SOURCE: "Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor: Fictional Biography in the Romance Genre," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 6, No. 3, Fall, 1974, pp. 256–67.

There are, at present, strong signs of renewed interest in the prose fiction of Robert Greene. New editions of Pandosto and A Notable Discovery of Cozenage in a widely-used college text, a lengthy chapter on the prose in a recent commentary on Elizabethan fiction, a spate of doctoral dissertations on Greene, and a proposed new edition of his complete works all testify to the existence of an overdue reconsideration of Greene as one of the most interesting and versatile of Elizabethan authors.¹

It is the purpose of this paper to further that reconsideration by focusing on one of Greene's most popular works, Ciceronis Amor: Tullies Love, in an attempt to understand both the reasons for its early success and the position that it occupies in relation to other Elizabethan prose fiction. Ciceronis Amor is scarcely ever read today, but this fact alone should not condemn it to literary limbo. One of the functions of criticism has always been to draw to others' attention little-known works which are valuable in themselves and which shed light on the literary issues of their age. Ciceronis Amor meets both of these criteria.

I

While there is no entry for Ciceronis Amor in the Stationers' Register, it seems probable that Greene wrote it shortly before the publication of its first edition in 1589. Chronologically, this would place it between two of Greene's better-known romances, Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (which René Pruvost, on sound evidence, assigns to the closing months of 1589).² All three romances show Greene returning to a longer narrative form after working for some time with collections of shorter novelle like Penelope's Web and Planetomachia. When these three fine pieces of prose fiction are read in combination with Greene's best play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, also generally assigned to 1589, it becomes clear that this period of a year or so saw the full maturation of Greene's literary talent. When he finished these, he had written very well indeed the type of literature that he had been working on for a decade. He was soon to turn to another—to the series of underworld pamphlets which may or may not reflect the events of the last years of his life.

Ciceronis Amor is unusual among Greene's writings in that no substantial source for it has ever been found. Even the individual scenes and speeches are apparently devoid of sources with the exception of one; the description of Fabius's discovery of Terentia sleeping in the forest and his subsequent transformation from a simple dolt into a refined courtier (pp. 184–89) is very nearly a literal translation of a portion of Boccaccio's tale of Cimon and Iphigenia in the first novel of the fifth day of the Decameron.³ This episode is an interesting one thematically, and we shall return to it later.

To judge from the title and some of the prefatory material to Ciceronis Amor, one might guess that Greene is creating here a prototype of the biographical novel. When we examine the book more closely, however, we learn that nothing could be farther from the truth. On the first page of the dedication, he states an intention "to pen downe the loues of Cicero, which Plutarch, and Cornelius Nepos, forgot in their writings," with the implication that he has been researching his subject. It is not until the reader does some research of his own that he discovers that while Cornelius Nepos did indeed write a biography of his friend Cicero, that it seems not to have been extant in Greene's day, just as it is not extant in our own. (Greene's contemporaries may have been more aware of its absence than we are and thus would have been alerted as to what was in store for them.) In the case of Plutarch, it is fairly certain that Greene was familiar with his Life of Cicero in the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, a work to which he would have had access either in its Latin version or in Thomas North's famous 1579 translation. But he does little more with it than pluck the names of a few Romans mentioned by Plutarch (Vatinius and Annius Milo, among others—names which he could also have found in Cicero's letters and orations) and turn around the picture that Plutarch presents of Cicero's wife, Terentia. Plutarch depicts her as a strong-willed woman at best and a shrew at worst; it is no surprise to learn that Cicero divorced her. The gracious beauty that we find in Greene, then, can come as a surprise, but perhaps not a surprise without forewarning. Green explicitly tells the reader, after all, that he is going to inform him of what Plutarch "forgot" to relate. The result is, as we shall see, something quite different from an accurate account of life in Rome of the first century B.C., and even less is it an accurate account of the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero; but it is hard to be disappointed in the additions furnished by Greene's imagination.

