by Steven Moore
Although The Man in the Moon belongs to the utopian genre popular at the time—only set on the moon rather than on an imaginary island at the bottom of the Earth—it really is an early example of “science” fiction because of Gonzalez’s detailed, Robinson Crusovian account of how he invented his flying machine (he even has a black assistant) and the empirical methodology he applies during his space trip. As he escapes Earth’s orbit en route to the moon, he makes informed observations on gravity and celestial mechanics, pouring scorn on philosophers who merely speculate on such matters without scientific evidence. He tentatively accepts Copernicus’s theories at a time when they were still consider heretical by the Catholic church, makes several accurate predictions of modern scientific advances, and limits his lunar observations to matters he can convey with precision. His style is deliberately flat, eschewing fanciful imagery even when commenting on the unearthly wonders of the moon and its inhabitants, which adds to the illusion this is a realistic account. Even though Godwin was an Anglican bishop, he knew he was in the middle of a scientific revolution and displays an enlightened attitude toward the latest discoveries, unlike his Catholic counterparts in Spain and Italy. From the preface onward, he also makes enough references to the New World to suggest his dwarfish Spaniard’s “discovery” of an inhabited moon is an allegory for the Spanish “discovery” of America, here reimagined as a positive encounter—Gonzalez admits the moon is “a very paradise” (100) and respectfully leaves it unspoiled—rather than a genocidal, imperialistic disaster.
And The Man in the Moon really is a novel—not a utopian mind-game or a Keplerian somnium—because of Godwin’s focus on character development. The narrators of most utopian novels are faceless everymen, but Godwin created a fully rounded character: he made him a Spaniard so that he could take advantage of certain stereotypes (proud, Catholic, but good observers); he made him short for practical reasons (easier for the swans to transport) but also to contrast his short stature with his big ego, which is put in its place when he encounters the gigantic Lunars, whose otherwise perfect society discriminates against little people; and he made Gonzalez a family man: even though we hear little about his wife and children, Gonzalez misses them and feels responsible for them, which is the basis for requesting permission to return to Earth. This may just be an excuse—Gonzales seems to feel the moon is too perfect, preferring the messiness and drama of Earth-life, and of course his short size prevents any advancement there—but even that adds an extra dimension to his personality. Despite all the lunar wonders that Godwin ingeniously invents, the novel is about “the man” in the moon, not the moon.
One of those wonders is the Lunarian language; with a bow to Chinese (which Godwin knew about, though he didn’t speak it), the Lunars speak in musical tones rather than words, as our wee narrator explains:
For example, they have an ordinary salutation among them signifying (verbatim) “glory be to God alone,” which they express, as I take it, for I am no perfect musician, by this tune without any words at all.
Yea, the very names of men they will express in the same sort; when they were disposed to talk to me before my face so as I should not perceive it, this was “Gonzalez”:
(103)20
We saw earlier how both Cyrano de Bergerac and Casanova adapted this linguistic innovation for their own sci-fi novels, and it’s been suggested that Swift picked up a few ideas from Godwin for Gulliver’s Travels. The intriguing novella went through several printings, was translated into several languages—Grimmelshausen did the German version—and remains to this day one of the most important early examples of science fiction.
The occasional comic novel still pops up during this period; there’s an anonymous one called The Pinder of Wakefield (1632), an adaptation of several old stories about a live wire named George a Greene, but it doesn’t improve upon A Nest of Ninnies or Dobson’s Dry Bobs. (A pinder is in charge of a town’s pinfold, where stray animals are kept until claimed.) Like Dobson, George is a prankster, and directs most of his pranks against annoying folks: a scold, a usurer, a litigious knave, a liar, a Puritan. Mostly George and his “crew” exchange amusing stories about the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, and it must have been fun for middle-class readers to read about characters like themselves: Tom the taborer, Cuthbert the cobbler, Stitch the tailor, Tobit the thresher, Miles the miller, Smug the smith, et al. There are songs throughout, and even Robin Hood makes an appearance near the end of this merrie olde English panto.
