SOURCE: "Greene," in The Elizabethan Prodigals, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 79–104.

No one will be surprised to find prodigality linked with the name of Robert Greene. Who can forget Harvey's account of his riotous life and miserable death, the penury, the loneliness, the pitiful plea for a cup of Malmsey wine?¹ Even the printer of Greene's last work saw him as a prodigal. "And forasmuch as the purest glass is the most brickie, the finest lawn the soonest stained, the highest oak the most subject to the wind, and the quickest wit the most easily won to folly, I doubt not but you will with regard forget his follies and, like to the bee, gather honey out of [his] good counsels."² This passage carries us from Harvey's colored facts into the realm of Euphuistic fiction. The language is Lyly's; the figure described a latter-day Euphues, quick witted, easily won to folly, transformed by repentance into a good counsellor.

Neither Harvey nor the printer invented the identification of Greene with the prodigal. Greene himself discovered and publicized this myth, and in so doing he replaced Euphues as the most popular Elizabethan representative of the type. But, unlike Euphues', Greene's was a particularly literary prodigality. He did of course make much of his dissolute life, his abandonment of his wife and his wanton behavior in London, but he regretted still more the vanity of his "amorous pamphlets." Thrice called back from the grave, by Henry Chettle in Kind-Heart's Dream (1592), by B. R. in Greene's News both from Heaven and Hell (1593), and by John Dickenson in Greene in Conceit (1598), he appears always in the guise of the repentant author, prohibited heaven, according to B. R., "for writing of books." But if writing damned him, it also saved him. He was "banished out of [hell] for displaying of conny-catchers." This appraisal of Greene's chances in eternity, borrowed from his own oft repeated judgment of himself, completes the pattern of prodigality. Satire serves an antidote to romance. The former wanton makes amends by warning others of the dangers he has known. Gascoigne did it; Euphues did it; and now Greene does it. But even Greene's admonition has particular application to the literary world. He directs his counsel "to those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plays" (XII, 141).

Greene was more a writer and less a courtier than the other university or inns of court men of his generation. Nothing in his career compares to Lyly's parliamentary service, to the military employment of Gascoigne, Rich, Whetstone, or Saker, to Gosson's advancement in the Church, to Lodge's adventuring, Sidney's work as a diplomat, or Harington's attendance at court. Nor does Greene seem to have written with an eye to preferment. "He made no account," Nashe tells us, "of winning credit by his works…. His only care was to have a spell in his purse to conjure up a good cup of wine with at all times."³ His works did have politically and socially prominant dedicatees, but he seems to have hoped from them no more than money. His real audience was the book-buying public. As long as that audience patronized romance, it mattered little to Greene that his writing might disqualify him from more respectable employment. This insouciance won him a literary freedom that most of his contemporaries lacked, a freedom that was, however, shortlived. For despite his apparent indifference to the expectations that usually accompanied a humanistic education, he was eventually overtaken by repentance and his abandoned self.

Why is so much Elizabethan fiction autobiographical? Part of the reason is self-advertisement, but part too may be guilt. As Paul Goodman has remarked, "The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves."⁴ Greene's career nicely illustrates this truism. As his guilt increased, so did his attention to himself, until, in one of the most remarkable passages in sixteenth-century fiction, he breaks off his Groatsworth of Wit to confess that he and his protagonist are one. "Hereafter suppose me the said Roberto" (XII, 137). And his last work, his Repentance, is explicit autobiography. Like Lyly, who identified himself with Euphues but not with Philautus, Greene enters his own fiction only when it records defeat. But before coming home to the guilty self, he went much further than Lyly had in the exploration of a romantic other.

Greene's career began in the shadow of The Anatomy of Wit. The style, action, and characters of his first work, Mamillia: A Mirror or Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England, are stamped with the likeness of Euphues.⁵ In its first pages we learn of the correspondence of the heroine, Mamillia, with the moral Florion. Like Euphues, Florion has been deceived in love and, as a result, has abandoned women. His advice to Mamillia closely resembles Euphues' to Livia. "It is a great virtue," he writes, counseling Mamillia to quit the court, "to abstain from pleasure" (II, 37).⁶ He warns her of the danger of love, of the fickleness of men, of "the substance of vice with the veil of virtue" (II, 37). She accepts his counsel, retires to her father's home, and bridles her passions with reason.

Such unprodigal docility would have left Lyly and the schoolmaster dramatists with no story to tell. But in Greene's fiction, whatever it may owe to Lyly, no care protects adequately against the perils of love and adverse fortune. Despite her mastery of precept, Mamillia succumbs to a wily deceiver. Greene's story thus suggests a disjunction between precept and experience quite foreign to Euphues. In Lyly's novel passion overturns precept and nature upsets nurture, but, if successfully adhered to, precept and nurture would guard one against the dangers of love. In Greene precept and nurture are equally irrelevant, and virtue, however resolute, provides no defense against vice. Virtue and vice are alike pawns in the hand of all-governing fortune, and in some stories fortune dispenses altogether with the instrument of passion, creating disorder by mere natural accident.

Greene's fiction does not, however, lack order. Vicious passion, though beyond effective human control, always meets with punishment and virtue quite often receives some reward. But, if Greene on occasion provides a happy ending, he rarely allows virtue to bring it about. Virtue remains as passive and powerless in victory as in defeat. The inhuman and impersonal force that does arrange accident into orderly patterns is time. Thus Pandosto is subtitled "The Triumph of Time" and the title page of Menaphon promises that here "are deciphered the variable effects of fortune, the wonders of love, the triumphs of inconstant time." In both stories an oracle guarantees that random fortune will eventually arrange the characters according to a predetermined pattern. In Menaphon the pattern is so obscure that "an old woman attired like a prophetess" comes on for the sole purpose of pointing out that the oracle has been accomplished. Not only are the characters incapable of working out their own happiness, they cannot even recognize it when it has been achieved for them. They are, as Greene often hints, players in a drama whose plot they ignore. In this senseless world where human action has neither significance nor effect, stoic resignation is the prime virtue.

