by Steven Moore
Pheander showed his judgment was but poor,
To call her a maid that was a common - - - - -.7
His Fairy Queen sponsor sends him some armor by way of a “fairy lady” who bestows it instead on the Knight of the Moon after he rescues her from a “pygmy giant”; learning in a vision he has been robbed of his armor, Pheander—now dubbed the Knight of the Sun—challenges the other knight to combat, a farcical fight that ends with the Moon wrestling the Sun to the ground, whereupon a supernatural eclipse darkens the land. Suddenly turning bitter, the author spends the next five pages describing all the evils that occur in Moropolis (i.e., London) under the cover of darkness, a corrosive satire that adds an edge to this fractured fairy tale. Getting to their feet, the knights end their battle by decision, the Knight of the Moon judged to be the winner, though he of the Sun can borrow the armor when needed, which is cold comfort: “he stood like a body without a soul, or a man whose heart was fallen into his hose, or indeed like King Belin’s armed stake in the fields which archers shoot at” (78), a surprisingly somber ending.
Though a minor work, Moriomachia is significant as the “earliest example we have of Cervantes’ impact on English fiction”8 and as an early example of what specialists of the period call the antiromance. Better examples of the genre would appear in France in the next decade beginning with Charles Sorel, but Moriomachia is an engaging tour de farce with a sting in its tail, and it’s easy to share in the fun Anton obviously had fulfilling Pheander’s wish “that hereafter historiographers shall, Roman-like, stuff out my valiant acts with the bombast of their perpetual inkhorns” (55).
The same year Anton’s novelette appeared, publisher/bookseller Thomas Saunders put on sale “at his shop in Holborne at the Sign of the Mermaid” the second and concluding volume of The English Arcadia (1607, 1613) by Gervase Markham (1568?–1637), an author best known for his instructional manuals on horsemanship, archery, and household hints. Reading The English Arcadia on the merry heels of Mariomachia, one’s impulse is to read it too as a pastiche, a send-up of Sidney’s Arcadia that exaggerates its literary conventions and rhetorical devices to the point of parody. But its somber tone suggests otherwise, for this is Arcadia in decay.
Sidney had concluded, or more precisely, abandoned his Arcadia with an invitation to other authors to finish his story: “But the solemnities of these marriages, with the Arcadian pastorals, full of many comical adventures happening to those rural lovers; the strange stories of . . . Helen and Amphialus, with the wonderful chances that befell them; . . . lastly, the son of Pyrocles, named Pyrophilus, and Melidora, the fair daughter of Pamela by Musidorus, who even at their birth entered into admirable fortunes, may awake some other spirit to exercise his pen in that wherewith mine is already dulled” (630). Markham opens his tale some 20 years later, when things are going to ruin: the aforementioned Amphialus, suspecting Helen of adultery, abandoned his kingdom three years earlier and now his subjects are threatening to kill Helen. Musidorus has died, leaving his kingdom in Thessaly to his and Pamela’s daughter Melidora, a “proud and disdainful dame” by her own admission,9 whose rite of passage from snooty princess to mature woman occupies the last two-thirds of the short novel. Before he died, Musidorus created a rural retreat called Tempe, but it’s now an Eden under siege: nearby is the enchanted castle of the evil magician Mysantropos, and terrorizing the pastoral neighborhood is a monstrous creature called Demagoras, guilty of “huge massacres” and “the disburdening of a few too-long borne maidenheads” (2:60r, 57v), who nearly rapes Melidora at one point. We learn at the end that, as in many pastorals, most of the shepherds and shepherdesses are aristocrats in disguise, all of whom fled here to escape romantic tragedies, which adds to the dismal atmosphere. Instead of a bucolic hideaway, Tempe is a Heartbreak Hotel where everyone has checked in under false names. Finally, most of the major characters take on further disguises at some point, dramatizing what appears to be Markham’s themes: the world as dangerous illusion, the unreliability of the senses, hence the need to obey religious authorities (in this case, a priest of Pan and a priestess of Minerva). Although there is a happy ending, it is a muted one, Demagoras’s “huge massacres” rudely mentioned on the last page along with the marriage celebrations.
