptations couplet version in Percy Folio, The Emperor and the

Child
chapbook and other short versions from 17th to 19th c
Allusions North, Diall of Princes (1557); Sidney (‘Pacolet’s horse’,
Apologie); Kirkman
Wedding of Sir Gawain, see under Gawain
William of Palerne
Edition ed. G. H. V. Bunt
Source early 13th c French (also 15th c French prose)
Date/MSS history c.1355; one MS
16th–17th c currency prose version (probably from the Middle English allit-
erative poem) printed c.1515, STC 25707.5 (fragment ed.
Bunt, pp. 328–31)
16th c Irish version of English prose
Allusions Hyrd
Ysumbras, see Isumbras
Ywain and Gawain

Editions ed. Friedman and Harrington, EETS O.S. 254; ed. Mills;
ed. Braswell; Shepherd
Source 12th c French Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes
Date/MS history early 14th c; one early 15th c MS
16th–17th c currency no prints known
Allusion Complaynt (‘Syr Euan arthours knycht’)
Notes
introduction
1. ‘An enterlude of Valentyne and Orsson, plaid by hir maiesties Players’ was licensed
in 1595 to Thomas Gosson and Raffe Hancock; licensing for publication commonly
occurred some years after the initial composition of a play, so the dramatization
may itself date from some years earlier. The licence was transferred to William
White in 1600 (SR, iii.159). A second dramatization was made by Richard Hathwaye
and Anthony Munday for Henslowe in 1598. Some of the playbooks of the Queen’s
Men (and conceivably the bearsuit too) passed to the Chamberlain’s Men,
Shakespeare’s company. See also Helen Cooper, ‘The Strange History of Valentine
and Orson’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind
Field (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 153–68, especially pp. 163–4; and, for a sample bear-
suit, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2002), p. 319.
2. Arthur Dickson, Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval Romance (New
York, 1929), p. 286.
3. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (first published 1872–4), ed. A. J. Hoppé,
rev. edn. (London, 1969), i.301. The reference is not, as might be thought, to The
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
4. A Contextual Study and Modern-spelling Edition of Mucedorus, ed. Arvin H. Jupin
(New York and London, 1987), I.i, opening stage direction in the original version
(first printed in 1598; the additions made to the third quarto of 1610 included an
explanatory opening scene before the bear, and some further stage business involv-
ing it; these are printed by Jupin in an appendix). The episode is derived from
Sidney’s Arcadia, and gives the hero an opportunity of exercising his prowess. By
the time of the 1610 publication, the play belonged to the King’s Men. It was prob-
ably written c.1590, but the order of composition of the plays containing bears is
uncertain, as there are no reliable dates for either this, the anonymous Valentine
and Orson licensed in 1595, or Locrine (see note 5 below). The anonymous play of
Valentine may not be the earliest, though its justification for including a bear is
rather stronger than for most of them.
5. The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, ed. Jane Lytton Gooch (New York and London,
1981), composed between 1585 and 1595, specifies a ‘Bear or any other beast’ (plus a
lion) in its opening emblematic dumbshow; the mention of a bear may have been
an acknowledgement of an existing bearsuit. The spectral bear figures in John Day
and William Haughton’s lost Cox of Collumpton (1599), the plot of which is known
through a summary by Simon Forman: see the account in John Pitcher, ‘ “Fronted
with the Sight of a Bear”: Cox of Collumpton and The Winter’s Tale’, Notes and
Queries 239 (1994), 47–53.
6. The phrase ‘mouldy tale’ (referring specifically to Pericles) is Ben Jonson’s, from the
‘Ode to Himself’ written after the failure of The New Inn in 1629—Pericles being
432 Notes to pages 2–4
another example of the long popularity of romance drama, still in the repertory
twenty years after its composition (Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George
Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), No. XXXIII; and cf. Leah Scragg, Shakespeare’s
Mouldy Tales (London and New York, 1992, p. 1). The literary ancestry of the bear
of the Winter’s Tale has been much debated: Pitcher, ‘“Fronted with the sight of
a bear”’, gives a summary. He favours its function as an avenging sprite, on the
model of the bear in Cox of Collumpton. The need for a bearsuit would remain
unaffected by the particular symbolic use made of the bear itself. The arguments
that real bears were used after 1609 remains tenuous: see, for instance, Barbara
Ravelhofer, ‘“Beasts of Recreation”: Henslowe’s White Bears’, ELR 32 (2002),
287–323, especially pp. 298–9, 304.
7. ‘A poetics describing literary competence would focus on the conventions that
make possible literary structure and meaning: what are the codes or systems of
convention that enable readers to identify literary genres, recognize plots . . . and
pursue the kind of symbolic interpretation that allows us to gauge the significance
of poems and stories?’ (Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford, 1997), p. 62).
8. The idea of the meme was put forward by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene
(Oxford, 1976), pp. 206–7, and has been extensively developed by Susan
Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999). Romance motifs fulfil precisely
her criteria of replication with fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. The romance
itself would be the meme vehicle or ‘memeplex’ (see pp. 63–6).
9. The transmission of medieval English romance into the Tudor age was first exten-
sively studied by Ronald S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance dur-
ing the English Renaissance (1919; repr. Norwood, Pa, 1977). Later studies include
Jean Wilson, Spenser’s Treatment of Romance Themes in the Faerie Queene (Ph.D.,
Cambridge, 1974); Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Popularity of Middle English
Romance (Bowling Green, OH, 1975); Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and
Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford, 2000), esp. pp.
29–42; and Michael L. Hays, Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance
(Cambridge, 2003), esp. pp. 27–65. Hays estimates that there were some 85,800
copies of romances printed before 1560, and 185,600 printed 1561–1610 (though
most of the latter were new works influenced by the fashion for Spanish
romances, not the medieval corpus).
10. John Bunyan: Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock
(London, 1966), Author’s Apology, pp. 139, 144. For his youthful reading, see A
Few Sighs from Hell, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Vol. 1, ed.
T. L. Underwood and Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1980), p. 333.
11. To give two examples: after the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress was the book most
likely to be taken to the trenches by soldiers in the First World War; and it forms
the ethical backbone of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a level of explicit allu-
sion that she could assume would be understood by her readers. The work had
been popular in New England from the moment of its publication, as Bunyan
notes in his introductory poem to the ‘Second Part’ (ed. Sharrock, l. 275). His dis-
appearance from modern culture is comparably measured by the work’s excision
from film and television adaptations of her novel.
12. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd edn., rev.
Louis A. Wagner (Austin and London, 1968); Susan Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative
Notes to pages 4–7 433
Structures in the Middle English Romances (Austin and London, 1978). Propp
identifies the recurrent characters and their functions within folktale; Wittig’s
aim is to identify and analyse the various levels of motif—the syntagm and syn-
tagmeme, motifeme and allomotif, type-scene, and type-episode—in terms of
their homologousness and the degree of substitutability within each class, on a
model drawn from tagmemic linguistics, ‘based on the concept of selection from
a paradigm of choices and substitution within an established matrix’ (p. 6). Her
concern is thus to parse the language of motifs rather than to consider their mean-
ings within particular texts or their change over time. The present book by con-
trast is concerned to demonstrate the non-substitutability of motifs.
13. Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York, 1927).
Other studies concentrating on continuity more than change include Charles
Ross’s The Custom of the Castle from Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley, 1997); and,
largely outside romance, John Kerrigan’s anthology The Motives of Woe:
Shakespeare and the ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford, 1991), and Götz Schmitz’s more
historically nuanced The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse
(Cambridge, 1990).
14. Anne Barton’s ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical
History’, reprinted in her Essays: Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, 1994), takes
the motif back to the Robin Hood ballads, but the romances that provide the
fullest narrative comparisons remain unexplored (for details, see Appendix, s.v.
John de Reeve, Rauf Coilyear). On boats, see David Quint, ‘The Boat of Romance
and Renaissance Epic’, in Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de
Troyes to Cervantes ed. Kevin Brownlee and Maria Scordilis Brownlee, (Hanover
and London, 1985), pp. 178–202, and pp. 133–5 below.
15. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,
1999), p. 29. A similar point is forcefully made in connection with romance by
Jean Radford, in her introduction to The Progress of Romance: The Politics of
Popular Fiction (London and New York, 1986), pp. 8–9, and by Stephen Knight in
his study of the changing ideological uses of Arthurian material, Arthurian
Literature and Society (London, 1983).
16. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
17. Northrop Frye, in the Foreword to Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance
Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca and London, 1989),
p. ix.
18. Gordon Teskey, in his Introduction to Logan’s and his Unfolded Tales, has noted
that works such as the Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s late plays are not classical
with romance elements, but ‘whole romances in which some classical elements
have managed to survive by adapting themselves, like parasites, to the larger
organism in which they are enclosed’ (p. 9): a formulation that provokes the
thought that those ‘classical elements’ have become memes in the minds of later
critics.
19. The advice to Arthur on good kingship was translated in the late fifteenth century
in the northern Lancelot of the Laik (ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo, 1994),
ll. 1314–542). There is no Middle English translation of the Lady of the Lake’s
instruction, though copies of the prose Lancelot are known to have been owned in
England (see note 84 below). Malory omits Lancelot’s youth, but he substitutes a
434 Notes to pages 7– 8
comparable summary of the duties of knighthood in the oath taken by the

Knights of the Round Table, which is apparently modelled on the oath of the dub-
bing ceremony for Knights of the Bath (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed.
Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edn., rev. by P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), i. 120 (Book
III, chapter 15 in Caxton’s edition) ); for the oath of the Order of the Bath, see
Viscount Dillon, ‘A Manuscript Collection of Ordinances of Chivalry of the
Fifteenth Century’, Archaeologia 57:1 (1900), 27–70 (text on pp. 67–8). For a dis-
cussion of how the Lancelot in particular was used in the fashioning of real-life
knights, see Elspeth Kennedy, ‘The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance’,
Culture and the King: The Social Implications of Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B.
Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, 1994), pp. 70–90.
20. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Brighton, 1982), pp. 22–5, 79, 88–9. Fredric Jameson reaches a similar conclusion
through a consideration of the social mechanism by which such a ‘horizon’ is
established, in his ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History
7 (1975–6), 135–63: ‘Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his read-
ers; or rather . . . they are literary institutions, which like other institutions of social
life are based on tacit agreements or contracts’ (p. 135).
21. Among the most powerful, though making transhistorical assumptions that this
book does not altogether share, are those of Northrop Frye, outlined in An
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), ‘The Mythos of Summer:
Romance’, pp. 186–206, and elaborated in The Secular Scripture; Jameson offers a
critique and development, ‘Magical Narratives’. A more pragmatic approach to
specifically medieval romance, also closely followed here, is that offered by Ad
Putter in his ‘Historical Introduction’ to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular
Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow, 2000), pp. 1–2: ‘The resem-
blances shared by the overwhelming majority of romances are very broad . . . We
can spare ourselves the trouble of agonizing needlessly about problems of
definition if we accept that we have inherited the word “romance”, with all its
vagueness, from those who talked before us . . . “romaunce” never was a precise
generic marker.’ The Brownlees’ introduction to Romance: Generic
Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, pp. 1–12, makes the further
important point that no genres, romance high among them, remain static across
time and historical change, as the essays of the book cumulatively demonstrate.
Attempts to produce rigorous definitions (such as that of John Finlayson, who
argues in his ‘Definitions of Middle English Romance’ (Chaucer Review 15
(1980–1), 44–62, 168–81), that the term should be restricted to stories of knights
achieving great feats of arms in a series of adventures for no reason other than an
increase in their renown, go against those inherited expectations, and appear cor-
respondingly restrictive. More satisfying, because grounded in medieval evidence,
are two articles by Paul Strohm, ‘Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic
Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narrative’, Speculum 46 (1971), 348–59,
and ‘The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce’, Genre 10 (1977),
1–20. A more detailed analysis of the varieties of Middle English romance is given
by Kathryn Hume, ‘The Formal Nature of Middle English Romance’, Philological
Quarterly 53 (1974), 158–80.
22. Many romance writers include some kind of comment on how their works are to
be read such as indicates just this kind of generic self-consciousness; the pro-
logues of Chrétien de Troyes are among the most famous examples, but a very
high proportion of romances, in English as well as French, include some kind of
horizon-setting as part of their introductory material, often by reference to other
earlier works or heroes such as place the new work in a context of existing litera-
ture on which it can build. Michel Zink stresses the element of self-consciousness:
‘Le roman est définissable précisement parce qu’il est tard venu et parce qu’il est
le fruit d’une activité deliberé’ (‘Chrétien et ses contemporains’, in The Legacy of
Chrétien de Troyes, ed. (Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby
(Amsterdam, 1987), i.5–32 (p. 6) ). More broadly, the links to Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales often provide some kind of generic commentary on the tale just
told, and form perhaps the most extended series of definitions of vernacular gen-
res. The genre that most insistently identifies itself is the Breton lai, a kind of mini-
romance, where an opening statement of genre is its primary defining feature.
23. The point is made by Alastair Fowler, that genres should be regarded ‘not as per-
manent classes but as families subject to change’ (Kinds of Literature: An
Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford, 1982), p. v.
24. The concept is developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), pp. 31–2 (a passage that includes the
invaluable advice: ‘Don’t think, but look!’). The idea has been taken up by a num-
ber of genre critics, including Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp. 40–3; and, with ref-
erence to romance, by Putter, Spirit, p. 2.
25. Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Thomas Wright and J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols. (London, 1841),
i.252.
26. The point is forcefully argued by Hays, Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric
Romance; and see the last chapter of this book.
27. Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in Later Shakespeare, ed. J. R. Brown
and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (1966), 49–79 (p. 49).
28. The classic work on the relationships and differences between epic and romance
is W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance, first published in 1897; Zink, ‘Chrétien’ p. 7,
argues that the romance is in fact closer to the saint’s life than to the chanson de
geste.
29. Ipomedon: Poème de Hue de Rotelande, ed. A. J. Holden (Paris, 1979), ll. 28–30 (‘Si
le Latin n’est translatez, | Gaires n’ie erent entendanz; | Por ceo voil [jeo] dire en
romanz’), and ll. 10,557–9 (quoted).
30. He also indicates that his imagined audience, and presumably his real one, is
gender-inclusive, since he adds a rather mischievous invitation to the ladies to
drop in on him.
31. Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, Early English Text Society
268, 279 (1973, 1979), Auchinleck version, ll. 23–4.
32. See S. H. Cavanaugh, A Study of Books Privately Owned in England 1300–1450,
PhD. thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1980). For women’s ownership of French
romances, see Carol M. Meale, ‘. . . alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch and
frensch: Laywomen and their books in late medieval England’, in Women and lit-
erature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Meale, (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 128–58, esp. pp.
139–41.
33. For a recent summary of the debate, see Putter’s Introduction to Spirit,
pp. 7–15, where he adduces evidence that points unequivocally to both manu-
script transmission as the norm and memorial transmission as a genuine, and by
no means uncommon, phenomenon. There is evidence that a number of the

seventeenth-century Percy Folio romances were recorded from memorized
recitations of printed versions: see S. G. St Clair-Kendall, Narrative Form and
Mediaeval Continuity in the Percy Folio Manuscript: A Study of Selected Poems,
Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney (1988), pp. 14, 24. The stories that were taken
up by romance-writers may sometimes have had an earlier existence in oral
form; and oral versions were sometimes developed out of romances, as seems to
have happened in the case of some traditional ballads (e.g., ‘Hind Horn’, from a
version of Horn and Rimenhild similar to that found in the Auchinleck manu-
script, and ‘King Orfeo’, deriving probably from the version of Sir Orfeo
recorded in a Scottish manuscript of c.1583 (The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, 5 vols. (1882–98, repr. New York, 1965), i. nos.
17, 19; Marion Stewart, ‘ “King Orphius” ’, Scottish Studies 17 (1973), 1–16).
34. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1981), ll. 1–22; Le
Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1978), l. 26; Chaucer,
Canterbury Tales, I.798, VII.946–58 (hereafter CT; The Riverside Chaucer, general
ed., Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987) ).
35. Knight’s Tale, CT, I.1347–53; cf. also the ending of the Franklin’s Tale, V.1621–4.
The fictional audience of pilgrims never takes up the question.
36. For the broad cultural background to medieval debate literature, see Thomas L.
Reed, jr, Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia,
Mo., and London, 1990).
37. As recorded in the Percy Folio manuscript (Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript:
Ballads and Romances, ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, 3 vols.
(London, 1868), ii.338–89, ll. 7–8; hereafter Percy). The text probably derives from
one of the sixteenth-century printed editions, surviving from c.1500 to 1565 and
possibly continuing later (see Sir Eglamour of Artois, ed. Frances E. Richardson,
EETS 256 (1965), pp. xiii–xiv). The other romances to use an almost identical cou-
plet are Sir Degrevant (9–10) (no prints known) and Sir Isumbras (7–8) (printed
editions surviving from c.1530 to c.1565). See the appendix to this book for details
of all the Middle English romances still current after 1500.
38. Prologue 5–8, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general eds., Stanley
Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986).
39. Telling or reading older romances (specifically Guy of Warwick and The Four Sons
of Aymon) is marked as a country rather than a courtly pastime as early as 1579, in
the anonymous Cyuile and Vnciuile Life (sig. Hivr); but both were still being acted
on the London stage in the seventeenth century, and although chapbooks were
increasingly regarded as country reading, that seems to have been more because
there was less competing élite reading in the countryside than because there was
any shortage of them in the towns. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
chapbook reading, see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories
(London, 1981); and John Simons, ‘Romance in the eighteenth-century
Chapbook’, in Simons (ed.), From Medieval to Medievalism (Basingstoke, 1992),
pp. 122–43.
40. See Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 16–18, and on its qualities of storytelling, pp. 27–34. In
contrast to most earlier critics and editors, they urge the evident ‘single creative
imagination’ behind the play.
41. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and
Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976), pp. 10–12.
42. Sir Orfeo ll. 51, 53–4, in Middle English Metrical Romances, ed. Walter Hoyt French
and Charles Brockway Hale (New York, 1964).
43. An example of both unhelpful detail and voyeurism occurs in the Anglo-Norman
Ipomedon, where the blazon of the beauty of La Fière continues beyond the parts
of her anatomy visible to an onlooker (Ipomedon, ed. Holden, ll. 2211–70). The
stanzaic Middle English version, which usually follows the original closely, cuts
the whole passage.
44. Even more explicitly later in the poem: ‘Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye’,
I.2273.
45. Winter’s Tale 4.4.156–9.
46. See further Chapter 5 below, ‘Desirable desire’.
47. CT, VII.2869–72, 3160–2 (quoted).
48. Thomas Hoccleve, ‘Of my lady, wel me rejoise I may’, in Hoccleve’s Works: The
Minor Poems, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, rev. Jerome Mitchell
and A. I. Doyle, EETS E.S. 61, 73, rev. repr. (1970), pp. 311–12; Sidney, ‘What length
of verse can serve’: it appears in different contexts in the Old and New Arcadia.
William A. Ringler, jr, discusses the history of such poems in his edition, The
Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), pp. 12, 384. Donne, ‘The Anagram’, in
John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, corr. edn.
(Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 96–7.
49. As happens in Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play contemporary
with the writing of the Faerie Queene: see further pp. 404–5 below.
50. Almost every Anglo-Norman romance (some twenty in all) had a Middle English
descendant. Two probably had English versions that are now lost (Waldef and
Fouke le Fitz Waryn); so far as is known, two were not given English versions
(Amadas et Ydoine, though it was widely known and cited; and the Protheselaus of
Hue de Rotelande). See Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1986), p. 6.
51. I use ‘insular’ in the sense, not of being written in Britain, but of being written in
any language within England. The Scottish romance tradition does not get under
way until the fifteenth century, in keeping with the country’s separation from
Angevin domination; the Welsh tradition has a still more distinct history, though
there are strong connections, of a kind still not fully understood, between the
romances of Chrétien de Troyes and some of the stories of the Mabinogion.
52. The Historia has a pro-British and anti-English agenda that may itself have served
as a kind of legitimation for the Norman Conquest, most particularly for the
Breton knights who followed William the Conqueror to England and who were
given lands on the Welsh Marches: see Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and
Society (London and Basingstoke, 1983), pp. 38–67.
53. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd edn. (London,
2001), II. x. 9, 13 (Brutus), II. x. 27–32 (Leir); hereafter FQ. A more extended
account of the Trojan ancestry of Britain is given at III. ix. 38–51.
54. Perceforest, a prose romance probably composed c.1330–40 under Hainault
patronage and possibly brought to England by Edward III’s queen Philippa of
Hainault, was twice printed complete in the sixteenth century in France, and an
excerpted story printed four times; it provided the plot for some early Elizabethan
plays, most particularly Clyomon and Clamydes. The Lear section is edited by Jane
H. M. Taylor, Le Roman de Perceforest, Part I (Geneva, 1979), ch. 8, ll. 1075–1283.
The Anglo-Norman Leir is mentioned in a list of titles of lays and romances in
Shrewsbury School MS 7: see Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Breton Lay in Middle
English’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith
Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 55–70.
55. See Ad Putter, ‘Finding Time for Arthurian Romance: Mediaeval Arthurian
Literary History’, Medium Ævum 63 (1994), 1–16, on how these individual
romances were given a chronological placing within the linear history of
Geoffrey’s model of Arthur.
56. See further Honour and Shame, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London, 1965).
57. Like Geoffrey, Chrétien may have been greatly elaborating on a pre-existing story.
The term ‘courtly love’, or rather the French ‘amour courtois’, was coined by
Gaston Paris in 1883 to describe the kind of love found in the Chevalier de la
Charrette (‘Etudes sur les romans de la table ronde. Lancelot du Lac II: Le Conte
de la Charrette’, Romania 12 (1883), p. 523); it has proved one of the most burr-like
of all memes, part of its faithful replication including the false notion that it is
itself a medieval idea. For further discussion, see pp. 307–10 below.
58. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MSS fr 794 (the Guiot MS); fr 375; and fr
1450, which contains the Roman de Troie, the Roman d’Eneas, and Wace’s Brut
with Chrétien’s Arthurian romances inserted into it (with the prologues removed
to smooth the transitions). See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of
Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca and London,
1987), pp. 21–8.
59. She informs us that her Fables are based on an English original. There would of
course have been little point in designating her as being ‘of France’ if she still lived
there.
60. Thomas was writing some time between 1150 and 1200, most likely in the 1170s.
For a parallel text and translation (by Stewart Gregory and Ian Short) of what sur-
vives of his Tristan, including the most recently discovered fragment, see Early
French Tristan Poems, Vol. 2, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 3–183. The
missing parts of his text can be extensively reconstructed from the Norse version
composed in 1226 by one Friar Robert, Tristrams Saga ok Ísöndar, which is more
concise than Thomas’s original but otherwise appears to follow it very closely
(text and trans. by Peter Jorgensen in Norse Romance, Vol. 1: The Tristan Legend,
ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge, 1999)); and also from Gottfried von
Strassburg’s more elaborate Tristan (c.1210; editions include that by Gottfried
Weber, Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan (Darmstadt, 1967). There is a translation
by A. T. Hatto, together with most of the surviving fragments of Thomas, for
Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1960)). There is also a Middle English adap-
tation of the late thirteenth century, though it is more useful as supporting rather
than direct evidence as to Thomas’s text: Sir Tristrem, in Lancelot of the Laik and
Sir Tristrem, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1994). The differences of
Thomas from the archetype of the Tristan story can partly be gauged through
other early retellings not mediated through him, in particular those of Béroul, in
Anglo-Norman, and Eilhart von Oberge, in German (both writing 1170–90).
61. The point should not need any references, since a glance at any range of romance
texts provides the evidence; the conviction to the contrary, still widely held, goes
Notes to pages 28– 9 439
back to C. S. Lewis’s seductive, and profoundly misguided, The Allegory of Love,

first published in 1936 and frequently reprinted. The combined dominance of the
model of Tristan and Isolde and its calque of Lancelot and Guinevere has tended
to overshadow the more socially acceptable forms of romance love narratives. See
also pp. 307–14 below.
62. See Bernard O’Donoghue, The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester, and Totowa,
NJ, 1982).
63. For the complicated textual history of the French romance and its derivatives, see
pp. 155–6 below. The English Floris is not known to have been printed in the
Renaissance, but it is now one of the most widely anthologized of the medieval
romances (including French and Hale, pp. 823–55; and Middle English Verse
Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands (New York, 1966), pp. 279–309).
64. The idea of there being three ‘materes’ of romance, ‘de France et de Bretaigne et
de Rome la grant’, originates with Jehan Bodel’s La Chanson des Saisnes (ed.
Annette Brasseur (Geneva, 1989), lines 6–7). Bodel is dismissive of the matter of
Britain by comparison with that of France; English romance largely inverted the
comparison. There were a good number of adaptations of Charlemagne
romances into Middle English, but those known in the sixteenth century (Huon
of Bordeaux, The Four Sons of Aymon) were recent translations, besides being
among the most hostile to Charlemagne himself.
65. The relationships between the lost prototype story, the Anglo-Norman Romance
of Horn, the Middle English King Horn and Horn Childe, and the later ballads of
‘Hind Horn’ do not allow for easy untangling: for a summary, see Maldwyn
Mills’s Introduction to his edition of Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild
(Heidelberg, 1988), pp. 44–50. T. B. W. Reid urges the priority of an English ver-
sion in his Introduction to The Romance of Horn by Thomas, ed. by Mildred K.
Pope, ANTS 9–10, 12–13 (Oxford, 1955, 1964), 2.19–20. The most detailed edition
of King Horn is that by Joseph Hall (Oxford, 1901); more accessible are the vari-
ous recent anthologies of romance that include it (e.g., Sands, from which cita-
tions here are taken; Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English
Romance, ed. Jennifer Fellows (London, 1993)). The ballad ‘Hind Horn’ appears
in Child, Ballads, i. no. 17.
66. See Paul A. Scanlon, ‘A Checklist of Prose Romances in English 1474–1603’, The
Library, 5th s. 32 (1978), 143–52, and, on the manuscript version, Carol M. Meale,
‘The Politics of Book Ownership: The Hopton Family and Bodleian Library
Digby MS 185’, in Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and
Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 103–22. The manuscript version
of the Middle English (which may have been known to the Tudor redactor) is ed.
F. J. Mather, jr, ‘King Ponthus and the Faire Sidone’, PMLA 12 (1897), pp. i–150.
Three printed editions are known, from c.1509 to 1511 (STC 20107, 20107.5, 20108);
an entry in the Stationers’ Register for 15 January 1548 (ii.405) suggests that there
may have been one or more later editions, now lost. The French prose Ponthus,
tentatively ascribed to Geoffroi de la Tour Landry, probably dates from the late
fourteenth century; it appears as one of the items included in the manuscript pre-
sented by the earl of Shrewsbury to Margaret of Anjou on her marriage to Henry
VI, British Library MS Royal 15 E VI.
67. For editions, see Le Lai d’Haveloc and Gaimar’s Haveloc Episode, ed. Alexander
Bell (Manchester, 1925); and for the Middle English, Havelok, ed. G. V. Smithers
(Oxford, 1987), and various anthologies of romance including those edited by

D. B. Sands and by W. H. French and C. B. Hale.
68. See p. 354 below.
69. Facsimile with Introduction by Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham, The
Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1, Intro.
(London, 1979). It was still finding scholarly or antiquarian readers in the later six-
teenth century, as evidenced by marginal annotations.
70. The Percy Folio manuscript is London, British Library, Add. MS 27879; for an edi-
tion, see n. 37. There are 99 surviving manuscripts containing romances, but half
the traditional canon of romance can be found in just ten of those, usually in
anthologies that also contain historical and/or religious material: see Gisela
Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances
(Munich, 1976), pp. 18–54.
71. Lanval was printed in the version known most often as Landevall (ed. by George
Lyman Kittredge, ‘Launfal’, American Journal of Philology 10 (1889), 1–33; see STC
Lamwell, 15187–15187.5, of 1548 and 1560). This derives from the earliest of the
Middle English translations, and is the closest to Marie. It appears in the Percy
Folio under the name Sir Lambewell. Thomas Chestre adapted it in the later four-
teenth century for his Sir Launfal, an expanded version put into tail-rhyme rather
than couplets. Hue’s Ipomedon was translated into English three times, in tail-
rhyme, couplets, and prose; it was the couplet version that was printed, the first
edition perhaps dating from 1505 (ed. Tadahiro Ikegami as the second volume of
his edition of The Lyfe of Ipomydon, Seijo English Monographs 21, 22 (Tokyo, 1983,
1985) ). On the setting-copy, see Carol M. Meale, ‘Wynkyn de Worde’s Setting-
Copy for Ipomydon’, Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982), 156–71. All three English
texts are edited by Eugen Kölbing, Ipomedon in drei englischen Bearbeitungen
(Breslau, 1889).
72. Guy and Amarant / Guy and Colbrande, a medieval version of the Guy legend;
Merline; Eglamore; Sir Degree; Sir Lambewell (Landevale). The manuscript con-
tains one further fourteenth-century romance, Libius Desconus, ‘Le Beau
Desconus’, the Fair Unknown; it was almost certainly printed, though no copies
survive. Other of the Percy romances are fifteenth-century in origin, including a
tail-rhyme retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight entitled The Grene Knight,
and a Gawain romance that uses some of the same motifs, The Turke and Gowin.
73. Susan Crane points out, however, that neither romance praises a patron, or men-
tions the family currently holding the title (Insular Romance, p. 16). Guy in par-
ticular was none the less treated later as if it were an ancestral romance: it became
one, even if it were not written as such. On the Albinis, see M. Dominica Legge,
Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963), pp. 156–61, and
Judith Weiss, ‘The Date of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone’, Medium
Ævum 55 (1986), 237–41.
74. On the later history of Bevis, see Jennifer Fellows, ‘Bevis redivivus: The Printed
Editions of Sir Bevis of Hampton’, in Romance Reading on the Book, ed. Jennifer
Fellows, Rosalind Field et al. (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 250–68. For a full account of the
dissemination of the legend of Guy, see Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend
of Guy of Warwick (New York and London, 1996).
75. FQ, I. xi. 29–53: see also King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance,
pp. 129–45.
76. The connection between Guy and Spenser’s Guyon was noted as evident by John
Lane, in 1617 (Richmond, Legend of Guy, p. 219), and there is no reason not to take
him as typical. See further King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance,
pp. 161–2, and pp. 95–6 below. Guy’s ancestry of the earls of Warwick was taken
up by Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, younger brother of the Elizabethan earl of
Warwick (see Richmond, Legend, pp. 189–90). The Golden Legend also defines
‘Guyon’ as ‘holy wrestler’: see Hamilton’s note to FQ, I. x. 65–6.
77. An early allusion to Bevis occurs in the dispute between Peter and Horner in the
first quarto of Henry VI Part 2 (The First Part of the Contention, sig. D2r, in
Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and
Kenneth Muir (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1981), p. 56): ‘with down-
right blowes, as Beuys of South-hampton fell upon Askapart’. The simile is cut
in the Folio text and modern editions: it would follow 2.3.96. Besides the cou-
plet discussed below, there is a further allusion in Henry VIII (originally entitled
All is True) 1.1.36–8, when the Duke of Norfolk notes of the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, ‘Former fabulous story | Being now seen possible enough, got credit | That
Bevis was believed.’ Allusions to Guy are made by the Bastard Faulconbridge in
King John 1.1.225 (to Guy’s opponent ‘Colbrand the Giant’) and by the porter’s
man in Henry VIII 5.3.22 (to Sir Guy and Colbrand)).
78. William Copland’s edition of c.1565, sig. Gir; and both texts of Lear, Quarto
11.126–7, Folio 3.4.131–2. By the time of Thomas East’s 1585 edition, ‘dere’ was
modernized into ‘chere’ (sig. Diir). See also The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun,
ed. Eugen Kölbing, EETS E.S. 46 (1885), p. 74, ll. 85–6. There was no need, as has
been suggested, for Shakespeare to have used a 1503 edition (see Hays,
Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 28).
79. Nashe was particularly scathing: ‘Who is it, that reading Bevis of Hampton, can
forbeare laughing, if he marke what scambling shyft he makes to ende his verses
a like? I will propound three or foure payre by the way for the Readers recreation.
The Porter said, by my snout, | It was Sir Bevis that I let out’ (‘The Anatomie of
Absvrditie’, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, corr. by
F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958), i. 26).
80. The surviving text is entitled The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and
various events of Guy earl of Warwick; it was printed in 1661, but dates from the very
early 1590s, perhaps 1593. See Helen Cooper, ‘Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and
Mounting Sparrows’, in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, ed. J. R. Mulryne and
Takashi Kazuka (Aldershot, 2004). Details are also given there of the other possible
dramatizations (one entered in the Stationers’ Registers in 1620 as being by John
Day and Thomas Dekker; one, probably different, performed at an Islington inn
in 1618; and possibly one current around 1580, if the details of Stephen Gosson’s
account of the kind of drama that he despised can be trusted).
81. The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, intro. Edmund W. Gosse (Glasgow,
1880), Vol. 3; the latest printing of the prosification appears to have been in the
Carisbrooke Library volume of 1889.
82. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor (Harmonds-
worth, 1980), p. 206. Pamela’s own name comes from Sidney’s Arcadia.
83. The connection is important for the dating of the romance (probably completed
1330–40); see Perceforest Part I, ed. Taylor, pp. 22–7, and Part IV, ed. Gilles
Roussineau, I. xii–xiii.
84. Known owners include the earl of Warwick, who gave a substantial number of
books to the abbey of Bordesley in 1305; Isabella, wife of Edward II, whose copies
may have been those recorded as still being in the royal library at the end of the
fourteenth century; Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Gloucester; and Elizabeth
Woodville (or possibly her brother) and her daughters (see Madeleine Blaess,
‘L’Abbaye de Bordesley et les livres de Guy de Beauchamp’, Romania 78 (1957),
511–18; Susan H. Cavanaugh, ‘Royal Books: King John to Richard II’, The Library,
6th ser. 10 (1988), 304–16; Carol M. Meale, ‘Manuscripts, Readers and Patrons in
Fifteenth-century England: Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance’,
Arthurian Literature 4 (1985), 93–126); and Roger Middleton, ‘Manuscripts of the
Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England and Wales: Some Books and their Owners’, in A
Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. Carol Dover (Cambridge, 2003),
pp. 219–35).
85. The first Middle English work to incorporate the affair and the incest is the met-
rical Morte Arthur of c.1400, based on the Vulgate Mort Artu, though it manages
to give both a very low profile by comparison with the French (Mordred’s own
incestuous pursuit of his uncle’s/father’s wife receives much more stress). The
Alliterative Morte Arthure, of around the same date, follows Geoffrey. The earli-
est implied reference to the affair in English appears to be a legend of origin for
the caves of Nottingham Castle, found in a unique interpolation in the
Auchinleck manuscript text of a metrical chronicle, which describes Lancelot as
having them excavated to hide Guinevere from Arthur: an account that presup-
poses a knowledge of his rescue and abduction of her, and which can be dated
c.1331 (An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl, EETS OS
196 (1935), Auchinleck additions 1071–90 (pp. 70–1); Helen Cooper, ‘Lancelot,
Roger Mortimer, and the Date of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in The Key of All
Remembrance, ed. A. J. Fletcher (forthcoming); Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Lancelot as
Lover in the English Tradition before Malory’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of
P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 199–216.
86. For the circulation of the French Arthurian prose romances in Italy, see Daniela
Delcorno Branca, Tristano e Lancillotto in Italia (Ravenna, 1998); and for their
influence on Ariosto, her Orlando Furioso e il Romanzo cavalleresco medievale
(Florence, 1973).
87. Richard Cooper provides an analysis and bibliography of printed French
romances in ‘ “Nostre Histoire renouvelée”: The Reception of Romances of
Chivalry in the Renaissance’, in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Sydney Anglo
(Woodbridge, 1990) pp. 175–238; their progression from manuscript to print can
be followed in Brian Woledge’s Bibliographie des romans et nouvelles en prose
français antérieures à 1500 and its Supplement (Geneva, 1954, 1975). Rabelais made
them a subject of satire in the 1530s, casting Lancelot as a horse-flayer and
Valentine and Orson as bath attendants (Cooper, Nostre Histoire’ p. 189), but
their popularity continued for centuries in shortened versions in the Bibliothèque
bleue.
88. It is generally assumed to be Greek in origin, though its earliest extant text is in
Latin. It is the only romance to appear in Old English; versions appear in Gower’s
Confessio amantis and in the course of the Gesta Romanorum (in a translation that
itself went through numerous printed editions); and a further translation, King
Apollyn, was printed c.1510. For the later sixteenth-century versions, see Vol. 6 of
Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols.

