The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction 9783110343380, 9783110343342

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Christina Wald The Reformation of Romance

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 44

Christina Wald

The Reformation of Romance The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-034334-2 e-ISBN 978-3-11-034338-0 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements In a study about transformations, it is a particular pleasure to remember and name with gratitude the colleagues and friends whose generous help and advice greatly contributed to the various stages of this project. This book is a shortened and reshaped version of the Habilitation thesis that I completed at the University of Augsburg, and my first thanks go to my Augsburg colleagues, most of all to Martin Middeke, who supported this project through all its phases with his characteristic enthusiasm and sensitivity. The most substantial work on this project was done during a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at the Humanities Center at Harvard University. I would like to thank the VolkswagenStiftung for the generous support of the fellowship, my colleagues at Harvard, in particular Homi K. Bhabha, James Simpson, and Gordon Teskey for inspiring conversations, my cofellows Andreas Fischer, Jean-Philippe Belleau, Detlef von Daniels and Nirvana Tanoukhi for their companionship and their good spirits, the Humanities Center team for welcoming us as they did, and the participants of the Renaissance Research Colloquium as well as my students for sharing many interesting insights. The VolkswagenStiftung and the Humanities Center also supported the conference “Early Modern Reformations: Literature, Religion, Aesthetics” that I organised at Harvard; I am indebted to all speakers and many participants of this conference for their contributions and their comments on my work, in particular to Sarah Beckwith, Brian Cummings, Tobias Döring, Deborah Shuger, James Simpson, Gordon Teskey, Mary Baine Campbell, Jonathan Hart, Martin Moraw, Claudia Olk, and Jason Zysk. I would like to thank Verena Lobsien for discussing my work in Frankfurt and for her later thought-provoking comments on my writing, Elisabeth Bronfen for our inspiring conversations in Zurich, Ingrid Hotz-Davies for our encouraging meeting in Munich, Steve Mullaney for our talk in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff for our dialogue in Rome, possibly the most congenial place to discuss Eucharistic matters. I would also like to thank Tobias Döring, Roger Lüdeke, Björn Quiring, and Claudia Richter for supporting this project in its earlier stages, and in particular Gordon McMullan for inviting me to London. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin for their support during the final stages of preparing this book. Many of the ideas of this study have been presented at conferences and in seminars, and for their invitations, support, and criticism, my thanks are due to Andreas Höfele and the participants of the Literary Colloquium at Munich, Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein and the participants of the conference “Weltliche Wallfahrten” at the University of Luxemburg, Isabel Karremann, Jonathan

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Baldo and the participants of the seminar “Forgetting Faith?” at the Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston, and Emily Sherwood, Sarah Lewis, and the participants of the conference at King’s College on “Transforming Early Modern Identities.” Earlier versions of parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe (eds. Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgård. New York: Routledge, 2011), Weltliche Wallfahrten: Die Suche nach dem Realen (eds. Stefan Börnchen and Georg Mein. München: Fink, 2010) and Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings (eds. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt. Trier: WVT, 2009). I am very grateful to Sofia Meyers, Charles Marcrum, Martin Riedelsheimer, Georg Hauzenberger, Anja Haslinger, Bianka Kretschmer, and Fabian Baier for the painstaking care they have taken with the various stages of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the editors of the Anglia book series who accepted my monograph proposal and the team at De Gruyter. For sharing (and causing) the transformations in my personal life, my most heartfelt thanks go to Markus Scheumann, Hans Jonathan and Heinrich David Wald to whom this book is dedicated.

Contents List of Illustrations and Acknowledgements of Rights Introduction  . .  .

. .

 . .

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The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern 30 England The Eucharist in Early Modern England: Theological Controversies 30 and Liturgical Reform 42 William Baldwin: Beware the Cat (1553/70) Disguise and Identity Transformation in Elizabethan Pastoral 60 Romances Robert Greene: Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1585 or 1588) and Menaphon: Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues in His Mel71 ancholy Cell at Silexadra (1589) Philip Sidney: The Old Arcadia (c. 1580) and The New Arcadia 89 (1590) Thomas Lodge: Rosalynd: Euphues’ Golden Legacy (1590) and A 130 Margarite of America (1596)

.

Foreign Fashion and the Transubstantiation of Englishness 165 177 George Gascoigne: The Steele Glas (1576) John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578, expanded 1579) and 183 Euphues and His England (1580) Barnabe Riche: Riche His Farewell to Military Profession 196 (1581) Robert Greene: A Quip for an Upstart Courtier: Or, A Quaint Dispute 201 between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (1592) 209 Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)



Conclusion

. .

Works Cited

Index

227

235 235 Primary Literature 242 Secondary Literature

261

List of Illustrations and Acknowledgements of Rights Illustration 1: Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea sive Sanctor Martyrum (Rome: 1584), plate 33. Engraving by Giovanni Baptista Cavalleri which reproduced the fresco painted in the church of the English College in Rome in 1583 by Niccolò Circignani. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Illustration 2: Boorde, Andrew. The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. Image 4 of the 1562 edition. STC (2nd ed.) / 3385. Reproduction of the original in the Bodleian Library. 1562 edition / 4° B 56 Art. Seld. By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Illustration 3: Greene, Robert. A Quip for an Vpstart Courtier. Title page of the 1592 edition. STC (2nd ed.) / 12300. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (RB 61128).

Introduction In one of the most erotically charged scenarios of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a young princess called Philoclea finds herself in a perplexing situation. She is unexpectedly asked by her close female friend, the Amazon Cleophila, to “[b]ehold here before your eyes Pyrocles, prince of Macedon” (Old Arcadia 105). Alas, Pyrocles is nowhere to be seen, all that is visible is Cleophila herself. The legendary male prince does not appear. Or does he? Does his hidden, but real presence exist beneath the Amazon’s external appearance, as she claims? And can the young princess penetrate the misleading looks to see this alleged substance beneath? In Sidney’s romance, Philoclea is ready to believe in Cleophila’s hidden male core. She is even immensely relieved by Cleophila’s assertion since she felt an unspeakable and indeed unthinkable desire for her female friend all along. When the narrator describes Philoclea’s feelings, he resorts to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, comparing her excitement with “[t]he joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind while he found his beloved image wax little and little both softer and warmer in his folded arms” (Old Arcadia 106; New Arcadia 231). The narrator here offers his readers a literary paradigm of supernatural shape-shifting to understand Philoclea’s overwhelming emotions, even though Cleophila does not alter her shape in any visible or palpable manner. Instead, it is the faith and imagination of Philoclea which transforms the Amazon into a valiant prince, at least from her perspective. The erotic excitement evoked in scenes like Sidney’s was severely criticised in a number of Elizabethan treatises. In one of the most influential condemnations of the new vogue of prose narratives, Roger Ascham presents a transformation scenario which likewise draws on Ovid’s tales. Ascham describes the transformative effect which reading fiction might have on readers as a metamorphosis of men into beasts. He fears that “some Circe” might convert Englishmen into lascivious Italians with “at once in one body the belly of a swine, the head of an ass, the brain of a fox, the womb of a wolf” (The Schoolmaster 62, 66). This monstrous transmutation is, however, a metaphorical vision of the inner change since the readers of romance “remain men in shape and fashion,” as Ascham emphasises (The Schoolmaster 66). Thus, both the Arcadia, the most influential Elizabethan romance, and The Schoolmaster, the most influential Elizabethan humanist treatise warning against romances, invoke processes of internal, concealed transformation that are not registered in the outward appearance. Nonetheless, they refer to ‘metamorphosis’ to describe this invisible change and to illustrate its profundity. The importance and fertility of the notion of metamorphosis have long been ac-

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Introduction

knowledged in the study of early modern English literature and culture, also beyond its etymological meaning of shape-shifting. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses and their manifold adaptations in early modern narratives, plays, poems, rhetorical handbooks, paintings, and pamphlets, the manifest outward change often has a complex relationship with the psyche of the transformed figure. For example, the metamorphosis sometimes completes the pre-existing inner change of the transformed figure, or it preserves his or her human consciousness despite the external transmutation into an animal or a plant. Still, invoking Ovidian shape-shifting to come to terms with a purely internal transformation, as Sidney and Ascham do, stretches the meaning of metamorphosis to its limit. Early modern authors apparently employed the popular notion of metamorphosis for lack of a more suitable concept. And yet, an alternative concept of invisible, internal identity transformation had existed for a long time in England and was deeply embedded in the Elizabethan cultural imaginary. What is more, this concept offered considerable emotional and epistemological excitement, which would have lent itself to literary adaptation. However, during the long process of religious reformation in England, many were at pains to oppose and repress this model since it was seen as the essence of the abandoned Catholic faith. It was therefore not only theologically, but also politically highly charged: transubstantiation. The term ‘transubstantiation’ precisely describes a transformation of essence which is not visible from the outside, neither in ‘shape’ nor ‘fashion,’ as Ascham puts it. When early modern Catholic believers were celebrating the Eucharist, they were asked for a leap of faith that is similar to the experience of Princess Philoclea: during consecration, the priest elevated bread and wine and announced that they were the body and blood of Christ – to ‘behold’ Christ’s body ‘here before your eyes,’ communicants had to see beyond deceptive outer appearances just like Philoclea. The notion of transubstantiation was at the heart of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, and belief or disbelief in the phenomenon became a touchstone of religious allegiance for centuries to come. In the mid-1550s, at the height of the English Eucharist debate, William Baldwin contributed to the controversy with a fictional narrative which has often been singled out as one of the foundational texts for the explosion of prose narrative later in the century, including Sidney’s epoch-making Arcadia. In Beware the Cat, Baldwin creates a scenario that resembles the puzzle in which Sidney’s Philoclea finds herself. A young gentlewoman is invited to the house of an older woman. When the guest sees a crying cat, the hostess recounts: “God hath […] my only daughter, […] turned into this likeness, wherein she hath been above this two months, continually weeping as you see and lamenting her miserable wretchedness” (Beware the Cat 42). Like Philoclea, the young woman is asked to believe in a substance

Introduction

3

that is hidden by false appearances. What is more, she is requested to trust in God’s power to disfigure human beings into animals – just like the gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Baldwin, however, does not encourage readers to believe in this extraordinary scenario. Instead, he has the allegedly transformed cat tell readers about the trickery of her owner and reveal her story to be a strategic lie. Baldwin thus, somewhat paradoxically, denies the human core of the cat by anthropomorphising her as a speaking spy. Baldwin’s narrative explicitly refers to the Eucharist debate and ridicules covert Catholics in England, in particular the ‘transubstantiationers’ whom he likens to pagans, naïve believers, vicious deceivers, and cannibals. Because Baldwin’s fictional contribution to the theological controversy is so outspoken, his narrative could not be published during the reign of Queen Mary and only became disseminated under Queen Elizabeth. I will propose in this study that Beware the Cat and other reactions to the theological controversy inspired new narratives in the later sixteenth century that engaged with the Eucharist in a more subtle, and possibly unintentional, manner. In the fraught historical context, authors of prose fiction could not have used Eucharist vocabulary, least of which the provoking term ‘transubstantiation,’ without taking sides in the political and religious struggles of the day. Employing transubstantiation purely for its conceptual implications as a model of thought that allows readers to reflect on internal identity change was virtually impossible – depending on the current official religious position, this would have risked the dangers either of blasphemy or of heterodoxy. As a consequence, the term appears in prose fiction only in contexts which are clearly marked as satire of Catholicism (and only in texts that are published under Protestant governments), for instance in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat. None of the other fictional prose tales which I will look at are such straightforward contributions to religious questions; and yet, as I shall argue, the cultural and poetic fertility of the Eucharist (and in particular of transubstantiation) that comes to the fore in Beware the Cat continues to inform their concern with identity change. There are a few exceptions to the general rule that the term ‘transubstantiation’ was avoided in non-theological, non-propagandistic texts. For instance, Michel de Montaigne uses ‘transubstantiation’ in the sense I am interested in, as a concept that refers to internal, invisible change. He does so in “How one ought to govern his will,” one of his essays that was widely read in England, first in the French original of the 1580s and later also in John Florio’s famous English translation of 1603, from which I quote here.¹ In the context of criticising the too passionate

 The third book of the Essais, from which “How one ought to govern his will” is translated, was first published in 1588.

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Introduction

identification of his contemporaries with their professions and with tasks they exert on behalf of others, Montaigne invokes ‘transubstantiation’ to account for internal changes of the ‘beings’ of his fellow citizens, and distinguishes it from the ‘transformation’ of their external ‘shapes’: “I see some transforme and transubstantiate themselves, into as many new formes and strange beings, as they undertake charges” (Vol. 3, 267; “se transsubstantient” in the French original). Taking my cue from Montaigne, my readings of Elizabethan narratives are based on the assumption that transubstantiation kept haunting the Elizabethans – both as the epitome of Catholicism and in ‘secular’ contexts.² As a remnant of the officially abandoned faith, the Catholic Eucharist remained an active force in Elizabethan culture for a wealth of reasons: not only did a considerable group of Englishmen and women cling to the old faith, but the potential official return to Catholicism also remained an issue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an age of drastic switches between faiths, heterodoxy often became a wellkept secret. It speaks to the ongoing presence of the old faith in Elizabethan England that several of the authors discussed in this study at some point were suspected of undisclosed Catholicism. Thomas Lodge, despite a firm Protestant upbringing, openly converted to Catholicism in the 1590s and emigrated to France, but critics debate to this day the precise year and the circumstances of Lodge’s private conversion. Both Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe might have had Catholic inclinations, and even Sidney, usually celebrated as an ardent Protestant, was said to have had Catholic sympathies, and Jesuits claimed to have almost converted him when he was travelling in Europe.³ Furthermore, an ongoing concern with the Catholic Eucharist in Anglican England seems plausible in view of its entrenched social and psychological functions. Scholars have shown that during the late Middle Ages and the pre-Reformation sixteenth century the Eucharist “organize[d] people’s utmost feelings, thoughts, and actions” (Rubin 361) and that Eucharistic concepts and rituals shaped “the way ordinary men and women conceived of political power, interpreted their social world, and established the relation between the sacred and

 Given the foundational eminence of religion in the period, ‘secular contexts’ are never fully independent of religious issues.  For instance, Greene dedicated his romance Gwydonius to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was notorious for his Catholic sympathies. Nashe read the banned Jesuit tract Leycesters Commonwealth and was suspected by contemporaries of praising implicitly the Catholic traitor Norfolk in his Pierce Penniless. For Greene, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel 184– 185. For Nashe, see Nicholl’s biography, esp. 112– 118; 158 – 160. Nicholl also locates a “discrete Catholic tinge” in The Unfortunate Traveller (159). See Duncan-Jones on Sidney.

Introduction

5

society” (Elwood 4). If this is true, then it is hard to imagine that the Catholic Eucharist could have been so quickly and fully given up that it disappeared without a trace in England once the Anglican Church was established. The question arises as to how people could swiftly and systematically forget concepts and practices which were essential to their senses of self, in private as well as public, in individual as well as collective respects. Because such a comprehensive act of individual and collective amnesia seems implausible, Steven Mullaney suggests rearticulating the question: “how can something that lies so close to the heart of the social imaginary, so that it is lodged in the affective core of social life, be converted or transformed into something else, so that it is, in a sense, at once forgotten and remembered, at one and the same time, in the sometimes bloody and always traumatic process of reform?” (4). From this perspective, the traumatic processes of reform and counter-reform in England even reinforced the Eucharist’s central importance. The intense theological and political struggles, including the public questioning and burning of martyrs on both sides, made each individual’s stance towards the Last Supper quite literally a matter of life and death. I shall argue that, in this historical context, early modern prose narratives engage with the Eucharist, in particular with the spectres of transubstantiation in Elizabethan culture. Their adaptations of Eucharistic concepts and structures of feeling creatively transform the heritage; they at once forget and remember the officially abandoned ritual. Assuming that during the long process of Reformation, officially abandoned theological doctrines and liturgical rituals migrated from theology to prose fiction, this study follows a concept of cultural memory that includes repressed and censored cultural practices.⁴ If we understand culture as a palimpsest of

 I use the term ‘cultural memory’ in the sense established by Jan and Aleida Assmann’s works. Drawing on a wide array of theories, including Halbwach’s, Freud’s, and Nietzsche’s, they have defined communicative memory as the social aspect of individual memory. Cultural memory is a special form of communicative memory, which draws not only on functional, but also on stored memory and can hence relate to a history of centuries and millennia (in contrast to oral memory, which can only extend over the span of three generations) (see J. Assmann 3; 7– 8). Cultural memory also needs to be distinguished from collective bonding memory, which is willingly forged by a group of individuals who use these memories to enforce their sense of collective identity: “It is a projection on the part of the collective that wishes to remember and of the individual who remembers in order to belong” (7). Foxe’s Acts and Monuments can be seen as representative of the new, bonding memories privileged in post-Reformation England which, at least officially, superseded the earlier bonding memories provided by the transnational Roman Catholic community. In contrast to collective bonding memory, cultural memory does not have a specific political aim and does not pertain to a particular (dominant) group, but covers all

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Introduction

memory layers, cultural memory consists of “an inextricable tangle of old and new, of obstructed and buried material, of detritus that has been reused or rejected. In this way tensions arise, rejections, antagonisms, between what has been censored and uncensored, the canonical and the apocryphal, the orthodox and the heretical, the central and the marginal, all of which makes for a cultural dynamism,” as Jan Assmann points out (25). The Eucharist is a particularly pertinent example of such processes of cultural memory, as frequently changing ‘old’ and ‘new,’ ‘censored’ and ‘uncensored,’ ‘heretical’ and ‘orthodox’ versions circulated in the long course of the English Reformation and overwrote each other in the palimpsestic cultural memory. This study proposes that in the cultural dynamism stemming from the religious and political upheavals, prose fiction drew on some aspects of the new Anglican celebration of the Eucharist, but also adopted the ‘obstructed and buried material’ of the Catholic liturgy for its own cultural and aesthetic concerns. The very fact that concepts like transubstantiation and multilocation were, at least officially, cultural ‘waste,’ that they were no longer sacrosanct doctrines but discarded, superstitious beliefs that could be taken up by pamphlets and literary texts in a satirical manner facilitated the unorthodox adoption of Eucharistic concerns in prose fiction. As Aleida Assmann has argued with reference to the waste of cultural memory, it can witness “unexpected renaissances and resurrections,” because it “exists materially or intellectually in a state of latency from which it may be rediscovered, reinterpreted, and imaginatively revived” (398). The actual status of the Catholic Eucharist in Elizabethan England was, of course, more complicated than the official denouncement as cultural ‘waste’; as we will see, this tension was poetically productive and led to unexpected appropriations of Eucharistic patterns, for example, by Thomas Lodge, who probably had already converted to Catholicism when he wrote A Margarite of America. The particular appeal of the Eucharist for the fictional prose texts considered in the following chapters is that it offers ways to explore questions of identity formation and transformation. Thus, this study suggests that the notion of transubstantiation also kept preoccupying Elizabethans because it captured a widespread concern with change. In pre-Reformation England, as Paul Strohm has emphasised, “[a]t the heart of sacramentality lay a concept of transformation; the sacrament is ministered in a ritual or ceremony which possesses the power to alter status or identity, even in the absence of apparent or outward change” (33). This power to alter status or identity caused ambivalent responses

remembered aspects of the past: “Cultural memory […] in contrast to collective, bonding memory, […] includes the noninstrumentalizable, heretical, subversive, and disowned” (27).

Introduction

7

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the dynamics of social change that had begun in the high and late Middle Ages accelerated and unsettled the traditional notion of inborn and fixed identity. In a culture which was used to thinking in the Aristotelian categories of substance and accidents, and whose socio-political and economic reality made identity categories increasingly fluid, the idea that a person might transubstantiate triggered anxieties in some, and wishful fantasies in others.⁵ In the same vein, the question of how personal ‘substance,’ the true but potentially hidden identity core, can be located became significant in many political and social respects. For instance, at a time of radical religious switches and political upheaval, the legitimisation of royal authority became more complicated. How can claims to the throne, how can ‘royal blood’ be proven? Further, the fact that a patriarchal society was ruled for decades by an unmarried queen who actively used gender codes for political purposes contributed to a questioning of traditional notions of sex and gender. If Queen Elizabeth was able to stabilise and rule England, and if she in her famous dictum could claim both a natural, delicate, female body and a symbolic, strong, male body for herself, where and how was her gender identity to be located? And what impact did this powerful figure have on the notions of gender of her male and female subjects? Concurrently, the Reformation and the separation of England from the hegemonic transnational religious community of the Catholic Church complicated not only matters of royal authority, but also fuelled the emergence of a national consciousness. Since the Catholic Church was no longer the predominant realm of belonging, new patterns of affiliation had to be established. The competition and war with European Catholic countries, but also imperialism and colonialism both on the British Isles and in the New World raised further concerns with national identity. In Elizabethan times, an English, and sometimes a British, community increasingly offered modes of identification, but the question arose: what did it mean to be English? How can English ‘substance’ be defined – and, at a time of constant threats by foreign spies and agents, how can it be perceived, proven, and secured? Simultaneously, factors like the gradual establishment of mercantilism and the humanist reform of education undercut a traditional feudal order based on status – for example, by creating wealthy social groups without claims to nobility, or groups of relatively poor, but well-educated young men in search of a proper occupation. Therefore, Elizabethan England witnessed intense debates about how nobility can be defined and whether it stems from birth or behaviour.

 See Curran 19 and passim for a similar argument that the very mutability at the heart of the Catholic doctrine caused anxieties in post-Reformation England.

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Introduction

Addressing these questions, the following chapters seek to shed light on transubstantiation as a useful model to think about the fears and desires of identity change and of dissimulation which preoccupied many early moderns – with respect to religion, gender, class (or, in early modern terminology, “kind, order, degree, estate or calling”⁶), and national identity alike. In early modern prose fiction, transubstantiation and other Eucharistic concerns are creatively adapted to explore identity in ‘secular’ contexts, most prominently in scenarios of disguise. Once singled out by Ian Watt as a characteristic of pre-novelistic narratives,⁷ disguise in early modern prose fiction is a powerful plot element used to create narrative suspense and to entertain readers with dramatic irony or sudden turning points, but it is also the most relevant topos to explore selfhood. Just as in Sidney’s above-quoted scenario, disguise narratives question whether and how an identity core can be covered or faked, whether and how the ‘real’ substance beneath can be determined, and whether this substance can change under the disguise, or possibly also because of it. Disguise scenarios also take up the Elizabethan concern with dress as a reliable marker of social identity, as we shall see. Tracing how particular preoccupations, for example with transubstantiation, travelled from the Eucharist debate to literary scenarios of masquerade (and back), my study lays out a cross-fertilisation between theology and literature. I do not claim that the motif of disguise is new to literature written during the long English Reformation, or that Eucharistic concepts like transubstantiation influenced literature only once the concepts were officially abandoned. Rather, I propose that the cultural concerns with an increased flexibility or even fluidity of identity innovatively merge with the suppression of Catholic notions and rituals in Elizabethan literature, and that the exploration of such interactions offers a new and productive perspective on these narratives and on the cultural concerns reflected in them. My study also seeks to complement the research on other forms of transformation in early modern literary texts and treatises, chiefly Ovidian metamorphosis. It will be one of the concerns of the subsequent chapters to explore the interplay between such forms of external change and the internal, invisible identity change that characterises transubstantiation.

 Stubbes 84; D2v. Although the term ‘class’ is anachronistic for the early modern period, which conceived of status difference as ‘degree’ or ‘rank,’ it has become an established and useful analytical category in early modern studies, which I will employ, too. Cf. Kastan 101 and passim.  “The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure” (Watt 67). See Fludernik for a qualification of this thesis.

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The suggested adaptation of theological concepts for secular concerns was part of a general trend of increasing secularisation, but this process should by no means be understood as linear and straightforward.⁸ The fictional narratives did not necessarily contribute to a ‘disenchantment’ of transubstantiation or an emptying of the ritual;⁹ on the contrary, many of the romances creatively adapted the emotional and epistemological fascination of the suppressed Catholic heritage for their own ends. Besides, the association of the Eucharist with clothing was also employed in sermons and religious tracts.¹⁰ The ‘Eucharist as disguise’ was a concept that travelled between religious and fictional literature, and it is therefore unproductive to determine whether religious discourse was thereby secularised or, rather, secular literature implicated in religious concerns – both phenomena are true for early modern England, as Brian Cummings has demonstrated in his wide-ranging study The Literary Culture of the Reformation. Just as the secularisation of religious heritage is an intricate issue, so is its metaphorisation. Many of the texts adopt theologically disputed concepts like transubstantiation, multilocation, or incorporation in a metaphorical manner, but others emphasise their literal meanings instead. The narratives oscillate on the spectrum between religious and secular meanings, and between literal and figurative adaptations of theological theorems. *** My analysis is divided into three parts. The first chapter, “The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England,” lays the historical and theoretical groundwork for my study. It will shed light on the Eucharist debate of the mid-sixteenth century, which was instigated by the Reformers on the

 As Alexandra Walsham puts it, “thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development” (“The Reformation” 497).  See Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” for an exploration of how exorcism was transformed in Protestant pamphlets that associated the no longer efficacious Catholic ritual with the theatre and how the theatre adopted exorcism for its own ends. I share Greenblatt’s interest in how theatre and literature adopted the former power of the Catholic ritual for their own efficacy (126), but my argument differs from Greenblatt’s insofar as I assume that part of the attraction of transubstantiation for early modern authors was its ongoing political relevance and, at least for some, its epistemological, cognitive, emotional, or spiritual force.  Earlier studies have associated disguise scenarios, in particular those on the Elizabethan stage, with the Incarnation and Christ’s ‘disguise’ in human shape, his tunica humanitatis (see for example Bradbrook 162). By focussing on the processes of camouflage that early moderns attributed to the Eucharist, my study seeks to establish an alternative theological and cultural significance of disguise.

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Continent and soon affected England as well. I shall ask which Catholic positions were challenged, which new doctrines were developed, and in which respects they were poetically productive. In the next step, I will begin enquiring into the cross-fertilisation of theological dispute and prose narrative by looking at Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, the earliest narrative to be considered in this study. I shall argue that Beware the Cat’s adoption of the Eucharist, in particular of the denounced Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, prepares the conceptual as much as the aesthetic ground for the narratives which followed in the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s.¹¹ As the centrepiece of this study, the second chapter will look at the abundant pastoral romances of the 1580s and 1590s. They feature protagonists whose disguises call into question their identity ‘core,’ chiefly with respect to gender and rank. Is a male character that puts on female attire, like Sidney’s Pyrocles, affected by this dress? What happens to aristocrats who dress as shepherds? Will their substances be debased? And, a possibly even more pressing question for Elizabethans concerned about the rise of ‘upstarts,’ what happens if characters of lower degree put on noble clothes? Will their class identity be elevated, and if so, only momentarily or with long-lasting effects? A further problem was of particular concern in Tudor England, which witnessed violent struggles over the legitimacy of their rulers: if princes and princesses grow up as shepherds, sometimes even unaware themselves of their royal origin, and their royal core is eventually discovered, the question arises as to how this revelation can be made convincing enough to justify their future rule. The narratives investigate how true royal substance can be perceived and how it can be proven. Further, the ‘romancing of the Eucharist’ concerns the experience of attaining physical union with Christ, a religious sentiment which had frequently been eroticised by ardent believers in the Middle Ages. In this tradition, Elizabethan romances in an equally eroticised context raise the question of whether lovers can indeed, as the communion suggests, mutually incorporate each other – and, if they can, what impact such a mutual engrafting will have on their identities. I will pursue such questions by looking closely at four works of prose fiction whose outstanding success with contemporary readers demonstrates their relevance for Elizabe-

 Reading Beware the Cat as an important precursor to the wealth of prose narratives later in the century, I do not claim that their authors read Baldwin’s text and were influenced by it, although this is possible. Rather, I argue that Baldwin and later authors wrote and were published in historical contexts with continuing theological, political, and aesthetic concerns. Baldwin’s early narrative is exemplary of the intersection of theological and literary concerns that was typical of the time, and it also shares with later narratives the interest in formal experimentation with a young literary mode.

Introduction

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than culture: Greene’s Pandosto (publ. 1585 or 1588) and Menaphon (1589), Sidney’s two versions of his Arcadia narrative which became known as the Old and New Arcadia (first publ. 1590 and 1593), and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd (1590).¹² These narratives open a spectrum of Eucharistic models of thought and structures of feeling: Eucharistic concerns reappear as, for instance, fantasies of clandestine internal transformation, anxiety about the rupture between outer appearance and inner substance, fascination with the simultaneous presence of the same body in several places, concern with the performative power of language, and desires for experiences of sudden bodily ‘presence’ and of physical fusion. In addition to their popularity and their thematic range, I have chosen to focus on these narratives because they offer a representative variety of aesthetic practices and of the social affiliations of authors and readers. As the first professional Elizabethan author, Greene writes for the print market, which was his principal source of income. He recycles established romance topoi in his hastily-written narratives. By contrast, Sidney’s two Arcadia versions engage with the aristocratic manuscript culture and are written in a more elevated style. In comparison to Greene and Lodge, Sidney develops a much more complex and large-scale plot that brings his take on the pastoral romance closer to the epic, especially in the revised version of the Arcadia. Lodge, who presents himself as a gentleman writing for gentlemen, takes an intermediate social position, which was, however, complicated by his public conversion to Catholicism. His narratives, in particular Rosalynd, are usually regarded as close to Sidney’s in terms of stylistic achievement. I will read Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596), the most recent narrative to be considered in this chapter, as a coda of the selected pastoral narratives because it transforms both Eucharistic concepts and the romance mode in a highly self-referential and critical manner. In the final chapter on “Foreign Fashion and the Transubstantiation of Englishness,” my focus will shift from class and gender identities to the question of nationality. In the course of the intense Elizabethan debate about appropriate clothing, the preference of the English nobility for foreign fashion, above all for Italian, French, and Spanish trends, is heavily criticised as a form of crossethnic or cross-national disguise. In contrast to strategic forms of masquerade that aim to deceive, ‘fashion victims’ do not perceive themselves as being in dis-

 In his critical history of English prose fiction, Salzman singles out the four romances as the most popular tales of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: “The Arcadia was, of course, one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century. Rosalynde went through eleven editions up to 1642; Menaphon six up to 1632; and Pandosto ten up to 1632” (English Prose Fiction 82).

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Introduction

guise. Instead, they are derided by others. Wearing foreign fashion, it is argued, might lead to an alteration of the English substance of the wearer – and by extension, in keeping with the metaphor of the body politic, cause the transformation of the entire nation, which is always considered to be in danger of an invasion or rebellion on the British Isles themselves. The opposition to a Continental, Catholic enemy helped to shape a nascent sense of English nationalism, and national stereotypes which were connected to textile fashions contributed to the gradual establishment of the imagined English, or sometimes British, community. The emerging fictional literature in the vernacular played a crucial part in establishing and promoting this sense of a nation, also because it validated the English language rhetorically and aesthetically. As I set out to show, in Elizabethan literature the notion of a national ‘core’ is established through and against fantasies of transculturation, of losing or transforming one’s national substance. Like Ascham’s Schoolmaster, the narratives frequently test English substance. They explore what happens if an Englishman travels abroad, in particular when he travels in the countries of the Catholic enemy. Will he have to strategically conceal his English, Protestant identity? Will his national identity be transformed and possibly even lost by the adoption of foreign manners? And can the same happen if he puts on foreign fashion, if he wears the livery of the Catholic enemy, as it were? Drawing on pamphlets, sermons, plays, poems, histories, and biographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to elucidate the historical context, I shall look more closely at narratives by five authors which were written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century with a complex and sometimes vexed relationship to the mode of romance. Again, I have chosen these tales for their thematic relevance, their aesthetic variety, the social diversity of their authors and implied readers, and their significance for Elizabethan England, as far as it can be inferred from their contemporary reputations and successes on the print market. I will first discuss George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas (1576) as an important precursor of Elizabethan narratives with regard to both form and content: as a relatively early example of a warning against foreign fashion written in blank verse, it helped pave the way for unrhymed literature – a development which was also fuelled by Gascoigne’s earlier prose narrative The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573). I will then turn to John Lyly’s epoch-making Euphues tales, written in an elaborate rhetorical style that itself became a much-imitated fashion. In the first book, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578, expanded in 1579), the eponymous protagonist risks the Italianisation of his national substance by travelling and foreign fashion – phenomena which also have fundamental metafictional implications for Lyly. By contrast, the second book Euphues and His England (1580) tests whether and how an Italian can be anglicised. Lyly’s fashioning of his books as stylish accessories speaks

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to the commodification of writing via the growing English book market. This trend is simultaneously embraced and rejected by Barnabe Riche’s story collection Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Robert Greene’s satirical dream narrative A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) connects to the admonitory concerns of Gascoigne and Riche. It stages the contemporaneous social battle between newfangled, foreign fashion and traditional, plain Englishness within the personification of attire: Cloth breeches and Velvet breeches argue as to which is the more appropriate dress for an Englishman. Greene lets an idealised version of a pure English past clash with Elizabethan transcultural consumerism. In the Aschamite and Lylyan tradition, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) again sends Englishmen abroad and has their substances tested, albeit in innovative ways, as we will see. *** Methodologically, this study is indebted to a cultural history that reconstructs ways of interpreting the world and of imagining alternative worlds, that chronicles not only events, but also meanings, values, beliefs, theories, and fantasies. The historical reality of early modern England has to be understood as the lived experience of people who comprehend the world according to their beliefs, ideologies, and their imagination. Therefore, cultural history “should attend closely to what people thought or believed was transpiring in their world” (Marotti 4). From this perspective, culture and, as part of it, literature, does not play a subordinate political role as is often assumed by cultural materialism, but needs to be understood as “itself the place where norms are specified and contested, knowledges affirmed and challenged, and subjectivity produced and disrupted” (Belsey, “Towards Cultural History” 89). Early modern fiction participated in the cultural negotiation of religious change and identity transformation, and like all works of art, prose narratives did more than record or mirror topical concerns. They actively shaped historical reality, the lived experience of individuals, for instance, by means of envisioning alternative worlds. Arguably, it was in the early modern period that literature began to develop transformative views of reality, as artistic representation began to emancipate itself from the constraint of mimesis. It did so in the course of growing social and religious pluralisation and the concomitant phenomenon of shifting concepts of reality – a shift which has been described by Hans Blumenberg as the development from the Middle Ages’ conception of a ‘guaranteed reality’ to the modern notion of reality as a process of realisation. Thus literature gradually became a means of “Vorahmung” instead of “Nachahmung,” of creative imagination rather than imitation of reality (Blumenberg, “Nachahmung” 45). Works of art attempted to establish alternative worlds. Instead of imitating aspects of the one and only reality, they imitated

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Introduction

its “Wirklichkeitswert,” its quality of realness.¹³ Due to this new task of fictional literature, Blumenberg notes, long narrative texts gained increasing prominence since they could assemble enough detail to create second worlds (“Wirklichkeitsbegriff” 21– 22). Growing literacy and the invention of print were additional reasons for the rise of longer narrative forms, as well as, after the Reformation, the Protestant iconophobia that eventually closed down English theatres for a time. In the wake of literary emancipation, new modes of writing were tested, among them vernacular prose fiction. Vernacular prose rivalled lyrical poetry and verse narrative from the thirteenth century onwards, and began to flourish in the sixteenth century – a development which culminated in the establishment of the novel as the most widespread literary form today.¹⁴ In Elizabethan England, vernacular prose fiction was still a relatively recent mode of writing, and the social status of fictional prose was volatile; in contrast to more traditional literary modes, it still had to be acknowledged as a respectable art form. Prose narratives, called ‘romance,’ ‘history,’ ‘pamphlet,’ ‘satire,’ or, most broadly, ‘poetry’ by early moderns, were attacked and defended in the contemporary literary theory avant la lettre, whether published independently or as paratexts of fictional narratives. In early modern terms, ‘prose fiction’ was seldom regarded as a genre in its own right. Since genres were derived from classical ancient poetology, new genres could not be invented, but were instead created by mixing existing modes (Greenblatt, “Sidney’s Arcadia” 269; Colie 76 – 102). Romance had been the dominant literary mode in the Middle Ages, and it remained essential in Elizabethan prose fiction. Given the Renaissance inclination towards mixed genres, the flexibility of the romance mode, and the various literary influences from ancient Greek to native medieval to topical Spanish romances, a straightforward definition of romance is difficult; and yet, as Helen Cooper has demonstrated in her comprehensive study The English Romance in Time, the employment of romance topoi like the lost heir, chivalric combats, courtship, or the happy ending helps to establish a ‘family resemblance’ among romantic narratives (8). The majority of texts discussed in this study display this family resemblance and have been read as romances by critics; most straightforwardly, this applies to the pastoral romances by Greene, Sidney, and Lodge that I discuss in the main part of this study, the extensive second chapter. Lyly’s Euphues tales and Riche’s stories are indebted to the mode of romance, but are also influenced

 “[Kunstwerke versuchen] zweite Welten zu werden – und das heißt: nicht mehr Wirklichkeiten aus der einen und einzigen Wirklichkeit nachahmend herauszuheben, sondern nur noch den Wirklichkeitswert der einen vorgegebenen Wirklichkeit als solchen nachzubilden” (Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff” 21).  See Mehl as well as Godzich and Kittay for accounts of this development.

Introduction

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by other genres, chiefly the novella. Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller satirises romantic topoi, and Gascoigne’s Steele Glas and Greene’s Quip deliberately employ native forms that differ from romance, as both authors aim at demonstrating their moral and literary reformation. The study’s title “The Reformation of Romance” pays tribute to the most influential and popular mode of early modern prose fiction, to which the narratives discussed in this study all relate, even if not all of them can be categorised as romances. By means of creating alternative worlds and alternative views of reality, fictional literature attained transformative power. As Verena Olejniczak Lobsien and Eckhard Lobsien have argued, it is the particular achievement of early modern art “to enable new ways of seeing the world, to pluralise the world into alternative views, to educate to innovative seeing, and to create a dynamics of transformation, which involves readers in an open, contradictory, ambiguous process” (Die unsichtbare Imagination 31; my translation). The acknowledgement of this new transformative power of fictional literature is particularly relevant for the narratives which interest me here since their plots are likewise dedicated to transformations and innovative ways of seeing. I propose that the scenarios of disguise and identity transformation in early modern narratives become an emblem of the fresh literary imagination and its uncertain impact on readers – questions which were vehemently debated at the time. Many commentators heavily criticised the new fashion of vernacular prose fiction for its morally corruptive effects. The most influential critic was Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s humanist tutor, in his leading schoolbook The Schoolmaster, written and revised between 1563 and Ascham’s death in December 1568 and published posthumously in 1570. The Schoolmaster, its likely model by Juan Luis Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christianiae (1528), and subsequent treatises that elaborated on Ascham’s theses, like Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), were countered by various defences of poetry, for instance by Thomas Lodge’s A Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage-plays (1579). Most famously, Sidney made a case for literature in his Apology of Poetry, probably written between 1579 and 1580 and published posthumously in 1595, also under an alternative title, The Defence of Poesy. ¹⁵ Both Ascham and Sidney are concerned with the question of how readers react to fiction, and so their texts bear witness to a debate which we can consider the Elizabethan reader-response theory avant la lettre.

 Sidney’s Apology probably responded directly to the School of Abuse that was dedicated to Sidney without his permission, but it also addresses the authoritative text behind Gosson, Ascham’s Schoolmaster. Cf. Maslen’s detailed discussion of the context of the Apology, in which he suggest that Sidney wrote “in friendly rivalry” with Ascham’s schoolbook (“Introduction” 55). Meyer additionally suggests an engagement with Giordano Bruno’s writings (79 – 100).

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Introduction

Ascham’s criticism of prose fiction is part of the anti-Italian, anti-Catholic stance of his treatise. The transformative dangers entailed in travelling to Italy are comparable to Odyssey’s hazardous journeys, Ascham maintains, but Englishmen are less capable than Homer’s hero. They will not withstand the enchantments of “[s]ome Circe,” who will therefore “make him, of a plain Englishman, a right Italian” (The Schoolmaster 62).¹⁶ In order to reinforce his point, Ascham cites the allegedly widespread Italian proverb “Inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato; that is to say, ‘You remain men in shape and fashion but become devils in life and condition’” (SM 66).¹⁷ As we saw above, Ascham’s free translation emphasises that the Italianate Englishman’s shape and outward appearance remain unaltered, while (invisible to sight) his internal ethnic or national substance changes. Ascham interprets the metamorphoses related by Homer’s Odyssey in an allegorical manner which forecloses the possibility that men in actual fact turn into swine, but he sees an internal, invisible alteration as a “marvellous[ly] dangerous” and real possibility (SM 60), a fear which he shared with other humanists of his time (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals 37). Ascham’s enquiry into identity transformation is indicative of the new focus on subjectivity in the early modern period. In particular, it contributed to a discourse which was increasingly concerned with the dissociation of the external and the internal; for instance, discourses on monstrosity by 1570 conceived of a new type of monster that was unknown before 1550, namely “one that lacked any outward sign of its inward monstrosity” (Brammall 5). The growing interest in the invisible might have merged, I propose, with the repressed notion of transubstantiation. Ascham himself was involved in the Eucharist debate as a pamphleteer against the Catholic Mass.¹⁸ If we borrow the theological term from the Eucharist debate, as Montaigne did, we could argue that Ascham’s view of national identity is haunted by a fear of transubstantiation in secular contexts, of an internal change of identity. This fear of transubstantiation is crucial for the study of literature because Ascham in his next argumentative step declares that Englishmen can be made prone to alteration prior to travelling or even  A few years later, Gosson repeated this claim in The School of Abuse, arguing that fictional narratives “are the Cuppes of Circes, that turne reasonable Creatures into brute Beastes” (A2v). Parenthetical references to The Schoolmaster will be abbreviated to ‘SM.’  See Warneke, Images (107– 109) for occurrences of the proverb and of the epithet Italianate before The Schoolmaster’s publication; afterwards, uses of both proliferated (122– 123).  Ascham’s Apologia pro caena Dominica (written during Edward’s reign, probably in 1548, and published posthumously in 1577) took a stand against the Catholic Mass, but avoided criticising transubstantiation because the official parliamentary position had not yet rejected the doctrine. However, the treatise attacked the Catholic belief concerning Christ’s Real Presence in the elements of bread and wine (cf. L. Ryan 94– 101).

Introduction

17

change without travelling to Italy by reading Italian books, which “beguile simple and innocent wits” (SM 67). Ascham’s word choice of ‘beguiling’ and ‘enticing’ (SM 67) shows that he credits literature, and in particular romantic love tales, with a magically transformative power which readers can hardly withstand – a view of romance which some twentieth-century critics still shared.¹⁹ Written roughly a decade after the Schoolmaster, Sidney’s poetological treatise opposes Ascham’s humanist denunciation of vernacular fictional narratives and his claim of their magic powers. Sidney clearly differentiates between credulous belief and the suspension of disbelief to which fiction invites its readers. He famously argues that the poet “never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes” (An Apology for Poetry 103).²⁰ Because of their awareness of fictionality, poets “will never give the lie to things not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written” (AP 103). Rather than fully deny Ascham’s concern that poetry has transformative efficacy, Sidney claims that the ‘right poetry’ moves readers to virtue rather than to vice.²¹ Sidney, who had travelled to Italy and read Italian literature widely, explicitly includes Italian poetry as well as chivalric romances in his definition of ‘right poetry.’ This transformative power of poetry is unique, Sidney argues, since poetry by its emotional force exceeds the exclusively intellectual ethical efficacy of history and philosophy, modes of writing which were highly regarded by humanists like Ascham. In the Apology and other early modern poetological writings, questions of literary form were often discussed with reference to scenarios of apparel, disguise, and transformation. In the context of a gradual establishment of prose fiction, some authors raised questions about literature that are similar to the narrative scenarios of identity transformation: What is the ‘true substance’ of literature? Is it its form, its rhetoric dress, its style? For example, are rhyme and metre an essential part of literature? In his Apology, Sidney defends fictional literature in general (which he, like his contemporaries, calls ‘poetry’), regardless of whether it was written in rhyme, in prose, or as a stage play. Nonetheless, he also makes a specific case for prose fiction in the vernacular. He explicitly equalises the less prestigious form of prose with verse because both ‘but apparel’ poetical inventions: “the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in […] verse – indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no

 Thus, A. C. Hamilton sees romance as an ‘enchanting,’ even ‘possessing’ mode of writing which “arouses only the single, uncritical, and primitive response of wonder” in readers (297).  Parenthetical references to An Apology for Poetry will be abbreviated to ‘AP.’  John N. King argues that Baldwin anticipated Sidney’s differentiation between divine, philosophical, and ‘right’ fiction (365).

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Introduction

cause to Poetry” (AP 87). A few lines later, Sidney affirms, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet – no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who though he pleaded in armour should be an advocate and no soldier” (AP 87). Sidney here explicitly makes a point which many of the narratives I will look at are also concerned with: the validation of prose fiction as an eligible literary form. Attempting to redress the volatile status of prose fiction, Sidney conceptualises aesthetic form as a dress which does not affect the substance of poetry. Sidney here takes a sceptical view of clothing which is ‘but’ an apparel and has no transubstantiating power because it neither alters nor constitutes the poetical invention. This changes when he expounds his reader-response theory. Sidney famously argues that poetry has more ethical efficacy than other text forms due to its vivacity and its capacity to teach readers by delighting them, by moving readers emotionally not only to gnosis, but also to praxis (AP 94). Sidney illustrates this axiom by conceptualising poetry as the dress of virtue which increases virtue’s beauty and thereby achieves a transformation of those who see (through) this dress: “if the saying of Plato and Tully be true, that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty – [the poet] sets her out to make her more lovely in her holiday apparel” (AP 99). Therefore, other types of text need to disguise themselves in poetry’s dress or at least imitate poetry’s fashion (that is, employ fictionality) if they wish to achieve a comparable capacity to move their readers by creating delight: “Where the philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move – […] which Plato and Boethius well knew, and therefore made mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of Poesy” (AP 96); “And who reads Plutarch’s either history or philosophy, shall find he trimmeth both their garments with guards of Poesy” (AP 108). In contrast to the philosopher and the historian, Sidney posits, the poet has to create this dress (his poetry) ex nihilo – he is a true “maker” who brings “his own stuff,” that is, his own cloth (AP 100). Here, in a self-confident manner which will be the model of poets in the following decades, Sidney presents the poet’s imagination as the raw material of his poetry, which he then needs to cut and sew into the appealing dress of poetry. As we shall see, Lyly, Riche, and Nashe also invoke the notion of the poet as tailor in their narratives. The fact that poetological tracts regularly presented poetic form as a ‘dress’ has implications for the scenarios of dress and disguise in Elizabethan narratives. I will explore whether we can identify in these tales reflections on questions of literary form, and whether disguise scenarios on the page call attention to the specificities of medium and genre, just as they do on stage. Do they serve as metafictional devices avant la lettre? And if they do, do they also tell us something about the narrative’s impact on readers, the

Introduction

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question which worried Ascham and other conservative commentators? Methodologically, my interest in reading early modern prose fiction from the perspective of cultural history is thus complemented by a specific concern for the aesthetic form of the narratives and the explicit and implicit ways in which authors reflect upon their contribution to an emerging, contested genre. *** As my readings of early modern literature are shaped by an interest in the historical context of the Reformation as much as for the specific literary form in which cultural issues are expressed, my study corresponds to three recent developments in early modern studies: the renewed interest in aesthetics, a turn to religion, and a growing engagement with prose fiction. More and more books have promoted an interest in formalism since the beginning of this century. They are indicative of a new phase of formal analysis in the perhaps inevitably pendular development of our discipline.²² Yet they do not call for a return to an earlier state of criticism which focused exclusively on questions of form regardless of historical context. Instead, they show that formalism and historicism – or, as the opposition is sometimes construed, literary analysis and cultural studies – do not have to be seen as irreconcilable and mutually exclusive alternatives, but can be brought together productively. Greenblatt conceptualised New Historicism as a method that pays attention to historical context as much as to aesthetic form as early as 1982 – a promise which many new historicist studies arguably did not quite fulfil (Cohen, “Introduction” 2). In 1992, Richard Helgerson called his Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England a “historical formalist” project (7). As Helgerson emphasises, the historical context of a particular literary text is registered, but also reformed by the aesthetic quality of literature. Therefore, we can only approach the historical role of a literary text via its particular form, which always already involves a creative transformation of the historical circumstances. On the other hand, genres do not have “an intrinsic or universal meaning” (7), but their significance is historically established first by the writer and then by each reader across the decades and centuries. Hence, the meaning of a particular literary form is subject to change. Indeed, the study of genre only becomes productive when we pay attention to the reformations which modes of writing undergo, when we take into account how they are adapt-

 For example, a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly in 2000 was entitled Reading for Form (Wolfson), a 2002 edition was dedicated to Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Rasmussen), and The New Aestheticism was published in 2003 (Joughin and Malpas). Towards the end of the decade, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism and The Forms of Renaissance Thought followed (Cohen; Barkan, Cormack and Keilen).

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Introduction

ed (or opposed) to new social, political and religious circumstances, to new groups of readers, to new forms of distribution of literature, to new aesthetic preferences, and to new literary intertexts. This approach has been described as a “truly historical formalism,” one that is “not a return to but a remedy for formalist essentialism, a theory of literature as both a measure and a means of historical change” (Cohen, “Introduction” 33). Alternatively, critics have called the trend ‘new formalism’ or ‘new aestheticism.’ Since the ‘newness’ of this approach can only derive from its comprehensiveness, one might speak just as well of ‘formalist historicism’ or repeal all ‘-isms’ to describe its method. With a formalist historicist interest in the reformation of genre, my study looks at the impact of the Reformation on vernacular prose fiction and its creative engagement with the mode of romance. In the last two decades, attention has shifted in early modern studies from the Renaissance to the Reformation. An invigorated awareness of the centrality of religious questions for the field emerged, including literary texts and cultural discourses which had customarily been discussed in secular, humanist, or classicist terms.²³ Debora Shuger was among the first critics demanding such a paradigm shift, arguing in her 1990 study Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture that “[r]eligion in this period supplies the primary language of analysis [… and] is the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic” (6). While not all critics share the conviction of the all-encompassing importance of religion, many have followed Shuger’s groundbreaking work. For instance, Cummings in his study The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (2002) investigates the cross-pollination between European theology, literary theory, and fictional literature, maintaining that “[t]he historical events now known as the Reformation are bound up at every level with acts of literature both spoken and written, with the interpretation of language and with the practice of literary culture,” but that likewise “without reference to religion, the study of early modern writing is incomprehensible” (5, 6). Tom Betteridge’s Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (2004) similarly makes a case for the intersection of religion and literature by tracing the Henrician, Edwardian, Marian, and Elizabethan poetics of the Reformation. Controversial historical studies like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 – 1580 (1992) and Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (1993) ar-

 See K. Jackson and Marotti for a detailed discussion of the turn to religion in early modern studies and its equivalent in contemporary theory.

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gued for a persistence of the old faith in the minds and hearts of early modern believers upon whom the Reformation was forced by official decree. Concomitant with this re-evaluation of the Reformation in historiography, a reassessment of Catholic faith in early modern England has become of interest in literary studies, too. For instance, Ramie Targoff’s Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (2001) contradicts the common assumption that Protestant belief promoted a more individual form of faith than Catholic liturgy, and traces the impact of the liturgical Reformation on English devotional poetry. Other literary critics have shed light on the persistent Catholic subculture in Anglican England; in addition to Marotti’s above-quoted study Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005), Alison Shell argues in Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558 – 1660 (1999) that a specific ‘Catholic imaginary’ creatively influenced Elizabethan writing, and Stephen Hamrick explores the intersections of Catholicism and Petrarchism in The Catholic Imaginary and the Cult of Elizabeth, 1558 – 1582 (2009).²⁴ Katharine Eisaman Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1995) has shown that the search for inward truth in early modern England was closely bound up with religious belief, but also with religious changes and the resulting need for detecting religious allegiances. Although my focus on the Eucharistic heritage and its modification in disguise narratives sets my study apart from Maus’s, it starts from a similar opening question: “What is at issue – ethically, politically, epistemologically, theologically – when someone in early modern England appeals to a difference between external show and form internal, or between outer and inner man?” (Maus 28). Like Maus, I set out to explore the early modern “dialectic of vision and concealment” that constitutes “an important chapter in the history of self-conceptions” (29). The question of whether or not subjectivity was ‘born’ in the Renaissance has been debated ever since Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 claim that “man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such” in the fifteenth century (98). While the issue remains controversial,²⁵ the idea that a person has an individual

 The more recent contributions to the study of the Reformation draw on seminal studies published before the ‘turn to religion’ in early modern studies, most prominently for prose fiction, on John N. King’s English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982), and, for the study of poetry, on Malcolm Mackenzie Ross’s Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (1964) and Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979).  Apart from Maus’s influential contribution, see also the classic studies by Greenblatt and Schoenfeldt (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning; Schoenfeldt). For a more recent contribu-

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core, and a core which may be hidden behind deceptive appearances, certainly gained momentum in the sixteenth century, also because of the importance of heterodoxy. The recognition of subjectivity and its problematisation condition and even constitute each other in early modernity: with the assumption of a personal substance that can be dissimulated or altered, speculations about a potential disguise are fostered, and, in turn, such speculations fuel the preoccupation with how identity can be perceived and how it can potentially change. As shown by Ascham’s dread of an internal transmutation of readers, the policing of the hidden substances of Elizabethans was an important issue, and not only for humanist pedagogues, as we will see. My argument that Eucharistic concerns resurface in secular narratives can be situated in a rich field of research that has examined the adaptation of pre-Reformation concepts and rituals in ‘post’-Reformation England.²⁶ For example, Elizabeth Mazzola has argued that “abandoned [Catholic] symbols or practices do not simply disappear from the mental landscape,” but can attain a new cultural meaning in secular contexts and in particular in poetry (1). According to Mazzola, “Renaissance literature might therefore be approached in terms of a sacred history of lost ideas, and read in terms of sacred signs which were downplayed or even disowned. Escaping the order imposed by theology, politics, or aesthetics, these sacred relics are no longer closely regulated,” but can be used for innovative aesthetic ends (9). Equally, Richard Santana suggests that the Elizabethan age was a particularly interesting period for such resemanticisations since the old rituals were officially abandoned and therefore no longer sacrosanct, but still powerful enough to attract readers. In this context, “elements of the Mass are on their way to becoming aesthetic commodities but not yet fully established as such” (33). A number of publications have argued for resemanticisations of the abandoned rituals of the old faith in Shakespeare’s plays and early modern theatre more generally, among them Stephen Greenblatt’s essays in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), in Practicing New Historicism (2000), and his monograph Ham-

tion, see Selleck. In discussions of subjectivity, interiority, which certainly existed before the Renaissance, has to be distinguished from individuality, which may have evolved in the Renaissance.  Just like ‘postmodernism’ and ‘post-colonialism,’ ‘post-Reformation’ is a complex term, which does not imply that England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left the old faith behind fully; instead, as I argue throughout this study, the processes of religious reformation and pluralisation were an ongoing business in Elizabethan England and beyond. I will use ‘postReformation’ for the long period beginning with Elizabeth’s reign, in which England’s state religion was consolidated as Anglican and independent of the pope.

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let in Purgatory (2001), Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare (2004), and John E. Curran’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (2006).²⁷ Tobias Döring has shown for mourning rites on and beyond the stage that “[o]blivion cannot simply be commanded or produced,” and hence that the official abandonment of Catholic doctrines and rituals did not lead to their complete erasure from cultural memory (153). Instead, they were “transferred into the realm of latent meanings, a cultural limbo where they lie dormant but whence they can potentially be retrieved and re-semanticized for active use” (153). Timothy Rosendale’s Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (2007) sees a link between the Reformational regard for the figurative that was shaped in the Eucharist debate and the explosion of literary writing later in the century. Rosendale’s study, from whose discussions of the complicated theological development in England and its liturgical reflections I have very much profited, analyses Shakespeare’s history plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Thomas Hobbes’s writing in the light of the liturgical reforms. My own readings of Elizabethan prose fiction seek to endorse Rosendale’s general thesis that the Eucharist debate provides an exceptionally relevant example of the cross-fertilisation between theology, liturgy, and fictional literature. Regina Mara Schwartz has traced adaptations of the Catholic heritage, transubstantiation in particular, in post-Reformation literature, identifying a ‘sacramental poetics’ in the work of Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. While I share Schwartz’s assumption that the deeper cultural and emotional values of the abandoned Catholic ritual were transferred to fictional literature, I will not concentrate on poetry’s claim towards the transcendental by analysing “how the spiritual cravings for communion with divinity addressed so fully by the Eucharist could also be addressed in poetry” (8). Instead, my study will propose that the model of transubstantiation offered early moderns a productive concept to negotiate anxieties and wishful fantasies about potential identity change, and that Eucharistically inflected visions of identity change in early modern literature are often explored through the motif of disguise. To the best of my knowledge, the only academic contribution so far which links disguise and the Eucharist is Tracey Sedinger’s article “‘And yet woll stieel say that I am I’: Jake Juggler, the Lord’s Supper, and Disguise” (2007), which focuses on an anonymous mid-sixteenth century interlude that negotiates the questions of multilocation and identity. Sedinger’s observations inspired my own work on early modern narratives.

 See also Mayer and Jensen.

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The collection The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor (2005) traces literary adaptations of the Catholic doctrine to the present day. The co-editor Douglas Burnham maintains in his introduction that in contemporary European culture, “transubstantiation is the ‘metaphor’ par excellence of the dissolution or intermingling of identities” (9 – 10). If this is true, then my study is concerned with the prehistory of this phenomenon. Projects like The Poetics of Transubstantiation highlight that for a long time, the notion of transubstantiation has fascinated writers and critics alike since it not only bears religious, but also epistemological, philosophical, and poetological relevance: in the scene of the Catholic Eucharist, signified and signifier, sense (i. e. sensual experience) and meaning,²⁸ presence and representation, flesh and word, soma and sema are unified. Therefore, the Eucharist has been regarded as “a concept that had an unparalleled role to play in the formation of modern Europe” (Burnham 1). Simultaneous to this turn to religion, medievalists have corrected some entrenched notions of early modern studies. For example, in his Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson highlights late medieval reformations which predated early modern changes; Simpson thus challenges the boundaries of periods and corrects the habitual differentiation between the traditional, ‘dark’ Middle Ages and the reformist, more enlightened Renaissance. After Miri Rubin’s foundational work in Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (1991), a number of studies have investigated the Eucharist’s importance for medieval literature and theatre. Most prominently among them, Michael Kobialka’s This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (1999) and Sarah Beckwith’s Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (2001) provide important antecedents for my own project. Others have re-examined the boundary between the fields, for example in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (2007), edited by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, and in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (2010), edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson. Helen Cooper’s The English Romance in Time (2004) demonstrates that while the literary conventions and motifs (or meme, as Cooper prefers to call them) of early modern romances derive from their medieval forerunners, the age modified and updated these conventions, finding in romance “a way of thinking about what it meant to be created human in an age that had abandoned the established

 “[I]m Sakrament von Brot und Wein wird Sinn sinnlich erfahrbar. Ein Ritual, das durch seine Unwahrscheinlichkeit offenbar noch an Reiz und Überzeugungskraft gewinnt: als Zeichen aller Zeichen muß das Abendmahl mehr als ein bloßes Zeichen sein; es muß als Zeichen sinnlich (und also nicht bloß als flatus vocis) anwesend sein, weil in ihm der Sinn von Sein und das Sein von Sinn sinnliche Gewissheit werden” (Hörisch, Brot und Wein 16 – 17).

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schemes of Roman Catholic doctrine; about what England and being English meant in an age of fierce nationalism” (7). Tracing the adaptation of the Catholic heritage in Reformation England, my study likewise makes a case for understanding the sixteenth century as more profoundly informed by medieval culture than the terminology of the ‘early modern’ and the ‘Renaissance’ suggests. Caroline Walker Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity offers a prehistory of the phenomena that interest me as it identifies a historical shift in concepts of change: from a notion of change as the unfolding of an essence, that is, basically, as the preservation of the existing condition, to a notion of change as replacement. According to Bynum, it was towards the end of the twelfth century that “a new understanding – a new model – of change emerged. In a quite stunning shift of intellectual paradigms, people were increasingly fascinated by […] radical change, where an entity is replaced by something completely different” (25). The reasons for such a paradigm shift, as Bynum proposes, are changing social circumstances, for example an increasing fluidity of the rank system through new economic developments. This sense of a growing flexibility of traditionally stable identity categories like rank, race, and gender is still central in the early modern period, and it raised a similar “fear of new identities, fear of boundary crossing,” but also a fascination with “change as an ontological problem” (27, 18). Not only in the medieval period, but also in early modern times, such challenges of traditional concepts prompt thought about identity. Bynum’s observation that “[i]dentity is explored via threats to it” also holds true for Elizabethan culture and its prose narratives, as we shall see (32). In recent years early modern scholars have paid more attention to the formerly relatively neglected field of early modern prose fiction. Paul Salzman accordingly has called prose fiction “the Cinderella of Elizabethan literature,” thus proffering an apt metaphor not only for the development of early modern studies, but also for my interest in disguise, hidden substances, and identity transformation (“Review” 805). An upsurge of interest in prose fiction has led to an entirely different field than in 1993, when Lorna Hutson claimed, “no one bothers to turn the pages of Elizabethan novellae unless they are examining the source of a Shakespeare play or attempting the by now rather discredited task of tracing the history of the novel” (“Fortunate Travelers” 83). Indeed, an overarching genre history has not been of central academic concern since the early 1990s. Nonetheless, the search for novelistic origins of prose fiction prior to the eighteenth century, which was one of the aims of Margaret Schlauch’s Antecedents of the English Novel, 1400 – 1600 (1963), of the introductory chapter of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1963), Dieter Mehl’s Der englische Roman bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (1977), and Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, 1600 – 1740 (1987), has offered valuable insight into early modern narratives. Recent

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critics have worked on the basis of these studies, as much as of histories of prose narrative more generally, chiefly Salzman’s seminal overview in English Prose Fiction 1558 – 1700: A Critical History (1985). Apart from genre history, a relatively small number of monographs since the 1960s have laid the groundwork for more recent critical engagements; most prominently, Walter R. Davis’s Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (1969), Richard Helgerson’s The Elizabethan Prodigals (1976), and Arthur Kinney’s Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (1986). Although they differ from my project in their thematic interests, these influential studies have also shaped my own engagement with Elizabethan prose fiction, and I shall return to their arguments in my readings of the narratives. Since the 1990s, the rich and heterogeneous body of early modern prose fiction has invited versatile approaches. Philip Sidney is still the predominant figure in academic criticism of early modern prose fiction, but John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and previously ignored writers such as Barnabe Riche have also become established objects of academic exploration.²⁹ Verena Olejniczak Lobsien and Eckhard Lobsien have dedicated a number of studies to early modern English prose fiction and its European context, focusing in particular on imagination, fictional world-making, and scepticism.³⁰ Steve Mentz’s Romance for Sale (2006) highlights the importance of ancient Greek romance for the Elizabethan reinvigoration of the mode, and Katherine Wilson’s Fictions of Authorship (2006) elucidates how authors deal with the new print

 Among the monographs on Sidney, see in particular Alan Hager’s Dazzling Images (1991) and Blair Worden’s The Sound of Virtue (1996). Thomas Nashe, who has attracted almost as much critical attention as Sidney in recent years, is the subject of several monographs and a wealth of articles; among the monographs, see in particular Neil Rhodes’s Elizabethan Grotesque (1980), Jonathan Crewe’s Unredeemed Rhetorics (1982), Lorna Hutson’s Thomas Nashe in Context (1989), and Georgia Brown’s Redefining Elizabethan Literature (2004). On Riche, see in particular Constance Relihan’s Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (1994). On Greene, see the collection Writing Robert Greene (Melnikoff and Gieskes 2008). Among the more recent books which are not dedicated to one author exclusively, Derek Alwes’s Sons and Authors revisits the question of prodigality, Reid Barbour’s Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction investigates how early modern narratives redefine the boundaries and the very nature of prose, and Robert Maslen’s Elizabethan Fictions examines early Elizabethan fiction in the light of the humanist attitudes toward Italianate fiction. Jeff Dolven focuses on Scenes of Instruction (2007) in Sidney’s and Lyly’s narratives.  Eckhard Lobsien, Imaginationswelten: Modellierungen der Imagination und Textualisierungen der Welt in der englischen Literatur 1580 – 1750 (2003); Verena Olejniczak Lobsien and Eckhard Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination: Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert (2003); Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Skeptische Phantasie: Eine andere Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur (1999).

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market in their fictional writings. Constance Relihan, Goran Stanivukovic, Patricia Parker, Helen Hackett, Lorna Hutson and others have explored the importance of gender and sexuality in early modern prose fiction.³¹ Andrew Hadfield’s Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545 – 1625 (1998) is highly relevant for my concern with the formation and transformation of national identity (to be pursued in the third chapter), and I have profited from Hadfield’s exploration of how national identity was forged through travel accounts and colonial reports. In particular, I have drawn on his chapter on English prose fiction, which shares a number of primary texts with my own study. Sharing Hadfield’s postulation that “one of the manifold uses of the relatively new form of prose fiction was as a vehicle to explore contemporary political problems,” even if the narratives are set in distant lands or in distant times (Literature, Travel 135), I will engage with his arguments in my own reading of the narratives, which approaches them from a different point of view. Religion is still a fairly neglected issue in the study of early modern prose fiction. Similarly, the implications of the body in disguise for prose fiction and its modes of narration have been tackled in a number of articles, but a more systematic analysis is lacking – in contrast to the pervasive work on cross-dressing in drama.³² Therefore my own interest in religious change and identity transformation, in transubstantiation and disguise, differentiates my approach from

 Patricia A. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (1987); Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (1989); Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994); Rosemary Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (1994); Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (1998); Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction (1999); Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (2000); Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories (2002); Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570 – 1640 (2004); Constance C. Relihan, Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender, and Elizabethan Fiction (2004); Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (2008).  On the stage, disguises have a visually spectacular dimension, which offers audiences the experience of the epistemological challenge of penetrating false surfaces. At the same time, masquerade on stage always has a metatheatrical quality, in particular on the early modern stage with its boy actors. The repercussions of cross-dressing in the theatre and beyond have been explored in a number of now classical studies, on which my arguments about the cultural relevance of dress and disguise are partly based: Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters (1983), Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579 – 1642 (1994), and Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1996).

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many preceding studies. For the study of prose fiction, disguise has chiefly been acknowledged as a characteristic motif of the pastoral, and in this context critics have commented on pastoral prose romances. Most relevant for my concern and my choice of primary literature are Walter Davis’s Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, which engages with most of the narratives which interest me, the second chapter of Wolfgang Iser’s The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993), which considers Renaissance pastoral romance, including Sidney’s Arcadia, and Louis Montrose’s seminal article “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form” (1983),³³ which sheds light on the cultural context of the pastoral. In particular the female disguise of Sidney’s protagonist has attracted critical attention and has caused a still unfinished debate whether his cross-dressing is indicative of weakness, ridicule, even monstrosity, or whether it signals a more perfect or more flexible state of his masculinity. I will revisit this debate in my own discussion of the disguise scenarios in Sidney’s pastoral narrative. Although critics sometimes assume that the stage is the most pertinent arena for disguise, just as narrative is better suited to depict metamorphosis,³⁴ studies like Lloyd Davis’s Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance (1993) and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have shown that questions of clothing and camouflage have a more pervasive cultural importance. Neither of these studies focuses on prose fiction, but they are nonetheless relevant for my own concern. Davis examines the interconnections between disguise and selfhood in a variety of early modern texts, including drama, rhetoric handbooks, philosophical treatises, religious pamphlets, and sermons. He demonstrates that disguise is a topos of selfhood in Renaissance texts, but that it does not stand for a particular notion of identity. Instead, it “works as a central motif for representing the cultural dialogism, rather than any particular thesis, of selfhood” (16). I shall argue that religion is an important, and frequently overlooked, aspect of this cultural dialogue about selfhood. Therefore, in the following I will first sketch the religious reformation processes that started on the European continent and soon affected England. Focusing on the Eucharist debate, I will lay out the deep-seated revisions of central cognitive concepts, ritualised models of perception, and emotional and spiritual experiences once offered by the Cath-

 See also John Danby’s Poets on Fortune’s Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher (1952), Sukanta Chaudhuri’s Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (1989), and Judith Haber’s Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction (1994).  On differences between metamorphosis on the page and the stage, see Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid; Burrow; Harzer; Wald.

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olic communion. These revisions had an impact on early modern culture that goes far beyond theology and liturgy, as I will begin to argue by looking at William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, before turning to Elizabethan romances in chapter 2 and prose fiction on foreign fashion in chapter 3. I will propose that the inherited literary motif of disguise gained new connotations when it merged with the theological concept of transubstantiation to explore issues of identity formation and transformation – just as Eucharistic concepts were transformed by their narrative adaptation.

1 The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England 1.1 The Eucharist in Early Modern England: Theological Controversies and Liturgical Reform When Christ shared his last supper with his apostles, he gave them bread and said, as the Latin Bible recounts, ‘hoc est corpus meum,’ ‘this is my body’ (The Geneva Bible Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24). What did he mean by this? That the bread is indeed his body? Or that it in some form signifies his body? If we look at the Hebrew and Greek sources of the Latin Bible, this question becomes even more difficult as here the sentence omits the verb and reads, ‘this my body’ (cf. J. Anderson 20 – 22). Due to the intricate history of Bible translations and the eminence of Christ’s utterance in Christian belief, this one Biblical sentence has generated an overwhelming number of theological interpretations which at times have conflicted heavily with one another – in particular during the Reformation, which turned the Eucharist debate, hitherto chiefly a concern of highly educated theologians, into a pressing public concern. Montaigne remarked accordingly in 1580, “How many weighty strifes, and important quarrels, hath the doubt of this one sillable, hoc, brought forth in the world?” (Vol. 2, 237). According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which had come to prevail since the thirteenth century, when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council silenced critics who defended competing opinions, the celebration of the Eucharist is a repetition of Christ’s original sacrifice. ‘Hoc est corpus meum,’ Christ’s (translated) words which are spoken by the priest, mean that the bread is indeed transformed into Christ’s body. Liturgy here counters sensual experience since the outward appearance of the elements of bread and wine remain unchanged by the priest’s words. Catholic theology has hence developed an elaborate theory which maintains that the ‘accidents’ (the outward appearance of bread and wine) remain unaltered, while their ‘substance’ changes. Invisible to the eye but discernible to true believers, bread and wine transubstantiate. Believers consuming the Eucharist incorporate Christ’s body into their own body; the communion entails the intermingling of identities which Christ envisioned according to John: “Iesus said […] For my flesh is meat in dede, & my blood is drink in dede. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (The Geneva Bible John 6:53 – 56). The idea of a real but invisible presence of Christ during communion poses a challenge of faith and imagination to believers. Therefore, altar pieces often tried to illustrate the mysterious action of tran-

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substantiation taking place in front of them: their “images glorified, explicated, and mediated the blank spectacle before them: Christ present as the invisible ‘substance’ of the bread” (Koerner 71). For some believers, such manmade visual support was not enough, they experienced divine visions that supported the truth-claims of the Eucharist. In these visions, the bread was transformed into the body of the infant Jesus or the wounded, crucified adult, and the wine into his real blood. Here, transubstantiation resulted in metamorphosis – or, in theological terms, in ‘transaccidentation.’³⁵ Such Eucharistic miracles were not only envisioned on altar pieces and in legends, but also in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The proper understanding of the Last Supper became one of the central points of debate during the theological and political quarrels of the sixteenth century. Confronted with the Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545 – 63) reinforced the dogma of transubstantiation and declared, “If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema” (Thirteenth Session, Canon I; Council and Waterworth 82). The wording of the Council of Trent, which rejects any figural interpretation of Christ’s bodily presence, indicates that Protestant thinkers attacked the Catholic dogma as being a too literal reading of ‘this is my body.’³⁶ They did so to different degrees. Martin Luther held a comparatively moderate position by arguing that a process of consubstantiation takes place, in which the substances of wine and bread coexist with the real presence of Christ’s body and blood ‘in, with and under’ bread and wine.³⁷ He rejected many Catholic sacraments, but kept the Mass (in addition to baptism and confession), nonetheless criticising the idea that sacraments work ex opere operato. For Luther, ‘hoc est corpus meum’ remained an original

 Cf. Koerner 355 – 358 for a discussion of the Gregory legend and its depictions that show Christ appearing on the altar during the celebration of the Eucharist. Cf. also Greenblatt “The Wound” 85 – 89, 99 – 109, Bynum, “Women Mystics,” and Bynum, Wonderful Blood 87– 94 and passim for accounts of such visions, which allegedly often also happened to convince and at the same time punish unbelievers.  The present-day Catholic position on transubstantiation has come closer to the Protestant notion. Some Catholic theologians, among them Edward Schillebeeckx, have argued that ‘this is my body’ refers to the ‘transignification’ of bread and wine, and thus, to a change of meaning rather than to a change of substance. Official Catholic doctrine, however, has retained the notion of transubstantiation.  ‘Consubstantiation’ is not Luther’s term, but was applied in retrospect to characterise his position.