There was a possible precedent for this sort of "historical" fiction in Antonio de Guevara's Libro del Emperador Marco Aurelio (1529). Guevara's book had been translated from the Spanish, first in 1532 by Lord Berners, and then again in 1557 (this time from an intermediate French version) by Thomas North under the title of the Dial of Princes. The interest of the book turned not so much about any aspect of the biography of Marcus Aurelius as it did about the moral dissertations, the countless "ensaumples," and the rhetorical style.⁴ By contrast, Ciceronis Amor is much more concerned with getting a story told, and to this extent Greene is breaking some new ground in English prose fiction: William Painter and Barnabe Rich had earlier told short historical tales, adapted from Italian novelle, but no one had worked with an extended narrative based on a historical figure. For this reason, if for no other, the traditional critical view that has seen Greene as a sort of literary chameleon, never innovating, never attempting a form which was not already popular, needs to be reassessed.⁵

To say that this type of fiction had no proven record of popularity is not, however, to imply that Greene was taking a stab in the dark. He surely must have realized the book's potential for success even as he was planning it. The title alone would have been a sufficient guarantee. Cicero's nearly all-encompassing position in the Renaissance educational curriculum is a well-known fact. But one suspects that frequently enough this primacy, rather than creating a near-absolute veneration for him on the part of generations of schoolboys, fostered a certain resentment against the rote memorization of what must have seemed an overly-burdensome "classic." To an audience so conditioned, a story which claimed to tell of a love affair of the grave orator perforce possessed an enticing novelty.

This curiosity factor, together with other causes, made Ciceronis Amor popular for at least forty years. Unlike Lyly's Euphues, it did not immediately go through a sizeable number of editions, but it did exert a steady, if unspectacular, appeal up to the time of the Revolution in 1640. There were nine early editions—one each in 1589, 1597, 1601, 1605, 1609, 1611, 1616, 1628, and 1639.⁶ Virtually all of Greene's writings appeared in multiple editions, but none in as many as Ciceronis Amor during the period that it was in print. Even Pandosto, which was to remain available well into the eighteenth century (no doubt in part because of its use by Shakespeare as the source for The Winter's Tale), had only eight editions before 1640. The seven seventeenth-century editions of Ciceronis Amor mean that it fell only three editions short of the minimum number of ten that Charles C. Mish uses to distinguish the "best sellers" in seventeenth-century fiction.⁷

We know today that a book's potential for financial success during this period was directly dependent upon its appeal to the more literary burgher readers. While the dedicatory preface to Ciceronis Amor would seem to indicate that Greene was writing for an audience of aristocratic courtiers, in all probability a work such as this one would have been equally attractive to the London citizens. Ciceronis Amor has all of the verbal elegance necessary to capitalize on the court faddishness that was in part responsible for Euphues's initial success, but it also has a sufficiently substantial plot to enable it to compete with the tales of Emanuel Forde and other popular contemporary romancers. If the plot does not have the same emphasis on chivalric adventure as do those of Forde, it has a love interest that would make it especially enticing to female readers. Critics since Jusserand have noted that several important works of Elizabethan prose fiction, by Lyly, Pettie, Fenton, and others, seem to have been directed primarily to an audience of women. Ciceronis Amor is not so obviously oriented toward one sex or the other, but it is certain that a lady, either of the court or of the city, would enjoy the chastely amorous wooing in the book and would be pleased when the narrator recognizes her presence in addressing the "courteous Ladies and braue gentlemen" who are reading his story (p. 188).

All this raises some larger issues concerning what Greene's audience, and Greene, would have said was the justification of a piece of fiction like Ciceronis Amor. The title page carries the Horatian precept: Omne Tulit punctum qui miscuit vtile dulce.⁸ The idea that pleasure and profit should be mixed was a standard critical tenet in English literature for several centuries, one to which everyone paid at least lip service. If Greene (even during the early part of his career) or one of his readers was pressed to explain it, however, he might well have said that what really mattered was the useful, the inculcation of moral virtue via the written word for the betterment of society and one's immortal soul. But, like humans in all ages, their desires and their practices did not always accord too well with their professed system of ethics, and what they in fact read most eagerly was probably literature whose rewards were distinctly those of pleasure. This is not to say that the popularity of Ciceronis Amor indicates that its readers took it to be nothing more than mindless entertainment (as we shall see, its friendship theme touched upon an important issue in Renaissance values), but there can be little doubt that, from the gloomy Puritan religious tracts that were so much in evidence, they would have turned to it for an hour or two of amusement and relaxation that carried little threat of damnation. In the dedication to Greene's Vision, the author apologizes for the "laciuious Pamphleting" by which he earned a living for several years and asks pardon if his writing has offended his readers. The apology seems superfluous, to say the least, for there is absolutely no prurience, no amorality in Greene's fiction; there is plenty of amatory talk and some outright lust, but in the end evil is always punished, virtue rewarded, and chastity either preserved or, more frequently, replaced by wedded bliss.