(London and New York, 1957–75). For a history and edition of the story, see
Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and
Variations (Cambridge, 1991).
89. Its history is discussed in the parallel-text edition of the manuscript and prints by
James Ralston Caldwell, Eger and Grime (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), pp. 6–42, esp.
p. 10.
90. O. Lengert, ‘Die schottische Romanze “Roswall and Lillian”’, Englische Studien
(1892), 16.321–56 (an account of the prints and an edition of the text), and
17.341–77 (annotation). The five known prints include just one from south of the
border, from Newcastle, undated. The romance borrows a number of motifs from
Ipomedon, probably from one of its Middle English translations rather than from
Hue’s Anglo-Norman; the printed text might be too late as a source.
91. Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, 1961), i.13
(pp. 33–4).
92. On Guy’s lion, see Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights, pp. 74–5, citing a sermon
in British Library MS Harley 7322, f. 49 (it was none the less too good a story to pass
over, and Spenser borrows from it for the fatal wounding of Una’s lion, FQ, I. iii.
41–4). Religious texts that offered themselves as a substitute for the wickedness of
reading romances included the South English Legendary, William of Nassington’s
translation of the Speculum vitae, the sermon collection known as the Mirror,
and the Cursor mundi, which gives the fullest listing of the stories of which it
disapproves (ed. Richard Morris, Vol. 1, EETS O.S. 57 (1874), prologue 1–26).
93. Hoccleve: Minor Poems, ed. Furnivall and Gollancz, p. 14, ll. 193–8. ‘Vegece of the
aart of Chivalrie’ is the popular military handbook by Vegetius, De re militari.
94. A very frvteful and pleasant boke callyd the Instrvction of a Christen woman, cap. 5;
there were numerous editions in the sixteenth century. For Vives’ original, see De
institutione foeminae Christianae (Antwerp, 1524), sig. Ciiiv.
95. The ballad version tells only a fraction of the story, and is not evidently descended
from Middle English: see Child, Ballads, v. 175, no. 300, ‘Blancheflour and
Jellyflorice’.
96. The prose redaction of the original alliterative romance, printed c.1515, is now
known only from one double leaf (ed. G. H. V. Bunt in William of Palerne,
pp. 328–31).
97. From The Scholemaster (published in 1570, six years after his death), in Roger
Ascham: English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904, repr. 1970),
p. 230. His animus is particularly directed against the Morte Darthur.
98. ‘Anatomie of Absvrditie’, Works of Nashe, ed. McKerrow, i.11; Henry Crosse (1603)
accuses ‘lazie monkes, and fat-headed friers, in whom was noght but sloath
and idlenes’ of acting as agents of Satan in so occupying ‘Christian wits in Heathens
foolery’ (Vertue’s Commonwealth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Manchester, 1878),
p. 99). For a conspectus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century condemnations
(and, just occasionally, defences) of chivalric romance, see Alex Davis, Chivalry and
Romance in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 7–19.
99. M. C. Seymour, ‘MSS Douce 261 and Egerton 3132A and Edward Banyster’,
Bodleian Library Record 10 (1980), 162–5; the Douce manuscript contains
Isumbras, Degaré, The Jest of Sir Gawain, and Eglamour; the Egerton contains
Robert the Devil.
444 Notes to page 39
100. Robert Langham: A Letter, ed. R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden, 1983), p. 53. The author was
in fact probably not Robert Langham (or Laneham), but William Patten;
Langham indeed seems to have tried to have the work suppressed (see Brian
O’Kill, ‘The Printed Works of William Patten (c.1510–c.1600)’, Transactions of
the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7 (1977), 28–45; and David Scott, ‘William
Patten and the Authorship of Robert Laneham’s Letter (1575)’, ELR 7 (1977),
297–306). The element of fictionality about the authorship in turn raises the
question of the fictionality of Captain Cox, but the list of his books must have
been recognizably plausible whether it were true or invented. The eight early
romances from the list are Bevis, Sir Eglamour, Sir Tryamour, Sir Lamwell (i.e.,
Launfal), Sir Isumbras, Sir Gawain (which could be one of several texts), and two
texts of c.1500, The Squire of Low Degree and The Knight of Courtesy and the Fair
Lady of Faguell. The prose romances are ‘King Arthur’s book’ (presumably
Malory), Huon of Bourdeaux, The Four Sons of Aymon, Oliver of Castile, and also
The Seven Wise Masters (otherwise known as The Seven Sages of Rome). Ben
Jonson makes a reference to his library as late as his 1624 Masque of Owls (l. 27;
in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols., corr.
edn. (Oxford, 1954), vii 781–6).
101. So Robert Ashley (born in 1565, writing in 1614): ‘Memini me dum puer essem
. . . magistri me in officio continerent, si forte in manus meas incideret libellus
aliquis qui fictas et futiles fabellas contineret qualia de Bevisio Hamtonensi
Guidone Warwicensi historia Valentini et Orsoni vita Arthuri Regis Britaniae et
equitum orbicularis mensae circumferuntur, ac huiusmodi portentis ac mon-
stris qualia aut nunquam extiterunt, aut certe supra omnem fidem futilia ac vana
per otiosos monachos de eis addita (ad irretiendam plebeculam et voluptate
inescandam conficta in superiore seculo) . . .’ (Ronald S. Crane, ‘The Reading of
an Elizabethan Youth’, Modern Philology 11 (1913–14), 1–3 (p.3): ‘I remember how
when I was a boy and my masters kept me hard at work, if by chance some book
fell into my hands that contained some fabulous and useless fictions such as were
told about Bevis of Hamtoun or Guy of Warwick, or the history of Valentine and
Orson, or the life of Arthur king of Britain and his knights of the Round Table,
or portents and monsters of a kind that never existed, or else indeed were useless
and vain things surpassing all belief added in by monks with nothing better to
do (made up in an earlier age to entrap the ignorant common man and ensnare
him with pleasures)’, he would abandon play, sleep, and work to read them.
(The Latin word order allows for a scornful pun: tales ‘such as were circulating
about the Round Table . . .’.)
102. They were taken sufficiently seriously at the popular level for the Seven
Champions to be dramatized in the seventeenth century (the surviving text dates
from 1635), to remain a chapbook favourite through the nineteenth, and to
appear in boys’ versions in the twentieth; for the first five editions of Tom a
Lincoln to be comprehensively read to pieces; and for Chinon to be dramatized
in 1595, assuming that the story was the same as that of the prose romance first
entered for publication in 1599. The sense they give of deliberately going over the
top may be illusory: as with some modern paperback fiction (such as the novels
entered for the Bad Sex Awards), a certain level of sophistication in the reader
can incur a reaction presumably unintended by the author. Tom and its 1607
sequel look much the most deliberate: see pp. 389–91 below.
103. The Melancholie Knight (1615), in Works of Rowlands, ed. Gosse, ii.27–9 (double-
numbered as pp. 33–5).
104. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford, 1967), i.447–50; the work
was first published in 1663, with a note on the title page that it was ‘written in the
time of the late Wars’ (probably in fact in the late 1650s, p. xlvi).
105. See Larry D. Benson, ‘The Tournament in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes
and L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal’, in Chivalric Literature, ed. Larry D.
Benson and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo, 1980), pp. 1–24.
106. The nude gymnastic exercises of the Latin Apollonius mystified later writers;
Gower represents them as a ‘game’ played naked (Confessio amantis, 8682–94),
Twine’s Pattern of Painefull Adventures (1576) has its hero play tennis (Bullough,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vi. 387, 435). Conversion into a tournament
emphasizes the assimilation of Pericles into the model of chivalric quest.
107. Extensive discussions of these issues can be found in Maurice Keen, Chivalry
(New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 18–82, and Richard Barber, The Knight and
Chivalry, rev. edn. (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 3–46.
108. Sir William Segar: The Book of Honor and Armes (1590) and Honor Military and
Civil (1602), facsimile intro. Diane Bornstein (Delmar, NY, 1975); Honor
Military, p. 60. The second work is in effect an expanded edition of the first.
Segar was promoted through the various posts of herald, becoming Garter King
of Arms in 1603, so had a professional interest in the rituals of chivalry.
109. Lull’s Libre del ordre de cavayleria became a pan-European bestseller; its Scots
version was made by Gilbert Hay; its English by Caxton (as The Book of the Ordre
of Chyvalry; ed. by Alfred T. P. Byles, EETS OS 168 (1926) ). The Lady of the Lake,
instructing the young Lancelot before he departs for King Arthur’s court, con-
centrates solely on the symbolism of armour as the defence of the Church
(Lancelot, ed. Alexandre Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1978–83), vii.xxia; trans. S.
Rosenberg, in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-
Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1992–7), ii.
59–60). A further widely disseminated set of interpretations is given in the
anonymous Ordene de chevalerie (before 1250), which purported to describe how
Saladin had asked the captive Hugh, count of Tiberias, for a demonstration of
how a knight was created. See further Keen, Chivalry, pp. 6–11.
110. Segar, Honor Military, pp. 51–2. A comparable process of backdating, this time
between the 1590 and 1602 versions of his work, occurs when the description of
the ceremony for creating knights is redated from 1020 to ‘about the yeere of
Christ 500, neere which time King Arthur reigned in England’ (p. 53; compare
Book of Honor, V. 4 (pp. 8–9 of new pagination)).
111. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Cranbury,
NJ, and London, 1986) pp. 13, 17, 25–6, 107–25.
112. Segar, Honor Military, heading to II. 7 (p. 60).
113. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 71–9.
114. Robert Anton, Moriomachia (London: Simon Stafford, 1613), sig. B1v; the ‘fayry
champion’ is in fact a transformed cow. Alex Davis calls attention to the passage,
Chivalry and Romance, p. 44, in a discussion of the crisis of knighthood.
chapter 1
1. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), in John Milton: Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides
(Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 213.
2. See p. 31 and note 76 above.
3. Of whom Lancelot is the ‘best breathed’: Malory, i. 266 (VI. 8).
4. The point is elaborated with regard to romance forms from Ariosto to Keats by
Patricia A. Parker in her Inescapable Romance (Princeton, 1979): ‘ “Romance” is
characterized primarily as a form which simultaneously quests for and postpones a
particular end, objective, or object’ (p. 4). Her term for this postponement is ‘dila-
tion’.
5. Monica Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London and New York,
1996), p. 22. She also notes how rare such duplicity is in folktales; it is the more
sophisticated romance authors, working in a tradition already well established
and understood, who produce such complexities of plotting.
6. See, for instance, ‘On Transience’ and ‘Those Wrecked by Success’, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957–74), xiv. 303–7, 316–31.
7. The story of the young man who has to marry the hag who tells him what women
most desire appears first in the late fourteenth century, in Gower as well as
Chaucer, and may have folktale antecedents; but the place they gave it within
romance was confirmed by its reappearance in the following century as The
Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell (ed. Thomas Hahn in Sir Gawain: Eleven
Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, 1995), pp. 41–80).
8. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2001), p. 23; the
following quotation is from p. 30.
9. Reto R. Bezzola, Le Sens de l’aventure et de l’amour (Paris, 1947), p. 83.
10. The heraldic device of St George first appears in the later thirteenth century, a few
decades after the invention of the Grail legend: see Olivier de Laborderie, ‘Richard
the Lionheart and the Birth of a National Cult of St George in England’,
Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995), 37–53, esp. pp. 41–2. I have not found an
early source for the statement that he was sometimes claimed to be a descendant
of Joseph of Arimathea (e.g., by Samantha Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and
Myth (Stroud, 2000), p. 20), though it would link the two bearers of the arms.
Malory summarizes the legend of the white or silver shield (they are the same,
‘argent’, in heraldic terminology) with the red cross, as developed originally in the
History of the Holy Grail of Robert de Boron and repeated in his immediate
source, the French Quest of the Holy Grail (cf. Malory, ii. 880–1 (XIII.10–11));
Galahad is the bearer of the shield within his main narrative. John Harding’s
Chronicle, printed with Grafton’s continuation in 1543, also summarizes the his-
tory of the shield (The Chronicle of Iohn Harding, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812),
ch. lxxviii, pp. 133–4). Spenser further mentions the legend of Joseph of
Arimathea’s role as disciple to the English, II. x. 53.
11. Steven Gunn, ‘Chivalry and the Politics of the Early Tudor Court’, in Chivalry and
the Renaissance, ed. Anglo, pp. 107–28 (p. 110).
12. FQ, I. x. 60, and see pp. 193–4 below. Redcrosse’s raising by a ploughman sup-
plies a link with Langland’s promotion of true religion in the person of a
ploughman; Piers Plowman was printed in Edward VI’s reign as a proto-

Protestant work. Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom is edited by
Jennifer Fellows (London, 2003); there is summary of its St George biography in
Riches, St George, pp. 180–1. Riches also notes the casting of St George in
Protestant opposition to a papal dragon, p. 153.
13. In Stephen Hawes: The Minor Poems, ed. Florence W. Gluck and Alice B. Morgan
(EETS 271, 1974); it was first printed in 1509 and went through at least two more
editions. The poem takes the form of a dream vision with a first-person narrator,
who is named as Youth in the list of contents and is renamed as Virtue from line
1540 onwards; see further pp. 102–3 below.
14. Carol V. Kaske, ‘How Spenser Really Used Stephen Hawes in the Legend of
Holiness’, in Unfolded Tales, ed. Logan and Teskey, pp. 119–36.
15. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn.
rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967), ll. 54, 86 (taking ‘childgered’, with the
editors, as ‘boyish’ rather than ‘childish’; ‘child’ did not have pejorative connota-
tions in Middle English, and is often used for a young hero).
16. The text survives only in the Percy Folio manuscript (ii. 56–77; also ed. Hahn,
Sir Gawain, pp. 309–35), so its dating and its relationship to Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight cannot be established with accuracy. Sir John Paston lists a
romance entitled The Grene Knyght in an inventory of books of the late 1470s,
which might or might not be this version. On Herbert and his determination to
do justice to his white lace, see The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (London and New York, 1976), pp. 38, 42–3;
and Davis, Chivalry and Romance, pp. 140–1.
17. The account closely follows the activities of earlier Arthurian fair unknowns, such
as Libeaus Desconus and Gareth (see below, p. 337, and Malory, i. 293–7 (VII.
1–2) ). Guyon also makes mention of the episode, II. i. 19.
18. Lybeaus was adapted into Middle English from French in the late fourteenth
century; it was still popular enough in the seventeenth to appear in the Percy Folio
manuscript. See further pp. 331–3 below.
19. Curiously, supposedly sexually liberated post-modern Britain and the United
States are much less tolerant of sexual infidelity in those in authority than was the
case in the Middle Ages. Modern literature, by contrast, generally operates by
much looser standards than life, whereas romance set stricter demands than
many princes followed in practice.
20. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (London, 1982), p. 43.
21. 1 Cor. 15:21–2, Bishops’ Bible version (the most widely disseminated of the late six-
teenth-century translations), adopted by the King James editors (New Testament
Octapla, ed. Luther A. Weigle (New York, 1962)).
22. From God’s speech explaining the providential scheme of salvation,
spoken immediately preceding the Annunciation (the first moment when the
Fall begins to move towards the Redemption) in The Towneley Plays, ed.
Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, EETS S.S.13 (1994), Vol. 1: Text, play 10,
ll. 31–4.
23. Ed. Tolkien and Gordon, 625–6, 2509. On the contemporary significance of
trouthe, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia, 1999).
24. There is no evidence for any intermediate source, though the radical rethinking
of the story indicates that the author was not working with a copy of Chrétien’s
text in front of him. It is edited by Maldwyn Mills, Ywain and Gawain, Sir
Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arthur (London, 1992); also in French and Hale,
pp. 531–603.
25. Ed. Mills, ll. 5 and 7; CT, VII. 915–16.
26. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, 1966), p. 363.
27. See Judith Weiss, ‘Structure and Characterisation in Havelok the Dane’, Speculum
44 (1969), 247–57, esp. pp. 247–8.
28. Clyomon and Clamydes, ed. Betty J. Littleton (The Hague, Paris, 1968); its outside
dates are 1570–83 (pp. 30–3). Its main story had already been separately printed in
France in 1542, but the author knew and used the whole romance, which had gone
through a number of printed editions (pp. 38–9). See also Littleton’s discussion of
the problems of turning episodic romance into coherent drama, p. 55.
29. See Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales 2nd edn.
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 67–8, 73–5. On The Two Noble Kinsmen, see pp. 374–5
below.
30. The last performance of the Coventry mystery plays, just a few miles from
Stratford, took place when Shakespeare was 15; Kendal managed to continue with
its cycle until c. 1610.
31. Pericles, scene 1.104, 65, 72 (the Wells–Taylor numbering incorporates Gower’s
prologue), scene 2.77.
32. 5.1. 17–28. Although he avoids harming anyone from Italy, this is the first point at
which he makes it clear that he does not intend to maroon his particular enemies
on the island. Productions have traditionally presented a gentler Prospero, but
the text would seem to favour a change of heart at this point.
33. See further pp. 112–13 below.
35. There was not even any single medieval term for ‘map’; ‘mappa mundi’ itself
could refer simply to a list of place-names, such as monasteries (Evelyn Edson,
Mapping Time and Space (London, 1997), p. 132). The first maps after the Romans
to use spatial co-ordinates, and therefore to have a practical function, were coastal
maps for the use of sailors.
36. The few medieval maps designed as journey aids sometimes took the form of
strip-maps, itineraries arranged spatially; Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century
polymath who experimented with most contemporary kinds of mapping, pro-
duced such a map, with place-names marked a day’s journey apart (Edson,
Mapping Time, pp. 121–2).
37. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard Trask (1953; repr. New York, 1957), ch. 6, ‘The Knight Sets Forth’,
esp. pp. 112–13.
38. Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, EETS OS 153 (1919), pp. 109, 180; The Boke
of Duke Huon of Bordeux, ed. S. L. Lee, EETS ES 40, 41, 43, 50 (1882–7; 2-vol.
reprint, 1973, 1998), ch. cviii, pp. 369–71; FQ, II. xii. 7–8. Huon’s island prevents
anyone drawn to it from leaving (he himself escapes by griffin); Spenser’s wrecks
everyone caught within its field of attraction.
39. For a full discussion, see Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance
(Cambridge, 1993).
40. The point is made by Helen Moore, in her forthcoming Amadis in English.
41. Andrew King stresses this continuity in The Faerie Queene and Middle English
Romance, pp. 48–52, 161–2, and passim; and see also Jacqueline Simpson, British
Dragons (London, 1980), pp. 80–90 (ch. 5, ‘You Can See it There Still’).
42. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965), p. 65. The chapter in
which the term occurs, entitled ‘The Return from the Sea’, is a powerful discus-
sion of the romance elements in the play.
43. See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii. 238–45, 275–98; and the edi-
tion for the Oxford Shakespeare by Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1987), pp. 31–6 and
appendices B and D. Stephen Greenblatt offers an extended discussion of the
play’s links with the New World through William Strachey’s True Reportory of the
Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates in Shakespearean Negotiations
(Oxford, 1988), pp. 142–63.
44. See below, pp. 227–8.
45. Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes II: Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris, 1982),
ll. 28–33.
46. A denial of Trojan origins for France landed someone in the Bastille as late as the
eighteenth century: see George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History (Urbana,
1970), pp. 75–7.
47. See, for instance, Edson, Mapping Time, plates VI and VII (the Psalter and
Hereford maps).
48. ‘And also’, he adds as an afterthought, ‘I was not worthi’ (Mandeville’s Travels, ed.
Hamelius, p. 202).
49. The story made its way from Latin to French to Sir Gilbert Hay’s Scots Buik of
Alexander the Conqueror, of c.1460, ed. John Cartwright, Scottish Text Society
(Edinburgh, 1986–), ll. 14458–16314.
50. See the chapter on ‘Flyaway Islands and False Voyages 1100–1492’, in Samuel Eliot
Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages AD 500–1600
(New York, 1971), pp. 81–105.
51. Geoffrey, in his Life of Merlin, describes Morgen’s home as ‘insula pomorum que
Fortunata vocatur’ (Life of Merlin: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. Basil
Clarke (Cardiff, 1973), l. 908, and his note on p. 147 on the connection of Isidore’s
fortunatorum insulae, ‘the island of the blessed women’, with the text’s island of
apples / Avalon).
52. Such a voyage was proved possible by Tim Severin’s re-enactment of it in a replica
leather boat in 1976–7: see his The Brendan Voyage (London, 1978). Translations
of the Irish and Latin forms of the legend, together with the Middle English texts
from the South English Legendary and the Golden Legend, are collected by Denis
O’Donaghue, Lives and Legends of Saint Brendan the Voyager (1893; repr.
Felinfach, 1994).
53. Caroline Walker Bynum emphasizes the medieval stress on non-appropriative
wonder in her Metamorphosis and Identity, pp. 38–75.
54. See further Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail (Princeton, 1988), pp. 211–20.
55. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was published in 1532, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata in
1575.
56. ‘Solo un ovile sia, solo un pastore’ (Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed.
Lanfranco Caretti (Turin, 1966) XV. 26, and see also 21–7); Sir John Harington, ‘it
was but a vaine conceit of some idle head’ (Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ed.
Robert McNulty (Oxford, 1972), p. 166, sidenote to his xv. 18—his abbreviation of
the text indicates his impatience with the whole section).
57. Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang
(Oxford, 1981), xv. 31. Neither ‘knight’ nor ‘wondrous’ is present in the original:
Tasso’s equivalent terms are merely ‘uom’ and ‘incognito’ (Torquato Tasso:
Gerusalemme Liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Milan, 1979)).
58. Orlando Furioso, cantos 6 and 7; he leaves for the return journey across Asia in
canto 10.
59. Fairfax’s term, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, xiv. 75, xv. 62. See xiv. 70 for the loca-
tion in the Fortunate Isles.
60. Fairfax, Godfrey, vi. 43. A further link between Morgan and this series of
enchantresses lies in Ariosto’s making Morgana into Alcina’s sister and fellow-
conspirator.
61. The classic study is by Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave (1949; repr. Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1992). Popular titles included not only Amadis de Gaule and its
offspring but others of earlier origin, including versions of Floris and Blancheflour,
Partonope, Robert the Devil, Renaud of Montauban (The Four Sons of Aymon), and
Oliver of Castille (pp. 104–20). See also Jennifer Goodman, Chivalry and
Exploration 1298–1630 (Woodbridge, 1998), esp. pp. 149–67 on Cortes.
62. Segar, Honor Military, pp. 58–9.
63. FQ, II Proem 2–3; and the end of Ralegh’s Discovery of . . . Guiana, Sir Walter Ralegh:
Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Harmondsworth, 1986), p.123 (see also the
discussion in Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘ “Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender
and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, Representations 1 (1983), 61–94, esp. pp. 76–7).
64. Quoted in Morison, European Discovery, p. 629.
65. ‘God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now’ (letter to his wife on the
death of their son on their voyage to Guiana, 1618); and he ascribes the deaths of
Drake and Hawkins to heartbreak ‘when they failed of their enterprise’ (Ralegh:
Selected Writings, ed. Hammond, pp. 277–8).
66. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, title page; summary of the journey from
Part 2, pp. 383–4; pp. 264–5, echoing the Song of Songs.
68. Malory, ii. 912 (XIV. 6).
69. Malory, i. 88 (II. 17).
70. ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (‘Das Unheimliche’, 1919), in Freud: Works, ed. Strachey, xvii.
219–52. Freud elaborates his definition into ‘that class of the frightening which
leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (p. 220). Eger and Grime in
many ways offers a more detailed fit with his category of the uncanny than the
story he takes as his paradigm, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sand-Man.
71. The surviving texts present the romance in two somewhat different forms (one as
found in the Percy Folio manuscript; the other in print), but apart from the end-
ing (where the prints add a coda in which Eger’s wife leaves him and enters a nun-
nery after he confesses to his deception of her) the differences are no greater than
those that sometimes obtain between different manuscript versions of essentially
the same romance in the Middle Ages. Neither version of Eger shows signs of
extensive modernization. Caldwell’s edition prints the two texts in parallel;
French and Hale print the Percy version, pp. 671–717.
72. l. 1864 in Caldwell’s edition of the printed text.