In 1640, two writers who probably noted the regular reprints during the 1630s of Elizabethan romances by Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Emanuel Ford, and even John Lyly, attempted to take advantage of their continuing popularity, with interesting results. The otherwise unknown Alexander Hart, apparently dazzled by the linguistic sheen of Lyly’s Euphues (reprinted in 1630, 1631, and 1636), published Alexto and Angelica, a novella written not in euphuistic prose but in an learned style full of recondite allusions, Latin quotations, and fanciful metaphors à la Lyly. Set in timeless antiquity, the thin plot concerns a Greek nobleman who falls in love with a Roman woman solely by report. His worldly friend Sandrico warns him about women’s mutability, but Alexto insists on traveling to Rome to meet Angelica, who welcomes his courtship but dumps him after she receives a better marriage offer from the Duke of Aragon. She taunts heartbroken Alexto by inviting him to what he thinks is a reconciliation but turns out to be her marriage ceremony; but later that day, “a buzzing horror did possess her ears,” informing her that she really preferred Alexto after all, so she throws herself off the battlements, “and so with the fall was battered all in pieces.”21 After Alexto defeats Aragon in a duel, he and Sandrico light out to join “certain Jews in the west part of India called Espi, who will eat no flesh, drink no wine, nor use the company of any woman . . .” (421).
Alexto and Angelica is a rather bloodless rhetorical exercise, smelling too strong of the lamp, as Tristram Shandy would say. In his preface Hart implies he wrote it when younger, and seems to have regarded it as a vehicle to show off his college education and various poems he had written, including one near the end that rips off Donne’s famous “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star . . .”). It is interesting only insofar as Hart seems to be questioning the validity of metaphor and literary representation, even as he indulges in it: “why should I with metaphorical phrase adorn the feature of your authentic self, which nature cannot parallel?” Alexto asks Angelica upon meeting her (384), after adorning her with metaphorical phrases for the last dozen pages. Sandrico encourages Alexto to write her a letter because “ladies delight in praising fictions as hearing their beauties extolled though undeserved, and again poetry is a second nature to make things seem more exquisite than they were first framed by nature” (392). Hart seems to be condemning the very kind of novel he’s writing for its exquisite artificiality and undeserved beauty; like Angelica, the Lylylian romance is pretty on the outside but rotten within. It’s as though he didn’t want to jump on the Elizabethan bandwagon but to run it off the road, to leave it “battered all in pieces” like devilish Angelica.
Miscellaneous writer Richard Brathwaite (1588?–1673) went another way, abandoning artificiality for greater verisimilitude. His modern editor calls The Two Lancashire Lovers; or, the Excellent History of Philocles and Doriclea (1640) “an intriguing experiment in prose fiction in which Brathwaite nudged the conventional romance love-story into contemporary times by leavening it with realistic elements which anticipate the novel.”22 The title says it all: Philocles and Doriclea are typical romantic names, but to a London reader a romance set in Lancashire, of all places, would be as jarring as a modern novel called “Romeo and Juliet in Nebraska.” The opening chapters are promising: Philocles is a distressed scholar who accepted a position as tutor to Doriclea, the dutiful but independent daughter of an upper-class family, and now of marriageable age. Predictably, the couple falls in love but meets opposition from the girl’s parents, enlightened enough to
provide her with a good education but snobbish enough to dismiss a lowly scholar as an improper match for her. (This tutor–pupil relationship anticipates those in later novels like Rousseau’s Julie and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons.) The rest of the novel concerns their attempts to outwit her parents—secret letters, crossdressing rendezvous, servant accomplices—who finally come around when they learn that Philocles also belongs to the gentry.
Brathwaite occasionally updates his Elizabethan prose with some Caroline idioms and proverbs, and isn’t afraid to toss in some dialect, as when a local fop visits Doriclea to propose marriage: “Yaw, Jantlewoman, with the saffron snood, you shall know that I am Master Camillus, my mother’s anely white boy [favorite]. And she wad han you of all loves to wad me: and you shall han me for your tougher [dowry].” Doriclea dismisses him in kind—“Fie, young gentleman, will such a brave spark as you, that is your mother’s white-boy, undo your hopes in marrying such a country Joan as I am?” (4)—but she reverts to romantic-heroinese for most of the novel, a symptomatic problem. Though Brathwaite occasionally nudges his novel toward realism (a doctor examines a urine sample from Doriclea), he keeps falling back on older forms and locutions, especially during the novel’s many stagy soliloquies. He seems to be aware of the artificiality of these conventions, for he concludes one soliloquy: “Thus discoursed constant Doriclea with her Philocles, in the absence of her Philocles” (19); but every modern, realistic touch is followed by something out of the Elizabethan era. (There are numerous theatrical metaphors and references to Shakespeare’s plays, as though Brathwaite really wanted to write something along the lines of A Comedy of Errors.) Like the poor cat i’ the adage, letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,” Brathwaite doesn’t dare break with conventions, rename his protagonists Philip and Doris, and write a truly contemporary novel. Had he done so, The Two Lancaster Lovers would be a historically important novel, rather than a pleasant but compromised romantic comedy. It gets marks for its liberal attitude toward women’s education and class snobbery, and for its patches of colloquial language, but loses points for timidity.
