by Steven Moore
Also published in 1656, Don Zara del Fogo: A Mock Romance claims to be “written originally in the British tongue, and made English” by one Basilius Musophilus, the pedantic persona of the otherwise unknown Samuel Holland. It’s a short parody of chivalric romances, which were still popular and often reprinted in the 1650s, and is amusing in a predictable way. Holland hits all the usual targets with bombastic prose, deliberately awful poetry, and ludicrous names. (Don Zara’s sword is called Slay-a-Cow, and his opponents in a climactic tournament bear Monty Pythonesque names like the Knight of the Pudding and the Knight of the Toasted Cheese.) Even without the reference to Don Quixote near the end, it’s obvious that the author wanted, as the title page of the 1660 reprint states, to cure readers of romances, for here “the prodigious vanities of a great part of them are (as in a mirror) most lively represented, and so naturally personated, that the ingenious reader, observing their deformities, may delightfully be instructed and invited to the pursuing of more honourable and profitable studies.”50
Don Zara del Fogo is indeed “most lively,” and most inventive. Holland gives his knight-errant a squire named Soto, but makes him wiser than his illiterate master, and undercuts their exploits with several doses of reality. Lodging in a peasant’s cottage en route to his first adventure, the knight is devoured by bedbugs at night and the next morning wonders how he is going to pay the bill the peasant unexpectedly sticks him with. He gets seasick during an ocean voyage, and though Don Zara speaks magniloquently most of the time, but doesn’t hesitate to tell Lamia, “I was once so bewitched that I could not shit till two or three candles’ ends were thrust up ―” (2.1). And there’s an element of sexual realism that is not only at odds with chivalric romances but daring for any novel of the time. Don Zara’s first encounter with a beautiful woman, whose blouse was “not so closed but that those hills of snow, her immaculate breasts, were visible” (1.5), does not go well: when he follows her to her palace, she dumps a bucket of her urine on him from the balcony. He has better luck with a witch named Lamia: she sizes him up with “good hope of his strenuous activity when Venus should make proof of his procreative part” (2.1), and the couple does get strenuously procreative later with a frankness rare in 17th-century fiction. After they have sex, Lamia takes Don Zara on a tour of hell—there may be a metaphor in that—by way of an infernal spell that the author warns readers not to utter aloud; after visiting the gloomy Christina hell and meeting Satan himself, our hero glimpses the pagan Elysian Fields,
Where are no locusts, nor six-footed lice,
But popinjays and birds of paradise,
Plump young youths with buxom maids do what they please,
And never fear the fatal French disease. (2.4)
For gay readers, there is the vision of “a troop of beauteous young men, all naked with vast-sized genitals,51 sitting at a table furnished with all sorts of delicates, and after their repast dancing most gracefully to the tune of Dido” (2.4).
As in Don Quixote, the narrator claims to be dealing with an older manuscript, and he fills the margins with pedantic notes: when Don Zara mentions astrological houses, the commentator adds: “Being twelve in all. See Merlinus Angelicus, De Starribus & ejus mansionibus tract. 100, p. 10,000” (1.2). In several marginalia, the commentator appeals to traditional authorities to justify unbelievable actions, and it’s here that the erudite Holland shows his claws. Like Cervantes, he often slips in the acts of biblical heroes and saints in his accounts of chivalric feats, sacrilegiously consigning the Bible and hagiography to the same level as silly romances. He isn’t much more respectful toward literary tradition: the commentator dismisses Homer and Virgil as “forgers,” and glosses a reference to Seneca thus: “That very Lucius Anneus Seneca who wrote of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like an effeminate epicure, and died like a pusillanimous coward” (1.1). This “Romance-Eater” (Romancio-Mastrix) wants not only to wean readers away from traditional romances but also from questionable traditions and “articles of faith” in theology, literature, and philosophy.
Writing with Rabelaisian gusto and Cervantine subversion, Samuel Holland produced a minor masterpiece. At the end of the novel, after Don Zara and Soto come across a giant winged hog, mount him for an aerial tour of the world, and crash-land in Libya among dog-headed people, the author leaves them there and invites (à la Sidney) someone else to continue Don Zara’s exploits. No champion came forth to accept the challenge, for Don Zara del Fogo is a tough act to follow.