73. Eger, ed. Caldwell, ll. 887–90.
74. Fairfax’s translation, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, p. 88. Tasso is making a distinc-
tion between ‘imitation’, which concerns itself with outward and visible action,
and ‘allegory’, which is concerned with what can be signified but not directly rep-
resented through such action.
75. Chroniques de Jean Molinet, ed. J-A. Buchon (Paris, 1828), i. 16–17, ‘Autre
Prologue’.
76. Ancrene Wisse, Part 4, ‘on temptations’ (various edns.; e.g. ed. J. R. R. Tolkien,
EETS 249 (1962), trans. Hugh White, Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses
(Harmondsworth, 1993).
77. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c.1150–1300
(Oxford, 2001), p. 139.
78. Malory, i. 280 (VI. 15).
79. Chrétien, Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Roques, 3118–28. Many manuscripts of the
prose Lancelot removed the lions altogether, presumably because the scribes
found the episode baffling; they are retained in that used by H. Oskar Sommer
(The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, Washington, 1900–16, iv. 201),
but appear only in the variants in Micha’s edition (iii. xxxviii.48 bis; compare ii.
xxxviii–xxxix).
80. Malory’s version, ii. 1014 (XVII. 14).
81. Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, pp. 175–6. Compare also the episode in the Valley
of the Shadow of Death when Christiana sees ‘something yonder upon the road
before us, a thing of a shape such as I have not seen. . . . An ugly thing, child; an
ugly thing . . .’, which vanishes when it is encountered by Mr Great-heart (‘The
Second Part’, p. 338).
82. Malory, ii. 931–4 (XV. 5–6).
83. Malory, ii. 892 (XIII. 17).
84. Hopkins gives a useful account of the doctrine of penitence in so far as it affects
the romances in her Sinful Knights, pp. 32–69.
85. It is edited by Maldwyn Mills, Six Middle English Romances (London, 1973), pp.
125–47.
86. Robert the Devil was a pan-European bestseller, but appears in England only in
early printed texts in both verse and prose. Modern editions are scarce—the verse
is edited by W. Carew Hazlitt, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England
(4 vols., London, 1864–6), i. 218–63; the prose in William J. Thoms, Early
English Prose Romances, rev. and enl. edn. (London, 1907), pp. 167–206. The
verse romance was one of those copied by the Elizabethan recusant Edward
Banyster (see p. 38 above). Lodge’s version is discussed below. The story enjoyed
particularly wide currency in France both before and after the age of print: its
popularity was confirmed by its appearance in the Bibliothèque bleue, and
Meyerbeer composed an opera on the subject in 1831. Sir Gowther (no early print-
ings) is closely derived from Robert the Devil, but originated in England: text in
Mills, Six Romances, pp. 148–68, or a fully scholarly edition by Karl Breul (Oppeln,
1886).
87. Robert of Sicily is edited by Hazlitt, Remains, i. 276–87, and French and Hale,
pp. 933–46; a dramatized version composed in the reign of Henry VII was revived
at Chester in 1529 (Hazlitt, i. 265–6; Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama

975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum, 3rd edn. rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London
and New York, 1989), p. 14). Despite its popularity in the Middle Ages (with ten
surviving manuscripts, including the Vernon manuscript, a huge volume of ver-
nacular texts possibly composed for reading in a convent), no early prints are
known. Two versions of the English Alexius (long and short redactions of the
same text) are edited by Carl Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge
(Heilbronn, 1881), pp. 174–88.
88. See p. 37 above.
89. Langham, A Letter, ed. Kuin, p. 53; The Complaynt of Scotlande (1549), ed. James
A. H. Murray, EETS E.S. 17–18 (1872–3), p. 63; Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie,
Works, ed. McKerrow, i. 11, or in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory
Smith (London, 1904), i. 323; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, ibid., ii. 308; and for
the dramatization, Harbage, Annals, sub anno 1603: it may have been a revival of
an older play.
90. The Famous, true and historicall life of Robert second Duke of Normandy, in The
Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, intro. Edmund W. Gosse, 4 vols. (1883; repr.
New York, 1963), ii. 19–20.
92. Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, Apology, p. 144.
93. Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, p. 390.
94. Guy of Warwick: Fifteenth-century Version, ed. Zupitza, ll. 272 ff., 7125 ff.; or in the
printed version, Guy of Warwick nach Coplands Druck, ed. Gustav Schleich
(Leipzig, 1923), ll. 440–50, 6085–92. Successive couplets look backwards and for-
wards, rather on the model of the comparisons of salvation history and salvation
itself: here, Guy repents of his past seeking of glory on bloody chivalric quests,
And all for the love of that maye, [maid
That he travelde fore nyght and day, [laboured
And not for god, his creatowre,
That had done hym that honowre.
ed. Zupitza, 7139–42
95. Longleat MS 249b; see Richmond, Legend of Guy, pp. 189–90.
96. Richard Lloyd, Briefe Discourse of the . . . Actes and Conquests of the Nine Worthies
(London, 1584).
97. The Famous History of Guy Earle of Warwicke, in Samuel Rowlands, Complete
Works, ed. Edmund Gosse (Glasgow, 1880), iii. 59.
98. The play contains a clown named Sparrow, ‘a high minded lofty mounting spar-
row’ who is, as he notes, a ‘bird of Venus’, and who was born at Stratford-upon-
Avon in Warwickshire. The wording is reminiscent of Greene’s notorious attack
on Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow’, of 1592: see Cooper, ‘Guy of Warwick’. The
play itself was not printed until 1661.
99. In the Chorus preceding Act 2, Guy is approved for fighting against God’s ene-
mies, ‘not in Deanes and Chapters lands at home’, and for his lack of concern
with splitting the Church over the hot topic of clerical vestments, ‘He doth not
strike at Surplices and Tippits, | (to bring an Oleo in of Sects in Sippits)’ (The
Tragical History of Guy, sig. B1v).
100. Tragical History, sig. F1v–F2.
101. For a discussion of the marital and penitential models offered by the two texts,
see Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cam-
bridge, 1997), pp. 99–106. Cartlidge makes the persuasive point that Guy’s pop-
ularity is partly due to its being ‘so free of moral anxiety’ (p. 105).
102. The early fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript contains not only the
romance of Guy and a chronicle account of him but also a homiletic work in the
form of a long sermon supposedly composed for the penitent Guy by a hermit,
the Speculum Gy de Warwike: a unique triple-genre representation of a hero in a
single collection (Richmond, Legend of Guy, p. 54).
103. ‘. . . that right worthie Guy earle of Warwike, who (as some writers have
recorded) fought with a mightie giant of the Danes in a singular combat, and
vanquished him’ (Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and
Ireland (1807–8; repr. with intro. by Vernon F. Snow, New York, 1965) i.
688).
104. Poly-Olbion, Song XII, ll. 147, 272–3 (in vol. 4 of The Works of Michael Drayton,
ed. J. William Hebel (5 vols., Oxford, 1961)).
105. ‘And by cause that he [the knight] be wel horsed and hyhe is by cause he may be
sene fro ferre. And that is the sygnefyaunce, that he oughte to be made redy to
doo al that whiche behoveth to thordre of chivalrye more than another man’
(Caxton’s translation of Lull’s Book of the Ordre of Chivalry, ed. Byles, p. 84,
modern punctuation supplied).
106. Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 338.
107. Rosemond Tuve, ‘The Red Crosse Knight and Medieval Demon Stories’, in
Essays by Rosemond Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton, ed. Thomas P. Roche, jr
(Princeton, 1970), pp. 39–48.
108. Mandeville’s Travels, ed. Hamelius, p. 187.
109. Gerald of Wales: The Journey through Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Har-
mondsworth, 1978), I. i. (p. 76).
110. Malory i. 88 (II. 17); Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, p. 180.
111. Malory, ii. 863 (XIII. 5).
112. Malory, ii. 1015, 1029 (XVII. 15, 20).
113. Malory, ii. 1034–5 (XVII. 22).
114. Malory, ii. 883 (XIII. 12).
115. Malory, ii. 984 (XVII. 2); and see pp. 132–3 below. Hawes has his protagonist
encounter a more overtly allegorical test in the shape of a narrow bridge with the
inscription
No man this brydge may over go
But he be pure without neglygence
And stedfast in goddes byleve also.
Yf he be ygnoraunt and do not so
He must nedys into this water fall
Over the heed and be drowned with all.
Example of Vertue, 1276–81
116. Malory, ii. 1011 (XVII.13).
117. Le Roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974), ll. 21,587–694.
118. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, ed. Caretti, xv. 62. Fairfax, for whom pilgrimages
were acceptable only when spiritual, cuts the image.
119. The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart (Le Livre du cuers d’amours espris) by René of
Anjou, ed. and trans. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and Kathryn Karczewska (New
York and London, 2001), pp. 6–7, 230–1; and Jean de Meun further figures
among the list of love-poets, pp. 173–81.
120. Jerome’s treatise Adversus Jovinianum enjoyed a succès de scandale throughout
the Middle Ages, especially among clerics, for its attack on sexuality, women,
and marriage.
121. Kaske, ‘How Spenser Really Used Hawes’, p. 126.
122. Hawes, Minor Poems, ed. Gluck and Morgan, plates 8 and 9.
123. Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Chivalric Restoration: From Bateman’s
Travayled Pylgrime to the Redcrosse Knight’, Studies in Philology 86 (1989),
166–97; she includes many of the woodcuts.
124. La Marche’s text, written in 1483, is edited and translated by Carleton W. Carroll,
Le Chevalier deliberé (The Resolute Knight) (Tempe, 1999). Bateman, like
Lewkenor, in fact used Hernando de Acuña’s Spanish translation El Caballero
determinado as his immediate source. Another work deriving from La Marche’s,
the 1572 imitation Le Voyage du chevalier errant by the Carmelite Jean Cartigny,
did keep its ‘knight’ in its English translation, William Goodyear’s The
Wandering Knight of 1581.
125. FQ, I. xii. 19, 40–1, and Hamilton’s discussion.
chapter 2
1. The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, translated from the Spanish of Miguel
de Cervantes by Thomas Shelton, 1612, 1620, intro. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (4
vols., London, 1896), iii. 21–2 (Part 2, ch. 1).
2. There may, of course, be some element of symbolism about these boats, but they
are always in the first instance real material ships—even the ship named Faith of
the Grail Quest, on which see p. 101 below. The symbolism can become overt, as
when Tristan and Isolde in the prose Tristan travel on a self-propelling magic
ship known as ‘la Nef de Joie’ (E. Löseth, Le Roman en Prose de Tristan (Paris,
1890), §323–35); or it may operate simply by association, as between the provi-
dentially guided boat and the Church (on which see, in particular, V. A. Kolve,
Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford and London, 1984), pp. 297–358).
In the version of the Grail Quest found in the prose Tristan, the material boat
that carries Galaad, Perceval, and Bohort is expounded as an allegory of the
Church (Löseth, Roman de Tristan, §512–13).
3. Don Quixote, trans. Shelton, iii. 217–22 (Part 2, ch. 29).
4. The phrase is used by Tasso, Rinaldo, ed. Michael Sherberg (Ravenna, 1990), vii.
83. The major study of this kind of boat is by David Quint, ‘The Boat of Romance
and Renaissance Epic’, in Romance: Generic Transformations, ed. Brownlee,
pp. 178–202.
5. The oldest known example of exposure on the water, of the third millennium
BCE, is the myth of Sargon, a baby abandoned on the Euphrates in a pitch-
covered basket: see Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, trans.
F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York, 1952), pp. 12–13; and Donald R.
Redford, ‘The Literary Motif of the Exposed Child’, Numen 14 (1967), 209–28.
For the appearance of the motif worldwide, see Carolyn Hares-Stryker, ‘Adrift
on the Seven Seas: The Mediaeval Topos of Exile at Sea’, Florilegium 12 (1993),
79–98, esp. pp. 80–4.
6. R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, 1959),
pp. 70–80. Later chroniclers incorporate the legend (William of Malmesbury
notes that his boat came sine remige, without any oarsman: Willelmi
Malmesbiriensis De gestis regum anglorum libri quinque, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series
90–1 (1887; repr. Wiesbaden, 1964), i. 121), but sometimes make nonsense of his
mysterious origin by giving his genealogy; Holinshed indeed traces it back to
Noah (Chronicles, i. 663).
7. James Hornell, ‘The Curraghs of Ireland’, Mariner’s Mirror 23 (1937), 74–83,
148–75, esp. pp. 74–7.
8. Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988), pp. 219–20; and
J. R. Reinhard, ‘Setting Adrift in Medieval Law and Literature’, PMLA 56 (1941),
33–68 (p. 48). A single ox-hide would make a boat a little over 1 metre wide and
under 2 metres long: see Hornell, ‘Curraghs’, 78, 154–61.
9. Fiacha, son of father-daughter incest, is described as having been set adrift in a
text of c.1168: see Reinhard, ‘Setting Adrift’, p. 37.
10. The Ancient, Famous and Honourable History of Amadis de Gaule (London, 1619);
quotations from pp. 11–12 (Book I ch. 2). The Amadis motif is closely imitated in
the anonymous Heroicall Adventures of the Knight of the Sea (1600), sig. D2r–3r.
11. Reinhard, ‘Setting Adrift’, p. 43.
12. The Pleasant Historie of Tom a Lincolne, in Early English Prose Romances, ed.
Thoms, p. 622; there is also a modern edition, R.I., The Most Pleasant History of
Tom a Lincolne, ed. Richard S. M. Hirsch (Columbia, SC, 1978), pp. 23–4. The
father who casts his daughter adrift in Torrent of Portyngale, one of the Middle
English romances that made the transition to print, suffers the same punishment
(ed. E. Adam, EETS E.S. 51 (1887), ll. 2122–48). Interestingly, none of these fatal
instances makes use of the ‘neither sail nor oar’ formula, though the absence of
equipment from the boats is implied.
13. The point is made forcefully by Partonope after he has entered an unmanned ship
that sails off with him, by comparison with being lost in the forest: Partonope de
Blois, ed. A. Trampe Bödtker, EETS E.S. 109 (1912), ll. 789–809—a lament that cul-
minates with the line, ‘Butte God allone he may me save’.
14. Holinshed, Chronicles, i. 687 (Book VI ch. xx, sub anno 934). His source, William
of Malmesbury, describes the boat as without oarsman and devoid of oars, remige
et remigio vacuam or sine remige et remigio vacuam (Willelmi Malmesbiriensis, i.
156). There is disagreement among the early chroniclers as to whether Edwin died
from exposure rather than drowning himself, a divergence of traditions that is
itself a strong indicator of suicide: see Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle
Ages: The Violent against Themselves (Oxford, 1998), pp. 48–9.
15. Lady Mary Wroth, Urania, in An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, ed.
Paul Salzman (Oxford, 1991), p. 38.
16. The Tempest, 1.2.154; on the echoes of Holinshed’s account of Edwin, see Helen
Cooper, ‘Prospero’s Boats: Magic, Providence, and Human Choice’, in
Renaissance Essays for Kitty Scoular Datta, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Calcutta and
Oxford, 1995), pp. 160–75, esp. pp. 169–71.
17. The play was first printed in 1661 under the names of John Webster and William
Rowley, but the ascription to Webster at least is probably libellous. Its only mod-
ern edition is none the less in The Dramatic Works of John Webster, ed. William
Hazlitt (London, 1857), Vol. 4; quotation from I. i. The plot owes something not
only to Shakespeare’s last plays and various Elizabethan pastoral romances (the
lovers come to land separately and both lodge with shepherds) but also to the
story of Havelok and Goldboru, under their alternative names of Curan and
Argentille, as retold in William Warner’s Albions England: see below, p. 265.
18. Livy, ed. and trans. B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library, 14 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London, 1952), i.16–25 (I. iii. 10–vi.3; quotations from pp. 18, 19, I. iv. 3).
19. Holinshed, Chronicles, i.435.
20. Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Zettl, ll. 283, 290; Redford,
‘Setting Adrift’, pp. 59–60. The story originated in Anglo-Norman (Des grants
Geanz, ed. Georgina Brereton (Oxford, 1937)), and (unusually) was translated
from the vernacular into Latin. The story exists in various forms, with the
daughters originating from Greece or Syria, succeeding or not in the murder of
their husbands, and being condemned by their father or the surviving husband;
the setting adrift is common to all versions. See further Lesley Johnson, ‘Return
to Albion’, Arthurian Literature 13 (1995), 19–40; and James P. Carley and Julia
Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s Past: An Annotated Edition of De Origine
Gigantum’, Arthurian Literature 13 (1995), 41–114.
21. Sir Eglamour, ed. Richardson, l. 883.
22. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii.166–7; Sicily and Bohemia
are inverted in the Winter’s Tale. Greene’s account is closely paraphrased in
seventeenth-century rewritings: e.g., Fortune’s Tennis Ball; or, The Most Excellent
History of Dorastus and Fawnia, by ‘S. S. Gent’, ed. James O. Halliwell (London,
1859), p. 11: Fawnia is placed in a ‘little boat . . . neither rudder, nor | A sayl to guide
it’, which is tied to a ship, towed out to sea, and the cord cut. The work was
entered in the Stationers’ Registers in 1656, but the earliest surviving copy dates
from 1672.
23. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Caretti, xxxvi.60–1; unusually, the mother comes to
land before giving birth, but dies in the process.
24. It may also underlie the indirectness of Prospero’s reply to Miranda that he is
indeed her father (viz. that he had his wife’s assurance on the subject), though few
Shakespearean men give a simpler answer to such a question (Tempest, 1. 2. 56–7;
cf. Much Ado, 1. 1. 100; King Lear, 1. 1. 8–9).
26. Romance of Horn, ed. Pope, ll. 58–114; ll. 74 quoted, ‘N’i ot tres n’avirum, guver-
nail ne struman’. For a translation, see The Birth of Romance: An Anthology, trans.
Judith Weiss (London, 1992).
27. Copies or fragments of three printed editions survive from c.1509 to 1511;
the licence to print the work was transferred on 15 January 1582, along with the
highly popular Sir Eglamour (SR, ii.405). The only modern edition follows the
largely independent version preserved in a mid-fifteenth century manuscript,
‘King Ponthus and the Faire Sidone’, ed. F. J. Mather, jr, PMLA 12 (1897), i–150.
One of the surviving manuscripts of the French prose original was probably
copied in England (Le Roman de Ponthus et Sidoine, ed. Marie-Claude de Crécy
(Geneva, 1977) p. ix); the text was also included in the manuscript presented to
Margaret of Anjou on her wedding to Henry VI, British Library Royal 15 E.VI.
28. De Worde print of 1511, sig. Avv (modernized punctuation); for the original, see
Ponthus, ed. de Crécy, p. 8—though it appears that this English translator added
the detail of the ‘two or three’ holes.
29. ‘Or les guarisset cil ki salvat Moïsan, | Quant fud jecté petit al flum del desruban’
(Romance of Horn, ed. Pope, ll. 72–6); cf. Exodus 1:15–2:10. The Biblical etymology
given for Moses’ name, ‘because I drew him out of the water’, underlines the
significance of his discovery.
30. Man of Law’s Tale, CT II.485–7. The analogy is found in a high proportion of texts
of rudderless boats, both hagiographic and secular, including (for instance)
Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius and the legend of St Kentigern.
31. ‘Withouten mast, other myke, other myry bawelyne, | Kable, other capstan to
clyppe to her ankres, | Hurrok, other hand-helme hasped on rother, | Other any
sweande sail to seche after haven’ (Cleanness, ll. 417–20, The Poems of the Pearl
Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron rev. edn. (Exeter, 1987)).
32. The Northern Legendary, in Altenglische Legenden, ed. Horstmann, pp. 81–8 (ll.
104–6); cf. ‘withouten ster and ore’, Magdalena, in his Sammlung altenglischer
Legenden (Heilbronn, 1878), pp. 148–62, l. 174.
33. The Golden Legend; or, Lives of the Saints Englished by William Caxton, ed.
F. S. Ellis, 7 vols. (London, 1900), iv.76.
34. The Lives of St Ninian and St Kentigern, ed. Alexander Penrose Forbes (1874; repr.
Lampeter, 1989), pp. 167–8: ‘iuxta morum Scottorum confecto, sine omni remi-
gio . . . “Confidit in Christo, liberet illam si valet de manu mortis, et de periculo
maris” ’ (cf. Matthew 27:43).
35. Die mittelenglische Gregoriuslegende, ed. Carl Keller (Heidelberg, 1914), pp. 44, 51
(quotations from two manuscripts). The legend is best known through
Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius and its recasting for a modern readership by
Thomas Mann as Der Erwählte (trans. as The Holy Sinner).
36 This is the argument of Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination
(Oxford, 2001), p. 232.
37. Whitley Stokes, ‘The Voyage of the Húi Corra’, Révue Celtique 14 (1893), 22–69; they
initially take oars, but ship them in order to commit themselves more completely to
God.
38. The Tripartite Life of St Patrick, ed. Whitley Stokes, Rolls Series 89 (London, 1887),
ii. 286–9; and see T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Social Background to Irish
Peregrinatio’, Celtica 11 (1976), 43–59 (48–50). An anti-providential, and therefore
anomalous, instance of the punishment of a criminal by a saint is told of St
Edmund, who condemned a murderer, his hunstman Bern (Beorn), to be cast
adrift in the boat ‘which nouther hadde oore, seil nor mast’ in which his own vic-
tim of murder through exposure, a Danish king, had been washed up on the
English coast; Bern not only survives, but on coming to land in Denmark, per-
suades Bern’s sons that it was Edmund who killed their father (Lydgate’s Life of St
Edmund Book II, l. 247 quoted; ed. Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden,
pp. 376–440).
39. ‘The Voyage of Snedgus and MacRiagla’, ed. Whitley Stokes, Révue Celtique 9
(1888), 14–25.
40. The passage is quoted and discussed by Charles-Edwards, ‘Social Background’,
pp. 48–9.
41. Victor Turner, ‘The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal’, History of Religions 12
(1972), 191–230 (p. 214).
42. ‘Deus enim adiutor noster est et nautor et gubernator atque gubernat. Mittite
intus omnes remiges et gubernaculum. Tantum dimittite uela extensa et faciat
Deus sicut uult de seruis suis et de sua naui’ (Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
from Early Latin Manuscripts, ed. Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, 1959), cap. 6, p. 12
(and cf. also pp. 39, 40; see also Lives of the Saints, trans. J. F. Webb (Har-
mondsworth, 1965), pp. 37, 51). The passage appears in the Irish Life, but not the
Middle English versions: see also p. 74 above. One of the hermits encountered by
Brendan on an otherwise uninhabited island had also been brought there by boat
without his control, and it returns empty to Ireland after leaving him there. See
also Tim Severin, The Brendan Voyage; and, for a testimony to the continuing fas-
cination of Brendan’s ‘wonders of the deep’, C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn
Treader (London, 1954).
43. Huon of Bordeux, ed. Lee, pp. 435–6, 439–43. Brendan’s fruit provides miraculous
sustenance; Huon takes apples that restore youth.
44. Philippe de Rémi: Le Roman de la Manekine, ed. and trans. Barbara N. Sargent-
Baur (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1999). It survives in a single manuscript, but it was
more widely known than that alone would indicate. A prose redaction was made
in the fifteenth century. There were two Philippes, father and son; Sargent-Baur
dates the romance to c.1230 and ascribes it to the father, though the issue is still
disputed. Philippe wrote another romance, Jehan et Blonde, which is largely set in
England; it may possibly have been written for the earls of Oxford, whose sup-
posed ancestress is the heroine of the story.
45. Philippe: Manekine, ed. Sargent-Baur, ll. 921, 1067–8; also 1081, 1190, 3989–90,
4222, 4784–5, 5047–9, 7150. Contrast 5433–4, 6819–20, 7889–90 for well-equipped
ships.
46. ‘Dix puet bien restorer tout, | Toutes pertes et tous tormens’, ibid., 8568–9.
47. They are surveyed by Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance, pp. 12–61.
48. Emaré, in Six Middle English Romances, ed. Mills, ll. 271–5 (275 quoted), 335, 593, 683.
49. Brendan’s voyage is dated to 565–73 (Webb, Lives of the Saints, p. 18); counting
back from 584, the year Trevet gives for Constance’s death, her second voyage
would have taken place from 564 to 569 (Trivet’s Life of Constance, ed. Margaret
Schlauch, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan
and Germaine Dempster (1941; repr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1958).
50. ‘Saunz sigle e sauntz neviroun’, Trivet’s Life, ed. Schlauch, in Bryan and
Dempster, p. 168; CT II.439–41.
51. The surviving fragments are edited by Franklin B. Williams, ‘Alsop’s Fair
Custance: Chaucer in Tudor Dress’, ELR 6 (1976), 351–68.
52. Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool,
1968), pp. 30–1. Despite the similarity of the title to Alsop’s version, the appear-
ance of a major new edition of Chaucer’s works in 1598 makes it most likely that
the source was the Man of Law’s Tale itself.
53. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Life of Merlin, ed. Clarke, l. 929–3 (Clarke’s translation of
line 931), and the note on Barinthus, pp. 165–6. In this text, Morgen herself is not
in the boat; for the development of the episode, see p. 185 below.
54. The unsteered boat was probably part of the original Tristan story; it is retained
in Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristant, but its currency in western Europe is indicated
by its illustration on a tile from Chertsey Abbey (reproduced in Roger Sherman
Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (New York and London, 1938), fig. 48);
the fragmentary accompanying inscription reads ‘sans gouvernail’, ‘without a
rudder’ (p. 47).
55. See further p. 161 below.
56. ‘Sanza vela e sanza remi e sanza neuno sopra sagliente’ (Il Novellino, ed. Guido
Favati (Genoa, 1970), lxxxii, p. 318.
57. See, for instance, the delightful collection put together by C. Grant Loomis in
White Magic: The Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 90–1,
and notes pp. 202–3; rather more than half his examples (culled from the Acta
Sanctorum) have British or Breton connections. The full versions of the legends
in the Acta almost all use some form of the ‘neither sail nor oar’ phrasing.
58. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xxxix. 26–8; Gilbert H. Doble, The Saints of Cornwall
(1923–44; repr. Felinfach, 1997), i. 89. St Hya had a considerable cult in Cornwall,
though the first surviving written version of her legend dates from as late as 1300.
There is some good maritime engineering behind the legends, as Ariosto notes,
the wooden frame of a ship being constructed on a design analogous to that of the
veins of a leaf.
59. John of Glastonbury, The Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey, ed. James P. Carley,
trans. David Townsend (1985; repr Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 48–51 (p. 48 quoted);
The History of the Holy Grail cap. 4, trans. Carol J. Chase, Lancelot-Grail, ed. Lacy,
i. 120 (quoted).
60. Ecclesiastes 7:27–8; the verses were so widely quoted in the Middle Ages as to make
any wife of Solomon’s wicked by mental reflex, whatever the gist of the story. She
also constructs a bed for the ship, in an interesting analogue for the bed of
Solomon’s work, ‘l’ovre Salemun’, that Marie de France’s Guigemar finds on
board his own magic ship (Guigemar, l. 172, in Marie de France: Lais, ed. A. Ewert
(Oxford, 1944)).
61. Malory, ii. 915 (XIV.8).
62. Malory, ii. 990 (XVII.5): it is found and entered by Pelles (misnamed in the text
as Pelleas) when he is hunting ‘toward Irelonde’. After transferring back to their
own vessel, the companions next come to land in the marches of Scotland, loca-
tions that confirm the Celtic connections of unsteered boats.
63. Malory, ii. 984–5 (XVII.2).
64. As Lancelot notes after he has been directed to it later by a dream: Malory, ii.1011
(XVII.13).
65. Malory, ii. 1003 (XVII.11).
66. Malory, ii. 1013 (XVII.13).
67. Rinaldo, trans. John Hoole (London, 1792), ll. 615–20; Tasso, Rinaldo, ed.
Sherberg, vii. 83–4.
68. Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, and Fairfax’s translation, Godfrey of Bulloigne,
ed. Lea and Gang, xiv. 56–7.
69. Fairfax, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, xv. 3–4, 9, 40.
70. See p. 75 above; and Quint, ‘The Boat of Romance’, pp. 180–1.
71. Malory recounts one such episode, from the prose Merlin, when a ship is left by
Morgan as a trap for Arthur, Uriens, and Accolon when they (like Guigemar and
Partonope) lose themselves while hunting (i. 137–40 (iv. 6–8) ). A more benevo-
lent example occurs in the French Floriant et Florete (ed. Harry F. Williams (Ann
Arbor, 1947), l. 790 ff.): this is unsinkable, and goes wherever the hero tells it.
72. Fairfax, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, p. 90.
73. FQ II. xi. 4, xii. 3, 5, 15, 21, 29, 37.
74. The classic statement of such an equation is that of Max Weber, The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons, intro. A. Giddens (London,
1992), pp. 113–25.
chapter 3
1. e.g. ‘many a terible monster made of broune paper’ complained of by Stephen

Gosson in his Playes Confuted in Five Actions (facsmile intro. Arthur Freeman
(New York and London, 1972), sig. C6r), or the giant Colbron in The Tragical
History of Guy of Warwick (probably dating from the early 1590s).
2. Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. Macrae-Gibson, ll. 7448, 8186, 8481. Fragments of
two sixteenth-century printed editions survive, from which the version in the
Percy Folio derives; these versions end at an earlier point in the story, before the
birth of Arthur.
3. George Peele, The Old Wives Tale, ed. Patricia Binney (Manchester, 1980), l. 169,
dating from c.1590. The man is, admittedly, enchanted from being a young man
into being old, but that is not very marvellous on stage.
4. Der mittelenglische Versroman über Richard Löwenherz, ed. Karl Brunner (Vienna,
1913), ll. 1637–46; and see also Sir Eglamour, ed. Richardson, ll. 616–21. In techni-
cal astrological terminology, a talisman is distinguished from an amulet by its
inscription with signs of power; such inscriptions are very unusual in romance,
perhaps because of their association with demonology, and I use the words in
their non-technical sense, as synonyms.
5. Malory, i. 54, 140–51 (I. 25, IV. 8–14). He omits the recovery of the scabbard
promised (but never recounted) in his source, the French prose Suite du Merlin
(Merlin, ed. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, SATF (Paris, 1886), ii. 222, trans.
Martha Asher, Lancelot-Grail, ed. Lacy, iv. 268).
6. See p. 69 above.
7. The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 226. The
1579 translation by John Frampton, interestingly, omits the last sentence: catching
a unicorn in the lap of a virgin had crossed the boundary between the possible and
the mythical in the intervening centuries (The Most Noble and Famous Travels of
Marco Polo, ed. N. M. Penzer, 2nd edn. (London, 1937), pp. 103–4).
8. Gervase of Tilbury: Otia Imperialia, Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans.
S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 558–9. See also Bynum,
Metamorphosis, pp. 48–54, for comparable ideas in authors from Aristotle to
Augustine and Roger Bacon.
9. The point is argued for an earlier period by Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil
Hunters: Palaeontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, 2000).
10. e.g., on the origins of the spark that makes Arcite’s horse rear and throw him,
‘what envious flint, | Cold as old Saturn and like him possessed | With fire malev-
olent’, Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.6.61–3. In contrast to the source, the gods do not
appear in person in this play: it is the only one of Shakespeare’s late plays where
their existence is not ‘proved’ by a stage appearance or a true oracle, most of
which he adds to his sources.
11. Ibid., 5.3.1; for the prayers for virginity, 5.3.24–32 (an apparent preference over
being given to the knight who best loves her), and Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, CT, I.
2304–21, which gives a higher profile to her preference for maidenhood.
12. Beues of Hamtoun, ed. Kölbing, ll. 1393–400 and variants (p. 77).
13. J. R. R. Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham (London, 1949), p. 12.
14. Percy, ii. 56–77; also ed. Hahn, Sir Gawain, pp. 309–35.
15. Orlando Furioso, vi. 67 (fraud, Ariosto’s ‘frodo’), xxii. 67–73, in Sir John
Harington’s translation.
16. Malory, iii. 1216–20 (XX. 21–2). Gawain is the protagonist in the sections of Of
Arthour and of Merlin where his increase of strength is mentioned (ll. 4778–806,
8130–50), but the first of those passages starts by noting that it is already past noon.
17. Bynum, Metamorphosis, pp. 72–3.
18. CT, V. 115–27; Valentine, ed. Dickson, p. 170 (cap. xli); Don Quixote, Part 2, chs.
73–4, trans. Shelton, Part 2, chs. xl–xli, iv. 18–33. An early version of the material
that follows appeared in Helen Cooper, ‘Magic that does not work’, Medievalia et
Humanistica 7 (1976), 131–46.
19. Chrétien, Chevalier de la Charrete, ed. Roques, ll. 2335–55.
20. Amadas et Ydoine, ed. John R. Reinhard (Paris, 1926), l. 2318 (2007–302 for the
whole episode); there is a translation by Ross G. Arthur, Amadas and Ydoine (New
York and London, 1993). The romance dates from 1190 to 1220, and survives in
one complete French manuscript and two Anglo-Norman fragments. It was,
however, much more widely known than those figures indicate, especially in
England, though it is not known to have been translated into Middle English (see
p. 475 n. 18 below). A copy was among the books given to Bordesley Abbey in 1305
by Guy Beauchamp (Blaess, ‘L’Abbaye de Bordesley’).
21. Huon of Bordeux, ed. Lee, pp. 113–14 (cap. xxxvi).
22. Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes IV: Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Mario
Roques, CFMA (Paris, 1965), ll. 2947–3011, 3086–127.
23. Ibid., ll. 2597–615, 2769–79.
24. Ywain and Gawain, ed. Mills, lines 1527–40; Chrétien, Chevalier au Lion, ed.
Roques, ll. 2602–15.
25. ‘It es ful mekyl ogains the right | To cal so fals a man a knight . . . Traytur untrew
and trowthles!’ (ed. Mills, 1611–12, 1626).
26. King Horn, ed. Sands, lines 567–80 (my italics). The effect threatens to be spoiled
by the next lines: ‘And Sire Athulf, thy brother, | He shal have another’—pre-
sumably meaning ‘another ring’, not ‘another ring like the one I am giving you’.
The poet has the tact not to mention this one again.
27. Out of innumerable examples, one might select the newly betrothed Guinevere’s
kissing Arthur as she arms him with each piece of his armour, at which ‘Merlin
bad Arthour the king | Thenche on that ich kisseing | When he come into bataile’,
which with additional incitement from Merlin he duly does (Of Arthour and of
Merlin, ll. 8681–3, 8821–30, 9239–6).
28. It lasts indeed into the seventeenth century, with or without a (non-magic) ring
to embody the idea. In Eger and Grime, the phrase itself become a recognition
token when Grime has to repeat back to the lady with whom he has fallen in love
the words she had spoken to him on their first meeting: ‘In press think on your
paramour: | I will not bid you think on me, | Think on your love wherever she be’
(ed. Caldwell, chapbook text ll. 1412–14 (cf. Percy 902–4); also 1470, 1803–4,
1863–4, and Percy 1003–4). It is, of course, she that he thinks of. The formula is
just occasionally used with the genders reversed: Rowlands’s Guy leaves his wife
with the words, ‘Here is my ring, this memory receive, | And swear the same, to
make thee think on me’ (ed. Gosse, iii. 59).
29. Floris and Blancheflour, ed. Sands, ll. 374–8. Compare lines 1213–19 in the French
source, the ‘roman aristocratique’ version, Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed.
Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris, 1980).
30. Ed. Sands, ll. 966–79; cf. Floire, ed. Leclanche, ll. 2793–4, 2806–18.
31. In his Preface to the French translation of Erich Köhler, L’Aventure chevaleresque,
trans. Éliane Kaufholz (Paris, 1974), p. xii.
32. None of the discussions of the complex relationships between any lost prototype
story, the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn, the Middle English King Horn and
Horn Childe, and the later ballads of Hind Horn takes the ring into account—not
even the best of them, Mills’s Introduction to his edition of Horn Childe,
pp. 44–55.
33. King Horn, ed. Joseph Hall (Oxford, 1901), text O (Bodleian Library, MS Laud
Misc. 108); the couplet would be expected to follow l. 588.
34. The Romance of Horn, ed. Pope, ll. 2055–9; trans. Weiss, The Birth of Romance,
p. 48.
35. Horn, ed. Pope, 3165–79; trans. Weiss, pp. 73–4.
36. King Ponthus, ed. Mather, ch. xxi (p. 62).
37. Child, Ballads, no. 17 (i. 187–208); Horn Childe, ed. Mills, 565–73.
38. See the rings motifs in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, rev. edn.
(Copenhagen, 1955–8), D 1076, D 1310.4.1, D 1344.1, H 433.1, H 94, and H 94.4,
though as several of Thompson’s citations are to the Horn romances the argu-
ment becomes somewhat circular. The indirect bestowal of prowess found in
King Horn does not, however, feature under any of his headings: a further
indication of the poet’s distance from popular literature. Child cites numerous
analogous folktales that use the ring solely as a recognition token (Ballads, i.
195–200).
39. Chrétien, Erec et Enide, ed. Roques, l. 22.
40. See p. 8 of the Introduction to Leclanche’s edition, the critical notes on ll.
2811–14 and 2937–8, and the textual notes to ll. 1213–19 and 2987–8 (where each
lover is trying to die before the other, but, in one manuscript, ‘l’anel ne pooit
soffrir’, and in the other, ‘Li autres [i.e., the onlookers] nel voloit soffrir’).
‘Aristocratique’ and ‘populaire’ imply an excessively polarized view of different
audiences; the alternative appellations of ‘roman idyllique’ and ‘roman
d’aventures’ are in some ways less misleading, though, as the following account
indicates, the non-functioning magic of the ‘aristocratic’ version never becomes