II

Today, Ciceronis Amor should be safe from the type of criticism that it once would have had to face. No longer considered to be novelists manqués, Greene and most of the other Elizabethan authors of prose fiction are now customarily read as romancers. Northrop Frye's influence in bringing about this change has been pronounced. The criteria by which he has delimited the romance as a literary type and separated it from the novel are extremely useful in the understanding of early English fiction: stylized characters who expand into psychological archetypes, improbability of motivation, and a setting unrepresentative of everyday reality.⁹

Ciceronis Amor possesses all these qualities of nonrealistic fiction. There is, it is true, some attempt to create and maintain a setting (perhaps a more serious attempt than in any of Greene's earlier fiction, most of which is substantially unlocated in time and space), but this effort is confined mainly to a liberal sprinkling of Roman personal and place names. No one is ever going to go to Ciceronis Amor to learn anything about Cicero's Rome—the texture of social background here is simply too thin. Furthermore, there is considerable historical conflation present in this romance, both in small specific details and in larger socioliterary concepts. An example of the former is the presence of a clock in a Roman household (p. 114) many centuries before its development. This type of conflation is relatively unimportant, however; it is the latter type that is of greater critical significance. In this matter the vocabulary can be a good index of what is going on. At one point in the narrative, Greene labels his protagonist Lentulus, Cicero's friend, a "cavalier" (p. 109) and at another a "courtier" (p. 199). In so doing, he is adding elements that are distinctly medieval to his Roman narrative. And, when the facts are considered carefully and Ciceronis Amor is compared to other sixteenth-century fiction, it becomes clear that the story Greene is telling here is a Western European, postclassical tale which has been deliberately placed in a classical setting. Elements of medieval chivalry were popular in Elizabethan romances (e.g., Lodge's Rosalind), for they were an effective means of distancing the archetypally idealized characters and actions from the Elizabethan present. Greene wants to be able to avail himself of aspects of this medieval social tradition—a tradition, it must be remembered, which had virtually created the concept of romantic love—but he also wants the novelty of his Roman setting. So he simply combines the two, expecting his readers not to scruple unduly about courtiers in a nation without royal courts. His expectations were undoubtedly well-founded. Renaissance readers seem to have been far more interested in the extrahistorical aspects of characterization, plot, and style, than they were in factual accuracy.

There is little about the characterization in Ciceronis Amor that could be described as realistic. The three principal characters, Lentulus, Cicero, and Terentia, are all representative types—Lentulus of the successful general turned unsuccessful wooer, Cicero of the bright young commoner who earns social position by his wit, and Terentia of the girl whose extraordinary beauty is accentuated by her chastity. The same is true of the most significant minor character, Fabius, the rustic who is transformed by love into a gentleman. To our modern sensibilities, trained as they are by novels, this sort of characterization may not seem as appealing as the more picaresque variety practiced by Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveler (1594) or Deloney in Jack of Newberry (c. 1597).¹⁰ But there is a different intention in each of these pieces of prose fiction and each has a method of characterization appropriate to it. Eccentric quirks in the personality of Jack Wilton are very much a part of the whole digressive structure and style of The Unfortunate Traveler, but the smooth elegance of Ciceronis Amor clearly requires something else. In Greene's romance, the characters are stylized so that thematic importance and verbal ingenuity are not obscured by palpably human literary creations; rather, theme is explicitly revealed here through the characters so that when, at story's end, they are all brought together in social accord, there is a simultaneous knotting up of the book's various themes.

Lentulus is clearly more successful in this story as a military campaigner against the Parthians than he is as a suitor of Terentia. But this does not mean that he is merely a socially inept soldier. He is, in fact, nearly the ideal Renaissance courtier, complementing his military valor with learning and grace.¹¹ The reader, it is true, does not always see these more refined qualities in Lentulus directly, but nearly all of the other characters report that he has them. Terentia's father, Flaminius, for example, in enumerating to her all of the reasons why she should marry Lentulus (pp. 198–99), touches on all of the attributes of the perfectlyendowed man—his blood lines, record of national service, wealth, courage, handsomeness, and gentlemanly polish. The poem that Lentulus writes in praise of Terentia (Greene supplies two versions—a Latin "original" and an English translation) is fashionably, if anachronistically, Petrarchan, and when he engages Archias, a full-time poet, in a wit combat, he holds his own with ease. His only shortcoming emerges when he encounters the first rebuff of his life: Terentia rejects his suit, and the shock addles him considerably. Failure in love is something which he never anticipated, and it proves to be a wound which can be healed only by friendship.