Greene seems, at first at least, unaware of how far he has departed from the humanistic moral tradition which stood behind Euphues. Particularly in the earliest of his works, and occasionally even after, he indulges in didactic reflections wholly inappropriate to an action so completely dominated by fortune. He does, however, acknowledge another departure from the tradition of The Anatomy of Wit and its misogynous forebears. Mamillia openly defends women. It is a work "wherein with perpetual fame the constancy of gentlewomen is canonized and the unjust blasphemies of women's supposed fickleness (breathed out by diverse injurious persons) by manifest examples clearly infringed" (II, 139). Lyly's portrayal of Iffida and Camilla in Euphues and his England may have led the way, but Greene seizes on the theme with the eagerness of a man who has found a cause both popular and suited to the kind of fiction he wanted in any case to write—fiction which prizes the feminine virtue of passive resignation in the face of masculine brutality and the ravages of fortune.

As the women's stock goes up, the men's comes down. The typical villain in Greene is a masculine figure of authority, a father or husband, an elder or ruler. This too sets him against Lyly and the writers of prodigal son plays. In the education drama, in Macropedius and Stymmelius and the English writers prior to Gascoigne, the parents were often guilty, but of excessive kindness rather than cruelty. And one older figure, the schoolmaster or good counselor, was always there to represent true wisdom. Similarly in Lyly the elder generation is both sympathetic and wise. Eubulus, Ferardo, the hermit, Fidus's father, and Lady Flavia all stand for positive values, though from the antiromantic Eubulus to the matchmaking Lady Flavia the character of those values changes markedly. Much the same sympathy attaches to the older people in Mamillia, but in his succeeding work Greene abandons this benevolent view of authority. A conflict between established, but abusive authority and youth soon comes to occupy the dramatic center of his fiction. Greene found this theme first in the Apocrypha, in the story of Susanna and the Elders, which he embellished with the usual Euphuistic ornaments and presented as the Mirror of Modesty (1584), and then in Greek romance and various Italian novelle.⁷ All three sources taught Greene the art of leading up to an elaborate and often violent confrontation between the figures of authority and their victims. One of his stories ends with the murder of a father by his long-suffering daughter, another with an armed combat between father and son, still a third with a fight between father, grandfather, and son. Pandosto and Menaphon each lead to the attempted rape of a daughter by her father, while the second story of the Planetomachia ends with a father executing his son for sleeping with his stepmother, whom the father had married in opposition to the son's sage advice.

What place can there be in this topsy-turvy world for the gravely moral story of the prodigal son? Greene reverses most of its assumptions. Precept is of no relevance to experience. Action results from either passion or fortune, forces over which the individual exercises no moral control. Woman is exalted and her chief virtue, stoic resignation, which is the opposite of the active, civic virtue championed by the humanists, celebrated. Nor does Greene maintain the humanists' conservative belief in the wise and benevolent order of society. Parents, who in Greene are most often rulers as well, are unjust, tyrannical, even unnatural. Another of the humanists' prime tenets, that nurture is superior to nature, is ignored. Greene rarely mentions nurture. His characters appear on the scene with no hint as to how they became what they are. Only Pandosto and Menaphon describe the process of growing up, and there Fawnia and Pleusidippus are unmistakeably royal despite their rustic environment.

At this point one might ask, "Why bother contrasting these two traditions? Isn't Greene's fiction, with its obvious debts to Greek romance and the Italian novella, simply irrelevant to the didactic pattern of prodigality?" Had Greene been content to leave the two traditions apart, had he been willing not to mix moral profit with romantic pleasure, there would be little reason for our doing so. But he was not. Like Lyly, who hung on to the prodigal son story even in Euphues and his England, Greene found it, if not indispensable, then very nearly so. It embodied a set of attitudes too prevalent to be dismissed. Greene was, as I have suggested, freer than Lyly and could on occasion escape, as he does in Menaphon (1589) to an Arcadian world of the pure aesthetic—an escape sanctioned perhaps by the reputation of Sidney's Arcadia, though probably neither Greene nor his friends had actually read Sidney's still unpublished romance.⁸ Had they read it, particularly in its first version, they would have found that not even Sidney could quite avoid the moral pattern. But unless they hazarded some such flight into the realm of pure beauty and pure accident, Greene and his contemporaries were stuck with a reality that included the paternal warning of moral consequence. The question for them was not whether to adopt that pattern, but rather, accepting it as given, how either to get around it or to refute it. Greene tries one of these strategies in The Card of Fancy (1584), the other in Pandosto (1588).⁹

The Card of Fancy begins with the prodigal son story, though modified in accordance with Greene's altered sense of things. The tyrannous Duke Clerophantes of Metelyne has two children, a beautiful and virtuous daughter, Lewcippa, and a son, Gwydonius, handsome and witty but given over to prodigality. Clerophantes remonstrates with his son whose impertinent response echoes Euphues' to Eubulus: "You old men most unjustly, or rather injuriously, measure our stayless mood by your staid minds" (IV, 17). He announces that he plans to leave the court and spend his days in travel. His father, unlike the loving and wise elders of the education drama, rejoices at ridding himself of his troublesome son so easily, and heartily recommends travel as the best way of choosing "what course of life is best to take." One can "buy that by experience which otherwise with all the treasure in the world he cannot puchase" (IV, 19), he says, reversing the opinion of Erasmus and Ascham. He does not, however, let his son go without giving him a lengthy dose of sounder paternal advice—the standard counsel of moderation with which we are by now thoroughly familiar—which he caps with the presentation of a ring having as its posy "praemonitur premunitur," forewarned is forearmed. All this Gwydonius disregards. It does not take long for experience to bring him to repentance. He establishes himself in the city of Barutta where the citizens "noted him for a mirror of immoderate life and a very pattern of witless prodigality" (IV, 24). Made suspicious by his extravagant expenditure, they imprison him. Abandoned by all, he quickly comes around. "Alas (quoth he) now have I bought that by hapless experience which, if I had been wise, I might have got by happy counsel" (IV, 25).