The English Arcadia opens exactly like Sidney’s Arcadia—two heartbroken shepherds lament the absence of a nymph named Cynthia—and Markham imitates Sidney’s magniloquent style the best he can. He’s fond of fancy phrases like “with a desire and fear, or a fearful desire” (1:28a) and “with a carelessness descending from a care too carefully employed” (2:14b) that don’t douse the suspicion of parody, and which in fact support Salzman’s suggestion that Markham “submits certain pastoral motifs to an ironic treatment” (128), especially when two characters engage in a traditional debate about city versus country, only for the smarter of the two to praise city life (1.59v–60v). There is a funny violation of point of view—probably unintentional rather than ironic—when Pan’s priest, who is filling in the visiting knight Pyrophilus on the story, tells how he was drugged once and lost consciousness, yet he continues to narrate what happened around him. But such violations are common in 17th-century writers, for whom the integrity of point of view was not yet an issue.
Although the pastoral is by definition an artificial genre, there’s a heightened self-consciousness in Markham’s version that Gavin Alexander picks up on: “Characters act with an instinct to conform to a pattern or an archetype, as if they have a sense of what is expected of them, as if instead of morality they have a repertoire of literary commonplaces. They feel themselves to be secondary: they are the second generation in a second generation text, the heirs of Sidney’s characters as Markham is the heir of Sidney” (272). Ultimately, The English Arcadia is not very satisfactory: a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion (as a self-deprecating modernist once said). Then again, Markham meant to continue his work—this is only the first of what may have been five books, like Arcadia—so who knows where he might have gone with it. In the preface to part 1, he expressed his fears of “the innumerable tortures wherewith severe censors [book reviewers] will torment and whip me, their phews, their pishes, their wry looks, apish gestures, and untunable pronunciations,” and evidently that’s what happened, for in part 2 he complains about the critics who chastised him for using Arcadia as a title and for imitating Sidney. He indignantly points out that many authors before Sidney used Arcadia for a title, and that Sidney himself was imitating Heliodorus and Montemayor. (Authors can handle unappreciative reviews; it’s the uninformed, unfair ones that drive us mad.) So Markham abandoned his Arcadia, returning to quill self-help books such as The English Housewife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman (1615).
A far more creative RSVP to Sidney’s invitation to continue The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was written by his niece, Mary Wroth (1587–1653?), whose 1,100-page Countess of Montgomery’s Urania is not only the first known English novel by a woman, but also one of the most significant novels of the 17th century. It is also one of the least known due to its unfortunate publication history. Shortly after part 1 was published in autumn 1621, a powerful nobleman detected a thinly veiled family scandal depicted in it and tried to suppress the novel.10 The second part, which Wroth worked on until around 1626, went unpublished. It wasn’t until 1991 that the first book of part 1 was reprinted (in Salzman’s Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction), and not until 1995 that all of part 1 was back in print; the previously unpublished part 2 followed in 2000. Though a superb production, this two-volume set is an expensive, old-spelling edition intended for specialists, so until a modernized, 1-volume edition appears, Urania will remain in the shadows along with Astrea, Argenis, Justina, and other literary wallflowers from this period. So let’s take her for a spin on the dancefloor to show her off.
The learned Lady Wroth not only read her uncle’s novel closely, but also everything he read for his chivalric p
astoral: Amadis de Gaul, Montemayor’s Diana, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and apparently Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story and the pastoral that started it all, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. In addition, she had the advantage of reading influential works that appeared after Sidney’s death in 1586, specifically Spenser’s Faerie Queen, the beginning of d’Urfé’s Astrea, and most important, Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote. Wroth doesn’t parody the pastoral/chivalric novel, but Cervantes inspired her to slyly subvert it. Like Argenis, behind Urania’s scrim of medieval pageantry is a coded account of early 17th-century politics, which may be the least interesting aspect of the novel today but which gives the work further depth.11
Urania’s difference is apparent from the first page, where we behold a 16-year-old shepherdess in tears, not from a romantic tiff but from a crisis of identity. Urania—the name of the nymph whose departure two shepherds lament at the beginning of Sidney’s revised Arcadia—has just been informed that she is not in fact a shepherdess but a foundling. “Can there be any near the unhappiness of being ignorant, and that in the highest kind, not being certain of mine own estate or birth?” she soliloquizes.12 She goes into a cave to hide her sorrows, boldly explores it, and deeper within finds a supine man groaning for his lost love. (Maternal caves outnumber phallic towers in this gynocentric novel.) Instead of panicking at finding herself unchaperoned in the presence of a strange man, as in most romantic novels of the period, she summons “a brave courage” and kneels down to ask him what his problem is, and after he explains how he lost his true love, she tells him to man up, to quit crying like a girl and go avenge her death. This role reversal is startling, as is her willingness a little later to offer a lost lamb (an emblem of Christian sacrifice in Spenser) to a starving old man. As Urania’s editor Josephine Roberts wittily puts it, “Wroth’s sudden shift from Lamb of God to lamb chops reveals a rupture between the world of high idealism and that of hard, pragmatic circumstance” (xxiii). Wroth toys with pastoral conceits, playing along with them on one page by pretending Urania creates daylight by opening her eyes (18), but on the next explaining the real reason why a ravenous wolf stops in her tracks before the beautiful shepherdess: “one might imagine seeing such a heavenly creature did amaze her, and threaten for meddling with her: but such conceits were vain, since beasts will keep their own natures, the true reason being, as soon appeared, the hasty running of two youths, who with sharp spears soon gave conclusion to the supposed danger, killing the wolf as she stood hearkening to the noise they made” (19). And then we’re treated to a lengthy and rather sexy description of these two strapping teens in their tight, revealing forest outfits, with details of the sort previously used only by male authors to describe beautiful girls: “their skin most bare, as arms and legs and one shoulder, with part of their thighs. . . .” (19–20).
