After ‘Tereus and Progne’, Greene’s writing seems to present a more humane world. When Greene published a novella about a woman called Philomela, it had no direct relationship to the Ovidian story, although he must have known his readers would be mentally comparing the two. The emphasis in Greene’s Philomela (published in 1592) seems designed to present an alternative to female vengeance. Although Philomela is wrongly accused of adultery, her patience and virtue ensure that she eventually achieves contentment—after the death of her abusive husband. The text has much in common with Pandosto, which appears similarly restorative in import: shepherdesses are revealed as princesses, fathers and daughters reunited, and the ruling dynasty handed over to the younger generation. Yet, like Pettie’s tale, Pandosto is charged with the violent consequences of excess, or to use one of Greene’s favourite
Words, ‘overloving’, in courtships, marriages, and families, and the happy ending of his story contains its own cataclysm.
Greene was Pettie’s heir in so many ways, not least because he was one of the primary authors whose works Greene ruthlessly plagiarized (Vincent 1939). Pettie had ensured that his identity was indissolubly woven into the title of his work. His successor imprinted his own name on many of his titles (such as Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit or Greene’s Farewell to Folly) and marketed ‘Robert Greene’ as a recognizable brand name which invoked its own set of readerly expectations. The missing link between Pettie and Greene is provided by John Lyly. In his best-selling Euphues books (1578 and 1580) Lyly developed Pettie’s alliterative style into ‘euphuism’ while (in the first book) imitating the plot of‘Alexius’. Greene in turn responded by imitating Lyly’s style but reversing his plot in favour of women in his first novel, Mamillia (1583). His popular success led him to dominate the literary marketplace throughout the rest of the decade, first with prose and dramatic romances and finally with supposedly autobiographical tales of dissipation and repentance, some of which were probably composed by Greene’s imitators. The death of the historical author barely dented the productivity of ‘Robert Greene’, and dispatches from the underworld kept his name alive well into the next century (see Figure 41.1).
Both his contemporaries and his successors seem to have regarded Pandosto as their favourite work by Greene. For his earliest readers, its popularity may have lain in part in its topicality. While many romances featured women falsely accused of adultery, the story of a queen condemned and her daughter saved from exile might have stirred memories of Anne Boleyn’s fall from grace and Elizabeth’s rise to power (H. Cooper 2004: 274-80, 396-7). More remarkable is the astonishing afterlife the text enjoyed in subsequent centuries; this was a tale which could be rewritten for every genre and royal dynasty (Newcomb 2002). Its genesis remains a mystery. Published at the height of Greene’s career in 1588, it may have been drafted years earlier; the Stationers’ Register records a ‘Triumphe of Time’ (the subtitle of Pandosto) in 1585 (Newcomb 2002: 55-9).
Pandosto belongs to a group of pastorals circulating in the mid-1580s, and the links between their authors are still mysterious. It shares features with Thomas Lodge’s (printed) novels, and more provocatively, with Sir Philip Sidney’s manuscript romance known as The Old Arcadia, probably composed in the late 1570s. What we can say for certain is that Greene, Lodge, and Sidney were all familiar with recently translated ancient Greek romances like Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, which Greene draws on in Pandosto (Wolff 1912). Such narratives inspired Greene to inject the moralizing alliterative fictional world which he had inherited from Pettie and Lyly with tragicomic plots in which separated young lovers escape repressive elders, and endure trials and capricious fortune before being joyously reunited. Whether Greene can have seen Sidney’s Arcadian interpretation of Greek romance can only be a subject for speculation (see Newcomb 2002: 62-6; Woudhuysen 1996: 264, 300-3, 328-31; Katharine Wilson 2006:112-17). But the internal evidence is suggestive. Both Greene and Sidney created plots in which at least one prince disguised as a shepherd courts and eventually marries an exiled princess cared for by rustics in the countryside. And
Fig. 41.1 The ghost of Robert Greene depicted writing, wrapped in his burial shroud. John Dickenson, Greene in Conceipt (1598), title page, A1r.
Both plots are triggered by the credulity of a lecherous ruler—although Sidney is more merciful to foolish Duke Basilius than Greene is to incestuous King Pandosto.