The friendship is given by Cicero, the titular hero of the romance. He is the character who contributes a democratic note to the story, the young man of lowly origins (the historical Cicero was actually of reasonably high birth) who rises socially by dint of his eloquence and his amiability. Greene frequently idealizes a common man in his romances, but Cicero is a rather special case, for a character with his name obviously cannot be idealized in the same way that Greene had idealized Perymedes the blacksmith. Cicero here is exquisitely refined in everything except his attitudes toward his fellow men; in these, he retains a simple humility (again not particularly characteristic of the historical Cicero) and friendliness which prevent him from becoming an insufferable upstart.

The title page promises the prospective reader that one of the rewards of perusing the book will be the discovery of the superiority of friendship to the adoration of feminine beauty. It is dubious that the claim is fulfilled, but this is not to say that the ideal of friendship is slighted. In fact, it probably receives favorable attention nearly equal in amount to that given to love. As was noted a moment ago, it is friendship that finally pulls Lentulus out of his doldrums. The friendship that he shares with Cicero goes through several stages in the course of the narrative. At first, it seems that Lentulus is interested primarily in getting to know Cicero because he thinks that the orator's talents might be of use to him in winning Terentia. Cicero, however, is always genuinely attached to Lentulus: even when Terentia bluntly tells him that she loves only him, Cicero still holds out the hope that she might change her mind and love his friend Lentulus. The first indication that his fidelity to Lentulus is being reciprocated comes when he persuades Lentulus that he will do anything at all to help him if only the warrior will reveal what is making him so morose (pp. 143–45). Lentulus does, and in so doing begins to appreciate how much Cicero is willing to give up for the cause of friendship. Complete reciprocity is finally achieved when Lentulus reads Terentia's ultimatum to Cicero and understands the sacrifice that his friend is making for him (p. 205). From this point on, the generosity and affection that are the hallmarks of friendship bring about the same selflessness in Lentulus that was always present in Cicero, and this accord prepares the way for the happy resolution of the plot's love interest.

In presenting so favorably the positive values of friendship, Greene was placing himself squarely in the middle of an important current running through Renaissance literature. The notion that friendship was the highest possible bond between humans, higher than either the ties of kinship or of sexual love, was one which many authors picked up to repeat and, often, to study more carefully.¹² However frequently and sincerely these claims were put though, it nevertheless remains true that none of the major Renaissance authors, from Spenser in The Faerie Queene to Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen of Verona, finally proves the validity of the theory of superiority by presenting convincing examples in his characters. After discussing friendship, all of the authors return in their fiction to situations where we sense their deepest sentiments lie to love between man and woman. Robert Greene is no exception; friendship in Ciceronis Amor is not an end in itself, but rather is preliminary to another sort of caritas.

It is Terentia, of course, who is the focal point of romantic love. Through her, Greene presents the passions, confusions, frustrations, and finally joys of love between the sexes. From an adamant chastity, she moves to a single-hearted devotion to Cicero. She too is a stylized character, but not so much so that she has no human warmth. On the contrary, again and again, from her dutiful service to her father in the banquet scene near the beginning (pp. 115–16), to her impassioned plea on the last page, she shows all of the qualities of a sweet young girl who is making a difficult transition from one view of life to another. Critics have always been attracted to Greene's female characters and with good reason. In girls like Terentia, Fawnia of Pandosto, and Margaret of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, he has combined naive spontaneity and virtuous chastity. There are very few authors who are able to please our modern tastes with female characters who are both attractive and chaste. Shakespeare, to be sure, achieved it in his Portia and Isabella, but even so considerable a talent as Richardson failed with Pamela. In a Greene heroine vivaciousness and virtue are always so inextricable that we could never wish her otherwise.