Here then, aside from the obvious unworthiness of the hero's father and the lack of any mention of the son's education, is a prodigal son story of the most conventional sort. We are, however, only on page twenty-five of a two hundred page romance. Before being reconciled to his father, Gwydonius must experience adventures of a very different kind, a brief account of which will serve both as a demonstration of the fraudulence of Greene's humanistic pretentions in this book and as an example of his plot making throughout this early phase of his career. Instead of returning home to beg his father's forgiveness, Gwydonius goes to Alexandria where, thinking him a poor gentleman, the good Duke Orlanio takes him into his service. Orlanio has a daughter, Castania, with whom Gwydonius naturally falls in love. After an almost interminable rhetorical courtship, his affection is returned and they secretly swear their devotion to one another. Meanwhile, "Fortune, minding to bewray her mutability, brought it so to pass" that Orlanio neglected to pay the annual tribute owing to the Duke of Metelyne, Gwydonius' father. The bloodthirsty Clerophantes threatens war, so Orlanio's son Thersandro is sent to Metelyne to negotiate a settlement. The only positive result of his embassy is that he meets and falls in love with Gwydonius's sister. All would now be well were Clerophantes not intent on war, but "he, as a man having exiled from his heart both piety and pity, bathed his hands in guiltless blood" (IV, 173). He marches his troops to the gates of Alexandria where, after an indecisive battle, they decide to settle the war by single combat. The fierce Clerophantes choses to defend his own cause. Orlanio, not being a fighting man, proclaims that he will give any champion who fights victoriously for Alexandria his daughter Castania in marriage and the Duchy of Metelyne, including the annual tribute, as her dowry. Gwydonius, who had fled into exile after his identity was revealed by a rejected suitor of Castania, hears this news and returns to seek to win his love by fighting his father. Disguised in the armor of Thersandro, Gwydonius enters the lists incapacitated by the inward struggle between "love and loyalty, nature and necessity" (IV, 190). Finally, after passively fending off his father's thrusts, he is moved by love to make a single blow with which he unhorses his antagonist. He reveals himself, is embraced by the warring dukes, claims Castania as his bride, and returns the Duchy of Metelyne into the hands of his reformed and repentant father.

The prodigal son episode thus introduces an action very unlike it in character. Rather than sending him repentant back to his father, love prepares Gwydonius to work his father's reform. Disorder comes not from the son, but from the father. While the children make love, their fathers make war. And in the end love triumphs bringing reconciliation and peace. But love, unlike moral precept, is not a rational tool. None of the young people uses it to bring about peace. They are used by it. Even Gwydonius, who in the final scene is aware of the whole situation, undertakes to fight his father with no larger aim than that of winning Castania. Like the characters in Menaphon, these are figures in a formal pattern worked out by fortune and Greene for our entertainment. Two fathers, dukes of adjoining territories, each with a son and a daughter, the sons and daughters paired in loving couples—the symmetry is too neat for a world controlled by anything but an agency beyond rational comprehension. The action thus belies the promise of the title. Greene's fiction is not a card of fancy, an anatomy of love, but an illustration of love's benevolent power. The threatening terms of the title page, "wherein the folly of those carpet knights is deciphered which, guiding their courses by the compass of Cupid, either dash their ship against most dangerous rocks or else attain the haven with pain and peril," ring hollow. There is nothing behind them. After the introductory episode from the tradition of the prodigal son, Greene neglects his moralizing.

The weakness of the Card of Fancy is that the romantic fails to subsume the didactic. The two elements do not come together in any coherent design. The lesson of moderation which Gwydonius presumably learned from his unhappy experience in Barutta is not so much reversed as forgotten. Nor is the conflict of reason and fancy in the second part more than apparent. For Gwydonius the way of love is also the way of prudence, and he knows it. Castania is not only beautiful, but rich and well-born. The bar which separates them, Gwydonius's base estate, is the meretricious instrument of the plot. At any time before the outbreak of hostilities between their fathers, he could reveal his true identity, making him her equal and a prudent match. In Barutta he wasted not his inheritance, but only his spending money. That he, the heir to the Duchy of Metelyne, should despair at great length and with much eloquence that "my ambition [is] above my condition" is nonsense. It takes from the rhetoric any but a pretense of meaning, reducing it to mere ornamentation.

In Pandosto Greene does successfully join in a single romantic vision a similar story of quarrelling parents and loving children with material from the didactic tradition. Like the Card of Fancy, Pandosto consists of two episodes that might have been told as separate stories. But though one is tragic, and the other comic, the two episodes inhabit the same moral universe. In both can be found the typical characteristics of Greene's fiction. A passion beyond the control of reason motivates the action of each part, and time, rather than any human agent, resolves the conflicts. Each part presents the persecution of innocent and helpless virtue by abusive authority, and in each a patiently suffering woman represents moral excellence. And here Greene allows the prodigal son motif, which he weaves into the second part, no independent admonitory life. It expresses not the usual humanistic morality, but the triumph of love.

Greene achieves his romantic remaking of the prodigal son story, much as Lyly did in Euphues and his England, by discovering a rightness in the passionate desires of youth; but his pastoralism better represents the abandonment of identity which inescapably accompanies rebellion than does Lyly's courtliness, and his protagonist is ethically more serious than Philautus. Dorastus does reject his father's advice—in this case that he avoid the folly of youth by marrying a princess of the father's choosing—but he rejects it unwillingly. Neither a hapless dupe, like so many of the prodigals in the education drama, nor an open and insolent rebel, like Euphues, Dorastus finds, despite himself, "that he could not yield to that passion whereto both reason and his father persuaded him" (IV, 273–274). And when he meets and falls in love with the seeming shepherdess, Fawnia, he is no less troubled. "Cursing love that had wrought such a change and blaming the baseness of his mind that would make such a choice," his whole rational and moral being cries out against loving one so far beneath him.