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The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England

performative speech act of fiat granted by God’s grace, just like in the Genesis (Shullenberger 27): if I were to say over all the bread there is, “This is the body of Christ,” nothing would happen, but when we follow his institution and command in the Supper and say, “This is my body,” then it is his body, not because of our speaking or our declarative word, but because of his command in which he has told us so to speak and to do and has attached his own command and deed to our speaking. (Luther 184)

Luther’s position on the Eucharist was challenged by the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli (as well as by Andreas Karlstadt and Johannes Oecolampadius), who refuted the Catholic doctrine far more fiercely. Zwingli argued that the Eucharist remembers the Last Supper and Christ’s crucifixion, but does not repeat them: bread and wine are figurative signs which represent Christ’s absent body. For Zwingli, Christ’s words read, ‘hoc significat corpus meum.’ No material change takes place; it is the task of the believers to commemorate Christ’s death. Zwingli’s ally Heinrich Bullinger explained that for Zwingli, ‘represent’ did not mean that Christ’s body is made present again: “sacramental signs […] signify, and in signifying do represent. […] But to represent doth not signify (as some dream) to bring, to give, or make that now again corporally present which sometime was taken away; but to resemble it in likeness and by a certain imitation, and to call it back again to mind” (Vol. 5, 327). Thus, in Zwinglian memorialism, “[p]sychological act replaces ontological fact” (Ross 50). Zwingli and his adherents argued that Jesus’s words following the institution in Luke and the Corinthians, ‘this do in remembrance of me’ point to the true meaning of the Eucharist as a ritual of remembrance rather than repetition (cf. also Strier 288). Their criticism went hand in hand with a reformed understanding of the role of sacraments. While Luther understood them as “a word with a promise attached,” they saw them as mere signs: “sacraments are not channels of the Spirit to give grace, for the Spirit needs no channel. At the very best, sacraments are only signs of grace already given” (Spinks 1, 2). Bridging the gap between Luther and Zwingli, Protestant theology developed a fourth interpretation of ‘this is my body,’ which was promoted by John Calvin (as well as, with some differences, by theologians like Martin Bucer, Philipp Melanchthon, and Heinrich Bullinger).³⁸ In his Institutes of Christian Religion (1536; revised until 1559), Calvin criticises the fixation on “this one thorny question” of  See Spinks for a discussion of Bucer’s notion of sacraments and the Eucharist, which emphasised the instrumental role in comparison to Zwingli and thus came closer to Calvin. Spinks also elucidates Bullinger’s ‘symbolic parallelism,’ which refuted Calvin’s idea that the sacraments exhibit rather than represent (Spinks 3 – 5; 8 – 11).

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how “Christ’s body lie[s] hidden under the bread, or under the form of bread” (1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1405; 4.17. 33). He sums up the state of the Eucharist debate: Some men, to prove themselves subtle, added to the simplicity of Scripture: that he is ‘really’ and ‘substantially’ present. Still others even went farther: they said he has the same dimensions in which he hung on the cross. Others devised a wondrous transubstantiation. Others said the bread itself was the body. Others, that it was under the bread. Others that only a sign and figure of the body were set forth. […] How is the body devoured by us? (Institutes, 1536 edition, 104; IV.C.27)

Calvin’s answer to this question was that Christ is present in the Eucharist; bread and wine are “not signa repraesentativa, signs representing something absent, but signa exhibitiva, signs manifesting something present” (Tylenda 31). Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine is, however, ‘true’ rather than ‘real’; it is spiritual rather than physical. Calvin is close to Luther’s position when he posits in his De Coena Domini (1558) that substance and accidents are interconnected: “the inward substance of the sacrament is annexed to the visible signs.” Since “God can neither deceive nor lie, it followeth that he doth in very deed fulfil and perform all that he doth there signify”; “the Lord doth in very deed give the same thing that he doth represent” (Calvin, “Lord’s Supper” 441, 461). Calvin himself characterises his position as metonymic when he argues that Christ’s offer of his body is a metonymy, a figure of speech […]. For though the symbol differs in essence from the thing signified (in that the latter is spiritual and heavenly, while the former is still physical and visible), still, because it not only symbolizes the thing that it has been consecrated to represent as a bare and empty token, but also truly exhibits it, why may its name not rightly belong to the thing? (Institutes, 1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1385; 4.17.21)

According to Calvin this metonymic connection is not an inherent quality of the thing itself, but has to be established in an act of faithful reading: Calvin’s position shifts the fusion of sign (the bread) and referent (Christ’s spiritual presence) to the interpreter of the sign. Hence, what all three Protestant positions share is a focus on the believers who perceive and consume the elements of bread and wine: it is through their faith that bread and wine come to entail Christ’s real (Luther), true (Calvin), or figurative presence (Zwingli) – an emancipation of the believer which was reinforced by having the Mass read aloud in the vernacular rather than in (often mumbled) Latin and by administering bread and wine to the laity, too. In this shift from elements to believers, from the signs to their interpretation, lies not only the theological, but also the epistemic and, as I will argue, poetic innovation of the Reformed position.

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The four most influential positions in the Eucharist debate cover a spectrum ranging from the real, physical presence of Christ in the elements via his spiritual presence to the representation of the absent body – from the Catholic position to Zwingli’s, a gap between the sign and the signified opens and widens. Theological debates over the Eucharist became the central field for early moderns to discuss the nature of representation, as early modern scholars have shown (Sedinger 239; cf. also Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap” 141 and Höfele and Laqué xi-xiii). The Eucharist debate marked the transition of the Catholic, medieval notion of repraesentatio, of making really present, to a modern notion of representation. In this vein, Protestant thinkers insisted on the conventionality of language and ascribed the earlier view to Catholics and all believers in magic. Thus, Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) emphasised that words are transparent, conventional, and inert; they can only have performative power and exert a “miraculous operation” if they are given the “power and grace of God” by God himself. Unlike the papists, Protestants “ought not to take upon […] [themselves] to conterfet, or resemble him, which with his word created all things. […] [N]o new substance can be made or created by man. […] For by the sound of the words nothing commeth, nothing goeth, otherwise than God in nature hath ordained to be done by ordinarie speech, or else by his speciall ordinance” (189). Likewise, the Puritan leader William Perkins argued in A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (published posthumously in 1608): “And that which is only a bare sound, in all reason can have no vertue in it to cause a reall worke, much lesse to produce a wonder”; it does not have “the power of touching the substance” (134 – 135), including the substance of Christ’s body in the ritual of the Eucharist. In stressing the nudity of the word, Perkins implicitly criticises “any theory of a natural language whereby the word might be seen to correspond to its referent, or, worse, whereby the word might acquire the referent’s power” (T. Greene 29). Such an interest in the performative, creative power of language is poetologically relevant. We will see that both early modern literary theory and the works of prose fiction raise similar questions about the power of language – spells, oracles, verbal revelations, and scenes of intradiegetic storytelling recur in the narratives of the 1570s, 80s, and 90s. In England, the Reformation led to fast changes in the official theology and liturgy from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. The most widespread pre-Reformation liturgy was the Roman Catholic Sarum Mass, held in Latin. In the Canon, the part of the Mass with Eucharistic prayers of intercession, consecration, and oblation, the crucial prayer asks God that “ut nobis cor✠pus et san✠guis fiat dilectissimi filii tui domini nostri iesu xp̄i” – that the bread and wine “be made unto us the body and blood of thy most beloved son, our lord Jesus Christ” (Rosendale 92). Little black crosses printed in the mass book in the words ‘cor-

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pus’ and ‘sanguis’ indicated the moments of priestly crossings; beyond this practical direction, they indicated divine intervention and were therefore sometimes understood as a textual reflection of Christ’s Real Presence (and hence derided as idolatrous by more radical Reformers). The actual moment of transubstantiation in the Roman Catholic Mass was thought to take place when the priest repeated the words of institution, “hoc est enim corpus meum,” “this is indeed my body.”³⁹ The priest elevated the host during this ceremony, so that the communicants could see Christ’s body; usually, lay believers physically incorporated the Eucharistic bread only once a year, at Easter (Rosendale 92). The Roman Catholic liturgy and doctrine of transubstantiation were maintained during the early years of Reformation under Henry VIII. In fact, the government issued the Act of the Six Articles in 1539, the first of which demanded that everyone who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation was to be burnt. This remained Henry’s policy toward Eucharistic reforms until his death. When Henry’s young son Edward ascended the throne, the English Reformation gained momentum. When the Six Articles were repealed, the English Eucharist debate reached a peak in the mid-sixteenth century. Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury and the leading theologian during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, gradually adopted Zwingli’s figurative understanding of the sacraments as the official Anglican position, and reformed the liturgy accordingly. Two Books of Common Prayer were published under Edward, both devised under Cranmer’s auspices and discussed in the House of Lords before publication. The first version of the prayer book from 1549 translated the entire service into the English vernacular and included important changes to the communion: the ministration of both elements to the laity and an interpretation of the communion as a memory of Christ’s sacrifice rather than its ritualistic re-enactment (Rosendale 93 – 94). Accordingly, a rubric points out that the priest “shall saye or syng plainly and distinctly” the prayer that makes clear that the Eucharistic celebration is a ‘perpetuall memory’ rather than a renewed sacrifice (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 29): O God heavenly father, which of thy tender mercie, diddest geve thine only sonne Jesu Christ, to suffer death upon the crosse for our redempcion, who made there (by his one oblacion once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifyce, oblacion, and satysfaccyon, for the sinnes of the whole worlde, and did institute, and in his holy Gospell command us, to celebrate a perpetuall memory of that his precious death, untyll his comming again: (30, italics added)

 The Church added “enim” to the words of institution as chronicled in the Bible.

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At this point, the Latin Sarum Rite compared Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to the sacrifice of the elements in the Mass. Cranmer deleted this section and had the celebration continue (Cummings, “Introduction” xxx): Heare us (o merciful father) we besech thee: and with thy holy spirite and worde, vouchsafe to bl✠esse and sanc✠tifie these thy gyftes, and creatures of bread and wyne, that they maie be unto us the bodye and bloude of thy moste derely beloved sonne Jesus Christe. (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 30)

The Order of Communion here takes over the medial crosses from the Sarum missals; because of their implication of a performative power of the words to transform the elements, the crosses were dropped in the more radically Protestant prayer book of 1552 (702 n.30). The 1549 prayer continues with Christ’s words of institution: Who in the same nyght that he was betrayed: tooke breade, and when he had blessed, and geven thankes: he brake it, and gave it to his disciples, saiyng: Take, eate, this is my bodye which is geven for you, do this in remembraunce of me. (31)

After the equivalent prayer for the cup of wine as a representative of Christ’s blood, the rubric emphasises that these words “are to be saied, turning still to the Altar, without any elevacion, or shewing the Sacrament to the people” (31). It was common in medieval masses from the twelfth century onwards to lift the host to mark the miracle of transubstantiation; the reformed liturgy explicitly forbids this gesture to forestall people’s continued belief in transubstantiation and their idolatrous admiration of the elements. Like their fellow campaigners in Europe, English Reformers mocked the ontological transformation claimed by Catholics as superstitious. Although, strictly speaking, the priest’s words ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’ of the Roman Catholic liturgy deictically refer to the divine operation which transforms bread and wine and hence emphasise verbally what cannot be perceived visually, the more radical Reformers tended to characterise the words as a performative utterance and ridiculed it as a magic incantation, as ‘hocus-pocus.’ Reformers derided the Roman Mass as a theatrical show in which believers committed idolatry by worshipping an idol of bread rather than the Christian God, by staging the ‘impanation’ of Christ.⁴⁰ Calvin rejected the Catholic transformation by which God’s “holy Sacrament is made a hateful idol” (Institutes, 1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1413;

 Cf. for example Thomas Becon’s polemical use of ‘impanation’ in Certain Articles of Christian Religion Proved and Confirmed (395).

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4.17.36), and the Scottish Reformer John Knox, who had met Calvin in exile, compared the Catholic Mass to ancient pagan idolatry of wood and stone, “because they worshipped there owne imagination, and the workmanship of there own hands, without any assurance of God or of his word” (171). Knox mocked that “the poore god of bread is most miserable of all other idoles” (172). Cranmer declared that “the people [are] being superstitiously enamored and doted upon the Mass. […] [This] Idolatry were taken for godliness and religion” (“Defence” 229). According to this criticism of the notions of transubstantiation and Real Presence, the 1549 prayer book points out at the beginning of the communion that “we spiritually eate the fleshe of Christ, and drinke his bloude, then we dwell in Christ and Christ in us, wee bee made one with Christ, and Christ with us” (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 22). Yet the first Book of Common Prayer included many passages which radical Reformers regarded as too close to the Roman Catholic liturgy. For example, the emphasis on a spiritual rather than physical presence of Christ in the elements is dropped in the prayer which immediately follows the words of institution, which beseeches God: “whosoever shalbee partakers of thys holy Communion, maye worthily receive the most precious body and bloude of thy sonne Jesus Christe […] and made one bodye with thy sonne Jesu Christe, that he maye dwell in them, and they in hym” (31). A similarly conservative phrase is retained in the rubrical explanations at the end of the Order of Communion, which emphasise that in each part of the broken bread is “the whole body of our saviour Jesus Christ” (39). This wording could be understood as a support of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and so it was deleted in the revised 1552 prayer book (704, n39). Likewise, the 1552 version changed the words that the priest spoke at the moment in which he delivered the sacrament to the communicants. In the 1549 version, he said “The body [and then: bloud] of our Lorde Jesus Christe which was geven for thee, preserve thy bodye and soule unto everlasting lyfe” (34). In the 1552 book, these lines were replaced by “Take and eate this, in remembraunce that Christ died for thee, and fede on him in thy heart by faith, with thankesgevyng” (733, n137). The new phrase reinforced Zwingli’s position of memorialism and tried to circumvent the believers’ association of the bread with Christ’s body by naming neither of them. However, as the wording had no liturgical tradition, it might have felt alien to believers, who might have experienced it as “a drastic reduction in sacramental action in favour of doctrinal statement,” as Cummings notes (ibid.). The 1552 prayer book also contained the so-called Black Rubric that was belatedly added to the Order for the Communion. It clarifies once again that Christians ought not to worship the elements themselves, but their meaning: “For as concernynge the Sacramentall bread and wine, they remayne styll in theyr

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verye naturall substaunces, and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatrye to be abhorred of all faythfull christians” (667).⁴¹ In this way, English Reformers like Thomas Cranmer gradually redefined the kind and locus of transformation that takes place during the Eucharistic celebration: it shifted from the elements to believers, and from a physical to a spiritual, emotional, psychic transformation. Debating with his Catholic opponent Stephen Gardiner in 1551, Cranmer pointed out that “the marvellous alteration to an [sic] higher estate, nature, and condition, is chiefly and principally in the persons, and in the sacramental signs it is none otherwise but sacramentally and in signification” (Cranmer, “An Answer” 323). After the Marian return to Catholicism, Cranmer was imprisoned, interrogated, and finally executed because he insisted on his rejection of Real Presence as published during Edward VI’s reign: “in the sacramental bread and wine is not really and corporally the very natural substance of the flesh and blood of Christ, but that the bread and wine be similitudes, mysteries and representations, significations, sacraments, figures, and signs of his body and blood” (“An Answer” 123). In the recorded public dispute between Cranmer and his conservative interrogators, they argue whether or not Christ meant ‘this is my body’ figuratively: Cranmer: […] I say, Christ did use figurative speech in no place more than in his sacraments, and specially in this his supper. Oglethorpe: No man of purpose doth use tropes in his testament; for if he do, he deceiveth them that he comprehendeth in his testament: therefore Christ useth none here. Cranmer: Yes, he may use them well enough. You know not what tropes are. […] Weston: [W]hosoever saith that Christ spake by figures, saith that he did lie. […] Cranmer: […] [W]ho say it is necessary that he which useth to speak by tropes and figures should lie in so doing? (Cranmer, “Disputations” 401)

 By contrast, earlier Catholic theologians had fashioned the Eucharistic Real Presence of Christ as a stronghold against idolatry. For example, “Take away this sacrament from the Church,” Bonaventure explained in On Preparing for the Mass in the 1250s, “and only error and faithlessness would remain in this world. The Christian people, like a herd of swine, would be dispersed, consigned to idolatry like all those other infidels” (Vol. VIII, 100, trans. in Denery 130). Even before the Reformation, however, the notion of Real Presence was criticised as idolatrous. Thus, the British theologian John Wycliffe posited in his treatise On the Eucharist (1379) a proto-Zwinglian stance: “these sensible sacraments are not the body and blood of Christ, but only their sign.” It would be less idolatrous to worship the sun than to worship bread and wine, Wycliffe continues: “For it would be much less evil for that man who first saw the sun rise to worship it as god for all the rest of the day than repeatedly to worship as his true God those accidents that he sees during mass, in the hands of the priest, in the consecrated host” (26 – 27, trans. in Denery 131– 132).

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Faced with the Protestant challenge, the Catholic position here equates figurative speaking with lying and thus resorts to “a dogmatic and uncompromising literalism” that is inconsistent with the rich Catholic history of allegorical interpretation (Rosendale 133). By contrast, Protestants developed a complex notion of the figurative, which will be of central concern in my reading of Sidney’s Arcadia. After Edward’s early death, Mary I retracted the reformation of the liturgy and re-established the Latin Sarum Mass. Hence, the official English position on the Eucharist returned to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation after a brief time of Zwinglian dominance during Edward’s reign. Eventually, when Elizabeth I ascended the throne, a version of Calvin’s intermediate stance came to define the Anglican position on the Eucharist. Elizabeth aimed at political and religious peace within the country in order to consolidate England as a nation. As part of this unification, a new prayer book was released in the year of her coronation.⁴² The Elizabethan liturgy was reinforced by laws such as the 1559 Act of Uniformity of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacrament, which required that all parsons, vicars and other ministers had to follow the instructions of the book; violations of this order led to fines and lifelong imprisonment. The 1559 prayer book (like the earlier versions) contained long speeches that priests could use to reprimand believers who failed to attend services regularly or who refrained from participating in the communion. These exhortations show that establishing steady attendance at the Anglican service proved difficult. There remained a reluctance to consume the elements among believers, who had been used to the medieval tradition of manducatio per visum and the taking of the bread only once a year. By contrast, the Reformed position argued that communion was only valid if both elements were physically incorporated (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 727). Yet, besides these methods of enforcement, the success of the 1559 prayer book might also have been due to its rather restrained theological position. While it kept many parts of Edward’s 1552 version, it included a few significant changes; one of them concerns the celebration of the Eucharist. As we have seen,  See Spinks 1– 31 for an account of the sacramental legacy of the Reformation and its adaptation in England. As Spinks notes, the competing European theologies were read in England and Scotland. Although both English and Scottish Reformers rejected the Catholic and Lutheran notions of the Eucharist and came to refute Zwinglian memorialism, too, it is more difficult to align their positions with other theologians: “it is not at all clear that they were particularly conscious of the nuanced differences between the German Swiss, French Swiss and German Reformed writers, and if they were, it seems that they did not regard it as problematical for the articulation of their own views” (Spinks 18 – 19). See also Rosendale 88 – 102 and Trueman for the development of Eucharistic positions in England, which eventually settled on the spiritual presence as proposed by Calvin and others.

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the 1552 prayer book deleted the traditional lines when delivering the sacraments in favour of a novel phrasing, which clearly separated the elements from Christ’s body and blood and thus rejected the idea of transubstantiation and Christ’s Real Presence. Rather than privileging one of the two extant vernacular versions (and the far-reaching theological concerns that inspired them), the Elizabethan prayer book included both in a conflated phrasing: The bodie of our lord Jesu Christ which was geven for thee, preserve thy body and soule into everlastinge life, and take and eat this, in remembraunce that Christ died for thee, and feede on him in thine heart by faith, with thankesgevynge. The bloude of our lorde Jesu Christ which was shedd for thee, preserve thy body and soule into everlasting life. And drinke this in remembraunce that Christes bloud was shedde for thee, and be thankful. (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 137)

This section keeps the interpretation of ‘hoc est corpus meum’ and the liturgy ambiguous enough to embrace Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Zwinglian believers. In Elizabethan times (and beyond), to believe in the real, true, or figurative presence of Christ were competing possibilities for communicants celebrating the Eucharist since the intermediate position of Anglicanism was arguably characterised by “a strange and uneasy tension between Catholic sacramentalism, Lutheran pseudo-sacramentalism, and thoroughgoing Puritan antisacramentalism” (Ross 49; cf. also Rosendale 101). Despite the relative inclusiveness of the liturgy, religious policies under Elizabeth were by no means lenient. Her excommunication from the Catholic Church in 1570 released her Catholic subjects from allegiance to the queen, and in 1580 Pope Gregory VIII declared that Elizabeth was a heretic whose murder would be no sin. Therefore, fears of a Catholic rebellion were strong, in particular after the Northern Rebellion against Elizabeth I by Catholic nobles in 1569. Potential revolts were frequently associated with Mary Stuart, who had lived under house arrest in England since 1568 and was eventually executed in 1587. Apprehensions of a religious uprising within England were complemented by anxieties of a Catholic invasion from the Continent; they came to a head during the attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and were only temporarily relieved by its defeat. In this politically fraught context, further anxieties were raised by the arrival of the Jesuits Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons in England in 1580 and many more Catholic priests in the subsequent decades, priests who had been trained abroad and returned to England to administer the Catholic Mass in secret. In this context, the government issued regulations like the “Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their due Obedience” of 1581, which made the participation in Anglican services obligatory. The act called for the death penalty for conversion to Catholicism and imposed high fines and imprisonment for the celebra-

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tion of the Catholic Mass. Further laws that dictated heavy fines for recusants and death penalties for priests were issued, and in 1588 alone, thirty-one priests were executed (Hadfield, Literature, Travel 185, 190). Also for this reason, the Eucharist continued to be a highly relevant theological and political issue after Elizabeth’s consolidation of Protestantism. As critics have shown, transubstantiation in particular had an important role as “the watchword of the good English Protestant” for the centuries to come (Davies 28).⁴³ In less than two decades, English believers had witnessed drastic changes in the theological stance towards the Eucharist and its liturgical celebration: from the Catholic Sarum Mass in Latin to the first mass in the English vernacular as prescribed in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, to the more radical 1552 version, to the Sarum Rite, to the more ambivalent 1559 liturgy. The issue of transubstantiation which was at the heart of the theological and liturgical debates remained a vital issue under Elizabeth and kept informing the cultural imaginary, and the Protestant turn to the believer’s interior faith arguably even fuelled its relevance in some respects. As we have seen, Cranmer insisted that “the marvellous alteration” typical of the Eucharist “is chiefly and principally in the persons” (“An Answer” 323). The new focus on internal transformation became a crucial source of anxiety and fascination for early modern culture at large and for Elizabethan prose fiction in particular. In the later sixteenth century, Richard Hooker, who further established Anglican theology, explained the emergence of Christ’s ‘true’ presence at communion by modifying the officially abandoned terminology of the old faith. In his influential theological defence of the Elizabethan settlement against more radical Reformers, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, he argued: “there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soul and body” (328). The publication of Hooker’s Laws postdates most of the prose texts which I will discuss in my study, but it captures the earlier developments by reinforcing the Protestant turn to the internal transformation of believers. I will argue that the possibility that ‘a marvellous alteration’ and ‘a kind of transubstantiation’ could happen within the believer – rather than ex opere operato in the material of bread and wine – inspired the literary imagination. The idea of internal transubstantiation proved to be poetically productive, in particular for scenarios of disguise and identity transformation. Before discussing the disguise scenarios of Elizabethan prose fiction of the 1580s and 1590s, let me turn to Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, a creative intervention in the Eucharist debate which prepared the ground for later Elizabethan narratives.

 Davies examines the late seventeenth century, when fears of the potential Catholic successor of Charles II, namely his brother James, gave the Eucharist debate renewed vigour.

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1.2 William Baldwin: Beware the Cat (1553/70) The 1988 edition of Beware the Cat called the narrative ‘the first English novel’ in its subtitle because it is the first piece of original, imaginative prose writing in English longer than the stories assembled in jest books. While reading pre-novelistic narratives chiefly in the light of later developments has become an outdated critical concern, Baldwin’s narrative is still regarded as outstanding for its time. Baldwin, editor of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), the most influential English poetry collection of the sixteenth century, is generally acknowledged as the “preeminent imaginative author of the English Reformation” (King 358) – and the imaginative force of his fiction exceeds the Reformational didacticism of Beware the Cat, as I shall argue. Probably written in the first half of 1553, in the last days of the reign of Edward VI, William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat made a literary contribution to the theological controversy by playfully ridiculing Catholic positions. Because of the outspoken criticism of Catholicism in Beware the Cat, which calls the pope the “very incarnated devil” (Beware the Cat 20), it could not be published after Edward’s early death in 1553 and England’s subsequent official return to Roman Catholicism under Mary’s rule.⁴⁴ The narrative was eventually issued in 1570 in two different editions under Elizabeth, seven years after Baldwin had died of the plague, and re-issued in 1584 with an additional poem at its beginning, which emphasised the narrative’s relevance to renewed fears of Catholic plots in the 1580s (Ringler and Flachmann 57).⁴⁵ Therefore, Beware the Cat has a complex historical context: the moment of its composition in the mid-century, a time of heated theological controversies regarding the Eucharist, and its first broader reception after 1570 in Elizabethan England, when the Anglican Church was more firmly established, but Eucharistic issues were still far from being resolved, as we have seen.

Beware Catholics? At the time when Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat, attacks on the Catholic Mass had reached a peak. After Edward’s first parliament had repealed the Six Articles (the first of which demanded that everyone who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation was to be burnt) and had begun to officially criticise the Mass, authors could dare to publish their treatises which took a stand against the Cath-

 Parenthetical references to Beware the Cat will be abbreviated to ‘BC.’  Cf. Holden 10 for comments on an alleged earlier but lost edition of 1561.

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olic interpretation of the Eucharist. In 1548 alone, over thirty editions of pamphlets appeared by prominent authors like William Turner and Robert Crowley as well as by lesser-known writers (Ringler and Flachmann xvii; Gresham 112). The 1549 Common Prayer Book demanded the elimination of observances based on the Roman Catholic tradition that were not in agreement with the Bible, including the Mass. The Latin Mass was abolished, bread and wine were considered symbolic, and the Roman Catholic notions of transubstantiation and Real Presence were declared superstitious. In this context, Baldwin, later to become a Protestant priest, criticises the notion of transubstantiation through a wealth of explicit remarks and implicit allusions. Beware the Cat employs the common anti-Catholic arguments of the day to ridicule and demonise the dogma, chiefly, as we will see, the charges of cannibalism and witchcraft. Professedly taking a stand against the remnants of the old faith in England, the narrative’s title and plot draw on the common equation of cats and Catholics. And yet, the plot attributes a far more ambiguous role to cats, as we will see. The text’s ambiguity and playfulness, which undercut any straightforward didacticism, partly stem from its elaborate narrative form. Beware the Cat has a complicated structure of embedded stories which are recounted by various characters, but its main plot can be briefly summarised as follows: At Christmas in 1552, and hence at a time “when preachers had leave to speak against the Mass, but it was not forbidden till half a year after” (BC 37), the intradiegetic narrator Gregory Streamer relates how he, after having taken a potion, is able to hear animals speak and overhears the communication of cats. These cats, and in particular a cat called Mouse-slayer, reveal secret celebrations of the forbidden Mass and idolatrous worship of saints as well as morally outrageous behaviour they have witnessed in Catholic households. Beware the Cat renders this story in a structure of Chinese boxes. The first frame of the narrative was added for the third edition of 1584, possibly by Thomas Knell the younger (Ringler and Flachmann 57). It is a poem entitled “T.K. to the Reader,” which makes the allegedly anti-popish intent of the following narrative explicit at a time of renewed fears of a Catholic plot against Elizabeth. T.K. warns against “Popish shifts” which “abuse” “simple souls” (BC 1). The second frame is established in the “Epistle Dedicatory” by GB alias Gulielmus Baldwin to John Young, in which Baldwin asks Young to “learn to Beware the Cat” (BC 4) and announces that in the following part he will offer a verbatim record of Master Streamer’s “order and words” (BC 3). Here, he claims the truthfulness of the subsequent tale; the author introduces his storia as history. The “Argument” constitutes a third frame, in which the setting during Christmas 1552 is explained and in which Baldwin introduces himself as a naïve narrator. Baldwin describes how he, sharing a room with Master Ferrers, “[t]hen master of the King’s Majes-

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ty’s pastimes” (BC 5), an ‘astronomer’ called Master Willot, and the ‘divine’ Master Gregory Streamer, becomes involved in a debate on whether animals have reason and are able to talk. Streamer claims to have witnessed animals’ capacity to speak and makes his interlocutors promise to listen to his story without interrupting him. Thus, a fourth frame is set because the following narrative is Baldwin’s account of Streamer’s story, given in direct speech in the first person and divided in two parts of “Master Streamer’s Oration.” For this speech, Baldwin serves as an editor, who has recorded, arranged, and commented on the story with headlines and additional remarks in the margins. Streamer himself retells several narratives that he was told by others, including the adventures of the cat Mouse-slayer which he claims to have overheard. Far removed from direct communication between narrator and narratee, the text here features four successive stories within a story within a story that is framed by a dedication and a poem and commented on by glosses in the margins. The story at the core of this complicated structure of frames is allegedly told by a cat – hardly the ‘true’ kernel of the narrative, whose outermost levels, the title and the dedications, already warn readers to beware the cat. The aesthetic structure of Chinese boxes fits the tale’s content, which is preoccupied with penetrating surfaces and discovering hidden spaces and identities. For this concern with discovery and exposure, the eponymous cats play an ambiguous role: they represent both Catholics and their Protestant opponents. On the one hand, their secret system of espionage and communication resembles the international Catholic network feared by Protestants: “There be few ships [from France, Flanders, and Spain] but have cats belonging unto them, which bring news unto their fellows out of all quarters” (BC 14). During Elizabeth’s reign, when Beware the Cat was circulated and read, Catholic priests were constantly smuggled onto the island and were hidden in sympathising households, where they celebrated the Mass and thus supported the remaining Catholics or converted Protestants back to the old faith. Since the search for hidden priests became increasingly serious in the 1580s and 1590s, when discovered clerics and their hosts were arrested, tortured, and sentenced for treason, Catholics developed more elaborate methods of importing and hiding priests.⁴⁶ Houses were rebuilt to contain secret spaces beneath staircases or behind walls; many of these so-called ‘priest holes’ were designed by Nicholas Owen, who was ultimately arrested in 1606 and died after being tortured.

 An Act of Parliament in 1581 declared the reconciliation to the Catholic Church treason, and an act in 1585 against Jesuits and seminary priests declared the sheltering of Catholic priests felony.

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Baldwin’s cats may allegorically represent the recusants who hid like animals in holes, especially since ‘Cat’ was an established abbreviation for Catholics in Baldwin’s day. As Ringler and Flachmann note, in February 1554, a cat was hanged on the gallows in Cheapside apparelled like a Catholic priest with a shaven crown and a round piece of paper between its forefeet to represent the Eucharistic wafer (xx). In 1571, a year after the first publication of Beware the Cat, the preacher John Bridges compared Catholic priests to cats: But now what do thei with him [i.e. Christ’s body], hauĩg thus trãsformed him? Forsoth euen as the cat doth with the mouse, play with it, dandle it vp & downe, hoise it ouer her head, tosse it hither & thyther, & then eate it cleane vp […]. Marke a Priest at Masse, and marke a Cat with a mouse, & tel me then what differẽce. […] O cruell Canibali, O barbarous Priests. (126)

Since Beware the Cat at some points explicitly associates cats with Catholics, for example when Grimalkin is repeatedly compared to the pope (BC 15, 20), its title has often been read as a warning against Catholics. This equation is reinforced by a scenario that charges cats/Catholics with cannibalism, which contributed to a common discourse on Catholic cannibalism as in Bridges’s comparison of Catholic priests with “cruell Canibali.” Likewise, Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563 between the composition and the publication of Beware the Cat, documents the case of martyr Thomas Brook, who maintained that “the thing which the priest useth to hold up over his head at mass, is not the natural body of Jesus Christ: for, if that were so, whoso would [receive the Eucharist] might have their stomach full of gods, their entrails full of gods” (Foxe 510). The association of the Catholic Eucharist with cannibalism was employed not only in the English context but by Reformers all over Europe. For example, pamphlets linked the persecution of Huguenots in France to the Catholic inclination to cannibalism. In 1560, the French Reformer Théodore de Bèze accordingly calls Catholics “anthropophagi,” for “roasting” Protestants, “yet worse, theophagites, / That as a last resort / You eat God to strengthen yourselves” (poem 5, ll. 1601– 04, trans. in Hoffmann 210). The insatiable appetites of Catholics is mocked in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat when a mysterious cat (as it later turns out, Grimalkin, the goddess of cats) eats all the roasted sheep that Irish rebels, hidden in a church, were about to eat. Afterwards, Grimalkin makes them kill and roast their cow, and arouses fear that she will eat the men next. When they flee and are followed by the cat, one of them kills her and is in turn devoured by a crowd of cats which immediately assemble. Here, the ritual of incorporation, the eating of a ‘sacrificed’ lamb in a church, which is later called Grimalkin’s “last supper” (BC 15), is ridiculed as excessive consumption. The marvel of transubstantiation and the mutual incorporation of

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Christ and believers are turned into the astonishment of how a ravenous cat can devour food which far exceeds her own size. On the one hand, the text employs the expected equation of cats and Catholics, yet on the other hand, it makes cats anti-Catholic agents: the cats keep their Catholic masters under surveillance and betray their secret celebration of the Mass and other trespasses. In this respect, they rather resemble the Protestant pursuivants who sought out and caught priests hiding like mice in their ‘priest holes.’ ‘Beware the Cat’ therefore could have been one of the lessons which young Catholic priests were told before being sent to England from the colleges in Rome and elsewhere. In their latter function, cats like Mouse-slayer support the Protestant project of identifying and making Catholics visible. In the early modern period, clothing was seen as the most straightforward form of marking, and sometimes the desire to demarcate gender and rank was extended to religious denomination. For example, in 1621, a motion was put in the Addled Parliament that Roman Catholics should wear yellow caps and slippers and thus be divested of their ‘disguise’ as common citizens (Notestein et al. 363; cf. Milton 105). The cats in Baldwin’s text help make an even more radical Protestant fantasy come true as phrased in John Baxter’s A Toil for Two-Legged Foxes (1600), one of many tales and images which presented Jesuits as foxes. It conjures total surveillance through access to inner thoughts. If one could place a window in his brest through which we might behold whether his heart and his tongue did accord. If a window were framed in the brests of these discontended catholikes, that her majestie and the state-guiding counsel and all true friends to the kingdom might know their secret intentions […,] many false hearts would be found lurking under painted hoods, and cakes of foule cancred malice under meale mouthed protestations. (Baxter 109 – 110; cf. also J. Yates)⁴⁷

Such anxieties about Catholics ‘under painted hoods’ responded to the actual political situation, in which Catholic priests arrived from French, Spanish, and  Elizabeth I’s aim at national consolidation ultimately did not pursue radical visions of surveillance like Baxter’s. Although rebels and recusants were arrested, tortured, and executed under Elizabeth, she tried to distinguish her own methods from the Catholic Inquisition. Coming to rely on outward conformity, she is said to have dispensed with the assessment of hidden inner thought in her famous statement, ‘I would not open windows into men’s souls.’ Francis Bacon quotes a letter by Francis Walsingham to the secretary of France in which he describes Elizabeth’s policy: “According to these principles, her Majesty at her coming to the Crown, utterly disliking the tyranny of Rome, which had used by terror and rigour to seek commandment of men’s faiths and consciences, […] not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts or affirmations, tempered her law so as it restraineth only manifest disobedience” (Bacon Vol. 8, 98).

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Italian seminaries disguised as laymen. As I shall explore in more detail in the third chapter which engages with issues of transculturation, they presented themselves as gentlemen, merchants, mariners, and soldiers, not only by having their appropriate attire speak for them but also by forging elaborate cover stories to convince Protestant interrogators. The desire for the reliability of clothes as social markers and for gaining insight into the ‘true’ inner self beyond deceptive appearances and cover stories is also at the heart of the romances and fictional tales written in the last quarter of the century. In this respect, Beware the Cat is a precursor of the late sixteenth-century tales which are interested in hidden essences and in potential transubstantiations of identity. In their function as anti-Catholic agents, Baldwin’s eponymous cats also serve as a litmus test for the efficacy of the Catholic communion – and they prove that it does not have the miraculous effects claimed by legends.⁴⁸ One of Baldwin’s episodes recounts how the elderly mistress of a cat called Mouseslayer was convinced by her children to give up the old faith, but, like her husband, found it “hard to be turned from their rooted belief which they had in the Mass” (BC 37). When she loses her eyesight, she calls for a Catholic priest, who explains that her blindness is a physical symptom of her spiritual dazzlement: “It is no marvel though you be sick and blind in body which suffer your soul willingly to be blinded. […] [T]hese heretics teach you to leave the Catholic belief of Christ’s flesh in the sacrament” (BC 38). He offers the Catholic Eucharist as a cure: “in any case believe that Christ’s flesh, body, soul, and bone is as it was born of our Blessed Lady in the consecrated Host” (BC 38). The mistress can see again once the host is elevated, but Mouse-slayer discounts this Eucharistic miracle by remembering that her blind kittens were not made to see by the presence of the host in the room, but on the contrary became even blinder (BC 39). Using cats to expose alleged manipulations by Catholic priests was a common device in Protestant polemics. Frequently, they asked whether animals who ate leftover hosts or crumbs of consecrated bread falling from the altar could experience Christ’s Real Presence, too (Sedinger 242; Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap”). In this way, they mocked the Catholic claim of a material transformation of bread and wine ex opere operato. Hence, in their responses to Protestant challenges, Catholic theologians had to ‘beware (arguments about) the cat.’

 Baldwin’s episode mocks stories of miraculous healing by means of the Eucharist. In a similar vein, Wycliffe, arguing against Real Presence in the fourteenth century, recounts the fabricated story of a man who, while receiving the Eucharist, prayed for a cure for his illness. Allegedly, a consecrated host descended from the altar, entered the man’s heart through an opening in his chest, and healed him (Wycliffe 19 – 20; cf. Denery 133). See also Bynum, “Women Mystics” for a discussion of similar tales.

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In turn, Catholic interrogators used such questions to convict Protestants of heresy; for example, the Protestant martyr Anne Askew was asked about her position on the question of leftovers eaten by animals before she was executed in 1546. As she recounts in her autobiographical account of the examinations, “whether a mouse eatynge the hoste, receyved God or no? Thys questyon ded I never aske, but in dede they asked it of me, wherunto I made them no answere, but smyled” (A8v). In addition to the discussed charges against Catholicism which Baldwin’s satire shares with other Protestant texts of the period, the narrative employs a further widespread strategy to discredit the old faith: it associates Catholicism with pagan beliefs, with superstition, and with witchcraft. For the purpose of this study, the association of the Catholic Eucharist with pagan and demonic metamorphosis is particularly relevant.

“deluding the sight and fantasies of the seers” – Metamorphosis, Transubstantiation, and Storytelling Among the narrative strategies which Baldwin uses to disempower Catholic belief, the association of transubstantiation with pagan and demonic metamorphosis recurs throughout the tale and its embedded stories. The similarity between shape-shifting by witchcraft and Catholic transubstantiation is invoked early in the narrative, when a “well-learned man” (BC 15), whom Baldwin in his glossary identifies as Master Sherry, suggests that the cat Grimalkin is a transformed witch. He is contradicted by the narrator who grants that the spirit of witches can take on the form of dead men’s bodies, but denies that “a woman, being so large in her body, should strain her into the body of a cat” (BC 16 – 17). Thus it is suggested that even magic transformations can only take place within certain logical boundaries, for example within the same species. The transformation of the body of Christ into a small host is utterly unimaginable, even for the credulous narrator. The allusion is made explicit when the well-learned man remarks, “where you spake of intrusion of a woman’s body into a cat’s, you either play Nichodem or the stubborn Popish conjurer: whereof one would creep into his mother’s belly again, the other would bring Christ out of heaven to thrust him into a piece of bread” (BC 17).⁴⁹ The glossaries in the margins additionally comment, “Transubstantiationers destroy Christ’s manhood” (BC 17). Here, the

 Nichodem took the idea of rebirth literally and asked how one can return to the womb in order to be reborn (Ringler and Flachmann 62).

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beliefs in witchcraft and in transubstantiation – ‘stubborn Popish conjuring’ – are presented as equally absurd and superstitious. In the long ensuing discussion between Master Steamer and his interlocutors, in which many folktales and legends of the metamorphosis of human beings into animals are recounted, the ‘well-learned man’ explains how witches can allegedly accomplish physical transformations. Among the explanations given, the claim that witches can manipulate the perception of others is particularly relevant for a later scenario of pseudo-magic bodily transformation: “For although witches may take upon them cats’ bodies, or alter the shape of their to other bodies, yet this is not done by putting their own bodies thereinto, but […] by deluding the sight and fantasies of the seers” (BC 17). In this explanation, the concepts of disguise (witches who ‘take upon them’ cats’ bodies) and metamorphosis (witches who ‘alter the shape of their to other bodies’) are presented as two equal possibilities, but both forms of change are then revealed to be a manipulation of perception rather than physical alterations. The explanation of alleged metamorphosis as a bewitchment of perception has a long history, which goes back to Augustine, an authority which the most credulous and superstitious of Streamer’s interlocutors quotes, albeit in a different context (BC 18). Augustine argued in De civitate Dei that demons cannot transform substances or create new substances (a capacity which only God has), but that they can change the outward appearance of human beings, including a transformation of human beings into animals. However, according to Augustine, this metamorphosis only appears to be a physical transformation – actually, the allegedly transformed person projects a mental image, a phantasticum, which is transported by demons to the deceived interior senses of others, whose exterior senses are blocked out at the same time (Veenstra 144– 146). Hence, for Augustine, demons “are masters of virtual reality,” who can lend a “physical guise” to mental illusions (Veenstra 146, 145). In Baldwin’s dialogue, none of the interlocutors delineates precise theological or philosophical positions; instead, they recount hearsay and sometimes attribute it to ancient authorities. Among their stories, they refer to the transformations of human beings into wolves that are explained as a punishment by St Patrick (BC 18). Such tales of human to animal metamorphoses in Ireland have a long tradition. For example, in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales recounts how an Irish priest meets a speaking wolf who brings him to his wife, who also has purportedly been transformed into a wolf for seven years. When the priest arrives, the wolf tears the wolf-skin from his wife as if it were a piece of clothing, revealing an old woman. Similar to the explanations given by Baldwin’s ‘well-learned man,’ the shape-shifting here is envisioned as a disguise, under which both substance and accidents of the old women remain preserved – a notion of transformation that clearly differs

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from Ovidian metamorphosis, by which the human character might be preserved, but the human shape is irreversibly lost. For Wales’s conceptual differentiation between pagan transformation and Christian transubstantiation it is significant that the old woman asks the priest to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist: “[She requested the sacrament, and] to remove all doubt [the he-wolf] pulled all the skin off the she-wolf from the head down to the navel, folding it back with his paw as if it were a hand [quasi pro manu]. And immediately the shape [forma] of an old woman, clear to be seen, appeared” (qtd in Bynum, Metamorphosis 107). This direct juxtaposition of an unchanged substance beneath false appearances and the transubstantiated wafer is striking because it attempts to draw a line between the pagan alteration of the exterior appearance and invisible, Christian transubstantiation. It exposes the incapacity of humans or devils to cause the substance change which only God’s power can effect. As Gerald emphasises, “that change of the appearance of bread [de ilia vero speciali panis… mutatione] into Christ’s body […] is not a change of appearance only but truly a change of substance [substantiali] because the appearance or species remains completely and only the substance is changed [specie tota manente substantia sola mutatur]” (qtd in Bynum, Metamorphosis 17). By contrast, in Baldwin’s Protestant satire, the refutation of material transformation includes the Eucharist. Conceptual differences between pagan or demonic metamorphosis and Catholic transubstantiation are deliberately elided, and both are presented as superstition and deception. In Beware the Cat, the initial declaration that seeming metamorphoses are the result of bewitched senses constitutes the foil for a paradigmatic story of pseudo-magic bodily transformation recounted by Mouse-slayer. Again, a human being in the skin of an animal is presented. Here, however, no demonic enchantment of the perception in Augustine’s sense takes place; instead, a bigoted Catholic bawd achieves a ‘delusion of the sights and fantasies of seers’ by mischievous storytelling, forged written proof, and the manipulation of visual evidence. Mouse-slayer recounts how the Catholic woman, her owner at the time, promised to help a young gentleman in love with a married woman and used the cat’s body to trick the woman into adultery. She invites the young woman to dinner, confronts her with the crying cat, and explains to her amazed guest that it was her grieving daughter who had been transformed as a punishment for not responding to the courtship of a gentleman: “God hath […] my only daughter, which […] was as fair a woman and as fortunately married as any in this city […], for her honesty or cruelty I cannot tell whether, turned into this likeness, wherein she hath been above this two months, continually weeping as you

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see and lamenting her miserable wretchedness” (BC 42).⁵⁰ In order to bolster her preposterous claim of ‘this is her body’ – ‘this cat is my daughter’ –, she presents not only the ocular proof of the cat’s supposedly human tears (and her own faked tears), but also a suicide letter of the gentleman, in which he beseeches “the gods” to “disfigure” the daughter who rejected him (BC 44). The procuress maintains that a few days after the gentleman’s suicide “a voice cried aloud, ‘Ah, flinty heart, repent thy cruelty.’ And immediately (oh extreme rigor) she was changed as you now see her” (BC 45). The young married woman, fearing a similar transformation, ultimately gives in to the courting of her admirer and thus to the sin of adultery.⁵¹ As a satirical comment on transubstantiation, the story ridicules the young woman’s naïve belief in the rhetoric of ‘this is her body’ as well as the untrustworthy textual and visual material which is used to ‘prove’ this claim: the suicide letter is faked, and, as Mouse-slayer complains, her owner had secretly fed her mustard pudding to make her cry. Through the disembodied voice, the tale also mocks the transformative effect which the Catholic ritual allegedly ascribes to the words ‘hoc est corpus meum.’ Further, by making the young woman believe in the power of what must be non-Christian “gods” that have the power to transform human beings, Baldwin’s narrative associates transubstantiation with pagan metamorphosis. Just as Baldwin’s references to pagan gods who are implored to disfigure the young woman associate Catholic belief with Ovidian transformation, the Protestant leader John Hooper, who was executed during the Marian persecutions, deprecatorily compares a literal reading of the Eucharist to the pagan fantasies of shape-shifting: “these words, Hoc est corpus meum, make no more for the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, than In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora” (120), the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In a similar manner, Thomas Becon in his mid-sixteenth-century treatise The Displaying of the Popish Mass associated pagan notions of metamorphosis with Catholic transubstantiation when he sneered, “Proteus never turned himself into so many forms, shapes, and fashions, as your mass hath virtues” (284). Hooper, Becon, and  Baldwin probably derived the idea of the weeping cat from the twelfth-century Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsi as recounted in “The Fables of Alfonce” in William Caxton’s Fables of Aesop (1483). In the Middle English version, the cat is still a dog, but Caxton apparently mistranslated the Latin ‘catella,’ little dog, as ‘little cat’ (Holden 18).  Streamer overhears this story during a trial among the cats, in which Mouse-slayer is accused of having rejected a male cat. As she relates to the jury, she went to live with the young woman and “never disobeyed or transgressed our holy law in refusing the concupiscential company of any cat nor the act of generation, although sometimes it were more painful to me than pleasant” (BC 46), thus mirroring the situation of the young woman, who is soon fully transformed into a lascivious habitual adulterer.

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Baldwin insist not only on the difference between superstitious fiction and Christian truth and associate the former with “an old wife’s tale” (Hooper 121), but also on the restricted performativity of human language, which cannot cause material change. However, language, and storytelling in particular, can achieve a transformation of the minds of the listeners and readers. Their senses can be deluded without witchcraft, by the means of words alone, which arouse the observers’ imagination and make them misinterpret visual, material signs. In this regard, the narrative framing of the suicide letter is also decisive because it further enhances the untrustworthiness of this piece of writing. As Clare R. Kinney points out, the authorship of the letter is as debatable as its way of being handed down to us as readers. Ironically signed by “G.S.,” the very initials of the narrator, it can be viewed as metonymic of the overall narrative: at the center of all the embedded narratives in a work so preoccupied with the dangers of hearsay and mediated tradition lies a text whose authorship is so ambiguous and which exists simultaneously as a voiced, scripted and printed utterance. Its textual reproduction by GB rehearses its oral recitation by Streamer, the cat, and the young wife who reads it aloud; it is presented as being authored by the fictional daughter’s fictional suitor, but may have been written either by the bawd herself (if she is lying about her literacy) or by the city wife’s suitor – even as it is fleetingly attached, in a kind of mise en abyme, to Gregory Streamer himself. (“Clamorous Voices” 204)

The letter is at the very centre of narrative framing – Baldwin’s account of Streamer’s record of the cat’s memories that present the words of the bawd and the young gentlewoman, including the suicide letter. Once again, the narrative kernel cannot be regarded as a trustworthy source. It may, however, offer the key to understanding the complex narrative structure since it warns readers against trusting written words and fictional stories, and thus, against “the dangerous powers of secular literary discourses” (204) which Ascham also criticised in his Schoolmaster, written a few years after Beware the Cat and published in the same year. Such didactic advice can be regarded as the project of the entire text of Beware the Cat, which does not offer any example of a positive, morally or epistemically profitable form of fiction. And yet, as I shall argue, the text ultimately does not sustain this didactic warning.

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“Diverse wonderful and incredible matters. Very pleasant and merry to read” – Beware Fictions? Why does Baldwin not warn his readers against fiction in a pamphlet, but rather in a piece of prose fiction, and in a piece of prose fiction called A Marvelous Hystory Intitulede, Beware the Cat. Conteynyng diuerse wounderfull and incredible matters. Very pleasant and merry to read? Baldwin may have aimed at readers of fiction in particular to encourage them in a general scepticism and distrust of stories – readers who included not only the aristocratic elite, but also less learned, lower-class readers (Bowers 22). In a nutshell, Mouse-slayer’s story contains the structural device which transports this didactic endeavour: it combines markers of unreliability with claims of factual accuracy which seek to authenticate the story, thus upholding the ambivalence of the title page’s announcement of a “history,” which could mean both ‘historia’ as fictional story or historiography (Bonahue 287). The narrative plays with the ambivalent character of prose, which, more than lyrical poetry and drama, can oscillate between a factual, realist record and fictional make-believe, far removed from reality. Baldwin, in a paradoxical strategy, emphasises the contrived nature of Streamer’s narrative by repeatedly claiming its truthfulness, by creating an “illusion of authenticity” (Maslen, “William Baldwin” 300). If he simply presented a tale of talking animals, no reader would assume that the tale claims to be factually true, and markers of unreliability would therefore be unnecessary – as Sidney observes in An Apology for Poetry, “so think I none so simple would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who thinks that Aesop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of” (103). Yet Baldwin complicates the generic status of his tale by embedding elements of the fable in a pseudo-historiographical tale. It is only because the paratexts and the narrative frame of Beware the Cat (the dedication and the “Argument”) declare that the subsequent tale is the record of events that have actually taken place and because characters like George Ferrers, Master Willot, and the rhetorician Richard Sherry correspond to real-life people at Edward’s court, that the following tale needs to include markers of unreliability – for instance, Streamer’s implicit self-characterisation as untrustworthy through a pompous style of speech, often incorrect Latin quotations, and esoteric scraps of learning (Ringler and Flachmann xxiii). This satirical characterisation is reinforced by the comments in the margins that serve as authorial comment on the autodiegetic narrative, even if the glosses are often “fraught with clichés, platitudes, and truisms” and hence are no more reliable than Streamer’s narrative (Bonahue 293; see also Ringler and Flachmann xxiv). Moreover, the glosses themselves are polyphonous since they “seem to be of at least two minds and

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at least two voices, sometimes inviting us to criticise Streamer, sometimes sliding towards a parody of conventional scholarly commentary” (C. Kinney, “Clamorous Voices” 201). Therefore, although the text’s structure and its glosses at first sight make it “book-like,” as the narrator declares in his Argument (BC 3), and readers could hence mistake it as a scholarly contribution to the Eucharist debate (Maslen, “William Baldwin” 300), its fictionality is highlighted at the same time. This questioning of authorial glosses is typical of the emancipation of early modern prose fiction, which increasingly acknowledged the importance of the reader for the creation of meaning (Liebler 9). Although glosses are still present in Baldwin’s didactic text – unlike in the later romances – they nonetheless require the readers’ interpretation and, hence, their collaboration with the implied author. In this light, Betteridge’s observation that the tale’s title could likewise apply to the narrator, whom readers need to beware (Betteridge 117), can be extended to the implied author whom readers can deduce from the questionable marginal glosses and, indeed, to fiction in general. Usually, marginal glosses in early modern narratives were replaced by prefaces to the reader that granted authority to the writer and stressed the importance of guiding the readers’ interpretation. In Baldwin’s case, however, his dedication also leaves the exact meaning of his tale open – although he states that he wants readers to learn to beware cats, it remains unclear what exactly this means. On the contrary, the further the story progresses, the more polysemous the title becomes. For an early piece of English prose fiction, the complex narrative structure of Beware the Cat and its self-referential, metafictional play are remarkable. Framing stories by yet more stories and adding further paratextual casings, Baldwin adopts the fascination with hidden substances, possibly misleading exteriors, and transubstantiation for his aesthetics as well. For example, the added poem by T.K. might lead readers (and has led critics) to the equation of the eponymous cats with Catholics, although the text presents cats as much more ambivalent allegories and does not fully endorse a reading that sees a warning against Catholicism as its ‘core’ message.⁵² On another level, the paratextual glosses sometimes change the perception of the tale that they frame; for readers trying to decipher Baldwin’s narrative, they change the substance of the tale’s meaning. Similarly, the characterisation of the intradiegetic narrator Streamer as ridiculous, naïve, and self-important discredits his tales, and the fact that his bizarre potion makes him understand cats undermines the trustworthiness  Cf. Hadfield’s assessment of the narrative: “Beware the Cat does not fit into any straightforward model of Protestant propaganda; rather, it refuses to rest with any easy answers, throwing up a series of disturbing questions which demand further debate” (Literature, Travel 147).

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of the accounts by Mouse-slayer which we hear once we have arrived at the smallest Chinese box, the narrative kernel of Beware the Cat. So, the narrative does not quite practice what it preaches. It has a contradictory attitude towards the issues that are at stake in the Catholic Eucharist: while Beware the Cat criticises the search for hidden substances and the belief that substances are mutable within its content, at the same time it employs these phenomena for its elaborate narrative structure, which gives readers the hermeneutic pleasure (or irritation) of searching for the narrative core, which, however, remains enigmatic and keeps changing depending on which framing (and which framing of the framing) is privileged by the reader. By this aesthetic appropriation of the search for substances and of transubstantiation, the overall narrative and its paratextual frames set up “a witty game of cat-and-mouse” with readers, who need to beware the narrative seductions that might lead them to “imaginative complicity with customs and moral imperatives they should reject.”⁵³ One of the earliest tales that Streamer recollects demonstrates how quickly listeners or readers can be convinced of the veracity of fantastical tales, how they start believing in bizarre stories and relate them to personal experience. Here, a servant becomes convinced of the capacity of cats to talk just because another servant has heard something similar; ‘proof’ is quickly produced by joined hearsay stories, a technique which will return, albeit less ironically, in Greene’s romances: “‘I will tell you, Master Streamer,’ quod he, ‘that which was told me in Ireland, and which I have till now so little credited, that I was ashamed to report it. But hearing that I hear now, and calling to mind my own experience when it was, I do so little misdoubt it that I think I never told, nor you ever heard, a more likely tale’” (BC 12). In this case, the apodictic comment in the margins exaggerates (and thus parodies) the false truth claim of this statement: “Experience is an infallible persuader” (BC 12). In a self-referential move, the tale here indicates the efficacy of narrative to affect readers so strongly that they take it for experience, and hence for infallible. Baldwin employs the interplay between fantastic, unreliable, and historiographical elements since he aims at using the evident fictionality of literature, and in particular of the fable, in order to reveal the fictitiousness of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.⁵⁴ In order to forestall an immersion in illusion and fiction, Baldwin attempts to train readers in “a questioning and interrogative

 Maslen, “William Baldwin” 300. See also Bowers 7 for a similar argument.  As Ringler and Flachmann point out, Baldwin “uses an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illusion. The general thrust of his fictional argument is that only a person gullible enough to believe a character as outrageous as Gregory Streamer would believe in the ‘unwritten verities’ handed down by the ‘traditions’ of the Church” (xxiv-v).

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hermeneutic” which makes them scrutinise their preconceptions rather than lose themselves in fable or allegory – a didactic strategy which Betteridge identifies as typical of Edwardian anti-Mass works (118). Hence Baldwin seems to distinguish implicitly between two forms of fiction: he sets the dangerous potential of fictional stories which aim to deceive their readers (a strategy which he associates with Catholicism) apart from his own writing (informed by the more rational, demystifying attitude of Protestantism), which aims to enlighten readers and to train their critical capacities.⁵⁵ Or does he? Can we fully trust in the didactic, anti-Catholic, and anti-fictional message of Beware the Cat? Again, the text is more complex. For example, Beware the Cat goes further than criticising only fictions which can easily be labelled ‘Catholic.’ I propose that the narrative also highlights the susceptibility to delusion that might be triggered by the least supernatural interpretation of the Last Supper, namely a Zwinglian celebration of the Eucharist as a mnemonic ritual that creates a communion among the consumers. To be able to understand cats, Streamer follows an old recipe and eats a cake that he has made of cats’ organs (besides other bizarre ingredients) and baked “till it was dry like bread” (BC 27). Here, the bread contains the body in a literal sense, no transubstantiation has to occur. The bread does, however, have a transformative effect on the consumer whose imagination and memory are made “fresh” and “purged” just as in Zwingli’s memorialism: “a thousand things which I had not thought of in twenty years before came so freshly to my mind as if they had been presently done, heard, or seen” (BC 28). By this pseudo-Eucharistic ritual, Streamer joins the communion of cats; he is not only able to understand them as if they “had spoken English” (BC 36) – possibly another comment on the Protestant vernacular liturgy – but later also uses a cat’s voice himself (BC 49). The eccentric circumstances of the complicated superstitious ritual of creating this potion are ridiculed in a detailed description over seven (of fifty-five) pages. In addition, Streamer claims to have woken after an hour’s sleep, which suggests that he might still be asleep and dreaming (a ‘dreamer’ rather

 In contrast to Thomas More, who did not want his own works or the Bible translated into vernacular since he feared the activities and interpretations of uneducated readers (Maslen, “Introduction” 19), Baldwin aims at guiding his readers to a conscientious reading habit: “By not becoming too absorbed in the storytelling, we are able to see and know more than the characters, who are caught up in its sensationalism” (Bowers 15). John N. King, Nancy Gutierrez, and William Ringler and Michael Flachmann have likewise argued that Baldwin encourages a responsible and careful reception: “The series of narrative situations presented to the reader, all of which illustrate an audience mishearing a text, provide exempla on how not to read Streamer’s oration” (Gutierrez 59, cf. also King 388; Ringler and Flachmann xxiv-v).

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than ‘streamer’) and thus in a similar state to Catholics who are captured by the “wicked and monstrous dream of transubstantiation” according to Protestant polemics (Becon, Displaying 269). Further, when Streamer describes an outflow of ‘gear’ from his mouth and nose, the glosses remark wryly, “There be many strange humours in many men’s heads” (BC 28), suggesting that Streamer fantasises, possibly because of the potion he took as his supper. Here Beware the Cat encourages readers to beware the danger of superstitious, ‘Catholic’ (self‐)deception and belief in magic, also in areas which could be labelled ‘Protestant.’ The tale thereby generally warns against the impact of imagination which can escalate into delusion.⁵⁶ Under the spell of the magic potion, Streamer is overwhelmed by his ability to hear more acutely. Attempting to record the polyphony he suddenly experiences, he begins to rhyme in a manner that reminded critics of John Skelton and François Rabelais (Holden 17, Gresham 115, and Maslen, “The Cat” 16): “barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks” and so on for thirteen lines (BC 32). The comment in the margins summarises laconically, “Here the poetical fury came upon him” (BC 32). In a self-ironic move, I would argue, the author comments here on his own creation of a polyphonous, heteroglottic text which overburdens its readers by the variety of intradiegetic narrative voices, including the voices of animals, and their intricate relationship set up by multiple narrative framings.⁵⁷ Ultimately, the narrative’s aesthetics subvert Beware the Cat’s allegedly clear-cut differentiation between two forms of narration – deceptive Catholic versus demystifying Protestant tales – and the declared warning against fiction. This contradiction is crucial from the point of view of literary theory and the history of genre: warning his readers against fiction in a piece of prose fiction, Bald-

 This slipperiness of religious convictions is reflected in the narrator’s name, the significance of which is emphasised in the final hymn which calls him “Gregory, no Pope” and compares him to a streamer (BC 55), and hence to “a flag or pennon […], suggesting that he changes direction with the wind – that he is a turncoat” (Maslen, “William Baldwin” 301).  As a consequence, the text’s didactic gesture is further undercut, as C. Kinney notes: “Given the doctrinal questions at issue here, there is a pervading irony in the fact that the text’s rivalling voices produce so many words of their own that the very notion of one true Word, one stable scripture, gets lost in the tumult” (“Clamorous Voices” 197). See Bakhtin for an account of heteroglossia as the various “social and historical voices populating language” at a given historical moment (The Dialogic Imagination 300), and their appropriation by literature as a double-voiced discourse, which simultaneously expresses the intentions of a particular character, or the narrator, and the author (324). If the author does not suppress other voices, a narrative becomes polyphonic.

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win cannot, and possibly does not even want to, escape submitting his message to the semantic complexity and interpretive openness of fictional literature. As Blumenberg puts it, fictional literature is characterised by the potentiality of a horizon rather than the definiteness of a spot.⁵⁸ Therefore, the professedly unequivocal intentions of authors are less decisive than the ambiguity and uncertainty that characterise every aesthetically engaging object. Since literary thinking might take up discourses and specific concepts but never fully endorse them, it instead stages, upstages, modifies, and questions them. Literature has been generally described as counter-discursive (Mahler 139). From a different angle, Olejniczak Lobsien has shown that if early modern literature can be aligned with a particular religious or philosophical attitude, it is scepticism, which suspends final judgement and always points to the possibility of its own negation (Skeptische Phantasie). Olejniczak Lobsien’s notion of sceptical literary imagination holds true for Baldwin’s tale, too: the recurrent reading suggestions (i. e. the encouragement of a general scepticism and distrust of stories) do not restrain the imagination unleashed by his tales of bodily transformation. Instead, the narrative revels in the new ‘transformation dynamics’ of early modern narrative (as discussed in the introduction to this study) as it opens up several competing perspectives, including those of cats. Hence the narrative exposes, as Clare R. Kinney noted, “the limits and perils of the humanist assumption that fiction-making may be subordinated to and contained by didactic agendas” (“Clamorous Voices” 196). For that reason, Beware the Cat also demonstrates that only a methodology which combines historical and formal analysis can excavate the complexity and the internal contradictions of the narrative, whose aesthetics undermine its professed Reformational concern. Juxtaposing medium and message, Beware the Cat has it both ways: it offers ‘pleasant and merry’ fictional tales, and at the same time didactically asks readers to beware ‘wonderful and incredible matters’ set forth by fiction. Transformation, and in particular transubstantiation, becomes a cipher of fictionality in Baldwin’s narrative, in all the ambiguity which both fiction and the Catholic doctrine carried for the sixteenth century. Beware the Cat’s references to theology and its simultaneous emancipation from clear-cut theological messages are representative of the development of prose fiction in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Prose fiction is a catalyst of gradual secularisation, but it is also an active force in the debates inspired by religious pluralisation.  “Der ästhetische Gegenstand hat nicht die Bestimmtheit eines Punktes, sondern die Potentialität eines Horizontes” (Blumenberg, “Sokrates” 108); “Vieldeutigkeit ist geradezu der Index, unter dem die Gegenständlichkeit des Ästhetischen sich ausweist” (Blumenberg, “Die essentielle Vieldeutigkeit” 112).

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Grounded in religious imagery, it derives a considerable degree of its appeal from a creative adaptation of theological theorems and liturgical rituals, of cognitive as much as affective modes of spiritual experience. In particular, Beware the Cat adopts the hermeneutic pleasures of transubstantiation for its aesthetics and concurrently undertakes a disenchantment of the Catholic doctrine on the level of content. While Beware the Cat claims to exorcise its own fictionality by delivering an anti-Catholic didactic message and by locating the source of fictionality and the power of language in Catholic transubstantiation, it revels at the same time in the thrill of hiding and discovering kernels and in the polysemy that is characteristic of aesthetic texts, a polysemy which the intricate aesthetic structure and the ambiguous pun of the title even augment. The simultaneous rejection of and fascination with Catholic doctrines is typical of Edwardian polemics, in which “papistry is attacked but is also the site of textual pleasure,” as Betteridge points out (103). I will argue that a few years later, under Elizabeth, when Beware the Cat was published and read, prose fiction absorbs this textual pleasure as much as the epistemological, emotional, and erotic fascination with the Eucharist in narratives which are not written as direct contributions to religious and political struggles and are therefore less polemical and less explicit in their references to religion.

2 Disguise and Identity Transformation in Elizabethan Pastoral Romances Baldwin’s narrative and its success on the book market demonstrate compellingly that the Eucharist debate had a profound impact on the literary imagination of the mid-sixteenth century, when Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat, as well as of later decades, when readers became acquainted with the text after its publication in two editions in 1570 and its reprinting in 1584. This chapter will propose that fictional prose texts written in the 1580s and 1590s absorbed the textual pleasure that Baldwin derived from both the theological debate and from popular belief. It will look at how the Eucharist was ‘romanced,’ how it was adapted in Elizabethan pastoral romances written by Robert Greene, Philip Sidney, and Thomas Lodge, in particular in their scenarios of disguise and identity transformation. After a decline of interest in romance during the Henrician era, Elizabethan narratives revitalised disguise scenarios by drawing on medieval romance literature, which “fell from the presses,” according to Louis B. Wright, “like leaves in autumn” (382) and became the “pulp fiction of the Tudor age” (Cooper 6).⁵⁹ When a manuscript of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica was discovered in 1526 in Budapest and translated by Thomas Underdowne into English in 1569, prose fiction could claim to be modelled after a classical ideal, just like drama and lyrical poetry. Further, the Aethiopian History provided a culturally valid model for coherently-plotted prose romance and a rich source for plot elements.⁶⁰ At the same time, early modern writers translated and imitated Continental romances. For instance, the Amadis de Gaule offered the motif that Sidney adapted in his immensely influential Arcadia: the young man who disguises himself as a woman to approach his beloved. That aspects of the ‘repressed’ old faith resurface in vernacular romance seems apt for a mode of writing which Helgerson called the “subconscious of Renaissance story telling” since it tends to cater to the emotional and sensual needs of its readers and was therefore denigrated by moralists, the “superego” of Eliza-

 In Tudor England, McKeon has argued, print contributed to “transform[ing] romance into a self-conscious canon. But it also helps ‘periodize’ romance as a ‘medieval’ production, as that which the present age – the framing counterpart of the classical past – defines itself against” (45). Yet although ‘history’ and ‘romance’ were indeed increasingly seen as antithetical modes of writing and of perceiving the world, their separation was by no means always straightforward.  See Mentz’s Romance for Sale for a discussion of the relevance of Heliodorus for Elizabethan prose fiction.

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bethan consciousness (Elizabethan Prodigals 91).⁶¹ Moreover, during their centuryold history, romantic formulae changed only slowly; as Helen Cooper has argued in her expansive study The English Romance in Time, “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” (250). In a similar vein, Northrop Frye has construed romance as a kind of “secular scripture” because it protects and reinvigorates cultural discards, and Nandini Das has argued that Renaissance romance “operates as a memorial link handed down across generations” (Renaissance Romance 5). As we have seen, early moderns like Ascham were well aware of this: in his criticism of fictional prose written in the vernacular, Ascham associates medieval English chivalric romances with the Catholic past of England, “when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England” (SM 68). Nevertheless, Ascham famously presents medieval English romances as less harmful than the new Italianate books (that is, narratives that are translated or written in the style of Italian models): “And yet ten Morte Darthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England” (SM 69); “More papists be made by your merry books of Italy than by your earnest books [i.e. Catholic theological pamphlets] of Louvain” (SM 68). Elizabethan romances, which drew on English medieval romance as well as on early modern Italian fiction (and many more sources), demonstrate how literary imagery and generic plot patterns function as media of cultural memory, which preserve, transmit, but also reform inherited models of thought – including, as I will argue, discarded Eucharistic concepts. Concurrent with the Elizabethan turn to traditional and topical romance forms and their disguise scenarios, the wealth of writing in the tradition of the pastoral tended to replace shepherds with aristocrats who camouflage themselves as shepherds.⁶² They thereby made explicit a nobility of the pastoral which had been typical of the mode all along. The reality of agriculture and animal husbandry was hardly registered in pastoral literature; instead, country life was idealised as the space of gentlemanly leisure, peace, and otium (Montrose, “Of Gentlemen”

 Helgerson sees “humanism and romance as opposed members of a single consciousness, as superego and id of Elizabethan literature, competitors in a struggle to control and define the self. Humanism represented paternal expectation, and romance, rebellious desire” (Elizabethan Prodigals 41).  For a concise account of the sources of Elizabethan romance, see Salzman, English Prose Fiction esp. 3 – 5. Kinney’s study Humanist Poetics discusses the classical sources of the romances in detail, and more recently, Mentz’s Romance for Sale has explored the particular importance of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica.

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427). The portrayal of actual and disguised shepherds therefore illustrated an ideal of aristocratic behaviour rather than offering a utopian counter-world and inviting criticism of the status quo. Elizabethan pastoral literature frequently naturalised class distinctions at a time when the political system was under pressure through growing social mobility, changes in the economic structure, and successes of humanist education. However, the choice of the pastoral mode for the negotiation of topical concerns sometimes also helped to disguise a critical impetus of narratives;⁶³ the mode is hence more politically versatile than often assumed. Romance has sometimes been attributed an equally conservative mission. For example, Cooper claims that it was “the objective of romance to promote the wellbeing of the realm, the common wele” (340). Frye instead argues for an occasional ‘kidnapping’ of romance by dominant, conservative discourses for means of political mythologisation: “romance formulas [are] used to reflect certain ascendant religious and socials ideals”; “kidnapped romance is usually romance that expresses a social mythology of this more uncritical kind” (30, 168). Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the most famous example of such an attempt at embedding Elizabeth I in a eulogistic mythological tradition in order to conceal doubts about the legitimacy of her rule, but I will argue for a similar project – albeit on a much smaller scale – in Greene’s pastoral romances, which mystify and celebrate royal substance. Nonetheless, romance formulae can also be used to criticise the status quo, as I will propose in my final reading of Lodge’s A Margarite of America. So while I look at the romances by Greene, Sidney, and Lodge in the chronological order of their publication (which in Sidney’s case occurred many years after he wrote the first version of the Arcadia), my reading at the same time moves from politically conservative to more challenging narratives. By locating topical political meaning in romances, my readings go against earlier notions of the mode as inherently apolitical and escapist. Virginia Woolf’s dismissal of the Arcadia can be regarded as exemplary in this respect. According to Woolf, Sidney “gazes far away into a beautiful land which he calls Arcadia,” in which “anything may be and happen except what actually is and happens here in England in the year 1580” (41). She thus came to a comparable conclusion to Erich Auerbach, who later stated with reference to medieval romance that it was “entirely without any basis in political reality” and offered “not reality shaped and set forth by art, but an escape into fable and fairy tale” (133, 138). However, in recent years critics have grown increasingly interested in problematising such

 See in particular Annabel Patterson’s study Pastoral and Ideology, which explores ways in which the pastoral offered chances to write undercover for early modern authors writing under censorship.