Pruvost is surely right in observing that even though Greene's young ladies are viergès sages, they also are possessed of a remarkable self-confidence which enables them both to discretely encourage whatever suitor they favor and to act independently of their fathers' resolutions in the matters.¹³ Because Terentia does not hesitate to act according to her desire, because she does not fear to tell her father that "in loue, parentes haue no priuiledge…. for loue is chosen by the eye and confirmed by the heart" (p. 200), she becomes one of the first of a very notable group of Renaissance women, a group that was to include Juliet, Desdemona, and Sir Giles Overreach's daughter, Margaret. In a society (be it Roman or Elizabethan) where marriages were most often arranged by parents, their independence was a wish-fulfillment which could happen only in literature. But because it happened there, it can provide an artistic pleasure for our age as well as theirs.

A discussion of the revelation of theme through character leads naturally enough to a consideration of plot. Unlike its chronological neighbors in Greene's canon, Pandosto and Menaphon, Ciceronis Amor has a plot which is relatively straightforward and obvious. It is well known by now that in developing the narratives of the other two, Greene relied heavily on the structural principles of the Greek romance, on the works of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius. Menaphon and Pandosto, like the Greek stories, make liberal use of chance or fortune as a motivating force to tie together a loose series of events. Samuel L. Wolff has taken Greene sharply to task for this, calling him "Fortune's abject slave" and generally objecting that he relies too much on fortune to keep these stories going.¹⁴ We would not need to concern ourselves particularly with Wolffs accusations, were it not for the fact that he does not confine his criticism to Menaphon and Pandosto, but broadens it to include most of Greene's romances. Of Ciceronis Amor, he states that nearly everywhere in the story "Fortune is said to be, and is, busy at every turn."¹⁵ Wolff would have been much more accurate had he left out the parenthetical "and is." He is correct that there is much talk of Dame Fortune in the book—nearly every character mentions her at least once. But when the causes of the narrative's events are examined, it is seen that of those which are of any significance at all, only two cannot be attributed to human decisions, and one of these—Fabius's stumbling upon Terentia asleep in the grove—is the type of coincidental happening that one might expect in even a more realistic novel. The other exception is a more important one; it occurs at the beginning and involves Cupid's random arrow striking Lentulus so that this highly professional soldier forgets about the honors of war as soon as he hears the report of Terentia's beauty. So blatant a use of a deus ex machina starts the romance off shakily, but fortunately Cupid as a character soon is forgotten as other events begin to accumulate.

There are, to be sure, some improbabilities in the plot, but they are not without human causes. Love is one of these causes, one which might conceivably be mistaken for fortune by both characters and readers. It is love, for example, that moves Terentia to take a walk in the countryside in hope of meeting Cicero (pp. 168–69). More significant is the metamorphosis of Fabius (pp. 187–88). A curious transformation, it is explained by the narrator as the triumph of love over fortune. There is no reason to doubt that love was in fact what jolted Fabius out of his benign cloddishness (why he was dull can be attributed to "Fortune" as well as it can to anything else). It accords well with what seems to be the case, and it is also Fabius's own explanation; he says that he was "so surprised with [Terentia's] loue that … I haue gaind a seconde essence by hir sweete selfe" (p. 209). We should remember, of course, that the narrator's analysis is a part of the scene that is translated nearly verbatim from Boccaccio. Interestingly, the "borrowing" is terminated just before the last sentence of the episode—"Let vs then think of loue as of the most purest passion that is inserted into the heart of man." This final word is Greene's own and in effect signs his approval to what has gone before, but it also adds a slight amplification. The preceding sentences had spoken of love as a sudden divine intervention which, like the fortune it conquers, seemingly operates independently of the humans it affects. But the last sentence tends to shift the emphasis. Love is still of exalted origin, only it now remains in the heart as a passion, prepared to interact further with that person and, presumably, with the affections of another.¹⁶