If Greene had even a vague knowledge of the Arcadia, there are hints of a more provocative social dimension to Pandosto. Greene was himself an anomalous social figure, an Oxford graduate from a humble background making his living by the new and often derided medium of print. His romance is equally hard to place: a ‘popular’ fiction which would have found the majority of its readers among Greene’s moneyed social superiors (Newcomb 2002: 21-6). While Greene’s desire to become an established author made him a fundamentally conservative figure, Pandosto is distinctive among Greene’s works for the attention he gives to the lower ranks of society. Pettie invited his readers into the claustrophobic world of a dysfunctional royal family. Sidney showed aristocrats effortlessly outsmarting foolish servants. Greene by contrast was always alerting his readers to the impact of lusty and unpredictable aristocrats on their powerless underlings. In Greene’s world princes make lousy shepherds, and country people praise rural poverty while eagerly aspiring to riches. Rustic virtue is also materially rewarded. In Pandosto, a cupbearer is offered a dukedom and a shepherd a knighthood. Greene’s examples of upward mobility are sufficiently incongruous as to be unthreatening to the social order, yet they also suggest some sympathy with the servants and shepherds struggling for a better lot.
Greene’s own aspirations towards status are signalled from the start of the book. As the title page proclaims, it is the creation of a university graduate: ‘Robert Greene, Master of Arts in Cambridge’. Although the dedication and address to the gentlemen readers are larded with modesty topoi, Greene chose as his intended patron a prominent aristocrat—George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. Greene’s erudition is reinforced by the fact that his name is stamped between two Latin mottoes. Greene uses his usual tag ‘Omne tulit punctum’ but also ‘Temporis filia veritas’ (‘Truth is the daughter of time’). The latter text is echoed in the subtitle ‘The Triumph of Time’, and the gloss, ‘that although by the meanes of sinister fortune, Truth may be concealed yet by Time in spight of fortune it is most manifestly revealed’. This is a book equipped with not just multiple but competing controlling powers: Fortune, the deity most common to Greek romance, is quashed by the more elemental power of Time. The battle for dominance of the text is in turn taken up by the human protagonists. The running title of the text is ‘The History of Dorastus and Fawnia’, the latter being the two young lovers who defeat the eponymous king Pandosto.
Like Pettie, Greene shows how one man’s obsession ruins all around him. Like Tereus, Pandosto suffers a vengeance unwittingly delivered by the next generation, and loses his young son in the course of the text. But Pandosto also has a daughter, Fawnia, who (like Progne and Philomela) refuses to be a casualty of male lust and violence. Fawnia admittedly is saved from danger by a variety of lucky chances as much as by her own virtuous resistance. As in Greek romance, the action in the book is supposedly organized by the unpredictable turns of Fortune’s wheel, and Greene frequently nudges his readers towards recognizing the ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ elements of which it is composed. But if the text ends in comedy, it is shot through with loss and tragedy to the last page. The reason is one emotion which is alien to Pettie’s tale—guilt. Pettie’s bloodied protagonists were changed into birds because of their lack of humanity; in Greene’s world it is the knowledge of transgression which is finally overpowering.
The internal landscapes of the protagonists’ minds dominate the first half of the plot. Like Pettie, Greene tells a story of the disintegration of married love and its appalling ramifications. King Pandosto becomes wrongly convinced that his faithful wife, Bellaria, has fallen in love with his best friend, Egistus. He is increasingly tormented by the cliches which are his (and Greene’s) stock-in-trade: ‘thinking that Love was above all Lawes and therefore to be staied with no Law, that it was hard to put fire and flaxe together without burning’ (1881-6: iv. 238). The alliterative balance of the prose is a mark of Greene's inheritance from Pettie and Lyly, but the lack of outlandish comparisons characteristic of euphuism are indicative of his later simpler prose.