Euphistic fiction is known for its exercises in the rhetoric of the divided mind, but Pandosto is almost alone in making the conflict dramatically convincing. Here we don't feel, as we usually do both in Lyly and elsewhere in Greene, that the character merely reads a leaf torn from the author's commonplace book. The minds and affections of the Euphuists were, I think, divided, but none depicted the division as well as Greene. In Dorastus, love opposes not a collection of glib platitudes, but the very structure of his conscious being. Unlike Gwydonius, Dorastus has no reason to suspect the essential prudence of love. He does not know that Fawnia is a princess, nor does she. In giving himself over to fancy, he thus sacrifices his sense of himself, and Greene makes us feel something of the agony of that sacrifice.

Pastoral provided Greene an image of the deprivation of identity. To win Fawnia, Dorastus must abandon the outward signs of his rank and assume the dress of a shepherd. But, unlike the usual prodigal, who changes in appearance, as in mind, without realizing it, Dorastus constantly suffers from the impropriety of his new guise. "Thou keepest a right decorum," he tells himself, "base desires and homely attires. Thy thoughts are fit for none but a shepherd, and thy apparel such as only become a shepherd" (IV, 287). He judges himself just as his father would, for his values and his father's are identical. But the story itself takes a larger and more tolerant view, allowing, and even celebrating, Dorastus' unfilial abnegation of identity.

Refusing to distinguish between culpable lust and innocent love, the more conservative humanists regarded metamorphosis as a Circean retribution that necessarily followed the surrender of one's will to fancy, an inescapable descent toward bestiality. Greene was to adopt a similarly punitive notion in Alcida (1589), making it one of the earliest evidences of his attempt to reassert moral respectability. In Pandosto, however, and in the other works most directly influenced by the pastoral tradition, he expressed a quite different attitude toward the transforming power of love. Most simply, his idea is that in losing oneself, in giving oneself up to the sway of passion, one finds oneself more fully than ever before. Ciceronis Amor, published a year after Pandosto, illustrates the conceit most fully.¹⁰ In a valley "most curiously decked with Flora's delicates," a place known to shepherds as "the vale of love," Fabius, the foolish son of a Roman senator, is transformed from his doltish ways by the sight of the heavenly beauty of Terentia. He returns to Rome and devotes himself to learning, soon becoming "expert in all gentle and manlike exercise." Greene explains this sudden alteration:

The high virtues of the heavens infused into this noble breast were imprisoned by the envious wrath of fortune within some narrow corner of his heart, whose bands, went asunder by love, as a lord too mighty for fortune, Cupid, the raiser up of sleepy thoughts, dispersed those virtues into every part of his mind obscured before with the eclipse of base thoughts. Let us then think of love as of the most purest passion that is inserted into the heart of man.

(VII, 188–189)

In Pandosto love likewise opposes fortune, which had concealed Fawnia's royal nature just as it had Fabius' "high virtues," and love effects Dorastus' passage from filial dependence to autonomy in adult society.

Success is not, however, immediate. Symbolic rejection of identity leads first to the loss of property and freedom, as the disguised Dorastus is imprisoned by Pandosto. Like all his prodigal forebears reduced to similar straits, he recalls his father's advice. "But poor Dorastus lay all this while in close prison … sorrowing sometimes that his fond affection had procured him this mishap, that by the disobedience of his parents he had wrought his own despite" (IV, 308–309). Nevertheless, he does not repent. And the story soon rewards his tenacious rebellion with liberty, a bride, and a kingdom, revealing that the intuition of his love was truer than the prudent wisdom of his father.

Thus in Pandosto Greene rights the argument of comedy set on its head by the schoolmaster dramatists, though he does it without abandoning their favorite story. The initial scene of paternal advice, the rejection of that advice, the surrender to love, the loss of goods and position, the recollection in suffering of the father's counsel, all this Pandosto shares with the didactic tradition. But the lesson of Pandosto is that the pattern of loss should be neither avoided nor repented. However painful, it is a necessary rite of passage, a way from childhood to maturity, from one stable identity to another. Pandosto, who unlike Dorastus, had "resisted in youth," pays the price by yielding in age to jealousy and incestuous lust, passions of an unconfirmed self. Though Greene leaves this insight unexplored, and thus later inaccessible to reason when it might have served to defend romance, he does seem intuitively aware of passion's place in the temporal scheme of a man's life. It is in something like this developmental sense that we can best understand the subtitle of Pandosto, "the triumph of time." Where the humanists had hoped to annul time, through repentance if necessary, making son's time and father's time the same, Greene allows their essential difference, which is not to say that he entertained an idea of progress, of sons bettering their fathers. Once the pattern of son's time is played out, the son becomes like his father. Youthful rebellion restores a fundamentally stable and unchanging society.

To allow rebellion even so much went against the grain of humanistic admonition. But when Greene wrote Pandosto in the mid 1580's, a quarter century of relative social tranquillity had taken some of the edge off those warnings. To Greene and his fellows the world looked considerably less dangerous than it had to their fathers. But with the renewal of military and religious conflict in the last years of the decade, the forces of moral right thinking reasserted themselves and brought Greene to repentance.

The central conflict of Pandosto, the conflict between reason and folly, faced Greene as a writer of prose fiction. Was he to write for profit or for pleasure? Dorastus' lament at discovering that he loved a shepherdess must have been the cri du coeur of many of Greene's contemporaries who found themselves unable to reconcile their humanistic morality with their desire to read and to write romantic tales which violated that morality in every way. "Thy thoughts cannot be uttered without shame nor thy affections without discredit" is a sentiment that echoed in them as they wrote defensive prefaces to tales they suspected indefensible.