In addition to reorienting the pastoral from a male perspective to a female one, and shifting from idealism to pragmatism, Wroth includes within the opening 20 pages the first of innumerable interpolated tales (that of the supine sissy, named Perissus), which links Urania’s crisis of self-identity to the related problem of female self-determination. Perissus tells Urania that his beloved Limena had been given away by her father to a lout named Philargus, who grew jealous of Perissus and took it out on his mild wife. (Continuing the role reversals, Limena remained calm and “judicial” during all this while the two men gushed and roared.) Limena is the first of many women in Urania who are prevented by men from choosing their own lovers and lives, who acquiesce to masculine authority and suffer as a result. Giving the reader little time to adjust to these reorientations, Wroth fills the next 20 pages with a dozen or more new characters: first, Urania meets Parselius, Prince of Morea, who has traveled to her island in search of the lost sister of his friend Amphilanthus, Prince of Naples, and suspects Urania may be her. Urania says goodbye to her foster parents and leaves with this stranger, at which point Wroth begins spinning a web of further interpolated tales and interrelationships, a pirate abduction, several murders, some not-so-surprising revelations—as in most pastorals, every shepherd is an aristocrat in disguise, every woman the princess of some kingdom—an attempted rape, a shipwreck, even a homosexual anecdote. Only when the ship Urania is taking to Naples is blown off-course to the island of Cyprus does the roller-coaster narrative slow down, only to throw us for another loop.
There on Venus’s isle, the mode switches from the relatively realistic to the magical. Urania and the others view three allegorical towers representing desire, love, and constancy, and then drink the local water and go a little crazy, whereupon the author abandons the title character and transports us to Greece to introduce us to the real protagonists of the novel, the aforementioned Amphilanthus and his cousin, Princess Pamphilia of Morea, Parselius’s sister. Most of the rest of the novel circles around their stalemated relationship—they love each other, but each fears the other loves someone else, and indeed many others are attracted to them—set against a proliferating number of subplots and interpolated stories involving over 200 characters. Urania reenters the story from time to time, but Urania is primarily about the poet Pamphilia’s passion.
