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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
sport, / Yet you your selves become no currish creatures" (9). The link back to Lyly seals the familiar associations between books and lapdogs, between pleasure-reading and women's leisure and desire. Wall (note 47) also reads this passage as creating a "market of salacious buyers and sellers" for the commodified book (205). It is also possible that the relationship between Rowland's frame and dedication evinces resistance to women entering bookshops during this period.
52 Like the many works written around Greene's death. Greenes Ghost Haunting Coniecatchers appropriates Greene's soul, or at least his name. It is no accident that this book replaces the copy of Greene's Conny-catching that the Tis Merrie apprentice lacks: Rowlands was engaging in cross-marketing of a In the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean years, increasing literacy and a growing publishing industry stimulated expansion of the popular literary audience; that is, of the diverse group of non-elite men and women who read print for pleasure.(1) The period's unprecedented output of new prose fiction titles offers critical access to that growing audience, but most twentieth-century criticism of early modern prose fiction has considered the popular audience only in order to cordon it off from an elite literary audience.(2) According to the dominant binary model of the genre, the elite Sidney circle inspired a few artful masterpieces (The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and now The Countess of Montgomeries Urania), while the burgeoning popular audience triggered a new business of hack writing.(3) When we follow Roger Chartier's example in discarding that "simple opposition of populaire versus savant," we can recognize instead that the early modern effort to marginalize popular print culture responded to this rapid diversification in the reading audience.(4) The category we now recognize as 'popular culture' was constituted socially, as a reclassification of early print forms that had originated within a "collective culture ... from which the dominant classes or the various elites only slowly distanced themselves."(5) Early modern print fiction, in particular, had circulated among other socially diverse cultural practices; like other such practices, fiction consumption was increasingly linked to social differentiation. As early modern England became a print-reading culture in which readers, authors, and texts proliferated, the socially and culturally elite found the need for a boundary between elite and popular cultures more acute than ever before. The growing collection of cultural commodities that we now call early modern print fiction was repositioned by a discourse that sought to distinguish elite from popular culture, and that discourse has delimited our understanding of early fiction ever since.
Modern critical dismissals of early modern fiction have typically been justified in aesthetic terms, which nonetheless betray a deeply social discomfort in their regular invocations of contemporary cultural prejudices. Consider, for example, this opening comment on the "Sources of the Play" in the Yale edition of The Winter's Tale:
The Winter's Tale is an excellent example of a novel turned into a play. That practice was common in Elizabethan times as in recent years; but with this difference, that the drama in Shakespeare's time was usually an improvement on the novel and in our own day is usually a popularized degradation of the original.(6)
This passage's proliferation of aesthetic judgments, in which the hierarchy of the genres repeatedly reverses itself, ultimately reveals itself as an unchanging prejudice against any form of "popularized degradation." The passage plays Elizabethan and modern popular texts off against one another, to mutual disadvantage. Its preference for Shakespearean drama over Elizabethan fiction is inseparable from its rejection of popular culture in any period.
Such social-cum-aesthetic judgments are ideologies of distinction, as Pierre Bourdieu calls the process by which the selective criticism of one group's cultural forms serves to define, normalize, buttress or even create the tastes of another group.(7) Critical dismissal of early modern prose fiction--in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth--reinforces those readers' predilections for elite cultural forms by devaluing more widely accessible forms of cultural capital. This dynamic of distinction has been at work throughout the critical history of prose fiction; the judgments of modern fiction criticism have devalued early modern popular fiction precisely because they have inherited a class-driven impulse to do so. The centuries-long attack on the romance, which would lead critics eventually to articulate the theory of the novel, arose from the desire of elite audiences to devalue the leisure-reading habits of newly literate, and thus disturbingly mobile, lower classes. At the same time, the exaggerated appetite for antifictional remarks betrays the early modern elite's considerable familiarity with, and interest in, the non-exclusive pleasures of the romance.
Among twentieth-century critics, too, nostalgic fascination with the romance has been bound up with universal disdain for popular readers. Writing soon after Pierce, Muriel St. Clare Byrne gave a patronizing summary of popular literature's role within Elizabethan Life in Town and Country:
Most Elizabethan books were wonder-books to their readers.... Pamphlet upon plagiaristic pamphlet thrilled honest country folk and sober citizens with anatomies of roguery, [and] the whole art of conny-catching.... [A]lthough this popular exploitation of the printing press had begun, it had not as yet been able to destroy the older art of story-telling. Hand in hand with the marvels of the modern world went the oldest of old things--the strange happenings and the quaint beliefs that for generation after generation had been handed down in a winter's tale.(8)
Byrne employs familiar ideological strategies to marginalize the popular as a transhistorical and non-literary category. But her details serve a more specific purpose: they compose a picture of an Elizabethan hack who wrote of rogues and coney-catchers, who "plagiarized" from others and from himself, and, finally, who did not disdain to borrow the lower classes' oral winter's tales for his own mercenary uses. That representative hack, symbol of the emerging popular literary marketplace, is of course Robert Greene, and the ultimate winter's tale is his greatest hit, Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time (first extant edition 1588). The anxieties Greene has excited among modern critics--about popular literacy, plagiarism, roguery, superstition, and mimetic imaginings--had all emerged in the first generation after Pandosto's publication. It is these early emanations of anxiety, from elite critics and also from Shakespeare, that constituted the category of popular literature as it emerged in Jacobean England.