popular in either the general or the social sense.
41. See Gaston Paris’s account of the relationship between the various versions in
Romania 28 (1890), 439–47, in a review of the first volume of Vincenzo Crescini’s
edition of the Italian Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore (Bologna, 1889, 1899, repr.
1969) (see i. 437–40); later discussions have not always improved on that. Paris
does not, however, specifically consider the protective ring in drawing up his
scheme of relationships.
42. See Crescini, Cantare, i. 438, and Florés Saga ok Blankiflúr, ed. Eugen Kölbing
(Halle, 1896), xxiii (p. 74).
43. Floire et Blancheflor: seconde version, ed. Margaret M. Pelan (Paris, 1975), ll. 651–6,
and 995–1208 for the combat (in which any special properties in the sword are not
mentioned).
44. See Cantare, ed. Crescini, i. 437–40, and ii. stanzas 23–4, 36, 91, 132–4.
45. ‘Assai gli aiutasse l’anello’: Filocolo in Boccaccio: Opere I, ed. Salvatore Battaglia
(Bari, 1938), p. 427. The ring does not, however, fulfil an additional promise: it was
supposed to make its wearer lovable as well as protecting him or her from fire and
water (p. 274), but the emir figure does not find Fiorio at all lovable.
46. Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan, ed. Gottfried Weber (Darmstadt, 1967),
ll. 15791–890, 16333–402.
47. Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, ed. and trans. Peter Jorgensen, in Norse Romance I:
Tristan, ed. Kalinke, chs. 61–3 (pp. 153–61); Sir Tristrem, ed. Lupack, ll. 2399–2424,
2468. Both versions (and presumably therefore also Thomas: this section of his
text has not survived) end the account of Petit-creiu by having him become a skil-
ful hunting dog. Gottfried’s substitution of a different future for the dog suggests
that the disabling of the magic may originate with him. In all the Celtic analogues
for the dog, the magic works: see Gertrude Schoepperle, Tristan and Isolt, 2nd
edn. (New York, 1960), pp. 322–5, and, on the whole episode in Tristan, Louise
Gnädinger, Hiudan and Petitcreiu (Zürich, 1971), pp. 26–8.
48. The balance of evidence suggests that it was Gottfried, not Thomas, who first
invented this outcome; but even if it were present in Thomas, its omission in the
other adaptations would run true to form for non-functioning magic.
49. Boccaccio tells the story twice, in the Filocolo (Book IV qu. iv, ed. Battaglia,
pp. 311–25; it forms part of one of the long digressions inserted into the story of
Floris), and again in the Decameron (10,5, ed. Vittore Branca, 2nd edn. (Turin,
1984)). The outline of the story is the same in both versions, though the first is
considerably longer. The Filocolo has generally been cited as Chaucer’s source, but
the evidence is, in fact, much stronger for the Decameron: see Helen Cooper, ‘The
Frame’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. 1, ed. Robert M.
Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–22, especially pp. 7–13.
50. Aurelius had thought of that earlier, with his prayer to the sun and moon to
change their courses—itself an indication of how mammoth an intervention in
the natural order would be required: see p. 141 above. A sufficiently high tide
would last at most an hour or two, not a week or two.
51. The Triumph of Honour, stage direction after ii. 175. The play is part of the Four
Plays, or Moral Representations, in One, for which Fletcher’s collaborator (who
may have been responsible for this play) may have been Nathan Field (ed. Cyrus
Hoy in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, general editor
Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1966–96), viii. 247–67).
52. Sir Gawain, ed. Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 2354–7. The fifteenth-century tail-rhyme
version of the story preserved in the seventeenth-century Percy Folio manuscript,
The Grene Knight, states that the white lace (its equivalent of the green girdle) has
nothing to do with Gawain’s survival, and the lady’s account of it falls just short
of claiming that it is actually magic (ed. Hales and Furnivall, ii. 56–77, lines 484–5,
395–402).
53. Sir Gawain, ed. Tolkien and Gordon, ll. 626, 2030–6, 630.
54. The commonest metaphorical usage of ‘weave’ had to do with constructing an
argument or a discourse, though it could mean ‘entangle’, MED ‘weven’ 5a. ‘Spell’
was similarly a neutral word, normally meaning ‘speech’ or ‘story’ (s.v. spel).
55. Malory, i. 18 (I. 8).
56. Hyrd adds it to Vives’ original list of romances, as being especially popular in
England; such popularity strongly suggests that it was printed, even though no
traces of any printed editions survive.
57. Partonope de Blois, ed. Bödtker, ll. 5913–35.
58. The Siege of Troy, ‘Zwei mittelenglische Prosaromane: The Sege of Thebes and The
Sege of Troy’, ed. Friedrich Brie, Anglia, 130 (1913), 40–52, 269–85 (corrected quo-
tation from p. 274).
59. Bödtker’s marginal note to l. 1659. The word most often used in the original
French text is ‘engien’, skill or skilful device (see, for instance, i. 1385 in
Partonopeus de Blois, ed. Joseph Gildea (Villanova, 1967)).
60. Malory, i. 10 (Caxton, I. 2).
61. Othello, 3. 3. 271.
62. Othello, 3. 3. 291–2. Taylor and Wells insert the stage direction ‘He puts the napkin
from him. It drops’ between the lines, though neither the Quarto nor the Folio
spell out the action; early readers of both occasionally marked it in for themselves.
In Cinthio’s original, Iago steals the handkerchief from Desdemona’s girdle after
distracting her attention (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vii. 246–7);
there is nothing corresponding to the ‘magical’ history of the handkerchief, which
is Shakespeare’s own addition to his source—another example of equivocal
magic’s appearance through individual invention rather than replication.
63. CT, V. 1125, 1184, 1272.
64. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Caretti, vii.70–2, 8.2.
65. FQ, I. vii. 33–6 (a description that promises considerably more than the shield
ever delivers), and IV. viii. 42; Arthur continues the battle without the shield’s
apparently having any effect on his enemy. The shield is based on Ruggiero’s,
described on p. 142 above.
66. The combat against Pyrocles, FQ, II. viii. 20–2, 30, 49; against Maleger, II. xi.
40–1.
67. FQ, I. i. 12, 14; v. 9; vii. 2, 19. Both Sansfoy and Duessa believe that the armour is
enchanted, I. ii. 18, iv. 50, v. 22. When his armour does shine with light from
‘heaven’ in his fight with the dragon (I. xi. 4), at the narrative level it is the sun that
causes it, not supernatural intervention.
68. The Romaunce of the Sowdone of Babylone, ed. Emil Hausknecht, EETS E.S. 38
(1881), ll. 1183–98.
69. Ibid., ll. 2299–318.

70. See further, pp. 379–80 below.
71. See further, p. 179 below.
72. Partonope, ed. Bödtker, l. 847.
73. The long version followed here (at over 12,000 lines, one of the longest romances
in Middle English) follows the structure of the thirteenth-century French origi-
nal; there was also an abbreviated version (itself derived from a shorter French
text) that explains everything in order, starting with the lady and her education
and only then going on to Partonope. Only the opening of the short English text
survives; it is printed by Bödtker as an appendix, Partonope, pp. 481–8. See also the
entry in Severs, Manual, i. 149–51.
74. Shakespeare is indeed careful to distinguish them from ghosts or devils: see
Midsummer Night’s Dream 3. 3. 382–9.
75. Tempest, 5. 1. 60–1, and cf. also 3. 3. 66–8; Tragical History of Guy, Act 2.
76. Tempest, 5. 1. 25–8; and see p. 164 above.
chapter 4
1. On the whole question of why Spenser should have chosen a ‘fairy’ medium for
his work, see Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in the ‘Faerie Queene’ (London, 2004).
2. The romance also appears in the list of books owned by Captain Cox, in Robert
Laneham’s Letter. For Lanval, see Marie de France: Lais, ed. Ewert, pp. 58–74;
Landeval is edited by George Lyman Kittredge, ‘Launfal’, in American Journal of
Philology 10 (1889), 1–33; Sir Launfal is widely anthologized, including Sands,
pp. 201–32; Sir Lambewell appears in the Percy Folio, i.142–64. Landeval repre-
sents the earliest of the Middle English translations, and is the closest to Marie;
it is also the immediate source of the Renaissance print (Sir Lamwell: see
Kittredge’s edn., pp. 2–20), and is effectively represented by Sir Lambewell.
Thomas Chestre adapted Landeval for his Sir Launfal, an expanded version put
into tail-rhyme rather than couplets, and this is the Middle English version most
extensively referred to in this chapter.
3. A basic core of prophecies appears in British Library MS Harley 2253, c.1340
(f.127r; see the facsimile edn. N. R. Ker, EETS OS 255 (1965), and The Romance and
Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. James A. H. Murray, EETS O.S. 68 (1875),
pp. xviii–xix). No narrative setting is provided, but Thomas is named in the head-
ing. The first reference to the romance comes in the course of a complaint about
the corruption of English-language texts in general and romances in particular in
the introduction to Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle (completed in 1338),
where ‘Erceldoun’ is attacked between tail-rhyme romances and Sir Tristrem, (ed.
Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY, 1996), l. 94; a reference to ‘Thomas’ a few lines
later is not to Thomas of Erceldoune, but apparently to the Thomas who com-
posed the original Anglo-Norman Tristan).
4. All the surviving fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript texts of the
romance, plus several of the prophecies-dominated texts, are edited by Murray.
The traditional part of the text in the 1652 Sundry Strange Prophecies of Merlin,
Bede . . ., printed by Matthew Walbancke, which is a modernization of a form of

the early Thornton text, is included in William P. Albrecht’s The Loathly Lady in
“Thomas of Erceldoune” (Albuquerque, 1954), pp. 80–94; and also as Appendix IV
in Part 2 of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Ingeborg Nixon (Copenhagen, 1980–3),
which updates but does not replace Murray’s edition.
5. The earliest identifiable text of the ballad, traceable back to 1700 or before, is text
E of Child’s Thomas Rymer (Ballads, no. 37, Additions and Corrections 4.454–5;
main texts i. 317–29); it is also printed by Nixon, Thomas, Appendix 1. Murray
prints two of the later texts, pp. liii–v. E. B. Lyle, ‘The Relationship between
Thomas the Rhymer and Thomas of Erceldoune’, Leeds Studies in English NS 4
(1970), 23–30, suggests that an early form of the ballad may underlie the
romance.
6. The legend of Melusine was well known in France and on the European mainland
generally, partly through the prose version (begun in 1387) of Jean d’Arras, and
more widely through Coudrette’s metrical version (c.1403), both of which were
printed and translated into various languages. The prose version survives com-
plete in English in a single manuscript of c.1500 (Melusine ed. A. K. Donald, EETS
E.S. 68 (1895)), and in printed form only as a fragment printed c.1510 by De
Worde. The rhyme royal Romance of Partenay (ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS O.S. 22,
(revised edn. (1899)) was less well known in England than the prose; it survives in
a single manuscript, and is not known to have been printed. For Hyrd, see
pp. 37–8 above; for the allusion, ‘More mystical than Melusine or any nimph
alive’, see Wilfride Holme, The Fall and Evill Successe of Rebellion (written 1537,
published 1572), sig. I.ivr.
7. Huon itself went through an uncertain number of reprints to 1601, and had been
dramatized by 1593, when Henslowe recorded three performances (Henslowe’s
Diary, ed. Foakes, p. 20). Greene used Oberon as the presenter of his James IV of
c.1590. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is generally dated to 1595; Jonson’s Masque of
Oberon was performed in 1611.
8. Ovid, Metamorphoses, iii. 173; xiv. 382, 438. He also uses it once for Latona, mother
of Apollo and Diana (vi. 346).
9. The confusion of the seasons caused by the quarrel between Titania and Oberon
also picks up on Proserpina’s resonances as goddess of the spring and summer
and Diana’s as moon goddess (the moon being, as Titania’s speech on the subject
notes, the governess of floods): A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.88–117.
10. See, for instance, Melusine, ed. Donald, p. 5; Spenser, Teares of the Muses, 31, and
FQ, VI. x. 7, 17.
11. Arthur Golding’s translation, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. John Frederick Nims
(Harmondsworth, 2000), vii. 265–6, translating Ovid’s vii. 197–8; Tempest, 5.1.33,
36–8.
12. He also imports the woodland-dwelling satyrs, though they occupy a niche rather
closer to wodewoses, wild men, who seem to have been regarded as ‘Other’ in that
they were not human, and marvellous in that they were unusual, but not as
supernatural: a modern analogy might be Bigfoot or the yeti.
13. For a summary of Celtic fairy mythology and further bibliography, see Bernhard
Maier, Dictionary of Celtic Religion and Culture, trans. Cyril Edwards
(Woodbridge, 1997), s.v. síd, Tuatha Dé Danann. On the medieval French usage
of fairies, see Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Age: Morgan et Mélusine
(Paris, 1984); and Kathryn S. Westoby, ‘A New Look at the Role of the Fée in
Medieval French Arthurian Romance’, in The Spirit of the Court, ed. Glyn S.
Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 373–85. The name Oberon
itself is connected with the Germanic king of the dwarfs Alberich.
14. See in particular Rachel Bromwich, ‘Celtic Dynastic Themes and the Breton Lays’,
Etudes Celtiques 9 (1960–1), 439–74. Sigmund Eisner’s claim that the myth under-
lies Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (A Tale of Wonder (Wexford, 1957)), has been
refuted by J. K. Ballard, ‘Sovereignty and the Loathly Lady in English, Welsh and
Irish’, Leeds Studies in English 17 (1986), 41–59.
15. For an outline of beliefs about the origins and nature of fairies, see Minor White
Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies (New York, 1930), pp. 41–8, and C. S. Lewis, The
Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 122–38. Huon of Bordeaux distinguishes
between its fairies, who operate by their own rules but promote virtue, and a fur-
ther group of supernatural beings consisting of angels who fell as far as the earth
because of their sympathy for Lucifer but who still hope for divine forgiveness
(ed. Lee, ch. 155 (pp. 592–3)).
16. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, Lansdowne MS, ll. 143–50.
17. Richard Cœur de Lion, ed. Brunner, ll. 188–94, 207–34. The episode is found in
only one of the two versions of the romance: see John Finlayson, ‘Richard, Cœur
de Lyon: Romance, History, or Something in Between?’, Studies in Philology 87
(1990), 156–80. See also p. 382 below.
18. For a eucharistic test, see e.g., Marie de France, Yonec, ll. 145–90 (Lais, ed. Ewert),
after the lady’s future lover has arrived in her chamber in a locked tower in the
form of a bird. Oberon, in Huon of Bordeaux, insists ‘I am a man as other be’,
apparently on the basis that his father was human (Julius Caesar, to be precise),
despite having full fairy powers including extended life (ch. 23, ed. Lee, pp. 69, 71).
Melusine claims at the end that her children are born ‘of a mortal woman, and not
of a serpent, nor as a creature of the fayry’—though the ‘as’ seems to make a dis-
tinction between her fairy descent from her mother and the human descent from
her father, the latter being passed on to her children (Melusine, ch. 46, ed. Donald,
p. 320).
19. The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols, 3 vols.
(1823; repr. New York, n.d.), ii. 212–13, reprinting Churchyard’s A Discourse of the
Queenes Majestie’s Entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk (1578).
20. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, ll. 93, 201–22.
21. Thomas Rymer, ed. Child, Ballads, i. 325, C stanzas 11–13.
22. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, ll. 157–60, quoting the sixteenth-century
Lansdowne MS; the phrasing is closely similar in all versions. The appearance of
the term ‘middle-earth’ in Thomas may be the first usage to distinguish the mor-
tal world from the Otherworld of fairy rather than Heaven and Hell (though
Layamon uses ‘middel-aerde’ in close conjunction with supernatural water-
creatures in the Brut, l. 10848 (Laamon: Brut, ed. G. L. Brooke and R. F. Leslie, 2
vols. EETS 250, 277 (1963, 1978)).
23. They are on the northern slopes of the Eildon Hills, south-east of Melrose in the
Scottish borders; an inscribed stone marks the spot where Thomas met his lady,
grid ref. NT 564 337.
24. Sir Thopas, CT, VII. 757; and for the heat of the day, e.g., Sir Launfal, ed. Sands, l.
220, and the Renaissance Sir Lambewell, Percy i, l. 55 (reading ‘underntide’ for
Bishop Percy’s emendation to ‘eventide’); Sir Orfeo, ed. Sands, ll. 41–2, 51–2,
109–10, 157; and Malory, i. 253, 256 (VI. 1, 3) where Lancelot is cast into a seven-
hour enchanted sleep while sleeping under an apple-tree at noon.
25. Sir Lambewell, Percy i, ll. 53–4; cf. also Sir Launfal, ed. Sands, ll. 280–1 (Her fadir
was King of Fairie | Of Occient [‘the west’], fere and nyghe).
26. Melusine, ed. Donald, p. 27; for her mother’s parallel encounter, p. 7.
27. CT, III.990; FQ, VI. x. 11.
28. Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Nichols, iii. 118. Aureola also brings the queen
greetings from the fairy king Auberon.
29. Huon, ed. Lee, pp. 63, 75.
30. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, ll. 217–20 (Lansdowne MS).
31. Huon, ed. Lee, pp. 596, 605; FQ, I. x. 55–6.
32. Sir Orfeo, ed. Sands, ll. 349–52.
33. Huon, ed. Lee, p. 71.
34. Richard, ed. Brunner, ll. 76, 60–72.
35. It is not, however, found in the only complete surviving pre-Reformation version
of texts of this group, Landeval.
36. Sir Lambewell, Percy i, l. 534; cf. ‘She might me of my balis bete, | Yef that lady
wolde’, Sir Launfal, ed. Sands, ll. 971–2.
37. See the 1603 ‘Prophecie of Thomas Rymour’, in Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. by
Murray, p. 48, ll. 31–45, 73–4, and the early sixteenth-century Prophisies of
Rymour, ibid., pp. 52–3, ll. 19–38. Texts that contain the affair between Thomas
and the elf-queen limit the likeness to a mis-identification, for obvious reasons
(Thomas of Erceldoune, ll. 85–92; Thomas Rymer, ed. Child, Ballads, i. 323–5, stan-
zas 3–4 of all versions).
38. See Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the
Virgin Mary, rev. edn., Basingstoke, 1996) on the whole phenomenon, and pp.
142–3 for a discussion of the closest Spenser comes in the Faerie Queene to invit-
ing adoration of her (II. ii. 41)—though as ‘th’Idole of her makers great
magnificence’, not as the Virgin.
39. Ulrich von Zatzikhoven: Lanzelet, ed. Wolfgang Spiewok (Greifswald, 1997), l. 180;
there is a translation by Kenneth G. T. Webster, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven: Lanzelet,
rev. Roger Sherman Loomis (New York, 1951), though Loomis’s notes drastically
overstate the Celticism of the text. That it had an Anglo-Norman original is
shown by some details of names and vocabulary, as well as by Ulrich’s claim that
his source copy had been taken to Austria by the English knight Hugh de Morville
when he was acting as hostage for Richard the Lionheart (ll. 9323–41; this may or
may not have been the same man who was involved in the murder of Thomas
Becket, see Loomis’s introduction, p. 5). Ulrich’s version probably dates from
c.1210–20 (ed. Spiewok, p. xv).
40. Lancelot, ed. Micha, vii: via; trans. Lancelot-Grail, ed. Lacy, ii. 11 (quoted), 12.
41. Malory, i. 52, 125 (I.25, IV.1). In the glosses to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,
E. K. identifies ‘Ladyes of the lake’ as nymphs, as if classical demi-gods were more
intellectually acceptable than water-fairies (gloss to Aprill 120).
42. Life of Merlin, ed. Clarke, ll. 908–40; and see also Clarke’s entry on Morgen,
pp. 203–6. Morgen is not herself in the boat that fetches Arthur in this account.
43. Etienne de Rouen, Draco Normannicus, ii. 1161–3, in Chronicles of the Reigns of
Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Howlett, Rolls Series (London,
1885), pp. 585–762.
44. Layamon was apparently working from the Life for this scene, since she is not
mentioned in Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain or in Wace’s Anglo-
Norman version, and he gives no hint of any kinship to Arthur.
45. ‘And ich wulle varen to Avalun, to vairest alre maidene, | to Argante there quene,
alven swithe sceone; | and heo scal mine wunden makien alle isunde’ (ed. Brooke
and Leslie, Caligula MS, 14277–9; and 14290–1, quoted). There is a parallel trans-
lation in Laamon’s Arthur, ed. and trans. W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg
(Harlow, 1989).
46. Quoted by Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘ “Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender
and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, Representations 1 (1983), 61–94 (p. 83).
47. Arthur of Little Britain, trans. by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed.
E. V. Utterson (London, 1814), pp. 297–300; it is one of the romances most fre-
quently noted as still being read in Elizabeth’s reign. Proserpyne also acts as
patroness to Arthur, giving him a shield and sword. Spenser may have known it,
but the parallels cited by e.g., Sarah Michie, ‘The Faerie Queene and Arthur of Little
Britain’, Studies in Philology 36 (1939), 105–23, overstate the case for her being the
original of Gloriana.
48. By I. M., perhaps Gervase Markham; it gets a first mention in the Stationers’
Registers in February 1595–6, but the first surviving edition is from 1612 (STC
17844). Morgue is a benevolent fairy, sister of Artus, and mother of Mervine. The
fairies here are very much under the control of God
49. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien and Gordon, l. 2452; see their note
to the line for other uses of the title in Gerald of Wales and one manuscript of the
Prose Lancelot, and Micha’s edition of Lancelot, i. xxii (p. 305). The idea that she
is derived from the Celtic goddess Morrigan, although still popular among those
interested in the occult, has been discredited by modern scholarship: see, for
instance, Rachel Bromwich’s conclusion in her ‘Note on Modron and Morgain la
Fée’, that Morgan’s association with the Morrígan ‘can be dismissed as too remote
to be credible’ (Bromwich, (ed.), Troiedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (Cardiff,
1978), p. 461).
50. Avalon in all these texts is a much more mysterious place than Glastonbury,
with which it is elsewhere identified; as in its reappearance in Melusine, it is not
somewhere within the normal geographical world (see p. 210 below). Malory
does not at first commit himself that it is Arthur who is buried in the
Glastonbury tomb, but Lancelot sees his corpse when he opens it to inter
Guinevere beside him.
51. The earlier couplet version is edited as A Royall Historie of the Excellent Knight
Generides, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (Roxburghe Club, 1866; repr. New York,
1971), and the rhyme-royal Generydes (the form in which it was printed) by
W. Aldis Wright, EETS O.S. 55, 70 (1878). The work is coupled with Partonope by
Richard Hyrd in his list of the most popular English romances (pp. 37–8 above),
and it was still of sufficient interest in 1568–9 for its licence for printing to be
transferred.
52. ‘The Prophecie of Thomas Rymour’ in The Whole Prophesie of Scotland (1603), in
Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, p. 48, l. 8.
53. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vii. 494–5, quoting The Chronicle of
Scotland. William Warner, in the Scottish additions incorporated into the 1606
edn. of his metrical history of England, identifies them first simply as ‘fairies’, then
as ‘Weird-Elfes’ (Albions England (1612), facsimile (Hildesheim and New York,
1971), pp. 376–7).
54. For instance, in Kyng Alisaunder, ed. G. V. Smithers, EETS O.S. 227 (1952),
l. L 5708 (B 6975), though in a context which claims the prophecy to be specious.
55. ‘I am of god, and my byleve is as a Catholique byleve oughte to be . . . Make you
no doubte of me but that I am of god,’ Melusine, ed. Donald, ch. 6, pp. 31–2.
56. Melusine, ed. Donald, pp. 30–3, 38–9, 299, 317–18; and see pp. 383–4 below.
Depictions show her looking like a mermaid: see, for instance, the illustrations on
pp. 159 and 170 in Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France,
ed. Donald Maddox and Sarah Sturm-Maddox (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996).
58. The Whore of Babylon, ‘Lectori’ and IV. iii. 69, in Thomas Dekker: Dramatic
Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1953–8), ii. 491–584. The work was
licensed in 1607, but was performed before its licensing, and may have been writ-
ten some years earlier (pp. 493–4).
59. The Tragedy of King Lear, 3. 2. 95–6, 81–90.
60. It appears in numerous manuscripts, some of them Chaucerian, and in all the
printed editions of Chaucer to 1598; quoted from the preface of Thynne’s 1532 edn.
61. Trans. from Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, pp. xviii–xix (from BL Harley MS
2253).
62. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Caretti, iii. 9–20; FQ, III. iii. 25–49.
63. See, for instance, R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995),
pp. 90, 335–6.
64. The Tudor print covers the first part of Of Arthour and of Merlin (ed. by
O. D. Macrae-Gibson, EETS 268, 279 (1973, 1979)). Fragments of two sixteenth-
century printed editions survive, enough to show that their text closes before the
birth of Arthur. The prints were probably the basis for the text in the Percy Folio
(i. 422–96). The story was attractive enough in the early seventeenth century to
earn a very free dramatization, The Birth of Merlin (conjecturally c.1608, but first
published in 1662 with an attribution to Shakespeare and Rowley; ed. C. F. Tucker
Brooke in The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford, 1908)).
65. See the chapter on ‘Ancient Prophecies’ in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline
of Magic (1971; Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 461–514, esp. pp. 470–3; and Howard
Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples (Stanford, 1990).
66. See Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII
(Woodbridge, 1991), esp. pp. 63–90, where she also gives a good edition of the text,
and pp. 157–60 for the manuscript dates. The text has some overlap with Thomas
of Erceldoune (see below for its unusual iconography of a horseback Blessed
Virgin) but is essentially a new work. Its terminus post quem of 1513 is set by the
accurate ‘prediction’ of the battle of Flodden; the text also cites 1531 as the date
when various of its other prophecies will be fulfilled (ll. 608–15), but nothing par-
ticular turned out to happen that year. The ‘Marlin’ form of Merlin’s name is also
found in both Malory and the print of The byrth and prophecye of Marlyn. For the
singing of ‘a song of Thomas Ersholedon and the quene of ffeiree’ that included
prophecies of the battles of Stoke and Flodden in a gentry house in Cheshire in
1520, see Lesley Coote and Tim Thornton, ‘Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon: A
Tradition of Popular Political Prophecy’, New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001),
117–37 (p. 124).
67. Prophisies of Rymour, ed. Murray, l. 111; the phrase is effectively a memetic for-
mula for civil war (see further pp. 385–6 below).
68. Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 1–4, 57–61; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic,
p. 475–8.
69. Ibid., pp. 482–3.
70. Neither Albrecht nor Nixon print this part of the text, which continues on the
next leaf from where the received text ends: see n. 4 above, and, for further dis-
cussion, pp. 385–6 below.
71. FQ, I. i. 1–2. The description of St George in the 1603 ‘Prophecie of Thomas
Rymour’ is not quite so close in phrasing to Spenser as the earlier manuscripts,
but the description of him and St Andrew notes that ‘two croces on there brestes
they bare’ (ed. Murray, p. 48, l. 16; cf. ‘on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore’, FQ,
I. i. 2). His shield by contrast portrays his emblem of a dragon, the ultimate enemy
overcome by the saint according to both his legend and Spenser.
72. Malory, i. 244 (V. 12); The Chronicle of Iohn Harding, ed. Ellis, ch. 82, p. 145.
73. Without knowing of these prophecies, A. Kent Hieatt argues for such a plan on
Spenser’s part in a second set of books of the Faerie Queene on the political
virtues: see ‘The Passing of Arthur in Malory, Spenser and Shakespeare: The
Avoidance of Closure’, in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian
Tradition, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York and London,
1988), pp. 173–92.
74. So noted in the entry for STC 17841.7.
75. ‘The Prophecie of Thomas Rymour’, ll. 235–48, in Thomas of Erceldoune, ed.
Murray, p. 51. The four lines beginning ‘A French wife . . .’ had already appeared
in another Thomas-related prophecy (p. xxxvi).
76. It could apply to a putative son of James V and Mary of Guise (their only child
was in fact a daughter, Mary Queen of Scots). Murray notes an eighteenth-
century suggestion that it refers to John duke of Albany, a cousin of James IV
(p. xxxiv), but he was only of the eighth generation.
77. John Colville, in his Oratio funebris exequiis Elizabethae (Paris, 1604), where he
gives a Latin translation of Rymer’s lines: see Original Letters of Mr John Colville
1582–1603, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1858), pp. xxxvi–xxxvii; and John
Spottiswood, The History of the Church of Scotland 1655 (facsimile, Menston,
1972), p. 47, under the year 1279 (Thomas’s approximate date).
78. The Magnificent Entertainment given to King James, ll. 31–8, in Dekker: Works, ed.
Bowers, Vol. 2; Dekker wrote up the whole series, and probably designed this
opening ‘device’, though it was not in the event performed.
79. Malory, ii. 1059 (XVIII.8); she is identified as Nenive, not therefore as the Lady of
the Lake who gave Excalibur to Arthur, though Malory does not always keep the
differences exact.
81. Ibid., pp. 76–8, 111, 155–60.
82. The Famous Historie of Chinon of England by Christopher Middleton, ed. William
Edward Mead, EETS O.S. 165 (1925), pp. 27–30. Oberon is here named as
‘Oberam’.
83. Lanval, Marie de France: Lais, ed. Ewert, ll. 21–2; Sir Launfal, ed. Sands, ll. 28–36;
Sir Lambewell, Percy, i. 144–5, ll. 17, 21.
84. CT, IV. 2227, 2220–1, 2035–41.
85. See Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. Bryan and
Dempster, pp. 341–50.
86. Genesis 3:16; and on Oberon, see, for instance, E. Talbot Donaldson’s discussion
in The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare reading Chaucer (New Haven and London,
1985), pp. 44–8.
87. Malory, i. 172 (IV. 23 [24 in some editions] ).
88. For white fairy horses, see e.g. Tydorel, in Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe
siècles, ed. Prudence Mary O’Hara Tobin (Geneva, 1976), pp. 207–26, and the
horses that can outstrip any other in Le Lai de l‘Espine (ibid., pp. 255–88) and in
Pwyll Lord of Dyved in the Mabinogion (trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Harmondsworth,
1976), p. 52). Bells on the bridle are also a common attribute, e.g., on the dapple-
grey horse ridden by Thomas’s lady.
89. Amadas et Ydoine, ed. Reinhard, ll. 5584–622 (trans. Arthur, pp. 100–115).
90. See the Percy Folio The Turke and Gawain and The Carle of Carlisle (Percy, i.
88–102, iii. 275–94; Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances, ed. Hahn, pp. 337–91). The
Green Knight of The Grene Knight is not very enchanted in the first place, and
just changes his clothes before his final encounter with Gawain (ll. 442–4, Percy,
ii. 74; or ll. 441–3, ed. Hahn, p. 326).
91. See Maier, Dictionary of Celtic Religion, s.v. geis, for definitions, summary his-
tory, and bibliography.
92. The hag is a mortal woman under a spell in Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent’ in the
Confessio amantis (The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS
E.S. 81–2 (1900–1), i. 1407–1861), the fifteenth-century The Wedding of Sir Gawain
and Dame Ragnell, and the Percy Folio Marriage of Sir Gawain (the latter two are
edited by Hahn in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances).
93. Melusine, ed. Donald, pp. 110–13. She gives further advice to her next two sons
when it is their turn to leave home.
94. Lancelot, ed. by Micha, vii. xxia (trans. in Lancelot-Grail, ed. Lacy, ii. 59–60).
Partonope’s Melior, while she is still in fairy mode, gives him similar but briefer
instruction: Partonope, ed. Bödtker, ll. 1852–65, 2404–22—both passages ending
with the injunction in which he fails, not to attempt to see her.
95. FQ, VI. x. 27; Sidney, Apology for Poetry, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith,
i. 157.
96. Robert Langham: A Letter, ed. Kuin, pp. 40–1. The text of the Lady of the Lake’s
speech is given in Gascoigne’s more official version of events, The Princely
Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle (The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed.
John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. (1907; repr. New York, 1969), ii. 93–4 (or, see Nichols,
Progresses, i. 431, 491–2)). Elizabeth had given Kenilworth to Leicester only in
1563. For a recent discussion, see Davis, Chivalry and Romance, pp. 73–97.
97. Malory, i. 52–3, iii. 1240 (I.25, XXI.5).
98. Etienne, Draco, ii. 1165–1208, ed. Howlett, Chronicles.
99. Huon, ed. Lee, pp. 599–603.
100. The Alchemist (1610), in which Dol Common acts Dapper’s ‘aunt of Faerie’ (Ben
Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, Vol. V, I. ii. 149). For a comparable fraud
regarding the fairy king, see The Fary Knight; or, Oberon the Second, attrib. to
Thomas Randolph (?1622–4) (ed. (from manuscript) Fredson Thayer Bowers