Romance is the subconscious of Renaissance story telling. It was harshly repressed by the mid-century moralists. Ascham attacked both chivalric romance and the newer Italian novella, which first appeared in England in the translations of Painter and Fenton as the Schoolmaster was being written. "What toys the daily reading of such a book [as the Morte Arthur] may work in the will of a young gentleman or a young maid that liveth wealthily and idly, wise men can judge and honest men do pity. And yet ten Morte Darthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England."¹¹

But romance could not be eliminated. Romantic tales were told, perhaps with a sense of guilt, but they were told nevertheless. The men who told them were obviously embarrassed. They sought to justify their liberation of those narrative forces which in the less troubled England of Elizabeth's reign could no longer be repressed, but with little success. The only conceptual frame readily available to them, as to Dorastus in his perplexity, was the humanists' own morality which distinguished so sharply between rational virtue and irrational vice. Against such a standard, these stories could only be judged vicious. The natural defense of them, the one adopted by Painter, Gascoigne, and Pettie, was that they might serve as negative examples—as warnings against the vice they portray. Ascham's analysis would have made short work of such an argument. A story, unlike a book of doctrine, acts not on the mind, which might be protected by reason, but directly on the will.

Where will inclineth to goodness the mind is bent to truth; where will is carried from goodness to vanity the mind is soon drawn from truth to false opinion. And so the readiest way to entangle the mind with false doctrine is first to entice the will to wanton living. Therefore, when the busy and open papists abroad could not by their contentious books turn men in England fast enough from truth and right judgment in doctrine, then the subtle and secret papists at home procured bawdy books to be translated out of the Italian tongue, whereby overmany young wills and wits, allured to wantonness, do now boldly condemn all severe books that sound to honesty and godliness. (P. 68)

Other writers, perhaps more honest than those who claimed moral profit for their stories, but no less ill at ease, flaunted the want of didactic use which characterized the tales they told. There is something of this bravado in Painter and Pettie's titles; they proclaim their works palaces of pleasure. The bravado is still more evident in Barnaby Rich's defense of his Farewell to Military Profession. "For mine own excuse herein I answer that in the writing of [these stories] I have used the same manner that many of our young gentlemen useth nowadays in the wearing of their apparel—which is rather to follow a fashion that is new, be it never so foolish, than to be tied to a more decent custom that is clean out of use." Rich goes on to satirize foolish fashions in apparel, obliquely satirizing at the same time his own fashion of writing. He can ward off criticism only by admitting himself, if not a villain, at least a fool. What Rich counts on, and what none of the other writers doubts, is that this sort of story will give pleasure.¹²

Following fashion, Greene moves from the first of these positions to the second. He begins by advertising his love pamphlets as warnings against love. Mamillia teaches "how gentlemen under the perfect substance of pure love are oft inveigled with the shadow of lewd lust" (II, 3). Gwydonius is a "card of fancy." The Planetomachia (1585) discovers "the inward affections of the mind … painting them out in such perfect colors as youth may perceive what fond fancies their flourishing years do foster" (V, 3). But with Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588) there is a new note; the profit becomes an adjunct of the pleasure. Perimedes teaches how to pass the time pleasantly telling stories, "how best to spend the weary winter's nights, or the longest summer's evenings in honest and delightful recreation" (VII, 3). Pandosto and Menaphon are presented as mere illustrations of the power of time and fortune. A marked decrease in the amount of moral reflection scattered through the story accompanies this change in Greene's announced intention. The decrease begins as early as the Card of Fancy, continues in Perimedes, and culminates in Pandosto and Menaphon, where authorial precept disappears entirely. And along with the waning of didacticism goes a falling off in the number of typically Euphuistic figures. In Gwydonius Lyly's rhetoric is still the constant vehicle of meditation and dialogue, but Pandosto adopts it only as an occasional decoration, and Menaphon explicitly announces its demise. As Henry Upchear wrote in praise of Menaphon,

It was not only Lyly's rhetoric but his kind of fiction, the didactic story in which ideas were more important than action, which had gone out of style.

In 1589, the appearance of Thomas Nashe's Anatomy of Absurdity, following on the sobering scare of the Armada, signaled another change in fashion. Nashe's Anatomy is first a satire on women and those who praise them, "a brief confutation of the slender imputed praises to feminine perfection." It is next an attack on the authors of romantic fiction. "Are they not ashamed in their prefixed posies to adorn a pretence of profit mixed with pleasure, whenas in their books there is scarce to be found one precept pertaining to virtue, but whole quires fraught with amorous discourses, kindling Venus's flame in Vulcan's forge, carrying Cupid in triumph, alluring even vowed vestals to tread awry, enchanting chaste minds and corrupting the continentest."¹³ It is hard not to see Greene in this image of absurdity. He was the self-proclaimed champion of women and the most prolific author of love pamphlets of the decade. That Nashe was no contemptible precisian, but a graduate of Greene's own college, St. John's, Cambridge (which years before had also been Ascham's college), and a fellow university wit in London (Nashe had written a preface to Menaphon) only makes it more likely that his satire represented a segment of fashionable opinion which Greene would respect.

