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Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission

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John Barclay’s Argenis (Paris, 1621)

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 12 September 2013

Post written by Jacqueline Glomski

 

The ‘no 1 bestseller’ of the seventeenth century was written in Latin. But, neither the language in which it was composed nor its classical setting put people off. For John Barclay’s Argenis was everything a blockbuster novel should be: a tightly written, probing, and exciting work of fiction. It energetically brought to life the swash-buckling adventures of a handsome, young noble, complete with shipwrecks, pirates, and hand-to-hand combat; it sensitively asked whether a charming princess should be forced to marry a man she did not love while the man to whom she had secretly promised herself was absent, pulling together his forces so that he could prove his royal identity to her father; it intelligently reflected on the components of good government; and it sensationally portrayed the darker side of the conduct of political celebrities, exposing secret surveillance, aborted insurgence, and attempted poisoning. The extreme popularity of Argenis among the (mostly male) educated classes quickly swept over the general reading public. Within five years of its 1621 publication, Argenis had been translated into English, French, Spanish, and German. For those who did not have the time or patience to plough through the thousand pages of the original edition, abridged versions sprang up. And, for theatregoers, the action-packed plot of Argenis made it to the stage, in French, Spanish, and German plays. Other authors, hoping to cash in on Barclay’s success, spun off sequels. Indeed, the mania for Argenis continued throughout the seventeenth century, the Latin text being reprinted more than thirty times and with Italian, Dutch, and Polish versions added to the list of its translations. With Argenis, Barclay had paved the way for romance to be treated as a genre for the expression of serious thought, and his influence can be spotted in the works of vernacular authors such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Sir Percy Herbert.

But, in spite of its massive appeal, Argenis did fade from the literary scene. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the reprints, translations, and spin-offs had dwindled: people’s tastes had changed. Barclay’s didacticism and political stance would be viewed as out of date, and his allegorical approach would be perceived as stale. Heroic romance had fallen out of favour.

Today, Barclay’s Argenis has been nearly forgotten as a readable text, except for a new Latin edition with the 1625 English translation of Kingesmill Long (with spelling, punctuation, and grammar modernised) brought out by Mark Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber in 2004 (Assen, Netherlands; Tempe, AZ). The omission of Argenis from university reading lists leaves a gap in the transmission of the cultural record of the seventeenth century; the lack of fresh translations deprives the general public of a thoroughly enjoyable and moving novel, one that has much to say for our times.

 

El Pasajero

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 4 March 2013

El Pasajero: advertencias utilisímas a la vida humana (Madrid, 1617) – Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa

 Post written by Jonathan Bradbury

The name of Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa (1571-1644?) has today little resonance beyond specialised scholarship on the Spanish Golden Age, but in his day he was a well-known and divisive figure in the major literary milieux of Spain as well as being an active and vociferous participant in the Spanish literary polemics of the early seventeenth century, not least those involving Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega. Once the dust had settled on the period, Suárez de Figueroa was allocated by historians of literature a place amongst the second rank of Golden Age authors; it is hard to quibble with this overall assessment of his literary significance, but he, like few other figures, epitomises the trends of the age and the situation within it of an average man of letters. His oeuvre ranges from pastoral to epic, tragicomic to encyclopaedic, translation to plagiarism; his travails and compromises with patrons, his struggle for recognition and stability in his day job of judge advocate, his peripateticism between the Peninsula and Spanish Naples in search of that one big break – all this and more render him a representative personage.

            The two works which brought him most success and acclaim could not be more different in character: his Plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes (1615), a work adapted from an Italian original which sought to provide information on every human profession, and El Pasajero (1617), a lively dialogue miscellany, both of which enjoyed two editions in the seventeenth century. The latter of these texts, in which four travellers are thrown together by chance on the road from Madrid to Barcelona and converse to while away the hours, contains material on topics as diverse as literary theory and Italian geography, the ideal gentleman and the nature of love, and so on. That El Pasajero is so often cited in the footnotes of critical editions of other Golden Age works attests its status as a trove of information on contemporary society, but it also boasts notable fictional compositions in its own right, including sonnets and short stories. Amongst the latter group, the most important is the first-person picaresque narration related by the inn-keeper Juan, as part of which Suárez de Figueroa reworks the fifth novella of the second day of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which Andreuccio da Perugia is left trapped in a tomb by his accomplices in a grave robbery. The ‘sanitisation’ carried out by Suárez de Figueroa is, however, manifest and extensive, as the Spanish author eliminates the anti-clericalism of the Italian source text, a conservatism typical of Counter-Reformation Spain and of this staunchly moral author.

