SOURCE: Waters, Gregory. “G. T.'s “Worthles Enterprise”: A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J.” Journal of Narrative Technique 7, no. 2 (spring 1977): 116-27.

[In the essay below, Waters analyzes the importance of the narrator in The Adventures of Master F. J.]

When George Gascoigne first began to write his tale about a young, highly romantic lover and an older, more experienced married mistress, he discovered in the courtly love tradition an ideal frame of reference to manipulate for satiric and moral effect. By 1573 courtly love had lost most of its power as a code of social values, and the time was right for a detached, perhaps even ironic story about a young man's folly in substituting fantasy for fact in love. Earlier in the century, the Tudor Humanists had established the use of prose fiction as a means of securing moral argument, and Gascoigne realized that by maintaining a satiric contrast in his tale between the ideals of courtly love and the blemished facts of life they often hid, he could win an audience that demanded moral satisfaction as well as entertainment from prose works of art. In The Adventures of Master F. J., he carefully included both elements, and presented the satiric story of F. J.'s courtly romance through the eyes of a “detached” narrator, G. T., who provided—or appeared to provide—both an “objective” view of events as they were taking place and a comfortable moral perspective from which readers could profitably judge the participants.¹

As the adventures proceed, however, it soon becomes clear that Gascoigne's purpose in having G. T. tell the story is not quite that simple. For in addition to satirizing the courtly code, and the naive efforts of a young man who tried to apply its formal and outdated terms to a very real love affair, it seems to me that Gascoigne is also commenting rather subtly on the ambiguous moral character of his narrator, as it is revealed in G. T.'s language and performance as a writer. As something of a moral satirist, G. T.'s function is presumably to point out the foibles of F. J.'s behavior. In doing so, though, he repeatedly calls attention to his own sexual peculiarities and moral limitations and becomes himself an object of satire. By investing the narrator with an ambiguous personality of his own, one that becomes increasingly more self-conscious as the work goes on, Gascoigne is able to call into question not only the moral validity of the courtly love tradition, but also G. T.'s enterprise of satirizing that tradition. Through a careful manipulation of G. T.'s role as narrator, Gascoigne proposes not so much the rewards as the limits of G. T.'s procedure, and suggests ultimately that the moral drama of The Adventures of Master F. J. is only incidentally that of F. J., Elynor and Fraunces; more importantly, it is the drama of G. T. himself trying to tell the story.²

In the first edition the history of F. J.'s illicit relationship with Elynor is presented through the letters and poems F. J. composed at the time of the affair, together with the prose links G. T. provided to give continuity to the narrative. At the outset, G. T.'s role as moral commentator is less fascinating than his self-promoting efforts as narrator, but, as we shall see, the tension that arises between style and moral purpose becomes increasingly more evident. He starts off as an editor, the friendly confidante of F. J. who, after first collecting the unorganized mass of correspondence, gives it some form and presents in proper order the story of the affair “as they themselves did alwayes with verse reherse unto me the cause that then moved them to write.” But soon the prose links between the letters and poems grow longer and more detailed, and G. T. begins to take liberties with his material, first by indulging himself with some pedantic literary criticism, then by introducing moral judgments into the narrative about the “courtly” nature of the relationship. The step from literary critic to moral commentator becomes a natural one for G. T. to take, and the language in which both kinds of judgments are made is wonderfully self-conscious. As he discourses upon events, G. T. becomes intimately more confidential, increasingly garrulous and defensively moralistic, but always in phrases loaded with bawdy innuendo. And as he gathers self-confidence in himself as a writer, F. J.'s letters and poems become fewer and fewer, until we find ourselves reading straight narrative. In the course of his narrative G. T. steps forward and puts F. J.'s story well behind him, stalling the action a bit for dramatic effect, and creating for himself the opportunity to weave moral allegories about suspicion, to demonstrate both his own superior learning and unique storytelling ability through the mouths of minor characters. What began as editorial intrusion becomes narrative method, and the story, as G. T. tells it, becomes at least as important as what actually occurred. Finally, and most significantly, as the plot draws to a close, G. T.'s language becomes progressively more self-conscious, full of coarse puns and double entendres that demonstrate not only how completely love has degenerated into lust, but also how much the peculiar concerns and language of the narrator dominate the story as we read it. Sooner or later we realize that G. T. has been leering all along, that beneath the condescending literary critic and scene-stealing moral commentator there is a narrator at odds with both his literary and moral positions. By constantly intruding on his own story to comment on the action as it is taking place, G. T. serves as both a self-parodying surrogate for the moralist as writer, and a self-indicting moralistic censor, forced to condemn activities he describes with such obvious relish. Insecure with the materials of his story, G. T. finds comfort only in narrative performance and fails to realize the ultimately ambiguous nature of his own moral position.