THE MOST TYPICAL NOVEL IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE?
No work could be more appropriate than Greene's Pandosto for an analysis of the early seventeenth-century production of antifictional and antipopular cultural judgments. For one thing, criticism has traditionally assigned Pandosto a symbolic role in which work and author alike are traitors to the cause of high literature: Greene, the university wit turned into desperate hack; Pandosto, the aristocratic romance eventually marketed as pulp.(9) Both work and author cross that tenuous boundary between elite and popular cultures, demonstrating and problematizing its demarcation in critical retrospect. This putative violation subjects Greene to particular critical disapproval, some of which is transferred from Shakespeare, another author who wrote for heterogeneous audiences but cannot as easily be assailed for doing so. The debate over the relative values of Pandosto and its famous stage adaptation has permitted critical anxieties about Shakespeare's more vulgar elements, including the folk-tale elements of The Winter's Tale, to be exorcised through attacks on his "paltry" source story, a winter's tale in print.(10) But this supposed gulf between Greene and Shakespeare, between merely popular works and works of genius, is a later projection, a self-protective myth of modern criticism that retroactively constructs Shakespeare as an elite author. To Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, Pandosto and The Winter's Tale both were carried in a broad cultural mainstream, one only beginning to be troubled, as the play's relationship to its prose source will show, by separating currents of elite and popular culture.
By the early twentieth century, Shakespearean source studies had uncovered the pervasiveness of Pandosto and the remarkable popularity of its author, to the extent that the subject of popular pleasure reading called Greene inevitably to Byrne's mind. What Byrne and Pierce did not know was that Pandosto was literally the favorite "wonder book" of the seventeenth century, the century's best-selling work of non-didactic fiction, according to Charles Mish's 1953 listing of seventeenth-century fiction best-sellers.(11) Mish found that Pandosto went through "some eighteen editions" over the century.(12) My research has brought the count of extant seventeenth-century editions up to twenty-one, plus no fewer than sixteen surviving eighteenth-century editions, many abridged.(13) The probable first edition of circa 1585, which has left its only ghostly trace in the inventory of a forgotten bookshop, was followed by the first surviving edition, of 1588, and further reissues in 1592, 1595, 1600, 1607, 1609, and 1614.(14) Thus, Pandosto was reprinted at about four-year intervals through the Jacobean period, a reissue rate that indicates steady sales, and large ones by early modern standards.(15) Pandosto's centrality proves to be statistical as well as symbolic.
Reasoning backward from Pandosto's continued popularity to the conditions of its debut, Mish concurred with Byrne's view that early popular fictions were antiquated fairy tales, foisted by cheap publishers on a captive audience of naive citizens who deserved their marginal status. I prefer to see Pandosto as a work whose attractions to multiple audiences gave it sufficient canonical momentum to outstrip other Elizabethan competitors and to become a long-term classic within the canon of popular romance.(16) Ironically, Pandosto's survival as a popular classic was made possible by its artful mixture of Elizabethan literary fashions. It anticipated Sidney's Arcadia, then unpublished, in combining elements from various romance subgenres: rhetorical setpieces a la Euphues, sylvan settings from the pastoral romances, and melodramatic turns of Fortune's wheel borrowed from the newly rediscovered Greek romances. The love story of Fawnia, the shepherdess who turns out to be a lost princess, delicately balanced the Elizabethan obsession with social mobility against a conservative desire to preserve the status quo.(17) Even its two titles, Pandosto on the title page and The historie of Dorastus and Fawnia in the running title, advertise the romance's synthesis of literary modes, in which the tragedy of a jealous king frames the happy love story of a second generation.(18)
The adaptability of Pandosto and Greene's other romances to diverse cultural literacies can be traced to Greene's dual literary parentage in both the essentially oral (rhetorical) training of the humanist university and the primarily print-based world of the Elizabethan book trade. Greene's publications were well suited for the early modern transitional period in which, as Chattier puts it, "different media and multiple practices ... mingled in complex ways."(19) After all, Greene transformed himself from a coterie author publishing works written in a manuscript tradition to a popular author whose works...
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