“O love,” Pamphilius apostrophes at one point, “what strange varieties are here?” (1:244) after she listens to a jilted woman’s tale of how her brother Parselius “forgot” that he had married and impregnated her recently. Baffled by love’s ways, suffering from “daintiness and fear” (1:190), pusillanimous Pam is paralyzed by indecision. She hears enough stories of the unhappiness that results when parents choose women’s husbands for them to know that traditional system doesn’t work—Wroth herself was forced into an unhappy marriage at an early age—yet she hears even more stories of women making bad choices, led astray by men who will say anything to get into their petticoats: “what should we trust, when man the excellentest creature doth excel in ill?” (1:228). (To be fair and balanced, Wroth also features a number of scheming women who fool men into marrying them and then destroy them, or betray them in some other deceitful way.) Nor can Pamphilia follow the example of a naked woman named Alarina bathing in a river, who tells her how she decided to forsake men and lead a Thoreauvian life in the woods. Weighing this alternative (and using telling political imagery), Pamphilia asks herself:
can thy great spirit permit thee to be bound when such as Alarina can have strength to master and command even love itself? Scorn such servility, where subjects sovereignize; never let so mean a thing overrule thy greatest power; either command like thyself, or fall down vassal in despair. Why should fond love insult or venture in thy sight? let his babyish tricks be prized by creatures under thee, but disdain thou such a government. Shall blindness master thee and guide thee? look then sure to fall. Shall wayward folly rule thee? look to be despised. Shall foolish wantonness entice thee? hate such vice. Shall children make thee follow their vain tricks? scorn then thyself and all such vanities. Yet when all this is said, and that the truest knowledge tells me these are true, my wounded heart with bleeding doth profess vassalage to the great and powerful might of love. I am a prisoner; guard me then, dear love, keep me but safely free from yielding, and keep me, as thou has already made me, thine. (1:225)
Pamphilia is later disappointed to learn Alarina gave up her independent life to get married. Unable to act, this prisoner of love wants to listen. On the same page, Pamphilia asks her friend Limena: “speak then of love, and speak to me, who love that sweet discourse (next to my love) above all other things . . . let me but understand the choice varieties of Love, and the mistakings, the changes, the crosses; if none of these you know, yet tell me some such fiction, it may be I shall be as luckless as the most unfortunate; show me examples, for I am so void of hope, much less of true assurance, as I am already at the height of all my joy” (1:225). Wroth shows us examples, dozens and dozens of them, most of which focus on “the mistakings, the changes, the crosses” in relationships, rather than (as in chivalric fiction) the routine obstacles that are overc
ome in due course in time for the wedding celebrations on the final page. Periodically Pamphilius is in a position to act on her love when sitting next to Amphilanthus—or in one instance, during a picnic, when he is “laying his head on Pamphilia’s gown, which she permitted him to do”—but she freezes: “she that now might have her wish yet refused that happy proffer for her delivery; modesty and greatness of spirit overruling her. . . . she did amiss in being so secret, as locked up her loss instead of opening her blessing.” Once again, Pamphilia prefers to listen to love stories rather than act in one: “Then variety of love came among them, I mean the discourses in that kind, everyone relating a story” (1:245).
Part 1 of Urania goes on like this for 660 pages, with countless love stories (mostly unhappy) set against political turmoil in the Mediterranean region as the male characters fight in various battles to expel usurpers and restore kingdoms to their status quo, and/or participate in brutal jousts, often at the request of a distressed lady. (These affairs of politics and honor are settled much more quickly than the affairs of the heart.) Published the same year as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Urania is an anatomy of love, cataloguing the countless ways women in particular handle “the most burdenous, tormenting affliction that souls can know, Love,” which is castigated as “only a senseless passion . . . at best but a sportful madness” (1:231, 423). It challenges traditional ideas of constancy, obedience, and the restricted roles women were expected to play, in fiction as well as in life. Most of Wroth’s women suffer, and the few that don’t aren’t exactly role models: one unnamed woman enjoys a marriage of convenience while entertaining a lover on the side, which her husband tolerates. (Amphilanthus listens to the story without disapproval.) Another nameless woman takes lovers as needed, which a male character finds refreshing: “ ‘Give me such a lady still,’ he said, ‘that needs no business to woo her, but merrily yields love for love, and rather before than after it is asked’ ” (1:407), but she’s no good because she keeps her discarded lovers in a dungeon. Similarly, another man is grateful to a sexually proactive woman named Lycencia “for she wooed, and he had now the labor saved of courting, loving, and all the other troubles” (1:624), but the author kills off this licentious woman for “loving all mankind.” At the opposite end is the virginal Pamphilia, who grows old saving herself for Amphilanthus; she begins dressing in black and neglecting her appearance, becoming “the sad example of forsaken love” (1:463). She is even mocked by a lusty young shepherd, appositely named Sildurino (Hard Wood), for retaining her virginity for so long: “O heavens, what a sweet face is there, and what pity it is you should be so long a maid?” (1:570). Her devotion to the ideal of constancy seems as mad as Don Quixote’s devotion to chivalry, which is reinforced when we learn at the end of part 1 that the enchantment that nearly kills Amphilanthus is the work of an early girlfriend of his, whose “constancy” takes the form of stalking and black magic. With understandable bitterness, the author notes the double standard at work here: “when did anyone see a man constant from his birth to his end? Therefore women must think it a desperate destiny for them to be constant to inconstancy, but alas this is women’s fortunes . . .” (2:23).