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accounts of medieval and early modern romance and have approached the narratives with new historicist interests. My own reading will likewise argue for the socio-political relevance of romance and make a particular case for the impact of the Reformation on Elizabethan narratives. The literary disguise scenes raise conceptual questions that were at the heart of the Eucharist debate: if accidents (the bread and the clothes) do not conform to the inner, invisible substance (Christ’s body and the disguised’s identity), how can this substance be perceived and how can it be experienced? Can an identity, or a body, be incorporated into another identity or body, as the Eucharistic communion proposes? Can identities indeed, as the Catholic interpretation claims, ‘transubstantiate,’ can they transform clandestinely, without a change in outward appearance or apparel? What can bring this potential transubstantiation about? Is it the performative power of language, as in the Eucharistic repetition of Christ’s ‘this is my body’ by the priest? Or – and here, the narratives transcend the issues that are at stake in the celebration of the Last Supper – could newly assumed accidents also transform the substance, that is, could disguises change the ‘true’ identity beneath? In Elizabethan romances, as in Baldwin’s tale, Eucharistically-inflected notions of transformation are closely associated with other discourses and literary traditions of transformation, most prominently with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While Beware the Cat explicitly refers to the Catholic Mass, Eucharistic concerns manifest themselves mostly in a more indirect and possibly unintentional manner in the fast-growing literary culture under Elizabeth. In the introduction to Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Cummings and Simpson have described the processes of cultural memory in an apt metaphor for the purpose of this chapter. They argue that “if one powerful aspect of a culture is depressed, it will resurface later, one way or another, in disguised form, as the return of the repressed” (6). The idea that repressed aspects of the cultural repertoire will be expressed in a displaced form, that they will not be abandoned, but reappear ‘in disguise’ fits in a twofold sense the rationale of my argument for a migration of concepts from English (pre‐)Reformation religion to (post‐)Reformation disguise narratives. To conceptualise the re-appearance of Eucharistic concerns in a disguised form, Louis Montrose’s comments on the Elizabethan cultural imaginary are helpful. Montrose uses the term ‘imaginary’ to describe the broad cultural repertoire on which the Tudors could draw.⁶⁴ As he expounds, the Elizabethan imaginary is  Montrose’s concept of the ‘imaginary’ resembles the notion of ‘cultural memory’ as developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann and discussed in the introduction to this study; it could maybe best be understood as a sub-group of the broader concept of cultural memory that also includes material remnants of the past, historical documents, etc.

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the collective repertoire of representational forms and figures – mythological, rhetorical, narrative, iconic – in which the beliefs and practices of Tudor political culture were pervasively articulated. With widely varying degrees of conscious and deliberate fashioning, complexity, and skill, countless Elizabethan subjects worked and reworked such forms and figures when they sought to formulate their experience, understanding, or judgment of the relations of power in their society. (“Spenser” 907– 908)

These statements are relevant for my subject because they draw attention to the fact that there were varying degrees of consciousness involved in the reworkings of the cultural imaginary. For my interest in how prose fiction took up Eucharistic concerns, it is hard to determine in retrospect how deliberately the authors drew on the religious aspect of the cultural imaginary. Given how politically sensitive the issue had become, dealing explicitly with the Eucharist, and in particular with its officially denounced aspects like transubstantiation, was a problematic undertaking for authors of prose fiction who wrote under censure. In the same vein, it is difficult to judge how aware readers would have been of Eucharistic references – readers who must have been a heterogeneous group of aristocratic and non-aristocratic readers with a range of education, of Anglican and Catholic believers, of young readers who had grown up under Elizabeth and older readers who had witnessed the swift changes between Catholic and Protestant versions of the Eucharist celebration. What is more, Eucharistic references were not only conveyed by theological treatises, prayer books, liturgical celebrations, and personal or communicated memories of the old faith, but they were also engrained in the literary and artistic heritage, in particular in the romance mode. The literary genre of romance functioned as a medium of cultural memory, even if neither the authors nor the readers would necessarily have been aware of the Eucharistic implications of, for example, eroticised scenes of mutual incorporation. My readings in the subsequent chapters will argue that the narratives are informed by Eucharistic concerns, but they ultimately cannot determine at which points in the narratives which authors and which readers would have been aware of this cross-pollination between religion and prose fiction. The assumption of a conceptual influence of the Eucharist debate on literary scenes of disguise is supported by the fact that early modern religio-political discourses highlighted analogies between the Lord’s Supper and disguise. During the controversy, Catholics as well as different Protestant schools invoked notions of deceptive clothing and theatrical masquerade. Protestants used the analogy to criticise the Catholic notion of transubstantiation. They pointed out that if the sacramental bread loses its essence of bread-ness, it becomes a cover, a disguise for Christ’s body that stands under (substat) the accidents. In this vein, by the fourteenth century Wycliffe had already rejected the idea of transubstantiation as a deceptive disguise of Christ’s body which does not fit divine truth: “Cum

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ergo Deus decrevit nobis dare donum tam magnum, videtur convenire sue veritati magnifice quod dedit nobis ipsum in velamento honorofico illusionem hominis excludente”; “Since God chose to give us so great a gift, it hardly seems fitting with the splendour of his truth, that he would deliver himself to us to honour in a veil” (57, trans. in Denery 132– 133).⁶⁵ On the other side, Thomas More in the early phase of the Reformation employed the example of theatrical disguise to explain and defend the Catholic position on the Eucharist. He pointed out that the actor can be identical with the role he plays, just as the bread is identical with Christ himself. “We [that is, the Catholics] say,” More argues, “that the very body in forme of bread betokeneth and representeth vnto vs, the self same body in his owne proper fourme hangynge vpon the crosse.” Reformers maintain, however, that “nothing can be a figure or a token of itself.” This is wrong, More elaborates, For if ther were but euen in a playe or an enterlude, the personages of .ij or .iij. knowen princes represented, if one of them now liked for his pleasure to playe his own part himselfe, dyd he not there his owne persone vnder the fourme of a player, represent his owne persona in fourme of his own estate? (More 157; cf. also Beckwith 144)

To illustrate that Christ can really be present under the form of bread, More envisions a prince who plays a prince on stage – just like Christ’s body, his royal body is really present underneath the theatrical costume (‘under the form of a player’). In Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, we will encounter a similar scene, in which a young prince in a theatrical frame dresses up as a prince to reveal his real presence. The disguise metaphor was also applied by Catholics to discredit the Protestant position. During the Marian persecutions, countering claims of Christ’s real presence became fatal. When Nicholas Ridley, Protestant Bishop of London, was imprisoned in the tower in 1555, he tried to defend Protestant belief by rejecting the costume metaphor in his Treatise against the Error of Transubstantiation. He argued that his Catholic persecutors had deliberately misunderstood the Reformed position on the Eucharist when they claimed that Protestants “make the holy sacrament of the blessed body and blood of Christ nothing else, but

 Further, as critics have shown, Protestants in the sixteenth century increasingly portrayed the Roman Mass as a theatrical spectacle involving disguise. For instance, Sarah Beckwith has shown how Becon’s above-quoted Displaying of the Popish Mass, written in 1554, but first printed in 1564 after Mary I’s demise, presents the Catholic priest as an actor, who puts on an elaborate costume for the show of the Mass. The Mass with its spectacle of visual display, sound effects, and smells has to be understood as a theatrical deception according to Becon (Beckwith 146).

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a bare sign, or a figure, to represent Christ, none otherwise than […] a vile person gorgeously apparelled may represent a king or a prince in a play” (10). Whereas More on the Catholic side employed the rare case in which the identities of the performer and the performed character are identical, and hence, strictly speaking, no disguise takes place, the Reformed position on the Eucharist was characterised as a typical case of theatrical cross-dressing. I will return to the question of why both More and Ridley employ the example of disguised princes and kings. Further, divisions within the Protestant league were negotiated with reference to the metaphor of clothing. For instance, Martin Luther defended his notion of the Eucharist against the more radical Reformers by comparing the questions of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. In both cases, Luther maintains in his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), “you cannot shell the divinity from the humanity […] making the humanity merely a pod, indeed a coat which the divinity put on and off.” According to Luther, “kernel” and “shell” cannot be separated (219). As Richard Strier points out, Luther understands the ‘body’ of Christ’s ‘this is my body’ as a synecdoche rather than a metaphor; he maintains that “Jesus was using a part of the composite entity of the bread and his body to represent the whole” (Strier 288). Debating with Zwingli and Oecolampadius at the Marburg Colloquy, Luther makes clear that he understands the pars pro toto relation in particular as the connection between the outer shell and the content: “By synecdoche we speak of the containing vessel when we mean the content, or of the content when also including the vessel, as e. g. when we speak of the mug or of the beer, using only one of the two to denote the other.” By contrast, he elaborates, “[t]he metaphor does away with the content” (Sasse 254). Hence, to read the words of institution metaphorically means to “take away from the bread the substance of the body, leaving us only the empty shells” (256). In contrast to such emptying “[f]igurative speech [which] removes the core and leaves the shell only,” Luther understands synecdoche in an unusual manner, namely as non-figurative. Therefore, his synecdochic interpretation of the Eucharist allows for the real presence of corpus Christi: “Synecdoche is not a comparison, but rather it says: ‘That is there, and it is contained in it.’ There is no better example of a synecdoche than ‘This is my body’” (254).⁶⁶ Luther emphasises his lack of interest in the mere outer shell when he compares accidents to dress. Discussing the exact nature of Christ’s body during the Last Supper, he declares: “Whether that body is mortal or capable of suffering – mortality and passibility

 Because of Luther’s idiosyncratic definition of the synecdoche, Zwingli can in the same debate describe his own, figurative understanding of the Eucharist as metonymic (Sasse 260).

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are accidentals –, I do not care more about that than I would care about the garment in which Christ was dressed at the Last Supper” (253).⁶⁷ As these selected contributions to the long history of the Eucharist debate demonstrate, the analogy between disguise scenarios and the Eucharist was recognised in early modern thought, but the precise nature of this analogy was by no means conventionalised. In the following, I will enquire further into the charged relationship between the Eucharist and disguise by tracing a genealogy between the heated religious debates in the early to mid-sixteenth century which cost More, Ridley, Cranmer, and others their lives and the motif of identity transformation by disguise that is so fashionable in Elizabethan prose fiction towards the end of the century. As we will see, in Elizabethan narratives, the conceptual link between the Eucharist and apparel is equally flexible and productive as in the theological debate. Eucharistic patterns resurface in ways which partly link up with Baldwin’s concerns and aesthetic practice. Just like Baldwin’s pseudometamorphic transformation stories, their disguise scenarios are preoccupied with identity change; this preoccupation again has implications for aesthetic form and affords metafictional reflection. Yet the narratives also develop inventive appropriations of Eucharistic theorems, rituals, and emotional structures – appropriations which often intersect with the early modern notion of dress as a marker, but also a potential maker of identity in a period of fundamental religious, political, economic, and social change. In early modern England, dress functioned as an officially controlled semiotic system that displayed and reinforced divisions of rank, gender, and nationality, and it hence “became a primary site where a struggle over the mutability of the social order was conducted” (Howard 422). Sumptuary laws, which had been issued since the fourteenth century but increased under Elizabeth I, attempted to preserve traditional social hierarchies by regulating in detail how one should dress according to one’s social position. Thereby, they attempted to maintain “a systematic [sartorial] hermeneutic, in which the surface appearance presumably mirrored the substantial reality of birth, station, and occupation” (Sedinger 247), as well as of gender and, increasingly, of nationality. Literary and theatrical cross-dressing, as much as real-life cases, probe the epistemological and ideological value of dress-codes. As has been argued, in particular with regard to Elizabethan drama, scenarios of transvestism frequently show how clothes not only display, but also constitute identity – clothes here  At one point in the debate, Zwingli similarly differentiates between the external form and the internal content and claims the latter for his own position, when he argues, “Luther, however, does not look upon the internal word (the interior meaning of the word), but upon the external word (the mere outward letter)” (Sasse 240).

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assume the ontological qualities which they were meant to signal according to the sumptuary laws.⁶⁸ Not only plays, but also treatises, pamphlets, letters, sermons, satires, poems, and prose narratives negotiated the capacity of clothing to transform identities. As Elizabeth Harvey puts it, “the fear that is voiced is that costume will become essence” (46). The ‘essence’ of the wearer was seen as particularly endangered with respect to sex, class, and nationality. For instance, Phillip Stubbes famously argues in his polemic The Anatomie of Abuses (first published in 1583), “Our apparel was giuen as a signe distinctiue, to discerne betwixt sexe and sexe, and therfore one to weare the apparel of another sexe, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his owne kinde” (118; sig. G3).⁶⁹ He accuses female cross-dressers of an aspiration to change their sex just like their clothing: “although this be a kind of attire, proper onely to man, yet they blush not to wear it: and if they could as wel change their sexe, and put on the kind of man, as they can weare apparel assigned only to man, I thinke they would as verily become men indeed, as now they degenerate from godly sober women” (118; sig. G2v-G3). Stubbes’s religious zeal and his strict morality cannot be taken as the normative Elizabethan position, but the prompt success of The Anatomie of Abuses (four editions were published before 1595) shows that his ideas must have been of interest to Elizabethan culture, even if many readers probably disagreed with his position.⁷⁰ In the context of this study, Stubbes’s exact phrasing is significant because it highlights the conceptual influence that Eucharistic thinking might have had on the discourse on identity: it evokes

 For example, sometimes rich clothing was understood as a source rather than expression of wealth and rank. Many courtiers, hoping for an advancement by drawing attention to their taste through conspicuous display, “thought that costumes were no idle toys but created wealth in the first place” (Ravelhofer 155).  I quote Stubbes’s polemic from Margaret Jane Kidnie’s edition that is based on the fourth publication of 1595.  Stubbes takes up the common idea that Elizabethan dress codes reflect a God-given order. Polemics, as well as sermons like the Homily against Excess of Apparel (which was read out in churches around the country during the reign of Elizabeth I), habitually referred to the Bible’s prohibition of cross-gender dressing. Deuteronomy 22 condemns transvestism as a serious violation of the semiotic system that was legitimised by God: “The woman shal not weare that which perteineth vnto the man, nether shal a man put on a womans raiment: for all that do so, are abominacion vnto the Lord thy God” (The Geneva Bible Deuteronomie 22.5). As the first Elizabethan anti-theatrical polemicist, Stephen Gosson (who later became an English agent spying in Rome) cited the sanction against cross-dressing in Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582). Here, he calls clothes “manifest signes of […] sexe” determined by “the express rule of the worde of God” (C3v; image 41). Likewise, the Puritan theologian William Perkins invokes Deuteronomy as the first rule of proper dressing in a section of his Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606) entitled “What is the right, lawful, and holy use of apparel?” (136).

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the possibility of an ‘adulteration of the verity of a kind’ – that is, the modification of an essence, or, in theological terms, a transubstantiation. For Stubbes a transformation of sex/gender essence is at stake that exceeds the accidents of clothing, and both Sidney’s Arcadia and Lodge’s Rosalynd engage with this idea in their disguise narratives of male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing, respectively. Cross-dressing across the divisions of rank was probably more common than cross-gender dressing in early modern England (Kastan 235), and it provided a shared plot line of pastoral narratives written under Elizabeth.⁷¹ In a treatise from 1606, the Puritan leader William Perkins defines the most basic function of clothing as the demarcation of class identity (next to the protection from the cold): “That apparel is necessary for the Scholler, the Tradesman, the Countrymen, the Gentleman; which serveth not only to defend their bodies from colde, but which belongs also to the place, degree, calling, and condition of them all” (The Whole Treatise 135).⁷² Besides five ‘Acts of Apparel,’ at least nineteen proclamations to regulate dress were issued in Tudor England in order to stop the distortion of the social order, and pamphlets recurrently criticised the confusion of station. For example, Stubbes complains that now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in England, and such horrible excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparel he listeth himselfe, or can get by any meanes. So that it is very hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a Gentleman, who is not: for you shall haue those, which are neither of the Nobilitie, Gentilitie, nor Yeomanrie, no, nor yet any Magistrate or officer in the common wealth, goe daylie in silkes, Veluettes, Satens, Damaskes, Taffaties, and such like: (sig. C2)

 The relationship between factual cross-dressing on London’s streets and depictions of disguise on the stage and in the literature of the day is contested, but the abundant remarks on the dangers of cross-dressing in sermons and pamphlets as well as the sumptuary laws are evidence of the cultural relevance of dressing beyond dramaturgical finesse and narrative suspense. See Cressy for an account of the scarce historical records of actual cases of cross-dressing at the time. See also Amanda Bailey’s study Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England for an exploration of how the theatre offered its audience an alternative aesthetic of masculinity not only by cross-dressing on stage, but also by providing a public forum for fashion for the audience. This model of masculinity did not obey sartorial moderation as required by the sumptuary laws, but celebrated irreverence and excess.  This social order is God-given, as Perkins elaborates with respect to Biblical examples: “it must be answerable to our estate and dignity, for distinction of order and degree in the societies of men. This use of attire stands by the very ordinance of God; who, as he hath not sorted all men to all places, so he will have men to fit themselves and their attire, to the quality of their proper places, to put a difference betweene themselves and others” (136).

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At the court, rich clothing according to the rules and according to the latest fashion was of utmost importance. It signalled not only wealth and good taste, but also became a political statement of loyalty to Elizabeth (Kuchta 242). Consequently, Elizabethans hardly desired to dress beneath their station; the ‘confuse mingle mangle’ which Stubbes and others identify derived mainly from wealthy non-aristocrats who copied courtly fashion. Sumptuary laws therefore attempted to make sure that fashion remained exclusive. As a privilege for the small court community, fashion had to differentiate courtiers from everybody else, also to secure the very fashionability of the clothes.⁷³ When William Rankins warns in his Seven Satires (1598) against non-aristocrats who display their wealth in clothing, he tries to differentiate between the substance and the accidents of class identity. He argues that upstarts confuse “the signe,” the rich clothes, with inborn nobility, which he regards as “the substance” (A4v; 5). By putting on courtly fashion, he argues, upstarts have become “[t]hose that the substance of their soule forsook” (B5r; 17). The early modern period was used to thinking in the Aristotelian terms of substance and accidents, so uses of ‘substance’ did not necessarily refer to the Eucharist. Yet some treatises display an explicit association with Eucharistic models of thought. For example, as we have seen, Montaigne put the changeability of his contemporaries in straightforwardly religious terms, when he mocked “some transforme and transubstantiate themselves, into as many new formes and strange beings, as they vndertake charges” (Vol. 3, 267). Professional preoccupations, which could change, are not to be confused with the ‘real essence’ of identity, Montaigne argues in an extended theatrical metaphor: “Wee must play our parts duly, but as the part of a borrowed personage. Of a visard and apparance, wee should not make a reall essence, nor proper of that which is another. Wee cannot distinguish the skinne from the shirt” (Vol. 3, 267). Analogously, English pamphlets argued that since upstarts put on noble clothing without having the appropriate substance, they were guilty of attempting disguise. As Montaigne’s eloquent reflections reveal, identity began to be thought of as a developmental, changeable product rather than an essence. In the very essay in which Montaigne criticises the too-ready transformation of his contem-

 As theories of fashion have established, it is one of the general functions of fashion to distinguish social groups: “The very character of fashion demands that it should be adopted at one time only by some members of the given group, the great majority being merely on the road to adopting it” (Simmel 302). Therefore, dressing à la mode is a paradox process of social inclusion and exclusion: “To follow fashion demands imitation in order to acquire difference” (Ekardt 178). Tudor sumptuary laws attempted to prevent a general move towards fashion by announcing serious punishments for ‘upstarts’ who tried to participate in the fashion cult.

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poraries, he outlines his own notion of identity formation, which emphasises the significance of life-long customs and habits for a gradual consolidation of identity: “let vs […] call the custome and condition of every one of vs by the name of Nature. […] Custome is a second Nature, and no lesse powerfull.” He sums up his reflection by describing his own identity formation as the gradual creation of a new substance, and hence, although Montaigne here does not employ the term, a transubstantiation by which inborn nature is slowly replaced by acquired custom: “To conclude, I am ready to finish this man, not to make another. By long custome, this forme is changed into substance, and Fortune into Nature” (Vol. 3, 266). Positions like Montaigne’s, the wealth of pamphlets and sermons tackling the issue of inappropriate clothing, and the need for more and more sumptuary laws demonstrate that both the notion of inborn and immutable identity and the idea of a God-given, stable sign system were no longer fully tenable in early modern England. Elizabethan narratives engage with the early modern debate about clothing, but in contrast to pamphlets, laws, and sermons, they do not state, they narrate such processes of identity formation and transformation – for instance, of identifying with an adopted dress, of faking an identity by means of an adopted dress, or of developing a new identity beneath an adopted dress. The tales rarely announce a clear-cut position on how identity ought to be formed, but instead open up a reflective, sometimes playful avenue of thinking about matters of identity. The outward guise of a character and his or her internal change are always in tension in the tales; transvestism and transubstantiation are the crucial issues that are associated in shifting ways.

2.1 Robert Greene: Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1585 or 1588) and Menaphon: Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues in His Melancholy Cell at Silexadra (1589) With fifteen works published, Robert Greene dominated English prose fiction in the 1580s. His romance Pandosto was immensely popular in its time, went through twenty-six editions over the next 150 years and inspired many adaptations, most famously Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Menaphon, which has been dubbed “a media sensation in Elizabethan publishing” (Mentz, Romance 114), was similarly widely read. Greene, who, unlike Gascoigne, Lyly, and Sidney, was neither aristocratic nor employed at the court, is commonly regarded as the first professional author. Writing for the book-buying public might have given him greater literary freedom than writing for patronage, but at the same time, it necessitated an enormous output. His wide-ranging work includes an abun-

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dance of romances, which were often understood to be addressed to a female audience. Although none of the narratives are addressed specifically to gentlewomen, his romances invoke female readers with a frequency beyond convention, for example, with ‘feminine’ subtitles and dedications to a female patroness (Hull 81). Since Greene also made many female characters the (sometimes eponymous) heroines of his romances, Nashe famously called his occasional co-author “the Homer of women” (Anatomie 12). Greene’s romances often repeat patterns or character constellations from his own earlier writing, and Greene additionally drew, like all early modern writers, on other sources.⁷⁴ Early modern fiction aimed at repetitions with a difference; rather than expecting entirely new plots, readers were interested in how a (known) story is told, in its “angle of attack” (Salzman, “Introduction” xi).⁷⁵ Accordingly, Menaphon and Pandosto have many motifs and plot elements in common, and their accounts of disguise and identity transformation share relevant aspects.

“his looks in shepherd’s weeds are lordly” – The Persistence of Nobility In Pandosto and Menaphon, as typical of Elizabethan pastoral romances, aristocrats live far from the court in the countryside and assume shepherd’s clothes, and in both texts, this first camouflage causes further disguises. Since the narrative development hinges on the challenge of recovering the identity of various royal protagonists, the characters’ tasks of perceiving the true substance hidden by misleading accidents constitutes one conceptual analogy to the Eucharist debate. In addition, the romances create narrative tension by voicing the characters’ fantasies of transubstantiation from prince and princess to shepherd and shepherdess and vice versa. They thereby open up imaginative spaces for readers, too, playing with the idea that talent and worth can be separated from status at birth.⁷⁶ Eventually, however, Greene’s tales foreclose visions of social mobility by affirming the inexpungeability of aristocratic identity.

 See, for example, Stanley Wells’s account of possible sources for Pandosto from Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica to the Amadis de Gaule and Greene’s own writing (xlviii-ixxiv).  Additionally, the references to other works served as a marketing strategy. Thus the title of Menaphon initially modelled the romance as a response to Lyly’s Euphues and its character of Camilla. From 1610 onwards, it was replaced by a title which associated it with Sidney’s by then more fashionable style: Greenes Arcadia – Or Menaphon.  As Lori Humphrey Newcomb has shown, Pandosto’s plot “flirts with the possibility that a shepherd’s daughter may be a figure of perfect maidenhood, fit to marry a prince” (“The Ro-

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For example, Dorastus, the prince who dresses as a shepherd in Pandosto, perceives his change of clothes as a further step on his downward transformation which was instigated by his degrading affection for the shepherdess Fawnia – his “slave[ry] to love” (Pandosto 179),⁷⁷ his “frantic affection” for “such a country slut” “not worthy to be looked at of a prince, much less to be loved of such a potentate” (P 180). Due to this humiliation through love, his disguise appears to Dorastus to be the “right decorum: base desires and homely attires. Thy thoughts are fit for none but a shepherd, and thy apparel such as only become a shepherd” (P 186). Soon afterwards, however, this fantasy of transformation from prince to shepherd – caused by love and expressed by clothing – is rejected by Fawnia, who is only briefly deceived by Dorastus’s transvestism and lectures him on the difference between substance and accidents: “rich clothing make not princes, nor homely attire beggars. Shepherds are not called shepherds because they wear hooks and bags but that they are born poor and live to keep sheep. So this attire hath not made Dorastus a shepherd, but to seem like a shepherd” (P 187). According to Fawnia, habit in the sense of apparel does not constitute identity, but habit in the sense of a preoccupation at least signals social belonging. By giving the motif of pastoral disguise a twist, the overall narrative supports Fawnia’s claim of inborn, substantial rank, but falsifies her belief in the impact of nurture on identity:⁷⁸ the alleged shepherd Fawnia is herself a child of royal parentage, who was cast out by her father Pandosto, King of Bohemia, because he suspected an affair between his wife Bellaria and his friend Egistus, King of Sicily, and hence believed Bellaria’s newborn daughter to be a “bastard brat” (P 165).⁷⁹ The baby was sent away in a boat and washed ashore in Sicily, where a mance” 117). According to Newcomb, the tale’s protagonist, Fawnia, can be seen as a fictional representative of Elizabethan female servants, who had an unusual position in terms of rank. Belonging to their master’s household and sometimes marrying into the family that they served, they were “social chameleons” who lived out the fantasy of social rise which Freud’s family romance theorises (123).  Parenthetical references to Pandosto will be abbreviated to ‘P.’  See A. Kinney for a discussion of the Greek romances which might have supplied plot structures, including the unwitting disguise (193 – 197). Greene could adopt the basic motif of nobility which manifests itself in beauty from his Greek sources; cf. for example The Aethiopica (Heliodorus 72).  One might argue that Fawnia’s contested status is a means to defend and celebrate Elizabeth I, who shared with Greene’s fictional heroine rumours of bastardy. In Fawnia’s case, her paternity is not entirely clear – the oracle affirms that “Bellaria is chaste, […] his babe an innocent” (P 169), but the romance describes in detail how close Bellaria grew to Egistus, “oftentimes coming herself into his bedchamber to see that nothing should be amiss to mislike him” and promoting “a secret uniting of their affections that the one could not well be without the company of the other” (P 157). Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, was

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Sicilian shepherd, Porrus, found her and raised her as his daughter. Fawnia grows up unaware of her origin (and hence of her pastoral disguise), believing herself to be a shepherd, just like her pendant in Greene’s Menaphon, Prince Pleusidippus. This device allows Greene to demonstrate that inborn nobility is preserved despite rustic nurture, apparel, and the characters’ self-definition as shepherds. Here Greene takes over the motif of an essential self from medieval literary forerunners. Bynum has argued that an insistence on immutable substance (which we have encountered in Gerald of Wales’s previously discussed tale of humans who are transformed into wolves but uphold their human substance beneath the wolf skin) was typical of the Middle Ages. Both hagiographies and secular narratives depicted their heroes and heroines as having an essential self, which is unfolded in the course of the narrative, but never radically changed: The biographer of a saint who grew up to be a bishop might tell of the saintly child building churches of sand on the beach while other boys, destined for knightly careers, built sandcastles. Behavior revealed character or type; a self was always what it was. The “end” or goal of development, if there was development, was to achieve the ideal version of that type or self. […] Like the soul in devotional literature, created capable of (because like) God and hence returning toward what it already is, the hero or heroine of secular literature grows into or unfolds rather than replaces a self. (Bynum, Metamorphosis 23)

Likewise, Greene’s romance understands the royal self as essential; as the development of the royal children demonstrates, they unfold their majestic qualities regardless of their rustic nurturing. Aristocratic substance even shines through base accidents and speaks to the beholder. Thus, Pandosto’s Fawnia is “of such singular beauty and excellent wit that whoso saw her would have thought she had been some heavenly nymph and not a mortal creature. […] [S]he so increased with exquisite perfection, both of body and mind, as her natural dispo-

likewise seen as a bastard by those (Catholics) believing in the insolubility of the marriage sacrament. While the romance leaves some doubts as to Fawnia’s parentage intact, it emphasises the importance of her noble nature since she is in any case the daughter of a king and a queen. The pervasive incest motif in the romance can also be seen as a political allusion. Pandosto imagines Fawnia’s procreation as “most incestuous adultery” (P 163) and the narrative offers two more, alternative scenarios of incest: if Fawnia is indeed Pandosto’s daughter, he is on the verge of committing incest with her – if she is, however, Egistus’s child, the relationship between her and Dorastus is one between half-siblings. The references to incest are politically relevant since Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn was executed due to accusations of incest with her brother – a reproach which further complicated Elizabeth’s parentage. Cf. also Cooper’s reading of Pandosto as an engagement with the question of whether Elizabeth’s claim to the throne was legitimate (274– 280).

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sition did bewray that she was born of some high parentage” (P 176). In the same manner, Prince Pleusidippus in Menaphon grows up unaware of his royal origin but “ingrafted nobility” becomes discernible when the child develops “kingly majesty,” “honourable justice,” and “sovereignity” (Menaphon 135).⁸⁰ Greene employs the romance convention of discovered parentage, which plays with, but eventually forecloses the possibility that gentility of action can be separated from gentility of blood. As Cooper puts it, “[i]t 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” (338). McKeon has likewise interpreted the topos of discovered parentage as a way of mediating the threat of a “noncorrespondence” between the gentility of action and looks and the gentility of blood by initially “problematically isolating physical beauty and true nobility apart from inherited nobility, only to reconfirm the wholeness of honor at the end of the story” (133). In Greene’s romances, this subversive potential of the ‘noncorrespondence’ is mitigated by the fact that readers are informed from the very beginning that Fawnia is a princess by blood. As McKeon and Cooper have shown, claims of essential royalty became a powerful topos far beyond romances. The topos was repeatedly used for biographies of kings and queens, who had to take on disguises in times of danger, but whose majesty nonetheless remained evident. For instance, William Warner’s Albion’s England depicted the young Elizabeth before her accession as Argentille, who disguises herself as a milkmaid but whose beauty is nonetheless without compare (Cooper 354). The motif of the “inexpungeability of aristocratic nobility” was still used in reports of the escape of Charles I’s son, later Charles II, whose nobility was perceived despite rustic disguises as “Country-Fellow,” “Serveingman,” and “Woodcutter” (McKeon 213): The telltale whiteness of his skin he obscures with coarse grey stockings, and with a distillation of walnut rind familiar to all romance readers as the preferred cosmetic of downward mobility. […] But despite these expedients, more than once his true identity is suspected and discovered by loyal subjects – ‘majestie being soe naturall unto him,’ according to one commentator, ‘that even when he said nothing, did nothing, his very lookes […] were enough to betray him.’ (McKeon 213)

In the same manner, Greene’s romances naturalise royalty as “natural disposition,” as an inborn quality which ought to be marked and enhanced, but is not created, by dress (P 176).

 Parenthetical references to Menaphon will be abbreviated to ‘M.’ I will use the modern spelling of Brenda Cantar’s edition but will not adopt her Americanisation.

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Both romances also raise the issue of an undue mixing between characters of different degrees in love affairs. For example, Fawnia reprimands herself for her love for Dorastus and her inherent ambition to climb the social ladder: “No bastard hawk must soar so high as the hobby, no fowl gaze against the sun but the eagle, actions wrought against nature reap despite and thoughts above fortune, disdain” (P 182); “Will eagles catch at flies, will cedars stoop to brambles, or mighty princes look at such homely trulls?” (P 182). The sense of degree and honour of each class forbids the union of Fawnia and Dorastus, and so the virtuous young lovers both desire death rather than the uncouth mixing of ranks inherent in their match. Yet, since readers are already aware of Fawnia’s nobility, the lovers’ struggle against their indecorous passion creates dramatic irony. For the informed readers, and in retrospect for the characters as well, Fawnia’s modesty and sense of honour prove her noble nature. As Salzman notes, Fawnia ironically reveals her courtly mind in a long description of the advantages of pastoral life. Contrary to Fawnia’s own conclusion, her obedience and diffidence qualify her for the court rather than exclude her from it: “I am born to toil for the court, not in the court, my nature unfit for their nurture” (P 184; Salzman, English Prose Fiction 64). Menaphon offers several equivalent scenarios of potential love relationships that do not obey the rules of rank, including the infatuation of the eponymous shepherd with an exiled princess who lives undercover. Princess Sephestia was banished from the court by her father Democles, King of Arcadia, for marrying Maximius, a gentleman beneath her station. When Sephestia, together with her infant son, arrives in Arcadia after a shipwreck, she puts on rustic attire and presents herself as the shepherdess Samela. She initially has to encourage herself not to suffer from her pastoral disguise, but soon sees advantages in her new identity: “then […] will I disguise myself, with my clothes I will change my thoughts; for being poorly attired I will be meanly minded, and measure my actions by my present estate, not by former fortunes” (M 106). After a few years, she even dreads the thought of shedding her disguise and returning to the court for a scene of renewed investiture as princess: “my country life (sweet country life) in thy proud soaring hopes, despoiled and disrobed of the disguised array of his rest, must return russet weeds [that is, that is, a reddish-brown fabric that was produced in England and worn by peasants] to the folds where I left my fears and haste to court my hell, there to invest me in my wonted cares” (M 135). The insight into Samela’s true identity and the ensuing dramatic irony make readers understand that Menaphon’s fear – that Samela might be a gentlewoman and hence inappropriate for his love – would be even greater if he knew that he woos an exiled foreign princess. As in Pandosto, the romance uses courtship to highlight the inborn quality of nobility, but here, cross-class courtship

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triggers even more outspoken warnings against an inappropriate mixing of ranks. Once again, social order is naturalised through references to the animal world, when Menaphon characterises himself as a fly and Samela as an eagle (M 113). In turn, Samela rejects hybridity with reference to plants and animals: love has to respect circumstance, she explains, since “[h]e that grafteth gillyflowers upon the nettle marreth the smell, who coveteth to tie the lamb and the lion in one tether maketh a brawl. Equal fortunes are Love’s favourites, and therefore should fancy be always limited by geometrical proportion” (M 115). This natural and mathematical law of proportion is disturbed if the classes intermingle in love: “if rich with poor, there happen many dangerous and braving objections” (M 115). In its poetological and generic choices, however, the romance does not obey such demands of purity. Like its possible model, Sidney’s Arcadia, it combines the fashionable mode of the pastoral, the low mode, with chivalric romance and epic elements, a higher mode, into a new hybrid form of fiction which allows for both meditation on love in the eclogues and for scenes of combat and action. In his Apology, Sidney defends such generically hybrid fictions, arguing that because the separate parts are good, their composite cannot be inferior: “some poesies have […] mingled prose and verse […]. Some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral. […] [I]f severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful” (AP 97). In all of the discussed romances, the mixture of the pastoral and chivalric mode includes the combination of poetry and prose parts. The interspersed poems are often relevant for the implied stance towards prose fiction. While in the Old Arcadia each book of the narrative is followed by a long eclogue, which comments on the preceding action and expresses the love of the male protagonists, the revised version dispenses with the eclogues. However, some of the poems are integrated into the action, mainly to create moments of reflection and introspection or a means of communication between lovers. In Greene’s romances, poems have a similar function. In Lodge’s narratives, however, poetry, and in particular Petrarchan poetry, is problematised – a move which is reinforced in some of the tales to be discussed in the third chapter, among them Lyly’s and Nashe’s narratives. In Menaphon, the insistence on the essence of royalty is stretched to nobility in the disguise scenario of Pleusidippus’s parents: Sephestia and Maximius are separated by shipwreck, believe each other to be dead, and do not fully recognise each other when they meet in their shepherd’s weeds as Samela and Melicertus and once again fall in love. In this case, at first readers are not informed by the narrator that the shepherd Melicertus is indeed Maximius and so they fully share the perspective of the female protagonist, who imagines Melicertus to be an incarnation of her dead husband, though she instantly represses this

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fantasy. Both Sephestia and Melicertus are, however, increasingly convinced of the aristocratic status of the disguised other – class identity here communicates more immediately than individual identity. Thus, Samela wonders: “May this Melicertus be a shepherd: or can a country cottage afford such perfection? […] [H]is face is not enchased with any rustic proportion, his brows contain the character of nobility, and his looks in shepherd’s weeds are lordly, his voice pleasing, his wit full of gentry” (M 128). Menaphon clearly draws a line between aristocratic and non-aristocratic characters: while a union of Menaphon and Sephestia is unthinkable and offers a source of comic relief, the smaller difference in rank between Sephestia, a princess, and Maximius, a gentleman, can be overcome by romantic love. In short, both Menaphon and Pandosto take a conservative stance by naturalising rank, by foreclosing the possibility of class ‘transubstantiation,’ and by demonstrating not only the persistence, but also the readability of substantial nobility.⁸¹ This essentialist view of class identity confronted and soothed anxieties regarding the above-discussed growing social mobility in Elizabethan times. As we have seen, due to the rise of mercantilism, wealth was no longer derived from the possession of land only. Consequently, non-aristocratic Englishmen could materially compete with the nobility and could display their affluence in status symbols such as clothing. In addition to the material habit, aristocratic behavioural habits also became more easily imitable for wealthy Englishmen, even if they did not have access to the court, since courtesy books like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528, translated in 1561), Thomas Elyot’s Governor (1531), Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo (1558, translated in 1576), Stephano Guaz-

 Greene’s conservatism might be explained by his dependence on the economic success of his writing, which found the majority of its readers among Greene’s wealthy social superiors (K. Wilson, “Revenge” 698; Newcomb, Reading 21– 26). Additionally, the increasing association of nobility and humanist education might have led to Greene’s own claim to the status of a gentleman because of his university education (Alwes, Sons and Authors 235). Even David Margolies, who sees Greene as a representative of the emerging “bourgeois individualism,” grants that at many points he “still retains an inherited aristocratic view that accepts the intrinsic superiority of the aristocracy” (127). The romance offers two cases of upward mobility (a cupbearer is offered a dukedom and a shepherd a knighthood), albeit in a non-threatening form, namely as rewards by the king, which reinforces rather than questions the romance’s conservatism (cf. Wilson, “Revenge” 698). Greene’s romances hence support Montrose’s argument that the pastoral mode naturalised class distinctions at a time when the political system was under pressure. By contrast, Helgerson perceives Greene’s romances as a rebellious departure from the conservative humanist tenet “that nurture is superior to nature” (Elizabethan Prodigals 83). I would rather read this contradiction as a return to a view of social hierarchy that is more conservative than the humanist outlook.

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zo’s Civil Conversation (1574, translated in 1581), and George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589) laid out the standards of aristocratic behaviour. Originally intended to teach aristocrats how to distinguish and to justify themselves by appearing noble and thus to shame their non-aristocratic rivals into submission, the courtesy books at the same time inadvertently offered those rivals the means to adopt the supposedly ‘natural’ characteristics of aristocracy – just as the sumptuary laws offered detailed information on how to dress nobly. Stallybrass’s claim that “the aristocracy becomes no more than one possible kind of style: a style which one can adopt or drop according to the extent of one’s wardrobe” seems exaggerated in the face of the political power structures, but it certainly captures the anxieties of the ruling classes (“Transvestism” 306). What is more, the humanist reforms of education broadened opportunities for learning rhetorical skills, hitherto an aristocratic privilege. Since humanist learning increasingly came to be equated with gentility, it further strengthened the esteem for a gentility of action over a gentility of blood. In this socio-political situation, Greene’s insistence on inborn aristocratic essence that is independent of training by courtesy books and apparel sustains the inherited social order. Nonetheless, Greene’s narratives do not fully suppress aspects of a nobility of action. Most of all, education and linguistic skills are regarded as signs of nobility. While Fawnia in Pandosto is presented as a naturally good and wise figure, her speeches are not as rhetorically polished as those of Samela, who is a princess not only by nature, but also by nurture. Thus, when Samela and Melicertus meet, it is not only their noble looks, but also their noble speech which attracts them to each other. Samela comes to think of Melicertus as aristocratic because of his sophisticated language, which distinguishes him from the lower style of the other shepherds, just as Melicertus perceives Samela’s noble upbringing through her witty, Euphuist rhetoric – each character wonders where the shepherd friend could have learned to talk like Lyly’s characters and both slightly mock the “superfine” rhetoric and “the inkhorn desire” of their interlocutor (M 130).⁸² Assuming inborn nobility and nonetheless acknowledging the importance of education, Greene’s romances are typical of the Elizabethan period, when concepts of identity were in constant tension between developmental and static notions of identity, between naturalisation and the acknowledgement of ‘nurture,’

 Martin Garrett relates a similar event in real life, in which a gentleman allegedly tried to impress a gentlewoman with a speech which he had stolen from Sidney’s writing: “A gentleman complimenting with a lady in pure Sir Philip Sidney, she was so well verst in his author, as tacitely she traced him to the bottome of a leafe, where (his memorie failing) he brake off abruptly. ‘Nay, I beseech you, Sir,’ says shee, ‘proceede and turn over the leafe, for methinke the best part is still behinde;’ which unexpected discovery silenc’t him for ever after” (22).

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as early moderns would have called socialisation, or, as we would call it today, with further-reaching implications, the ‘performativity’ of identity.⁸³ The ‘true gentility’ of Greene’s princesses is never questioned, but for some of the male monarchs and princes, it is debatable. King Pandosto’s probably causeless and in any case too-rash jealousy as much as his sexual harassment of Fawnia show how deficient his nobility is. Prince Dorus likewise attempts to sexually blackmail Fawnia. In a romance that arguably attempts to praise Elizabeth I, it is the female heir to the throne who displays spotless nobility, even despite her lack of nurture – just as Sephestia in Menaphon, who remains noble despite living as a shepherdess for decades. Accordingly, the narrative emphasises the inborn nobility of its princesses by stunning revelation scenarios that implicitly draw on Eucharistic concerns, as I shall argue.

“… here standeth under …” – The Wonder of Narrative Transubstantiation In support of a concept of inborn, immutable royalty, Greene’s romances employ the sense of wonder caused by an experience that resembles Eucharistic transubstantiation. As is typical of romance denouements, Pandosto and Menaphon culminate in moments of narrative peripeteia that let readers gain pleasure from participating in the characters’ “ecstasy of sudden joy” when the revelation of true identities overwhelms them (M 173). The scene of Sephestia’s final transformation in Menaphon is visually analogous to the Eucharistic scenario since her rustic outward appearance does not conform to the revealed royal substance. The moment of narrative transubstantiation is presented in a condensed form that heightens the sense of ritualistic wonder. At the very moment when “the deathman [… is] ready to give Melicertus the fatal stroke” soon to be followed by Sephestia/Samela’s execution, “an old woman attired like a prophetess” deciphers an oracle and reveals Melicertus’s, Samela’s, and Pleusidippus’s real identities (M 173). The woman’s assertion of ‘this is her body’ affords the protagonists a fresh perception – it is through the power of words which invest wellknown appearances with a new substance that Maximius’s perception changes accordingly: after hearing that “fair Sephestia […] here standeth under the name of Samela” (M 173), “Maximius first looked on his wife and seeing by

 See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble for the most influential account of a performative concept of identity, which is created by the iteration of performative acts rather than by an internal, inborn essence. Her later works, in particular The Psychic Life of Power, look more closely at the processes by which socially constructed identity markers such as gender are internalised by psychic processes.

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the lineaments of her face that it was Sephestia, fell about her neck” (M 174). The notion that the ‘real’ noble identity ‘standeth under’ the assumed shepherd’s name reinforces the concern with hidden substances as it refers to the etymological root of ‘substance,’ which is derived from the Latin ‘substare,’ ‘standing under’ (cf. J. Anderson 35 – 36). During the Eucharist debate, the Catholic side had sometimes used an equivalent association of name change and substance change. For example, Robert Pointz, in one of the ‘books from Louvain’ that Ascham had warned his readers against, argued in 1566 that “the change of names (which are commonly given according to the nature of things) importeth also the change of the things them selves” (184).⁸⁴ Therefore, the incapability of the lovers to recognise their former spouse, which strains plausibility for readers today, partakes in an early modern investment in names and the constitutive power of words (cf. also Barker 85). Riche’s novella “Sappho Duke of Mantona” (1581) offers a comparable scene of recognition between spouses who believed each other dead. It creates a similar sense of wonder. As D. T. Starnes has argued, Riche’s scene draws on the saint legend of St. Eustache, who was converted to Christianity in Roman times; this source again demonstrates the close intertwining of religious thought and romance which I argue for in this chapter. Just as Greene’s Fawnia and Sephestia, Riche’s protagonist Messilina is of outstanding “beauty, which could not be blemished with mean and homely garments” and is too virtuous to give in to the courting of any other man while she considers herself a widow (Farewell 142).⁸⁵ Riche’s final recognition scenario is more realistic and less ritualistic than Greene’s: “the duke, now taking better view of the woman, knowing her both by her voice and also by looking well on her face, perceived assuredly that it was his own wife” (FW 171); “Messilina, likewise perceiving her lord and husband, clasping her hands about his neck, was not able to speak a word for joy and contentation” (FW 172). Such descriptions of the gradual recognition of the spouse by her looks and voice are lacking in Greene’s narrative, where the recognition, triggered by the power of words, happens more suddenly. Here, they are an overpowering epiphany rather than a gradual recognition process, just like in the ritual of the old faith.

 Also in secular contexts, as Valentin Groebner shows in his study Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, names were often thought to be essential markers of identity: “Many of the personal descriptions transmitted in writing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries assumed that a name was in itself sufficient to ensure identification” (78).  Parenthetical references to Farewell will be abbreviated to ‘FW.’

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In Pandosto, Greene inserts a narrative complication which makes Fawnia shed her shepherd’s clothes much earlier than the denouement: when Dorastus and Fawnia escape together by ship, they are driven by a tempest to the coast of Pandosto’s Bohemia and put on disguises to protect themselves from Pandosto’s hatred of Dorastus’s father, Egistus. Dorastus takes on the identity of a foreign gentleman called Meleagrus, whereas he presents Fawnia as his fiancée, a gentlewoman from Padua, clad in rich apparel. This camouflage grants readers the pleasure of dramatic irony; in contrast to Dorastus and Fawnia, they know that the supposed masquerade actually means the shedding of a life-long, unwitting disguise. It is an investiture that restores the looks appropriate to Fawnia’s inborn nobility. After further complications, Porrus is forced to reveal how he found the baby who he raised as his daughter, and the joint narratives of Fawnia’s foster father and her biological father ultimately attest to her royal origin. Moreover, Porrus displays visual proof that is meant to reinforce his claims, namely a chain and jewels which he found with the infant and which Pandosto recognises. This gesture of reinforcing verbal declaration with visual proof, which we have already encountered in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, is also employed in the Eucharistic revelation scenarios of Sidney’s Arcadia, as we shall see. In this moment, Fawnia, who is already apparelled and acting like a noblewoman, becomes the clothes she wears. Fawnia’s noble clothes are truly becoming. She is transformed into a princess in the eyes of the bystanders and also in her own eyes – or to be more exact, not in the eyes, but in the minds of the bystanders and of Fawnia. As in the case of Samela, her transformation is not one which can be discerned by the senses; it is no metamorphosis (in theological terminology, we might say, no ‘transaccidentation’), but a transubstantiation. When we envision Greene’s narrative alternatives, his choice is all the more remarkable: if Fawnia had kept wearing her shepherd’s clothes and then appeared dressed in rich apparel and suddenly looked like a princess, the bystanders (and readers) would have been given the ocular ‘proof’ of an external transformation at the right moment. Despite this lack of a visible transformation, the revelation is ‘amazing’: while the labyrinthine plot is resolved in the narrative denouement, the astonished characters feel driven “into a maze” (P 203) by the wonder of this scene. By focusing on internal change and by evoking a sense of wonder, Menaphon and Pandosto take up and use for their own aesthetic (as much as political) ends the epistemological and emotional excitements that the Catholic ritual afforded believers: the experience of internal, invisible identity change and of the sudden ‘real’ bodily presence of the missing daughter, the lost heir to the throne. Doing so, the narratives replace the material transformation that is signalled by the priest’s words ‘hoc est enim corpus meum,’ ‘hic est enim sanguis meus’ in

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the Catholic ritual by a transformation of the characters’ perception that is triggered by words. It substitutes the miracle of material, ex opere operato transubstantiation for the marvel of sudden plausibility of the unlikely. In this focus on the transformation of perception rather than of matter, the romances also profit from the epistemic and poetic fertility of the Reformed positions, whose attention shifted from elements to believers, from signs to their interpretation. As we have seen, Reformers emphasised that it is through the faith of those who consume the elements that bread and wine come to entail Christ’s real or true presence. Frederic Jameson’s argument that “the fate of romance as a form is dependent on the availability of elements more acceptable to the reader than those older magical categories for which some adequate substitute must be invented” holds true in this context (143): both Pandosto and Menaphon employ the abandoned notion of transubstantiation, which was derided as superstitious magic by Protestants, in a different, secularised context and adapt it to the new theological focus on the believer’s interiority. Greene’s revelation scenarios demonstrate how, as Hooker put it a few years later in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ‘there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us’ (328). The narratives present these moments of transubstantiation as peripeteia, thus indicating how important dramaturgy is to create an experience of ‘real presence’: at the height of suspense, when the tales are just about to decline into tragic catastrophe, the verbal confessions redirect the course of action to a miraculous happy ending. Likewise, the Catholic communion happens in an elaborate ritual with a clear dramaturgy, which does not make transubstantiation more plausible in a logical sense, but facilitates the emotional or spiritual experience of Christ’s real presence. As Christina Lechtermann points out in a study of courtly literature around 1200, bread and wine are the material presence of the divine, but this presence has to be staged in a way that makes communicants not only believe, but also experience this presence with their senses. The Catholic Mass addresses the senses in many ways, for example with sound and light effects, by touching, eating, and drinking. The deictic phrase ‘hoc est corpus meum, hic est sanguis meus’ makes audible what cannot be seen. By these appeals to the senses, the Catholic ritual attempts to close the gap between Real Presence and evidence (Lechtermann 22– 23). If we read Pandosto’s scene of transubstantiation by intradiegetic tales as a mise en abyme of Greene’s own act of narration, we can infer a position regarding the aesthetic and ethic efficacy of fiction as discussed by Ascham, Sidney, and others: by offering emotional and epistemological excitement, narrative can transform the perception of its readers. Greene’s trust in the efficacy of narrative leads to a variation on similar motifs within one romance, but also across his oeuvre. Reid Barbour has argued that Greene’s stories “say basically one

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thing in a host of ways” (25) – and it is this host of ways which interests Greene. How to tell a story, how to evoke wonder and amazement through complicated plots as much as by polished rhetoric is Greene’s crucial concern. Readers were probably hardly impressed by the many familiar proverbs about the naturalness of class which both Pandosto and Menaphon initially invoke: as we saw, the characters use conventional comparisons between eagles and flies, hobbies and hawks, gillyflowers and nettles. However, Greene’s innovative plots which test and reinforce the validity of these proverbs can cause admiration in audiences who might (or might not) accept the ideological core of the story more readily.

Invisible Substances: The Eucharist and Royal Legitimacy In the narratives, the material basis of the newly found royal ‘substance’ is equally impenetrable to the senses and hence subject to belief as the presence of Christ’s body in the (Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist) Eucharistic ritual. The ‘proof’ of nobility is based on an overwhelming of emotions and an epiphanous insight; hearing about Samela’s origin and seeing Fawnia in noble clothes is not enough, one has to believe in their nobility, too. This lack of a factual proof troubled Greene’s contemporaries both in religious and political realms. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not only witnessed violent theological divisions regarding the Eucharistic question, but the definition and the location of royal substance also became a pressing topic. Since the Tudor regime was shaken by the Reformation and the resulting complication of the King’s legitimisation, it had to construct and make plausible a line of succession of Henry VIII’s progeny and, towards the end of the sixteenth century, face the looming lack of an heir to Elizabeth’s throne. In addition, the age had to deal with a number of pretenders who claimed royal blood, and attempted to profit from the impasse of proving royal ‘substance.’⁸⁶ The difficulty of pinning down royal substance is captured in the ambiguous early modern seman-

 Cf. Hopkins; Groebner (212– 218). For example, a false Edward VI appeared in England in 1555 (Groebner 213). The concern with dissimulation, aptly diagnosed by Montaigne – “[d]issimulation is one of the notablest qualities of this age” (Vol. 2, 402) – even extended to Christ himself. As Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller records, there were rumours about a book entitled De Tribus Impostoribus Mundi that exposed Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as the three greatest frauds of all time (Unfortunate Traveller 256, cf. also Groebner 217). See also Olejniczak Lobsien’s study Transparency and Dissimulation, whose broad spectrum of readings traces the problem of dissimulation that preoccupied religious and scientific discourses as much as the rich fictional literature of seventeenth-century England.

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tics of ‘pretender,’ which originally meant “a claimant to a throne or the office of a ruler” in a neutral sense, but increasingly became “applied to a claimant who is held to have no just title.”⁸⁷ Greene’s narratives are hence indicative of the “deep-seated concern about the precise impossibility of such corporeal proof” for royalty in a society that was troubled by the “tantalising intangibility of that suggestive phrase ‘royal blood’” (Hopkins 188). Pandosto and Menaphon are part of a larger literary preoccupation with the core of royalty, an issue which was frequently negotiated by presenting monarchs in disguise. Besides pastoral romances, in the 1590s and 1600s a subgenre of ‘disguised ruler plays’ became popular.⁸⁸ The variety of political and literary strategies of legitimisation demonstrate how difficult it is to pin down the source of sovereignty; as Cooper notes for romance, the “insistent concern […] with identifying the rightful king is a reflection of the fact that rightfulness does not necessarily show itself in unequivocal ways” (324).⁸⁹ While references to the peculiarities of Elizabeth’s legitimacy, and that of her potential successor, indicate the topical historical relevance of Pandosto, the romance’s unusually intense endurance over the subsequent centuries, when it was rewritten and adapted across genres and royal dynasties,⁹⁰ points to the more fundamental question of royal legitimacy raised in the text. Political and religious discourses faced analogous challenges, namely, accounting for a lack of evidence of a hidden substance founding an entire system of thought. Inseparable in a time of theologically legitimised political theory, these corresponding challenges were connected in contemporary discourse in various forms. Traditionally, as Ernst Kantorowicz famously argues in The King’s Two Bodies, the two natures of Christ were used as a model to conceptualise and legitimise political power and its location in the second, transcendental royal body which functions as a representative of God. Elizabethan legal discourse expounding the King’s legitimacy after the break from Rome was “crypto-theological,” Kant-

 OED, accessed at http://dictionary.oed.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/entrance.dtl, 17 November 2009.  Cf. L. Davis 57. Leonard Tennenhouse argues that at the beginning of James’s rule, a number of disguised ruler plays tested what happens to the state when the monarch is absent and demonstrated that ultimately “only the true monarch […] masters the law” (156). The plays thus made it generally possible to think about the state independent of the monarch – in contrast to Elizabethan plays, whose “strategic intention […] was to forge the structural interdependence of monarch and state” (155).  Cf. Cooper’s chapter on the romantic motif of the lost and restored heir (324– 360).  See Newcomb’s study Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England for Pandosto’s adaptation history.

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orowicz proposes, since it “applied, unconsciously rather than consciously, the current theological definitions to the defining of the nature of kingship” (16, 19). The very definition of Christ’s two bodies that was at the heart of Elizabethan “Royal Christology” (16) was one of the cruxes of the Eucharist debate. More sweeping Reformers argued that Christ’s words ‘this is my body’ during the Last Supper referred to his human body, which has to obey natural laws and hence cannot be in the consecrated bread and wine.⁹¹ In 1533, the Protestant John Frith was executed for denying Real Presence by arguing that Christ’s body was natural and not phantasticall, but had the qualities of an other body in all thynges saue synne, nether was it more possible for that naturall body so being mortal and not glorified to be in dyuers places at once, then for myne. So that when we heare these words spoken, this is my body, and se that they were spoken before his body was gloryfied, knowyng also that a natural body vngloryfied can not be in many places at once, and that yf these words were vnderstanden as they sounde he shuld haue ben at ye least in .xii. or .xiii. places at once in his Disciples mouthes, and syttyng at the table with them. It causeth vs to loke better vpon it, and so to search out the pure vnderstandyng. (429)

By 1552, however, the second prayer book of King Edward VI, which included the most radical Protestant version of the Eucharist in the history of English common prayer books, had adopted the denial of multilocation as official doctrine. It clarified that metaphysical laws applied to Christ’s human body. Hence, multilocation was impossible, as the Black Rubric made clear: “And as concernynge the naturall body and blood of our saviour Christ, they are in heaven and not here. For it is agaynst the trueth of Christes natural bodye, to be in moe places then in one, at one tyme” (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 666).⁹² Under Elizabeth, who aimed at national unification by means of relative religious tolerance, this rubric was removed. It was only reinserted in 1662 (Gardiner 114). To demonstrate the untenability of Christ’s multilocation – in Calvin’s words, “the monstrous notion of ubiquity” (Institutes, 1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1401; 4.17.30) – Protestants, as we saw in the chapter on Beware the Cat, frequently pointed to the logical consequences of cannibalism and (given Christ’s dual nature) theophagy as well as to the question of digestion. By contrast, the Catholic position, as  During the Marburg Colloquy, Luther and his adherents defended Christ’s multilocation, while the Swiss Reformers rejected the notion; the dialogues are recorded in Sasse 225 – 272.  Accordingly, in the Geneva Bible, the marginal notes for Matthew 26:26, “And as they did eat, Iesus toke the bread: and when he had giuen thankes, he brake it, and gaue it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat: this is my bodie,” explain the “is” of “this is my bodie” as a metaphor and in the glossary cite Christ’s later promise as textual evidence for this interpretation: “You shal no more enjoye my bodelie presence til we mete together in heauen” (The Geneva Bible Matthewe XXVI.26, DD.iiir, cf. Sedinger 245).

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well as that of Luther, assumed not only the simultaneous manhood and godhood of Christ’s pre-surrected body, but also the ubiquity of his godly body: Christ’s body can be at several places at the same time, including within the elements of bread and wine. Yet it remained an unresolved theological question how Christ’s body can replace the substance of bread and simultaneously be in heaven; competing models like ‘reproduction’ and ‘adduction’ were developed.⁹³ In the course of this quarrel about multilocation, the Catholic side drew on the analogy of Christ’s body with the King’s two bodies and inverted its causality to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation. For example, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s government, a speech by the Catholic Bishop Scot of Chester against the Act of Uniformity in 1559 linked the concepts of transubstantiation, clothing, and royalty, attempting to discredit the reformation of the Eucharist as a politically revolutionary act. He argued that to not believe in transubstantiation, to “worship him [Christ] in heven but not in the sacrament,” was similar to worshipping the king only when he “sytteth under the clothe of his estate princly apparelled,” that is, when he is visibly invested with the insignia of his second, mystical body, “but if he come abrode in a frise cote he is not to be honorede, and yet he is all one Emperoure in clothe of goulde under his clothe of the estate and in a frese coat abrode in the street, at yt ys one Christ in heven in the forme of man and in sacrament under the formes of bread and wine” (Scot 24). Elizabeth herself used the concept of the king’s two bodies to justify her female rule in a patriarchal society; her dictum that she had the body of a weak and feeble woman but the heart and stomach of a king had far-reaching implications for the gender politics of the day as much as for literary eulogies.⁹⁴ In this light, I suggest reading Pandosto’s convoluted plot, which accumulates examples of how Fawnia’s royal substance persists against all plausibility, as a narrative equivalent to the intricate theological debate that accounted for the similarly puzzling processes of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or the entailment of Christ’s spiritual presence in the elements of bread and

 For a brief and precise account of these competing models, see “Transubstantiation,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nded. Detroit: Gale, 2003, accessed 1 March 2010.  As critics have shown, Elizabethan religious and political discourses as well as fictional literature are haunted by the opposition between Elizabethan’s symbolic male and natural female body (Levin; Scholz 66 – 68; 74– 77 and passim; Gilbert 52– 57). Scholz argues that “the female body, conceived as in need of permanent control, interferes with the right to govern; and even if, by taking recourse to a different body paradigm, the Queen is rendered as a legitimate, albeit remote, sovereign, there is always the hint that her rule might be subverted by the shortcomings of her female body” (77).

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wine. Just as Eucharistic visions about the metamorphosis of the elements of bread and wine into Christ’s body, visual representations of Christ’s presence on altar pieces, and abundant theological treatises circled around the productive void at the heart of the Eucharist, namely the inexplicability of Christ’s presence in bread and wine, a different but related void, namely the lack of a proof of royal substance, triggers Greene’s narrative overspill. And, just as the theology of transubstantiation did not aim to “‘explain’ the host, but to elaborate its mystery” (Strohm 33 – 34), the point of Greene’s narrative is not to offer a logical, causal proof of kingly substance. Instead, it mediates the miracle of its persistence and eventual revelation by a dazzling drive and speed of narrative that is full of unexpected incidents, stunning denouements, narrative turns and duplications,⁹⁵ and which is written in a “marvellously eloquent” style that rejoices in the rhetorical use of language (A. Kinney 182).⁹⁶ Hence, I suggest that Greene’s romances are “fictions of wonder” not only with respect to their reworking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and their humanist combination of pleasure and instruction, as Arthur F. Kinney argues, expanding Hamilton’s earlier observation,⁹⁷ but also in their adaptation of the Eucharistic experience of extraordinary transformation and sudden and joyful bodily presence. Therefore, I would propose that Helgerson’s observation (made with reference to Lodge) that “Catholicism answered just those emotional needs excited by romance” (Elizabethan Prodigals 121) also holds true for the reverse process in Greene’s romances: they take up the emotional and sensational needs left unat-

 For Pandosto, see K. Wilson for a concise discussion of “the central stratagem of the second half of the text – the repetition of scenes with substituted participants” (“Revenge” 700).  Strohm assesses the medieval Eucharist as the supreme example of a sacramentalism that is founded on the mysterious: “The point about sacramental actions is that they do not – cannot – make sense. Their mystery of utter transformation in the semblance of apparent continuity is unsusceptible to rational or causal analysis. And, least susceptible of all is the sacrament of the consecrated host, which breaks every natural or empirical rule. This ceremony not only does not make sense but is not supposed to; it functions precisely as a complete exception, a suspension of rules, a thing like no other” (33).  Cf. A. Kinney 181– 229 and 289 – 290. Hamilton argues that the “delighted amazement and wonder of the major characters which the reader fully shares” (289) rather than the resolution of the plot is the point of Menaphon’s denouement and that romance in general “may be defined not in terms of its special world but in terms of its special relation to the reader” (297). A. Kinney sees Greene as a humanist poet who grafts “the marvels of Ovid and of Alexandrian romance to the conservative moral tenets of humanism” (184). For his humanist project, Kinney argues, Greene utilises wonder and amazement as a delighting and at the same time didactic tool since “[g]enuine and significant instruction […] comes at moments of amazement – of engaged mental activity suspended out of bafflement – which must then be comprehended and utilized by alert minds” (182).

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tended in Elizabethan England after the Reformation’s disenchantment of the Eucharistic ritual and employ them for a (re‐)enchantment of royal legitimacy. Greene’s romances are not alone in doing so. As critics have shown, under the Tudors “a migration of the holy” took place, in which the powers of abandoned sacraments and Catholic rituals were transferred to the rituals of monarchy (Bossy 145); in particular, the awesome real presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist was acquired by stagings of “royal presence” (McCoy, Alterations x). Greene’s romances illustrate that the potentially subversive mode of romance, which, as Helgerson and others have convincingly argued, frequently rebelled against the dominant humanist “superego” of the Elizabethan consciousness (Elizabethan Prodigals 41), could also be put to politically conservative uses. Romance might have accomplished political stabilisation more effectively than humanist philosophy precisely through romance’s capacity to affect readers emotionally. How willingly the imagination of early modern readers participated in the sense of wonder evoked by Greene’s romances, however, will remain subject to debate – in particular since Greene no longer wrote exclusively for an aristocratic audience, but for the book market which addressed an emergent, nonelite audience for prose fiction. Although Greene, whose “gestures of authorial control over the interpretation of his fictions are notorious” (Alwes, “Elizabethan Dreaming” 164), might have subscribed to the Protestant humanist notion that the “ideal story fashions its own interpretation” (Barbour 44), the narrative could not control the responses from the growing numbers of readers from heterogeneous social backgrounds.⁹⁸ If we side with Sidney rather than Ascham, romances could hardly ‘conjure’ readers ‘to believe for true’ the inexpungeability of aristocratic substance. Readers might just as well have focused on the more subversive parts of the romances which entertain the possibility of cross-class marriage and the potentially radical upward mobility of a shepherd.

2.2 Philip Sidney: The Old Arcadia (c. 1580) and The New Arcadia (1590) The Arcadia, often regarded as the most influential early modern fictional prose text, circulated in the 1580s in manuscript form. This first version, retrospectively titled The Old Arcadia, was revised by Sidney until his early death in 1586. He  Even if the author aspires to control the readers’ interpretation, a strategy which Barbour calls ‘deciphering,’ the unfolding of the basic idea (here, the inexpungeability of noble identity) will always contain elements which readers might read independently of, or even in contrast to, the story’s supposed semantic centre.

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expanded and rewrote books I to III, strengthening the heroic aspects of the narrative and its protagonists. This new, unfinished version, called The New Arcadia, was posthumously printed in 1590. Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, published a composite version in 1593. She complemented the two finished books and the third, partially revised part of the new version with the ending of the original narrative. This composite version changed every aspect of the original that its editors thought inappropriate for the new, morally sounder version. The original three books were only rediscovered in 1907 – until then, the composite version dominated the reception of Sidney’s romance (Woudhuysen 224– 232). In the following, I will focus on Sidney’s original, complete version of the Arcadia, but at crucial points I will discuss the differences between the old and the new text. As a highly educated aristocrat writing for a courtly audience, Sidney developed an intricate plot in a polished style, and his narratives are considerably longer and more demanding than Greene’s and Lodge’s romances. Just like Greene’s narratives, the plots of both Arcadia versions seem to support the above-mentioned assessments of the romance mode as apolitical and escapist: at the outset of both versions, the princely cousins Musidorus and Pyrocles take on disguises in order to come closer to their objects of desire, the Arcadian princesses Pamela and Philoclea. The king, their father Basilius, retreated from the court and set up a household in the countryside. He placed his elder daughter Pamela in a shepherd’s family since an oracle prophesised that she “shall […] [b]y princely means be stolen” (The Old Arcadia 5),⁹⁹ whereas his younger daughter Philoclea is under the surveillance of her parents to protect her from the foretold fulfilment of “an uncouth love, which nature hateth most” (OA 5). However, in recent decades critics have shed light on the topical relevance of the Arcadia, also in the context of the Reformation and its religious pluralisation, most exhaustively in Blair Worden’s The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (1996), which opens with the observation that “the imaginative literature of the early modern period was often able to say things that could not be said in parliaments or pamphlets or pulpits” (9). Before writing the Arcadia, Sidney himself had learned how dangerous a straightforward political statement could be in Elizabethan England. After he had written an open letter criticising Elizabeth for her marriage plans with Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon, he fell into the Queen’s disfavour. Suspended from all courtly, diplomatic, and military services, he turned to writing the Arcadia, which

 Parenthetical references to the Old Arcadia will be abbreviated to ‘OA’; references to the New Arcadia to ‘NA.’

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therefore has frequently been read as a literary preoccupation with matters of government. My reading of the Arcadia considers this aspect in the context of an exploration of how Sidney adapts abandoned Catholic rituals and doctrines for his depiction of the effects of love and disguise on gender and class identity. As in Greene’s romances, but with a different technique and outcome, the Arcadia raises the question of royal authority and good rule in scenarios which test out how royal disposition can be perceived, revealed, and possibly transformed. Its portrayal of romantic love, I will propose, redeploys the epistemological and emotional excitements involved in the Catholic Eucharistic ritual; most prominently, the notion of invisible change, the experience of real bodily presence, and the promise of mutual physical incorporation. At the same time, just as in Greene’s narratives, the Arcadia’s reflection of Eucharistic concerns is informed not only by officially abandoned doctrines and rituals, but also by new, Protestant positions. For example, I shall argue that Musidorus’s revelation of his true identity engages with the Protestant stance towards allegorical reading – a scenario which bears metafictional meaning, too.

“a secret and inward working” – Transvestism and Transubstantiation A large amount of the Arcadia’s suspense and entertainment stems from a case of cross-gender disguise, which raises the question of whether the masquerade involves a more permanent change of gender identity. After having fallen in love with a picture of Philoclea, the young Macedonian prince Pyrocles disguises himself as the Amazon Cleophila. Regarding the relationship between substance and accidents, and between identity and outward appearance, Pyrocles introduces his clothing as an ambiguous sign. On the one hand, it certainly is a disguise, and one taken on for strategic reasons: as a woman, he can come closer to Philoclea than any man. On the other hand, Pyrocles claims that his clothes are not a mask but rather the apt expression for his altered inner state, which seeks utmost unity with his beloved, even in terms of gender identity. His new, anagrammatic name is meant to symbolise this desire for identification: “As for my name, it shall be Cleophila, turning Philoclea to myself, as my mind is wholly turned and transformed into her” (OA 17). Pyrocles is, as he later comments in a sonnet, “Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind / […] What marvel, then, I take a woman’s hue, / Since what I see, think, know, is all but you [i.e. Philoclea]?” (OA 26).¹⁰⁰

 For an alternative reading of the scene in the light of the Neoplatonic concept of divine

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Here Pyrocles imagines his quasi-magical transformation by love, to which he has to surrender helplessly. Indeed, his elder cousin Musidorus initially believes that the disguise not only expresses, but also reinforces Pyrocles’s transformation. Musidorus loathes the vision since he perceives heterosexual passion as an overthrow of masculine reason and a submission to womanly weakness. To him, Pyrocles’s transformation by love is an “ethical emergency” (Dolven 107). He warns his young cousin accordingly: “if we will be men, the reasonable part of our soul is to have absolute commandment, against which if any sensual weakness arise, we are to yield all our sound forces to the overthrowing of so unnatural a rebellion” (OA 17). This admonition is remarkable in several respects: Musidorus’s phrase ‘if we will be men’ rather than ‘since we are men’ indicates that the rational, independent masculinity he aspires to is an idealised construct, which the cousins have to struggle to attain; it needs to be upheld performatively, also by means of appropriate clothing. Further, Pyrocles’s failure to do so is directly linked to his heterosexual passion, which Musidorus characterises as both unnatural and as a state of military upheaval.¹⁰¹ He sees it as the intrusion of uncontrollable magic into their lives: [I]ndeed, the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting and, as it were, incorporating it with a secret and inward working. […] And this effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that, if you yield to it, it will not only make you a famous Amazon, but a launder, a distaff-spinner. (OA 18 and NA 71– 72, my emphasis)

In this passage, I would argue that Musidorus envisions the dangerous potential of love as a scenario of supernatural transubstantiation – as we have seen, the Catholic version of the Eucharist likewise employs a ‘secret and inward working’ to ‘transform the very essence’ of bread and wine which are thought to ‘incorporate’ Christ’s body. Pyrocles’s female clothes, Musidorus fears, will not only make visible, but also further promote this transubstantiation of Pyrocles’s gender identity: “see

versus human love, see Davis, A Map of Arcadia (69 – 71). Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien likewise relate the scene to the Neoplatonic ideal of courtly behaviour as phrased by Castiglione (Die unsichtbare Imagination 203 – 230). See also Olejniczak Lobsien’s examination of Pyrocles’s cross-dressing as an “allegory of his courtly self” (“Transformed” 113).  Cf. Charles for a discussion of the homoerotic attraction between the cousins and a reading of this scene that interprets Musidorus’s reaction as “thinly veiled sexual jealousy” (468). See also Stanivukovic’s discussion of the scene as a typical romance pattern that chronicles the male protagonists’ development from same-sex friendship to heterosexual love (“English Renaissance Romances”).