(Chapel Hill, 1942) ). One of the more extensive series of real-life frauds was
recorded in The severall notorious and lewd Cousenages of John West and Alice
West, falsely called the King and Queene of Fayries (1613), repr. in Fairy Tales,
Legends and Romances illustrating Shakespeare and other early English Writers, ed.
W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875), pp. 223–38; Alice West would claim that the fairies,
most often the fairy queen, were particularly desirous of giving treasure to a
selected individual, but up-front payment was required for a banquet or other
preparations for the bestowing of the gift. Only one of their frauds involved a
claim of sexual attraction, when Alice’s companion made an apprentice ‘beleeve
the queene of fayries did most ardently doat upon him’ (p. 237).
101. Dekker, Whore, ed. Bowers, II. i. 236–42.
102. See Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2001),
pp. 178–85.
103. Melusine, ed. Donald, p. 12.
104. Ibid., p. 368; and see p. 384 below. The story also appears in Mandeville’s Travels,
ed. Hamelius, pp. 97–8, though without the Melusine connection.
105. Lanval, in Marie de France: Lais, ed. Ewart, ll. 71–4: ‘Sire Lanval, ma dameisele, |
Que tant est pruz e sage e bele, | Ele nus enveie pur vus; | Kar i venez ensemble
od nus!’
106. Sir Lambewell, ll. 83–6 (Percy i).
107. FQ, I. xii. 41, Mutabilitie Cantos, viii.1–2.
108. Graelent, l. 317, in Les Lais anonymes, ed. Tobin, pp. 83–125. The poem was writ-
ten on the continent but was circulated within the ambit of Anglo-Norman
(p. 89). Its story is very close to that of Lanval / Launfal.
109. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, Thornton text ll. 129–36.
110. Dame Tryamour’s father is ‘King of Fairie’ and Thomas’s fairy mistress has a
‘lord’, but neither figure has any role in the narrative, or seems to have any
influence or control over his daughter or lady (Sir Launfal, ed. Sands, l. 280;
Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, l. 229, though she expresses alarm at the
thought that he might discover their affair). Richard Cœur de Lion’s mother is
unusual in that she is given in marriage to King Henry by her own father, but,
despite his fairy coding, he identifies himself as king of Antioch.
111. A possible exception would be the prohibition laid on Thomas of Erceldoune by
his elf-queen that once he is in her own country he is to speak to no one but her,
which seems intended to prevent her husband’s discovering their relationship
through any careless talk; she will say that she took away his power of speech
before bringing him to the Otherworld (Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, ll.
223–32).
112. See the note to 2. 1. 158–64 in Peter Holland’s edn. of the play (Oxford, 1994).
113. See Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1977),
pp. 196–210.
114. Montrose describes the play as both ‘personally and politically inimical’ to
Elizabeth (‘ “Shaping Fantasies” ’, p. 82).
chapter 5
1. Germaine Greer, Shakespeare (Oxford and New York, 1986), p. 109.

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth,
1981), i. 78.
3. See Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, for its history. The name Thaisa (Thaise) first
appears in Gower’s version of the story, but it is used for Apollonius/Pericles’
daughter (who is normally named Tarsia); his wife remains anonymous in most
early versions.
4. This is the manuscript poem ‘The Question Answer’d’, in Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1932), p. 100.
5. Legend of Good Women, l. 544, describing Queen Alceste, who gave her life for her
husband’s.
6. See for instance, Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vi. 394 (Gower,
Confessio amantis Book viii. 980–1), 444 (Twine); Pericles, 10. 9–11 (chorus to 3.1 in
editions with act divisions). The wedding-night conception is part of the plot of
Guy, so likewise figures in both the medieval and the printed versions: see, for
instance, Schleich’s edn. of the print, l. 6073–5.
7. John Gillingham, ‘Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century’, reprinted
in his Richard Cœur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century
(London and Rio Grande, 1994), pp. 243–55; Sir Frederick Pollock and
F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd edn.,
(Cambridge, 1911), ii. 260–313, 414–21; F. M. Powicke, Henry III and the Lord
Edward (Oxford, 1947), ii. 788–90. Stricter practices of primogeniture meant that
political power was less likely to be diverted away from an heiress towards a cadet
male line (e.g., of her father’s younger brothers). Complications arose where there
were two daughters, and those too are recognized in some romances, including
Chrétien’s Yvain. See further Knight, Arthurian Literature, pp. 47–51, 58–9,
68–104.
8. See R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the
French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), pp. 73, 78–9.
9. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago and London, 1991), pp. 186–96; and Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image
in Medieval Literature (New York and London, 1975), pp. 11–13, who notes a con-
comitant decline in positive images of women in the thirteenth century.
10. See Judith Weiss, ‘The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance’; and
Rosalind Field, ‘Romance as History, History as Romance’, both in Romance in
Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Carol Meale, and Jennifer Fellows
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 149–61, 163–73. The actual amount of intermarriage
between Normans and aristocratic Englishwomen was low: see Michael Wood, In
Search of England (London, 1999), p. 15.
11. Twenty Norman baronies descended in the female line before 1130 (Jane
Martindale, ‘Succession and Politics in the Romance-Speaking World
c.1000–1140’, in England and her Neighbours 1066–1453, ed. Michael Jones and
Malcolm Vale (London, 1989), pp. 19–41); twenty-one peerages continued
through marriage to an heiress between 1439 and 1504 (J. M. Lander, Conflict and
Stability in Fifteenth-century England (London, 1977), p. 170).
12. William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and
James I (London, 1865), pp. 90, 260–2.
13. See Gillingham, ‘Love, Marriage’, for examples.
14. See p. 145 above, and the accompanying note as to the provenance of the romance.
A comparable example of a woman’s fixing male arrangements for her choice of
husband in accord with her own wishes occurs in Ipomadon, where the Fere
promises her barons to follow her uncle’s advice in her choice of husband, but
agrees with him a scheme for a tournament which she trusts Ipomadon will
win.
15. See p. 455 n. 12 above.
16. Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 47–63.
17. Sir Isumbras, ll. 745–50, ed. Mills, Six Romances; Peter Day, Dictionary of Religious
Orders (London, 2001), s.v. Hatchet.
18. See pp. 201–3 above. The lovers are cited in the early thirteenth-century ‘Luve
Ron’ of Thomas of Hales (in English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, ed. Carleton
Brown (Oxford, 1932), no. 43, ll. 65–72, where they figure alongside Paris, Helen,
Tristram, and Isolde as ubi sunt examples), and in texts across the fourteenth cen-
tury from Cursor mundi through Emaré, Sir Degrevant, and The Parliament of the
Three Ages to Gower’s Confessio amantis. They are embroidered on the first cor-
ner of Emaré’s marvellous cloth, as exemplifying ‘love that was so trewe’, the
other corners depicting Tristram and Isolde, Floris and Blancheflower, and the
emir’s daughter who embroidered it and the sultan’s son whom she loves (Emaré,
121–68, ed. Mills, Six Romances).
19. Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Mills and Boon meets Feminism’, in The Progress of
Romance, ed. Radford, pp. 194–218 (esp. 198–9, 204).
20. From Caxton’s heading to his translation, Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Englantine,
c.1489, ed. Leon Kellner, EETS E.S. 58 (1890), p. 3.
21. Mary Carruthers, ‘Afterword’ to ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, in
Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and all her Sect,
ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London and New York, 1994), pp. 39–44 (42).
For the feminist argument for the composition, circulation, and meaning of such
texts as solely homosocial constructions, see Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley:
‘For a male author to write women in these periods was to refer not to women,
but to men—to desire nor relationship with women, but relationship to the tra-
ditions of male textual activity, and, by extension, of male social and political
privilege’ (Introduction (‘The Lady Vanishes’) to their collection Seeking the
Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual
Criticism (Knoxville, 1989), p. 4).
22. The Wife herself may want dominance, but her Tale offers a model in which mar-
ital bliss follows on the husband’s recognition of, and trust in, his wife’s ability to
make her own choices. Several other tales, including the Franklin’s Tale and
Melibee, make a comparable point. Melibee shows a wife creating such a role for
herself within the larger role of obedience to her husband; the declaration about
love’s freedom in the Franklin’s Tale is taken up as a key text by Spenser (on which
see p. 253 below).
23. Le Roman de Silence, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge, 1972), l. 2497–656 (l. 261
quoted; for a translation, see the parallel-text edition by Sarah Roche-Mahdi,
Silence (East Lansing, 1992) ). ‘Cornuälle’ could alternatively designate an area of

Brittany or a small French town in Maine-et-Loire, but the only connection
offered by the text itself is with the British Cornwall (l. 2697). Heldris shows no
close knowledge of the area, however, and he was not apparently a denizen of
Cornwall: the dialect of the poem is northern French rather than Anglo-Norman
(see Thorpe’s Introduction to his edition, pp. 15–16).
24. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’,
in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York and
London, 1975), pp. 157–210.
25. Chaucer, Troilus, IV. 182.
26. House of Fame, 256–95; Legend of Dido in Legend of Good Women.
27. King Horn, ed. Sands, ll. 281–96, 341–50.
28. Roswall, ed. Lengert, ll. 373–6.
29. So Troilus’s eyesight goes ‘depe’ as it lands on Criseyde, and her look in turn fas-
tens a ‘fixe and depe impressioun’ in ‘his hertes botme’ (Troilus, I. 272, 295–8). It
was believed that sight involved beams or rays travelling out from the eye, and
back from that object through the observer’s eye to his heart. The ‘impression’
made by sight on the heart was therefore literal. The physicality of these rays gives
rise to such images as Donne’s lovers’ eyebeams being ‘twisted . . . upon one dou-
ble string’ as they gaze into each other’s eyes (‘The Ecstasy’ 7–8, in John Donne:
Poems, ed. Smith, p. 53). For a full account of the physiological and optical theo-
ries underlying sight and falling in love in the Middle Ages, see Norman Klassen,
Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight (Cambridge, 1995).
30. Chaucer, Troilus, I. 267–308, 400–20 (quotations from 416–20), translating
Petrarch’s Sonnet 132.
31. This correlates with the lady’s inaccessibility, taken to have its origins in the
poetry addressed by the Provençal troubadours to a feudal donna; but it proved
much too useful as a literary device to abandon.
32. Eneas, ed. J. J. Salverda de Grave (Paris, 1925, 1929), ll. 8057–61 (p. 215 in the trans-
lation by John A. Yunck, Eneas (New York and London, 1974)).
33. Eilhart von Oberge: Tristrant und Isalde, ed. and trans. Danielle Buschinger and
Wolfgang Spiewok (Greifswald, 1993), 2508–719; Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant,
trans. by J. W. Thomas (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1978), pp. 75–7.
34. Ed. and trans. by Ian Short in Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Lacy, ii. 176–83, esp.
ll. 30–71. The soliloquy is cut in both the Norse and Middle English versions of
Thomas.
35. Gottfried: Tristan, ed. Weber: the whole passage runs from ll. 11707 to 12043. See,
in particular, 11968–12012 (the punning on ‘lameir’); 11707, 11787–8, 11817–18
quoted. For a translation, see Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan, trans. A. T. Hatto
(Harmondsworth, 1960), pp. 195–6.
36. ll. 4240–48 in Ulrich’s version; she also addresses a soliloquy to love, ‘minne’,
4372–406. On the Anglo-Norman origin of the romance, see p. 468 n. 39 above.
37. For the date, see the introduction to Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Alexandre Micha
(Geneva, 1990). Wooing women were starting to become less frequent in French
by this date; but the poem had a female dedicatee, the countess Yolande, daugh-
ter of count Baudouin IV of Hainault, and the author may therefore have opted
for a representation that was moving out of fashion in his own culture.
38. In his list of additional titles of reprehended works in his translation of Vives, see
pp. 37–8 above. The prose version of William was printed around 1515. Bunt prints
the surviving fragment in his edition of the poem, William of Palerne, pp. 328–31.
39. Ed. Bunt, ll. 451–7. A leaf containing the opening of the soliloquy is missing from
the single manuscript, but it still runs for 140 long alliterative lines (433–570)—
longer, therefore, than the 140 shorter lines of the original French (ed. Guillaume,
Micha, ll. 829–969).
40. The editor of Hue’s text, A. J. Holden, goes so far as to call it ‘une composition
comique’ on the grounds of its bawdiness, satire and effrontery (Ipomedon, pp.
53–4); but those elements are almost entirely confined to the narratorial frame,
and affect the story only indirectly. Susan Crane offers a more nuanced reading,
in which she recognizes the balance of the work between the sophisticated
reassessment of romance ideals and the ironic narrative voice, which she com-
pares to Jean de Meun (Insular Romance, pp. 160–5, 171).
41. The classic analysis of the male gaze in film is Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’, reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke,
1989), pp. 14–26. Her comments on the male gaze in the cinema (by characters,
camera, and audience), that they make the woman ‘an object of sexual stimula-
tion through sight’, is precisely inverted in the romances; and they call into ques-
tion too her statement that ‘the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual
objectification’ (pp. 18, 19).
42. See ll. 4694–5 and 5287–8 of the tail-rhyme version, Ipomadon, ed. Rhiannon
Purdie, EETS OS 316 (2001); for a full list of examples, see Bartlett Jere Whiting,
Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings mainly before
1500 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), W275.
43. See William Calin, ‘The Exaltation and Undermining of Romance: Ipomadon’, in
The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Lacy, Kelly, and Busby, ii. 111–24, esp. p. 121.
44. E. D. Blodgett, for instance, claims that in courtly romance, the lover ‘is the sub-
ject of a language that generates the figure of the Lady, who is continually
redesigned as the speaker’s apostrophe’ (Introduction, The Romance of Flamenca,
(New York and London, 1995), p. xxiv). There are areas of romance where this
holds good (one could indeed define ‘courtly’ romances as those where it does),
but it is more generally true of medieval lyric and of the whole Petrarchan tradi-
tion than of the whole corpus of romance.
45. Huon, ed. Lee, p. 628 (cap. clxi).
46. Eliduc, ll. 300–5 (and see the whole context, 273–538), in Marie de France: Lais,
ed. Ewert; cf. also 327–8, ‘La pucele ki l’ot veü | Vodra de lui fere son dru’, ‘when
she saw him, the maiden wished to make him her lover’. ‘Curage’, translated as
‘heart’, was adopted into Middle English with a strong sexual association (cf. the
twitterpated birds in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, I. 11, and
Criseyde’s being ‘slydynge of corage’, Troilus V. 825). Eliduc is exceptional
among romances in that the man is already married: it is the husband, not the
wife, who falls in love with someone else, in a kind of Dr Zhivago scenario where
all three parties carry the author’s and readers’ sympathy. Marie resolves it by
having the wife become a nun in an act of emotional magnanimity, to allow her
husband and his new beloved to marry. Such an ending may reflect the less rigid
attitude to divorce obtaining before the twelfth century.
47. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart OSB (London,
1980), Vision 7 (p. 281). See also letter 9, on how the Beloved and his earthly lover
will ‘penetrate each other in a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself
from the other. But they abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart
in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet divine nature flows
through both and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same time
remain two different selves—yes, and remain so forever’ (p. 66). Michael Camille
notes that the only male body fully open to the female gaze is that of Christ, The
Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London, 1998), pp. 35–6.
48. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow, 2000), chs. 35–6 (ll.
2951–2 quoted). Margery’s readiness to put words into Christ’s mouth might be
regarded as a reversal of the ventriloquism of male authors in regard to their female
characters, though it is, of course, a characteristic of mystical writings generally.
49. ‘Li oel d’esgarder se refont, | cil qui d’amor joie refont | et le message au cuer
anvoient, | mes molt lor plest quanque il voient’ (‘the eyes, which are the well-
spring of the joy of love and send its message to the heart, renewed themselves
with looking, for everything they saw pleased them greatly’): Chrétien: Erec et
Enide, ed. Roques, ll. 2037–40.
50. Malory, ii. 332 (VII. 21).
51. Jehan et Blonde de Philippe de Rémi, ed. Sylvie Lécuyer (Paris, 1984), ll. 4740–831.
Compare also Hue’s rather startling description of the wedding night of
Ipomedon and La Fière:‘Chescun de cez ad ben gardé | A autre sa virginité, | Or
se entreaiment tan par amur | Ke il se entrefoutent tute jur’ (each had so well kept
their virginity for the other that now they loved each other with such desire that
they fucked each other all day long) (ed. Holden, ll. 10513–16).
52. Malory, ii. 645 (X. 38–9).
53. Malory, ii. 803 (XI. 7).
54. ‘And yf ye were nat, I myght have getyn the love of my lorde sir Launcelot’
(Malory, ii. 806 (XI. 9)).
55. Malory, ii. 1091 (XVIII. 19).
56. Malory, ii. 1093 (XVIII. 19)
57. See in particular Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary
Tradition (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3: Natura Vicaria Dei, pp. 68–109; and for the quo-
tation, Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 379. A personified Nature first enters ver-
nacular poetry in the Roman d’Eneas: see Yunck’s note to his translation, Eneas,
p. 133, to l. 3915 (ed. Salverda de Grave).
58. H. A. Kelly has argued that private vows such as they have exchanged constituted
a valid marriage in medieval canon law (Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer
(Ithaca, 1975), pp. 59–67); but they never appear to regard themselves as married,
or speak of themselves in those terms. Despite the ‘woodbine’ simile, and in keep-
ing with the Petrarchan shaping of Troilus, most of the description of their love-
making (the most erotic poetry yet written in English) is focalized through him:
see in particular ll. 1247–53, and the abundance of speech given to him compared
to Criseyde’s brief interjections.
59. Larry D. Benson, ‘The Occasion of The Parliament of Fowls’, in The Wisdom of
Poetry, ed. L. D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, 1982), pp. 123–44.
There is no confirming evidence from within the text.
60. Cleanness, 697–704, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Andrew and
Waldron. The lines are not free of anxiety about all sexual activity, however, as
they form part of a condemnation of homosexual activity.
61. Malory, i. 332–6 (VII. 22–3); the sister acts to preserve their honour rather than
their virtue, though Malory implies that there may be a touch of jealousy in her
motives too.
62. Sir Philip Sidney: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. by
Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1973), pp. 201–2, 242–3, 306; hereafter Old Arcadia. The
printed versions never allow the lovers to go beyond ‘virtuous wantonness’ (Sir
Philip Sidney: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans
(Harmondsworth, 1977), iii. 38 (p. 652); hereafter New Arcadia.
63. For Sir Degaré, see The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve
Salisbury (Kalamazoo, 1995), pp. 89–14, and Percy, iii. 16–48; there are prints sur-
viving from c.1512 to 1560 in addition to the Percy text. Compare also Torrent of
Portyngale.
64. See Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture
c.1150–1300 (Oxford, 2001), esp. pp. 95–106.
65. There is of course no necessary disjunction between a woman’s free choice to
enter a convent and family wishes: as Wogan-Browne notes, ‘The free will of
young women is a prestige symbol for their male kin, since it denotes a political
and economic mastery so complete . . . that young women’s choices can be
afforded’ (Saints’ Lives, p. 85).
66. Beues of Hamtoun, ed. Kölbing, ll. 3216–24 (Auchinleck text; 2863–7, Chetham
MS).
67. The great majority of the most popular legends of virgin martyrs follow the out-
line given here, including those of St Margaret of Antioch, St Katherine of
Alexandria, St Barbara, St Agnes, and St Agatha.
68. Ramón Lull, Le Livre de Evast et de Blaquerne, ed. A. Llinarès, Publications de
l’Université de Grenoble 47 (Paris, 1970), Book I (Natana’s love) and II. i (her
escape) (for a translation, see Blanquerna, trans. E. Allison Peers (London, 1926),
chapters VI, XX).
69. The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot, rev. edn. (Oxford,
1987), pp. 42–3. On the impossibility of raping a saint, see Corinne J. Saunders,
Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001), pp.
120–51; there are, however, very rare exceptions when the woman is required to
give birth to a more famous male saint, in which case her unwillingness can help
to prove her own sanctity—St Non, mother of St David, being a case in point.
70. For more detailed discussion, see the analysis of the ‘bridal’ model of holy virgin-
ity in Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge,
2001), pp. 10 (where she describes holy virginity as ‘a culturally specific organisa-
tion of desires’), 12–13, 66–74. I would want to modify her analysis of ‘Virgins and
Romance’ (pp. 57–66) in so far as it flattens romance into a single patriarchal/
misogynist model. Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, offers an extensive expoloration
of the relationship between secular and religious models of love.
71. ‘Eadi is his spuse, hwas meithhad is unwemmet hwen he on hire streoneth’ (Hałi
Meiflhad, ll. 28–9, in Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. by Bella Millett
and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford, 1990), p. 34); my translation. ‘Streoneth’
indicates the act of procreation; Millett and Wogan-Browne’s translation stresses

the result—‘begets offspring’. The first editor of the text, in the 1860s, classed
this sentence among the ‘coarse and repulsive passages’ for which he used Latin
in his parallel-text modern English translation (Hali Meidenhad, ed. Oswald
Cockayne, EETS OS 18 (1866), Foreword and p. 38; most library sets of the EETS
have substituted the less eccentric revised edition by F. J. Furnivall published in
1922).
72. See Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-
Modern England (New York and Oxford, 2000), for a thoughtful study of the dis-
tinction and its effect on artistic and dramatic representation.
73. How absolute the division between the two kinds of love was depended on the
text in question and the writer’s agenda: there was a widespread recognition that
the chastity of virginity, chaste widowhood, and virtuous marriage itself consi-
tuted a spectrum—see for instance the Tree of Charity episode in Piers Plowman
(B-text xvi. 65–82, in William Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed.
A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn. (London, 1995)), and Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives,
p. 83.
74. Ancrene Wisse, Part 7; in Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. Millett and
Wogan-Browne, pp. 112–14.
75. See for instance Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval
French Law and Literature (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 22–5; Simon Gaunt, Gender
and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 196–233; and, for
a more nuanced reading, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in Feminist
Readings in Middle English Literature, ed. Evans and Johnson, pp. 165–94.
76. FQ, VI. viii. 40–3 (a passage where Spenser’s blazon of Serena’s naked beauty con-
stitutes a bold and arguably not fully successful attempt to enact the distinction
between the voyeuristic and the marvelling gaze); and I. vi. 4–19 (quotations from
4 and 5). Una finally is ‘content to please their feeble eyes’ (19), to be the subject
of the satyrs’ gaze, as the implied symbolism of the exposed virgin as witness to
God is brought to the allegorical surface.
77. John Foxe, Ecclesiasticall Historie, 3rd edn. (London, 1576), p. 95. Foxe also
recounts the rather similar legend of Theodora, pp. 63–4.
78. Sir Philip Sidney, Apologie for Poetry, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith,
i. 176–7; The Virgin Martyr, in Dekker, Works, ed. Bowers, iii. 365–465 (see in par-
ticular Act IV. ii). The play was licensed for the Red Bull in 1620, entered in the
Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1621, and first published in 1622. Like all saintly
martyrs, Dorothea does not in fact feel pain at her martyrdom.
79. The Virgin Martyr, II. iii. 85–7, IV. iii. 151 (spoken most immediately about her
guardian angel figure, but it is made clear that he is a stand-in for Christ).
80. CT, V. 764–6.
81. For the phrase and how the practice fits into Spenser’s other varieties of allegory,
see Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (London, 1962), pp. 105–8.
82. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, p. 12; and see pp. 14–15 above.
83. FQ, V. v. 25, vii.42.
84. FQ, III. ii. 1–3.
85. FQ, III. vi. 7; compare the frequent analogy for the conception of Christ whilst
Mary’s virginity remained intact as the sun passing through glass, though Spenser
goes on to discuss the generative power of the sun within Nature. A comparison
with the Annunciation is also suggested earlier (vi. 3), in the comment that
Belphoebe’s ‘birth was of the wombe of morning dew’; the dew on Gideon’s fleece
was a recognized prefiguration of the conception of Christ.
86. ‘An Epithalamion made at Lincoln’s Inn’, Donne, Poems, ed. Smith, pp. 133–5,
refrain line.
87. Clyomon and Clamydes, ed. Littleton, in particular scenes viii, xi, xv, xx, xxiii. The
play was first printed in 1599; for the date, see pp. 30–3, and for its difference from
its source, pp. 38–49. Littleton assumes the greater freedom of the heroine to mark
a shift to an Italian model, and marks the difference between her and her courtly
original by calling her a ‘new woman’ (p. 39); but she conforms much more strik-
ingly and consistently to the native English tradition—not a new woman, but the
continuing reincarnation of a conception of the heroine that always remained
fresh.
88. Sidney, New Arcadia, ed. Evans, I. 3 (p. 76).
89. Ibid., I. 14 (p. 150); II. i (pp. 213–14).
90. Ibid., II. 4, p. 238. Helen Hackett, in Women and Romance Fiction in the English
Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 116–29, also discusses the emergence of
Sidney’s heroines into subjecthood, though she finds the most striking examples
at the time of their imprisonment, in Book III of the New Arcadia.
91. This at least is the chronology accepted by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in their
Oxford edn. External evidence for the dating of the early plays is lacking.
92. Romeo and Juliet, 1. 5. 92–105.
93. Ibid., 3. 2. 1–31; 7–8 quoted.
94. Copies survive from thirteen editions of the Gesta in English published between
c.1502 and 1640 (STC 21286.2– 21290a). The casket story is no. 66 in The Early
English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS 33
(1879), pp. 294–306, ‘Ancelmus the Emperor’; the story is reprinted, without the
moralization, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, i.511–14.
95. Bassanio is the only suitor to be provided with an accompanying song while he
makes his choice; and, although the degree of emphasis given to it will vary with
individual productions, the song gives him some pretty clear hints that the lead
casket is the one to go for, in the warning that ‘fancy’ engendered by the eyes alone
gets you nowhere, and the rhyme words ‘bred—head—nourishèd’.
96. Caxton gave it the title Chronicles of England; most of it is based on Geoffrey of
Monmouth, but this particular story is an interloper. See further p. 343 below, and
Helen Cooper, ‘The Elizabethan Havelok’, in Medieval Insular Romance, ed. Weiss,
Fellows, and Dickson, pp. 169–83. Warner’s work is most easily accessible in the fac-
simile of the 6th edn., William Warner: Albions England (1612) (Hildesheim and New
York, 1971); the work was enlarged in almost every edition it went through, but the
‘Havelok’ section had been included from the start (Book IV, ch. 20). The Havelok
character is in fact given the alternative name he bears in the chronicle tradition,
Curan; texts that tell his story sometimes use one name, sometimes the other, or
sometimes both, one as his true name and the other as the name he carries while his
identity is unknown.
97. The alteration was made by Thomas Bowdler in his Family Shakespeare, reprinted
throughout the nineteenth century, and held the stage for longer than that.
98. Tempest, 1. 2. 422–3, 3. 1. 93–5, 4. 1. 14–22.

99. Winter’s Tale, 4. 4. 130–2. Thomas Bowdler cuts this, too, though doing so would
seem to assume a recognition of Elizabethan terminology of orgasm on his read-
ers’ part such as would make the need for sparing their sensibilities redundant.
100. They first take hands (so that she can see the ring), 22. 58–61, an unproblematic
stage action between male actors; then kiss (64–5), a rarer move; and then addi-
tionally have a long embrace, the closeness of which is indicated by the descrip-
tion of her as ‘buried’ within his arms (65).
101. Pericles, 21. 210–21; Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 64–5.
chapter 6
1. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 6.