In the first edition the story is presented through a series of signed blocks of material, similar in structure and perhaps playing off the method of controlled point of view established in the prefaces. By counting these initialed blocks, Robert Adams has shown how twenty-six lines of prose are signed “SHE” and belong to Lady Elynor, four hundred and twenty lines of prose and verse were written by F. J., and no less than eighteen hundred and forty-eight lines, or eighty percent of the discourse can be attributed to G. T.³ By sheer physical presence alone it is G. T.'s role that dominates the narrative. In the beginning, in his efforts to insinuate himself as a credible editor, G. T. is forced to refer back to his source repeatedly, and interjections such as “My friend F. J. hath told me,” “as I have heard him say,” or “F. J. told me himself” appear in the discourse with disturbing frequency. Paradoxically, these interjections remind the reader not only that the information came from F. J., but also that it is G. T. who is creating a story around the fragments, a story he comes to regard with some pride as “my tale.” At the same time the increasingly longer prose links signed “G. T.” declare by their frequent appearance that our narrator is assigning himself an everlarger amount of space as a commenting character and is making himself indispensable to our understanding of the story as readers.

At first G. T.'s commentary takes the form of literary criticism, and he breaks in after F. J.'s poems to analyze meter and weigh conceits, to praise, express doubt or explain mistakes by referring back to the events of the narrative. At the outset, G. T.'s readings of F. J.'s poems are usually favorable, though expressed with an undercurrent of irony that becomes increasingly less subtle as the love affair progresses. After one early poem, for instance, which pleases F. J.'s mistress for its originality, G. T. informs us that “The Sonet was highly commended, and in my judgment, it deserveth not lesse, I have heard F. J. saye that he borrowed th' inventiun of an Italian: but were it a translation or invention (if I be Judge) it is both prety and pithy”. G. T. playfully casts doubt on F. J.'s originality, yet he excuses the fault by applauding the style. As the love relationship becomes less Platonic, however, G. T. finds occasion to object to the style of the poems more forcefully, and implies that F. J.'s infatuation has hindered his art. After a lover's quarrel which F. J. celebrates in a rather dreary poem called “A Cloud of Care,” G. T. apologizes: “This is but a rough meeter, and reason, for it was devised in great disquiet of mynd, and written in rage, yet have I seene much worse passe the musters … and as it is, I pray you let it passe.” Again he seems to be raising doubts only to put them aside, but our suspicions linger, about both the quality of the poems themselves and G. T.'s place in the discourse. Finally, once the affair is physically consummated, G. T. claims that F. J. was “so ravished in Extasies with continual remembrance of his delights that he made an Idoll of hir in his inward concypte,” and his comments about the poems which follow indicate that he finds it hard to deal with a relationship that is no longer contemplative. Without mentioning his own lost perspective in his literary criticism, G. T.'s language makes it clear that his critical reserve has been shattered. He suggests, for example, that a critical reader might find “A Moonshine Banquet,” which celebrates the consummation, “a dyddeldome,” and is himself so confused by F. J.'s blatantly sexual allusions in “Beautie shut up thy shop” that he declares “either hee was than in an extasie or els sure I am nowe in a lunacie.” His confusion is further made manifest when he tries desperately to explain that poem's reference to Helen of Troy, and decides that she was a former love of F. J. and that the young man merely adapted a previously written poem to suit Elynor, to “so make it serve both their tunes, as elder lovers have done before and still do and will do world without end. Amen.” Of the three remaining poems G. T. reveals that two are translations from the Italian (and points out how “The Italians do most commonly offend in the superlative”), while the third, which lewdly treats of Elynor's husband's horns of cuckoldry, tastes so much of “Rye” that he advises the reader who “liketh it not” to “turn over ye leaf to another.” At this point G. T. announces he must break off with his literary criticism altogether, “untill I have expressed how that his joyes being now exalted to the highest degree, began to bend towardes declination.”