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how extremely every way you endanger your mind; for to take this woman’s habit, without you frame your behaviour accordingly, is wholly vain” (OA 18); ‘habit’ as dress and as behaviour ought to and will eventually be reconciled, Musidorus emphasises. In the heated argument with his love-struck cousin, he outlines a vicious circle in which passionate love causes effeminacy, which triggers a disguise as a woman, which in turn further reinforces the femininity of Pyrocles.¹⁰² By evoking a scenario of Eucharistic transformation and by insisting on the importance of the appropriate appearance in order to sustain the changeable male identity, Musidorus shows a comparable insistence on the inseparability of accidents and substance to Cranmer, who confronted his Catholic opponent Gardiner in the Eucharist debate as follows: “take away the accidents, and I pray you what difference is between the bodily substance of the sun and the moon, of man and beast, of fish and flesh, […] between a man and a woman?” (“An Answer” 260).¹⁰³ In contrast to Greene’s romances, which eventually celebrate the inexpungeability of inborn nobility and, above all, royal substance, the Arcadia presents identity as more volatile. Here, identity is performative and developmental rather than inborn and immutable. Musidorus’s emphasis on the constitutive role of custom (and costume) for the formation of identity links up with a growing emphasis in Sidney’s day on the impact of nurture on gender, class, and, as Ascham’s Schoolmaster indicates, also English identities. Even though Sidney does not let his character go as far as Montaigne, who, as we saw, proposed to call custom ‘by the name of Nature’ or at least to acknowledge it as ‘a second Nature,’ Musidorus’s arguments resemble discourses promoted by men like Stubbes, who feared that men who indulge in fashion are feminised (they become a “womannish kind of people, who thus pamper their bodies in such daintie attire” 95; sig. E2v) and ‘transnatured’: Philoponus, the more authoritative interlocutor in Stubbes’s dialogue, maintains that “nicenesse in apparell (as it

 Some critics have followed Musidorus in his assumption of a complete inner and outer transformation of his cousin. For example, reading the Arcadia versions as stories of “quasiOvidian change,” Elizabeth Dipple argues for a “total physical change which is urged by a new interior experience and performed with idealistic ignorance” and which makes Pyrocles “launch […] completely into a new persona” in the Old Arcadia (“Metamorphosis” 328, 338). I will argue that this vision of interconnected transubstantiation and metamorphosis is most of all a rhetorical strategy, as other critics have observed (e. g. Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination 211).  As Judith Anderson points out in her detailed analysis of the debate between Cranmer and Gardiner, “Cranmer’s objection operates within Gardiner’s terms, insisting only that accidents must inhere in their proper substance and not questioning the basic division of objects into substance and accident,” as other Protestant treatises did (34– 35).

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were) transnatureth them, and maketh them weak, tender and infirme” and “rather seeme nice dames, and wayrish girles then puissant, valorous and hardy men, as our forefathers haue bene” (95; sig. E2v and 96; sig. E3). Although the Arcadia does not make Musidorus’s fears about a substantial sex change come true, it repeatedly questions the nobility of the princes. Nobility of blood and nobility of action do not necessarily coincide; the princes have to aspire to an ideal of aristocratic nobility, they have to attempt a performance of perfection to legitimise their royalty (cf. Olejniczak Lobsien, “Transformed”).¹⁰⁴ As we will see, the danger of a transubstantiation of the princes’ nobility returns with a vengeance at the end of the narrative. The opposing opinions of the princely cousins on cross-gender dressing are mirrored in a critical debate about the implications of Pyrocles’s female disguise. Is it meant to ridicule and disapprove of the prince for his surrender to romantic love, is it a witty strategy to obtain the princess’s love, or does it even represent an ideal of androgyny?¹⁰⁵ To shed light on the text’s stance towards cross-gender

 By contrast, in the New Arcadia, the nobility of the princes is unquestioned. Here, newly added characters, Cecropia and Amphialus, demonstrate how villainous characters can be despite noble blood.  In the early 1960s, Mark Rose identified Pyrocles’s transvestism as a source of embarrassment and took for granted that readers would feel the “natural shock of seeing a man in woman’s clothes” (357). For him, “Pyrocles’s womanish dress […] is the mark of that spiritual effeminacy which has resulted from his allowing his reason to be ruled by passion” (357). Rose argues that Sidney meant to criticise the cross-gender disguise, like his contemporary Spenser, who in The Faerie Queene has his female protagonist resent “that lothly vncouth sight, / Of men disguiz’d in womanishe attire” (V.vii.37.6 – 7). Following this trajectory, the disguise makes visible an internal transformation, namely Pyrocles’s submission to passionate love, which, according to the view of the day, entailed effeminisation. In contrast to and before Rose, John Danby had argued that Pyrocles’s dress adds to his masculine virtue, that he “is capable of a synthesis of qualities that includes the womanly” (56) – a reading which gained momentum with the advent of feminist criticism and gender theory. For instance, Casey Charles has posited that “even the virtues of the feminine reside in the perfect heroic male” and has interpreted the costume as indicative of a new masculine gender role, of the male lover who accepts himself as a sexual subject (469). Constance Jordan likewise has understood the Arcadia as “feminist to the extent that it gives a positive value to the feminine aspect of male behaviour in private life” (222). She has proposed that Pyrocles’s transvestism represents “the oxymoronic union of self and other” which is the foundation of all forms of private and political organisation, such as “the stability of the couple, and thus the family; and second, of the state” (223). More recently, Steve Mentz has discussed the metafictional significance of this cross-dressing, highlighting that Sidney adopted the motif not from his main model, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, but from Continental fiction: “Pyrocles’s hybrid gender constructs a heroism that is active and passive, male and female, epic and romance. This hybridity has its clearest emblem in the clothes Pyrocles wears when he disguises himself” (Romance 91).

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transvestism, the actual scene of Pyrocles’s disguise, which is presented as a prolonged description of this investiture, is significant. The narrator offers a detailed portrayal of Cleophila’s rich dress, including a “doublet of sky-coloured satin,” sleeves of “purled lace,” and “crimson velvet buskins” (OA 24).¹⁰⁶ The narrative description of Pyrocles’s vestment highlights that it is not only relevant what Pyrocles wears, but also how he wears it: “his hair […] lay upon the upper part of his forehead in locks, some curled and some, as it were, forgotten, with such careless care, and with art so hiding art, that he seemed he would lay them for a paragon whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be the more excellent” (OA 24). These lines betray a certain fascination with the disguise which is not straightforwardly judged as a descent into monstrosity. Instead, the description celebrates Pyrocles’s/Cleophila’s sprezzatura, the “studied off-handedness” required at court (Montrose, “Of Gentlemen” 444), which Sidney also displays in his dedication when he presents himself as disengaged author of “this idle work” (OA 3). The positive attitude of the narrator towards Pyrocles’s disguise is reinforced when he ironically admits “compassion of his [Pyrocles’] passion” (OA 25). Presenting himself on the verge of becoming a homodiegetic narrator, he decides henceforth to use the new name Cleophila and the female pronoun exclusively, in order not to spoil Pyrocles’s scheme by betraying his true identity. As Juliet Fleming and Helen Hackett have argued, the compassion for the transvestite protagonist by the narrator – and thus, at least in the Old Arcadia with its personalised narrative situation, by the implied author – might be due to the author’s own act of cross-dressing: writing in the allegedly feminine genre of romance, “the author shares not only in Pyrocles’s passion, but also in a literary kind of transvestism” (Hackett 112, cf. also Fleming 158). Moreover, the narrator makes his male readers undergo a comparable act of transvestism because he exclusively addresses the “[f]air ladies that vouchsafe to read this,” and in particular his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, in both the dedication and throughout the text (OA 25, cf. also 26, 34). Just as Pyrocles has access to Philoclea in a much more intimate manner because he is disguised as Cleophila, male readers in metaphorical female attire might expect similar voyeuristic pleasures. Narratives have played on this ambiguity ever since George Pettie and Lyly propagated a male voyeuristic perspective for their narratives in the late 1570s and early 1580s, featuring them as “Trojan fetish, giving male authors (and readers) illicit entry into women’s fantasy lives” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 124). For example, in

 For a possible model for such extensive descriptions of clothing, see The Aethiopica (Heliodorus 81– 82).

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the dedication to gentlemen readers of his Penelopes Web, Greene stirs voyeuristic expectation when he argues that “Mars wil sometime bee prying into Venus papers, and gentlemen desirous to heare the parlie of Ladies” (145). In the Arcadia, such desires are fulfilled, for instance in a passage which revels with the camouflaged male protagonist in Philoclea’s “nymphlike apparel, so near nakedness as one might well discern part of her perfections” (OA 34).¹⁰⁷ The feminisation of readers also applies to the passionate, non-rational reading attitude to which the narrator invites them. As Mary Ellen Lamb has argued, both male and female readers who grew concerned for the lovers were put in the textual position of a ‘fair lady,’ they were effeminised by passion, just like the protagonist Pyrocles (“Exhibiting Class” 66). Lamb further argues that “male readers may also have been judged effeminate for their pleasure in other aspects of the Arcadia – its more languid pastoral eclogues, its lush descriptions, its ornate language – all of which appeal more to the passions than to the reason” (67). The notion that romance has a feminising effect on readers was widespread in antipoetic tracts of the day. For example, Gosson’s The School of Abuse castigated not only romances, but also poetry in general as a feminising influence (Maslen, “Sidney” 217). By contrast, Sidney in his Apology emphasised the valour of “right” poetry, aligning it with military success, whereas he ascribes effeminateness and sensuality to the “bastard poets” of his day (AP 109, Maslen, “Sidney” 218 – 219). Yet Sidney’s emphasis on the transformative power of fiction which affects readers emotionally, independent of the intellectual activity of their “erected wit” (AP 86), can be understood as the clandestine construction and appreciation of a ‘feminine’ reader response. While Sidney in An Apology probably tried to avoid the association of fiction and effeminacy established by Gosson, the preface to the Arcadia associates such an emotional reading (as well as writing, if we keep in mind the ‘compassionate’ narrator) with femininity. Hence, rather than explicitly judging this act of cross-gender dressing (which was a pressing topic beyond fictional literature, as we have seen), Sidney turns it into a complex scenario that opens up avenues for thought and imagina-

 Alternatively, rather than as a male reader in female disguise, Sidney’s implied reader has been described as a gendershifter; for instance, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast suggests “a conceptually hermaphroditic audience that reads the work from a series of shifting narrative and gendered perspectives” (113). By contrast, the New Arcadia, whose chivalric and heroic aspects are much stronger than in the original romance, does not explicitly address female readers and, taking into account its manifold sexualised descriptions of the female protagonists, “the only perspective from which his narrative can be read is that of the male subject” (C. Kinney, “The Masks of Love” 465), at least in a heteronormative framework.

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tion and that involves the author and readers in a self-ironic manner in this potentially effeminate disguise. On the level of action, however, Sidney soon resolves the question of Pyrocles’s effeminisation by his Amazonian camouflage. After the scene of investiture, it turns out that Pyrocles not only sees love as a more positive power (and women as less contemptible) than Musidorus, but that he also comes to deny the gender-transformative power of clothing. Subsequent to striking the rhetorical pose of the helplessly transformed lover, he explains to his anxious cousin that female clothes will not transubstantiate his manliness, but will, on the contrary, reinforce it: “Neither doubt you, because I wear a woman’s apparel, I will be the more womanish; since, I assure you, for all my apparel, there is nothing I desire more than fully to prove myself a man in this enterprise” (OA 21). Indeed, the disguised Pyrocles will prove his masculine ‘substance’ in terms of successful heterosexual courtship and chivalric successes, both made possible by his witty control of signifiers, or, as Hackett puts it, his “strategic use of voluntary effeminisation in the cause of virility” (113). Pyrocles’s comment on his identity change, “[t]ransformed in show, but more transformed in mind” (OA 131), can in this context also be understood as a comment on how, through his manipulation of visual signs (‘transformed in show’), he is ‘transformed in the mind’ of others. Thus, as it turns out, Pyrocles’s claim of a gender transformation by love is, above all, a rhetorical strategy which justifies his disguise. Likewise, the ensuing action elucidates that Pyrocles’s declared longing to incorporate the beloved, as expressed in his anagrammatic name change, aims not only at a psychic identification with Philoclea, but also at a physical, sexual union (to which the narrator, as we will see, concedes only ironically the spiritual idealisation which Pyrocles repeatedly invokes).¹⁰⁸ The narrative lets readers gain pleasure from witnessing Pyrocles’s effort to make his behaviour agree with his dress. The first person to encounter the Amazon, the shepherd Dametas, perceives him/her as “woman or boy, or both” (OA 29, NA 81) and when Dametas attacks him/her, Cleophila/Pyrocles momentarily lapses into the former male ‘habit’: she strikes back “with a right Pyrocles countenance in a Cleophila face” (OA 29). When she subsequently meets the royal family and their court, the habits are reconciled and her disguise is therefore more convincing. Basilius immediately believes in the femininity of Cleophila and falls in love with “the excellent perfection of her beauty” (OA 31). By con Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien (Die unsichtbare Imagination 210 – 211) explore the ambiguity of the disguise as a conflict between personal agency and the extrapersonal power of love as personified by Eros, which the Old Arcadia invokes but does not fully endorse. Cf. C. Kinney, “The Masks of Love” for a discussion of the complex role of Cupid in the New Arcadia.

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trast, his wife Gynecia realises “at the first sight […] she was a man thus for some strange cause disguised” (OA 43). The gender-ambivalent figure sets in motion a “three-headed kind of passion” (OA 49). Basilius desires the young Amazon, Gynecia loves the young valiant man she hopes to find beneath the attire, and Philoclea is left confused: “for taking her [i.e. Cleophila] to be such as she professed, desire she [i.e. Philoclea] did, but she knew not what; and she longed to obtain that whereof she herself could not imagine the mean” (OA 29); “sweet Philoclea found strange unwonted motions in herself” (OA 85). Philoclea’s lesbian desire for Cleophila is here presented not only as a love that dare not speak its name, but as an attraction which is unimaginable for her since she has no categories to grasp its meaning; it is an “impossible desire” (OA 98). From this complicated constellation of erotic involvement, an entertaining interlacing of micro-narratives ensues, which traces Pyrocles’s simultaneous efforts to continue deceiving Basilius but restrain his desire for the Amazon, and, first to deceive Gynecia and then, after she has confronted him and required “disguise not with me in words, as I know thou dost in apparel” (OA 83, NA 123), to postpone their amorous encounter, too. Most importantly, however, he attempts to make possible the consummation of his love for Philoclea by letting her perceive, at the right moment, his hidden masculine substance. For the depiction of this endeavour, as well as for Musidorus’s analogous task, I will argue, the romance keeps adapting (in creative ways) the Eucharistic concerns already established by Pyrocles’s supposed transformation to Cleophila.

“meseemed I tasted her deliciousness” – Sacramental Sex Among the implications of the Eucharistic ritual for romance, it is in particular the experience of attaining physical union with Christ which lends itself to eroticisation. Calvin describes the experience as mutual engrafting: “Christ to have been so engrafted in us as we, in turn, have been engrafted in him” (Institutes, 1536 edition, 102; IV.C.24), and the liturgy of Communion in the Elizabethan prayer book likewise explains it as a mutual incorporation and, in consequence, a unification of identities: when “we receive that holy sacrament […,] then we spiritually eate the fleshe of Christ, and drincke his blonde, then we dwell in Christe and Christe in us, we be one wyth Christ, and Christe with us” (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 132). In the mutually influencing genres of medieval romance and the autobiographic accounts and hagiographies of medieval mystics, communion is frequently eroticised as a sacrament of love in both religious and sec-

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ular contexts (B. Newman, “Exchanging Hearts”).¹⁰⁹ For example, in a Eucharistic vision from the thirteenth century, a communicant described how Christ approached her from the altar “in the form and clothing of a Man, […] wonderful, and beautiful, and with glorious face” and gave himself to her in his other form, the Eucharistic bread. Afterwards, the incorporation by consumption is followed by a more sexual attempt to merge physically: “he came himself to me, 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. So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported” (Hadewijch 281). After this erotic encounter, the vision disappears, but her sense of physical and spiritual unification is enhanced:¹¹⁰ I lost that manly beauty outwardly in the sight of his form. I saw him completely come to nought and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer recognize or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me. Then it was to me as if we were one without difference. [….] I wholly melted away in him and nothing any longer remained to me of myself; (281– 282)

I propose that the Arcadia, just as John Donne’s later sonnets,¹¹¹ revitalises this literary and religious heritage and puts it to ambiguous uses. On the one hand, as I will try to show in the following, the notion of incorporation is employed in an idealised, spiritual manner in the typical early modern amalgamation of Platonist, Christian, and Petrarchan discourses. However, the Arcadia intertwines the spiritual desire for unification with the physical desire, rather than treating them as irreconcilably dual. Therefore, on the other hand, the Eucharistic scenario is also adapted for erotic fantasies and sexual encounters which not only undermine the spiritualisation of love, but also oppose the morality of Sidney’s day

 See also the second chapter of Slights’s The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, which traces literary and visual examples of the ‘interchange of hearts’ motif from medieval to early modern times. Slights explores how “[t]he amorously inflamed heart of the lover from innumerable medieval romances finds a shocking new context for display in the hands of devout nuns offering themselves to Christ and receiving Him into themselves” (50).  For a discussion, see Bynum, “Women Mystics” (179 – 180).  A romancing and eroticisation of the Eucharist is also apparent in lyrical poetry of the seventeenth century, e. g. Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which he promises to be really present to his beloved despite his physical leave-taking (cf. Gardiner). Donne uses the notion of mutual incorporation when he asks his lover, “let us melt” and states, “Our two souls […] are one” (Donne 261). See also Schwartz for a discussion of “a theology with a long and rich tradition from the biblical Song of Songs through Bernard to Donne’s contemporaries, one that reads the lover in the Song of Songs as both God and woman and that frames desire for and from God as erotic” (92).

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which sanctioned premarital sexual intercourse. Just like the protagonist’s double code of preaching a spiritual identity transformation but simultaneously practicing a deception strategy for erotic ends, the Arcadia as a whole rhetorically invokes a theology of love, but contrasts it with a different course of action that at least challenges its rhetoric and sometimes fully strips the amorous of the transcendental. References to the spiritual or mental union of the lovers, or, put in Eucharistic terms, the notion that communion entails mutual incorporation, recur throughout both Arcadia versions. Modelled on Pyrocles’s telling name change to Cleophila as an expression for his love for Philoclea, Musidorus and Pamela carve their names into tree trunks as “Pamedorus and Musimela” (OA 174). In the finale of the romance, they name their daughter “Melidora,” while the son of Pyrocles and Philoclea is called “Pyrophilus” (OA 361). In a similar vein, both Musidorus and Pyrocles envision in the New Arcadia that they enclose the beloved in their minds or that their own minds are engulfed in the beloved: [I]f it [i.e. starving] destroyed Dorus, it should also destroy the image of her that lived in Dorus; […] and when the thought of that was crept in unto him, it began to win of him some compassion to the shrine of the image, and to bewail, not for himself whom he hated, but that so notable a love should perish. (NA 309 – 310)

How Dorus came to incorporate this image of his beloved is explained in a passage which offers literal equivalents to the common romantic metaphors. Dorus recounts how he opens himself to the ‘darts’ Pamela sends towards him. While this idea is often associated with Cupid and seen as a metaphoric rendering of the sudden power of love, it also refers to early modern medical theory. For instance, Marsilio Ficino’s medical science – drawing on Plato and Aristotle – understood such darts, which are transmitted by eye contact, as vapours distilled from the blood, which enter the lover’s body and infect his blood with the disease of love: Therefore, what wonder is it that the eye, wide open and intent upon someone, throws missiles of its own light into near-by eyes and directs also, together with these missiles which are the vehicles of spirits, the bloody vapor which we call spirit? Hence the virulent missile pierces the eyes, and since it is sent from the heart of the one striking the blow, it seeks the heart of the man struck as though [seeking] its proper place. It pierces the heart; but in the back of the heart, which is more resistant, it is condensed and turns into blood. This wandering blood, foreign, so to speak, to the nature of the wounded man, infects his own

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blood, and the infected blood becomes sick. Hence follows a double bewitchment. (Ficino 7.IV, 223)¹¹²

The blood of the beloved in the lover will constantly be drawn back to its source; “it always draws him to the person by whom he was infected,” Ficino explains (224). Hence the lovers seek physical closeness. Ficino, drawing on Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, straightforwardly describes sexual intercourse, also between men, as the result of this physical infection by love at first sight. He presents it as an attempt to fuse bodies, of mutual incorporation: “For since the seminal fluid flows down from the whole body, the lovers think (according to Lucretius) that by ejaculation or reception of it alone, they can give up their whole body to each other and receive a whole body in return” (225). How closely medical theory and literary motif are intertwined is demonstrated when Ficino speaks of this transmission of vapours as “arrows which wound the heart” and talks of “Cupid’s nest” (227). In turn, Greek romance, an important source for Elizabethan narratives, referred to the theory; for example, the Elizabethan translation of Heliodorus’s Aethiopian Historie recounts how love “taketh his beginning and occasion of that which is seene, and so […] by the eyes is suffered to enter into the harte. […] For seing of all our other pores, and senses, sighte is capable of most mutations, and the hottest, it must needs receive such infections as are about it, and with a hote spirite entertaine the changes of love” (Heliodorus 87). Castiglione also took up Ficino’s theorem almost verbatim in his influential Cortegiano,¹¹³ so that authors of early modern prose fiction could draw on a variety of sources that associated romantic, metaphoric discourse and medical theory. The presumption of an infection with love at first sight participated in a long tradition of belief in visual affect: as Joseph Koerner puts it, many thought “that harm or help could come from seeing a thing, that the eye either touched the object’s surface through extramission or was intromissively touched by the eidola emitted by the object, and that the eye itself was the soul’s window” (71). This belief was also at the heart of the manducatio per visum, the eye communion that was common in the medieval Catholic Church. In the Arcadia, Dorus envisions an equally material incorporation of the beloved into his body via eye contact when he recounts how “[s]ometimes my eyes would lay themselves open to receive all the darts she did throw, sometimes close up with admiration, as if, with a contrary fancy, they would preserve the

 Cf. Hub for an account of the materiality of such ‘missiles.’  See de Boer for a discussion of Castiglione’s notion of visual infection by love.

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riches of that sight they had gotten, or cast my lids as curtains over the image of beauty her presence had painted in them” (NA 86 – 87). By comparing his lids to a curtain, Dorus’s simile grants a material quality to the painting of Pamela which he carries in his eyes. Similarly, Pyrocles imagines his mind as transplanted to his beloved: Zelmane [Pyrocles’s female name in the New Arcadia] came with her body to find her mind – which was gone long before her and had gotten his seat in Philoclea […]. (NA 314)

This equation of the image of the beloved in the lover’s mind with her actual existence can also be found in the Old Arcadia, where Dorus perceives himself as Pamela’s ‘vision’: Such weight it hath which once is full possessed That I become a vision, Which hath in other’s head its only being And lives in fancy’s seeing. O wretched state of man in self-division! (OA 56)

Towards the more physical pole of the spectrum of Eucharistic allusions, the first moment in the revised Arcadia when Pyrocles sees his beloved is cast in blatantly sexualised terms. Pyrocles recounts to Musidorus how his aroused senses, during a (first, rather than last) supper with the royal family, mistook wine for Philoclea’s body:¹¹⁴ my eyes […] when the table was stayed and we began to feed, drank much more eagerly of her beauty than my mouth did of any other liquor […]. And so was my common sense deceived, being chiefly bent to her, that as I drank the wine and withal stale a look on her, meseemed I tasted her deliciousness. But alas, the one thirst was much more inflamed than the other quenched. (NA 86)

Sidney here offers, I propose, a scenario of communion between lovers (albeit as yet unidirectional) which is modelled on the Eucharistic ritual. He goes further than earlier narrative scenarios, for example in an analogous synaesthetic feeding experience in George Pettie’s Petite Palace: “After this amarousin counter [sic], he caused the company to sit downe to the banquet, and so disposed the matter, that Gamma sat right ouer at the table against him, wherby hée fréely fed his eyes on that meat which conuerted rather to nourishment of sicknesse”

 In the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, the sacrament of the communion is also compared to a secular banquet; a “riche feaste” “with al kynde of provision” (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 130).

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(4; image 7). While Pettie’s tale draws on the notion of lovesickness, Sidney’s description also has Eucharistic overtones. Just as Pyrocles “drank the wine and withal stale a look on her,” believers who consume (or just see) wine and bread as Christ’s body and blood often gazed at depictions of the crucified Christ behind the altar.¹¹⁵ Moreover, Pyrocles’s consumption of the wine values its sensuous qualities, as the Anglican ritual encouraged believers to do. Thus, Cranmer argued in his “Defence” that Christ indeed is “put into all […] senses” of the communicants: “To the intent that as surely as we see the bread and wine with our eyes, smell them with our noses, touch them with our hands, and taste them with our mouths; so assuredly ought we to believe, that Christ is our spiritual life and sustenance, like as the said bread and wine is the food and substance of our bodies” (71). However, by turning the sensuous into the sensual, Pyrocles’s erotic imagination grows so intense that it transcends not only the metonymic association of wine and bodily liquid in the Anglican rite, but also their literal equation by Catholic doctrine: in Pyrocles’s profane Eucharist, the wine is not only transubstantiated into Philoclea’s “deliciousness” in a brief moment of erotic ecstasy, but also its accidents have changed (at least pertaining to its taste) to provide an experience of physical fusion for the enamoured prince. In line with Protestant criticism of the Catholic ritual, Pyrocles experiences “an elusion of […] [his] senses” (Cranmer, “Defence” 87– 88).¹¹⁶ His ‘Eucharistic miracle’ resembles the above-quoted vision from the thirteenth century, which the woman concludes with a comparison that equates consumption and seeing, religion and romance: “It was thus: outwardly, to see, taste, and feel in the reception of the outward Sacrament. So can the Beloved, with the loved one, each wholly receive the other in all full satisfaction of the sight, the hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other” (Hadewijch 281– 282). Nonetheless, immediately after his pseudo-Eucharistic erotic vision, Pyrocles recovers his “common sense” and with it, his longing for an actual physical fusion; as described, his “thirst” for Philoclea is “much more inflamed.” To ultimately “taste” Philoclea’s “deliciousness,” Pyrocles realises, he will have to rely on his disguise and his cunning manipulation of signifiers, rather than aim at supernatural transformation. Pyrocles’s subsequent attempts to come closer to Philoclea (as well as Musidorus’s attempts to come closer to Pamela)

 See Koerner’s study The Reformation of the Image, which shows how altarpieces usually focused on Christ’s passion and crucifixion and only with the Reformation and its new focus on communion and remembrance began to concentrate on the Last Supper (340 – 361).  Cranmer goes on: “And so we make much for their purposes that said that Christ was a crafty juggler, that made things to appear to men’s sight that indeed were no such things, but forms only, figures and appearances” (88).

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adapt the desire for the corporeal experience of ‘real presence’ as an erotic pattern and as narrative structure: the sexual encounters with the princesses are constantly deferred, but the yearning is fuelled by the increasing intimacy between the princesses and the disguised princes. The supper scene of a quasi-Eucharistic communion is original to the revised Arcadia, but the earlier version contains a similar scenario in the first eclogues, in which the lovers reflect on their desires. Here, Pyrocles in Petrarchan manner blends amorous and religious imagery to express his alteration by love and his desire to reveal himself to Philoclea. In a metaphoric scenario of sacrificing pieces of his wounded heart, that is, his flesh and blood, Pyrocles uses the term ‘oblation,’ which was central to the Eucharist debate: “And for a sure sacrifice I do daily oblation offer / Of my own heart, where thoughts be the temple, sight is an altar” (OA 78; cf. Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 701 and 731).¹¹⁷ Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in the same year as Sidney’s Arcadia, likewise associates wine, flirtation, and the Eucharist in its famous “sacrament prophane in mistery of wine” (Faerie Queene III.9.30.9).¹¹⁸ Paridell and Hellenore (homophonous to ‘Helen whore’¹¹⁹), modelled on Paris and Helen of Ovid’s Heroides, secretly communicate their desire for each other during supper, supervised by Hellenore’s jealous husband. At first, they exchange flirtatious gazes, which, in keeping with the topos of love at first sight, have the effects of a “fyrie dart” that penetrates the heart (FQ III.ix.28.8 and 29.2), but soon they devise an additional means of communication: Thenceforth to her he sought to intimate His inward griefe [that is, his desire for her], by meanes to him well knowne, Now Bacchus fruit out of the siluer plate

 In an advanced stage of the narrative in the New Arcadia, when Musidorus has already revealed his true identity to Pamela, the drinking of wine is again erotically charged. Here, Musidorus attempts to kiss Pamela, “[b]ut she, as if she had been ready to drink a wine of excellent taste and colour which suddenly she perceived had poison in it, so did she put him away from her” (NA 309). That wine and sexuality are associated in an ambivalent manner is characteristic of the Arcadia’s overall ambiguous attitude towards premarital sexuality. It is also due to the gender ideals of the age, whose “aristocratic ‘double standard’ tolerated strong sexuality in young noblemen if not young women” (Norbrook 90): wine-as-sexual-encounter provides a wishful fantasy of physical union for Pyrocles – though critics disagree about the extent to which this desire and its later premarital fulfilment in the Old Arcadia compromise Pyrocles’s status as an ideal gentleman – but sexual-encounter-as-wine appears as a poisonous danger to Pamela, who attempts to protect her chastity, and hence shows her adherence to the ideal of the gentlewoman.  Parenthetical references to The Faerie Queene will be abbreviated to ‘FQ.’  See Fowler 585.

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He on the table dasht, as ouerthrowne, Or of the fruitfull liquor ouerflowne. And by the dauncing bubbles did diuine, Or therein write to let his loue be showne; Which well she red out of the learned line, A sacrament prophane in mistery of wine. And when so of his hand the pledge she raught, The guilty cup she fained to mistake, And in her lap did shed her idle draught, Shewing desire her inward flame to slake: By such close signes they secret way did make Vnto their wils, and one eies watch escape; (FQ III.ix.30.1– 31.6)

As Mihoko Suzuki has shown, Paridell’s line is “learned” and his “meanes […] well knowne” since it draws on Ovid’s Heroides, where Paris writes amo in spilt wine – a gesture which was discussed as a potential strategy of courtly love in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (“Metamorphoses” 164). In the politically and religiously charged climate of England in the 1580s and 1590s – possibly even more so for writers like Sidney and Spenser who were involved in the English imperialist project to subdue the Catholic Irish – the pagan association of wine and secular sexuality has Eucharistic overtones, as Spenser’s explicit reference to “sacrament prophane in mistery of wine” shows. Scholars agree that Spenser’s invocation of the Eucharist for the depiction of blatantly sexual, adulterous love play is meant to reinforce criticism of the lovers for their “shocking blasphemy” (Tuve 221), their “blasphemous perversion of Holy Communion” (Suzuki, “Metamorphoses” 164). By contrast, the Arcadia’s secular Eucharist scenarios do not demonise the lovers as unequivocally, which might be one of the reasons why its Eucharistic imagery is more implicit. Instead, they are in line with the narrator’s ironic but affectionate view of the imperfect, often too passionate, and at times culpable protagonists.¹²⁰ Carol V. Kaske’s Spenser and Biblical Poetics investigates the Faerie Queene’s “farcical sexual travesty of the true Eucharist” (51) in comparison with other moments in which cups of wine are presented in the romance, differentiating between in bono and in malo uses of the Eucharistic reference. The adaptation of

 This attitude comes particularly to the fore in the Old Arcadia, in which the narrator is more overt and borders on becoming homodiegetic. As we have seen, he explicitly declares his “compassion” with Pyrocles. The narrator’s affectionate view of the protagonists is particularly noteworthy given Pyrocles’s consensual premarital sexuality and Musidorus’s intention to violate Pamela while she is asleep. By contrast, the revised version delegates the darker sides of sexuality to the new character Amphialus.

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the Eucharistic ritual by the adulterous lovers is, for Kaske, clearly an example of in malo use, but she identifies more forthright criticism of the Catholic Eucharist in Spenser’s depiction of the whore Duessa’s cup that is “replete with magick artes” and contains “secret poison” (FQ I.viii.14): Which [the contents of Duessa’s cup] after charmes and some enchauntments said, She lightly sprinkled on his [Timias’] weaker parts; Therewith his sturdie courage soone was quayd, And all his senses were with suddeine dread dismayd. So downe he fell before the cruell beast, [….] No power he had to stirre, nor will to rize. (FQ I.viii.14– 15)

This scene offers a demonic version, as Kaske observes, of not only the Roman Catholic Mass in general, but transubstantiation in particular (42, 44; cf. also Waters 104– 106): Duessa’s “enchantments said” resemble the priest’s performative ‘hoc est corpus meum,’ and the enthrallment of Timias’s senses after having (albeit unwillingly) consumed the wine, as well as his kneeling, are further markers of (the Protestant critique of) the Catholic ritual. The general function of Spenser’s shifting use of the image of the cup is that of an “exercise in readerly discrimination” according to Kaske (48): to make readers aware of the importance of exactly how Eucharistic rituals and symbols are used and to join Spenser in “fine-tuning” their “definition of a good Eucharist” (49). Kaske concludes that by means of this complex eliciting of careful perception and subsequent judgment, which sidesteps “the either/or thinking of the iconoclast,” the “social purpose” of Spenser’s Faerie Queene ultimately is the promotion of “religious toleration” (97). In a similar vein, critics have tried to find evidence for Sidney’s precise religious position in his fictional writings, with differing results. D. P. Walker analyses Sidney’s relationship to Ancient Theology and argues that Sidney presents Pamela, Musidorus, and Pyrocles “as saved pagans, as pre-Christians who have reached religious truth” and thereby “puts himself in the liberal camp, and contributes to the survival of Platonizing theology in Elizabethan England” (163). Alan Sinfield contradicts Walker, arguing instead that Sidney would have shared the Protestant view that “[s]alvation is granted only through true religion” (29). More recently, Blair Worden’s study of the Arcadia versions as political allegories has read the Old Arcadia in the light of the political crisis caused by Queen Elizabeth’s apparent intention to marry the Duke of Anjou and the New Arcadia as concerned with the threat presented by Mary, Queen of Scots. Barbara Brumbaugh’s reading of the New Arcadia follows Worden as well as earlier research by Edwin Greenlaw and Martin N. Ratiere, who have established parallels be-

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tween Cecropia and Catherine de Medici and between their sons Amphialus and Francois d’Anjou et d’Alençon. Brumbaugh proposes to regard Cecropia as a demonic personification of the Church of Rome; in that respect, Cecropia appears as an equivalent to Spenser’s Duessa. By contrast, Katherine Duncan-Jones highlights Sidney’s Catholic sympathies, and Jane Kingsley-Smith likewise discovers astonishingly positive attitudes towards Catholicism in Sidney’s Arcadia while arguing that Sidney’s Protestant beliefs evolved from a Calvinist bias to a Lutheran one (66). Most convincing seems Robert E. Stillman’s account, which proposes to overcome “the failed paradigm of Calvinist piety for interpreting Sidneian poetics” in favour of Philippism, which reconciled Protestant and Catholic attitudes, also with regard to the Eucharist.¹²¹ In contrast to these studies, I do not suggest to read Sidney’s Arcadia as a comment on topical religious debates or as a manifestation of Sidney’s affiliation with a particular religious or political group in the increasingly pluralised Elizabethan society. Instead, it appears more fruitful to explore how Sidney adopts figures of thought from the Eucharist for aesthetic (and hence never fully determinate) ends. The Eucharist provided Sidney with a conceptual pattern to think about the invisible change of a person’s substance and its impact on the imagination – and vice versa, the impact of imagination on unseen identity change. By adapting Eucharistic theorems, the romance can explore phenomena that accompany the experience of love, such as psychic alterations, the transformation of the lover’s perception, and the (trans‐)formation of the beloved in the lover’s perception. Further, the Eucharist’s preoccupation with ‘real presence’ and mutual incorporation is employed to depict the yearning for not only spiritual and psychic, but also bodily unification of the lovers. In the following let us turn to the scenes of revelation that uncover the ‘real presence’ of the masked princes and that, as I shall propose, adapt the Eucharistic rhetoric of ‘this is my body’ in a move similar to the equivalent scenarios of Baldwin and Greene. I will first discuss Pyrocles’s revelation to Philoclea and its comic exaggeration in Basilius’s experience of real presence. Musidorus’s disclosure, to be considered towards the end of this chapter, shows that on a metafictional level, the rhetorical gestures of ‘this is my body’ in secular disguise scenarios also become a means to explore the efficacy of fiction.

 “With its distinctive humanist program to ally the secular and the sacred, its conspicuous cultivation of moderation in religious matters, and its considerably more optimistic account of human agency,” Stillman argues, “the Philippism of Languet and his network of Melanchthonian enthusiasts supplies a more conducive and more persuasive context in which to reopen questions about the character of Sidney’s piety” (“Deadly” 236; cf. also Stillman, Philip Sidney).

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“Behold here before your eyes” – Pyrocles’s Real Presence and the Power of Belief As we have seen, Pyrocles (alias Cleophila) manages to become Philoclea’s close friend and instils a confusing passion in her. In his camouflage, he not only sees Philoclea’s near-naked body, but also “(warranted by a womanly habit) often kiss[es]” and “straitly embrac[es]” her (OA 104). Therefore, at the point of the narrative when he finally reveals himself to Philoclea in order to elicit her consent to marriage (in the second book of both Arcadia versions), Pyrocles has long overcome the early stages of his desire, when he had to compensate for his distance from his beloved by imagining her presence in a profane Eucharistic scenario. The scene in which Pyrocles discloses his ‘real presence’ to Philoclea fuses explicit Ovidian references with implicit allusions to the Eucharistic ritual. The scene’s erotic tension is fuelled by the possibility of a metamorphosis, of a revelation of Pyrocles’s male body, just as the Catholic ritual arguably creates tension as to whether the disguise of breadness might be shed to reveal Christ’s body – a wonder which believers sometimes claimed to have witnessed.¹²² Yet although the narrator refers to the Metamorphoses, in particular to the animation of Pygmalion’s statue, Pyrocles does not stage this moment of revelation as a material shape-shifting. He neither undresses, as Silla in Riche’s “Of Apolonius and Silla,” who exposes her female breasts to give visual proof of her female body beneath the male disguise (FW 199), nor changes his dress, as Lodge’s eponymous Rosalynd does, as we will see (Rosalynd 122). Instead, Pyrocles effects the transformation of Philoclea’s perception of him in a way that is once again modelled, I propose, on the Eucharistic ritual, albeit with decisive differences to Greene’s narrative transubstantiation. In contrast to the Arcadia’s earlier secular Eucharist scenario, in which Pyrocles put himself in the position of the believer eager to experience Philoclea’s presence, here he makes Philoclea the recipient of this secularised sacrament of love. Like the priest administering bread and wine as Christ’s flesh and blood, Cleophila/Pyrocles deictically appeals to Philoclea’s sight without offering her the appropriate visual image: “Behold here before your eyes Pyrocles, prince of Macedon, whom you only have brought to this […] unused metamorphosis [into Cleophila]” (OA 105). This contradiction between apparent female looks and claimed male identity which needs to be overcome by belief in words matches the gap between the Eucharistic bread and wine and Christ’s presence inher-

 Cf. Wolf’s description of this tension in his study of Christ images in the Renaissance (67).

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ent in the consecrated elements – be it the gap between accidents and substance in the Catholic and Lutheran Eucharist rituals or, for followers of Calvin, the question of how bread and wine can entail Christ’s ‘true’ presence. As we have seen, the competing theologies and liturgies solved this contradiction in different ways. While the Catholic doctrine assumes that bread and wine are transubstantiated regardless of the communicant’s state of mind, all Protestant interpretations emphasised the importance of the communicant’s faith which effected the bread’s coexistence with Christ’s body (Luther), its enhancement of the believer’s faith in Christ’s spiritual presence (Calvin and, eventually, the Anglican position), or considered it a mnemonic device to remember Christ’s sacrifice (Zwingli). As in Greene’s narratives, this shift from a Catholic material transformation to a Protestant focus on the faith and imagination of the communicant is important for Sidney’s revelation scenarios, too. Philoclea proves to be an accomplished believer in the Arcadia’s scenario of a profane Eucharist. Pyrocles’s words have the desired effect on her; they make Philoclea quickly overcome the incongruity of sight and words and experience Pyrocles’s as yet invisible “presence” (OA 106): The joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind while he found his beloved image wax little and little both softer and warmer in his folded arms, till at length it accomplished his gladness with a perfect woman’s shape, still beautified with the former perfections, was even such as, by each degree of Cleophila’s words, stealingly entered into Philoclea’s soul, till her pleasure was fully made up with the manifesting of his being, which was such as in hope did overcome hope. (OA 106; cf. also NA 231)

As in the Eucharistic ritual, ‘words’ which ‘enter the believer’s soul’ effect the ‘manifesting of Christ’s being’ ‘stealingly,’ that is, invisibly. In Pyrocles’s case, as the readers have known all along and as Philoclea instantly believes, it is his real, physical presence that he reveals and that Philoclea experiences – albeit not by a material transubstantiation ex opere operato and hence independent of the believer, but by her belief and the consequent change in her perception. Given the scenario of internal rather than external transformation, the invoked parallel between Philoclea and Pygmalion does not concern the actual metamorphosis of the statue into a living being and of Cleophila into Pyrocles, but the analogous pleasure of Pygmalion and Philoclea that their ‘impossible desires’ for the beloved objects suddenly become satisfiable (cf. also C. Kinney, “The Masks of Love” 477). However, Pyrocles’s newly exposed “presence” triggers, at least briefly, contradictory feelings in Philoclea, both “comfort” and “fear” (OA 106). She feels caught off guard by Pyrocles’s revelation and her realisation that she has already kissed and been kissed by the prince without being fully aware of it. Trying to

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defend her honour as a gentlewoman – prompted by, as the narrator wryly remarks, “a certain spark of honour aris[ing] in her well disposed mind” (OA 106) – she draws attention to the gap between evident accidents and declared substance (that she has already bridged mentally and emotionally, as readers know, but Pyrocles still has to learn): “Shall I say, ‘O Cleophila’? Alas, your words be against it! Shall I say, ‘prince Pyrocles’? Wretch that I am, your show is manifest against it” (OA 106). In reply to these qualms, Pyrocles at last produces visible proof of his male, princely identity: Pyrocles […] presented her with some jewels of inestimable price as tokens both of his love and quality, and for a conclusion of proof showed her letters from his father, king Euarchus, unto him; which hand she happily knew, as having kept divers which passed betwixt her father and him. There, with many such embracings as it seemed their souls desired to meet and their hearts to kiss as their mouths did, they passed the promise of marriage. (OA 107)

Nevertheless, the romance does not present this shared secularised sacrament as the culmination of their relationship or as the peripeteia via anagnorisis which leads to a sudden denouement as in Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon. Nor does the Arcadia employ the Eucharist to celebrate love in a mystic manner as in medieval hagiographies and romances or to sublimate erotic love as in Petrarchan poetry. The quoted translation of bodily into spiritual contact, “with many such embracings as it seemed their hearts to kiss as their mouths did,” rhetorically refers to the spiritual sublimation of love, but the phrasing “as it seemed” already qualifies the power of the comparison. Instead of mystifying sexual love, the narrator keeps employing the rhetoric of a theology of love in a distanced, often ironic manner as he chronicles the further difficulties which arise from Pyrocles’s maintained disguise. In the equivalent revelation scene in the revised Arcadia, Philoclea is presented as an even more ardent believer who fully trusts in the efficacy of Pyrocles’s words. Sidney here adds the following emphasis on Philoclea’s faith: “Yet doubt would fain have played his part in her mind, and called in question how she should be assured that Zelmane was Pyrocles – but love straight stood up, and deposed that a lie could not come from the mouth of Zelmane” (NA 231– 232). What is more, he deletes devices that had increased the plausibility of Pyrocles’s evidence – the claim that Philoclea knows Euarchus’s handwriting – and the narrator adds: “But little needed those proofs to one who would have fallen out with herself rather than make any contrary conjectures to Zel-

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mane’s speeches” (NA 233). As it should be for the devoted communicant, words and faith are more powerful than visible proof.¹²³ Consequently, later in the narrative, when Pyrocles appears undisguised before Philoclea’s eyes, the encounter does not inspire a sense of amazement about his real presence in Philoclea or in readers. The narrator does not at all emphasise the retrieved male appearance of Pyrocles in the way he celebrated Cleophila’s beauty after the investiture, and as he will portray Pyrocles’s dazzling looks in his regained male clothes at the end of the Arcadia. In fact, readers are only informed thirty pages later, in the next book, about Pyrocles’s exact appearance, when Dametas discovers the sleeping lovers in Philoclea’s chamber: “[Dametas] taking with him Pyrocles’s sword (wherewith upon his shirt Pyrocles came only apparelled thither), being sure to leave no weapon in the chamber” (OA 237). Presented as a parenthetical addition to a different, more pressing issue (the disarming of Pyrocles), the relevance of the experience of reconciled accidents and substance is downplayed. It is downplayed, it seems to me, because the scene attempts to demonstrate that for love (as much as the Eucharist), visible proof cannot work without the believer’s trust and faith that accepts the evidence as verification; neither the presence of love nor the presence of God can be proven objectively. Accordingly, Philoclea’s immediate reaction to Pyrocles’s appearance without his female dress is distrust in his new male shape, which she does not take as a revelation or as a substantial truth but as a visual token of his emotional changeability that might lead to further metamorphoses: “What aileth this new conversion? Have you yet another sleight to play; or do you think to deceive me in Pyrocles’s form, as you have done in Cleophila’s? Or rather, now you have betrayed me in both those, is there some third sex left you into which you can transform yourself, to inveigle my simplicity?” (OA 205 – 206). Pyrocles is helpless in the face of such disbelief and anger; he realises that he has no chance to offer further proof since words will be discounted and the disclosure of his male body has not soothed but instead enraged Philoclea. Pyrocles faints with the words “Oh, whom dost thou kill, Philoclea?” (OA 206), thus converting his helplessness into a physical symptom. It is significant that he demonstrates his vulnerability in this situation, in which Philoclea feels overpowered. His fainting has a positive effect on her as it recovers her love for him in an eroticised

 It is noteworthy that the Old Arcadia’s “jewels of inestimable price” (OA 107) have become “jewels of right princely value” in the revised version (NA 233) – a more ambiguous phrase which also allows for an emblematic value of the jewels and which possibly points towards the rise of merchants and non-landed gentry at Sidney’s time, which made wealth alone no longer a convincing marker of nobility.

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resurrection scenario (OA 206). Once Pyrocles wakes up, they consummate their love, only to be discovered by Dametas on the following morning.¹²⁴ Yet despite the reanimation of their love and the resolution of Philoclea’s doubt, her accusations have introduced a powerful notion: clearly transgressing the Eucharistic model of a single, irreversible, internal transformation, Philoclea imagines an ongoing cycle of metamorphosis. Although Pyrocles’s transformations eventually come to a halt for Philoclea, the narrative will draw suspense and also comic potential from Pyrocles’s protean body until the very end. In the pages following the lovers’ encounter, the narrative is again much more interested in Cleophila’s imaginary body, which keeps haunting the pastoral world outside of Philoclea’s chamber. As I will continue to argue in the following, the narrative gains more epistemological and emotional suspense from the gap between accidents and substance than from their reconciliation. The nightly encounter between Philoclea and Pyrocles is presented as the culmination of the micro-narratives about the manifold desires for Cleophila in the royal family. To facilitate the secret meeting with Philoclea, Pyrocles had employed a strategy – and Sidney a narrative device – which, in the light of the Eucharistic imagery of the romance, can be linked to another central concept at stake in the Eucharistic debate: the previously discussed notion of multilocation, of Christ’s simultaneous bodily presence in several places. Cleophila alias Pyrocles stages such a sequence of his/her own multilocation in a variation of the romantic motif of the bed-trick: he promises both Basilius and Gynecia a nightly sexual encounter in a cave and plans to flee with Philoclea while her parents are absent. To facilitate his scheme, he disguises himself as Gynecia, pretends to be ill and goes to sleep in the royal bed next to Basilius, while Gynecia, disguised as Cleophila, sneaks to the cave – as soon as Basilius believes his wife asleep, he likewise hastens there. Narratologically, the preparation and exertion of this multilocation scenario requires the handling of four simultaneous narrative levels and the presentation of the events of the same night from the differing perspectives of the involved characters: (1) Philoclea, who is alone in her chamber, desperate about Pyroc-

 In another ironic take on the Neoplatonic sublimation of love, the narrator employs it as an explanation for why the exhausted lovers oversleep. He undermines the Neoplatonic rationale of a spiritual unification by presenting it as a post-coital phenomenon, when he speculates whether “their souls, lifted up with extremity of love after mutual satisfaction, had left their bodies dearly joined to unite themselves together so much more freely as they were freer of that earthly prison” (OA 237). In the composite Arcadia published in 1593, the editors turned the premarital sexual encounter into “chaste embracements” (Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans 690) to uphold Sidney’s revision of the young princes as morally sound.

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les’s feigned love for Gynecia, and is surprised by Pyrocles; (2) Pyrocles’s planning and execution of the scheme, including his devices to obtain the keys to Philoclea’s lodge; (3) Gynecia’s escape to the cave and expectant wait for Pyrocles; (4) Basilius’s subsequent escape to the cave and his unwitting fulfilment of the oracle’s paradox prophecy, “Thou with thy wife adult’ry shalt commit” (OA 5). Aesthetically, the prose narrative in its multilocation scenario pointedly demonstrates how it can depict the simultaneity of action through repeated analepses and how it can juxtapose complementary perspectives by means of its allpervading narrator who is capable of being present in several places and consciousnesses. The narrator thus provides readers the pleasure of participating in Cleophila’s alleged multilocation and the suspense as well as dramatic irony arising from it by offering them synchronic experiences of time and insight into the figures’ conflicting perceptions and thoughts, often to comic effect. As a climax of this complex narrative interlacing, Basilius’s encounter with his wife in the cave is presented as a comic reverberation and amplification of the lovers’ earlier Eucharistic communion. The imaginative command of Cleophila’s annunciation ‘this will be my body’ over Basilius’s perception is so strong that he has “his spirits sublimed with the sweet imagination of embracing the much desired Cleophila” and consequently does not recognise his own wife whom he makes love to in the darkness of the cave (OA 238). Even his tactile sense is so preconditioned by his erotic expectation that he (mis‐)apprehends (in its double meaning of understanding and taking hold of) the familiar body of his wife as the Amazon’s unknown body. When Basilius reflects on his experience on the next morning, he praises the advantages of the night, whose blindness allegedly provides deeper insight than daylight, which “hath our sight with too much sight infected” (OA 238). Accordingly, Basilius perceives the nightly experiences as an eye-opener not only in sensual, but also in sensuous respects, thus proffering readers the pleasure of dramatic irony: ‘O Basilius,’ said he, ‘the rest of thy time hath been but a dream unto thee. It is now only thou beginnest to live; now only thou hast entered into the way of blissfulness. […] O who would have thought there could have been such difference betwixt women? Be not jealous no more, good Gynecia, but yield to the pre-eminence of more excellent gifts; […] alas, Gynecia, thou canst not show such evidence [….]. (OA 238 – 239)

Basilius’s sensual experience is so profoundly influenced by his erotic fantasy that he had not only misinterpreted Pyrocles’s disguised body for weeks, but also did not recognise the ‘body of evidence’ in the cave, which purportedly excels Gynecia’s body by “more excellent gifts.” If Philoclea’s trust in Pyrocles’s real presence provided a positive example of faithful love that manages to avoid hasty credulity but also to prevail over distrust, Basilius’s infatuation

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with the Amazon demonstrates the misapprehensions that can be triggered by overly credulous, overly passionate love. While proof reinforces Philoclea’s belief, Basilius’s intoxication creates false evidence. The entertainingly baffling effects of Cleophila’s strategy of multilocation persist on a fifth narrative strand and by means of a fifth perspective through the eyes of the simple-minded shepherd Dametas. After the romance’s plot has taken a more severe turn, after Basilius drank a potion and apparently died, and after Dametas simultaneously discovered Pyrocles and Philoclea’s secret sexual encounter and had them imprisoned, Dametas thinks he sees the jailed Cleophila alias Pyrocles in the open fields: Dametas (that saw her [Gynecia] run away in Cleophila’s upper raiment, and judging her to be so) thought certainly all the spirits in hell were come to play a tragedy in those woods, such strange change he saw every way: […] But of all other things Cleophila conquered his capacity, suddenly from a woman grown a man, and from a locked chamber gotten before him into the fields […].(OA 244)

Dametas here explains Pyrocles’s skill at shape-shifting and multilocation as the devil’s work. In a similar manner, Riche’s “Phylotus and Emelia,” first published in 1581 in his collection Farewell to Military Profession, uses the notion of multilocation for comic effect which mocks such superstitious beliefs. Riche’s story culminates in a scenario of multilocation and exorcism which is engendered by its intricate narrative build-up. In the tale, a cross-dressed man, Phylerno, finds himself in a comparable situation to Pyrocles: he has become a close (allegedly female) friend to a woman he is in love with, Brisilla. In contrast to Pyrocles, however, Phylerno did not create this situation himself by means of a cunning masquerade, but was initially forced into it. His sister Emelia fled their father’s house in male attire since her father, Alberto, promised her to an old, unpleasant suitor called Phylotus. When Alberto accidentally meets his son Phylerno, whom he has not seen since he was a small child, he takes him for his disguised daughter. As in Riche’s “Of Apolonius and Silla,” its sources, and Shakespeare’s adaptation of the tale in Twelfth Night,¹²⁵ the siblings in “Phylotus and Emelia” look so alike that only gender-specific clothing can differentiate them. The tales and the play all employ a common fantasy in early modern England, when, as Ruth Gilbert points out in her study Early Modern Hermaphrodites, “both gender and sex are [frequently] hermaphroditically entwined in images of brother-sister relationships” (81).

 See Beecher’s introduction to Farewell for a discussion of possible dramatic and prose sources from Italy and France, which all feature look-alike twins (75 – 77).

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Since Alberto searches for his daughter in disguise, he is sure that he has found her when he encounters his son. He thereby brings Phylerno into a situation that is even more perplexing than the position in which Philoclea and all other characters find themselves when they are asked to believe in a hidden substance beneath someone else’s misleading outer appearance. To his surprise, Phylerno is addressed as “most shameless and ungracious girl” and “vile strumpet” by a stranger who later turns out to be his father, and he is embraced by Phylotus as his “sweet and loving wench” (FW 299). Curious about the precise nature of the misunderstanding, Phylerno plays Emelia’s part, agrees to dress in her clothes, and henceforth lives with Phylotus and his daughter Brisilla in anticipation of the wedding day. However, future mother and daughter grow so close to each other that they begin to wish for a sexual transformation which in an equivalent case in Ovid’s Metamorphoses solved the problem of unspeakable and unliveable homosexual attraction: But I would to God, my Brisilla, that I were a man for your only sake. […] Do we not read that the Goddess Venus transformed an ivory image to a lively and perfect woman at the only request of Pygmalion? Diana likewise converted Acteon to a hart, Narcissus for his pride was turned to a flower, Arachne to a spider […] and the gentle goddess having compassion transformed Iphis to a man. (FW 303 – 304)

The professed ‘Emelia’ eventually fakes a physical transformation, which Riche renders in comic detail: And herewithal he seemed with many piteous sighs, throwing up his hands to the heavens, to mumble forth many words in secret as though he had been in some great contemplation, and suddenly without any manner of stirring either of hand or foot did lie still as it had been a thing immovable, whereat Brisilla began for to muse and in the end spake to him, but Phylerno made no manner of answer but seemed as though he had been in some trance, wherewith Brisilla began to call and with her arm to shake him, and Phylerno giving a piteous sigh, as though he had been awaked suddenly out of some dream, said: “O blessed Goddess Venus, I yield thee humble thanks that hast not despised to grant my request.” (FW 304– 305)

This crude performance of a ritualistic sexual transformation convinces Brisilla. Just like Philoclea in the equivalent situation, she spends the night with Emelia, who is, Brisilla is assured, “now consecrated by the goddess to be thy loving husband,” and, as Brisilla confirms, “indeed […] perfectly metamorphosed” (FW 305).¹²⁶

 The scene might be drawn from accounts of Jesuits faking similar ‘wonders’ to convert

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In a world which conceived of the body as directed by humours that are prone to influences from outside, and in which many people believed in the existence of only one anatomical sex in different states of perfection, such sexual metamorphosis was not entirely fantastical. In some medical treatises, it was presented as a very rare, but possible, event. Drawing on Hippocrates, physicians like Jacques Ferrand in his Treatise on Lovesickness described actual sexual transformations as a consequence of love melancholia, concluding that “it is quite plausible that the genitals of a girl, overheated by the fury of love, would be pushed outside the body, because those parts are the same as the male parts” (230). In a milder version, Ficino regarded the partial transformation of lovers into each other as the usual result of love melancholia, which he did not understand as a metaphorical malady, but a material infection, as we have seen: blood is turned into spirit, which is transmitted by gazes from eye to eye and transported to the heart of the beloved, where it is turned into blood. From then onwards, the blood of the beloved in the lover’s body seeks its source. The fact that the blood of the beloved is flowing in the lover is also responsible for the gradual transformation of the lover into the beloved. In a chapter entitled “How Lovers Become like the Loved Ones,” Ficino asks, “Therefore, is it any wonder that, if the blood, infected with a certain image, impresses the same image on parts, Lysias should seem at length to have become like Phaedrus in some colors, lines, feelings, or manners?” (227). Riche’s scene evokes such semi-mythical, semi-scientific belief in the possibility of sexual transformation. In crucial points it resembles the night-time encounter between Pyrocles and Philoclea of Sidney’s Arcadia, which was written at almost the same time. Philoclea’s polemical rhetorical question of whether there was a third sex left into which Pyrocles could transform himself appears like a cue for a faked physical transmutation in Riche’s tale, and Emelia’s trance as well as Brisilla’s attempts of waking her correspond to Pyrocles’s fainting and Philoclea’s reanimation of the supposedly dead beloved – in both cases, the scenario results in a sexual encounter between two lovers who see each other for the first time as man and woman. Towards the end of Riche’s narrative, a multilocation scenario is developed that likewise parallels Sidney’s setup. Emelia’s lover, Flanius, who made her leave her father’s house in male apparel and has secretly lived with her ever since, witnesses the wedding between Phylerno alias Emelia and Phylotus. He returns to the real Emelia convinced that she is the devil who has assumed Eme-

English Protestants to Catholicism. See Marotti 56 – 58 and 123 – 124 for accounts of such performances which included tricking women into marriage.

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lia’s shape. The tale here refers to superstitious beliefs that Beware the Cat also invoked – metempsychosis, which the devil can engineer. Emelia thus finds herself in a situation comparable to her brother’s: addressed as someone she is not, she is pressed to reveal an allegedly hidden substance beyond her false appearance. Flanius’s attempt at exorcising the devil ridicules superstitious beliefs and Catholic ritual when he addresses Emelia, I charge thee in the name of the living God that thou tell me what thou art, and that thou presently depart to the place from whence thou camest. And I conjure thee in the name of the Holy Trinity, by our Blessed Lady the Virgin Mary, by angels and archangels, patriarchs and prophets, by the apostles and four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, by all the holy martyrs and confessors, and the rest of the rabble and blessed rout of heaven, that thou quietly depart […] and that thou take no manner of shape that may seem either terrible or fearful unto me. (FW 309)

This mocking of exorcism might refer to the miraculous healings secretly carried out by Jesuits in Protestant England. As critics have shown, exorcism “was a major engine of the Counter Reformation” and hence “[f]ar from a hangover from the medieval past” (Walsham, “Miracles” 801). The parallels between Riche’s and Sidney’s tales indicate not only that spectres of internal identity change haunted the Elizabethan imagination and that the notion of mutual incorporation triggered erotic fantasies, but also that the idea of multilocation might have particularly appealed to early modern writers interested in developing complex plot structures and experimenting with scenarios told from multiple perspectives. Like Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and Greene’s pastoral romances, Sidney and Riche reflect theological concepts both in their stories and in their narrative form. As I shall propose in the following, Musidorus’s revelation scenario self-referentially highlights the capabilities of multi-layered narration and in particular of allegorical messages rendered by narrative.

“under that veil there may be hidden things to be esteemed” – Musidorus’s Real Presence and the Attraction of Allegory Not only Pyrocles’s love for Philoclea, but also Musidorus’s love for Pamela uses Eucharistic patterns of thought to negotiate anxieties of identity change as well as the desire to reveal his presence to the princess. After having fallen in love himself, Musidorus dresses as a shepherd to approach the elder princess Pamela, who lives incognito with a shepherd’s family. As both Arcadia versions recount, she “had yet, to show an obedience, taken on a shepherdish apparel which was but of russet cloth cut after their fashion, with a straight body,

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open breasted, the needier part full of pleats, with long and wide sleeves” (OA 33, NA 83). In the Old Arcadia, she additionally wears a jewel “which she had devised as a picture of her own estate. It was a perfect white lamb tied at a stake with a great number of chains, as it had been feared lest the silly creature should do some great harm” (OA 34). An impresa was a popular device at the Elizabethan court to communicate a secret message “while concealing its meaning from all but the most ‘suitable’ readers” (Howe 44). As Paolo Giovio puts it in a 1555 tract on imprese that was translated into English in 1585, an impresa should “be not obscure, that it neede a Sibilla to enterprete it, nor so apparant that euery rusticke may vnderstand it” (image 20). The impresa’s invitation to allegorical reading puts in a nutshell the strategy of simultaneous concealment and revelation which Musidorus will later employ. In Pamela’s case, as “complaint of her misery” (OA 34), this jewel through its worth and its image signals that Pamela is disguised and desires to be freed from her camouflage. In the revised Arcadia, Sidney transforms the narrator’s description into a report by Pyrocles, who tells Musidorus how he saw through Pamela’s disguise as a shepherd and noted her nobility and beauty: “But believe me, she did apparel her apparel, and with the preciousness of her body made it most sumptuous” (NA 83). As in Greene’s romances, the natural beauty of royalty overcomes simple clothes and thus inverts the relationship of substance and apparel as ‘it apparels the apparel’ and invests the vesture with nobility (cf. Dana). Accordingly, Pamela’s impresa in the New Arcadia is “a very rich diamond set but in a black horn” which reads “Yet still myself” (NA 83). The impresa suggests that just as a diamond cannot be altered in its substance by having it framed by black horn, royalty cannot be altered by shepherd’s apparel; it makes simple clothes beautiful instead. To put it differently, Pamela’s metamorphosis by disguise entails no transubstantiation and is hence incomplete and reversible. By contrast, Musidorus considers his shepherd’s disguise not only an inconvenience and an injustice, but also a mutilation of his princely identity, as the shortening of his name to ‘Dorus’ already implies (Lobsien 76). Analogous to Pyrocles’s case, his disguise has strategic reasons, but it also aptly expresses his alteration by love – an alteration which Musidorus does not, as Pyrocles, experience as a desire for identification with the beloved, but as a degradation from rational self-control and self-sufficiency. Hence, shepherd’s weeds initially appear to Musidorus as a fitting expression of his humiliating fall from this ideal. Like Pyrocles, he invokes a transubstantiating power of clothing in a sonnet that he presents in a “lamentable tune” “with his eyes sometimes cast up to heaven” (OA 36). It opens with the incantation, “Come shepherd’s weeds, become your master’s mind / Yield outward show, what inward change he tries” (OA 36). The double meaning of ‘become’ as ‘come to be’ and ‘suit’ highlights

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that once again, Musidorus envisions a mutually reinforcing process between metamorphosis and transubstantiation: the “outward show” of clothing is meant to express, but also to fortify his “inward change.” However, as in Pyrocles’s case, this transformation by love which Musidorus perceives as a transubstantiation of his noble self relates just metaphorically to his changed appearance, insofar as both involve degradation from nobility. As the ensuing actions show, Musidorus’s love for Pamela does not mean that he truly aims at a new life as a shepherd or that he has automatically forfeited his noble birth by falling in love and dressing as a shepherd. Yet his excessively passionate behaviour will seriously question his claims to nobility; most significantly, in book three, he will make sexual advances on Pamela while she is asleep, despite her own resolution against premarital sex. At this early point in the narrative, however, Musidorus plans to use his disguise above all as a strategy to reveal his hidden but intact noble identity to Pamela, just as Pyrocles undergoes a strategic and provisional gender change to come closer to Philoclea. After Musidorus has managed to trick Basilius into making him Pamela’s guard (OA 48 – 49), his ambiguous task is to play the shepherd convincingly enough to deceive Pamela’s other guardians Dametas, Miso, and Mopsa, but at the same time to disclose his true identity to the princess, whose class consciousness prohibits falling in love with a shepherd, for whom she feels “disdain” (OA 47). Therefore Musidorus uses the following strategy “for the manifesting of his mind” (OA 87): he pretends to woo the dim-witted and ugly shepherd Mopsa in order to signal – via this courting – his love for Pamela and his attractiveness as a suitor. The advantage of his dissembling is, Musidorus calculates, that the “second meaning” (OA 87), which Pamela begins to perceive, makes her pay attention to and even ponder the shepherd’s words: “and so to this scanning of him was she now content to fall, whom before she was resolved to banish from her thoughts” (OA 87). Scanning Dorus and his utterances, the rhetorically skilled princess perceives an infringement of decorum in Dorus’s elaborate poems and speeches addressed to a shepherdess: “But Pamela did not so much attend Mopsa’s entertainment as she marked both the matter Dorus spake and the manner he used in uttering it. And she saw in them both a very unlikely proportion to mistress Mopsa” (OA 88). Yet to make Pamela not only ‘scan,’ but also fall in love with him, Musidorus takes a second step. He reveals his identity by recounting the adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus, including Musidorus’s strategy of disguise: “[Musidorus] clothed himself in a shepherd’s weed, that under the baseness of that form he might at least have free access to [Pamela]” (OA 92). Through his story, he directs Pamela’s attention to the possibility that there are “hidden things to be esteemed” “under that veil” of the shepherd’s clothing (OA 93). At the same

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time, he invites her to a complex reading attitude: Pamela ought to read the shepherd Dorus’s tale and his body allegorically; she ought to seek a second meaning beneath the material veil of his clothes and beneath the linguistic veil of his story. Whereas the uneducated and insensitive Mopsa, who does “not love comparisons” (OA 94), does not see through the veil, does not even perceive the veil as a veil, Pamela, who “let no word slip without […] due pondering” detects Musidorus’s allegorical message of ‘this is my body,’ “that he did under that covert manner make her know the great nobleness of his birth” (OA 93). The scenario, which has been referred to as “one of the most remarkable examples of metafiction in literary history” (Alwes, “To serve” 153),¹²⁷ consequently differentiates between two forms of spectators / listeners / readers, namely those who inattentively take everything at face value and those who detect a second, profound meaning by means of textual clues: And that if he [Musidorus] might, with taking on a shepherd’s look, cast up his eyes to the fairest princess nature in that time created, the like, nay the same, desire of mine [of Dorus] need no more to be disdained or held for disgraceful. (OA 93, my emphasis)

Such textual clues ensure not only that a second meaning is signalled, but also that its content is indicated clearly enough to avoid enigmatic obscurity and random interpretations. The intradiegetic story thereby encourages a form of sensitive and sensible reading (and by extension, also writing) of fiction which avoids what Protestants, trained in humanist exegesis, perceived as the two Catholic extremes of interpretation: either a too-literal or a too-far-fetched figurative reading. Through Mopsa, Sidney’s scenario ridicules the overly literal Catholic interpretation of the doctrine of transubstantiation that Reformers criticised. As we have seen, the dissent of Protestant theologians crystallised in their figurative readings of ‘this is my body.’ In post-Reformation England, every time Anglican believers celebrated the Eucharist, they were expected to strengthen their allegorical interpretation skills and their belief in allegorically conveyed messages by iterating a figurative reading of Christ’s words of institution. With regard to the Eucharist, Protestant  Iser’s reading of the scene even goes a step further since he not only identifies metafictional advice on how to read this romance, but recognises Musidorus’s double coding as a metafictional comment on the “basic pattern of literary fictionality” (Iser, The Fictive 64). Like Musidorus’s disguise, fictionality discloses itself as an illusion in order to show that such illusions can be modes of revelation. From an alternative perspective, Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien interpret the disguises of the princes as metafictional comments on the mechanisms of allegory and the courtier’s behaviour, as “verbergend-zeigende[…] Duplizität, die die allegorische Grundfigur des Höfischen bildet” (Die unsichtbare Imagination 214).

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believers were expected to read more carefully than Catholic worshippers. Yet, at the same time, Musidorus’s revelation tale also rejects the other Catholic extreme: an allegoresis of the Bible which Protestants opposed as implausible and contrived since it was too far removed from the scripture. For instance, William Tyndale famously argued in The Obedience of a Christian Man in 1528: “The greatest cause of […] the decay of the faith, and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang at first of allegories. […] Yea, they [Roman Catholics] are come unto such blindness, that they not only say the literal sense profiteth not, but also that it is hurtful, noisome, and killeth the soul” (307– 308). Hence, situated between too literal and too contrived interpretations of the Bible, the ostensibly paradoxical Protestant position required that allegorical reading ought to conform to the literal sense.¹²⁸ Tyndale and other Protestant leaders acknowledged that the Bible contains allegorical and figurative sections, but they demanded a diligent and justified reading of them. In 1588, the Calvinist theologian William Whitaker phrased the complex Protestant stance towards allegory as follows: “There is but one true and genuine sense of scripture, namely the literal or grammatical, whether it arise from the words taken strictly, or from the words figuratively understood or from both together” (406). I propose that it is this complex reading attitude, reinforced by the Reformation, which Sidney employs in his revelation scenario – not to make a theological statement, but to stage an entertainingly complex form of intradiegetic narration that grants readers hermeneutic pleasure. Understood as a mise en abyme of Sidney’s own act of narration, it proffers readers the additional pleasure of reflecting on their own act of informed, careful reading. Pamela proves to be an ideal reader of Musidorus’s allegorical revelation since she grasps his literal sense through a careful appraisal. As I set out to show in the following paragraphs, the revised version again undertakes some significant changes and additions to the section, which augment its differences to Pyrocles’s corresponding revelation scene: whereas Philoclea in the New Arcadia is turned into a more intuitive believer who does not need to cautiously read the evidence provided (as we saw, she does not take the time to study Euarchus’s letters and recognise his handwriting), in the revised version Pamela is presented as a more vigilant reader, one who is fonder of deciphering allegory than even

 Cf. also J. Simpson’s discussion of the complexities of the Protestant notion of figural language and its literal sense, in particular with regard to Tyndale (“Tyndale”). Cummings elucidates that “the phrase ‘literal truth’ is at best a paradox, perhaps an oxymoron. What is literal is made up of letters, of words. This expression, then, which appears to claim truth by direct revelation, depends on a process inevitably interpretative, properly speaking ‘literary.’ The Reformation is as much about literary truth as it is about literal truth” (Literary Culture 5).