2. See Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford, 1997).
3. And indeed of Cymbeline, where the ‘stepdame false’ has no name of her own,
being identified rather as a ‘crafty devil’ or simply the ‘wicked queen’ (1. 6. 1, 2.
1. 49, 5. 4. 464). Stepmothers are however, likely to be younger than mothers-in-
law, so the rejection of the aged operates to different degrees for the two groups.
4. For an anthology of such writings, see Alcuin Blamires’s anthology, Woman
Defamed and Woman Defended (Oxford, 1992).
5. See the ‘Defence’ section of Blamires’s Woman Defamed.
6. The quantity is summarized in Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib (Columbus,
1944), and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Brighton,
1984); for the proportion, see the Registers themselves.
7. Hence the personification of Idleness (Leisure) as the gatekeeper to the Garden
of Mirth in the Roman de la Rose. The only medieval literary mode that found
room for peasant love was French bergerie writings, where the famously unde-
manding life of watching sheep and the coexistence of shepherds and shep-
herdesses allowed space for just such sentiment (see Cooper, Pastoral, ch. 2.
Shepherding in England was a male occupation).
8. Christine opens the work by contrasting ‘the natural behavior and character of
women’ with the ‘lies’ universally told by male authorities; Lady Reason then
attacks her for doubting her direct experience of the first in the light of the sec-
ond (Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards
(New York, 1982), pp. 4, 6 (I. i. 1. I. ii. 2); La Città delle Dame, ed. Patrizia Caraffi
and Earl Jeffrey Richards (Milan, 1998), pp. 42, 44, 46). For Brian Anslay’s Boke
of the Cyte of Ladyes, see STC 7271.
9. The research, given wide press coverage, was undertaken by Bryan Sykes and
Catherine Irven on his own surname, ‘Surnames and the Y Chromosome’,
American Journal of Human Genetics 66 (2000), 1417–19. The 99% figure can be
alternatively expressed as only one child in a hundred per generation having no
legitimate paternity (or at least strongly acknowledged paternity: it does not dis-
tinguish between legitimate children and the children of unmarried mothers
who are given the father’s surname, for instance within a stable but unofficially
sanctioned relationship, or between children conceived to the same parents out-
side or inside marriage).
10. Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance, pp. 64–5; the book gives a full account of the dis-
semination of the whole motif.
11. The scarcity of Middle English fabliaux might be taken as further evidence of the
same phenomenon (Chaucer had to look to continental models for his own), but
there are a number in Anglo-Norman: a fact that may do no more than reflect the
comparatively high survival rates for the more prestigious language, but may
equally reflect a resistance on the part of the married secular English-speaking
population of England—ordinary people, in other words—to buy into this par-
ticular aspect of international high or clerical culture.
12. The Susanna corpus is surveyed by Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early
English Narrative Verse (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 155–69. For Greene, see The
Myrrour of Modestie and Francescos Fortunes, in The Life and Complete Works of
Robert Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart, 12 vols. (1881–3; repr. New York, 1964), iii. 1–42,
viii. 111–229 (for the Isabel section, see 144–64). The play is edited as The Most
Virtuous and Godly Susanna by Thomas Garter, ed. B. Ifor Evans and W. W. Greg
(Oxford, 1937). It was entered in the Stationers’ Registers early in 1569, but the sur-
viving print dates from 1578. It is discussed as a forerunner to Shakespeare’s plays
of calumniated women by Joyce H. Sexton, The Slandered Woman in Shakespeare
(Victoria, BC, 1978), pp. 39–49.
13. For a discussion of the medieval origins of the motif and for texts of both tales, see
Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii. 12–16, 50–63 (Decameron 2,9),
63–78 (1560 edition of Frederyke); Shakespeare may have used both stories. On the
increasing emphasis on the woman in medieval French romances of the wager,
which she sees as a step towards the ‘feminist interpretation of romance’, see
Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Double Jeopardy: The Appropriation of Woman in four Old
French Romances of the “Cycle de la Gageure” ’, in Fisher and Halley (eds),
Seeking the Woman, pp. 21–50 (p. 45).
14. The danger was made explicit by Pope Pius V, who in 1570 excommunicated
Elizabeth and declared her deposed (so inviting her Catholic subjects to rebel
against her), and his successor Gregory XIII, who encouraged plans to assassinate
her.
15. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven and London, 1996), p. 159.
16. On its later history, see Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘The Triumph of Time: The
Fortunate Readers of Robert Greene’s Pandosto’, in Texts and Cultural Change in
Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke
and New York, 1997), pp. 95–123.
17. The Earl of Toulouse itself is not known to have been printed. The analogous story
underlying Sir Aldingar first appears in written form in William of Malmesbury’s
De gestis regum anglorum, from where it is taken over by Vincent of Beauvais and
Matthew Paris: see Paul Christopherson, The Ballad of Sir Aldingar: Its Origin and
Analogues (Oxford, 1952), pp. 18–21. Here it is told about Gunhild, sister of
Hardicanute. For the later texts, see nn. 31–2 below.
18. The only exceptions are some ‘rudderless boat’ stories that incorporate calumny:
La Manekine in French, Thomas Alsop’s Fair Custance, and the lost play Fair
Constance of Rome (see pp. 126–8 above).
19. Hamlet, 1. 2. 146, 3. 1. 138–9.
20. The Knight of the Swanne, in Early English Prose Romances, ed. Thoms, p. 756.
21. Philaster, I. i. 94–6, in Beaumont and Fletcher, gen. ed. Bowers, Vol. 1.
22. Posthumus’ comment on Innogen’s sexual restraint would fall into this category
(2. 5. 9–10); its interpretation as meaning that the marriage has not been con-
summated would fall so far outside audience expectation as to need a stronger
statement, especially as his choice of words as to how she ‘prayed me oft fore-
bearance’ does not suggest ‘always’. The opposing argument has been put most
intelligently by Anne Barton, ‘ “Wrying but a little”: Marriage, Law and Sexuality
in the plays of Shakespeare’, in her Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 3–30.
23. Othello, 1. 3. 163–5, 250–7; contrast Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, in Bullough,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vii.242–3.
24. 1. 3. 292–3, 3. 3. 209, and 3. 3. 234–8 (quoted).
25. ‘Hyt was sothe the lady sayde— | Therfore hym lykyd ylle’, ll. 158–9, ed. Fellows in
Of Love and Chivalry, pp. 231–65.
26. The original French verse romance is lost, but its contents can be reconstructed
from a number of derivative versions in other languages: see Dickson, Valentine:
A Study.
27. Percy, ii. 390–9.
28. Valentine and Orson, ed. Dickson, p. 15.
29. The shorter printed versions current from the seventeenth century, and aimed at
a wider market than the full romance, highlight the role of the merchant and
blacken the archbishop still further.
30. The deaths are Spenser’s own addition; his source (Ariosto’s story of Ginevra,
Orlando Furioso v. 5–74) has Ginevra vindicated in a trial by combat. The renam-
ing of the woman as ‘Claribell’—a name close to such romance heroines as the
Christabelle of Sir Eglamour and the Desonelle of Torrent of Portyngale—suggests
a desire on Spenser’s part to imply a setting closer to home.
31. Sir Tryamour, ed. Fellows, Of Love and Chivalry, pp. 147–98, ll. 528–64; Percy, ii.
78–135, ll. 547–70. ‘Providence’ might be accused of being too kindly a reading of
the episode: a more cynical interpretation would see the testimony of a dog as
outweighing that of a woman (though the creature is directly avenging the mur-
der of his master rather than the defaming of the queen).
32. Sir Aldingar, Percy, i. 165–73. In one of the ballad versions, a knight volunteers to
be the queen’s champion, a non-supernatural outcome that brings the story
closer to The Earl of Toulouse (Child, Ballads, no. 59, ii. 33–48).
33. It is one of the few plays of Shakespeare to be designated as a ‘comedie’ on the
title-page of its quarto edition; his only play to incorporate the word into its title,
The Comedy of Errors, is his most closely imitative of Latin comedy in both struc-
ture and plot.
34. Ralph Roister Doister, v. iii. 11–12, in Three Sixteenth-century Comedies, ed. Charles
W. Whitworth (London, 1984); it was first printed c.1567. Cf. CT, II. 639–40:
‘Immortal God, that savedest Susanne | From false blame . . .’
36. All is True, 2. 4. 10–54.
37. Cymbeline, 5. 3. 116.
38. See also pp. 201–3 above for further discussion of this episode.
39. Greenes Vision, in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert
Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart (1881–6; repr. New York, 1964), xii. 201–81 (pp. 222–3).
40. Carolyn Dinshaw explores the analogy extensively in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics
(Madison, Wis., 1989).
41. Octavian (mid-fourteenth century, printed c.1505) is an exception, in that the
mother-in-law arranges for a young man to be placed alongside the empress in
her bed.
42. The fourteenth-century alliterative Chevelere Assigne and the Tudor print of the
prose Knight of the Swanne; both derive from the Godfrey of Bulloigne cycle of
French chansons de geste.
43. The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, ed. H. H. Gibbs, EETS ES 6 (1868), ll. 272–3:
a detail omitted from the prose.
44. CT, II. 696, 779, 782–3.
45. The heroine of Frederyke of Jennen is ‘so womanly in her behavoure’ that the man
who has bet that he can seduce her does not dare to proposition her (Bullough,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii. 66); in Hoccleve’s ‘Tale of Jereslaus’ Wife’, a
story of a series of attempted seductions and false accusations, the wife dismisses
the seneschal who seeks her sexual favours with a ‘wommanly nay’ (Hoccleve,
Minor Poems, ed. Furnivall and Gollancz, pp. 140–73, l. 77).
46. CT, II. 358, 360; the woman-headed serpent in the Garden of Eden makes its first
appearance in Peter Comestor’s late twelfth-century Historia scholastica, from
where it rapidly entered iconography.
47. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii. 68; see also p. 66.
48. Heldris, Silence, ed. Thorpe, ll. 1701–24, 6033–80 (6080 quoted).
49. Partonope, ed. Bödtker, ll. 6471–5, 6759–94. The authorial comments (carried over
from the French original) are partly self-serving, in that the real or fictional claim
of the author is that his lady does not reciprocate his love; but the argument
against generalization can hardly be ironic, given the wide documentation of its
truth. On the Wife, see CT, III. 688–96.
50. The question of antifeminism in Hue’s Ipomedon is given a nuanced discussion by
Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 158–73. Hue makes the sexuality more aggressive and
the antifeminism more overt in his Prothesilaus, though that was never so popu-
lar, and never translated into English (possibly as a consequence): see Judith
Weiss, ‘A reappraisal of Hue de Rotelande’s Protheselaus’, Medium Ævum 52
(1983), 104–11.
51. New Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 76. The metaphor of the stepmother may well have
been so commonplace as to pass unnoticed by both Sidney and his readers.
52. Ibid., p. 501.
53. The Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and Elizabeth Gee
(Leiden and New York, 1998), p. 239. The Secundus quotation is given at fuller
length in Blamires, Woman Defamed, p. 100: ‘man’s undoing, an insatiable
animal, perpetual trouble and non-stop combat, man’s daily ruin, a storm in the
home, an impediment to peace of mind, the wreck of a weak-willed man, instru-
ment of adultery, expensive war, the very worst creature and heaviest burden,
hateful snake, human property’. Mulier est hominis confusio (‘man’s undoing’,
‘confusyon of man’) decisively entered English literature in Chauntecleer’s mis-
apprehension of it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale as ‘womman is mannes joye and al his
blis’ (CT, VII. 3164–6).
54. Old Arcadia, ed. Robertson, p. 20; New Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 134.
55. Ibid., p. 22 (Old), p. 136 (New).

56. From the close of Caxton’s preface to the Morte Arthur.
57. In all the English versions other than Shakespeare’s, the daughter is initially the
unwilling victim of paternal rape; he is unusual in removing any degree of sym-
pathy for her.
58. See pp. 250–1 above.
59. For the mid-fifteenth century Middle English version, see Merlin, ed. Henry B.
Wheatley, Vol. I part II (EETS O.S. 21), rev. edn. (1877), chapter XXIII (pp.
420–37); this section is also included in Prose Merlin, ed. John Conlee
(Kalamazoo, 1998), pp. 224–41. The episode forms the last section of Heldris’s
Silence.
60. On distinctio as ‘normative array’, see Judson Boyce Allen and Theresa Anne
Moritz, A Distinction of Stories (Columbus, OH, 1981), p. 86. They offer the idea
as a principle of narrative structure and unity, contrasting with the Aristotelean
idea of organic unity, but widely used in medieval—and, one should add,
Renaissance—works.
61. Malory, i. 323–4 (VII. 21–2).
62. Malory, i. 168–9 (IV. 23), Gawain and Ettarde; i. 145–6 (IV. 11), i. 256 (VI. 3), ii. 643
(X. 38), Morgan.
63. Malory, iii. 1120 (XVIII. 25).
64. Sidney, New Arcadia, ed. Evans, ii. 18 (pp. 334–44).
65. ‘O sweet woods the delight of solitariness’, in the Eclogues to Book II (ed. Evans,
pp. 433–4).
66. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue (New Haven and London, 1996).
67. In the description of Nature in the Mutability Cantos, VII. vii. 9.
68. Lewis, Allegory of Love, esp. pp. 2, 32–43.
69. In Romania 12 (1883), p. 523. It was Lewis’s 1936 Allegory of Love that gave the term
the status it held for much of the twentieth century. The criticisms of Lewis’s posi-
tion have been many and various: see, for instance, The Meaning of Courtly Love,
ed. F. X. Newman (Albany, New York, 1968); in particular John F. Benton, ‘Clio
and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love’, pp. 19–42; and, for a more
recent discussion, David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England
(London, 1998), pp. 148–75. For an excellent and varied selection of medieval texts
with an Introduction that raises all the necessary questions, see The Courtly Love
Tradition, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (Manchester, 1982).
70. See Burnley, Courtliness, pp. 152–62.
71. P. G. Walsh in his edition and translation, Andreas Capellanus on Love (London,
1982), p. 1. He notes that ‘De amore’ is the commonest title; the more familiar ‘De
arte honeste amandi’ (used for instance by J. J. Parry to entitle his translation ‘The
Art of Courtly Love’) is based on a single manuscript where ‘honeste’ is added
above the line in a different hand. The rendering of ‘honeste’ as ‘courtly’ is in any
case tendentious (and Lewis-derived).
72. For a recent summary of the scholarly debate, see Alastair Minnis, Magister
Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 9–10. John F. Benton’s study of the literary culture of
the court of Champagne found no likely ‘Andreas’, nor any evidence to support
any non-fictional basis for the promotion of ‘courtly love’ or for the existence of
courts of love. He did, however, find a good deal to indicate that marriage was
regarded at the court of Champagne with approval and as normative, and that
Marie’s literary tastes leaned towards the religious (‘The Court of Champagne as
a Literary Center’, Speculum 36 (1961), 551–91).
73. Interestingly, Chrétien himself did not finish the Chevalier de la Charrette; its con-
clusion (which reads more like the conclusion to an episode than to a completed
narrative) was written by another poet.
74. Cligés, ed. Micha, l. 3123.
75. Andreas, ed. Walsh, i. 6 (pp. 146–7; Walsh’s translation).
76. Ibid., pp.156–7. In those rare cases where a couple opted for married celibacy, the
Church required that both parties should agree; Margery Kempe, for instance, has
some difficulty in persuading her husband to accord with her own wish for such
a marriage, but she takes it for granted that his agreement is necessary (The Book
of Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, chs. 9–11).
77. Andreas, ed. Walsh, ii. 7. ix (pp. 258–9).
78. CT, V.796–8.
79. Two Late Medieval Love Treatises, ed. Leslie C. Brook (Oxford, 1993), Heloïse’s Art
d’amour, p. 35. The manuscript is preserved in the British Library, Royal MS
16.F.II.
80. The demandes d’amour constitute the second of the Two Late Medieval Love
Treatises, ed. Brook.
81. If most aristocratic women did not initiate marriage, their right to refusal of con-
sent was none the less important. The treaty setting out the terms under which the
child Isabella of France was handed over to Richard II not only gave her the right
to withdraw from the marriage before its consummation, when she reached the
age of puberty, but set out the financial arrangements to be followed if she did so
wish. This does not mean it would have been easy, but the detail indicates that it
was considered a real possibility.
82. ‘Por vos plas, ieu i consen,’ ‘since it’s what you want, I consent’ (Flamenca, ed. and
trans. Blodgett, l. 284). The description of the wedding night, interestingly, is told
from the man’s point of view, not in the terms of mutuality employed for lovers
(323–42).
83. Despite some classical pronouncements that friendship was possible only
between men, a number of authors argued that marriage could be a compelling
form of friendship. Aquinas described it as maxima amicitia (quoted by Benton,
‘Clio and Venus’, p. 21); and for sample medieval and Renaissance vernacular
instances, see Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, CT, V. 762, and The Flower of Friendship
by Edmund Tilney, Elizabeth’s Master of the Revels, an entire work devoted to
arguing the case for marriage as the highest form of friendship (ed. Valerie Wayne
(Ithaca, 1992)).
84. Flamenca, ed. Blodgett, pp. xii, xxi. The work is incomplete in the single manu-
script, but it seems to be heading irreversibly towards a happy ending for the wife
and her lover.
85. On the work’s Anglo-Norman source, see p. 468 n. 39 above. The allusions to
Chrétien’s Arthurian romances are too deeply embedded in the work to have been
added by Ulrich, though he may have known them on his own account. For the
episodes cited below, see in particular Ulrich, Lanzelet, ed. Spiewok, ll. 215–48 for
Iblis’s dream and her subsequent lying awake, and 5178 for Guinever’s passing the
test of the ‘Eren steine’, the stone of honour that will not tolerate falsehood.
86. It appears in the famous Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Digby 86; Robert Biket, Le
Lai du Corn, ed. E. T. Erickson, ANTS 24 (Oxford, 1973).
87. Ed. Spiewok, ll. 5679–6228.
88. Ecclesiastes 7.28–9. On its widespread medieval use, see Blamires, ed., Woman
Defamed.
89. Chaucer comments on it in the Manciple’s Tale, CT, IX. 212–22; for a later pointed
contrast, see Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, Act II. 292–3, in Beaumont
and Fletcher, gen. ed. Bowers, vol. 1.
90. Percy, ii. 301–11 (quoted); Child, Ballads no. 29 (i. 257–74). Child gives a full
account of the tales of both the mantle and the drinking-vessel in his introduction
(the text contains both).
91. Malory, i. 430 (VIII. 34).
92. FQ, III. vii. 55–60, viii.44.
93. FQ, III. vii. 37, 49, 52. The later statement that Argante ‘did in feminine | And
filthie lust exceede all woman kind’ (III. xi. 4) does however use her to denigrate
women even while superficially distinguishing her from them. Spenser’s choice of
name for her has no connection with Layamon’s use of it for his Morgan figure.
94. The stories contained in the Seven Sages vary from version to version, but this one
is found in all the English texts in both manuscript and print: see The Seven Sages
of Rome, ed. Killis Campbell (Boston and London, 1907), pp. xxxiv–lxvi, and for
the text, ll. 3235–726.
95. The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, ed. E. McCausland
(Northampton, Mass., 1922), ll. 46–7; also in Hazlitt (ed.), Remains, ii. 65–87. It
survives in a single printed copy of c.1556, which the electronic STC describes as a
second edition. There are two possible French sources, the Chronique du
Chatelain de Coucy, included in McCausland’s edn., and Le Roman du Castelain
de Couci et la Dame de Fayel par Jakemes, ed. M. Delbouille (Paris, 1936), both
thirteenth-century; there is also a French prose version of the fifteenth century.
The Chronique, like the English but in contrast to the French romance, keeps the
affair platonic. See also p. 397 below.
96. The earliest reference to the affair in English occurs in a unique addition to the
Auchinleck manuscript version of the Anonymous Metrical Chronicle, ed. Zettl, A
1071–98, pp. 70–1, in which a foundation legend for the caves in Nottingham
Castle rock is created by having Lancelot carve them out to hide Guinevere after
he has rescued her from the stake. The passage seems to have been inspired by the
arrest of Mortimer at Nottingham late in 1330: see Cooper, ‘Lancelot, Roger
Mortimer’.
97. Numerous allusions to Chrétien’s Arthurian romances indicate knowledge of his
work on the part of either the Anglo-Norman author or Ulrich himself. One of the
episodes, but with the love interest removed, concerns Lanzelet’s rescue of Ginover
from abduction: this constitutes the whole plot of the Chevalier de la Charrette, but
some form of the story, with Gawain as hero, pre-existed Chrétien too.
98. Chronicle of Iohn Harding, ed. Ellis, p. 131 (ch. 76, misnumbered as 77).
99. See Ruth Morse, ‘Sterile Queens and Questing Orphans’, Quondam et Futurus 2:2
(1992), 41–53.
100. Malory, i. 270–1 (VI. 10).

101. Examples are widespread across Europe, but see, for instance, Chrétien de
Troyes’s lyric ‘D’Amors, qui m’a tolu a moi’, in which the lover insists that ‘fins
cuer et bone volentez’ create a stronger love than the poison drunk by Tristan (in
Les Chansons courtoises de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Marie-Claire Gérard-Zai
(Frankfurt, 1974); Heinrich von Veldeke’s ‘Tristrant mù ste ãne sìne danc’, in
O’Donoghue, Courtly Love Tradition, pp. 218–19; and Amadas et Ydoine, ll. 81–2
of the Anglo-Norman fragment.
102. Malory, iii. 1165, 1171 (XX. 3, 6).
103. Malory, iii. 1120, 1252 (XVIII. 25, XXI.9).
104. Malory, iii. 1253 (XXI. 9).
105. Malory, iii. 1258 (XXI. 12).
106. Holinshed’s Chronicles, i. 580. He also questions whether Guinevere was unfaith-
ful at all, suggesting that both her marriage to Mordred and indeed any ‘incon-
tinencie and breach of faith to hir husband’ are slanders; but that was scarcely
enough to make her plausible as a national heroine.
chapter 7
1. Havelok, ed. Sands, ll. 604 (and note), 1262–3, 2139–45.

2. Valentine, ed. Dickson, p. 85.
3. Matthew Paris: Chronica Maiora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, Rolls Series 57, 7
vols. (London, 1872–83), iii. 497–8; Ann Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception
(London, 2003), pp. 119–20.
4. From Edward III through his second son Lionel; his daughter, Philippa; her son
Roger, earl of March; his daughter, Anne; and her son, Richard, duke of York,
Edward IV’s father. There was a shorter line of descent through Edward III’s
fourth son, but that was a cadet line to the Lancastrians, who were descended
from John of Gaunt, the third son.
5. Winter’s Tale, 3. 2. 134–5.
6. The tightening of the principles of primogeniture into rules with the force of law
took place predominantly in the twelfth century; Donald Maddox notes the ten-
dency to enhance genealogies with fiction at this period, describing it as a ‘dis-
tinct propensity to alloy biology with mythology’ (Fictions of Identity, pp. 171,
176).
7. Formulated c.1090 as that a king ‘fieri non possit nisi a Deo’, the principle was
picked up by Bracton: see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton,
1957), pp. 330–1. English kings were also ‘elected’ by acclamation, and in the later
Middle Ages endorsed by Parliament, but that was a post hoc procedure
confirming an implicit true kingship.
8. Frye, The Great Code, p. 46; and see p. 182 on the contrasting of past-directed
causality and future-directed typology.
9. FQ, II. x. 70–5.
11. Freud powerfully links the psychological and the literary in his ‘Family
Romances’, Works, ed. Strachey, ix. 237–41.
12. The Knight of the Swanne, in Early English Prose Romances, ed. Thoms, p. 726.
13. John Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Chronicles, ed. Peter J. Lucas, EETS 285 (1985),
p. 9.
14. Winter’s Tale, 3. 3. 32, 3. 2. 135. The naming is original to Shakespeare, who found
her in Pandosto merely as ‘Fawnia’.
15. Percy, iii.16–48, ll. 213–16.
16. In The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury, ll. 255–7. On the ety-
mology, see Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Old French “Degaré” and Middle English “Degarre”
and “Deswarre”’, Notes and Queries 17 (1970), 164–5.
17. Pandosto, ed. by Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, viii. 169; Winter’s Tale,
3. 2. 134–5.
18. King Edward III, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge, 1998), 5. 1. 87–8; for the date,
see pp. 3–5. The New Cambridge Shakespeare series includes the play on the
grounds, increasingly widely accepted, that at least part of it is by Shakespeare.
19. Lybeaus Desconus may have been written by Thomas Chestre, the early/
mid-fourteenth-century author of Sir Launfal and Octavian: see Maldwyn Mills’s
Introduction to his edition (EETS O.S. 261 (1969)). No print survives, but the
accuracy of the Percy text (ed. Hales and Furnivall, ii. 404–99) and an allusion of
1603 strongly indicate publication. Skelton lists it among other romances known
to have been printed in Philip Sparrow (ll. 649–50, in John Skelton: The Complete
English Poems, ed. by John Scattergood (Harmondsworth, 1983); before 1505?).
20. Sir Percyvell, ed. Mills, ll. 506, 1094; 545–76, 1107–8; 1572–647.
21. ‘Niht anders me, | wan der stolze degen vonme Sê. | Er ist durch neizwas namelôs’,
Ulrich, Lanzelet, ed. Spiewok, ll. 2293–5; trans. Webster, p. 56.
22. Knight of the Swanne, ed. Thoms, pp. 753–6, and the ‘Prologue of the Translatour’
from the original print. The fifteenth-century antiquarian John Rous claimed to
have drunk from the Beauchamp cup (Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in
England II (London, 1982), p. 324). The Bohuns also carried a swan badge in sign
of their descent, adopted by Henry V through his Bohun mother.
23. FQ, VI. ix. 14, xii. 3–22.
24. Malory, i.101 (III. 3). The ‘milkmaid’ detail is specific to English; French texts, here
and widely elsewhere, make such a victim of a countryside rape or seduction a
shepherdess.
25. Malory is less close as an analogue at this point: the dwarf in ‘The Tale of Sir
Gareth’ is Gareth’s own, who brings him his armour after he has been granted the
adventure. Spenser is unlikely to have known the Perceval story, as Percyvell is not
known to have been printed, and his enfances do not figure in Malory. On the par-
allels with ‘Gareth’, see the opening of Paul R. Rovang’s Refashioning ‘Knights and
Ladies Gentle Deeds’ (Madison and London, 1996), pp. 23–8.
26. ll. 116–19, in Hawes, Minor Poems, ed. by Gluck and Morgan, pp. 93–122.
27. So, for example, Ine, who became king of Wessex in 688; a twelfth-century
account, written at the very start of the romance era, has him called from the
plough to the throne by revelation from God. He proposes marriage to the queen
of the region north of the Humber, Aethelburgh, in order to unite their king-
doms, but she scornfully rejects the idea of marriage to a peasant; in a move more
characteristic of early romance, she is won over by sheer sexual desire when he
visits her incognito. See A Brief History of the Bishopric of Somerset from its
Foundation to the year 1174, in Ecclesiastical Documents, ed. Joseph Hunter,