 

Short Bibliography

 

Arce Menéndez, Ángeles, ‘Notas sobre Boccaccio y Suárez de Figueroa’, Filología Moderna, 55 (1975), 603-12

Cerdan, Francis, ‘Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa y la oratoria sagrada de la España de Felipe III. (En torno al alivio IV de El Pasajero)’, Criticón, 38 (1987), 57-99

Crawford, J.P. Wickersham, The Life and Works of Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1907)

Suárez de Figueroa, Cristóbal, El Pasajero, ed. by María Isabel López Bascuñana, 2 vols (Barcelona: PPU, 1988)

Lady Hester Pulter’s ‘The Unfortunate Florinda’ (c. 1655-1662)

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 15 January 2013

Post written by Alice Eardley

In recent years, the manuscript verse of Lady Hester Pulter, which was uncovered in Leeds University Brotherton Library in 1996, has become the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Less well known, however, is Pulter’s prose romance, ‘The Unfortunate Florinda’ (c. 1655-1662). Written in the style of the French romances that were becoming increasingly popular in England during the middle decades of the seventeenth-century, Pulter’s text follows the romantic entanglements and political intrigues of a group of North African and Spanish noblemen and women. Its central narrative is based on the legend of the 8th century Spanish king Roderigo who usurps his nephew’s throne and then rapes Florinda, the daughter of one of his ambassadors. Enraged at the violation of his daughter, Florinda’s father incites a North-African invasion of Spain, leading to nearly eight centuries of Islamic rule. Pulter draws on the version of the narrative in The Life and Death of Mahomet (1637), a text originally attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, fleshing out the sparse historical narrative with dialogue and dramatic emotional scenes. Alongside this historical account, Pulter develops a series of entirely fictional storylines, echoing its main themes and concerns. These include the story of a love affair between Fidelia, a virtuous African noblewoman, and Amandus, a slave who is eventually revealed to be king of half of Europe. Like Florinda, Fidelia is subject to the lascivious advances of an illegitimate ruler but with the aid of Amandus and her brother she escapes with her virtue in tact.

            Composed during Cromwell’s Interregnum, Pulter’s romance provides a royalist exploration of the nature of legitimate kingship. We are presented with a series of different monarchs, including Roderigo, a tyrannous usurper, Gloriana, a virginal queen modelled on Elizabeth I, Clodoneus, a melancholy and weak ruler who attempts to resign his kingship, and Amandus, a virtuous and heroic leader. Ultimately, the rule of legitimate and virtuous monarchs is upheld, while the tyrannous, weak or illegitimate meet premature and ignoble ends. Alongside the text’s political analysis, Pulter provides a far-reaching examination of early modern gender roles, addressing issues including divorce, women’s access to education, and casual misogyny. There is often humour in her treatment of the misguided attitudes men display towards women but more serious attacks, including rape, are explored with emotional intensity. What becomes clear is that the status of women in society cannot be separated from broader political issues. In Pulter’s text, it is always bad or illegitimate rulers who abuse women, while virtuous and legitimate leaders uphold female status and dignity. Thematically and also formally, the text draws on French examples of the romance form, including those by Madeleine de Scudéry, in which interlocking narratives of romance and political power are grounded in historical fact. In their quest for vraisemblance, or ‘true resemblance’ as it was often translated by English writers, authors placed great emphasis on the importance of uniting hard historical ‘fact’ with the more emotive fictional elements. It was argued that this combination of features would make romances effective tools for political and social education, a phenomenon apparently not lost on Pulter when she began composing her own response to a political regime she vehemently opposed.

 

‘The Unfortunate Florinda’ appears in Leeds Brotherton MS Lt q 32. See also Lady Hester Pulter, Poems by the Noble Hadassah and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. by Alice Eardley (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014).

 

For a discussion of the romance and its source see Peter Herman, ‘Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion and the Politics of Rape’, Renaissance Quarterly 64.4 (2010), 1208-46.

Poetics, Fiction and the Reformation

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 14 December 2012

 

Post written by Alexander Samson

 

Although Cervantes apparently won the war, Lope de Vega attacked the ‘one-armed man of Lepanto’ for his populist poetics and asserted that only noblemen and philosophers (presumably such as himself, although it is unclear which category he fits himself into) should be allowed to write prose fiction. His understanding of the novel in the Novelas a Marcia Leonarda eschews social protest or critique, associated with picaresque forerunners like Lazarillo de Tormes. Seduced into writing prose fiction, Spain’s leading dramatist figured ‘novelar’ [novelising] as a form of ‘cortejar’ [courting]. The muse he attempts to woo through his stories, Marcia Leonarda, was the pseudonym of the actress Marta de Nevares, who became his mistress in 1616 until her death in 1632, blind and mad. The Novelas a Marcia Leonarda are a kind of anti-Cervantine collection of short stories, attempting to add insult to injury no doubt by being intercalated in two poetic miscellanies La Filomena (1621) and La Circe (1624), dedicated to members of the Pimentel family –Doña Leonor, lady-in-waiting to the newly crowned Philip IV’s sister and the Count-Duke of Olivares, his mother, who was also a member of the Pimentel family, and daughter, María de Guzmán. Elitist, full of digressive, didactic and improving detail, far from sending up the moral and ethical pretensions of fiction, they place it at its heart and yet…. As readers we leer on as Lope criticises the fickle nature of women’s desire and attempts to win favour from the subject of his own adulterous liaison. Adultery and the novel, here adultery is the novel.