This scene with Fabius and Terentia is finally also of interest to us insofar as it constitutes the last element in the larger episode of the pastoral interlude in the Vale of Love, an episode whose presence in the scheme of the romance is perhaps in need of justification. The old, and previously unchallenged, opinion here is that the Vale of Love is largely irrelevant, that it is dragged in merely to capitalize on the pastoral vogue which had entered English literature with Spenser's Shepheards Calender in 1579 and which had gained considerable impetus as the manuscript version of Sidney's Arcadia began to circulate.¹⁷ This view, however, ignores what should be fairly obvious about the scene in this idyllic valley, with its friendly shepherd and his tale of the courtship of Coridon and Phyllis—that this inset tale prefigures the happy conclusion of the affair between Terentia and Cicero and that the entire interlude influences Terentia to the extent that after it is over she frankly avows her love for Cicero and will not be told otherwise by anyone. What happens in the tale and its accompanying ode is, it will be recalled, the persuasion of a reluctant lover by an uncoy mistress, a persuasion exactly like the one that Terentia is going to have to work on Cicero. Terentia realizes this; when the tale and ode are over and the shepherd falls silent, we are told that it "touched hir passions" and that she began to grow "into the effects of loue that keepes no proportion of persons" (p. 184). She had been in the process of falling in love for some time, but she had been confused and uncertain as to what she should do. Now she can return to Rome with new self-confidence and a clearer understanding of what her passion means. The effect of this brief pastoral is thus very similar to that of longer pastorals in Lodge and Shakespeare; the characters find an ideal and an inner harmony in the "green world" which they can then apply to their problems in the "real world" and happily resolve their personal indecisions and crises. It is a matter for us of finding the correspondences between parallel fictional environments.

These techniques of imaginative fiction, then, clearly make it impossible for the reader to deal with Ciceronis Amor as even an approximation of biography. But this is no doubt just as Greene would have it. He as an author understands very well Sidney's warning in the Defense of Poesy that the historian is made captive by the "bare was." In this tale, he is determined to flirt with those historical limits solely from the outside, never choosing to enter them and submit himself to their rule.

Notes

¹Pandosto and A Notable Discovery in Merritt Lawlis, ed., Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Odyssey, 1967); Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969). The new edition has been proposed by the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham; it would replace the now-outdated Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, 15 vols. (1881–86; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964).

² René Pruvost, Robert Greene (Paris: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres d'Alger, 1938), p. 335.

³ Pagination is to Grosart's edition in Vol. VII of the Complete Works.

⁴ J. J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, trans. Elizabeth Lee, rev. ed. (London: Unwin, 1908), p. 106.

⁵ Tucker Brooke, "Greene and His Followers" in A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1967), p. 421. See also Edwin H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 92. It should be noted that in plays such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc (1561) the English drama had already employed "biography" as a basis for literature.

⁶ An early bibliographer, Samuel E. Bridges, Censuria Literaria (London: Longman, 1808), VIII, 388, also reports editions in 1592, 1615, and 1632, but, unless Bridges is in error, there are no known copies of these extant today.

⁷ "Best Sellers in Seventeenth-Century Fiction," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), 356–73. There were only nineteen works of fiction that went through more than ten editions between 1600 and 1700. The ones which receive most critical attention today are (in order of descending popularity): Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Pandosto, Deloney's Jack of Newberry and The Gentle Craft, Sidney's Arcadia, and Lyly's Euphues (no edition after 1636). The others are mostly older romances, full of adventure and lush, exotic description.

⁸ This was the motto that Greene used for his title pages until 1590. Then, as the nature of his fiction changed, so did his mottoes, to Nascimur pro patria and Sero sed serio, the former presumably reflecting what he took to be his patriotic motives in writing his "cony-catching" pamphlets and the latter his personal repentance.

⁹Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 304.

¹⁰ It is important to notice the dates of these works. The art of presentation of character developed rapidly in the 1590s, building on and branching out from the methods of Greene and Lyly.

¹¹ Cf. Samuel L. Wolff, "Robert Greene and the Italian Renaissance," Englische Studien, 37 (1907), 323, who claims that the ideal of the doubly-accomplished courtier finds no place in Greene's fiction.

¹² Spenser, for example, professed to see friendship triumphing over other contending relationships "no lesse then perfect gold surmounts the meanest brasse" (The Faerie Queene, IV.ix.2). For a listing of all the works in which this theme appears (the accompanying criticism, unfortunately, is not particularly perceptive), see Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia, 1937).

¹³ Pruvost, p. 576.

¹⁴The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1912), pp. 374–87. For a recent, and important, reconsideration of Wolff s views, see Davis, Idea and Act, pp. 138–88.

¹⁵ Wolff, Greek Romances, p. 374.

¹⁶ It is worth noting that this verdict on the nature of love is one of the very few judgments made by the narrator in Ciceronis Amor. Greene's penchant for narrative detachment has been noted in the past (Davis, p. 170; Pruvost, p. 343). Virtually the only judgments made on the characters and their actions in this romance are those which they make themselves and those which the reader makes as he responds to the text.

¹⁷ John C. Jordan, Robert Greene (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1912), p. 43; Wolff, "Italian Renaissance," p. 369.