SOURCE: Weld, John S. “Some Problems of Euphuistic Narrative: Robert Greene and Henry Wotton.” Studies in Philology 45, No. 2 (April 1948): 165-71.

[In the following essay, Weld argues that Courtlie Controuersie of Cupid's Cautels, Wotton's translation of Jacque D'Yer's Le Printemps D'Yver, is a source for Robert Greene's Mamillia, and he delineates what form this influence takes.]

Among the sources for Robert Greene's first novel, the first part of Mamillia (1580), is one which has remained unnoticed, Henry Wotton's Courtlie Controuersie of Cupid's Cautels (1578).¹ The source is important because what Greene borrowed and the changes he made are illustrative of his problems as a euphuistic novelist.

Wotton's book is a translation of Jacque D'Yver's Le Printemps D'Yver (1572), and for the most part it justifies the remark of the translator that it follows the original “as near as our English phrase will permit.”² Occasionally he euphuizes the sentence structure by the use of the typical schemata, but never at the expense of departing from the literal sense of the original.³

Yver characterizes his book as an imitation of the many Italian frame-tales. He complains in his preface that France has produced no collections of novelle, and he writes to supply the lack.⁴ The book consists of five short tales set in the frame of a questione d'amore. Three knights, the sieurs de Bel-accueil, de Fleur d'amour, and de Ferme-foy, are guests at the elaborate chateau of Printemps in Poitou. The lady of the castle, her daughter, Marie, and her niece, Marguerite, entertain the young gentlemen for five days while the company discusses the nature of love and the cause of lovers' misfortunes. Each speaker tells a short tale to illustrate his argument. When the last tale is told, the good-natured and rather digressive controversy is summed up, and the hostess defines love in Neo-Platonic terms. The work as a whole is a slight but graceful trifle, a typical product of the Italian Renaissance from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth. It is adorned with, but not burdened by easy learning, graceful songs, and a wealth of almost Arcadian description. It is static, like the medieval débat. Nothing happens to the conversationalists; they are merely amusing themselves with the old game of discourse on love. The tales they tell not only illustrate their arguments, but give rise to new controversies.

Mamillia, on the other hand, is superficially a novel about human beings who act upon one another. It does move. Within the space of 135 pages, in Grosart's reprint, a young man wins the affections of two girls and jilts both. The book has a plot; it has a beginning, a middle, and a stopping place, if not an end. But the apparent action is deceptive. The plot becomes a string on which are threaded the myriad letters, speeches, and soliloquies of didactic euphuism, and this vast wealth of euphuism is never made relevant to the action or motivations of conduct.

Illustrative of this quality are Greene's borrowings from Wotton, which consist entirely of the debates on love. Greene simply inserts this static, medieval material into his own narrative of courtship and broken vows. Thus, for instance, he puts one of the generalized remarks about the infidelity of men into the mouth of his heroine when she coyly rejects an offer of marriage. “The Poets and paynters,” she remarks,

representing the loue of menne, bring in Cupid with a payre of winges; disciphering the loue of women, a Tortuse vnder the feete of Venus: shewing that as the loue of men is moueable, and vnconstant as a byrde: so the fancy of women is a firme & fixed, as a steadfast Tortuse. And with great reason: for neyther the Romish recordes, nor Grecian hystories haue made any, or at the least so oft mention of the disloyaltie of women: but onely how their simplicitie hath beene beguyled by the flatterie of faigned lovers, of whome the most renoumed may beare sufficient witnes: (as Theseus, Iason, Hercules, Aeneas, and Demophon) that the loue of men hath euer beene inconstant: yet they so reioysed at their infamous deedes, that the Poets canonized them, not only for saints, but placed them among the Gods, so that others of base estate, taking example by them, doe vaunt of their disloyaltie, as of some glorious conquest, and as Herostratus fiered the temple of Diana to be spoken of, so they falsifie their faith, to be famous.⁵

The passage is, of course, applicable to Mamillia's situation, but it is equally applicable to any girl in the same situation, and more applicable to the speaker in a débat.

