Abstract
That the Greek romance exerted a strong influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean prose fiction and drama, including Shakespeare, has been well documented.1 Notwithstanding individual variations, the plots of the Hellenistic romance authors who were most influential in the Renaissance—Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius—share an underlying structural pattern: a pair of youthful lovers meet, fall in love, separate, suffer trial and tribulation, and eventually reunite in lawful marriage. According to the classicist John J. Winkler, the Greek romances of North Africa and Asia Minor introduced “a quite specialized form of erotic story: these are love-leading-to-marriage stories, in which the necessary goal of passion itself is lawful matrimony.”2 The erotic stories that constitute the ancient prose romance genre include Heliodorus of Emesa’s Aethiopica or Theaøenes and Chariclea (fourth century A.D.); Longus’s Lesbiaca or Daphnis and Chloe (third century A.D.); Achilles Tatius of Alexandria’s Leucippe and Clitophon (second century A.D.). Two additional romances with less direct bearing on early modern drama and fiction are Xenophon of Ephesus’s Ephesiaca or Habrocomes and Anthia (second century A.D.) and Chariton of Aphrodisia’s Chaereas and Callirhoe (second century A.D.).3 Typically, the hero and heroine of Greek romance persevere in a series of conventional ordeals (storms, shipwrecks, pirates, bandits).
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Notes
I would like to thank Christy Desmet for her helpful suggestions in the revision of this essay. For a discussion of the plot affinities between the Greek novel and Elizabethan prose fiction and drama, see Samuel Lee Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912); see also Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970).
Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970).
John J. Winkler, “The Invention of Romance,” in The Search for the Ancient Novel, ed. James Tatum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 24. In Chariton and Xenophon, the primary lovers are already married before they separate.
David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 36. Konstan’s central argument is that the Greek romances as a genre “portray eros as a fully reciprocal passion between equals” (p. 33).
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotpe in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mikhail Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258. Citations of Bakhtin’s essay refer to this edition, and they will be cited parenthetically. For further information on Bakhtin’s novelistic theory, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 275–94.
About the idea of the companionate marriage in Protestant doctrine, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 136.
James A. Brundage, Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 1993), p. 364.
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 552.
Eric Fuchs, Sexual Desire and Love (Cambridge: James Clarke; New York: Seabury Press, 1983), pp. 157–63.
Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 2nd edition (Houndsmills: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 24.
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 63.
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage & Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 261. Cressy argues against Lawrence Stone’s findings that marriage at this time lacked romantic intimacy. Cressy also points out that Puritans often advocated the idea of the “companionate marriage”: the equal affection between a married couple “based on ‘mutual society, help, and comfort’ ” (p. 297).
Consequently, Underdowne repeats several of his predecessor’s mistakes. See Tomas Hägg, “The Renaissance of the Greek Novel,” in The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 192–213. See also F. A. Wright’s introduction to Underdowne’s translation, Heliodorus: An Aethiopian Romance (London: Routledge, n.d.), pp. 1–5.
Sterg O’Dell, A Chronological List of Prose Fiction in English Printed in England and Other Countries, 1475–1640 (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of MIT, 1954), pp. 39–98 passim.
For further discussion of the chivalric tradition, see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1936), pp. 22–43.
Hallet Smith, Shakespeare’s Romances (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1972), p. 9.
Gertrude Marian Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques, 1500–1642 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1933), pp. 157–58.
Marie H. Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg: Buckneil University Press, 1997), p. 54.
R B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1995), pp. 1–17.
Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11. Jack Goody also explains the difference between present and future consent: “Consent alone, and not coitus, made a marriage valid, at least in terms of its ‘present’ form. With future consent, an indissoluble bond was created only by means of sexual relations,” The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 149.
Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 273.
Brigitte Egger, “Women and Marriage in the Greek Novels,” in The Search for the Ancient Novel, ed. James Tatum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 266.
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© 2003 Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Greenhalgh, D.C. (2003). Love, Chastity, and Woman’s Erotic Power: Greek Romance in Elizabethan and Jacobean Contexts. In: Relihan, C.C., Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09177-2_2
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