by Steven Moore
Reader, I’d marry her.
Notes
1 John Buxton (1963), quoted in Salzman’s English Prose Fiction 1558–1700 (123), the best introductory book on the period. I’m surprised (but chuffed) to learn Arcadia was more popular than The Pilgrim’s Progress or the Bible.
2 Page 20 in Zall’s edition of A Nest of Ninnies and Other English Jestbooks, where Armin’s novella occupies pp. 15–71.
3 A Nest of Ninnies is also the title of a novel by the American poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler (1969), but it has nothing to do with Armin’s novella (aside from its comic spirit). Ashbery said he simply noticed the title in a bookseller’s catalogue and decided to use it.
4 Chapter 3 in Horsman’s old-spelling edition, hereafter cited by chapter.
5 The novelette occupies pp. 4–42 of Mish’s Anchor Anthology of Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century, and will be hereafter cited by chapter.
6 Walter R. Davis, 192. He relates it to a supernatural Elizabethan novel called The Adventures of Lady Egeria (1585?) by “W. C.” It sounds fascinating, and had I known of it I would have written about it in my earlier volume.
7 Page 56 in Mish’s Anthology of Short Fiction, where Moriomachia occupies pp. 46–78. Anton also adds a number of wry footnotes that similarly deflate the high diction of the text.
8 Randall and Boswell, Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England, xxxvi—a stupendous reference work.
9 Part 2, p. 3v, hereafter cited by part/page number: only the rectos (right-hand pages) are paginated, so I’ll use r for recto and v for verso.
10 How successful he was is hard to say. Nearly 30 copies of Urania survive, not bad for an early 17th-century novel: only a copy or two are extant of all the other English novels I’ve discussed so far.
11 For an attractively written account of this aspect of Wroth’s novel and her familiarity with the intellectual debates of her day, see Cavanagh’s Cherished Torment.
12 Part 1, page 1; hereafter cited by part/page.
13 “A mighty number of lights appeared in the sky, a strange-formed and built castle appearing in the midst of those lights, and in the castle a most stately tomb. . . . It came at the first extremely high; when nearer the city, it stripped the lights of that brightness and glory, as it was impossible to describe the extreme luster of them; then came lower, and so by degrees descended and settled in the middest of a most pleasant and delectable grove . . .” (2:318).
14 Dude, I flagged the pages for you: 1:84, 87, 197–98, 216, 284, 657; 2:237, 328, 371.
15 My old anthology from college, Witherspoon and Warnke’s Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, includes only one woman in its 1,094 pages: not Wroth but Katherine Philips (1631–64), who is permitted one poem near the end.
16 Page 653 in Baker’s edition of Sidney’s Arcadia, where the Sixth Book occupies pp. 631–78. Beling is sometimes confused with Irishman Richard Bellings, who, born in 1613, was too young to write this.
17 See the introduction to Cullen’s splendid modern edition for what little is known of her.
18 No condescension intended, by the way, toward Miss Weamys with the phrase “paper dolls”: in a reductively literal sense, isn’t that what all literary characters are?
19 Page 75 in Butler’s edition, where the novella occupies pp. 69–114 (following an exhaustive introduction that is longer than the novella itself).
20 As Knowlson pointed out back when I was in high school, this is merely a cipher in which letters of the alphabet are assigned a note in the musical scale; a few cryptologists of the period toyed with this notion.
21 Pages 420–21 in Mish’s Anchor Anthology, where the novella occupies pp. 368–421.
22 Henry D. Janzen’s introduction to his well-annotated edition, 11; the novel itself will be cited by chapter. By “novel,” Janzen, like many conservative critics, means realistic fiction; by now it should be obvious I consider any book-length fiction a novel, regardless of its degree of realism.
23 Dodona’s Grove was an ancient Greek oracle where priests and priestesses conned their marks by pretending to interpret the rustling of the leaves.