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Musidorus wishes her to be. For example, whenever Musidorus tries to break off his tale and tell Pamela straightforwardly about his love, she makes him resume his narration, the charming spell of which she apparently does not want to be broken.¹²⁹ The New Arcadia also changes the narrative situation of the episode: Musidorus’s discovery of his identity is not directly presented by the narrator here, as in the original version, but is recounted as an intradiegetic narration by Musidorus to Pyrocles. Therefore, it becomes the core of a complex mise en abyme in which the narrator tells readers how Musidorus tells Pyrocles how Dorus told Pamela about Musidorus’s experiences. Although Musidorus’s intradiegetic tale uses many sections of the original version verbatim, it displays some striking innovations: Dorus’s means of ‘proving’ his noble identity are multiplied, but Pamela’s reaction to the displayed evidence becomes uncertain. In the original version, after having heard Dorus’s tale, Pamela experiences a conflict between spontaneous belief and the need for proof.¹³⁰ This tension is solved by the same device of authentication as in the corresponding scene in which Pyrocles reveals himself to Philoclea, namely by a rich jewel that ought to prove Musidorus’s wealth. It convinces Pamela, who thereby “receive[s] into her own mind a great testimony of the giver’s worthiness” (OA 95). By contrast, the revised Arcadia deprives the intradiegetic narrator Musidorus (and thereby readers) of Pamela’s belief in Musidorus’s real presence despite his offering of visible proof. Thus Dorus not only shows Pamela a jewel that demonstrates his wealth (NA 139), but also a birthmark on his body which – provided that Pamela reads his allegorical tale correctly and sends messengers to Thessalia – would prove his individual noble identity as Musidorus: “Lastly, said he [i.e. Musidorus whom Dorus talks about] for a certain demonstration, he presumed to show unto the princess a mark he had on his face, as I might,” said I [Dorus], “show this of my neck to the rare Mopsa,” and withal I showed my neck to them both, where, as you [i.e. Pyrocles to whom Musidorus relates the events] know, there is a red spot bearing figure, as they tell me, of a lion’s paw, “that she may ascertain herself that I am Menalcas’ brother. And so did he, beseeching her to send someone she might trust into Thessalia, secretly to be advertised whether the age, the complexion, and particularly that notable sign, did not fully agree with their Prince Musidorus.” (NA 138)

 For example, she interrupts Musidorus’s later attempt to profess his noble identity and love for her directly by waking up her guard Mopsa, thus forcing Musidorus to once again resort to indirect, allegorical messages (NA 187).  “Full well she found the lively image of a vehement desire in herself, which ever is apt to receive belief, but hard to ground belief. […] She did immediately catch hold of his signifying himself to be a prince, […][b]ut straight the longing for assurance made suspicions arise” (OA 93).

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Displaying marks on the skin, and in particular birthmarks, as evidence of one’s identity had been a topos in Hellenic romance and became acknowledged medieval legal practice for establishing identities.¹³¹ Bodily marks offered one solution to the problem of the invisibility of royal substance that I discussed in my reading of Greene’s romances above, also because they allegedly offered, in contrast to changeable clothes and names, “undisguised information” about the person in question (Groebner 103). However, as Dorus’s “as they tell me” indicates, such bodily marks nonetheless needed to be read according to cultural conventions and were far from offering incontestable proof (Hopkins 191).¹³² In addition, Dorus bolsters his verbal technique of revelation-via-concealing by giving visible proof of his nobility via an alleged act of masking. As private entertainment for Pamela, Dametas and Dorus put on princely clothes and stage a scene of horsemanship. Here, he discloses his nobility to the princess not only rhetorically but also visually: I have appeared to her eyes like myself, by a device I used with my master [Dametas], persuading him that we two might put on certain rich apparel I had provided, and so practise something on horseback before Pamela, telling him it was apparel I had gotten for playing well the part of a king in a tragedy at Athens. (NA 140)

Purportedly disguised, Musidorus reveals his princely looks, his aristocratic sprezzatura of wearing courtly fashion, and his chivalric, and hence noble, skills to Pamela. Sidney here offers a literary equivalent to More’s above-quoted scenario of a prince impersonating himself on a stage; a theatrical metaphor that More employed to make the Catholic position on the Eucharist more plausible. Moreover, in the New Arcadia Dorus’s amplified tale develops new narrative devices for signalling Musidorus’s real presence. When Pamela objects to Dorus’s account by pointing out that she heard of Musidorus’s death, Dorus wittily blends the present situation and his tale to once again signal their concurrence: “But for Musidorus, […] I perceive indeed you have either heard or read the story of that unhappy prince, for this was the very objection which that peerless princess did make unto him when he sought to appear such as he was before her wisdom” (NA 137). Dorus claims here that, previous to their encounter, Pamela  See The Aethiopian Historie for one literary model of such birthmark scenes (Heliodorus 271). See Groebner 97 and 110 for the medieval legal practice.  See also Groebner for an account of the unreliability of birthmarks as “hallmark of identification”: “Skin marks announced the triumphant motif of recognition so explicitly that at the first trial of the true or false Martin Guerre in Rieux in 1560, both the witnesses who were convinced of Guerre’s identity and those who regarded him as a trickster had recourse to such signs to substantiate their case” (115).

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read and learned by heart the very dialogue between princess and shepherd which they now re-enact. On a second level, however, he once again appeals to her capacity to read between his lines and to understand them in the appropriate allegorical manner: they do not re-enact, but create his story in the very moment in which he recounts it. Hence the tale opens with a traditional retrospective perspective (“In the country of Thessalia […] there was […] a prince […] named Musidorus” NA 134) and then turns from an account of past events to a record of the present and a means to form the future. It turns from narration to enactment, and from representation to a means of conveying ‘real presence.’ Dorus’s amalgamation of past, present, and future and his shift from representation to real presence are analogous to the intricate temporal and semiotic structure of the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy, which does not exclusively memorialise Christ’s past sacrifice, but repeats it in the present moment with a view toward future salvation. Like Pyrocles’s revelation scenario, Musidorus attempts to create an interactive sacrament of love that employs concepts and temporal structures made prominent in early modern discourse by the Eucharist debate. At the same time, the unusually complex temporal structure of Dorus’s tale can be read as a hallmark of the generic development of prose fiction. It indicates the difference between the classic epic and Sidney’s innovative literary mode, which links pastoral romance with traces of the chivalric romance and the epos and became an important forerunner of modern narrative forms like the novel. As Mikhail M. Bakhtin has emphasised, the modern narrative form which he calls novelistic differs from the epic’s “absolute past” that is “monochronic”: “It is as closed as a circle; inside it everything is finished, already over” (The Dialogic Imagination 15). Dorus’s story begins just like such a monochronic epos set in past and distant lands and featuring idealised heroes. It then grows, however, into a scenario in the here and now, which features its protagonist not as an almost superhuman warrior, but as a helpless lover disguised as a shepherd. For Pamela, both the protagonist and the action of this epos are no longer “inaccessible to personal experience […]: One cannot glimpse it, grope for it, touch it” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 16). The narrated situation that seemed to be set in the epic past is now turned into Pamela’s personal experience in the present – quite literally, she can ‘grope for and touch’ the epic hero. Still, Pamela at first refuses to show that she is ‘touched’ by Musidorus’s tale. Despite the amplification of Musidorus’s revelation scenario and his attempt at creating an interactive sacrament of love, in the New Arcadia Pamela does not immediately expose whether she partakes in the secular communion with the necessary faith and understanding. Therefore, Musidorus complains to his cousin, “but in the princess I could find no apprehension of what I either

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said or did, but with a calm carelessness letting each thing slide” (NA 140); “But howsoever I show I am no base body, all I do is but to beat a rock and get foam” (NA 141). So we can see that for the protagonist as much as for readers, the romance of Musidorus and Pamela contains the element of “openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy” which is, according to Bakhtin, typical of the newer narrative form which he describes as novelistic and which came to supersede the inherited epos (The Dialogic Imagination 16). It is only when talking to her sister that Pamela admits that she fully believes in Dorus’s tale which he delivered by the “finest policy that might be” (NA 152) and that she has fallen in love with him because of his demonstrations of noble “grace” in rhetorical as much as chivalric respects (NA 153). Yet, as I shall argue in the following final section, the newly revealed noble substance of Musidorus is seriously called into question towards the end of the narrative.

“degraded from being princes”? The Transubstantiation of Nobility As we have seen, the princes’ disguises as Amazon and shepherd initially invoked the dangers of transubstantiation – of not only a metaphorical and outward, but also actual and inward change from man to woman, from prince to shepherd. This spectre of transubstantiation reappears at the end of the narrative, when Euarchus, Pyrocles’s father, passes judgement on the princes’ behaviour without recognising his son and nephew, both of whom he has not seen for years and who have taken on new pseudonyms, Timopyrus and Palladius. They are charged by the Arcadians with high treason for the seduction and kidnapping of the princesses. They are also accused of the murder of Basilius, who, after his night in the cave, drank a potion which Gynecia took for an aphrodisiac but which had, so the Arcadians and readers believe, lethal consequences for Basilius. Although the miraculous ending (the alleged corpse of Basilius wakes up from a long sleep engendered by the potion) clears the princes and Gynecia of the charge of murder, Euarchus’s stern judgment on the conduct of the princes provides a view of their habits which is much more critical than that of the Old Arcadia’s narrator. Consequently, critics disagree about the narrative’s stance towards Euarchus and the princes. The question of whether Euarchus is, as his telling name suggests, indeed the representative of the good governor, or whether his moral judgment is considered too severe, depends on whether the princes are viewed as “exemplary heroes, or imperfect agents who contribute to the near downfall of Arcadia” (Salzman, English Prose Fiction 52). As Ann Astell puts it, “Euarchus is judged as judge by the justice of his verdict” (44). While Elizabeth Dipple concludes that Euarchus’s verdict “is true justice, the kind of

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justice which Sidney as narrator longs for” (“Unjust Justice” 87), Derek Alwes sees Euarchus as an overly strict father figure whose “intellectual arrogance” is criticised by the narrative, and would have been even more questionable at the end of the revised version (“To serve” 165). In addition to Euarchus’s questionable justice, the trial scene is also interesting with regard to the reader responses it elicits and their significance for questions of genre. Helgerson argues that Sidney’s narrative sets a trap which makes readers share the lenient, compassionate view of the imperfect princes and then confronts them with Euarchus’s harsh criticism; therefore, readers are made to share “the guilt and the awareness of guilt” of the male protagonists (Elizabethan Prodigals 136). Both Astell and Alan Hager call attention to the retroactive reading which the trial scene requires of readers, who are asked to re-evaluate their judgements by reconsidering the princes’ deeds (Astell 45; Hager 130). Further, concerning the trial’s notion of justice, the question of generic allegiances is at stake: does Sidney hark back to medieval romance, which was “a remarkably indulgent moral tutor,” one who accepted premarital sexuality (Carver 328)? Or does he privilege the stricter Protestant morality, which is also in line with the Greek romance model (Skretkowicz 199)? While The Old Arcadia initially seems to endorse the romantic notion that love justifies unusual means, the ending undermines such a stance since the princes, divested of their disguises, are accused of rape, kidnapping, and regicide. Prior to the trial, this stripping of the disguises and the restored princely and masculine looks of the princes are celebrated. “[W]isely considering that their disguised weeds, […] would make them more odious in the sight of the judges,” Kerxenus gives the princes back their original clothes (OA 323). The princes’ subsequent entrance is described in ekphrastic detail: Pyrocles came out, […] clothed after the Greek manner in a long coat of white velvet reaching to the small of his leg, with great buttons of diamonds all along upon it. His neck, without any collar, not so much as hidden with a ruff, did pass the whiteness of his garments […]. On his feet he had nothing but slippers […]. His fair auburn hair (which he ware in great length, and gave at that time a delightful show with being stirred up and down with the breath of a gentle wind) had nothing upon it but a white ribbon, in those days used for a diadem, which rolled once or twice about the uppermost part of his forehead, fell down upon his back, closed up at each end with the richest pearl were to be seen in the world. […] [T]he noble Musidorus […] had upon him a long cloak after the fashion of that which we call the apostle’s mantle, made of purple satin – not that purple which we now have, and is but a counterfeit of the Gaetulian purple (which yet was far the meaner in price and estimation), but of the right Tyrian purple (which was nearest to a colour betwixt our murrey and scarlet). On his head (which was black and curled) he ware a Persian tiara all set down with rows of so rich rubies as they were enough to speak for him that they had to judge of no mean personage. (OA 325 – 326)

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It is worth quoting this description at length to show how it revels in the beauty and wealth of the princes’ clothing. It thus belatedly inspires a sense of wonder regarding the reconciliation between substance and accidents. Even Stubbes, in his strict treatise against foreign fashion and sumptuous apparel, acknowledges that princes and kings should be allowed to wear rich clothing, “thereby to strike a terrour and feare into the hearts of the people” (70 – 71; sig. C2). It is precisely this inspiration of awe in bystanders which Sidney’s princes aim at, too. However, the trial probes into this presumed agreement between appearance and identity. In contrast to the revelation scenarios of the princes, who could trust in the willingness of the princesses to believe in their noble substances, a trial is not meant to work according to belief or emotion. Here, factual “proofs clearer than the sun are required” (OA 341). Once again, the questions at stake are: (a) whether the outward, strategic, and provisional metamorphosis is indicative of an internal, irreversible transformation and (b) whether disguises can be justified on the grounds of their beneficent revelatory power or are merely indicative of a strategy of deception. The princes themselves make a case for the positive efficacy of disguise by claiming that they attempted to reveal their love via their transvestism and to liberate the princesses from their father’s unkind captivity (OA 339). However, Philanax, Basilius’s confidant and his stand-in as ruler of Arcadia, characterises the princes (in particular Pyrocles alias Timopyrus) as shameless shape-shifters and untrustworthy manipulators of signs: “This man, whom to begin withal I know not how to name, since coming into this country […] from a man grew a woman, from a woman a ravisher of women, thence a prisoner, and now a prince; […] this Timopyrus, this Cleophila, this what you will (for any shape or title he can take upon him that hath not restraint of shame)” (OA 334). Philanax presents disguise as an offence akin to rape, murder or treason, when he argues that the princes give an “eternal example […] to all mankind of disguisers, falsifiers, adulterers, ravishers, murderers, and traitors” (OA 346). For readers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, such descriptions of treason exerted by disguised foreign agents might have been reminiscent of Jesuits from the Continent, who purportedly infiltrated England and similarly took on false names, identities, and clothes to deceive their English Protestant pursuivants. Duncan-Jones therefore proposes that Sidney might have been influenced by the public trial of Edmund Campion when writing the fourth and fifth books of the original Arcadia (Duncan-Jones 100). Euarchus follows Philanax’s interpretation and condemns both princes (as well as Gynecia) to death. In doing so, he demonstrates that he cannot be manipulated by the princes’ rich attire, which they put on for strategic reasons. As the narrator explains, they attempt to employ the “violence of magnanimity, and so to conquer the expectation of the lookers with an extraordinary virtue”

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(OA 326). Euarchus, however, is above the simple people’s impressionability; in fact, he himself uses a lavish visual staging of his power to reinforce his authority as a judge: “For Euarchus did wisely consider the people to be naturally taken with exterior shows far more than with inward consideration of the material points” (OA 324). After Euarchus has condemned the princes to death, a typically romantic intervention could lead to the plot’s peripeteia via anagnorisis and its denouement in a happy romance ending: And being come to Euarchus, Kalodoulus fell at his feet, telling him those he had judged were his own son and nephew, the one the comfort of Macedon, the other the only stay of Thessalia […]. [H]e cried they should salute their father, and joy in the good hap the gods had sent them; who were no less glad than all the people amazed at the strange event of these matters. (OA 355)

However, the amazing denouement via recognition, which Greene’s romances employ in equally dramatic situations, is stifled in the Arcadia. Euarchus’s stern judgement of the princes does not change after hearing that they are his son and nephew (the very princes whose extraordinary chivalric achievements are celebrated internationally). Sidney might have taken over the figure from An Aethiopian Historie, in which a king is likewise willing to sacrifice his daughter for reasons of “regard to the publike utilitie, [rather] then […] private profite” (Heliodorus 272). Euarchus conforms to Erasmus’s vision of the eu-archus, the good ruler: “The good, wise, and upright prince is simply a sort of embodiment of the law,” a man who can “disregard emotional reactions and use only reason and judgment. […] [T]he prince should be removed as far as possible from the low concerns and sordid emotions of the common people” (Erasmus 79, 24; see also Dolven 124). Because he comes from outside of the pastoral world and is not involved in the complex erotic networks, Euarchus can judge in an impartial way; his “speech is an abstract, impersonal, explicit analysis of the themes which until now we have had to extract from ambiguous dramatic contexts” (Lanham 316). The romance’s negotiation of the relationship of external and internal change, of metamorphosis and transubstantiation, comes full circle when Euarchus revitalises Musidorus’s initial argument. To him, the metamorphic disguises have also entailed the transubstantiation of the princes; their habits (their disguises as well as their conduct) have destroyed their noble substances – a judgement that is reminiscent of another stern father figure, Ascham, who warned against the transubstantiation of national identity by travelling, reading foreign books, and wearing foreign fashion. Euarchus declares:

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If rightly I have judged, then rightly have I judged mine own children, unless the name of a child should have force to change the never-changing justice. No, no, Pyrocles and Musidorus, I prefer you much before my life, but I prefer justice as far before you. [… ] I cannot in this case acknowledge you for mine; for never had I shepherd to my nephew, nor never had woman to my son. Your vices have degraded you from being princes, and have disannulled your birthright. Therefore, if there be anything left in you of princely virtue, show it in constant suffering that your unprincely dealing hath purchased unto you. For my part, I must tell you, you have forced a father to rob himself of his children. (OA 356)

On the sliding scale between nobility of blood and nobility of action, Euarchus emphasises that nobility and in particular royalty must be deserved by virtuous conduct.¹³³ Since Euarchus judges the princes’ conduct as a fall from nobility, the names of Pyrocles and Musidorus as well as their appearances have become vacant signifiers. They only point to the ‘real absence’ of the princes. So for Euarchus, the princes’ original, rich clothes do not reconcile accidents and substance. Instead, the vestments have to be regarded as misleading disguises for their degraded, transubstantiated identities. This severe judgement might come as a particular shock to readers who have revelled in the narrator’s excessively detailed description of the princes’ dazzling clothes at the beginning of the trial. By having Basilius wake up from his supposed death, the romance ultimately provides the required peripeteia and a happy ending including marriages. However, as many critics have noted, the suddenness of the ending and the lack of eclogues after the fifth book weaken the sense of sufficient denouement or closure. Moreover, Basilius’s restoration neither acquits the princes of all of Euarchus’s accusations, nor does it do away with the additional trespasses; for instance, only readers share Musidorus’s secret that he almost raped Pamela.¹³⁴ This attempt contradicts the aristocratic ideal of masculinity more profoundly than Pyrocles’s premarital consensual sex with Philoclea. Hence the ending does not dissolve the glaring “contradictions between moral values and fictive rewards” (McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney 132), and “the sinister questions of legitimization remain lurking below the surface” (Bates 93). It merely presents

 Hence he does not subscribe to an absolutist concept of monarchy and might agree with the “Ister bank” sonnet of the shepherd Philisides, who is often understood as a representative of Sidney. It shows that sovereignty is not inherent in the body of the monarch, but has to be attributed to the ruler by the people (Shrank, Writing the Nation 246).  Furthermore, readers share with the narrator the knowledge of Pyrocles’s sexual interest in Gynecia: “she discovered some parts of her fair body, which, if Cleophila’s heart had not been so fully possessed as there was no place left for any new guest, no doubt it would have yielded to that gallant assault” (OA 180).

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a romantic injustice contradictory to Euarchus’s questionable justice; it is an example of ‘unjust poetic justice’ (cf. Dipple, “Unjust Justice” 94). Therefore, the precarious relationship between disguise and identity change, between metamorphosis and transubstantiation, is not clearly resolved at the end of the Arcadia. It remains a controversial issue in Sidney’s narrative, just as discussion of the constitutive power of clothing and the roles of nature and nurture in the creation of gender and class, and increasingly also national or ethnic identities, remained in full swing throughout the 1590s and far beyond.

2.3 Thomas Lodge: Rosalynd: Euphues’ Golden Legacy (1590) and A Margarite of America (1596) Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd matched the popularity of Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon as well as Sidney’s Arcadia. Lodge’s romance, which might have been revised by Greene before its publication (K. Wilson, Fictions 144) and was probably influenced by the Arcadia, went through eleven editions between 1590 and 1642 (Nellist 20, 7). Rosalynd has an unusually long subtitle, Euphues’ Golden Legacy: Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra. Bequeathed to Philautus’ Son, Nursed Up With Their Father in England. Fetched from the Canaries by T. L., Gent. Here, Lodge fashions his tale as the legacy of Euphues, the protagonist of two influential narratives by Lyly that I will discuss in the next chapter. The title also announces that the book was ‘fetched from the Canaries’ by Lodge. Lodge amplifies this claim in his preface, where he maintains that he wrote the narrative during a voyage to the Canaries and Azores. This gesture is repeated in Lodge’s later romance A Margarite of America, which is presented as an exotic souvenir from South America. In the later romance, I shall argue, this exoticist subtext is significant for understanding the main narrative. By contrast, title and preface of Rosalynd are chiefly a marketing device that attempts to link the book to the fashion of Euphuism and the new demand for all things foreign, phenomena which will interest me in the third chapter. The following subchapters will look at Lodge’s two romances consecutively since their approaches to pastoral romance are discrepant in terms of both content and the use of genre. First, the earlier narrative Rosalynd will be discussed, whose take on the pastoral romance is much closer to the literary forerunners by Greene and Sidney than A Margarite, which drives both the genre of pastoral romance and Eucharistic references to a destructive extreme.

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“if your robes were off, what mettle are you made of”? Experiments of Identity Transformation in Rosalynd In Rosalynd, Lodge adapts the fourteenth-century poem Gamelyn to offer a tale of not only multiple pastoral cross-class dressings, but also female-to-male disguise. After having been banished to the forest of Arden from the French court of the usurper Torismond, the erstwhile princess Rosalynd puts on male apparel and “play[s] the man so properly” that she can protect her travel companion Alinda, Torismond’s daughter (Rosalynd 47).¹³⁵ Alinda and Rosalynd set up a household in the countryside and become shepherds, calling themselves Aliena and Ganymede. It turns out that Rosalynd’s father, the rightful ruler Gerismond, and his followers escaped to the same wood. Eventually, Rosader, a young nobleman with whom Rosalynd had fallen in love at court, and his elder brother Saladyn also seek refuge in Arden, where the disguised nobles meet in several scenes of misrecognition (and eventual detection). The woods of Arden are a much more inviting pastoral world than Sidney’s war-ridden Arcadia. Accordingly, in contrast to a harsh portrayal of the court (which Lodge’s final romance, A Margarite of America, takes to a violent extreme), Rosalynd idealises the shepherds to a far greater degree than Menaphon, Pandosto, and the Arcadia, in which characters such as Menaphon, Dametas, Miso, and Mopsa are ridiculously base and dim-witted. Not only is the shepherd Montanus presented as the most constant lover in Rosalynd, he also composes poems and offers accomplished eclogues, while Corydon, another shepherd, speaks Latin just as fluently as the courtiers do (Nellist 20). Therefore, the shepherds excel even in courtly rhetorical qualities. That they could surpass courtiers in physical exercise was well known; one of Castiglione’s interlocutors in Il Cortegiano accordingly discourages gentlemen from athletic contests with peasants and instead recommends dressing as a shepherd in aristocratic masked entertainments (Montrose, “Of Gentlemen” 444– 445). Moreover, the shepherds in Rosalynd outshine the courtiers in modesty since they are, just like Fawnia in Pandosto, content with their situation. Corydon points out, “Envy stirs us not, we covet not to climb, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our thoughts above our fortunes” (R 57). Therefore, the pastoral world has often been read as a utopian countermodel to the ambitious court and its power politics, as a world where noblemen and women experience a life that is relatively free. As a consequence, the noble characters do not perceive their pastoral disguises

 Parenthetical references to Rosalynd will be abbreviated to ‘R.’

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as a source of embarrassment or a menace to their noble cores as compared to those in Greene’s and Sidney’s equivalent scenarios. Yet even in the alternate world of the pastoral, courtiers and noblemen cannot free themselves from the desire to improve or at least secure their social status.¹³⁶ As critics have observed, “[p]astoral in Rosalynd is only a momentary holiday for the courtly characters who take advantage of a cleaner world of more spontaneous feelings but continue to think as men and women of rank” (Nellist 12).¹³⁷ Likewise, to a certain degree they remain under the influence of the gender system they grew up with. Therefore, Arden may be better described as a heterotopia than as a utopia.¹³⁸ While Arden offers a counter-site in which alternative behaviours can be tested, the oppressions and obligations of the nearby court are not fully resolved. Since the characters struggle with the inherited rank and gender system in the heterotopian Arden which offers them new freedoms, experiments in identity transformation ensue that might have attracted Elizabethan (and later) readers who found themselves in a similar situation: a hitherto closely regulated rank and gender order offered them in some respects new flexibilities and possibilities of identity transformation.

 Rosalynd attempts to discourage herself from loving a poor suitor thus: “Then Rosalynd, seeing Rosader is poor, think him less beautiful because he is in want, and account his virtues but qualities of course, for that he is not endued with wealth” (R 42). Rosader, likewise aware of their status difference, reproaches himself: “I have reached at a star, my desires have mounted above my degree, and my thoughts above my fortunes. I, being a peasant, have ventured to gaze on a princess whose honours are too high to vouchsafe such base loves” (R 69). In the narrative’s finale with its three weddings, Alinda has to console her future husband: “Why, how now, Saladyn, all amort? What melancholy, man, at the day of marriage? Perchance thou art sorrowful to think on thy brother’s high fortunes, and thine own base desires to choose so mean a shepherdess? Cheer up my heart, for this day thou shalt be married to the daughter of a king” (R 123).  Larson likewise argued that “[t]he aristocrats never lose sight of pre-established social relationships, even though they find themselves in a physically different environment from the court” (121). See W. Davis, “Masking in Arden” for the original reading which Nellist and Larson partly criticise.  Foucault defines heterotopias as realised utopias. In contrast to utopias, which are by definition “sites with no real place” that “present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case […] are fundamentally unreal spaces,” heterotopias are “real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). The presence of exiled nobles in the forest was possible in Elizabethan England, too, and the counter-site of the forest simultaneously upholds principles of the real world while calling them into question.

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Prior to the negotiation of class and gender identity in the heterotopian Arden which grants the disguised characters new agency, Rosalynd stages a crueller identity experiment that tests the perseverance of class substance; an experiment which is entirely forced on the reluctant subject. After the death of their father, the young gentleman Saladyn plans to disadvantage his younger brother, Rosader, and to deprive him of his noble heritage. Saladyn attempts to re-educate Rosader as a servant: “Let him know little, so shall he not be able to execute much; suppress his wits with a base estate, and though he be a gentleman by nature, yet form him anew and make him a peasant by nurture” (R 33). However, akin to the narrative trial of Fawnia’s royal substance in Pandosto, Rosader’s noble essence cannot be ‘formed anew’ by nurture. On the contrary, in the course of the action, he turns out to be nobler than his brother, whose nobility of blood does not result in nobility of action. Rosader overpowers Saladyn with the help of his servant Adam Spencer, and escapes to the woods of Arden, where he presents himself as a forester. When Rosader and Adam grow weak from hunger on their way to the forest, Adam, as the father figure, offers his blood as nutrition to hungry Rosader: “Let me die, I will presently cut my veins, and, master, with the warm blood relieve your fainting spirits: suck on that till I end and you be comforted” (R 63). Critics have read this moment as a “dark parody of Christian communion and a jarring insertion of cannibalism within pastoral romance” (Mentz, Romance 160). Adam’s comment foreshadows, as we shall see, the sacramental literalism in Lodge’s later romance A Margarite of America. In the context of Rosalynd’s testing of class identities, it is striking that Rosader, after having fled the spiteful attempts by his brother to transubstantiate his nobility and just when he is about to enter the pastoral world disguised as a forester, is offered the opportunity to physically incorporate a servant – an act which, according to the Catholic concept, would affect his noble substance. Rosader refuses Adam’s sacrifice, and they instead join the supper of Gerismond and his followers which resembles Christ’s feast with his disciples; their supper is not a moment of sacrifice, however, but celebrates the communion between exiled nobles. Rather than pursue the early reference to Eucharistically inflected incorporation, which will be of central concern in Lodge’s later romance A Margarite, the ensuing narrative of Rosalynd focuses on the task of perceiving substances hidden under possibly false accidents and on questions of identity transformation. By staging a test of class substance before the character enters the pastoral world, the romance’s plot innovatively outsources the issue of class transubstantiation to its frame narrative. In the main narrative set in pastoral Arden, the focus shifts to the attempted gender transformation of its female protagonist: what happens to a young, royal woman who puts on the clothing of a male shep-

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herd? How does she interact in her masculine role with the man she is secretly in love with? When and how does she reveal her true identity? This identity experiment and the erotic friction that derives from the role play turned out to be so attractive to readers that it secured Rosalynd not only the reputation of “the most accomplished pastoral romance” of the period, next to the Arcadia (Salzman, English Prose Fiction 72), and a long print history, but also a renowned dramatic adaptation in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. ¹³⁹ While nobility cannot be suppressed in Rosalynd, gender identity can more easily be concealed. In contrast to Pandosto, Menaphon, and the Arcadia, no character (except Alinda) sees through Rosalynd’s disguise: Rosader does not recognise the woman he fell in love with at court, nor does Gerismond identify his daughter. The shepherdess Phoebe falls in love with the supposed swain. These misrecognitions are even more remarkable since Rosalynd’s new, male looks are similar to her earlier female appearance. The narrator describes Rosalynd’s and Ganymede’s beauty in analogous Petrarchan comparisons. For example, “[u]pon her cheeks there seemed a battle between the Graces […]. The blush that glories Luna […] was not tainted with such a pleasant dye as the vermilion flourished on the silver hue of Rosalynde’s countenance” (R 37), while “in his cheeks the vermilion teinture of the rose flourished upon natural alabaster, the blush of the morn and Luna’s silver show were so lively portrayed” (R 108; cf. also Paran 96 – 97). By reference to the conventionalised Petrarchan comparisons, the narrator emphasises that factors such as equally conventionalised dress codes and inherited gender expectations are enough to effect the convincing gender change. Just like Sidney’s gender- and class-ambivalent protagonists, Rosalynd has incited critical debates regarding her status as either a proto-feminist figure or as a misogynist gender bender who ultimately reinforces the gender stereotypes of the day. Ganymede’s ‘proper’ masculinity entails misogyny, as he soon remarks, “what mad cattle you women be […]. They delight to be courted, and then glory to seem coy” (R 49). In response, Alinda reminds Ganymede of his ‘actual’ sex by playing on the proverbial notion that “truth is ever naked” (R 106): “if your robes were off, what mettle are you made of that you are so satirical against women? Is it not a foul bird that defiles its own nest?” (R 49). Ganymede nonetheless “keep[s] decorum” in his role play and envisions an all-male world without female vices: “if man had grown from man, […] men had never been troubled with inconstancy” (R 50). He acknowledges, however, that his defini-

 For differences between the plot of the narrative and that of the play, which are often overlooked in criticism, see Charles Whitworth’s “Rosalynde As You Like It and As Lodge Wrote It.”

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tion of femininity depends on his male perspective. This insight into the importance of personal perspective for the creation of gender stereotypes is one of the main concerns of the narrative, which will also shape Ganymede’s later role play as Rosalynd. Ganymede also argues that clothes are constitutive of allegedly natural feminine qualities such as beauty and courtesy: “all women have desire to tie sovereignty to their petticoats and ascribe beauty to themselves, where if boys might put on their garments perhaps they would prove as comely; if not as comely, it may be more courteous” (R 71). Trying to provoke Alinda, Ganymede here voices an idea which we have encountered in Greene’s and Sidney’s romances, too: clothes might have transubstantiating power, they might be capable of creating the essential qualities which they were meant only to express or augment according to the conservative sermons, pamphlets, and laws of Elizabeth’s reign. By contrast, Alinda, who believes in the ‘mettle’ underneath attire, takes a more essentialist view, arguing that “[w]omen must love, or they must cease to live, and therefore did nature frame them fair that they might be subjects to fancy” (R 94). Just as the characters disagree regarding their implied essentialist versus constructivist notions of sex and gender, so the narrator’s opinions oscillate between them. On the one hand, he comments that Alinda and Rosalynd take pity on Rosader’s lovesickness “according to the nature of their sex” (R 68), but on the other hand, Rosalynd performs the role of Ganymede convincingly. The oscillation is also registered in the narrator’s use of personal pronouns to depict the transformation of his gender-ambivalent protagonist, the “amorous girl-boy” (R 102). While the narrator, like the narrators of Menaphon and the Arcadia, switches to the new name Ganymede and the male pronoun after the disguise, he does so less consistently. Sometimes, his choice of pronoun changes within a few words: “Ganymede, who was loath to let him [Rosader] out of her presence, began thus: ‘Nay forester,’ quoth he, ‘[…] let me see how thou canst woo […]’” (R 79, my emphasis). A pattern that emerges is a tribute to heteronormativity because references to Ganymede’s passion for Rosader use the female pronoun, thus emphasising the heterosexual nature of this attachment and defusing the subversive impact of the homoerotic attraction which culminates in a gay marriage scene between Ganymede and Rosader.¹⁴⁰ Rosalynd’s disguise soon turns out to have more strategic value than protecting the women from attacks. When Rosalynd alias Ganymede meets Rosader in  For an account of the homoerotic potential of early modern romances, including the Arcadia, see Stanivukovic, who concludes: “The division between sodomy (excluded from romances) and homoeroticism (inscribed in them) suggests that prose romances distinguished between threatening and non-threatening discourses of non-normative desire” (“Knights” 183).

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the woods, s/he uses the allegedly all-male, homosocial encounters to test the love of Rosader and to get to know him better than the conventions of heterosexual courtship would allow.¹⁴¹ For example, the women tempt him to fall in love with Alinda, who is, in contrast to Rosalynd, present and available. Distrust of outer appearances is at the heart of the courtship between Rosader and Rosalynd/Ganymede (and later between his brother Saladyn and Alinda/Aliena). As Alinda remarks, faces do not always offer reliable “calendars of fancy” (R 96). Although the narrative opens with the legacy of Rosader’s father that emphasises the untrustworthiness and fickleness of women’s outward shows (R 30), Rosader falls in love with Rosalynd immediately, thus fulfilling the romance convention of love at first sight: “But as love, willing to make him as amorous as he was valiant, presented him with the sight of Rosalynd, whose admirable beauty so inveigled the eye of Rosader that forgetting himself he stood and fed his looks on the favour of Rosalynd’s face” (R 38). Despite Sir John’s misogynist warnings against women’s dissembling, it is the women in particular who have to find out how serious and reliable the men’s professions of love are, whether they are subject to momentary fancy and sexual passion or are an expression of a more deep-seated and long-lasting love. The fact that both Rosader and Saladyn are of noble heritage even complicates the matter,¹⁴² since love is considered a trifle at court, as the women themselves remember. Rosalynd “accounted love a toy and fancy a momentary passion, that as it was taken in with a gaze it might be shaken off with a wink” (R 39), and Alinda admits, “While I lived in the court I held love in contempt […]. I knew not affection while I lived in dignity, nor could Venus countercheck me as long as my fortune was majesty and my thoughts honour” (R 93). Saladyn likewise recollects, “whilst I lived in the court I knew not love’s cumber, but I held affection as a toy, not as a malady” (R 105). These characterisations of courtship correspond to the eroticised politics under Elizabeth, which permitted courtiers “to love without loving, and to desire without desiring; the Queen, to be flattered without in any way diminishing her fame or her majesty. At the court of Elizabeth, then, courtship was frequently separated off from its nuptial function

 Therefore Rosalynd has been championed by critics as the chief example of how the genre explores the pastoral mask as a means of forming and transforming the self. As Walter R. Davis puts it in one of the most influential readings of Rosalynd, “conscious artifice, the deliberate playing of a role through a mask” is “of the utmost importance […] to the exploration of human possibilities” (“Masking in Arden” 155). Disguises here offer the “possibility of striking an attitude in order to clarify one’s sense of one’s self or position” (153).  The narrative’s opening lines point out that their father was “a knight of most honourable parentage” (R 27).

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and became an end in itself” (Bates 89). The proverbial unreliability and dissemblance of the courtier is registered in Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589). In his influential poetological treatise, Puttenham invents the rhetorical figure of the Courtier by ‘englishing’ Allegoria as the Courtier or “Figure of False Semblant or Dissimulation” (271): “the courtly figure allegoria […] is when we speak one thing and think another, and that our words and our meanings meet not” (270). As Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn note in their introduction to The Art of English Poesy, “[t]o use allegory and to be a courtier are, in essence, the very same thing” (60). In Rosalynd, the courtiers not only dissemble by the use of figurative speech, but also by using disguises. Like disguise, allegory is based on a semantic paradox: disguise is the sign that disappears as soon as it appears since “to be effective, a disguise must be perceived, but not be recognised as such” (L. Davis 5). Similarly, for those who are unable to decode allegory, it is not perceived as allegory at all but taken at face value, and the allegorical coding would not have been necessary for readers who can decipher it (Miller 162). Both disguise and allegory, however, allow for secret communications and both attract, as we saw in Musidorus’s revelation scenario, attention and the hermeneutic desire of decoding. The romance emphasises the excitement and seduction associated with uncertainty and dissembling in court(ier)ship. Finding out what mettle the beloved is made of beyond his or her rhetorical as much as material clothes is a source not only of anxiety, but also of hermeneutic and erotic pleasure. In the complicated decoding processes involved in courtship, the false outer appearance of Rosalynd as Ganymede allows her a truer insight into her beloved’s mind than her ‘true’ female identity ever could. Ganymede even goes a step further when he offers to play-act Rosalynd for Rosader, thus preparing him for encounters with the real Rosalynd. Rosalynd here creates the opportunity to rehearse her own behaviour and experiment with her feelings; the disguise offers her a means of genuine expression through a distancing role that is similar to the conventionalised “verse-game” of the eclogues, which likewise offered a means for possibly genuine expression in the framework of a convention (Nellist 16). Although Lodge still incorporates a number of poems in the narrative – albeit to a much smaller degree than Sidney’s Old Arcadia – disguise as a plot device partly takes over the function of the verse eclogue; it facilitates the gradual emancipation of prose narrative from verse. Likewise, in contrast to the Old Arcadia, insight into the characters’ feelings is mainly rendered via monologues in prose rather than in poems and songs. The prose monologues create an aesthetic of introspection that provides readers with reliable information regarding the characters’ states of mind. Rather than being informed by the authorial narrator (who in some moments is an explicit “I”; for example R 37 and 66), readers di-

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rectly witness how the characters attempt to clarify their situation, lament their positions, or debate their future behaviour with themselves (R 32, 34, 41). These monologues are given subtitles such as “Saladyn’s mediation with himself” (R 32), “Rosalynd’s Passion” (R 42), or “Saladyn’s Complaint” (R 66). In this way the romance displays a narrative situation and means of characterisation which are often considered an innovation of the novels that emerged in the eighteenth century (cf. Fludernik 71). Further, the monologues demonstrate that the characters act on purpose and attempt to measure the consequences of their actions beforehand; Rosalynd thus opposes claims that the intentionality of action is an unprecedented characteristic feature of the novel (cf. Fludernik 68). The departure from poems in favour of prose in the romance’s discourse reinforces an important claim in its story, namely that Petrarchism is an outmoded discourse which does not agree with the realities of love. It is only at the court, where love is seen as a trifle, that Rosalynd feels flattered by a conventional sonnet that includes the typical Petrarchan comparisons of eyes as suns, hair as gold, teeth as pearls, and so forth (R 40). In the forest, Rosalynd alias Ganymede challenges the Petrarchan rhetoric and questions the truthfulness of conventionalised poems: “‘I can smile,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘at the sonnetos, canzones, madrigals, rounds and roundelays that these pensive patients [suffering from lovesickness] pour out when their eyes are more full of wantonness than their hearts of passion” (R 76). As Stanivukovic has argued, the poems which Lodge includes are deliberately unsatisfactory in rhetorical terms and thus “turn love-lyricism into travesty” (“Rhetoric” 237) in order to favour a more complex depiction of the dynamics and problems of courtship, rendered in a polyphonous prose narrative. The parody of Petrarchan conventions comes to the fore, for example, in an eclogue in which Ganymede represents Rosalynd and tests whether Rosader is guilty of “deep-dissembled doubleness” (R 80). Rosader here can affirm his “[t]ruth and regard and honour” (R 81). As Rosalynd observes afterwards, in this eclogue she takes on a multi-layered pose (which in Shakespeare’s As You Like It is given yet another level, the boy actor’s role of a female character). She is playing a man playing a woman who incorporates the oxymoronic Petrarchan ideal of an adored woman, the “fairest” and “chaste” “saint” and “goddess” (R 68) who is “cruel and unkind” (R 67) in not yielding to the lover: “Have I not played the woman handsomely, and showed myself as coy in grants as courteous in desires, and been as full of suspicion as men of flattery?” (R 82). Through the role play, which culminates in a mock marriage, Rosalynd can teach Rosader a more realistic notion of femininity beyond poetic conventions. Moreover, she overcomes the gendered courtship rules in her more active role

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as Ganymede – in contrast to Alinda, who cannot make the first step in the wooing process because of the ideal of a gentlewoman: she would “rather die than discover any desire, for there is nothing more precious in a woman than to conceal love and to die modest” (R 94). Therefore, the task for Rosalynd is not so much to reveal her true female identity beneath the male disguise (in contrast to the Arcadia, no guardians stop her from doing so), but rather to achieve a transformation of Rosader’s notion of Rosalynd. While he can keep thinking about the beautiful female noblewoman he met at court, she has to make him perceive and love Rosalynd’s substance beyond Petrarchan clichés of the beautiful but cruel mistress. In other words, she has to achieve a transubstantiation of Rosader’s idea of Rosalynd. Once she has transformed Rosalynd in Rosader’s mind, she can reveal her female identity.¹⁴³ In this context of identity transformation, the question arises once again as to the degree to which Rosalynd’s new appearance as a young man affects her inner self – or, put differently, the extent to which her metamorphosis through disguise involves a transubstantiation. It is one of the appeals of Lodge’s psychologically sophisticated narrative that Rosalynd, in the very process of re-educating Rosader, experiments with her femininity, that her allegedly inborn female ‘substance’ changes to a certain extent under the masculine accidents. As we have seen, the disguise increasingly offers Rosalynd not only the chance to explore her love and test a relationship with Rosader, but also opens up ways to behave more freely and more self-confidently than at court, where she was restricted by the gender expectations of “chaste, obedient, and silent” femininity (R 30). The detailed narration of Rosalynd’s behaviour and the degree to which readers gain insight into the characters via Lodge’s aesthetics of introspection make the disguise scenarios of Rosalynd psychologically appealing and it allows the romance to utilise “histrionics in the interest of ethical clarification more fully than any other work of Elizabethan fiction” (W. Davis, Idea and Act 155). Consistent with this partial transubstantiation under her metamorphic disguise, Rosalynd’s eventual retransformation into a woman is not described as the shedding of a disguise to reveal a substantial truth underneath, as Rosalynd initially claims. Still attired as Ganymede, she promises to restore Rosalynd by means of “necromancy and magic” (R 116). This reference to magic, however, is a red herring; in contrast to Lodge’s later romance A Margarite, which in many respects inverts Rosalynd, magic is not at work in Arden. Instead, as Iser observes, Rosalynd rules out the supernatural power which was still vital

 Hilaire Kallendorf describes this process as a ‘self-exorcism,’ which young lovers in early modern romances typically have to undergo as a prerequisite for marriage (195).

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in its models such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1480s, publ. 1504) and in some contemporary works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to which Lodge occasionally refers. Rosalynd replaces magical transformation with identity change through role play (Iser, “Liebe und Verwandlung” 156, 159). Accordingly, no magic act of necromancy reanimates the much-missed Rosalynd of the narrative’s opening. Rather, Rosalynd’s reinvestiture as a woman is presented as the attire of her transubstantiated, no longer conventionally feminine identity: “In went Ganymede and dressed herself in women’s attire, having on a gown of green, with kirtle of rich sandal, so quaint that she seemed Diana triumphing in the forest. Upon her head, she wore a chaplet of roses, which gave her such a grace that she looked like Flora perked in the pride of her flowers” (R 122, my emphasis). The narrator’s phrasing emphasises that Rosalynd’s clothing gives her the accidents of female grace and goddess-like beauty. As in the case of her cross-dressing as Ganymede, the accidents of idealised gender are established via dress rather than being an expression of internal, substantial gender identity. Here, femininity (and, by extension, masculinity) turn out to be chimeras. Just like the spectral evidence which Greene’s romances offer for the substance of royalty in particular and class identity more generally, feminine ‘substance’ is at stake in Rosalynd: how can it possibly be perceived, measured, and proven? Neither the Petrarchan conventions of the beautiful but cruel mistress nor the courtly ideal of the silent, chaste, and obedient woman prove to be substantially true for Rosalynd. Instead, her gender identity (as much as Rosader’s) is tested and negotiated through a complex role play and use of false accidents which transubstantiate her identity in decisive respects. Like the previously discussed romances, Rosalynd ends on a recuperative note. The gender and class trouble as well as the sexual confusion caused by Rosalynd’s and Alinda’s disguises are settled in the end, when three heterosexual marriages within the same rank occur between Rosader and Rosalynd; Alinda and Saladyn; Phoebe and Montanus. Moreover, the legitimate king Gerismond is reinstalled as ruler. However, Nancy Lindheim’s claim that the text therefore ultimately discourages role play and disguise is too apodictic in my view (Lindheim 126). Throughout its narrative the romance presents characters and scenes which disturb and question the gender and class order, and even its ending does not celebrate Rosalynd’s reinvestiture as a return to her true, feminine essence. As in the case of Menaphon and Pandosto, one can only speculate whether early modern readers and theatre audiences of As You Like It focused exclusively on the recuperative ending, or kept in mind the subversive action beforehand. In any case, the narrative’s fundamental question “if your robes were off, what mettle are you made of?” will have resonated with early modern readers in search of or in fear of new rank and gender identities.

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“I held it for the substance” – The Accidents of Romance in A Margarite Published six years after Rosalynd, A Margarite of America is a much darker and much more violent narrative. While Ganymede does not accept the melancholic self-fashioning of the lover who “hunt[s] after a cloud and love[s] without reward or regard” (R 78), in the world of A Margarite, such hunting after romanticised clouds and shadows is not only ridiculous, but life-threatening. A Margarite of America is the tale of the princess of Mosco who cannot differentiate between accidents and substance since she takes appearances at face value, as the proverbial leitmotif emphasises: “Margarita, poor princess, thinking all that gold which glistered.”¹⁴⁴ Therefore, she is deluded by the “most hateful doubleness” of the villainous prince of Cusco, Arsadachus, whom she is meant to marry in order to peacefully join two dynasties that are at war (MA 94). Arsadachus obeys his father and courts Margarita according to the conventions, but soon comes to desire her closest friend, Philenia, whom he attempts first to seduce, then to rape, and whom he eventually kills while masked. Here, disguise is presented as the strategy of a ruthless, lascivious killer and is hence fully divested of the beneficent and revelatory power that it had in Sidney’s Arcadia and Lodge’s Rosalynd. Neither Arsadachus’s actual, textile disguise, nor his metaphorical masquerade open a space for the transformation and revelation of identity or become a way to communicate secretly with a beloved. Instead, Arsadachus’s dissembling and “cloak[ing] with” Margarita and her father’s entire court are a Machiavellian means to pursue his villainous schemes (MA 106).¹⁴⁵ Put cynically, Arsadachus is the perfect courtier in Puttenham’s sense since he is the most elaborate dissimulator of the narrative. After all, the allegorical other-speaking envisioned by Puttenham as typical of the courtier is ethically ambiguous. As Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien have pointed out, it becomes impossible to distinguish ‘false’ from ‘fair semblants.’ Refined eloquence becomes independent of the morality of the courtier who employs it (Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination 190 – 191).  A Margarite 92. The line is later repeated almost verbatim: “Margarita, poor princess, supposing all that gold that glistered” (108). Cf. Beware the Cat (41), which also cites the proverb to warn against the seemingly reputable Catholic bawd. Parenthetical references to A Margarite of America will be abbreviated to ‘MA.’  Cf. Claudette Pollack’s discussion of Margarite as an ‘Elizabethan medley’ of Castiglione’s The Courtier and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Beecher qualifies Pollack’s argument; he plausibly posits that Lodge does not directly refer to the writings of Machiavelli, but is instead influenced by the “popularized ‘Machiavellian’ tyrant then stalking the Elizabethan stage, a character often barely hiding his origins in the folk Vice figure of the Tudor interludes” (“Introduction A Margarite” 12).

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A Margarite does, however, also present pastoral disguises in the romantic mode, albeit highly self-consciously: at the more light-hearted outset of the tale, Philenia’s beloved Minecius, later murdered by Arsadachus, puts on a shepherd’s dress to express his devotion to Philenia: “Minecius sought all means possible to satisfy her delights; sometimes therefore, under a pastoral habit, he would hide him in the groves and woods where the ladies were accustomed to walk, where recording a ruthful lay as they passed by, he through his harmony caused them believe that the tree tattled love” (MA 84). In contrast to Greene’s, Sidney’s, and Lodge’s earlier romances, the shepherd’s attire of Minecius is neither necessitated by the plot nor expresses a feeling of debasement by love. Instead, Minecius deliberately uses it as an established romance convention, and the women immediately decipher it as this pastoral courtly pose.¹⁴⁶ Margarita is so enchanted by the conventions of pastoral role play and poetry that she falls in love with romance and casts Arsadachus as her romantic hero regardless of his actual character; as Katherine Wilson puts it, Margarita “is so convinced that she is living in the middle of a romance that she assumes all those around her are guided by romance conventions” (Fictions 161). She sees the actualization of her romantic “fancies” in the love of Minecius and Philenia, and transfers their romantic love to Arsadachus and herself, “who was ordained to be the miracle of love”: The interchange of which affections [between Minecius and Philenia] was so conformable to the fancies of the princess that she, who was ordained to be the miracle of love, learned by them and their manners the true method of the same; for when Minecius courted his Philenia, Margarita conceited her Arsadachus; and by perceiving the true heart of the one, supposed the perfect habit of the other. (MA 84)

The text here juxtaposes, emphasised by alliteration, ‘heart’ and ‘habit’ – Margarita deludes herself about Arsadachus’s nature by mistaking outward conduct (and noble attire) for a noble essence, and by deducing true love from the rituals of courtly courtship: “It was wonderful to see him counterfeit sighs, to feign love, dissemble tears, to work treasons, vow much, perform little; in brief, vow all faith and perform nothing but falsehood” (MA 92). In the latter part of the narrative, this misrecognition is highlighted by a magical device. After having fled from the court to search for Arsadachus, Margarita meets Arsinous, who was banished from the court after his daughter had

 In the latter half of the narrative, when Margarita travels to Cusco, it is necessary for her to disguise herself as a country maid. However, everyone she meets sees through her disguise immediately and recognises the princess.

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been killed by Arsadachus. He has, in the meantime, become a hermit who practices magic; in order to test Margarita, he evokes an image of Arsadachus, which Margarita embraces, only to see it evaporate. This device of magic demonstrates in a pointed manner Margarita’s inability to distinguish between accidents and substance and to differentiate between her romantic projections and reality. When Arsinous lectures her, “whatever you saw was but an apparition, not the substance, devised only by your servant Arsinous to discover you,” Margarita replies: “Ah, pardon me, […] I held it for the substance” (MA 159). As Joan Pong Linton puts it, the episode raises “the question of whether Margarita can distinguish the real Arsadachus from an illusion, or whether she has not all along projected onto the Cuscan an image of her own desire” (The Romance 58).¹⁴⁷ The scenario points to the gap which increasingly widens in Lodge’s tale between the accidents of romance and its substance – and this applies not only to the liaison between Margarita and Arsadachus, but also to the literary mode of romance. As I shall elaborate in the following, Lodge upholds many of romance’s formal characteristics and plot elements, but he relinquishes its narrative core, namely the principle that love will prevail and lead to a happy ending. A Margarite, as a highly self-conscious romance, criticises a naïve, conventionalised notion of romantic love by highlighting Margarita’s, and later Arsadachus’s, misconceptions and by letting the audience realise their mistakes early in the narrative. Further, with its Machiavellian protagonist, its countless acts of extreme cruelty, its association of sexuality with violence, and its tragic ending, Lodge’s A Margarite emphasises and radicalises the darker sides of the romance mode which are usually contained by cheerful endings. Critics have identified a number of literary and cultural influences which might have shaped Lodge’s violent take on the mode of romance which his fellow English writers Sidney, Greene, and Spenser, and also Lodge himself, had pursued in the 1580s and 1590s. Focusing on questions of genre development, Éliane Cuvelier places A Margarite in the context of prose fiction which was inspired by the Italian novella and its depiction of horror, such as Greene’s Planetomachia (1585) and Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Donald Beecher emphasises the influence of the fashionable English revenge tragedy that revived Senecan revenge drama (“Introduction A Margarite” 11– 26). In a cultural-historical approach, Linton argues that Lodge undertook “a veiled critique of empire” in his romance (The Romance 7). Lodge’s critique of romance as literary form entails, according to Linton, a cri-

 In Sidney’s revised Arcadia, a manipulator of signs is introduced who is akin to Arsadachus: here, Amphialus is aware of “how few there be that can discern between truth and truthlikeness, between shows and substance” (NA 325).

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tique of the ‘romance of the New World’ and its mystification of mercantile colonialism as well as of England’s rivalry with Catholic Spain in the colonies (39 – 61; cf. also Roberts).¹⁴⁸ From my equally ‘historical-formal’ point of view, I will pursue an additional reason for Lodge’s deconstruction of romance. I shall argue that Lodge redeploys the heritage of medieval romance, and in particular its Eucharistic references, for a denigration of idolatrous love and a social critique of late Elizabethan England.

“remember thou leavest me heartless” – Romantic Idolatry and Sacramental Realism in A Margarite In Lodge’s narrative, the idolatry of romantic lovers is presented as a deluded, sacrilegious act with devastating consequences on private and political levels; as Katherine Wilson puts it, “[i]dolatry meets its nemesis in possibly the goriest, the most allusive, and the most ironic of Elizabethan novels” (Fictions 158). It is in this context that the Catholic heritage resurfaces in A Margarite of America, whose very title might have invoked the Eucharist for some readers. ‘Margarita’ is the Latin word for pearl, and Rabanus Maurus had contended, referring to Matthew, that “By pearls is meant spiritual sacraments (per margaritas spiritualia sacramenta), as in the Gospel: ‘neither cast ye your pearls before swine,’ that is, do not intrust the inner mysteries to the impure” (qtd in R. Garrett 19). Medieval pearl commonplaces, the fourteenth-century dream narrative Pearl, as well as The Testament of Love by Thomas Usk associated the pearl with the Eucharist (Falke 144 and passim; Phillips; Heninger 97– 98). As Robert Max Garrett put it in a recently re-evaluated reading of Pearl, “I have an idea that the whole poem arose from gazing at the Elevated Host in the hands of the Priest […] ‘round, white, like a pearl, the meeting place of heaven and earth – a pearl, Margaret’ – something like this would, I think, be the train of thought which would bring the germ of the poem to him.”¹⁴⁹ One of the pastoral poems in A Margarite might refer to this association of pearls with the Eucharist since it envisions transubstantiation in an eroticised context: Ye gentle pearls, where ere did nature make you? Or whether in Indian shores you found your mould,

 See also Benedict Robinson’s study Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton, which argues that “the genre of romance shapes early modern identities in the scene of cross-cultural encounter” (2).  R. Garrett 36. See Phillips 185 and passim for qualifications of Garrett’s argument.

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Or in those lands where spices serve for fuel: Oh if I might from out your essence take you, And turn myself to shape what ere I would, How gladly would I be my lady’s jewel! (MA 88)

Minecius here envisions the transmutation of the pearls into himself, so that he replaces their “essence” while the accidents remain the same, thus allowing him to be physically close to his beloved. For most of Lodge’s Anglican readers, the Catholic Eucharist was an abandoned rite that survived in the cultural mainstream, as I have argued, as a spectre of religio-political threat, but also as a partly secularised heritage which was put to new uses. However, Lodge himself had with all probability already converted to Catholicism while writing A Margarite and hence had a different approach to the Catholic Mass.¹⁵⁰ In contrast to Greene’s and Sidney’s romances, Eucharistic references in A Margarite do not relate to issues of identity change and the search for the real presence of the beloved, but to a radicalisation of the romantic motif of the mutual physical incorporation of lovers, and in particular to the motif of the exchange of hearts. This motif had already been associated with the Eucharist in medieval romances such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Chrétien de Troyes’s narratives, Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, and Le Roman du Castelain de Couci et la dame de Fayel – a literary tradition which Lodge, possibly inspired by Spenser, turned to even more than Sidney and Greene (K. Wilson, Fictions 140, 158; Beecher, “Introduction A Margarite” 46). As Barbara Newman has shown, “[e]xchanging hearts is a compelling way to represent coinherence, that mysterious exchange by which one person’s life and love animate the body of another” in both religious and secular literary traditions (“Exchanging Hearts” 4).¹⁵¹ Newman traces the mutual influence of medieval European fiction and hagiographies in the tradition of mysticism which merge the Eucharist and the notion of the Sacred Heart. She shows how in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, religious expression was eroticised to a hitherto unparalleled extent. Possibly drawing on the romance literature of the time, “the devout soon discovered that Jesus, like a good courtly lover, was eager to exchange hearts with his  Lodge’s conversion to Catholicism was probably a prolonged and protracted process; see Shell 77.  Cf. chapter 3 of Barbara Newman’s forthcoming study on The Permeable Self: Medieval Meditations on the Personal, presented at Harvard’s Medieval Colloquium on 1 October 2009. It traces the motif of exchanging hearts and its link to the Eucharist in medieval European romance and mysticism. The page numbers refer to the manuscript of Newman’s talk. See also Newman’s earlier work Newman, “La mystique”; Newman, “Love Divine” and Cooper for comments on the interaction between romance and mystic hagiographies (238, 242).

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brides. The devotional tradition followed the same course as the secular, progressing from lyric explorations of the theme to exemplary narratives, with the latter insisting more strenuously over time on the material reality of the exchange” (33). The exchange of hearts with Jesus, often caused by or compared to the Eucharist, became a habitual feature of women’s mystical vitae as chronicled in autobiographies and hagiographies up to the early modern period (cf. Cabassut). As Newman recounts, the exchange of hearts was such a widespread topos in female hagiography that the theologian Jérôme Ribet still insisted on its material reality in the 1880s, linking it to the question of Christ’s multilocation. Ribet argued that just as Christ could be physically present in heaven and in the element of bread simultaneously, so his heart could beat at the same time in Christ’s own breast and that of a chosen saint (Ribet 635 – 636). In its literary and theatrical history, the motif of the exchange of hearts was frequently associated with the consumption of the heart. Such incorporation scenarios are repeatedly modelled on the Catholic Eucharist, as Milad Doueihi’s study A Perverse History of the Human Heart shows for example with respect to Lai d’Ignaure and the Le Roman du Castelain, two thirteenth-century narratives that offer early examples of the motif (22– 45).¹⁵² In these tales, women unwittingly eat the hearts of their lovers which are served to them by their jealous husbands. In a variation on this motif, a story of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone recounts how a young man, the clandestine lover of Ghismunda, is killed by her father because of his incestuous desire for his daughter. After killing Guiscardo, Ghismunda’s father sends her Guiscardo’s heart. In a golden chalice Ghismunda intermingles blood from her lover’s heart with her tears and a lethal poison, drinks the contents, and awaits her death while pressing the heart of her lover to her breast – a powerful secular version of the Eucharistic mutual incorporation, which was made popular on the Elizabethan stage in a dramatic adaptation entitled The Tragedy of Tancred and Gismund (1592). Here, the desperate Gismund again and again addresses her lover’s heart in the golden goblet as “my sweet heart” and “mine owne deare heart” (Wilmot sig. G4r) and thereby reinforces the notion of an exchange of hearts and the desire for mutual incorporation.¹⁵³ In the tradition of the legend of the eaten heart, Dante’s late

 See also Solterer on the profane Eucharist of lovers in Le Roman du Castelain, which, like Lodge’s romance, literalises the metaphor.  See William E. Slights’s study The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare for a discussion of Boccaccio’s tale and its dramatic adaptation in the context of narratives of cardiectomy, which indicate “the traumatic impact of anatomical instruction and practice on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England” (106). Slights further discusses the infatuation with cardiectomy and the motif of the eaten heart in Jacobean and Caroline drama.

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thirteenth-century Vita Nuova is a landmark text, which partly innovates the motif (Doueihi 56). Here, a lover knowingly eats the heart of her beloved that is offered by a god. The literalisation of the exchange of hearts is represented in a dream, in which the narrator sees Cupid in whose arms there lay a figure asleep and naked except for a crimson cloth loosely wrapping it. Looking at it very intently, I realized that it was the lady of the blessed greeting, the lady who earlier in the day had favoured me with her salutation. In one of his hands he held a fiery object, and he seemed to say these words: ‘Behold your heart.’ And after a short while, he seemed to awaken the sleeping one, and through the power of his art made her eat this burning object in his hand. Hesitantly, she ate it. (Dante Alighieri 6)

The narrator observes his beloved, Beatrice, eat his heart in a dream which combines his feelings of deep adoration with his desire for mutual incorporation. Despite the violence inherent in the vision, the narrator is only distressed by its disappearance, and uses it, once awake, as a source of inspiration for love sonnets. English prose narratives written in the 1580s and 1590s drew on the motif of the eaten heart and love as ingestion. For instance, Greene’s Menaphon employs the idea of devouring the beloved’s flesh in a metaphorical manner as the narrator states that Samela’s “mouth could digest no other meat save only her sweet Melicertus” (M 155). The Arcadia invokes the notion of an eaten heart when Dorus “might at least have free access to feed his eyes with that [the image of Pamela] which should at length eat up his heart” (OA 92– 93, NA 138). The romance, as we have seen, briefly transcends the metaphor when Pyrocles’s psyche is overwhelmed by a hallucination of ingesting his beloved as wine. Lyly’s Euphues and His England likewise compares sexual contact with drinking wine and sees both as analogous to fashion: “To love women and never enjoy them is as much as to love wine and never taste it, or to be delighted with fair apparel and never wear it” (294). The narrator elaborates on the metaphor of love as ingestion: “the qualities of the mind, the beauty of the body, either in man or woman, are but the sauce to whet our stomachs, not the meat to fill them. For they that live by the view of beauty still look very lean, and they that feed only upon virtue at board will go with an [sic] hungry belly to bed” (Euphues and His England 296). The metaphor of the exchange of hearts also recurs in the romances of the 1580s; for example, Pyrocles calls Philoclea “the owner of my heart” (NA 87). In Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, the equation of erotic desire with hunger for food is made in cruder, more misogynist terms. Here, an old woman complains, “churchmen have so much mind of young rabbits, old men such joy in young chickens, and bachelors in pig’s flesh take such delight, that an old sow, a tough hen, or a grey cony are not accepted” (326). One year after Lodge’s A Margarite, Jack of Newbury used a Dantesque dream scenario

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to literalise the notion of the heart wounded by love. Jack’s mistress has a dream in which she encounters an injured dove that transmutes into her own, bleeding heart: “thinking to take up the pigeon methought I had in my hands my own heart, wherein methought an arrow stuck so deep that the blood trickled down the shaft and lay upon the feathers” (321). When she runs home “with my bleeding heart in my hand” to cure it, she wakes up (321). In contrast to Dante’s narrator, the experience does not inspire her to write poetry, but is part of her indirect courting of her servant Jack, who should have come to her help when she was groaning in her chamber. In Deloney’s ‘bourgeois’ fiction, references to the romance tradition become part of a contrived seduction strategy of ‘middle-class’ characters. In its take on this tradition, A Margarite of America infuses erotic imagination with Eucharistic imagery in an increasingly literalised manner. Initially, the exchange of hearts is invoked rhetorically, as a metaphor of love which is presented as a mutual incorporation of lovers. When Arsadachus leaves Mosco under the pretext of having to see his ill father, Margarita affirms what she understands as their strong, irrevocable bond: “Ah my soul. Must thou leave me when thou wert wholly incorporate in this body? […] Ah dear Arsadachus, since thou must leave me, remember thou leavest me without soul, remember thou leavest me heartless” (MA 137). While the syntax of “thou leavest me heartless” aspires to the mutuality of their exchange of souls and hearts (Margarita remains without her heart, but Arsadachus also departs without his heart), the romance’s dramatic irony ensures that readers grasp the third meaning, namely that he leaves her in a heartless manner, “with a feigned look and a false heart” (MA 136). This one sentence puts into a nutshell the overall strategy of A Margarite: it lets readers participate in a deconstruction of romantic love rhetoric by making them realise that conventional meaning glosses over Arsadachus’s ruthless self-gratification. In her “too fiery” love for Arsadachus, Margarita takes her unidirectional profane version of the Eucharist further (MA 138). In the long period while she waits for his return and their marriage, she idolatrously worships a picture of Arsadachus placed before her bed, “offering drops of her blood daily to the deaf image” (MA 138). Once again, A Margarite here literalises a romance convention and thereby emphasises the idolatrous aspects of romantic love. Whereas Cleophila in Sidney’s Arcadia only metaphorically offered “daily oblation” of her “own heart” to the image of Philoclea she carries in her head – “where thoughts be the temple, sight is an altar” (OA 78) – Margarita overdoes her veneration of Arsadachus by sacrificing her real blood. And whereas Zelmane in the New Arcadia reveres the written name of Philoclea in a “foolish idolatry of affection”

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(NA 387) which has been described as “a popery of heart” (Worden 303), Margarita, even worse, worships an actual portrait of her beloved. Lodge here literalises a romance topos, but he might also criticise the pseudo-religious worship of secular portraits that he could witness in Protestant England after the iconoclast attacks. As Margaret Aston has argued, [t]he personal presence which the best miniature painters were able to enclose in so small a space could become the focus of intense feelings; eye contact with a handheld image was an exceptionally intimate prompt. These jeweled objects made to be handled, worn, and cherished in private cabinets might almost seem comparable to the religious images and relics of an earlier period, objects of devotion and protective power which were sometimes carried by noble persons. As the sixteenth century made the terminology of sainthood and worship common currency in the vocabulary of poetic love, the miniature portrait could, as much as any saint’s image in the past, become the meeting point between worshipper and worshipped. (185)

Aston’s observation that the “entry to royal bedrooms or other private spaces might seem to offer access to secrets of the heart” (185) certainly holds true for Margarita’s chamber, over whose entrance “was drawn and carved out of curious white marble the fair goddess of chastity blushing at the sudden interception of Acteon” (MA 83). Once they entered, intruders could see the image of Arsadachus, whom the chaste princess adores with idolatrous devotion. This criticism of Protestant England grows more outspoken in the second half of the romance, in which Arsadachus, as typical of romantic mirror structures, becomes the one who is “suddenly altered” by affection and who surrenders blindly to his love for a dishonest beauty (MA 140).

“he honoured her as a goddess” – Diana and the Cult of Elizabeth I in A Margarite Returned to his father’s kingdom, Arsadachus loses his heart to a beautiful young woman who plays Diana in a courtly masque that was devised by her father Argias, the Duke of Moravia.¹⁵⁴ Just like Margarita, Arsadachus seems to fall

 Diana replaces Margarita, who is the more appropriate incarnation of the chaste goddess. In the exposition, she is presented as “the chiefest, fairest, and chastest, Margarita” (MA 79). When Margarita, disguised as a country maid, searches for Arsadachus in the second part of the romance, a lion devours her maid Fawnia because “she had tasted too much of fleshly love” (MA 156), but licks the hand of chaste Margarita. The scene probably refers to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which a wild lion “lickt” the “lilly hands” of the “royall virgin,” Una, rather than

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in love with the romantic convention as much as with the actual woman embodying this convention. The narrative underpins his equation of role with performer: it turns out that the young actress is also called Diana in real life, in which she performs, again directed by her father, the role of the seemingly chaste seductress. From the very beginning, Arsadachus’s love for his “angelical Diana” is shown to be as idolatrous as Margarita’s love for him (MA 145). Having fallen in the melancholic mood of the Petrarchan lover who considers himself unworthy of his beloved, he writes a poem which opens with the lines: I pine away expecting of the hour, Which through my wayward chance will not arrive; I wait the word, by whose sweet sacred power My lost contents may soon be made alive: (MA 140)

The poem plays on the notion of giving away one’s heart in love, of ‘losing’ one’s ‘contents.’ In the context of the narrative’s overall interest in Eucharistic metaphors and language, it seems plausible that it here also emphasises Arsadachus’s idolatry by a Eucharistic reference: ascribing Diana’s “word” (her acceptance of Arsadachus’s love) “sweet sacred power” and a capacity for healing, lines 3 and 4 of the poem might be modelled on the Roman Catholic liturgy that Lodge knew well, which prepares believers for the reception of the Eucharist with a similar phrase: “Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea,” “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you (verbatim: that you should enter under my roof), but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed” (Catholic Church 313).¹⁵⁵ And indeed, as the plot progresses, the poem, which Diana shows to her cunning father, leads to healing via the real presence of his beloved which Arsadachus so urgently desires. In an ironic repetition of Margarita’s ideal of physical and psychic fusion expounded in the first part of the romance, Diana’s father supports Arsadachus’s claim (that he cannot marry the princess he is not in love with) by describing marriage as “ordained to knit and unite souls and bodies together” (MA 144). Whereas Margarita romanticised a political necessity, Diana’s father in turn invokes romance to overrule the political importance of the royal marriage and to encourage instead Arsadachus’s secret wedding with Diana. Their disobedient marriage causes a spiral of violence: Arsadachus’s father, the king, has Diana’s father torn

killing her (FQ III.5 – 6). The maid’s name might be an ironic comment on the Greene’s ‘high’ romance which celebrates Fawnia’s royal substance (cf. K. Wilson, “From Arcadia” 16).  The Anglican liturgy replaced the phrase with the ‘The Prayer of Humble Access,’ which Cranmer included in the first Common Prayer Book of 1549.