There’s nothing timid about Welshman James Howell’s (1594?–1666) audacious attempt to tell the recent history of England and Europe by way of talking trees. His Dendrologia: Dodona’s Grove, or The Vocal Forest (1640) begins by evoking a time “not long since that trees did speak, and locally move, and meet one another,” a time when the narrator “was but a little, little plant newly sprung up above ground” (1–2).23 Making every arboreal pun imaginable, the sapling promises a political exposé that goes “between the bark and the tree,” leading the reader through the woods of his “rough-hewn, ill-timbered discourse” to a better understanding of recent political events (3). After a tour of the forest-kingdoms of Druina, Ampelona, Elayana, and Itelia (i.e., England, France, Spain, and the Low Countries), the narrator returns to Druina and begins his story of the conflicts between these forests, a thinly veiled diplomatic history of England during the early 17th century. The book was popular enough (four editions in the 1640s and a translation into French) that he published a second part in 1650 that continues the story up to the beginning of the English Civil War (1642–48). It concludes with a promise for a third part dealing with the war and the beheading of the oak-king of Druina (“His trunk from top was cleft asunder” [287]), but that never appeared.
Though Dodona’s Grove is mentioned in passing in some literary histories, and though Henry Wotton’s congratulatory poem-blurb compares it to Barclay’s Argenis, it is probably better classified as political satire than as literature. Once the reader realizes Druina is England, that the olive tree is the king of Spain, that yews are clergyman, and so forth—pretty obvious from the start, and made explicit in the key printed in later editions—what’s left is political commentary rather than imaginative literature, a cleverly told account of recent history rather than a fiction that functions independent of its coded references, as Argenis does (or, more aptly, as Holberg will do with his dendrologic characters in Niels Klim.) Howell himself regarded the work as allegorical history rather than fiction, for on the last page of part 1 the narrator fears the book will be mistaken for “some senseless, fantastic romance,” which would be not “to have seen the wood for trees” (217), punning to the end. He reiterated the point a decade later in his prologue to the second part, where he disassociates his work from mainstream fiction, but in doing so offers a defense of the kind of unconventional, “difficult” fiction that Dodona’s Grove closely resembles:
Nor is this author the first, though the first in this peculiar maiden fancy, who deeming it a flat and vulgar task to compile a plain downright story (which consists merely of collections, and is as easy as walking of horses or gleaning of corn) hath under hieroglyphics, allegories, and emblems endeavored to diversify and enrich the matter, to embroider it up and down with apologues, essays, parables, and other flourishes; for we find this to be the ancientest and most ingenious way of delivering truth and transmitting it to posterity: . . . We find that the best commodities are kept in boxes and under locks, when the coarsest sort of wares lies prostitute upon the stall, and exposed to every common view and dirty fingers. (7–9)
The confusion over how to categorize Dodona’s Grove is a perfect example of what critic Michael McKeon calls “the destabilization of generic categories” in 17th-century fiction, which also applies to Samuel Sheppard’s Amandus and Sophronia (1650).24 Subtitled “A Piece of Rare Contexture,” this short novel offers a mulligan stew of genres: it combines Sidney’s high romance with Greene’s low stories of sex and violence, spices things up with a comically sordid tale alla Boccaccio, adds a few supernatural scenes, a masque, a pastoral interlude, and hints of political allegory concerning England’s recent Civil War, winks at a misanthropic, all-male utopia (with homosexual overtones), and is garnished liberally with a number of poems in various genres. The prose likewise offers a party platter: Sheppard laces his narrative with flights of fancy, written with a quill “pluck’d even from Cupid’s wing” (2.4), literary allusions and apostrophes, sardonic asides, and cameos from mythological figures. (As Amandus and his companion swim ashore after a shipwreck, “Neptune with all his Tritons gazed upon them, imagining another Melicerta, with Saron accompanied, had divided the dusky waves” [3.2].) The story itself is not particularly original: while noble Amandus is off repelling an invasion, his friend Rhoxenor, prince of Verona, tries to seduce his fiancée Sophronia; rebuffed, the prince tricks her into being caught naked in bed with a soldier and sends her to prison. Amandus returns, leads a rebellion after he learns what’s happened, then escapes to Poland while Sophronia—after fighting off the king of Verona, who also lusts after her—escapes and becomes a shepherdess for a while. After the king’s death, Amandus is called back to Verona to assume the throne, and eventually Sophronia returns and marries him. Amandus and Sophronia reads like the work of an erudite man trying to make a quick quid with a pulp novel, and amusing himself while doing so.25 Whether by accident or design, it demonstrates the porousness of generic boundaries in fiction at the time, and is a fast and compelling read, which can’t be said of our next novel.