24 See chap. 1 of The Origins of the English Novel. McKeon doesn’t actually discuss Dodona’s Grove or Amandus and Sophronia—or, for that matter, any of the English novels I’ve treated so far. Nor does Patrick Parrinder in his more recent Nation & Novel, where he writes, “the seventeenth century is largely a missing chapter in the history of the English novel” (44).
25 Hyder Rollins, who reviews his varied output in what seems to be the only essay ever written on Sheppard, guesses he lived from around 1624 to 1655, the last year anything was heard of him.
26 Although the collected edition of 1676 is about 730 pages long, it’s an oversize volume with tiny print; a modern setting would be closer to 1,000 pages.
27 This preface was omitted from the complete 1676 edition I, but it is reprinted in Davies’s Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances. For a credible prediction of how Parthenissa would have ended, see C. William Miller (1947).
28 Page 143 in Moore Smith’s edition. Osborne’s intelligent comments on the fiction of her day, especially on French novels (which she read in the original—she had a low opinion of the English translations), are a valuable resource.
29 Indeed, his brother Robert “discovered striking resemblance’s between [Boyle]’s conquests for Cromwell in Munster and the martial exploits of Parthenissa’s gallant lover Artabanes” (Lynch, 188).
30 See Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660.
31 On the basis of one slim piece of evidence, the novel has been attributed to the otherwise unknown William Sales, but the modern editor of Theophania (whose well-annotated edition will be cited by page number) prefers to regard the author as anonymous.
32 Kahn discusses this aspect of Theophania in her superb essay on the English political romance genre, “Reinventing Romance,” 652–54.
33 Salzman, 157; Smith, 237; Kahn, 638. Only a few other critics have written about this magisterial novel, largely because it has been out of print since the 17th century. (Even its author was unknown until the 1980s.) Salzman reprints the novel’s preface and opening pages in his Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (211–47).
34 Page 73, one of many labyrinth images. The Princess Cloria is 614 pages long, but as with Parthenissa, the page count is deceptive: the second edition (1665) I read is a huge (7” × 11”) folio averaging 700 words per page: a modern setting would be close to 1,000 pages.
35 That’s the title of Christopher Hill’s classic book on the English Civil War and its effect on the lower classes, which is useful as a corrective to Sir Percy’s aristocratic view. It’s a shame that apparently none of the Levelers, Ranters, Diggers, or Seekers that Hill describes wrote a novel giving their take on the times. (In Cloria, these people are dismissed as “the rabble.”)
36 Page 212 in Salzman’s anthology (which I’m citing because more accessible), where the prefatory “To the Reader” occupies pp. 211–16.
37 The first two parts of the novel were published in 1653 and 1654 as Cloria and Narcissus while Cromwell was still in power, and were allowed to be published, Patterson suggests, because “The text would have been either inscrutable to Cromwell’s censors, or sufficiently oblique to avoid direct confrontation” (192). Cromwell, by the way, appears as “Hercrombrotus” in Cloria and is treated with considerable contempt.
38 To keep things in perspective, even the best English novels of the 17th century are inferior to the best poems, plays, and creative nonfiction (like Burton’s Anatomy) produced then. The novel wouldn’t surpass these genres until the following century.
39 Boyce, 489. I may be undervaluating Panthalia; for more sympathetic readings, see Boyce’s pioneering essay (which includes a character key), Patterson (198–202), and Kahn (638–46).
40 Sir Thomas Browne, best known for Religio Medici (1643), and Walter Charleton, auth
or of many books published from 1650 onward, including a novelette, The Ephesian Matron (1659). Mackenzie is hardly one to criticize others for using pedantic terms.
41 In what is undoubtedly the obscurest literary allusion in television history, Seinfeld’s George Costanza once said he liked Flatman’s poetry. Montelyon, Knight of the Oracle is a popular chivalric romance by Emanuel Ford (c. 1600).
42 Page 12 of Jack and Lyall’s introduction. The Jewel itself occupies pp. 49–213, set in a cushion of commentary. On the errata page, the author insists the title was to have been spelled as I have it above, not the typesetter’s Ekskubalauron, a neologism signifying “out of dung, a jewel.”