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to pieces as a punishment and threatens to execute Diana, as a consequence of which Arsadachus mutilates and humiliates his own father, kills all nobles who defend him, and, after his parents have died of shock and grief, ascends the throne. As the ruler of Cusco, King Arsadachus turns his idolatrous love for Diana into the new state religion: “he honoured her as a goddess, causing his subjects to erect a shrine and to sacrifice unto her; and such was his superstitious and besotted blindness that he thought it the only paradise of the world to be in her presence; no one was better rewarded than he that could best praise her” (MA 150). The phrasing ‘he honoured her as a goddess’ spotlights the literalisation of the common metaphoric adoration of the beloved as if she were a goddess (‘like a goddess’), which was also employed in Lodge’s earlier romance; here, as we saw, Rosalynd ‘seemed like Diana,’ but was not elevated to a divine status as Diana in A Margarite. In the worship ceremonies orchestrated by Arsadachus, pastoral disguise becomes a ritual robe which helps to re-enact and celebrate the institution of this religion, namely the moment of first falling in love with Diana, as well as Arsadachus’s subsequent lonely pining for her: “Sometimes would he, attiring her like a second Diana ready to chase, disguise himself like a shepherd, and sitting apart solitarily, where he might be in her presence, he would recount such passions” and compose more love poems (MA 150). In comparison to Sidney’s earlier romance, which chronicles the lovers’ infatuation with compassionate criticism, Lodge’s A Margarite takes a much stricter position regarding the idolatrous worship of an earthly woman. One reason for this outright satirical criticism, I propose, was the political implication that erotic adorations had in Elizabethan England; particularly the name which Lodge chooses for his character, Diana, can be read as a comment on the cult of Elizabeth, which merged the respect for the Queen and head of the Anglican Church with the abandoned Catholic veneration of Mary and mythical references to the moon goddess Diana (or to her alternative names, Artemis, Cynthia, and Belphoebe).¹⁵⁶ John Dowland’s verses made the replacement of the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen explicit:

 The moon is the symbol of empire, and the sun of papacy: “The virgin of imperial reform who withstood the claims of the Papacy might therefore well become a chaste moon-goddess shedding the beams of pure religion from her royal throne” (F. Yates 76). My argument partly draws on Katherine Wilson’s work which discusses ‘idolatrous constructions’ in A Margarite and briefly notes a possible link to the cult of Elizabeth (Fictions 156 – 165, esp. 140 and “Revenge” 15). Wilson notes that it “is tempting to read the text as Lodge’s (Catholic) Faerie Queene, in which the Roman church wreaks revenge on Protestant duplicity,” but does not offer such a

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When others sing Venite exultemus! Stand by and turn to Noli emulari! For Quare fremuerunt use Oremus! Vivat ELIZA! for an Ave MARI! (525)

In a similar vein, an engraving of the queen was subtitled, “This Maiden-Queen Elizabeth came into this world, the Eve of the Nativity of the blessed virgin Mary; and died on the Eve of the Annunciation of the virgin Mary, 1602.” This association of Mary and Elizabeth was reinforced by an accompanying couplet, “She was, She is (what can there more be said?) / In earth the first, in heaven the second Maid” (qtd in F. Yates 78 – 79). Courtiers took part in devotional pageants that increasingly adopted the characteristics of liturgy; for instance, Sir Henry Lee fashioned himself as a hermit praying at Elizabeth’s shrine and later erected an altar covered in gold with two burning candles to express his devotion to the queen (McCoy, Alterations 66). Frances Yates traces how the glorification of Elizabeth continued after her death, which in memorial poems “becomes a kind of Assumption of the Virgin, followed by a Coronation of the Virgin in heaven” (79). These secular forms of worship echoed and thereby superseded former Catholic rituals, thus adopting their religious power for political ends. For example, the Saints’ Holy Days were cut down, but the Queen’s Holy Day was celebrated, processing with the host was supplanted by the Queen’s entry, and portraits of the Queen (as well as aristocratic portraits) replaced images of the saints. Hence the Protestant move towards iconoclasm not only led to a destruction of idols of the old faith, but to a strategic replacement with images of the queen.¹⁵⁷ Because of this adoption of Catholic rituals, language, and iconography, critics have described the cult of Elizabeth, which was constructed and celebrated in portraits, pageants, plays, prose, and lyrical poetry, as “monarcholatry” (Bossy 159). In poetry, Elizabethan was perhaps most elaborately praised in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, whose two parts were published in the 1590s and which infused romance with a more straightforward political meaning than I have identified in Greene’s romances of the late 1580s. As a Roman Catholic who made his conversion public in 1596, the same year in which A Margarite was published,¹⁵⁸ Lodge reading (Fictions 140; cf. also 159). See Cuvelier, “Renaissance Catholicism” for a discussion of anti-Protestant allusions in other works by Lodge.  See for example the early study by the art historian Roy Strong which concludes that “the royal portrait filled the vacuum left by the pre-Reformation image cult” (39) and Montrose’s exhaustive study The Subject of Elizabeth. Cf. also Schwartz 31 and passim.  Lodge published Prosopopeia, Containing the Tears of the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctied Mary, Mother of God in 1596, which declared his Catholicism and his abandonment of romantic fiction.

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would have been opposed not only to Elizabeth’s consolidation of the Anglican Church, but in particular to the eroticised and sacralised worship of the Virgin Queen.¹⁵⁹ As Wilson has argued, Lodge’s growing uneasiness with romance and his eventual abandonment of fictional writing in 1596 might have derived not only from his conversion and the typical distancing from a prodigal life, but also from panegyrics like Spenser’s (K. Wilson, Fictions 140). Given that Protestants defamed Catholic rites such as the Eucharist as idolatrous, Elizabeth’s stylisation as Diana was particularly delicate since in the New Testament, the cult of Diana is presented as the example of pagan idolatry that Christianity had to overcome (Aston 205). Therefore, depictions of Elizabeth as Diana always risked being criticised as a pagan form of idolatry (Montrose, The Subject 92– 95). If we can read Lodge’s portrayal of a bizarre state religion that worships its queen as the goddess Diana, for example by pastoral role plays, as a mocking of the veneration of Elizabeth, then A Margarite can be placed in the context of other satirical abuses of Elizabeth-as-Diana in the late sixteenth century in both literature and painting – abuses which were often instigated by exiled English Catholics on the Continent or by recusants, but also by ardent Reformers in England (Montrose, The Subject 136 – 143; McCoy, Alterations 66 – 67). For example, William Allen, a pre-eminent English Catholic cleric in exile, attempted to incite a domestic rebellion against Elizabeth in his 1588 pamphlet An Admonition to the Nobility by criticising her usurpation of Catholic adoration: She impiouslie spoiled all sanctified places of their holye Images, Relikes, memories, and monuments of Christe our Saviour, and of his blessed mother and Saintes, her owne detestable cognisaunce and other prophane portraitures and paintings exalted in theire places. (Allen xiii; see also Montrose, The Subject 74)

Lodge himself had written a poem called “The Discontented Satyre” in which the poetic persona laments his “watchful griefs,” “sorrows,” and his “fear.” He meets a Satyre, who heavily criticises the moon-goddess for her “borrowed beauties”:

In 1597 he exiled himself to Avignon, where he studied medicine and received his doctorate the following year, vowing obedience to the Pope and all Catholic doctrines (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals 119).  See Hamrick’s study The Catholic Imaginary and the Cult of Elizabeth, 1558 – 1582 for an account of how poets in the early phase of Elizabeth’s reign adapted Catholic rituals, including transubstantiation, to establish (and to counter) the cult of Elizabeth (in particular 16 – 24 for Elizabeth’s own ‘usurpation’ of transubstantiation).

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Lower on, fair Cynthia, for I like thee not; For borrowed beauties merit no regard:

The Satyre refuses the adoration of Cynthia in favour of discontent, whom he reveres like a God: Boast, discontent, naught may depress thy power Since in thyself all grief thou dost devour. Thou art the God whom I alone adore. Whose power includeth discords all in one; Confusions are thy food and fatal store; Thy name is feared where thou art most unknown; (87)

Hadfield proposes to read the poem as an “attack on the vagaries of life in overcentralized Elizabethan England” and likewise reads Rosalynd as a critique of the Elizabethan court, arguing that the romance’s “atmosphere of intense paranoia and fear” parallels Lodge’s precarious status as a Catholic in England (Literature, Travel 188, 189). According to Hadfield, Phoebe is modelled on Elizabeth I, and Montanus stands for the aporia of the obedient Catholic subject.¹⁶⁰ While such a Catholic subtext of Rosalynd is possible, but hypothetical, the references in A Margarite are much more straightforward – and yet oblique enough to pass censorship. As Lodge emphasises in his poem, the “power” of satirical discontent derives from the fact that it remains partly undercover: “Thy name is feared where thou art most unknown.” Just as Cynthia in Lodge’s poem probably refers to Elizabeth, so Lodge’s Diana in A Margarite of America might be modelled on the queen’s elaborate self-fashioning and stylisation by her subjects. As we have seen, the romantic convention of disguise is divested of its playful, innocent qualities and is given an obsessive turn when Arsadachus adopts it for the cult of Diana in what Walter Davis calls his “psychopathic fixation” (Idea and Act 202). Hence critics have described Arsadachus’s disguise as an “inversion” (Roberts 411) and as a “hopelessly perverted” (K. Wilson, “From Arcadia” 15) use of the pastoral. The same holds true for the incorporation motif, which culminates in destructive bloodshed at the end of the narrative. The finale depicts Arsadachus’s extravagant coronation ceremony, which can be read as further criticism of Elizabeth I. The exiled Catholic cleric Allen in his previously-cited Admonition

 “However loyal Montanus tries to be, Phoebe/Elizabeth will turn her back on him and refuse his love and loyalty, exactly the situation of her Catholic subjects for the best part of her reign after the Papal bull of 1570” (190 – 191).

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in particular criticised the elaborate celebration of the Queen’s Accession Day, 17 November, which appropriated earlier Catholic celebrations of saints:¹⁶¹ “She hathe caused the annuall daie of her coronation in all partes of the realme to be sacredly kepte and sollemnised, with ringing, singing, shewes & ceremonies, & farr more vacation from all servile labours then any day either of our blessed lorde or ladie” (Allen xxv). Further, it became a custom to hold a pageant on Accession Day, an “annually enacted romance of chivalry of which the Queen was the heroine” (F. Yates 88).¹⁶² During Arsadachus’s coronation ceremony, celebrated with similar pomp, Arsadachus, in a “merrily jesting” mood, opens a little box which Margarita once gave to him and asked him to unlock only if he were about to forget her (MA 162). When he does so, a flame issuing from the box, as the narrator puts it, “bestraught Arsadachus of his senses” (MA 163) – or rather, as the ensuing action shows, restores his moral sense but inspires violent revenge. He tears his royal vestures, thus divesting himself of the usurped position as king, discloses the murder of Philenia, and kills his accomplice in a perversion of the Eucharistic sacrifice that intermingles blood and wine: “taking a huge bowl of wine and crying out, ‘Brasidas, I drink to Philenia whom thou murtheredst,’ he tasted the wine, and with the cup took him such a mighty blow on the head that he pashed out all his brains” (MA 163). When he turns to Diana, the notion of ritual sacrifice is extended and once again associated with pagan beliefs: “Ah, tyrant that hast robbed me of my heart, my hope and life, let me sacrifice to Nemesis; I will sacrifice” (MA 163). In a gruesome literalisation of the romance metaphor of the exchange of hearts, he endeavours to reclaim his heart by reincorporating it into his own body: “with the carving knife he slit up the poor innocent lady’s body, spreading her entrails about the palace floor; and seizing on her heart, he tore it in pieces with his tyrannous teeth” (MA 163). The romance’s motif of the profane Eucharist as the mutual incorporation of lovers is here taken to a violently literal extreme; communion becomes cannibalism.¹⁶³

 On 17 November, the feast of St. Hugh of Lincoln was celebrated in pre-Reformation England.  See F. Yates 88 – 102 for possible reflections of the pageant in Sidney’s Arcadia.  See Cantar for a discussion of cannibalism as a displacement of motherly bodies in A Margarite and Robin the Devil. See also Scholz’s discussion of Serena’s encounter with cannibals in Book 6 of the Faerie Queene as the “literal conclusion” of the Petrarchist association of blazonic body descriptions and the idea of consumption (63), which is, as Scholz notes, related to the Eucharist debate (64).

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Ravenous Revenge: Communion and Cannibalism in A Margarite Lodge’s interest in Catholic martyrs, but also the colonial, exoticist subtext of the romance are relevant to this violent literalisation. Since Diana turns from a representative of the cult of Elizabeth into its victim, her cruel murder and subsequent mutilation might refer to the public execution of Catholics in England, who came to be worshipped as martyrs. One of the earliest and most spectacular cases was the execution of the Jesuit Edmund Campion in the early 1580s, which was documented in many accounts and images. For example, thirty-four frescoes of the English College Church in Rome by Niccolò Circignani, probably finished in 1583, recounted the history of the Catholic Church in England through its martyrs. Prints of the frescoes, based on the engravings by Giovanni Baptista Cavalleri, were distributed in England in the book Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea sive Sanctor Martyrum that had been published in Rome in 1584 (Richardson 49; Williams 382). They depict the torture, murder, and mutilation of Campion and his fellows in gory detail (and visually model the Protestant torturers on ancient Romans to invoke the persecution of the first Christian martyrs).¹⁶⁴ On one of the frescoes, Campion’s corpse is cut open, his heart is taken out, and it is cooked in a boiling pot together with other body parts and organs – an image which associated the Protestant persecutors with the cannibals of the New World (see illustration 1). References to the New World are a decisive subtext of A Margarite of America, whose title and preface appealed to the Elizabethan interest in exotic adventure tales. Lodge presents A Margarite of America as a souvenir brought back from South America: the romance itself, not its protagonist Margarita, is the eponymous margarite, the pearl, of America. Lodge claims that he wrote the narrative during his disastrous trip on the galleon Leicester with Captain Thomas Cavendish, who had previously circumnavigated the world and was attempting to do so again. However, the project failed and the captain died at sea. Having left England in 1591 with five ships and 350 men, less than a third of the passen-

 See Marotti 16 – 24 for the great impact of Campion’s execution and that of other Catholic martyrs on witnesses. The intense preoccupation of Catholics with the physical details of martyrdom was also reflected in the saving and cherishing of relics of the martyrs – parts of their bodies, drops of blood, their clothes, and instruments they had physical contact with, including the instruments of their torture. Such relics were brought back to the English College Church that established itself not only as the centre for the devotion of English martyrs and attracted pilgrims for this sake (Richardson 38), but also as the ‘nursery’ for new martyrs to be sent to Britain.

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Illustration 1: Engraving by Giovanni Baptista Cavalleri which reproduced the fresco painted in the Church of the English College in Rome in 1583 by Niccolò Circignani

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gers returned on three ships in 1593 (Roberts 407).¹⁶⁵ Lodge reinforces the equation of the narrative with an exotic souvenir by claiming in his preface “To the Gentleman Readers” that he found a Spanish manuscript in a Jesuit library in Sanctum (Santos in Brazil), where the sailors stayed from December 1591 to February 1592. Lodge maintains that he translated the Spanish “history” and published it three years after his return to London (MA 75). Yet although Lodge did bring back other books from the Portuguese library, this particular claim is probably less a serious note on his sources than a gesture of sprezzatura; at sea, Lodge modestly maintains, “I wrote under hope rather the fish should eat both me writing and my paper written, than fame should know me” (MA 75).¹⁶⁶ As Beecher and others have argued, Lodge’s claim to have written the romance during the voyage is hardly convincing given the dire circumstances of hunger, mutiny, fighting with natives, frostbite, and sickness (Beecher, “Appendices” 60). It might better be understood as a fictionalised fashioning akin to the claim that Rosalynd was a legacy of Euphues. Lodge’s assertion that he translated his romance from a text found in Brazil is interesting since it introduces the New World as a subtextual spectre, as well as England’s rivals Portugal and Spain, whose presence at Manila the voyage attempted to erase. Despite Lodge’s sympathies for Catholic France, to which he eventually emigrated after his conversion to Catholicism, he despised the cruelty of Spanish colonialism. Lodge’s divided sympathies – between England and France, but against Spain – are typical of Catholics at the end of the sixteenth century. In contrast to pre-Reformation Catholicism with its unified Church, Catholics after the Reformation had more regional allegiances which were governed by local or national sentiments as much as by religious denomination. References in the romance also evoke the New World; thus, Arsadachus’s home, Cusco, can be understood as the legendary Inca capital which the Renaissance imagination associated with immeasurable supplies of gold. This allusion reverberates in Arsadachus’s name that is derived from ‘arsedine’ or ‘arsadine’ for false gold (Linton, The Romance 53).¹⁶⁷  Anthony Knivet published an account of the voyage, which ended for him on San Sebastian, where Cavendish left him, and from where Knivet experienced a nine-year-long journey back to England, full of dangers. Philip Edwards suggests that Knivet’s report might have been a source for Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (Edwards).  See Beecher, “Appendices” 57– 61 for further information about the historical circumstances.  The association of Cusco with the Inca capital is not geographically sound, however, since the narrative suggests that it is possible to travel on foot from Cusco to Mosco. Taking into account the unusual spelling of Moscow and the references to a “dukedome of Volgradia” (MA 79), other critics have located the romance in “a fantastic Russia invented by Lodge” rather than

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If Lodge’s Arsadachus is to be regarded as a native South American, his cannibalistic act can be seen as representative not only of the cruelty of the Protestant authorities, but also of a relapse into the pre-civilised, savage nature that English colonisers associated with the colonised. Early travel narratives by Columbus coined the term ‘cannibals.’¹⁶⁸ Later reports, for example by Hakluyt, forged and expanded accounts of cannibalism in the New World. Thus, Hakluyt recounts, “the Tabaco of this place [St. Vincent] is good: but the Indians being Canibals, promising us store, and delaying us from day to day, sought onely oportunitie to betray, take, and eate us, as lately they had devoured the whole companie of a French shippe” (The Principal Navigations Vol. 7, 384). In 1572, Henry Hawks’s report infers from the discovery of human bones that “[t]here remaine some among the wild people, that unto this day eate one another. I have seene the bones of a Spaniard that have bene as cleane burnished, as though it had bene done by men that had no other occupation” (Hakluyt, Hakluyt and Taylor, The Original Writings 113). In a different report, George Peckham resolves to protect a people “from the cruelty of their tyrannicall and blood sucking neighbors the Canibals, whereby infinite number of their lives shalbe preserved” (The Principal Navigations Vol. 6, 69).¹⁶⁹ As critics have increasingly come to acknowledge, the factual evidence for acts of anthropophagy in the New World is scarce and possibly unreliable. European travellers were frequently denied food by Native Americans and hence consumed the corpses of each other or had to resort to

in the New World (Salzman, English Prose Fiction 77). Alternatively, one could argue that Lodge tries to cover the known world of his age in his telescoped setting, that the marriage between Margarita and Arsadachus is meant to unite the most Eastern city with the most Western. The fact that characters can travel by foot to remote places is a topos of medieval romance which Lodge might reactivate here to fictionally ‘circumnavigate’ the world after his actual expedition with Cavendish failed.  As Frank Lestringant explains in his seminal study Cannibals, “[t]he noun ‘cannibal’ derives from the Arawak caniba, apparently a corruption of cariba, the name (meaning ‘bold,’ it is said) which the Caribbean Indians of the Lesser Antilles gave to themselves. To their enemies, however, the peace-loving Arawaks of Cuba, the name had a distinctly pejorative connotation of extreme ferocity and barbarity. It was from the latter that Christopher Columbus first heard the word during his epoch-making voyage of 1492” (17). See Hulme 16 – 18 for a discussion of Columbus’s reports and how they were expanded to more horrifying scenarios by later writers, most of all by Peter Martyr: “To the handful of bones in one hut reported by Chanca, Peter Martyr pluralized the location, gave the houses kitchens, added pieces of human flesh broached on a spit ready for roasting and, for good measure, threw in the head of young boy hanging from a beam and still soaked in blood” (18).  See Schülting 109 – 142 for a discussion of reports about female cannibals, who are frequently presented as a dangerous, often sexualised, threat to colonisers.

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other forms of survival cannibalism, also after shipwrecks or at sea.¹⁷⁰ They might have displaced their own traumatic experiences onto the inhabitants of the New World, thus establishing the myth of habitual cannibalism. Regardless of the historical circumstances, however, the impact of cannibalism on the cultural imaginary in England was immense. The possibly South American setting of Lodge’s tale and the fact that he allegedly found a source for it in Brazil fits the narrative’s cannibalistic turn, since in the sixteenth century, cannibalism came increasingly to be associated with present-day Brazil (Lestringant 41). Moreover, a standard explanation of cannibalism came to be established after the influential writings of Andre Thevet, whose work was translated into English in 1568 in The New Found VVorlde, or Antarctike. Thevet sees cannibalism as a form of revenge, of ‘avenging oneself with one’s teeth,’ as he puts it (Lestringant 56). As we saw in Lodge’s romance, Arsadachus’s ‘tyrannous teeth’ likewise take revenge and aim at retribution. The re-membering of Arsadachus’s own body requires the dismembering of Diana. As Arsadachus in his continued frenzy also kills his newborn son to atone for the murder of his own parents, the romance activates yet another strand of Diana’s mythology, namely the child sacrifice she requested from Agamemnon as retribution for his hubris. The perversity of the act is increased by the fact that Arsadachus does not sacrifice a child for Diana but sacrifices Diana’s own child to make up for his earlier, obsessive love for Diana. Accordingly, when she watches the frenzy of her husband before she is killed herself, her role becomes more ambiguous: “woeful Diana, rather like the statue of Venus raised in Paphos than the lovely Lucina that gave light to all Arsadachus’ delights, sat still quaking and trembling, as one ready to depart this life” (MA 163). As a mother, Diana is no longer predominantly associated with the goddess of chastity, but with Venus and with Lucina, the goddess of childbirth – and at the same time, this hitherto adored goddess is herself now turned into the sacrificial object.¹⁷¹ In what follows, Lodge’s romance further extends its sacramental realism. When Margarita, who in the meantime has fled her father’s court to seek her be See Hulme for a discussion of historic examples.  As Freya Sierhuis has shown, the part of the “Diana metaphor” that relates to child sacrifice was also activated in a different post-Reformation cultural context, namely during the Arminian debate in the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century, where the notion of child sacrifice was used to criticise the Calvinist doctrine of predestination – here, as in Lodge’s romance, the “practice of child sacrifice [can be seen] as exemplary for the way superstition and idolatry pervert man’s natural goodness and religiosity.” Just like Lodge’s disparagement of Anglican idolatry, the Dutch plays and pamphlets which Sierhuis explores associate the cruelty of predestination with pagan rituals of child sacrifice. They are similar “forms of oblique criticism, through the use of classical example” (n.p.).

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loved, arrives on the scene, she is “heartless to behold the doleful estate of Arsadachus” (MA 164). Henry D. Janzen’s notes explain “heartless” here as “lacked the heart, could not endure” (MA 164), but in the context of the increasingly literalised metaphor of the exchange of hearts, the expression also echoes its previously referenced use and hence Margarita’s continued love for Arsadachus, to whom she gave her heart but did not receive his in exchange, as she still refuses to realise: “‘Is this the joy of my love?’ said she. ‘Are these thy welcomes to thy beloved, instead of triumphs to feast her with tragedies, in lieu of banquets with blood? Why speaketh not my dear spouse? Why lookest thou so ghastly?’” (MA 164). Arsadachus’s rage knows no limit and, when he realises that he has killed Diana to revenge Margarita, he kills Margarita to revenge Diana’s “bright looks […] [and] beautiful locks,” exchanging “blood for blood” (MA 164). Margarita, who is unable to give up her infatuation with romance, willingly offers herself as a sacrifice and even tries to follow Arsadachus after he fatally wounded her. Such a literalisation of the romance metaphor is also undertaken in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which was possibly Lodge’s model. Here, however, it is used on a more recuperative note. After having fallen in love, Amoret, the twin sister of Belphoebe and hence one of the many representatives of Elizabeth I in the romance, undergoes ‘surgery’ on her heart which literally cures her of her lovesickness by removing the dart that causes her secret wound. To begin with, Amoret’s falling in love with Busyrante is described in unusually violent metaphorical terms: Whilest deadly torments doe her chast brest rend, And the sharpe steele doth riue her hart in tway. (FQ III.xi.11)

Amoret is accordingly introduced as a patient on the verge of death: Her brest all naked, as nett yuory, Without adorne of gold or siluer bright, Wherewith the Craftesman wonts it beautify, Of her dew honour was despoyled quight, And a wide wound therein (O ruefull sight) Entrenched deep with knyfe accursed keene. Yet freshly bleeding forth her fainting spright, (The worke of cruell hand) was to be seene, That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene. At that wide orifice her trembling hart Was drawne forth, and in siluer basin layd, Quite through transfixed with a deadly dart, And in her bloud yet steeming fresh embayd. (FQ III.xii.20 – 21)

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As A. Leigh DeNeef notes, “[p]repared for a metaphorically wounded Amoret, we are given instead a picture which emphasizes its own literalness” (15). He explains this unusual literalisation as a narrative move. In a figural narrative perspective, readers here share the character’s point of view; the surgery of the bleeding heart “is a psychologically myopic extension of a terrified perspective (a psychomachia), not a perceptible fact” (15). While Arsadachus’s attack on Diana has similar psychological significance – the desperate attempt to retrieve his heart – it clearly exceeds his own perspective: here, all other characters witness his act. As a consequence, Spenser’s and Lodge’s scenarios of heart surgery have opposing results. In contrast to Diana’s murder, Amoret is healed by the temporary removal of her heart. Once the dart is removed, “the wyde wound” closes “as it had not bene sor’d,” “[a]s she were neuer hurt” (FQ III.xii.38). The wording of the healing shows that the narrative perspective is recuperated at the same time: the wound does not magically close ‘as if’ Amoret were never hurt, but ‘as’ (‘because’) she was never hurt in actual fact.¹⁷² In contrast to Spenser’s celebratory romance project, Lodge’s literalisation of romance topoi is not taken back. Instead, it is used for an aggressive take on the romance mode as well as on Elizabeth’s rule.¹⁷³ Lodge’s romance offers a deconstructive culmination of the romances of the 1580s and 1590s discussed in this chapter, also with regard to their employment of Eucharistic concepts. By its demetaphorisation of the exchange of hearts motif and its other cruelties, A Margarite turns the romantic sense of wonder into a sense of horror. While Greene’s romances demonstrate the persistence and visibility of nobility, and in particular of royalty, in complex narrative plots that test class identity, Lodge’s villainous prince undercuts this romantic convention. His nobility of blood does not match his ignoble, bloody action at all; Arsadachus

 DeNeef points out that prior to the cure of Amoret, the literal is retransformed into the metaphorical. In stanza 31, Amoret’s heart is “[s]eeming transfixed with a cruell dart” and Busyrante now appears as a metaphorical “worker of her smart” (FQ III.xii.31, my emphasis). DeNeef comments: “because the figures are un-figured, the charms are removed; because the charms are removed, perception is cleansed; because perception is cleansed, the human action can be presented and recognized as such” (17).  In its insistence on literal bloodshed and incorporation, A Margarite rather resembles “Jupiter’s Tragedy,” one of the stories in Greene’s Planetomachia, in which the metaphor of communion is acted out in a blatant, cannibalistic way (Cuvelier, “Horror” 39). Here, a young woman avenges the death of her brothers. She orders the execution of the murderer and plucks out his heart. Revelling in her blood-for-blood revenge, she stabs his dismembered heart. Afterwards, she drinks the blood of her brothers from their skulls to remember them and to reconnect them to her flesh and blood. Her incorporation of the blood of her brothers by ingestion blends cannibalism and communion, as her desire is to feel physically close to them.

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makes the spectre at the end of the Arcadia, that the princely protagonists might have to be regarded as ‘degraded,’ come true in an excessive form. Greene’s and Sidney’s sense of wonder and erotic energy deriving from the revelations of royal or masculine substance are turned into shock in the face of Arsadachus’s unexpected cruelties, including his sexual violence. Likewise, the metaphors of mutual incorporation which the Arcadia develops in its eroticised sacraments of love are turned in A Margarite into gruesome bloodshed in the literalised motif of the exchange of hearts. In the vein of criticism of the cult of Elizabeth including its pastoral pageants, Lodge also divests pastoral disguises of the revelatory and transformative force that they had in Pandosto, Menaphon, the Arcadia versions, and Rosalynd. As part of Lodge’s generic transformation, pastoral disguises constitute, together with the profane Eucharist of lovers, rituals of courtship that grow increasingly violent and which contribute to the romance’s self-referential exhibition and critique of romance topoi. This is undertaken in such a radical manner that critics have described A Margarite as “the breakdown of the pastoral romance, of which it is in fact the last considerable example” (Watt, “Elizabethan” 125), as an attempt at the ‘annihilation’ of romance (K. Wilson, Fictions 165), or even as a “renunciation of fiction” in general (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals 116).¹⁷⁴ I have proposed to read Lodge’s violent deconstruction of romance as a means of criticising the cult of Elizabeth. Consequently, I think that Cooper’s assessment of romance as an inherently conservative mode of writing needs to be qualified. Nonetheless, her evaluation of the socio-political centrality of romance as “a means by which cultural values and ideals were recorded and maintained and promulgated” even heightens Lodge’s social criticism. If Tudor England indeed “looked to romance as the site where its values could be questioned and tested but ultimately reaffirmed” (Cooper 6), then what readers saw in Lodge’s destructive tale might have unsettled them. Yet Lodge’s criticism had to pass the censoring authorities and hence functions so obliquely that many readers might have taken a conservative, or at least a non-political stance of the tale for granted and may not have perceived any parallels between Arsadachus’s frenzy and Protestant England. It is part of Lodge’s strategy of indirect criticism to employ discourses which were frequently used to buttress Protestantism, such as idolatry and cannibalism, and to resemanticise them. By connecting idolatrous romantic love to a criticism of Protestant England, Lodge also inverts a

 See K. Wilson, Fictions 165 and Wilson, “From Arcadia” 17 for Lodge’s disenchantment with romance. Beecher argues contrariwise that “even in conflation with other genres the order of romance remains operative” (“Introduction A Margarite” 19).

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widespread association of Cupid with Catholicism, which was built on their common idolatrous nature (cf. Kingsley-Smith 68). In A Margarite of America, Lodge thus subversively redeploys both a literary mode and religio-political discourses which were usually invoked to reinforce the Protestant status quo and to demonise Catholicism. Lodge’s harsh social criticism of the cult of Elizabeth therefore goes disguised. While upholding the accidents of romance – literary motifs, rhetorical style, and parts of romantic plot structure – he has transubstantiated its essence. As this subchapter has shown, encounters with the New World and the tales associated with its inhabitants linked up with the forging of national identity against the religious enemy within Europe. In England, a growing sense of nationhood and patriotism was fuelled by the Reformation and the exploration and colonisation of the New World. The final chapter of this study will explore how national identity was negotiated in early modern English culture and what role prose fiction played in this endeavour. Once again, my readings of historical sources and selected prose narratives will enquire into the importance of Eucharistically inflected notions of transformation. The versatility of the Eucharistic heritage reaches beyond the questions of gender, class, and religious identity which I have focussed on so far; as I set out to show in the next chapter, it also resurfaces in treatises, pamphlets, and narratives which are preoccupied with the formation and transformation of Englishness, albeit in a more metaphorical manner.

3 Foreign Fashion and the Transubstantiation of Englishness The previous chapters have argued that Eucharist concerns such as mutual incorporation, multilocation, and fears and hopes of transubstantiation played a role not only in early modern narratives interested in promoting the Reformational cause, but also in tales about more secular issues of rank and gender. In the sixteenth century, an additional identity category gained increasing importance, in politics as much as in fictional literature: nationality. In contrast to age-old notions of gender and rank, knowledge of what it means to be ‘English’ consolidated slowly in the sixteenth century. The growing sense of nationhood was closely linked to England’s unique religio-political position. A number of historians and literary critics in the early modern field have argued that the origins of the modern nation can be traced back to the Reformation. Undoubtedly, in comparison to other European countries, in England the Reformation had an enormous impact on the emergent sense of an independent nation. The break with Roman Catholicism and the establishment of the Anglican Church isolated the country from a transnational network of religious and political allegiance and endorsed a view of England as “a self-contained national unit,” a view which increasingly turned from a “tacitly accepted necessity” to a “consciously desired goal” (Elton 3).¹⁷⁵ Arguably, the brief return to Catholicism even fuelled the establishment of the Protestant nation since the Protestant martyrs killed under Mary were subsequently celebrated as national heroes (see Greenfeld 51– 59). The establishment of a sense of Englishness was a process of imagination, construction, writing, and reading. Beforehand, the English had often been thought of as being characterised by a lack of specific traits and by their changeability and easy infatuation with foreign things. In a number of pamphlets, an inability to resist the attraction of novelty and change, then called ‘newfangledness,’ was presented as an inherently English quality. At times, it was explained by geographic specificities; living on an island, the English were thought to be so liable to the influence of the moon and the tides that they were changeable in their political, cultural, and religious allegiances (cf. Warneke, “A Taste” 881). In the fourteenth century, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville already referred to  This emerging view had, as Scholz demonstrates, an impact on depictions of the natural and symbolic body of Elizabeth I; she argues that “[t]he emergence of chastity as the prime virtue for the Renaissance woman could thus be attributed to the perceived necessity to consolidate boundaries on a social and political level” (82– 83).

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the specific English climate: “We are in a climate under the rule of the moon, which is a planet that moves quickly – the traveller’s planet” (120). This conviction was still invoked in the late sixteenth century. For example, Rankins’s Seven Satires chastised the changeable English who “with the Moone participate their minde” (A4r; 5), and thus with “[t]he vainest Planet, and most transitory” (A4v; 6). Hence, Rankins mocked, they “Proteus-like […] change their peeuish shape” (A4r; 5). Pamphlets and books printed in the vernacular played a decisive role in this shaping of the nation. The invention of print, the onset of capitalism, and the turn to the vernacular inspired by the Reformation (most notably in the Book of Common Prayer and the English Bible) contributed to the creation of language and reader communities, which formed the basis for envisioning a national community. Critics have shown that many of Benedict Anderson’s arguments in his study of nations as imagined communities, which he developed mainly for the eighteenth century, also apply, in crucial respects, to sixteenth-century England. As Helgerson points out in his seminal Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, legislative changes under Henry VIII were a first step to form an independent English nation, but a sense of Englishness had to be created in addition to these political changes – an important task for Elizabethan authors (4). Modifying Helgerson’s argument, Cathy Shrank in her programmatically titled study Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530 – 1580 calls attention to the fact that the literary creation of Englishness started in Henrician times.¹⁷⁶ On the British Isles, this process was complicated by the rival notions of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’; critics disagree which notion was more foundational, and which was more pertinent to Elizabethan concerns.¹⁷⁷ The prose

 See also Claire McEachern’s The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590 – 1612 on nationbuilding and literature in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. See in particular 5 – 33 for a discussion of concepts of the nation (as emanating from the sovereign or the people) from Henrician times onwards. Nonetheless, as Philip Schwyzer reminds us, a nationalist preoccupation remained an elitist concern until the French Revolution of the eighteenth century: “To put it crudely, sixteenth-century nationalists talked the talk, but only after 1750 would whole nations walk the walk. What we discern in some early modern texts is not the nation per se so much as the nation in potential” (9). See also Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (10 – 11) for the elitist project of forging a nation. However, events like the attack of the Spanish Armada and obsessive anxieties about a Catholic invasion of England arguably strengthened the sense of a nation which it was necessary to fight for.  Helgerson traces the problems inherent in defining the nation and discusses the different names which Elizabethan poets chose for it (Forms of Nationhood 8). See Schwyzer’s study Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, which makes a case for the construction of British rather than English national identity in the sixteenth century, albeit of

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narratives that I discuss in this chapter speak of the ‘English’ and might sometimes implicate the Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but often define Englishness in opposition to other peoples on the British Isles. Given the crucial role of the printed vernacular, Elizabethan literature took part in a nation-shaping endeavour regardless of its content, simply by creating a sense of having “fellow-readers,” to whom each reader was “connected through print” (Anderson, Imagined Communities 44). This group of fellow readers “formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44).¹⁷⁸ Anderson argues that the sense of a reader community draws on and partially replaces religious feelings, and he employs the Eucharistically charged term of the imagined “communion” between members of the same nation (6). The idea that fictional literature created a communion between readers that could, at least potentially, transcend differences in religious affiliations (as much as in rank and gender) is significant for Elizabethan England, which attempted to achieve a new national unity after decades of religio-political upheaval and severe inner divisions. Longer prose narratives might have been particularly suitable for creating such a sense of an imagined communion. Anderson grants the eighteenth-century novel (as well as newspapers) a particular significance in this process of nation-making since it offers a model of modern, linear chronology and simultaneity (24). The same can be claimed for the printed prose narratives of the sixteenth century: in contrast to the theatre, their audience is an imagined community, and in contrast to lyrical poetry, prose narratives themselves are concerned with creating plot patterns that play with the simultaneity of action, as we saw in Sidney’s Arcadia. Just as in eighteenth-century novels, in sixteenth-century prose “acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another” (26). By illustrating and promoting “[t]he idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” they likewise offer “a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid “a version of Britishness that served English interests” (6). Hadfield argues in Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain that “the notion of Britain loomed […] large in the horizons and imaginations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers,” but at the same time caused anxieties in England (4).  Of course, language alone is not a sufficient foundation for all nations, as Gopal Balakrishnan points out (207). Likewise, critics engaging with Anderson’s argument have emphasised that the onset of print capitalism alone did not establish a sense of a nation. For example, Balakrishnan and Jonathan Culler have highlighted the importance of war for the creation of nationalism: “Only in struggle does the nation cease to be an informal, contestable and taken-for-granted frame of reference, and become a community which seizes hold of the imagination” (Balakrishnan 210; see also Culler 49).

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community moving steadily down (or up) history” (26).¹⁷⁹ Accordingly, chronicles which endorsed the idea of a national community moving through history became popular in the sixteenth century. They constituted, as Helgerson puts it, “the Ur-genre of national self-representation” (Forms of Nationhood 11). Yet also on the level of content, Elizabethan tales enquired into what it might mean to be English. They turned to the two hotspots of exposure to foreign habits that might lead to identity change: travelling and foreign apparel. As Ascham’s Schoolmaster indicates, the Elizabethans were much more worried about the damaging influences of travelling than the English under Henry VIII, when young aristocrats were regularly sent to the Continent, and above all to Italy. Their grand tours were regarded as patriotic endeavours and an important contribution to education, in particular to the education of future politicians (Korte 41– 48). In the changed cultural climate after the Reformation, anxieties about the negative effects of travel were foregrounded. Catholic, and in particular Jesuit, seminars on the Continent were thought to transform Englishmen into ‘seedmen of treason’ (Hughes and Larkin 88): “[T]ransformed into monsters […], […] insorcered with these Spanish inchantments, [they] are transformed into shapes much more horrible and monstrous,” as Lewis Lewkenor lamented in a post-Armada treatise that contributed to the ‘Black Legend’ of Spain’s cruelties (66 – 67; see Hadfield, Literature, Travel 48). As in the case of Ascham’s previously quoted warning against travelling, the idea that Englishmen are changed in their outward appearance, that they are metamorphosed into monsters, is metaphorical. Actually, it is their invisible internal change, their ‘transubstantiation,’ that causes fear. Such anxieties were furthered by the publication of accounts like Anthony Munday’s The English Roman Life (1582), which depicted the subversive activities at Rome’s English College from an insider perspective: Munday had infiltrated the College in 1579 by posing as the recalcitrant son of an English Catholic gentleman, and he described his experiences in The English Roman Life, which is modelled on government intelligence reports. As Melanie Ord  As Culler points out, Anderson’s observations regarding the analogous structure of the novel and the nation have sometimes been misunderstood as a straightforwardly causal argument; it “has encouraged critics to assume that the decisive factor is the novel’s representation of the nation,” but “[t]he distinction between the novel as a condition of possibility of imagining the nation and the novel as a force in shaping or legitimating the nation needs to be maintained” (47, 48). Culler elaborates: “If we try to argue that the novel, through its representations of nationhood, made the nation, we will find ourselves on shaky ground, but if we argue that the novel was a condition of possibility for imagining something like a nation, for imagining a community that could be opposed to another, as friend to foe, and thus a condition of possibility of a community organized around a political distinction between friend and enemy, then we are on less dubious ground” (49).

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has shown, Munday’s record displays an uneasy oscillation between the reliable secret agent he asserts to be and a prodigal traveller who is not immune to European attractions (48 – 49). During the trial of Campion in 1581, witnesses who attempted to discredit Munday’s testimony against Campion fuelled Protestant anxieties when they presented Munday as a ‘transubstantiated’ Englishman: “beyond the seas he goeth on pilgrimage, and receiveth the sacrament, making himself a Catholic, and here he taketh a new face, and playeth the Protestant” (Henry Orton, qtd in R. Simpson 430).¹⁸⁰ The Eucharist plays a twofold role in this transformation process: not only does it offer a concept of the invisible alteration of a hidden core (that is, of Munday’s religious and hence political allegiance), but the celebration of the Catholic Eucharist also functions as a catalyst for this change. According to Campion’s associates, Munday’s essence was irreversibly transformed by having received ‘the sacrament,’ the Catholic Eucharist. Consequently, his claims to being a lawful English Protestant can only be the putting on of a ‘face,’ a masquerade.¹⁸¹ This argument is noteworthy. Receiving the Catholic sacrament was usually an important part of the conversion process, but here the rhetoric implies that the Catholic Eucharist has a transformative power to change the identity of the communicant that is akin to its irreversible transubstantiation of bread and wine ex opere operato: ‘making himself’ is a grammatically ambivalent phrase here – it could mean that Munday actively transformed himself into a Catholic, but it could also mean that the sacrament made him a Catholic. In any case, the possibility that Munday might have reconverted to Anglicanism is neglected. The example of Campion’s trial indicates that spectres of transubstantiation haunted national identity in Elizabethan England, both in literal and in metaphorical ways. Transubstantiation was quite literally a threat to Anglican identity because the consumption of transubstantiated bread and wine were a means of conversion as much as of maintaining a hidden, Roman Catholic identity. Metaphorically, ‘transubstantiation’ offered a conceptual pattern to think about the transformation of invisible identity cores – an issue which preoccupied Elizabethans  The accusations against Munday deliberately invoked cases of actual conversions of Englishmen in Italy. For example, Robert Parsons, who returned to England together with Campion in 1581 as part of the first English Mission, had not intended to become a Catholic missionary when first travelling abroad. He had left England in order to study medicine at Padua and visited Rome to see its historical sites – only to be transformed by Jesuits from a tourist to a ‘traitor.’  See Ord 51– 52 for biographies of Munday which support such claims and argue that Munday might indeed have converted to Catholicism and changed his religious allegiances when back in England. Donna B. Hamilton argues that Munday secretly remained Catholic, but attempted to balance this with loyalty to the English crown (passim; see 39 – 40 for comments on Campion’s trial).

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with regard to denomination and nationality as much as with regard to rank and gender. The records of Campion’s trial show how difficult it was for the authorities to judge the culpability of the accused and the reliability of witnesses, as the ultimate ‘proof’ of the true inner faith and loyalty to either the queen or the pope could hardly be found. This search for hidden substances was further complicated by disguises and false biographies which some of the Catholics used while planning to reconvert England, among them many Englishmen who had been trained abroad in Catholic seminaries like the one in Rome that Munday visited.¹⁸² The trial of Campion brought such disguise strategies to public awareness: when he left Ireland, he had camouflaged himself as ‘Mr Patrick,’ a lackey; later, as ‘Hastings,’ he wore a velvet hat and velvet Venetians. During the interrogation before his execution, Campion was asked, Your name being Campion, why were you called Hastings? You a priest and dead to the world, what pleasure had you to roist it? A velvet hat and a feather, a buff leather jerkin, velvet Venetians, are they weeds for dead men? […] No, there was a further matter intended; your lurking and lying hid in secret places concludeth with the rest a mischievous meaning. (Reynolds 178)

As a proclamation against seminary priests and Jesuits in England that was issued on 18 October 1591 outlines, the ‘Jesuitised’ Englishmen in the following decade returned to their country disguised, both in their names and persons; some in apparel as soldiers, mariners, or merchants; pretending that they have heretofore been taken prisoners, and put into galleys, and delivered. Some come in as gentlemen, with contrary names, in comely apparel, as though they had travelled into foreign countries for knowledge; and generally, for the most part, as soon as they are crept in, are clothed like gentlemen, in apparel, and many as gallants; yea in all colours, and with feathers and such like, disguising themselves; and many of them in their behaviours as ruffians, far off to be thought or suspected to be the friars, priests, Jesuits, or popish scholars. (Strype 83 – 84; cf. also J. Yates 67)¹⁸³

As Campion’s trial and the law show, the attire of an English gentleman has become unreliable in several respects. It might not only camouflage a vain upstart or a woman, as the sumptuary laws and pamphlets against disorderly clothing show, but also a Catholic priest.

 In the English college at Rome, seventy students were trained in 1581, who all swore to return to England if instructed to do so (Richardson 38).  Paul Hughes and James Francis Larkin’s edition speaks of “contrary tales” rather than “contrary names” (91); both versions make sense and reinforce the same basic point.

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This fear of foreign infiltration also affected the mode of romance. For instance, a concern with treason by disguised foreigners is registered in Greene’s Gwydonius, or, the Card of Fancy (1584), which chronicles a prodigal son story but gives it, as typical of Greene’s narratives, an innovative twist. Gwydonius, the young prince of Metelyne, is sent abroad by his father, King Clerophontes. One situation during Gwydonius’s travels is particularly interesting with regard to national identity. Having grown poor and while travelling incognito, he falls in love with and grows close to the princess of Alexandria, just as his father attacks her country. Thus, Gwydonius finds himself in the position of a foreign spy, comparable to the disguised Jesuits who preoccupied the Elizabethan imagination. Accordingly, the romance features numerous scenes of eavesdropping and creates an atmosphere of surveillance and paranoia. Eventually, the true nationality of Gwydonius is found out and the king of Alexandria is alerted by one of his own spies. Gwydonius, the Alexandrians imagine, has been “trained up in treachery” (Gwydonius 177) and “is purposed to procure your [the king’s] fatal death and the final destruction of your dukedom” (176). ¹⁸⁴ When he escapes, he is pursued all over the country to “requite his hateful treachery with most hellish torments” (176). By 1584, when Greene’s romance was published, the Elizabethans had witnessed such ‘hellish torments’ during public executions and knew about the cruel torture practices of the English government. Eventually, Gwydonius assumes another disguise and fights against his own father, defeating him in a duel. He thereby re-establishes peace between the dukedoms, is reconciled with his father, and marries Castania. As is typical of Greene’s recuperative endings, the romance thus negotiates a widespread cultural anxiety about political subversion by disguised agents of the foreign enemy, but soothes it in its wondrous conclusion. By contrast, each disguised Jesuit caught in England – astonishingly few compared to the obsessive anxiety about them¹⁸⁵ – further increased fears about the infiltration or invasion by Continental Catholic opponents. In addition to dealing with disguised agents of the enemy, dress and a more metaphorical notion of disguise played an important role for the early modern negotiation of Englishness. The ambivalent meaning of ‘habits’ and the linguistic affiliation of ‘costumes’ and ‘customs’ already highlight the important role of

 The modern spelling of Carmen Di Biase’s edition is maintained, apart from the Americanisation.  Marotti comments, “Although in the 1580s and 1590s only a couple dozen Jesuits came to England, one would think from the government’s actions and from the rash of anti-Jesuit polemical activity that a secret army of thousands had landed on England’s shores to prepare the way for foreign invasion” (11).

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clothing for the establishment of shared national characteristics. The process of creating a sense of Englishness had to overcome the above-mentioned notion of English changeability, which was frequently linked to a symptomatic inclination towards fashion, in particular towards foreign fashion. In the sixteenth century, reservations against fashion became more pronounced because textile fashions changed faster than before and the imitation of Continental modes became more problematic for religio-political reasons. Already in Henrician times, fashionable clothing was used as an epitome of a cultural nakedness and changeability. Famously, Andrew Boorde’s “Introduction of Knowledge” (1542) presented an image of a naked Englishman holding a cloth and tailor’s scissors, unable to decide what type of fashionable garment he should create (see illustration 2). Boorde commented:¹⁸⁶ I am an English man, and naked I stand here, Musyng in my mynde, what raiment I shal were For now I wyll were thys and now I wyl were that Now I wyl were I cannot tel what All new fashions, be plesaunt to me I wyl haue them, whether I thryue or thee […] Yet aboue all thinges, new fasions I loue well And to were them my thyst I wyl sell (image 4)

Boorde’s notion of the naked Englishman remained a relevant reference point for Elizabethan and Jacobean historians, social commentators, and authors of prose fiction alike. For instance, William Harrison refers to the famous illustration in his account of English attire in The Description of England (1577) and calls his fellow countryman a “chameleon” (145, 147). Lyly in turn draws on Boorde via Harrison and depicts the English as literally bare of national characteristics in his Euphues and His England, as we shall see; in their tailoring of a national identity, they have to imitate foreign nations. Thomas Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sins of London in 1606 again alludes to the image, observing that “[w]ittie was that Painter therefore, that when hee had limned one of euery Nation in th[ei]r proper attyres, and beeing at his wittes endes howe to drawe an Englishman: At the last (to giue him a quippe for his follie in apparell) drewe him starke naked, with Sheeres in his hand, and cloth on his arme,” so that he “could cut out his fashions but himselfe” (31). In the same year, Perkins draws on the inherited national stereotype of the English as “the vainest and most newfangled people under heaven” to reprimand the wearing of Continental apparel. Perkins

 See Shrank, Writing the Nation 25 – 64 for a discussion of Boorde’s oeuvre as part of the nation-making project of Tudor writers.

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Illustration 2: Andrew Boorde, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge

maintains that strangers coming to England keep their “ancient and customable attire, without varying or alteration. We on the contrary, can see no fashion used either by the French, Italian, or Spanish, but we take it up, and use it as our owne” (The Whole Treatise 136 – 137). A few years later, the poet George Wither in a similar vein ridicules the imitation of every foreign fashion in his successful satire Abuses Stript, and Whipt (first published in 1613): The Sunne lights not a Nation That more addicteth Apish imitation Then doe we English: Should a stranger come And weare his doublet fastned to his Bumme:

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Pluck gloues on’s feet, & put his hands in’s shoes, And weare his Rings and Iewels on his toes. And come so tired to our English Court, Attended in some strange preposterous sort; Most of our Courtiers would make much ado, But they would get into that fashion too. (image 94)

The author of Hic Mulier (1620) again invokes Boorde and in particular criticises the monstrous mix of English fashion, when he claims that the Englishman “had liberty with his shears to cut from every Nation of the World one piece of patch to make up his garment” (Henderson and McManus 276). Against this discourse of protean changeability and lack of English substance, commentators began to establish the idea that foreign fashion is a form of disguise, which not only conceals, but potentially affects the disguised identity core. For example, Ascham called fashionable clothing “some new disguised garment” (SM 43), and William Harrison in 1577 lamented the infatuation of the English with Continental trends by describing it as an undue camouflage: today there is none to the Spanish guise, tomorrow the French toys are most fine and delectable, ere long no such apparel as that which is after the High Almain fashion, by and by the Turkish manner is generally best liked of, otherwise the Morisco gowns, the Barbarian sleeves, the mandilion worn to Collyweston-ward, and the short French breeches make such a comely vesture that except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England. (145 – 146)

In a similar vein, Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy (1589) repeated the reproach that the wearing of outlandish clothes (“a strait buskin al inglesse, a loose alo Turquesque, the cape alla Spaniola, the breech a la Françoise”) means that the English courtier “by twenty manner of new-fashioned garments […] disguise[s] his body” (379). Thus, even though the national core identity beneath the foreign disguise often remained undefined, the idea was established that such a core exists and that it needs to be protected. Once again, what is at stake is the relationship between outer transformation by disguise and an inner change, between metamorphosis and transubstantiation: what happens if an Englishman wears Spanish or Italian fashion? Will his substance be penetrated by the clothes? Will he become an Italian (and hence Catholic) at heart? And if English courtiers, and even the Queen herself, are in danger of being transformed by the foreign clothes they wear, what happens to the body politic? Discussing such questions, Stubbes’s polemical Anatomie of Abuses sees foreign textiles as “fond Inuentions, and newfangled fashions [which] rather deforme, then adorne vs: beguile vs, then become vs” (67; sig. B4v). Even though Stubbes’s position was not representative of Elizabethan society, his idea that foreign

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fashion has transformative power because it beguiles and changes its wearers, recurs in other writings. For instance, Dekker in 1606 again employed this ambiguous meaning of ‘becoming fashion,’ when he scolded his English countrymen, “And thus we that mocke euerie Nation, for keeping one fashion, yet steale patches from euerie one of them, to peece out our pride, are now laughing-stocks to them, because their cut so scuruily becomes vs” (The Seuen Deadly Sinnes 32). In the same vein, Perkins envisions the infiltration of “heads and hearts” by foreign fashion (The Whole Treatise 136) and William Rankins chronicles in his English Ape, the Italian Imitation, the Footesteppes of Fraunce (1588), “what scornefull conceites, Nations of forreine condition harbour in the entrayles of their [the fashion addicts’] heart” (1). The Italianate Englishman not only imitates foreigners in his “externall habite,” but also in his “inward disposition,” as Rankins makes clear (2). Explaining the transnaturation of Englishmen in a metaphor of weeds which spoil the wholesome English garden, Rankins envisions how foreign clothes (also sometimes called ‘weeds’) affect the cores of his contemporaries: “The slips whereof [of the ‘plants frõ some forraine plots’] are slipt into the hearts of many hollow, and empty vessels, wherein is neyther contayned the seat of vertue, nor yet the smallest sparke of that light that kindleth all faithfull, and loyall heartes” (14). Rankins’s reference to ‘loyall heartes’ indicates that besides the usual preoccupation with morality and virtue, the question of national allegiance, of loyalty to the Queen and head of the Anglican Church, is also at risk. In the closing comments of his treatise, Rankins appeals to his readers that they should truthfully inspect the state of their substances: “Let euery one commune with his secret hart, & search the secrets of his inward soule” (24). ‘Secret heart,’ ‘inward disposition,’ and ‘inward soul’ are used as terms to account for the hidden core of the English endangered by foreign fashion. The potentially corrupting influence of foreign qualities and products remained a pressing issue in Jacobean times. In 1616, John Deacon compiled a long list of the deplorable effects of the “carelesse entercourse of trafficking with the contagious corruptions, and customes of forreine nations.” Worried about the transformation of English identity, he highlights this concern through a number of neologisms – the English are Turkished, Romanized, Italianized, Frenchized and so on: from whence cometh it now to passe, that so many of our English-mens minds are thus terriblie Turkished with Mahometan trumperies; thus rufully Romanized with superstitious relickes; thus treacherously Italianized with sundry antichristian toyes; thus spitefully Spanished with superfluous pride; thus fearefully Frenchized with filthy prostitutions; thus fantastically Flanderized with flaring net-works to catch English fooles; thus huffingly Hollandized with ruffian-like loome-workes, and other like Ladified fooleries; thus greedily Germandized with a most gluttenous manner of gormandizing; thus desperately Danished

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with a swine-like swilling and quaffing; thus sculkingly Scotized with Machiauillian proiects; thus inconstantly Englished with euery new fantasticall foolerie; thus industriously Indianized with the intoxicating filthie fumes of Tobacco, and what not besides? (10)

Lamenting the manifold transculturating influences on an Englishman’s substance, Deacon curiously even castigates the fact that “English-mens minds” are “Englished,” since he equates Englishness with newfangledness, with “euery new fantasticall foolerie.” Deacon’s paradoxical plea that Englishmen should not be Englished spotlights the quandary (and sometimes, the liberating insight) which is at the heart of many early modern writings: ‘Englishness,’ understood as an inner identity core and a religio-political allegiance, is inaccessible to the senses and incapable of ultimate proof, comparable to the phenomena discussed in previous chapters – Real Presence, royalty, gender, rank. It is an equally prolific void, which triggered an overspill of laws, state theories, pamphlets, sermons, and letters, but also of fictional literature. These writings have a strategy in common: attempting to characterise Englishness, they often begin by stating what it is not, what it should not be, or what it should not become. The English self is defined in opposition to others, chiefly against the Continental, Catholic other, but also against the people of the New World. Englishness had to be substantiated, and fictional narratives endeavoured to do so by evoking scenarios of an internal change against which Englishness had to be protected: the spectre of transubstantiation fuelled the substantiation of Englishness. Like Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and the Elizabethan pastoral romances, the narratives discussed in this chapter are interested in the relationship between external and internal change, between metamorphosis and transubstantiation, in particular in their scenarios of cross-national disguise. However, just like disguise is a metaphor used here for Englishmen who wear fashion cut after foreign patterns and made of foreign materials, so is the notion of transubstantiation a conceptual metaphor that is detached from other Eucharistic concerns. Unlike the narratives discussed so far, the tales that I will focus on next do not draw on the notion of real presence, of mutual incorporation or of multilocation, and they do not employ the Eucharistic sense of wonder. I noted in the introduction that Elizabethan narratives oscillate between literal and figurative adaptations of theological theorems, that they display a spectrum of religious and secular meanings. The narratives discussed in this chapter adapt transubstantiation in a figurative manner for mostly secular concerns. Testing what happens to English nationality when it is put under pressure by exposure to foreign habits, the narratives take up the topical patriotic discourse against fashion, but do not fully endorse this criticism. Instead, they develop an

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ambivalent stance towards fashion. This ambivalence is partly due to the heterogeneity of the addressed readers: aristocratic as well as middle-rank readers, those infatuated with fashion and those critical of it. The ambivalence also stems, however, from the specific literary quality of the narratives. Just like Beware the Cat, their aesthetic practice complicates and undercuts the political discourses which they adopt. What is more, textile fashion offers a powerful and complex metaphor of textual fashions, which the narratives playfully employ in metafictional scenarios that explore their own position in the emerging book market for prose fiction. As part of this poetological reflection, they comment on the national allegiance of their own literary products. For authors of prose fiction in the vernacular, who usually drew on successful Continental precursors, the critical view of foreign fashion posed a poetological problem, which they countered with varying strategies. Romance plays an ambivalent role in this respect: it was suspect because of its Continental models, but could also claim to follow classical ideals – and, a matter of increasing importance for ideas of nationality, romance had a long standing native tradition. As a precursor to the selected prose tales preoccupied with foreign fashion, in the following I will first look at George Gascoigne’s highly acclaimed Steele Glas (1576), which is written in blank verse and employs the literary form of the ‘glass’ that became increasingly popular in prose narratives, too. I shall then, in chronological order, turn to Lyly’s epoch-making Euphues tales (1578, 1579, 1580), to Barnabe Riche’s bestselling Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581), and to Greene’s widely-read dream narrative A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). The final and most recent narrative to be discussed, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), was less successful on the book market than the other tales, but Nashe was an important reference point for many early modern authors, and the self-referentiality of the narrative makes it particularly interesting from the point of view of genre history.

3.1 George Gascoigne: The Steele Glas (1576) As George Gascoigne announces in his dedication, The Steele Glas is the first English blank verse satire “written without rhyme, but I trust not without reason.”¹⁸⁷ Its form comes closer to a dramatic monologue than to a full-fledged narrative since the tale’s action is reduced to a minimum: the poetic persona,

 The Steele Glas 137; cf. LaGrandeur 344, Wallace 4– 5. Parenthetical references to The Steele Glas will be abbreviated to ‘SG.’

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whom Gascoigne presents as his autobiographical voice, first reflects on his own situation as a censored writer and strikes the pose of the prodigal son by distancing himself from “the faults of youth” (SG 143), that is, from writing love poetry and erotic narratives like The Adventures of Master F. J., whose publication in the anthology A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573) had caused a scandal. He then addresses various social groups, which ought to see themselves critically in the steel mirror of his writing, in particular with regard to their infatuation with fashion. Since the tale emancipates itself from rhyme and since it is an early literary example of the fear of transculturation through foreign fashion, it is a noteworthy forerunner of the prose fiction that is preoccupied with Englishness in the late 1570s, the 1580s, and the 1590s. The tale shares a concern with sexual transformation via dress with the popular romances of the day as Gascoigne links up discourses on foreign fashion with the monstrosity inherent in cross-gender dressing. As typical of warnings against foreign fashion, the outer change via dressing up, the metamorphosis, is seen as expression or even as agent of the inner change, the ‘transubstantiation.’ Gascoigne’s satire reflects the warning against foreign fashion in its aesthetics, specifically in its generic choices. Presenting his satire as a mirror to society, Gascoigne chooses a popular genre with a long-standing literary tradition, just like Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates (1555), Stephen Batman’s A Crystal Glass of Christian Reformation (1569), Thomas Salter’s Mirror of Modesty (1579), Gascoigne’s own The Glass of Government (1575), and Riche’s later My ladies looking glasse; wherein may be discerned a wise man from a foole, a good woman from a bad, and the true resemblance of vice, masked under the vizard of virtue (1616). The genre flourished until well into the seventeenth century (and beyond), which saw the publication of further long, admonitory titles, but also more catchy and enticing titles like Aphra Behn’s The ladies looking-glass to dress themselves by, or the whole art of charming all mankind (1697). Gascoigne criticises “[t]hat pevishe pryde, [which] does al the world possesse, / And [where] every wight, will have a looking glasse / To see himselfe” in “[t]he christal glas, which glimseth brave & bright, / And shewes the thing, much better than it is” (SG 147, 148). By contrast, his satire, as its title announces, offers a more truthful and less flattering version of reality, a “both trusty […] & true” (SG 147) reflection. Gascoigne’s preference of the steel mirror is decisive regarding his critique of foreign fashion: steel mirrors could be produced in England, whereas crystal mirrors were imported as luxury products from Venice or Antwerp (528). In this way he presents his text as truthfully English manufacture. This concern with establishing a genuinely English literary form is further enhanced by Gascoigne’s “deliberate medievalising” of the satire by drawing on the versification and the

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themes of William Langland’s fourteenth-century dream vision Piers Plowman as well as on the tradition of medieval estates literature (Austen 156). Further, Gascoigne here employs a simple, colloquial style with predominantly Anglo-Saxon diction, as opposed to the ornate courtly style and its foreign loan words (Wallace 6 – 7). Thus, his declared reformation has an equivalent in his literary allegiances: whereas The Adventures of Master F. J. was modelled on the Italian novella and in the revised edition was even presented as a translation from an Italian original, The Steele Glas is not only morally sounder, but also a straightforwardly English product. When Gascoigne, following the tradition of the medieval estates literature, criticises all social groups which have fallen prey to pride and luxurious clothing, repeated qualifications show his caution. First, he scolds kings for their fascination with sumptuous clothing, their desire “[t]o deck their haules, with sumpteous cloth of gold, / To cloth themselves, with silkes of straunge devise” (SG 151). Afterwards, however, English authorities are assured of Gascoigne’s conformity as he projects his criticism to foreign lands: “I speake not this, by any english king, / Nor by our Queene, whose high forsight provids / That dyre debate, is fledde to foraine Realmes, / Whiles we injoy the golden fleece of peace” (SG 151). Replacing the sumptuous golden clothing of foreign kings with the metaphorical golden fleece of the English queen, Gascoigne defuses the critical impact of his satire, which has to fear the ‘Raysor of Restraynte.’ At the same time, this displacement strategy, which asks his readers to look into a mirror that shows foreign habits as a warning, reinforces his denunciation of foreign fashion which might infect English bodies and minds. Thus, the poetic persona condemns in the following “these new Italian sports” and in particular, the exotic and excessive clothing of courtiers. Although he does not explicitly name their nationality, the repeated use of the pronoun ‘our’ indicates that he addresses English courtiers, who should not wear Spanish and Italian fashion: Our bumbast hose, our treble double ruffes, Our sutes of Silk, our comely garded capes, Our knit silke stockes, and spanish lether shoes, (Yea velvet serves, ofttimes to trample in) Our plumes, our spangs,¹⁸⁸ and al our queint aray, Are pricking spurres, provoking filthy pride, And snares (unseen) which leade a man to hel. (SG 152– 153)

 Spangs were clasps or buckles, but often the word referred generally to small ornaments of glittering metal.

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In elaborating on his chiding of foreign fashion, the speaker in the following also includes the import of exotic products from non-European countries and the New World, such as “purples come from Persia,” “crimosine and lively red from Inde” and “soft silks […] from Sericane” (SG 163). Once again, he qualifies his disparagement, exempting English courtiers from his reproach that for the fashionable “no wool, appeareth fine enough”: “(I speake not this by english courtiers / Since english wool was ever thought most worth)” (SG 163). Yet he leaves open whether this exclusion refers only to the material of wool or his entire list of fashionable follies. This complaint about the import of raw materials and textiles from “forain Realmes” (SG 162) points to the economic subtext of both the sumptuary laws and the literary satires that rail against foreign fashion. The production of cloth and wool were important sources of income in England which were undercut by the growing popularity of silk, velvet, and other nonEnglish materials, “queint costs [that] do come from fardest coasts” (SG 163).¹⁸⁹ The satire not only addresses courtiers, but all social groups given to pride and sumptuous attire. According to Gascoigne, even some priests show too great an interest in their clothing and thereby betray their inclination toward Roman Catholicism: “some do (Romainelike) / Esteme their pall, and habyte overmuche. / And therfore pray (my priests) lest pride prevaile” (SG 168). They violate the modesty which should characterise priests if they mean to imitate saints, who “[n]ot deckt in robes, nor garnished with gold” are most beautiful and majestic (SG 164). Gascoigne here joins the vestimentary debate on priests, in which Protestants criticised the rich apparel of the clergy which they regarded as part of the theatrical show of the Roman Mass. Maybe most outspokenly, Becon attacked Catholic priests in his mid-sixteenth-century tract, The Displaying of the Popish Mass, in which he associated theatrical show, sexual looseness, and lavish garments. In contrast to “Christ and his apostles [who] used no such fond coats at the ministration of the sacrament,” Catholic priests “come unto your altar as a game-player unto his stage,” thereby transforming the holy service into an “abominable apish mass” (Becon 260, 259). The rich and multi-layered vestments indicate effeminacy and wantonness, Becon continues: “This your fool’s coat, gaily gauded, signifieth your pleasant fineness and womanly niceness, and your delectation in the verity of change of Venus’ pastimes, because ye will not be cumbered with one lawful wife” (259). Catholic celibacy here becomes a sign of insatiable sexual appetites which delight in change. As Becon’s remarks also indicate, pamphlets frequently depicted cross-gender dressing as akin to the

 Hentschell details, “[i]n the 1550s and 60s, wool cloth comprised up to 94 percent of England’s exports and dominated the European textile market” (“Treasonous Textiles” 78).

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dresses of Roman Catholic priests, or, vice versa, their clothing as effeminate. Thus, potential religious conversion and potential sexual transformation were blended in a scenario of cultural endangerment. To this scenario, Gascoigne contributes the menace of transculturation by foreign fashion. Accordingly, the satire’s epilogue launches a harsh criticism of courtiers who imitate foreign trends like the Italian style of curling hair, the French lovelock, and Spanish clasps. These courtiers cannot be categorised in national or sexual respects; they are hermaphroditic and transnational “monsters” (SG 173): They be not men: for why? they have no beards. They be no boyes, which weare such side lõg gowns. […] What be they? women? masking in mens weedes? With dutchkin dublets and with Jerkins jaggde? With Spanish spangs, and ruffes fet out of France […], They be so sure even Wo to Men in dede. (SG 173 – 174)

Here Gascoigne takes up the discourse against foreign fashion and effeminacy in a rather straightforward manner. This criticism is undercut, however, by his complex self-presentation at the satire’s outset, in which he describes himself as a hermaphroditic author. Gascoigne invokes the story of Tereus and Philomela as recounted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and adapted in Gascoigne’s The Complainte of Philomene, which was published together with The Steele Glas in the original volume of spring 1576. In the Steele Glas, Gascoigne compares himself to Philomela. He presents himself as the personified Satyra, daughter of Plain Dealing and Simplicity and sister to Poesy, who is abducted, raped, and mutilated by her sister’s husband, vain Delight. Gascoigne thus envisions the position of the female victim for himself. Accordingly, he presents his mutilation by vain Delight with “the Raysor of Restraynte” (SG 146) as a form of emasculation. No longer as “a man sometimes of might,” but “womãlike” does Gascoigne sing his verse “with the stumps of my reproved tong” (SG 146). Gascoigne emphasises his moral and literary reformation in another scenario of sexual indeterminacy (addressed to his chief patron, Lord Grey of Wilton; cf. Austen 154): But that my Lord, may playnely understand, […] I am not he whom slaunderous tongues have tolde […] To be the man, which ment a common spoyle Of loving dames, whose eares wold heare my words Or trust the tales devised by my pen. I n’am a man, as some do thinke I am (Laugh not good Lord) I am in dede a dame, Or at the least, a right Hermaphrodite: (SG 144)

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Gascoigne features himself here as a sexually harmless, emasculated writer, who no longer seduces his female audience (McCoy, “Gascoigne’s ‘Poëmata Castrata’” 49). However, at the same time the Ovidian intertext subverts Gascoigne’s pose. As readers of the Metamorphoses know, Philomela took cruel revenge on Tereus. Therefore, Gascoigne might be less harmless than he attempts to present himself. Moreover, as Syrithe Pugh points out, the fact that Satyra alias Gascoigne keeps singing after the glossectomy ‘with the stumps of my reproved tong’ calls into question Gascoigne’s figurative castration; his song, the The Steele Glas, is a forceful satirical attack. This well-concealed subtext might also explain the spelling of ‘Satyra,’ which refers to aggressively potent satyrs as much as to the literary genre. Gascoigne’s textual disguise as female victim is a strategic pose, which might have entertained his readers; Gascoigne deliberately has his masculine substance shine through his female camouflage (Pugh 579). As a framing for his tale about the impact of foreign fashion on identity, Gascoigne thus envisions an Ovidian metamorphosis that ostensibly goes together with an internal change, but turns out to be a disguise. In this professedly didactic glass, it remains the task of the readers to decide how Gascoigne’s figurative hermaphroditism (or rather, his cross-gender camouflage) relates to the hermaphroditic courtiers transformed by foreign fashion. Are these two forms of hermaphroditism not comparable because one is enforced and the other self-inflicted, as Kevin LaGrandeur has argued (345)? Or does Gascoigne, who aspired to be a courtier and was finally granted a position in the same year in which The Steele Glas was published, here ironically align himself with fashionable courtiers? Is his denunciation of the hermaphroditic courtiers a sign of self-hatred, as Richard McCoy has proposed (“Gascoigne’s ‘Poëmata Castrata’” 519)? Or does Gascoigne deliberately obscure his position as part of his play with roles and personae, thus entertaining and teasing readers with the question “which is the real George Gascoigne,” as Felicity Hughes suggests (7)? Given the openness of his text, its presentation as a steel glass rather than a crystal mirror might also refer to its implicit reader-response theory. Gascoigne fashions his text specifically as an outmoded steel mirror and not as a clear crystal mirror, in order to activate readers: “To recapture that sense of the labor of contemplation and reflection, Gascoigne must specify that his is a steel glass, a glass that requires the effort of polishing, some labor on the part of its user, before it can be expected to render a proper image” (Kalas 524). Thus his central metaphor emphasises that he perceives the construction of meaning as a collaborative effort by author and readers – an awareness which Lyly and Nashe will display in their narratives, too, and which helps them to make their texts attractive for heterogeneous reader groups, who can interpret them according to their own literary and moral inclination.

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While Gascoigne presents himself as the victim of ‘the Raysor of Restraynte,’ Lyly actively undertakes a literary vivisection in his first Euphues tale, The Anatomy of Wit, which was published two years after The Steele Glas. Lyly shares many of Gascoigne’s concerns, and he likewise integrates the genre of the glass. In contrast to Gascoigne, however, Lyly does not primarily present his tale as a moralistic warning against rich clothing, but features the book itself as a fashion commodity.

3.2 John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578, expanded 1579) and Euphues and His England (1580) John Lyly’s two-part story of Euphues was immensely successful in Elizabethan times and popularised ‘Euphuism’ as a distinct form of writing and speaking.¹⁹⁰ Creating a fashionable English style, Lyly’s voyage narratives are also preoccupied with English matters on the level of content. They sound out what happens to national substance while travelling abroad and wearing foreign fashion. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit features a protagonist who travels from Athens to Naples. Here, Naples arguably stands both for Italy and “the Italianate English metropolis,” London, while Athens represents Greece and Oxford (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals 75; see also Hunter 59 and Mentz 132). The sequel, Euphues and His England, sends Euphues and his Italian friend back to England in an explicitly present-day setting: the book opens on “the first of December, 1579” (Euphues and His England 166).¹⁹¹ As many critics have noted, Ascham’s Schoolmaster is an important intertext for Lyly. Even the protagonist’s name is borrowed from Ascham, who in turn adopted it from Book Seven of Plato’s Republic. Euphuia is a commendable quality for both Ascham and Plato, and a “Euphues,” according to Ascham, is “he, that is apt by goodness of wit and applicable by readiness of will, to learning” (SM 27). As the very name of the protagonist evokes a humanist worldview, one might expect that he will be presented as the ideal student of Elizabethan humanism. Indeed, the narratives in some respects reinforce humanist precepts. Like Ascham, the narrator declares the dangers of travelling to Italy, the hotspot of lust, folly, and heterodoxy (e. g. AW 33). Early on, Euphues meets an old gentleman who, as if he were the incarnation of Ascham, warns against travelling, in  Lyly did not create this style ex nihilo, but drew on Ciceronian oratory as promoted by Renaissance humanism.  Parenthetical references to Euphues and His England will be abbreviated to ‘EE’ and references to The Anatomy of Wit to ‘AW.’