Greene's literary maturity is further suggested by his breadth of outlook and awareness of an ever more socially diverse readership. Confiding in his cupbearer Franion, Pandosto tries to persuade him to poison Egistus. Franion is well aware of the constraints of his position: ‘Kings are knowne to command, servants are blameless to consent’ (242). But, unlike his master, he remains capable of exercising moral choice: ‘prefer thy content before riches, and a cleare minde before dignity; so being poore thou shalt have rich peace, or else rich, thou shalt enjoy disquiet’ (242). Warned by Franion, Egistus flees with him, incentivizing him with promises of a dukedom. Meanwhile, it is Bellaria (who never enters into Egistus’ calculations) who is imprisoned by Pandosto, and infuriates him further by giving birth to what her husband believes is Egistus' daughter. Greene shows men locked in their own thoughts but capable of action; the casualty is the woman at the heart of the negotiations. However, like the other aristocrats in the tale, the jailed Bellaria has little idea that her social inferiors can suffer too. Unwittingly echoing Franion, she imagines a life of poverty and simplicity: ‘Ah happy life, where poore thoughts and meane desire live in secure content, not fearing Fortune because too low for Fortune’ (249).
Yet like many of the women of Greene’s romances, Bellaria counters her necessary passivity with active strategy. Unable to stop her daughter from being exposed in a boat, she vindicates herself by applying to the Delphic oracle, and receives an unequivocal endorsement of her and Egistus’ innocence. Unlike his Shakespearean counterpart Leontes, Pandosto believes the oracle, and husband and wife are on the point of reconciliation. But in a conflict of emotion typical of Greene, news is brought of the death of Pandosto and Bellaria’s young son Garinter. Bellaria falls down dead, while the repentant Pandosto is left to entomb his wife and son.
The burial of Bellaria and Garinter marks the end of the first half of the narrative, as Greene exchanges the claustrophobic court of Bohemia for the pastures of Sicilia. Yet the tumultuous events at court are constantly reasserting themselves. Greene had already left clear signs of unfinished business: the response from the Delphic oracle had ended with ‘and the King shall live without an heire: if that which is lost be not found’ (258). Accordingly, the princess exposed in a boat is rescued by the shepherd Porrus, who is ‘so poore, as a sheepe was halfe his substaunce’ (258). Fawnia by contrast is bedecked with royal jewels, an unmistakable indicator of her romance heritage. Porrus (like Franion) is obliged to struggle with conscience and self-interest, and also reaches the sort of moral compromise which eludes the nobles in this text—he decides to keep the riches but take the child home and raise her himself. However, the appearance of unexpected daughters causes problems, and Greene takes the opportunity to insert a wry parody of his earlier plot. For the second time in her life the baby arouses a jealous rage, not from Pandosto this time but from Porrus’ wife, Mopsa. When Porrus appears with the child she ‘beg[ins] to be somewhat jelousse, yet marveiling that her husband should be so wanton abroad, sith he was so quiet at home’ (267). Porrus only escapes a beating when he presents Mopsa with the purse of gold accompanying the child, and Greene delivers a characteristically economically focused version of the foundling myth. As the girl the shepherds call Fawnia grows up, Porrus buys a farm and sheep and starts acquiring land. By the time she reaches 16, the fame of her beauty and modesty have spread to court, and Greene (or perhaps Porrus) notes that she is courted by rich farmers’ sons.
Greene’s comic cameo of the home life of Porrus and Mopsa invites comparison with the turbulent marriage of Pandosto and Bellaria. It also highlights the central stratagem of the second half of the text—the repetition of scenes with substituted participants. Most of the latter part of the tale is concerned with the courtship of Fawnia, first by Egistus’ son Dorastus and then by her father, Pandosto. The relative values of the suitors are called into question by Greene’s juxtaposition of the two. Dorastus is fleeing from an arranged marriage when a chance meeting with Fawnia leaves him astonished by his attraction for such a ‘country slut’ (276). Unwittingly echoing Pandosto’s earlier belief, he concludes that love is above the law. Furthermore, he reassures himself by citing an Ovidian metamorphosis: after all, he reasons, Jupiter loved the maid lo (Ovid 2002: 51-8). What he does not say is that Jupiter raped Io, although the idea is not far from his mind. His parting shot to Fawnia is ‘Why Fawnia, perhappes I love thee, and then thou must needes yielde, for thou knowest I can commaund and constraine.’ Fawnia, however, is having none of it, and responds that ‘constrained love is force, not love: and know this sir, mine honesty is such, as I had rather die than be a concubine, even to a king’ (284). Both reflect on their love in parallel monologues, but it is only when Dorastus dresses up as a shepherd that Fawnia agrees to allow him to court her. However, as she pithily remarks, ‘shepheards are not called shepheardes because they weare hookes and bagges, but that they are borne poore, and live to keep sheepe’ (289). In fact, Dorastus’ disguise turns out to be so transparent that the neighbours see through it and warn Porrus that a prince has designs on his daughter’s honour. By this stage Fawnia has committed herself to loving Dorastus, although she too takes a pragmatic view of the situation. Despite having earlier amazed Dorastus with a witty encomium on the simplicities of country life, she is also ‘hoping in time to be advanced from the daughter of a poore farmer to be the wife of a riche King’ (291-2).