Greene's use of another borrowed passage is even less appropriate. It is a rather stock piece of anti-feminism appropriate to Yver's debate on the relation of the sexes. Greene, however, inserts it as a casual and inappropriate aside to the reader at the point where his hero, Pharicles, is considering marriage to Mamillia.

There is no such hinderaunce to a man, as a wife: if respecting warre, Darius and Methridates are witnesses: of learning and Philosophy, Socrates comes in as plaintife: so in my opiniõ, if men would neuer marry, they should neuer be marred. … Yea some haue called a wife, a heauy Crosse, as a mery iesting Gentleman of Venice did: who hearing the preacher command euery man to take vp his Crosse, and follow him, hastily tooke his wife on his shoulders, & said he was ready with the formost.⁶

When it is recalled that Pharicles is something of a rascal, and Mamillia is a pattern of virtue and the “mirror of modesty,” the inappropriateness of the passage becomes clear. Only in the most ironic sense could Mamillia be considered a hinderance to Pharicles. Greene's purpose in borrowing the passage is for adventitious ornament, or a mildly pleasant, but quite irrelevant joke.⁷

Greene's interest in ornament is shown further by minor changes in the phrasing. Thus, “if men woulde neuer marrie, they could not fayle to attain great felicitie,” becomes “If men would neuer marry, they should neuer be marred.” Greene's phrasing is more precisely balanced; alliteration is added, and the sentence emerges as euphuism. The same sort of impulse is evident in the transformation of Wotton's clumsy sentence.

As hee that desyreth to be notorious, when hee can not aspire therevnto by any vertuous acte, doeth prosecute his intente by mischiefe, and setteth on fyre the Temple of Diana, or committeth some other villanous facte: euen so we dayly beholde the heires of our age, seeke to make their liues famous in defaming a great number of women.

Greene changes this to, “As Herostratus fiered the temple of Diana to be spoken of, so they falsifie their faith to be famous.” Other examples of Greene's euphuizing can be found,⁸ but he was often content to use a less patterned style.

Another change which Greene effects for the purpose of ornament is the identification of men referred to by Yver and Wotton, and the interpolation of learned-looking references in the already extensive lists of his original. In the following passage, for instance, the names of Ovid, Anacreon, Callimachus, and Propertius are inserted without the warrant of either Wotton or history.

Ouid … Thought [love] more obscure then the Letters of Ephesus, or the riddles of Sphynx. … Anacreon said it was a sweete mischiefe, sith for a pince of pleasure we receiue a gallon of sorow. … Calimachus calleth it a Court without Sergeantes, for because they that loue, obey without constraint, and are captiue without conquest. … Propertius saieth, loue is a sweete tyranny, because the Louer endureth his tormentes willingly.⁹

Sometimes Greene's attributions are correct. Thus he identifies Wotton's “great advocate of Athens” as Demosthenes¹⁰ and the man who burned Diana's temple as Herostratus.¹¹ In another passage, unsatisfied by Wotton's list of references to Hiarbita, Hermonyda, Hipparchion, Ruffin, the great advocate of Athens, Phillip of Macedon, Marsias, and Apollo, Greene adds references to Astorides, Roscius, Carnitus, and Hannibal.¹² It is not important that Ovid, Propertius, Callimachus, and Anacreon, did not write the conceits that Greene attributes to them, nor is it important that Greene correctly identifies Demosthenes and Herostratus. It is important that Greene should have found Wotton lacking in elegance. Those references that are correct strengthen his argument no more than those that are false.

This brief analysis of Greene's borrowings from Wotton has been enough to demonstrate something of Greene's purpose as a novelist. It is clear that in no case did he borrow from Wotton for the sake of explaining motivation or supporting argument. He was looking for ornament, and where Wotton's phrasing was not sufficiently ornamental, Greene still further embroidered it.