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particular against travelling to Italy. His name, Eubulus, indicates his “good counsel” as in other texts of the period (K. Wilson, Fictions 57). Yet Euphues, as typical of the prodigal son that populates Elizabethan literature,¹⁹² does not follow the advice of father figures. He does not believe that he will be as easily enticed as other travellers by the Italian “Sirens” and be inwardly transformed by his life in Italy (AW 37). Instead, Euphues takes the anti-humanist position of privileging direct experience over education. Ascham had declared that “[l]earning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty, and learning teacheth safely, when experience maketh more miserable than wise” (SM 50), but the wisdom of humanistic father figures in Lyly’s tale does not appeal to the young man eager to learn novel things, partly because this wisdom is presented in abstract and lifeless humanist sententiae (Dolven 67– 68; Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals 61, 65). Humanistic knowledge would be much more appealing, Lyly seems to imply, if it were presented in stories as vivid as his own narrative, which is modelled on the erotic romances that humanists like Ascham criticised. Lyly thereby elevates the status of prose fiction: if it is able to provide quasi-empirical knowledge via reading, then it competes with, and might supersede, humanist teaching; “the school of romance” excels (Dolven 78; cf. also Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions 216).¹⁹³ Indeed, as Goran Stanivukovic argues, experiential narratives might have functioned as alternative, more realistic conduct books for young men who were searching for new concepts of masculinity because they “teach (not preach) by example, by trial and error in young men’s actions” (“English Renaissance Romances” 77). And yet, in Lyly’s narratives a clear pedagogical effect is hard to verify due to their eclectic integration of sources and discourses, their sophisticated generic stance that draws on a variety of literary models, and their ironic, morally ambiguous tone. The sequel, Euphues and His England, is not written as a continuation of the first story but as an alternative to it since the later narrative features Euphues as a youthful character, whereas he had already reached middle age by the end of The Anatomy of Wit. The books can be compared to twins or to the two faces of

 See Helgerson’s seminal study The Elizabethan Prodigals for an exploration of this narrative pattern, also in the biographical presentations of the authors.  Linton has drawn attention to the return of some humanist notions at the end of The Anatomy of Wit: “Yet the narrative ultimately recuperates the humanist subject when prodigal experience prompts a return to learning, and […] a recourse to yet another humanist discourse, that of domesticity, as the basis of a new stability for the masculine subject” (“The Humanist” 75). More recently, Fred Schurink has emphasised the common ground of The Schoolmaster and Lyly’s romance, arguing that Euphues less clearly challenges Ascham than was previously maintained.

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Janus; both metaphors recur in the narratives.¹⁹⁴ Resorting to the disguise metaphor, John Dover Wilson, in an early scholarly assessment, described their relationship as a return in camouflage. He criticised the second part as “simple reproduction of the ‘Anatomy’ in English dress” (349). Lyly himself employs the clothing metaphor, but presents his work as creative recutting rather than camouflage of the same. He depicts himself as an economical writer-as-tailor who does not waste any material: “Adam’s old apron must make Eve a new kirtle” (EE 239). The comparison that envisions the genesis of the two literary companions as a tailor’s work also takes into account Lyly’s change of addressee after The Anatomy of Wit: from a misogynist tale written to warn gentlemen against the corrupting power of women to an adulatory fashion accessory for gentlewomen.¹⁹⁵

“so monstrous a shape” – Fashioning Englishness Part of Euphues’s travel experience is a confrontation with habits abroad, and textile habits play a significant role in the intercultural encounters, on both intradiegetic and metafictional levels. On the intradiegetic level, dress again becomes a touchstone for national identity: spectres of a national identity as changeable as fashion recur throughout the narratives. For example, the second book, Euphues and His England, includes a story-within-the-story about a meeting between Callimachus and the hermit Cassander. Here, the elder character attempts to stop the younger from travelling by recounting his own misadventures abroad, from where he “returned with more vices” (EE 175) and in “so monstrous a shape” (EE 176), as Ascham had warned. That is, the change of outward appearance, the ‘metamorphosis,’ entails an internal alteration, a ‘transubstantiation.’ Like his outward looks, his English substance has not only become Italianised, but also so chameleonic and adaptable that it changed just as and with the foreign fashion he wore: “If I met with one of Crete, I was ready to lie with him

 Alternatively, Meyer suggests reading the two books as typologically related (309, 313 – 329).  See Meyer 378 on the simultaneous shift from a pro-academic and anti-courtly to a procourtly and anti-academic narrative. This change is analogous to Lyly’s biography: first seeking a career at university, he later turned to the court in hope of preferment. He secured the patronage of the Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, to whom he dedicated Euphues and His England, and became the purveyor and author of a number of courtly plays. Yet after his career as a dramatist declined and a new career as a Member of Parliament turned out to be financially unrewarding, he died in poverty in 1606. See Leah Scragg’s introduction to her edition of the Euphues tales for a comprehensive account of Lyly’s life and work.

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for the whetstone; if with a Grecian, I could dissemble with Sinon. I could court it with the Italian, carouse it with the Dutchman. […] There was no fashion but fitted my back, no fancy but served my turn” (EE 175). Unsettlingly, this perpetual alteration also includes his religious beliefs, the core of English Protestant identity: “In Egypt I worshipped their spotted god at Memphis; in Turkey their Mahomet; in Rome their Mass, which gave me not only a remission for my sins past without penance, but also a commission to sin ever after without prejudice” (EE 175). A developmental, unreliable, ‘fashionable’ identity also impacts relationships in a negative manner. For example, Euphues (who had betrayed Philautus in the first book) accuses Philautus of fickleness by comparing his friendship to “a new fashion, which being used in the morning is accounted old before noon” (EE 239). Mocking Italian fashion as much as the changeable Italian character of Philautus, Euphues’s accusation emphasises not the cost and vanity of clothing as many pamphlets do, but focuses on what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘dialectics of fashion’ (113).¹⁹⁶ To guarantee its continual newness, fashion from time to time has to recycle older trends: “when no new thing could be devised nothing could be more new than the old” (EE 239). Another story-within-the-story in Euphues and His England negotiates anxieties of internal change à la fashion in the arena of romantic courtship. Here, Iffida accuses her admirer Fidus that he is ‘making’ love as if he were tailoring fashionable attire: If you mean either to make an art or an occupation of love, I doubt not but you shall find work in the court sufficient, but you shall not know the length of my foot until by your cunning you get commendation. A phrase now there is which belongeth to your shop-board, that is ‘to make love,’ and when I shall hear of what fashion it is made, if I like the pattern you shall cut me a partlet – so as you cut it not with a pair of left-handed shears. And doubt not, though you have marred your first love in the making, yet by the time you have made three or four loves you will prove an expert workman; for as yet you are like the tailor’s boy, who thinketh to take measure before he can handle the shears. And thus I protest unto you, because you are but a young beginner, that I will help you to as much custom as I can, so as you will promise me to sew no false stitches; and when mine old love is worn threadbare, you shall take measure of a new. (EE 213)

 Benjamin’s theory of fashion is part of his reassessment of history, which for him is not a teleological progress, but includes “the permanent possibility and necessity of the re-actualization of what has (seemingly) been done away with,” the “permanent reconversion of latent into current” (182, 183). When Benjamin describes the repository of obsolete fashions as “das Herz der abgeschafften Dinge” (281), the ‘heart of abandoned things,’ he also offers a powerful metaphor for the processes of cultural memory which can resemanticise latent concepts such as transubstantiation.

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The unreliability and changeability of heterosexual love and same-sex friendship based on an infatuation with fashion also apply to all relationships which are necessary to found and reinforce the imagined community of the English nation. In sections like these, readers can deduce matters of national political importance from apparently private questions of courtship. The main plot of Euphues and His England gives the motif of cross-national transformation a twist by turning the tables: now an Italian travels to England. This Italian agent on English soil does not undermine English society as Jesuits secretly arriving on the island allegedly did, but desires to be ‘Englished,’ also because he falls in love with an English gentlewoman. This device allows Lyly to unabashedly praise England and to employ the contested genre of romance in the service of patriotic statements. By recounting Philautus’s courtship of Camilla, Lyly can contrast English “beauty” to Italian “baseness,” English “virtue” to Italian “vice” (EE 231). The alterations that are inspired by romantic love can be celebrated since they make Philautus recognise the “vices” and “beastliness” of his corrupted Catholic motherland (EE 231). In contrast to the dangers of effeminacy and loss of nobility negotiated in Greene’s and Sidney’s pastoral romances and in contrast to the dangers of national transformation by foreign ‘Sirens’ as recounted by Ascham and depicted in Lyly’s first book, Philautus’s outer and inner transformation is an improvement. Attempting to become an Italiano Anglizzato, like Lyly’s famous contemporary John Florio,¹⁹⁷ Philautus realises that he cannot rely exclusively on the transformative power of clothes: “Shall I go and attire myself in costly apparel? Tush, a fair pearl in a Morian’s ear cannot make him white. Shall I ruffle in new devices with chains, with bracelets, with rings and robes? Tush, the precious stones of Mausolus’ sepulchre cannot make the dead carcass sweet. Shall I curl my hair, colour my face, counterfeit courtliness?” (EE 232). Foreign fashion is thought to have an impact on national substance, but it takes more than putting on English courtly clothes to become English in Euphues and His England. ¹⁹⁸ Despite all attempts at cultural assimilation, Philautus’s Italian substance betrays itself again and again, most of all in devices that involve disguise and magic and therefore stand in contrast to the alleged English quality of plain dealing. Eventually, though, Philautus succeeds in his endeavour of assimilating his ethnic identity by acquiring English manners, wearing English clothing, buying English lands, and marrying an English wife, the gentlewoman Frances.  Cf. Manfred Pfister’s account of Florio as an Italiano Anglizzato.  Legally, Englishness was a matter of the place of birth, as Pfister notes with reference to John Florio: according to a Common Law rule dating back to the thirteenth century, every child born in England was English (36).

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To present Philautus’s transformation as a model which every Italian ought to follow, Lyly, just like Gascoigne, employs the popular genre of the glass at the end of the second book. “Euphues’ Glass for Europe” is specifically addressed to “the ladies and gentlewomen of Italy” (EE 321). Euphues commands Italian gentlewomen to use his text as a mirror in which they can perceive their shortcomings by comparing themselves to the ideal they should aspire to. This ideal is embodied by English gentlewomen, in particular by the Queen. Whereas the narratives warn against the dangers of transculturated Englishmen, the final pages of the second part explicitly call for Englished Italian ladies: “This is the glass, ladies, wherein I would have you gaze, wherein I took my whole delight. Imitate the ladies in England” (EE 342). By professing to ask foreign instead of English courtiers to look into a literary glass to see their vices, Lyly uses the same device of displaced criticism as Gascoigne in his Steele Glas. Rather than confronting the English with their shortcomings, he praises them, thus offering them in his literary mirror an idealised image of themselves to which readers ought to aspire.¹⁹⁹ Lyly’s device of ‘othering,’ of ascribing negative qualities to the other in order to define and idealise the self, not only reinforces English national pride, but also makes clear that English readers who recognise themselves in the corrupted Italian gentlewomen are the Inglesi italianate which Ascham characterised as devilish dangers to the English national substance. Hence the glass functions as a concave mirror, in which the English can see their own deformities; it entails, as Jürgen Meyer argues, the implicit revocation of its flattery (363) and can, as Hadfield has put it, be regarded “as a conduct book on a national level” (Literature, Travel 172, see also 169). In line with Lyly’s double appeal to fashionable readers seeking delight and to those critical of fashion seeking moral profit, the stance towards fashion in Euphues’s glass is ambivalent. On the one hand, it takes over the popular stereotype of the English infatuation with foreign trends, which Lyly adopted from his source, William Harrison’s above-quoted “Description of England” in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised 1587):²⁰⁰ “The attire they use is rather led by the imitation of others than their own invention, so that there is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancy of attire. Now using the French fashion, now the Spanish, then the Morisco [that is, Moorish] gowns, then one thing, then another” (EE 324). Lyly refers to Boorde’s image of the naked Englishman and interprets it as a warning against foreign fashion: “having in the one  Cf. Hackett’s discussion of how “the contrast between virtuous English ladies and foolish Italian ladies is in fact a mask for a contrast between English ladies as they should be and English ladies as they are” (82).  See Reilly 305 for an account of how Harrison in turn incorporates Euphuism in his writing.

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hand a pair of shears, in the other a piece of cloth who having cut his collar after the French guise is ready to make his sleeve after the Barbarian manner” (EE 324– 325; cf. Harrison 145 – 146). However, in a later passage describing the English court, the fashion of English courtiers is praised because not only is it more dazzling than Italian clothing, but it is also embedded in a political, patriotic context: For bravery I cannot say that you [Italian gentlewomen] exceed them, for certainly it is the most gorgeous court that ever I have seen, read, or heard of. But […] [t]he bravery they [the English] use is for the honour of their Prince, the attire you wear for the alluring of your prey; the rich apparel maketh their beauty more seen, your disguising causeth your faces to be more suspected; they resemble in their raiment the ostrich, who being gazed on closeth her wings and hideth her feathers, you in your robes are not unlike the peacock, who being praised spreadeth her tail and bewrayeth her pride. […] Look diligently into this English glass, and then shall you see that the more costly your apparel is the greater your courtesy should be […]. (EE 328 – 329)

This description focuses on the patriotic function of the expensive dress: whereas Italian fashion is a narcissistic, private occupation, English clothing has political significance, Euphues claims here. Since its “bravery” is used “for the honour of their Prince,” it is a display of loyalty to the queen. This assertion was certainly true since the fashionable apparel of courtiers sought the attention of the Queen in a court at which, as David Kuchta has shown, “elite masculinity was defined in part as properly sumptuous display, as living up to the sartorial experience of the crown” (234).²⁰¹ The passage is striking because it redefines the social function of fashion. Throughout the narratives of both books modish dress was regarded as indicative of an unreliable, chameleonic identity and of a lack of commitment in friendships and courting, but in the glass, it is praised as the expression of loyalty to the Queen. Rather than being an agent of subversion of national identity, fashion is now reinterpreted as a patriotic statement and an affirmation of (elite) Englishness. For this reinterpretation, the question of how foreign the fashion worn at the English court is must be evaded. Lyly masters this task elegantly: he avoids directly ascribing foreign materials such as silk or velvet or Continental trends like ruffs to English courtiers by naming them only in comparisons with Italian habits: “But yet do they [English courtiers] not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who think scorn to kneel at service for fear of wrinkles in your silks, who dare not lift up your head to heaven for fear

 For this reason, however, English courtiers were hardly interested in imitating the shy ostrich which Lyly invokes, but on the contrary were encouraged to strut about like the peacock.

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of rumpling the ruffs in your neck” (EE 328 – 329).²⁰² Thus the Euphues tales set up a contradictory attitude towards fashion. Whereas on the one hand it is presented as a danger to national identity, the final part of the second book redefines it as an elite expression of loyal Englishness. Rather than promoting a clear-cut political position, the tales use the contradictory Elizabethan discourse on fashion for means of entertainment, for appealing to heterogeneous reader groups, and sometimes as plot elements. It is remarkable, however, that both views of fashion are presented as patriotic concerns. This nationalistic stance towards fashion is reflected in Lyly’s employment of fashion as a central metafictional metaphor throughout the Euphues narratives.

“take the measure of a woman’s mind as the tailor doth” – Fiction as Fashion In addition to this negotiation of national identity on the intradiegetic level, which reflects the Elizabethan ambivalence regarding (foreign) fashion, the issue of clothing repeatedly serves Lyly as a metafictional metaphor, and this aspect of fashion in his work is much more inventive. Through dress, Lyly reflects on his own writing, also in terms of its nationality. As critics have emphasised, as one of the earlier vernacular prose authors, Lyly wrote in a cultural “vacuum” (Hadfield, Shakespeare 108). He experimented with style and narrative patterns and often innovatively mixed elements of various literary modes.²⁰³ For his breaking of new literary ground, (foreign) fashion offered a productive metafictional metaphor in three crucial respects.  In the rare examples when he names expensive foreign materials worn by English courtiers, he presents them as the apt dress for the exquisite physical and moral beauty of the English elite: “Velvets and silks in them are like gold about a pure diamond, in you like a green hedge about a filthy dunghill” (EE 329).  Therefore the literary mode of Lyly’s Euphues tales is hard to determine. Focusing on matters of courtship, they are indebted to romance, but they do not entail pastoral or chivalric elements like the romances discussed in chapter 2. Lyly draws on a number of additional models including Latin classics, English precursors like Pettie, the commonplace and the courtesy book, the Italian novella, and the questioni d’amore. Like Lodge in Rosalynd, which is partly modelled on the Euphues tales, Lyly uses long soliloquies to explore the psychological states of his characters – a feature which he probably took from the novella. In the first book in particular, Lyly generally focuses on speech and the exploration of ideas, and is much less interested in narrative action than the longer tales by Greene, Sidney, Lodge, and Nashe, or the novelle by Riche. See Salzman’s critical history of English prose fiction and Scragg’s introduction for concise accounts of Lyly’s eclecticism, which leads to a “kaleidoscopic assemblage” that makes the tales morally ambiguous (Scragg, in particular 11– 14, here 13 and Salzman, English Prose Fiction 35 – 47).

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First, the fashion metaphor is used to expound the implicit reader-response theory. It helps Lyly to emphasise that writing and reading the book is a joint effort. Thus Lyly opens his dedication to the gentlewomen by asserting that he has to rely on the collaborative imagination of his readers to fill in a Leerstelle, a textual blank:²⁰⁴ Arachne having woven in cloth of Arras a rainbow of sundry silks, it was objected unto her by a lady, more captious than cunning, that in her work there wanted some colours; for that in a rainbow there should be all. Unto whom she replied, ‘If the colours lack thou lookest for, thou must imagine that they are on the other side of the cloth; for in the sky we can discern but one side of the rainbow, and what colours are in the other, see we cannot, guess we may.’ (EE 161)

In the following, Lyly extends this initial appeal for teamwork between author and readers by comparing his book to a piece of clothing which needs to be creatively adapted to fit every reader’s stature and tastes: If a tailor make your gown too little, you cover his fault with a broad stomacher, if too great, with a number of plights, if too short, with a fair guard, if too long, with a false gathering. My trust is you will deal in the like manner with Euphues, that if he have not fed your humour, yet you will excuse him more than the tailor; for could Euphues take the measure of a woman’s mind as the tailor doth of her body, he would go as near to fit them for a fancy as the other doth for a fashion. He that weighs wind must have a steady hand to hold the balance, and he that searcheth a woman’s thoughts must have his own stayed. (EE 163)

Here, Lyly probably draws on Harrison’s mocking of the fuzziness of fashion victims, who bother tailors with their “chafing,” “fretting,” and relentless extra wishes (Harrison 146), but turns it into a positive and metafictional scenario. Lyly admits that his taking measure of the minds of his implied readers will never be perfect – therefore his actual readers will have to modify the garment of his fiction once they wear it. He thereby extends the metaphor of fiction as clothing to a scenario in which readers put on the apparel of fiction. Readers do not only behold contents and meanings which are apparelled in particular poetic dresses, as Sidney imagines in his Apology, but they themselves come to wear poetry. Here, Lyly creates an image that is riskily evocative given the humanist reservation against the transubstantiating power of fiction and the cultural pre-

 Likewise with reference to the metaphor of textile, Iser in his classic study of aesthetic response explores the “interwoven” perspectives of a literary text and introduces blanks as “the unseen joints of the text” which “trigger acts of ideation on the reader’s part” (The Act of Reading 184; 183). See also Meyer 356 – 357 on the activation of the readers’ imagination by Lyly’s Arachne reference.

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occupation with the power of apparel to form and transform identities: what will happen to the substances of readers once they put on the apparel of Lyly’s fiction? By emphasising the superficiality and ephemerality of his fashionable books, as we will see, Lyly plays down and mocks the harm they might exert on readers – but the evoked intertext by Ascham as much as the contemporary discourses on fashion might have undercut Lyly’s light-heartedness for some readers. Second, the idea of fiction as fashion speaks to the commodification of writing which accompanied the establishment of the print market. This also meant that reading (and writing) for pleasure was an increasingly acknowledged alternative to the humanist requirement of reading and writing for moral profit. Addressing an aristocratic patron while at the same time courting the print market, Lyly casts his work in contradictory terms. In the dedication to his patron in The Anatomy of Wit, Lyly claims that a “naked tale doth most truly set forth the naked truth” and, quite contrary to Sidney’s image of virtue in rich apparel, that “verity then shineth most bright when she is in least bravery” (AW 29). Belying the elaborate rhetoric of the subsequent tale, Lyly claims here to set forth a morally edifying narrative in plain style. He extends his claim of having written a “simple pamphlet” by comparing polished style to the desire for fine food and clothing: “I cannot feed their humours which greatly seek after those that sift the finest meal and bear the whitest mouths. It is a world to see how Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than the language will allow, to eat finer bread than is made of wheat, to wear finer cloth than is wrought of wool” (AW 29). Like Gascoigne, Lyly resorts here to the common notion that wool was quintessentially English. However, in his subsequent address of gentlemen readers, Lyly, in a famous gesture of sprezzatura, calls his book a “toy” which will become “trash” once it is outmoded (AW 30). He acknowledges that it is printed as a fashion commodity: “Gentlemen use books as gentlewomen handle their flowers, who in the morning stick them in their heads and at night strew them at their heels. […] [P]rinters and tailors are bound chiefly to pray for gentlemen; the one hath so many fantasies to print, the other such divers fashions to make. […] But a fashion is but a day’s wearing and a book but an hour’s reading” (AW 30). In the dedication to the gentlewomen of the second book, Euphues and His England, Lyly introduces his tale even more straightforwardly as a fashion commodity that does not at all meet the requirements of a humanistic educational book.²⁰⁵ He frankly admits that

 Cf. also K. Wilson’s comment on the two dedications of Euphues and His England: “The two letters act like one of the ‘double prefaces’ so common in the works of Greene. Euphues begins

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his style resorts to ‘finer speech than language will allow’ and thereby appeals to the aristocratic craving for ‘finer cloth than is wrought of wool’: You choose cloth that will wear whitest, not that will last longest, colours that look freshest, not that endure soundest, and I would you would read books that have more show of pleasure than ground of profit. Then should Euphues be as often in your hands, being but a toy, as lawn on your heads, being but trash; the one will be scarce liked after once reading, and the other is worn out after the first washing. (EE 162)

Here, Lyly again presents his tale as a “toy,” as non-enduring but entertaining “trash.” As Helen Smith comments, books and clothes are thus shown to be “part of a system of ‘fashion’ and a burgeoning consumer culture that binds them closely together in the early modern imagination, creating a compelling language of dress and ornament that is at once metaphor and reality” (208). Lyly could here draw on Pettie’s marketing of his Pallace as a product of fashion, in which he defends his innovative style and advises readers, “if you like not of some wordes and phrases, vsed contrary to their common custome, you must thinke, that seeing wee allowe of new fashions in cutting of beardes, in long wasted doublets, in litle short hose, in great cappes, in low hattes, and almost in al things, it is as mutch reason wee should allow of new fashions in phrases and words” (Aiii-Aiiiv; image 3 – 4). In his second book, Lyly straightforwardly targets a female audience in a sexualised manner, and this focus on questions of gender and sexuality might also have functioned as a smokescreen for the class issue involved in each publication. Gentlemen and those aspiring to become courtiers, such as Lyly, needed to conceal their interest in selling books.²⁰⁶ By rhetorically seducing women (the addressed audience) in front of male readers (the implicit audience), the writers emphasise their masculinity, thereby marginalising questions of class. When Lyly famously declares that he would rather his book “lie shut in a lady’s casket than open in a scholar’s study” (EE 162), this marketing trick makes his books also more attractive to male readers hoping to overhear the intimate conversation between Lyly and gentlewomen. Ever since the ironic address of “Gentle Readers, whom by my will I woulde haue onely Gentlewomen” in A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure (Pettie Aii; image 2), authors played with the convention of exclu-

to develop the strategies of a commercial author, shamelessly advertising his text as simultaneously misogynistic and a celebration of female virtue” (Fictions 63).  As Fleming elucidates, Pettie’s A Petite Pallace “demonstrates the ease with which discussion of the class anxieties attaching to print publication is displaced into the available register of gender. Fear of the class impropriety of printing a text may be disguised as a hesitation about doing it in front of women” (165; see also Wall 276 – 277).

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sively addressing female readers. They established a professedly intimate conversation, which male readers could enjoy from the position of the secret voyeur that I discussed in the chapter on the Arcadia. ²⁰⁷ In a similar manner, Nashe, fifteen years after Pettie and ten years after Lyly, in his preface to the first edition of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, plays with the sexualised discourse of exposing secrets, that is, of publishing a manuscript which was written for private circulation among friends, “[w]hich although it be oftentimes imprisoned in Ladyes casks, & the president bookes of such as cannot see without another mans spectacles, yet at length it breakes foorth in spight of his keepers, and vseth some priuate penne (in steed of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement” (A3). Nashe’s imagery plays with the connotation of ‘casket’ as female genitalia inseminated by a private ‘pen,’ which results in ‘enlargement’ (Wall 171– 172). Hutson has shown that this homosocial strategy is not only at work in prefaces, dedications, and epistles accompanying the publications, but also in some narratives themselves (The Usurer’s Daughter 98). This is certainly the case in The Anatomy of Wit, in which Philautus and Euphues renew their friendship in shared hatred of Lucilla, whom they both courted, only to be rejected in favour of a third suitor. Thirdly, fashion offers a model to think about genre, also in terms of national questions. As we have seen, Lyly uses modish ‘Continental’ genres like Italian romances and novelle which were criticised for their negative influence on readers and creatively employs them in the service of patriotic concerns. For instance, in The Anatomy of Wit, he employs the Italian novella, which was perceived by many as a mode of “amoral indifference” because of its narrative immediacy and lack of moral commentary (Beecher, “Introduction Farewell” 30), but at the same time, he makes sure to criticise Italy in his depiction of Italian vices. In Euphues and His England, as shown, Lyly defuses the suspected subversive potential of erotic romance by making it an agent of anglicisation. Hence, Lyly, who compares his work as an author to that of a tailor and who calls his books fashion products, employs Continental materials and (dress / plot) patterns, and he tailors his fiction according to the heterogeneous tastes of his English clients. He thus turns his claim in “Euphues’ Glass for England” that foreign, courtly fashion is not in itself harmful, but can be put to patriotic

 Accordingly, R.B., the alleged friend of Pettie who published his ‘secret’ without the author’s permission, confesses in his dedication, “I care not to displease twentie men, to please one woman: for the friendship amongst men, is to be counted but colde kindnesse, in respect of the feruent affection beetweene men and women: and our nature, is rather to doate of women, then to loue men” (Aii; image 2). As critics have noted, ‘R.B.’ is most probably a mask for Pettie himself (Fleming 162), who establishes here “a fantasy of aristocratic promiscuity” (Collins 187).

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uses into a metafictional statement: foreign genres and plot patterns can be adapted in the service of Englishness; they offer the raw material from which “the most gorgeous” fashion can be created and circulated “for the honour of their Prince.” Indeed, Euphuism became the dominant literary fashion whose rhetoric represented elite Englishness (Hadfield, Literature, Travel 166; Bates 97). That Lyly’s narratives were bought and consumed as fashion is reflected in the reactions of his contemporaries.²⁰⁸ Yet, as Lyly anticipated, his narratives eventually suffered the fate of all modish products, namely to become an outmoded “victim of fashion” once the market was saturated with Euphuism (Hunter 257– 297).²⁰⁹ In the 1590s, Euphuism as the dominant courtly style was succeeded by the new interest in Arcadian fiction modelled on Sidney’s prose narrative, which privileged periphrasis rather than antitheses. At the same time, more and more writers came to challenge the notion that courtly rhetoric should be the dominant English style. On this trajectory, Euphuism came to be mocked by authors writing for middle-rank readers, who presented it as a decadent style against which they set their own new, plain, and, as it was often implied, more patriotic style. For example, the first dedicatory poem of Greene’s Menaphon announces by means of floral metaphors that Lyly’s fashion and its ‘labouring beauty’ are superseded by Greene’s fresh style: Of all the flowers a Lily once I lov’d Whose labouring beauty branched itself abroad; But now old age his glory hath removed, And Greener objects are mine eyes’ abode. (Menaphon 78)

The next poem presents Greene as a “sweet shepherd” who foregoes “pomp of speech,” and instead complies with the simpler mode of “country swains,  For example, William Webbe in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) declares that “Master Iohn Lilly hath deserued moste high commendations, as he which hath stept one steppe further therein then any either before or since he first began the wyttie discourse of his Euphues. Whose workes, surely in respecte of his singuler eloquence and braue composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof” (image 18). Since ‘brave’ at the time was used to describe clothes, just as in Lyly’s reference to the ‘bravery’ of English apparel discussed above, its use indicates that Webbe “was thinking of eloquence in conventionally sartorial terms” and perceived Lyly as the latest textual fashion (Pincombe 104).  Yet G. K. Hunter notes that while authors mocked Euphuism as outmoded, Lyly’s narratives remained in demand until well into the seventeenth century: “before the turn of the century Lyly was no longer avant-garde and no longer being imitated by the smartest wits – […] it was now smart to decry the style. But against this one must set the plain fact that Euphues went on being reprinted, all through the ‘nineties, and through the first three decades of the seventeenth century” (284).

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whose thoughts are faith and troth, / [and who] Will shape sweet words of wool and russet cloth” (79). Thomas Nashe’s preface characterises Greene’s middle style in terms of the textile metaphor as an “attire, though not so stately, yet comely” (82). Nashe also paves the way for claiming prose fiction written in this middle style as more substantially English when he compares the use of ‘inkhorn terms’ to foreign textile fashion: “I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is grown of late, so that every mechanical mate abhors the English he was born to, and plucks, with a solemn periphrasis, his ut vales from the inkhorn” (81). He contrasts Greene’s “true eloquence” with the “Italianate pen” of plagiarists and of translators who present their works as original although they are actually a “disguised array” (82), that is, copies from the works of others ‘disguised’ as their own. Nashe’s attempt to establish a quintessentially English middle style without foreign terms or elaborate rhetoric, which I will discuss again with reference to Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, was already recommended by Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric, which was published roughly thirty years before Menaphon and became an Elizabethan bestseller (Müller 310). Wilson called for a unified, plain language: “either we must make a difference of English, and say some is learned English and other some is rude English, or the one is court talk, the other is country speech; or else we must of necessity banish all such affected rhetoric and use altogether one manner of language” (Wilson 190).²¹⁰ The books discussed in the following contribute to this criticism of decadent courtly fashion in both textual and textile respects. Barnabe Riche’s story collection Riche His Farewell to Military Profession was particularly noteworthy for its author’s unusual career and for his straightforward criticism of infatuation with fashion.

3.3 Barnabe Riche: Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581) Like Lyly, Barnabe Riche presents his stories as a fashion commodity; they are, as the title announces, gathered together for the only delight of the courteous gentlewomen, both of England and Ireland (FW 121). Riche confirms in his conclusion, “I have put forth this book because I would follow the fashion” (FW

 See Schmitt-Kilb’s discussion of Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (82– 125), in particular the subchapter on the construction of plain speech as a rhetorical ideal (92– 99). See also King’s chapter on “The Protestant Plain Style” (138 – 144).

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316). From an author who had previously been a soldier, as the title also announces, such a declaration is highly unusual and involves a greater degree of selfcontempt and mockery than in the case of Lyly. In his preface addressed to the gentlewomen of England and Ireland, Riche accordingly explains his professed career change as a reaction to the fact that the military prowess of England is undercut by foreign fashion: excessive consumption diverts funds away from soldiers fighting for England, as Riche himself had to experience – after decades of fighting in both Holland and Ireland, having been promoted to the rank of captain early in his career and having functioned as a government spy, he was taken out of service by a fashionable woman, Elizabeth I. Hence, in Riche’s view, the corrupting influence of foreign fashion is not an individual, psychic problem of fashionable aristocrats and upstarts, but concerns the very core of the body politic. Among the stories, “Sappho Duke of Mantona” illustrates particularly clearly the danger of abandoning military prowess in favour of erotic and sartorial preoccupations, especially once a country is attacked. In Riche’s scenario, effeminate courtiers are unable to defend their mother country. Previously, soldiers had fallen out of favour for the sake of these cowardly fashion victims, who imitate rather than fight foreigners: those that had braved it up and down the court in the new cuts, strange fashions, their hair frizzled, looking with such grisly and terrible countenances enough to make a wise man believe they were clean out of their wits, now in the time of wars were glad to run under a gentlewoman’s farthingale to hide them. The emperor, I say, being thus perplexed, called to his remembrance the injury that he had done Sappho [a soldier], whom he had banished only to satisfy the wills of those that were about him. (FW 164)

Like Gascoigne in his Steele Glas, Riche criticises foreign fashion for its gendertroubling impact. Riche had similarly warned his readers about England’s lack of prowess in his Alarm to England, and so for his contemporaries, it must have been “something of a shock,” as Fleming argues, “to discover that, having published his plea that his countrymen turn from Venus to Mars, Rich himself suddenly turned from Mars to Venus” (170). Like the other authors discussed in this chapter, Riche closely associates textual and textile fashions, and he mocks aristocratic, effeminate literature as much as sartorial fashion. As part of his ridicule, he presents his new occupation as an author of romantic tales as more valiant than his former profession. During his career as a soldier (which he was to resume after the publication of Farewell), Riche published accounts of the battles and tales from camps, for example in A Right Excellent and Pleasant Dialogue between Mercury and an English Soldier (1574), in Alarm to England (1578), and later in A Pathway to Military Practice (1587). In the preface to Farewell, he describes himself as newly converted to ro-

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mance writing, a claim which is not entirely true in view of his earlier literary experiments:²¹¹ “Gentlewomen, I am sure there are many – but especially of such as best know me – that will not a little wonder to see such alteration in me, that, having spent my younger days in the wars among men and vowed myself only unto Mars, should now, in my riper years, desire to live in peace amongst women and to consecrate myself wholly unto Venus” (FW 123). Inverting the prodigal son pattern, Riche claims to regret his masculine, virtuous life and to be ‘reformed’ into an effeminate courtier dedicated to romance. In the following, he ironically plays with the Petrarchan imagery of physical injury: Riche states that there is “nothing so dangerous to be wounded with the luring look of our beloved mistress as with the cruel shot of our hateful enemy: the one possessed with a pitiful heart to help where she hath hurt, the other with a deadly hate to kill where they might save” (FW 123). Associating the exaggerated desire for luxury goods with the effeminate elite, Riche rehabilitates the masculine soldier and fraternises with the non-aristocratic readers who see through splendid apparel and recognise the moral corruption beneath (Lamb, “Mildred” 84). Therefore, in addition to his explicit address of gentlewomen, Riche implicitly courts a non-aristocratic audience, as his second dedication to “Noble Soldiers, both of England and Ireland” (FW 127) makes clear, too. Here, he fashions a different genesis of his Farewell. He tells his soldierly readers that he wrote the tales in the camps in Ireland, thus presenting them as the by-product of war rather than the expression of his new, idle, and effeminate lifestyle. Riche now more straightforwardly condemns the decline of England due to the craving for luxury goods and explicitly criticises not only gentlewomen, but also all men who share the effeminate desire for foreign fashion (FW 128). In particular, the Frenchified English gentleman, whom Ben Jonson was to call the ‘English Monsieur,’ has become indistinguishable from a cross-dressed woman according to Riche: he claims that he met someone in London “apparelled in a French ruff, a French cloak, a French hose, and in his band a great fan of feathers, bearing them up very womanly against the side of his face […], but [I] rather thought it had been some shameless woman that had disguised herself like a man in our hose and our cloaks – for our doublets, gowns, caps, and hats they had got long ago” (FW 128 – 129).

 Riche had already experimented with fictional frames in his military writing and had written the fictional tale The Strange and Wonderful Adventures of Don Simonides (1581) while he was still in Ireland. In a sequel to this work, The Second Tome of the Travels and Adventures of Don Simonides (1584), Riche makes his characters meet up with Lyly’s Euphues at Athens. Accordingly, as Beecher observes, the title Riche His Farewell to Military Profession “signifies a change in his literary interests and not a renunciation of his profession” (“Barnabe Riche” 285).

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Riche’s anti-aristocratic perspective also comes to the fore in egalitarian remarks in his stories. For instance, one character demystifies the notion of a hidden royal substance, which, a few years later, Greene’s romances were to present as the source of legitimacy. Employing the term ‘mettle,’ Riche’s character questions the very idea of an innate noble core by rhetorically asking, “of what mettle are either monarch, king or kaiser framed of otherwise than of natural and common earth, whereof other men do come?” (FW 152). Rather than buy into the essentialist concept of nobility of blood as in Greene’s romances, Riche’s stories emphasise the performative notion of nobility of action: “Or what maketh these differences which by sottish opinion we conceive either of gentle or ungentle otherwise than the show of virtue and good conditions?” (FW 152). Formally, Riche’s stories reinforce their appeal to non-elite readers by choosing a plain prose style and by doing away with the interspersed poems typical of pastoral romances.²¹² Accordingly, his style was described as “masculine and sinewy” by contemporaries (King and Kynder 54). Like Gascoigne, Riche connects his scorn of elite effeminacy to the rejection of products and trends that come from enemy lands. From his soldierly perspective, he emphasises that England is (or should be) at war with a number of nations on the British Isles, on the European continent and in Asia, and, finally, with the Devil for reasons of religious and cultural differences: First the French hath ever been our enemies by nature, the Scots by custom, the Spaniards for religion, the Dutch, although we have stood them in great stead and helped them at many a pinch, yet I could buy as much friendship as they do all owe us for a barrel of English beer. If we should go any further, then we come to the Pope, the Turks, and the Devil, and what friendship they bear us I think everyone can imagine. (FW 133)

In his conclusion to Farewell, Riche criticises the English adoption of Italian, Spanish, and French fashion as a form of “disguising” (FW 316). Wearing foreign fashion undermines the English substance of individual Englishmen as well as the body politic since it is ruled by aristocratic fashion victims. As Jones and Stallybrass note, “[t]he implication that foreign fashions dismember the body politic was a commonplace” (66). Among the starkest of such dismemberment metaphors was Dekker’s comparison of the Englishman’s fashionable dress to the mutilated and dispersed body of a traitor: For an English-mans suite is [l]ike a traitors bodie that hath beene hanged, drawne, and quart, red, and is set vp in severall places: his Codpeece is in Denmarke, the collor of

 Riche might have wanted, as Constance Relihan suggests, to create “literary comfort in narrative prose for those who failed to find it in [lyrical] poetry” (Fashioning Authority 15).

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his Duble a[n]d the belly in France: the wing and narrow sleeue in Italy: the short waste hangs ouer a Dutch Botchers stall in Vtrich: his huge stoppes speakes Spanish: Polonia giues him the Bootes […]. (The Seuen Deadly Sinnes 32. Cf. K. Newman 125, Jones and Stallybrass 1, and Hentschell 552)

In unison with other critics, Riche again emphasises how corrupted English society has become in the prefatory letter to The Irish Hubbub (1617), the last of a number of books on Ireland. Here, Riche describes an alarming act of deserting the English army, of abandoning his English identity: he borrows an Irish mantle, and thus the clothing of the Catholic enemy he fought against for many years, because in its plainness it seems more virtuous and masculine to him than English, effeminate, and transculturalised clothing. Even though for Riche, the Englishman, the Irish mantle is a “disguised manner,” this disguise can better signal his truly English substance, his “inward virtue” than the “more glorious garments” worn by English aristocrats (A2; cf. Jones and Stallybrass 71– 72). As is usual for the dress metaphors employed in prefaces, the plainness of the Irish mantle also stands for Riche’s plain, honest style: “For want of a better cloake whereby to shelter these indeauours of my untutered penne, I haue borrowed an Irish mantle” (A2). Thus Riche presents his own, simple style as both more masculine and more English than the elaborate, effeminate style of courtly literature, which was dominated by Euphuism at the time when Riche wrote his Farewell. In a similar self-deprecating move, Riche attempts to alarm the readers of Farewell by drawing their attention to the scandal that a blunt soldier is forced to submit to effeminate, foreign fashion. His contradictory attitude of preaching against luxury goods while at the same time presenting his own book as a fashion commodity is a cunning marketing strategy to appeal to heterogeneous reader groups: the effeminate elite (represented by the addressed gentlewomen) as much as middle-rank readers (represented by the addressed soldiers). The fact that Farewell became a long-standing bestseller shows how successful Riche’s approach was (Lamb, “Mildred”; Jorgensen 188).²¹³ The complex stance towards

 It is part of this complex reader appeal that Riche not only scorns gentlewomen, but also flirts with them. As Paul A. Jorgensen has shown, in his preface Riche fashions himself in a literary role, namely that of “the blunt soldier” and “reluctant or inept lover” who is inexperienced in erotic, rhetorical, and sartorial matters (183). This type was popular during Riche’s day on both the page and the stage, where it was represented, for instance, by Shakespeare’s Benedick, Hotspur, and Henry V. The thirty-nine-year-old unmarried soldier Riche, who had no university education, could embody this role as a seemingly honest, biographically validated identity. Notwithstanding his intimate conversation with his female readers, shaped by his alleged inability to understand or appreciate female and erotic matters, Riche does not lose

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readers concerns not only gender and class, but also the question of nationality. While Riche declares his rejection of elite foreign products, his tales are indebted to modish courtly European literary influences, chiefly to romance and the Italian novella (and its French translations). It is also for this reason that they arouse contempt from their own author. With unusually forthright “bravado,” the ‘honest’ soldierly author admits in his conclusion (Helgerson 92; cf. also Hackett 85): “in the writing of them [these stories] I have used the same manner that many of our young gentlemen useth nowadays in the wearing of their apparel – which is rather to follow a fashion that is new, be it never so foolish, than to be tied to a more decent custom that is clean out of use” (FW 315). The patriotic, masculine soldier attempts to alarm (and at the same time please) his readers by surrendering to foreign, effeminate fashion. Thus Riche, just like Lyly, employs the contested genre of romance in the service of patriotic statements, but he chooses a radically different strategy: rather than defusing the subversive impact of the romance mode by making it an agent of anglicisation, Riche even heightens its foreignness and its damaging influence on individuals as well as on the body politic in order to warn readers – even if, just like in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, such didactic advice against fiction is undercut by the tale’s aesthetic appeal.

3.4 Robert Greene: A Quip for an Upstart Courtier: Or, A Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (1592) Greene’s dream narrative A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, which he himself calls a “pamphlet” (Quip 210), revisits the issues of fashion and its transformative power in an unusual manner.²¹⁴ The tale anthropomorphises velvet breeches and cloth breeches and lets them discuss passionately which of them is worthier and more English (see illustration 3). The tale was extremely popular in its day: going through seven printings in 1592 alone, it was reprinted in 1606, 1620, 1622, and 1635 (Hentschell, “Treasonous Textiles” 559). It is based on a poem that was

sight of potential male readers. As typical of the triangular scenario of reader addresses which Riche probably adopted from Pettie, his explicit courting of gentlewomen includes men as voyeuristic witnesses of their professedly intimate conversation. Accordingly, Farewell displays a complex gendering. Jorgensen describes this setup as focusing on “concern[s] with female peculiarities that would interest men – or women who were most concerned with how men felt about women” (183; see also Beecher, “Introduction Farewell” 59 – 60).  Parenthetical references to A Quip for an Upstart Courtier will be abbreviated to ‘Q.’

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issued privately by an unknown author called “F. T.” (now identified by some critics as Francis Thynne) more than twenty years before Greene turned to the material.²¹⁵ The Debate between Pride and Lowliness, published a little earlier than or simultaneously with The Schoolmaster in 1570, displays the anxieties of transculturation which were enhanced by Ascham’s treatise.²¹⁶ Greene wrote his dream narrative in the final phase of his life, which he, just like Gascoigne, fashioned as a prodigal reformation and a dedication to more moral matters than his earlier love romances – a development contrary to that declared by Riche in his Farewell. Yet even though Greene clearly relinquishes the ‘foreign,’ subversive mode of romance in his late writings, critics disagree about the seriousness of Greene’s moral rectification. Possibly, as in Gascoigne’s case, it was another authorly pose and a marketing trick rather than a deep-felt personality and life change. If we are to believe Thomas Nashe, Greene remained interested in fashion until his early death, despite his extended criticism of wealthy clothing and foreign fashion. Nashe recounts that his friend Greene flounced about London “a month before he died” in “a very faire Cloake with sleeues, of a graue goose turd greene” “as fine as may bee” (Strange Newes 288).²¹⁷ In A Quip, the narrator’s dream begins with a prolonged description of a field of plants and flowers, thus placing his following tale about sartorial ‘weeds’ in the context of transnaturation (Q 211). Next, the narrator encounters personifications of velvet and of cloth breeches and offers himself as first member of a jury which is to settle their quarrel as to who is the more worthy apparel for the English. In the following, the quarrelling breeches will select twenty-three more members for their jury and reject more than thirty tradesmen due to their alleged bias. Not only in the title, but also in the dedication, Greene clarifies his position in this debate since he complains, “How since men placed their delight in proud lookes and braue atyre, Hospitality was left off, Neighbourhood was exiled, Con-

 For a discussion of the authorship of the Debate, see Collier (viii-xvi), who argues for Thynne, and Carlson, who questions Collier’s assessment. Edwin H. Miller points out that Greene’s prose narrative is a rather free version of the earlier poem.  The device of having clothes speak was also used by the earlier pamphlet A Pleasant Dialogue or Disputation between the Cap and the Head (printed in 1564 and reprinted in 1565). A Pleasant Dialogue was adapted from the French Dialogue de la teste et du bonnet, which was in turn translated from the original Italian Il Filotimo by Pandolfo Collenuccio (1444– 1504). See Jaster for a discussion of the similarities between Greene’s tale and A Pleasant Dialogue and their interaction with early modern sumptuary laws.  Nashe might have emphasised Greene’s fineness in order to invalidate Harvey’s deriding of Greene’s “fonde disguisinge of a Master of Arte with ruffianly haire, unseemely apparel, and more unseemelye Company” and “his pawning of his sword, cloake, and what not, when money came short” (Harvey, Foure Letters B2-B2v).

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science was skoft at, and charity lay frozen in the streets” (Q 209). Like Riche’s Farewell, this lamentation explicitly names the consequences on society of a seemingly private preoccupation with fashion; a relationship which Lyly’s Euphues evoked more implicitly.²¹⁸ Here Greene constructs an idealised vision of the past, a strategy which was one of the cornerstones of creating a sense of Englishness in Elizabethan discourse. In his address of the gentlemen readers, however, this criticism becomes a source of embarrassment since he addresses those who wear and promote courtly fashion. Displacing the critical attitude onto his protagonist Cloth breeches, Greene defends his position by explaining that “though he speakes against Veluet breeches which you were, yet he twists not the weede but the vice, not the apparell when tis worthily worn, but the unworthie person that weares it, who sprang of a Peasant” (Q 211). Attempting to incite the gentlemen’s disdain of “vpstarts” (Q 211), Greene seeks the approval of noble readers despite his criticism of foreign fashion – a displacement strategy akin to Gascoigne’s and Lyly’s claims of criticising foreign courtiers rather than the English nobility for their infatuation with sumptuous apparel. The narrator’s bias towards Cloth breeches becomes clear when the opponents first appear. When he glimpses Velvet breeches, he recalls, “Mée thought I saw an vncouth headlesse thing come pacing downe the hill, stopping so proudly with such geometrical grace, as if some artificiall bragart had resolued to measure the world with his paces” (Q 220). The foreignness of the proud apparition is emphasised in its characterisation: “a very passing costly paire of Veluet-breeches, whose paines béeing made of the cheefest Neapolitane stuff, was drawn ouer with the best Spanish Satine” (Q 221). Because of its richness, the narrator is able to identify its social standing through this one piece of clothing as “such a straunge headlesse Courtier” (Q 221), and, due to its uncouth combination of foreign materials, he perceives Velvet breeches as a “most monstrous sight to see” (Q 221). By contrast, the “other pair of breeches more soberly marching, and with softer pace” is described as originally and purely English: “a plain paire of Cloth-breeches, without either welt or garde, straight to the thigh, of white Kersie, without a flop, the nether-stocke of the same, sewed too aboue the knee, and onely seamed with a little couentry blewe, such as in Diebus

 As Hutson has remarked, the idea that consumerism is “directly responsible for a withdrawal from charitable habits associated with traditional pre-consumer economy […] is absurd, given the same moralists’ readiness to condemn the all-consuming idleness which had also been a feature of ‘hospitality’ in the pre-Reformation organization of society” (Thomas Nashe 26 – 27).

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Illustration 3: Robert Greene, A Quip for an Vpstart Courtier. Title page of the 1592 edition.

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illis our great Grand-fathers wore, when neighbour-hood and hospitality had banished pride out of England” (Q 222).²¹⁹ The portrayal of Cloth breeches as essentially English again invokes an idealised national tradition, one of the distinctive features of the ‘imagined community’ of a nation. Anderson employs the notion of a spectre when he theorises the integration of the transhistorical community into the synchronic community of the nation; “an as-it-were ancestral ‘Englishness’” derives from “a ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogeneous, empty time” (Imagined Communities 145), thus creating a sense of the nation as “bounded, intrahistorical societywith-a-future” (The Spectre 334). With reference to Anderson’s seminal study, Philip Schwyzer points out that the community of a nation therefore includes not only the living, but also the dead. The “remarkable imaginative leap” required when including the dead as part of the living national community was particularly difficult for the English since the pre-Anglo-Saxon “ancients with whom they were required to imagine community were not their own ancestors. They were not even English,” but, strictly speaking, Welsh – or Trojan, taking into account the legendary construction of Britain as founded by Brutus (2– 3; see also 6 – 7). Visions of the golden age of pure Englishness abound in Elizabethan pamphlets and fictional literature. Like Greene, Nashe in his Unfortunate Traveller refers to diebus illis when talking about “the generation of Brute” who allegedly founded Britain (UT 227). In The School of Abuse, Gosson likewise differentiates between the present state of the nation and an old, idealised England (16 – 16v). Joseph Hall in his Satires (1590) invoked a similarly purist version of “the time of gold” before “crept in pride” (50 – 51). In “the world’s best days,” “They naked went; or clad in ruder hide; / Or home-spun russet, void of foreign pride” (52). Hall suggests that the Englishman in Continental apparel is a grotesque composite. His rhetoric strategy replaces the dressed body part with the flesh beneath, thus heightening the penetration of the English body (politic) with foreign habits: A French head joined to neck Italian: Thy thighs from Germany, and breast from Spain: An Englishman in none, a fool in all: Many in one, and one in several. (52)

 This focus on a (forged) English tradition obfuscates the economic interest behind ideological claims. Greene here contributes to a discourse that turned wool broadcloth into an epitome of English virtue, thus concealing the economic factor involved in the promotion of the English product (Hentschell, “Treasonous Textiles” 565).

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Most often, as in Greene’s Quip, the pamphlets and narratives that attempt to mould an English identity focus on the present, pressing issue of foreign infiltration via fashion and conceal the fact that the English community was constantly transformed by overseas influences and arguably even founded by foreign invasion. They anchor the non-existent ideal of ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’ Englishness in the distant past. This utopian move is part and parcel of the collective enchantment of the nation, of the absorption of a sense of the sacred in increasingly secular political discourses. At a time of fast religious changes and increasing religious pluralisation, nationhood slowly emerged as a new, compensatory pattern of collective identification. Here, a new semiotics of clothing is foreshadowed, which will fully develop in the seventeenth century, fuelled by Puritanism as well as an anti-court and anti-urban ideology which cherished the countryside. As Kuchta has shown, this iconoclastic discourse located vanity, moral corruption, and effeminacy not in the hearts or souls of the fashion victim, but in the clothes themselves (245). Clothes were not only thought to display vices, but to cause or at least significantly strengthen them. Since clothes were granted such intrinsic transubstantiating power, the “true masculinity” and the nationalist political allegiance of anti-court republicans was signalled and secured by “a fashion which disdained fashion” (245), by an abstinence from modish trends and imported textiles. Instead, wool and cloth, which were regarded as natural English products, became the proper attire of conservative republicanists (Jones and Stallybrass 76). This attitude involved a turning away from the infected, transcultural court to the ‘pure’ English countryside, a movement which was prepared in the late sixteenth century by texts like Greene’s (cf. also Hentschell, “Treasonous Textiles” 559). Further, Cloth breeches emphasises the newly-rich, upstart quality of Velvet breeches as opposed to his own family background of generations of gentlemen. Like the sumptuary laws of the day, he naturalises and sacralises the class division of England in another allusion to the legendary past, this time to the Bible: Noah’s sons Sem, Iapeth, and Cham were understood to figure church, gentility, and labour respectively. Although their offspring will be born into the corresponding social group, changes are possible: “Gentility grew not onely by propagation of nature, but by perfectiõ of quality” (Q 225). Here, Cloth breeches complements the idea of gentility of blood by gentility of action. As we have seen, they were taken for granted by Greene’s romances, their relationship was put under pressure in Sidney’s Arcadia versions, and they were to be disjointed in Lodge’s Margarite. In Greene’s dream narrative, Cloth breeches insists that nobility is not only inherited, but also needs to be maintained and justified. According to this logic, Velvet breeches doubly lacks nobility since he is neither a born gen-

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tleman nor behaves nobly. The foreign ancestry of Velvet breeches, his being “sprung from the ancient Romans, borne in Italy, the mistresse of the world for chiualrie, cald into England from my natiue home” (Q 224) cannot improve his status either because the Roman empire has declined and Italy has turned out to be the decadent realm of Catholicism. Velvet breeches’ claim that he was ‘called’ to England troubles Cloth breeches, and it might have evoked associations with Jesuits who were likewise summoned to England – by the ‘wrong’ people – and infected the island, according to Protestant pamphleteers and the anti-Jesuit laws. Therefore, Cloth breeches argues: “so hast thou beene the ruine of the Romane Empire, and nowe fatally art thou come into Englande to attempt heere the like subuersion” (Q 226). This subversion is presented not only as the danger of political upheaval, but also as a form of physical contagion of both individual bodies and the body politic: “him may wée curse that brought thée first to Englande: for thou camest not alone, but accompanied with multitude of abhominable vices, […] infectious abuses, and vaine glory, selfe loue, sodomie and strange poisonings, wherewith thou hast infected this glorious Iland” (Q 226). This notion of transculturation as infection returns in early modern writings, in which diseases, in particular venereal diseases, were frequently characterised as foreign.²²⁰ Just like Gascoigne, Greene chooses a native, medieval form and a plain style for his concern with constructing an English identity in line with the national tradition. Greene’s dream vision relates back to the popular medieval dream visions also used by Chaucer, in which the melancholy narrator usually falls

 For instance, in “an elaborate deflection of blame” the English considered syphilis the ‘French pox,’ while the French called it ‘Italian disease,’ the Italians named it ‘Spanish disease,’ the Poles understood it as a ‘German disease,’ and the Russians referred to it as ‘Polish disease’ (Hentschell, “Treasonous Textiles” 550; see also Eamon 5). Alternatively, syphilis was thought to be emanating from the New World (Eamon 6). Since undergarments were thought to be carriers of syphilis, the metaphoric association of foreign apparel and an infection of the English body (politic) was grounded in a belief in literal contagion. Accordingly, Gosson in his Pleasant Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (1595) claims that farthingales were invented to hide the deformations caused by syphilis and to separate the frock from the underwear to prevent further infection (10). Likewise, Thomas Middleton in Michaelmas Term (1608) links venereal disease to foreign fabric: “So farewell wholesome weeds, where treasure pants, / And welcome silks, where lies disease and wants” (1.2.49 – 50). Sometimes, the infatuation with foreign fashion and infection with venereal disease were seen as mutually reinforcing. For example, Jonson in his “On English Monsieur” imagines a vicious circle presenting the father’s syphilis as a possible reason for the son’s infatuation with French fashion: “Or had his father, when he did him get, / The French disease, with which he labours yet?” (252). Foreign fashion, infection by actual diseases, and moral corruption thus became almost synonymous in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

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asleep in the countryside in spring-time, just as Greene’s narrator does, to encounter personified abstractions in his reverie. Accordingly, the narrative is indebted to the medieval practice of metonymic characterisation, in which one piece of clothing represents the entire person. Greene took this characterisation from his source, The Debate between Pride and Lowliness, in which Claire Bartram identifies “[t]he medieval, Chaucerian qualities of this parade of symbolically dressed individuals and its interaction with the conventions of estate satire” (140). The redeployment of medieval, English literary techniques and genres creates an apt literary form to underpin the tale’s patriotic concern with forging an English tradition and to promote its creation of nostalgia for this dissolving world. Greene, in his Quip as much as in the repentance pamphlet Greenes Vision, which was posthumously published in the same year, employs the late medieval literary tradition, most notably Chaucer and Gower, to bolster up his moral and literary reformation: by employing the mode of the Middle English dream vision, Greene models his writing on truly English precursors rather than imitating Continental romances, as he did in the ‘prodigal’ phase of his life (Dimmick 471– 472). As Margaret Rose Jaster points out, the fact that Greene’s narrative was printed in Black Letter, a font “used to antiquate (and therefore legitimate) the text” underscores this project, too (206). Accordingly, the pamphlet associates the decline of England with the impact not only of foreign fashion, but also of foreign fiction. Just like Riche’s Farewell, Greene contrasts the good old martial times with the weakened present-day spoiled by fashion and love poetry: Then charitie florished in the Court, and young Courtiers stroue to exceede one an other in vertue, not in brauerie: they rode not with fans to ward their faces from the wind, but with Burgants to resist the stroke of a Battle axe: they could then better exhort a soldior to armor then court a Lady with amortrs: they caused the Trumpette to sound them pointes of warre, not Poets to write them wantõ Eligies of loue […]. (Q 234– 235)

The narrator laments that ‘bravery,’ a term which we encountered in Euphues, too, consists only of wearing daring fashion and no longer in chivalric achievements; burgonets have been replaced by fans, armour by amorous discourse. Because of these manifold damaging influences of foreign fashion on the individual English body as well as the body politic, national identity needs to be defended against the corrupting transubstantiating power of foreign fashion, in textile as well as textual respects. Hence the jury’s eventual condemnation of Velvet breeches as “an vpstart come out of Italy, begot of Pride, nursed vp by selfe loue, & brought into this country by his companion Nufanglenesse” (Q 294) – and then the narrator wakes up from his wishful dream. Here, Greene radically changes the ending of his source. In The Debate between Pride and

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Lowliness, Cloth breeches is presented as the more worthy candidate, whose “cause [is] so good that néedelie must he winne” (F.T. F1; image 41). Yet he is attacked and defaced by six armed strangers, who accuse the “wéede of lowliness” of a lack of reverence for Velvet breeches, a “garment of such woorthynes” (F1v; image 42). In contrast to Greene’s suggestion that Velvet breeches must be regarded as an upstart, in the source text the strangers teach lowly Cloth Breeches a lesson in humility: Thou shalt therefore be a memorial, Of such as with their betters daren stryve: (F1v; image 42)

The earlier narrative thus culminates in a clash of classes, in which the competition for who is the ‘better’ is ultimately a question of birth and wealth rather than virtue. In comparison, Greene’s text defuses the class antagonism by shifting interest to questions of nationality; as we saw, he makes plain rural Cloth breeches a representative of traditional Englishness. In The Debate between Pride and Lowliness, the strangers eventually tear Cloth breeches apart. Disfiguring sartorial characteristics are presented here as a cruel “execution” (F2; image 42). Having witnessed this, the narrator wakes up, immediately checks his own breeches and is relieved to see them “whole & in good plight” (F2v; image 43). In contrast to his source text, Greene offers poetic justice at the end of his tale, clearly favouring the ancient, plain, English apparel. However, the vogue for Italian things was by no means abdicated by narrative condemnations such as Greene’s. Italianisation hence remained a concern of prose fiction in the 1590s, maybe most imaginatively in The Unfortunate Traveller.

3.5 Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) After the highly influential books by Ascham and Lyly, in 1594 Thomas Nashe again sent Englishmen to Italy. Jack Wilton, an eighteen-year-old page, first serves at the French camps of Henry VIII, briefly returns to England and, fleeing the sweating sickness, returns to Europe. He accompanies the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on a grand tour of Europe that spans several years. In Italy, Wilton deserts Surrey and continues travelling on his own. At the end of the narrative, Wilton returns to the French camps together with his newly wed Italian wife. The Unfortunate Traveller, which has been called “one of the richest productions of the Elizabethan imagination” (Bate, “The Elizabethans” 55), again negotiates the complex Elizabethan attitude towards all things foreign which also informs Gascoigne’s, Lyly’s, Riche’s, and Greene’s narratives: a fasci-

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nation with foreign fashion and a sense of English inferiority coincide with growing national pride and fear of transculturation. As we shall see, Nashe is acutely aware of his literary predecessors and constantly alludes to intertexts. In accordance with the tale’s remarkable self-awareness, the topics of travelling and foreign fashion attain an unusually sophisticated metafictional dimension in The Unfortunate Traveller. The wanderings of the traveller are a metaphor for writing, in particular since its travelling protagonist is a ‘page.’²²¹ Accordingly, Nashe, who is credited in the OED with the first use of ‘page’ in the sense of a printed sheet, introduces the narrative as the “chronicle of the King of pages” in his dedication to the pages of the court (The Unfortunate Traveller 209; Simons 21).²²²

“a youth of the English cut”? Transcultural Fashion and Transgeneric Fiction The Unfortunate Traveller is set in the early sixteenth century when educational travel was still highly regarded, but it was published at a time when this had drastically changed, as we have seen. Although the tale’s title and its reproduction of many xenophobic stereotypes make it appear like a narrative unfolding of Ascham’s criticism of Italianism,²²³ its relationship to its source text is more complex. Like Lyly, Nashe constantly evokes the Aschamite worries about travelling and transculturation as well as the admonitory discourse against foreign fashion, but he does not fully endorse them. When Wilton enters Rome, he comments on the English habit of assembling Continental modes: “At my first coming to Rome, I, being a youth of the English cut, ware my hair long, went apparelled in light colours, and imitated four or five sundry nations in my attire at once” (UT 269). Calling himself “a youth of the English cut,” Wilton emphasises the constitutive role which fashion plays for the creation as much as the expression of nationality, which is understood both as an external look and an inner (albeit not natural, but ‘cut’) core. In Italy, Wilton meets an exiled English earl modelled on Ascham and on Lyly’s Eubulus, who asks him to stop “straying so far out of England to visit this strange nation,” since “naught but lasciviousness is to be learned” in Italy (UT 283). Drawing on Ascham’s metaphoric description of the Englishman’s Circean transformation into a “marvellous monster” with “at

 Cf. Hutson, Thomas Nashe 220; Olejniczak Lobsien and Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination 344; G. Brown 92.  Ferguson suggests that Nashe might have taken this pun from Rabelais (“Cornucopias” 203). I will abbreviate The Unfortunate Traveller to ‘UT’ in parenthetical references.  As Jones notes, the stereotypes owe more to the 1590s than to Henry VIII’s day, in which the tale is set (63).

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once in one body the belly of a swine, the head of an ass, the brain of a fox, the womb of a wolf” (SM 66), Nashe’s earl claims that “a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him” (UT 283). Similar to Ascham, who talks of “the simple head of an Englishman” (SM 69), the earl characterises “our Englishmen [… as] the plainest dealing souls that ever God put life in” (UT 284). The adoption of foreign manners and the loss of Englishness go hand in hand with the wearing of foreign fashion, the earl laments: What is there in France to be learned more than in England but falsehood in fellowship, perfect slovenry, to love no man but for my pleasure […]? […] [A]nd when they come home they have hid a little wearish lean face under a broad French hat […] and spoke English strangely. […] From Spain what bringeth our traveller? A scull-crowned hat of the fashion of an old deep porringer, a diminutive alderman’s ruff with short strings like the droppings of a man’s nose, a close-bellied doublet coming down with a peak behind as far as the crupper and cut off before by the breast bone like a partlet or neckercher, a wide pair of gaskins which ungathered would make a couple of women’s riding-kirtles, huge hangers that have half a cow hide in them […]. (UT 285 – 286)

Similar claims were widespread in Nashe’s day, as we have seen, and they remained vital in the seventeenth century. For instance, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary recounts the case of a friend’s son who lost his English manners in France. When he returned home, he “refused to aske his father blessing after the manner of England, saying, Ce n’est pas le mode de France, It is not the French fashion. Thus whilest (like Apes) they imitate strange fashions, they forget their owne, which is iust as if a man should seeke his perdition, to gaine a cloake for ornament” (Moryson part 3: 3; cf. Kirk 529). As Moryson’s simile indicates, under a French cloak, the English substance suffers perdition. While Nashe invokes the discourse of the mutable English prone to transculturation, he divests Ascham’s authoritative voice of credibility and force by transferring it to an expatriate, impoverished Englishman who used to live on a pension from the pope.²²⁴ Furthermore, even though Wilton’s travels prove the allegedly lascivious, vengeful, violent, and lawless nature of Italy in many respects, his experiences do not confirm that travelling has equally corrupting influences as the earl claims, in unison with contemporary treatises and reports.

 Hence I disagree with Wenke’s positive reading of the earl in his assessment of The Unfortunate Traveller as a “moral aesthetic” that reinforces Ascham’s precepts. Latham notes that Nashe here uses a well-established figure in a way which does not validate the earl’s opinion (89).

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Wilton had been ‘false in fellowship’ and far from ‘a plainest dealing soul’ before he travelled to Italy. The pure England which the nostalgic and exiled earl dreams about no longer exists. What is more: it might never have existed. Some pamphleteers projected visions of cultural purity onto the early sixteenth century and in particular onto Henry’s camps. For instance, Dekker claimed in 1606 in The Seven Deadly Sins of London that English ‘apish’ fashion was “begotten, betweene a French Tayler, and an English Court-Seamster” only recently: it “cannot be read in any Chronicle, that he [personified Apishnesse] was euer with Henrie the eight at Bulloigne or at ye winning of Turwin & Turnay” (30). Yet Nashe’s chronicler describes in detail his imitative outfit at Henry VIII’s camp and thus counters the fantasies of cultural purity promoted by pamphlets as well as by Gascoigne’s, Riche’s, and Greene’s tales: I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top, my French doublet gelt [i.e. slashed] in the belly as though, like a pig ready to be spitted, all my guts had been plucked out, a pair of side-paned hose that hung down like two scales filled with Holland cheeses, my long stock that sat close to my dock and smothered not a scab or a lecherous, hairy sinew on the calf of my leg, my rapier pendant like a round stick fastened in the tacklings for skippers the better to climb by, my cape cloak of black cloth overspreading my back like a thornback or an elephant’s ear that hangs on his shoulders like a country huswife’s banskin [i.e. leather apron] which she thirleth her spindle on, and in consummation of my curiosity, my hands without gloves, all a-more French, and a black budge edging of a beard on the upper lip, and the like sable auglet [i.e. fringe] of excrements in the first rising of the angle of my chin. (UT 225)

In Nashe’s narrative, English fashion is a transcultural product, and not only in sartorial respects. Wilton describes his garments in an ambiguous manner, which oscillates between naïve pride and a subversive parody of English fashion. His minute depiction of his garb and its unfavourable similes draws on the common opinion that English fashion not only imitates, but also exaggerates foreign habits. In 1567, for instance, Gascoigne had criticised his contemporaries, “of a Spanish Codpeece we make an English football; of an Italian wast, an English petycoate, of a French ruffe, and English Chytterling” (“A Delicate Diet” 466). However, Wilton’s own stance towards his dress is not clear. It might be a parody unintended by Wilton, in which readers discern how the implied author mocks the naïve narrator for his typically English attitude towards dress: as a middle-rank character, he imitates aristocrats who imitate foreign fashion. At the end of this pattern of imitation and exaggeration stands Wilton’s ridiculously extravagant dress. Alternatively, the narrating protagonist might deliberately make up this outfit to entertain his readers with a parody of upper-class fashion (W. Davis, Idea and Act 217). In both cases, The Unfortunate Traveller would mock, but at the same

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time endorse, the idea that the English are newfangled, inconstant, and plain enough to copy foreign fashion, and that they do so in a tasteless manner. Yet the scenario affords a third reading: rather than being indicative of inconstant, hybrid Englishness, it might be a witty strategy of disguise during Wilton’s presumably dangerous travels. Travellers were sometimes given the advice to put on flamboyant clothes in order to divert suspicions that they were English Protestant spies. For example, Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary (1617) recommended colourful clothing to avoid the Inquisition. As Sarah Warneke explains, “[t]he rationale behind this behaviour was that anyone affecting such remarkable dress could hardly desire to pass unnoticed and was therefore unlikely to be a Protestant desperately trying to hide in the shadows” (Images 180). In the late sixteenth century, Sir Henry Wotton claimed to have employed this tactic successfully; travelling to Rome, he wore a large blue feather with his black hat (180). Therefore, Wilton’s “feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top” might be a strategy of camouflage rather than a display of fashion – or maybe both at the same time. The narrative here leaves open the motivation of the narrating protagonist, and this indeterminacy is maintained throughout the tale. The identity of Nashe’s page – his tale as much as his protagonist – is deliberately ephemeral and performative. The tale’s ideological ambiguity is further enhanced by its sophisticated generic position that combines elements of romance, travel report, chronicle, autobiography, cony-catching pamphlet, jest-book, the picaresque, tragedy, sermon, moral treatise, and satire. This amalgamation of genres involves an amalgamation of world-views and hence leads to a “kaleidoscopic effect” similar to Lyly’s eclectic tales (Salzman, English Prose Fiction 92). As part of its amalgamation of genres, The Unfortunate Traveller juxtaposes romance and a kind of literary realism which drew on (proto‐)journalistic or historiographical writing. As critics have shown, the influence of popular travel accounts and their claims to trustworthiness created a “new demand for verisimilitude” in prose fiction, too (W. Davis, Idea and Act 216). Wilton uses a relatively plain, colloquial style and professes to draw on the literature of recorded fact; and as his self-characterisation as ‘outlandish chronicler’ indicates, he merges the travelogue, the chronicle, and (auto)biography. After introducing the tale as a “chronicle of the King of pages” (UT 209), he has his narrator ask readers, “Let me be a historiographer of my own misfortunes” (UT 269) and thus downscales historiography to autobiography. Accordingly, Wilton invokes John Foxe’s biographical accounts of the interrogations and executions of Protestant martyrs in Acts and Monuments as one of his generic models and turns it, somewhat megalomaniacally, into an apt frame for his autobiography. He asks his audience at the very beginning of his tale, “What stratagemical acts and monuments do you think an

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ingenious infant of my age might enact?” (UT 210). As Wilton has to experience, however, his initial command over others soon changes into his own surrender to fortune; the story shifts from a focus on his ‘acts and monuments’ to incidents that only allow him to ‘react’ to the ‘moment.’ The narrative rendering does not conform to the retrospective (auto)biography advertised in the tale’s subtitle The Life of Jack Wilton. Rather than narrating the experiences of the ‘experiencing I’ from a temporal distance and with the knowledge of hindsight, readers participate in Wilton’s seemingly spontaneous reactions: “it is as if Jack tells his story as he lives it” (Suzuki, “Signiorie” 369). The fact that Foxe’s Acts and Monuments arguably “was the most articulate statement of the identity of the English national and Protestant interests” in the sixteenth century and beyond makes it an interesting reference point for Nashe’s narrative which is, as I shall argue, concerned with forging an English mode of writing (Greenfeld 61). The generic patterns of chronicle, travelogue, and autobiography are thus invoked, but they are also undercut in favour of a heightened immediacy of narration, to create irony, or to entertain and surprise readers. By including diverse encounters with historical figures of Henry’s day, Nashe’s tale clearly differs from chivalric romances, which he scorned in The Anatomie of Absurditie as “feyned no where acts” (11). Accordingly, Nashe repeatedly invokes romance topoi, but in the next move undercuts or mocks them. For example, in a brief scene of cross-gender dressing, Wilton camouflages himself as a “half-crown wench” to trick a captain into paying him (UT 223). This episode invokes the romance motifs of cross-gender disguise and the bed trick. Rather than elaborating on the scenario, however, as in Sidney’s and Lodge’s romances, Nashe only uses it as a brief hoax and thus brings it close to the cony-catching pamphlet or the jest book.²²⁵ Just as Wilton here turns the romance topos into a strategy for gaining money, so does the author himself, who aims, as he repeatedly makes clear, at selling his book. To gain literary reputation as much as economic success, Nashe literally sells out romance motifs. Accordingly, his dedication to Lord Wriothesley calls his written leaves “goods uncustomed” and hopes

 Some of Wilton’s jests play with the early modern fear of infiltration by foreign spies and assassins, which was also reflected in Elizabethan romances like Greene’s Gwydonius, as we have seen. In order to trick the camp’s cider merchant into giving out his cider for free as a form of exculpation, Wilton convinces him that “[i]t is buzzed in the King’s head that you are a secret friend to the enemy and, under pretence of getting a licence to furnish the camp with cider and such like provant, you have furnished the enemy, and in empty barrels sent letters of discovery and corn innumerable” (UT 214). For a discussion of contemporary cony-catching pamphlets, see for example Clark’s chapter on “Rogue and Prison Literature” in her Elizabethan Pamphleteers (40 – 85).