Even had Greene been less a slave to fashion, Nashe's criticism is of a sort that he was unprepared to ward off. Though he had been successful, particularly in Pandosto, in creating a fiction which might dispute the claims of the moralists, he was not able to conceptualize his defense of love. He came closest to doing so, as we have seen, in the episode of Fabius's transformation by love in Ciceronis Amor. The Neoplatonism that there and elsewhere provides an occasional idea was not, however, maintained consistently. Herschel Baker, writing of the use made of Neoplatonic doctrine in the Renaissance, has said that, "as a Neoplatonist, one could revel in the sensuous beauty of the physical world and all the while have as his ultimate goal the beauty and virtue of the spirit."¹⁴ This worked for Greene only so long as he was able to divorce his fiction from the claims of utile. Neoplatonism could never compete as a rationally defensible moral system. Nor could it, in fact, have been easily made to fit the reality of Greene's fiction. In some stories, like Gwydonius or Pandosto, love is successful; but in many others it is unfortunate and even tragic, fully justifying its condemnation. And even those where it succeeds contain counterevidence. Gwydonius is successful in love, but Valericus, Castania's rejected suitor, is not. In Pandosto both Dorastus and Pandosto love Fawnia. Both condemn their love and in much the same terms, as opposed to virtue and honor. Yet Dorastus' love is an inspired intuition that leads to a match more ideally suitable than even the wholly reasonable one suggested by his father; Pandosto's love is, on the other hand, a damnably incestuous lust which drags him down to despair and suicide. Is love a blessing or a curse? It can be either and so can be embraced by no rational system of ethics.

Thus, once subjected to criticism, repentance became inevitable for Greene. It began with a wavering repudiation of his defense of women. His Alcida, registered December 9, 1588, several months before the publication of the Anatomy of Absurdity, exposes the three cardinal vices of women—pride, inconstancy, and prattle—vices which oppose the three virtues illustrated in the earlier Penelope's Web—obedience, chastity, and silence.¹⁵ But Ciceronis Amor and Menaphon, neither of which contain any trace of this fugitive misogynism, quickly succeeded these pallid and unconvincing stories. Greene took a more definite step in his Orpharion (registered February 9, 1590).

The title page announces that Orpharion contains "the glorious praise of womankind," and so it does. But it also contains a satire on women. The narrator has been travelling from one of Venus' shrines to another seeking a remedy for love. "I heard many counsels and read many precepts but all in vain" (XII, 14). Finally, on the slope of Mt. Erecinus he is granted a dream vision of the mansion of the gods. There the immortals are involved in a dispute over the value of love. To aid them in their determinations they call Orpheus and Arion up from Hades. The two poets disagree. Orpheus attacks love and tells a story intended to prove the distructive pride of women. Arion answers, defending his praise of women with the story of the chaste Argentina. Mercury reasonably suggests that the true nature of woman is a mean between these extremes. The vision has, however, a less ambiguous effect on the narrator. "Calling to mind the occasion of my journey, I found that either I had lost love, or love lost me, for my passions were eased. I left Erecinus and hasted away as fast as I could, glad that one dream had rid me of fancy, which so long had fettered me" (XII, 94). So far as the narrator is concerned, Orpheus' misogynous arguments have carried the day….

Repentance for Greene means turning back to the self, a self defined by biblical fable and humanistic morality. It means too repudiating romance with its image of another self and its toleration of women, love, and folly. Metamorphosis is again only destructive. The courtesans in the Mourning Garment are Circes; they "turn vain glorious fools into asses, gluttonous fools into swine, pleasant fools into apes, proud fools into peacocks, and, when they have done, with a great whip scourge them out at doors" (IX, 163–164). Any deviation from reason, from the received rules of conservative morality, can lead only to inner and outer loss, a descent into bestiality. So at least Greene would now have us believe.

There is no doubt that the milieu in which these stories exist is thoroughly moralized. The title pages, dedications, addresses to the reader, and authorial intrusions all speak with one voice. But, when we look more closely, we discover a hesitancy in Greene's repentance. Even he confesses that these reformed works are to be classed with his "amorous pamphlets." At the end of Never Too Late he writes, "And therefore, as soon as may be, Gentlemen, look for Francesco's further fortunes and after that my Farewell to Folly, then adieu to all amorous pamphlets" (VIII, 109). He calls the Mourning Garment "the first of my reformed passions" and "the last of my trifling pamphlets" (IX, 222). Again, a year later, he writes in his Farewell to Folly (1591) that "it is the last I mean ever to publish of such superficial labors" (IX, 229)—and so it was. But this lingering farewell suggests that, though he might introduce a moral commentary and might reform the story of the prodigal son, his basic romantic conception of fiction resisted change.

In Orpharion the love-forsaken narrator responds onesidedly to the stories he hears. Arion's praise of women might as well have convinced him as Orpheus' blame. And it is rather Orpheus' tale, based on the Orlando Furioso, than Arion's which derives from the romance tradition.¹⁸ Arion's tale, as René Pruvost has remarked, "participe à la fois du fabliau et de l'exemplum" (p. 326). The narrator is thus reformed by a romantic, if somewhat misogynous, tale and not by a more obviously didactic one. Something of the same anomaly can be observed in Greene's Vision. On close examination the Vision appears as much a covert defense of Greene's earlier work as a repentance for it. Chaucer's tale is, the narrator informs us, just the sort of thing found in the much abused Cobbler of Canterbury. It is not at all like what Greene wrote. It is a fabliau, Greene's first. Gower's tale is, on the other hand, just what we have come to expect from Greene. It closely resembles his two earlier tales of jealousy, Pandosto and Philomela not only in its narrative style, but in its presentation of the heroine as inflexibly chaste and loyal despite the insane suspicion of her husband. In preferring Gower over Chaucer, Greene is not so much rejecting the folly of his youth as preferring the kind of story he had always written over the kind to which he was to turn in his cony-catching pamphlets.