Such conclusions are obvious enough, and yet it is of the greatest importance that they are kept in mind if one is properly to understand the euphuistic novel. Miss Violet Jeffrey has already argued well that much of the form of Euphues was derived from the Italian dubii, and has noted Lyly's frequent use of formal debates.¹³ She has also pointed out that the euphuists' pattern of soliloquy, letter, and formalized conversation was probably derived from the Italian novelle.¹⁴ What has not perhaps been sufficiently made clear, however, is that much of this conversation and soliloquy is of precisely the same stuff as the speeches of the dubii.

In the dubii, of course, as in the débats, such material has a clear function. The speakers are either personifications of abstractions, or representatives of pretty well-defined constituencies. Their points of view are important, but their personalities are not. Those individual, personal traits that distinguish, say, one damoiselle, one courtly lover, one Soul, or one Reason from others of their kinds must not be emphasized, must not, in fact, be revealed at all. The argument is generalized argument and must apply to all individuals of a species. As in a mathematical demonstration, attention must be focussed on the speech, not on the speaker.

The validity of such argument rests on the assumption that men, or at least classes of men, are so much alike that their individual differences are relatively unimportant. Insofar as imaginative literature based on this assumption may be called medieval, Greene's novels betray a medieval inheritance.

Yet this assumption, inherited by Greene, was not really accepted by him. Unlike Yver he does not assume that these generalized speeches are significant in themselves. On the other hand, it is also clear that he has not achieved the fully developed position that the individual is of dominating interest. His irresponsible and needless invention of authorities, for instance, like his later irresponsible and needless invention of phenomena from natural history,¹⁵ shows his lack of interest in the generalizations. The fact that his characters react to particular situations with generalized speeches shows his lack of interest in their personalities.

Greene's writing comes between two modes. They are not only two modes of writing; they are two modes of thought. His novels bear witness, of course, to the mediocre talents of a hack, but they also show that the older tools of thought were becoming the tools of a hack. While, tried by the ethical code of his own time, Greene might escape the charge of plagiarism (a concept then still emergent), his borrowing is clearly closer to that of the Grub Street writer than the medieval redactor. Medieval citation has become Renaissance decoration, the schematic medieval rhetoric, a jingling of euphuistic bells, and generalized argument, a species of auditory pyrotechnics.

Notes

1. The earliest extant copies of the first part of Mamillia date from 1583, but it was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1580. See Arber's Transcript, II, 378.

2. A Courtlie controuersie of Cupids Cautels: Conteyning fiue Tragicall Histories, very pithie, pleasant, pitiful, and profitable: Discoursed vppon wyth argumentes of Loue, by three Gentlemen and two Gentlewomen, entermedled with diuers delicate Sonets and Rithmes, exceeding delightfull to refresh the yrksomnesse of tedious tyme. Translated out of French as neare as our English phrase will permit, by H. W. Gentleman (London, 1578). Yver's title runs: Le Printemps D'Yver, Contenant cinq histoires, discourues par cinq iournées, en vne noble compagnie, au chasteau du Printemps (Paris, 1578). All references are to this edition.

   There remains a possibility that Greene may have borrowed directly from Yver. Beyond the a priori probability that Greene would have used the translation, I can offer only one tenuous bit of evidence that he did. That is the proverbial phrase “as bold as blind Bayard” which appears in the epistles dedicatory of both Wotton and Greene and for which there is no equivalent in Yver's book. See Wotton, A 4, and The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart (1881-83), II, 6. However, the question of which source Greene used is not important for this discussion. Wotton gave a fairly close rendering of the passages borrowed by Greene and he introduced none of the changes which appear in Mamillia.

   Wotton's fifth tale has recently received notice as a possible source of Two Gentlemen of Verona. See Dorothy F. Atkinson, “Source of the Two Gentlemen of Verona,” SP, XLI (1944), 223-234.

3. For Wotton's euphuism, see Ernst Sieper, “Die Geschichte von Soliman und Perseda in der neuren Litteratur; 3. Die englischen Bearbeitungen,” Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, Neue Folge, X (1896), 151 ff.

