ABSTRACT
To attempt to define the popularity of early modern romance is to embark on a journey as errant and as fraught with difficulties as any of the genre’s protagonists ever undertook. Native medieval romance persisted in the sixteenth century, given new impetus by print, and this was joined by classical Greek and continental romance translations and, increasingly, original romances by English writers. Often romance emerged as a mode at play in other genres including the epic, the novella, and drama. 1 The pervasiveness of romance in much literary writing of the Elizabethan period testified to its widespread appeal both for writers, who continued to find creative inspiration in it, and for consumers who continued to enjoy it. Given its prevalence in early modern literary culture, it was unquestionably a popular genre in both quantifiable and unquantifiable terms: both a bestseller and a crowd-pleaser. While certain romances were aimed towards a more restricted readership – such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – the genre was not generally elite: it appealed to the widest range of readers, from the highly educated to the least literate, who had the narratives read to them. As Roger Chartier points out, ‘in the Renaissance the same texts and the same books often circulated in all social milieus.’, 2 and as Helen Cooper observes, ‘Romances, like novels, can appeal to readers of every level of intelligence, although (unlike the most intellectually demanding, and therefore elitist, novels) they always do their audience the kindness of placing a primacy on telling good stories.’ 3
