Emasculating Romance: Historical Fiction in the Protectorate

Abstract

This essay examines the rewriting of the English romance tradition in relation to seventeenth-century political culture and strained gender relations, which lay at the heart of the “crisis of order” in the period.¹ The Renaissance witnessed the Golden Age of romance fiction and drama, culminating in the production of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia- and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In a pejorative sense, a “romance” was an imaginary, flighty story featuring extraordinary adventures presented episodically and involving low-class, stereotypical characters; when used favorably, the term referred to what John Milton described as “those lofty fables and Romances, which recount in solemne canto’s the deeds of Knighthood founded by our victorious Kings; & from hence had in over all Christendome.”² Romance also became identified with works of popular fiction with historical or topical references; such texts included Sidney’s Arcadia (1580–90) and John Barclay’s Barclay his Arøenis (1621, Lat.; 1623, Engl.).³ Following the death of Elizabeth, the feminized romance tradition—which was hybrid and experimental from the start—underwent various metamorphoses in response to the growing disenchantment with courtly life and the escalation of civil and political tensions that affected cultural expression and literary tastes. Renaissance romances could sustain criticisms of political authority, but the overlay of governmental affairs and sexual politics in later romances transformed the genre.