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to achieve a good price for them from his patron: “Prize them as high or as low as you list; if you set any price on them, I hold my labour well satisfied” (UT 207). Here, Nashe again employs a romantic topos in a highly ironic manner, when he assures his patron: “Unreprievably perisheth that book whatsoever to waste paper which on the diamond rock of your judgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrecked” (UT 207). Just like the grand narrative openings of Sidney’s Arcadia and Greene’s romances modelled on Heliodorus, Nashe begins his own tale with a shipwreck. Yet by letting the shipwreck happen even earlier than Sidney and Greene, namely in the preface, he ironically outdoes them: before the narrative even starts, romance becomes an unfortunate traveller, who will not recover from this initial shipwreck.²²⁶ However, the narrative does not maintain a clear division between non-realistic romance and the realistic genres of chronology, (auto)biography, and travel report. Nashe’s ambiguous introduction of his tale as a “fantastical treatise” already indicates that he merges the modes (UT 207). Against a strong general interest in correct chronological writing in the late sixteenth century, Nashe creates a “wild chronology” which is less interested in historical accuracy than in a stunning plot and in comic juxtapositions (Ossa-Richardson 946).²²⁷ To begin with, the narrative’s premise (that Wilton accompanies Surrey on his grand tour of Europe) is contrived since in actual fact Surrey never went to Italy. Further, Wilton admits to be a moody and selective historical witness. For example, he becomes a negligent chronicler when he witnesses a debate between Luther and ‘Carolostadius’ at Wittenberg:²²⁸ A mass of words I wot well they heaped up against the mass and the Pope, but farther particulars of their disputations I remember not. I thought verily they would have worried one another with words, they were so earnest and vehement. Luther had the louder voice, Carolostadius went beyond him in beating and bouncing with his fists. Quae supra nos nihil ad nos. They uttered nothing to make a man laugh, therefore I will leave them. (UT 244)

 Mentz argues that the final third of The Unfortunate Traveller comes closer to romance conventions and that Jack’s marriage invokes the romance topos while at the same time parodying it (“The Heroine” 358).  For example, he flees the 1517 sweating sickness in England and afterwards witnesses the battle of Marignano, which took place in 1515. From Italy, he travels to Munster, where he encounters the Anabaptist rising and their bloody defeat in 1535 (Hibbard 152– 153).  This is another instance of unreliable recording since one historical debate between Karlstadt and Eck happened at Leipzig, another between Luther and Zwingli at Marburg, but none at Wittenberg.

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Instead of paying attention to the content of the theological debate at Wittenberg as a chronicler in Foxe’s tradition should, Wilton manages to render it in a way that does ultimately ‘make a man laugh,’ namely as a theatrical dumbshow (UT 244). The narrative gains dynamic force and entertaining irony from the juxtaposition of conflicting genres, but it also poses a strong hermeneutic challenge to readers, who will hardly ever see their generic expectations fulfilled. In this respect, Nashe’s late Elizabethan prose narrative resembles Baldwin’s experiment with contradictory modes forty years earlier. As we have seen, the professed didactic message of Beware the Cat is undercut by its sophisticated device of framing, which makes the retrieval of a ‘core message’ difficult. It turns the search for substances and the fascination with transubstantiation into an aesthetic structure. The formal complexity of The Unfortunate Traveller likewise invites readers to wonder about the impact of travelling and fashion on Jack’s identity and thus to search for the hidden substance of its ‘page’ – however, this substance remains indeterminate: it might be constantly shifting or possibly simply missing. Therefore, some critics have concluded that the tale’s protagonist can hardly be considered a ‘character’ at all since he lacks a substantial core,²²⁹ and likewise that the narrative itself “eludes all attempts to define its essence, […] because its consistency within itself has proved impossible to establish; and its moral center is as puzzling to locate as its literary kind” (Edwards 295). Yet it is this puzzling hermeneutical task which makes The Unfortunate Traveller a particularly intriguing reading experience. Just as Baldwin’s readers could not be sure which cats they were meant to beware and whether they were indeed meant to beware them at all, Nashe’s readers have to figure out which character the eponymous traveller refers to and whether they should indeed regard him as unfortunate. Further, just as Baldwin’s tale itself, in a metafictional move, became the cat which readers ought to beware, Nashe presents his tale as itself a traveller. Nashe’s use of mixed modes and his extemporal style are part of the tale’s concern with “the lottery of travel,” which is not only its topic, but also its aesthetic practice (UT 238). Wilton’s narrative voice is as travelling and as adaptive

 For instance, Hibbard states, “[i]n fact Jack has neither conscience nor character. As a realized human being he does not exist at all” (177), Holbrook calls Wilton “more a rhetorical attitude than a character” (70), Reinhard H. Friederich maintains that the narrator is beyond “any pretence to a consistent persona” (211), and Stephen S. Hilliard perceives him as an “empty […] vessel,” a “tabula rasa” (135). In a similar vein, Alexander Leggatt sees Wilton not as “a coherent character but a series of effects” (37; 40), Patrick Morrow grants him the function of a narrative “continuity device” (640), and James Nielson concludes that he might as well be considered “a travel agency” (136).

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as Wilton himself (Hibbard 178). Hence some critics have described his account as “without doubt a voice in search of a proper rhetorical mode” (Haas 25). Yet although it is true that Wilton keeps changing genres and discourses, I think that neither the narrator nor the author is searching for a ‘proper’ mode. Instead, I would argue that each of these shifting registers is the appropriate rhetorical mode for the particular, unexpected situation in which Wilton finds himself on his trip. Just as his voyage is incoherent, sometimes erratic, full of detours, and replete with sudden turns, so are his extemporal style that oscillates between colloquial and high registers and the tale’s shifting generic allegiances.²³⁰ Presenting his tale as a traveller, Nashe imagines the readers as co-travellers (and thus, presumably, as prone to transcultural fashion as the young page ‘of the English cut’). In his dedication to the pages of the court, Nashe creates a similar narrative situation to Beware the Cat, namely an oral tale delivered to fellows: “Hey pass, come aloft. Every man of you take your places and hear Jack Wilton tell his own tale” (UT 209).²³¹ Throughout the story, Wilton repeatedly invokes his live audience, but at other points he also addresses his readers. He thus creates a conversational style which is “studiedly informal, its spontaneity artfully achieved” (Clark 256). As part of Wilton’s conversational style, he attempts to take into account the reactions of his addressees.²³² For this reason, as Kiernan Ryan puts it, the reader is not imagined as “the passive consumer

 Hibbard equally concludes, “Nashe is essentially an improviser” (147), and Peter Holbrook elaborates, “Wilton’s [discourse] seems empirical rather than idealistic, dedicated to the disordered actuality of the world” (76; see also Stephanson 32 and Erchinger 81, 87, and 102– 105 for a discussion of travelling as paradigm of Nashe’s art). As Kiernan Ryan has acknowledged, the aesthetics might not only reflect the particular experiences of a traveller, but also the unprecedented plurality and fluidity of the Elizabethan world (48). To Walter Davis, the tale therefore seems informed by a “thoroughgoing and even doctrinaire skepticism which does indeed come close to complete nihilism” (230). Others have identified more specific discontents in Nashe’s tale, for instance unease with the humanist expectation of profitable fiction. This thesis has been most thoroughly pursued in Lorna Hutson’s study Thomas Nashe in Context (65, 217 and passim).  This narrative situation was not unlikely for Elizabethan prose fiction, which might have been read aloud. For the most comprehensive discussion of the oral delivery of early modern narratives, see Ong, Orality and Literacy. As Sulfridge points out, Wilton’s style might be described more aptly as colloquial rather than as oral in Ong’s sense (5). Clark, in her study of Nashe’s pamphlets, clarifies that “[i]t was not the case here that the techniques of oral discourse and speech found their way into written prose, but rather that Nashe deliberately cultivated such techniques in order to create a kind of paradox: that of the airiest and most ephemeral display of verbal fireworks transfixed and made permanent in print” (256).  Ong, Interfaces 71; Relihan, “Rhetoric” 143 – 146. See Sulfridge 3 – 4 for an account of the narrator’s intimacy with his listeners/readers.

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of a prepacked authorial ‘content’,” but as “an active collaborator in the production of the narrative” (52). Just as Lyly asks his readers to fill in the blanks of his text, so Wilton encourages them to make up for the gaps in his narrative, for example when he requires readers to “[s]leep an hour or two, and dream” a part of his travels which Wilton is unwilling to relate in detail (UT 224). That Nashe chooses a travel narrative to invite readers as active collaborators seems fitting for his experiment with prose fiction. As Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay have shown in their study of the emergence of prose writing in European literature since the Middle Ages, prose is particularly suitable for an aesthetic project like Nashe’s since it invites the reader “to unmoor himself or herself from single or singular perspectives and travel the roads of positionality” (124). Aesthetically and on the level of content, the reader becomes a co-traveller through the tale’s polyphonous, multi-generic world.²³³ The narrator himself fashions the reader as his companion and equates reading and travelling when he calls for advice by the man “most travelled in histories” (UT 257). Further, Nashe signals that it is up to the readers to decide how fortunate his traveller is. As we shall see, Nashe’s metafictional comments make quite clear that the fortune of his narrative lies in the hands of its readers, and he also points out that this fortune depends not only on the aesthetic judgement of readers, but also, particularly for a professional writer like Nashe, on their willingness to spend money on buying the book: if they like, they can turn the traveller into a fortune for Nashe. It is part of Nashe’s deconstruction of inherited genres that he turns their motifs into metaphors for writing, and in particular of writing for the newly established book market. As we have seen, Nashe, in a self-ironic gesture, sells out romance motifs. In a similar manner, a metafictional scenario of the narrative literalises the genre of the ‘anatomy’ made famous by Lyly. In this episode, Wilton’s body is inspected by a physician, who plans to buy and dissect him: The purblind doctor put on his spectacles and looked upon me, and when he had thoroughly viewed my face, he caused me to be stripped naked, to feel and grope whether each limb were sound and my skin not infected. Then he pierced my arm to see how my blood ran; which assays and searchings ended, he gave Zadok his full price and sent him away, then locked me up in a dark chamber till the day of anatomy. (UT 289)

Nashe’s tale raises the provoking question of how much a human life is worth. In Wilton’s case, the question of a human life’s worth is settled (“five hundred crowns,” UT 289), but the scenario also points to the metafictional question of

 See Jones for an account of The Unfortunate Traveller in the light of Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel.

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the worth of a page. Further, it plays with reader expectations since Elizabethans presumably did not only wait for the typical revenge story, but might also have anticipated a Lylyan anatomy in this new travel tale. Accordingly, Nashe here announces not An Anatomy of Wit, but an ‘Anatomy of Wilton.’ This self-referential, satirical strategy of literalising crucial metaphors of pretexts pervades the scenario. Like Lyly in his paratextual comments, Nashe compares surgical cutting to tailoring, when Wilton imagines himself as a veritable fashion victim: “O the cold, sweating cares which I conceived after I knew I should be cut like a French summer-doublet” (UT 290). Quite literally, the ‘youth of the English cut,’ because of his travels and his concomitant adoption of foreign fashion here faces the lethal danger of ending his life as a ‘youth of the French cut.’ Similar to Lodge’s literalisation of romance topoi, this parody of Lyly’s anatomy and Greene’s and Sidney’s romances is itself an act of abscission. It cuts the tale off from the literary tradition, as Walter Davis has suggested: “This encyclopaedic destructiveness both epitomizes the fictional mode of the Sidney-Lyly tradition and severs The Unfortunate Traveller from it forever” (Idea and Act 229). The story itself reflects on its departure from literary tradition by narrating a competition between Surrey and Wilton which involves a disguise scenario that adopts and revises the romantic disguise motif.

“I made up my market” – Italianate Aristocratic Poetry versus English Common Prose The Unfortunate Traveller adopts the romantic motif of cross-class disguise and turns it into a metafictional statement regarding the young mode of English prose fiction. When Wilton and the Earl of Surrey have arrived in Italy, Surrey asks Wilton to exchange clothes and identities as he hopes “to take more liberty of behaviour” as a page (UT 246).²³⁴ Once Surrey and Wilton have exchanged clothes and names, none of Nashe’s characters can see through their disguises. Surrey, whom Wilton described beforehand as royal because of his poetic abilities – “A prince in content because a poet without peer” (UT 237) – does not appear nobler than a page, nor does Wilton betray his humble origins. Regarding the question of whether class identity can be transcended by disguise, the nar-

 See Jones 68 for brief remarks which link this scenario to the carnivalesque reversals of hierarchies as analysed by Bakhtin in Rabelais’s writing – possibly one of Nashe’s sources. See also Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, especially chapters 2 and 3 for the ritual of crowning and uncrowning carnival kings in early modern culture and Rabelais’s writing – scenarios which Nashe might refer to when he presents Jack as a king.

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rative thus proffers an answer that opposes the romances by Greene, with whom Nashe collaborated and to whose Menaphon, as we saw, he contributed a preface. In the world of The Unfortunate Traveller, identity is not inborn and essential, but performative and developmental. When they are imprisoned during their eventful travels in Italy, Wilton (disguised as Surrey) and Surrey (disguised as the page Brunquell) enter a competition which merges sexual rivalry, class struggle, and a paragone between lyrical, Italianate poetry and English prose. They meet a beautiful fellow prisoner, Diamante, whose husband has falsely accused her of adultery. The arrival of Diamante is a source of inspiration for both Wilton and Surrey, albeit with largely discrepant results. Surrey begins to imagine that Diamante is Geraldine, an Italian woman he fell in love with in England. He thus turns Diamante into a fake Geraldine, who in turn was an incarnation of Surrey’s ‘second mistress,’ namely Italian poetry. The very motivation of Surrey’s trip to Italy was, besides his love for Geraldine, his adoration of Italian poetry; as Surrey explains, “[t]he fame of Italy, and an especial affection I had unto poetry, my second mistress, for which Italy was so famous, had wholly ravished me” (UT 239). By blending his love for Italian poetry with the adoration of Geraldine, the narrative demonstrates the transformative power of both. In accordance with the love discourse of romances as much as with Ascham’s influential anti-travel writing, Surrey feels “far metamorphosed” and enchanted by Geraldine who “is come out of Italy to bewitch all the wise men of England” (UT 238). During the paragone between Wilton and Surrey, however, it becomes obvious that this love of Geraldine and Italian poetry is a self-absorbed and sterile infatuation. Surrey dedicates several Petrarchan poems to Diamante alias Geraldine while they are in prison. As critics have noted, here the narrative literalises the Petrarchan conceit of the imprisoned lover (Fleck 25 – 27). However, because of the hybrid coding of his muse – Diamante alias Geraldine alias Italian poetry – Surrey is not only imprisoned by his beloved, but Petrarchism itself imprisons him. Accordingly, he is unable to adequately respond to the situation and instead perpetuates the long-standing literary tradition. Consequently, Diamante is not flattered by being used as an instrument for the adoration of Geraldine – notwithstanding Surrey’s Petrarchan metaphor which envisions just that: “Diamonds thought themselves dii mundi if they might but carve her [Geraldine’s] name on the naked glass” (UT 261). Surrey’s Petrarchan love for Italian poetry, its personification in Geraldine, and her replacement by Diamante are shown to be idolatrous as well as ridiculous: sometimes he would imagine her [Diamante] in a melancholy humour to be his Geraldine, and court her in terms correspondent. Nay, he would swear she was his Geraldine, and take her white hand and wipe his eyes with it as though the very touch of her might stanch his

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anguish. Now would he kneel and kiss the ground as holy ground which she vouchsafed to bless from barrenness by her steps. […] [H]e was more in love with his own curious forming fancy than her face; and truth it is, many become passionate lovers only to win praise to their wits. (UT 254)

Surrey’s love makes him “[f]rom prose […] leap into verse” and “with […] rhymes assault” his beloved for whom he takes Diamante in “this his entranced mistaking ecstasy” (UT 254). His sonnets invoke the Neoplatonist vision of incorporation which we encountered in Sidney’s Arcadia; here, however, the text does not heighten the scenario to invoke the Eucharistically reflected notion of sacramental, sexualised physical union. For example, Surrey laments,²³⁵ If I must die, O let me choose my death, Suck out my soul with kisses, cruel maid, In thy breasts’ crystal balls embalm my breath, Dole it all out in sighs when I am laid. (UT 254)

Wilton himself is more pragmatic than “to woo women with riddles.” He seduces Diamante in prison: “My master beat the bush and kept a coil and a prattling, but I caught the bird; simplicity and plainness shall carry it away in another world” (UT 255). Boasting of his sexual success, Wilton contrasts the aristocratic, elitist poetry of his master with his own “dunstable [i.e. plain] tale” with “some cunning plot” which “made up my market” (UT 255). This cunning plot involves Wilton’s suggestion that Diamante should at least commit the crime of adultery which she is imprisoned for, thereby taking revenge on her husband. Wilton thus manages to seduce Diamante, and after their release from prison he is first supported by Diamante’s inheritance and eventually marries the wealthy widow. On a metafictional level, the section comments on the fact that Nashe’s ‘dunstable’ prose tale and its ‘cunning’ plot aim at the new print ‘market’ that is frequented by non-aristocratic readers. Just as his narrator Wilton, Nashe made a book’s economic success the new yardstick for literary quality, for example in

 It remains a matter of critical debate whether or not Nashe wrote deliberately bad poetry for his character to criticise Surrey and the late sixteenth-century sonneteers who followed in his tradition. While Stephen Guy-Bray claims that Surrey’s sonnets are deliberately bad and hence unfair, Ann Rosalind Jones, Jonathan Crewe, and Andrew Fleck argue for a more ‘dialectical’ attitude towards Petrarchism in The Unfortunate Traveller, which imitates literary models to dismantle them from within (Guy-Bray 42; Fleck; Crewe 81; Jones 74). Latham notes that “the satire on Petrarchan conceits is so delicate that in another setting it might almost pass for sincerity” (91). Indeed, as Crewe recounts, one of the poems was included in a Renaissance anthology of poems, England’s Parnassus, as a representative of Petrarchan sonnets (82).

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his public controversy with Gabriel Harvey. Nashe ridiculed Harvey for his alleged vanity publishing when Harvey reproached him for being corrupted by the print market – a notion which Nashe took up and extended by presenting his own work as prostitution.²³⁶ In Strange News, Nashe mocks that while he and “others have monie given them to suffer them selves to come in Print,” Harvey’s books are so inferior that he has to pay the publisher to print them (258). Thus professional integrity rather than aristocratic honour emerges as Nashe’s new paradigm. Nashe’s double dedication highlights his new target audience. While his parodic and almost insulting dedication to Lord Henry Wriothesley (which is omitted from the second edition in 1594) betrays Nashe’s disappointment with the patronage system,²³⁷ his dedication to “the dapper monsieur pages of the court” addresses a new group of readers which we would today call middle class.²³⁸ In Lenten Stuff, published five years after The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe has passed the stage of double dedications and simply addresses his book “to his Readers, hee cares not what they be” (6). While Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller, as we have seen, still resorts to the ambiguous metaphor of ‘prizing’ his fiction when addressing his aristocratic patron, when talking to “as many” of his middle-rank readers “as will pay money enough to peruse my story” he can have his narrator more straightforwardly declare his economic interests (UT 210). The explicit address of middle-class readers is daring and still unusual in 1594. As we have seen, Sidney and Lodge fashion their readers as aristocratic and Lyly, who emphasises the commodification of his books, also writes explicitly for gentlemen and gentlewomen. Greene, whose works could be found, according to Nashe, “in serving men’s pockets,” addressed gentle readers and noble patrons (Nashe, Strange Newes 329). Only Riche dared to attend to both gentlewomen and soldiers, but he less openly attempted to sell his novelle to his middle-rank readers. In 1597, Thomas Deloney was to follow Nashe’s model of “radical populism” (Hyman 27) in his own tale dealing with

 See G. Brown 75 – 80 on the controversy. On Nashe’s metaphor of writing as prostitution and the metaphorical association of penis and pen in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596) and “Nashe’s Dildo” (1592), see Mentz, “Day Labor.”  See Simons for a discussion of Nashe’s insulting rhetoric in the dedication to his patron, which “turns the dedication from a topos of courtesy into one of compulsion” (19). By contrast, Margolies’s unconvincing assessment sees the dedication as Nashe’s “last serious” attempt to attract patronage: “Nashe seems really to believe in the inherent value of aristocratic approval, rather than paying it the lip-service of many of his contemporaries” (87, 88).  Because middle-class readers began to replace aristocratic patrons as Nashe’s main source of financial income, Nashe might have attempted to entertain his new readers by “gently poking fun at the old convention of addressing books to noblemen” (Ferguson, “Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller” 167).

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a servant named Jack who lives in the days of Henry VIII and rises to the status of a gentleman, Jack of Newbury. ²³⁹ Like Nashe, he presents his narrative as a biography, as “The Pleasant History of John Winchcomb, in his younger years called Jack of Newbury, the famous and worthy clothier of England” (Jack of Newbury 313). Deloney, whose tale straightforwardly engages with economic concerns, does without an appeal to a potential patron and instead dedicates his work “To All Famous Cloth Workers of England” (313).²⁴⁰ By portraying his work as a prose tale written for a market of non-noble readers, Nashe presents The Unfortunate Traveller as an alternative to the elitist aristocratic manuscript culture. Rhymed poetry, and in particular Petrarchan sonnets, are taken as the epitome of this elitist, non-profit literature: “seldom have you seen any poet possessed with avarice; only verses he loves, nothing else he delights in” (UT 237). On the level of plot, The Unfortunate Traveller emphasises the superiority of non-aristocratic prose: the servant’s prose outdoes the master’s sonnets not only economically, but also in their emotional (and sexual) impact on the addressee. Accordingly, The Unfortunate Traveller does not include poetry as a serious complement to its prose narrative, in contrast to prosi-

 As in Nashe’s tale, Jack rises socially by marrying the wealthy widow of his erstwhile master. Having risen to the state of the master, Jack advises his former fellow apprentices, “it shall be wisdom in you to forget what I was, and to take me as I am” (Jack of Newbury 330). His elevation to the status of a gentleman is due to his nationalistic conduct, most of all his generous spending on behalf of England. Queen Katherine hence declares him “though a clothier by trade yet a gentleman by condition” (Jack of Newbury 339). What is more, as Suzuki has argued, “Jack essentially claims superiority over the nobility by affirming his class’s sexual restraint over the aristocrats’ sexual license” (“London” 197), a tendency which became more powerful in the subsequent centuries, as McKeon has shown: “the new gentry supersede not only the old gentry but also the old conception of gentility; the new conception consists of virtue” (222). This cherishing of middle-class virtue does not apply to The Unfortunate Traveller, as we saw.  See D. Morrow, “Entrepreneurial Spirit” for a discussion of the narrative’s ‘moral economy’ and its communal ideology, and Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth (51– 71) for a discussion of the significance of Deloney’s work to England’s culture of cloth. In Nashe’s tale, Wilton sometimes refers to the unusually low rank of his implied audience in an ironic manner. He suggests that they, just like him, appropriate an upper-class status simply by reading, hitherto an occupation that was considered aristocratic: “Gentle readers (look you be gentle now, since I have called you so), as freely as my knavery was mine own, it shall be yours to use in the way of honesty” (UT 216). Analogous self-referential comments on the conventionalised nobilitation of implied readers recur in later texts, for example in Dekker’s preface to his satire The Wonderful Year (1603), in which he mocks: “to maintaine the scuruy fashion, and to keepe Custome in reparations, he must be honyed, and come-ouer with Gentle Reader, Courteous Reader, and Learned Reader, though he haue no more Gentilitie in him than Adam had (that was but a gardner) no more Ciuilitie than a Tartar” (A3).

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metrical narratives written by or for gentlemen, like the Arcadia and Rosalynd. Instead, Nashe’s tale inserts rhymed poetry as a foil that highlights the eligibility and superiority of prose. In this respect, Nashe’s strategy differs from comparable ‘bourgeois’ fiction like Deloney’s Jack of Newbury which embedded the indisputable art form, verse, in prose narrative in a non-satirical manner.²⁴¹ Nashe presents his prose not only as freed from aristocratic poetry, but also from the bondage of the foreign literary tradition – at first sight a surprising move after his parodic, liberal attitude to transcultural fashion regarding his page. In the controversy with Harvey, in prefaces, and in his prose fiction, Nashe sets up a new literary paradigm on behalf of his generation, on behalf of his rank striving for profit, and on behalf of his nation. He attempts to legitimise his writing by making the choice between aristocratic, Italianate rhyme and middle-class, plain prose a question of national dignity and literary patriotism.²⁴² As we saw in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon, the earliest text he published, Nashe already criticises the slavish imitation of foreign sources, in particular the “English Italians” who are infatuated with “Petrarch, Tasso, Celiano, with an infinite number of others” and who disregard the English tradition of “Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower” (“To the Gentlemen Students” 92). In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe lets his narrator criticise the witless imitation of foreign classics in a dress metaphor: “It be no more than a fool’s coat of many colours. No invention or matter have they of their own, but […] pick threads’ ends out of an old, overworn garment” (UT 245).²⁴³ In his quarrel with Harvey, Nashe likewise presents his own style as quintessentially English and blames Harvey for corrupting English language and English literature with foreign phrases and  As Constance Relihan suggests, Deloney’s strategy elevated the status of both the prose texts and of its readers: “As poetry transformed momentarily the pamphlets into traditional literary art, the readers became momentarily aristocratic during the process of reading” (Fashioning Authority 18).  See G. Brown (79 and passim) and Guy-Bray (33 and passim) for explorations of Nashe’s creation of an English mode of writing, explorations to which my argument is indebted. See also Hibbard (162– 163).  Nashe here, as in the preface to Menaphon, associates foreign apparel and foreign poetry, a comparison which recurs throughout The Unfortunate Traveller, as we have seen. His invocation of the multi-coloured fool’s coat resembles Edward Webbe’s account of his travels, entitled The Rare and Most Wonderful Thinges which Edward Webbe Hath Seene and Passed in his Troublesome Travailes, which was published four years before The Unfortunate Traveller. Webbe describes his attempts to preserve his English, Protestant identity while travelling and presents the enforced disguise by a multi-coloured fool’s coat in Rome’s English College as one of the challenges. Webbe recounts that although for three days he had to wear “a fooles coate on my backe halfe blew, halfe yeallowe, and a cockes-combe with thrée belles on my head,” he did not change internally and is still fit for service in England (image 14; cf. also Kirk 529).

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modes of writing, for “supplanting and setting aside the true children of the English, and suborning inkhorn changelings in their steade” (Nashe, Strange Newes 317).²⁴⁴ In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe adopts a more complex and more playful attitude towards foreign textual fashion than in his quoted statements. Here, just as his celebration of simple prose valorises the notion of English plainness, Nashe, in a self-reflexive and ironic move, turns the negative stereotype of the inconstant English into a positive artistic quality: the originality of Wilton’s narrative voice stems from his extemporal, flexible, chameleonic style (that reflects the chameleonic, composite textile fashion he wears). Michael Drayton likewise inverted the negative stereotype of the changeable English to valorise his style. In the 1619 version of his pastoral eclogue Idea, which he had first published a year prior to The Unfortunate Traveller, he declared, “My verse is the true image of my mind, / Ever in motion, still desiring change”; “My muse is rightly of the English strain, / That cannot long one fashion entertain” (Drayton, “From Idea” 583).²⁴⁵ In Drayton’s self-mockery, Helgerson (rightly, I think) also identifies selfconfidence and pride (Forms of Nationhood 14). Nashe, I would argue, displays a comparable self-ironic pride in stylistic changeability and suggests that his prose can be regarded as genuinely English for that very reason. So rather than evoking a ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ Englishness, and thus promoting the idea of an immutable English ‘substance’ beneath changeable foreign accidents, as in earlier narratives and pamphlets, Nashe lays bare the artifice of

 For Nashe, this demand for a ‘separate form of writing of one’s own’ applies to the rejection of foreign modes in favour of English literature, but it is also relevant with respect to the individual accomplishment of a writer in comparison to the literary heritage (Hyman 36). Likewise, in The Unfortunate Traveller, Surrey represents the English literary tradition from which Nashe departs by emphasising his originality. Accordingly, in his dedication he calls for an innovative form of prose fiction, for a “new brain, a new wit, a new style, a new soul” (UT 207). In his Strange Newes, written a few years after The Unfortunate Traveller, he shows off his selfsufficiency and his independence from not only classical and Continental, but also English literary precursors: “Is my stile like Greenes, or my ieasts like Tarltons? […] This I will proudly boast […] that the vaine which I haue (be it a median vaine, or a madde man) is of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe, neyther Euphues, nor Tarlton, nor Greene” (319). Nashe thereby opposes Lyly, who in Euphues and His England still freely admits to borrowing from other authors by employing a clothes metaphor, “if I seem to glean after another’s cart for a few ears of corn, or of the tailor’s shreds to make me a livery, I will not deny but that I am one of those poets which the painters feign to come unto Homer’s basin, there to lap up that he doth cast up” (EE 157– 158).  In the 1603 version, Drayton still speaks of “My actiue Muse is of the worlds right straine, / That cannot long one fashion entertaine” (The Barron’s Wars image 190). He deliberately replaced ‘worlds’ by ‘English’ in the later edition.

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his ‘page’ (his tale and his protagonist) as much as his Englishness. By suggesting that The Unfortunate Traveller is a ‘youth of the English cut,’ he presents it as a tailored, manufactured product that is far from natural. Nashe foregrounds his own authorial act as well as the constructed and transient character of Englishness.²⁴⁶ Nashe implicitly claims, however, that his prose tale is more innovative (‘youthful’) and more original, and hence better suited to become the new English style (at least for a while) than, for example, Italianate rhyming poetry which imitates one specific, elitist foreign fashion and which has literally become worn out. At the end of the narrative, Nashe’s ‘youth of the English cut’ has come of age; his protagonist (and, by implication, the narrative itself) have risen to wealth and fame. The allegedly unfortunate traveller makes a fortune during his voyage; contrary to the warnings against going abroad, Wilton hits the ‘jack-pot’ in the ‘lottery of travel.’ His fortune can be seen as a wishful fantasy of economic and literary prosperity on the part of the author, who envisions the analogous fate for his tale – a fantasy which did not come true for Nashe. The Unfortunate Traveller was reprinted only once during his lifetime and could not compete with the success of the pastoral romances which Nashe parodies, nor with the Euphues tales; in contrast to Lyly, Nashe never wrote the sequel to which he alluded at the end of the tale. Only in recent decades has Nashe been championed as one of the most relevant Elizabethan authors. However, Nashe’s concern with creating a self-sufficient and self-ironic English prose written for non-aristocratic readers remained popular. The rise of the novel in the subsequent centuries can be linked to Nashe’s promotion of extemporal prose writing in the English vernacular, of “novus, nova, novum, which is, in English, news of the maker” (UT 208).²⁴⁷

 In a diachronic study of the contingency that is at the heart of all fictional narratives, Philipp Erchinger has analysed Nashe’s technique of laying bare the artifice of his own act of writing as ‘manneristic imagination,’ as a form of narration which exposes its contingency and constantly has to legitimise “die Formung seiner Form,” the (shifting) formation of its narrative form (105). Erchinger’s description of the narrative strategy of The Unfortunate Traveller also applies, as I have argued, to its constructivist stance towards its Englishness: “Der Text stellt nichts künstlich Gemachtes dar sondern die diffizilen Bedingungen seines Machens; er präsentiert keine fertigen Produkte, sondern führt vor, wie sie gefertigt werden” (109). See also Lobsien and Olejniczak Lobsien, Elisabethanische Imaginationen 58.  See Erchinger for a discussion of The Unfortunate Traveller as an important precursor of the European novel, akin to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605; 1615), with which Nashe’s tale shares the self-awareness of Mannerism (124).

4 Conclusion Questions about identity gained momentum in English prose narratives of the sixteenth century, a time of major religious, political, social, and economic change. This study has argued that the development of notions of identity formation and transformation in Elizabethan culture were interwoven with the processes of religious reformation and pluralisation. More specifically, it has proposed that central patterns of perception, models of thought, and emotional structures which were at the heart of the Eucharistic ritual in pre-Reformation England remained active in Elizabethan fiction dedicated to secular concerns. As part of the complex processes involved in the formation and continuation of cultural memory, theorems and experiences of the officially abandoned Catholic faith resurface in these narratives and are adapted for new concerns: the quest for an invisible substance, the epiphanic revelation of this hidden kernel, the wonder of transubstantiation, the experience of physical, psychic, or spiritual fusion, and the simultaneous presence of the same body in different places. These concepts had been contested since the Eucharist debate, and they play an ambivalent role in Elizabethan prose fiction, too. Their adoption creates stylistic shifts between pathos and parody as well as narrative tension between desire and fear, between wishful fantasies and worst-case scenarios. For instance, the desire to achieve or to perceive a transubstantiation of rank or gender, which I have located in many pastoral romances, is often countered by an alternative voice in the tale, which fearfully apprehends the negative consequences of such a transformation. Likewise, the eroticised, sometimes ecstatic desire for mutual incorporation in love plots is haunted by the spectre of identity loss. In the narratives discussed in chapter 3, the prospect of substantial change is usually presented as a menace to the English, Protestant self; nonetheless, dissimulation and changeability are also valued, not least in metafictional comments. Chapter 1 traced the cross-fertilisation between religio-political discourses and fictional literature in a first case study of prose narrative, Beware the Cat. Written during the intense theological disputes of the mid-sixteenth century, Baldwin’s narrative intervenes in the Eucharist debate. Among the allusions to topical theological and liturgical concerns, I have focused in particular on a scene which employs the Eucharistic gesture of ‘this is my body’ to trick a naïve character into believing in shape-shifting – and thereby to warn readers against making the same mistake. Associating pagan metamorphosis and superstitious ‘hocus-pocus’ with Catholic transubstantiation, the tale discredits the old faith. Yet despite some professed anti-Catholic didactic messages, reinforced by paratextual addenda, the complex narrative structure (in particular its multiple framings), and the multifac-

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eted generic stance of Beware the Cat also open up avenues for heterodox thoughts and fantasies. I have proposed that the desire to penetrate misleading surfaces and to discover hidden identities as well as the fascination with the transformation of such core identities not only inform Beware the Cat on the level of content, but also have a profound influence on its literary form. The narrative adopts the hermeneutic pleasures (and irritations) of transubstantiation for its aesthetics, while professing a disenchantment with the Catholic doctrine on the level of content. This simultaneous rejection of and fascination with Catholic doctrines also characterises the poetic fruitfulness of the Eucharist in prose fiction written in the last quarter of the century. Transformation, and in particular transubstantiation, becomes a cipher of fictionality in Beware the Cat, as the tale self-referentially ponders on prose fiction in the vernacular, a relatively new mode of writing which was itself very much in transformation. Beware the Cat, the earliest text discussed in my study, takes an ambivalent stance towards fiction since it warns readers to beware its transformative force. This alteration within the reader caused intense debates among early moderns, documented in rhetorical handbooks and pamphlets like The Schoolmaster and An Apology for Poetry, as well as in prefaces and other paratexts of prose narratives. Additionally, as I have argued throughout this study, a concern with the new mode of English fiction also comes to the fore in metafictional passages in the narratives themselves. Prose narratives in the sixteenth century are actively creating a young, unformed, and illegitimate mode of writing and while doing so, they frequently reflect on their raison d’être and their aesthetic choices. To contour and legitimate their endeavour, the tales hark back to and incorporate established modes and forms, chiefly romance, but also modify and question these models or combine them in innovative ways, thus experimenting with the possibilities of prose narrative. While Baldwin explicitly refers to the Eucharist debate, in the prose narratives discussed in chapters 2 and 3, this link between Eucharistic transformation and identity change has become more oblique. In Elizabethan prose fiction, it is not a precise theological position which is at stake. Rather, it is the epistemological, cognitive, and emotional force of the officially abandoned doctrines and rituals which makes them attractive for narratives concerned with matters of identity. Drawing on the rich field of research on cultural memory and adaptations of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, I have argued that Eucharistic concepts and modes of experience appear in a ‘disguised form’ in Elizabethan prose narratives in a twofold sense: they are present in a covert, implicit manner, and they are particularly relevant for the manifold disguise narratives of the last quarter of the century. The suggested alliance of the Eucharist and disguise was not unheard of in early modern England. On the contrary, associations of the phe-

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nomena were also frequently used in religious pamphlets from all parties involved in the long process of the Reformation. This comes as no surprise since in Tudor and Stuart England, dress played such an important role for social order that sartorial metaphors were widespread. The public debate about apparel displayed anxieties and hopes similar to discussions of the ceremony of the Last Supper, as both revolved around the question as to whether substance and accidents – or, social identity and dress – need to conform to one another or whether they can be disjointed. Both were concerned with the question of how substances can be perceived; whether the exterior appearance is a reliable index of the core beneath or whether alternative modes of perception need to be employed. In both discourses, change was of crucial importance, and they considered the question of how external and internal changes are related. Such issues are at the heart of the most renowned representatives of English pastoral prose romances, which all set up a complex interplay of metamorphosis and transubstantiation, of outer and inner transformation, of disguise and identity change. In the narratives by Greene, Sidney, and Lodge, pastoral disguises raise concerns about identity, most of all about gender and rank, including the delicate matter of royal legitimacy. In political thought, the issue of sovereignty itself was fundamentally related to the theology of the Eucharist, in particular to the notion of Christ’s two bodies. The pastoral narratives adopt and creatively modify politicotheological theorems on the level of content as much as aesthetically. Greene’s romances Menaphon and Pandosto uphold the medieval motif of an immutable royal and aristocratic disposition, of ‘ingrafted nobility.’ While Greene’s narratives thus foreclose the possibility of identity transubstantiation regarding social degree, they nonetheless employ the cognitive and emotional fascination of transubstantiation for their revelation scenarios: when Fawnia becomes the noble clothes she wears and when Sephestia is discovered ‘under’ the name and attire of a shepherdess, the narratives adapt the awe-inspiring revelation of Real Presence from the ritual of the old faith. In comparison to Greene’s naturalisation of rank and mystification of royal authority, Sidney’s Arcadia versions take a more sceptical view. Here, identity is envisioned as more processual and more performative, and consequently, the noble substances of the princely protagonists are seriously called into question by their various disguises and name changes. Before the romantic happy ending, the narrative’s finale envisions the ‘real absence’ of their noble substances, which makes their resumed male, princely clothes appear as false accidents, as disguises for their debased cores. While royal identity and authority are mystified in Greene’s narratives and questioned in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, they are radically dismantled in Lodge’s A Margarite of America, which redeploys the heritage of medieval romance for a critique of the idolatrous cult of Elizabeth and its appropriation of Catholic rituals for political ends.

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The pastoral narratives further employ the Eucharistic notion of mutual incorporation of Christ and believer for secular sacraments between lovers, which potentially have deep-seated consequences of identity fusion. For example, Greene’s romances raise, but eventually foreclose, the possibility of an improper mixing of ranks in marriages between royals and shepherds. In Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles’s masculine identity is endangered by ‘a secret and inward working’ of ‘incorporation,’ which might ‘transform his very essence.’ Similar to Baldwin’s and Greene’s narratives, the Arcadia versions use the gesture of ‘this is my body’ for their scenes of identity revelation, which are here part of a secular communion between lovers. They likewise put emphasis on the importance of perception, faith, and imagination for achieving an identity transformation, and additionally employ the sophisticated Protestant Eucharistic stance towards allegoresis. A Margarite depicts the gruesome consequences of a mutual incorporation of lovers gone awry. The romantic motifs of the exchange of hearts and the worship of the beloved are literalised in a series of Eucharistically inflected scenarios, which include the deterioration of communion into cannibalism. Viewed from the perspective of genre history, the narratives display a spectrum of attitudes towards their main models, namely the pastoral and romance. Greene intensifies the emotional appeal of pastoral romance and enriches its traditional plot patterns by creative adaptations of the Catholic doctrine. Sidney integrates Eucharistic concepts to heighten the eroticism of his romance, but also to entertain readers by a parody of romantic and pastoral topoi and to call into question the romance convention of the happy ending. Lodge’s narratives take the critical stance towards the romance mode further. They challenge romantic topoi like the quasi-religious adoration of the beloved and the mutual incorporation of lovers. A Margarite radicalises romantic plot patterns in such an extreme manner that the romance mode is gradually dismantled. As part of this generic collapse, disguise is divested of its transformative power and is employed in an unusual, destructive form. In the pastoral romances, just like in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Eucharistic models, including transubstantiation, become a source of formal inspiration and help to develop a new confidence in the aesthetic possibilities of vernacular prose fiction. Greene’s tales adopt the emotional and epistemological power of sudden revelations of true substance from the Catholic ritual in their attempt to elicit a response of wonder from their readers. By contrast, Sidney’s Arcadia, through its intradiegetic tales in particular, invites readers to a careful, informed reading that is modelled on the Protestant notion of allegoresis as developed in Eucharistic theology. Nonetheless, the Arcadia also adopts aspects of the old faith. For example, it features an entertaining multilocation scenario that pointedly demonstrates how narrative can depict the simultaneity of action by repeated

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analepses and how it can juxtapose complementary perspectives by means of an all-pervading narrator who is capable of being present in several places and consciousnesses. As part of this literary emancipation process, prose narratives clarified their stance towards verse, the more established and renowned literary art form. Authors often integrated poems or longer eclogues and thus, as Sidney would have put it, ‘trimmed’ the ‘garments’ of their prose tales ‘with guards of [rhymed] Poesy.’ However, at the same time the narratives begin to call into question these incorporated poems and to substitute them with narrative strategies. For instance, in Rosalynd, poems or songs that offer insight into the characters’ minds are increasingly replaced by monologues that create an aesthetic of introspection independent of rhymed poetry – a fitting move for a tale that mocks the conventionality of Petrarchan love poetry. In chapter 3, I have examined how the traditional linchpins of individual identity as much as social coherence, namely religion, gender, rank, and royalty, are complemented by matters of nationality in many discourses. Frequently, as I have argued, the transformation of national substance is evoked to shape and reinforce a sense of Englishness; spectres of transubstantiation are employed to substantiate Englishness. In the prose tales as much as in early modern pamphlets and sermons, travel and the wearing of foreign fashion are presented as the most powerful forces of such a transformation. Employing Ascham’s admonitory Schoolmaster as an important but questionable intertext, the fictional travelogues by Lyly and Nashe test what happens to English national substance abroad and beneath outlandish clothing. The tales by Gascoigne, Riche, and Greene explore the harmful impact of foreign fashion on the island. In these tales, disguise is mainly used as metaphor to highlight the ‘unnaturalness’ of Englishmen wearing foreign fashion. Likewise, the spectre of the transubstantiation of Englishness here is a conceptual metaphor that is largely detached from other Eucharistic and religious concerns. On the sliding scale between literal and figurative adaptations of theological theorems in Elizabethan writing, the texts discussed in chapter 3 adapt transubstantiation in a figurative manner for mostly secular concerns. Again, the preoccupation with national transubstantiation is also reflected on the aesthetic level. The narratives tend to employ styles and modes that are perceived as more genuinely English than foreign models, or they justify their use of foreign modes as a patriotic endeavour. For example, Gascoigne and Lyly employ the morally immaculate genre of the ‘glass.’ The fact that Gascoigne specifically presents his text as a steel glass, a product of England, and rejects the crystal glasses that were imported from Italy endorses the nationalistic thrust of the tale. Greene reactivates the popular medieval form of the dream narrative in a tale that nostalgically evokes a time of pure Englishness. In unison with rhetoricians like Wilson who promoted ‘plain style’ as a unifying force in early modern England,

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the authors claim to use a plain prose style (sometimes, however, as in Lyly’s case, this is only ironic lip service). Riche mocks Petrarchan imagery in his Farewell and contrasts it with his own simple, honest style of a soldier allegedly uneducated in court matters. Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller declares and demonstrates the efficacy of a ‘dunstable tale’ with a ‘cunning plot’ against the artificial, outworn imagery of Petrarchism. Moreover, the triumph is a double one: not only does an unknown, middlebrow, middle-class writer triumph over the incarnation of aristocratic literary reputation, but an English middle style that defies foreign inkhorn phrases as well as foreign generic models also outdoes aristocratic Italianate rhetoric. As part of this engagement with the nationality of literary fashions, the narratives define their relationship with the contested mode of romance. While both Gascoigne and Greene, as part of their declared reformation, reject the mode of romance and instead turn to the glass, medieval estates literature, and the medieval dream vision, Riche claims a contrary reformation by surrendering to the fashion of foreign romance, thus attempting to alarm (and entertain) his readers. Lyly modifies romance in the service of patriotism, and Nashe invokes, but at the same mocks, romance topoi in his innovative narrative. Since literary form was often considered in sartorial terms, the depiction of foreign fashion in the narratives lends itself to metafictional reflection. In addition to the question whether a generic ‘dress’ could be regarded as genuinely English or had to be understood as foreign, the issue of fashionability is at the heart of the tales. Lyly’s Euphues tales created a literary fashion that dominated Elizabethan tastes for several years, and the tales comment self-referentially on their own market value in the commodified print culture, and also anticipate their own expiration due to the fast changes of fashion. Departing from the humanist tradition of morally profitable literature, Lyly advertises the financially profitable qualities of his entertaining tales, which he presents in a gesture of sprezzatura as a desirable ‘toy’ that will soon be regarded as outmoded ‘trash.’ At the same time, Lyly employs the fashion metaphor to lay out his reader-response theory and thus to contribute to the concern that is also at the heart of Ascham’s Schoolmaster and Sidney’s Apology. Writing and reading fiction is a joint effort for Lyly, and he asks his readers to be lenient about his incapacities as a tailor-poet, one who might not have been able to take the exact ‘measure’ of their ‘minds.’ In contrast to Lyly, Riche in his Farewell attacks the craving for luxury goods that he, just like Lyly, ascribes mainly to aristocratic women. For Riche, effeminacy and fashionability are the main reasons for the moral, financial, and military decline of England, and so his own turning to fashionable fiction is a self-deprecatory gesture. Greene celebrates simple English cloth in a tale that is itself clothed in plain style and a traditional, medieval form. The metafictional project which Nashe undertakes in The Unfortunate Traveller is equivalent to his critical comments on travelling

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and attire, also in its ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone: he attempts to establish a new ideal of English, non-elitist prose fiction that is written for the marketplace and hence independent of aristocratic patrons who imitate literary and sartorial foreign fashion. By calling his ‘page’ a ‘youth of the English cut,’ Nashe presents both his tale and his protagonist as an English product, but he never attempts to conceal the fact that it is the result of a production process and hence far from ‘natural.’ Unlike Gascoigne’s Steele Glas or Greene’s Quip, which invoke a national tradition to create a sense of natural or even inborn Englishness and then place themselves in this tradition, The Unfortunate Traveller constantly exposes its own fabrication as much as the fabrication of Englishness, and, what is more, it takes pride in this creative endeavour. My investigation of prose fiction covers a period of roughly fifty years – a time span during which I have traced a number of formal and thematic developments; for example, a growing critique and parody of the romance mode. The fact that the earliest text considered, Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, and the latest Elizabethan narratives, The Unfortunate Traveller and Lodge’s A Margarite, are among the most formally innovative and most experimental narratives of the period demonstrates that the mode of prose fiction was still in the making at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Before the establishment of the novel in the eighteenth century, further narrative experiments led to a diversified field in the seventeenth century, which also witnessed the emergence of significant female authors such as Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Nor did the preoccupations with the Eucharist, disguise, and foreign fashion abate in the seventeenth century. James I was haunted by a fear of magical transformation and bewitchment. In the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, radical Catholics attempted to kill the king and the aristocratic elite because they were disappointed by James’s reign which did not, as they had hoped, re-establish Catholicism in England; the failed assassination heightened anti-Catholic paranoia. The wife of James I’s successor, Charles I, the French princess Henrietta Maria, supported Catholic priests and encouraged several of her noblewomen to convert to the Catholic faith, thus stoking fears of a return to Catholicism in England. Towards the end of the century, after the rise and demise of the Puritan Republic, debates about the Eucharist were taken up again with renewed vigour, as the potential successor of Charles II, his brother James, was Catholic. In 1673 and 1678, Test Acts were issued which demanded that everyone who held civil or military offices had to take the Eucharist in an Anglican church and had to deny belief in transubstantiation. Eventually, a Catholic king, if only briefly, became the head of the Anglican Church in 1685, thus intensifying unease with the heritage of the old faith. At the same time, disguise remained attractive subject matter for prose fiction interested in matters of identity. Popular narratives like John Barclay’s Argenis

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(1621) depicted elaborate disguise scenarios, and the plot of the first English prose narrative which called itself a ‘novel,’ William Congreve’s Incognita (1692), was still based on various disguises of its protagonists. Even though in his preface Congreve emphasises the difference between romances and novels, his narrative shares an interest in masquerade and identity confusion with its Elizabethan forerunners. Critics have shown how this trend continued in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, the heyday of the public masquerade and its inversions of class, gender, religion, nationality, and age, for example in novels by Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Fanny Burney (cf. Castle, Craft-Fairchild). With the rise of impostors in jest-books, cony-catching pamphlets, the picaresque, and criminal biographies, disguise further gained prominence in fiction; Mary Frith alias Moll Cutpurse was the most well-known cross-dresser of the early seventeenth century, to be succeeded by the protagonist of the highly popular The English Rogue (part 1 by Richard Head, 1665; part 2 by Francis Kirkman, 1668). The Civil War added an additional dimension to disguise because authors began to write romans à clef that clandestinely referred to contemporary individuals – maybe most controversially in Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621). Fashion gained importance in public discourse after the Elizabethan period, and it kept arousing national sentiments. In seventeenth-century England, France rather than Italy served as the main source of fashionable influence and, at the same time, of satirical derision. During the Civil War, anti-royalists scorned aristocratic modish decadence and rejected fashionability in favour of plain dress that was assumed to be naturally English. However, as pamphlets, fashion books, sermons, and also works of prose fiction like Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) show, fashion rose again after the Restoration, and with it, the adoption of foreign trends. In the early eighteenth century, and thus at the beginning of a century that saw the rise of consumerism and of popular fashion (cf. Lemire), Thomas Brown once more referred to the age-old notion of English changeability and hybridity, when he remarked that “[t]he Spanish Women are altogether Spanish, the Italians altogether Italians, the Germans altogether Germans, the French Women always like themselves,” but “among the London Women we find Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and French, blended together into one individual Monopoly of all Humours and Fashions” (71; cf. also Huck 74). With the increase of colonialism, anxieties regarding the import of exotic fashion were enhanced, too, and in 1721, the wearing of Indian cotton and printed fabrics, luxury products worn by the wealthy, was officially banned. Thus, far beyond the period discussed in this book, concerns persisted regarding the relationship between metamorphosis and transubstantiation, between outer and inner change. In religious respects as much as with regard to notions of identity, spectres of transubstantiation kept haunting the English.

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Index Allen, William 153 – 155 Alwes, Derek 26, 78, 89, 120, 126 Anderson, Benedict 166 – 168, 205 Anderson, Judith H. 30, 81, 93 Aristotle 7, 70, 100 Ascham, Roger 1 f., 12, 15 – 17, 19, 22, 52, 61, 81, 83, 89, 93, 128, 168, 174, 183 – 185, 187 f., 192, 202, 209 – 211, 220, 231 f. Askew, Anne 48 Assmann, Aleida 5, 6, 63 Assmann, Jan 5, 6, 63 Astell, Ann W. 125 f. Aston, Margaret 149, 153 Auerbach, Erich 62 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo 49 f. Austen, Gillian 179, 181 Bacon, Francis 46 Bakhtin, M. M. 57, 124 f., 218 f. Balakrishnan, Gopal 167 Baldwin, William Beware the Cat 2 f., 10, 17, 29, 41 – 59, 60, 63, 67, 82, 107, 117, 176, 178, 201, 216, 227 f., 230, 233 Mirror for Magistrates 178 Barbour, Reid 26, 83, 89 Bate, Jonathan 28, 209 Bates, Catherine 129, 137, 195 Baxter, John 46 Beckwith, Sarah 1, 24, 65 Becon, Thomas 36, 51, 57, 65, 180 f. Beecher, Donald 114, 141, 143, 145, 158, 163, 194, 198, 201 Behn, Aphra 178, 233 f. Belsey, Catherine 13 Benjamin, Walter 186 Betteridge, Thomas 20, 54, 56, 59 Bèze, Théodore de 45 Blumenberg, Hans 13 f., 58 Boccaccio, Giovanni 146 Bonaventure, Cardinal 38 Book of Common Prayer 35 – 43, 86, 98, 102, 104, 150, 166

Boorde, Andrew 5, 172 – 174, 189 Bossy, John 89, 152 Bridges, John 45 Brown, Georgia 26, 210, 222, 224 Brown, Thomas 234 Bullinger, Heinrich 32 Burckhardt, Jacob 21 Butler, Judith 80 Bynum, Caroline Walker 25, 31, 47, 50, 74, 99 Cabassut, André 146 Calvin, Jean 32 f., 36 f., 39 f., 84, 86, 98, 107, 109, 121, 160 Campion, Edmund 40, 127, 156, 169 f. Cannibalism 3, 43, 45, 86, 133, 155 – 163, 230 Castiglione, Baldassare 78, 92, 101, 105, 131, 141 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 28 Clark, Sandra 214, 217 Class identity change 8, 10, 62, 68 – 70, 76 – 84, 89, 91, 93 f., 119 f., 122 f., 125, 127 f. 130 f., 132 – 134, 136, 140, 142, 162, 164, 193, 199, 201, 206, 219 – 225, 229, 232, 234 Colie, Rosalie Littell 14 Colonialism 7, 22, 27, 144, 156, 158 f., 164, 234 Conversion 1, 4 – 6, 11, 40, 44, 81, 111, 115, 145, 152 f., 158, 169 f., 181, 186, 198, 233 Cooper, Helen 14, 24, 60 – 62, 74 f., 85, 145, 163 Cranmer, Thomas 35 – 38, 41, 67, 93, 103, 150 Cressy, David 69 Crewe, Jonathan V. 26, 221 Culler, Jonathan 167 f. Cultural memory 5 f., 23, 61, 63 f., 186, 227 f. Cummings, Brian 1, 9, 20, 24, 35 – 37, 39 f., 63, 86, 98, 102, 104, 121

262

Index

Danby, John Francis 28, 94 Dante Alighieri 146 – 148 Davis, Lloyd 28, 85, 137 Davis, Walter R. 26, 28, 92, 132, 136, 139, 154, 212 f., 217, 219 Deacon, John 175 f. Dekker, Thomas 172, 175, 199, 212, 223 Deloney, Thomas Jack of Newbury 147 f., 222 – 224 Disguise 8 – 11, 15, 17 f., 21 – 23, 25, 27 – 30, 41, 46 f., 49, 60 – 64, 67 – 79, 82, 85, 90 – 98, 103 f., 107 f., 110 – 115, 118 – 120, 123 – 131, 133 – 137, 139 – 142, 149, 151, 154, 163 f., 169 – 171, 174, 176, 182, 185, 188, 193, 196, 198 – 200, 213 f., 219 f., 224, 228 – 231, 233 f. Dolven, Jeffrey Andrew 26, 92, 128, 184 Donne, John 23, 99 Döring, Tobias 1, 23 Doueihi, Milad 146 f. Dowland, John 151 Drayton, Michael 225 Dress, see also fashion social identity 8, 10 f., 20,13, 27 f., 45 – 47, 66 – 71, 73 – 75, 79, 82, 97, 91 – 98, 108, 111, 114 f., 118 f., 127, 130 f., 134 f., 140, 170 – 172, 178, 180, 198 – 200, 202 f., 205, 208, 212 – 214, 229, 232, 234 sumptuary laws 67 – 71, 79, 135, 170, 180, 202, 206 as metafictional metaphor 17 f., 77, 130, 185, 190 – 196, 200 f., 212, 224 – 226, 232 f. Duncan-Jones, Katherine 4, 107, 127 Englishness 11, 13, 164 – 167, 171 f., 176, 178, 185, 187, 189 f., 195, 203, 205 f., 209, 211, 213, 225 f., 231, 233 Erasmus, Desiderius 128 Eucharist Anglican liturgy 6, 34 – 41, 86 f., 103, 109, 120 f., 150, 233 cannibalism 45, 146 – 148, 155 – 164, 230 Catholic liturgy, Catholic heritage 2 – 6, 8, 21, 23 f., 30 f., 34 – 41, 44 – 48, 51, 55,

65, 82 f., 86 – 89, 92, 101, 103, 106 – 109, 120 f., 124, 144 – 146, 150, 169, 180 f., 228, 233 consubstantiation 31, 87 cultural memory 5 – 6, 8 f., 22 – 25, 60 – 64, 145, 152 f., 164, 186, 227 f. eroticisation of 10 f., 59, 63 f., 98 – 106, 108, 110 – 113, 117, 144 – 149, 163, 221, 227, 230 Eucharist debate 2 f., 6, 9 f., 16, 23, 28, 30 – 43, 54, 59, 60, 64 – 67, 72, 81, 86, 93, 11 – 114, 227 f., 233 Eucharistic miracle 31, 36, 47, 83, 103 exchange of hearts 145 – 148, 155, 161 – 163, 230 identity transformation 7 – 9, 11 f., 23, 29, 48 – 52, 58, 60, 63, 68 f., 70, 72, 80 – 84, 88, 91 – 93, 107 f., 112, 116, 125 – 130, 133 f., 169 f., 228 incorporation 9 f., 30, 35, 39, 45 f., 63 f., 91 f., 97 – 101, 107, 117, 133, 145 – 148, 154 f., 162 f., 165, 176, 221, 227, 230 manducatio per visum 39, 101 memorialism 32, 35, 37, 39, 56, 109 multilocation 6, 9, 23, 86 f., 112 – 114, 116 f., 146, 165, 176, 230 Real/True/Spiritual Presence 1, 11, 16, 30 f., 33 – 35, 37 – 39, 40 f., 43, 47, 65 f., 82 – 84, 86 – 89, 91, 102, 104, 107 – 109, 11, 113, 117, 122 – 124, 145, 150, 176, 229 royal legitimacy 62, 84 – 89, 129, 149 – 155, 199, 229 secularisation of 9, 22, 58 f., 61, 83, 108, 110, 145 – 152, 165, 176, 206, 227, 23 transubstantiation 2 – 11, 16, 18, 23 f., 27, 29 – 33, 35 – 37, 39 – 43, 45, 47 f., 50 f., 54 – 59, 63 – 65, 69 – 72, 78, 80, 82 f., 87 f., 91 – 94, 97, 103, 106, 108 f., 118 – 120, 125, 128 – 130, 133, 135, 139 f., 144, 153, 164 f., 168 f., 174, 176, 178, 185 f., 191, 206, 208, 216, 227 – 231, 233 f.

Index

Fashion, see also dress 11 f., 18, 51, 69 f., 93, 117, 123, 126, 147, 172, 177 f., 183, 185 – 188, 190 f., 193 – 195, 197, 199 – 203, 206, 208, 211 – 213, 216, 219, 225, 232, 234 Foreign fashion 11 – 13, 127 f., 165 – 183, 186, 189 – 192, 196 – 201, 203, 206 – 208, 210 – 213, 217, 219, 224, 231 – 234 Ferrand, Jacques 116 Ficino, Marsilio 100 f., 116 Fleming, Juliet 95, 193 f., 197 Fludernik, Monika 8, 138 Foucault, Michel 132 Foxe, John 5, 45 f., 213 f., 216 Frith, John 86, 234 Frye, Northrop 61 f. Garber, Marjorie 27 Gardiner, Stephen 38, 86, 93, 99 Gascoigne, George 12 f., 15, 71, 177 – 183, 188, 192, 197, 199, 202 f., 207, 209, 212, 231 – 233 Gender identity change 8, 10, 25, 46, 67 – 69, 91 – 98, 119, 131 – 140, 178, 180 – 182, 197 f., 214, 227, 229, 231, 234 Godzich, Wlad 14, 218 Gosson, Stephen 15 f., 68, 96, 205, 207 Greenblatt, Stephen 1, 9, 14, 19, 21 f., 31, 34, 47 Greene, Robert 4, 11, 26, 225 Gwydonius 171, 214 Menaphon 14, 55, 60, 62, 71 – 91, 93, 107 – 110, 117 f., 123, 128, 130, 132, 135, 140, 142 f., 145, 147, 150, 152, 162 f., 187, 190, 193, 195 f., 199, 215, 219 f., 222, 224, 229 f. Pandosto 14, 55, 60, 62, 71 – 91, 93, 107 – 110, 117 f., 123, 128, 130, 132, 135, 140, 142 f., 145, 150, 152, 162 f., 187, 190, 193, 199, 215, 219 f., 222, 229 f. Penelopes Web 96 Planetomachia 162 A Quip for an Vpstart Courtier 13, 15, 177, 201 – 209, 212, 231 – 233 Gresham, Stephen 43, 57 Groebner, Valentin 81, 84, 123

263

Guazzo, Stefano 79 Hackett, Helen 27, 95, 97, 188, 201 Hadewijch 99, 103 Hadfield, Andrew 4, 27, 41, 54, 154, 167 f., 188, 190, 195 Hakluyt, Richard 159 Hall, Joseph 205 Hamilton, A. C. 17, 88, 169 Harrison, William 172, 174, 188 f., 191 Harvey, Gabriel 68, 202, 222, 224 Helgerson, Richard 16, 19, 26, 60 f., 78, 88 f., 126, 153, 163, 166, 168, 183 f., 201, 225 Heliodorus 60 f., 72, 73, 94, 95, 101, 123, 128, 215 Hentschell, Roze 180, 200, 202, 205 – 207, 223 Hibbard, G. R. 215 – 217, 224 Höfele, Andreas 1, 34 Holden, William P. 42, 51, 57 Homer 16, 72, 225 Hooker, Richard 41, 83 Hooper, John 51 f. Hopkins, Lisa 84 f., 123 Hörisch, Jochen 24 Howard, Jean E. 67, 209 Hutson, Lorna 25 – 27, 194, 203, 210, 217 Iconoclasm 106, 149, 152, 206 Idolatry 35 – 38, 43, 144, 148 – 153, 160, 163 f., 220, 229 Iser, Wolfgang 28, 120, 139 f., 191 Italianisation 12, 16, 26, 61, 175 f., 183, 186, 188, 196, 209, 210, 219 – 226, 232 Jameson, Fredric 83 Jardine, Lisa 27 Jones, Ann Rosalind 28, 199 f., 206, 210, 218 f., 221 Jonson, Ben 198, 207 Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig 85 f. Kaske, Carol V. 105 f. Kastan, David Scott 8, 69 King, John N. 17, 21, 42, 56, 196 Kinney, Arthur F. 26, 61, 73, 88,

264

Index

Kinney, Clare R. 52, 54, 57, 58, 96 f., 109 Kirk, Andrew M. 211, 224 Knox, John 37 Koerner, Joseph Leo 31, 101, 103 Kuchta, David 70, 189, 206 Lamb, Mary Ellen 96, 198, 200 Lestringant, Frank 159 f. Lewalski, Barbara 21 Lewkenor, Lewis 168 Liebler, Naomi Conn 54 Linton, Joan Pong 27, 143, 158, 184 Lobsien, Eckhard 15, 26, 92 f., 97, 118, 120, 141, 210, 226 Lodge, Thomas 4, 6, 11, 15, 26, 59, 88 “The Discontented Satyre” 153 – 154 A Margarite of America 6, 11, 14, 62, 77, 90, 130 f., 133, 139, 141 – 164, 206, 214, 219, 229 f., 233 Rosalynd 11, 14, 69, 77, 90, 108, 130 – 141, 151, 154, 158, 163, 190, 214, 224, 229, 231 Lovesickness/love melancholia 103, 116, 135, 138, 141, 150, 161, 220 Luther, Martin 31 – 33, 39, 40, 66 f., 84, 86 f., 107, 109, 215 Lyly, John 26, 71, 95, 226 Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit 12 – 14, 18, 26, 72, 77, 79, 130, 177, 182 – 185, 192 – 197, 203, 209 f., 213, 218 f., 222, 231 f. Euphues and His England 12 – 14, 18, 26, 77, 147, 172, 177, 182 – 198, 203, 209, 213, 222, 225, 231 f. Mandeville, John 165 Marotti, Arthur F. 13, 20 f., 116, 156, 171 Maslen, Robert W. 15, 26, 53 – 57, 96, 184 McKeon, Michael 25, 60, 75, 223 Mentz, Steve 26, 60 f., 71, 94, 133, 183, 215, 222 Metamorphosis 1 – 3, 8, 16, 25, 28, 31, 48 – 51, 63, 67, 82, 88, 93, 108 f., 11 f., 115 – 119, 127 f., 130, 139, 168, 174, 176, 178, 181 f., 186, 220, 227, 229, 234 Middleton, Thomas 207

Montaigne, Michel de 3 f., 16, 30, 70 f., 84, 93 Montrose, Louis Adrian 28, 61, 63, 78, 95, 131, 152 f. More, Thomas 19, 56, 61, 65 – 67, 86, 94, 106, 123, 184, 227 Moryson, Fynes 211, 213 Munday, Anthony 168 – 170 Nashe, Thomas 4, 26, 194 – 196 The Anatomie of Absurditie 72, 214 Lenten Stuffe 222 Strange Newes 202, 222, 225 “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities” 224 The Unfortunate Traveller 4, 13, 15, 18, 26, 77, 84, 143, 158, 177, 183, 190, 196, 202 f., 205, 209 – 226, 231 – 233 Nationhood 7, 11 f., 25, 27, 39, 86, 158 see also Englishness fashion 11 f., 67 f., 130, 168 – 181, 185 – 190, 197 – 213 231 – 233 as imagined community 166 f., 187, 205 literary form 167, 177, 188 – 190, 194 – 201, 207 f., 214 f., 219 – 226, 231 f. change of national identity 7 f., 11 f., 16, 27, 128, 165 – 177, 181, 183, 197 – 213 Nellist, Brian 130 – 132, 137 New World encounters 7, 144, 156 – 160, 164, 176, 180, 207 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey 72 f., 78, 85, 95 Newman, Barbara 99, 145 f., 200 Olejniczak Lobsien, Verena 15, 26, 58, 84, 92 – 94, 97, 120, 141, 210, 226 Ovid Metamorphoses 1 – 3, 8, 50 f., 63, 88, 93, 108, 115, 182 f. Heroides 104 f. Pastoral 10 f., 14, 28, 60 – 62, 69, 72 – 74, 76 – 78, 85, 96, 112, 117, 124, 128, 130 – 134, 136, 142, 144, 151, 153 f., 163, 176, 187, 190, 199, 225 – 230 Perkins, William 34, 68 f., 172, 175

Index

Petrarchism 21, 77, 99, 104, 100, 134, 138 – 140, 150, 155, 198, 220 – 224, 231 f. Pettie, George 95, 102 f., 190, 193 f., 201 Pointz, Robert 81 Prose fiction 1, 2, 25 – 27, 53 f., 58, 71, 89, 113, 124, 167 f., 184, 190, 196, 216 f., 221 – 223, 225 f., 228, 230, 233 allegory 17, 39, 54, 56, 91, 117 – 125, 137, 230 ethical efficacy 15 – 18, 52, 55, 60 f., 61, 83, 126, 181 f., 184, 192, 194, 202, 208, 231 glass 177 f., 182 f., 188 f., 231 f. metafictionality 12, 18, 54, 67, 91, 107, 120, 177, 185, 190 f., 195, 210, 216, 218 f., 221, 227 f., 232 novella 15, 143, 179, 190, 194, 201, 222 poetology 14, 17 f., 24, 34, 57 f., 60, 77, 177 polyphony 53 f., 57, 138, 218 reader address/response 13, 15 – 19, 22, 52 – 61, 72, 83 f., 89, 95 – 97, 105, 120 f., 126, 162, 167, 179, 182, 184, 188, 191 – 195, 197 – 201, 203, 212 – 214, 216 – 219, 222 f., 227 f., 230, 232 realism 13 – 15, 53, 62, 81, 143, 160, 184, 213, 215 rhyme 14, 16 – 18, 57, 77, 137 f., 177 f., 199, 220 f., 223 f., 231 rise of the novel 8, 14, 25, 42, 124 f., 138, 167 f., 226, 233 f. Puttenham, George 79, 137, 141, 174 Rankins, William 70, 166, 175 Reformation 1 f., 4 – 9, 14 f., 19 – 25, 30 f., 34 f., 38 f., 42, 63, 65, 84, 89 f., 103, 117, 120 f., 152, 155, 158, 160, 164 – 166, 168, 178, 203, 227 – 229 Relihan, Constance C. 26 f., 199, 217, 224 Reynolds, Ernest Edwin 170 Riche, Barnabe 26, 178 His Farewell to Military Profession 13 f., 18, 81, 108, 114 – 117, 177, 190, 196 – 203, 208 f., 212, 222, 231 f. The Irish Hubbub 200 Ridley, Nicholas 65 – 67

265

Ringler, William A. Jr. 42 f., 45, 48, 53, 55 f. Romance 11 f., 14 f. cultural memory 9, 61, 64, 81 – 83, 88 – 89, 103, 144 f., 154 f. genre 11 f., 14 f., 60, 64, 77, 83, 124 f., 130, 138, 142 – 144, 148, 163 f., 177, 187, 194, 198, 201, 208, 213 – 215, 219, 228, 230, 233 f. Greek romance 14, 26, 60 f., 72 f., 94 f., 101, 123, 126, 128, 215 impact on readers 1, 17, 60 f., 88 f., 95 f., 142, 184, 194, 230 medieval romance 14, 24, 60 f., 98 f., 126, 144 – 146, 229 political function of 24, 62 f., 74 – 80, 85, 89 – 91, 93 f., 105 – 107, 118, 140, 143 f., 148 – 164, 171, 177, 187, 194, 198 f., 201 f., 206, 229 f., 232 Rosendale, Timothy 23, 34 f., 39 f. Royal legitimacy 7, 10, 62, 74, 84 – 89, 94, 129, 199, 229 Rubin, Miri 4, 24 Salzman, Paul 11, 25 f., 61, 72, 76, 125, 134, 159, 190 f., 213 Scholz, Susanne 87, 155, 165 Scot, Reginald 34, 87, 106, 199 Sedinger, Tracey 23, 34, 47, 67, 86 Shakespeare, William 22 f., 25, 71, 114, 134, 138, 200 Shrank, Cathy 129, 166, 172 Shuger, Debora 1, 20 Sidney, Philip 4, 26 An Apology for Poetry, or, The Defence of Poesy 15, 17 f., 53, 83, 89, 96, 192, 231 Astrophil and Stella 194 The Arcadia 1 f., 8, 10 f., 14 f., 28, 39, 60, 62, 65, 69, 71 f., 77, 79, 82, 89 – 132, 134 f., 137, 139, 141 – 143, 145, 147 f., 151, 155, 163, 167, 187, 190, 194 f., 206, 214 f., 219, 221 f., 224, 229 – 232 Simmel, Georg 70 Simpson, James 1, 24, 63, 121

266

Index

Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene 62, 94, 104 – 107, 140, 143 – 145, 149, 152 f., 161 f. Stallybrass, Peter 28, 79, 199 f., 206 Stanivukovic, Goran V. 27, 92, 135, 138, 184 Strohm, Paul 6, 88 Strype, John 170 Stubbes, Philip 8, 68 – 70, 93 f., 127, 174 f. Suzuki, Mihoko 105, 214, 223 The Debate betweene Pride and Lowlines 202, 208 f. Thevet, André 160 Transubstantiation, see Eucharist Tyndale, William 121

Walsham, Alexandra 9, 117 Warneke, Sara 16, 165, 213 Watt, Ian 8, 25, 163 Webbe, Edward 224 Webbe, William 195 Wilmot, Robert 146 Wilson, Katharine 26, 78, 88, 130, 142, 144 f., 150 f., 153 f., 163, 184, 193 Wilson, Thomas 196, 231 Wither, George 173 Woolf, Virginia 62 Worden, Blair 26, 90, 106, 149 Wycliffe, John 38, 47, 64 Yates, Frances Amelia 151 f., 155, 170