Dorastus’ apparently playful suggestion of rape is never repeated—by him. But Porrus’ opinion that ‘Kinges lustes are lawes’ (293) overshadows the remainder of the plot, as the young lovers find themselves having to thwart the machinations of two very different fathers. Fearing exposure by her foster-father, Dorastus and Fawnia enlist the help of a sea captain and flee to Bohemia, with the captured Porrus in tow. Once there, Fawnia's reputation as a beauty spreads again, and Pandosto, now a lusty fifty-something, has the pair arrested as spies in order to bring them to court. Like Dorastus, he is smitten but anxious, as he reflects when alone, ‘Dooth Pandosto then love: Yea: whome: A maid unknowne, yea, and perhapps immodest’ (306). Fawnia’s response to his advances also recalls her earlier encounters with Dorastus. While Pandosto reminds her that ‘my power is such as I may compell by force’, she insists, ‘the body is subject to victories, but the minde not to be subdued by conquest [...] know this, that I will alwaies rather choose death then dishonour’ (310-11).
Greene’s presentation of the unknowingly incestuous father’s designs on his daughter is in many ways understated. At the same time Greene the dramatist calls his readers' attention in particular to the second encounter between Pandosto and Fawnia. This is set out in dialogue, as if in a play, with Pandosto ‘using these familiar speeches’ (284). In fact, Pandosto, Dorastus, and Fawnia all use speeches which would have been familiar to readers or audiences of Lyly’s first play, Campaspe, in which Alexander the Great contemplates raping his captive Campaspe, but eventually resigns his claim on her (Moore Smith 1907). But in Lyly’s play there is no direct confrontation between Alexander and Campaspe. Greene cobbles together lines from Campaspe to invent a new scene, which serves as a template for both Fawnia’s would-be lovers. Pandosto and Dorastus speak the same language; love and violence share the same vocabulary.
What Greene does not do is to turn the text into a tragedy of incest. It is entirely characteristic of his technique that he pulls back from the horrific conclusion at the last moment, only to replace it with a breakneck series of reverses of plot and emotion. Fawnia’s honour is saved because Pandosto’s spurned love turns to hate. He resolves to execute her, Dorastus, Porrus, and the sea captain, having first tortured and blinded the latter. Only when Porrus reveals the secret of Fawnia’s birth does Pandosto understand his own moral blindness. The next metamorphosis of emotion he suffers is equally rapid. As he fervently embraces his bemused daughter, Greene notes wryly, ‘Fawnia was not more joyfull that she had found such a Father, then Dorastus was glad he should get such a wife’ (316). Pandosto is seemingly reconciled with all, including Egistus; the ‘most comical event’ of Dorastus and Fawnia’s marriage is celebrated; and even Porrus is knighted. But Greene has more tricks up his sleeve, and several new plot lines in his last sentence. The wedding was no sooner ended, but Pandosto (calling to mind how first he betraied his friend Egistus, how his jealousie was the cause of Bellarias death, that contrarie to the law of nature hee had lusted after his owne Daughter) moved with these desperate thoughts, he fell into a melancholie fit, and, to close up the Comedie with a Tragicall stratageme, hee slewe himselfe; whose death being many daies bewailed of Fawnia, Dorastus, and his dear friend Egistus, Dorastus, taking his leave of his father, went with his wife and the dead corpse into Bohemia, where, after they were sumptuouslie intoombed, Dorastus ended his daies in contented quiet. (317)
A wedding followed by a funeral; comedy followed by tragedy—followed by comedy? Greene’s reading of Greek romances led him to heap sensational conclusions on top of each other, but the final state of affairs remains ambiguous. Dorastus achieves ‘contented quiet’, but only apparently after ‘they’ (logically his wife and father-inlaw) are safely below ground. Greene may be guilty of a grammatical error, but the joint burial is eerily reminiscent of Pandosto’s dispatch of Bellaria and Garinter at the end of the first half of the narrative. Greene often ended romances (like Philomela) with a lone figure. While appearing to endorse a conventional conclusion in which the young lovers triumph, Greene simultaneously suggests the possibility that, like Pettie’s Alexius, or Lyly’s Euphues, Dorastus somehow rids himself of women and lives in solitary bliss. Fawnia—who never comments on her father’s actions—is thus as effectively silenced as her mother before her.