One final thought, where do 17th century discussions about ‘fact and fiction’ come from, if not the Reformation critique of transparency. How do individual acts, words and gestures of worship allow us to access belief? Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner criticising the use of English to Protector Somerset, argued tha traditional piety might employ popular forms, conceding ‘the foolishnesse of Legende aurea & the Festivall, as yr Grace heareth to be, wch books what they conteyn I cannot tell, for I have not read them’, but he argued, there was a fundamental difference between doctrine and fable:

we have a rule to judge doctrine by, whereby we may say this or that doctrine is false & a lye. But in stories we have not so. And therefore to say in the story of Arthur in strange matters, such as to our understanding appere fond or vain, it were hard to say they were lyes, altho they cannot be affirm’d for trew[1]

Alexander Oldys, ‘The Fair Extravagant’ (1682)

By Thibaut Raboin, on 21 November 2012

Post written by Ros Ballaster

 

Alexander Oldys composed two novels in the early 1680s, The Fair Extravagant (1682) and The Female Gallant (references to King James suggest it was composed  between 1685 and 1688 although it was not published until 1692). Oldys brings conventions from the Restoration comedy of intrigue into both works and the first is an early example of the representation of a ‘female Quixote’ named Ariadne who seeks to make her life live out the plots she has encountered not only in French romances but also in Cervantes, Rabelais and a wide variety of English worthies (Shakespeare, Johnson, Suckling, Withers, Denham, Cowley feature among others); the narrator informs us ‘she was a great lover of Knight Errantry, and was a little way addicted’ (4). Ariadne persuades her friend Miranda to dress in men’s clothes and sets about finding herself a suitable husband in this guise among the denizens of Fleet Street. She alights upon a young man named Polydor. The novel concerns Ariadne’s labyrinthine plots to test her new lover and set him a variety of comic trials, resulting in his sojourn in prison and a final clarification scene in which they are happily united. The novel combines a lively third person narrator with likeable energetic young characters who inhabit a London filled with anti-Catholic controversy over the Exclusion Crisis. Oldys melds with sophistication elements from the Cervantean critique of romance, the real world of the coffee-houses of London, the female to male cross-dressing so popular in the restored comedies of the later seventeenth century and the wit and survival strategies of the virtuous jilt modelled in Villedieu. The narrator presents himself as a comic editorial presence. The psychological ambivalence of the later seventeenth-century novel provides a source for comedy at one striking moment when Ariadne discloses her plots to the imprisoned Polydor:

he would fain have been angry and have rail’d at her, but when he beheld her Beauty, he was no more able to do’t, than I am to fight a Whale in the water! And that is not very probably; for I can swim no more than a Mill-stone. (151)

Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen (1673)

By Thibaut Raboin, on 12 November 2012

Post written by Alex Davis

 

The seventeenth-century London bookseller Francis Kirkman published and composed a number of important works of fiction, including a translation of the chivalric romance Don Bellianis of Greece (1673); parts of the picaresque adventures of The English Rogue (1665); and an account of the life of Mary Carelton, accused of impersonating a German aristocrat (1673). But some of his most fascinating writing appears in The Unlucky Citizen (1673), a narrative about a London apprentice’s upbringing that has been read as a thinly-disguised autobiography. Here, the ‘citizen’ describes his love of tales of knightly adventure:

… reading Montelion Knight of the Oracle, and Ornatus and Artesia, and the Famous Parismus; I was contented beyond measure, and (believing all I read to be true) wished my self Squire to one of these Knights: I proceeded on to Palmern of England, and Amadis de Gaul … All the time I had from School, as Thursdays in the Afternoon, and Saturdays, I spent in reading these Books; so that I being wholy affected to them, and reading how that Amadis and other Knights not knowing their Parents, did in time prove to be Sons of Kings and great Personages; I had such a fond and idle Opinion, that I might in time prove to be some great Person, or at leastwise be Squire to some Knight: And therefore I being asked, What Trade I would be of? first scorned to be any, hoping that I was not born to so mean a Quality …

With striking details such as these, The Unlucky Citizen offers a unique window into the imaginative life of one early modern reader of romance. It also curiously anticipates the psychological insights of a much later era. In a paper published in 1909, Sigmund Freud described the common childhood fantasy, in which ‘both [the child’s] parents are replaced by others of better birth’. The paper’s title in English could provide an apt description for much of Kirkman’s output: ‘Family Romances’.

  • Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-64), 23 volumes, 9: 235-41

  • Francis Kirkman, The unlucky citizen experimentally described (London: Anne Johnson for Francis Kirkman, 1673)