43 visotactile = involving both sight and touch; visuriency = desire to look; tacturiency = desire to touch; attrectation = touching with hands; hirquitalliency = cry of delight; gnomon = pointer on a sundial; obscoeness = obscenity; definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus = logical definitions are verified by objects; exerced = exercised; suppones = anticipates.
44 Mish, “English Short Fiction in the Seventeenth Century,” 257. This 100-page essay provides a valuable overview of all the novelettes and novellas published that century.
45 Whitaker, Mad Madge, 193, which goes on to give an inviting overview of the collection.
46 Page 5 in Lilley’s edition of The Blazing World and Other Writings, where A Contract occupies pp. 3–43.
47 Page 47 in Lilley’s edition, where the novella occupies pp. 77–118. See Genesis 34 for the rape; as Lilley notes, “Dinah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, avenge her rape in a massacre which led indirectly to the foundation of Israel” (226), another grim allegory.
48 Nature’s Pictures contains another novella, The She-Anchoret, of which Cavendish was particularly proud. A precocious young lady retires from the world after her father’s death, but her reputation for wisdom attracts many visitors, and the bulk of the novella consists of their Q&A sessions. Threatened by a king’s marriage proposal, she commits suicide at the end. As a platform for Cavendish’s views, The She-Anchoret is impressive in its encyclopedic sweep, but as fiction it’s static.
49 Page 167 in Lilley’s edition, where the novel occupies pp. 119–225.
50 Each time the popular novel was reprinted, it was given a new title: the second printing of 1656 is called Wit and Fancy in a Maze, and this 1660 edition—“printed for the author” and thus perhaps reflecting his preferred title, is called Romancio-Mastrix; or, A Romance on Romances. When the novel was reprinted in 1719 (by which time Holland was probably dead), the publisher renamed it The Spaniard, and pretended it was translated not from British to English, as Holland playfully had it, but from Spanish to English.
51 “These torments must needs be inpressible,” the commentator sympathizes from the sidelines.
52 Page 3 in Todd and Spearing’s Counterfeit Ladies, where the novella occupies pp. 1–73. The diction is so slangy and allusive that the editors append 415 notes to the slim work.
53 Richard Johnson’s popular Seven Champions of Christendom (1596) relates how St. George rescued other Christian heroes from enchantment. It is available in Simons’s Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances, 79–94.
54 Page 88 in Counterfeit Ladies, where the novella occupies pp. 77–130. “Adblandiments” is a word she makes up to sound sophisticated.
55 Pages 22–37 in Peterson’s anthology (where The Counterfeit Lady occupies pp. 8–102), equivalent to pp. 93–108 of the earlier novella.
56 Though as Salzman points out, the licensors were more concerned with religious and political heterodoxy than with obscenity. In a 1982 essay he prints most of the naughty bits from the rare and inaccessible first printing.
57 Literally: Moseley details the passages from Mandeville that Head adapted, and suggests he added this section to take advantage of the popularity of exotic travel books.
58 Chapter 76 in the expanded edition of 1680, the earliest available (and hereafter cited by chapter). The first printing consisted of 50 chapters, but more material was added to it as the popular book was reprinted over the years.
59 Factual Fictions (125), though Davis pushes this too far when he goes on to suggest, “There seems to have been something inherently novelistic about the criminal, or rather the form of the novel seems almost to demand a criminal content. Indeed, without the appearance of the whore, the rogue, the cutpurse, the cheat, the thief, or the outsider it would be impossible to imagine the genre of the novel” (125).
60 Salzman calls it an autobiography but lists it in his bibliography under “Picaresque Fiction.” Cited by chapter.
61 Cynthia Wall’s splendid Norton Critical Edition, x.
62 Page xlii in Forrest and Sharrock’s 1988 edition, hereafter cited by page number.
63 Page 351 in Salzman’s Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, where the novel occupies pp. 351–445. It also appears in Peterson’s Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (185–289), preceded by an informative account of Dangerfield’s conspiratorial activities.
