Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture)

274 Pages·2008·2.58 MB·English

by  Valerie Wayne:

Staging Early Modern
Romance
Routledge Studies in
Renaissance Literature and Culture
1. Stillness in Motion in the 8. Fictions of Old Age in Early
Seventeenth-Century Theatre Modern Literature and Culture
P.A. Skantze Nina Tauton
2. The Popular Culture of 9. Performing Race and Torture on
Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson the Early Modern Stage
Mary Ellen Lamb Ayanna Thompson
3. Forgetting in Early Modern 10. Women, Murder, and Equity in
English Literature and Culture Early Modern England
Lethe’s Legacies Randall Martin
Edited by Christopher Ivic and
Grant Williams 11. Staging Early Modern Romance
Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance,
4. Luce Irigaray and and Shakespeare
Premodern Culture Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb
Thresholds of History and Valerie Wayne
Edited by Theresa Krier and
Elizabeth D. Harvey
5. Writing, Geometry and Space
in Seventeenth-Century England
and America
Circles in the Sand
Jess Edwards
6. Dramatists and their Manuscripts
in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson,
Middleton and Heywood
Authorship, Authority and
the Playhouse
Grace Ioppolo
7. Reading the Early Modern Dream
The Terrors of the Night
Edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle
O’ Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman
Staging Early Modern
Romance
Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance,
and Shakespeare
Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and
Valerie Wayne
New York London
First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Staging early modern romance : prose fiction, dramatic romance, and Shakespeare /
edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne.
p. cm.—(Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and
criticism. 2. English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and
criticism. 3. Romances, English—Adaptations—History and criticism. 4. Romances—
Adaptations—History and criticism. 5. Romanticism—England—History—16th
century. 6. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Sources. 7. Shakespeare, William,
1564–1616—Knowledge—Literature. I. Lamb, Mary Ellen, 1946– II. Wayne, Valerie.
PR658.R65S73 2009
820.9'003—dc22
2008035566
ISBN 0-203-88207-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-96281-1 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-88207-5 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-96281-0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-88207-8 (ebk)
This book is for our grandchildren,
Venice and Keala.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Part I: Continuities and Incongruities
1 Introduction: Into the Forest 1
MARY ELLEN LAMB AND VALERIE WAYNE
2 The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story,
and the Patterns of the Pericles Tales 21
LORI HUMPHREY NEWCOMB
3 “Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other”:
Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance 47
CYRUS MULREADY
Part II: Page and Stage
4 “A Note Beyond Your Reach”: Prose Romance’s Rivalry
with Elizabethan Drama 75
STEVE MENTZ
5 Hamlet and Euordanus 91
GORAN STANIVUKOVIC
6 Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania 107
SARAH WALL-RANDELL
viii Contents
7 Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale,
The Tempest, and Old Wives’ Tales 122
MARY ELLEN LAMB
Part III: Gender and Agency
8 The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles, or
“Religious Romance,” in The Winter’s Tale 145
GLORIA OLCHOWY
9 Romancing the Wager: Cymbeline’s Intertexts 163
VALERIE WAYNE
10 John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and
the Pedagogy of Reading Romance 188
JOYCE BORO
11 Undoing Romance: Beaumont and Fletcher’s Resistant
Reading of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia 203
CLARE R. KINNEY
12 Probable Infi delities from Bandello to Massinger 219
LORNA HUTSON
13 Afterword: Shakespeare and Romance 236
BARBARA A. MOWAT
Contributors 247
Index 251
Acknowledgments
This book fi rst began as a seminar on “Women and Romance” that we
cochaired at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in
New Orleans in 2004. The participants included Jean R. Brink, Chris-
topher Cobb, Julie Crawford, Huston Diehl, Michelle Dowd, Susan
Dunn-Hensley, Susan Frye, Clare Kinney, Alan Lewis, Steve Mentz, Lori
Humphrey Newcomb, Gloria Olchowy, Patricia Parker, Constance Reli-
han, Sasha Roberts, and Edith Snook. We are grateful to all of them for
their stimulating papers and productive discussion, which helped us see
how we might pursue this subject further through a collection of essays.
We want especially to remember the late Sasha Roberts, a vital member of
that seminar, whose energetic presence and provocative work in the fi eld
of romance we will sorely miss. Our thanks go to Patricia Parker for her
early and strong encouragement of this project. The scholarship of Barbara
Mowat has always been formative for this collection, and we are grateful
for her expertise and clarifying support as we completed it.
Mary Ellen Lamb would like to thank Arthur Kinney and the Massa-
chusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, where she was a fellow in 2006–
07, for resources enabling her work on this project. She would also like to
thank Southern Illinois University for her research leave in 2006–07 as well
as other forms of support. She also thanks her husband, Bill, for their many
long walks, during which he gave generous attention to her ideas about
romance and many other topics.
Valerie Wayne is grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for its
extraordinary resources and accomplished staff, who supported her work
on Cymbeline during a long-term fellowship in 2003 and provided welcome
assistance on this book during subsequent summers. Georgianna Ziegler’s
expertise has been crucial. She especially thanks her husband, Richard,
whose energetic engagement with the incongruities of Cymbeline and the
mode of romance speaks volumes of care.
Both of us became grandmothers during the last year of working on this
book, which may mean that we are “old wives” with tales of our own to
tell. As our dedication suggests, we cherish our children and the children
they nurture so well.