The other works of this "repentance group" show much the same inconsistency. The tale of Francesco's prodigality, on which the palmer bases most of his didactic commentary, is only one of four loosely related stories included in Never Too Late and its sequel, Francesco's Fortunes. The others could hardly be used as evidence for the same moral lesson. There is first the thoroughly romantic story of the love of Francesco and Isabel. When their reasonable and prudent passion is opposed by her tyrannical father, they elope in the dead of night. They are pursued, harassed, and Francesco is imprisoned; but true love finally triumphs. There is also the story of Isabel's heroic defense of her virtue, a word for word retelling of Greene's version of Susanna and the Elders from the Mirror of Modesty. There is finally the host's tale which, with its heroine's rejection of all three of her suitors, might be considered misogynous, but the point is never made. It is told solely for pleasure. And even the biblical Mourning Garment contains the pastoral tale of Rosamond, the virtuous shepherdess betrayed by a fickle shepherd.

Despite some remarkable surface changes, the romantic current of Greene's fiction flows unchecked, and repentance had always been part of that current, though before it had involved neither Greene nor the writing of fiction. With the exception of Maedyna in Ulysses' tale in the Censure to Philautus, Greene's female characters persist in either good or evil. But from the first his men have been subject to repentance. Pharicles in Mamillia repents for fear of exposure; Gwydonius in the Card of Fancy and Phillippo in Philomela repent as the result of a legal judgment of their guilt; Saladyne of Egypt and Calamus of Ithaca in the first and second tales of Penelope's Web repent because of a woman's virtue; King Psamnetichus in Saturn's tragedy in the Planetomachia and Pandosto repent and commit suicide when they discover the full implications of their lust. In the pattern of Greene's fiction repentance is to time as passion is to fortune. Fortune brings disorder, usually with the aid of passion, and time restores order, usually with the aid of repentance. Tragedy occurs when passion is not converted by repentance (Venus's tragedy in the Planetomachia), or when repentance comes too late (Arbasto, Saturn's tragedy, Pandosto).

Maxims repeated throughout Greene's fiction warn that folly can end only in repentance. "He which is rash without reason seldom or never sleepeth without repentance" (Card of Fancy, IV, 77). "Better it is for a time with sorrow to prevent dangers than to buy fading pleasure with repentance" (Planetomachia, V, 58). Virtue buys "fame with honor," beauty breeds "a kind of delight but with repentance" (Penelope's Web, V, 139). The shepherd Menaphon sang of love,

Tis not sweet
That is sweet
Nowhere but where repentance grows.
(VI, 41)

And in the same work the narrator breaks in to give his opinion that love leaves "behind naught but repentant thoughts of days ill spent for that which profits naught" (VI, 140). This seeming inevitability is abrogated only for the few lucky young lovers whose passion leads to a prudent marriage—Gwydonius and Castania, Dorastus and Fawnia, and a handful of others. In the "repentance group" these exceptions become rare indeed, perhaps the only one being Francesco and Isabel in the first episode of Never Too Late—and Francesco's subsequent folly partially blights even their success.

Although repentance may at first seem a meaningful choice in a world where one has little control over one's destiny, there are increasingly prominent hints that it too, like love, jealousy, and the accidents of fortune, may be no more than a figure in the formal pattern that governs a man's life. The narrator of Orpharion concludes with the telltale remark, "I was overtaken with repentance" (XII, 94). In the early pages of the book he had reported seeing the temple of love where men entered rejoicing and left repenting. This is no longer a warning; it is a statement of fact, a fact which "overtakes" him at the end of the book. The poem which the palmer leaves with his listeners in Francesco's Fortunes suggests the same inevitability. It compares the course of love to the course of the sun passing through the zodiac. Love is a natural cycle, from youth to age, from folly to repentance.

What emerges is a determinist interpretation of prodigality and repentance like that of Acolastus, a play intended to illustrate the Lutheran notion of grace. Greene's work lacks this theological base, but in explaining his own repentances Greene does move toward radical Protestantism.¹⁹ His literary repentance was the child of fashion, and his personal repentance the work of God. In both he was merely a passive object. His long persistence in the folly of romantic storytelling he blames on the leniency of his readers. "Because that gentlemen have passed over my works with silence and have rid me without a spur, I have … plodded forward and set forth many pamphlets, full of much love and little scholarism" (IX, 221). One thinks of Calvin's image of man as a horse ridden by either God or the Devil and powerless to choose which.²⁰ As for the personal repentance, it came, he tells us, only in his final illness when God got into the saddle. "I was checked by the mighty hand of God, for sickness (the messenger of death) attacked me and told me my time was but short" (XII, 164). The thought that his life has shown no marks of God's predestined favor brings him to the edge of despair. Others "were elected and predestined to be chosen vessels of God's glory, and therefore though they did fall, yet they rose again, and did show it in time with some other fruits of their election" (XII, 169). But then, recalling God's promise of forgiveness to those who repent, he feels the movement of grace within him. "Thus," he concludes, "may you see how God hath secret to himself the times of calling, and when he will have them into his vineyard; some he calls in the morning, some at noon, and some in the evening, and yet hath the last his wages as well as the first, for as his judgments are inscrutable, so are his mercies incomprehensible" (XII, 180).

The inscrutable and incomprehensible world of this Calvinist God differs little from the world of Greene's romantic fiction with its accidents of fortune and its sudden reversals. In neither, strictly conceived, can precept have any force because the individual has no power to choose his destiny. Yet Greene continues to hope that the example of folly punished with guilt and repentance will keep others from following the like course. He admits that "it is bootless for me to make any long discourse to such as are graceless as I have been" and that "to such as God hath in his secret council elected, few words will suffice," but, he continues, "let my repentant end be a general example to all the youth in England to obey their parents, to fly whore-dom, drunkenness, swearing, blasphemy, contempt of the Word, and such grievous and gross sins" (XII, 179–180).