When young Roger Boyle (1621–79) was in France in the 1640s, he learned that the gigantic roman héroïque was all the rage among the jeunesse dorée, so even though he wasn’t much of a reader before then, he became one after reading several of them. Boyle seems to have been especially taken with La Calprenède’s Cassandra, for in 1651 he published the first volume of what would become a thousand-page imitation entitled Parthenissa (1651–69).26 Set in the 1st century bce, it features two principal story arcs: one concerns two young princes named Artabanes (of Media) and Artavasdes (of Armenia), who separately arrive at an oracle in Syria for guidance on how to proceed with their messy lives. During the first two thirds of the novel, the oracle’s priest, Callimachus, listens to their entwined, alternating stories: both are victims of political intrigue, and both are separated from the women they lo
ve—Artabanes from Parthenissa, Artavasdes from Altazeera—for the usual reasons of jealousy and suspicion. Then the priest (like them, born a prince) begins to tell his own story, which is even more blatantly based on Cassandra. (Just as La Calprenède’s Oorondates falls for a foreign princess named Statira and winds up fighting against his own country’s army, Callimachus falls for one, also named Statira, and does likewise.) But Boyle abandoned the novel before concluding Callimachus’s story, or that of the two princes, apparently out of boredom. In a revealing preface that appeared in a 1655 edition of the first four parts (of six), Boyle regrets beginning the novel in the first place, “the idle fruit of some idle time”: “And if I should continue the two remaining last tomes, it shall be as a penance for having writ the four first.”27 Part 5 appeared in 1656, but 14 years lapsed before Boyle could bring himself to publish part 6 (1669), at which point he abandoned the book and turned to other projects, including a short historical novel about Henry VIII entitled English Adventures (1676).
Parthenissa differs from its French models in two minor ways, structurally and thematically: it simplifies the overall narrative by limiting itself to a few story arcs and dispensing with the many, often irrelevant interpolated histories that bloat the genre, and then multiplies the complications of those few arcs. It also dispenses with the long discussions of love that characterize French novels; Huet, describing those of La Calprenède and Scudéry in his History of Romances, said they “have love for their principal subject, and don’t concern themselves in war or politics but by accident” (8). Boyle reverses the emphasis, placing it on war and politics, and treating love “but by accident.” But these differences are not enough to save Parthenissa from the charges of unoriginality and tedium made even by its earliest readers. In February 1654, Dorothy Osborne, a brilliant young Englishwoman who was addicted to French romances, wrote to her boyfriend to say she had almost finished part 2 of Parthenissa, and allows it has “handsome language, you would know it to be writ by a person of good quality though you were not told it, but in the whole I am not very much taken with it, all the stories have too near a resemblance with those of other romances, there is nothing of new or surprenant [surprising] in them, the ladies are all so kind [ideal] they make no sport. . . .”28 Osborne’s right: to anyone who has read the earlier French novels, the novel is so derivative that it is difficult even to pay attention, much less to appreciate Boyle’s accomplishments. Admittedly, his battle scenes and endless pages on military maneuvers and tactics have a louder ring of authenticity than similar scenes in French novels, largely due to his own battlefield experiences fighting under Cromwell during the Civil War, as does his grasp of the complicated political machinations that go on behind the scenes in any regime at war.29 (After he abandoned the novel, Boyle wrote A Treatise on the Art of War [1677].) But these aren’t enough to save Parthenissa from tedium; Boyle prides himself on its realistic complications—Artavasdes, undoubtedly speaking for the author, says of his story “the strange changes and intricacies it is replenished with [are] worthy your attention” (3.2, sic)—but after a while the eyes glaze over, lulled by Boyle’s colorless, expository prose. In addition to borrowing the form of the roman héroïque, he uncritically retained their most ludicrous features: the protagonists’ almost superhuman heroics, the incredibly coincidental meetings, the ability of Artabanes’s servant to narrate great swatches of his master’s story from his point of view, including letters he received, and so on. Although Boyle was quite familiar with Roman history—much of Artabanes’s story takes place in Italy, where among other exploits he leads a slave revolt under the name Spartacus—he confesses in his preface that he takes great liberties with chronology, such as allowing Hannibal to exist at the same time as Cleopatra, though they lived a century and a half apart. (He offers the lame excuse that historical fiction will inspire readers to seek out history books for the truth.) Like a soap opera, the endless complications seem to exist only to keep the story going endlessly; the last two parts in particular read like they were written on autopilot.