4. Yver, A4^v.

5. Greene, II, 65-66. Cf. Wotton: Wherefore (I pray you) doe Poets, and Painters resemble the loue of men, to an infant hauing wings, and doe painte the loue of women in the shape of a Tortois lying vnder Venus feete? but only to testifye the loue of men to be voluble and vnconstant lyke a birde, and the loue of women firme and steadfast, like the sluggish Tortois: Wherein they haue greate reason, seeing that Historiens in their discourses entreate seldome of the disloialtie of women, but wee heare and reade in infinite volumes, howe their bounty and simplicitie hath continually bin deceiued by the malice of their periured and changeable louers: Whereof in manner al the most victorious and famous personages of old time are witnesses, so as throughout all ages the faithless Jason, Theseus, Demophon, Aeneas, and Hercules, are examples of certaine proofe that the loue of men is wandering. An althoughe their worthye actes be defyled with the blottes of this infamie, yet are they notwithstandyng placed among the Gods, yea and their starres honoured, and reported to surmounte all others in clearnesse. … The libertie whiche in times paste was onely permitted to Princes, at this daye is common to euery priuate person, so that nowe a dayes there is none so verye a wretche, who aduaunceth not his disloyaltie with such triumph as if he had obteined some glorious conquest. … But alas, as hee that desyreth to be notorious, when hee can not aspire therevnto by any vertuous acte, doeth prosecute his intente by mischiefe, and setteth on fyre the Temple of Diana, or committeth some other villanous facte: euen so we dayly beholde the heires of our age, seeke to make their liues famous in defaming a great number of women.—E3-E3^v.

6. Greene, II, 54. Cf. Wotton: How great disturbers women bee of vertuous actions, be it in war as Darius and Metridates do testify, or in Philosophy as Socrates complained him, whiche maketh me to belieue, that if men woulde neuer marrie, they could not fayle to attain great felicitie. … I am content to cal a woman a stay, although I knowe many haue bin constrained to speake more hardly calling hir our peasant crosse, as he witnesseth, who hearing y^e preacher say it behoued that euery man should carry his owne crosse, ran immediately home and toke vp his wife vpon his backe, & brought hir into y^e church: God or the Deuill deliuer me of some of my crosse, or else hyr weight will breake my necke.—R1^v-R2.

7. Greene borrowed two more long passages from Wotton. One of these is inserted as an apology by Pharicles in which he protests his inability to speak well, and the other is part of his rather formal discourse on the nature of love. Again, of course, they lack relevance to the personality of the speaker, though the irrelevance is somewhat masked by the fact that the novel at this point becomes momentarily a real questione d'amore. Cf. Greene, II, 78-79 with Wotton, Bb2, and Greene, II, 79-84 with Wotton, Aa 1-Aa 2.

8. E. g., see below Greene's use of the schemata in his “citations” of Ovid, Callimachus, Anacreon, and Propertius.

9. Greene, II, 81. I omit much of his embroidery. Cf. Wotton: Even that little which they [i. e., the philosophers] speake as by acquittaunce, is more obscure than the Ephesians letters, or the wordes of Sphinx. … For one will tell you it is a sweete bitternesse, bycause menne receyue therein a thousande pleasures: another saith, it is a Court without Seriants, because they which loue obey without constraint: another calleth it a sweete tyrannie, because a Louer endureth voluntarily.—Aa 1.

10. Wotton, Bb2^v; Greene, II, 78.

11. Wotton, E3^v; Greene, II, 66.

12. Greene, II, 79, Cf. Wotton, Bb2. “Astorides” and “Carnitus” appear to be inventions.

13. John Lyly and the Italian Renaissance (Paris, 1929), Ch. I.

14. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

15. See Don Cameron Allen, “Science and Invention in Greene's Prose,” PMLA, LIII (1938), 1007-1018. I have noted, incidentally, three of Greene's natural history allusions which appear to come from Wotton: the herb “Spattania,” Greene II, 72, and Wotton (“Spartania”), A2^v; the emerald, Green, II, 61, and Wotton, F2^v; the “fountaines of Ardenia,” Greene, II, 72, an apparent reference to the fountains of Arden, which play a part in Wotton's fourth tale.