From our point of view, particularly given our acquaintance with a number of Greene's contemporaries, the paradox of an attachment to two seemingly irreconcilable views, the romantic and finally Calvinist view of an inscrutable world governed by forces unknowable to man and the humanistic view of a rational world in which man might govern himself by precept and example, is too easily resolved. Precept has bred its own necessity. What began as a warning of the folly of youth and the need for repentance soon becomes a description of the inevitable course of human existence. Repentance is the acceptance of this inevitability in one's own life. For nearly a decade Greene's heroes had heard the voice of their conscience warning that folly leads to repentance. For some it did. But for others, most notably Dorastus in Pandosto, apparent folly was revealed as a higher wisdom. The moral pattern was, however, too strong to be long resisted. At the first touch of the spur, Greene repented his literary folly and retold the prodigal's story in accordance with the pattern of defeat. In the Groatsworth of Wit he breaks off the tale of the prodigal Roberto to confess that it mirrors his own life.²¹ And in the Repentance he tells his life as a prodigal son story, from his disregard of his parents' "wholesome advertisements," through the excesses of his life in London, to his final, inevitable repentance.

The works that followed Greene's literary repentance were also part of the pattern. From prodigality, through repentance, to the service of mankind. Like Euphues, Greene becomes a satiric Eubulus. In his cony-catching pamphlets, his Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and his Groatsworth of Wit, he exposes the follies and vices which he came to know as a prodigal. Or so he claims. In fact, these works are for the most part catchpenny collections of jest book tales of a very conventional sort. But this only makes it more significant that he should have chosen to subsume them under the pattern of repentant prodigality. It was the one model which all experience, however varied, must eventually be made to fit.

Notes

¹Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, Especially Touching Robert Greene, ed. G. B. Harrison (1922–1926; rpt. New York, 1966), pp. 20–21.

²The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. (1881–1883; rpt. New York, 1964), XII, 155–156. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

³ Quoted by John Clark Jordan, Robert Greene (1915; rpt. New York, 1965), pp. 2–3.

⁴New York Review of Books, 10 (23 May 1968), 22.

⁵ Jaroslav Hornát, "Mamillia: Robert Greene's Controversy with Euphues," Philologica Pragensia, 5 (1962), 210–218.

⁶ Cf. Euphues: "They say to abstain from pleasure is the chiefest piety" (Ed. Croll and Clemons, p. 180). See also p. 65, above.

⁷ For Greene's use of Greek romance see Samuel L. Wolff, Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction (New York, 1912), pp. 367–458. René Pruvost discusses each of Greene's fictions in terms of its probable sources and closest analogues in his Robert Greene et ses romans (Paris, 1938).

⁸ See my "Lyly, Greene, Sidney, and Barnaby Rich's Brusanus," HLQ, [Huntington Library Quarterly] 36 (1972/73), 110 n. 9.

⁹ Though 1588 is the date of the earliest surviving edition of Pandosto, the book may have been written and published as much as four years earlier. An inventory of Roger Ward's Shrewsbury print shop, made in December 1584 or January 1585, includes among its entries "i9 Triumphe of time." There is good reason for identifying this as Pandosto: The Triumph of Time. The Short-Title Catalogue lists no other "Triumph of Time," and we do know that Ward had dealings with Greene. Included in his stock were "i Antomy [sic] of fortune" and "7 mirror of modestie"—i.e., one copy of Greene's Arbasto: The Anatomy of Fortune and seven copies of his Mirror of Modesty, both published in 1584, the Mirror by Ward himself. I am kept, however, from adopting this earlier date by the fact that Pandosto shares a number of passages with Greene's Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587), and the debt seems to be on Pandosto's side. I suspect that only a careful reconsideration of the whole Greene canon, with particular attention given to self-plagiarism and plagiarism from other authors, will allow us to reconcile these contradictory bits of evidence. Until such a reconsideration has been completed, I think it prudent to date Pandosto 1588. For the Ward inventory, see Alexander Rodger, "Roger Ward's Shrewsbury Stock: an Inventory of 1585," The Library, 5th Ser., 13 (1958), 247–268.

¹⁰ Walter Davis discusses the passage from Ciceronis Amor relating it to other pastoral romances (Idea and Act, pp. 76–78). Davis (pp. 78–79) seems, however, to underestimate the pastoral element of Pandosto.

¹¹Schoolmaster, ed. Ryan, p. 69.

¹²Rich's Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Thomas Mabry Cranfill (Austin, 1959), p. 204. Pettie (Petite Palace, ed. Hartman, p. 6) and Sidney (Prose Works, ed. Feuillerat, I, 4) also employ the self-depreciatory comparison of fiction and fashion. Another way of disarming critics common to Pettie, Lyly, Greene, and Sidney is to address one's work to gentlewomen readers—a simple way of announcing that one is dealing in trifles. A third possible line of defense which seems not to have occurred to Greene or to the translators of the novelle is to claim that the story conceals a moral allegory. This will be Harington's main argument in defending the Orlando Furioso (1591).

¹³The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (1904; rev. and rpt. Oxford, 1958), I, 10.

¹⁴ Baker, The Image of Man (1947; rpt. New York, 1961), p. 248.

¹⁵ Pruvost (p. 323) suggests that Greene may have seen Nashe's satire in MS. This is plausible, but not necessary for my argument. Greene may already have been worrying about his reputation before Nashe further endangered it….

¹⁸ Samuel L. Wolff, "Robert Greene and the Italian Renaissance," Englische Studien, 37 (1907), 346 n. 1.

¹⁹ This despite Greene's known distaste for the English Puritans. For a discussion of his part in the Marprelate Controversy see E. H. Miller, "The Relationship of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe (1588–1592)," PQ, [Philological Quarterly] 33 (1954), 353–367.

²⁰Institution de la Religion Chrétienne, II, iv, 1. Calvin attributes the image to Augustine.

²¹ Recent suggestions that Chettle rather than Greene wrote the Groatsworth of Wit, even if true, do not seriously trouble my argument. Chettle would only have been giving further expression to an identification that Greene had established in a number of earlier works, works of unquestioned authorship, between himself and his prodigal protagonists. For a summary of the relevant bibliography, see Shakespeare Newsletter, 26 (1974), 47.