Romance (and the alliterative prose in which it is written) often depends on doubling and reduplication, and repeated plot devices suggest repeated emotions. Both Pettie and Greene organize their romances—and revenges—around displacement and the breaking of taboo. Greene’s imaginative geography in Pandosto allows the tides flowing around Bohemia and Sicilia to provide a metaphor for the way in which one protagonist unwittingly enacts the role of another. But this repetition does not bring comfort. Both Pettie and Greene decline to follow a trajectory in which sin is followed by forgiveness or atonement. Thus, one of the commonest features of romance—the appearance of the disguised relative—serves a damning rather than a restorative function, whether the instrument of vengeance turns up as shepherdess or shepherd’s pie. Tereus’ incestuous violence to his sister-in-law leads him to ingest his son. Pandosto’s abuse of his wife is replaced by his incestuous violence towards his daughter. In both Pettie and Greene’s narratives the languages of obsession, violence, and love are almost impossible to separate. The powers of fortune and providence are subordinate to the human motivations which drive the narrative.
Both authors are unremitting in their punishment for human evil. Pettie manipulates his narrative so that Progne emerges as more unnatural than her husband, and her violence looks forward to that of a Lady Macbeth. Pettie refuses the comfort Ovid built into his narrative—the creation of Philomela the singing nightingale— in favour of delivering an awful warning to his readers of the horrors incident to marriage. Greene appears to deliver a comic ending in which the romance pattern of exile, reintegration, and return is fulfilled. But while Dorastus and Fawnia return to court, Pandosto’s repentance is not enough to allow him to join them. Unlike Pettie, Greene gives his villain a conscience, but shows his inability to master his emotions. Greene is notably severer than Shakespeare in this regard. Pandosto is in some ways closer to Lear than to his counterpart in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, who regains his family at the end of the play. If his last works are to be believed, Greene himself spent his final years constantly repenting and reoffending. He allows no such latitude to Pandosto, who put himself beyond the pale by lusting after his daughter; like Progne he exceeded normal moral boundaries. His attempts to seize generic control of the plot are also thwarted. The battle between old Pandosto and young Dorastus and Fawnia begun in the alternative titles of the text reaches its apogee when Pandosto commits suicide. Even this ‘Tragicall stratageme’ is swiftly displaced by the ongoing comic narrative of Dorastus and Fawnia. Yet the hint Greene gives of Dorastus’ similarity to Pandosto leaves open the possibility that the cyclical nature of romance is more sinister than it might first appear. And perhaps it is this multiplicity so characteristic of Renaissance romance that links Pettie and Greene most significantly. In Pettie’s tale the Ovidian story is pushed to one side in favour of a series of mini-metamorphoses, the transformations of Tereus and Progne’s mental states. Pandosto is stuffed with colliding narratives, and the conclusion lies somewhere beyond the compendious last sentence. If romance is a story already told, for Greene it is also a story which never quite ends.
PRIMARY WORKS
Fenton, Geoffrey (trans.) (1924), Bandello: Tragical Tales. The Complete Novels, ed. Hugh Harris (London: Routledge).
Gascoigne, George (1907), The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. J. W. Cunliffe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Greene, Robert (1881-6), The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene M. A. in Prose and Verse, ed. A. B. Grosart, 15 vols (London: Huth Library).
Nashe, Thomas (1958), The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell).
Ovid (2002), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin).
Painter, William (1890), The Palace of Pleasure, ed. J. Jacobs, 3 vols (London: David Nutt).
Pettie, George (1938), A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, ed. H. Hartman (London: Oxford University Press).
CHAPTER 42
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS AND NATHANIEL WOODES’S THE CONFLICT OF CONSCIENCE
World History