G. T.'s role in the discourse as a self-conscious literary critic is important, because it offered Gascoigne the opportunity both to comment ironically on his own poems while in the process of presenting them, and to suggest through G. T.'s peculiar manner that he is far from being an “objective” narrator. Because Gascoigne was the author of the first critical treatise in English on the art of poetical composition (which, incidentally, he included in the second edition of this work as Certayne Notes of Instruction), we might expect the literary criticism in The Adventures to be of some value. Instead G. T.'s ironically pedantic intrusions serve only to call attention to their own intrusiveness, and reinforce the comic ambiguity of his character as it becomes evident in the language of the narrative. But the comedy becomes more sinister when we realize that the poems and letters are designed to appear as the “real” correspondence of actual lovers. By assuming the role of the detached literary critic in several of his prose links, G. T. inadvertently leads us to feel that perhaps he is unable to deal with evidence of real passion in any other way.

This inability to face the passionate events of life in any way but a literary fashion is ironically undercut by the manner in which G. T. handles the narrative details of the affair. As one who insists most vehemently that he has never been in love himself, G. T.'s efforts to satirize F. J.'s courtly techniques become highly ambiguous. Previous commentators have shown how almost every move F. J. makes as a lover can be traced back in some form to the courtly love tradition, and the story itself can be read most enjoyably as a sarcastic treatment of the courtly love code. Frank Fieler, for example, in his excellent study “Gascoigne's Use of Courtly Love Conventions in The Adventures Passed by Master F. J.,” demonstrates how F. J. woos his mistress according to script, with letters and poems full of Petrarchan conceits, and postures adapted from The Romance of the Rose:

He regards her as a paragon of virtue—the source of all goodness; he suffers; he becomes bedridden with love sickness; he loses, regains, and once more loses his appetite; he cannot sleep whenever his mistress has shown him some disdain; he trembles in her presence, sighs frequently, swoons once, and is thrown into a trance no less than four times by something she has said. In fact … each of the twelve injunctions laid down by Cupid to the lover in The Romance of the Rose is conscientiously followed by F. J.⁴

And as Fieler goes on to show, the events of the story reveal the overwhelming inadequacies of courtly convention in face of flesh and blood reality, since in the end F. J. repudiates both the courtly code and his unfaithful mistress by violently raping her. While Fieler is certainly correct in so far as he goes, it seems to me that he fails to appreciate the full significance of G. T.'s role in the satire. For instead of providing “The truth of events and of character,” as Fieler suggests, it is my contention that G. T. repeatedly calls his own perspective into question by the intensely self-conscious language in which he presents his point of view. By constantly intruding on F. J.'s story to comment on the action as it is taking place and by revealing a fascination with the illicit sexual activities he is supposed to be condemning, G. T. undermines his narrative and moral positions even as he struggles to establish them. In the end, instead of providing us with “a mirror of perfecte life,” G. T. can give us only the reflection of his own imperfect self, frightened by what attracted him and confused by the way he described it.