Camden Society Old Series 8 (London, 1840); and Tony Davenport, ‘Chronicle
and Romance: The Story of Ine and Aethelburgh’, in Cultural Encounters in
Medieval English Romance, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge, 2004).
28. For its fullest development, see ‘The Stanley Poem’ written by Thomas Stanley,
bishop of Sodor and Man, around 1562 (printed in The Palatine Anthology, ed.
James Orchard Halliwell (London, 1850), pp. 208–71 (pp. 217–21)). The Eagle and
Child inn in Oxford, which dates from around 1650, memorializes the legend; it
is a medieval, not a classical, eagle and child.
29. See Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-poet (London, 1996), pp. 34–6.
30. The point is made by Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, pp. 154–5, in
relation to Shakespeare’s last plays.
31. See, in particular, Rosalind Field, ‘The King over the Water: Exile-and-return in
Insular Tradition’, in Cultural Encounters, ed. Saunders.
32. Capgrave, Abbreuiacion of Chronicles, ed. Lucas, p. 97 (under the years 1010–29).
33. See Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, in
Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol Meale (Cambridge, 1994),
pp. 121–34.
34. In other versions, Havelok is sometimes the name given to Curan’s father, or
Curan and Havelok are the two names the hero bears in his own identity and after
his dispossession; Goldeburh would seem to be a revaluing upwards of the merely
silver Argentille. G. V. Smithers’s edition of the romance outlines the numerous
early versions of the story and gives a table of the names (pp. xvi–xxi). The chron-
icle texts, in contrast to the Middle English romance version, do not fashion the
stories of hero and heroine as parallels.
36. A Collection of Old Ballads (possibly ed. by Ambrose Phillips; 3 vols. (London,
1723–5)), iii. 1–10. This supplements the other later versions described in Cooper,
‘The Elizabethan Havelok’.
37. For a survey of the evidence, see Ian Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of
Sir Roger Mortimer (London, 2003), pp. 244–64.
38. On these rumours, and comparable stories across Europe, see Simon Walker,
‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of King Henry IV’, Past and
Present 166 (2000), 31–65.
39. This is the central thesis of Ann Wroe’s Perkin; and see n. 54 below.
40. The prophecies are discussed by Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp.
498–501; and see Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, p. 63. The quotation is from
the coda at the end of the Thomas prophecies found in the 1652 printing of the elf-
queen version, Sundry Strange Prophecies, p. 27. Albrecht and Nixon omit these
lines from their texts of this version; they are on a new page after the end of the
medieval part of the prophecy, but they follow with no other break from the pre-
ceding text and in the same double-column verse format (which is unique to
Thomas in the volume). The coda seems to date from the middle of Mary’s reign
(‘Sice, that was lost in three, | Shall come again in six only’, i.e., 1553 and 1556), but
the print adds a 1596 date for the ‘sice’s’ return. See further pp. 385–6 below.
41. Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother (Cambridge,
1992), p. 69.
42. Francis Bacon succinctly summarized his difficulties in his History of the Reign of
King Henry VII, though even he avoids mentioning the complication of his still
living mother (ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 7–10).
43. Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, pp. 37–8. She in fact outlived her son
by a few months, so the sermon indicates a continuing anxiety over the succession
even in the next generation.
44. From The Most Pleasant Song of Lady Bessy, discussed further below (ed. by J. O.
Halliwell, Percy Society 20 (1847), p. 34; and see also Ian Baird, ‘Some Missing
Lines in Lady Bessy’, Library, 6th ser., 5 (1983), 268–9). The lines quoted come
from a later seventeenth-century manuscript, now untraceable, which seems to
preserve some authentic details not found in the earlier texts.
45. See Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the
John Rylands Library 44 (1961), 17–48, and the qualifications to that in his Images
of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992), pp. 40–60.
46. See Robert Huntington Fletcher, The Arthurian Materials in the Chronicles,
2nd edn., rev. by Roger Sherman Loomis (New York, 1966), pp. 241–9. The
tradition runs from John of Fordun (1385) to Hector Boece (1527) and his
translators.
47. Pietro Carmeliano, Giovanni de’ Giglis and Bernard André all made the compar-
ison, though in phrasing drawn as much from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (the
‘Messianic’ prophecy) as romance: see Anglo, ‘British History’, pp. 29–30.
48. Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 425–73.
49. Sir George Buck, History of King Richard III, ed. Arthur Noel Kincaid (Gloucester,
1979), p. 38; Henry VI Pt 3, 4. 7. 65–76. Buck, still in 1618 an ardent Yorkist, holds
it against Henry Tudor that he illegitimately pre-empted what Providence would
have arranged for him anyway; contrast FQ, III. iii. 25 on the need for ‘mens good
endevours’ to ‘guide the heavenly causes’ to the outcome that would happen
regardless.
50. ll. 2053–71, in Hawes, Minor Poems, ed. Gluck and Morgan, pp. 68–9.
51. See Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, pp. 181–2; Helen Cooper,
‘Romance after Bosworth’, in The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn
Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 149–57.
52. She is completely unnamed in the original French metrical romance; the prose
romance does, in fact, once give her her proper name, deep within the narrative
(see Blanchardyn, ed. Kellner, p. 36), contrary to my discussion of the work in
‘Romance after Bosworth’, pp. 151–2. The prominence given to her name by
Caxton is none the less original, and presumably also intentional.
53. ‘The eglantine, by which I mean England’ as the chronicler Jean Molinet put it, in
the course of his account of Perkin Warbeck (‘l’englentier, par qui j’e[nt]ens
Engleterre’: Chroniques, ed. Buchon, v. 49); for English examples, see Anglia as
looking ‘like eglantine’ in Holme, Fall and euill Successe, sig. I.iii v, and Gorges’
use of the eglantine as ‘the Albion flowre’ to symbolize Elizabeth (The Poems of Sir
Arthur Gorges, ed. Helen Easterbrook Sanderson (Oxford, 1953), no. 100).
54. From the lyric ‘In a gloryus garden grene’, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins, Historical
Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), pp. 93–4. It is preserved
in a court songbook, so the equation of its ‘queen’ with Elizabeth of York seems
inevitable; but it is still odd that it should be the Yorkist rose that is described as
ruling ‘by rightwise law’, a claim that would not have pleased Henry. Ann Wroe’s
suggestion that it refers to Perkin Warbeck, the supposed Richard of York, seems
too subversive for the manuscript context (Perkin, p. 449).
55. Blanchardyn, ed. Kellner, pp. 122–3.
56. i.e., the usurpation was not ‘by the consente of the noblemen of the countree’.
57. The Hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, ed. Gail Orgelfinger (New York, 1988),
pp. 206–7.
58. See Percy, iii. 319–63; Stowe’s copy is printed with the later seventeenth-century
manuscript by Halliwell, The Most Pleasant Song. In so far as the story has a hero,
it is Humphrey Brereton of Malpas, Elizabeth’s envoy; the Breretons were in the
Stanley affinity, and the poem may have originated in their household. The poem
borrows from Bosworth Field, also preserved in the Percy Folio (3. 233–59), which
treats the claims of Richard and Henry with exceptional even-handedness, and
which appears to date from before Sir William Stanley’s execution in 1495; Lady
Bessy includes a reference to that at the end. See Cooper, ‘Romance after
Bosworth’, pp. 154–6.
59. Percy text, l. 440, but similar lines are recurrent: see 188, 600, 604, 620, 752. The
plotting for Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry was in fact carried out by Lady
Margaret Beaufort; there is no evidence outside this poem for the princess’s per-
sonal involvement.
60. Bacon, in his Life of Henry VII, declared that Henry’s actions (or failure to act)
‘hath so muffled it that it hath left it almost as a mystery to this day’ (ed. Vickers,
p. 96); Thomas Gainsford, in his True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck
(1618), came down firmly on the side of impersonation; and Sir George Buck in his
History of King Richard III argued passionately for his being what he claimed to be.
61. The play does not make mention of the confession that Warbeck signed after his
capture, except in so far as he persistently refuses to confirm such an identity
(John Ford: Three Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Harmondsworth, 1970)). Ford used
Gainsford and Bacon as his sources.
62. Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity, pp. 172, 177–86 (he offers the term specifically
for those rare women who start a dynasty from nothing). On the less beneficent
mother-marks of Melusine’s children, see p. 383 below.
63. It was on display in the 2003 ‘Elizabeth’ exhibition at the National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich.
64. See Cooper, ‘The Elizabethan Havelok’; Foxe, Ecclesiasticall Historie, p. 1987; and
Thomas Heywood, If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody; or, The Troubles of
Queen Elizabeth (1605) (Oxford, 1934), ll. 1184–90. Compare also her remark in a
speech to Parliament in 1576, on her intention of remaining single: ‘If I were a
milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little set by,
I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with the greatest monarch’
(J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments (London, 1953), p. 366).
65. See the last eight lines of Warner, Albions England, Book IV, ch. 20; and Anne
Somerset, Elizabeth I (London, 1991), pp. 99–100.
66. From his Commentary on the Book of Domus Dei, quoted in Buck, History of King
Richard III, ed. Kincaid, p. xxxii.
67. FQ, II. x. 70–6, III. iii. 26–49; and see also Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History
(Oxford, 2002), pp. 164–96.
68. Ed. by J. W. Cunliffe in Early English Classical Tragedies (Oxford, 1912); and by
Brian J. Corrigan (New York, 1992), though his claim that its source is the alliter-
ative Morte Arthure is certainly wrong—heavy alliteration is typical of mid-
Elizabethan poetry. The play is discussed further below, pp. 404–5.
69. Merry Wives 5. 3. 55–72 (from the Folio text). It was probably written for the feast
of the Order of the Garter held in April 1597, and may have been acted at the feast
at Whitehall preceding the installation of the new knights at Windsor. The Arden
edition by H. J. Oliver (London, 1971) assembles what is known or conjectured
about the play (pp. xliv–xlix), and later editors and critics have concurred. The
title page of the 1602 quarto makes the claim that it had been acted before the
queen; it is a ‘bad quarto’, most likely a memorial reconstruction (pp. xiii–xxxvii),
but there is no particular reason to doubt its claim.
70. Commentary on the play’s relation to Elizabeth has been largely focused through
its Garter connections: see Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Garter Plays
(Newark, 1994).
71. On the possibility that Shakespeare ‘learned from Chaucer’s Parlement a certain
plotting of poetic language and history’, see Theresa M. Krier, ‘The Aim was Song:
From Narrative to Lyric in the Parlement of Foules and Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in
Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Krier (Gainesville, 1998), pp. 165–88
(p. 166 quoted).
72. See Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism 11 (1961), 84–99.
73. Hackett notes that the double meaning is especially common in the Winter’s Tale
(Women and Romance Fiction, pp. 154–5).
74. Multiplying in good deeds was the preferred Catholic exegesis of Genesis 1:28,
God’s instruction to ‘be fruitful, and multiply’.
75. On the wider use of phoenix imagery for the unbroken line of kingship, see
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 385–95; and for Elizabeth herself, Elkin
Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (1938; repr. New York, 1966), pp. 23, 27, 244 and
facing plate (the Phoenix Jewel).
76. History of the World, 2nd edn. (London, 1617), Preface, sig. B2r. On the implica-
tions for historiography of reading everything as part of a divine plan, see Arthur
B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in
Renaissance England (Durham, NC, 1979), esp. p. 18.
chapter 8
1. See the discussion in Hayden White, ‘Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in his
Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 84–92.
2. Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and
Irene Samuel (Oxford, 1973) p. 50.
3. Helen Cooper, ‘Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-killing in the Prose
Romances’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen
Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 141–62. The late fifteenth-century
prose Siege of Jerusalem, which has as its central events not just the destruction of
the city but the cannibalism to which its starving inhabitants resort, has none of
the idealizing markers of courtesy or love or adventure that set audience expecta-
tions for romance, and is, therefore, not considered here.
4. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca and London, 1981), p. 102.
5. George Steiner, ‘Roncevaux’, in The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Werner
Sollers (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 299.
6. See p. 58 above; and, for a more extensive discussion of the transformation of the
romance, Helen Cooper, ‘The Strange History of Valentine’, pp. 153–68.
7. Valentine, ed. Dickson, p. 163.
8. See p. 81 above.
9. Malory, i. 89 (II. 17).
10. Malory, i. 89, 91 (II. 18, 19).
11. See further, Elspeth Kennedy, ‘Failure in Arthurian Romance’, Medium Ævum 60
(1991), 16–32.
12. The strength of the pun is emphasized by the manuscript reading ‘non’ (for the
editors’ ‘mon’): no one may conceal his failure without misfortune. The verb
‘hitte’ is not normally intransitive in Middle English, so the attractiveness of
translating the phrase as ‘lest disaster strike’ is a false friend; but it can carry the
meaning ‘come true’ or ‘be verified’ (MED ‘hitten’, 3c).
13. Boethius’ Philosophy explains that randomness increases with distance from the
centre, God; cf. Knight’s Tale, CT, I. 3007–10, where Theseus argues that although
the natural world takes its origin from something perfect and stable, it ‘descend[s]
so til it be corrumpable’.
14. CT, VII. 2771–4.
15. Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman antique’ (Cambridge,
1992), p. 248.
16. For more extensive discussion, see Helen Cooper, ‘Jacobean Chaucer: The Two
Noble Kinsmen and other Chaucerian Plays’, in Krier (ed.), Refiguring Chaucer,
pp. 189–209.
17. 1. 3. 35–85 for the debate on heterosexual versus same-sex love; 1. 3. 18–22 on the
Amazons’ experience of war; and 3. 3 for the lovers’ joking about the women they
have seduced and ruined.
18. Thomas Gent, an Irishman who set up a publishing business in York, wrote a
verse life of Judas that devotes six pages to the casting adrift (Judas Iscariot (York,
1772), reprinted in Yorkshire Chap-books, ed. Charles A. Federer, 1st ser. (London,
1889), pp. 205–10; Gent probably wrote it some decades earlier (p. 11)).
19. The South English Legendary, ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, EETS O.S.
236 (1956), pp. 692–7, ll. 23–4. The legend originated in Latin in the twelfth century;
it was most widely disseminated through the legend of St Matthias, who took his
place as apostle after the Betrayal, in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It
also appears in Middle English in Judas’s introductory monologue to the Suspensio
Judae in the Towneley cycle of mystery plays. Thomas Gent adds the detail that the
baby carries a double birthmark of a cross and a gibbet (in Yorkshire Chap-Books,
ed. Federer, p. 206).
20. The phrase is the linking colophon at the end of Vinaver’s section 7, which he uses
as a heading for the final section: see iii. 1154. Caxton omits the phrase.
21. From the anonymous mid-fifteenth-century translation, Merlin, ed. Wheatley,
p. 579. The kin-killing is a synecdoche for civil war as well as being a specific ref-
erence to Mordred: see further p. 403 below.
22. On the rival interpretations of magic as divine or devilish, see John S. Mebane,
Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (Lincoln, Nebr., and London,
1989). Fairies were interpreted by the witch-hunters as devils rather than as a sep-
arate order outside the human, angelic, and diabolic.
23. This is the driving argument of his Religion and the Decline of Magic.
24. William of Palerne, ed. Bunt, l. 120. She turns into an attractive character at the
end, reassuring her de-wolfed stepson that he needn’t be ashamed of his naked-
ness because he is all that a man should be, bathing him ‘curtesli’, and being
greeted as ‘swete lady hende’ by William (4443–80).
25. For the development of English legislation, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline
of Magic, pp. 521–34.
26. Gervase of Tilbury: Otia Imperialia, ed. Banks and Binns, pp. 118–19. He also insists
that precious stones have intrinsic virtues that can be enhanced by God through
consecration, pp. 614–19.
27. The French text was first printed in 1489, having been composed probably within
the dozen or so years before that. Direct influence from the Malleus even on its
later English readers is highly unlikely, as the work remained little known in
England (Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 523).
28. Valentine, ed. Dickson, pp. 142 (Pacolet at the ‘scole of tollette’, Toledo), 168
(Adramayne ‘had learned so wel the arte of tollette’).
29. Valentine, ed. Dickson, pp. 255–7 (Valentine’s anxiety is less about the treachery
itself than its being ascribed to him); p. 272.
30. Richard Cœur de Lion, ed. Brunner, ll. 188–234.
31. The Armenian episode is emphasized in the French metrical version of the
romance composed early in the fifteenth century, a few years after the prose; for
its political context, see Laurence Harf-Lancner’s Introduction to her moderniza-
tion of this text, Coudrette: Le Roman de Melusine (Paris, 1993), pp. 26–35. My
discussion here follows the briefer version appended to the prose romance. The
metrical text was also translated into English, as the Romance of Partenay; see in
particular ll. 5619–28, 5682–91 (ed. Skeat).
32. See Maddox, Fictions of Identity, p. 178.
33. Melusine, ed. Donald, p. 15.
34. The term is Donald Maddox’s, Fictions of Identity, p. 178.
35. Melusine, ed. Donald, pp. 64–5.
36. Ibid, p. 298.
38. Sundry Strange Prophecies, p. 27; and see also, p. 345 above.
39. See Antonia Fraser, Cromwell our Chief of Men (London, 1973), pp. 400–33.
40. William Caxton, The History of Jason translated from the French of Raoul Lefevre,
ed. John Munro, EETS E.S. 111 (1913), p. 198. She promises not to practise any
more ‘enchantements ne none other malefices’ unless she tells him first.
41. These are the dates of their entry in the Stationers’ Register; no copies survive from
before the sixth (1631) impression (STC 14684).
42. Ed. Thoms, Early English Prose Romances, p. 621 (the Pleasant Historie is on
pp. 603–54, the Second Part on pp. 655–90).
43. Tom a Lincolne, Part II, ed. Thoms, p. 657.
44. It is probably taken from Novel 38 in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, (1st edn.
(1566); Bullough prints the 1575 edn., Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ii. 373–96),
though there is a possibility that he used a French translation of Boccaccio’s story.
The subplot is apparently his own invention.
45. William of Palerne, ed. Bunt, ll. 445–6; the corresponding section of the printed
version does not survive. The continuing familiarity of such a motif in the hero-
ine’s mouth is proved by its reappearance in Tom a Lincoln (p. 630, Valentine’s
lover; p. 644, Anglitora).
46. In the Painter, she presents her husband with the twins she has borne, and he rec-
ognizes them as his because ‘they were so like hym’ (Bullough, ii. 396). The play
text indicates that she is just pregnant, since she presents him with his letter and
ring but still ‘feels her young one kick’.
47. Winter’s Tale, 1. 2. 69–88.
48. See Newcomb, ‘The Triumph of Time’.
49. The Knight of Curtesy, ed. McCausland, l. 48; cf. also 87–96. It appears among the
books listed in the mid-1570s in Robert Langham’s Letter. On its sources, see note
95 on p. 488. The core motif of the eaten heart is most widely known through
Boccaccio’s story of Guiscardo and Sigismonda, though the Knight of Curtesy
shows no influence from it; the Boccaccio does, however, probably underlie the
ballad of Lady Diamond (Child, Ballads, no. 269, v. 29–38), in which the lady eats
the heart of the kitchen-boy who has made her pregnant.
50. Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, possibly by way of a French translation: see
Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vii. 194.
51. 3. 4. 100; and see p. 163 above.
52. The Folio reading ‘Iudean’ in 5. 2. 356, indicating Judas Iscariot as the traitor who
destroyed someone of infinite worth, in place of ‘Indian’, the ignorant man who
cannot recognize value when he sees it, would fit attractively with this line of argu-
ment; but since ‘Indian’ scans and ‘Iudean’ does not, the Folio reading is over-
whelmingly likely to be simply the result of a turned n.
54. 5. 1. 64.
55. From Bodleian MS Rawlinson D 82, a paper manuscript without watermarks; the
handwriting probably dates from after 1450. In Friedrich Brie’s edn. (‘Zwei mitte-
lenglische Prosaromane’, Anglia, 130 (1913), 40–52, 269–85), Thebes runs from
pp. 47–52, 269–72; Troy from pp. 272–85.
56. Quotations up until the last from Brie’s edn., pp. 47–52; ‘with bright baners . . .’
from p. 270.
57. John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, EETS E.S. 121–4 (1924–7),
Vol. 3, viii. 2703–870 (2855–6, 2759 quoted).
58. Lydgate’s Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Ernst Sieper, EETS E.S. 84 (1901),
ll. 3140–210; Lydgate has Diana choose Arthur’s court as the exemplum of good love.
59. The argument that the Alliterative Morte Arthure punishes Arthur for his hubris,
his overweening pride, does not receive any significant support from the text. In
contradiction of the general moral emphasis of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Arthur’s
is one of the very few falls ascribed solely to envious Fortune.
60. Malory, ii. 698–700 (X. 58).
61. Malory, iii. 1183 (XX. 9).
62. Guinevere blames their love for ‘the deth of the most nobelest knyghtes of the
worlde’ and commits herself to a life of religious penance (Malory, iii. 1252 (XXI.
9)), but even she does not claim that it was God’s punishment.
63. The French treatment is very different, describing the battle as a series of long-
drawn-out individual combats. Malory is here following the ballad-like stanzaic
Morte Arthur (in King Arthur’s Death, ed. L. D. Benson, rev. by Edward E. Foster,
3rd edn. (Kalamazoo, 2000), ll. 3358–83).
64. ‘The Union of the Red Rose and the White’, in A Collection of Old Ballads, ed.
Phillips, ii. 106–14.
65. Early English Classical Tragedies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Oxford, 1912), pp. 217–97,
p. 224; and see also III. iv. 21, ‘I made my sister bad’—and by Elizabethan con-
ventions of twinhood he could hardly have failed to recognize her anyway. The
original text as printed includes a number of variant speeches written by other
members of Gray’s Inn, which substituted for some of Hughes’s.
66. Richard Robinson’s 1582 translation of the antiquary John Leland’s ‘O scelera: o
mores: o corrupta tempora’, in his 1544 Assertio inclytissimi Arturii, ed.
W. E. Mead, EETS O.S. 165 (1925), as part of the issue titled for Middleton’s
Chinon of England; see pp. 63, 129.
67. From the Chorus that closes Act I, ll. 21–4.
68. See p. 24 and n. 54.
69. Quotation from 4. 6. 38 of the Folio ‘Tragedy’ text (21. 43 of the Quarto ‘History’:
Wells and Taylor print the texts in sequence). Lear’s ‘Look there!’, inviting
performance as a belief that she still breathes, appears only in the Folio.
70. Percy, ii. 390–9 (ll. 183–4 quoted).
71. From his concluding note on Lear in his edition of Shakespeare: ‘Since all rea-
sonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the obser-
vation of justice makes a play worse . . . I was many years ago so shocked by
Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last
scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor’ (Johnson on
Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, 1968), ii. 704).
72. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, ed. James Black (Lincoln, Nebr., 1975),
V. vi. 159–60.
Bibliography
Anonymous works are listed by title; anthologies are listed under the surname of
the editor. For further information on individual romances contained within
anthologies, see Appendix.
primary
Alexander: The Prose Life of Alexander, ed. J. S. Westlake, EETS O.S. 143 (1913).
—— see also Hay; Kyng Alisaunder.
Alsop, Thomas, Fair Custance, in Franklin B. Williams, ‘Alsop’s Fair Custance:
Chaucer in Tudor Dress’, ELR 6 (1976), 351–68.
Amadas et Ydoine: Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. John R. Reinhard, CFMA (Paris:
Honoré Champion, 1926).
Amadas and Ydoine, trans. Ross G. Arthur (New York and London: Garland,
1993).
Amadis de Gaule: see Munday.
Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth,
1982).
—— see also Brook.
An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl, EETS OS 196
(1935).
Anton, Robert, Moriomachia (London: Simon Stafford, 1613).
Apollonius of Tyre: see [secondary], Archibald.
Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, ed. Lanfranco Caretti, 2nd edn. (Turin:
Einaudi, 1992).
—— see also Harington.
Arthur, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS O.S. 2 (1864).
Arthur: Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, EETS 268, 279 (1973,
1979).
Arthur of Little Britain, trans. John Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. E. V. Utterson
(London: White, Cochrane, 1814).
Ascham, Roger, Roger Ascham: English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904, repr. 1970).
The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1,
intro. Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (London: Scolar Press in associa-
tion with the National Library of Scotland, 1979).
500 Bibliography
Augustine, Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1961).
Bacon, Francis, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII and Selected Works, ed.
Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Baldwin, William, Beware the Cat by William Baldwin: The First English Novel, ed.
William Ringler, jr, and Michael Flachmann (San Marino: Huntington
Library, 1988).
Bateman, Stephen, The Trauayled Pylgrime (London: H. Denham, 1569).
Beaumont, Francis, and Fletcher, John, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and
Fletcher Canon, general editor Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966–96).
Benson, L. D. (ed.), King Arthur’s Death (1974; repr. Exeter: Exeter University
Press, 1986).
Berners: see Arthur of Little Britain, Huon of Bordeaux.
Bevis of Hamton: The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun, ed. Eugen Kölbing,
EETS E.S. 46, 48 65. (1885, 1886, 1894) (also 1-vol. reprint, Kraus, New York:
1978).
——Syr Beuis of Hampton (London: W. Copland, ?1565).
——Syr Beuis of Hampton (London: T. East, ?1585).
Biket, Robert, Le Lai du Corn, ed. E. T. Erickson, Anglo-Norman Text Society 24
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
Blake, William, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London:
Nonesuch Press, 1932).
Blamires, Alcuin (ed.), with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, Woman Defamed and
Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992).
Blanchardyn and Eglantine, see Caxton’s Blanchardyn.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca, 2nd edn. (Turin: Einaudi,
1984).
——Opere I, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, Scrittori d’Italia 167 (Bari: Laterza, 1938).
Bodel, Jean, La Chanson des Saisnes, ed. Annette Brasseur, TLF, 2 vols. (Geneva:
Droz, 1989).
Bowdler, Thomas (ed.), The Family Shakespeare (London, 1807).
Braswell, Mary Flowers (ed.), Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain
(Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1995).
Brendan, see Navigatio; O’Donaghue.
Brie, Friedrich (ed.), ‘Zwei mittelenglische Prosaromane: The Sege of Thebes und
The Sege of Troy’, Anglia 130 (1913), 40–52, 269–85.
Brook, Leslie C. (ed.), Two Late Medieval Love Treatises, Medium Ævum
Monographs, 16 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediæval Languages and
Literature, 1993).
Brooke, C. F. Tucker (ed.), The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1908).
Bibliography 501
Brown, Carleton (ed.), English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1932).
The Brut; or, The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS O.S. 131,
136 (1906, 1908).
Bryan, W. F., and Dempster, Germaine (eds), Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales (1941; repr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1958).
Buck, George, History of King Richard III, ed. Arthur Noel Kincaid (Gloucester:
Alan Sutton, 1979).
Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols.
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press,
1957–75).
Bunyan, John, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. T. L. Underwood and
Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding, ed. Roger Sharrock
(London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Il Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, see Fiorio.
Capgrave, John, John Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Chronicles, ed. Peter J. Lucas,
EETS 285 (1985).
Caxton, William, Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Eglantine, c.1489, ed. Leon Kellner,
EETS E.S. 58 (1890).
—— The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry Translated by William Caxton, ed.
A. T. P. Byles, EETS O.S. 168 (1926).
—— Christine de Pisan: The Book of the Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye, ed.
A. T. P. Byles, EETS O.S. 189 (1932).
—— The Golden Legend; or Lives, of the Saints Englished by William Caxton, ed.
by F. S. Ellis, Temple Classics, 7 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1900).
—— The History of Jason translated from the French of Raoul Lefevre, ed. John
Munro, EETS E.S. 111 (1913).
—— The Right Pleasant and Goodly History of the Four Sons of Aymon, ed.
Octavia Richardson, EETS E.S. 44, 45 (1884–5).
—— Paris and Vienne Translated from the French and Printed by William Caxton,
ed. M. Leach, EETS O.S. 234 (1957).
Cervantes, Miguel de: see Shelton.
Chatelain de Coucy: see Jakemes; Knight of Curtesy.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, general ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Chevelere Assigne: The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, ed. Henry H. Gibbs,
EETS E.S. 6 (1868).
Child, Francis James (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols.
(1882–98; repr. New York: Dover, 1965).
Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances, trans. by William W. Kibler
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
502 Bibliography
Chrétien de Troyes, Les Chansons courtoises de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Marie-

Claire Gérard-Zai (Frankfurt and Berne: Lang, 1974).
—— Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes I: Erec et Enide, ed. Mario Roques, CFMA
(Paris: Champion, 1981).
—— Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes II: Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha, CFMA
(Paris: Champion, 1982).
—— Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes III: Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Mario
Roques, CFMA (Paris: Champion, 1978).
—— Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes IV: Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed.
Mario Roques, CFMA (Paris: Champion, 1965).
—— Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes V–VI: Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), ed.
Félix Lecoy, 2 vols., CFMA (Paris: Champion, 1975) .
Christina of Markyate: The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-century
Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot, rev. edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Christine de Pizan, The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, trans. Brian Anslay (London:
Henry Pepwell, 1521).
—— The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1999).
—— Book of Fayttes of Armes: see Caxton, Christine.
—— La Città delle Dame, ed. Patrizia Caraffi and Earl Jeffrey Richards (Milan:
Luni Editrice, 1998).
Cyuile and Vnciuile Life (London: R. Jones, 1579).
Clyomon and Clamydes, ed. Betty J. Littleton, Studies in English Literature 35 (The
Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1968).
Colville, John, Original Letters of Mr John Colville 1582–1603, ed. David Laing
(Edinburgh: Bannatayne Club, 1858).
The Complaynt of Scotland (c.1550) by Mr Robert Wedderburn, ed. A. M. Stewart,
Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1979).
Coudrette: Le Roman de Mélusine, intro. and trans. Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris:
Flammarion, 1993).
Coudrette: Le Roman de Mélusine ou histoire de Lusignan par Coudrette, ed.
Eleanor Roach, Bibliothèque française et romane (Paris: Klincksieck, 1982).
Crosse, Henry, Vertue’s Commonwealth by Henry Crosse (1603), ed. Alexander B.
Grosart (Manchester: privately printed, 1878).
Cunliffe, John W. (ed.), Early English Classical Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1912).
Cursor mundi I, ed. Richard Morris, EETS O.S. 57 (1874).
Dekker, Thomas: The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 3
vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–8).
Degrevant: see Sir Degrevant.
De origine gigantum: James P. Carley and Julia Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s Past:
An annotated Edition of De origine gigantum’, Arthurian Literature 13 (1995),
41–114.
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Des grants Geanz, ed. G. E. Brereton, Medium Ævum Monographs 2 (Oxford:
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Donne, John, John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, corr. edn.
Drayton, Michael, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1961).
Eger and Grime, ed. James Ralston Caldwell, Harvard Studies in Comparative
Literature 9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).
Eglamour: see Sir Eglamour of Artois.
Eilhart von Oberge: Tristrant und Isalde, ed. and trans. Danielle Buschinger and
Wolfgang Spiewok, WODAN 27 (Greifswald: Reinecke Verlag, 1993).
Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant, trans. J. W. Thomas (Lincoln, Nebraska, and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).
Eneas, roman du XIIe siècle, ed. J. J. Salverda de Grave, CFMA 44, 62 (Paris:
Champion, 1925, 1929).
Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance, trans. John A. Yunck (New York and
London: Columbia University Press, 1974).
Etienne of Rouen, Draco Normannicus, in Howlett (ed.), Chronicles of the Reigns
of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ii. 585–762.
Fairfax, Edward (trans.), Godfrey of Bulloigne, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and
T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
Federer, Charles A. (ed.), Yorkshire Chap-books, 1st ser. (London: Elliot Stock, 1889).
Fellows, Jennifer (ed.), Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English
Romance, Everyman (London: J. M. Dent, 1993).
Fiorio e Biancifiore: Il Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, ed. Vincenzo Crescini, Scelta
di curiosità di letterarie inedite o rare 233, 249 (1889; repr. Bologna:
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Flamenca: The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. E. D. Blodgett (New York:
Garland, 1995).
Fletcher, John: The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, general
editor Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Floire et Blancheflor: Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche,
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Floire et Blancheflor: seconde version, ed. Margaret M. Pelan, Association des pub-
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Florés Saga ok Blankiflúr, ed. Eugen Kölbing, Altnordische Saga-Bibliothek 5
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Index
adultery 28, 270, 273, 274–6, 281, 307–22, Ascham, Roger 38, 320
404 Ashley, Robert 444 n. 101
advice to princes 56 Athelstan 112, 114
Agnes, St 250 Auchinleck manuscript 30, 409, 413, 416,
Alain de Lille 241, 244 419, 420, 423–7 passim, 453 n. 102
Albina 115–16, 411 Auerbach, Erich 69
Alexander 6, 74; romances of 411 Augustine, St 37, 246
Alexander III, Pope 222
Alexis, St 89, 94 Bacon, Francis 492 n. 42, 493 n. 60
allegory 10, 83–6, 99–104, 242–3; magic in Banyster, Edward 38, 410
164–5; see also Quest of the Holy Grail barca aventurosa 107, 129, 133–5; see also
Alsop, Thomas 128, 415 rudderless boats
Amadas et Ydoine 145, 201–3, 223–5, 237, Barinthus 124, 129
291–2; Ydoine 297 Bateman, Stephen 103–4
Amadis de Gaule 28, 35, 38, 39, 71, 110, 334; bears 432 n. 6; abduction by 284, 339;
Oriana 355 bearsuits 1, 8, 229; on stage 1–2, 137;
ancestral romance 120, 353 in Winter’s Tale 342; see also
Ancrene Wisse 84, 249 Valentine and Orson
Andreas Capellanus 308–12; De amore in Beaufort, Lady Margaret 346, 348–9, 382,
England 310–11 493 n. 59
Angevin empire 22, 26 beauty of heroine 15–20
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 123 Beowulf 6, 108, 326
Anonymous Short English Metrical Berners, John Bourchier, Lord 35; see also
Chronicle 115, 422, 442 n. 85 Arthur of Little Britain; Huon of
Anton, Robert 44 Bordeaux
Apollonius of Tyre 35, 266, 300–1; conspec- Bevis of Hamton 30, 38, 142, 247, 413; Bevis
tus of versions 411–12; Apollonius 361; printed editions 3, 36; used by
121; see also Shakespeare, Pericles Bunyan 3, 32, 90–1; used by
Ariosto, Ludovico 34, 75–6; Orlando Shakespeare and Spenser 31–2
Furioso 28, 54, 117, 131, 303, 414; magic Biket, Robert 315
in 142, 164; as source for Spenser 191, Blake, William 221
252, 318 Blanchardyn and Eglantine 225, 348–9,
Aristotle 271, 398 413–14
arms, symbolic 42, 51, 102, 104, 165, 205; Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, as source
magic lance 253; magic sword and of All’s Well 392; of Franklin’s Tale
scabbard 138, 143, 165; sword as 157; of Frederyke of Jennen 275; and
recognition token 329; see also shield Knight of Curtesy 497 n. 49; Il Filocolo
Arthur, King 22, 347, 355; legend of 24, 156
342; conspectus of romances 412–13; Bodel, Jean 439 n. 64
campaign against Rome 194; as ‘fair Boleyn, Anne 276–8, 353–4
unknown’ 55, 332; death 129, 185, 186, Bowdler, Thomas 264, 482 n. 99
347, 403; see also Guinevere; Hughes; Boy and the Mantle 316
Malory; Morte Arthur ; Morte Brendan, St 74, 124–5
Arthure ; Of Arthour and of Merlin Brut, prose 265, 343, 420; see also
Arthur of Little Britain 185, 413 Layamon, Wace
534 Index
Brutus (Brut) 24, 115, 414 297, 309; Conte du Graal (Perceval)
Buck, George 355, 493 n. 60; quoted 348 21, 46, 60–2, 100, 332–3; Erec et Enide
Bunyan, John, 3, 32, 68, 98, 102; and Bevis 56, 185, 239; Yvain (Chevalier au Lion)
32, 90–1; Christian 78, 85, 99–100; 87, 102, 146–8, 204
Faithful 323 Christina of Markyate 248
Butler, Samuel, Hudibras 40 Christine de Pizan 273
Bynum, Caroline Walker 49, 143 Churchyard, Thomas 179
Byrth and Prophecye of Marlyn 191, 424; see Cleanness 119–20, 244–5
also Of Arthour and of Merlin Clyomon and Clamydes 64, 258, 425
Colville, John 195
Camoens 75 Complaynt of Scotland 90, 410
Capgrave, John 329–30, 341–2, 421 condemnations of romance 37–9, 90,
Carle of Carlisle 418, 472 n. 90 410–11, 441 n. 79
Catherine of Aragon, see Katherine Constance 127–8; see also Chaucer, Man of
Caxton, William 34, 343, 348–9; Preface to Law’s Tale
Morte Darthur 307, 316; see also Four Cortes 76
Sons of Aymon; Golden Legend; courtly love 26, 308; see also love, termi-
Lefevre; Lull, Book; Paris and Vienne nology for
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 39, Cox, Captain, see Laneham, Robert
106–8 Cox of Collumpton 431 n. 5
Charlemagne 56; romances 6, 363, 414; see cross-dressing, female to male 279, 281,
also Huon of Bordeaux ; Sowdone of 301; male to female 258–60, 299, 301;
Babylone see also women warriors
Chatelain de Coucy 318; see also Knight of Crosse, Henry, Vertue’s Commonwealth
Curtesy 410, 443 n. 98
Chaucer, Geoffrey: crusades 42, 99
afterlife of writings 128, 158–9, 174, Cyuile and Unciuile Life 436 n. 39
374–5, 414–16
women in 16–20, 304 Dante 34, 70
Canterbury Tales: Day, Angel 335
Franklin’s Tale 27, 141, 157–8, 253, 475 n. 22 Dekker, Thomas 128; ‘Magnificent
Knight’s Tale 12, 16–17, 48, 64, 141, 372–5 Entertainment’ 196–7; Virgin
Man of Law’s Tale 116–17, 127–8, 294, Martyr 251; Whore of Babylon 189,
295–6; Constance 287 190, 209
Merchant’s Tale 19, 174, 176, 200 Deloney, Thomas 422
Nun’s Priest’s Tale 19–20, 422, 485 n. 53 Dering, Edward 410
Squire’s Tale 138 Des grants Geanz 411, 456 n. 20
Tale of Sir Thopas 19–20, 48–9, 138, 180, Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed [1530],
235; elf-queen 141, 174 quoted 299
Wife of Bath’s Prologue 297 Dickens, Charles, 1; Oliver Twist 328
Wife of Bath’s Tale 48–9, 181, 204–5, Donne, John 20, 257, 476 n. 29
214–15, 226 Drayton, Michael 95, 412, 415, 419, 421
Parliament of Fowls 243, 304–6, 358
Troilus and Criseyde 18–19, 21, 48, 227, Earl of Toulouse 278–9, 416
230, 242, 372 Edmund, St 457 n. 38
see also Greene, Greene’s Vision Edward II 344
Chestre, Thomas 440 n. 71, 490 n. 19; see Edward IV 325, 329
also Sir Launfal Edward VI 1, 345
Chevelere Assigne 279; see also Knight of Eger and Grime 36, 58, 82, 416,
the Swan 462 n. 28
Chrétien de Troyes 12, 26–7, 43, 73; eglantine, as symbol of England 349
Chevalier de la Charrette 26, 28, 84, Eilhart von Oberge 232, 459 n. 54
102, 145, 308–9, 438 n. 57; Cligés 233, Elaine of Ascolat 130–1, 240
Index 535
Elizabeth I 179, 187, 257, 277–8, 323, 353–5, Foucault, Michel 219
492 n. 53; and fairy queen 22, 181; and Four Sons of Aymon 39, 89–90, 167, 379, 417
Shakespeare 216–17, 352, 358, 359–60; Foxe, John 250–1, 354, 355
at Kenilworth 207–9; sexuality 185, Frederyke of Jennen 275, 279, 296–7
211; virginity 96, 325–6; death 195, Freud, Sigmund 48; uncanny 82
327; see also Dekker, Whore; Spenser, Frye, Northrop 5, 57, 72, 326
Faerie Queene, Gloriana
Elizabeth of York 346, 349; see also Lady Gamelyn 36, 264, 417
Bessy Garter, Thomas 275
Emaré 126–7, 330, 475 n. 18 Gawain 6, 34, 142–3; conspectus of
Emperor and the Child 283, 407–8, 429 romances 417–18; see also Sir Gawain
enchanters 157, 164, 166–7, 171–2, 379–81; and the Green Knight
enchantresses 18, 79–80, 129–35, 145, gaze 238–9; female 19, 234, 236–7; male 17,
160–4; see also Merlin; Morgan; 250
witchcraft geis 204, 210
Eneas, Roman de 25–6, 72; Lavine 227–8, Generides 38, 186, 312–13, 318–19, 332,
231–2, 388 418–19
English language 7, 11–12 Gent, Thomas 495 n. 18
Erasmus 223 gentilesse 9, 328, 392; gentility 338–404
Esplandian 76 Geoffrey of Monmouth 27, 404, 412; 414
Etienne of Rouen 185, 208 History of the Kings of Britain 23–4,
eucharistic test 179, 203, 382 405; Life of Merlin (Vita Merlini) 74,
exposure: at sea 108–10, 112–14, 117–19, 129, 184; ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ 191
120–3, 335, 375–7; on land 335, 341, 389 George, St 42, 46, 51; and prophecy 193–4,
196
‘fair unknown’ 55, 331–40; see also Lybeaus Gerald of Wales 99
Desconus Gervase of Tilbury 140; cited 379
Fairfax, Edward 75, 79; see also Tasso Gesta Romanorum 264, 411, 442 n. 88
fairies: frauds involving 209, 472–3 n. 10; Gloriana, see Elizabeth I; Spenser, Faerie
rationalized 184, 186–7; traditions of Queene, Gloriana
177–84, 188, 381–2 Godfrey of Bulloin, see Fairfax; Knight of
fairy mistress 22, 141, 173, 175, 178, 211–15, the Swan; Tasso
389; see also Chaucer, Tale of Sir Golagros and Gawain 417
Thopas; Gloriana; Melusine; Sir Golden Legend 121, 375, 441 n. 76
Launfal; Thomas of Erceldoune Golding, Arthur 177
fairytale, distinguished from romance 143 Gottfried von Strassburg 156–7, 233
Fall 79–80, 89, 244, 297; Eve 271, 283, Gower, John 127, 411, 419, 442 n. 88; see
295–6, 297, 396; Paradise 399; see also also Greene, Greene’s Vision
salvation history Graelent 213
Field, Nathan 158–9 Grail, quest of 53, 85–6, 100–1; see also
Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones 328 Chrétien de Troyes, Conte; History of
Fisher, John 346 the Holy Grail; Perceval; Quest of the
Flamenca 307, 312, 313 Holy Grail
Fletcher, John: Philaster 280–1; Triumph of Gray, Sir Thomas 316
Honour 158–9; Women Pleas’d 415; Greek romance 35
see also Shakespeare, Two Noble Greene, Robert: Greene’s Vision 276,
Kinsmen 293–4; Pandosto 87, 116–17, 276,
Floire et Blancheflor 28, 155–6 278–9, 285, 331, 396–7 (afterlife 456
Floris and Blauncheflour 28, 38, 56, 150–1; n. 22); Susanna stories 275
conspectus of versions 155–6 Greer, Germaine 218, 220
Ford, John 352 Gregory, St (Gregorius) 121–2, 399
forest 70 Grene Knight 142, 418, 440 n. 72, 464 n. 52,
Forrest, William 276–7 472 n. 90
536 Index
Grisandol 252, 301 Hughes, Thomas 357–8, 404–5, 412, 413

