The Renaissance Historical Novel: Elizabethan and Jacobean Historical Fiction

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This is not a study of contemporary fiction set in the Renaissance. It is a study of prose fiction from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that is set in the past. My aim is to examine the ways in which these fictions might operate like a modern historical novel, by providing a chronologically distinct setting that comprises some part of the overall significance of or pleasure afforded by the story. Perhaps a majority of the fiction composed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is set in the past. Lodge, Sidney, Nashe, Deloney: all the major prose writers of the period produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia') to the relatively recent past (the time of Henry VIII, in Nashe's 'The Unfortunate Traveller'). One might go so far as to say that it was fiction with a contemporary setting that was unusual at this time. Yet this historical bias has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. For the most part, the unexpressed assumption seems to be that if a prose fiction published in 1578 opens by declaring that it is set 'after that the great Emperour Constantine had people of Constantinople with the race of the noble Citizens of Rome', as Margaret Tyler's translation of 'The Mirror of Knighthood' does, this is as much as to say, 'once upon a time ...', and that any such historical gesture is therefore essentially neutral. This study will argue the opposite: that it is not, or at least not necessarily so, and therefore to ask the question: how does Renaissance prose fiction respond to and represent the fact of historical difference?This is a literary-critical project, and as such it aims to promote a heightened appreciation of the artistry of early modern prose fiction, but it is also one designed to open out into a consideration of larger historical questions. How do writers of fiction understand the past, and how do they put it to use in their fictions? What do their fictions have to tell us about the historical culture of the period of their composition, as opposed to the period in which they are set? Is the historical vision of early modern fiction distinct from that evident in formal historical writing of the period? How might this historical sense relate to larger questions of periodization, given that the Renaissance is so often characterised by an improved understanding of the classical past in particular? And, finally, how does the historical culture of the early modern period resemble or differ from our own? This last question affords the opportunity of a comparison between early modern and contemporary forms of historical knowledge, via the literary formats that might encode them. If the fact that the majority of early prose fiction is set in the past has never received any substantial critical discussion, the same might be said of its modern analogue. The historical novel is one of the most popular of literary forms, and one of the least studied. Some seventy years after its composition, Lukacs' work remains one of the few monographs devoted to the genre. This absence becomes all the more noteworthy when one considers the 'postmodern' fascination with historiographic issues of mediation and representation, its penchant for detailing the multiple, alternative and in some sense imaginary pasts that populate the present. A contemporary political history like Toby Judt's 'Postwar' almost inevitably organises itself around a metahistorical theme, of how historical progress may be marked or even driven by successive reconfigurations of the past. One aspect of this modern self-consciousness would be to reconstruct different, past ways of imagining history, the better thereby to understand ourselves in our own distinctive modes of knowledge; and this, through my specifically literary theme, which offers the possibility of such comparisions, is exactly what I am proposing here.