64 Cf. Balzac’s remark in Le Père Goriot: “Behind great fortunes with no obvious source is some forgotten, well-executed crime.”
65 Page 41 in Hinnant’s recent critical edition, where he lays to rest the mistake made by some (including the Library of Congress) that The London Jilt was written by Alexander Oldys, whose 1692 novel The Female Gallant was misleadingly subtitled The London Jilt. In fact, The London Jilt is an adaptation of a Dutch novel published in 1680–81 entitled D’Openhertige Juffrouw (The Outspoken Damsel), as Lotte van de Pol recently revealed in The Burgher and the Whore (10–12). However, The London Jilt is so throughly Anglicized with British place-names and politics that it deserves treatment here. At this time, “jilt” meant not someone left at the altar, but a prostitute, and/or a woman (in or out of the profession) who flirtatiously offered more than she delivered.
66 In The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, Mowry detects a political subtext (46–47, 118–19), another way the author shifts our focus from the Jilt’s body to her brain.
67 To keep things moving, I’m skipping over some minor novels of the the period that the curious reader may want to look into: The anonymous Don Samuel Crispe (1660) is a facetious romance with several references to Don Quixote (see Randall and Boswell, 230–33). Nathaniel Ingelo’s religious allegory Bentivolio and Urania (1660–64) is notable only for its pedantic preface, in which the clergyman denounces the authors of secular romances whose “chief design is to put fleshly lust into long stories” and offers a Christian alternative, which Stevenson dismisses as “a superlatively tedious romance” (36). In John Bulteel’s preface to his Birinthia (1664)—and it’s interesting that, at this late date, authors are still arguing about what a romance should be—he boasts that his romance is more realistic than others because “this is a romance accommodated to history” (quoted by Stevenson, 36), and though the result is negligible, it is part of a trend: John Crowne’s Pandion and Amphigenia (1665) is an incongruous mix of high romance and low comedy; see Salzman (282–84), who argues that novels like it and Sheppard’s Amandus and Sophronia (which we looked at earlier) are “part of the development of anti-romantic impulses that led to the [realistic] Restoration novel” (284). Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668) is too short to be considered even a novella, but it contributed to the desert-island genre that includes Grimmelshausen’s Continuation (as noted earlier) and Robinson Crusoe. Instead of a man Friday, George Pine is shipwrecked with four women, whose propagative activities earned The Isle of Pines the distinction of being the first work of fiction to be banned in Boston: someone there probably noticed that “Pines” is an anagram for “Penis.” (It stretches from pp. 187–212 in Bruce’s Three Early Modern Utopias, cited earlier.) And for further Restoration crime novels, shoplift Peterson’s The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England.
68 Page 27 in Todd’s critical edition, hereafter cited by page. The novel pretends to be a translation of L�
�Intrigue de Philander & Silvia, set in France a century earlier, but no key was necessary because everyone knew who it was about.
69 See Gardiner; even though I obviously disagree with that designation, her essay is an informative account of how and why Behn got lost in canon formation. For example, Ian Watt, who didn’t get a rise from her novels, refers to Behn only in passing.
70 As though to disassociate herself from Oroonoko’s blasphemous remarks, Behn praises the Catholicism of her dedicatee. Politically a Catholic, Behn was a freethinker “approaching what the seventeenth-century termed ‘atheism,’ ” according to Todd (The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, 292).
71 Seductive Forms, 82–83, from a wonderfully insightful chapter on Behn’s work.
72 This might refer to two other novellas by Behn, The Fair Jilt (1688) and The Story of the Nun (1689), the protagonists of which are corrupt and murderous.
73 See Spengemann; like Gardiner, he has interesting things to say about canon formation. To him Oroonoko “seems now, for all its stumbling oddity, to anticipate the whole subsequent history of English fiction” (390).
74 “English Short Fiction in the Seventeenth Century,” 299. Not surprisingly, the novel was later converted into a play entitled She Ventures and He Wins (1695) by the pseudonymous “Ariadne.”