In 1659, after 15 years’ work, William Chamberlayne (1619–79) published Pheronnida, which, as I noted earlier (p. 37), one critic called the first English novel in verse. The subject matter is indeed similar to that in ancient Greek novels, specifically Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, and Chamberlayne’s excessive use of enjambment provides a narrative flow lacking in predominantly end-stopped verse. However, the fact that he subtitled it A Heroick Poem, and later rewrote it as Eromena: A Novel, suggests he intended the earlier work to continue the tradition of narrative poems like Orlando furioso and William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651) rather than to introduce a new genre. The posthumously published Eromena (1683) reduces the 300-page poem to a slim novella, and is dismissed as “worthless” by George Saintsbury, a champion of Pheronnida, so I’ll take his word for it and move on down the mean streets of crime fiction.
This ain’t great literature, so we won’t linger long, but the crime novels that sprouted up in the 1660s form an important link between older Spanish picaresques and later realistic novels like Moll Flanders, increase the number of roles women could play in fiction, and goose literary diction with racy vernacular. For example, the anonymous Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith (1662)—like the others in this genre, based on a real person (1584–1659) but tarted up with fictional elements—celebrates the criminal exploits of a transvestite woman, “alias Moll Cutpurse,” in goofily exuberant prose. The opening address “To the Reader” could have been written by Urquhart, offering “an account of this Sybilla Tiburnia, the Oracle of Falsity,” and warning “he that looks not upon Moll Cutpurse with the same admiration, and thinks not her nymphship as venerable as any of that mysterious sisterhood, is not fit to carry guts to a bear, nor officiate in the rites of those games consecrated to this Bona Roba and goodly matron”—that is, to this prostitute and bawd.52 Formally enacting Frith’s rejection of patriarchal expectations—she refuses to act like a girl when growing up and escapes from her family’s attempt to ship her to America—the novella begins with an account of her childhood by a male narrator who regards her as an intriguing freak, but after 10 pages Frith takes control of the narrative and tells her own story. This section purports to be a memoir she wrote at the end of her life, after perusing “tale-books and romances, and the histories of the Seven Champions, and the like fopperies” (70)53 and concluding she could novelize her life in a similar fashion. Just as Dekker and Middleton did in their 1611 play The Roaring Girl, the author ignores the seedier aspects of the historical Mary Frith’s life (especially the whoring and pimping) and focuses instead on her daring independence and business accomplishments as a fense for stolen goods. (Though not a prostitute herself, Frith acknowledges “that among my large acquaintance I had some familiarity with the mad girls and the venerable matrons of the kind motion” [51]—a euphemism of Japanese delicacy.) If the reader suspects the whole thing is a con like those she pulls on her victims—and in fact this section too was probably written by a man practicing literary transvestism—it remains an entertaining tale filled with garish local color, literary allusions (Guzman of Alfarache, Don Quixote), political observations (like most criminals, she’s a conservative, and discusses the disastrous effects of the Civil War on her illicit trade), as well as (im)pertinent challenges to the patriarchal status quo, in fiction as well as in life.
The less interesting Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663) is a more blatant con job, ostensibly the autobiography of a German princess but actually a concoction by a ghostwriter de
fending a crafty Englishwoman who impersonated not a man but an aristocrat, a far worse transgression in class-conscious England. It imitates in style and content the French memoir-novels then coming into vogue, and in fact when younger the narrator admits she occasionally set aside history books to indulge in the “facile pastimes of literature: romances and other heroical adblandiments, which being written for the most and best part in French.”54 A few pages later, she boasts, “I might as well have given luster to a romance as any of those supposed heroines” (91), and if we didn’t know from the historical record that Mrs. Carleton—aka “Henrietta Maria de Vulva,” as the pamphleteers dubbed her—was merely a scheming gold-digger, one could add her to those bookish dreamers who try to live their lives as though they they were in a novel. To confuse fact and fiction, the author includes transcripts from Carleton’s recent trial for bigamy (in which she was acquitted, to the delight of the public), and this “supposed heroine” puts on a convincing act as an unfairly libeled woman, enough to gull some readers of the time into mistaking this contrived fiction for nonfiction, and for others a half-century later to still remember her: realizing the need to conceal her name, the heroine of Defoe’s Roxana (1724) says, “I might as well have been the German Princess” (271).