II

It is, of course, in his treatment of the sexual details of the affair that G. T.'s performance becomes most ambiguous, and it is here that our suspicions about his role in the discourse are confirmed. We must keep in mind the fact that he is telling the story, creating incidents around the fragmented material of the letters and poems. Yet when he comes to speak of the physical circumstances of the affair, G. T. pretends he is unable to do so directly: he can only suggest and imply in a kind of language that is best described as leering. His treatment of these scenes is shocking, not because it is so different from the courtly nature of the letters and poems, but because it is G. T. the narrator who is shocked by his recreations of them. At the same time it is G. T. who strips Elynor down to her shift, and it he who tells how she shrieked “but softly.” After all the finely stylized action and language of the first part of the story, informed by the standards of traditional courtliness, G. T. presents the following scene, which takes place when F. J. encounters Lady Elynor in a gallery near her chamber:

The dame (whether it were of feare in deede, or that the wylyness of womanhode had taught hir to cover hir conceites with some fyne dissimulation) stert backe from the Knight, and shriching (but softly) sayd unto him. Alas servaunt what have I deserved, that you come against me with naked sword as against an open enemie. F. J. perceyving hir entent excused himselfe, declaring that he brought the same for their defence, & not to offend hir in any wise. The Ladie being therwith somewhat appeased, they began w^t more comfortable gesture to expell the dread of the said late affright, and sithens to become bolder of behaviour, more familier in speech, & most kind in accomplishing of comon comfort.

G. T.'s suggestive reticence is consistently undercut by his elaborate and quite vivid conceit concerning the “naked sword,” and is further confounded by the leering presentation which follows, in which the narrator addresses the reader directly, as a sexually experienced man of the world, only to confess with mock shyness that he must refrain from too much realism “for lacke of like experience”:

But why hold I so long discourse in discribing the joyes which (for lacke of like experience) I cannot set out to y^e full? Were it not that I know to whom I write, I would the more beware what I write. F. J. was a man, and neither of us are sencelesse, and therefore I should slaunder him, (over and besides a greater obloquie to the whole genealogie of Enaeas) if I should imagine that of tender hart he would forebeare to express hir more tender limbes against the hard floore. Suffised that of hir curteouse nature she was content to accept bords for a bead of downe, mattes for Camerike sheetes, and the night gowne of F. J. for a counterpoynt to cover them, and thus with calme content, in steede of quiet sleepe, they beguiled the night.

G. T.'s shyness, of course, is too deliberately coy to be taken seriously, particularly when considered in counterpoint with the highly charged language he employs to portray the sexual encounters. He pretends to be shocked by the scenes he must describe, yet he takes immodest delight (and adds considerably to our enjoyment) in vividly retelling their most intimate details. It is G. T. who emphasized the hardness of the floor, just as it is he who has Elynor refer to herself as an “open” enemy. In addition to this scene, there are the suggestive metaphors of the earlier incident in which G. T. tells how F. J. entered Elynor's bedroom to “stop hir bleeding,” and his description of the later encounter between Elynor and her paramour the secretary, who “having bin of long time absent, & therby his quils & pennes not worn so neer as they were wont to be, did now prick such faire large notes, y^t his Mistress liked better to sing faburden under him, than to descant any longer uppon F. J. playne song.” The sexual puns and suggestive conceits are quite intentional, and they work to indict not only the illicit lovers, but also the self-conscious narrator who indulges himself with them.

The renewed activity between Elynor and her former paramour incites F. J.'s jealousy, and at something of a climax in the tale he violently rapes her, demonstrating graphically enough the inadequacy of the courtly code and G. T.'s fascination with the manner in which it was repudiated. Our narrator describes how Elynor came to F. J.'s bed expecting to make love, not at all embarrassed by her knowledge that F. J. knew of her other affairs. He, still insisting on courtly “trouthe” between lovers, demands they discuss their differences, and G. T. intrudes with his opinion as well, in the following fashion:

Now, here I would demaund of you and such other as are expert: Is there any greater impediment to the fruition of a Lovers delights, than to be mistrusted? Or rather, is it not the ready way to race all love and former good will out of remembrance, to tell a gilty mynd that you doe mistrust it? It should seeme yes, by Dame Elynor, who began nowe to take the matter whottely, and of such vehemency were hir fancies, That shee nowe fell into flat defiance with F. J. who although hee sought by many faire wordes to temper hir chollerike passions, and by yeelding him selfe to get the conquest of an other, yet could hee by no means determine the quarrell. The softe pillowes being present at these whot wordes, put forth themselves as mediatours for a truce betwene these enemies, and desired that (if they would needes fight) it might be in their presence but onely one pusshe of the pike, and so from thenceforth to become friends again for ever. But the Dame denied flatly, alleadging that shee found no cause at all to use such courtesie unto such a recreant, adding further many wordes of great reproche: the which did so enrage F. J. as that having now forgotten all former curtesies, he drewe uppon his new professed enimie, and bare hir up with such violence aginst the bolster that before shee could prepare the warde, he thrust hir through both hands, and &c. wher by the Dame swooning for feare, was constreyned (for a time) to abandon hir body to the enemies courtesie.

G. T.'s language is almost always a part of a process of self-aggrandizement: G. T. is as narrator who competes with his material, struggling to declare his own presence even at the most private moments of his story. The first-person intrusions (“But why hold I so long discourse in discribing the joyes,” “now, here I would demaund of you,”), the suggestive metaphors (F. J.'s “naked sword,” the secretary's “quils and pennes,” the “pusshe of the pike”), and the self-consciously literary allusions (the desperate reference to the “whole genealogie of Enaeas” for support), all serve to restore our attention to G. T.'s unique “methode and maner of writing,” especially when they are present at the expense of the adventures themselves. At the same time there is a kind of self-parody going on, as G. T.'s obsessive interest in the physical details of the love scenes, and the sensuous language in which he describes those details, consistently belie the detached moral perspective he claims to possess as narrator. Like a voyeur G. T. watches too closely, and we look in vain for the “right rewardes of vertues, and the due punishments for vices” he promised in his preface. On the one hand he needs morally to condemn Elynor for her wantonness, hypocrisy, and deceit, but on the other he too seems fascinated with her as sex object, full of “flitting fantasie,” “girlish garishness,” and “hot dissimulation.” The scenes that stay with us long after the work is over, those invested with the most imaginative invention, are precisely the scenes we are meant to condemn, those intended to reveal F. J.'s foolish infatuation and the clearer, more balanced viewpoint of the narrator. Ironically, their effect is to diminish G. T.'s moral perspective while he is still in process of declaring it.

By altogether obliterating any distinction between events and his own analysis of them, G. T. serves as both a self-parodying surrogate for Gascoigne himself as writer, and an ironic caricature of the moralistic commentators found in the work of the early Tudor Humanists. As previous studies have shown, for Erasmus, Vives and Roger Ascham the function of fiction was the direct presentation of ideal modes of conduct, and the few fictional works produced between 1500 and the publication of Gascoigne's tale in 1573 amounted for the most part to treatises or dialogues using stories to prove a moral point. In The Adventures of Master F. J., however, it is not only G. T.'s moral position in retelling F. J.'s affair that is satirized, but also the strange sort of relationship he has with the material of his story in general. For in addition to his ambiguous performance when describing sexual matters, it soon becomes apparent that Gascoigne has made G. T. appear uncomfortable as narrator with the plot of The Adventures as a whole. He is forever interrupting himself to provide prior information about his characters, or to indicate, as moral commentator, future turns in events which will put the present moment in its proper moral perspective. When F. J. celebrates the return of Elynor's husband with some brutally lurid verses about his newly acquired cuckold's horns, for example, G. T. abruptly breaks into the narrative to assure us that “in the end his [F. J.'s] hap was as heavie, as hitherto he had bene fortunate.” Or earlier, when he first introduces us to Fraunces, Elynor's rival for F. J.'s attentions, G. T. is careful to set her apart from Elynor in virtue, “least the Reader might bee drawen in a jelouse suppose of this Lady.“The effect of these intrusions is both to lead the reader by the hand to the desired interpretation, and at the same time to suggest G. T. is not altogether sure of himself as narrator. Occasionally G. T. even interrupts his narrative of F. J.'s adventures to tell a different story himself, both to stall the action a little to keep the reader in suspense and to allow himself the chance to comment upon his own plot allegorically. After F. J. takes to his bed in a “feavor” of jealousy, for instance, G. T. remarks sympathetically that the young lover lacked sufficient instruction about this “monster” suspicion, and for the next three full pages allegorically describes the “hellish bird” with a story borrowed form Ariosto, “for I think you have not red it.’” He returns to his main narrative almost as self-consciously as he departed from it, declaring “nowe then I must thinke it high time to retorne unto him.” Through the use of borrowed sources, G. T. tries to reinforce his narrative position and secure the major points of his discourse, but the borrowed scaffolding and anachronistic asides serve instead to underline G. T.'s essential insecurity with his story and his own role as writer.