Guillaume de Lorris, see Roman de la Rose Huon of Bordeaux 76, 245, 420; Clariette
Guinevere 312, 323, 404, 461–2 n. 27; in Sir 237; Huon 69, 125, 139, 145–6 (in
Orfeo 199–200; in Lanzelet 314, 319; Spenser 198); Oberon 176, 181–2, 189,
see also Lancelot; Malory, Guinevere 197–8, 208, 467 n. 18
Guy of Warwick 89, 98, 370; ancestor of Hya, St 131
earls of Warwick 31, 93; and Guyon Hyrd, Richard 37–8, 176, 216, 235, 410
31, 95–6; fathered by St George 51
Guy of Warwick 30, 38, 92, 419; later know- incest 34, 121–2, 328, 398–400, 403–4
ledge 31–3, 92–3; see also Tragical Ine 490 n. 27
History of Guy instruction 6–7, 56, 205–6
interlacing 53–4, 63
Hadewijch 238 Ipomadon 225, 235–6, 420–1, 475 n. 14; Lyfe
Hali Meithhad 248 of Ipomydon 38; see also Hue de
Harding, John 194, 319, 411, 412, 419, 446 Rotelande
n. 10 Irish Laws 109
Harington, John 75; see also Ariosto Irish pilgrims of the sea 122–4; see also
Hartmann von Aue 457 nn. 30, 35 Brendan, St
Havelok 29, 64, 334, 343, 420; Havelok 324; iudicium Dei 110, 130, 132, 346
later versions 343–4; see also Warner
Hawes, Stephen: Comfort of Lovers 338; James I (VI) 43, 195–6, 327, 339, 359;
Example of Vertue 51, 102–3, 348, 453 prophecy of 188–9, 195, 345
n. 115 Jameson, Frederic 363–4
Hay, Sir Gilbert 445 n. 109, 449 n. 49 Jason, see Lefevre; Medea
heir, recovery of 114–15, 127, 324–31, 340–3, Jauss, Hans-Robert 8
348; from over sea 117, 341, 351 Jeast of Sir Gawayne 418
heiress 117, 222–3, 225, 227, 229, 284, 334–6, Jerome, St 103
351, 354, 359; see also Elizabeth of John of Glastonbury 131–2
York; Warner John de Reeve 421
Heldris of Cornuälle 226, 297, 301 Johnson, Richard 39, 338, 389, 415; Seven
Henry II 25 Champions of Christendom 51; Tom a
Henry III 325 Lincoln 111, 138, 389–91, 423, 497 n. 45
Henry VI 344, 348 Johnson, Samuel 408
Henry VII (Tudor) 71, 191, 192, 325, 341, Jonah 119
344–52 Jonson, Ben: Alchemist 209; knowledge
Henry VIII 35, 192, 276–8, 325, 347 of romances 413, 415, 419, 444
Herbert of Cherbury, Lord 52 n. 100
Heywood, Thomas 354, 412, 414, 428 Joseph of Arimathea 131–2, 421
History of the Holy Grail 132, 419, 421 Judas 122, 375–6
Hoccleve, Thomas 20, 37, 485 n. 45
Holinshed’s Chronicles: Albina 115, 411; Katherine of Aragon 37, 311; see also
Arthur 412; Brutus 24, 414; Edwin Shakespeare, Henry VIII
112; Guinevere 323; Guy of Warwick Kempe, Margery 238, 487 n. 76
95; Macbeth 187–8, 385; Scyld 455 Kenilworth entertainments 207, 209, 211,
n. 6 413
Holme, Wilfride 423, 466 n. 6, 492 n. 53 Kentigern, St 121, 457 n. 30
Horn 332, 341; conspectus of romances 29, King Alexander, see Alexander
117–18, 153–5, 420; Hind Horn (ballad) King Apollyn, see under Apollonius
36, 154–5; see also King Horn; King king in disguise 4, 421, 425
Ponthus King Edward III 331
Hue de Rotelande 11, 29, 478 n. 51; King Edward and the Shepherd 421
Ipomedon 19, 30, 235–6, 297–8, 437 King Horn 149–50, 153–4, 342, 420;
n. 43; see also Ipomadon Rimenhild 228; see also Horn
Index 537
king-mark 324–5, 343 Lewis, C. S. 4, 95, 308; Allegory of Love

King Orphius 424 438–9 n. 61, 486 n. 69; Narnia books
King Ponthus and the Faire Sidone 29, 38, 4 (Voyage of the Dawn Treader 74,
118, 154, 422 458 n. 42)
Kirkman, Francis 410 Lewkenor, Lewes 43
Knight of Curtesy 318, 397, 422 Libeaus [Libius] Desconus see Lybeaus
Knight of the Swan 294–5, 335, 422; Helyas Desconus
329 Lloyd, Richard 93, 412, 419
knighthood 41–4, 84; social context 55 loathly lady 178, 204–5, 214
Locrine 431 n. 5
Lady Bessy 350–1; quoted 346 Lodge, Thomas 36; Robert the Devil 90,
Lady of the Lake 184, 205, 332; at 426; Rosalynde 264–5
Kenilworth entertainments 207; see Lollardy 90; Wycliffism 37
also Malory, Lady Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 35, 335–6
Lai du Corn, see Biket love, language of 239, 289; terminology for
Lai le Freine 335 221, 245, 308, 321, 438 n. 57
La Marche, Olivier de 43, 104; see also Lovelich, Henry 419, 424
Bateman; Lewkenor Lull, Ramón, Blanquerna 247–8; Book of
Lancelot 34, 468 n. 24; conspectus of the Order of Chivalry 42, quoted 453
romances 422–3; in Harding 319–20; n. 105
little known in England 6, 34, 319; Luther, Martin 251
education 6, 205; encounters with Lybeaus [Libeaus, Libius] Desconus 38, 55,
lions 84–5; as ‘fair unknown’ 332; on 328, 332–4, 423, 440 n. 72
Grail quest 86, 101, 369; and Lydgate, John 400–1, 457 n. 38; Troy Book
Guinevere 26, 133, 313, 320–3, 442 n. 399, 415
85; death 322–3, 370
Lancelot, Prose 6, 42, 85, 184, 422 Mabinogion 27, 437 n. 51, 472 n. 88
Lancelot-Grail 33–4, 205, 369, 401; English Macbeth 187, 385
adaptations 412, 421, 423; see also Maddox, Donald 353
Malory; Merlin, Prose; Quest of the magic, and astrology 140–1; distinct from
Holy Grail marvel and miracle 139–41; non-
Lancelot of the Laik 56–7, 319, 422, 433 functioning 144–55, 159–60; problems
n. 19 of 141–3; suspicions of 164–72; test of
Landeval, see Sir Launfal chastity 314–16; see also arms;
Lane, John 32, 415, 419, 441 n. 76 enchanters; ring; shield
Laneham [Langham], Robert, Letter: Malleus maleficarum 379
authorship 410, 413, 444 n. 100; Cox, Malory, Sir Thomas 33–4, 38, 45
Captain 38–9, 90; romances cited in Morte Darthur 24, 412–13
410, 444 n. 100 *see also under individual entries
Langland, William, Piers Plowman 338, disaster in 400–3
447 n. 12, 480 n. 73 *Grail quest in 63, 85–6, 100–1, 132–3,
Layamon, Brut 185, 412 369
Lefevre, Raoul 387–8 shame culture in 83
legitimacy rates 273–4 topography 71, 81
le Goff, Jacques 152 women 302–3, 387
Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of 207, 209, Alysaunder and Alys 239
441 n. 76 *Arthur, death 403, 469 n. 50
Leir 24, 405; see also Shakespeare, Balin 81, 99–100, 367–9
King Lear; Tate; True Chronicle Elaine of Ascolat 130–1, 240
History Elaine of Corbin 239–40
Leland, John, Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Excalibur 138, 143
412 Gareth 236, 239, 245, 332, 337
Leon, Ponce de 76 *Guinevere 197, 320–3
538 Index
Malory, Sir Thomas (cont.): Mirror for Magistrates 412

Morte Darthur : misogyny 132, 269, 271–3, 281, 298–9,
*Lady of the Lake 184, 197, 201, 208 308–9, 315, 387–91; fears of women
*Lancelot 320–3, 468 n. 24 169; see also sexuality
*Merlin 191 Molinet, Jean, Chroniques 84
*Mordred 376–7, 403 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 21
*Morgan 161, 316–17 Mordred 34, 122, 358, 376–7, 403–5
*Perceval 78–9 Morgan le Fay 76, 134, 378; early history
Tor 336 74, 184–5; in Malory 316–17; in prose
Mandeville, Sir John 69, 74, 99, 473 n. 104 romances 185–6; in Sir Gawain and
Manekine, see Philippe de Rémi the Green Knight 160–2
Marco Polo 139–40 Morte Arthur (stanzaic) 319, 412, 442 n. 85
Margaret of Anjou, manuscript for 409, Morte Arthure (alliterative) 412, 442 n. 85,
439 n. 66, 457 n. 27 497 n. 59
Marie de Champagne 26, 308–11 Moses 108, 118–19
Marie de France, Lais 27, 312–14; Bisclavret Mucedorus 2
307; Deux Amants 148–9; Eliduc Munday, Antony, see Amadis de Gaule
237–8, 313; Guigemar 129–30, 186, 394, mystics 238, 241
459 n. 60; Lanval 30, 198, 211, 423 (see
also Sir Launfal); Le Fresne 335; Milun naming 126, 330–1; of fairy monarchs 176;
329; Yonec 467 n. 18 anonymity 333–4
Markham, Gervase 185 Nashe, Thomas 38, 411, 441 n. 79
Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus 381 Nature 241–5, 305–6
marriage, consent required for 222, 252–3, Nicuesa, Diego de 111, 114
311–12, 395; sacrament 241; theology Nine Worthies 93; Nine Women Worthies
of 246 355
Martorell, Joanot, see Tirant lo Blanc Noah 119–20
Mary [Tudor] 345 Novellino 131
Mary Hamilton 109
Mary Magdalene, St 120–1 Oberon 176, 198, 467 n. 13; see also Huon;
matter of England 29, 117 Randolph; Shakespeare, Midsummer
‘matters’ of romance 29, 362 Night’s Dream
Medea 161, 172, 387–8 Octavian [Octovian] 30, 424, 485 n. 41;
Melusine 38, 71, 175–6, 423; fairy prohibi- Florent 329
tions in 210–11, 215, 382–4; good Oedipus, legend of 398–400
advice in 205; Melusine 181, 188–9, Of Arthour and of Merlin 30, 33, 423–4, 460
197, 467 n. 18 n. 2, 461–2 n. 27, 470 n. 64; giants in
memes 3, 21; and courtly love 308; of lost 137; quoted 11
heirs 340–1; of rudderless boats 106 Oliver of Castile 349–50, 424
Meres, Francis 410, 413, 417, 419, 420, 424 Ordene de chevalerie 445 n. 109
Merlin 160, 167, 423–4; as prophet 189–92, Order of the Bath 52, 434 n. 19
346–7, 385–6; see also Geoffrey of Order of the Garter 33, 51, 52, 494 n. 69;
Monmouth, Vita Merlini; Morgan; Knights 358
Spenser, Faerie Queene, and prophecy Ovid 172, 176–7, 232; Pyramus story 38
Merlin, Prose 185–6, 191, 376; Grisandol
252, 301; later versions 11, 33, 423–4 Painter, William 392
(English quoted 377); see also Of Paris, Gaston 308
Arthour and of Merlin Paris and Vienne 38, 424
Mervine 185 Partenay 423, 466 n. 6; see also Melusine
middle-earth 467 n. 22 Partonope of Blois 38, 297, 425; boat in 130,
Middleton, Christopher 39, 40, 198, 423, 428 455 n. 13; magic in 160–1, 167–70;
Mills and Boon 218–19, 225 Melior as fairy 186, 215–16, 297, 425,
Milton, John 45, 77, 87, 413, 415, 423 472 n. 94
Index 539
Paston, Margaret 224 Rauf Coilyear 425

Patrick, St 122 readership 7, 10–14, 38–9, 152–3; women
Peele, George, Arraignment of Paris 354, 219, 226; see also instruction
357; Old Wives Tale 137, 166 recognition tokens 327–9
penitential romance 87–98; romances of Reformation 35; condemnation of
atonement 279 romance 38–9; continuity across 250,
Perceforest 24, 33, 64, 258, 425 298; effect on romance 5, 90–2, 96–7,
Perceval 18, 78–9, 90, 134; see also 98, 110, 135, 251, 320, 366, 378; and
Chrétien, Conte; Quest; Sir Percyvell prophecy 192, 194; and spiritual love
Percy Folio manuscript 30, 36, 350, 410, 249
416–19 passim, 422–9 passim; Birth of Renaut de Beaujeu 332, 423
Merlin [Of Arthour and of Merlin] René of Anjou 102
423–4, 470 n. 64; Boy and the Mantle resurrections 10, 57–8, 170–1, 344–5, 360,
316; Emperor and the Child 283, 362, 407
407–8, 429; Grene Knight 142, 418, 440 Richard II 243, 325, 344; marriage contract
n. 72, 464 n. 52, 472 n. 90; Guy 487 n. 81
romances 32, 419, 440 n. 72; Libius Richard Cœur de Lyon 30, 138, 425: mother
[Lybeaus] Desconus 332–4, 423, 440 179, 182–3, 382, 473 n. 110
n. 72, 490 n. 19; Sir Aldingar 278–9, Richardson, Samuel 32–3
282, 285, 416; Sir Degree [Degaré] ring, [non-]magic 138, 145–8, 149–51,
330–1, 416; Sir Lambewell, quoted 183, 153–6, 164, 202, 462 n. 28
199, 211; Stanley poems 339, 350; Robert the Devil 36, 89, 425–6
Turke and Gawain [Gowin] 203, 418, Robert of Sicily 89, 426
440 n. 72; see also Eger and Grime; Roman de la Rose 17, 102, 482 n. 7
Lady Bessy ; Sir Eglamour; Sir Launfal; romance, continuity of 5–6, 30–3, 35–6, 39;
Sir Tryamour definition 8–10, 24–5, 218, 222; history
Petrarchan love 19, 230, 236, 353 of 22–40; structure of 57–67, 87;
Philippa, Queen 224 topography of 70–81, 111, 135–6; see
Philippe de Rémi, Jehan et Blonde 239, 458 also ancestral romance; condemna-
n. 44; Manekine 125–6, 294 tions; penitential romance; reader-
pilgrimage 84, 98–9, 102; at sea 123–4 ship; Reformation
Ponthus, see King Ponthus romans antiques 25–6, 43
primogeniture 225, 325–6; inheritance Romulus and Remus 108, 114–15
practices 222–3 Roswall and Lillian 36, 228–9, 331, 426
prophecy 113, 187–96, 329, 350, 385–7; of Rowlands, Samuel, Guy of Warwick 32, 93,
Stuarts 188–9, 195–6, 327; of Tudors 95, 462 n. 28; Melancholie Knight
187, 188, 192, 327 39–40, 411
Prophisies of Rymour 192–4; see also Rubin, Gayle 227
Thomas of Erceldoune, as prophet rudderless boats 101, 106–23, 126–9, 133; see
Propp, Vladimir 4 also Quest; Partonope; Shakespeare,
Pullman, Philip 8 Tempest
quest 41, 45–50, 53, 58, 67; allegorical 84, saints’ lives 249–51; see also Agnes;
99–105; and exploration 74–7; one- Brendan; Dekker, Virgin Martyr;
way 98–9, 124, 133, 367–9 Edmund; Mary Magdalene
Quest of the Holy Grail, Prose 25, 62, 63, salvation history 5, 57–8, 87–9, 125–6, 352,
78–9, 85–6, 100–1, 132–3, 419; see also 376; Redemption 119, 330; see also Fall
Chrétien de Troyes, Conte; Grail; Schlauch, Margaret 4
Perceval Secundus 299
Segar, William 42, 43
Ralegh, Walter 76–7, 257, 360; see also sentence and matter (sens and matière) 12,
Spenser, Letter to Ralegh 49, 101, 148–9, 152, 155, 260; see also
Randolph, Thomas 472–3 n. 100 allegory
540 Index
Seven Sages of Rome 318, 426 Venus and Adonis 263

sexuality 103, 219–21, 241; dangers of Winter’s Tale 87, 97, 116–17, 170–1, 282,
78–80, 244, 404–5; exemplary models 336
132, 300–2, 304–7; female desire bear 2, 342
231–8, 248–9, 254–5; approval 222, Hermione 290, 396–7
359; fear 202–3, 221, 269, 274, 288–9, Perdita 17–18, 266, 327, 330, 331, 335,
292–3, 390–1; theories of conception 359
222 see also King Edward III
Shakespeare, William: shame culture 25, 54, 83
knowledge of romances 31, 72, 261, 264–5, Shelton, Thomas, Don Quixote 39
412, 413, 415–16, 417, 419, 427, 428 shield, magic 142, 165; pentangle on 52,
All’s Well that EndsWell 391–6 59–60, 160; red cross on 51, 193;
As You Like It 21, 170, 264–6, 406–7 Trinity on 103; Virgin on 95–6
Comedy of Errors 263 Sidney, Philip 20, 43, 251, 429; Arcadia
Cymbeline 98, 284, 285–6, 288–9, 290–2, (New) 34, 42, 47, 62, 252, 258–60;
327–84, 484 n. 22 Arcadia (Old) 245; representations of
and James I 359 women 298–9, 303
Milford Haven 71 Siege of Jerusalem 494 n. 3
sources 275 Siege of Thebes 399–400
Henry VI part 3 348, 403 Siege of Troy 399–400
Henry VIII 276–8, 284, 290, 359–60 Silence, see Heldris of Cornuälle
King Lear 9, 406–8 Sir Aldingar 278–9, 282, 285, 416
Fool’s prophecy 189–90 Sir Degaré 30, 246, 328–9, 330–1, 416
poor Tom 31 Sir Eglamour of Artois 13, 30, 106, 116–17,
Loves Labours Lost 263, 358 335, 416–17; known to Shakespeare
Merchant of Venice 264, 399 261; see also Rowlands, Melancholie
Merry Wives of Windsor 177, 286–8, 358 Knight
Midsummer Night’s Dream 143, 216–17, Sir Firumbras 414
263 Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle 418
fairies in 170, 174, 177, 178, 201 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 13, 21,
Much Ado about Nothing 285–6, 289–90 47–8, 50–3, 80, 142, 369–70, 418; girdle
Othello 162–4, 261, 281–2, 286, 396–8 159–60; opening 73; shame culture
Pericles 13–14, 97–8, 266–8 83; structure of 59–60, 64; Bertilak
structure 64–6 203–4; Gawain 54–5; guide 69; lady
tournament 42 18, 312; Morgan 186
Marina 250, 359 Sir Gowther 89, 425
Thaisa 220, 300–1 Sir Isumbras 30, 88–9, 98, 224, 421
see also Apollonius Sir Launfal 79, 181, 183, 198–200, 211; con-
Rape of Lucrece 263 spectus of versions 175, 423;
Richard II 357 Tryamour 473 n. 110
Richard III 352 Sir Orfeo 16, 63–4, 181, 182, 204, 209, 424;
Romeo and Juliet 261, 263–4, 311 Orfeo 362, 363; ballad 36; see also
sonnets 20, 234 King Orphius
Taming of the Shrew 263 Sir Percyvell of Galles 26, 60–2, 333
Tempest 77, 117, 177, 245, 359 Sir Tristrem 234, 319; see also Tristan
setting 72, 111 Sir Tryamour 278–9, 282, 285, 427
structure 66–7 Song of Roland 25, 54
Gonzalo 118 Song of Songs 241, 246–7
Miranda 266 Sowdone of Babylone 166–7, 227, 414
Prospero 110, 112–13, 170–2 Spenser, Edmund 363
Titus Andronicus 263 knowledge of Bevis 31; of Chaucer
Two Gentlemen of Verona 261–2 414–15; of Eglamour 335; of Guy 31;
Two Noble Kinsmen 141, 374–5 of Hawes 103
Index 541
Faerie Queene 10, 13, 34, 54, 63, 71, 104, Torrent of Portyngale 224, 427; Torrent
370–2 116–17
and hagiography 250 tournaments 41–2
magic in 165–6 Towneley Plays, quoted 58
and prophecy 191, 193–4, 347, 356–7 Tragical History of Guy of Warwick 93–4,
Arthur, education of 206 166, 441 n. 80; Oberon in 176
Cleopolis 182 translatio imperii 26, 72–5, 227
Gloriana 173–4, 183–4, 187, 189, 257, Trevet, Nicholas 127
323; and Arthur 55–6, 96, 181, 212, Tristan 9, 25, 38, 313, 321–2; early versions
255, 355–7 27–8, 129; Prose 33, 319, 427–8, 454
Book I 50, 70, 105, 212; representation n. 2; Isolde 232–3, 312; Petit-Creiu
of women 279–80, 284–5; 156–7; see also Sir Tristrem
Redcrosse Knight 51–2, 89, 96–7, Tristram 427–8
165, 193–4, 337–8; Serena 250 Troy, romances of 25–6, 399–400, 428
Book II 79–80, 134–6; chronicles in True Chronicle History of King Leir 406–7
24, 323; read by Milton 45; Guyon Tudor dynasty 187, 347–8, 352, 370, 405;
31, 95–6; Phedon and Claribell 285 prophecies of 191–6, 346–7
Book III-IV 47, 251–8, 306–7, 317–18; Turke and Gawain [Gowin] 203, 418, 440
Trojan history 388; Britomart 228, n. 72, 472 n. 90
252–7, 356; Garden of Adonis 242–3 Tuve, Rosemond 63, 97
Book VI 181, 206–7, 339; Pastorella 17,
327, 335 Udall, Nicholas, Ralph Roister Doister 287
Letter to Ralegh 7, 52, 55–6, 279, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet 184, 314,
337 315, 319, 388; Iblis 233; Lanzelet 334
Mutabilitie Cantos 105 unicorns 139–40
Spottiswood, John 195
Squire of Low Degree 338, 339, 394, 426–7 Valentine and Orson 89, 167, 278–9, 282–4,
Stanley family 339, 350, 493 n. 58 325; later versions 1, 36, 39, 283, 290,
Stow, John 350 407–8, 428–9; unhappy ending 9,
Sundry Strange Prophecies [1652] 192, 364–7, 379–81; Orson 388–9
385–7, 465–6 n. 4; quoted 345; see also Vives, see Hyrd
Thomas of Erceldoune, as prophet Vulgate Cycle, see Lancelot-Grail
Susanna 275, 287
swan cup 335; see also Knight of the Swan Wace, Roman de Brut 24, 26
Warbeck, Perkin 325, 345, 351–2, 493
Tasso, Torquato 34, 362–3; Gerusalemme n. 54
Liberata 75–6; Armida 79–80, 102, Warner, William, Albions England 327, 470
134–5; Rinaldo 133–4 n. 53; as source for As You Like It
Tate, Nahum, King Lear 408 265; story of Havelok in 29, 343–4,
Thomas, see Horn; Tristan 354, 420
Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital 327–8 Warwick, earls of 335; see also Guy of
Thomas of Erceldoune 178, 181–2, 473 Warwick; Leicester
n. 111; as prophet 188–9, 190–1, 192–5, Watson, Henry, see Oliver of Castile;
345; conspectus of texts 175, 427; Valentine and Orson
Thomas of Erceldoune 179–80, 181–2, Wedderburn, Robert, see Complaynt
183, 213–14; (ballad) Thomas the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
Rhymer 36, 183; see also Sundry 418, 446 n. 7
Strange Prophecies Whole Prophesie of Scotland 194–5; see also
Thracian Wonder 112 Thomas of Erceldoune, as prophet
Tilney, Edmund 487 n. 83 William of Malmesbury 455 nn. 6, 14, 483
Tirant lo Blanc 32 n. 17
Tolkien, J. R. R. 4; Farmer Giles of Ham William of Palerne 38, 234, 329, 378, 429;
142; Lord of the Rings 46, 80–1 Melior 229, 234–5
542 Index
witchcraft 160–2, 366, 378–81; sorceresses Worden, Blair 304

145; ‘weird-elfes’ 470 n. 53; see also Wroth, Lady Mary 112
enchanters, enchantresses Wyatt, Thomas 415
Wittig, Susan 4
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival 100 Ywain and Gawain 26, 429; Alundine 204;
women warriors 53, 224, 252, 257–8, 317 Ywain 50–1, 146–8; see also Chrétien,
Worde, Wynkyn de 30, 349, 382 Yvain

The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs From Geoffrey of Monmouth To The Death of Shakespeare (2008)

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The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs From Geoffrey of Monmouth To The Death of Shakespeare (2008)

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The English Romance in Time

The English Romance in Time is a study of English romance across the

Myn owne swete herte

This book is a study of romance motifs in England and their changing

Kennedy, Paulina Kewes, Elizabeth Maslen, Alexander Murray,

INTRODUCTION: ‘ENTER, PURSUED WITH A BEAR’ 1

1. QUEST AND PILGRIMAGE: ‘THE ADVENTURE THAT

2. PROVIDENCE AND THE SEA: ‘NO TACKLE, SAIL, NOR

3. MAGIC THAT DOESN’T WORK 137

4. FAIRY MONARCHS, FAIRY MISTRESSES: ‘I AM OF ANE

5. DESIRABLE DESIRE: ‘I AM WHOLLY GIVEN OVER UNTO

6. WOMEN ON TRIAL 269

7. RESTORING THE RIGHTFUL HEIR: ‘IF THAT WHICH

Romance after Bosworth 344

8. UNHAPPY ENDINGS: ‘THE MOST ACCURSED, UNHAPPY,

Appendix: Medieval romance in English after 1500 409

ANTS Anglo-Norman Text Society

bears accordingly began to appear on the Elizabethan stage to occupy the

replication across cultures: the meme

The abduction of a child by a bear or some other wild animal is an exam-

monsters of Bevis had lodged since its own composition.11 Modernist

providential bulwark against foreign encroachment. Manuscript culture,

the precision that separates biological genera, six-legged insects from

Ages, as in a quatrain deﬁning the set of qualities required to recognize

with many other genres, though spelling it out is necessary in order to

over vernacular writings is in inverse proportion to those who could

restricted group in England; what is known of the ownership of French

Chaucer to his own real-life audience.35 It is likely that romances that do

hath been sung at festivals,

unique: the ability to give the sharpness of the individual to a variation on

exploiting the familiar

Ful of love and godenisse,

It ﬁl ones, in a morwe of May,

She was arisen and al redy dight, [dressed

shepherdesses may only be implied, but it is implied by a stress on the

sexually available female leads of a fabliau (such as May in the Merchant’s

new and unexpected ways. The colonels who overthrew democracy in

romance in england: a summary history

This book is concerned speciﬁcally with romance written or current

texts themselves, showed remarkable adaptative powers and survival

endlessly inventive spawning of legends, however, provided the kind

partly in their choice of language—romanz, this time French, rather than

Monmouth indicates. Geoffrey was probably living in Oxford when he

theme of a love so strong as to override all social and political taboos,

As the instance of Thomas of England demonstrates, it was Anglo-

Anglo-Norman antecedents, composed around 1300, and the numbers

Rattes and myse and suche small dere [animals

Mice and rats and such small deer

Shakespeare seems to be right on the mark here in positing both a noble

century. Their continuing fashionability is indicated by the translations

and Floret, Pyramus and Thisbe. In England: Parthenope, Genarides,

romances in addition to an abundance of prose romances, ballads, jest-

Sir Eglamour, that worthy knight,

coda: the rise and fall of the knight

Throughout the ﬁrst four centuries of romance, until the mid-sixteenth

devotion, whether in pitched battle against the enemies of God or in

knight, the chivalric ideal of knighthood received its deathblow.113 The

Quest and pilgrimage:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unex-