Mary Carleton continued to rob and cheat for another decade until she was caught and hanged in 1673; that year, an author/publisher named Francis Kirkman (1632–80?) rushed into print a more interesting novel about her entitled The Counterfeit Lady Revealed. Announcing that he is going to expose the real details of Carleton’s life, Kirkman—who had met her a few times—gives a fairly accurate account of her upbringing, her love of romance novels, and her first marriage. But after a dozen pages, he decides The Case of Mary Carleton is reliable after all and quotes almost verbatim from it for the next 15 pages.55 Fully aware Carleton was an inveterate liar, he buys into her fiction with the same gullibility with which he read chivalric romances as a kid (see below, p. 595), and unwittingly converts his book from nonfiction into fiction. He proceeds to quote (without acknowledgment) several lengthy passages from an anonymous verse lampoon entitled Vercingetorixa; or, The German Princess Reduced to an English Habit (1663), which are rudely entertaining but hardly bolster his claim to have written “the best and truest account” of Carleton (9). He passes along unsubstantiated rumors, quotes from a play about her (which he confesses he hadn’t seen), and recounts her love affairs, though pulling himself up short “that I may not seem to romance by telling you all their private discourses” (54). Yet he goes on “to romance” by dramatizing dialogue-filled stories of her later crimes. I’d like to think The Counterfeit Lady is an artful experiment in mixed media and the nature of truth, but, knowing Kirkman, it is more likely an artless mélange he threw together to cash in on Carleton’s death. We’ll meet him again in the back alleys of publishing, but first let’s cross-examine a 1665 book Kirkman bought rights (and wrote unauthorized sequels) to, the longest and most vicious of these Restoration crime novels.
The English Rogue appeared in an unlicensed edition in 1665, too “smutty” (as a later commentator said) to be sold over the counter until a more “refined” edition was licensed in 1667.56 The anonymous author was a ne’er-do-well bookseller-turned-hack named Richard Head (1637?–86?), who wrote it to make money, drawing upon his own upbringing for the first few chapters and padding out the rest with material pilfered from other books. It purports to be the autobiographical confession of a lowlife named Meriton Latroon (cf. Spanish ladrón: thief), from juvenile delinquency up to about age 30. A born criminal, he runs away from home as a child, falls in with some Gypsies, then with some professional beggars, and as a punk teenager arrives in London (or Romeville, as the Gypsies call it) for a life of petty crime and debauchery—gambling, drinking, and whoring away his time until he flees to Ireland for further scams and scrapes, returns to England and joins a troop of highwaymen, and then a troop of crossdressing highwaywomen, who wear him out with their sexual insatiability. He is eventually arrested and deported in September 1650 to America (at that time a dumping ground for criminals), is shipwrecked and rescued by a ship en route for the Canaries, and in the final 30 pages undergoes a novel’s worth of adventures in Yemen and a fabulous Orient straight out of Mandeville’s Travels.57 He marries a waitress in Java, becomes a successful East Indian trader, and concludes his memoir hoping “that the reading of my life may be any ways instrumental for the reformation of licentious persons.”58
Dick Head’s seedy novel marks an important development in realism: it reeks of body odor and soiled clothes, and exposes the way the lower and criminal classes lived, giving middle-class readers some cheap thrills (loads of illicit sex here) and useful tips on how to avoid victimization. The artistry is questionable: hardly anyone is named (“Meriton Latroon” appears only on the title page), which reduces all the characters to stereotypes and depersonalized victims, including the narrator, for whom the author makes zero effort to elicit sympathy. The style is an incongruous mix of straight reporting, patches of purple prose and Latin quotations, and some poetry—probably less because the author conceived of his protagonist as a poet than because he figured the novel would be a good place to fense some of his own (and others’) verses, much of it pornographic. It’s possible there are some subtle critiques of religious hypocrisy (to curry favor, Latroon’s mother switches religious denominations as often as criminals don disguises) and an implication that women angling for husbands use the same fraudulent techniques that crooks do (literalized in the chapters on those highwaywomen). There are a few successful stabs at extended metaphors and black humor, but ultimately The English Rogue is, like earlier crime novels, something of a con job. In the original preface, Head admits “But some may say that this is but actum agere, a collection out of Guzman, Buscon, or some others that have writ on this subject,” but protests, “I never extracted from them one single drop of spirit” (vii). In one sense this is true, for The English Rogue doesn’t display the sincere concern with morality that complicates Alemán’s novel (translated into English as The Rogue) and Quevedo’s Swindler. But literary detectives have unearthed Head’s borrowings from jestbooks, true-crime pamphlets, and other subliterary works, giving the lie to his claim, “I skimmed not off the cream of other men’s wits, nor cropped the flowers in others’ gardens to garnish my own plots; neither have I larded my lean fancy with the fat of others’ ingenious labors” (vii–viii). Deny everything, criminals advise.