G. T.'s relationship with his story becomes even more ambiguous when we consider his treatment of the character Fraunces, and the interesting course of action he has her pursue in The Adventures. Previous readers have been right in showing how she operates as a foil to Elynor, but it is more important, I believe, to see her a foil to G. T. as well. For the narrator, the Lady Fraunces represents an ideal of womanhood, full of virtue, integrity and “temperate fidelity.” Though she loves F. J. and would provide him with the security and companionship of marriage, she is too self-conscious to reveal her love openly. Instead she becomes F. J.'s confidante, and manipulates his relationship with Elynor believing that once he has discovered the latter's infidelity he will turn to her. In the course of the adventures G. T. presents Fraunces as something of a romantic heroine, constantly frustrated in her halfhearted efforts to win F. J. for herself, and in the second edition she eventually dies from unrequited love. Her strategy too is somewhat romantic in the way she invents a series of complicated riddles for F. J. to solve, hoping that through them F. J. will see the folly of his ways and change the course of his behavior. Like the narrator, she structures her efforts with allegory and names F. J. her “Trust” and herself his “Hope.” She enlists the help of Dame Pergo, another gentlewoman of the house, and together they tease F. J. with allegorical puzzles about love and infidelity, hoping he will see the light. Unfortunately Fraunces' campaign fails, because reality denies her allegorical categories, and, as G. T. himself sadly admits, because F. J. realizes “the one [Elynor] is overcome with lesse difficultie then that other.”

Throughout the adventures Fraunces involves herself in the plot as G. T. himself might, and, as Richard Lanham points out, her constant presence makes us follow the adulterous love affair with the alternative of a better, more positive relationship always in mind.⁵ For G. T. the affair with Elynor causes the disruption of a story which could have had a happy conclusion, and his displeasure with events and F. J.'s choice greatly colors his narrative. Yet at times G. T.'s language raises questions about Fraunces' morality as well, as in the bawdy scene in which she spies F. J. leaving Elynor's company with “the poynt of his naked sworde glistring under the skyrt of his night gowne.” The Lady Fraunces, “being throughly tickled now in all the vaynes,” enters his bedroom where “his naked sworde presented it selfe to [her] handes,” and she borrows it for a while before returning it to Elynor and later back to F. J. On one level the incident is meant to be a practical joke Fraunces plays on F. J. to embarrass him, but when read against the suggestive context which G. T. has constructed around F. J.'s “sworde,” the joke is at Fraunces' expense too. She is no longer the temperate moral heroine G. T. had previously made her out to be, but becomes for the moment almost as sexually playful as Elynor. My point is that our narrator never knows when to quit, and we, as readers, are often hard pressed to decide exactly where he stands in relation to his plot. On the one hand he morally disapproves of the promiscuous behavior of his characters, and on the other he is more than willing to provide us with graphic accounts of their encounters. In the end G. T. is so thoroughly confused that he feels obliged to “make an end of this thriftlesse History” with an apology, not for the “two or three wanton places” noted by the printer, but rather for his own “barbarous style in prose.”

