Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare

by Mary Ellen Lamb (Editor), Valerie Wayne (Editor)

Overview

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare’s late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes original essays that relate at least one prose or dramatic romance to an English play written from 1570 to 1630. The introduction explores the use of the term "dramatic romance" over several centuries and the commercial association between print culture, gender, and drama. Eight essays discuss Shakespeare’s plays; three more examine plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Other authors treated at some length include Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Wroth. Barbara Mowat’s afterword considers Shakespeare’s use of Greek romance. Written by foremost scholars of Shakespeare and early modern prose fiction, this book explores the vital cross-currents that occurred between narrative and dramatic forms of Greek, medieval, and early modern romance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415879385
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/26/2010
Series:	Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Valerie Wayne is Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is Associate General Editor of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (Oxford, 2007), editor of The Flower of Friendship by Edmund Tilney, and The Matter of Differerence.

Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and her most recent book is The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (Routledge, 2006).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I: Continuities and Incongruities

1 Introduction: Into the Forest

Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne

2 The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of the Pericles Tales

Lori Humphrey Newcomb

3 "Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other": Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance

Cyrus Mulready

Part II: Page and Stage

4 "A Note Beyond Your Reach": Prose Fiction’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama

Steve Mentz

5 Hamlet and Eourdanus

Goran Stanivukovic

6 Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania

Sarah Wall-Randell

7 Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Old Wives’ Tales

Mary Ellen Lamb

Part III: Gender and Agency

8 The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles, or "Religious Romance," in The Winter’s Tale

Gloria Olchowy

9 Romancing the Wager: Cymbeline’s Intertexts

Valerie Wayne

10 John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy Reading of Romance

Joyce Boro

11 Undoing Romance: Beaumont and Fletcher’s Resistant Reading of the The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

Clare R. Kinney

12 Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger

Lorna Hutson

13 Afterword: Shakespeare and Romance

Barbara Mowat

Notes on Contributors

Index