Francis Kirkman gained rights to the novel just after it was published in 1665 and urged Head to write a sequel; when he refused, Kirkman wrote and published a second part in 1668, admitting in his preface that his “first and chieftest” consideration “was to gain ready money.” (He was also probably responsible for the extra material that extended the first edition’s 50 chapters to 76.) Here some English visitors to the East Indies tell Latroon their disreputable stories, a rehash of his own rap sheet that is notable only for a few chapters (22–24) exposing the lowdown ways of booksellers/publishers (usually the same person back then), which support Lennard J. Davis’s claim that in the 17th century “something about the literary trade was considered illicit, disreputable, and even criminal.”59 Parts 3 and 4 (1671), in which Head may or may not have collaborated with Kirkman, do little more than to sentence the reader of The English Rogue to nearly 1,000 pages of crimes and misdemeanors. Disgracefully, this was the first English novel to be translated into a foreign language.
Before leaving Kirkman and this genre, I want to praise him for achieving in another book what he failed to do in The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, namely, an artful experiment in mixed media. The Unlucky Citizen: Experimentally Described in the Various Misfortunes of an Unlucky Londoner . . . Intermixed with Several Choice Novels (1673) is a publisher autobiography that reads like a picaresque novel, in which interpolated “novels” (i.e., tales) eventually take over the book.60 Even though he claims “I shall not (as it is usual in books of this natur
e, viz. Gusman, Lazarillo de Tormes, or our late English Rogue) give you any account of the miscarriages of my parents” (2), the book combines picaresque adventures with elements from Kirkman’s beloved chivalric novels. His account of how he came upon those works is touching, and indicates that one doesn’t need to be as mad as Don Quixote to fall under their spell:
Thus was I bred till it was time to be an apprentice, and in all that time I do not remember that I was master of any money, only once I happened upon a sixpence, and having lately read that famous book of The Friar and the Boy, and being hugely pleased with that, as also the excellent History of the Se ven Wise Masters of Rome, and having heard great commendation of Fortunatus, I laid out all my money for that, and thought I had a great bargain, conceiting that the Lady Fortune would one time or other bestow such a purse upon me as she did on Fortunatus; now having read this book, and being desirous of reading more of that nature, one of my schoolfellows lent me Doctor Faustus, which also pleased me, especially when he traveled in the air, saw all the world, and did what he listed; but I was as much troubled when the Devil came to fetch him; and the consideration of that horrible end did so much terrify me that I often dreamed of it. The next book I met with was Friar Bacon, whose pleasant stories much delighted me. But when I came to knight errantry, and reading Montelion, Knight of the Oracle, and Ornatus and Artesia, and the famous Parismus, I was contented beyond measure, and (believing all I read to be true) wished my self squire to one of these Knights: I proceeded on to Palmerin of England, and Amadis de Gaul, and borrowing one book of one person, when I had read it my self, I lent it to another, who lent me one of their books; and thus robbing Peter to pay Paul, borrowing and lending from one to another, I in time had read most of these histories. All the time I had from school, as Thursdays in the afternoon, and Saturdays, I spent in reading these books; so that I being wholly affected to them, and reading how that Amadis and other knights not knowing their parents, did in time prove to be sons of kings and great personages, I had such a fond and idle opinion that I might in time prove to be some great person, or at leastwise be squire to some knight. (2)