It is this tension between style and moral purpose that ultimately indicts G. T., and makes us aware of Gascoigne's major intention in The Adventures of Master F. J. In a sense, Gascoigne writes in order to question the authenticity of what G. T. is doing, and uses the language of his narrator to suggest that G. T.'s enterprise of writing is “thriftlesse,” as limited and limiting as his method of satirizing the courtly love tradition. Unfamiliar with the ways of love himself, G. T. insists he cannot describe its joys “for lacke of like experience.” Yet he struggles to portray events in a moral context, as F. J. attempts to woo Elynor by means of an outdated courtly code. At the same time his language reveals that his own “morality” is as debased as F. J.'s courtliness, and in the process of questioning the one he ironically undercuts the other. In the revised edition this process of self-parody is less obvious, because G. T. is absorbed into the discourse as its informing intelligence, and the story, as he sees it, becomes the story as it really was. The rape scene is cleaned up a bit and the account of Elynor's husband's horns is omitted, but the moral commentary and the peculiar language remain ambiguous. The setting is changed to avoid libel, but the story, for all intents and purposes, stays the same. The most important revision, however, and one meant to clinch the moral argument of the work is the epilogue to the second edition, which is wonderfully ironic in the way it involves the narrator in its generalizing sweep, and instead of releasing him from the charge of moral ambiguity, works to include him in his own judgment:

Thus we see that where wicked lust doeth beare the name of love, it doth not onelye infecte the lyght-minded, but it maye also become confusion to others which are vowed to constancie. And to that ende I have recyted this Fable which maye serve as ensample to warne the youthful reader from attempting the lyke worthles enterprise.⁶

Gascoigne leaves it to the reader's sensibility to decide whether this “worthles enterprise” refers to F. J.'s attempts to make love in terms of an outmoded courtly love code, or B. T.'s efforts to write about it from the ambiguous moral position he has chosen to assume.

Notes

1. Since I am concerned chiefly with the ambiguity of G. T.'s performance as a narrator, most of my remarks are based on the first edition of the work. The second edition is not as interesting to me as the first, because it incorporates the narrator into the tale as its central intelligence, and reduces the ironic ambiguity of his role. All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from C. T. Prouty's George Gascoigne's “A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers,” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1942).

2. In their efforts to read the tale primarily as a satire on the courtly love system, critics have consistently overlooked the ambiguity of G. T.'s role in the discourse. Most have followed the position first taken by Robert Adams in “Gascoigne's Master F. J. as Original Fiction,” PMLA, LXXIII (September, 1958), pp. 315-326, that G. T.'s role is basically “to distance us from the action by means of his own unsympathetic attitude toward it.” Frank Fieler, in “Gascoigne's Use of Courtly Love Conventions,” Studies in Short Fiction, I (Fall, 1963), pp. 26-32, claims the narrator provides “the truth of events and of character,” but fails to consider how G. T.'s performance often calls these “truths” into question. Leicester Bradner, whose important early work “The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J.,” PMLA, XLV (June, 1930), pp. 543-552, did not concern itself with the narrator, maintains in “Point of View in George Gascoigne's Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction, III (Fall, 1965), pp. 16-22, that G. T. “is obviously a man of intelligence and experience, one who not only has the requisite knowledge about the story he is telling but also understands its significance.” Richard Lanham, in “Narrative Structure in Gascoigne's F. J.,” Studies in Short Fiction, IV (Fall, 1966), pp. 42-50, correctly asserts that the reader's point of view cannot altogether coincide with the narrator's, but I think he is wrong when he says that G. T.'s “plain style … fails to express attitude.” Merrit Lawlis, in his introduction to The Adventures in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1967), pp. 31-34, somehow finds both “tact and delicacy” in G. T.'s point of view, despite the self-conscious intrusions and sexually charged asides. The most recent commentary, Lynette McGrath's “George Gascoigne's Moral Satire,” in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXX (July, 1971), pp. 432-450, speaks of “The essentially static role assigned to G. T.,” and contends that “G. T. keeps himself withdrawn from the possibilities of anarchy and unreason that love implies.” One of the few studies that begin to consider the ambiguity of G. T.'s role, Walter Davis' Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), is unfortunately based on the second edition, and his remarks are somewhat limited as a consequence.

3. Adams, p. 318.

4. Fieler, pp. 28-29.

5. Lanham, pp. 46-47.

6. This quotation from the second edition is from John W. Cunliffe's George Gascoigne's “The Posies,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907).