Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford English Monographs)

Elizabethan Fictions is a study of the works of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, and a number of other English writers in the context of changing attitudes to fiction in Elizabethan England. Both the censors and the writers of the time were aware that the developments in Elizabethan prose threatened to transform the nature of fiction itself, and it was felt that these destructive capabilities might constitute a material threat to the security of the Elizabethan state. Maslen explores their violations of current conventions, their mockery of contemporary platitudes, their self-conscious stylishness, and their subtlety, and makes the case for these fictions to be seen as the precursors of Shakespeare's comedies, Sidney's prose epics, and the satires of Marlowe and Nashe. This book argues that English writers of prose fiction from the 1550s to the 1570s produced some of the most daringly innovative publications of the sixteenth century. Through close examination of a number of key texts, from William Baldwin's satirical fable Beware the Cat, to George Gascoigne's mock-romance The Adventures of Master F.J. and John Lyly's immensely popular Euphues books, he sets out to demonstrate the courage as well as the considerable skills which these undervalued authors brought to their work. They wrote at a time when the Elizabethan censorship system was growing increasingly rigorous in response to the perceived threat of infiltration from Catholic Europe, yet they chose to write books of a kind that was specifically associated with Catholic Italy and France. Their topics were the secrets, lies, and acts of petty treason which vitiated the private lives of the contemporary ruling classes, and their vigorous experiments with style and form marked out prose fiction for years to come as shifty and perilous literary territory. These writers presented themselves as masters of the arts of duplicity, talents which made them eminently suitable for employment as informers or spies, whether for the government or for its most deadly ideological opponents. Their sophisticated narratives of sexual intrigue had a profound effect on the development of the complex poetry and drama that sprung up towards the end of the century, as well as on the modern novel Title Pages (p.v) Acknowledgments (p.viii) Conventions Used in the Text and Notes Monstrous Imaginations The Fiction of Simplicity in the Sixteenth-Century Treatise Fictions and their Commentaries before 1570 George Gascoigne and the Fiction of Failure George Pettie, Gender, and the Generation Gap The Dissolution of Euphues The Resolution of Euphues Conclusion (p.301) Bibliography (p.312) (p.313) Index